by Roger Wall
“It’s gone, now,” I said, but at any moment I expected to hear the scraping of the wooden panel as agents kicked it away from the entrance of the basement. We stayed seated on the bed, not moving, and lapsed into another long silence.
After a time, Nola broke the quiet.
“It has my coordinates. It’s flying a grid. It won’t stop until it pinpoints me. And then Rescue will be alerted. A helicopter will come to take me home. Then I’ll be punished. But don’t worry. They’re only looking for me, not you.”
“They won’t find us.”
“They may already have. Maybe that’s why the Scout left. I’d give Rescue half an hour. I’m sure they were on standby.”
We spent the rest of the day in the basement, but Rescue never arrived. I don’t know whether it was because Otis’s concrete construction foiled the Scout or the government decided to give Nola time to contact her advisor. Or maybe the agents, ones high up in government, decided not to look for her. The Scout must have seen her boat tied at the dock and the rumpled tarp laying in the garden, not to mention the crops, perhaps even the carcass of the deer hanging from a cottonwood. The Scout would be back, she assured me, even if her device couldn’t transmit in the basement.
Nola began bouncing her knee up and down, as though she were beating time to a song and was about to start singing. The motion made the bed squeak, but she didn’t start singing. Perhaps she didn’t realize she was doing this. Perhaps the sound of the rusty springs comforted her. Maybe she had forgiven me for pushing her down into the basement. The rhythmic creak of the rusty springs had an odd effect on me, and perhaps Nola, too, because we softened, and I put my arm around her.
“When I was growing up, my grandfather told me that a vision had guided him to the basement, then to the cave, that we were starting a new life, a traditional Hidatsa life. ‘The Vision Foretelling the Event and Our Escape to Destiny.’ We used to recite the story all the time. First, he to me, then my joining in as I got older. But he had made it all up, the vision. It was just a good story, as it turned out. We happened to be in the basement when the machines came. That’s what he confessed right before he died. He never tried to find my parents and warn them, call them back to the basement. They disappeared. It was all an accident. Just an accident.”
Nola didn’t say anything for a moment, then she said, “We’re kind of alike, you and me. You grew up here, safe with your grandfather. I was in the Center, safe with my parents. Meanwhile out there in the continent people were dying and everything was falling apart.”
“That’s how I got my name.”
“How’s that?”
“My grandfather called the destruction of the town the Event and named me after it. During-the-Event. It was supposed to be a Hidatsa name. During-the-Event Pérez.”
“Something made up and something Spanish.”
“A fake name, just like his vision. Just like being Hidatsa. I was the ‘first’ and the ‘last.’ That’s what he sang in my birth song right before he died. The first Hidatsa to be born in our town, the last to die. Another lie. Who was the last real Hidatsa to die? Not me. Not even my grandfather. He didn’t really know who he was, except white, maybe.”
My mouth filled with bile, and I spit the sour fluid on the floor.
“History’s a burden, Pérez,” she said and squeezed my hand, “and we can’t outrun it.”
I didn’t move, but followed the entrance’s shaft of light that spread over the floor and the rough walls and revealed the horizontal ridges in the cement, created by the seams of the lumber forms Otis had used, and the matrix of steel beams and galvanized sheeting in the ceiling. How many days had Otis spent in the dim cellar digging alone while the town people passed by and laughed at him? I smelled the minerals in the cement.
At some point early on, I had pleaded with Otis to see the basement. Finally, he had relented and took me there. We had stood in the dark, with the sound of our breathing filling the air. I had expected Otis to say something about his vision, but he only broke our silence by asking, “Have we been here long enough for you?”
Nola took my hand and we lay down. The rusty springs creaked under our weight. The foam mattress launched a gritty cloud into the close air. The dusty shaft of light at the entrance seemed far away.
“My parents were with everyone else, eating deer and drinking, that night,” I said.
Nola put her hand over my mouth.
“Hush. It doesn’t do any good to remember. Just try to forget.”
I let her kiss me but didn’t become aroused until she pulled off my pants. We pushed our clothes onto the floor, and I held her tightly as we rocked together on the sour-smelling, rotting foam, only the springs creaking. When we were done, I kept my arms around her. We didn’t move but breathed almost as one. We fell asleep with our arms wrapped around each other against the dampness.
Sometime later I woke up and stared at the light coming through the seams in the wood cover. I rose silently and climbed the ladder. I ran to the dock in darkness. I pulled Nola’s rowing shell into the boathouse. I didn’t want the Scout to see it and think she was still here.
We returned to the cave. Nola couldn’t turn off the GPS in her device; it was always on, she said, but keeping the device at the back of the cave and letting the battery drain might prevent the Scout from tracking her to the butte.
The next morning the plane returned and again spent the morning flying a grid over the valley. I worried that the drone might photograph the cave entrance and decided to make the opening look like any other hole in the side of the butte, not someone’s home. It hurt me to smash apart the stove and chimney and throw the river rocks and pieces of clay down the butte, to brush the ashes and bits of charcoal over the edge, but I knew that Otis wouldn’t have felt remorse, if he’d thought giving up the stove would have allowed him to avoid detection.
As I worked, I wondered if I should leave Nola, run up the valley and hide in a forest or in a collapsing house or the rusted yellow bucket that lay in the grass below the broken wind turbines on top of Windy Butte.
My thoughts troubled me. When Otis became sick, sometimes I wished that he would die, so I wouldn’t have to face his demands, the long process of death, the loneliness of living with someone who was no longer whole. Then when he did die, I regretted feeling that way, but I couldn’t take back those feelings. The burden of caring for him was lifted, but so was Otis. I didn’t want to feel that way again. I wanted Nola to stay.
I was surprised that Nola didn’t want to apologize to her advisor for failing to call in, ask for a new pin for her oarlock, and return to thesis, but she didn’t. She seemed to have crossed a line and didn’t know how to go back. I thought it would be easy for her, a person from the Center, to do so, but she seemed as desperate and fearful as the stranger, as though she, too, had run away. But from what? Perhaps she didn’t know how to explain what she had done. Contact with Overlooked was illegal, true. Perhaps making love to one was even more illegal. But how would anyone know? Couldn’t she destroy the record of me in her hedgehog and keep silent about our sex? Or was there some way government agents would know we’d had sex? Would a scientist examine her?
I walked to the back of the cave. Nola was lying in my bed and drawing on the back of one of my old arithmetic exercise sheets. She had sketched a picture of an airplane with rockets zooming toward it from a butte. She stopped and looked up at me and narrowed her eyes.
“This was supposed to be my project,” she said. “I was supposed to have latitude to carry it out as I saw fit. Twenty days. That’s all! I could barely breathe when I saw the drone. I bet my parents are behind this. They probably urged my advisor to trigger a search. Such cowards . . .
“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. By now they probably don’t consider me in distress or indecisive but actively pursing deceit. A willful disruption of mission, not just poor judgment about the handling of a mishap along the way. Poor judgment can be forgiven if you respond in
a way that shows you’ve recognized your mistake and are taking steps to correct it.”
“Tell them you’re hurt,” I said.
“They wouldn’t go for that. You’d have to throw me down the butte for there to be enough evidence. Punishment, that’s what I face. I’ve made myself an outcast, not just an embarrassment to everyone, including myself, but also a failure. I won’t be trusted. Won’t be able to graduate with my class, take part in the celebrations, or receive a special career assignment. Because I’m female and have good genetic stock, I’ll be forced to become a professional breeder. Everyone has to breed, it’s a national duty, but some females that’s all they do. I’ll be like a lab animal, carefully watched as I’m impregnated, gestated, delivered. Singles, twins, triplets. Maybe a batch of quadruplets, if I’m unlucky. I’ll have to keep it up for as many years as I can, until my chromosomes start to show signs of age and higher than normal random mutations. Of course, maybe they’ll judge my character to be so undesirable that they’ll reject me as a breeder. Don’t want a republic full of troublemakers, do we? I might end up on a production preserve.”
“I don’t see what you did wrong. You only took a day off from rowing.”
“You don’t know how the Center works. Detours aren’t tolerated.”
That evening Nola began what she called “the shits.” She became pale, and cramps and spasms forced her from the cave to relieve her gut around a corner in a fold of the butte. She blamed her diarrhea on the raw food, foul-tasting well water, unevenly cooked meat, and poor sanitation, things, she said, that her inoculations couldn’t protect her from.
I suspected that somehow the currents were responsible for her disease, that it was an extension of her unevenness. The currents had brought all sorts of unhappiness into my life. Otis had protected me from them as long as he could, maybe with the help of his own guardian spirit. I wondered if Otis knew about the singing wolves, that they were the ones who took over after he died. Perhaps out on the lake in the afternoons when I sailed the canoe, before the stranger arrived, I wasn’t starting to have a vision but beginning to sense the wolves’ presence. And then, in Parshall Bay, the dream had revealed their power to me.
Before it got too dark, that first night of the shits, I descended to the valley and collected bergamot. At least this would treat the symptoms of Nola’s illness, even if it were useless against what the currents had set in motion.
During this time I worried about being able to complete the harvest alone. The harvest was usually a period of hard work and long days in which Otis and I became closer. I never imagined I would harvest the first crop of corn after he died under these conditions: risking the threat of detection by a Scout while someone I barely knew recovered from illness in the cave.
My attention toward Nola diminished, perhaps because we weren’t sexing and I suspected she’d leave me. She seemed to be slipping away, retreating into herself, whereas I began to think about what we would do once the harvest was complete.
We passed the daylight hours by sleeping, reading children’s stories, and looking at the black book of photographs of Otis and Malèna and the blue booklet of the Sierra Madre Occidental farmers. Only once did I hear a Scout fly low through the valley. Its sound silenced us, froze us in place, as though our movement could be detected, our voices heard, our body heat sensed, even though we were at the back of the cave. Was it surveying the garden, tracking my progress with the harvest, to determine whether we were still in White Earth River? And then it left.
At night I’d descend from the cave to finish the harvest. I worked naked, both to stay cool and to blend in with the landscape. I cut down sunflower and bean plants and draped them along with the braids of corn over the roof of the monorail car, where they could bake undetected, drying out more quickly than they would in the field. I carved up the fawn in long strips and laid the meat over the red seats, keeping the door closed so flies wouldn’t contaminate it.
My eyes adjusted to a world of dim star- and moonlight, and I navigated this terrain by touch, memory, and error. Food was plentiful, but I couldn’t enjoy it. I ate almost as though I were in the middle of the cool season.
While alone in the dark fields of the garden, I started to think that the only option was to leave White Earth River and hide out in a new valley, one unknown to the Scout and where no one would look for us. Then we would head south. The Badlands along the Little Missouri River had been a feature of Otis’s stories about the history of the Hidatsa. We would be safe there. When I told Nola about the Badlands, she asked, “Do you think we have enough food to get there?” “We can carry quite a bit in the canoe, especially if it’s dried,” I answered.
This was the only exchange we had on the subject.
Nola always waited for me to return to the cave before going to sleep. To help her relax, I drummed softly against a cottonwood post or massaged the shoulder that I had hurt when I dragged her from the garden and down into the basement.
One night in the middle of my drumming, I said, “I don’t like this, living only at night.”
“Once my malaise passes and I regain my strength. A few more days,” she said.
Then she said, “You know your book, the one about the farmers in the Sierra Madre?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, those people aren’t related to your father. Your father has Indian blood, several types of it, and Spanish blood, too, but he’s not Tarahumara, like the farmers in the book. A lot of people from Mexico and South America have mixed blood. Very few are pure, Pérez.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Of course I know that. The analysis of your blood proved it.”
“You said it’d take awhile.”
“The results came in while you were collecting honey. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel bad, since it seemed important to you to believe that your father was from the Sierra Madre Occidental. But I’m telling you now because I don’t know what will happen. I want to tell you something else, too.”
“Okay.”
“Your mother was one hundred percent Italian. One hundred percent. Do you know how rare it is to be one hundred percent?”
Why had Nola waited until this moment to tell me? Perhaps she’d never intended to reveal what she’d found about my parents but then changed her mind. Maybe she understood that the cave was where stories were created and shattered and wanted somehow to be part of this tradition. Or maybe she was trying to warn me that the government knew all about me now, and that the Scout wasn’t just looking for her.
I drummed loudly for a few minutes to force an end to our conversation. Then I took off my shorts and shirt and climbed into Otis’s bed beside her. She slipped off her rowing shorts and the heavy navy sweater of Otis’s that she had been wearing. Her body felt cool to me, and I hugged her and drew the rabbit-skin blanket over us and held her until she was warm.
The red canoe held the dried corn, not the entire harvest, of course, as well as the dried venison, sunflower seeds, and beans; as many fresh vegetables as I thought we could eat before they became limp and inedible; and a few tools and supplies. With our heavy load secured between the bow and stern, our progress down the river, across the bay, and along the shore of Lake Sakakawea was slow. I left the sail behind, so we’d have more room in the canoe for food; once we reached the Little Missouri, we wouldn’t have been able to use the sail, anyway.
It took two nights to reach the Van Hook Arm, where we camped in a grove of elms on the southern shore. The next night we continued east, to what Nola was fairly sure was the mouth of the Little Missouri River, the route to the Badlands, which Otis had told me was so rugged and remote—impenetrable was the word he had used—that no one could track people who hid there.
We stopped paddling well before sunrise. Already I felt lost in the maze of coves that obscured the transition from Lake Sakakawea to the main channel of the Little Missouri River. I guided us into a narrow inlet and searched for a land
ing where we wouldn’t leave footprints or a skid mark from the canoe. I helped Nola struggle up an embankment to tall cottonwoods, away from the grasses so we wouldn’t have to worry as much about snakes. It was a miserable way to spend the day, swatting insects and sitting still in the heat, trying to sleep under the deerskin. I prayed to the singing wolves to not let satellites spot the tracks we had made through the grass.
“You think they’re still searching for you?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “By now they probably think I’m dead. We haven’t heard or seen anything since the last Scout. That could’ve been sent to confirm their suspicions of no activity.”
“We haven’t given them anything to find. And soon we’ll be in a place where they aren’t looking.”
Patches of low clouds started to gather in the afternoon, leaving just enough of an opening in their coverage to allow light from a less than full moon to help us navigate. Even though I was steering the canoe, I was glad that Nola sat in the bow, as if she were the one guiding us across the water in the dark. Her paddle barely made a sound as she dipped it into the water and drew it along the hull of the canoe.
I heard Nola set the blade of her paddle across the gunwales to rest. She turned toward me. The moonlight caught her face.
“Pérez?” she said. “It feels like we’re really far away. I mean, farther away than we’ve been so far.”
“We’re just starting up the Little Missouri. Land is all around us. It’s the darkness that makes you feel that way,” I said.
“No, that’s not what I mean. I know where we are. I remember the maps. But this feels different. Maybe it’s knowing that the Scouts aren’t interested in me anymore, that they’ve let me go, said goodbye.”
“We’re just floating. Paddling and floating. Once we get to the Badlands and it’s daylight, you’ll feel different. We’ll be somewhere.”
