by Roger Wall
“Maybe.”
After several hours of slow paddling, we reached a section of the river where I couldn’t tell whether the main channel ran east or west. Rather than risk making a mistake, I pulled ashore and hid the canoe under willows. We walked up a valley to a terrace and spread a deerskin under some scrubby oaks. This was a drier and cooler site than our other camps had been, and we were able to sleep until morning, when the rain started. Lying beneath the deerskin reminded me of becoming soaked and cold and dreaming of the singing wolves. This time I didn’t shiver but stayed entwined with Nola, our body heat keeping us warm under the damp hide. When we were together like this, in each other’s arms, I could forget what had happened and pretend that we had never been discovered, that Nola was not preoccupied with her fears. When night fell, we reentered the river and drifted in darkness while I tried to gauge our movement against the black shore.
“My hedgehog could tell us which direction to go,” she said.
“You don’t need a hedgehog to detect current,” I said.
“Don’t worry, it’s packed away. It hasn’t charged,” she said.
In that moment I believed her. I felt the water pushing against my paddle, suggesting a westward turn of the river. The channel narrowed, the inlets became fewer and shallower, and the bends began to loop back and forth in a predictable pattern. The current finally revealed its strength. Nola turned to me and said, “I don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere.” I dug my paddle into the water and encouraged her to do the same.
In the soft pre-morning light I could tell that the landscape would conceal us well and landed the canoe on a wide gravel beach. All around us the buttes were severe, layered, and widespread, more jagged and steep than the two framing the White Earth River. Canyons, ridges, and outcrops seemed to stretch to the horizon. If a Rescue helicopter could manage to land on one of these features, the pilot would become lost as soon as he stepped from the cockpit.
I unloaded the canoe and carried our provisions into the thick, cottonwood-covered bottomland that was only a short run from the spine of a butte. This would be our escape route, if we needed one, I thought. Out of habit, I tied the canoe to a sapling with a section of the faded and frayed yellow rope, even though the boat was far enough from the river that only a flood would wash it downstream.
I chanced making a small fire, hoping its smoke would go unnoticed by any satellites or Scouts still passing overhead. I sliced fresh corn from a cob to make a mush and tossed in tomatoes and carrots for a change.
“A long time ago Indians spent the winters down along the river bottoms in the cottonwoods to stay out of the wind and to hunt buffalo,” I said as I prepared our meal. “They’d call them to their camps and then kill them. That’s what Otis said, anyway.”
“Go ahead and try. I’m sure we’re isolated enough that your yelling wouldn’t draw any attention,” Nola said. She was resting against a tree trunk, her legs stretched out.
“There probably aren’t any buffalo left anyway. Elk, maybe. We could try to call them, if we knew what sound they liked.”
“I don’t think I’m ready to tangle with an elk, considering a little deer gave me so much trouble. Maybe I should just drink the rest of the powder. After all, I’m probably not going to finish thesis.”
“To celebrate daylight, maybe,” I said, hoping to humor her, so she’d feel happy about our new life together. “But I can always try to catch a walleye later, too.”
“I should probably save the powder for an emergency.”
We shared the pot of mush, blowing on steaming spoonfuls before placing them in our mouths and chewing the soft, warm vegetables.
“I’m famished,” Nola said.
“It doesn’t bother your stomach?”
“No, food seems to help. Maybe I get nauseous because I’m empty.”
“But you’re feeling better?”
“It comes and goes. I’ve never had anything like this.”
“I was worried about you.”
“I wasn’t sure. At first you weren’t saying much.”
“You were so pale, you still are, and we couldn’t make love.”
“I thought you were mad at me.”
She sounded sad, and I felt guilty for thinking about running away and leaving her behind. I took leaves of chard, spooned mush along their central veins, and rolled them up.
“I knew I had to be strong for both of us,” I said. “I’m sorry the harvest didn’t last longer. It’s usually a happy time.”
“The first day was good,” she said. “Even killing the deer, I guess. I’m probably the first person in the Center to have that experience.”
“Probably.” I handed her a leaf of chard. “You need fresh greens.”
She seemed older, her voice quieter, flatter; her hair had taken on a dirty color and was no longer golden fuzz.
“I need everything. I can’t believe we’re here.”
“I can. I knew if I concentrated, we’d make it. Plus, I asked the singing wolves to look after us.”
“I was wondering about that.”
I stretched out across from Nola on the soft duff of cottonwood leaves and old grasses. I had grown so accustomed to living in darkness that it seemed as though we had been dropped through a cloud into this Badlands valley, with no memory of how we had arrived and no clue about how to leave. It was a reassuring sensation, I decided, like being in the cave, cut off from the world.
“You know, when we were paddling, I started to think,” I said, “that there’re two types of people, those who make plans, and those who see patterns. But very few do both.”
Nola laughed, the first time since we had gone into hiding.
“And this is based on, what, knowing three people?” she asked.
“Yeah, but I know about more than three people,” I said.
“What five, six? Maybe eight?” She laughed again. I liked hearing the ring in her voice.
“No, listen. My grandfather thought he saw patterns, but he didn’t. He was just making them up, and so he was stuck with his plans. The stranger was the same. He had only plans, which weren’t much good against forces he couldn’t control.”
“His drowning, you mean?”
“Yeah, the currents.” I took a bite of the chard roll.
“And you’re different?”
“Me and you. We can see patterns. And make plans. That’s why we’re going to survive. Maybe that’s what my grandfather meant when he sang that I was the last and the first. The last one to survive because I was the first one to see things this way.”
Nola finished chewing her chard and mush and then spoke: “That’s quite a philosophy. You could be a professor.” She sat up straight and crossed her legs. “I think I’d like a little deer meat. That’d be okay, don’t you think?”
“It’s fairly tough.”
“I’ll just suck on it, soften it up. I feel like something tough and stringy. I need to get my muscles back.”
I untied the deerskin in which I had wrapped the meat and took out a handful of strips and dropped them into the pot. I began to work on a piece with my back teeth. After a while, Nola paused in chewing and pointed her strip of meat at me.
“I didn’t know your grandfather,” she said, “and don’t know if he really would’ve cared much about patterns. He certainly could make plans. All successful people do. His photographs showed that he was accomplished. And that he enjoyed life. I think he wanted you, too, to enjoy life.”
I sucked on the dried venison and gnawed off a small piece. I savored its sharp taste.
“His photographs helped him remember his old life,” I said.
“I’m sure they did. But when he died, he seemed to be giving up not only the life you shared but also some of the delusions he had created about it, while still holding onto a few that would make dying easier. ‘First’ and ‘last,’ I think he was probably speaking literally. You were the first and last person to be raised the way you were, in your
grandfather’s experience, at least. His acknowledgment of that was his way of saying, ‘Okay, now it’s time to go out and create your own life because this one is over.’”
I felt angry that Nola was speaking about Otis as though she knew what he had been thinking. Her tone of voice didn’t suggest that she was being disrespectful of him, only that she knew something that I didn’t, that perhaps even Otis didn’t know. It was as if she had made a sudden movement that I hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t counter, and for a few minutes I didn’t know how to react. Then I said:
“It’s not over. Our life, Otis’s and mine. I’m just moving it to a safer place. I could start a garden here, if I wanted. I could build a house here, too. In fact, I think I like this valley better than the White Earth River valley. Or we could travel south and find my father’s family.”
“Okay, okay. Yeah, you could do any one of those things. But, really, why?”
At first I nearly blurted out, “I like looking at these buttes.” She had questioned such a fundamental aspect of my nature. Then I wanted to say, “Because it’s who I am,” but that seemed more stupid and inadequate than an observation about buttes. So I said:
“It’s what I know.”
“Yeah, okay, sure, that’s true. It’s been your life up to now. But I think you were destined for greater things.”
Nola was sitting up, now, no longer lying on her side, with her hand propping up her head. She had more color in her face. Her voice was lively again, the way it was when we met on the water, before we went into hiding. Did this make me happy? No, Nola sounded as though she were trying to imitate Otis. Our conversation was making the air sharp, threatening the pleasant safety of the cottonwood grove. I sat up, too, and said: “What do you mean?”
“You know the way I’ve been feeling nauseous? Well, I’ve been thinking. I might be pregnant.”
“What?” I shouted. “It’s not possible, is it?”
“I don’t know. My breasts have been a little sore, too.”
“I haven’t touched them in over a week.”
“I’m sure it’s not from you. You’re gentle, suckling like a little lamb.”
Nola laughed—at me it felt like. I was furious.
“I am not a little lamb!” I shouted.
After all my work, hiding us in the cave, caring for Nola, harvesting the crops at night, navigating to this isolated valley in the Badlands, she begins to talk happily about impossibilities—pregnancy.
“Oh, Pérez, you’re so serious. I’m sorry. It makes me laugh.”
She covered her mouth to conceal her chuckling.
“But imagine, Pérez, if I am pregnant, it would be a special child, yours and mine, a predominantly European genotype with exceptional coloring. I think everyone would be very satisfied, especially my father. My mother, too. She might be less sad as a grandmother. It would be a free child, a bonus, one that didn’t cost the government anything. No search for eggs and sperm, no lab expenses, no surrogate. Of course, I’d want to have it in the Center. I’d want it to have a perfect navel.”
“Malèna died in a hospital in the Center.”
“I could call my father and ask him to negotiate for us.”
“I thought you said it was too late.”
“A baby would redeem me, reunite me with my father and mother. An unexpected end to thesis, but a positive outcome nonetheless.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You have unique DNA, Pérez, your history and experience, too. It’s a sign of fitness and desirability. They’d match you with other women.”
“I don’t want to make love to other women.”
“Just ejaculate into a cup. That’s all guys do. You have thousands, millions of sperm in one sample. Enough for an army of Pérez’s!”
“I’m not doing it in a cup, either.”
What happened next embarrasses me. It’s hard for me to admit to myself that Nola’s and my conversation about pregnancy and ejaculating into a cup aroused me. I know it’s pathetic that such stupid talk about things I had no interest in could make me desire her. My lack of self-control disgusts me, but there I was, placing my half-eaten strip of deer meat in the pot and moving close to Nola. I put a hand against her sunburned cheek and kissed her rough lips.
“Wait,” I said.
I unrolled the patchwork of hides, the one in which I had wrapped Otis to tow him to the grave. I didn’t tell Nola about the history of the deerskin, and risk breaking the spell of arousal. I spread it on the ground. She scooted onto the skin and lay down on her back. She worked her hand between the buttons of my shirt and began to stroke my chest. I took in the scent of her unwashed body and the smell of venison on her breath.
I shed my clothes and helped her remove hers. Our lovemaking wasn’t frantic, as it had been the first time or even subsequent times in the fields and in the basement, but it was pleasurable. The memory of it still gives me joy. How could I be so mad one moment about her suggestion that I become a breeder and the next moment want to make love to her?
When Nola and I had finished, I rolled onto my back and held her against me, her head resting on my chest. I could feel the stubble on her head, longer and softer, now. Her hair was starting to grow back.
“You did it this time, Pérez,” she said, “I’m sure.”
I squeezed her against me and let my thoughts drift. We should stay here. I could transfer all we needed from White Earth River, then I’d split apart the canoe with the ax. Pregnant, Nola wouldn’t be able to walk overland to the Center; she wouldn’t even know the way. I looked up at the undersides of the cottonwood leaves and watched them tremble. I would know how to raise a child. Except for my earliest years, I remembered everything.
“Roll up the blanket. Wedge it under me.” Nola interrupted my thoughts.
“What?”
I began to laugh as Nola raised her pelvis up into the air.
“I want your sperm to settle deep down inside of me. Get it past my cervix, up into my fallopian tubes. Store it, give me the best chance.”
I shoved the blanket under her buttocks.
“I might have some eggs loose, first hatch scouting for sperm.”
I laughed again at the position Nola had assumed.
“Okay, while you’re waiting for my sperm to swim upstream, I’ll take a walk and try to find us a spring. We’ll need clean water so you don’t get sick again.”
“Find something that tastes better than your dirty old well, Pérez.”
I left her on the deerskin and followed the shore of the river around a bend until it ended at a cut bank where the river had churned into the earth. I climbed up through loose dirt to what seemed like an overgrown path. It was wider than a game trail. I could tell that it had been there, well above the bends of the river and the seasonally flooded bottomland, for a long time. People, horses, or perhaps cattle had worn the trail into the ground through their comings and goings, perhaps to pasture, perhaps to the river for water. It was narrower than it had once been, but the well-trodden track was still easy to follow. I saw the footprints of deer, mice, rabbits, raccoons, and, every so often, coyotes. All sorts of animals used it.
The trail passed along the edges of the bottomland, while rugged buttes rose above me. After hiding in the cave and working at night, I craved the sunlight. The proportions of the valley were pleasing, and I walked fast. As I moved upstream, the buttes became more spread out and patches of shrubs and bands of trees stretched over the hills. From the top of a rise, I could see the flat prairie lying before me to the south, the path a line to the horizon. This was the route we would take to the Sierra Madre Occidental—when the baby was old enough to travel.
I liked what I saw: a valley with a history of human use, which seemed to prove that we would be able to stay here and plant a garden. I liked the broadness of the valley, too, how it expanded from the canyons of the Badlands. This gave me hope. Although I hadn’t found a spring, I felt confident that one was uphill. I turne
d and jogged downstream toward camp to tell Nola what I had found.
She wasn’t lying on the deerskin. At first I thought that the food had made her sick and she had wandered into the cottonwood stand to vomit. I called her name several times, but she didn’t answer. I searched for her in larger and larger circles, eventually ending up at the gravel beach.
The yellow rope snaked from the sapling through grass to the edge of the river, where its frayed end floated in the water. A line through the sand left by the keel showed where Nola had pushed the canoe into the river. Perhaps I had been away too long and she had gotten scared and gone to look for me. Once in the current, she wouldn’t have had the strength to paddle upstream and would have been taken downstream toward the bay. I had to catch her before she drifted into one of the wide arms of the river, out of sight and shouting distance.
I picked up a path above the river, down from our camp, and began running north, toward Lake Sakakawea. As I ran, I thought of the singing wolves and hoped they were guarding Nola, even if she didn’t believe in them. I recited the simple prayer that Otis and I had said when we hunted: “We accept this and give thanks in return.” And then began rearranging the words: “We take this and give thanks for it.” “We give thanks for living.” “We offer ourselves in return.”
I thought: If she were not in any of the inlets or the bay, I would start swimming. Once she heard my shouts, she would paddle toward me. Then I would never let her out of my sight.
The path ended on the bank of an inlet. Nola wasn’t on the water. She didn’t answer my shouts. I didn’t start swimming. The inlet was vast, larger than I had imagined it to be when we had paddled its length in the dark. The canoe was nowhere along the shore. I had lost her. She was gone.
PART VI:
COACHELLA VALLEY (ALICE AND GEORGE)
Something in me broke that moment as I stared out across the empty surface of the water. The feelings that welled up in my body told me that Nola hadn’t gone to look for me upstream and hadn’t been swept away; she’d stolen the canoe and paddled downstream to the lake, where she could float in the open water and call to be rescued. Her device still worked—that was never in question—she had only chosen not to charge it in the sun. Perhaps she had charged it that morning when we woke up in daylight in the Badlands. Perhaps she had been charging it all along while I was sleeping or working in the valley. Or maybe the laser cylinder that she called “protection” had enough power to signal the military. Agents could have been following us at night in a boat and had rescued her as soon as I walked upstream. Or what if she had tried to paddle away, capsized, and drowned, as the stranger had, and the currents had claimed her?
