Man V. Nature: Stories

by Cook, Diane

  Shouting began over by the toaster. More voices joined. Something about cinnamon toast. A scuffle erupted. People surged to escape the fight and both of Jane’s feet left the floor as she was pressed upward by the bodies around her. She screamed. The nearest people shrank from her and let her fall to her knees.

  She had lost sight of West. She heard him call out, his voice filled with concern but far away. “Are you okay?”

  Jane couldn’t speak. She punched her way through the crowd, wanting to harm, and once inside her bedroom, slid all the furniture in front of the door, even the wicker hamper which held only one sock. Someone had stolen all her dirty clothes

  By midday, West was able to force himself into the bedroom. Jane sat stiffly in bed. He approached with caution, as if she was either delicate or dangerous. He tried to hold her.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said coldly.

  His eyes widened. “Why not?” He tried to hold her again.

  “I don’t want people touching me.”

  “But it’s me,” he said, his voice soft with confusion. “I’m different.”

  He was different. That was the problem. “You need to go,” she said.

  “But I can help. Let me help you.”

  “Help? You can’t help me. I don’t even love you.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, not believing it.

  “Yes, it is,” she said, through tears now. “Get out.”

  “You do too love me. I can see it.” He tried to sound certain, but he shook his head, stunned.

  “You’re wrong. This whole world was wrong. I have nothing to give you. So leave.”

  “Honey, you don’t really believe that. That’s not what you want.”

  “You have no idea what I want.”

  “So tell me.”

  But she didn’t know what to say. She felt a strong desire to be alone, but she didn’t know how long that feeling would last. And she didn’t equate that desire with knowing what she really wanted. She said nothing.

  West smoothed her cheeks, but he failed to find her behind hardened eyes, and so he reluctantly packed a bag, a bag he hadn’t arrived with, full of things that didn’t belong to him, and left.

  News spread through the house, out to the yards, up the trees and underground. Conversations died in the living room. People quickly got out of Jane’s way when they saw her coming. For the first time in what felt like years, she went a full day without brushing shoulders with someone.

  When the food ran out, she didn’t buy more. People scrounged in the garbage, hunted for scraps in the yard. The hunger set in. Motley caravans began to leave, clanging down the streets at all hours. People insisted Jane buy supplies to make them snacks and bagged lunches for the road, pay their bus fare, drive them to the airport. “You owe us,” they said, but she gave them nothing. They threw pennies at her, then collected what fell at her feet. They would need them.

  “Mom, they’re leaving.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I kicked West out.”

  “Oh honey, why?”

  “I don’t know. They steal my stuff.”

  “You have plenty of stuff.”

  “It was too much. I couldn’t take it.”

  “How am I not surprised? You have no follow-through. You never have.”

  “Mom.”

  “Jane. What’s one year? You were happy. They were happy.”

  “I wasn’t happy.”

  “Well, is this what you wanted?” her mother said. “Now who’s happy?”

  Jane found a naked woman slumped in the shower. The woman was slack-jawed in the relentless spray, her pouty mouth like a cherubic water feature spouting water down her chin, her breasts. Jane pulled her onto the bathroom tile, where she lay splayed for days, barely breathing. Eventually the woman dragged herself down the stairs, trailing rust-colored urine. Jane listened to the drag all night.

  The last people crawled away on their hands and knees, stricken by the sudden lack. Their eyes were yellowed, their skin blotchy. Behind the couch, Jane found two corpses, their gray, confused faces covered by a sheet. She recognized them. A new couple. A thing started here. They’d stayed too long, perhaps believing her fortunes would change.

  She dragged these leaden bodies to one of the empty burrows and dropped them in. They hit like apples hit the floor.

  The burrows in the yard sank with no families to keep them from caving. The tree-house nails rusted, and wind worried some boards from the branches. At night, Jane heard the creak of swinging pieces. Her house groaned above the shifting ground, and the floors settled into new, unnerving contours. The nighttime glowed green against her windows, and her room felt full of muck.

  She was alone. She hadn’t meant to be this alone.

  This is how her year ended: Occasionally someone would show up, most often some man down on his luck, having heard about a woman with prodigious good fortune to share. She would welcome him, buy him things, cook and serve his meals, take him in her bed or anywhere he wanted and he would find it all soothing. The man would be hopeful that his life was changing. But eventually he would realize no good could be found in such a desolate-feeling house. The man would stay a week more, eating her cooking, sleeping with her, because she made it easy to.

  But then Jane would wake alone. She’d search, hoping to surprise the man in a dark closet, under a bed, all the places where she used to find people without even trying. But Jane would only ever find something missing. A box of her grandmother’s jewelry. Her checkbook. Stereo equipment.

  She kept a log of all the things that had been taken from her that year. It sat heavily on her kitchen table. On mornings she’d sit before it, the sunrise making the wood table glimmer like the surface of a pond, slightly quaking from her unsteady breath and anxious knees, the wood grain arcing longways like bug trails on the water. She’d wait, peering down the road and drumming her fingernails on the table, the dense sound ricocheting around the house, into all the empty rooms, finally settling like leaves in her lap.

  THE NOT-NEEDED FOREST

  I get told I am Not Needed by a man in a suit. This only happens to ten-year-old boys, and only some. My mother cries and cries on the suit, and the man’s face budges not a bit. He says simply, as she is sobby, Ma’am, would you like the State to make a status exception for just your boy?

  Of course, I know this trick from school, but Ma makes grateful saucer eyes and wiggles. Oh, would you?

  So I hold her arm to steady her because it’s clear she isn’t ready for his two-punch.

  There are no exceptions from the State.

  The next day I put my belongings on the curb, and the Needed boys come for the good toys—my bike, skates, mitt—the things any ten-year-old wants; their mothers search for the clothes that fit and are warm, shoes of the right size. My pile is not the only one on the block.

  Birds smother the trees, and to pass the time we throw rocks at them, hover while they sit stunned and blinking on the ground. We don’t mess with them there. Once they rise back up to the branches, we try to hit them again. I stun the same bird three times, which cheers me. It’s a hard game, but I’m good at it.

  At dinner my father swirls his brown drink, looks at my mother with this expression I don’t know. Maybe he can’t settle on a feeling. He shrugs as if to say something.

  My mother throws a spoon at him, yells. I know her look.

  Ma, I cry. It’s no one’s fault.

  My father’s face crumples.

  I say, It’s random.

  Ma says, Oh random, my eye.

  I’ve never seen her so ugly.

  In the morning, I board the bus. It’s a solemn ride. We look out the windows at our city disappearing. People on their way to work, girls in pretty dresses lined up outside a school. We hear the hollow huts of boys playing football. Boys we’ll never be. Then we’re speeding by dumps, by corn and cows and silos, reservoirs and fields of tree stumps, new swamps. We drive for hours, and many of u
s fall asleep.

  We jolt awake at the Processing Hub, dead center in a mud lot of buses coughing darkness, buses full of boys like us.

  I’m draped in a thin paper smock. My shoes are taken. I wait for hours that seem even longer in a line that coils and squeezes itself as we jostle for some last breathing room. Boy after boy, stoic or weepy, slides into the Chute. Here, the Chute is just a hole that makes a sucking noise. But beyond, it’s a long, snaking tube that leads to the Incineration Center. It’s a means to an end.

  At the front of the line, a white-coated processor sits at a cluttered desk, his hair flying up, sucked by the Chute. He holds a clipboard of bulging paper, and when I tell him my name, he rustles through the pages and jots the time in a column, ENTERED CHUTE.

  The processor says, Please get in the Chute.

  I remind myself that this is my status, this is just the way things are. I tell myself, You had a nice time; even, Maybe it’s better this way. I allow one last, fun, deep, muscle-straining breath, the kind you take before you dive into the quarry—the breath of being most alive—and I slide into the Chute.

  I tumble toward the roar and rising heat of the Incinerator, trying not to think of life things, which only makes me think of them more. It’s an unfair game. The walls turn pocked and buckled. They are warming. Just as I’m trying not to think of Ma baking cookies, I wrap hard into a curve and bang against the side and stop. I hear a suck and a pop behind me; another boy has entered the Chute. I try to pull myself forward, to squeak my own way to my death. But I’m stuck. I feel cool air tickle my leg, and I realize my foot is no longer in the Chute. I feel around with my hands. I’m able to slip fingers out, then my arm. More cool air rushes at my face from where my arm and foot are. I’m caught in a hole; a fissure in the seam of the Chute. My stomach flutters. Around the curve, the funneling wind picks up, tugs at my body. I can hear the next boy hurtling toward me as I scrape my other leg through the hole, then the rest of me. I barely think about what I’m doing—that I’m going against my fate, the State, my status—and the consequences of it. I just have this feeling inside, like, Win.

  And then I’m cold and in a stinking, mushy pit below the Chute, and it’s hollow dark. A pair of eyes blinks white at me, and I hear, Shush. Lots of teeth are smiling. A boy’s voice whispers, Can you believe it? And we find hands in the dark and squeeze, ecstatic. We can’t believe it.

  We escaped the Chute! We’re not dead!

  We wait in mud until the whirring Chute quiets. The end of Processing. It’s even harder to see our teeth and eyes now, as if the night has gotten deeper. We move toward the sound of frogs, and steadily we are more boys. We slither under a fence and through dark grass, run for an even darker line: a forest.

  We bushwhack, try to navigate by stars, follow a river, eat what we find: little berries and thwacked oily nuts. We sing songs we’d sung in school. We tell jokes. As our eyes adjust, we throw rocks at skulking animals. A squirrel dies. We realize how hungry we are. We peel its skin, eat it raw. We puke.

  The sun climbs, and a boy starts shouting, This way! A camp! I’ve found a camp!

  He runs ahead and we run after, along the sandy and mucky river edge, until we break through the trees and into a clearing.

  Black stones ring a pile of flaky, charred wood. A rough structure hides beneath a blanket of evergreen branches.

  We mill about, touching things—animal bones, hatches in a tree to mark the passing days. A black soup pot and a ladle, a sharp blade, deer hides tacked up to dry.

  The boy who found the camp holds up a stick, shrieking, This is an arrow!

  We huddle, look nervously to the tangled trees surrounding us. We see that fourteen of us escaped the Chute. Fourteen boys, naked and shimmering with mud.

  We should have buddies, one boy says. We think this is a good idea and pair off. I am with a boy named George. The two Michaels are together, and so we name the scrawny one Small Michael. Carl is the tallest, and he pairs with Alfred, the boy who found the camp, who is almost as tall. He is muscular too, in a way none of the other boys are muscular. Because they are tall and strong, they easily seem like the leaders. Ryan and Brian are paired, Joe and Davey, Fred and Frank, Steven and Gil.

  Small Michael asks, What is this place? He sounds spooked, like a girl.

  Must be an abandoned hunting camp, Alfred says. It must be very old.

  Do you think we’re the first boys to escape the Chute? Carl asks.

  We can’t be, I say, thinking of that hole that grabbed my leg and jerked me to a stop.

  We must be, Alfred says. Otherwise there would be a whole community here of boys like us. But older.

  It makes sense. Where would such boys have gone? Not-Neededs are not welcome anywhere.

  This is when we understand that we’re here for good. We get quiet.

  What are you whittling? Carl asks Alfred.

  The arrow, Alfred says, and he holds it up. The point is dull. I’m making it pointier.

  The point is now very pointy. He throws it at a tree, and it sinks in deep. He laughs. Alfred has a small laugh.

  There’s no bow, he says, but I’ll just throw it and hit something meaty. How hard can it be?

  Alfred disappears into the woods, and before the pot of water is boiling he returns with a deer, small like a fawn but past its spots. He cleans, skins and hunks it, and we skewer the meat on broken saplings, roast it over a popping fire.

  When we are full and warm and lying around the fire, drifting, I say, We are charmed boys.

  The others sleepily hoorah, and Alfred smiles at me through the flickery orange light.

  Life with boys is great!

  No one tells us to behave, and yet we do. In our own way. When we get that feeling in our pits, we go into the woods and wrench large branches from living trees. We can pummel the flank of a dead deer and scream, and we don’t have to answer why because no one is asking us why. We all know why. We’re boys. We’ll stun a bird and twist its neck, and we’re on to the next thing. We don’t ask what did it ever do to us. We’ll set fires and watch them burn, and later, when we feel better, we’ll put them out. And wouldn’t you know, those fire spots bloom mushrooms for us to eat.

  We get good at foraging. We have nut piles and traps to catch the squirrels that raid them. We collect bird eggs, and we eat the mom. A few boys become ace whittlers, and to shoot their arrows we bend bows from saplings, thread them with stretched sinew. We have a nice, organized camp, and when we yearn for our mothers, we have each other. No boy gives another boy a hard time ever.

  The height of summer means berries. The small trees grow taller, and we hide among them when we hunt. We play games. Some old games, but also some new ones with extra-fun parts. Davey made up a tug-of-war done in heats. Ryan made up a chase through the forest, with tagging and spotting and no feet touching the ground. Everyone has a game, and we play them all, and no one has a favorite.

  Each game has rules, and we make them complicated. That’s where our mothers got us wrong—boys like rules. But rules must also be a kind of game.

  Sometime in late summer Alfred builds an obstacle course. It goes like this: Wade through the mud pit, swim across the river to the maze he hacked into grasses that have sprung human height along the banks. Out of the maze, slide under the fence of thorny branches he’s woven, and race to touch the deer-pelted tree. At that point the rules end. If you are fast, you can run to win. If you are strong, you can tackle the runner. If you are clever, you can let someone strong tackle someone fast, and while they wrestle, you win.

  The first day we race the course, we finish ecstatic and spent under the tree.

  When’d you do all this? we wheeze.

  Alfred says, Sometimes I can’t sleep.

  The leaves turn and fall, and we know we’re near winter. We crudely stitch skins together for warmth. Mushrooms explode; we fight animals for nuts. The deer huff down leaves like vacuums. All the animals we see are stuffing their faces, but many more
have disappeared, getting tight in their dens. All the delicious berries are gone. Brian found an apple tree deep in the forest and picked every last one. We make ourselves sick on apples, then bury the rest in a hole for storage. Alfred says the tree is a sign there once was a farm here.

  One morning we wake nestled in snow. The fire has been doused by melt. It smokes and sizzles. We shake the clumps off our sleeping pelts and sit in silence. We’ve only ever known winter in our homes.

  We are months past our scheduled deaths, and now we are nearly starved.

  We’ve eaten our nuts, our apples, our seeds, our mushrooms, our dried deer and squirrel and rabbit and fish. We break water from the frozen river. We suck on bark, chew leaves that have already been chewed by worms. We hook fingers around bones we never knew we had. This is our new game because we’re too tired to run.

  We dig through the snow for animal bones to boil. We must have squandered something when we were just new and careless boys, left scraps decomposing on the forest floor. We roam deeper and deeper into the woods, days from our camp, sleep in the open so that we can travel even farther. One day we see a track and follow it up into the mountains, where we find a deer struggling in the snow and pounce, kill it with our hands even though we have weapons. We just don’t think. But it’s a starved deer, almost meatless, and it gives us strength for only a week. Every creature is a ghost. We can’t find the end of the forest to leave it, and we can’t leave it because we have nowhere to go.

  Davey is curled around a tree, his neck turned like he’s looking at something in the middle of his back. He is dead.

  Maybe he was climbing and fell.

  Maybe he was chasing an animal and didn’t see the tree.

  Who cares what happened, Alfred says. What are we going to do with him?

  We stand around the body, kick holes in the crusty snow.

  A few boys punch their guts guiltily. Their stomachs are cursing.