Before he knew what, Bunch was on the porch. The house wood was warm and giving under his feet. His feet, clean, now, and the skin soft from his walk across the warm cool water of Papoose creek and the cleansing pebbles of the path. The wood – the wood of the porch, the walls, the place – was from another place; not Bluffton-milled. Nope. Whiter, this stuff was, where it was white, and redder, more fragrant, where it was red.
The door widened. “Come on in, why don’t you?” it damn near said. Across the room, there, his bike shivered, its chain rattled, tires squeaked against the floor. Happy to see him, Bunch figured. The radio purred and its music danced the air between them.
Damn if it wasn't all so pretty. The world was filled with pretty, the air with sound, smell, and the flash of the thin wings of dragonflies and damsels. Bunch barely walked. The room rippled him forward. A fire crackled in the hearth. He reached to touch the bike and it shivered like a nervous mare. Good old bike.
A dragonfly wisped past his nose and buzzed his ear. Bunch reached for it, gently, smiling. It backstroked from him then the pretty thing settled in the air; it hovered above a shadow by the corner. Made Bunch smile. In the shadow sat a pretty fox, a fat red fox.
The dragonfly wings went sudden and swift. Its buzz climbed into a scream that hung in the air.
The fox in the corner twitched as the soft floor lapped and licked its legs. The animal's eyes found Bunch.
“Hey,” Bunch said.
The fox screamed; yelled death at the world. It strained to stand. Its body rippled. Then it settled softly into the floor, rolled like a body sinking in still water, going down without a bubble. Like that, the pretty fox vanished a half-inch, then another and another. When the critter rolled again, Bunch saw shiny wet red stumps and white bone, cut smooth where legs and haunches should have been. From where its furry belly should have been, blue and silver guts uncurled across the floor. The floor ate and the fox became half-a-fox, then no fox at all. Then its spilled out guts, were gone too.
The hovering dragonfly settled on the mantle. Vanished like/that! From legs up, melted to sizzling nothing like an ice cube on a griddle.
A half second later, Bunch felt the tingle in his feet. Big soft needles pushed at his soles, first, like coming back from being asleep. Then the sharpness, the heat, barefoot in hot roof tar!
Bunch had plenty of scream left.
The damn radio, too. It yelled and yelled, like someone inside was torturing the orchestra slow and just for fun. And the damn bike chattered like a haunt rattling its chains!
Bunch yelled again and the dream of pretty was over. He tried to turn, to run for the door.
Nope. The floor slobbered up his ankles and took hold. Where the soft planks lapped him, his skin felt cold, felt hot, felt sharp, dull, and wet all at once.
Walking was no use. Pulling one foot up, pushed down the other. Walking wouldn't work!
Standing still didn't help, either. The longer he stood, the deeper the pain reached into the meat of him. Second on top of second, the foot-asleep feeling got more muscle to it. Pretty soon, he figured, the pins and needles were going to be big shrieking hurts. Soon both feet would be, what did they call it? Appetizers. Soon after that, the rest of him would be meal and desert. Bunch: soup to nuts. Dinner for a damn, house! He could not have that, no sir!
He tried to jump, to reach the roof beams.
The splintery joists heaved out of his reach and the floor nibbled higher on Bunch's feet.
The floor he was sinking into...
Okay, call it what the hell it was: the damn house’s tongue! The tongue he stood on and sank into lapped higher, sucked his pantsleg. It didn't hurt or even tingle where it snatched dungaree, but Bunch felt it gum the cloth, gnawing, feeling blind for skin and meat, blood and bone.
About then, the ceiling started shifting shape and color. The wooden beams and stringers he’d reached for, wetted up, thinned out, stretched and reddened until they looked like raw ribs after the flesh was gnawed. The joists dissolved into the walls. The walls bowed out like a skin balloon, a what-do-you-call-it? A bladder.
Walls, roof and tongue, the insides of the place were starting to show for what they were. Bunch knew he was in a critter: a mouth – maybe a gullet, maybe a gut!
He didn't want to go further with the maybes. He was in trouble was what he was in, and that was sure.
The house – the critter – rolled, tossed and smoothed itself. It went tight, then churned loose, wrinkled. The sun shone through the silver blue veins of the walls, the walls stretched like cow guts by firelight.
All the pretty scents the shack had breathed, luring him here, were gone too. The place stunk like a meat fart. The stench licked inside Bunch's nose and reached down his throat to his gut.
Bunch shuffled himself around. Seen from inside, the doorframe was lips. Of course it was lips! Lips wet and getting wetter. They puckered toward him like a boar hog slobbering up for a kiss. The threshold peeled into jagged teeth and rotted tusk.
Bunch shuffled around again. On the back wall, the fireplace and chimney had softened to a soot-black hole. The hole opened, squeezed shut, opened again, then shut. Bunch had seen a cow’s ass do that and that's all he thought about that.
Between him and the house’s clenching butt hole, his bike shivered. The frame and handles, the plastic fringes trailing off the grips, glowed in the sunlight that filtered through the blue-white skin of the place. The bike bucked and pulled, shook and rattled on chewed up tires. The radio warbled, dying. A good country tune blared too loud and too shaky. The floor gnawed toothless on the wheel’s rims and spokes and what was left of the tire rubber. Least the damn house wasn't having any luck eating the bike.
Damn, there it was! There was the answer. Okay, Bunch said and jumped – fell forward more like; lunged as good as he could toward the damn bike. If he fell and missed, he figured, the critter would be all over him in half a breath and done. That would be it. If he fell, he'd had it.
He fell.
. . .and grabbed the bike's handlebars and frame on the way down.
Wrenched by the floor, the bike pulled back. The house tried to snatch the bike out of Bunch's hands. Bunch stretched: his feet hauled one way by the critter's tongue and his arms and body yanked the other way by the bike.
Letting go would be pretty stupid, Bunch figured, so he didn't let go. He grabbed tighter and tried walking, hand over hand, away from his own bare feet, gnawed and sucked on by the house's stomach juice. If his hands slipped, if his shoulders gave out. . .
They didn't. The house gave one last tug to snatch Bunch from the bike, he held on for life and with a soft wet suck his feet slipped from the floor’s tongue.
Bunch flipped head over ass and landed, gut-over, across the bike. From there he scrambled, keeping his feet off the floor and inched his tail onto the seat.
He was not the world’s best biker, but now he kept his balance, kept it as best he could, wiggling one way, waggling the other. Through it all the radio shouted. Now it shouted an ad for a health club in Cruxton. Bunch wasn't interested. Damn good radio, putting up with this.
In a bit, the rolling, reaching tongue eased its grip on the bike bit by bit. In a couple minutes, Bunch found himself wobbling and waggling to keep standing-still, upright, his feet off the floor. By then the tongue was looking more like pale wood floor. The ceiling had settled back to being wooden ribs and the soot black pucker hole at the tail end of the place? Well it relaxed into being a fireplace and stopped doing whatever it had tried to do before!
Bunch reached down with one foot, then the other, and touched the pedals. The bike wiggled side to side. Desperate – now kept upright less and less by the floor’s grip on the metal rims and more and more by Bunch’s bad balance – Bunch nudged the right pedal.
They moved. An inch. Another. He pushed with his left foot. They moved a foot, then another. The bike crept toward the door, waggling fearsomely.
By then the door looked
more like wood and paint and only a little like pig snout, slobber and tusk.
Bunch reckoned if he pushed too fast, the damn house would grab hold and turn to pure critter again; swallow radio, bike and him altogether, spit out what it couldn't swallow, crap what it could. He was not going to end up house shit!
Bunch was not good with time, but the radio man in Cruxton kept counting it out for him: It took a good half-hour to make the twelve feet to the door, steady pedal shoving and even fiercer wiggling. By then, the place looked and smelled pretty much like a nice little shack in the woods, a place somebody might fix up pretty, a body like him, a place a woman might even. . .where he might even. . .like he ought to stop this indoor biking stuff, step down and rest a bit, consider the future!
Without thinking, Bunch sprung and tossed himself through the door. He rolled across the porch, tumbled down the step in one long leap, flop, roll and scrabble! He was onto soft sand and damp cool pebbles! Morning light washed over him where he lay. His feet felt like they’d walked a slow mile of hot rock. His body was all over one big brush burned bruise, he dripped sweat and grease but he was outside the inside of the critter house and rubbing himself happy.
From where he sat, Bunch considered.
He considered ax. He considered fire. He wished dynamite. He relished all manner of destructions onto the place.
The place shivered, sucked in, a balloon tire oozing flat, collapsing on itself. As it wheezed, it exhaled a stink breath, once live things now dead and gone to rot.
Damn place shriveled until it was the near the size (and almost the shape) of the bike. When it couldn't wrap itself around it any more, the house squirted the cycle at Bunch like a melon seed through pinched lips. Bunch ducked as the bike spun past his head and crashed onto the path near the creek.
Free of the bike’s steel shape, the house shriveled to the size of a good raccoon. The radio popped past Bunch's head.
At that point Bunch felt the urge to kick the damn thing. He wanted to drown it in the creek or stomp it, barefooted as he was, into the earth.
The damn thing sucked even smaller. It sucked slower, now, maybe because from all around, the late-blooming plants, the rotted stumps, all that stuff – the just for show stuff – sucked into the earth. Part of the critter, Bunch figured.
Now cat-sized, the beast let a stinking wheeze of breath as Bunch righted his bike. Like Bunch, the cycle was slicked over, something both oily and gritty – like MyOwne sandy-soap Einar kept by the sink at the Formerly Amoco. He and the bike dripped with the stuff.
The damn radio was bust, the plastic chewed, cracked and melted. Useless! Damn, if that didn’t piss him.
When the old strange place got to be the size of a good black squirrel, it pulled one foot, then another, then another, then three, four, a half-dozen more out of the ground. The little critter skittered its ugly ass out of the depression where the house had stood for the past nine months, and scooted into the forest.
By then it was no bigger than a really good-sized centipede. Bunch felt like grabbing a stick to whomp it but he didn't. Hell, it was just a critter like others. It didn't float in a galloping way, it didn't slip like a cat, sneak like a fox, not even flow like a thousand-legger might do shivering down a wall. It crashed and ripped through the bushes and the trees with one hell of a racket. It just bashed into the thicket. For a good two minutes after, twigs snapped and branches crunched before the sounds faded to nothing.
Little as it was, the damn thing probably weighed out about the same as a good cow. No wonder the noisy son of a bitch showed up during thunder season. No wonder the damn thing couldn’t catch a decent meal and just sat around all summer and stuck it out, stupid, into Fall. No wonder. Bunch just pitied the damn thing!
Chapter 5
ENGINE WARM
Some people saw Eagle Feather Proud just fine. Most did not. Bunch could not, and he saw more than most.
Eagle Feather Proud said he wasn’t there, though, and that was good enough for most people. Fact was, Feather Proud couldn’t see a lot of people, himself, so it was a standoff.
If you could see him and he forgot to let you know he wasn’t there and you got to know him, he’d tell you he’d been around, running or looking, for hundreds of years. Couldn’t say exactly because his people counted time different than the soft shirts did – that’s what he called people, “soft shirts.”
Why?
“Because your shirts are soft,” he’d say. Then he’d be off. Running. He wouldn’t say what he was looking for or where he was trying to get. And you'd be there feeling your flannel, cotton, or whatever.
Feather Proud was already there when Old Ken was just a little shit climbing Morning Bluff every sun-up to bag snake for bounty on the Amish lands. That was near the turn of the old century.
Feather could see Old Ken just fine.
Ken saw him, too, until he went blind, but that’s something else again.
Man-With-Box-That-Looks saw him and tried putting Feather in his box. Feather made a horrible face at Man-With-Box, who only laughed, and took the picture anyway.
Some people said the great photographer succeeded and that somewhere was a glass plate with a picture of an Indian with a broken feather; swore the image was plain as day and night. Some claimed to have seen it years before when photographer Burroughs was still around, making his pictures and having his parties.
Those people are mostly dead now up in the Lutheran churchyard or the Catholic cemetery across the way, or lying in graves in far off lands. Other folks, just as dead, had looked and seen only a pretty silvertone picture of the place where the rivers join, down at the place some old German had starting calling “Engine Warm.”
That’s the way it was with Eagle Feather Proud: sometimes there, mostly not. It depended.
Years and years ago, when Bluffton was a sawmill and a few crappy sheds on a muddy place in the river, back when there were 24 white men, a handful of whores and about three wives in the whole valley, Feather Proud used to come running, running, running through the settlement every morning at dawn, ignoring everything.
Only two could see him back then. One was a Scandahoovian chippy that washed her dirty parts in private every morning by the river. One day, Feather Proud came running past and the chippy stood to see him fly by naked and wonderful, trailing sun and flapping manhood.
“Oh, my,” she said in Scandahoovian. “Isn’t he a man of great promise?”
Rhetorical, maybe, but the view ruined her for being a chippy and she soon moved on and became a wife in Mankato. Until she saved enough to leave whoring, though, she made sure she saw Feather Proud every morning. “He inspires me. I will aim high,” she said.
The other one could see him was a little boy. He saw the naked native man run along the riverbank and off around the bend. Every morning, after, he was at that spot, and there’d be the naked Injun. Injun’s was scarce, his daddy’d said. Injun’s ain’t for years and years been around. Killed each other all, warring with each other. Then the white men came...
“White men's us, huh?” the boy said.
“'Course it's us. What'd you think?” his dad said.
“Injuns warring,” the kid said. “Warring with each other?”
“Yep, killing each other. Injuns are like that. Savage.”
“Injun warrin'“ the kid repeated.
“'Course some sickened and died, some went away, just. So, nope,” daddy said, “Hardly ain't nobody Injun no more ‘round here. Just as well, too! Savage folk, they are.”
Of course they said that in what was left of their German.
One morning, daddy and the boy were fishing the river when Feather splashed past. The boy laughed, pointed, said “there he is, there’s the Injun. Hello Injun!”
The father smacked the back of his son's head and told him not to ever again fib.
“Wasn’t fibbing,” the kid said, rubbing his head.
His father smacked him again. “What’d I tell you?�
��
After, the boy made sure he didn’t talk about the Injun to anyone. He continued saying hello to Feather Proud every morning he saw him – when he was alone.
Eventually, Feather Proud answered; told the boy to not speak to him. “Don't speak to me,” he said, “I'm not here.”
The kid didn’t believe that and laughed. Then he remembered the smack the Father had given him for fibbing and realized big people didn't lie. So the Injun really wasn’t there. Still...
The Injun splashed away down around the bend in the river.
“Hello, Injun,” the boy said to the river.
He soon tired of saying hello, and not being hello'd back. Soon after that, he’d grown. After that he got old. The Injun was still coming through. Still running. But he was running slower, running and looking around a little. The boy, who was now old, old, old still said, “hello, Injun,” but he was real tired of it and said it with little enthusiasm. A habit.
When he died and got buried at the Lutheran, the little boy in him came back to the river to wait for Feather Proud, very next morning.
“Why’re you running?” the little boy asked the Injun.
Feather Proud stopped. For the first time in he couldn’t say how long, he stopped. Dead. He looked at this new spook. He’d seen other spooks before, sure. This was the first time any of them bothered to ask Feather what he was doing. Spooks were mostly just interested in their own problems.
“I’m running for help,” Feather Proud told the little dead boy. “My people are being starved in the caves by the Animals Who Think They’re People.”
The boy nodded. “Figured it was something important,” he said, and watched as the Indian ran around the bend in the river. “Knew it was!”
Just North of Nowhere Page 8
