Warnings from the Future

by Ethan Chatagnier

  The outdoor shower on the back side of the house was like the stall in a cheap bathroom, with just walls on either side but no door. I’d been in the hot water a long time, getting my fingernails clean, degunking the creases between my toes, the cracks of my thighs, mud just about everywhere it can go, before I looked over my shoulder and saw Hugo standing where he had a line of sight. This was far from the first time I’d caught one of the guys here watching me, but it was the first time the culprit had the nerve to keep watching, to smile openly, after being discovered, rather than tucking his head and hurrying off. So what the hell, I thought. I closed my eyes, tilted my head back, and ran my hands through my hair as I turned around to give him the full show.

  WESLEY

  You can tell a thing by its absence. The first absence I noticed was Hugo’s during breaks and study hours and our nightly stretches of free time. It was common enough for Eli to be off during these stretches, pounding stakes or killing snakes or fixing up the truck. All the details that didn’t fall within student work routines were his domain. Because Columbia’s milk remained pink, I knew I should be able to catch Hugo pilfering from the garden or in the barn, and yet I could never find him at either. Then I noticed I could never find him at all during those hours. Then I noticed that when I tried to find Eli to express my concern, I could never find Eli either. But the idea did not occur to me then. It remained too impossible for even the imagination.

  It was with genuine curiosity, genuine worry, that I too disappeared from our unscheduled hours, searching every corner and level of the barn, searching in and under the pickup, and riding horseback down the alleys between fields and along the perimeter of campus, searching for my missing compatriots, to no avail. I’ll admit that I began to despair, as if it were an important page missing from a book of philosophy I was reading, a page offering definitions that would be referenced again later.

  A broken sprinkler head shifted me from one despair to another. I found it flooding the corner of the farmhouse green on one of those dusk rides, and I hopped off and waded into the mud to screw a cap onto it. I went out to clean off at the mud shower, which no one used at that time because it was too cold and work hours were long over, but as I rounded the corner to the back side of the dormitory, I spotted a pair of boots under the wall of the cubby, the feet in them shifting gently from side to side. As I crept around to see in the faint purple light, the scene revealed itself: they were both clothed, but Eli had Hugo lifted and pressed against the back wall of the shower, and Hugo’s legs were wrapped around Eli’s waist, crossed at the ankles, and the two of them were kissing.

  “The Devil has brought you together, but I will pry you apart,” I shouted, but it came out as a whisper. The Devil had quieted my voice, I thought, and I confess that I fled. When I came back again on several other evenings, I also found my voice missing and my conviction sapped. I could not even speak on the one when I found them both nude, and Hugo kneeling in front of Eli, working Eli’s lap with his mouth. The greater their indiscretions, the more my power was blocked, such that I found myself paralyzed by the spectacle and unable to look away. Eli’s eyes were closed so he could not see my face, but I could see his, and it was caught in a fire of what at the time I called ecstasy. But the roots of the word ecstasy are the Greek ek, for “out of,” and stasis, for “the place where one stands,” though it was not that he was outside of himself. No, the right word was the one that means to be held by, to be occupied. The look on his face was that of a man possessed.

  ELI

  How many months does it take to fall in love?

  The question is phrased wrong.

  It doesn’t happen like the flipping of a switch, like the addition of a current to a dormant wire. Falling in love is like being flooded with water so that you feel it running down your head and body even as it rises around your ankles and immerses you.

  Hugo named the damn dog Mavis and taught her to live in the southwest corner of the barn near the door, next to Columbia. The cattle didn’t have stalls like the horses did; they could wander into any place they liked, but after Hugo had guided Columbia enough times to her place near the door, through which the snowcapped mountains could be seen sleeping on top of the orchard, she had adopted it as her own.

  The students did not like the idea of adopting a pet and grumbled indistinctly about it, but really making that kind of call was something about which they knew to defer to me. I fended them off by arguing she was a herding breed, though she did not herd and seemed only to care for food and petting. In truth, the dog would have gone to a shelter, kill- or non-, on the day she showed up if anyone but Hugo had taken her in. That was one of the things that drew me to him—his renunciation of the utilitarian view of the land we all took, and the way he looked at a dog or a cow or a horse and wanted it to be nothing more than what it was. When we weren’t sneaking off, he spent most of his free time in the barn, rubbing Mavis’s belly, talking to Columbia, and currying and otherwise tending to Galahad. The way he acted not just with these animals but with an onion, a lizard, made me believe that I myself should love them all better too.

  WESLEY

  As I have said, the gravity of their sins somehow prevented me from acting. A much smaller sin, a simpler one, is what freed me. Early one morning I walked by the barn and saw Eli inside, offering a carrot to Columbia all by himself. That was it. Let it not be said that I took rash or hasty action. I sought first the counsel of Pastor Dale. I waited for him to ride out on Lancelot one Tuesday after our theology class, and I rode out after him on Gawain, neglecting my work duties to do so, though for the purpose of speaking to the pastor, allowances were made.

  “You’re in a great trial,” he said before I could even begin. I looked away. “It’s all over your face, kid. Lay it on me.”

  “I fear for Eli’s soul.”

  “You’ve got a real atavistic diction, you know that?”

  “I’d call it nostalgic.”

  “Potato, po-tah-to.”

  He kept his boots clean, kept his jeans clean, despite not being shy with the dirt. It was a simple trick, but quite comforting, as was his cowboy-gospel mien, which, casual though it was, was rooted in a deep and abiding faith. I tried not to sound nostalgic and instead sounded only like a child.

  “He’s up to something bad.”

  Pastor Dale held up his palm to try to stop me.

  “Something very bad. And I’ve known for weeks, and I’ve tried to stop it.”

  He raised his hand two inches, and I stopped.

  “Who is his spiritual leader?” he said. “Has Eli been named one of your sheep? Who hears his confession weekly? Your concern is good hearted, but look first to the beam in your own eye.”

  “But he’s failed to confess this, or you wouldn’t take it so lightly.”

  “If his confessions are partial that’s a matter for me. Mostly for him, really. A little for me. Trust in me. Trust in the Lord. He expects his sheep to return to him. He does not expect them never to stray, for who knows their nature better than Him?”

  He waited to see if I had further objections. He clearly did not welcome them.

  “Cheer up, kid,” he said, spurring Lancelot, and I had no choice but to either chase after him or let him go.

  With effort I could mind his counsels during the day. But for a week I had trouble sleeping. With my eyes closed, the theater of my mind flashed only to the scene of Hugo’s buttocks saddled on his heels, of his head doing that thing to Eli, of Eli’s long body arching backwards and his face the face of his possession. And then in the darkness of the bunkroom I would lose track of whether my eyes were closed at all. After a week of this torment, which I suspected was the prompting of God to do what must be done, I took my knife from my footlocker, unfolded it silently, and padded silently across the room to Hugo’s bed. I scraped the knife twice against the skin of his neck as if shaving him, just enough to leave an abrasion and see if he would wake. When his eyelids fluttered open, I
pressed the flat of the blade into his lips, and I whispered to him, perhaps I hissed, “Agents of the Devil cannot abide in holy places. You must cast yourself out or be cast out. Your Master is nothing compared to ours. Your faith is small compared to ours, and ours will not flinch. You must leave tomorrow. You are exiled from the lands of the Lord.”

  His eyes were wide with awe and terror. They seemed to glow in the dark. Knowing that I would be unable to sleep after this encounter, I walked out into the frigid night air, but my body felt no cold.

  ELI

  I’ve never been a light sleeper, so I chalk it up to providence that I woke that night. A rustling sound repeated across the bunkroom that was not quite the wind, not quite a squirrel on the roof. My eyes adjusted, and I thought I saw Hugo standing up next to his bed, but as I strained to see in his posture hints of what was troubling him, it became clear that the height and the build and the carriage were not his. I crept closer and saw that the exposed flat buttocks, matte gray in the scant light, were certainly not his. The pauper’s haircut, the military stance—Wesley Denniston.

  As soon as I got an angle enough to see Wesley stroking his erection and prodding Hugo’s sleeping lips with it, my concern for stealth disappeared, and I wrapped my fists in his shirt and lifted him off the floor, hearing the fabric at his armpits rip. He went rigid, locking his wide white eyes on mine as I shouldered open the door and carried him out into the yard and threw him in a horse trough. His limbs came unlocked when he landed in the frigid water, churning a storm out of it. I thought of helping him get out, but decided against it.

  Back inside, once my eyes had adjusted back out of the starlight, I saw that a few of the students were sitting up and looking at me quizzically, sleepily. “Coyote,” I said. They nodded and lay back down. After crawling back into my bed I couldn’t sleep, keeping sentinel watch over Hugo, prepared for Wesley to return with more drastic intentions. He didn’t return at all, though, and I was kept up the rest of the night by the worry that I’d killed him. It was October now. The lows were in the 40s.

  I went out in the morning to look for him, while the other students were just rising. He was fast asleep in the barn. He’d hung out his wet clothes, curled up with Columbia, and covered himself with hay. He showed up at breakfast as if nothing had happened.

  WESLEY

  Hugo did not heed my warning. He and Eli shifted their trysts to some other nook I was unable to discover, but their sly public glances and sensitive friendship went on undeterred. This time I did not hesitate. After allowing two days for him to leave our midst, I snuck away from my planting detail and packed his bags in the bunkroom. I grabbed the pickup keys from the office, threw his bags in the cab, and watched him all day until he ambled back alone through the already bare stone fruit trees. Just as he was turning to head out of the treeline, I roped him by the ankle, and he fell flat on his face. By the time he rolled over I had a sock stuffed in his mouth and a handkerchief between his teeth to tie it in place. Kneeling on his shoulders, I socked him twice to stop him struggling, and when he went gentle I tied his wrists together between his legs and back out around his waist. Then I tied his ankles together and looped it to the other rope. Hoisting him onto the tailgate, I looped his tethers with bungee cords to the hooks in the bed of the truck.

  “If you jump out you’ll get dragged to death,” I told him. “You stay calm, and I’ll keep the ride gentle.”

  Nonetheless he kept hooking his feet on the bed the whole way, trying to jimmy his hips onto the edge, and I kept having to take hard turns to shake him back into the box. The roads out there all looked like they led to nowhere. I didn’t mind him thinking maybe he was on his way to get buried. Forcing him out would obviously take more fear than I’d delivered thus far. I didn’t want him to think me incapable of it, and at the same time I struggled not to believe myself capable of it.

  No one was about in Ridgecrest. It was the dominion of dust. A bus that would stop here despite the dearth of passengers seemed an idea from the realm of myth or fable, and I bought his ticket half believing that the driver would lose heart and retire before he ever made it to the station. Nonetheless, I spent the time before its scheduled arrival in the bed of the truck with Hugo, explaining to him the stakes of the situation.

  “I know the Devil will draw you back to Eli like a magnet,” I said, “so I will be the other pole of the magnet, repulsing you. I will kill a thing you love each time you return.”

  His eyes were defiant, but when the miracle bus arrived, I cut the ropes and slipped the ticket to Denver by way of Barstow into his pocket. I left the knife open and loose in my palm, and he got on the bus without complaint. He watched me the whole time with the Devil’s eyes, but I watched him right back with the eyes of the Holy Spirit and I saw, I thought I saw, the spirit in him quell.

  ELI

  I loved perhaps nothing more about Hugo than his tenderness to animals, but I also wanted to teach him the danger of loving things this way, of loving animals raised for stock or bred for labor. I taught that lesson only to myself. Hugo disappeared from campus. The police weren’t interested. He was young. He’d taken his things. They took my suspicions of Wesley to be a silly grudge.

  I took Mavis out all over the compound hoping she’d lead me to Hugo, but I didn’t know whether she found nothing because there was nothing to find or because she was as bad at tracking as she was at everything else. For five days I searched, and I had to consider that falling out of love also had no requisite number of months, that it could go extinct in a moment, that the faucet could simply turn off.

  On the fifth night Mavis smelled something out by the nut orchard, near where we’d first found her. She tapped at the top of the irrigation canal with one paw but would not go in the water. After commanding her to sit and wait, I hopped across and walked into what looked in the twilight like a palace of dark colonnades. I scanned the orchard floor for disturbed earth. Then I heard a very poor imitation of a horse’s nicker, and when I looked up there he was.

  We made love in the dirt. We said little. We’d said it.

  Lying there on our backs, I saw him fighting great emotion.

  “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I won’t come back again.”

  “Let’s get you back to your bunk.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  He was up, pulling his jeans over his naked hips. He tossed his boxer briefs into my lap.

  “Don’t forget me,” he said, trotting away toward the road holding his shirt in his fist.

  The next day, Mavis disappeared, and I figured she’d followed him off, that maybe he was camping or living somewhere nearby, but I didn’t have anything to track the dog that was tracking him. The week after that, Claude found her floating in the irrigation ditch near where we’d first saved her and where I’d met with Hugo, and I figured she had smelled him on the other side again, and without me there to stop her, had lost patience and tried to get across. Claude and I buried her there in the lane between orchard and field. Then I sent him back, and I ran through the orchard. I searched it by day and by night, by dusk and dawn, but there was no trace of him.

  He found me again a month later, with that unmistakable hamfisted nicker issuing from a field of sloping grazeland, and I tramped the grass until I spotted him sitting cross-legged in it, invisible except to me. We flattened a patch of fresh alfalfa that left long red stripes along his back and my thighs. Again I could tell that his instinct was to run off. I’d seen deer and elk before, spooked, their bodies tensed for flight. But he stayed a few minutes because he sensed my need.

  “I won’t come back again.” He rolled against me and put his head on my shoulder and rubbed his hand on my belly and said, “This is the most beautiful man.”

  I almost asked him then what had brought him here. He was nothing like the rest, whose seeking followed only paved roads. He was so secret. Why had he come to a place for which he knew he was too gentle? But I restrained myself from asking wh
at had brought him so as not to ruin my little dream that the answer he would give me was God.

  BATTLE CREEK COLLEGE

  All day the ranch had smelled of coal and beef fat. The odor kept in everyone’s mind the sight of great pearly globs of the fat, sheets of it, peeled away and tossed in a trash barrel, there being too much other work to worry about making tallow. They ground the chucks and mixed a vat of meatloaves and Saran-wrapped rectangular portions that stacked neatly in the freezer, displacing loaves of bread that were buttered and grilled to round out the meals. The short ribs, shanks, rounds, and briskets were first on a low fire in the morning so they’d melt in time for dinner. The ribs and a long loin roast were cooked for lunch, but the meal was a somber affair, the ribs eaten slowly, reluctantly. Despite the talk of honoring Columbia by making our best use of her, no one was quite ready to chew on her bones.

  By dinner that melancholy had given way to celebration not of the spirit and sacrifice of the stock animal but rather to the conviviality that comes with rich and abundant food, that comes with unctuous chins and hands and the jeans they’re wiped on. An early sunset gave way to a shroud of night around the same floodlights they’d labored under in the morning. The pool of blood had thawed and soaked into the ground, leaving a dark and fertile streak of soil. There was no beer with the feast, but there was singing. No hymns tonight, just songs from high school dances, songs from the radio, songs from the radio of years past, all carrying out who knows how far toward the mountains.

  No one asked where Wesley was, but he could hear their song out on the perimeter, where he’d stopped Gawain and turned off his flashlight to offer his ear to the night, sorting the crickets from the frogs and the scattered howling of coyotes and the muffled drumming of drunks shooting target practice on the outskirts of Bishop. The crunch of a man’s boots in the dirt was a different order of noise, its own category, and not hard to tell from the others. But tonight there was nothing. Every sound was organic except, when he set Gawain to walking again, the step of a shod horse. It was a waste of time, anyway. Hugo left long trails of boot prints every time he came, traveling the quarry road that ran a few miles north of campus. If Hugo had come again, it would be clear enough by daylight. Wesley supposed it was time to think about, then, what other reasons had drawn him out here.