The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

  “Can Carl really drink from more rivers?” Agnes asked.

  “No.”

  “Why did he say he could?”

  “Because sometimes Carl says things that aren’t true.”

  “But even when Glen said he was wrong, he said no, he was right.”

  Bea said, “Don’t listen to either of them.” She paused. “Well, you should listen to Glen because he’s family. And because he is a smart man.”

  “And Carl isn’t?” Agnes asked, all innocence.

  “Well,” Bea said.

  “I think they’re both wrong.”

  “Oh?” Bea smiled in the dark.

  “Yes. The animals are always right, and when I do what they do, nothing bad happens.”

  “Next time we’re hungry, thirsty, or lost, I’ll follow you.”

  “Okay.” Agnes straightened. She seemed proud.

  “We might need to cut your hair.”

  “No,” Agnes said.

  “Well, short hair doesn’t tangle. And something has to be done about these tangles.” Bea gripped a chunk of Agnes’s hair at its base and then tried to pull the brush through to the bottom. “When in doubt, listen to Glen,” she said. “The difference is Glen loves you and Carl doesn’t.”

  “Carl loves me,” Agnes said. “He says so.”

  A snag came free and Agnes’s head snapped back.

  “Ow,” Agnes said. She touched her head near the loose snarl gingerly. “Carl says he loves me and he loves you,” she continued.

  “Well,” Bea said. She didn’t want to hear about who Carl loved. She wasn’t sure Carl loved anyone but himself.

  They were quiet.

  “Do you love me?” Agnes asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Even when you’re angry?”

  “I’m never angry,” Bea lied. She didn’t want Agnes to see her that way. And it was better if everything Bea did was labeled as love, wasn’t it? Bea yanked the brush through again and Agnes whimpered, “Mama,” and it was such a lonesome sound that Bea stopped. The top of Agnes’s head was a soft smooth dome that ended in a nest of snarls.

  Agnes picked up the brush and whimpered her way through her own tangles. “Maybe I could put lard in my hair and it would be easier?” she hoped out loud.

  “Sure, you could do that, and the next thing you know the coyotes will be eating your hair.”

  Agnes smiled through the pain. “They wouldn’t,” she said almost shyly, and Bea watched Agnes’s face contort, trying to imagine coyotes snuffling her hair.

  “They might.” Bea laughed. But she really did think they might.

  Bea saw the adults rising, moving about, some putting out the fire. The meeting was over and soon everyone would bed down.

  She yawned theatrically. “Time for sleep now.” Agnes fought against her mirror yawn, but it slowly crawled out. They lay down, Agnes at the foot. Bea wished she’d come up and sleep in her arms like she had when she was young, but she wouldn’t ask because she didn’t want Agnes to say no. So she waited for the cold rush of air as Glen joined them in the bed, but she was asleep before she felt him arrive.

  * * *

  They could see that this dry landscape ended at the ridge, and like prisoners who’d grown used to a captive life, they began to fear not being in it, this place they’d wanted out of so badly. Bea was looking behind her as much as she was gazing at the towering bulbous ridge. She knew on the other side of it was a profoundly different world. She thought it must be the border with the Mines. The land was mostly in active use, the jobs automated, but she knew there was housing for the workers who were needed. The workers tended to be those who couldn’t afford even the smallest apartments in the City. Who’d been pushed out, priced out generations ago. Now they had barracks or low-cost apartment complexes for their indebted lives. What happened outside of the City had always seemed kind of mysterious. One guy she’d fucked from the Manufacturing Zone told her he got free housing, which was almost impossible to believe. She’d been impressed. She thought he’d seemed proud.

  A wild wind was just kicking up when they’d made it to the edge of the playa, so they camped for the night. They still couldn’t see any sign of the Post or other structures. But they did see signs of civilization. Discarded scrap metal and a few wooden electrical poles, the wires long gone, where hawks perched to hunt. A picnic table overturned in the sage. It was weathered almost white and covered in rock tripe, which they peeled off and ate.

  Bea sat on the edge of the playa and watched the fine sand of the dry lake kick up in short-lived swirling dust devils, at first excited and then dying down as though realizing there was nothing to be excited about. The ridge rose to her right, and in the far, flat distance tall banks of brown clouds hugged the horizon. Dust storms. They were so far away that she could distinguish the different storms from one another. Three in all. Their front ends curled out like snake tongues, hurriedly flicking to learn where they were. The back ends dragged across the land like sandbags.

  Behind her she heard Agnes talking to the birds that were hiding in the sage. Agnes always talked to the hiding animals, even though Bea had explained that they were hiding from her because she was talking to them. “They want to think you don’t know they’re there,” she would explain.

  “But I want them to know I can see them. So they know they need to hide better.”

  It was not logic she could argue with.

  She watched Agnes flitting about the bush, talking a blue streak and flapping her arms, while the birds, now trapped by her daughter’s manic actions, complained back in a high pitch. Incredible. Bea remembered when Agnes could not lift her head off of her bloodstained pillow. Those many frantic trips to the private doctor who lived in the building, the one who took on emergencies for a steep price. All the nights she lay on the floor next to Agnes’s bed, listening to each breath, her own heart stopping when there was a gasp. The number of times tears leapt to her eyes in the too-long pauses between her daughter’s labored breaths. It had been untenable.

  She’d never forget the feeling around her conversation with Glen. Sitting at the small round dining table after another emergency visit, wineglasses half full, dinner mostly untouched, pasta still curled around her fork, lying where it had clattered to the table at that sound, “Mama,” through that hacking. The music was still playing, low. Agnes was asleep. Safe. Glen giving his brief history lesson about the convalescence movement that was once common but had been utterly forgotten about. Of sanatoria, of people escaping to far-flung places to get well. To take in the good air. To find health away from the place that ailed them. “What does this have to do with anything?” she’d snapped, half listening, half tuned for sounds from Agnes’s room. He and Bea weren’t married yet, though they knew they would. He was already in love with Agnes. And when he explained fully about the study and his idea, Bea had said, “It seems crazy.” “It is crazy,” he said. “But if we stay, she’ll die.” It came out so flatly, so unequivocal, she felt like he’d slapped her. They stared at each other, not speaking. She thought hours might have passed. She wished that she’d had better thoughts running through her head. Thoughts like, I don’t even need to think—of course that’s what we’ll do. Like, Whatever it takes. But really she thought, So, we have to risk all our lives just to save hers? Is this the rule, or do I have a choice? She looked at Glen and he had that resolute look. That no other solution look. And she knew her eyes were spinning, confused, everywhere. She was thinking of how much she’d looked forward to the three of them being a family here in this cozy apartment. She was thinking about the projects she had lined up and how she wouldn’t be able to do them now. Big contracts that had come in after the magazine spread. A career shift. She was thinking of her own mother and how she would have to leave her. If they did this, Bea knew already her mother would never come. She needed her mother still. Didn’t she? Did her needs not matter anymore? Bea shivered at her cold heart. She hit the side of her head to rattle her
humanity loose. To think of her daughter first. She didn’t realize she’d kept hitting herself until Glen gripped her wrist and brought her arm firmly to her side, held her, and she felt the bitter tears on her face for the first time. She choked sobs into his shoulder. This is motherhood? she thought, furious and brokenhearted as she tried to let go of her own self so she could free her arms to hold up Agnes.

  The playa dust devils were dancing longer and higher now, and closer to where Bea sat. She smelled dirt in the air. When she breathed through her mouth to escape the smell, her mouth gritted with fine, stale-tasting sand. She looked around. They seemed to be in a fog cloud, or was it already dusk? She squinted, looking for the sun, and saw its hazy imprint high in the sky. She looked toward the far-flung dust storms, and now there was just one large one. The searching tongue had ballooned into a cloud hovering on the horizon. But now the horizon was the whole cloud and the horizon was very close.

  Bea stood.

  She heard tinkering behind her from Debra and Juan making dinner. The rest had spread out for more kindling and for water. She turned quickly to run toward the camp, and there was Agnes behind her, hypnotized by the cloud, her hands making fists at her sides. She ran to Agnes and grabbed her clenched fist, and dragged her along toward the camp. Agnes stumbled and Bea looked down at her daughter. Her mouth was open and moving, and Bea realized she could hear nothing but a roar that had started so soft and risen so gradually she had noticed nothing but an increasing pressure in her ears. She screamed at Debra and Juan, but she couldn’t hear her own voice. They were already running. She slung Agnes by the arm up and onto her back, and ran in the direction where people had gone for water. She looked at nothing but right in front of her feet so she wouldn’t fall and the bushes ripped into her legs as she ran through them. Agnes pushed her face into her neck, her mouth so close to her ear she could finally hear her. She was crying. Bea felt hot tears and saliva on her neck. And then Bea could see nothing and she could not stand up straight and her skin was on fire with the pricks of a thousand needles and the shuddering knocks from stones. She fell over a sagebrush and onto her knees and Agnes flew over her shoulders and her face was one hollow scream but there was no sound over the scream of the wind. Bea crawled, reaching blindly for her daughter until she felt her feet. She pulled Agnes to her and covered her curled, quaking body with her own.

  Twigs and dirt and stone whipped against Bea, and the roar became muted so that she thought her ears must have filled with sand. She bent herself so her back would shield their heads, and it felt to her there was a mound of debris around her, blanketing her, as though because they stopped they would be buried alive. She curled tighter around Agnes and gnashed her teeth against the onslaught. And then, mercifully, she stopped feeling anything.

  * * *

  Bea heard the muffled chirp of a bird near her head. She smelled stale urine from deep in her huddle with Agnes. One of them had wet themselves.

  She peeled open a gooey eye. A towhee stood uneasily in front her, peering at her with a black inquisitive eye. It hopped and then puffed itself up, and a little halo of dust from its feathers escaped into the air. Bea lifted her head and groaned. The bird flew away.

  Bea pushed upward and felt things tumble off of her. What must have been a wall of sand behind her collapsed. It had been a rare gift from the storm, something that stopped her from being pelted to death.

  She felt Agnes squirming under her.

  “You peed,” the girl’s muffled voice accused.

  Bea rolled away to let her daughter up. Agnes scrambled up and dusted herself off. But when she looked up, her eyes widened and she froze.

  Bea jumped to her feet in front of Agnes, assuming some threat was there, some herd of bison whipped into a stampede. But Agnes was looking at the land and sky.

  The sun had sunk behind the ridge and the day’s light was in fast retreat. Across the sky, a reclining half-moon rose lazily, pink and pearlescent. It appeared so big it looked as though it was half of another earth rising. Around them were piles of sand, through which sage branches reached desperately. The land before them, where the playa had been, where the dry craggy land of bushes had been, now looked more like the surface of the moon, a moon where tufted tips of sage lay across its surface like crowns. The new dunes muffled the sound of the world. They listened for the ping of the bugs of dusk, for the trill of a towhee, for the sound of any of their companions, but they heard nothing, not even the storm, the back of which Bea could see on the horizon, wagging its tail goodbye.

  She checked Agnes through the girl’s protests. Her daughter felt intact, while her own body felt pocked.

  They walked the slow and exaggerated steps of moon walkers, their feet unsettling the sand. And when they reached ground that was hard dirt beyond the storm’s reach, they shot forward with ease as though released from a captor’s grip.

  They walked past where Debra and Juan had been cooking and saw nothing but the turned-over Cast Iron, wooden bowls, ruined food.

  Bea looked for the pond where people had gone, but she could see no evidence of it. Then, she saw two small shapes low in the sky and getting lower and then landing somewhere not too far in the distance. They flapped and reared and dropped their legs before they dropped from her sight, and she led Agnes toward where they’d landed, hoping to find the water.

  They walked awhile before they heard the honk of a goose. And then they were upon it: a pond at the bottom of a shallow escarpment. It wasn’t the pond they’d walked by. That one had merely been a bloated spring ringed with some reeds and milkweed. They never would have seen this pond; it was below the horizon. It was small, almost a perfect circle, murky and browned by mineral and decay, but there were two geese and two ducks and some grebes noodling on the surface. Bea could see the animal trails heading to and from the water’s edge. It felt secret, protected, even though nothing in the Wilderness ever is.

  She looked at Agnes.

  “You’re filthy,” she said. Agnes’s bronzed hair was now matted with dirt. Her skin shimmered as the fine sand that coated her caught the light.

  Agnes smiled shyly to hide her laugh. “You’re filthy.” Her cracked tooth making her smile impossibly goofy, cracking Bea’s heart.

  “Let’s get something for a fire and then take a dip before the sun leaves,” Bea said and took Agnes’s hand.

  * * *

  They were dripping dry and shivering, and Bea admitted to herself that perhaps the swim was not her best idea. How stupid it would be to survive a violent dust storm only to bathe themselves to death.

  They’d gathered stems and grass for a fire and now searched for something to cook over it. Bea wanted meat and fat to ward off the cold that she could now smell in the air. The geese were pecking around the pond, and she and Agnes crouched in the shore grasses with Bea’s slingshot. Around them, frogs croaked, and worst case, Bea thought, they could catch some of them, roast them, and nibble their legs and around their gooey middles. Agnes was in a pensive mood, and so Bea just concentrated on the geese, getting to know them before she made any moves. They hadn’t been scared off by the swim. A good sign. But if they spooked and flew now, she and Agnes would be hungry.

  Agnes’s head snapped to attention. Bea thought she must have heard something ominous, but Agnes’s eyes widened and she asked, “Did Carl do this?”

  “Did Carl do what?”

  “Make the wind?”

  “Honey, of course not. Why did you think that?”

  “Because he told us that someday we’d have to split up. Now we’re split up.”

  Amazing how earnest she seems, Bea thought, as though she believes Carl has sway over dust. Then, Bea got a chill. It wasn’t an absurd thing to think, she realized. There was something unsettling in how much Carl was capable of. How useful he had made himself. To a child, someone like that might seem capable of anything.

  “No, sweetheart,” Bea said, “he didn’t do this. It’s just a coincidence.”


  “What’s that?”

  “Well,” Bea said, “it’s when things happen that seem related but aren’t.”

  “That’s weird. Isn’t everything related?”

  “Well, not everything.”

  Agnes said under her breath, “Yes, everything.”

  “Of course you would think that, because here everything does seem related. But trust me. Where I’m from, not everything is related. And sometimes things just happen.” She nodded to finish the thought. But she felt rattled. The idea that something was happening that was bigger than them started to seep under her skin.

  They were quiet, listening to two frogs find each other in the water.

  “Did Nana live in a house?”

  “When she was young.”

  “I wish I could live in a house.”

  Bea scrunched her face. “You do?”

  “They’re pretty,” Agnes said. She said it boldly, asserting this new feeling of being right.

  “How do you know?” She didn’t think Agnes had ever seen a house. Maybe she thought Posts were houses? But they weren’t very pretty.

  “The magazine,” she said, bold at having snooped at Bea’s hidden things.

  The magazine she had stashed away had new design trends and spreads of modern, styled apartments like hers, but what made it one of the most popular magazines in circulation were the vintage spreads it printed every month. Scenes from the archives. Of the old days. Old estates, sprawling penthouses, rustic-chic farms, front porches, lawns, and even sky blue pools, views of landscapes that were nice to look at, of attics, of homes in all sorts of weather. These were astonishing to look at now. Such things didn’t exist anymore.

  “You’re right, those houses were very pretty. But they’re gone.”

  “Why are they gone?”

  “That is a big question.”

  “And?”

  “They just are. Those places are all in the City now, and you remember, it doesn’t look like that at all.”

  “But what was it like?”