The Land

by Thomas Maltman

  With him halfway out the door, I thought I could get away with a little sarcasm, but his gray wattles flushed a dark purple above his turtleneck. His heavy-lidded eyes narrowed. “What’d you say?”

  I shrugged. “I only meant to wish you well. Have a good night, sir.”

  One fat vein pulsed in his balding pate. Even if he was no longer a customer, he wasn’t going to let this go. “You were mocking me.”

  I shrugged again, which further infuriated him.

  “I’m going to let your manager know about what you said,” he said, jabbing a finger at my tie. “I will be filing an official complaint.”

  “Sir,” Maura said, stepping in. “I’m the Ops. Supervisor. I can help you.” She locked her till and came around the counter, opening the half door that separated us from the rest of the lobby, empty of any actual management at this time of night. Maura guided him over to the desk and pulled out a chair for him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, because there were other customers in line to deal with, just the low murmur of her consoling voice as she scratched something down on a blank form. They talked for a long time—long enough that I was sure I was in trouble—before finally he left, Maura escorting him out the door, the guy glaring in my direction, muttering something about “this insolent generation.”

  Maura still had the form as she came back to her place. “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” She looked prim and disapproving, her face not giving anything away. I still didn’t have a firm read on her. Was she going to turn me in? “As your Ops. Supervisor,” she went on, “this is the part where I’m supposed to bust your balls.”

  I blushed. “There’s no such position at this branch,” I said. I was pretty sure Maura was a Customer Care Specialist, level two, just like me.

  Maura showed me the page, a blank loan application sheet where she’d printed official complaint form at the top and the name lucien swenson underneath with details of my transgressions. She smiled and then dropped the form into the shredder. There were no customers in the lobby. She set one hand on her hip, shaking her head at the departing customer. “Good luck on your quest,” she said, “Frodo Douchebaggins.”

  After that, we were tight. “So you’re a student at Northern? What are you studying?” she asked during another lull between customers. I liked the sound of her voice, too, a little husky for a woman, tinged with smoke.

  “Life,” I said. If that sounds like a smug answer, I was twenty. A dumb punk. I already knew then that I wasn’t cut out for biology, though I had doggedly enrolled in calculus and anatomy that semester. I wanted to study English, but my dad ruled it out. It was pre-med or econ like him, so I could grow up and work for a bank, groom myself for management. That was my dad’s deal for me. He would pay my tuition so long as I stuck to marketable majors. My job at the bank covered most everything else.

  “Life studies must be one of the liberal arts,” she said. “Something in the humanities?”

  “It sure as hell isn’t a science.”

  Maura just laughed. “No,” she said, “it’s more like a poem written by a drunkard, down in the ditch looking up at the stars.”

  “Something like that,” I said, recognizing the Oscar Wilde reference.

  I didn’t know many people in Aurora Bay. My cousin in Duluth had moved to Sioux Falls and the rest of my family lived in Chicago. After the move I lost touch with friends from high school, most of whom had gone on to better things at the University of Chicago or Loyola. Northern had proved to be one of those suitcase campuses, a ghost town on the weekends, and I’d only made a few friends. Where Maura was concerned, I was doomed from the start.

  And from the start, I idealized her. One time Harry Larkin held the monthly staff meeting at night to go over changes in procedures and projected growth in branch checking accounts along with new marketing pitches. Maura brought her daughter, Sarah, to the meeting, then just a baby. Baby Sarah had thistledown hair and the huge round eyes of an anime character, and she delighted the loan supervisor and other female tellers with her cooing charms, though Harry had been clearly displeased by the distraction. He was introducing an important new marketing blitz—No monthly fees! Automatic overdraft protection!—and tellers would now be expected to make cold calls during lulls in the day. I sucked at sales, so I ignored much of Harry’s instructions and instead made faces at the baby, who had the trilling laugh of a bird.

  After the meeting ended and everyone else skedaddled, another teller named Dorothy—a stout, matronly woman—and I were handling final closing procedures. Dorothy was the only female I’ve ever met with a mullet, which somehow suited her personality and her square face. She was already a grandmother at the age of thirty-seven.

  Maura had not left with the others because baby Sarah needed to be fed and so she had discreetly rolled her chair over to one corner by the branch manager’s desk to unbutton her blouse. She’d positioned the chair so it was facing away from us, so from behind the teller’s station I could just see the crown of her head, see how she cupped the baby by the back of her head, both of them bathed in the soft green glow of the branch manager’s lamp. In the quiet after closing, I could hear the baby feeding. They were held by the light, mother and child. I could see how much Maura loved her baby.

  Maura, do you know what I felt most in that moment, what I still feel? I wanted to protect you. Even before I knew you were in trouble. I wanted you and Sarah to stay in the warm light and not have to step outside into the icy, outer darkness. I wanted to be the one who kept you safe. I didn’t know how much pain this would mean for both of us, but even if I had known, I think I would have still done the same.

  I hadn’t realized I was staring until Dorothy nudged me. “She’s sweet on you,” she said.

  “I’m good with babies,” I said. But of course, she hadn’t meant the baby and I knew that.

  Dorothy gave me her cut-the-bullshit look. “Don’t get any ideas,” she said, patting me on my shoulder.

  I woke, not unlike Maura’s man down in the ditch, but I wasn’t looking up at any stars. Instead, I woke to a nightmare. I woke when Kaiser stuck his icy muzzle right into the soft of my neck and let out a snort. The pain softly thrummed behind my temples, but I could see again. I climbed unsteadily to my feet. I woke to the rage.

  I stood up in the ringing din, in the falling snow. The reek and scream where ravens dark as bruises blotted the pines. Something must have torn up inside their heads. All these years later, I can still feel it inside me. A rip in time. Whatever tissue that had penned the boiling shadows inside their brains at bay disintegrated. Or, when I stood I snapped a branch, sharp as the report of a rifle.

  All at once they lifted from the trees, flinging their bodies from the branches, screeching, rising into the sky and then diving with talons outstretched, one whisking right past my head. Still groggy with the remains of a migraine, I didn’t even duck. At first I thought they were attacking me. I was about to be the first man in America to die by being pecked to death by an unkindness of ravens, or carried off like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. The air whirred around me, a maelstrom of beak and talon. Then I saw one impale its beak into the chest of another. Those two plummeted to the ground, locked in their fatal embrace. I realized what was happening. They were killing each other, killing their own kind. Mothers and brothers and friends. Hundreds battling. Whirling black feathers and bones cracking. The thump and thwack of bodies smashing into the icy ground.

  Kaiser and I stood in the vortex, stunned by their savagery, the birds’ minds bleeding red, all pulsing shadows. The birds did not see us. They shuddered at each impact. They flew all around us, but we were not touched. What a terrifying thing a nightmare is when you stand in the midst of it.

  How long did it last? How long? Time elongated.

  When the battle was done, the shadow lifted, ascending like a breath, one last gasp before perdition. Around
us lay the dead, dozens bleeding out in the snow. The Enemy gone. It had taken all morning for so many ravens to fill up the pines on the ridge, but they died in a few minutes.

  The survivors, most of the birds, winged off north again, climbing vanishing ladders of snow into the clouds. Black feathers clotted the ice, pinkish streaks of blood and bird brain. We stood in the middle of it, untouched. A great silence spread and deepened. The pain in my mind quieted.

  Kaiser and I walked back. A metallic taste burned in my throat. Blood spattered my coat and one long bloody streak marked one of the bay windows where a raven had struck in its madness. I shucked off my coat inside, let Kaiser in, and closed the door. Numb with shock, a shock nearly as visceral as I’d felt during the accident, I stripped off the rest of my clothes and wandered naked upstairs and took a sumatriptan and a Percocet and climbed under my sheets. Sleep is an inhospitable country if every time you roll over on your left side barbs of pain spike throughout your entire body, but I slept, and this time I did not dream. My sleep was like the snow, a whiteout, and when I woke it was as if the massacre had never happened.

  I shrugged on a t-shirt and some sweatpants and wandered downstairs to feed Kaiser. The clock showed it was a little past three, so I had slept much of the day. Outside the bay windows, I saw a few wolves had appeared to drag off the corpses, at least three with maybe more circling deeper in the grove, ghostly shapes. The wolves should have thrilled me. Most people go their whole lives without ever seeing one in the wild, but I was too shell-shocked to wonder over their primal arrival, so intent on their feast they did not lift their bloody muzzles to see me watching them.

  Near the birches, one fox, a splash of fiery orange, made a feast of his own, keeping a nervous eye on the larger predators. I felt sure watching that no one would ever believe me. In the years since, I have heard of ravens doing this up in Alaska when their flocks grow too numerous, driven by starvation or overpopulation. Surely, there is a natural explanation. Such rationality insulates us from suffering. I know I didn’t just imagine my mind spreading out to touch the minds of those birds. I felt their hunger and pain. I sensed the drained emptiness in their bellies and in that emptiness, a place where shadows seethed.

  In that moment I felt I had seen the Enemy and I knew now what he could do. And I knew he could do the same to the human heart.

  Snow kept falling and falling. I was about to turn away when I saw a fleck of black stir in a snowdrift nearest the bay window, a smaller raven struggling to rise. Alive, a lone refugee of the war. The fox and wolves hadn’t noticed it yet, but they would soon. I didn’t stop to think. Barefoot, I opened the back door and waded into the snow to fetch what I figured was a dying animal.

  The door snapping shut behind me startled the predators. A large gray timber wolf lifted its muzzle from the red-soaked snow. It had eyes like white fire in the dark, lit from within. Too late, I remembered old man Kroll advising me about the .30-06 in the gun cabinet. Could I make it back inside if they came for me?

  Yet I did not feel that same sense of dread as I had caught up amid warring ravens. Her glowing eyes held my own and I sensed her intelligence, her rightness in this wintry world. She belonged here as I didn’t. I write she even though I had no way of knowing for certain if she was the alpha female. In a fellow mammal I just remember sensing a distinct motherly presence.

  “Mine,” I told the wolf about the surviving raven behind me. “I’m taking this one.” She huffed in dismissal and, with her tail bristling, retreated into the woods, taking the rest of the pack with her. I watched her go and then turned to my task.

  I took off my sweatshirt, wrapped the bird in it, and carried it inside. The sleek black body quivered as I cradled it to my chest, holding it against my bare, goose-pimpled skin. Its eyes were sealed shut, covered in a gray film, like it was sick with some disease.

  I thought about calling animal control, but it was already too late at night and I would have to also tell them about what I’d seen in the woods, try to explain it somehow. The sheer savagery. I couldn’t do it. Holding that breathing bird against my chest, I had this feeling it had been sent. A messenger from beyond. Wrapped in my sweatshirt, the raven made a muffled caw of protest, unhappy with the effort I had made to save it.

  Unsure what to do next, I brought the wounded bird into the garage, found a discarded box, and made a nest of newspapers. I sat on the garage step and rubbed the glossy black body in my sweatshirt trying to revive it. The eyes never opened, but I could feel the tremor of its breathing in my hands.

  I’m the caretaker, I remember thinking. And for the first time in a few months my life made sense, had some purpose. This is why I was put here, in the midst of this madness. I was here to care for things, and not just the house and dog. I had failed to take care of Maura. I couldn’t fail again.

  Winter Visitor

  I drove the twenty-mile trip to NMSU on roads slick with freezing rain, hemmed in by jack pine, the tamarack in their sphagnum bogs shedding the last of their golden needles. The ride gave me time to think. On a good day, once I crested the last hill the looming trees should have dropped away to reveal a vista of Aurora Bay, glowing green as a gem below, but in the storm the bay glowered, the same leaden color as the lowering sky. The vast inland sea of Lake Superior brooded beyond. I had been longing for a view of open water, for the clarity I hoped the sight might bring, but the choppy waters below frothed with whitecaps.

  I had driven here because I desperately needed some normality in my routine. At school I paid for my standard coffee at the Commons where I searched out a class to attend from a crumpled semester schedule in my backpack. I hadn’t slept well the night before. Hell, I hadn’t slept well in months. I needed something else to occupy my mind, to keep it from returning to Maura’s vanishing and the accident. The brutality of the ravens and the lone survivor I’d pulled from the snow. The carrion bird of my brain circling bruised skies.

  While I was scanning the schedule, I spotted my buddy Noah just coming in. Noah was one of a few people of mixed race on campus, athletic and good-looking in an all-American way, with dark, coppery skin and long-lashed green eyes he’d inherited from his white mother. A goalie for the Voyageurs’ hockey team, Noah happened to be one of the nicest people I knew. This morning, a blonde walked by his side, her extravagant hand gestures indicating they were in some kind of debate from a previous class. Instinctively, I ducked my head. Noah would have questions. He would want to know if I felt better, what progress I was making on The Land, when we would hang out again. Why did I feel separate from him since the accident? I can’t explain why I didn’t want to talk to him, except this: I didn’t want anyone’s pity, and there are few things athletes pity more than a cripple. For all these reasons, I slunk out of the Commons before he spotted me.

  I ended up in my old anatomy class. Before I dropped out, I had a capable lab partner, Naomi, who wielded a scalpel like a talon, peeling back the leached skin of a fetal pig to expose a universe of sluggish gray organs that I dutifully mapped out in my notebook. “Poor Oliver,” I had said at the time, pretending he had been our pet, recently perished after a mysterious illness. “You poor, poor bastard.”

  “You’re not supposed to name dead fetal pigs,” Naomi said in a flat voice, clearly repulsed by the notion.

  The coursework varied between lab and lecture days, and today was one of the lectures so I could slip in a little late and find myself a place at the back. Professor Rhone was already busy lecturing by the time I snuck in. I waited until his back turned to the board, where an invertebrate had been neatly diagrammed, before I searched for a seat. I kept my head hunched, not looking to see if Naomi was in class that day, until I found a spot at the back. I unzipped my backpack and cracked open a Mead notebook and began to take notes. Hadean. Archean. Proterozoic. The words singing out from the professor as they had from the preacher’s mouth. I wrote as fast as he talked, my pen scratching o
ut furious patterns, copying diagrams from the board, faithfully at first before my attention wandered and in the margins I began to animate a war between amoebas. All of life a struggle, from the dawn of time. Ravens warring in the snow. Our bodies at war on a cellular level. High up in the lecture hall, alone in my row, I heard the professor’s drone and the hum of the generator and the ice striking the glass of the skylights, a gust of wind bringing slanting sheets of freezing rain. My head felt heavier and heavier. There is nothing better than a good lecture-nap. I slouched in my seat and let my heavy head do the rest.

  I slept so deeply I dreamed. In my dream the devil was chasing me. I was not sure how I knew it was the devil. There was something about his very ordinariness I found terrifying because no one but me knew who he was, his face both familiar and unplaceable.

  In the dream he stood on the shores of the Wind River and he called to me again and again. In the waking world, I didn’t believe in the devil or Hell, but in the dream it was some freaky shit. In the dream I knew that Hell was real and it was here on earth and in our brains and in our DNA. Even animals like those ravens knew Hell. I knew there was a great spiritual evil hovering over the world, clouds of wings occluding the sun.

  A stranger in the kingdom, the devil looked lost, a stray piece of dark, unloved. This, too, seemed so ordinary, his longing tucked inside so much rage and violence. He wanted to be loved for his power. I sensed this power as well. He would give me some if I let him.