The Land

by Thomas Maltman

  I was not alone in the dream. I had something precious. He cried out not only for me, but for a baby I held in my arms as I stood in the knee-deep rushing current of the river, my teeth chattering. I was covered in blood like I’d just come from the accident. It spilled out of my shattered skull.

  “Bring it to me,” the devil said, “and I will let you live. A life for a life.”

  The baby squalled in his loose bundle of cloth, a sound that filled me up. I knew exactly who this baby was. The child Maura and I were meant to have together. Our baby. It was ours and now the devil had come to claim the fruit of our sin. I knew that if I obeyed the devil both the baby and I would be lost forever.

  Farther out in the river the waters deepened, but there was no way to make it to the other side. Downriver, the rapids ripped along. I walked along the shallows as the devil shadowed me on shore until we reached a bend in the river and he stepped into the water. I could walk over to meet him or give myself to the river.

  (I could choose death. I would choose death rather than give the baby to the devil or learn the Name he had for me. I would choose to be split open once more. Let the hurt come.)

  I went deeper into the current, the bundled baby wrapped tightly in my arms, and the surging water swept me from my feet. We raced along between boulders that were sure to crush us, the devil screaming after us. “The baby is mine! Mine! Mine!” He screamed a name over the rapids, claiming me. I heard it in the roar. Jagged rocks loomed in the torrent as I spun out of control, heading right for a collision that would wreck me and the child I could not save.

  The next thing I knew, I was standing up in the middle of Professor Rhone’s lecture, my ears still ringing from the shock of impact with the boulders. I must have cried out in my sleep. I barely knew why I was standing up, my pen gripped in my fist, sweat soaking my shirt. The same heat in my throat as when the preacher beckoned me closer. I was shaking and my mouth tasted of blood. I must have bitten the inside of my cheek during the nightmare.

  “Yes?” Professor Rhone said. He had shaggy eyebrows, a permanent five-o’clock shadow darkening his jawline. Students whispered about his three tours in Vietnam, what he’d seen over there. Before class, Rhone stood outside chain-smoking cigarettes and tossing the burning butts into a snowbank. Known for his temper and for sprinkling his lectures with unexpected profanities, Rhone didn’t like interruptions. He didn’t look pleased to see I’d returned to class.

  My mind felt full of noise, the icy rain falling inside me. I swallowed and tried to get my bearings. I was not dead. The river had not broken and drowned me. The devil had only been a dream. The baby. The rest of the class turned to look at me. I could see Naomi now, up near the front, scrunching down in her seat.

  I had to say something, so what came to me is what I had been wondering about all semester when Rhone talked about evolution, but hadn’t dared speak aloud. I cleared my throat. “There are something like six million species on the planet,” I said, my voice cracking. “And I was wondering how it’s possible for so many variations to have evolved from single-celled bacteria. Or whatever?”

  My question trailed off. Professor Rhone’s jaw worked while he massaged a stick of chalk in his fist. “Well,” he said, “given enough time, anything is possible.” He gestured for me to sit down; clearly he felt he’d answered the question definitively. Time. Like millions and billions of years. Eons. Time. Gobs of it. Time was the solution to everything! His frown deepened when I remained standing.

  “But how is it possible when the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that all things decay and break down. Entropy. This is one of the central principles of energy that governs the universe. How does life evolve faced with chaos and decay? How does anything?” I was losing the thread of my question. The other students in the lecture hall shifted uncomfortably in their seats. They must have all thought I was some kind of religious nutcase.

  “What are you asking exactly?” The chalk in his fist had been ground to a nub, a white snow coating his loafers. I bet this guy killed a lot of people in the Nam.

  Why life? is what I thought. How does life go on when the world itself seems so hostile? “It’s just . . . I’ve been thinking, why not God?”

  “Why not God?” he repeated, and he shook his big, shaggy head slowly and sadly from side to side. “I believe you’re in the wrong fucking class.”

  I went home and didn’t go back to Northern for a few days. I didn’t think I’d go back to school ever again. When I got home, the first thing I did was check on the rescued raven.

  I hadn’t expected it to live through the night and left without checking in on it earlier that morning, not wanting to deal with a corpse then. So when I returned from my failed trip to Northern State and opened the garage door that afternoon, I was sure I would find the body stiff with rigor mortis. Instead, the box was empty. I went down the steps and checked all around it. Not a single feather nestled amid the shredded papers, not a trace of blood. This worried me even more than a dead body.

  I half-wondered if I had dreamed the moment, the great battle in the snow, the lone survivor. My grasp on reality so tenuous I moved in a waking dream. Then I heard it squawk from up in the garage rafters. Ten feet away, half-obscured by shadows my eyes couldn’t penetrate, it called to me in its harsh language.

  “You’re alive,” I said, a sense of relief flooding through me.

  In answer the raven fluttered deeper into a loft area amid the rafters, hiding from me. I didn’t want to frighten it further so I left it alone and carefully shut the garage door. I was going to have to figure out what to feed it.

  I ended up feeding it Kaiser’s dog food, pounding the nuggets into smaller pieces and placing them in a trail leading up to the stairs. When I returned a few hours later, the food was gone, the bird back in his hiding place.

  The next couple of days I settled into my habits, caring for the raven, walking the dog in the snow, visiting the koi pond, which looked frozen over completely now, and digging into old man Kroll’s impressive collection of movies on Betamax. So far I had made little progress on the programming I had left to do for The Land, but I had all winter ahead of me. An insomniac with access to enough pharmaceuticals to rewire my brain—I stayed up most nights watching the classics. Chinatown. The Godfather. The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  The lower level had another sunken room that was like a bunker. No windows. A dusty mothball smell mingled with stale popcorn grease. A vintage movie projector, an eight-millimeter, occupied the center and there were two plush La-Z-Boys on either side in front of a big screen. The eight-millimeter collection was “off limits,” he had explained to me while giving me a tour of the house, so I stuck to his Betamax shelves. Here in this windowless place, while the mirage of images flashed on the screen, I felt safe enough to sleep. I didn’t so much sleep as catnap for a few hours. I think I had the best naps ever in my life in that La-Z-Boy recliner, under the spell of my meds and Hollywood.

  I was just getting into The Exorcist when the doorbell rang. The sound jarred me from the dark dream of the movie. Who could possibly be here? This house was in the middle of nowhere. I paused the movie and climbed the spiral staircase. I opened the door to reveal a skinny girl who appeared to be about my age and was dressed in a pea green army coat, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. Her dark hair was chopped short, her features sharp and hawkish, her eyes brown and almond-shaped. Her coat appeared too thin for the weather, her face pale as the clouds dropping snow behind her. She tilted her head, birdlike, as if I was the mystery here. “Who are you?”

  “Me? Lucien. I’m looking after this place for the Krolls.”

  “Lucien?” She frowned as if she disapproved of the name.

  I considered explaining how I’d been named after a cherished grandfather, but truthfully I’d never cared for my name. I thought maybe I really should change my name to Meshach.

 
The girl peered past me into the foyer as if looking for someone. “Where are my parents?”

  “Uh . . . parents?” Neither Kroll had mentioned any daughter. Rambling through the house, I’d seen no pictures of this girl, no toys or dolls or any sort of evidence that any child had ever lived here. The only framed photos mostly featured Mr. Kroll in blaze orange or camo posing with recently slain animals, elk or bear or some other luckless beast, blood freckling the leaves about him.

  She hugged herself with her arms and let out an exasperated sigh. Her lips had a bluish cast from the cold. “Listen, I don’t know who you are.” Her tongue darted out to touch her lips, and her eyes locked on mine as if she had made some vital determination. Without another word she pushed past me, tracking snow into the foyer.

  I snagged her by the elbow. “Hey,” I said. “I didn’t say you could come in.”

  The girl looked thin and bony, but she shook out of my grip, dropped her duffel, and jabbed one finger right in the center of my chest. She smelled like she hadn’t bathed in a month, a musky animal odor overwhelming in tight quarters. “What have you done with my mom and dad?” she said, advancing on me until she had me backed against the wall.

  “They’re in Texas,” I told her, still not sure what to believe. I squeezed past her to the open door, taking one fresh gulp of cold air before shutting it and turning back to her. “South Padre Island. At least until March or April. I’m caring for the house and dog while they’re gone.”

  “Kaiser?” she said, her nose twitching. “And they’re gone all winter?”

  She made it sound like they had never done it before, which had not been my impression. “They couldn’t wait to escape the cold.”

  She quirked one thin eyebrow, as if she knew there was more to it than that. I hadn’t mentioned any of the Y2K talk. I considered it vaguely reassuring that she knew the name of the dog. “They’ll be back when the snow melts,” I continued. If the world doesn’t end on December 31st, I didn’t add.

  “And you’re in contact with them?”

  I massaged my sore hip, which ached from the cold the girl had brought into the room with her. “I have their number in case something goes wrong.” Such as a stranger forcing her way into the house.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “It’s nothing. So, you’re . . . their daughter? You think they would have mentioned something like that.”

  She spread out her hands, palms up. “Why would they? We’ve been estranged . . .” She lingered on that word, her small, sharp face tightening at some unpleasant memory. “They wouldn’t expect me to come home for the holidays.”

  “There aren’t any pictures of you anywhere,” I said. Not a single room bore any girlish trace, like a stuffed bear or a pink quilt, but then again she didn’t seem the girlish type. Thanksgiving was little more than a week away. How long was she planning to stay? I resented this intrusion on my peace.

  “We aren’t on speaking terms. My dad wiped his hands of me.” She made a gesture, a flat, slapping sound as her palms came together. I could picture Mr. Kroll doing the same.

  “I’ll call them,” I said. “They’ll want to know you’re here.”

  She shook her head, her brown eyes huge and pleading. “Don’t,” she said.

  The pain in my hip jogged up into my skull and started to party there. Starbursts began to pop and flare at the corner of my vision. Not again. Not now. I didn’t feel so hot. Fuck. After the accident migraines came on when I was stressed, thunderclouds boiling up inside my brain, a roaring wind across the plains.

  “I wasn’t expecting a happy homecoming,” she said. “I just need a place to stay for a while. I took the bus from Bellingham and then walked the rest of the way.”

  Bellingham? I pinched the skin between my eyes. That was halfway across the country.

  “Heh? What’s wrong with you?”

  “I just need to sit down for a minute.”

  The girl led me into the kitchen by the elbow and sat me on one of the chairs. She banged around in the cabinets before finding a glass she filled at the tap. Shaking, I accepted the glass, stood again, and started walking away. My sumatriptan was on the nightstand in my bedroom, and I needed it now. The girl tailed me. I still didn’t know her name, thought there was something off about her story, but I had pressing physical concerns of my own, a monsoon drumming behind my temples.

  In the bedroom, pain walloped me. I nearly dropped the glass I was carrying. It felt like I had a whole fraternity inside my skull, all of them drunk and hurling bottles and shit at the walls inside my head. I managed to set the glass down and reached for my medication, but I was shaking so badly by then I couldn’t get it open.

  “Here,” the girl said. She took it from my hands, unscrewed the cap, and fished out a pill. “Open up,” she commanded, so I did and she set the pill on my tongue gingerly, like she was doling out a Communion wafer. I chased it with a gulp of water, but the migraine had me in such a fierce grip I couldn’t even see straight. The girl guided me to the bed, pulled back the covers. I felt her take my shoes off. I no longer noticed the intensity of her odor. Her voice was soft as she laid a cool hand on my forehead. A winter priestess attending her parishioner. “It’s going to be okay,” she said.

  I shut my eyes, unable to respond. Hadn’t I promised Maura the same thing? She shut off the lights and left me in the dark, where the pill warred with the fraternity of pain and eventually won out. I was so tired. How long had it been since I had a full night’s rest, undisturbed? The medicine made me so woozy that I shut my eyes to rest and soon slipped into sleep.

  The Land

  “I never slept easy there,” Maura told me one rainy night when the bank was largely empty of customers. When she talked about The Land—a steep slash of hillside where Airstream and Scottie trailers squatted amid the jack pines, the foundations propped on hewn logs to keep them from sliding downhill—her eyes grew distant as though the place spread out right before her. “When it got stormy, rivers of mud ran under the foundation. The trailer swayed like a ship at sea. I could feel it shifting. Those nights I dreamed of it giving way in a rush of water, saw us sliding down through the pines all the way to the Wind River. I always woke before we went over the falls.”

  “Sounds awful,” I said.

  “He’ll take us back there one day. Sarah and me.” Maura glanced my way as she unpinned her hair and let it down, a nimbus of curls framing her face. Maura wore just a touch of makeup, lipstick, and eye shadow she wiped away with a handkerchief before she left the office. Her husband considered makeup a vanity in a world that was ending. At home she answered to his demands. At work she could be herself.

  “You don’t have to go.”

  “Eli only agreed to leave after I fainted and fell down the metal stairs of our trailer. I fell hard. I was pregnant with Sarah at the time. Both of us so scared we were going to lose her.” Maura dropped her gaze. “Pregnancy does crazy things to my blood pressure. The doctor put me on bed rest. We moved to town. Got the apartment for the baby’s sake, so we would be close to the hospital. But now that Sarah’s getting older, he’ll take us back.”

  I loved these stories, loved watching her face while she told them. “But you don’t want to go, right?” I knew that Elijah wanted her there so he could control her, maybe even force her to quit her job. How could I help her see that she didn’t have to go?

  Maura didn’t answer right away. She bit down on her lower lip. “It’s not such a terrible place. When we first lived there, Eli had just gotten out. No one would hire him, not with his record. We needed a home and Mother Sophie took us in. In some ways that place made us.”

  I knew about Mother Sophie from past conversations. A blind old woman whose forebears had made a fortune in the timber industry, she used her windfall to buy the property and the trailers, leasing them to members of her Christian Identity church, a motley bunc
h of outcasts, criminals, and dreamers. I knew The Land was meant to be a refuge against the apocalypse, that Mother Sophie had paid for the correspondence courses Maura’s husband had taken from a seminary back east before bringing him in as co-pastor for the church, and that she’d even helped him finance the loan on his tow truck.

  “We owe her,” Maura continued. She opened the upper cash drawer and started counting out twenties to band in a stack of five hundred and tuck in the lower drawer for safekeeping—most robbers wouldn’t know about the second drawer—her long, elegant fingers moving with a card sharp’s dexterity. “Besides, Eli really does believe all that stuff about the Great Tribulation. He honestly thinks we’re going to be safer there.”

  “You don’t?”

  Maura’s face hardened, the light in her eyes flattening. “From what I’ve read of history, it seems to me that the world is always ending. And it’s always beginning again.”

  “Martin Luther once said that if he knew the world was going to end tomorrow he would plant an apple tree today.”

  Just then a man entered the lobby and set up at the kiosk to fill out his deposit slip. Maura lowered her voice. “Hush with your heresy. Let’s talk about happier things the rest of tonight. Deal?”

  Those late nights closing with her, I talked to her as I’d never spoken with anyone else. There were no secrets between us, and I could see why she longed for happier stories. Maura told me how after her mother died of breast cancer, her dad lost it and ran off. She spent her teenage years as a foster child growing up with different families on the Iron Range. One of her foster brothers could hot-wire any car in town and would drive her to a nearby ghost town where they would have midnight picnics outside an abandoned mine, sitting on the warm hood of the car, the engine ticking. I heard about another foster family getting involved in the Christian Identity church, where Maura would later meet Elijah when they were both just sixteen. Stories from my own life paled in comparison: my parents’ divorce, my dad’s subsequent remarriage to a much younger woman, Barb, a loan officer from his branch—that old song—his transfer to Milwaukie where he started up a brand-new family with bratty twins named Colleen and Connie, my half-sisters, now four years old. My mom got the house, full custody of me, and weekly AA meetings.