The Park Service 01: The Park Service

by Ryan Winfield

  “Making a run for it, were you?”

  He coils up again in my palm.

  I look up at the water plunging over the falls. One wrong step crossing, and I would have been cut to pieces by rocks on my way down. And I’m still not safely passed.

  Dropping the caterpillar back into my pocket, I climb on without looking down—down past pools of leaping salmon, down past the cool spray on my face, down until the rumbling water is thundering in my ears, down until my feet land on solid ground. I stand on the lower bank and look back up at the falls.

  “We did it,” I say, peeking into my pocket, not really sure why I’m talking to a caterpillar. “We did it, little fella.”

  I sit on a boulder at the riverbank and rest in the afternoon sun. Stretching out my tired legs, I dip my bare feet in an eddy of cool water swirling past. And I feel really, really good.

  Night comes on fast

  The darkness begins behind me and stretches toward the shrinking light ahead, bringing with it cold gusts of wind racing upriver and chilling me to the bone. I’m starving. Not hungry like I’ve been in Holocene II, but famished to the point of pain. It’s as if the soft ache I’ve always carried in my guts has spread to every cell of my body. My stomach, my limbs, my tongue—even my eyes are hungry, if that’s possible.

  I search the dark riverbank for shelter. Finding a tall and sturdy thicket, I crawl beneath it until I come to a hollow that will hold me and there I sit protected from the wind, plucking the thorns and sucking the scratches on my skin.

  Exhaustion overcomes hunger and I lie back and pray to science that the dense shrubs will protect me as I curl up on the soft ground and fall fast asleep …

  I dream I’m in the testing center again and everyone’s heads are bent over their desks. I’m sitting, staring, not understanding any questions. Mrs. Hightower appears before me and asks if there’s a problem. I jump up and turn my desk over, racing to the bin of lesson slates and I smash them one by one against the wall.

  “Lies!” I shout, “Lies!”

  Then someone knocks me down. I feel a knee on my neck, another on my back. I’m suffocating and screaming but my scream is muffled by the bodies piling on, and I’m crushed and buried beneath Mrs. Hightower and the entire class and five miles of rock and dirt and lies.

  It’s freezing when I wake, shivering and wet with sweat.

  In my delirium I drift off again, back to that wrecked train car, and everything since then seems only a dream. But the cold and lumpy ground presses hard into my sore back, making sleep impossible, my dream morphing into a waking nightmare as I roll onto my side and puke into the brush.

  “Ah, man, am I ever sick.”

  It’s mostly just water, really. An acid spume of river water filled with whatever vile microbes are multiplying like mad and leeching on my intestines. I unzip my jumpsuit, pull it down, and vacate the foreign intruders from the other end, too. When I zip it up, I notice a moist lump in my pocket and reach in and find a black and orange mush of hairy guts.

  “I’m sorry, little fella. I really am.”

  Leaving the crushed caterpillar behind with the contents of my stomach, I crawl from the thicket into the cold dawn.

  The ground is damp, the air crisp, the pink sky pulling a fog up from the river’s surface. Appearing from the fog, at first no more than an apparition seen through the misty gray, an eagle glides upriver, its flapless wings spread from nearly shore to shore, talons tucked and ready, pale head swiveling silent and pendulum-like less than a meter above the water. I watch as it passes me by, so close the wind from its cupped feathers tickles my ear, one yellow-piercing eye taking me in without interest. It tips a wing and disappears around the bend, following the river up toward the salmon falls down which I came.

  The sight of that majestic bird leaves me feeling small and useless and pathetic as I turn and vomit again.

  The morning drags on forever as I drag myself downriver. I forget why I’m even heading down, but I’m consumed with a desperate need to reach the ocean. Maybe to see for myself that it isn’t frozen over, or black with tar, or boiling in an unfiltered sun. Or perhaps it’s the call of some distant past that wants me to plunge into it and cool my fever, one last human returning to where it all began. All I know for sure is that I need salt. I’m dehydrated and sick, but my body is craving salt.

  I collect small stones and bits of dried river weed and suck them for their salt as I continue stumbling downriver, catching myself on beached logs, climbing carelessly down banks, hanging onto exposed roots. My hands bleed. My Level 3 shoes prove themselves no match for the real world, one sole flapping lose, the other somewhere miles behind lying limp on the riverbank like a solitary clue to mark my passing.

  Morning turns to afternoon, afternoon to evening, and like the hand of a giant planetary clock, the sun arcs in its sky and beats down on me where I walk. I wish I could wish it away—send it barreling down into the depths from which I came. I’m sunburnt. My nose, my ears, my neck, even my scalp beneath my hair, are all radiating a kind of flesh-on-fire pain. And when the sun finally does lower, my skin seems to burn with a heat of its own against the quick and coming cold.

  I shiver with fever. The fish are fine, the grizzly, too. It’s not some deadly radiation killing me—it’s my years of isolation down below, my immature immune system. It seems as if the surface is punishing me for daring to climb upon it uninvited, or maybe for all those years of denying its existence.

  I think these rambling thoughts as I lurch on into the setting sun, my shadow cast a mile behind me, staggering and nameless, broken and small, mumbling to myself about the lies I’ve been told, I’m angry, my face is lifted, my steps defiant, my hand held before me pushing the giant sun away where it sinks, now enormous and orange, into the shimmering sea.

  End of land relief.

  Nowhere to walk now.

  I drop to my knees and flail my useless arms into the sky, but when I open my mouth for a victory scream, my tongue is cotton dry, my throat swollen, and not even the faintest sound comes out. I fall forward and press my cheek to the cool, salty mud, and with one eye open, I see a vision just beyond the surf.

  Twenty meters offshore, he crouches on a coral rock, his toes arched, his butt resting on his heels. His long arms wrap his shoulders, and he stares out to sea as if he were sending the sun to bed with his gaze. His hair is thick and dark and long, falling down around his elbows in curly, sun-kissed waves. His tan skin is smooth and glistening wet, and he looks like the sun himself fallen into the ocean and just now having climbed out.

  I’m reminded of Bill watching from his lifeguard tower in Holocene II. Bill, buried somewhere beneath me now, just a faded remembrance of some other life.

  I continue watching.

  His pose is still and calm, grounded in the sea. So much time passes that I wonder if he’s not just some illusion invented by my delirium; firm and wishful thinking chiseled by my mind from some striking outcropping of rock.

  The rising waves lap at his feet. Soon, the rock disappears giving him the look of a bronzed effigy cast after some godly boy who sits on water. And then he rises and dives forward and disappears headfirst into the orange, sun-dappled water with hardly a splash. The ripples move away and diminish, the rock now completely covered by the tide, and no evidence remains of his ever having been there at all.

  I surrender to exhaustion and close my eyes and beg the universe to give the liars what they deserve. I beg it to save my father from his prison, to save my mother wherever she is. And I beg it for my own easy and painless death.

  CHAPTER 8

  Jimmy

  I can’t see them, but I can hear them.

  I’m lying on something soft in a dark room, my waking eyes watching shadows play on what appears to be an opaque and glowing canvas wall. Busy shadows moving back and forth, tall and thin, hunched and fat. Shadows belonging, I assume, to the women’s voices. They speak my language, but in a different way—an accent of
stunted consonants and drawn out vowels. It’s hard to catch anything more than a word here, or a phrase there, because they’re talking fast, each to more than just one other, and sometimes at the same time.

  “Are ya sure?”

  “Nah, but did ya look at his skin?”

  “Poor fella.”

  “Gets what it deserves.”

  “Camille!”

  “She jus’ bitter.”

  “Oh, hush and let ’em rest.”

  “Here, hold this while I check on ’em.”

  “Pass the stitch there.”

  “It ain’t worth the mend.”

  A flap opens in the wall and a triangle of light lands on the dirt floor. The opening darkens, clears, and then the flap closes again. I flinch when I feel her hand on my forehead.

  “Shh … relax now,” she says.

  A cool cloth replaces her hand on my brow and then I feel her smearing something on my face and neck. My hands sting when she peels the bandages away, but they’re quickly soothed again by a layer of cooling gel. She hovers over me working, her silhouette immense against the backlit canvas wall, and when she begins to hum, I let myself relax and surrender to her care. Her voice is light, as if the air itself were singing. Her hands are coarse but gentle. Her smell is of fern and fire and earth.

  She props my head in her strong hand and brings a cup to my mouth—warm liquid that tastes of honey, a bite of bitter. It seeps into my belly and salves the pain. I try to thank her, but she holds her fingers to my lips. She lays my head back, and her humming fades away in the flash of the flap and she’s gone.

  Days pass this way …

  With every visit, I know her more and more. Changing my bandages, feeding me broth and tea, emptying my bedpan. She sometimes sits in the dark and hums me to sleep and if I waken in a feverish panic thinking I’m alone, her quiet breathing there comforts me. Now, when the women chatter nightly beyond the canvas wall, I can tell her voice with just a word.

  Once, in the feverish thrashings of a terrible dream, I’m in Eden and everything is burning and I run to my mother and cling to her waist and when I wake, she’s holding me, humming in the darkness, her gentle rocking lulling me back to sleep.

  Then one day she doesn’t come.

  Nobody comes. No food, no humming, no voices beyond the wall. My hands are unwrapped, my skin no longer on fire. My stomach even feels right again. I sit up—careful, easy, not too fast. Finding my jumpsuit folded beside the bed, I pull it on in the dark. Then I crawl toward the flap in the wall.

  The flap opens to another room. Larger, sunlight filtering in through holes high in the outer wall. A small charcoal fire pit lined with stones. A crude chimney made of tree bark running up the wall and turning out. Indentations worn in the red-clay floor where the women must have sat and done their work.

  I duck beneath the flap and stand full height in the outer room. I see I’m in a cave. I see that my burnt skin has peeled to reveal a light tan. My palms are still red and somewhat scarred, but finely healed with new flesh. I’m thinner than I was, but I feel virile and vibrant and strong. My jumpsuit is clean, even mended with patches over the tears. Then I notice my shoes parked next to the thatched exterior door, the soles replaced with layers of thick leather. Next to the shoes I find a canteen of water made from some sort of gourd and a leather pouch containing nuts and dried fruits and salty red flakes of meat that I’m assuming to be smoked fish.

  I wonder where I am? I open the door to look out and pull back just in time to keep from falling to my death—

  The cave door opens to a narrow ledge fifty meters above a treacherous span of shore where waves heave high, lashing themselves against jagged rocks.

  I retreat back into the cave and sit, wondering what to do, wondering if the women will return. I watch a beam of sun poke through the smoke-hole and pool on the floor. It rises up the far wall, then moves onto the ceiling before disappearing. No one comes. I drink from the gourd and nibble on nuts. Late in the night, I crawl back to the inner room and sleep.

  When I wake all is as before—the beam of light again on the floor, the cave quiet and empty. I slip on my shoes, sling the canteen over my shoulder, and step out from the cave.

  The narrow ledge, steep switchbacks.

  I flatten myself against the cliff and inch my way, sliding my feet and trying not to look down.

  When I scramble over the lip, the sound of crashing waves fades, and I scan the barren plateau for any sign of the people. In the quiet sunlight, I realize how totally alone I am, and just how ill-equipped my lesson slate reading made me for surviving here. Across the plateau, snowcapped mountains loom in the distance, reminding me of the trip down from that train crash.

  I’m not going back that way, so I guess it’s either north or south. Deciding to leave it to chance, I pick up a broken stick and toss it twirling into the air, committing myself to setting off in whatever direction its broken end indicates. I’m disappointed when it lands pointing north. I remember Dorian loading me into the train at the Transfer Station and saying that Eden was north. “Sweet, sweet north,” he said. I’m not sure what’s going on, but until I get some answers, Eden or Holocene II are the last places I want to go right now.

  I kick the stick off the cliff edge and watch it tumble and bounce, landing in the surf a hundred meters below.

  Then I set off walking south.

  I walk the day into dusk, exhaustion and darkness catching up with me just as I come upon an enormous burned out fire. Kicking over black coals, the white clumps of ash, I uncover a blackened jaw bone—molars, a wisdom tooth still attached.

  Too creeped out to eat anything, too tired to move away, I lie down within spitting distance of the fire and sleep beneath the stars with my head on a tuft of prairie grass.

  I’m cold and bug bitten when I wake.

  The food these mystery people left for me touches parts of my tongue never reached by our rations down in Holocene II. The fish is very salty—at least I hope it’s fish—and the dried fruit is chewy and sweet. I finish my breakfast, wash it down with water from my canteen, and I set off again, walking until I come to a red-rock caldera dropping like a bowl in the plateau.

  The caldera is alive with color. Tufts of green shrubs, fields of purple wildflowers, a distant lake reflecting the blue sky, its shore ringed by oak trees. Despite my fear of getting sick again, I need to fill my canteen. Finding a natural path, I descend.

  The caldera floor is full of life. Not just flowers, but animal life, too. Grasshoppers leap in front of me, their clicking wings carrying them off above the flowers. A snake slithers from my path, freezing me in my tracks. Lizards sunning themselves on rocks, independent eyes rolling in their sockets, following me out of sight. Then, without warning, the ground darkens and a wild smell wafts down on a warm, fluttering breeze. I look up; the entire sky above the caldera is blacked out by a billion birds. They move like a living sky, flying wing to wing, flying belly to back, stirring the humid air as they spill together and roll with an aquatic rhythm, moving on without break for what seems like half an hour as I stand watching in awe.

  When they finally pass, my eyes are blinded for a moment by the return of unfiltered sun and when they adjust again, I’m standing face to face with him—

  I recognize him right away. I had convinced myself he was a hallucination, but here he is, dropped from the sky. His dark hair cascading over his shoulders, his chest bronzed, his waist narrow. It’s him, I’m sure—the boy who sits on water. I would have guessed he stood three meters tall, but his piercing gray eyes are almost level with mine. And he’s young, too. Maybe not much older than I am. He wears some kind of loin cloth stitched from animal skin. Slung over his shoulder he carries a large netted bag containing several dead birds.

  After looking me over, he passes me by and continues on walking toward the lake. He walks quick and easy, loose on his feet, and I have to jog to keep up.

  “Hey, what’s your name?”

&
nbsp; He ignores me, walking faster. I’ve never seen anyone like him before. His skin seems to fit him perfectly and the way he walks suggests that the very ground is there only for him to cross. He’s long and lean, his arms already ripped with muscle, and I can’t imagine him ever being afraid of anyone.

  “Hey, slow down.”

  I trot along behind him, dodging left and right, desperate to get his attention. He ignores me, his eyes focused, the netted bag of birds bouncing against his naked back.

  “Was it you who found me?”

  When he reaches the grove of trees at the edge of the lake, he stops. I stand in the leafy shade and watch as he opens his bag and tosses birds onto the grass, bending over to artfully fluff them up, or tuck their wings. Five, six, seven dead birds spread out. Then he breaks a narrow limb from a sapling and strips it of leaves. He pulls a string from his belt and lashes his last bird to the stripped limb. Then he buries the free end of the limb into the ground, pumping it back and forth to make a sort of hinge before lowering it onto the grass.

  “What are you doing with those birds?”

  He squats and ties a coil of rope to the stick just beneath where he tied the bird, then he uncoils the rope over to me.

  “Pigeons,” he says, stuffing the end of the rope into my hand. “They’s pigeons.”

  So he can speak. His voice is higher-pitched and more like mine than I expected it to be.

  “What do I do with this?” I ask, holding the rope.

  “On my signal,” he says, “pull fast an’ bring ’em up.”

  “Bring what up?”

  “The stick pigeon.”

  “What’s the signal?” I ask, but he’s already walked off.

  He unfolds the pigeon sack into a large circular net edged with small stone weights, looping it together with well-practiced folds and climbing with it up the nearest tree.

  Several minutes pass and I stand there, feeling stupid with the rope in my hand. He conceals himself in the overhanging branches so well that I have to keep refocusing to even see him there. I want to ask what we’re doing, but with every passing minute the silence grows heavier until I give up the idea of ever speaking again. So I stand, rope in hand.