by C. P. Boyko
Then everything changed. He heard a sound. His heart began to pound rapidly. Could he be imagining it? No! There it was again: human voices, human laughter. He hobbled more quickly, putting weight on his bad ankle and allowing the branches in his path to thrash his face. At last he burst out onto a trail, tumbling into the dirt. But he hardly noticed, intent as he was on the distant voices. Yes, they were coming nearer! He was saved!
He got to his feet, propped himself against a tree, and brushed himself off. Boy, he was a real mess! He picked burrs from his pant legs and dry mud from his sleeves. He ran his fingers through his hair and was appalled to see what fell out. His hands were too filthy to wipe his face with, so he used a large leaf, dampened with saliva, as a washcloth. Then he leaned back against the tree, slung the rifle casually over his shoulder, arranged upon his face a sardonic expression of relief, and waited for the appearance of his saviors.
There were four of them: four rough, dirty, grizzled sportsmen lugging rifles and packs, looking wearied but satisfied, at peace with themselves and at home in the universe. One of them carried an immense pair of antlers, held together, as if for lack of any better adhesive, by a small severed deer’s head with glossy black marbles for eyes.
When they noticed Lance, the hunters nodded and grunted their salutations.
Lance nodded and grunted back.
“Any luck, pard?”
Lance chuckled deprecatingly. “None to speak of.”
The hunters nodded and grinned, grunted their valedictions, and continued on their way. Lance watched them go, then slumped to the ground and listened to their voices and laughter fade into the distance.
Only when they were too far away to call after did he begin to rationalize his behavior. They had no pack ponies, and he could hardly have asked them to carry him. Besides, he was on the trail now, and could follow it back to civilization. He had water, and he had—a gun.
As he limped in the direction the hunters had gone, he began scanning the woods around him for animals to shoot. But all he spotted were squirrels and birds probably too small to hit, and certainly too small to eat. And since he did not relish the prospect of skinning and gutting his dinner, surely one large fleshy beast would be preferable to several scrawny ones; it would also save bullets. Then he remembered that he did not have a knife, or any means of building a fire. At home he liked his steak well done; could he bring himself to bite into the raw flank of a dead moose, or wolf, or wild boar? He was hungry enough to imagine that he could. Probably uncooked flesh tasted more or less like raw cookie dough …
This pleasant reverie was interrupted by the sight, far down the trail, of a herd of deer grazing. He threw himself behind a bush and waited for his pulse to return to normal so that he could think. Had they seen him? Had they heard him? Lying on his back, he kicked with his heels and slid on his head a few inches into the trail. They were still grazing peacefully, apparently oblivious. He flopped onto his belly and wriggled back behind cover. Would they smell him? Was he downwind? He stuck a finger in his mouth, then held it out, coated in slobber. Yes; he was lucky: the side nearest the deer grew cool first.
He sat up and looked at the gun in his lap. There did not seem to be any place to put the cartridges, aside from the hole in the barrel. He was about to drop one in, pointy end up, then stopped to wonder what would hold it in place, what would keep it from sliding back out, if he tilted the gun past horizontal? He recalled Maury saying something about chambers—testing the cartridges in the chambers. He tried twisting and bending the gun along different seams. Finally he found a little sliding latch which revealed a bullet-sized trench. He inserted a cartridge; it fit perfectly. Then, with a satisfying series of clicks, like a key turning in a lock, the latch slid back into place. His heart was thumping again, but now with joy.
He peered over the top of the bush. The deer, or whatever they were, had not moved. He could see at least five of them. The closest one was facing his direction. It lifted its head into clear view between bites. He took aim.
His arms were trembling, his breath shallow. It was a beautiful beast, with sleek khaki-colored fur. A shame that it had no antlers. A female, he supposed. He waited for her to raise her head again. She had no idea that her life was in his hands. She did not even know he existed! She was in his possession; he owned her. The thought made him giddy. He could let her live, or destroy her with the twitch of one finger. She lifted her head. He held his breath. His whole body quivered with an intoxicating feeling of power. Then he squeezed, not the trigger, but the entire gun, with both hands and with all his might, as if throttling the deer from a distance. The gun kicked in his hands like a living thing, then was still.
All was still. Nothing moved; nothing had changed. But then, after what felt like minutes, the deer fell sideways into the ferns—dead. He’d got her! He’d killed her! He’d blasted her to bits! His head swam with delight. How much better than literature was life!
He was about to run forward and revel in his kill when he noticed that the other deer still hadn’t budged. They stood there, sniffing the air, apparently unable to move, either from fear or confusion. He was marveling at their stupidity when something that Maury had said came back to him. Why, these must be caribou! The very same creatures these mountains had been named for, and which had been decimated by commercial hunters who had single-handedly massacred entire herds, because when you shot at them they froze! Quickly, with his breath catching in his throat, Lance reloaded his rifle.
P-kow! P-kosh! Ch-chow! Bakaw!
One by one, each time with less haste and more skill, he knocked the life out of his prey. The woods reverberated with his shots, then fell silent. Even the birds held their breath. He did not want to stop, but he had killed them all. Five shots, five dead caribou. He was a hunter. He was—
“Are you crazy?”
Maury and the Indians came bounding out of the bush. Lance noticed, behind them, the pale grey canvas of their tents and packs. He had found camp.
“What the hell are you shooting at?”
“I got lost,” he started to explain.
Rocky and Old Moose had meanwhile discovered the carcasses, and were praising his marksmanship.
Maury staggered to the nearest one, fell to his knees, and put his hand on its bloody neck. “You shot our ponies?”
Lance, still tingling from the kill, refused to acknowledge any mistake. “They—attacked me,” he said at last.
Maury’s eyes grew wide. “Attacked you? These ponies?”
Lance stood rigid, rifle on shoulder, defying disbelief.
Slowly the amazement drained from Maury’s face, leaving behind only a profound melancholy. He shook his head and muttered, “They must have been mad.”
THE LANGUAGE BARRIER
SHE STAGGERED THROUGH the narrow streets with her head thrown back and her eyes peeled open, drinking in the strange sights and sounds like a clean page absorbing ink. She paused occasionally to siphon some of these impressions into her notebook, her lips fluttering slightly as she translated her raw perceptions into prose. Each afternoon, back at the albergo, she refined and expanded these jottings into long letters home to her husband, which she posted in the mailbox across the street with the gravity of a woman making a deposit at the bank. When she returned home to North Carolina, she intended to mine these letters for material for her next novel. It was to be called Italy.
Katherine had been in Italy only two and a half days and already she had collected an incredible assortment of material. She had seen an old woman spitting off a balcony into the hair of an unwitting vendor below. She had seen a boy riding a bicycle that was much too large for him, so that his feet reached the pedals only at their apex. She had seen garbage; never before had she seen so much garbage: in alleyways, in the gutters, in cracks and corners like drifted snow. She had seen little boys pissing in the street—into the street, with their b
acks to a wall. She had seen Coca-Cola served in plastic bags. She had seen very small cats—not kittens, but fully grown cats in miniature. She had seen a dead dog lying undisturbed in the street, strangely black and mummified, as if it had been sun-dried before it could decompose. She had seen a fat man, shirtless but wearing black pants, socks, and shoes, seated on a rocking chair in the middle of a bustling market and apparently asleep. She had seen a man watering a dirt road with a garden hose. She had seen a man in some kind of military uniform holding a rifle under one arm and a baby in the other.
And she had captured all these astonishing things in her notebook, preserving them in noun phrases, as if they were found objects: “That Italians at bus stops crane their necks out into the street to see if the bus is coming.” “That in an otherwise empty restaurant, the Italian waitress insists on seating you next to the only other patrons.” “That Italian dogs will like any face.” Truly, Italy was unlike any other country in the world.
And the Italians were unlike any other people in the world. Never had she encountered, never had she imagined such friendliness. Everywhere she went, the locals stared, smiled, waved, or shouted “buongiorno!” Hostesses stationed outside restaurants asked when she had last eaten; grocers stuffed her pockets with oranges, for which they charged her a “very special price”; passing taxi drivers hailed her, and expressed concern for her feet. One morning a shopkeeper had come running out of his shop to ask her where she was going. Katherine, by making slithering gestures with her arms to suggest peregrination, and carefully mangling one or two sentences that she had memorized from her phrasebook (“Where can I buy a ticket,” and “I asked for a room with a bath”), managed to convey to the shopkeeper her happy destinationlessness. The man was scandalized. Taking Katherine’s pen and drawing a map on her forearm, he sketched an itinerary which featured the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Pantheon, many famous churches, famous ruins, and famous museums, and which culminated in a visit to the most amazing, most essential, most famous suit factory. How much would Katherine expect to pay for such a tour? Five hundred lire? One thousand lire? Katherine shrugged and nodded in cynical agreement. The shopkeeper slapped this idea out of the air and stamped on it. He took a step closer and said in a confidential tone, “For you, my friend—one lira.” Katherine was moved almost to tears by gratitude—gratitude which she could express only by purchasing three suits at the factory and tipping her driver 999 lire.
Perhaps fortunately, Katherine had no head for math. The exchange rate between lire and dollars was an awkward enough number (it had a seven in it) to deter her from attempting the calculation. As a consequence, Italian currency, with its funny dour faces printed on childishly colorful bills, seemed to her a sort of play money, which she was amused and titillated to exchange for real products and services. The atmosphere of make-believe was reinforced by the fact that nothing in Italy had a price tag; apparently the vendors just made up the prices as they went along, like children playing General Store. Katherine was careful not to burst their bubble, and paid whatever they asked, with a serious face.
A vendor beckoned and Katherine crossed the street. The old man was selling some kind of green gourd with its top lopped off and a spoon stuck inside. Katherine supposed that she was rather hungry. In any case, she had not tried one of these things before; it would make good material.
Holding up one finger, she said, in mellifluous Italian, “One very.”
The vendor, who assumed that this yellow-haired tourist was speaking English, heard her say in that language what sounded to his incredulous ears like, “Who knows old train motors?” He decided, after a few seconds of grinding cogitation, that the young foreigner could not possibly be asking for the whereabouts of an antique train engineer, but must be searching for the train station—and someone there who could tell her when the old trains “motored.” Perhaps, he thought charitably, English was not the young woman’s first language. Speaking slowly, out of consideration but also necessity, the old man gave Katherine, in a simplified version of English, a simplified version of directions to the central train station.
Katherine, who assumed that the old man was speaking Italian, listened with squinting intentness for any of the phrases or words that she had memorized, and eventually pulled from the river of verbiage what sounded to her like the Italian word for “beef.” She thanked the vendor sincerely for this recommendation, then pointed at one of the gourds and said, “Quanto?”
A light, as bright as that of first love, came into the old vendor’s eyes. “You,” he cried in English, “speak—Italian!”
Katherine blushed and shrugged and agreed that it was so. “And you,” she said, “speak English so well!”
The old man, who assumed now that Katherine was speaking Italian, could not make heads or tails of this statement, and kindly asked her, in Italian, to try again. Katherine, who now assumed that the old man was speaking English, apologized profusely and asked him, in English, to please repeat what he had just said. Then they both shook their heads and turned up their hands and laughed in companionable befuddlement. To seal their new friendship, the vendor gave Katherine a gourd, for which Katherine paid him twenty times its value, and they clasped hands and parted smiling, each pleased to have surmounted however briefly the language barrier.
Katherine walked back in the direction of the albergo in a daze of joy. She rapped on lampposts with her knuckles, ruffled children’s hair, and stared into passing doorways and alleys like a camera, taking pleasure even in simple parallax—the way her moving perspective caused the various planes of the scene to shift and stretch smoothly and in perfect unison, like a symphony of converging lines. She stopped to preserve this simile in her notebook, and while she did so, her joy slipped furtively away.
When she looked up, she discovered that she was standing in the middle of the street, and that some of the omnipresent honking of horns was directed at her. She waved her arms apologetically, then froze in amazement when she realized that the little black car directly in front of her had not stopped at all, but was steadily creeping towards her. She stared incredulously at the approaching fender, then through the windshield at the shouting and gesticulating driver, then back at the fender. She was flabbergasted. Did the man intend to run her over? Some of her happiness returned on a wave of astonishment. This could never happen in North Carolina!
When the fender was a mere inch from her right knee, Katherine, against her own will, took a step back. The car continued to stalk forward, and soon had swallowed the spot where she had been standing. She became convinced that he really would have run her over—and she resolved this time not to budge, in order to prove it. But again, at the critical moment, she retreated reflexively. It was like trying to hold one’s eye open to an approaching finger. She withdrew dejectedly to the sidewalk and the little black car roared through the intersection, blazing its horn in what sounded to Katherine like triumph. Surely he would have run her over? She pulled out her notebook—but did not know what to write.
One evening a week later, after she had posted her afternoon’s letter, Katherine was sitting alone in a deserted trattoria, waiting for whatever dish she had ordered to arrive, watching the chimney pots across the street change color as the sun set somewhere behind the apartment blocks, and fitfully describing this vision in her notebook, when the English family appeared—being led, with only their partial and conditional submission, to a table.
The Freemantles were the other tourists staying at the albergo. Katherine had smiled and said “buongiorno” when she passed them in the hallway or saw them in the street, but had otherwise avoided them. Although she would have liked to exchange impressions of the country with other visitors—and though she would have loved to hold an entire conversation in rich, untrammeled English, without having to wave her arms or flap her hands to illustrate her meaning—she was reluctant to ratify her outsider status by socializing with other outsiders. She thoug
ht it important for her research that she blend in—that she behave like a local and be treated like one. It seemed to her that her first duty as a local was to snub foreigners.
But when, inevitably, the waitress seated the Freemantles at the adjacent table, Katherine consoled herself with the thought that, after all, everything was potential material, even the experience of being a tourist chatting with other tourists in a strange land. She closed her notebook and said, “Good evening.”
Mr. Freemantle, a stooped, wiry man with brown hair and a white beard stained yellow by nicotine, asked what she had been writing; and, perhaps to encourage reciprocal confidences, went on to admit that he was something of a journalist himself—what he called a “photo-journalist.” His photography was quite highly regarded in Europe and North America, he assured her, but lately he had found that journalism paid better, so he was focusing on that for the time being. Had she seen the Colosseum yet? He had just written a rather interesting article about it. He regretted that the best parts of Italy were “off limits,” to coin a phrase. He would have dearly loved to see the Malabria Waterfalls … Mrs. Freemantle, a prim, well-groomed woman who spoke quickly and absently as if rehearsing the speech she was about to deliver to a much larger audience, said that Katherine was quite brave to be travelling alone, especially in Italy, especially now. But then she supposed one could hardly be surprised by the mess the Italians had made of things when one considered their innate baseness. One could see it in the disgusting way they spat everywhere, the filthy way they scavenged for cigarette butts, the shameless way they inflated their prices for tourists. One could hear it in the very way they talked; she could not imagine an uglier language—unless it was German. She hoped that Katherine was not drinking the water? And the Freemantle boys, giggling and jostling and punching each other brutally, asked for her opinion of something they referred to as the “bogs.” The bogs here were something else, weren’t they? They did take some getting used to, didn’t they? One had to cultivate a knack for them, as it were, or one might miss them altogether. The bogs inside the showers were their favorites—such convenience, such sophistication! Gradually it dawned on Katherine that “bog” was British for “toilet.”