The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  “If you can make birds come to your rescue, why can’t you ward off a snake or lure in a rabbit?”

  Her stick sketches the sand. ASK. NOT MAKE.

  “You ask. So you’re saying not everything answers, not everything wants to listen?”

  Y is her shorthand for yes.

  “Did Burr teach you how to ask?”

  Y, she writes, & N.

  “He said we’re the same. Do you think we’re the same?”

  She looks at him with those depthless eyes, then circles what she has already written, Y & N.

  And then, when he asks if she can teach him, she makes a circle within the circle, around the letter N.

  She is the messenger. Burr is the educator. And Lewis is impatient for an education. He felt the same way as a child, pulling down books in the library and asking his father to talk to him about them. I’m too busy might have been the phrase his father said to him most often, next to Quiet. When he remembers his father, he remembers him from a distance—studying documents at a desk or meeting with advisers in a boardroom or giving speeches on a stage—only occasionally looking up to find Lewis, staring back at his son not with pride or affection but with disappointment.

  This man, Aran Burr, who lavishes Lewis with attention, who summons him in dreams and in life, who promises him guidance, appears the same age as his father, his hair and beard wilder, but his appearance otherwise similar, so that they are beginning to merge in his mind. Burr wants him—his father wants him—and he feels as excited by this as he does frightened.

  They hurry to gather their belongings, to feed and water and saddle their horses, who seem infected by their energy when they set off, no longer stumbling or ignoring their reins, but riding hard and straight toward the clouds, despite their bloodied hooves, toward the man whose vaporous shape Lewis can still see.

  He longs for a sniff from his silver tin but knows he must ration it better. It spikes his mind and numbs his senses. Sometimes his thoughts feel so alive and singular that he could shed his body altogether, peel it off like a wet jacket. And sometimes he imagines the sand as powder, imagines diving off his horse, headfirst into a pillowy pile of it, and he would breathe, breathe, breathe, until he is overcome with pleasure.

  They slow to a canter when noon comes and the clouds burn away. By then there are birds—not just the crows and vultures they are accustomed to seeing—but a red-winged blackbird, a yellow tanager, even an owl that hoots at them from a high branch. At one point a murmuration of starlings darkens the sky, like a net cast over them.

  They drop down into the Missouri River, their constant guide, leaning back on their horses as they slide and stutter down the sandy banks, and then follow its wide-walled passage. Its bed is clay cracking beneath their hooves. They startle three deer bedded down in the shade of a root-twisted overhang and fire three bullets and two arrows uselessly after them.

  The water they don’t find for two more days.

  Lewis senses something different. The air takes on a greater texture, less thin and dry, more palpable, and so does it ripen with a fecund smell, like the breath of an unwashed mouth. Then he notices the riverbed softening. The sound of the clay shattering, once echoing all around them, hushes and then vanishes as the ground grows spongy and then sticky with muck.

  Reed is the one who points it out—shouting, “There!”—a great gray tongue of mud twisting its way down the middle of the riverbed. For a quarter mile they follow it. It grows wider, eventually reaching from bank to bank, before giving way to a brackish puddle with salt formations like small cauliflower growing around it.

  York lets out a whoop and shifts out of his saddle and falls to the ground and scrabbles on all fours to the edge of the puddle and splashes a handful into his hair before dunking his face beneath the surface to taste it. He reels back, his face distorted. He heaves several times. A line of bile hangs from his lips when he looks up at them. Gawea nudges her horse and shakes her head and tsk-tsks him with her tongue. York laughs, the laugh cut short when Clark spurs her horse between him and the girl and berates him for his damned fool idiotness.

  The way is now impassable, too swampy for them to ride, and they clamber up the banks and parallel its winding course for an hour. Algae thickens. Bushes cluster. Reeds spring up. Leaves unfurl from branches. To Lewis’s eyes, so accustomed to browns and grays, everything seems obscenely green. There is a whine at his ear, and then a sting at his cheek. He slaps it and studies the bloody smear on his hand.

  He hears another slap behind him and the doctor says, “What is that? What are they?”

  Lewis wipes his hand on his thigh. “Mosquitoes, I think. They drink blood and carry disease.”

  The bugs thicken, swarming in hazy clouds, and the slapping and clapping becomes as frequent as applause. York says, “Why couldn’t they have been wiped out with everything else?”

  “Purely to harass you,” Lewis says.

  York laughs. They all do, despite the welts rising from their skin, because there is water. There is actual water beside them, oozing along thickly at first, then clearing and broadening, creeping up the banks. And where there is water, there is life. The desert has filled their heads with questions and defiled their spirits. But now all those bad feelings wash away. Gawea was right—there is an end to the desert waste—which means they have been right to follow her. She has led them to life, and they are going to live.

  When the sun eases toward the horizon, when the shadows begin to cluster, the doctor walks her horse onto a rocky shoal and stares out over a calm stretch of water dimpling with bugs and says, “Let’s stay here. And I don’t just mean for the night. Let’s rest. We need our rest.”

  When no one says anything—the water has stolen their words—she says, “I insist on it. This will be good medicine for us all.”

  Right then a possum with a long pink tail and a mouth full of needlelike teeth clambers down a tree and hisses at them before Reed puts an arrow in its side.

  Lewis knows that with prey come predators. North America was once home to big mammals that long ago went extinct. Once humans crossed the land bridge, once they notched out shell-shaped projectile points, once they learned to fire arrows and hurl spears with atlatls, the big animals began to die off. The mammoths, the dire wolves and lipoterns, the saber-toothed lions, the giant ground sloths and giant short-faced bears. All gone, replaced by scrawnier, deadlier humans. Nature fills a void. Now that humans are gone, something big will be clambering its way to the top of the predatory chain. He remembers what Gawea wrote in the sand, Goblins, and while they butcher the possum and talk excitedly about what tomorrow might bring, he keeps his eyes on the dark forests that wall the riverbank.

  Chapter 14

  THE MELANOMA RISES from the tip of his ear. It has been bothering Thomas for weeks, a faint itching at first, then a throbbing. It is a raised lump, darkly pigmented, purplish at its center, pink and yellow along the edges. Vincent insists he get it removed.

  The mayor is not overly worried. He does not feel weak or nauseous. Removing suspicious lesions is as commonplace as getting a haircut, clipping toenails. Everyone is dotted with moles. Everyone has growths lumping them. Their sunburned skin husks away like the peelings of an onion. The UV exposure, with no ozone layer to filter, cooks them, mutates their cells.

  His doctor—a man with an eggishly bald head and a nest of black hair rimming it—seats him in a chair and gives him an opiate that a few minutes later makes everything fuzzy around the edges. “It feels like nothing could ever possibly hurt,” Thomas says, and the doctor says, “I’m sorry to contradict you,” and slices off the top of his ear with a pair of clippers.

  He hears the snip. Blood runs into his ear. The doctor smashes a towel against it and tells Thomas to hold it. The pain takes a moment to arrive. A rising heat. Thomas begins to say, “Ah-ah-ah,” and the doctor says, “You’ll be all right.”

  Then he smears glue over the wound and bandages it and tells Thomas
to follow up with him if he has any questions.

  Thomas is late because of the procedure. But then again, he is always late. People wait for him. And they will continue to wait for him, whether for five or fifty minutes, as long as it takes. When he walks late into a room, any room, people feel both relief and exasperation. For so many decisions he makes, this is his intention. To make clear his power.

  Slade meets him in the hallway. “How are they?” Thomas asks, and Slade says, “They’re impatient. Pimpton threatened to leave.”

  “Perfect.”

  He opens the tall oak door and together they walk into the high-ceilinged chamber. Slade stands in the corner. A chandelier fitted with candles hangs over a long wooden table around which six councilmen are seated. They stand when he enters, though none of them greet him. Only a few even look at him. Some are men; some are women. Some are young, and some have been serving longer than Thomas has been alive, and they look it, graybeards with hunchbacks taking too long to wobble upright at his entrance.

  Thomas takes his seat in a tall leather-backed chair at the head of the table. “I call this meeting to order. The minutes, please.”

  Councilman Pimpton falls back into his chair and sighs theatrically. He walks with a cane made from a crooked length of wood. His eyebrows are combed up his forehead like white feathers. “I’ve lost too many minutes already. Waiting.” He says this at a mutter just loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Last week’s minutes—about the creation of a water committee and the proposed construction of a new well—are read and approved. Not that Thomas believes there is more water to be found, but they need to look like they are trying. Rain is the real answer, but they can’t make a motion to sequester clouds.

  The blinds are closed, the room dark except for the candles sparking above them. Water glasses are staggered around the table, along with two sweating pitchers. Thomas fills his glass to the very top and takes a small sip and pops his lips. “New business for today’s agenda?”

  Pimpton raises a hand. It wavers in the air a long moment before Thomas acknowledges him. “What news is there of Jon Colter?”

  “What news?” Thomas says. “What do you mean? What news could there possibly be?”

  “I don’t really know. That’s why I’m inquiring.”

  “I took him out of one cell and I put him in another. One much vaster. He’s probably already dead. Just like they’re undoubtedly all already dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pimpton says and quivers his lips, “help an old man understand. Why did you send Colter at all?”

  “Because we needed to do something. It was a symbolic act. To make everyone fearful. You run away from me and I’ll send a monster after you. There’s always the chance he might find them. Maybe. And do me the favor of killing them. Maybe. And bring back their bodies. Again, maybe. In which case, I’d have some lovely ornaments to decorate the city with.”

  “You would think,” Pimpton says, “our mayor would be wise enough to not end a sentence with a preposition.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. Let me try again.” He clears his throat. “In which case, I’d have some lovely ornaments to decorate the city with, you walking corpse.”

  The old man pretends not to hear. “I propose we concentrate on actuals instead of hypotheticals. We need water. Let’s figure out how to get our people some water. Let’s be the leaders we promised to be.”

  “I’m being the leader I promised to be. A realist, not a soothsayer.”

  “I don’t understand anything that comes out of your mouth.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re a thousand years old and can’t hear.”

  Pimpton scrunches up his face and waves a hand, dismissing him.

  The secretary, a shrew-faced man with an inkpot and a pile of paper, scratches down everything said at the meeting so far. For a moment his writing is the only sound. Thomas says to him, “You don’t need to record any of this. I’m just going to talk for a minute. I’m going to say a few things. Is that all right with everyone?” Maybe it is the opiates—the bleary warmth that makes him feel capable of anything—but he doesn’t want to hold back today. He doesn’t see the point of coddling this alliance of fools. “I had a friend. He was a good friend, but an idiot father. Married to a woman who turned out to be an idiot mother. They ruined their children. They let them breastfeed until they were nine. They let them share their bed until they were twelve. The children were never spanked or scolded. The parents talked things out. ‘Why do you think you hit Sally? Why do you think you pissed on John?’ Which only taught the children how to manipulate. And so the children grew up to be weak and precious, unable to function. Children are no different than puppies. They must be broken. They must be taught to heel and to roll over, or they’ll spend the rest of their lives gnawing on the furniture and shitting on the rugs and waking you in the night for a treat. I am not a parent. I do not wish to be a parent. But if I was a parent, I know exactly how I would raise my children. Fear and love. Those are the fundamentals of leadership. You need people to fear you and love you.”

  Thomas takes another drink of water. One of the candles spits. A tongue of melted wax plops to the table and hardens into a white shell.

  “Excuse me.” A voice, Pimpton’s.

  “Yes?”

  “Who loves you? Who are these people who love you?”

  His eyes flit to Slade and then to Pimpton. “You don’t love me?”

  “I most certainly do not.”

  “That hurts my feelings.”

  The old man lifts his beard and neatens it across his chest.

  Thomas says, “I wonder…”

  “Do you?”

  “I wonder if you would love me if I tied you down? If I took a long needle, heated by fire until it glowed orange, and slid it into your urethra? Would you love me then? If I held it there until you said so?”

  The old man looks at him with his mouth agape.

  “I bet you would.” He gives a small smile. “Of course you would.”

  “A question for the table,” Pimpton says. “It has come to my attention you closed down a church?”

  “I did.”

  “Without consulting us.”

  “I did. The minister was speaking out against me, calling for civil disobedience.”

  “To close down a church.” His tongue moves audibly inside his mouth, clicking and popping. “They’re saying it’s un-American.”

  “I don’t believe in America. America is a myth.”

  There is a collective intake of air. Several lean forward and grip the arms of their chairs, as if to stand, then reconsider.

  Thomas’s ear feels so hot and his tongue feels so loose. The words tumble so easily off it. “People believe in America, but America is a myth. It has been since 1776. People believed in the country’s greatness because it promised them greatness. Hold a gold coin just out of reach and say, ‘This could be yours.’ One percent of the population controls everything. One percent. That’s how it is here. That’s how it was all over the world. That’s how it has always been throughout human history. America sponsored the appearance of freedom. I do not. They say I’m a liar? America was a liar. I’m a truth teller.”

  “But…” This from a woman named Packer, dressed in purple with an acorn-cap haircut. At his gaze she pinches her mouth.

  Thomas fondles the damaged tip of his ear. “I’m making a motion.”

  Pimpton lays his hands flat on the table. “What now?”

  “We’re going to reduce the water rations again.”

  “We can’t.”

  “We will. By a third.”

  The meeting goes on for another thirty minutes until they adjourn. Thomas was the last to arrive but is the first to leave. On his way out the door, Packer puts a hand on his shoulder and he flinches away from her.

  “Are you all right?” she says.

  “Of course I’m all right.”

  “Your ear?”

  He touches it
and examines his hand. “That’s nothing.” The glue dirties his fingers. “Just a cancer I had cut away.”

  His eyes then follow Pimpton as the old man shuffles from the room and down a long hallway that will lead him to the entry that opens into the unforgiving white light.

  Chapter 15

  THEY DON’T WANT to waste their bullets, so they hunt with arrows. The quiver rattles at Clark’s back when she sneaks along the game trail, a thin strip of dirt polished down by hooves. She pauses often. To run her hand along the trunk of a birch tree and peel away a strip of its papery bark. To study the starburst of a white flower. To listen to the river bubbling. To watch a bird flit among the reeds crowding the banks. Everything is new. She feels as if she has stepped into one of those books read to her as a child—through the wardrobe, down the rabbit hole, up the twister—a portal that leads to the fantastic. It makes her feel giddy, girlish.

  Last night they stripped off their clothes and bathed in the river. Though it was only calf high, they laid down flat in the water and let it pour over their bodies. They spread their arms and legs and twirled like pale stars. They dunked their heads and spit bubbles. They splashed at each other and scrubbed their skin with sand and shot arcs of water from their mouths. When she sat up and looked downstream, she could see the water had grown cloudy with the sweat and grime washing off them. The water softened her, melted her, like hard-packed dirt exposed finally to rain. Her clothes are still damp. They stick to her when she moves. It is an unfamiliar feeling, like a tongue touching her all over, and she likes it.

  Her brother follows a few paces behind her. They come upon a clearing spotted with coneflowers and waist-high bunches of big bluestem, and in a crouch they wait near the water’s edge. At one point she hears her brother’s mouth open, forming a question, and she gives him a wilting stare. “Shh,” she says. After a time her legs go numb and her vision wavers—and then a deer untangles itself from the forest. A doe. Maybe twenty yards from them. The big pouches of its ears twitch. Its damp black nose tests the air. Then it lowers its head to eat. This deer is nothing like the ones she occasionally kills near the Sanctuary, their growth stunted and their bones showing sharply through their mangy hides. She can see its muscles jump with every small step it takes and imagines them peeled from the bone and spitted over the fire, dripping fat into the flames.