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25
p i l g r i m s
for his own music,” Audrey went on. “Have you ever lived in
a city?”
“No,” Jean said.
“Well.” Audrey rolled her eyes. “Let me tell you, there’s a
limit, an absolute limit, to what you can endure there. Just three
months ago, I was getting ready to go out on some errands and
I suddenly realized I’d taken all my credit cards out of my purse
so that, if I was mugged, I wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of
replacing them. Without even thinking, I’d done this, as if it
was perfectly normal to live that way. And that night I told
L.D., ‘We’re leaving; we have got to get out of this crazy city.’
Of course, he was more than happy to comply.”
Jean looked over to Benny, who had been standing quietly
through all this, listening. She’d forgotten for a moment that he
was there, and she felt the same quick guilt that came when,
during dinner, she’d glance around the table and be surprised to
see Benny eating with them, sitting between Ed and herself.
“Well.” Jean pushed her glasses back farther on her nose.
“We’ve got to get going.”
“Listen,” L.D. said, and he took a flat black disk from his
pocket. He slid it into his mouth and made the full screech of an
elk bugle ring through the small, heavily insulated living room
of Jean’s cabin. She saw Benny jump at the suddenness of the
sound. L.D. took the disk out of his mouth and smiled.
“Oh, honey.” Audrey winced. “That’s so loud inside. You
really shouldn’t bugle in people’s homes. Don’t be scared,” she
told Benny. “It’s just his elk talker.”
Jean had heard one before. A friend of Ed’s was a hunting
guide who used one to call in bull elk. He’d demonstrated it for
Jean once, and she’d laughed at how fake it had sounded. “You
might as well stand in a clearing and call, ‘Here elky, elky, elky,’”
she’d said. L.D. had the same device, but his sound was full and
alarmingly real.
Benny grinned at Jean. “Did you hear that?”
26 ✦
Elk Talk
She nodded. “You do know that you can only hunt elk in
season and with a license, don’t you?” she asked L.D.
“We don’t want to hunt them,” Audrey said. “We just want to
talk to them.”
“Did it sound real to you?” L.D. asked. “I’ve been practicing.”
“How’d you do that?” Benny asked. L.D. handed him the
disk.
“They call this a diaphragm,” L.D. explained, as Benny
turned the object over in his hand and held it up to the light.
“It’s made of rubber, and you put it in the back of your mouth
and blow air through it. It’s not easy, and you have to be careful
or you’ll swallow it. There’s different sizes for different sounds.
This one is a mature bull, a mating call.”
“Can I try it?”
“No,” Jean said. “Don’t put that in your mouth. It doesn’t
belong to you.”
Benny reluctantly handed it back to L.D., who said, “Get
your dad to buy you one of your own.”
Jean cringed at the reference, but Benny only nodded, con-
sidering the suggestion. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.”
Jean took her coat off the hook by the door and put it on.
“Come on, Ben,” she said. “Time to go.”
L.D. lifted Sophia from where she’d been sitting on his boots.
One of her antlers had slipped from its masking-tape base and
hung like a braid down her back.
“Doesn’t she look precious?” Audrey asked.
Jean opened the door and held it so the Donaldsons could file
out onto the porch. Benny followed behind them, small, antler-
less. She turned the lights off and left, closing the door. She
pulled a skeleton key from the bottom of her pocketbook, and,
for the first time since she’d lived in the cabin, locked up.
It was a clear night, with a nearly full moon. There had been
no snow yet, none that had lasted, but Jean suspected from the
sharp smell of the cold air that there might be some by the next
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27
p i l g r i m s
day. She remembered reading that bears wait until the first
drifting snowfall to hibernate so that the tracks to their winter
dens will be covered immediately. It was getting late in the year,
she thought, and the local bears must be getting tired of waiting
around for proper snow.
The Donaldsons were standing on the porch, looking past
Jean’s small back yard to the edge of the woods.
“Last summer I got the elk to answer,” L.D. said. “That was a
wild experience, communicating like that.”
He slid the diaphragm into his mouth and called again,
louder than he had in the cabin, a more powerful sound, Jean
thought, than a human had a right to make around there, and
disturbingly realistic.
Then there was silence, and they all stared across the yard, as
if expecting the trees themselves to answer. Jean had forgotten
her gloves. Her hands were cold, and she was anxious to get to
the car, and warmth. She reached forward and touched Benny’s
shoulder.
“Let’s go, honey,” she said, but he laid his hand over hers in a
surprisingly adult manner and whispered, “Wait,” and then,
“Listen.”
She heard nothing. L.D. had set Sophia down, and now the
whole family stood on the edge of the porch, their antlers
outlined against the night sky. They’d best not make their cos-
tumes too authentic, Jean thought, or they’d get themselves
shot. She pushed her fists down into the pockets of her coat and
shivered.
After some time, L.D. repeated the call, a long high squeal,
followed by several grunts. They all listened in the ensuing
quiet, leaning forward slightly, heads tilted, as if they were
afraid the answer might be faint enough to miss, although it was
unnecessary to listen so carefully: if a bull elk was going to bugle
back, they wouldn’t have to strain to hear it.
28 ✦
Elk Talk
L.D. sounded the call again, and immediately once more, and
as the last grunt vanished into silence, Jean heard it. She heard
it first. By the time the others tensed in realization, she’d already been thinking that it must be a bear making all that noise in the
underbrush. And then she’d guessed what it was, just before the
elk broke out of the woods. The ground was hard with cold, and
his hooves beat in a light fast rhythm as he circled. He stopped
in the black frozen soil of Jean’s garden.
“Oh my God,” she said under her breath, and quickly
counted the points of his antlers, which spread in dark silhou-
ette, blending with the branches and forms of the trees behind
him. He had approached them fast and without warning, mak-
ing himself fully visible to confront or to be confronted. Clearly,
this elk did not want to talk to the Donaldsons. He wanted to
know who was in his territory, c
alling for a mate. And now he
stood, exposed, looking right at them. But the cabin was dark
and shaded by the porch roof, so there was no way the elk could
have picked out their figures. There was no breeze to carry a
scent either, so he stared blindly at the precise spot from where
the challenge had come.
Jean saw Sophia reach her hand up slowly and touch her
father’s leg, but, aside from that, there was no movement. Af-
ter a moment, the elk stepped slowly to his left. He stopped,
paused, returned to where he’d been standing, and stepped a few
feet to his right. He showed both his sides in the process,
keeping himself in full view, his gaze fixed on the porch. He did
not toss his head as a horse might, nor did he strike a more
aggressive, intimidating stance. Again he paced, to one side and
to the other, slowly, deliberately.
Jean saw L.D. raise his hand to his mouth and adjust the dia-
phragm. She leaned forward and placed her hand on his fore-
arm. He turned to look at her, and she mouthed the word no.
He frowned and turned away. She saw him begin to inhale,
✦
29
p i l g r i m s
and she tightened her hold on his arm and said, so softly that
someone standing even three feet away would not have heard
her, “Don’t.”
L.D. slipped the diaphragm out of his mouth. Jean relaxed.
Out of the woods came two females, one fully mature, the other
a lean yearling. They looked first at the male, then at the cabin,
and slowly, almost self-consciously, walked the length of the
yard to the garden. All three elk stood together for some time in
what Jean felt was the most penetrating silence she had ever
experienced. Under their sightless gaze, she felt as if she were
involved in a séance that had been held in jest but had acciden-
tally summoned a real ghost.
Eventually, the elk began their retreat. The older two ap-
peared decisive, but the yearling twice looked back at the cabin,
two long looks that Jean had no way of reading. The elk stepped
into the woods and were immediately out of view. On the
porch, no one moved until Sophia said very quietly, “Daddy.”
Audrey turned and smiled at Jean, shaking her head slowly.
“Have you ever,” she asked, “in your entire life felt so incredibly
privileged?”
Jean did not answer but took Benny by the hand and led him
briskly to the car. She didn’t look at the Donaldsons standing at
the threshold of her home, not even as she waited for some time
in the driveway for the engine to warm up.
“Did you see that?” Benny asked, his voice tight with wonder,
but Jean did not answer him either.
She drove with only the low beams of her headlights on,
recklessly, veering to the other side of the road, heedless of the
possibility of oncoming traffic or other obstacles. She drove the
road faster than she ever had before, venting a fury that took her
four dangerous miles to isolate, and she did not begin to slow
down until she realized that not only had she been manipulated,
but she had been a participant in a manipulation. They had no
right, she thought over and over, they had no right to do such a
30 ✦
Elk Talk
thing simply because they could. She remembered, then, that
Benny was still with her, beside her, that he was entirely her
responsibility, and she eased her car into control again.
She wished, briefly, that her husband was with her, a thought
she immediately dismissed on the grounds that there were al-
ready far too many people around.
✦
31
Alice to the East
✦
✦
✦
The drive from Roy’s house to the center of Verona was
twenty minutes through sunflower fields that stretched
out on either side, flat and constant as a Midwestern ac-
cent. It was a good highway, well-paved and broken by nothing
but the horizon and the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad.
When Roy’s daughter Emma was young, he had taught her
how to ride a bicycle on the yellow line that divided those who
were going east from those headed west. It was safe enough;
there was less traffic then, and the few cars that did pass could
be seen coming from miles away. There was always plenty of
time to make a decision, to move over, to be prepared.
About ten miles out of town the grain elevator could be seen,
standing with all the arrogance one would expect from the only
structure in the area over two stories tall. Roy had just passed
that point when he noticed an unfamiliar object ahead which
became, as he drove closer, a truck, a white truck, pulled off the
road, hazards flashing. He slowed down, read the Montana
license plate, and then eased his car so deliberately to a stop
behind the pickup that it appeared as if he’d parked there every
day of his life.
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33
p i l g r i m s
Roy stepped out of his car and walked a few feet before he
saw them in the ditch. He stopped, and slowly reached out his
hand until he was touching the hood over his warm, ticking
engine. There were two of them, teenagers. The girl was stand-
ing. The boy knelt at her feet, slicing one leg of her jeans open
at mid-thigh with a jackknife. Roy was startled and then em-
barrassed by the strange intimacy of the scene: the girl standing
with her legs slightly spread, hands on her hips, the boy on his
knees, the unexpected flash of the knife, the gradual revealing of
more skin as a pair of jeans became shorts.
After a moment, the girl turned and looked at Roy with
vague interest. Her hair, short and dark, was pressed damply
against her head, as if she had just taken off a baseball hat. She
wore a man’s white undershirt, a pair of sunglasses clinging to
its V neck with one arm.
“Hi,” she said.
“I saw you were pulled over,” Roy said. “I thought you might
need a hand.”
She gestured at the truck. “Yeah. It just quit on us all of a
sudden.”
“Fuel pump,” the boy added. “Busted.”
“Want me to take a look at it?”
The girl shrugged. “Just a sec,” she said.
Roy waited while the boy cut through the last heavy inseam
and the girl stepped out of the tube, with its hemmed bottom
and frayed top. One leg bare, the other in long jeans, she walked
to the pickup, opened the door, and released the hood. Roy
came around to the front of the truck, noticing the dead but-
terflies and grasshoppers flattened against the radiator grill. He
and the girl looked at the dusty engine block, and she pointed
one thin hand through the network of tubes and hoses and said,
“Pete thinks it’s this that’s broken. The fuel pump.”
“If it is, you’ll need a new one,” Roy said.
34 ✦
Alice to the East
“That’s what Pete thinks, too.”
&nbs
p; “What is this, a three-fifty?”
“It’s a Chevy,” she answered.
“I mean the engine. What is it?”
“Three-fifty,” the boy called from around the truck.
“I figured we’d have problems and everything,” the girl said,
“but damn. I thought we’d at least get through North Dakota.”
“You’re from Montana?”
“Yeah. Right across the border. Are you from here?”
“Yes,” Roy answered. “I live just outside Verona.” He thought
it strange that he said this the way other people said they lived
just outside Chicago or ten minutes from Manhattan. Like it
meant something. There wasn’t much inside Verona, and there
was nothing just outside it, except sunflower fields and Roy’s
house.
“We haven’t been on the road two days and now . . .” She left
the thought unfinished and smiled at Roy. “I’m Alice,” she said.
With the s sound, the tip of her tongue made a brief appearance between her teeth and then vanished.
“I’m Roy. I know someone in Verona who might have the
part you need. I can give you a ride. If you want.”
“Let me ask Pete. My brother.”
She walked back to the ditch, and Roy stood at the corner of
the truck, watching. He didn’t believe they were related. Some-
thing about the way she said “my brother” after Pete’s name.
Something about the emphasis, the hesitation.
Pete had been lying on his back in the dead grass, and at
Alice’s approach he sat up, wiped his forehead with the inside of
his arm, and complained that it was hot.
“Finish making my shorts and he’ll give us a ride into town,”
Alice said. “He told me some guy might have the part.”
Pete took the jackknife from his pocket, opened it, and be-
gan to cut into what remained of Alice’s jeans. Roy watched
✦
35
p i l g r i m s
her stand there, still and relaxed, eyes forward. He saw that
Pete, while bending his head in close concentration, did not
touch Alice at all, not even brushing a knuckle against her
skin. Only the frayed ends of her shorts grazed her thighs, and
Roy found himself staring. He looked down at his own pants,
studying the symmetrical cuffs that rested on the laces of his
thick shoes.
When Pete finished, Alice stepped out of the second denim
tube as she had the first, picked them both up, and draped them
over her arm, like guest towels on a rack.
Pilgrims Page 4