Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  Farley looked at me, scooping. “Well. It’s illegal to harm a companion animal, though technically they’re still property.”

  “What about over at Hormel?”

  Farley came and sat down. “You can’t cause intentional suffering to any animal, even livestock, though a violation at Hormel would be USDA jurisdiction, rather than a criminal infraction.”

  “But you can kill livestock, legally?” I asked, filling a plastic cup of coffee for Farley, the metal one for myself.

  “Sure.”

  “What about someone else’s livestock?”

  Now Farley eyed me with interest. “I’d have to look it up,” he said. “Could be theft, could be rustling, I suppose.”

  I took a sip of coffee and set it down, trying to seem off the cuff.

  “Let’s say the pig just got sick, no one knows how it died.”

  “What pig?”

  “Any pig, a hypothetical pig.”

  “Is there something you want to tell me?” Farley asked.

  “What about hunting?”

  “Hunting livestock? For sport?”

  “Forget that. Let’s say a wildcat, a big puma, comes and kills the pig.”

  Farley nodded. “That could be an act of God.”

  “Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s say there’s a wild man, and he’s from a land far away, and he doesn’t know our laws, and—”

  Farley lifted his hand. “And you were just curious if this strange traveler could legally murder a hypothetical pig? This ‘wild man’ wouldn’t be a student of yours, would he?”

  I got up to scoop ice.

  “What’s he gone and done now?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I waved the scooper. “What?”

  “You fool.” Farley said, “That kid has all of you smoked, your whole university. You’re gonna give him a Ph.D. in camping. My grandfather was living the Old Way even when I was a kid. And he didn’t smell, eh? You know I caught your boy Eggers drinking out of a hose once, right there on the courthouse lawn. My paw-paw didn’t drink from any hose.”

  I asked, “Did your paw-paw teach you the Old Way?”

  “No,” Farley admitted.

  In the distance, a flag went up near one of the fishing huts, but no one came out. And far beyond that, I saw a Corvette, its yellow paint bright against the snow, appearing and disappearing as it negotiated the turns and switchbacks in the hills between town and the marina.

  “So what was the interpretation of your dream?” I asked.

  I reached for my coffee cup, but it had frozen to the ice.

  Farley answered. “She said my dream was easy, that it was about litigation. The fish is the jury. I have to lure the jury on, persuade it to take the bait, and then it will speak the truth. The fish is gold because I value the law.”

  “What do you think?”

  “She wasn’t for me.”

  My eyes followed the Corvette. Sure enough, it was making its way past the fish hatchery, past Mr. Chippy’s Fish Ship, and finally to the marina, where it drove down a steep boat ramp and out onto the ice. Lifting a hand against the glare, I tracked my father as he raced across the lake, leading a spinning tunnel of snow.

  The tires drummed over old ice-fishing mounds, rocking the chassis back and forth, making the motor sound breathy. The wheels stopped spinning a hundred yards away, yet the car floated, tires brooming snow off the ice, all the way over to us. I’d bought that car, the classic ’72 with the huge spoiler, to celebrate the publication of The Depletionists, and now, as it careened to a halt before me, making the ice crinkle and talk, the ironies were too much to take.

  Dad revved the engine before killing it, and as he was climbing out, he grabbed a motel bedspread off the passenger seat. He wore the same mustard vest as he had yesterday.

  “Jeez, you look like hell,” Farley said. “You sleep?”

  “Christ, it’s cold,” Dad said. He draped the bedspread over his head and bundled up, so only his face and black dress shoes showed from under the gold floral pattern.

  I studied my car, beyond extravagant on the ice. Now we looked like all the other convenience-addicted jerks out here. Plus, there’d be an oil stain on the ice when we left. There were several empty bottles of airplane liquor visible on the dash. “You didn’t hook up with a stewardess, did you?” I asked.

  Dad didn’t answer. He grabbed Farley’s extra bucket and dumped all the tackle out, including the carton of crickets, which fell open. Upturning the bucket, Dad took a seat as a hundred black crickets sprang from us. They got about three hops before they paused and then froze in place.

  “Great one,” Farley said.

  Dad grunted at Farley. “Shouldn’t you be defending freedom about now?”

  Farley said, “I’m taking the Tribe to court this afternoon.”

  I looked at Farley. “I thought you wanted to go to work for the Tribe?”

  “I do,” Farley said. “But they don’t want some Indian defending them. They want hotshots from New Jersey, white guys in tight suits.”

  “So you’re suing the Tribe?”

  Farley bent to grab his scooper off the ice. “I got to get their attention,” he said, and walked over to the holes, quiet and serious.

  Dad said, “What’s your case about?”

  “It’s a good one,” Farley answered, scooping. “There’s this older woman, in a motorized wheelchair. Every day she rides it over to the casino to gamble—slots mostly, and some keno. Fortune is with her, and she wins most every day. People start rubbing her wheelchair for luck before they play. It’s just superstition, but the casino gets nervous about these things. Anyway, she up and dies, and her grandson gets this chair. So he picks up right where she left off and starts driving this thing to the casino. The Tribe’s like, No way, you’re no cripple, and they won’t let him in the door. It’s a clear civil-liberties violation. My opening remarks to a white jury will be about a once-proud people and so on. Those Jersey lawyers are going to shit.”

  “Sounds like the story of Senival,” I told them.

  Dad and Farley were quiet. I couldn’t tell if this was out of reverence for the stories I sometimes told, or an effort to not encourage me.

  “Senival was a warrior king, and before the third and final battle for Scali, he asked the oracle what sacrifice was needed for victory. In those days, wars took years, and soldiers brought their wives, kids, goats, everything. Senival brought his mother, who got sick on the way, and she was like this bad omen. Her wails filled the camp, and the moaning was driving everyone crazy. A cloud of death hung over the campaign, and the oracle was clear: Senival had to—”

  “Oh, don’t tell me,” Farley said. He meant it.

  Dad said, “He had to kill his mother?”

  We all shook our heads in disbelief.

  “What happened?” Dad asked.

  “Senival was victorious, of course. He enjoyed a long and prosperous life and turned out to be a pretty good king, too. But when Dante and Virgil visit him in the fifth circle of the Inferno, Senival’s torment is to drag his ancestors into hell with him, connected by a chain of umbilical cords.”

  I paused while Dad and Farley tried to wrap their heads around that picture.

  “Where does the chain end?” Farley asked.

  “It doesn’t,” I told them. “It goes mother-child-mother-child, all the way to infinity.”

  Farley’s face slumped, and I immediately felt bad. It struck me that I hadn’t been thinking how his mother had left them when he was young. He’d been raised by French Catholics who, in the way of life skills, taught the girls to sew, trained the boys to fix shortwave radios, and provided them all with Canadian accents.

  Farley said, “It would be something, though, to see all your ancestors lined up like that. You could see what manner of people they were, who you took after.”

  An ironic smile crossed Dad’s face. “So the fathers didn’t go to hell, huh?”

  “Not because of their sons,
” I told him.

  Eventually, a little flag popped up, and Farley went over to reel in the fish. I had sunk into a mood, and I started to feel bad for that fish. I imagined its point of view—feeling the draw of a silver hook on an unseen line that pulled toward a circle of light. What perch wouldn’t contemplate the afterlife: Farley’s face, appearing walrusy, gleams down through a hole in a sheet of blue, broken only by the great shadow of a golden, winged vehicle, waiting amid a field of deliciously helpless crickets to whisk you away.

  While Farley reeled in the tugging line, I tried to imagine the afterlife of crickets, but, looking at their black husks lying crisped on the ice or flipping in the wind, I couldn’t come up with anything. I stood and picked up my bucket. I didn’t have to teach just yet, but I suddenly didn’t want to be around when Farley landed that fish and, before the skin froze solid, scaled it alive.

  “I’ll see you guys,” I said.

  “Take ’er easy, eh,” Farley said.

  My father, nodding off in the cold, perked up. “I’ll run you back.”

  A man couldn’t look sadder than sitting on a bucket, wrapped in a gaudy, snow-dusted motel blanket, making a spectator sport of ice fishing. How pathetic his hours must be since Janis died if this counted as living. “No thanks,” I said, “I’ll just catch you later.”

  By the time I’d climbed below the dam, I was sadder than I’d been all day. I stopped again at the spillways, the green safety rail now dripping in the morning sun, and I turned to regard the dam. The wall of concrete stood giant and blank as a drive-in movie screen, and I imagined the dam was made of ice, that instead of cement there was a curving window of ice, clear as glass, and my vision could penetrate straight into the lake. I looked deep into the standing water, ice-hued and shot through with beams of light from fishing holes, my eyes swimming like fishes that roved the dark channels.

  My vision followed a long, submerged valley, then narrowed into a dramatic, dim canyon whose floors were littered with car axles and upturned outboard motors. A rusty shopping cart stood sentinel over grounds on which people after people had documented their lives with petroglyphs: spanning the walls were hands, palms open, carved one after another, a whole history of hands. A herd of bison, suggested merely by the curves of their humps, ran beneath a spear, in mid-air above them. A peccary was carved on his back, legs up, spine twisted in pain. Higher on the rockfaces, above it all, were spirals, chipped deeper in the rock, holes in the sky to the next world.

  Farther up the canyon, way ahead in the water, I saw a flash of gold, layered and shimmery, as if off many scales, and amid the cold and dark, this was clearly the light of the living. Like eyeshine glimpsed on a night’s drive along a country road, you know when something’s alive and interested in you. The gold flashed again, more faintly, then was gone, and I was left only with the sensation of having been seen.

  * * *

  Back at the university, life seemed so normal as to appear foreign. The sky was clear and sunny, the wind subsiding. Students wandered campus with their hair exposed—parka hoods hanging loose against their backs, unneeded. I walked past a couple students puffing menthol cigarettes as they hung colorful crepe-paper decorations on the kiosks, and ahead, near the anthropology building, young people had gathered in some kind of forum.

  When I got closer, though, I saw the students were circled around a large brown van, illegally parked below my office. The van was extended, windowless, and the thing that you immediately noticed, aside from the yip of little dogs inside, was the way it was weighed down, the rear tires almost rubbing the wheel wells. The nose of the van seemed almost to levitate. Then I walked round to the front of the vehicle and saw what had drawn the students’ attention.

  The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.

  This dog looked into my eyes, its baby-sized tongue darting in excitement as its tiny breaths pompommed the window. Was it begging for help, or wild with savage frenzy? What had someone done to these poor miniaturized beasts? All I knew was this: dogs arose here on the North American plains during the Eocene epoch, and they managed to get along just fine in the twenty-eight million years before they finally met a creature named Homo sapiens. If dogs had an afterlife, I hoped for their sake it was void of humankind.

  * * *

  In my office, a sheriff’s deputy was inspecting artifacts on my desk. Though his back was to me, I instantly recognized his incredible physique, even through a winter uniform. He was a tiny man, about five foot one, but with a brawny torso and powerful, knotty forearms. His small hand passed over the items in my flint-knapping kit and landed on an antler-handled adze. He picked it up, swung it a couple of times, and seemed surprised when a hanging trailer of ivy fell to the floor. He turned the tool in his little fist, and I remembered the strength of those bully hands. This was Gerry, my nemesis from Mactaw High, though back then he was “Chief Gerry.”

  The Mactaw People were eradicated by either the Mandan or the Arikara—each claimed the honor, in the days before they, too, were eradicated. After Parkton’s city councilmen bulldozed the Mactaw’s burial grounds to build our school, they paid tribute to the land’s former tenants by preserving their likeness in the form of a mascot. “Chief Gerry” was famous for his ballgame antics, which included the War Whoop Kickoff Run, a Flaming Spear routine, and the ever-popular Firewater Dance, in which Gerry stumbled over to the other team’s bench, dropped his buckskin breeches, and mooned them.

  And here he was in my office. Small though Parkton was, I hadn’t seen him in probably a decade. I looked at Gerry’s blue jacket, a size too large, then eyed his snub-nosed pistol.

  “Hey, Gerry,” was all I could muster.

  Gerry turned, adze in hand. “Hey, Hanky,” he said. “Man, is this thing sharp. You could kill someone with this. What’s with all the plants?”

  From below rose the constant yipping of dogs, but Gerry seemed not to notice.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked Gerry.

  “Dang, how long has it been, Hanky? Sheriff Dan and I were just talking about you—that got me telling all kinds of stories from the old days. I see you keep a tomahawk on your desk. Go, Tomahawks.”

  “It’s an adze,” I said.

  “Sure it is,” Gerry said, smiling. “Gosh, remember how you used to slick your hair down?”

  “People don’t call me Hanky anymore.”

  He smiled. “Remember how you were the only guy in the Hot Rod Club without a hot rod?”

  “Times have changed,” I told Gerry.

  His laughter subsided. “I suppose they have,” he said.

  Over a hail of dog yapping, I said, “I’m pretty busy right now, if you don’t mind.”

  Gerry glanced at the fishing bucket in my hand. “I’m sure your time’s important,” he said, “so I’ll get right to it. I was just over at Glacier Days with Sheriff Dan, and he has one sad little girl on his hands. Sheriff Dan said you were the only one who could help.”

  All day, a spear had been hovering in my mind, and now it floated past me, sailing toward the Parkton courthouse, poised to land at the feet of a judge whose every pronouncement over the years had been recorded by Janis and rebutted by Farley, a courtroom where a small, weeping girl would learn that I’d conspired to murder her hog.

  I felt a little light-headed. I needed my inhaler. Gerry gave me a concerned look.

  “Hey, sorry about the hot-rod joke,” he said. “You’re not still sore about high school.”

  He stepped forward, reaching up as if to pat my shoulder. I took a step back. This little guy looked unassuming, but I knew better. During football games, he’d run the field in his headdress, swin
ging a giant tomahawk, executing incredible gymnastics—successive back springs strung together with double flips, sailor rolls, and pommel leaps higher than you could believe. This guy could be on your back in a heartbeat.

  ’“Look,” Gerry said, “high school’s ancient history. We’re mature adults now. I’m not the kind of guy who goes around sticking people in cafeteria tubs anymore.”

  A chorus of howls rang out. Irritated, Gerry opened the window. “Shut up,” he shouted.

  Below, students backed away from the van.

  “McQueen better not be getting into my evidence,” Gerry said.

  He lifted his eyebrows and mimed the sharpening of a knife.

  “I’m going to perform a little autopsy,” he said, in a braggy, conspiratorial way.

  “So—those are your dogs?” I asked.

  “If you can get McQueen to shut up,” Gerry said, “then they all shut up.”

  “McQueen?”

  “You know, Steve McQueen from The Great Escape,” Gerry said. “McQueen’s my stud. Can’t breed him fast enough. This batch is headed to the airport right now.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Fast enough for what?”

  “What planet are you on, Hanky? You haven’t heard of Impossible Journey?”

  “Is that a movie?” I shook my head. “Didn’t they turn the theater into a gun range?”

  Gerry couldn’t tell if I was joking or what.

  “You’ve never been to the outlet mall?” Gerry asked. He was gesturing all over the place. “There’s a brand-new multiplex out there. Impossible Journey is showing on half the screens. My ex–old lady’s kids are crazy for this movie. It opens with a circus plane crashing in Canada, and these little dogs have to make it all the way back to Orlando. But an evil French fur-trapper catches the dogs and makes them drag this miniature sled piled high with traps and icy with blood. All these Pomeranians have are their tattered and burned circus uniforms to keep them warm. I’m telling you, when the little ones see those sad stripes and polka dots, they bawl their eyes out. I bought a dozen of these dogs through the mail the next day. Right away, I sold four to the ex—old lady. Covered my costs and—bang!—I’m in with the kids again.”