Knocking on Heaven's Door

by Sharman Apt Russell

  Now the other direwolves saw how different he was. The fifth claw didn’t make them angry. But the way he intruded into their thoughts. They had their own thoughts, which he could hear, and that was good. That was a good way to hunt and stay together. But his thoughts seemed bigger than theirs. His thoughts were too loud. His thoughts confused them. Now his mother growled more fiercely. Stay away. His siblings whined. Stay away, stay away, until he was big enough to scavenge on his own. Then they drove him into the mountains where the air was cold. No, don’t follow us. They drew blood. He whined and crept forward on his belly. They drew blood. His mother grabbed his neck. Yes, she would kill him.

  Epinephrine, cortisol. Dog remembered being lonely as Luke was lonely now. Heart pounding. Worse than hunger. He climbed higher into the mountains, higher into the cold, for this was in the north, where there was rain and snow melting on Dog’s guard hairs. This was a long time ago although his memories of the den felt so new. He could almost smell his mother, his sister. Oxytocin. Dopamine. He smelled them sometimes on Luke/Lucia, direwolf mixed with human.

  Luke! Lucia! Dog called.

  Dog knew he was older than most direwolves, older because he lived with Luke, not alone and not in a pack. Because of Luke, his teeth hadn’t snapped off in a fight. Because of Luke, his hindquarters were unscarred. Because of Luke, his stomach didn’t ache with parasites. Once Lucia had made him eat a certain plant—guanine, cytosine—so that worms streamed out of his anus, twisty and ribbony, not a double helix. Once a snake bit his nose, and Luke had stayed with him for days and nights, bringing water, stroking his fur. Don’t die, Luke said. I need you. Don’t die.

  Dog remembered hunting rabbits. The rush of hot blood filled his mouth. Nothing so right as blood in his mouth.

  Dog remembered leaving the lab. He was Lucia then. He had been a woman all his life, dressing like a woman, using a woman’s soft voice. He had breasts. He had a vagina. But he didn’t feel like a woman. Inside, not a woman. He didn’t believe really that he had a uterus, that he could have children. He didn’t have sex with men. He was really a man. What could he do? People were born certain ways, without the right parts, with too many parts, with parts cross-wired, not quite sure if they were male or female or even human. Sometimes alone in the lab, Lucia became Luke. She was happy in the lab. Then why did she leave? Dog couldn’t remember. These were not his memories. Perhaps she went on a quest. Perhaps she went north to see snow and there she became Luke as often as he wanted. There he could be Luke for years and years. There he could be Lucia, too, if he wanted, when he wanted. There he found Dog, almost dead from loneliness and snow.

  Luke was lonely now. Scared. Sad. It was hard to stay and watch, hard to be still. Dog remembered eating a giant beaver. Even its tail was enormous. There was so much meat and so much of it fresh. That was such a happy day.

  Dog remembered eating prickly pear fruit, how the tiny thorns bored into his lip. He remembered looking at numbers, scrolling down the computer screen, the rates of mutation in the northern tribes, the rates of mutation in the southern tribes. No one lived near the bad radiation, in California (what was California?) or the Northeast, the nuclear reactors overheating and melting down. Nuclear, nucleus. The way the double helix acted as a radio sending and receiving information, a super-functioning biocomputer, the organizing agent at the center of each cell, the DNA in each cell creating the biohologram.

  Dog remembered the snake bite, how much that hurt! Cortisol. Adrenaline. He felt fear like the color red, a sharp pain in his hip, an insect boring into his ear. Heart pounding. Bam, bam, bam. He had the scavenger gene, the runaway gene. He was afraid of what he would not do.

  Ashamed of himself, Dog looked over at the two humans also watching the bushkies, a male and female hidden on a rock ledge. Dog remembered he couldn’t go hunt. He couldn’t eat because he had to stay here.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BRAD

  “Bushkies,” Brad said sourly. Bushkies were loners, they didn’t travel together, they didn’t form groups. The bushkies chanting below were a brief isolate pack, formed by some rare pattern. They disgusted Brad, although he knew his feelings were irrational. Bushkies were chemically damaged. It wasn’t their fault. They were no different from children born with failing organs or without a limb. These children compensated for their disability or they died. A few grew up to become bushkies. It wasn’t their fault, but Brad blamed them anyway. No, he corrected himself, not blame exactly. A minor neurosis. Bushkies scared him. He was not one of them. He was different, but he was not one of them.

  Clare touched his arm and jerked her head. She began to inch backward slowly, her rump raised.

  Brad studied the four bushkies. The man kneeling in the circle of stone lifted his head, and Brad could see that parts of his beardless face looked misshapen, as though he had been beaten. Brad looked more closely at the younger man on the ground, who wasn’t simply sitting but had curled around himself rocking back and forth. Only the bearded chanting man seemed vigorous—easily holding up the half-conscious woman, his voice booming, happily singing the chant of the dead.

  Clare hissed. Brad gripped his spear and lowered his face to the slickrock, pebbles, and thorns. Raising his rump, he also began inching backward.

  They moved far enough away to whisper and not be heard.

  “We should go,” Clare said. “Get our packs. Back to the river.”

  Brad was surprised. “Do nothing?”

  “Bushkies. They have nothing to do with you—with us,” Clare said. “I shouldn’t have followed these people.”

  “The old man. We could help him,” Brad argued out of habit.

  “It’s too dangerous. This isn’t what we should be doing.”

  Brad could hear the frustration in her voice. She was his teacher and guide. She had to protect him. But what would she do if she were with someone else, someone she could trust with a spear? “It’s my decision, isn’t it?” Brad whispered.

  Now Clare looked surprised. “Yes, but you should follow my advice.”

  Brad paused at that. She was right. He could be injured or killed. She could be injured or killed, and then he would be alone. The bushkies could be injured or killed, and how would she feel about that? In truth, one of the above was almost certain to happen if he and Clare interfered.

  After all, they were only bushkies.

  “Let’s see what they are doing now,” Brad said, more as a delay than a decision.

  But then, by the time they had inched back to the hiding place, the bushkies had already started. The younger bushkie was on his feet and throwing stones with enthusiasm into the circle. The woman lay tumbled and still on the ground. The leader of the group chanted as he wound back his arm. One of his rocks, the size of a fist, hit the old man on the shoulder. Almost immediately another rock struck his forehead. Brad heard a high-pitched cry as the bushkie jerked back and bobbed forward, immobilized somehow by his kneeling position. It was just a matter of waiting. Another stone to the head. Another and another. It would all be over soon. Beside him, he could hear Clare take a breath.

  In his mind’s eye, Brad saw the grotto, that dizzying twist of perspective. The webbed feet twitched as though the animal were still suffering and not yet dead. Brad could see the yucca twine looped around its legs, tying them to the cross, thorns nailing flesh to wood. The limbs had been pulled apart, white belly lifted. Bits of quartz and mica winked in the dim light. Beautiful jewels. Glittering stars. Brad knew the reference, not just to the old Christian theology but to all of human history. The sacrifice of the innocent, the Aztec temples, the Holocaust, the African wars. There had to be pain. Torture and ritual. It was the bearded man’s vision below in the stone circle, in the miniature grotto. There had to be blood. It was the way to power.

  Brad hated that story. Also, if he did nothing now, Clare would never fall in love with him. Before he could think too much, Brad stood up, positioned himself, adjusted his eyeglasses, and threw his spear.<
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  He missed the bearded man by a good distance, the spear sailing into the bushes beyond. But now in the space between the two rocks, Clare was standing, too, and her weapon went to target—the bearded man’s right shoulder and chest. With hardly a pause, she darted backward and was gone, reappearing to Brad’s left as she half ran, half slid down the gravelly slope. Brad literally gulped and followed her.

  The bearded man roared, flailed, and moved forward, seemingly energized by his unexpected wound. The younger man also moved forward and suddenly had a knife. Brad slipped as he came down the rough incline and saw most of what was happening from his new seat on the ground. Clare started circling the bearded man, angling toward the teenager. From somewhere she also had a knife.

  Then with a shower of rocks and pebbles, clattering and spattering from one of the cliff faces, a dark shape hurtled past both Clare and the boy and knocked the bearded man over, the spear sticking up and swaying almost comically. The shape, the animal, held the man down with the weight of its body while slobbering teeth and heart-stopping growls seemed to shock the victim into a faint. The bearded head lolled to one side. Brad shut his eyes and when he looked next, the younger man with the knife had vanished from the scene. The woman lay in her heap on the ground. The man in the stone circle found his voice and was croaking heartily, “Good boy! Good boy!”

  As easy as that, the rescue was over. Brad got up and limped over to Clare. They watched in disbelief as the fully grown direwolf bounded away from the unconscious bushkie, leaped over the stone circle, and trotted toward the old man. The powerful animal slobbered over this human, too, licking and whining.

  Brad exchanged a glance with Clare.

  “Please, untie me!” the old man mumbled, ducking his head to fend off the glistening tongue.

  Clare looked down at her knife and at the direwolf. She looked at Brad and then at the unconscious bushkie. “Watch him,” she said as she climbed over the stone wall. As she approached the old man, the direwolf turned and snarled, hackles rising. Brad estimated that its teeth were at least ten centimeters long.

  “Come on,” the old man said to Clare. “He won’t hurt you.”

  Clare actually laughed.

  “Watch the bushkie!” she reminded Brad, and Brad nodded. He would. But he didn’t. He was watching Clare instead.

  Unfortunately, the woman was dead. No one could guess when she had died or why, although the three of them compared notes. Brad had last seen her conscious when the bearded man began his speech. Clare remembered how the bearded man had tossed the woman down at one point, her head hitting the ground. The old man, rubbing his arms, said the woman had always seemed sickly, breathing hard, her face blueish.

  “I think she had a bad heart,” Luke said.

  The old man had introduced himself, not really a bushkie but more a hermit or bachelor bull. He had been on his own for many years, living off and on with the Colorado tribes, but mostly alone.

  “A bad heart?” Brad stood over the body. The woman was so young.

  “Born that way,” Luke replied.

  “Would one of you help?” Clare asked sharply. “I’m going to take out the spear now.” She knelt by the unconscious bushkie and braced herself for pulling. If the bushkie was lucky, the tip of the spear would slip free and the wound could be cleaned and bandaged. Otherwise, they would have to dig into the flesh and cause more damage, with more loss of blood and chances for infection. In case the bushkie woke up, Clare had already tied his feet and hands, using the rope that had once tied up Luke.

  “I’ll do this,” Luke told Brad. “Watch for the other one. I don’t think he’ll come back. But we should be careful.”

  As if on cue, leaning against Luke’s leg, the direwolf growled. Brad couldn’t help himself. The hairs on his neck stood up.

  “Good boy,” the old man cooed.

  Brad tried again to catch Clare’s eye, but she was busy with her patient, who shrieked as the spear came out whole, tip included. Luke moved swiftly to stop the bleeding with a fistful of grass, pressing down on the wound. Clare had already cut the edge of the woman’s deerskin skirt into a strip she pushed under the bushkie’s chest, lifting him up, wrapping the bandage around him twice. The man didn’t struggle but only stared at her with bulging eyes. He didn’t seem to know what was happening now or why, and he didn’t react to Luke’s hands or face, the man he had recently tried to stone to death.

  Brad had to admire Luke’s lack of emotion. The old man did his job without fuss.

  Later, they made a stew of the javelina head and some herbs Luke found and tubers Clare dug up. As they ate around the fire, Luke talked about his capture and the days afterward when he was tied and helpless. Brad guessed the old man to be in his early seventies, wiry and strong, well muscled, without any facial hair—although he couldn’t have been shaving, so that must be a mutation.

  Brad was intrigued. Luke had a certain serenity. What was he doing living alone?

  “The man is delusional,” Luke was saying. “Before The Return, he would have been given drugs.”

  “You think we should be taking care of him,” Brad asked, “people like him?”

  Luke shrugged. “How can we? We don’t live in that world anymore. And should we, in any case? How much should we muck-a-luck? We’ve been asking that since the supervirus.”

  Brad noted how easily Luke slipped into discussion, the age-old questions. “So we send the bushkies out to die. We don’t interfere.”

  “We don’t interfere,” Luke said. “And we hope they die before they have children. We hope all the damaged people die before they have children.”

  Brad turned to Clare, unnaturally quiet as she added another stick of wood to the fire. “What will happen now,” he asked her, “when we take him back? What will the elders do?”

  “I don’t know.” His guide also shrugged. Of course, they had to return to her tribe now, taking the bound bushkie with them. Brad wondered if this had ruined his quest. Would this reflect badly on her?

  Luke put his hand on the direwolf’s neck, the ridiculous animal lying right next to him. “I can travel with you,” the old man said. “I can tell them what happened. I owe you that. There will be a lot of talking and explaining to do.”

  “Yes,” Clare said. “There will be a lot of explaining to do. Your Paleo, though …”

  “Dog,” Luke corrected. The direwolf raised his head.

  “He won’t get along with our dogs,” Clare promised.

  Luke agreed, “We’ll have to make some arrangements.”

  As the fire died down, the Milky Way arched more clearly above their heads, a thousand stars like a river without water, pouring out light. Brad stretched and looked up, feeling reverent and humble and pleased by that. Clare also stretched in her skins by the fire and fell asleep.

  “You’re from the lab,” Luke broke the silence, adding more branches. The flare lit his face. “You live there permanently?”

  “That’s right,” Brad murmured, wondering if he had said he would take the first watch or if Luke was doing that. “Were you there before you went out on your own? Doing your service?”

  “I told you I was from the north. But once I also lived in the lab.” Luke paused, and Brad understood the old man had something important to say. “I think I knew your mother. I was a woman then.”

  The branches crackled, pop, pop, pop. Brad sat up, his heart beating in his ears. If he had known how exciting quests could be, he would have gone on one long before. The fact that Luke was a woman—had been a woman in the lab—was surprising but not shocking. These things happened. Hormones got confused. Wires crossed. It was something else making this hammering in his head. “You seemed familiar!”

  “You were only a child when I left. You could hardly talk.”

  “It’s not that I remember you,” Brad said. “But you seem familiar. Did you know my father, too?”

  “We all knew your father.”

  “You were there when h
e left.”

  “No, I didn’t know about that. I was gone by then. But I was at his wedding feast. I ate his meat, of which there was always plenty. Your father could hunt a raven in a storm.” Luke paused again. “I watched him carry your mother on his shoulder, over his heart, and break a clay pot under his foot. He said it was an old custom from his tribe.”

  Brad had heard that story before, from his mother and others. His mysterious father from a distant place. His beautiful mother born in the lab. He felt a light descent, a mantle on his shoulders, skein without weight, unaffected by time. Without moving, he drew the mantle close and warm in the night.

  “You knew my mother better than my father? When you were a … woman?”

  “We sometimes worked together. The Council agreed we could look at patterns of fertility in the tribes. So we talked a lot about the work, and other things.”

  Brad made himself more comfortable, bringing up the horsehide around his back and settling closer to the heat. “What other things? Were you born in the lab, too?”

  “No, but I was a child there …” And Luke began his story.

  River and roof, the Milky Way arched above their heads.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CLARE

  Clare waited for Brad by the elder’s tent. From this rise, she could see the rest of their summer and fall camp, some fifty tents contained within a meadow rimmed by foothills and pink cliffs. Although the clustering of tents looked random, Clare knew why some people chose to be near the communal kitchen and some far away. She knew why this elder was nearest the stream that ran the meadow’s western edge, why that tent had been set off alone, why the drying racks were closest to a widow and her children. A few of the tents were larger than others. A few had smoke holes for a private fire. All were decorated with designs of orange ocher, mineral blue, and limestone white, lines of charcoal gray and devil’s-claw black. All could be easily dismantled, the poles and skins stored in a nearby cave when the tribe made the move to their winter camp, a larger valley to the east.