The Language of Elk

by Benjamin Percy

  Where are they? he wondered. Where is she?

  He pictured a town, Aloha, a house, hers. Probably she lived in the same kind of house everyone lived in around here, a ranch with tan clapboard siding and white gutters and white trim surrounding the windows and doors. Probably she just stepped from the shower, he thought, and now stood opposite the bathroom mirror, combing her hair with a brush, her breasts flattened by the neon towel wrapped around her body. Surely she thought about the lake, the jumping place, the rush of wind when the water rose to meet her. Surely she would come.

  He felt a pounding in his chest. He tried to calm it, imagining it as aligned with the breaking of the water against the logs, a vision ruined by an enormous trout slipping its mouth around his foot, a moistly violent sensation just obscene enough to stroke him all over.

  When Kenny said, “Maybe they aren’t—” Drew put a finger to his lips that told him to be quiet.

  Finally she came, along with the rest, but only to retrieve their towels and coolers. They stood where the beach met the trees, shading their eyes, watching the swans nap with their heads tucked under their wings, and from a distance the swans looked like tremendous molars and the lake a big mouth.

  Whereas the other girls darted forward and snatched their things and hurried back to the safety of the trees, Jessica sauntered out and stood with her legs apart and yelled, “Hey!” The swans paid her no attention. “Hey, you fuckers,” she said and picked up a rock and hurled it at a nearby swan, striking its back. The swan released a surprised honk before uncurling its neck and sighting Jessica and departing the water with one determined snap of its wings.

  She had a wild happy look on her face when she lifted her hands to accept its body and together they crashed to the sand.

  She fought in a way that reminded Drew of dancing—swirling, crouching, leaping, sometimes closing her eyes when she found a steady rhythm—and she did this as she did everything, with abandon. There was no turning back—and so even if she bled, even if she fell in a tangle now and then, she would right herself, she would continue to fight.

  The swans gathered on one side, the cheerleaders on the other, each voicing their encouragement with honks, screams, each scurrying forward and then back, eager and afraid to join the violence.

  A perspective Drew understood completely when he swam from his hiding place and dashed along the beach and joined the girls—who paid him no attention—soon followed by Kenny.

  Her lip curled back in a snarl, her muscles jumped beneath her skin, her hands needed no instruction, knowing what to do, where to go, a left hook to the wing, a chop to the neck, even as the swan snapped its beak, pinching her chest and arms, hissing.

  Then, in exhaustion, she wrapped her arms around the swan and the swan curled its neck around hers, so that they seemed but one fantastic creature. When at last they broke apart, when she retreated to the woods and the swan to the lake, each of them breathing in asthmatic bursts that revealed how badly they hurt, Drew imagined approaching Jessica.

  The girls would part before him, and there she would be, bleeding and hurting but putting on a big show, giving him the thumbs-up when he asked if she was okay, if she needed anything, anything at all? “No,” she would say, “nothing,” and he would brush from her face a damp strand of hair and she would close her eyes a moment, savoring his touch, still panting from the fight, looking both fierce and vulnerable. “You’re worried about me,” she would say. “That’s sweet.” And then they would bring their mouths together, hard, making blood. Hers would be sweet, like maraschino cherries, and the cheerleaders would murmur all around them.

  I should totally do that, Drew thought. I should kiss her and carry her home. That’s what I’m going to do right now.

  But he didn’t—and the girls disappeared between the trees, following Jessica to where the game-trail turned to the gravel path turned to the asphalt road that led to the highway, and after that, Aloha.

  Friday night came and so did the footballers. They entered Overall en masse—ten Camaros, three pickups, and a salmon-colored El Camino, all with their mufflers drilled to make their noise bigger, all with faces leering and hollering through their open windows—and then they split apart, some of them blazing along the main strip, others diving down side streets.

  From all corners of the town they squealed their tires and honked their horns. Police sirens joined their noise and the effect was strangely musical, not something you could tap your foot to, but pretty nice.

  Drew watched all this from the sidewalk, along with his father and Kenny and the rest of Overall, watching like you would watch a sporting event, jealous of and awed by the players’ upsetting power. He drank from a glass bottle of root beer that sweated in his hand. He kept the bottle to his lips when a Camaro came tearing by, its wheels rising on one side when it took the corner, followed by a cop car.

  Marty was being Marty. He was being happy. Except to say duck, he ignored the beer cans thrown in their direction. Instead he pointed out the footballers when they zoomed past, saying hey, that’s so-and-so, who broke the Washington County rushing record.

  Like everyone else he paid careful attention to Aloha, subscribing to their newspaper, sometimes reading it twice in one sitting, holding it close to his face, studying the names and scores and obituaries.

  “Man,” he said, his voice a joyful shout. “Holy smokes, did you see that? He drives as fast as he runs.”

  A couple Boy Scouts walked by selling popcorn and Marty bought a bag off them. He passed it to Drew and said, “Isn’t this great, guys? Drew?”

  Drew didn’t say anything. For some reason he felt bothered by his father, the way he clapped his hands, the way he smiled so big the corners of his mouth twitched slightly. Beneath his mask of a face he seemed sick. Drew could smell the fish smell puffing off his father and though it had never bothered him, it bothered him now as a smell that partnered a fever, a bad one, one that keeps you up all night, sweating.

  He tried concentrating on his popcorn, which made him thirsty, so he guzzled his root beer down, only to spit a mouthful out his nose, hacking for breath when one of the pickups rocketed past with a blonde cheerleader hanging out its window, giving him the finger, her face painted blue, orange and white, their colors. From the open bed three more girls—his girls—shook their pom-poms and cheered, “Aloha!”

  “Oh, great,” Kenny said. “Now they’re in on it, too.” He lifted his thin arms and let them fall. “Wonderful.”

  Marty said, “Pretty sure that was Hank Haines. Heck of a quarterback, that guy.”

  Drew now studied the window of every passing car. He sought her face and hoped he would not find it. He hoped she was better than this. He drank more root beer and his throat moved up and down as if something was trapped there.

  Then the El Camino fishtailed around the corner and came to a sliding stop, and though Drew didn’t recognize her at first—with her face painted blue on one side, white on the other—this was her, this was Jessica, the girl he wanted to know in so many ways. She sat on the passenger side, the side facing him, and he wondered was she with the dumb ape behind the steering wheel? He hoped not.

  She looked at Drew. He liked being looked at. She sees me! he thought. We are having a moment. He interpreted the moment as one exchanged between two strangers who meet unexpectedly, in the forest, at the mall, and develop in one lingering glance that weird kind of closeness people get when they know zero about each other but feel a deep connection. Then she smiled at he didn’t know what, and he wondered what she saw, a fat boy or something else.

  He raised a hand to her: she copied the gesture.

  And an egg, launched from her hand, struck his face, oozing into his eyes and mouth. He felt all the hope knocked black from his body—though the longing was still there.

  She threw back her head and laughed and the El Camino took off and she was gone.

  Sometimes—not very often but sometimes—when Drew and Marty were out on the s
kiff, sucking the peanut butter off their thumbs and waiting for the bells to ring, they talked. Marty would talk about the nurse shark he landed at Beverly Beach, Oregon, how it took him an entire afternoon, and how the shark kept biting at the air, at nothing, long after it died. He would talk about the Labrador puppy he once found inside a sturgeon’s stomach, whole, with its tiny pink penis stuck out. And he would talk about women. The girls he dated in high school and in college. But never—not ever—did he talk about her.

  At times like these Drew felt more like a friend than a son of any sort, his father seeming at once younger than him and like an old man who remembered life sweeter than it honestly was.

  So Marty talked and Drew listened and they laughed when zipping up and down Washington County’s lakes and reservoirs and along the streams that sometimes petered out into salty marshes crowded with mosquitoes and turtles and mossy trees, the middle of nowhere.

  Marty knew where to find the fish. Sometimes they would be where two rivers converged, feeding in the eddies, hungry for the swirling larvae. Other times they would be where the willows hung off the banks or where the logs piled up, hiding in the shade.

  On one of these trips he showed Drew the most amazing thing.

  At the time he was working on a study that estimated the smallmouth bass’s annual growth and reproduction cycles. For this he used a miniboom shocker, a small device with a generator the size of a microwave and a rod he lowered from the skiff into the water, applying four hundred volts that first drew toward the anode every fish within a hundred feet, and then, with a simple twist of the output settings, paralyzed them, so that the surface of the water filled with convulsing fish you could pluck from the water with your hands.

  Drew noticed how Marty smiled the whole time. He always smiled, sure, but right then, when the fish rose and tremored and gaped in pain, he looked truly happy. He looked like the footballers looked when they terrorized Overall, like Jessica looked when she dove off the cliffs, like his mother looked when she walked out the door with a suitcase in each hand. He looked like he felt good.

  Drew knew what he needed to do. When his father showered and the house filled with steam, he stole from the skiff the miniboom shocker and with bungee cords strapped it between the handlebars of his bicycle.

  It was noon and it was hot when he arrived at the cove. The swans napped with their heads tucked away. Flies buzzed around them. The raft had run aground and he carried the shocker there. The logs were slick with shit. With not a little effort he shoved off the raft and climbed halfway onto it, legs kicking, propelling him toward where the swans waited, now awake and yawning and stretching like people.

  Near the middle of the cove he crawled all the way onto the raft and held his breath when the swans inched toward him, fanning out to surround the raft, shifting nervously, cocking their heads, opening and closing their wings to pound the water. One of them showed its sharp tongue and hissed and the hissing spread among the other swans.

  For a second Drew didn’t know what to do—hugging himself, he felt lost—but only for a second. He reached for the rod and lowered it into the water and knobbed on the power to four hundred volts, like his father showed him.

  Their hisses transformed to shrieks. It was a sound Drew never imagined he might cause—it sounded like women in pain or in sexual climax—but he did not stop and neither did they—they continued to move toward him—and so he upped the voltage.

  Beneath their screams was an undersound, the sound of the miniboom, an angry buzzing as electric currents crackled into the water, currents whose yellow fingers snapped and popped and took hold of the perch and the trout and the eels and leeches and drew them to the raft so that the water gradually darkened and stirred with their presence.

  So many creatures broke the surface, seizuring, rolling over and over, showing their pale bellies, that the cove shook, boiled. The swans crawled more than swam toward the raft. The smell of fish was everywhere. Next to the raft a bass rose, its sharp ugly face gaping in silent agony, and then, as if its pain belonged to him, Drew began to weep. He couldn’t help it. He cried as he had never cried before.

  Never had he felt so powerful and repulsive and so awfully good.

  The swans were nearly upon him when he switched the output settings from an alternating current to a direct current—a switch that caused muscle paralysis and illuminated the water with flashes of light—and the buzzing sound vanished, replaced by a heavy arterial pulsing.

  The swans went quiet and limp, their necks collapsing, their wings unfolding, so that they just floated there, among the fish, not dead, but not wholly alive. Still sobbing, Drew switched off the miniboom and picked them from the water, stacking their trembling bodies on the raft to put elsewhere so that the girls might return to him, falling from the sky with their arms wide open, their faces beautiful.

  Unearthed

  Denis began acting strangely soon after he dug up the dead Indian. This happened in Christmas Valley, in Eastern Oregon, among the sand dunes and sage flats and rimrock canyons where he and his son, Elwood, often spent their weekends. They called themselves rockhounds, fossil hunters, archaeologists, and they carried on their backs shovels and picks and trowels and paintbrushes to whisk away the dust and calcite. When they hiked through the high desert, their eyes studied the soil for the sparkle of a quartzite vein, the scattered depressions of a long-rotted Paiute village, some hint of treasure, some sign they might point to and say, “Look!”

  They dug up thunder eggs, opals, petrified wood, fist-sized agates that seemed to emit a foggy light, like tiny suns breaking through a cloud. In a grotto with a small spring bubbling from it, they discovered a deer skull encased in rose crystals. And in the Mt. Mazama ash—as hard-packed as kiln-cooked clay—they found fossils of all sorts, of leaves and clams and ferns. After they filled their Bronco and drove the hundred miles back to Redmond, they cleaned their treasures and labeled them and put them on display so that their house resembled a museum.

  In the center of their dining room table sat the crystal skull, glowing pink, like a sugared ham. Their bookcases and tables overflowed with precious stones, and their walls were crowded with velvet-lined display cases holding chirt and obsidian projectile points—“Not arrowheads,” Denis would say. “Arrowhead is an all-encompassing hack term that should not be used with reference to carving tools or spear and at-latal points.” He talked like that, like a textbook—throwing around words like prismatic, occipital, Macedonian—and Elwood listened to him with the same polite disinterest he gave his tenth-grade teachers.

  Which was not far off the mark. His father worked as an adjunct in the anthropology department at Central Oregon Community College, though at first glance you would guess him a construction worker or a truck driver, not a scholar. Years ago he had played catcher for the Oregon State Beavers, and he looked like a catcher, at once too short and too wide for most clothes. When he got excited, he would repeatedly pound his hand into his palm.

  Elwood loved and half-loved many things about him, but more than anything, he felt sorry for him. How else can you feel about a man who randomly bursts into tears—at the grocery store, the movies, the buffet at the Golden Corral—mourning his dead wife? What else can you do except follow him into the desert, where there were no enclosures, where everything seemed to draw a free breath, and where the two of them regularly escaped the present in a quest to dig up the past?

  Elwood remembered his mother, Misty. He remembered her hair, a deep brown, almost black. He remembered how she always wore tank tops and how the bones pressed from her shoulders like wings. He remembered his father constantly telling him how sick she was, how very sick. He remembered the medications—the Prozac, the Lithium, the green-and-white pills meant to tame the yo-yo effect of her bipolar condition—and how they sometimes made her act drunk, made her dizzy, made her slur her words. She would stroke his cheek and look at him with her eyes half-lidded, like a set of dying moons, and say, “My Elwood. Tha
nk God for my Elwood.” He remembered her laughing one instant, sobbing the next—one time lurching up from the dinner table with sudden tears on her cheeks, sweeping the turkey off its platter, onto the floor, because his father said it tasted, “A bit dry, but good.”

  And he remembered, finally, the night she shook him awake and said, “You know I love you, right?” Somewhere between waking and dreaming, he saw her hovering above him in the dark and he said, “Yeah, Mom. Love you, too.” She left him then and he lied there, still half-asleep, realizing too late—after he tossed away the covers, after he hurried down the hall, down the stairs, after he heard the snap of the rifle—that something was wrong.

  She left him a red carnation of brain matter on the wall, and on the kitchen table she left him a letter. “I’m so sorry,” it read. “And I know that doesn’t mean anything. I know that’s just a bunch of shitty words. But I’m really truly sorry.”

  It didn’t make any sense. She didn’t make any sense. He tore the letter up and let its pieces flutter into the toilet, but six months later the words remained imprinted on his brain like the patterns of a long-dead leaf, fossilized by the intense pressure of the moment.

  Summers in Eastern Oregon, the wind blows in heated gusts, like the breath of a beast. The July day Elwood and Denis discovered the dead Indian, to keep the seething grit from their eyes and lungs, they wore sunglasses and tied wet bandanas around their faces as bandits would.

  They were hiking through a shallow canyon, when they noticed among its basalt pillars a six-foot notch with wind channeling from it, indicating depth. This wind brought with it a low drone, like someone blowing across a bottle top. They clicked on their flashlights and ducked inside and the notch opened into a cave over a hundred feet deep and thirty feet wide.