The Language of Elk

by Benjamin Percy

  Elwood watched his father’s hands ball into fists, and he wondered, would he strike her? But he only lowered his head, concentrating on his shoes. “Please don’t do that.”

  Kim continued, the anger mounting in her voice. “I mean, what were you thinking? Bringing me here?” Elwood wondered the very same thing. “You want to get caught or something? Or you just so dumb and horny you hoped I wouldn’t notice?” Here she put her hands to either side of her head, incredulous. “Or you think I’m going to be all, like, wow and shit. Like happy to see your little museum?” She snorted out a laugh. “You got to be kidding me.” She jumped from her chair with such force it fell backward. “Where’s my shoes? Where’s my jacket?”

  She walked in an aimless circle and then went to the closet next to the staircase. She jerked it open and screamed. Among the coats and boots sat the huddled brown shape of the Indian.

  She put a hand between her breasts, over her heart. She seemed to spit at them when she spoke. “You dug up a grave?” She faced the closet again and stared at the thing. “What’s wrong with you?” She examined the body another moment—it appeared to be snarling—then scooped it up and ran.

  Denis hurried after her. “No! Leave that alone! Misty!”

  She yanked open the door. Denis followed her, and Elwood followed him. The sky was cloudless, the air so bright everything seemed colorless. A hot wind blew and ruffled their lawn’s long grass, bending it flat, swirling it in ever-changing directions. Kim cut through it, moving toward her beater Ford pickup parked in the driveway.

  “Give me the body,” Denis said, his voice cracking with emotion. He grabbed the back of her shirt but she kept moving, even when it tore a little. “Please. Please.” He was begging her, and right then Elwood felt more than sorry for his father: he felt disgusted and embarrassed by him. “I’ll give you money. As much as you want.”

  Kim reached the pickup and turned, a flush burning her skin, and at that moment, Elwood thought, if you sort of closed your eyes and made everything blurry, she could be his mother, almost. “You’re sick,” she said. “You got to let the dead rest.”

  Denis lunged at her and they began to wrestle with the body, their hands clasping it, tugging, and then—with a soft crack, like a popped knuckle—it broke in half. Chunks of skin and bone and the dust of decayed organs littered the driveway and they all gathered around staring at the mess, as it moved this way and that, blown by the wind, whirling and changing across the concrete so that it looked like some strange text, some hidden message left by the corpse they would never understand.

  The Iron Moth

  I used to think Cairo, Oregon, was the only place in the world. This was when I was a kid, when the population was six thousand and trucks filled the parking lots and deer wandered the streets. Then the Californians moved up here and changed everything.

  Used to be a white T-shirt, a pair of Wranglers, a belt buckle the size of a frying pan, a pair of shit-kickers, was standard uniform. Used to be the Golden Corral, with its $7.99 buffet, was everybody’s idea of a quality supper. Now, not so much. Now, rather than earning your tan, moving irrigation pipe and bucking hay bales into a pickup bed all afternoon, you get inside some capsule that glows like a bug-zapper and has about the same effect in frying you to a crisp. Now, every time I turn around there’s a new microbrewery or sushi joint or European car dealership, all of them springing up overnight like mushrooms.

  Now everybody who lives here is from someplace else.

  I’m big. They call me Big Boy. Back in the heydays, some ten years ago, I was the star linebacker for the Mountain View Mountain Lions. I am six-foot-five, 260 pounds, with hands too big for pockets. Without much effort I can throw people around like bags of laundry.

  I’m not proud of this but one time I hit my buddy Barney so hard his eye popped out. No kidding. This happened during practice, during a blitz drill, and I can remember his eyeball hanging there by a red thread. Somehow we managed to shove it back inside him. I said, “Are you all right? Can you see?” and he blinked a few times before giving the thumbs up. “As clear as mud,” he said. To this day his left eye wanders as if possessed by its own strange life.

  My senior year our team went to state. That is the only time that has ever happened. Five busloads worth of locals drove to Portland to cheer us on, to shake their cowbells and scream like the Romans in the gladiator movies. We lost—to a bunch of black boys—but it didn’t matter.

  We were heroes!

  Believe it or not, not only was I good at football, I was one grade point short of salutatorian. UO, UW, Oregon State, Washington State, all offered me scholarships, and in the end I decided to become a Duck. Everyone was absurdly happy. My parents bought me a Camaro, custom-painted green and gold with the UO lettering stenciled across its hood. The sheriff bought me beer. The cheerleaders offered me blowjobs as if they were handshakes. Back then people believed in me. They thought I would make something of myself.

  I didn’t.

  I remember my parents helping me move in to my dormitory. They had only left Central Oregon a handful of times and kept rubbing their eyes, commenting on the campus—“Look at that. Goodness, will you look at that.”—as if surprised a life separate from Cairo actually existed outside a television set. They gave me many hugs, and before they left, my mother said, “The world is your oyster.”

  My entire life people have been saying things like this, asking me to carry around their dreams, and I always believed them. I believed with absolute certainty what lay in store for Big Boy was sunshine and go-go dancers and chocolate-chip cookies.

  I liked the idea of college, the freedom of it. I could sleep all day, eat a Philly cheese-steak for breakfast, maybe go to class if I felt like it. For a few weeks I went nuts, all hot damn and rock ’n’ roll, a girl in one hand, a Budweiser in the other, sweating my way through football practice, believing a better life waited for me in the end zone. But I soon came to realize I was just another body here, no bigger or stronger—not really—than the fifty other guys on the roster, no smarter than the ten thousand other students on campus. Coaches and professors alike referred to me as “You!” Nobody knew who I was. Nobody cared. Always I felt Cairo’s pull at the back of my neck, a blood-born gravity that made me pause and helped me understand: you want to be a Big Boy bad enough, you seek out the love that makes you such.

  Knowing your place, it’s called.

  We don’t say Cairo like you say Cairo. We say Kay-row.

  At three thousand feet above sea level, this is the high desert, a region known as Little Egypt. The name comes from the hundreds of miles of irrigation canals that zigzag every which way and bring lush alfalfa fields to soil that would otherwise hardly support the sage and fennel that grow native here.

  It’s a bizarre place, and if we gave prizes for bizarre behavior, we’d have to hand out an awful lot of them. Take for instance the annual Pigtona 500 race. Take the Fourth of July cow-chip toss, the blindfolded lawnmower sprints, the Thanksgiving Rocking Chair Rock-A-Thon. Take the Deschutes County Rodeo: the opening ceremonies consist of cowboys racing their broncos to a marker, chugging three beers, then racing back, foaming at the mouth.

  It’s a Cairo thing.

  The locals participate to remind themselves they are locals. And the Californians? They sometimes show up and laugh and point and snap photos like a bunch of half-assed anthropologists.

  In the middle of town there is a cinder cone, several hundred feet high, with an asphalt road swirling up its side to the parking lot at its bald summit. This is Sphinx Butte. From here you feel like a god, with the whole world spread beneath you.

  To the west are the Cascade Mountains, and in their shadow, Sisters and Bend and Redmond. To the east, a long wash of desert, the horizon ironed flat by the weight of the sky.

  Here, every Saturday night, Barney and I shoot off anvils.

  There is something truly beautiful about the sight. Picture a two-horned missile, spinning end over en
d, sometimes reaching heights up to three hundred feet. When the sky is dark, when the anvil’s base is warmed orange by two pounds of gunpowder, its haloed ascent into the blue-black sky looks like some weird and dangerous comet that will eventually find its way back to me.

  Many people come and lay out their lawn chairs and picnic blankets. Sometimes they say, “What did your parents feed you growing up, Big Boy? Hay?” and sometimes they ask, “You remember that time, that game against Crook County, when you put the quarterback in a coma?”

  “Do I ever,” I say.

  Barney and I light, with a cigarette tip, a fuse that sparks and hisses its way toward some fourteen thousand grains of black powder. We do not run, not yet, but stay close to suffer the blast, a red-wreathed concussion that hits us square in the belly and foams Budweiser all over our knuckles. We lean back our heads and smile and say, “Yee-doggies!” as the anvil rockets upward, as a gray-white cloud surrounds our bodies, stinking of sulfur.

  Then we run.

  You need two anvils to make one fly. The lower anvil is the larger of the pair and serves as the foundation. We flip it upside down to expose the cavity at its base, into which we pour gunpowder and slip the fuse. Over this we lay a few playing cards, a joker, a king, to act as a gasket and cushion the shooter anvil, The Iron Moth.

  The Iron Moth is 150 pounds and cast on both sides with the old Arm and Hammer trademark. I suck my cigarette until the cherry burns red. I touch the cherry to the fuse and the fuse spits out a spark and everybody holds their breath, waiting for the bang, the puff, the boom. The Iron Moth soars and cindered playing cards flutter all around us.

  Every time an anvil rises into the sky, Little Egypt listens. The sound is inescapable. During the week, I will walk through Cairo and people will report having heard the blast as far away as Redmond, some thirty miles distant.

  “That’s something else,” I will say, smiling, knowing I am in Cairo’s ears, even if I am no longer in their hearts.

  You might wonder about a Mexican named Barney McCabe. I did. He is a half-breed. Half Mexican and half Irish—which makes him double Catholic—and for that I gave him a pretty hard time, back in fifth grade, when he first moved up here from Phoenix.

  Before Barney, every Mexican I knew was Lopez or Suarez or something in the ez family. I told him as much and rather than sit me down and explain the intricacies of his genealogical history, he slapped me with the back of his hand—just like that—and with his finger in my face said, “You ever even think about making fun of me, fat boy, and I will stab a pencil into your eyeball.” That’s Barney.

  To this day no one has ever stood up to me—not my coach, not my father—nobody except him. We became serious friends. He has this royal air about him. He combs his hair back in a pompadour and always wears silky collared shirts with the top buttons unbuttoned, displaying his chest hair and a gold crucifix shaped like a knife.

  The women are suckers for Barney. Partly for his body—he looks like he just stepped out of a Bowflex commercial—but mainly for his voice. On many occasions I have witnessed his accent at work. Women melt like dog shit on hot pavement. He could talk about anything—he could talk about eating a hamburger—and make it sound like the sexiest, most fascinating thing in the universe.

  “And as I chewed this delicious ham-bur-ger,” he would say, lingering on every syllable, while one of his eyes—the one I knocked loose—crept toward his nose, “it became ground up into little nutrients that descended into my stomach, where they were broken down by acids and made into energy.”

  I’m telling you: the special-effects blockbuster of the summer would not be more mesmerizing.

  Some evenings, after we finish blasting anvils into the sky, after our audience wanders away, if we don’t feel like going to the bars, we set up our lawn chairs on Sphinx Butte and look out over Cairo with the blue haze of gunpowder still clinging to the air. A few cars remain in the parking lot—their windows dark and steamed over—and every once in a while a horn will beep, accidentally pressed by the elbow of some teenagers getting carried away. Otherwise we are alone to discuss matters.

  “Japan,” Barney says, only he says it like Huh-pan. “Korea. Thailand. I hear you can go there and make serious money teaching English.”

  I kill off a Budweiser, crush the empty, reach into the cooler resting between us for another. “No doubt they’d jump at the chance to hire a Mexican to teach American,” I say. Barney keeps a dictionary in his bathroom and every day memorizes three new words while on the can. He could do great things, if only he put his mind to it. Certainly he could teach the pants off anyone—Japanese, Mongolian, Ethiopian, whatever—but I’m not going to tell him this. What are friends for if not for giving each other a good-natured ribbing?

  He stares at the stars as if his dreams might come together in a constellation. “You don’t even teach. Not really. You just engage them in conversation. They want practice, you see. Lawyers, doctors, businessmen. They pay you thirty dollar an hour just to bullshit with them.” For Barney, shit rhymes with feet. “That’s good money.” He nods his head as if to muster conviction for the idea. “We should think about it.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Right.”

  Every day or two we come up with a new plan, a ticket out of town, something that will redeem us, lead us to greatness. Our minds hum with dreams of white-sand beaches and jungle safaris and oil fields. Next to women, it is our favorite topic of conversation, though for all our talk of travel, we haven’t gone far.

  “What’s with you today?” Barney adjusts his chair so that he faces me. “I do not like this grumpy monosyllabic thing you have going on right now.”

  Monosyllabic must have been one of his words of the day.

  I am not grumpy. I am preoccupied. Today I learned Kelly Jones is coming home. Kelly Jones was my high school crush. She was prom queen, volleyball captain, student council president, ridiculously beautiful, and wanted nothing to do with me. She is red-haired and I have always been a chump for red-haired women. Ann-Margret makes me want to chew on my hand.

  Kelly went off to college and married some financial analyst—and that was that. Sometimes I crack open the yearbook and stare at her perfect white teeth, but mostly I put her out of my mind, concentrating instead on the women at Ponderosa Tavern, our favorite haunt, a locally famous dive with a pine tree sprouting through the floor and on past the ceiling. The women there look all right from a distance, but once you get close, you notice the wrinkles and acne scars, their makeup like paint glopped on a barn door. They hurl darts and wear Daisy Duke short shorts and expect nothing except a couple drinks and a name-brand condom, and these days, that is all I have to offer.

  But now Kelly Jones is getting a divorce—she is coming home—and I don’t know what to think. Even when sitting down, I feel as if I am stumbling in a circle, groping the air for something to steady myself with….

  Barney gives my shin a kick and says, “What’s your deal? Where are you?”

  “I’m here.” I consider telling him about Kelly, but don’t. Freshman year they kissed in the back row of the movie theater—“Just messing around,” Barney called it—and I have never forgiven him for this.

  Now one of his eyes studies me while the other retreats back into his skull, seeking something there, and I try to make up for my inattentiveness by giving him one of my secret-joke looks. “You know what,” I say, and he says, “What?” and I say, “I hope you appreciate the time we have spent together, because it won’t be long now before I move into my deluxe chateau and spend all day lounging beside my heated swimming pool with mermaid statues—and then you won’t ever see me because I’ll be too busy basking in all my glorious wealth.”

  Barney dismisses me with a wave. “Man, are you kidding me? That doesn’t even compare to what I’ll have going on.” He makes a list with his fingers. “Yachts, mansions, an island in the South Pacific, a starring role opposite Angelina Jolie in her sexy new thriller.”

  F
or us, wishes come up in conversations like weather.

  I say, “How about one of those Sports Illustrated swimsuit models for a maid?”

  He toasts his beer and says, “Right on.”

  I ask will he run for president, will he throw the winning touchdown, will he perform brain surgery and accept his third Oscar all in the same afternoon?

  He pretends to give this some serious thought before saying, “In all likelihood.”

  I say, “That would be the life.”

  After that first semester, I didn’t give up on college altogether. Along with Barney—who was, and still is, working full-time at the convenience store—I enrolled at Central Oregon Community College, COCC. COCC on the rock, everybody calls it.

  I signed up for painting and creative writing—Poverty and Starvation 101—and more often than not did not attend. For a while, people still believed me when I said I needed a break, a year to cool off, to save some cash and get my head together. Then, as time went on, they stopped listening to the lie and I stopped telling it.

  For the hell of it Barney and I signed up for a metalsmithing course. We delighted in the hammers and torches, the sweat and soot, our muscles aching as badly as our ears after we spent five hours in the shop, casting, forming, hammering, inlaying, etching, welding.

  Our professor told us way back when, blacksmiths used to blast their anvils up to God—filling them with powder and firing them into the sky like a sacrifice, seeking His favor, hoping He might bless them with wealth and happiness.

  We thought that was pretty cool—a whole hell of a lot more interesting than the prayer we subjected ourselves to as kids—and soon thereafter Barney surprised me with The Iron Moth. He had wrapped a red ribbon around her horn. For the christening we used a bottle of Miller High Life, the champagne of beers.