The Language of Elk

by Benjamin Percy

  Sometimes it feels as if someone is watching, listening, and I wonder, beyond the window, in the pine forest surrounding my home, where the shadows splash together, is it him? Is he studying me? Committing to memory, like some shaggy anthropologist, my eating and sexual habits, my favorite television programs, so that when we finally meet, he will know what he is up against?

  In the dead of night, when the motion detector clicks on and fills the yard with yellow light, I put on my slippers and I walk outside, onto the deck, toting my thirty-ought-six, and say, “Yum-à-kwa, Yum-à-kwa, Yum-à-kwa,” again and again, like a conjurer’s spell.

  The call comes at 8:30 p.m. “It’s him,” the voice says. “He’s here.”

  This is Russ. Russ is vice president of the Oregon chapter of the Pacific Northwest Bigfooting Society. He lives about thirty miles away, in Rhododendron, and last week rented a backhoe to dig a pit, nearly twenty feet deep, in the middle of his front yard. He lowered into it buckets of fresh blackberries and raw hamburger, to lure Bigfoot, alongside a couple cowbells, to announce his capture. Then he covered the thing with sticks and grass.

  “It worked?” I say. “The pit?” I admit I had my doubts. If Bigfoot is anything, he is a climber.

  “Bingo!” he says. “Jackpot!”

  “You’re sure?”

  “There’s something in there. Something big.”

  When I hang up the phone and snatch my keys and head for the door, Heidi asks where on earth am I going and why on earth am I grinning like an idiot.

  False alarm, it turns out. I stand at the lip of the pit and with a magnum flashlight spotlight its bottom, revealing a black bear—its eyes glowing green—as it slurps and smacks at its burger-and-berry casserole dinner. The smell—of wet fur and rotten meat—is like a mouthful of bad breath. Russ stands behind me, his face pinched with regret, regarding the bear.

  I say, “You make me drive all the way out here for this?”

  “Sorry,” he says. “I heard the cowbells and I heard this weird groaning and I figured who else could it be?” He holds out his hands as if he has given up searching for something. “I’m stupid. I’m sorry.”

  When I return home, when I shuffle up the stairs, my shoulders heavy and weighing me down in a disappointed slouch, I find Heidi fast asleep, her body humped beneath a brown blanket. The only sound is the slow whistle of her breathing.

  I brush my teeth and notice the bath mat, the towel, are damp, the shower dappled with water. Heidi never takes a shower at night. She hates going to bed with wet hair.

  Weird.

  The moon is out and puddles of it are in the bedroom. A cold breeze slides in the open window and my hair prickles. Something is funny. As in not right. I know this sounds corny, but swear to God, I think I’ve got a sixth or seventh sense about me. Just yesterday I was thinking about Chinese food when bam: Heidi walks in the door with Egg Foo Yuck.

  Now this. Now my body vibrates like a tuning fork when I move to the window and discover in its pane a knot of hair. Rough reddish hair. I bring it to my mouth, slowly, to taste. It tastes like Bigfoot. You might wonder, how does Bigfoot taste? I’ll tell you: heavy, mushroomy, like something rotten found in a dank cave. Evil.

  There is no question about it: he has been here. In this bedroom. With my wife.

  I consider grabbing her, shaking her, saying, “Wake up!” With a far-off look in her eyes, she would rise from sleep and say, “What? What’s wrong?” looking around, her mind muddled by dreams.

  Outside the motion detector clicks on and spotlights something in my brain, a memory from last week, when I snuck up on Heidi taking a shower and peeled back the curtain and discovered her kissing her own hand—passionately, not like the pecks we normally exchange—her eyes closed, her feet twirling her in slow circles as if dancing.

  I did not interrupt her then just as I do not wake her now, despite all the questions looping through my mind. In the morning we will talk. For now the truth can wait.

  I slump against the wall and feel something empty opening inside me, a hollowness that keeps expanding, leaving behind a cavity’s ache. Partnering this is the overwhelming desire to rip off my clothes and run outside, my wild black shape moving across the lawn and into the woods, howling.

  Winter’s Trappings

  There was a stretch of highway, just outside Sisters, Oregon, where semis—with their engines roaring, their grills gleaming silver—came rumbling down from the Cascade Mountains, a long steep descent, and slammed into deer, dragging them sometimes thirty feet, tearing them open. This happened all the time—three, five times a day—so often that blood permanently smeared the asphalt, and the buzzards, the ravens, and the magpies would roost in the nearby pines, waiting, descending like some horrible shrieking cloud to pick apart a carcass immediately after it was laid down.

  Here, around midnight one November, Gordon and his mother Pamela hit the buck. They were racing away from Salem, toward Redmond, in their pickup—its color, once red, now a collage of rust and gray primer—when out of the darkness sprang three deer, two of them does, the last a four-horn buck, caught midleap by the yellow cast of their headlights.

  The buck was big, broad-chested, and when the pickup struck him, the impact snapped Gordon forward, snapping his nose against the glove compartment, breaking it. The pop of cartilage separating from bone was lost against the enormous thud of metal and meat.

  Pamela mashed the brake and the tires squealed and the pickup lurched and the buck rolled over the hood—slick with snow from the mountain pass—over the windshield, the cab, its antlers and hooves clattering, finally thumping into the bed just as the pickup came to a rocking halt.

  “Jesus,” Pamela said, “Christ.”

  Gordon yelped and tented his hands over his nose, to stop the blood, to muffle the pain, which was like nothing he had ever known in his twelve years. He had broken fingers, fallen from trees and dirt bikes, torn off his toenail, lost a tooth in a fistfight, felt innumerable times his father’s hand’s blow, but this was something new. Pain, real pain, a roaring burn that fingered its way behind his eyes and up his forehead, pinching his brain with sharp fingernails.

  Later on, when he had time to think about it, Gordon realized that if you took the way he felt when his father, during one of his drunks, tripped his mother down the stairs, when he took off his belt and whipped her face with the buckle, if you took that vision and melted it into a physical sensation, a broken nose would be it.

  Now Gordon was crying, but not like he normally cried—with big gulping hiccups. He knew that would only make the pain worse. Silently, awfully, he let the tears drop down his cheeks, cleaning paths through the blood. When his mother asked, “You okay, baby?” he took a hand from his nose, showed her the blood, and quickly returned it. “I’m sorry,” she said, “Jesus, I’m so sorry,” though her voice was distant and seemed not to refer to his injury, but to something else entirely.

  She sighed through her nose, took her foot off the brake, and the pickup crawled forward, maybe a little wheezy, with one headlight busted, but otherwise no worse for wear. She parked on the cinder shoulder and twisted the ignition quiet and they sat there a moment, breathing. A Wal-Mart semi rushed past, moaning as it downshifted, swaying their pickup with the wind rolling off it.

  They left the doors open, the keys buzzing in the ignition, and stepped around front to investigate the damage and stepped around back to investigate the cause. “We are so lucky,” Pamela said in a tone that reminded Gordon of the church people on TV: desperate to convince. “This could have been much, much worse.”

  All this time Gordon kept his hands pressed to his nose, as if to stifle a sneeze, breathing through his mouth. The alpine air tasted clean and cold and brought gray clouds from his lungs, smearing the stars above. He had forgotten about stars, living in Salem, where the neon signs and streetlamps drowned away their light. Just then a constellation broke apart, a star descended, flaring greenly.

  His mother w
as nibbling at her thumbnail, as was her habit, focusing her eyes on the pickup bed. Gordon climbed onto the bumper for a better view and saw some paper coffee cups, some logging chains, two suitcases hurriedly filled earlier that evening after his father pressed a too-rare T-bone steak to his mother’s mouth, holding it there, strangling her with it until Gordon stabbed him in the arm with a fork and said, “Stop!”

  And on top of the suitcases, all splayed out, was the buck, its neck at a funny angle. The dome-light reflected off the buck’s eye, brightening it into an orange sun, making Gordon wonder, just for a moment, was it alive, was it watching him? Then he saw how its tongue hung from its mouth—so purple—like a coughed-up ventricle.

  His mother touched his shoulder, squeezed it, turning him, shepherding him back into the pickup. “Come on,” she said, “We’re almost there. Nothing we can do now except leave it be. Verna will be happy for the meat.”

  She was referring to her sister, who lived on thirty acres of sage and pines, near the lower Metolius River. Fifteen minutes later they knocked on her cabin door, its brass knob worn bright as gold, and when it opened, some light filtered around her edges but basically she filled the entire doorway.

  The next morning Gordon woke with his cousins, Lynn and Lori, standing over him. They were sixteen and they were twins. They were not particularly attractive, nor were they ugly. They just were. Plain and rigid, like Amish furniture, they wore pageboy haircuts and their expressions never changed, not really, from the clinical stare they gave Gordon now, the same stare they gave him a few years back, when they demanded to see his penis.

  Gordon had said, “Are you kidding?”

  “No,” they had said. “Now show us.”

  He wouldn’t, so they made him. This happened deep in the woods, where they had led him, where no one could hear him cry out. They were big girls, not fat, but husky—like Aunt Verna—stronger than Gordon, whom adults often called a beanpole. Lynn held him down on a blond bed of pine needles while Lori yanked his shorts around his ankles.

  “It’s so small,” Lynn said.

  “It’s so pink,” Lori said. “I’m reminded of a boiled shrimp.”

  “Weird,” they said.

  Now he was balled up on the couch, cocooned beneath an afghan, the dull ache of his nose reminding him of last night. He could hear bacon hissing in a pan, the coffeemaker burbling and popping, but he could smell nothing. His nose was clogged with gelatinous blood. The twins snapped their eyes at him, studying him, their arms crossed beneath their muscular breasts. One of them—Lori, he thought—finally said, “Greetings, cousin.”

  Lynn said, “Mother tells us you’ll be staying for a while.”

  Lori said, “Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? You look like crap.”

  And he did. The bathroom mirror revealed an eggplant purple reached up the swollen length of his nose, making a mask around his eyes, all bloodshot and sore, his lashes rooted in scabs.

  Aunt Verna was the very definition of butch. She wore steel-toed boots and denim—always denim—denim pants, denim shirts, denim jackets with wool collars, denim of all different colors, maybe even denim underpants, for all Gordon knew. She didn’t wear makeup, didn’t dye her hair, but wore it in a grayish sort of crew cut, only long in back. His father called her The Mullet. He called her other things, too, but never to her face. He didn’t dare. She was twice the size of him, just about, her muscles like small sacks of grain, full and surging beneath her clothes. When she was younger, she had traveled around, competing in arm-wrestling tournaments, and to this day kept the medals and trophies hanging in her study, among her diplomas, so many you could have hammered them into a suit of golden armor.

  Once, when she was trying to loosen a rusted-over lug nut, Gordon saw her break a wrench. And another time, when she brought him along to see about a sick bull—she was a vet—he watched in amazement when she slugged the animal for trying to hoove her, slugged it right in the snout, sending the bull into a sneezing fit.

  She had always seemed an invincible kind of woman, the kind who filled up a room, who never looked small, not even from a distance. And so whenever Gordon visited her cabin, he felt safe, he felt good.

  He wasn’t sure he believed it, but his mother claimed a man hurt Verna long ago. Not physically—she never would have allowed that—but the man tore her heart open, gashed it, leaving it scarred over, impenetrable. When Gordon heard this, he tried to imagine his aunt with a man, and couldn’t. What seemed more believable was that by some miraculous process the twins had appeared one morning, crawling out of a hole in the earth, brushing the dirt off their sleeves, waving hello.

  But Verna had been hurt, just as his mother had been hurt. You could see it in both their faces, the straightness of their spines, though they handled their hurt differently. His mother would stand where she hoped no one would see her, her head bowed, whereas Verna would take the center of the room, the head of the table, her feet planted wide, her hands gesturing in quick tomahawk motions, her eyes sparkling with something like joy and malice, as she was now, at breakfast, when shoveling eggs into her mouth. “If that son of a bitch was here, you know what I’d do? I’d cut his neck. And then I’d cut him up into little pink cubes. I’d heat up a pot and boil him in it for a whole day. I’d season him with some wild peppermint and some onion and basil. Maybe I’d put some dried berries in with him, some roots and some potatoes, make him into a stew.” All this time she kept her eyes on Gordon, as if daring him to grow into such a man as his father.

  Pamela shook her head and put a trembly hand to her forehead, rubbing the space between her eyebrows. “Jesus, Verna.”

  “What?”

  “You really think Gordon needs to hear that kind of thing?”

  She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Bah,” she said. “He knows his old man is a worthless pile of shit.” When Gordon said nothing, she popped her eyebrows and said, “Don’t you?”

  Now Gordon hurried to agree with her, saying, “Yes, ma’am,” though he wasn’t sure how he felt about his father. Sometimes he wanted to kill him, and sometimes he wanted to hug him. It was complicated. The man had a switch inside him, a switch that when triggered could trap him in darkness, from which he would emerge the next morning—his eyes red-rimmed with regret—apologizing to them believably, profusely, with roses the color of skinned knees, bottles of peppery red wine, kisses.

  In a way, Gordon felt sorry for him, imagining him last night, after he came home from Slippery’s Tavern, smelling of cigarettes and beer and peanuts, walking through every room, twice, three times, calling their names louder and louder and receiving no reply, because they were gone, they were some two hundred miles away and at that very moment showing Verna the buck, broken and motionless in the back of the pickup.

  “Well, isn’t that the damndest thing,” she had said. One of its hind legs stuck out at a sharp angle and she took it by the hoof, lifted it, let it fall. “Quite polite of him, wasn’t it? He knew exactly where to go. Like a dollar into the offering plate.” She dropped the tailgate and crawled up into the bed, yanking the stag by the antlers, wrestling him off their luggage, now spotted with blood, Gordon noticed, when Verna handed him down a suitcase.

  “No sense messing around this time of night,” she said. “I’ll be up again in a couple hours. The cold will keep him until then.”

  After breakfast, when Gordon’s mother called the Dodge dealership where she worked as a secretary, where her husband worked as a salesman, and told them she wouldn’t be coming in, not today, not for a while—maybe not ever—the twins washed dishes and Aunt Verna wrestled her way into a pair of Carhartt coveralls. “Come on then,” she said and ruffled Gordon’s hair. “I’ll show you a thing or two about being a man.”

  He followed her to the garage, where she sharpened a knife, sliding its long blue blade along a piece of novaculite, a finely granular, highly pure silica rock mined only in Arkansas, she claimed. “Doesn’t chew away the met
al like all those diamond-hone electric gadgets.” She was always saying things like this, handing out nuggets of wisdom like strange candy.

  She sharpened the knife slowly, diagonally, making a low scraping sound, and when its edge was sharp enough, she set it down on a stainless steel counter with an industrial sink. “We’ll slice him open,” she said with energy, her tongue wetting her lips, “and then we’ll hang him high.” From a pulley system above a central floor drain, she lowered a hook the size of a hand.

  She hauled up the garage door and it settled above them with a rusty rattling bang. Sunlight filled the air, highlighting the dust whirling in every direction. They headed outside, walking toward the pickup, their feet chewing at the gravel.

  It wasn’t until Aunt Verna stopped and said, “Well, hell,” balling her hands against her bulky hips, that Gordon noticed the buck. It stood in the pickup’s bed—one of its legs curled up under it, like a flamingo—looking right at them so that Gordon froze, afraid and awed, admiring its reddish tan coat, its wide rack, with eight white points rising out of a brown crown. It swished its tail. A cool breeze blew.They stood this way a long time, looking at each other.

  Then the buck approached the open tailgate and more fell, than jumped off it, landing clumsily, collapsing and bawling, before righting itself and taking off at a crooked run that lasted about twenty feet, and then its legs crumpled, its chin hit the ground, and it rolled on its side and waited to for them to help it or kill it.

  Clouds piled up on the mountains. The air cooled. Sap slowed in the pine trees. The last leaves fell from the sumac and alder and cottonwood to scatter around the cabin, and Aunt Verna told Gordon and the twins to rake them into piles for burning. Flames rose, crackling into giant orange tongues that licked Gordon’s skin so hot he took one step back, then another.

  Rain fell and froze and surrounded the crabgrass and the yellow fennel with a thin white film that crunched beneath Gordon’s boots, when he walked around these thirty acres, exploring, seeing. He saw a bobcat slink off into a cluster of rabbit brush. A coyote flattened itself behind a log. A great horned owl swooped from its perch in search of a chipmunk. He saw his mother chewing her thumb, stripping the flesh off it, until it bled. He saw her doll up her face with makeup and head off to interviews—“Cross your fingers,” she said, “and hold your breath.” He saw her face split in to a grin when she came home with a secretary position at the chamber of commerce. He saw Aunt Verna nurse the broken buck back to health, corralling him out back, splinting his fore and hind legs, draining with a syringe his joints, all swollen with puss, feeding him alfalfa, apples, corn, IGH pellets made of oats, hormones, and bone-meal. She named him Lazarus and eventually he came to recognize his name.