The Language of Elk

by Benjamin Percy

  There was a pile of logs behind the cabin and the twins beat the frost off it with brooms, and with an ax they split wood for hours, never tiring, pausing only to position a log so that the blade might follow the grain, sliding, severing, with no more effort than they beat the boys who beat on Gordon when he enrolled at the local junior-and-senior high school. The ones in letterman jackets and expensive white sneakers surrounded and ravaged him—a fawn among wolves—but the twins always came to his rescue, their faces calm but flushed with blood when they performed a right cross, an uppercut, a one-two combination followed by a roundhouse swing—as their mother taught them, punching through their target, with one foot planted before the other for stability—their movement and noise as violent as the sharp crack of the broken wood they gathered and stacked in a rectangular pile so tall they needed a stepladder to reach its top.

  Late at night the phone would ring. Sometimes it was a rancher—calling about a fevered colt, a fresh heifer bleeding from her udders—and sometimes it was not. Sometimes it was Gordon’s father, his voice carrying across two hundred miles of cable, dripping from the pores of the receiver to the floor, where it slid across the kitchen linoleum, the living room hardwood, finding Gordon on the couch, his makeshift bedroom until he and his mother could afford their own place, something better.

  Gordon pictured his father sitting on their kitchen counter back in Salem, surrounded by dirty dishes, crumpled beer cans, empty bags of potato chips—fruit flies swirling everywhere—his mouth pursed as he waited for the rhythmic purr of the call to be broken by a “Hello?” He would not say, “What’s up?” or “I’m sorry.” He would scream. A forked vein would leap across his forehead and he would beg them to come back, promising to love them if they did, threatening to kill them if they didn’t. Did Pamela not realize she had embarrassed him at work, where all day people pointed and spoke her name from behind cupped hands? Did she not realize she had effectively kidnapped his son? His son.

  Pamela would have kept listening, let him pump her full of poison, but Verna gently took the phone from her and set it in its cradle and unplugged it.

  The pickup knocked something from Lazarus, some of his wildness. He became dependent, and when the water froze or when the corral went empty of alfalfa, he would bawl for them to help. “Take care of it,” Verna would say to Gordon and watch him through the kitchen window when he went into the cold to stomp through the veneer of ice collecting on the water trough.

  At first Lazarus feared him, hobbling off to the far edge of the corral with his ears flattened against his skull, swirling his antlers in a clockwise motion to show he was ready for Gordon. Once Lazarus even snapped his mouth, as if to bite, when he charged Gordon and turned away at the last minute to circle back to his original position. But eventually, Lazarus grew accustomed to Gordon and to Verna and would lower his head in thanks when they fed him, petted him, finding with their fingers that special place between his ears he loved so much.

  Trapping would put Lynn and Lori through college, trapping beavers and otters and pine marten, as they had for the past ten years in the Conibear 330 traps they set along the Squaw River, which poured and purled through their property, frozen in places, entombing the traps in blue ice.

  In the garage they would skin and flesh the animals, then hose the blood in pink frothing waves down the central floor drain. They flattened and nailed the furs to a board and hung them throughout the garage. “Prices aren’t as good as they were in the eighties,” the twins would say, “but we aren’t complaining.” Otters were worth around ninety dollars, beavers less, much less, averaging eighteen dollars, with the occasional monster pelt pulling in twenty-five from the fur-buying cooperatives in Canada, which took a 9 percent commission. Right now the twins were stocking up for January, for the North American Fur Auction.

  This two-degree day in December they took Gordon with them, through the frozen forest, where dim light fell through the trees and the dry powdery snow squeaked beneath their boots. Lynn carried a backpack filled with tools and ham sandwiches and peppered jerky and a thermos of hot cocoa and Lori dragged behind her an orange plastic sled that smoothed her tracks, only to be broken a moment later by Gordon and then Lazarus, Lazarus trailing by twenty yards and pausing whenever they paused, maintaining the distance between them.

  The other day they tried to set him free. They opened the corral and whistled for him and he lifted his head from his drinking trough. Water dribbled from his muzzle when he regarded the gate and beyond it, the forest. But he did not prance off into the distance, as they expected, not even when they crept back to cabin to watch with their faces pressed to the windows, every minute or so wiping away the frost their breath created. Instead Lazarus returned to his drinking and then bedded down on a blanket of straw, plumper and happier than he had ever been.

  “That deer,” Verna said, “is a chicken.”

  In the days after, with the gate still open, Lazarus would venture into the surrounding meadow, pawing through the snow for grass, occasionally staring off at the surrounding pines, their needles coated with white frosting, and he would cock his head, as if listening.

  Now Lazarus kept his crown low, trying to melt into the underbrush, watching the woods with the same wariness as before—as if seeking that part of himself left behind—never straying from the sled-polished tracks of Gordon and the twins.

  From time to time, Gordon noticed, a magpie or jackrabbit would stick its head from beneath a manzanita thicket, from behind a pine, and stare at the bizarre parade of man and beast, before hurrying off, its flight muffled by the hush of snow.

  Then the trees opened up to reveal the Squaw River dusted with snow, the water murmuring beneath the ice. “Here we are,” Lynn said and stepped onto the river, carefully, sliding more than stepping toward where the tips of aspen branches jutted through the ice and marked the beaver colony’s feed bed. Farther down the river, in a hump of sticks, sat the lodge.

  Lynn shrugged off her backpack and removed from it a chisel. “Your turn to chip,” she said, and Lori said, “I know,” snatching the chisel. “Don’t tell me what I already know.”

  Lori dropped to her knees, chipping with short powerful chops through three inches of ice, the shaving sticking to her mittens. The sound of the chisel ticked and snapped. At one point Lori paused to remove her stocking cap and shove it in her coat pocket, her hair damp with sweat and steaming in the cold, soon hardening into an icy helmet, as she attacked the river once more and in a violent succession of stabs finally broke through and the water boiled up like a grayish tea.

  Once the twins widened the hole enough to accommodate the trap, they pulled it from the dark water. Inside the steel square was a beaver, dead, its fur slick and gleaming, its mouth open, displaying orange scimitars for teeth. “This one’s a good one,” Lori said, “a twenty-pounder,” when she rolled it in the snow to absorb the water from its coat. She then dumped it in the sled with its little legs stuck up in the air.

  Gordon looked at Lazarus—who was looking at the beaver—and wondered what the stag was thinking. Thinking about the steel jaws of their pickup bearing down on him. Thinking about the cage of his corral. Thinking. Maybe Gordon gave the animal too much credit. There was just so much personality in its eyes, so gloomy and black and regarding him with thoughtfulness, he was almost sure.

  Lori pointed her mitten at Lynn and said, “Pull.”

  “I always pull the sled. Why don’t you pull the sled?”

  “Why don’t you kiss my butt?”

  “I know,” Lynn said. “Gordon will pull it.” They stared at him, snapping their eyelids.

  “No way,” he said. “You’re the ones making money off it.”

  The twins’ voices were sober and motherly when they said, “We provide you with food and shelter, Gordon. It’s the least you could do.”

  He looked at the twins, looked away, looked again at their broad expectant faces and said, “Fine,” and took the towline and drag
ged the sled up the trail, his footsteps sliding away from him in the snow, as if he was incapable of moving forward without being drawn back, reminded of the way he came.

  The day Gordon’s father arrived a freezing rain fell This followed three days of snow, so the rain glazed a blue-white sheet across Central Oregon like the frosting on a cake whose powdery core measured two feet deep. Branches shattered. Cars slipped and flipped, into ditches, into other cars, while the semis plodded along slowly, powerfully, one of them crumpling a spun-out Geo beneath its chain-choked wheels, the news reporter said while the tickertape at the bottom of the screen announced school cancellations throughout Deschutes County.

  That morning the twins set off on their Polaris snowmobile, breaking through the ice and then cresting it and then breaking through again like a boat through rough water, headed to Sisters to shovel the driveways of anyone willing to cough up twenty dollars.

  That morning Gordon discovered it was possible, if he kept his feet flat and depressed them slowly, to walk across the two-inch crust without breaking through. With each step the ice squeaked and groaned, settling under his weight—and he imagined there was nothing to catch him if he punched through, nothing except snow for miles and miles beneath him, and so at any moment he might plummet into a forever whiteness.

  Behind him Verna chipped and dug a trail from the garage to the corral, where Lazarus—whose tiny hooves punctured the ice—crashed through with every panicked step he took, so that his legs bled, socked bright red, and he bawled for help, for Verna to once again clean his wounds and butter them with salve.

  If Gordon and Verna had not been so focused on their task—whispering to the stag, petting him as they led him into the garage, limping and mewling—if they had only looked a quarter mile to the west, they would have seen the black Dodge Ram turn into the driveway and carve a path toward the cabin.

  As it was, Gordon and Verna did not look—closing the door behind them with a click—nor did they hear the diesel engine go quiet, the footsteps on the porch, the soft knock at the door and the undoing of the bolt to answer it. The garage radio was tuned to KICE 100 and Gordon snapped his fingers and Verna sang, in her gruff barking way, along with Woody Guthrie as he described the five shades of shadow that darken the land.

  No, they didn’t realize they had a visitor at all until thirty minutes later, when they entered the cabin through the garage, walked down the hall and noticed a sound seeping from the guest room, Pamela’s room.

  That sounds like quail, Gordon thought, quail calling to each other. The lilting croon accompanied the creak and zoop of springs, the clacking of the headboard against the wall—and it only took him a second to understand. Verna saw the understanding swell into a smile that bent into a frown that settled into the restrained suspicious expression he learned from the twins.

  “Come on, son,” she said and laid her heavy hand on his shoulder. “Let’s you and me go make some lunch, huh?”

  Gordon’s father—whom people called Buddy—had driven all night, driving straight from the dealership off Kuebler toward the mountains, up and down the Santiam Pass, stopping only for gas. His blood fizzed with caffeine—not booze, not ever again, he had decided, taking pull after frantic pull from a one-liter bottle of Coca-Cola clamped between his thighs. He had no plan. He only knew he had to get there, get them.

  Once he hit the pass, where the sleet wrapped ice mittens around his wipers and where the taillights of other cars, lost cars, glowed red from the ditches, he couldn’t go more than ten miles an hour. At one point, way up high, in the snowy saddle between Three-Fingered Jack and Hoodoo, a perilous place where the winds blew fiercely, his brakes locked and he slipped off the road, only to be towed out two hours later by a cinder truck. And at another point he ran over a fawn—watched it slip, heard the thump, felt the truck rise on its left side—but could do nothing as it happened on an incline so slick and so steep that if he were to stop, he might never move forward again.

  And finally—finally—after twenty-four hours awake and painfully sober, he showed up on the front porch, where he handed Pamela flowers, roses whose petals had wilted and blackened from ten hours before his blazing heat vents.

  More than a month had passed since they last saw each other, and he immediately noticed in Pamela something different, something Verna, in the straightness of her spine. And whereas before she had always appeared a little cadaverous, gray and sickly, she had put on color and weight. She looked less slump-shouldered, more big-butted.

  After she took the flowers from him and threw them over his shoulder, into the day, she turned on her heel, but left the door open, a sort of invitation. In the living room she crossed her arms and uncrossed them and looked everywhere but his face—too square-jawed and too green-eyed to reason with—when he said his I’m sorry’s and Never again’s and Would you please please please forgive me’s and touched her face with the back of his hand, his lumpy knuckles familiar there and as effective as any punch in giving him power, making her his.

  Now Pamela emerged from the bedroom, a drugged smile on her face, to find Verna and Gordon busy in the kitchen, warming a pot of corn chowder and slicing honey-cured ham for sandwiches. The look shared between the sisters was one of private understanding and old grudges.

  “You’re so dumb,” Verna said, and Pamela said, “I know,” but didn’t stop smiling.

  “What do you want on your sandwich,” Verna said and pointed the knife at her. “Tomato? Onion?”

  “Yes. That sounds good.” Pamela leaned her elbows on the slate counter dividing the dining nook and kitchen, making eyes with Gordon. “Your daddy’s here.”

  When Gordon didn’t answer—not knowing what to say—Verna stabbed her knife into the mustard jar, slopping yellow across a slice of wheat bread, and said, “He’s not stupid. Not like you.”

  “Gordon?” Pamela said. “Would you like to see him?”

  Verna said, “Whose house is this? This is my house.”

  Pamela pitched her voice high when she said, “He’s better, I swear. He swears, too.” This was the first time Gordon considered his mother pathetic. “He swears he’s done drinking, Verna.”

  Verna considered her a moment, snorted, and returned to her sandwiches.

  Just then a door clicked open and footsteps came down the hall and Buddy emerged from it, smiling, wearing his best salesman outfit—a JC Penney suit, black with gray pinstripes and gold cufflinks, a huge watch shimmering around his wrist—looking rumpled but slick. “Hey, Gordo,” he said. “Good to see you, buddy. You got a hug for me?”

  For a second Gordon forgot who his father was and remembered who he had been, remembering all the times they lounged on the couch, half-asleep, watching football and eating peanuts and cussing imaginatively when the Ducks lost by a field goal in OT. In those days Gordon never believed there would come a time when his father wouldn’t be laughing, telling stories about the people he knew, the things he did, the milk-white Mustang he drove in high school, even when two beers turned into six beers turned into twelve beers, even when the alcohol seemed to pull his gaze further and further away, even when darkness grew against the windows and meanness slipped from his mouth, even when he hurled a nacho platter against the wall and left behind a bouquet of guacamole and salsa. Even then.

  Back then Gordon understood on some level something was going to happen, something was going to end, but didn’t believe.

  Once, nearly a year ago, after everyone else had gone to bed, Gordon drank from a bottle of Southern Comfort. Its taste, like the smell of fireworks, was recognizable but unlike anything he had ever put in his body. It had a different heat to it, so that his skin opened every pore, as if to release steam. After ten swigs, he felt the need to vomit, and did, and felt happy for it because what happened to his father—the rage, the insatiable thirst—had not happened to him.

  Now his father looked like he used to look, on his good days, smiling widely, opening his arms, requesting a hug, but
Gordon remembered. He remembered his mother spitting bits of tooth. He remembered the black marks smudged across his back. He remembered and he said, “No.”

  Of course Buddy couldn’t not drink. It was beyond habitual—it was necessary. Like breathing. He woke later that night with an awful thirst, with moonlight coming through the window, onto the wall, where it made a silver rectangle. When he sat up, his shadow filled it.

  Then he snuck from his bed to his truck and removed from the glove-box a bottle of Wild Turkey and took it to the bathroom to drink, in front of the mirror, as he sometimes did, watching his throat pitch and heave when the burning worked its way inside him, settling in his belly and sending wasps through his veins.

  Thirty minutes and he finished half the bottle and flushed the toilet and opened the door and discovered Verna there, a big stooped thing holding his jacket in one hand, a pump-action shotgun in the other. “Get out,” she said.

  When he started to say something, to explain, to beg her not to tell, to promise this time was the last time, she slowly brought a finger to her lips.