The Language of Elk

by Benjamin Percy

I fire a match and deliver the foomp. Flames rise from the bucket and Seb applauds and Gillian hoo-rahs and, the gasoline burns a ghostly blue color. Then the bucket begins to buckle and melt and all at once something gives.

  There is a hissing sound when the flames spread across the hood, looking like the purest water, impossibly blue, waterfalling down the grill, crackling the paint into black curls, seeping into the engine where things sizzle and pop. The sight is strangely beautiful, and I just stand there with my head cocked, watching.

  Seb wakes me from my daze with a “She’s gonna blow!” and we run inside, all three of us stoned and laughing so hard we cry. “Oh, Jesus,” Seb says, “I’m going to bust a gut.” We peek out the window, saying shit, shit, shit, but the car never blows—the front tires burst and the engine is toast, but that’s it, no explosion, and maybe we are more than a little disappointed.

  Our agriculturist, K. B. Woodrell—whose eyes are bloodshot, whose fingernails are rimmed with dirt—says we have too many males. And though at first I think he is talking about something else, he is talking about weed.

  Our horticulture takes place largely in the bear-grass meadows, of which there are many. We grow Indica and Sativa strains, and hybrids, the kind of thick beautiful buds you’ve only seen on the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. To fend off the deer we circle each plant with blood and hair, mainly raccoon, some possum, whatever ends up trapped in the many steel-mesh cages stationed around the colony.

  We intersperse the weed with sticker bushes and dwarf pines because sometimes the black helicopters buzz all up and down our woods. Men in bulletproof vests hang out the open doors with binoculars and infrared cameras pressed to their eyes. We wave at them. We know what they’re looking for, and they won’t find it.

  We plant every plant to the east side of a disguising bush or tree, because weed needs at least five hours of direct sunlight a day, and for some reason it takes easier to the morning rays. And “because the feds typically work in north-south search patterns,” K.B. says, his mouth cocked in a lazy smile. “They’re weird like that. Something about shadows.”

  As an extra precaution K.B. trims the herb and ties it to the ground and affectionately calls it Herb Junior. “And though Herb Junior’s bud yield is not as hot as it could be,” K.B. says, “Herb Junior does what he can.”

  K.B. knows his dope. He talks of nothing else. Not hardly.

  He spends his days fertilizing, weeding, watering, testing pH levels, adding peat moss to make the soil more porous. And when we throw parties, when everyone passes around the old peace pipe, K.B. crawls around, collecting our spilled seeds into a Ziploc baggie.“Whatever you say, K.B.,” is what we tell him when he tells us we have too many males.

  “Eighty percent,” he says and shakes head, like: man.

  “This is bad?” Seb says.

  “Hardly any females means hardly any harvest means hardly any cash means hardly any money means hardly any beer,” K.B. says.

  “This is bad,” Seb says.

  About twice a month the colony gathers together for supper, as we do tonight, partly to discuss business, but mainly as an excuse to drink. Under the stars we sit at a big banquet table made from the wideboard leftovers of my cabin flooring. At its head sits Seb, like some strange poo-bah, wearing a football helmet with antlers attached to it, so heavy that it weighs his head down into his shoulders, and he appears to have no neck.

  Normally I sit to his right—“My right-hand man” he calls me—but tonight Gillian takes my spot. I find a place elsewhere, between K.B. and Preacher, who click their steak knives together playfully and say, “En garde.”

  A bonfire crackles nearby, making shadows on our faces.

  Our cook, Travis Junk—who wears sweatpants and a blue-jean jacket that can’t hide his poochy belly—serves us venison steaks drowned in a hickory barbecue sauce, twice-cooked potatoes, and some sort of dope salad crumbled over with candied pecans and gorgonzola. When everyone comments on how delicious it all tastes, I realize I’m not tasting anything, my eyes on Seb and Gillian. They feed each other bites of food, and I notice Gillian holds her fork like I hold my fork, like a sword.

  And so we eat and we drink and we talk and eventually decide to have a hundred seeded females shipped up from Humboldt.

  We drink Black Butte Porter straight from the bottle, many bottles. Our knives clatter against our plates and we soak up the leftover blood with great hunks of tangy sourdough. Our bellies swell over our belts and when there is nothing left to eat, we hack up a willow bush for sticks for roasting marshmallows.

  Gillian drinks like a pro. She drinks so much, beer suds between her teeth when she talks. At one point she takes my hand and leans against me.

  Seb runs an extension cord from his cabin and sets up his stereo system in the bear grass. From the speakers a dozen fiddles saw a fast jig and he pumps up the volume until you can feel it. He does a goofy little half step with one hand wrapped around a whiskey bottle and the other hand on top his helmet to hold it there. Everybody claps to the beat. Gillian takes one look at him and throws back her head and laughs her loud mannish laugh. Everybody loves that laugh. Everybody wants to hear it again. So one by one the men start in with their own goofy dance moves—K.B. doing a few Egyptian movements with his arms and head—while the rest of them stomp their feet, wave their hands, going yoo-hoo, trying to get her attention.

  The men make a circle and Gillian stands in its middle and claps and laughs when they swirl around and around her, each man’s chest at the back of the next man, when they beat their feet into the grass, trampling it down.

  This is Friday night and for the past five days they have been abused by their jobs, like penned animals, and now they are drunk and excited and hungry. I stand a short distance away and watch with my arms crossed, tapping my feet and smiling, awkwardly, at the strange picture that makes me want very badly to put Gillian in a bag to hide someplace.

  Seb breaks from the other men and shakes his antlers and pretends his hands into hooves, sort of galloping to the banquet table, where earlier he placed his acoustic guitar. The men slow their dancing, as if the game is no longer fun without him. Then he slips the guitar strap around his neck and with a pink pick strikes a few chords that tremble in the air. Everyone stops dancing to watch him. He strikes another string or two and toys with the tuning pegs and Gillian breaks through the men and shuts off the stereo. “Play,” she says and picks up a beer bottle and holds it with two hands. “Would you please please please play?”

  The men look at one another with something like embarrassment, and at Seb with something like resentful admiration, before retreating to where they left their beers.

  Seb goes to town on the guitar, his eyes closed, his fist tumbling up and down the strings, so he doesn’t seem to play any one song in particular. Instead he plays what sounds like a whole bunch at once, the pick a blur, his fingers marching up and down the frets.

  The men keep their eyes on Gillian, who bends her knees and swirls in circles. Her black hair shakes and trembles, always a second behind her body. The men stare. They love her. They want her. And when all of them step forward, toward her, I step back, onto the foot of another guy.

  This is Bob. Bob is a dentist. He looks like a bullfrog in a polo shirt. “The fuck off me,” he says and shoves me into the table. Its bench strikes my knees and my mouth puckers around the pain.

  The guitar grows louder.

  Bob has twenty pounds on me but I have fifty bar fights on Bob. About now I could use some electrical tape to wrap around my knuckles. I say, “You are in some deep hot water, friend,” and stand up straight as an exclamation mark.

  Seb plucks a fast series of high notes and I try to shove Bob but Bob resists and tosses me back into Preacher, who says, “Jesus,” and falls on Joe Doolittle, a diesel mechanic with three teeth and nothing to lose. So it gets to be a big fight. There’s a lot of punching. Bottles get broken. Seth picks up a plate and brings it down on Bob. Bob colla
pses and Preacher stomps on his back before getting smacked in the nose by a jerked elbow.

  I spot Gillian slipping the antler helmet off Seb, putting it on her own head. She climbs onto the table and I push my way through the rout, moving toward them, toward her—I don’t know why—but no matter where I step, there is something, a body, glass, beer or blood, something slippery.

  I slip and end up on top of Bob, who ends up on top of me. His knuckles batter my ribs and I punch him in the face, crushing his cheek. He lets out a braying sound and reaches for my neck. My breath chokes away and he starts to look fuzzy and a long way off. Over his shoulder Gillian appears, smiling, swinging a bottle like a Louisville Slugger. There is a line-drive crack and Bob shivers and falls off me and leaves a burning necklace around my throat. I choke in a few breaths and Gillian says, “Wow, I always wanted to do that.”

  A moth flutters between us and I say, “Thanks,”—meaning it and resenting it.

  Seb’s guitar picking filters into the fight, a hillbilly riff. Our eyes meet. His lips split open and some laughter spills out and gets mixed up with my nerves so I feel like some great twanging string he tickles with his finger. And with the men fighting all around us I can’t help but laugh, too, at what he has created, at the wildness of it all.

  Seb is at a city council meeting, discussing zoning rights, when I bang on his cabin door. Gillian opens up wearing cut-offs and a purple bikini top. From behind her comes the sound of the TV and something cooking: chicken maybe.

  I take a stutter-step toward her and for a second don’t know what to say. I concentrate on her face so she won’t think I’m turned on by her breasts, her belly, the dark mole on her hip. She gives me a steady look, a daring look, and my shy interest in her body seems unclean, even dangerous.

  “Yeah?” she says, her voice full of gravel. “What do you want?” She squares her shoulders as if ready to wrestle. “Hello? You here?”

  My pulse is in my ears. “I’m here,” I say and hand her a backpack. “You take this.”

  For a moment, before she takes the bag, her face creases with puzzlement, and I wonder can she smell the pot fumes puffing off it. “Just take it,” I say. “Open it.”

  Her eyes bounce between me and what I’m handing her, watching for any mismove on my part, I assume. When she unzips the zipper, the smell of weed comes roaring out.

  “That is A-1 world-class premium bud,” I say. “Sensamilla. Eighty ounces. You know how much money that’s worth?”

  She shakes her head, no, looking at me under all that hair.

  “A lot. Thousands. I’m figuring about seven thousand.” I lift my hands into a palms-up gesture and say, “Smoke it, sell it, I don’t give a damn, but take it. Okay? Just take it.”

  For a moment she’s quiet, looking into the backpack, her nostrils flared. Then her eyes rise and meet mine and she says, “Look, I’m just fucking him. It’s no big deal. You don’t have to have a cow over it.”

  “I don’t believe you’re with him for the long haul,” I say. “I believe you’re with him for the vacation, to escape whatever it is you’re escaping.”

  That nudges her enough to say, “Yeah?”

  “That backpack is overflowing with escape. No strings attached.”

  She reaches into the pack as if to withdraw an answer, withdrawing instead a big nugget, so tight and resinous. She pops it in her mouth and starts crunching away at it like a stubborn hunk of celery. That’s like thirty dollars. That’s like such a terrific waste of a dragonmaster of a smoke session. Even though the weed is hers, I can’t help but twitch.

  If I had that nugget inside me, if I had a buzz behind my eyes, she would be easier to manage. She would be entertaining, the comedy smash of the summer, and I would be relaxed and unafraid.

  “You think about it,” I say, and through a soggy green mouthful she says, “I will. Thanks for stopping by.” In her neck a vein pulses slowly, and a big part of my unhappiness fades away when I lift my hand, waving good luck, good-bye.

  Maybe we are not so different, Gillian and I. Both with history, as they say, both orphans brought in from the cold, taken under Seb’s wing, our lives turning on a dime as the greener grass arrived by the midnight train, so to speak.

  But I can’t, I won’t, share.

  With Seb, I have slashed the tires of a Mercedes with a bowie knife. With Seb, I have learned to call crows by fitting grass into the end of a split branch. With Seb, I have shot the bull, I have laughed, I have wept, I have given and received good-natured shit, which is what every man looks for in a buddy.

  With Seb, I have sliced holes in a Sealy Posturepedic mattress—into which we stuffed ammunition, every kind of bullet you can imagine—and drenched the thing in gasoline and launched it into the river that snakes through the colony, the Sandy River, its waters milky white from glacial till. We dropped a match and the fire took to the mattress in a great snapping coil that floated away from us like one of those ceremonial Viking grave things, flaming, exploding.

  With Seb I have blazed through a blunt and pretended to be a Mohican warrior, the two of us leaping over logs and ducking under branches, giggling, hunting jackrabbits and coveys of quail with potato guns, me turning my head every few steps to make sure he was still there.

  Dawn, Seb sits next to me on the porch, wearing his antler helmet, teary and drunk after an all-night bender. I am struck by how much I love this man. I love him, as a friend and a brother both, more deeply than you can imagine. When we are together, drinking and joking, I feel a warmth spreading inside me—a sense of belonging, of knowing it feels so right to be here, at the colony, with him.

  We watch K.B. push a wheelbarrow through the meadow. In the morning light, dew sparkles. The wheelbarrow is crowded with female marijuana plants, seeded—some cross-pollinated strain that arrived yesterday by U-Haul, and K.B. has been working all night, to avoid detection, planting, to ensure a good crop for Preacher to pawn, for the benefit of us all.

  For the benefit of us all is exactly why she had to go.

  I dig another couple beers from the cooler and we clink them together—“To Gillian,” we say—before drinking to mourn and to celebrate her departure.

  Seb looks terrible, big bags under his eyes like he’s been punched. “To us,” I say and he barely manages a smile. We clink bottles and drink and he swishes the beer around in his mouth before swallowing it down. “Yeah,” he says. “For sure. To us, man.” There’s a lot of exhale in his voice.

  I wonder, if he had to make a choice, who would he pick? Her or me?

  Any lingering anxiety vanishes when he says, “You know what? I’m thinking this is a good thing.” He puts his hand on mine and leaves it there. His fingers move—so very slightly—reminding me of a heartbeat. “I’m thinking I’m happy about this.”

  I give him a hopeful smile and say, “Me, too.”

  Behind us is Portland, the skyscrapers rising above the trees, glimmering in the half-light, looking like several dozen spaceships ready to launch to the moon. Before us are the Cascades. The sun crests, flaring, haloing the chain of mountains with a light red light that draws my eyes to the sky, the enormous blue sky, where high above us a vulture circles, fat off carcasses, its feathers shining, able to see what we cannot.

  The colony has changed, we have changed, and off toward Portland acres of clay and basalt and fir are being bulldozed to make way for yet another subdivision.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Greensboro Review, Idaho Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sycamore Review, Rosebud, and Swink, in which these stories originally appeared.

  Author’s Note

  Most writers never feel satisfied. They could revise endlessly, toying with words, rearranging sentences, chopping scenes. Eventually they have to let go, sometimes submitting the work with great reluctance, because they know once a story is printed, they can’t return to it. Their words, crystallized on the page, belong now to the world.

  I find it painful to re
turn to my stories, my novels, because I am habitually dissatisfied, always hell-bent on improving. What I wrote six months ago is not what I am capable of writing now. When I am behind the podium, reading to an audience, I often find myself editing as I go along, skipping a paragraph I should have cut, replacing a clumsy metaphor.

  The Language of Elk is my first book. These are my grad school stories, all of them written when I was twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, an energized kid who had a lot of growing up to do and so much to learn about craft. The stories matter to me, the way a shoebox full of old photos might, as artifacts. I laugh at my prom haircut. I shake my head, wondering what I was thinking, when I see a picture of me in neon-green parachute pants. I feel like I barely know or understand that person. But sure enough, it’s me.

  That’s a little how I feel about these stories. They are the raw, hyperemotional, sometimes awkward products of a beginner. But I had to write them or I would not be the writer I am today. When Grand Central/Hachette generously offered to bring them back in to print as an e-book, I felt so tempted to overhaul them completely, polish them to a glow, but really, that would be a pointless exercise. These are the stories I wrote when I first dreamed of becoming a writer. The best of them—“Swans,” “Winter’s Trappings, “The Bearded Lady Says Goodnight”—glow with a weird energy. None of them are perfect, not by a long shot, but I hope you enjoy them, as I do, archaeologically.

  About the Author

  Benjamin Percy was raised in the high desert of Central Oregon. He is the author of two novels, Red Moon and The Wildin;, as well as two short story collections, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Paris Review’s George Plimpton Prize for Fiction. His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio and published by Esquire, GQ, Men’s Journal, Outside, Time, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.