by Diane Cook
The hunting party returned with a deer and two jackrabbits, and that night they built the fire big and broad and a smaller one next to it. It took the whole Community to prepare for that much butchering. Grass gatherers set out. Whole dead sage bushes were dragged back. The smoking tent was large, but a whole deer could only be done in halves. The deer was skinned, then split, and the first half butchered, strips of meat sliced long and thin and draped over the drying racks, made years ago from strips of a downed maple, and repaired as needed with the pliable strips of smaller green bushes and trees they’d encountered along the way. It was an almost daily job, to look for materials to keep the drying rack functional. But it was possibly the most important item they had. The maple had proved incredibly resilient, and it lent good flavor too. They’d never seen another maple in all their walking. It was as though the Rangers had put it there for them to find, to study what they did with it.
The butchering was an all-night job. They switched off tending to the smoker. The whole atmosphere felt like fire. They built a larger campfire to keep everything dry and hot so the small fire inside the tent could do its small work. Create smoke and just enough heat. It was how they had evolved the process.
Near dawn they’d done all they could, and many were laid out where they’d stood, sleeping lightly.
By their count it was Saturday.
People began to worry.
“Do you think they’ll all come back in the morning?”
“Maybe they’ll come back tonight to beat the traffic?”
“What traffic?”
“What’s traffic?” the children asked.
“We tried all the doors, right?” Debra asked.
“Yes. Even the Garage. And the safety door to the Arsenal,” said Dr. Harold.
“Why is there such a door on the Arsenal? Do they expect people to storm the Post and steal their weapons?” Val said. She kicked at some dirt.
“Why is there an arsenal at all?” Glen said.
“Maybe beyond that ridge there is a militia waiting to invade,” offered Dr. Harold.
“It’s absurd they let truck drivers in,” Val pivoted. “He just had a permit. Probably got it for a bribe. Actually, it’s probably a fake.”
Carl shrugged. “Like I said, commerce is king.”
Bea laughed. “When did you say that?” She rolled her eyes at Debra. But Debra frowned back. Bea looked around and no one was looking at her. They were all looking at Carl, nodding their heads. Was everyone on Carl’s side now? She looked for Glen. He had wandered off, was crouched and dusting away some loose earth, peering closely at something. A relic or fossil, she thought. It was so Glen of him. He was only interested in the past. She felt briefly furious at him.
“And we wait here. Waiting for what? Our keepers to give us our orders?” Val spit into the dirt she had just kicked.
“Yes, we should leave immediately,” said Juan. He even got up from his squatted position, as though he would just walk away, but he only stood, stretching out his bad hip, which had never fully recovered from the tumble he took in a boulder field in their second winter.
“This is our land, is how I see it,” Juan continued. “We’ve been invited here. We are guests, and our rude hosts aren’t even here to give us a place to lay our heads or somewhere to clean up, take a shower.”
Sister asked, “What’s a shower?”
“They never do,” said Debra. “Why is this Post any different?”
“Because it is,” Carl interjected, with a fake professorial voice. He had never been a professor. “They told us to come here. For no reason. It’s wrong of them to not be here.” His calm facade melted to show his true agitation. “At least have someone here to let us into the fucking building to get our fucking mail.”
“Well,” Bea said, “they didn’t exactly know when we’d show up. And it is a holiday . . .” She let her voice trail off. She didn’t enjoy this game of Us Against the Rangers that Carl and Val and now Juan were trying to start. It made the situation they were in feel precarious. But she too wondered where the hell someone, anyone, was.
Carl shot Bea a stern look as he leapt up and strode petulantly to the Office.
Everyone followed him.
They peered in through the windowed door.
The Office was lit by the sun through the side windows. A playful ray danced over everything. The stapler, computer, In and Out mail bins that sat atop the front counter. Vinyl carpet in Ranger green. A flag with the emblem of the Wilderness State. They saw the desk that must belong to the Post’s head Ranger because on it sat a mug that read, Porque yo soy el jefe. And on another desk sat a vellum box spilling over with mail. Packages sticking out the top. Letters stuffed into all crevices. They pressed their faces to the windows, straining to read the names written with that ancient cursive.
“Okay, what are we doing?” said Val.
“Debra,” Carl said, in a sappy voice, “do you have any issues with me opening this door? There’s probably a rule about it in the Manual.”
“Oh, fuck the Manual,” Debra said. She yanked on the doorknob. “I want my fucking mail,” she screamed.
Carl covered his elbow with a pelt and bashed it into the center of the glass. Shards rained inside and out. He reached in to turn the door lock, but couldn’t.
“One of the children,” ordered Carl.
Debra put her arms out like branches and the children scooted behind them. “Absolutely not,” she said, eyeing the glass shards.
Carl tried to punch them out to create a smooth edge, but they just became more jagged and the children stepped farther behind Debra.
Then they heard a loud smack and a grunt. Glen had thrown himself against the door. He reared back and yelled as he threw himself again. Then he kicked at the knob. His noises were guttural, incidental, as though they were just what happened when a body hit a door. He kept kicking at it until the knob hung off. And then, with a roar, he threw himself full force at it one more time and sailed through, splattering to the floor and skidding a few feet. Glen beamed up at them and then at Bea, who knelt beside him and stroked his hair.
“Good work, babe,” said Bea.
They swarmed the mail table. Val and Debra wrestled for the box.
“Wait, wait,” yelled Glen, and they all stopped and turned to him, Val and Debra holding the box between them.
Glen smiled at this victory. “We need a system,” he said.
Carl groaned at the word system. But, Bea noted happily, no one gave Carl any attention. They just waited for Glen to explain.
His system, it turned out, was simple. Two people would sort. And no one would get their mail until the last piece was sorted. Debra and Val were chosen as the sorters, and Bea could see that Val relished the task. With the reading of each name she would stare thoughtfully at the person, then place it solemnly on their pile. They were deliberate and slow, and everyone was salivating watching the progress. The piles lay across the help counter. It was possibly the only action the help counter ever saw. Who came here for help ever? Other Rangers? There were no other people. The Office seemed equipped as a welcome center from some long-ago time. In the corner there was even an educational display about soil erosion.
Bea wandered the Office, opening doors, while the others hovered as close to the mail table as they were allowed.
She found a bathroom and giddily washed her hands. Then she pulled up her tunic, wet a handful of paper towels, and scrubbed her vagina. It left the brown paper towel even more brown. The paper pilled, and she unhappily realized she’d be leaving tiny balls of paper towel everywhere she peed for the next few days. Or the bits might entangle in her pubic hair, making it snarl and clump. She sat on the toilet lid and spread her legs, hunching to investigate. She felt around for them and picked them out one by one as though they were an infestation of something worse. The cool porcelain felt good against her skin. So smooth and clean. When she stood, she’d left a vaguely heart-shaped smudge in scum on t
he lid. She wiped it away with more paper towel. She washed her hands again and splashed water on her face until the water ran clean. Then she noticed a mirror hung on the door, partially hidden by an old stiff towel. She held her breath, closed her eyes as she removed the towel. Then opened them.
Her skin had wrinkled in the sun. Her eyes turned down, as did her mouth. She looked many years older than she should. She had freckles for the first time since she was a child. And she only remembered them because of pictures that proved they’d been there. She had no memory of her young face anymore. Except, occasionally, she saw something in Agnes that looked achingly familiar. And she thought it must be because it was something she’d looked at every day as a girl, studied as a girl, picked at as a girl. Or, other times, it was because Agnes made a face that her own mother made. Or laughed in a way her mother laughed. In those moments genetic lines seemed like the only thing that mattered in all of life. That proved anything. She thought of the way children were viewed in the City. There were simply too many people already. Making more wasn’t encouraged. No one became an ob-gyn anymore. She’d been lucky to get in with a doctor at one of the last birthing hospitals with Agnes. Home births now. Hidden behind doors. With no help if something went wrong. No one specialized in new life.
No one specializes in old life either, she reminded herself, pushing the corners of her mouth up until they formed what could pass as a smile.
Her hair was sun-bronzed like Agnes’s; the old charcoal tones had turned the color of wet sand. It looked as though someone had sprinkled acorn flour on her temples and in streaks from her scalp. She looked like a different person.
“No, you look like you,” said Bea to her face in the mirror. “I just haven’t seen you in a while.” She stared a beat longer. She raised a rigid palm and swept it in an arc in front of her. “Hello, you,” she said to her reflection, and forced a yearbook smile. The tendons of her neck popped and a thick vein throbbed across her brow. She frowned and covered the mirror again with the towel. No one needed to see this.
In the next room she found reams of paper, a neglected printer that seemed broken. Light bulbs on shelves. Sponges, paper towel packs. A bucket and mop, vacuum, other implements of cleaning, and she wondered who did that work. The Rangers? Or did some cleaning crew from elsewhere come in? Did someone’s wife do it for extra money? Did Ranger households need extra money? Did they need money at all?
She’d never thought about it at any Post. She’d never seen the inner workings before. The idea of all those people milling around this office, tidying up, making it smell nice, sucking dust up from the flooring, made her sweat with longing. What she wouldn’t give to be the cleaner here. A small, clean bunk that she could tightly make each morning, then ease under the nubby, overwashed sheet at the end of the day. She’d wander around picking things up, wiping them off, placing them back in the perfect place. She’d scrub the toilet with bleach. Her nose burned at the memory of the smell. But why waste time on memories, she thought. She pulled a jug of bleach down and opened it. She inhaled and doubled over into convulsive coughs, sloshing bleach onto her hands and the floor. She put a wet finger up to her mouth and tentatively touched it with her tongue. Her mouth watered.
In the next room, she found a table, a worn couch covered in stains. Along the sides of the room were counters, a microwave, a toaster oven, and a coffee maker whose glass carafe was crusted in burnt coffee. She sniffed the room. It smelled of rot. A mix of stagnant marsh and carrion on a hot day. It was beginning to seem that this Post was abandoned too.
The other side of the room had a refrigerator and a vending machine. Bea floated to the machine as though pulled by a magnet. It was half full. The good stuff was gone. Instead there were granola bars, fruit-shaped gummies, a potato chip brand she didn’t recognize but whose flavor turned her stomach. Beef stew. But whose beef stew did it taste like? She thought of a dish her grandmother made. When people could still freely travel, her grandmother had picked up a taste for interesting spices. These chips couldn’t possibly taste like her grandmother’s beef stew.
Bea opened the fridge and found the origin of the smell. An uncovered old turkey sandwich and, in the crisper drawer, a head of disintegrating romaine. What a surprising waste. Precious lettuce. How could the Rangers have just forgotten about it? She wondered if the life of a Ranger was even more glamorous than she or Glen had imagined. They worked for the Administration. Perhaps those in charge had other supplies, stores of food, different choices, cheaper prices, discounts. Discounts! That’s what people claimed when they spread rumors about the Private Lands. That the people there had all the things you could ever want. All the things you used to take for granted. Like discounts. For some reason finding a stocked cleaning closet and wasted food made Bea more receptive to the idea of Private Lands than ever before.
Other items in the fridge: powdered milk and yogurt, a large block of lard, boxed rice, orange drink, some Meat™ wrapped in white butcher paper. She lifted it to smell. It smelled nothing like the meat she ate now, but she could tell what it was by the way she began salivating. Bacon. Where had Rangers found bacon? She tucked it under her arm. She needed an implement or some help to get into the vending machine. Juan was very good at snaking a wire and catching a treat. And bacon would blow their minds. She thought Carl might even cry. She smiled at how happy Carl would be. Then she scowled that feeling away.
Through the final door, she found a closet full of rags, for cleaning she supposed. Some electric cords. And two fifty-pound bags of sand. A catchall closet. Then a stack of blankets caught her eye. She pulled them down and nuzzled her cheek to one that she would have described, at some point in her life, as scratchy. But to her cheek now it felt like fluffy cotton. There were softer things in the world—hides, furs, new grass, moss—but that it was man-made made it seem careful, tender. She would sleep under this blanket tonight, she decided.
From the hallway window, Bea could see Sister and Brother outside tossing a rock in the air. Then she heard the clang of it on the metal roof. Again and again. They never got any mail, and their mother, when she was still alive, had never gotten any mail either. How awful it must have felt to not have anyone missing them. They kept throwing the rock. Clang. Bea felt bad. She barely registered the other children. Debra and Juan took care of them all.
The Community were now crowded so close to the help counter, their hands were almost touching their stacks of mail, and they shouldered one another to keep their positions. Pinecone careened around, pinging from one wall to another, and Agnes sat on the floor scratching shapes into the carpet with her fingers. Glen too held back, watching the proceedings with a smile, scolding those who attempted to touch their mail.
“Not yet,” he said. “Not until every last piece—”
And that’s when Val, after placing a piece with great reverence, looked up at the others.
“The mailbox is empty,” Val announced.
They pounced.
Glen yelled, “Slow, slow, careful, careful,” over the commotion of the Community lunging for their mail and scrambling to find a place to open it undisturbed, to feel their feelings and eat their stale cookies in peace.
Juan milled about, tapping a new set of paints to his chest and cooing “Mamá.” When they were at rivers, he liked to paint the stones and then wash them off. Leave no trace, he would say and kiss the clean stone. He said it was how he expressed his artistic side.
Bea saw Agnes with a small box in front of her. And she saw her gnashing her teeth against something that looked like a brownie that was now rock hard from one of these pen pal projects some schools did. They sometimes got letters from stranger children, carefully written out, spelling checked by a parent, asking what nature was like and why they were there and needling to write back soon. They never wrote back anymore. At first, when mail, always precious, had been desperately so, some had written back. Now they limited their time in Post, and Post was where the pens and paper were. Time in
Post was spent writing to family. It had become an unofficial rule. But even those letters were waning.
They’d carried stationery and pens, but the paper got wet and the pens broke, leaking onto their hands. One Ranger fined them because he claimed to have found blue ink smeared on a boulder. An indelible mark, he’d said, though it washed away in the next rain.
It got hard to think of what to say when they were out walking. Hard to carve time to write something important. The letters they got felt essential and full of information. But what information could they impart to their families in the City? After all this time—how many more sunsets could they describe? And often, whatever they offered was met with hostility: I don’t understand a thing about where you are or frankly why you’re there. Why don’t you come home?
Now they wrote letters at Post that were simple, noncontroversial: Not much new to report. We’re heading to the mountains before the snows come. Sending love. They’d begun just using the postcards that all the Posts carried, that showed a pretty view of the Wilderness State. They sat out for visitors to take, but what visitors? The cards did a much better job of conveying something to people in the City. No one ever commented on the picture in response letters, though. It was as though they didn’t even look at it, or imagined it was just a stock image unrelated to the life of the Community, and not the real thing they were sending letters to or getting letters from. But it was real. It was the canyon they’d spent part of their first year traversing. They’d lost Jane and Sam there. They’d perfected smoking their meat. They discovered that when the water was fast it was fine to drink without the iodine tablets they’d been using, thanks to their guinea pig Dr. Harold. They’d learned Dr. Harold liked being a guinea pig. They’d become better at navigating by stars, and in the canyon was where Debra began sewing their clothes from animal hides with Carl’s sinew. The place was meaningful to them, but they couldn’t convince the people they were writing to of that. It felt absurd to say, Jane was swept away in a flash flood along with our best knife in this very canyon. The people they were writing to would never get that, even though they’d been sad to lose Jane because she was a good singer, the thing they pined for to this day was that knife.