The Language of Elk Read online

  They took off their sunglasses and bandanas. Here, breathing was like drinking from a cellar puddle, a taste both cool and mineraly and tinged with mold. Their flashlights spotlighted the many suns and rattlesnakes and antelope and men with gigantic penises that covered the walls. Some were pictographs—colored blends of ocher and blood and berry juices—and some were petroglyphs, crudely chipped into the stone. Above all this hung many bats, chirping softly in their upside-down sleep, their brown bodies tangled together and moving so that the cave seemed a living thing.

  “Man,” Elwood said, and Denis said, “Wow.”

  Denis took out some butcher paper and held it against a petroglyph and rubbed it lightly with a crayon. The image of a pig or a bear or a dog—something—transferred onto the paper, and he rolled it up and put it in a plastic tube.

  It wasn’t long before they prostrated their bodies and began to dig. Their fingers had darkened and thickened from so much time in the desert, and they used them now, along with their trowels, to claw away the soil.

  For the next several hours they filled their backpacks with the cave soil—cool and loamy with guano—and carried it outside, dumping it in a pile that grew larger as the cave grew deeper. They discovered a seed cache, a thick layer of charcoal, obsidian chips, and a collection of bones, so broken they could not be identified. Then Elwood’s trowel scraped across something smooth and brown.

  “Dad,” he said. “I think I’ve got something here.”

  The Indian had been buried upright, in a fetal position. A cocoon of dust and papery skin surrounded its brown bones. Elwood and Denis whisked away the soil, revealing first the skull’s round crown—erratically haired—and then the hollows of its eyes, and then its shriveled nose, and then its teeth showing in a yellow snarl.

  The more they unearthed, the more agitated Denis became. He pounded his fist into his palm. His cheeks glowed painful red. His breath blew out of him in gusts as if he were inhabited by some desert storm. From the look on his face, Elwood could not tell if his father was blissfully happy or simply afraid.

  “Dad?” he said. “You okay?”

  Denis ran a hand across his face, leaving dirt there, and said, “Are you kidding? This is unbelievable. I’m in Paleolithic heaven, buddy.” His voice seemed at odds with his words, tonally dead, almost mournful.

  Buried with the Indian were a pipe, a knife, an at-latal, a pair of moccasins, and a decayed leather robe braided with elk teeth. Denis and Elwood took everything.

  They never thought about the legality or the rightness of what they did. They only knew that it brought them pleasure, somehow—taking these things, these hidden treasures, and making them their own.

  It was nearly night when they left and a massive flapping followed them as hundreds of bats escaped the cave, like ashes blown from a chimney, riding the hot gusts into the purpling sky until they were lost from sight.

  Their house was an ordinary house—a tan two-story box with vinyl siding—except that it was full of dead things. Bones and fossils, tools from long-dead tribes, and now a mummified body. Denis carried it across the threshold as you would a bride, proudly, staring down at the thing in his arms as if it held great promise.

  At first he could not decide where to put the Indian. On the end table in the corner of the living room? Perched on top of the television, the refrigerator? Or how about—Denis removed the crystal skull from the dining room table and replaced it with the corpse—how about here?

  Elwood watched all this with some discomfort, and when his father asked him what he thought, he said, “I don’t really like it anywhere. I don’t really want it in the house at all.”

  Denis gave him a look, like: why on earth not?

  Because of the dresses hanging in your closet, the perfume in the bathroom, the photographs staring at me from the mantel, the spackled section of wall where the bullet lodged itself like a seed. Because this house is full of too much death already. That’s what Elwood wanted to say, but didn’t.

  “It’s a dead body, Dad. It’s creepy.”

  “Hmm,” Denis said and looked at the Indian as if for the first time. It sat on the table, its bones shining dully beneath the chandelier, like some spirit summoned by séance. “Maybe you’ve got a point.” He scooped up the Indian—it was small, weighing fifteen, twenty pounds at most—and he sort of rocked it in his arms, peering around, seeking a place for it.

  “I tell you what,” he said. “If it bothers you that much, I’ll keep it in my bedroom. Locked up tight. Okay? Don’t you think that’s a good place for it?”

  From where he stood, some five feet away, Elwood could smell the Indian. It smelled like mothballs and old fruit. One of its eyes was pinched tightly closed—the overlying skin a greenish black color, like that of a baby bird—while the other eye was a gaping black hole, a direct channel to its brain. From this Elwood felt he was being watched.

  Ten days after Misty died—the middle of February—Denis demanded Elwood come outside and play catch. “But it’s freezing,” Elwood said, and Denis said, “So put on a fucking coat.” Elwood had never heard his father swear: he did as he was told.

  Snow fell when they faced each other across the front lawn, the grass frozen and crunching beneath their feet. They began to lightly toss the ball back and forth, and then their muscles limbered and their aim improved and the speed of the ball increased, until they were hurling it at each other, throwing as hard as they could. They would seek out the ball with their mitts, zapping it from the air, pocketing its speed, and then—with a full windup, a big windmill motion—they would whip it back in the direction it came from. The snow grew thicker, the air colder, and before long, their hands went numb and they could hardly see the ball as it sizzled through all that whiteness. Cars slowed to watch them, the drivers no doubt smiling at first, and then gasping, saying, “My word,” when they realized they were not witnessing a snowball fight but something else entirely.

  Then Elwood got struck in the forehead with such force his sinuses bled out his nose and an immediate lump rose between his eyebrows. Denis said, “I’m sorry. Jesus, am I sorry,” and carried Elwood inside and cleaned his face with a cold washcloth and helped him to bed and placed an icepack over his eyes.

  Since her suicide, they had not talked about Misty, but now they did. There was something about hurting his son that made Denis feel so guilty, he wanted, he needed to bring out a hurt of his own. “Elwood?” he said. “You want to hear something terrible?”

  Elwood did not. Every sound, every bit of light, seemed to intensify the red throbbing behind his eyes. But he listened, and his father finally said, “I more than once wished she was dead.” He laughed quietly, wretchedly. “You know how it is, you get in a fight, you see some beautiful woman on the street, and you think terrible things? You think: man, how great would it be if tomorrow the wife died of brain cancer or whatever. You don’t really mean it, but you think it.” He blew a sigh out his nose. “It’s awful, I know.”

  There followed a long silence, and then Elwood took off the ice pack and locked eyes with his father before reaching out and taking his hand.

  This was the last they spoke of Misty, except to occasionally say, “Jeez, do I miss her.” There was an understanding between them. They had both lost the love of their lives and a bond like that makes words more often than not unnecessary. She was always there, between them, like an awkward silence Denis sought to fill, first with baseball, then boxing, hunting, fishing, action movies, and finally, the desert. Here they would peel away the soil and smash open rocks and loot the dead for as long as it took them to answer the question: What next?

  The Monday after they returned from Christmas Valley, Elwood thought he heard voices coming from his parents’ room. He peeked inside and saw his father sitting on the edge of his bed, and next to him, the Indian.

  Without Misty, the garden had gone wild. Dandelions and crabgrass took over the sod, weeds choked away all the flowers except the sunflowers,
and morning glory and kudzu vines groped their way up the house, to the roof, tangling their way across the second-story window Denis stared out of now.

  The leafy vines shaded the room, and when the breeze blew, a flashing green and yellow light shuddered across Denis and the Indian, and he stared at the window, his mouth agape, as if he were hypnotized by it.

  “Dad?”

  Denis snapped shut his mouth and looked at Elwood as if he didn’t recognize him. “I didn’t hear you,” he said in the too-loud voice he sometimes used on the telephone. “You spooked me.” He protectively put his arm around the Indian and drew it a little closer to him. Some blackness remained where it sat before.

  “Dad, I thought you taught class on Mondays.”

  His forehead creased. “That’s correct,” he said. “I do.” He lifted his arm and examined his wristwatch, and then his arm continued its journey up so that he could squeeze the bridge of his nose. “Dang.”

  Sometimes his father looked emotional enough to kiss Elwood on the mouth. Other times—such as right now—his eyes seemed unfocused, his words distant, as if he were someplace else. This had been happening more and more often—until his standard state of mind was elsewhere, nowhere.

  Missing the occasional class was par for the course. No big deal, Elwood thought. Nothing to worry about.

  Then Denis began to paint. He bought a crate of salmonberries at the Farmers’ Market and with a mortar and pestle he mashed them, filling a big bowl. He added to this blood—brought out of his thumb by a tack—and then carpenter’s glue, which thickened the mix into a bright red paste. He applied it to the living room walls with his fingers and with a stick whose end he hammered and chewed into a bristly brush, painting animals and hunters and suns and strange geometric patterns. Above the couch, over the spackled section of wall, he painted a crude rendering of Misty, so red she seemed on fire.

  He did all this with the Indian seated on the La-Z-Boy recliner, supervising, and when Elwood came home from baseball practice and saw his father’s hands gloved in blood, when he saw the murals swirling around him, he could only say, “Dad?”

  Pizza Hut was where Elwood worked part-time over the summer—in the back, since he didn’t like dealing with customers. Here, the conveyor-belt oven blasted heat, a heat so tremendous Elwood imagined it as the source of the Eastern Oregon winds. With temperatures hovering around one hundred degrees, he would sweat through his clothes and season pans with cornmeal and flour, garlic and salt, and he would stretch the refrigerated dough balls, at first caressing them—sometimes imagining them into boobs—and then squeezing, kneading, tossing them with an artful flick of his wrist—up—fitting each pie perfectly into its pan, and then decorating it with sauce and cheese and meats and vegetables.

  He liked it. He got lost in the heat and the repetitive motions.

  His daze broke when from the front register came a shout: “Elwood! Hey, Elwood!” His manager, Joanne, an overweight grandmother with a cigarette voice, was motioning to him with one hand and to his father with the other.

  His father stood across the counter, waving, his face painted with what Elwood recognized as baseball grease. Six black stripes started at his eyes and ended at his hairline like tall eyelashes or backward tear trails. His chin and cheeks were patterned with swirling designs, the kind a cartoonist would use to indicate wind.

  Elwood wiped the sweat off his face with his forearm and went to him. “What are you doing here, Dad?”

  “I always come here.” Which was true. He often dropped by during Elwood’s shift. “Just saying hello.”

  Elwood noticed some people in the buffet line staring. “But what are you doing here… like that! Like it’s Halloween.”

  “Pretty cool, huh?” He smiled and touched his face lightly and checked his fingers for paint. “I’ll do you later, if you want.”

  “I don’t think so, Dad.”

  “Okay.” They stood there a moment, just looking at each other, and then Denis said, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know I’m going to a bar tonight. I won’t be home when you get home.”

  “You? A bar?” Elwood would not have been more surprised if his father said the world was flat and cows came from outer space.

  “I know this may come as a shock to you, Elwood, but I need to have fun. I need to intermingle with people. People of the opposite sex. Women. It’s part of the healing process.”

  “Whatever. I don’t care.” Which was not entirely true, but Elwood felt more stunned than upset. “But you can’t go like that. You’ll get beat up.”

  “It’s Cowboys and Indians Night down at the Wounded Soldier Tavern. I’m just adhering to dress code.” Here he winked, and Elwood noticed the Atlanta Braves shirt, the fringed buckskin pants, and the moccasin bedroom slippers his father wore. “I’ll see you later, bucko.” With that he patted his mouth with his hand and made a woo-woo noise and rain-danced his way down the aisle and out the door.

  Later that night Denis came home with a woman.

  From his bed, propped up on his elbow, Elwood heard them laughing in the kitchen and then whispering in the hallway as they tiptoed past him and clicked closed their bedroom door.

  There followed a great deal of moaning. Elwood felt simultaneously aroused and disgusted. The bedsprings began to chirp, the headboard began to clap the wall—and in her final excited release, the woman made these yee-yee-yee noises that reminded Elwood of coyotes barking.

  His mind was still hazy from sleep when he shuffled downstairs for breakfast and saw his mother in the kitchen, doing dishes, bending her knees and singing quietly, a sort of undersong to the bluegrass playing on the radio.

  Then she turned to grab a dishcloth, and when she turned she turned into an Indian woman who dried a coffee cup. Last night flashed through his mind—he could hardly believe what had happened happened—and she blew on a dirty spot, her lips pursing.

  She noticed him standing there and clicked off the radio. “Morning,” she said, and he said, “Hi.”

  Her hair was long and black and her face round and brown. She was pretty, Elwood thought, but a different sort of pretty. Not as pretty as his mother, but close.

  She wore blue jeans and an untucked white blouse, wrinkled across its bottom from being tucked. She wiped her hand off on her thigh and held it out. He took it and she shook like a man would—like: let’s see who can squeeze harder.

  She said her name was Kim White Owl, from the Warm Springs Reservation. “You guys are messy, hey? Hardly a clean dish in the house.”

  Elwood looked at the counter, where fruit flies swarmed around piles of dirty bowls, clusters of cups half-full of congealed milk. Mostly he and his father ate off paper plates or over the sink, so they wouldn’t have to wash anything.

  “What’s with your house?” she said. “What’s with all this stuff?” She poured coffee into her cup—the sunflower cup his mother always drank from—and sort of toasted it at a fanlike display of projectile points, and then at the living room, where blood-red murals splattered the walls and where beaded moccasins and a mortar and pestle and an at-latal and a dozen other artifacts covered the bookshelves and end tables.

  “Is my dad here?”

  “He went to get cinnamon rolls. He said you liked cinnamon rolls.” She was husky, her arms sleeved with fat beneath which muscles moved. “So tell me, where’d you guys get all this stuff?”

  “How long ago did my dad leave?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty, thirty minutes. Long enough for me to get dressed and make coffee and poke around.” She slurped her coffee and sat down at the table and scooted a chair toward him with her bare foot. “Sit down, why don’t you. Take a load off. You drink coffee?” He shook his head, no, and sat next to her. He could feel her eyes on him, but couldn’t meet them. He concentrated instead on the crystal skull, the way it sparkled under the sun shining through the window. “You’re a handsome kid. You look a lot like your old man.”

  When she didn’t say anyt
hing else, he said, “Thanks.”

  From the garage came the noise of the door rumbling up and the Bronco pulling in, and Kim said, “Speak of the devil.”

  They both stared at the far end of the kitchen, waiting for the door there to open, and when it did, Denis hurried in with a brown grocery bag clutched to his chest. “Hey,” he said, his eyes jogging between them, settling on Elwood. “You’re up.”

  An uncomfortable silence filled the kitchen, along with the smells of cinnamon and butter warming in the microwave, as Denis prepared their plates and poured orange juice and coffee. His war paint had faded and smeared so that his face looked bruised, shadowy.

  He dropped a rolled-up newspaper on the table and Kim took the rubber band off it and spread it between her thumb and forefinger. She then let her head fall between her knees and whipped it back, grabbing her hair into a ponytail. This made her face appear even rounder.

  She wants us to see her, Elwood thought. She wants us to see her clenched jaw and narrowed eyes and know we’re in trouble.

  The microwave beeped and Denis pulled from it a steaming paper plate with three rolls on it. When he set one on Elwood’s plate, and then on Kim’s, she said, “You know what I’d like to know?” Denis didn’t answer, but kept his eyes on her. “I’d like to know how two white boys ended up owning a bunch of museum-quality redskin shit they don’t have any right owning.” She said this softly, calmly, which somehow made her seem all the more threatening.

  Denis took a step away from her and said, “I don’t know how to answer that.” There were weird pauses in his speaking, as if he was out of breath.

  She pointed a finger at him, and her face twisted into a scowl. “You better learn how to answer. You better learn.” She began to punctuate every few words by stabbing her finger into the table. “Come tomorrow, I’m thinking you might have some police asking some pretty serious fucking questions you better learn how to answer.”