Driftless. David Rhodes
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returned to sit next to the dying animal, not near enough to alarm it, but close enough to make a connection. He turned off the flashlight and listened to the creature’s labored breathing.
Later, following a rustling movement, a half-grown coyote emerged from the long grass and entered the swale, its eyes reflecting greenish light from the sky and its body shaking visibly. It regarded Jacob with little interest, perhaps having already taken his measure, approached the dying animal, and sat next to it. Five or ten minutes later the labored breathing stopped. The young coyote stood up, sniffed the lifeless form, looked at Jacob, and gazed briefly into the western sky, as though unsure what to do next. Then it climbed out of the swale and disappeared into the grass.
Jacob remained sitting on the ground. Why had he been called to witness this if he could do nothing to prevent it? On some fundamental level it made no sense. What purpose had been served? No doubt the coyotes had come upon the cougar eating the deer carcass and, unfamiliar with the strange beast, were overly confident in their numbers. Even so, how could one kill seven? Wouldn’t their mistake have been obvious in the first moment? Why didn’t they simply run in all directions after discovering the evil they had unlocked? Wouldn’t their individual survival instincts outweigh pack allegiance? What perversion of nature had unfolded here? How was it possible for one to kill so many? What future awaited the lone pup, and would he live only to wish he hadn’t?
Jacob lay on his back. The stars looked back at him from ten million years ago, their light just now arriving. He wondered if there were other places in the universe where the rules of the living did not require feeding on each other—where wonder could be discovered without horror and learning the truth did not entail losing one’s faith.
Unwilling to go back home and face the ordeal of trying to sleep, Jacob continued in the direction the young coyote had taken, west.
He often walked at night and was familiar with the woods, streams, and valleys for miles around, including the heavily forested area inside the reserve. He knew which families owned dogs, where coon hunters hunted, the narrow ravine with a corn mash still boiling in late summer, and where the local militia—forty or fifty armed men—held meetings at night.
At the end of the field he followed a narrow path along the chain-link fence surrounding the Heartland Federal Reserve, stopped at the rope bridge he had strung across the river, listened to the moving water, and eventually reached the gravel road.
Morning light grew in the sky.
On either side of the road were the DO NOT SPRAY signs he had put up two years ago. He had won that particular battle, but after he convinced the township to stop spraying herbicides they bought a radial arm shredder. The chewing device ripped through plants with ear-splitting efficiency, leaving saplings and bushes severed between two and four feet above ground, their decimated tops splayed out like beaten stakes. It was a war of factions. The road crew wanted safe, wide roads and managed ditches; Jacob was making more signs.
Some distance later he came to his driveway—two parallel tire-wide tracks trailing off through the grass and weeds and into the trees. He looked in his empty mailbox and straightened the bent flag. Geese flew overhead.
He followed the driveway half a mile to his ramshackle log home. It was the last remaining building in a former logging camp, and he had added onto it one room, porch, door, garage, loft, and solarium at a time. It now stood as a tribute to afterthought. Solar panels were mounted on the south- facing roof, and, beneath them, were storage tanks for rainwater. A composting outhouse sat partially hidden in honeysuckle and snow pine with a satellite receiver on top, providing access to the Internet. A dozen small round windows salvaged from boats were set into the front of the cabin, giving it a hivelike appearance.
Inside, Jacob showered and shaved and dressed in coveralls for work. He moved the carburetor and newspapers to the far side of the table, ate two tomatoes, and drank a glass of orange juice for breakfast.
Before leaving the house, he glanced at the framed picture of his wife taken two years before her death. She looked lovely, though because of too much sunlight the photograph was beginning to fade.
PAINTED BODIES AND ORANGE FIRES
INTIMACY HAD NOT ALWAYS BEEN DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE FOR Grahm Shotwell and his wife, Cora. Not at all—until about a year ago, when finding a way to close the door on the rest ofthe world ago, when finding a way to close the door on the rest of the world became harder. Problems that couldn’t be solved kept stealing into their mutual space, making it impossible to experience each other with the spontaneous delighting freedom that they both desired. It was maddening to them both because it always seemed as though they should have the mental strength, the courage, to close the door and keep all the unwanted concerns outside. And they should be able to have the integrity to not blame each other for what neither of them could control. But they couldn’t. Banished from each other, they endured in their lonely spaces, and the grief was all the more unbearable because of their well-remembered history of comforting sensuality.
In fact, their relationship had been forged, as it were, in the furnace of physical inspiration, when Cora, a young woman working for her father’s insurance company in Milwaukee, attended a concert by the Barbara Jean Band with a couple friends. Dressed in a flaming red dress and heels, her black hair gathered on top of her head with long, waving strands falling along the sides of her face, she stood next to a folding table covered with Styrofoam cups, cold cider, and hot coffee. She surveyed the crowd and wondered what she was doing in a place that resembled a page out of a ten- year-old JCPenney catalog.
Her roaming eyes fell on a young man on the far side of the room, beyond the musicians, wearing a suit too large for him. He seemed almost comical as he attempted to negotiate his medium-sized frame through the room, armed with only rustic formality and a broad smile that flashed like fireworks from inside his neatly trimmed beard. Many people apparently knew him and reached out to shake his hand, whisper, joke, and touch him as he tried to move around them, causing him to blush again and again in shy retreat.
His slow progress appeared as though it had been filmed earlier and was now being replayed at reduced speed, and it took him nearly five minutes to wend his way through the mostly-seated crowd. Unaware that such mannerisms evolved naturally from the habit of walking among large, excitable animals, she could not take her eyes off him, even after it became clear that his destination was the very table she was standing in front of. His slow movements seemed overly practiced. His oversized suit, she became convinced, was neither borrowed nor stolen, but a deliberate choice to cover up more of him—extra folds of material to hide within. It seemed his ambition, frequently obstructed by people who clearly enjoyed his company, might be to remain unnoticed.
He continued moving until he almost reached her and then stood on the edge of her personal space, looking at the floor. They continued standing this way until Cora realized he had come all the way across the room for a cup of coffee or cider and was now too shy to look directly at her, say what he wanted, or come close enough to reach for it. The realization that she was effectively blockading an entire field of refreshments with her own slender presence gave her—as soon as she recognized it—a surprisingly pleasant sense of power.
“Oh,” she said, moving to her left, “excuse me.”
Grahm stepped forward and captured a Styrofoam cup of coffee with his rough-looking left hand. They stood together without speaking for several minutes, sipping from their drinks. Grahm noticed the perfume evaporating from Cora’s neck, and Cora discovered an interesting pattern of swirling thread in his jacket sleeve, next to the button.
Left alone, they could discover no conversation. But out of the crowd, fate provided two young boys chasing a third. The pursued—running pell-mell in the direction of the exit door—was more concerned with his pursuers than with what lay directly in his path and was busily engaged in knocking chairs to either side of him and scrambling around them.
It seemed inevitable that all three would rapidly collide with Cora, who put out her one free hand in a pallid imitation of stopping traffic and grimaced in anticipation of being driven onto the field of drinks in an undignified collision of overwhelmingly