Pilgrims Read online

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  25

  p i l g r i m s

  for his own music,” Audrey went on. “Have you ever lived in

  a city?”

  “No,” Jean said.

  “Well.” Audrey rolled her eyes. “Let me tell you, there’s a

  limit, an absolute limit, to what you can endure there. Just three

  months ago, I was getting ready to go out on some errands and

  I suddenly realized I’d taken all my credit cards out of my purse

  so that, if I was mugged, I wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of

  replacing them. Without even thinking, I’d done this, as if it

  was perfectly normal to live that way. And that night I told

  L.D., ‘We’re leaving; we have got to get out of this crazy city.’

  Of course, he was more than happy to comply.”

  Jean looked over to Benny, who had been standing quietly

  through all this, listening. She’d forgotten for a moment that he

  was there, and she felt the same quick guilt that came when,

  during dinner, she’d glance around the table and be surprised to

  see Benny eating with them, sitting between Ed and herself.

  “Well.” Jean pushed her glasses back farther on her nose.

  “We’ve got to get going.”

  “Listen,” L.D. said, and he took a flat black disk from his

  pocket. He slid it into his mouth and made the full screech of an

  elk bugle ring through the small, heavily insulated living room

  of Jean’s cabin. She saw Benny jump at the suddenness of the

  sound. L.D. took the disk out of his mouth and smiled.

  “Oh, honey.” Audrey winced. “That’s so loud inside. You

  really shouldn’t bugle in people’s homes. Don’t be scared,” she

  told Benny. “It’s just his elk talker.”

  Jean had heard one before. A friend of Ed’s was a hunting

  guide who used one to call in bull elk. He’d demonstrated it for

  Jean once, and she’d laughed at how fake it had sounded. “You

  might as well stand in a clearing and call, ‘Here elky, elky, elky,’”

  she’d said. L.D. had the same device, but his sound was full and

  alarmingly real.

  Benny grinned at Jean. “Did you hear that?”

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  Elk Talk

  She nodded. “You do know that you can only hunt elk in

  season and with a license, don’t you?” she asked L.D.

  “We don’t want to hunt them,” Audrey said. “We just want to

  talk to them.”

  “Did it sound real to you?” L.D. asked. “I’ve been practicing.”

  “How’d you do that?” Benny asked. L.D. handed him the

  disk.

  “They call this a diaphragm,” L.D. explained, as Benny

  turned the object over in his hand and held it up to the light.

  “It’s made of rubber, and you put it in the back of your mouth

  and blow air through it. It’s not easy, and you have to be careful

  or you’ll swallow it. There’s different sizes for different sounds.

  This one is a mature bull, a mating call.”

  “Can I try it?”

  “No,” Jean said. “Don’t put that in your mouth. It doesn’t

  belong to you.”

  Benny reluctantly handed it back to L.D., who said, “Get

  your dad to buy you one of your own.”

  Jean cringed at the reference, but Benny only nodded, con-

  sidering the suggestion. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.”

  Jean took her coat off the hook by the door and put it on.

  “Come on, Ben,” she said. “Time to go.”

  L.D. lifted Sophia from where she’d been sitting on his boots.

  One of her antlers had slipped from its masking-tape base and

  hung like a braid down her back.

  “Doesn’t she look precious?” Audrey asked.

  Jean opened the door and held it so the Donaldsons could file

  out onto the porch. Benny followed behind them, small, antler-

  less. She turned the lights off and left, closing the door. She

  pulled a skeleton key from the bottom of her pocketbook, and,

  for the first time since she’d lived in the cabin, locked up.

  It was a clear night, with a nearly full moon. There had been

  no snow yet, none that had lasted, but Jean suspected from the

  sharp smell of the cold air that there might be some by the next

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  day. She remembered reading that bears wait until the first

  drifting snowfall to hibernate so that the tracks to their winter

  dens will be covered immediately. It was getting late in the year,

  she thought, and the local bears must be getting tired of waiting

  around for proper snow.

  The Donaldsons were standing on the porch, looking past

  Jean’s small back yard to the edge of the woods.

  “Last summer I got the elk to answer,” L.D. said. “That was a

  wild experience, communicating like that.”

  He slid the diaphragm into his mouth and called again,

  louder than he had in the cabin, a more powerful sound, Jean

  thought, than a human had a right to make around there, and

  disturbingly realistic.

  Then there was silence, and they all stared across the yard, as

  if expecting the trees themselves to answer. Jean had forgotten

  her gloves. Her hands were cold, and she was anxious to get to

  the car, and warmth. She reached forward and touched Benny’s

  shoulder.

  “Let’s go, honey,” she said, but he laid his hand over hers in a

  surprisingly adult manner and whispered, “Wait,” and then,

  “Listen.”

  She heard nothing. L.D. had set Sophia down, and now the

  whole family stood on the edge of the porch, their antlers

  outlined against the night sky. They’d best not make their cos-

  tumes too authentic, Jean thought, or they’d get themselves

  shot. She pushed her fists down into the pockets of her coat and

  shivered.

  After some time, L.D. repeated the call, a long high squeal,

  followed by several grunts. They all listened in the ensuing

  quiet, leaning forward slightly, heads tilted, as if they were

  afraid the answer might be faint enough to miss, although it was

  unnecessary to listen so carefully: if a bull elk was going to bugle

  back, they wouldn’t have to strain to hear it.

  28 ✦

  Elk Talk

  L.D. sounded the call again, and immediately once more, and

  as the last grunt vanished into silence, Jean heard it. She heard

  it first. By the time the others tensed in realization, she’d already been thinking that it must be a bear making all that noise in the

  underbrush. And then she’d guessed what it was, just before the

  elk broke out of the woods. The ground was hard with cold, and

  his hooves beat in a light fast rhythm as he circled. He stopped

  in the black frozen soil of Jean’s garden.

  “Oh my God,” she said under her breath, and quickly

  counted the points of his antlers, which spread in dark silhou-

  ette, blending with the branches and forms of the trees behind

  him. He had approached them fast and without warning, mak-

  ing himself fully visible to confront or to be confronted. Clearly,

  this elk did not want to talk to the Donaldsons. He wanted to

  know who was in his territory, c
alling for a mate. And now he

  stood, exposed, looking right at them. But the cabin was dark

  and shaded by the porch roof, so there was no way the elk could

  have picked out their figures. There was no breeze to carry a

  scent either, so he stared blindly at the precise spot from where

  the challenge had come.

  Jean saw Sophia reach her hand up slowly and touch her

  father’s leg, but, aside from that, there was no movement. Af-

  ter a moment, the elk stepped slowly to his left. He stopped,

  paused, returned to where he’d been standing, and stepped a few

  feet to his right. He showed both his sides in the process,

  keeping himself in full view, his gaze fixed on the porch. He did

  not toss his head as a horse might, nor did he strike a more

  aggressive, intimidating stance. Again he paced, to one side and

  to the other, slowly, deliberately.

  Jean saw L.D. raise his hand to his mouth and adjust the dia-

  phragm. She leaned forward and placed her hand on his fore-

  arm. He turned to look at her, and she mouthed the word no.

  He frowned and turned away. She saw him begin to inhale,

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  and she tightened her hold on his arm and said, so softly that

  someone standing even three feet away would not have heard

  her, “Don’t.”

  L.D. slipped the diaphragm out of his mouth. Jean relaxed.

  Out of the woods came two females, one fully mature, the other

  a lean yearling. They looked first at the male, then at the cabin,

  and slowly, almost self-consciously, walked the length of the

  yard to the garden. All three elk stood together for some time in

  what Jean felt was the most penetrating silence she had ever

  experienced. Under their sightless gaze, she felt as if she were

  involved in a séance that had been held in jest but had acciden-

  tally summoned a real ghost.

  Eventually, the elk began their retreat. The older two ap-

  peared decisive, but the yearling twice looked back at the cabin,

  two long looks that Jean had no way of reading. The elk stepped

  into the woods and were immediately out of view. On the

  porch, no one moved until Sophia said very quietly, “Daddy.”

  Audrey turned and smiled at Jean, shaking her head slowly.

  “Have you ever,” she asked, “in your entire life felt so incredibly

  privileged?”

  Jean did not answer but took Benny by the hand and led him

  briskly to the car. She didn’t look at the Donaldsons standing at

  the threshold of her home, not even as she waited for some time

  in the driveway for the engine to warm up.

  “Did you see that?” Benny asked, his voice tight with wonder,

  but Jean did not answer him either.

  She drove with only the low beams of her headlights on,

  recklessly, veering to the other side of the road, heedless of the

  possibility of oncoming traffic or other obstacles. She drove the

  road faster than she ever had before, venting a fury that took her

  four dangerous miles to isolate, and she did not begin to slow

  down until she realized that not only had she been manipulated,

  but she had been a participant in a manipulation. They had no

  right, she thought over and over, they had no right to do such a

  30 ✦

  Elk Talk

  thing simply because they could. She remembered, then, that

  Benny was still with her, beside her, that he was entirely her

  responsibility, and she eased her car into control again.

  She wished, briefly, that her husband was with her, a thought

  she immediately dismissed on the grounds that there were al-

  ready far too many people around.

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  31

  Alice to the East

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  The drive from Roy’s house to the center of Verona was

  twenty minutes through sunflower fields that stretched

  out on either side, flat and constant as a Midwestern ac-

  cent. It was a good highway, well-paved and broken by nothing

  but the horizon and the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad.

  When Roy’s daughter Emma was young, he had taught her

  how to ride a bicycle on the yellow line that divided those who

  were going east from those headed west. It was safe enough;

  there was less traffic then, and the few cars that did pass could

  be seen coming from miles away. There was always plenty of

  time to make a decision, to move over, to be prepared.

  About ten miles out of town the grain elevator could be seen,

  standing with all the arrogance one would expect from the only

  structure in the area over two stories tall. Roy had just passed

  that point when he noticed an unfamiliar object ahead which

  became, as he drove closer, a truck, a white truck, pulled off the

  road, hazards flashing. He slowed down, read the Montana

  license plate, and then eased his car so deliberately to a stop

  behind the pickup that it appeared as if he’d parked there every

  day of his life.

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  Roy stepped out of his car and walked a few feet before he

  saw them in the ditch. He stopped, and slowly reached out his

  hand until he was touching the hood over his warm, ticking

  engine. There were two of them, teenagers. The girl was stand-

  ing. The boy knelt at her feet, slicing one leg of her jeans open

  at mid-thigh with a jackknife. Roy was startled and then em-

  barrassed by the strange intimacy of the scene: the girl standing

  with her legs slightly spread, hands on her hips, the boy on his

  knees, the unexpected flash of the knife, the gradual revealing of

  more skin as a pair of jeans became shorts.

  After a moment, the girl turned and looked at Roy with

  vague interest. Her hair, short and dark, was pressed damply

  against her head, as if she had just taken off a baseball hat. She

  wore a man’s white undershirt, a pair of sunglasses clinging to

  its V neck with one arm.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “I saw you were pulled over,” Roy said. “I thought you might

  need a hand.”

  She gestured at the truck. “Yeah. It just quit on us all of a

  sudden.”

  “Fuel pump,” the boy added. “Busted.”

  “Want me to take a look at it?”

  The girl shrugged. “Just a sec,” she said.

  Roy waited while the boy cut through the last heavy inseam

  and the girl stepped out of the tube, with its hemmed bottom

  and frayed top. One leg bare, the other in long jeans, she walked

  to the pickup, opened the door, and released the hood. Roy

  came around to the front of the truck, noticing the dead but-

  terflies and grasshoppers flattened against the radiator grill. He

  and the girl looked at the dusty engine block, and she pointed

  one thin hand through the network of tubes and hoses and said,

  “Pete thinks it’s this that’s broken. The fuel pump.”

  “If it is, you’ll need a new one,” Roy said.

  34 ✦

  Alice to the East

  “That’s what Pete thinks, too.”

&nbs
p; “What is this, a three-fifty?”

  “It’s a Chevy,” she answered.

  “I mean the engine. What is it?”

  “Three-fifty,” the boy called from around the truck.

  “I figured we’d have problems and everything,” the girl said,

  “but damn. I thought we’d at least get through North Dakota.”

  “You’re from Montana?”

  “Yeah. Right across the border. Are you from here?”

  “Yes,” Roy answered. “I live just outside Verona.” He thought

  it strange that he said this the way other people said they lived

  just outside Chicago or ten minutes from Manhattan. Like it

  meant something. There wasn’t much inside Verona, and there

  was nothing just outside it, except sunflower fields and Roy’s

  house.

  “We haven’t been on the road two days and now . . .” She left

  the thought unfinished and smiled at Roy. “I’m Alice,” she said.

  With the s sound, the tip of her tongue made a brief appearance between her teeth and then vanished.

  “I’m Roy. I know someone in Verona who might have the

  part you need. I can give you a ride. If you want.”

  “Let me ask Pete. My brother.”

  She walked back to the ditch, and Roy stood at the corner of

  the truck, watching. He didn’t believe they were related. Some-

  thing about the way she said “my brother” after Pete’s name.

  Something about the emphasis, the hesitation.

  Pete had been lying on his back in the dead grass, and at

  Alice’s approach he sat up, wiped his forehead with the inside of

  his arm, and complained that it was hot.

  “Finish making my shorts and he’ll give us a ride into town,”

  Alice said. “He told me some guy might have the part.”

  Pete took the jackknife from his pocket, opened it, and be-

  gan to cut into what remained of Alice’s jeans. Roy watched

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  her stand there, still and relaxed, eyes forward. He saw that

  Pete, while bending his head in close concentration, did not

  touch Alice at all, not even brushing a knuckle against her

  skin. Only the frayed ends of her shorts grazed her thighs, and

  Roy found himself staring. He looked down at his own pants,

  studying the symmetrical cuffs that rested on the laces of his

  thick shoes.

  When Pete finished, Alice stepped out of the second denim

  tube as she had the first, picked them both up, and draped them

  over her arm, like guest towels on a rack.