Night Soul and Other Stories

  It was late when they arrived. Late by the clock, by the sky, by the voices of the trees, many-timed too by the delicate, reassuring stink of one deciduous burr oak leaf the woman crumbles to release a scent reminiscent of the potato trees she walked among with her great-grandfather, a preacher/farmer/hunter/small businessman, just those values she has often brought up in her speeches, a man who she once but only once had stunned her handlers and biographers by saying he had brought her up. Strangely like her rival’s childhood, the thin man of many ideal origins, dreams, races (if there be such a thing as race, he has added late one night in a university dorm—himself a veteran of reverse outsourcings that brought him and his facets to our shores).

  “You,” she said, hearing a sound, a soft shoosh bird-sound and/or a syllable—“old”?—finding across the clearing before she knew it the figure in jeans and windbreaker and modest backpack. You was what she said, her voice unnaturally soft, in fact making no sound at all we think though he grasped her sense, the flaxen-haired woman as well-known to the man and the world as he now to the nation and to her stare across the clearing. “A piece of him,” he joked, and as often before, she strove to place his familiar and she hoped borderline inappropriate words. Though her dead reckoning of danger and opportunity at once in his unexpected presence fifty yards away was less clear than her suspicion why and how he’d come (for her, she thought). “I see you’re ready,” he said.

  Good speakers, each, yet now even her own long-leveled aim was the issue she had come here almost by chance to worry with a dearly missed emotion all but unnameable, for she now thought this duel with herself was why she had slipped away from her handlers incredibly, her wardrobe friend, constant updates, and from her public obligatory feats of agility—the great leap five or seven feet vertically up into the air, arms outstretched, at the beginning and at the end of the address; the enlarged eyes required of her but not her male opponent, whose notorious concentration was expected in midspeech to change the color of his eyes from brown to blue to green and back, as too he must inimitably lean—toward the whole world which had him in its hand (why not hers?—though sometimes hers); and required of him and her, embraces gauged instantly to each person old, young, gendered, health insured, needy, sometime foreign; conferring a Christian thought through the sinew and ingenuity and virtually exposed bone of certain bodily exercises the tradition of our country and these damned transcontinental contests demanded of its would-be leaders and the endless speaking engagements and her factual preparedness and tongue for prophecy: today a scant hundred thirty-five miles to the south and east to set off here almost unrecognized in an old experimentally environmental vehicle she had found in a driveway and piloted here.

  And so, while she heard herself say to this slender, tall, perhaps overeducated rival, “Do your people know?” (that is, that he was here—the overnight liability more his than hers)—he a person of color suddenly alone with her, equally famous now and able if not to read her mind, to guess her thoughts—to which his quick shake of the head, his wide, full lips pursed, worried her thoughts again of whether he, this brown man, her rival genetically she realized, had come from west or east, or even north, she thought—no law against it, no laws or rights anywhere except what you claimed, she privately knew. (And she had never had a ready read on compass bearings.)

  While she smelled what? The trees, some rot, some real matter, him even though not from this distance surely—how black exactly were we talking about, while he, thinking of her instincts and recalling the émigré Pole’s tale of water and canoes and initiation in which if you really read the words you saw that the sun had to be coming up in the west, saw to her left as did she at the same moment through a distant aisleing thinning of the trees a sudden distance of aerial space a jump-off from what must be a cliff edge beyond which through gathering twilight stood a horizon not of events this time but of a conflagration as beautiful as the end of the world, a sunset she would not have to share, whatever direction she was looking, the sun dying in the east or north or upside, where lay the lands of our neighbors from whom we had a few short weeks ago annexed this small but valuable pocket of wooded, fossil-rich land fifty by forty miles but more than its sum of two thousand square miles of land with its great water table not horizontal but vertical down and down like a flumey flue an add-on destiny for the nation when we put it to work, the northern rim of this new territory now our rim and border, already manned by a border patrol the equal of any this side of China.

  One trail to the clearing, it was said and therefore thought: so the man and the woman had arrived by their curious routes nonetheless of one same trail passing into and/or leaving the clearing, with in store for them a savage, never-documented animal in the woods, a stormy night, and a contrary denizen, a reputed man, an independent who came with the territory—but what did they first find? Embers of a campfire waiting in the light of the late late day, on the horizon below the cliff beyond which one heard the sound of still waters lifted by a wind itself the natural frontier our nation is about, final sunburst flooded by evening, while high above in the last light and airspace of our new territory an eagle circled for rodents, its white wing patches identified by the man—exclaiming softly before he’d seen the woman—as those of an “immature golden” (as American as we could have wished)—and then they, these two weary warriors, were surprised to see each other across the clearing appearing from out of nowhere, entering from the woods as we had planned—yet half a day ahead of us, as if they had known our plan and, if you will, stolen a march, in order to seize a solitary time, however brief, never imagining that the rival would arrive at the same moment, to say nothing of the same place.

  He from the west, though mysteriously not only west; she from the southeast as we had foreseen after a series of engagements, the toll of casualties growing by the day—the fading but brave little (yet not little) campfire like an end of the ongoing trail—though we had lost track of them for a day unthinkably and by the time we were able to observe them many hours later in dark of night they had evidently survived together and kept alive this earlier discovered and soon to be legendary fire they had found flameless but for two pinkly twined tongues of blue jetting like signals or souls, the campfire waiting for someone to slide the long tree limb along, burned black only at one end, yet now with brush and caches of already hewn hardwood logs both campers had gathered even alert to what had previously, in the last of the light of the sun that seemed to have died in the north, appeared to be an abandoned den deeper into the first and second growth evergreen dark and a small curving sound or song from those woods that they had after all not been asked into, as the man observed to the woman, who pursed her lips skeptically at his useless thought.

  No killer instinct, she had long since concluded.

  And too thin. To be a leader of substance. To win (she thought). Too thin to win, this man with whom she might spend the night now virtually upon them—a man should have a certain…a capacity to…A man? she caught her temper in mid-flush, a male man?—well, he should cast a certain shadow, whether white or not, whatever certain breakdowns of the electorate who, bless them, don’t believe in evolution in their heart of hearts really and truly or feel comfortable with, you know, we know, about him or bottom line like…Though “white,” she answered the critics of her honesty, meant not “white wash” but beige or in fact pink like her own husband somewhere across the country keeping the home fires burning tonight. In fact any everyday white blue-collar worker from any of our red-zone American towns with blue and yellow soccer uniforms and green soda pop can see through your words—in fact you’re too thin to lead, she read him almost to the t yet quite liked his thinness like some vanishing point where she could have seen her life if she believed it could be relived.

  But this man, knowing her strangely like some native who’d been here before her, this late-model backpack of his—she sensed him, smelled him—in another country she could almost like him, get accustomed to his
face, use him. A distance between them, as they talked for the first time as…as what? Vacationers, prize-winning campers, hopeless humorists, make-believe comrades, ill-equipped spouses by some arranged marriage improvising some mutual decision-making technique near physical—a closeness contracting through the time itself of this clearing they had accidentally gained as representatives of their nation. He spoke of the fossil beds here, he was asking if the white race talk meant really the fossil subject—was that what was coming up in her mind? The fossil record? With its proof not so much of Darwin’s bleak rightness as of Charles being himself a child of, even incarnation of, the intelligent designer.

  Smiling, perhaps somewhere in pain, she all but loved his vulnerable thought, this man. Yet now this opponent of hers, this man of color, he…he spread his arms to the trees, the sky, the nation, a mute speech all but sweeping away whatever truly had brought him here today. And her. With a new in-and-out, back-and-forth field of time whose very quality was to grasp a future.

  Lured here, they half-knew, like prosperous but tired but happy tourists who at a tipping point had heard of this place unspoiled, this territory recently annexed by our nation for its own good from our northern neighbor. It was to have been an unplanned get-together, a tryst set up by us to give them some quality time, a rest from months of strife, talk, partial truth, ignorant armies. When all the time we had this trail to follow if we would, as the intimation came to meet us in our dream that this new territory just annexed might offer a special campsite to resolve or retool or half silence all this talk. No roaring camp, no big two-hearted river (though who knew?). Waiting maybe for a three-day blow…these two chatting quietly.

  As God was their witness, their limbs loosened with the toilsome months along the trail, the campaign to turn the nation not just to words but with great leaps upward to health, wealth, sense.

  Knowing each other curiously, negotiating their situation politely, gathering wood, reconnoitering the clearing. Negotiating the next few, well, hours in an exchange almost jocose at times, argued like two lawyers in cahoots across the hard ground. Though feeling each other out not undarkly, nonetheless, the still green branches of blow-down she found herself gathering into a pile upon which to place she knew not what cloth or fur to pillow the spirit from the night of trees, of animal life that would contemptibly dare to take advantage of her—attempted rape by the unknown that did not know it was already known by her even as also we are known as scripture will say in even such a place as this.

  Did silence fall between them? He found his matches, she a personal flashlight in her bag; she complaining that the administration seemed unconscionably undecided whether to call this new region a territory or a district; he that a one hundred and some foot Coast Guard cutter had just been flown in—yes, she had heard that too—to close that part of the new northern border that was a huge kidney-shaped lake known for fifty-pound walleyes; she, that among multiple other things, it reminded her of a dangerous and ravaged part of Africa she had visited; he, that there were thirteen ways of looking at the lake—a charming word from him, an echo somehow for her, as he approached her now, and she said a storm was coming up and maybe they’d be among the first to help the survivors; he, that the weather coming here might well be artificially precipitated by the Administration. And just like that they sat down, they were sitting shoulder to shoulder, grounded, she remembering she’d wanted a vacation in Michigan for some reason, demographics, waterscape, no reason, and then they heard their stomachs growl, it reminded her of her husband…Yet it was the woods, wasn’t it? And they were up in a second standing back to back, buttock to buttock, for they were hearing more than their inner selves, but what?

  We know they were in the woods soon afterward, where lingering music of late sunset layering its touch among the trees led beautifully beyond a huge hemlock to a bouldered den and a shock it held in store. Here the man, the woman a few yards behind him, had surprised an animal he had never seen, fangs tearing at the yellow-pink hams and inner thigh of a fawn caught in a trap like those sold in our country to tourists. About to come at him, gory teeth like eyes, this dark, bushy-coated, heavy-clawed wolverine-like creature (unlike what we’re familiar with along the northern borders of our nation)—longer-tailed yet almost bearlike, its claws disproportionately heavy for its body—turned back to feed a moment—yet that proved almost a ruse or a stark evolutionary vagary of the creature poised to spring. Yet as, suddenly, the man, always game himself, dodged its strike, and dodged again—and would have grappled fatally with it in a moment, had there not flashed into his hand a blade seemingly too long for the compact switch-blade unit housing it, a blade unfolding somehow out of lengths of itself—a shot now exploded from behind him in an instant smashing the wolverine’s head to blood, the animal already incredibly by two strokes of the man’s knife disemboweled.

  The stuff of legends that moment when, seeing this angry glutton indigenous to our northern neighbor about to rake her rival’s arm shoulder neck rib groin, the woman had drawn from a side pocket of her tailored camouflage fatigues a pistol she liked the feel of, the heft, the history of freedoms in, though had never fired: a souvenir slipped her somehow in public by a forestry-and-marketing professor at a truck stop where she’d gone formica to formica, hand to hand, at midnight—liked her—as a woman—and admired her animal eye-color change from hazel to blue to green, one of her recent feats a feature of her no-holds-barred campaign answering her opponent’s own iris-pigment menu, still more his simultaneous look left and right embracing a range of people and what is in them.

  How could the man have skinned and butchered and cooked their prey and left quality time before they settled down for the night? We may never know. “Veni, vidi, vici,” he mutters at his work. “I could taste him,” the woman said standing by as the man peeled away in a mess of harsh hair and fur a section of hide and flesh warm with then intestine that fell crawling around his wrist and as he reached the blade to grope for rib between rib and said, drily, “It’s a sow” (wondering if that was the right wolverine word for a female, if this thang was a wolverine), in the corner of his eye he saw the partly eaten fawn move, the dead wolverine’s prey, for the act of inhaling had slid its eye to one side, and its breath-out then was its last—and the woman, “An inch or two to the left and it would have been your head,” and he, “It was what it was,” and she (for the fawn did breathe once more), “Thanks, are we gonna eat the baby too?” yet he (meaning the pistol), “How did your handlers let you…where did you…?”

  —as time, whose quality or qualities once upon a library table he had found for himself with science, philosophy, and international law all working together in his thesis—what was it?—extended audaciously our own look back into where we are, Time’s aspiration imagining we grasp what grasps us and our institutions. His knife does its work. “Getting some experience,” she murmurs, needing to defend herself now against who could quite say what. Experience is also the lack of it, experience is experience, he thinks, and cuts himself almost unnoticeably in the thick of his work, and what will happen next, he asks, eating and sleeping and in the sky and tomorrow? A boy’s thought, she replies. The lost sun speaks dark wind now. Well experience comes from you not just to you, he said. She gasps. “There you go again,” she cried suddenly and he looked over his shoulder to see her pocket’s cargo where it belonged, but it was the wind she had cried out upon, from the cliff, the cold grace that knows us in the sky, she recalled someone thinking. “Well I hope you can cook,” she said like a mind reading what a girlfriend—was it in college?—had said to a guy when he had done something…what was it?

  Home again, the fire rises to the occasion, it is not angry at the meat, the lean, the gristle. The storm somewhere near the clearing but not here, the flames gnaw at the night. She has found a thinly surfacing spring running past a corner of their camp and brought him to wash his wound, water in a dented beer can left in the fire with other plausible litter provided by our
advance team that traveled this trail of our future leaders, which was reopened after a racist sniper from our northern neighbor or a separatist, or both, shot two hikers a fortnight ago evidently tragically just as they turned, hand in hand, to look each other in the eye outdoors.

  Yes, I can cook, he says. They exchange a look. Is the river its water or the banks that shape it, she thinks out loud, and she knows he is listening with those big ears of his and she doesn’t mind, for, in a gust of smoke coughing, he jokes, “Is that your Christian energy plan? You’re sounding like me.” “Can’t stand the smoke get out of the kitchen,” she says, time elapsing how, when—for she is like a woman who has agreed to spend the night with a man she hardly knows.

  They were the land’s, the land vaguely realizing northward toward water. Something we were withholding from our land of the living. It comes out of nowhere but months of talk, what he says now, but out of nowhere still: they have no right to ask if and where and why you go to church, temple, or—it’s unconstitutional, he says to the fire. She pricks up her ears, some woods person’s instinct, something Out There, while with one part of her mind replies out loud, “Unconstitutional, eh?”—for in her heart of hearts she knows those founding fathers would have been astonished to find God in the three-person of our checks and balances laboring openly in our vineyards loving every minute of it.