The Marsh King's Daughter(49)
He took Rambo so I’d have no choice but to follow. Again, he’s done this before. Back when I was around nine or ten and had gotten very good at tracking, my father came up with a way to make the game more challenging by raising the stakes. If I found him before the allotted time was up, usually before the sun went down but not always, I got to shoot him. If I didn’t, my father would take away something that was important to me: my collection of cattail spikes, my spare shirt, the third set of bow and arrows I made from willow saplings that actually worked. The last three times we played—not coincidentally, the last three times I won—we played for my fawnskin mittens, my knife, and my dog.
I go around to check the other side of the truck. Both tires on the passenger side are also flat. Two sets of prints angle away from the truck across the road and into the trees, man and dog. The prints are so easy to see, they may as well have been painted in neon colors and given direction arrows. If a person were to look down from above and draw a line through the prints from where I’m standing to extrapolate where the man and the dog are traveling, the line would end at my house.
Which means we’re not playing for my dog. We’re playing for my family.
18
THE CABIN
It was sometimes as if Helga acted from sheer wickedness; for often when her mother stood on the threshold of the door, or stepped into the yard, she would seat herself on the brink of the well, wave her arms and legs in the air, and suddenly fall right in.
Here she was able, from her frog nature, to dip and dive about in the water of the deep well, until at last she would climb forth like a cat, and come back into the hall dripping with water, so that the green leaves that were strewed on the floor were whirled round, and carried away by the streams that flowed from her.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
For weeks after my father took me to see the falls, I couldn’t stop thinking about that family. The way the children ran up and down the stairs. How their parents stood with their arms around each other and smiled as the boy and the girl threw snowballs and wrestled and laughed. I didn’t know for sure if they were a boy and a girl because they were wearing scarves and hats and coats, so in my mind I made them one of each. I named the boy Cousteau because he wore a red hat like Jacques-Yves Cousteau did in the National Geographic pictures, and I named his sister Calypso after Cousteau’s ship. Before I discovered the article about Cousteau, Erik the Red and his son Leif Eriksson were my favorite explorers. But they only sailed on top of the water, while Cousteau explored what was beneath. Whenever I tried to tell my father about Cousteau’s discoveries, my father said the gods were going to punish Cousteau one day because he dared to go to a part of the Earth that man was never meant to see. I couldn’t see why the gods would care. I would have liked to have known what was at the bottom of our marsh.
Cousteau, Calypso, and I did everything together. I made them older than the children on the platform so they would be better company for me and so they could help me with my chores. Sometimes I made up stories: “Cousteau and Calypso and Helena Swim in the Beaver Pond.” “Cousteau and Calypso Go Ice Fishing with Helena.” “Cousteau and Calypso Help Helena Catch a Snapping Turtle.” I couldn’t write the stories down because we didn’t have pencils or paper, so I repeated the best ones over and over in my head so I wouldn’t forget. I knew the real Cousteau and Calypso lived with their mother and father in a house with a kitchen like the ones in the Geographics. I could have made up stories that happened there: “Cousteau and Calypso and Helena Eat Jiffy Pop Popcorn While They Watch Television on Their Brand-New RCA Color Television Set,” but it was easier to bring them into my world than it was to picture myself in theirs.
My mother called Cousteau and Calypso my imaginary friends. She wondered why I didn’t play with the doll she made for me the way I played with them. But it was too late for that even if I’d wanted to, which I did not. The doll still hung from the handcuffs in the woodshed, but there wasn’t much left. Mice had made off with most of the stuffing and the sleeper was shot full of arrow holes.
My father never said one word about that family—not on the way home from the falls, and not in the weeks that followed. At first his silence bothered me. I had many questions. Where did the family come from? How did they get to the falls? Did they drive a car, or did they walk? If they walked, they must have lived close by because the children were too small to hike very far and they weren’t wearing snowshoes. What were the children’s names—not the ones I gave them, but their real names? How old were they? What did they like to eat? Did they go to school? Did they have a television set? And did they see my father and me watching from the other side of the falls? Were they now wondering the same things about me?
I would have liked to have known at least some of the answers. I thought about packing the rucksack with enough supplies for two or three days and heading for the tree line while the marsh was frozen to see if I could find their house. Or if I couldn’t find that family, perhaps I would find another that was just as interesting. I had always known the world was full of people. Now I knew that some of them were not so very far away.
One thing was certain: I couldn’t stay in the marsh forever. It wasn’t only that we were running out of things. My father was much older than my mother. One day, he would die. My mother and I could manage by ourselves as long as we had bullets for the rifle, but one day, my mother would die, too, and then what would I do? I didn’t want to live in the marsh by myself. I wanted to take a mate. There was a boy in the article about the Yanomami who looked good to me. He wore a dead monkey around his shoulders like a cape and nothing else. I knew he lived in another part of the world and we would likely never meet. But there had to be other boys like him who lived closer who I could pair up with. I thought if I could find one, I could bring him back to the marsh with me and make my own family. A boy and a girl would be nice.