The Removed(25)

“Where did you get this?”

“I found it near the river,” he lied. “I want you to eat it, please. Taste it and tell me what you’re feeling. It’s good corn. I ate it myself.”

She pulled off some kernels and tossed them to the ground. After a moment a small bird, a sparrow, flew down and hopped over to it and ate it. The sparrow immediately began convulsing and making noises. “This is poison,” she said. She stood and went over to the sparrow, which was still shaking. The bird fluttered and shook, trying to fly away.

“You killed that bird, and it would’ve poisoned me,” she told the young man.

He was horrified by what had happened. “No, no,” he told her. “I didn’t know.”

“You told me you ate it, so you lied to me, too.”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I gave it to you because I thought it would make you like me.”

But she walked away. He called after her, but she didn’t respond.

Now furious, the young man returned to the cave and called for Laoka: “Yo ho, Laoka! Yo ho, yo ho, Laoka! Come out so I can kill you . . .”

He entered the cave, but it was empty. He searched and searched for him, but he wasn’t there.

He sat outside and waited. For days he sat there, starving himself, freezing in the cold, but Laoka never returned. The young man knew he was out in the world somewhere, but he held his anger inside himself so fiercely that he slowly died out there. While he waited, he heard the hissing of Laoka, but never found him. He heard the shrieks of animals in the woods. He saw black vultures in the moonlit sky.

*

My son, I had to earn trust of your mother by showing I was trustworthy. I did not lie or betray her. Anger and vengeance were not uncommon in our family. They are dangerous, as you can see from the story of Laoka. We must warn our family about their dangers.

Your mother and I married, and soon you were born. We lived peacefully among our people on our land. But soon, too soon, I began having visions of the coming soldiers.





Edgar


SEPTEMBER 3

MY DAD USED TO SAY the ringing in my ears was a sign the dead were trying to contact me. “Your ancestors,” he said. “Listen for them. Pay attention to things around you.” At Jackson’s that first night, the constant ringing made it difficult to sleep. I remembered how Rae used to stay up late with me and talk whenever I couldn’t sleep. She would turn on the lamp, sit up in bed, and we would talk about anything. I listened again to the voice mail my mother had left, reminding me of Ray-Ray’s anniversary.

In the morning I woke to a noise outside, which I hoped was a cat or raccoon rummaging around and not the red fowl. My room was still dim despite it being morning. The room had a bluish tint. I heard the wind blowing, and from the window I could see the branches moving. I thought of Rae lying next to me. I thought of my dad’s confusion, walking around the house, forgetting where he put things. I thought of the look on my mother’s face while she watched him struggle.

I lay in bed awake for several minutes before I finally got up. In the kitchen, Jackson was clanging dishes around in the sink. He wiped his hands on a dish towel and took a drink of his coffee.

“You should go back to bed,” he said. “Sleep while you can. I’m hoping to talk to someone today about getting you involved in the software development and new avatars, now that you’re here. If you leave and run into anyone, say your name is Jim, as in Jim Thorpe. You look like him anyway. You don’t want people harassing you.”

“What the hell?”

“The name Edgar is a loaded name. There was an Edgar in town who went on a killing spree a few years ago, and it’s still touchy. Everyone knew the guy as Edgar, plain old Edgar. He took an assault rifle and shot a bunch of people at the park on the south side. Everyone was saying Edgar this, Edgar that. He was the only Edgar in this town. So you should go by Jim for a while.”

I rubbed my hands over my face.

“It’s a strange place,” he said. “People might give you weird looks. Best to just ignore them. You need to trust me.”

I got a coffee mug from the cabinet, and Jackson poured me a cup. “I better get to work,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here, Edgar. I’m going to talk to my work team about bringing you on board for the game development, but for now feel free to walk around town and explore. There’s a coffee shop down the street. There’s a liquor store. Everything will be fine.”

After he left, I drank my coffee, went to lie down on the couch. I put my arm over my face and lay there, thinking about the Darkening Land, where I was, and trying to remember why I decided to come here in the first place, so far away from my family. I sat up and looked around Jackson’s rotting house. While Jackson was at work, I made a piece of dry toast and ate it standing up, looking out the window. I sat in the rickety wooden chair and watched TV for a while, read part of a book from his shelf on Eastern religion. I found strange old books, one on the occult, another on General Custer. I flipped through a book on Baron Jeffrey Amherst and Pontiac’s War, with a photo of dead men. The book felt dirty in my hands, so I headed out for a walk.

The air was hard to breathe, full of smog. All around, the land was full of dumpy houses, old buildings, small shops. Dead leaves trembled as I walked past them. I stopped at trees and examined the cracked faces in them, wondering whose faces they were. One street I came to was lined with pink weeping trees, which I found somewhat attractive in such a dark place, so I followed that road. I walked past a laundromat. A few steps ahead of me was a woman wearing a long coat and house shoes, annoyed that I was walking behind her. She stopped and waited for me to pass, muttering to herself. Behind the laundromat were three dumpsters with graffiti spray-painted on them: SAVAGES. All the buildings were falling apart, abandoned video rental stores, restaurants, auto parts stores. I saw a man with no legs begging in the street, shouting “Beware Devil’s Bridge!” I saw another man pushing a boy in a wheelbarrow along the side of the road. The boy was pointing a toy gun at everything he saw. “POW!” he yelled, pointing the water gun at me as they wheeled past. “POW WOW!”