Okay then, I thought.
After that, I watched Tameka like I was a loon, with a flat button eye that didn’t move, that saw everything across the lake and never blinked. Whenever she lifted her spoon to her mouth, I lifted mine too, and we both swallowed mushed-up rice down into our bellies. Later, when Tameka wanted to scratch her scab, I wanted to scratch mine too—until it bled down my leg and into my toenail cracks. And when the Parents started fighting at Meeting, waving their arms and holding their heads, Tameka and I decided at the same time to sneak out the back door and down into the cattails—that empire of green stalks—and when we came out on the other side we had to squint in the bright sun. We ran up the Big Rocks together, ripping up little swaths of moss with our calloused feet. We scrambled up the far bank to the Road, and walked all the way to the Highway by ourselves, collecting the good pinecones and leaving the stupid ones, carrying armloads, and—amazed at our newfound strength, our endurance—we kept right on going toward Town. We weren’t afraid of the trucks that blew past us.
Gnashing their terrible teeth, I thought.
Showing their terrible claws, Tameka thought.
One of those truck drivers slowed down as he passed, waving a long white arm from his rolled-down window. “Hey, watch it!” he called, but we waited until he was close enough to shoot with a rifle in the head, and we did—with our trigger fingers, bam—and screamed, “Be still!” We weren’t worried about him or his little white hand, waving, waving, waving at us from up high. We knew where we were going. We knew in a way we would not say to anyone, a way past explaining, a way like the pike or the loons—who dove beneath the surface at the exact same moment and appeared as tiny points on the far side of the lake. One, two. We blew kisses at the deer. We threw pinecones in the road.
We watched trucks swerve.
One of the big boys eventually showed up, yelling at us, coming down the road behind on his bike. We liked how his greasy black hair had blown back and made two funny bulges over his ears, like the beginnings of antlers. Tameka and I laughed. He stopped when he neared us. He had a face like he was chewing something he couldn’t get his lips around, and only later did I wonder what it must have been like to be fourteen in that crowd, all those shrieking little kids and whining hippie songs, and not an empty room anywhere, ever. There were always too many of us, too few beds and clean spoons, too few rolls of toilet paper.
What was his name? Did somebody send him after us?
What he didn’t like was little girls laughing. He was pissed off and he made that clear to us, yelling, “Are you two crazy? Get the hell out of the road!” Then he paused, calmed himself. With two hands, he smoothed his baby antlers, one after the other, and drew his hair into a stubby ponytail. Then, at last, he got his mouth to say the thing he was supposed to say: “You’re detracting from our overall positive experience.” He sighed.
“We’re lucky,” Tameka reminded him, tapping her own lucky forehead. Twice.
“You’re in deep dog doo,” he corrected.
The year I was twenty-six, I totaled my car. I was heading back to Duluth after my father’s funeral when I swerved around two deer and skidded into a stand of cedar. I bit open my lip on impact, but other than that I was fine. I was maybe two miles from my parents’ cabin, three and a half miles to Loose River, and I kept trying my cell phone—even though coverage was spotty there, and even though I was pretty sure my service had been cut because I’d failed to pay my bill on time. I kept opening my phone and saying, Please. A few cars drove by, and every time one did I ducked down. I didn’t want to have to go back to the cabin. I didn’t want to have to explain to my mother why I was still around, so when those two deer came creeping from the woods again, when I saw them drop their heads to nibble shrubs, I retrieved my backpack from the trunk and headed off down the road.
It was three when I started walking, long past dark by the time I hit the first gas station. I went in the opposite direction of Loose River, aiming for Bearfin, which was eleven miles north.