Whisper (4 page)

We gathered on the logs around the fire, the baby calm and still, Eva's head resting on Jeremia's knee, Jeremia's eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, his face smudged with dirt from the trip. He was always so happy when he returned that I wondered why he did it, why he tortured himself by watching a bruised world he couldn't heal.

There were others from our camp who had never returned. Rosa, my roommate, camp sister and mentor, left when she was fourteen and never came back. Jeremia's mentor, Telise, never returned either. Every time Jeremia disappeared, Eva fidgeted, worried and slept in the hut with me. She was always sure Jeremia wouldn't come back.

“It's worse now,” Jeremia said. “Many, many of us.”

Ranita's eyelids began to close. Her tiny hands relaxed and she breathed softly through her open mouth. I lifted her from my legs and held her beneath my nose, breathing her in, sweet and fresh.

“Tell us,” Nathanael said. He leaned forward in the camping chair, his knobby hands on his knees. He looked into the fire.

“It was the same as before. I came through the oaks, through the stunted bushes, over the reeking creek to the place with roads. I followed the road back to the mountains, to the city, until I came to the hill of rocks and slept there, watching travelers on the road, coming and going.”

We'd heard this part of the story before. Jeremia often found a cave or a rock overhang for shelter and watched from his safe perch. Other people lived in these rocks, many like us, he said, and they sometimes lived together in camps like ours, where they shared a fire, food, company. But he also said they sometimes stole from each other or rolled among the rocks kicking and hitting or attacking the weakest.

This time he had slept near a camp with four boys in it, beside a train track, over which trains roared every few hours. Two of the boys looked a bit like me, he said, with openings in their faces that shouldn't have been there, but the other two boys were different. One had no arms or legs and had to be carried from place to place. The other had no nose or ears, only openings where the cartilage should have been. I tried to imagine this, having a face with no nose. Even though my face is open in odd places, I have cartilage. I wondered if he could smell—what life would be like if you never knew the aroma of honeysuckle in the spring.

“They were a tribe,” Jeremia said. “They'd built a platform on wheels for the boy, a rolling platform with a strap that held him in place. In the morning, they rolled to the city, and they came back at dusk, when the sweeping lights search the sky. They would have food, money, bottles of drink. They sat around their fire and talked to each other, their voices growing louder and louder as the moon moved across the sky, until one boy became very sick and the other three fell asleep. They did not hear the other tribe coming.”

I held Ranita tightly against my chest and listened to her breathing. Jeremia had stopped speaking, his hand curled into a fist. A pulse appeared in his left cheek, as though his jaw was clamped so tight it begged for release.

“The other tribe was normal, without blemish, like Nathanael.”

We all looked at Nathanael as though we had forgotten his face. He had little hair now—a few thin strands that grew against the sides of his head—and his face had grooves in it like a walnut shell, but he did not have extra openings in his face where water sometimes trickled out, he did not have webbed feet like the ducks, and he was not missing an arm.

“While the first tribe slept, the other tribe took everything. They took the food, the money, the drinks. They took the radio and headphones, they took the rolling platform for the boy with no legs, they took the plastic covering that sheltered the first tribe from the rain. And then they woke up the first tribe.”

Eva covered her eyes with her hands. Jeremia watched Nathanael now, the muscles in his arm tensed. Jeremia looked like an adult with his black eyes, the fire dancing shadows across his face. He was almost eighteen, much older than the other rejects had been when they left, but he still returned. I hoped it was because of me.

“Why are they like that, Nathanael?” Jeremia said.

I thought Nathanael had not heard. He didn't move or blink. He stared into the fire while I listened to the sounds of the wolf on the hill, the crickets in the grasses, the bats in the sky. Slowly he turned his head. His eyes were old, creased below, above, to the sides.

“People are cruel,” Nathanael said. “Here we are unnoticed, isolated, maybe even a bit lonely, but it is better to be unnoticed than to be in civilization where cruelty will find you.”

Jeremia nodded as though he understood Nathanael's comments.

“It found that first tribe, cruelty. Those other boys used boards, they used rocks. I heard the first tribe screaming, running, trying to get away to hide in the hills or between the boulders. I'd never heard screams like that, so terrified, like animals in pain. I thought of the screaming rabbit that woke us one night with its head caught beneath the root. These boys screamed like that, like death would be welcome.”

I remembered the scream of the rabbit. I'd been about eight, still living in the hut with Rosa, and the scream cut through our dreams and woke us. She'd held me that time, held me close, covering my ears, adding her own screams to that of the rabbit until Nathanael had freed the creature and it had run, unhurt, into the trees. We'd slept together then, her arm around me, her body warm and protecting. The night of the screaming rabbit is my best memory of Rosa.

“They got away, the two who looked like Whisper, and the one without ears. The fourth rolled on the ground, twisted below their legs while they laughed and hit him with the board. He begged once, prayed that they would stop, but after they laughed and spit on him, he was silent. He waited for the board to come down again. I couldn't watch anymore, so I ran at the cruel boy whose back was to me. I knocked him to the ground, grabbed the board from his hand and stood over the armless boy on the ground. There were three surrounding us, three whose bodies appeared perfect, but they backed away when their friend did not rise. I snarled, and they ran.”

I wasn't breathing. I held Ranita tightly against my chest and thought of violent boys chasing me through the night. I thought of how my heart would have pounded, how I would have run like a puma, fear chasing me. I would never go to the city.

“I dragged the boy into the space between the rocks, went down the hill and filled a bottle with water from the creek. The water had a film over the top like the skin of dead leaves after winter, and he drank from the water. He drank for two days, but he could not speak. He never told me his name, and the wound on his head would not stop bleeding even when I pressed a cloth against it. On the third day, he died. I covered the opening with rocks and walked through the forest, the wolf howling on the hill. I never saw his tribe again—they never returned to look for him.

“And then I went to see my family.” Jeremia was silent for a moment, his hand skillfully flipping a knife between his fingers. He had been working on a large maple sculpture, and in it I could see leaves from the trees, falling, falling, never touching the ground. We were Jeremia's family.

“I watched my brother, my oldest one, Calen. He hunted the wolf.”

Jeremia's wolf followed him everywhere, but always at a distance. Jeremia had never smoothed the coarse fur of the wolf's mane and the wolf had never brushed his rough tongue along Jeremia's hand, and yet they watched each other, predicted each other's moods, followed in each other's footsteps.

Calen couldn't catch the wolf, of course. He followed it up into the hills, tracked the footprints in the soft mud of the creek bank, but he was so loud and clumsy in his movements, the animals stayed miles away.

“My brother returned to the village with nothing and Jun, my father, hit him on the side of the head with the gun Calen carried. My mother came out of their square house, pressed a cloth against Calen's head, but Calen pushed her away so roughly she fell to the ground.”

Four boys his mother had raised, four rough boys who beat each other blue and purple for saying the wrong word, breathing too loudly, giving the wrong look. Only Calen, the oldest, lived at home anymore. Jeremia wasn't sure why his brother chose not to get married and have his own family. He was like Jeremia, though, taking aimless walks that were not intended for food gathering. Such walks produced ideas, claimed Jeremia, and understanding.

In our village, parents abandoned us, older sisters left for the city and we never heard from them again. Would I do the same when I got older? Would I someday leave Eva, Ranita and old Nathanael? I swore I would not do this. I would not abandon the people who had become my tribe.

All night I held Ranita against my chest. I heard the creek trickling its song through the night, I heard the coyotes snuffling by the fire, I heard the soft barks of the fox puppies, I heard the distant whine of an airplane, and I heard Eva's macaw, Emerald, chirping in her hut, but I did not hear boys with boards running through the woods, even though I listened until the sun reached its fingers into the hut.

Since returning from his last excursion, Jeremia had changed. His actions seemed desperate now, more frantic and intense. While I warmed water on the fire, preparing to wash Ranita, he came up behind me, silent as a moth. I felt his nervousness, his fluttering hand, and when I looked at him, I saw his mouth moving, his lips whispering to himself. If I remained calm, gave him his space, maybe he would relax, stop fidgeting. Instead, he picked Ranita up from where I had laid her on the grasses and held her against his cheek. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He brought Ranita to Nathanael, who sat in the camping chair in front of the fire, and rested her on the old man's knees. Nathanael picked up the baby, rocked back and forth, hummed.

Jeremia grabbed me around the upper arm with his long, muscled fingers, pulling me away from the water and toward the creek. He let go and began to walk up the path. He didn't turn to watch me, didn't check to make sure my steps followed his—he knew I would come. We'd walked this path many times, day and night, sun and wind, but usually Eva was with us, running ahead, shrieking and hopping over the branches in our path. Often Nathanael came along with his fishing pole, wishing to catch the trout in the water hole.

It was early in the day to swim, but the water was always warm in late summer. The trees above the hole stretched their branches to the sun, leaving an opening above the water that sucked in heat. Jeremia sat on the branch of the pine that reached out over the water, took off his shirt and swung his feet. His body reminded me of the willow tree, limber and thin, his muscles moving beneath the skin, his ribs gently raised bumps. His second arm was a rounded limb that reached to where his elbow would have been. I was so accustomed to seeing his arm without fingers that it didn't seem strange to me.

I sat beside him and waited.

Our feet were almost the same color, darkened by the sun, but his toes were long and bumpy while mine were short and curled. I tilted my head back, felt the warmth of the sun and looked up into the sky. A solitary vulture, with its bald head and shaggy wings, flapped across the opening between the trees, and I saw the smoky trail of an airplane as it cruised through the sky in its carefully plotted path. I heard the hum of the mosquitoes just awakening. I saw the stirring of the water bugs skimming the surface of the pool. A leaf lazily drifted to the opening where the stream trickled from the pool.

Jeremia's hand touched mine. I looked down at our hands, his fingers over mine, warm and dry against my skin. That small touch, so light and delicate, sent tingles through my wrist and up my arm. I had been touched by Jeremia many times, but lately his touch had changed. When we were younger, we'd wrestled like kittens. We'd tumbled over each other, fought with each other, scratched, pinched, hit, but now every contact meant something more. I wanted him to touch me all the time.

I looked at him. His eyes were pinched around the edges, as though he couldn't see me clearly without squinting. Something needed to be said, but I didn't know what. None of us talked much—except for Eva, who chattered like the squirrels. Nathanael was quiet, and Rosa had been moody and spoke almost always in caustic bites. Jeremia and I had never needed to speak; we understood each other. But sitting beside him wasn't enough right now because I didn't know what he saw when he visited the city, and I didn't have the words to speak to him about it.

A groan came from his lips. Then he dropped from the branch, his body straight, and slid like an otter into the water. I could see his legs frog-kick and move him just beneath the surface. His black hair spread behind him, straight and streaming. When his head surfaced, the sun glistened off the drops on his skin and made him beautiful. He pulled his arm back and dragged it along the surface of the water, sending a plume into the air that hit my legs. I pushed off from the branch and dropped without a splash, my legs straight. This was a language I understood. I dropped down, down, until my feet hit the muck of the bottom, and then I pushed up right below Jeremia. I found his ankle and pulled hard.