Wild Life (2 page)

Four days later Erik was on a plane to Chicago. It was only the first leg of the daylong journey he'd been dreading. When he'd told Patrick and Mr. Holt that he couldn't go hunting with them because he was going to North Dakota, Mr. Holt had tried to cheer him up.

“You lucky son of a gun!” he'd said. “I've always wanted to go out there! The pheasant hunting is fantastic! It's a bird hunter's paradise.”

When Erik and Patrick had pointed out that Erik didn't own a gun himself, or a dog, either, for that matter, Mr. Holt had shaken his head with sympathy. “That's a darn shame, Erik, and I'm really sorry you won't be coming with us Saturday. But we'll go next year, you can count on it.”

Which didn't make Erik feel the least bit better.

Mr. Holt gave Erik some of his hunting magazines with articles that featured North Dakota. Now, on the plane, Erik pulled them out of his backpack and tried to read, but he couldn't concentrate on the words. When the batteries in his computer game died, he fidgeted. Tapping his foot and drumming his fingers on the tray table, he watched the people around him and wondered how they could stand sitting still for so long. Weren't their legs twitchy? Didn't they want to jump up and move around, the way he did?

He took the items from the seat pocket in front of him and examined the barf bag. The woman beside him gave him a worried smile and asked if he'd like her to get up so he could visit the bathroom. Embarrassed, he said no, returned the bag to the pouch, and tried to keep his body still.

More embarrassing was the fact that he had been escorted on and would be escorted off the plane by a flight attendant, as if he were a little kid. Even worse than that, he had to wear a badge with “UM” on it, which stood for “Unaccompanied Minor.” He tried to entertain himself by thinking up other things the letters could represent, like “Ugly Moron,” “Upchucking Midget,” “Unbalanced Madman,” and “Unusual Mammal.” This amused him enough so that he chuckled to himself, causing the woman beside him to give him another worried glance. He stared down at his lap, willing the flight to be over.

After Chicago, he flew to Fargo, North Dakota, and from there to Minot, in a plane so small he felt like he was on an amusement park ride. He spent the whole trip looking out the window at the ground below, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Then he realized that he was actually trying to make sense of what he
wasn't
seeing. Where
was
everything? Maybe, he thought, they were too high in the air for normal things like roads and houses and stores to be visible. But, no, that wasn't it, because every once in a while he did see a building or a road. They sure looked to be few and far between.

When the plane was about to land, Erik was astonished to see five jackrabbits hop off the runway. While he thought that was pretty funny and he liked seeing them, he couldn't help wondering if he'd come to a place with more rabbits than people.

Minot, he'd learned from the airport loudspeaker, rhymed with “why not.” As he got off the plane and walked across the windy tarmac and into the airport, he could think of a lot of reasons why not.

At the end of the long hall leading from the airport gate, a tall man wearing jeans and a John Deere cap stood waiting beside a small, thin woman who reminded Erik of a nervous little bird. Even from such a distance, the intense blue of the man's eyes was striking.

Erik drew closer, and the woman's face broke into an anxious smile. He could read her lips as she said, “That's him.” The man's face showed no expression. Erik knew these people must be his grandparents, but he didn't feel related to them at all. His mother had told him to greet them with a hug, but instead he hugged his backpack to his chest as he approached.

“Erik Anders Carlson, is that you?” the woman asked.

All at once Erik felt panicky and thought about shaking his head and walking past. But then what?

He nodded.

“Thank the Lord. I was worried you wouldn't make it, what with all those stops you had along the way. Why, I could barely make head or tail of that itinerary your momma sent.”

She said the word
itinerary
carefully, Erik noticed, as if perhaps she were saying it out loud for the first time.

“Well, now, say hello to your grandfather.”

“Hi—” Erik hesitated, embarrassed. His birthday cards were always signed “Oma and Big Darrell.” While he could imagine addressing this somber man as “Sir,” he couldn't bring himself to say “Big Darrell” to the man's face.

But his grandmother was urging, “Go ahead. Call him Big Darrell. Everybody does.”

“Hello, B-Big Darrell,” Erik said.

Big Darrell cleared his throat. “Erik,” he said, in a voice filled with gravel.

“How come people call you that?” Erik asked him.

But Big Darrell had already turned away and was heading for the baggage claim area. Erik wished he could call the question back.

It was Oma who answered, as she and Erik followed Big Darrell through the light crowd of people. “It's on account of at the school he went to, there were two Darrells,” she explained. “Can you imagine, in a one-room school with twelve children on a good attendance day,
two
Darrells? Anyway, tall like he is, he was the big one.”

“Oh.”

They waited in silence for Erik's suitcases to come around on the carousel, and then he followed his grandparents out of the terminal. They sat in the front seat of a beat-up-looking red pickup truck, with Erik in the middle. His grandmother patted his hand and told him to call her Oma. “That's how our people do. It stands for Old Ma,” she said. Then she gave a dry little laugh and added, “And I expect I'm old enough.”

She pointed her thumb and said, “He'd be Opa, for Old Pa, if he wasn't Big Darrell.”

Erik glanced out the corner of his eye at Big Darrell, who started the engine looking straight ahead, his face set. Erik wondered what he had done to make Big Darrell mad. He'd just arrived; how could he have done anything wrong?

As they drove through Minot, he was relieved to see a lot of the same fast-food places he was accustomed to seeing at home, as well as a mall, and a theater showing eight different movies. But when they left the city behind, driving farther and farther west, the world out the window looked more and more unfamiliar. There was so much empty space, so much sky, so much
nothing
. He could see really,
really
far…, but there wasn't anything
to
see as they drove along what had to be the longest, straightest, flattest road in the country. Nothing except for mile after mile of flat, brown prairie, and corn and sunflower fields so big they seemed to never end.

Every once in a while, there was a grain silo or a broken-down, old white church with a tall steeple, or things that looked to Erik like big metal dinosaurs bending over to drink, leaning back to swallow, and bending over to drink again. Oma explained that they were rigs to pump oil out of the ground. Fires burned beside some of them, sending flames shooting into the open air. Oma said they were new rigs that were burning off excess methane gas. The fires looked eerie, sending their heat up into the sky.

North Dakota appeared every bit as foreign and desertlike to Erik as pictures of Iraq and Afghanistan he'd seen on TV. After they'd been driving for three and a half hours, he couldn't help wondering if they were going to the very end of the world. It had been the end for lots of people, Erik could see that. There seemed to be more abandoned houses slowly sinking into the prairie than there were ones that were inhabited.

Squished between Big Darrell and Oma on the truck's seat, he felt oddly tired and wired at the same time. Even if he had felt relaxed enough to doze off, he was sure the rattle and whistle of the truck's windows would have woken him. The wind seemed to him like some sort of crazed creature that was trying to tear its way inside the cab. Dust and—he could hardly believe it—actual
tumbleweeds
raced across the highway, with nothing to stop them in all that wide openness.

Oma knitted and Big Darrell drove, both of them seeming content to pass the ride without talking. Erik wasn't used to this, and it made him uncomfortable. In a momentary lull in the shriek of the wind he blurted, “Where are all the
people
?”

Neither of his grandparents spoke for a minute. Then Oma said, “Busy. Doing the things people do…” Her voice trailed off vaguely, and she gave a small shrug.

“No,” Erik said, “I mean, how come there
aren't
any people? Or hardly any houses or any stores or any
anything
?”

Oma blinked. “Why, I expect it looks different here than it does in New York,” she said. “But there are people. You'll see.”

A while later Erik asked, “How much longer until we get there?”

“Another hour or so,” said Oma.

He tried not to groan. The day seemed endless. He'd never sat still for so long in his entire life. After what seemed much more than an hour, Big Darrell turned off the highway by a sign whose paint had peeled so badly Erik had to squint hard to make out what it said.
FORTUNA, N.D.—YOU'LL
IT
. Painted around the words were four pictures: a motor home, a cow, a tractor, and a pheasant.

The sight of the pheasant cheered Erik for a couple of seconds, until he remembered that tomorrow he was supposed to be home, hunting actual pheasants with Patrick.

As Big Darrell drove slowly down a street that was lined with boarded-up dingy storefronts, Erik looked around with a sinking heart. Everything was dusty, and rusty, and old. He thought that a buzzard would be a far more appropriate symbol for the place than a pheasant. He knew right then and there that he wasn't going to
Fortuna, not one bit.

There were clues, such as the presence of cars and tractors, a string of limp telephone wires lining the street, and a satellite dish on a rooftop, that told him he hadn't actually gone back in time to the old Wild West.

But he sure as heck knew a ghost town when he saw one.

Big Darrell pulled into a dumpy-looking gas station Erik would have guessed was out of business, and got out to work the pump.

“Fortuna's only got a few streets,” Oma explained while she and Erik waited. “So it's real simple to find your way around.”

Erik almost said what he was thinking:
As if anybody could possibly get lost in such a dinky place.

“All the businesses are closed now,” Oma went on, “except for this gas station and the tavern.” She pointed to a dilapidated building with a neon beer advertisement in the window. “We have to go clear to Crosby for groceries. There's only eleven houses here that still have folks living in 'em.”

They had passed a few houses, all of which had a sad, run-down look. Erik wasn't convinced that people actually lived in any of them. There was a lot of old stuff scattered about the yards, too: rusty car bodies and farm machinery, a bike, a washing machine, a deflated plastic swimming pool. It was hard to figure why people would keep junk like that around. It wasn't as if there was nowhere else to put it. There was nothing but empty space out here. He felt his spirits dip even lower.

“Mom said you sold the farm. Where's your house?” he asked, hoping it wasn't one of the ones he'd already seen.

“Oh, we don't live here in town,” said Oma. “We still live out at the farm, where your momma grew up. We just sold the land. Jim Lund bought it. Big Darrell still works with Jim every day. You can't imagine Big Darrell not farming, can you?”

Erik didn't know what to say to that, so he didn't answer. Instead, he said, “Where
is
the farm?”

“I guess you don't remember much from your visit, it was such a long time ago,” Oma answered. “It's out a ways.”

“Out a ways” turned out to be miles down a part-dirt and part-gravel road off the main highway. It was beginning to get dark. As they jounced along over the ruts, three deer appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, running across a field to the right of the truck. Erik knew immediately that they were mule deer, not white-tails like they had in New York. These were the first mulies he'd ever seen! He couldn't wait to tell Patrick about them.

Oma noticed him looking at them and patted his knee. “We have to be real careful driving at night around here. The deer start moving at dusk. I can't think of a soul who hasn't had a run-in with one, or at least a close call. Can you, Big Darrell?”

Big Darrell might have shaken his head no, but it was hard to tell. A little farther along, Erik was amazed to see a group of about twenty pheasants standing on the edge of the ditch by the side of the road. He couldn't help reaching across his grandfather to point, crying out, “Look! Over there! Pheasants! A bunch of 'em!”

“Oh, heavens, there's pheasants all over the place this year,” Oma declared. “Last year we had a mild winter, so they did real well. Jim Lund was just saying yesterday you can hardly swing a dead cat without hitting one.”

Erik twisted around in his seat so he could watch the birds until they were out of sight. “What are they all doing in the road?” he wondered aloud.

“They're out in the crops all day, eating,” Big Darrell said. “Heading back to cover for the night.”

It seemed to Erik as if his grandfather had spoken in spite of himself, almost as if the words had forced themselves from between his lips. Still, these were more words than he had uttered all afternoon. Encouraged, Erik asked, “Can we hunt them?”

Both Big Darrell and Oma stiffened in their seats, and a charged silence filled the truck cab. Finally, Oma said quietly, “Big Darrell's too busy for hunting these days.”

Erik suddenly felt desperate to escape the tense, strained atmosphere in the small enclosure of the truck's cab. His brief feeling of happiness at seeing the deer and pheasants drained away. Oma broke the silence finally, saying in an overly cheery voice, “Well, here we are!”

On the right, a gravel driveway led to a two-story wooden farm house. Erik searched his memory, but he had no feeling of recognition for the place. He could tell the house had once been painted white, and the two shutters that were left had once been red. The roof sagged, and the whole thing sort of slumped to the left, as if it had grown weary of fighting the wind. Everything looked old and poor and ready to give up.

There was a big barn, too, and some smaller buildings, and a lot of large farm machinery, like tractors and combines and others he didn't know the names of. As Big Darrell pulled up beside a pile of neatly stacked firewood, Erik pointed to a narrow little building with the shape of a crescent moon cut into the door. “Is that—um…is that what I think it is?” he asked.

“Why, that's the out house, Erik,” Oma answered.

His face must have shown his dismay, because Oma laughed and added, “There's a bathroom inside. But the out house comes in handy during mud season when the men are out here working and their boots get all dirty.”

Erik thought,
If
my
feet get muddy, I'm taking off my shoes and going inside.

Oma got out of the truck with a low groan. “Come on in,” she said, “but mind the porch steps. One's broken. Stay to the right when you go up.”

Big Darrell got Erik's suitcases from the truck bed and walked toward the house. Erik's legs were numb from the long ride, and he had to force himself to move. When he slid from the truck seat to the ground, a fierce blast of wind snatched at him, nearly knocking him over. Pushing his hair out of his eyes, he looked around in the gathering darkness.

There wasn't another house as far as he could see. There were fields, and a straight line of trees to one side of the house, which he figured had been planted in a vain effort to try to break the wind. The trees led to a low area where some scrubby-looking bushes grew. There might have been a pond down there, but it was too dark now to tell.

The first stars were appearing, and as he looked up at them he felt dizzy, lost in all the endless space stretching out in every direction. He closed his eyes as he was buffeted by another blast of wind. The wind here was different from at home. Here, it seemed to him to have a will of its own, as if it were determined to clear the land of anything too weak to withstand its relentless pressure. He bent into it and climbed onto the porch, being careful to put his weight on the only two steps that looked solid, and went into the house.

Oma stood at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the second floor. “I'll show you your room. You go first. These old legs of mine are awful slow.”

Wordlessly, Big Darrell handed over one of the suitcases and Erik started up the stairs with it. Oma came next, and Big Darrell followed with the other suitcase. Erik hesitated at the top, then reached for the knob on the first door he came to. He was about to turn it when Oma drew a sharp breath.

“No,”
Big Darrell said. The single word, spoken forcefully in his deep, hoarse voice, hung in the air.

Erik pulled back his hand in surprise and turned around. Big Darrell's face was hidden in the shadows, but Oma's eyes were wide with alarm. Quickly, she recovered herself and gave a small, nervous laugh. “Not that one, Erik. The next one, farther down on the right.”

Slowly, Erik turned to the door across the hall, half expecting another outburst. But Oma opened it and flicked a light switch. Sounding slightly out of breath, she said, “Here you are.”

Without speaking, Big Darrell set the suitcase on the floor in the hallway and went back down the stairs. Oma and Erik stood looking around the room. “Just like your momma left it,” Oma said, “except we've ended up storing a few things in here, you know how that goes…”

A few things?
Erik thought incredulously. There was a single bed, covered neatly in a faded blue-flowered spread, and a dresser with a mirror attached. But the floor was piled with random
stuff
—a fake Christmas tree in a stand, a sewing machine, cardboard boxes, and several bulging plastic bags. A narrow path snaked through it all, making it possible to walk from the door to the dresser or from the door to the bed.

Doesn't anybody around here ever throw anything out?
Erik wondered.

Oma was looking around, too, with a funny expression on her face. He had the feeling she was really seeing the room for the first time in a while. “I expect we'll need to move some of this to the attic,” she said uncertainly. “Give you a little more space.”

When Erik didn't say anything, Oma said, “You just go ahead and make yourself at home, now, while I get some supper started.”

Erik had a sudden hopeful thought. “The school,” he said. “Is it closed, too, like all the stores in town?”

“Oh, there's no school in Fortuna,” she replied.

Wow,
he thought.
I have actually come to a place so far out in the middle of nowhere that there isn't even a school!
This news would have been thrilling if he could have thought of one thing to do here
besides
going to school.

Oma said, “You'll be going to the Crosby Middle School. I let them know you were coming, and the bus will be stopping for you out by the highway.”

Erik didn't know whether to feel disappointed or relieved. He'd been trying hard not to think about the prospect of starting school at a new place where he didn't know anybody. But what was he going to do with himself for the next two days before school began on Monday?

When Oma left, Erik sat on the bed looking around the tiny room. This must be what it felt like to be in a jail cell in Siberia, except his cell had the added attraction of being filled with junk.