Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

She looks at him with those depthless eyes, then circles what she has already written, Y & N .

And then, when he asks if she can teach him, she makes a circle within the circle, around the letter N .

She is the messenger. Burr is the educator. And Lewis is impatient for an education. He felt the same way as a child, pulling down books in the library and asking his father to talk to him about them. I’m too busy might have been the phrase his father said to him most often, next to Quiet . When he remembers his father, he remembers him from a distance — studying documents at a desk or meeting with advisers in a boardroom or giving speeches on a stage — only occasionally looking up to find Lewis, staring back at his son not with pride or affection but with disappointment.

This man, Aran Burr, who lavishes Lewis with attention, who summons him in dreams and in life, who promises him guidance, appears the same age as his father, his hair and beard wilder, but his appearance otherwise similar, so that they are beginning to merge in his mind. Burr wants him — his father wants him — and he feels as excited by this as he does frightened.

They hurry to gather their belongings, to feed and water and saddle their horses, who seem infected by their energy when they set off, no longer stumbling or ignoring their reins, but riding hard and straight toward the clouds, despite their bloodied hooves, toward the man whose vaporous shape Lewis can still see.

He longs for a sniff from his silver tin but knows he must ration it better. It spikes his mind and numbs his senses. Sometimes his thoughts feel so alive and singular that he could shed his body altogether, peel it off like a wet jacket. And sometimes he imagines the sand as powder, imagines diving off his horse, headfirst into a pillowy pile of it, and he would breathe, breathe, breathe, until he is overcome with pleasure.

They slow to a canter when noon comes and the clouds burn away. By then there are birds — not just the crows and vultures they are accustomed to seeing — but a red-winged blackbird, a yellow tanager, even an owl that hoots at them from a high branch. At one point a murmuration of starlings darkens the sky, like a net cast over them.

They drop down into the Missouri River, their constant guide, leaning back on their horses as they slide and stutter down the sandy banks, and then follow its wide-walled passage. Its bed is clay cracking beneath their hooves. They startle three deer bedded down in the shade of a root-twisted overhang and fire three bullets and two arrows uselessly after them.

The water they don’t find for two more days.

Lewis senses something different. The air takes on a greater texture, less thin and dry, more palpable, and so does it ripen with a fecund smell, like the breath of an unwashed mouth. Then he notices the riverbed softening. The sound of the clay shattering, once echoing all around them, hushes and then vanishes as the ground grows spongy and then sticky with muck.

Reed is the one who points it out — shouting, “There!”—a great gray tongue of mud twisting its way down the middle of the riverbed. For a quarter mile they follow it. It grows wider, eventually reaching from bank to bank, before giving way to a brackish puddle with salt formations like small cauliflower growing around it.

York lets out a whoop and shifts out of his saddle and falls to the ground and scrabbles on all fours to the edge of the puddle and splashes a handful into his hair before dunking his face beneath the surface to taste it. He reels back, his face distorted. He heaves several times. A line of bile hangs from his lips when he looks up at them. Gawea nudges her horse and shakes her head and tsk-tsks him with her tongue. York laughs, the laugh cut short when Clark spurs her horse between him and the girl and berates him for his damned fool idiotness.

The way is now impassable, too swampy for them to ride, and they clamber up the banks and parallel its winding course for an hour. Algae thickens. Bushes cluster. Reeds spring up. Leaves unfurl from branches. To Lewis’s eyes, so accustomed to browns and grays, everything seems obscenely green. There is a whine at his ear, and then a sting at his cheek. He slaps it and studies the bloody smear on his hand.

He hears another slap behind him and the doctor says, “What is that? What are they?”

Lewis wipes his hand on his thigh. “Mosquitoes, I think. They drink blood and carry disease.”

The bugs thicken, swarming in hazy clouds, and the slapping and clapping becomes as frequent as applause. York says, “Why couldn’t they have been wiped out with everything else?”

“Purely to harass you,” Lewis says.

York laughs. They all do, despite the welts rising from their skin, because there is water. There is actual water beside them, oozing along thickly at first, then clearing and broadening, creeping up the banks. And where there is water, there is life. The desert has filled their heads with questions and defiled their spirits. But now all those bad feelings wash away. Gawea was right — there is an end to the desert waste — which means they have been right to follow her. She has led them to life, and they are going to live.

When the sun eases toward the horizon, when the shadows begin to cluster, the doctor walks her horse onto a rocky shoal and stares out over a calm stretch of water dimpling with bugs and says, “Let’s stay here. And I don’t just mean for the night. Let’s rest. We need our rest.”

When no one says anything — the water has stolen their words — she says, “I insist on it. This will be good medicine for us all.”

Right then a possum with a long pink tail and a mouth full of needlelike teeth clambers down a tree and hisses at them before Reed puts an arrow in its side.

Lewis knows that with prey come predators. North America was once home to big mammals that long ago went extinct. Once humans crossed the land bridge, once they notched out shell-shaped projectile points, once they learned to fire arrows and hurl spears with atlatls, the big animals began to die off. The mammoths, the dire wolves and lipoterns, the saber-toothed lions, the giant ground sloths and giant short-faced bears. All gone, replaced by scrawnier, deadlier humans. Nature fills a void. Now that humans are gone, something big will be clambering its way to the top of the predatory chain. He remembers what Gawea wrote in the sand, Goblins , and while they butcher the possum and talk excitedly about what tomorrow might bring, he keeps his eyes on the dark forests that wall the riverbank.

THE MELANOMA RISES from the tip of his ear. It has been bothering Thomas for weeks, a faint itching at first, then a throbbing. It is a raised lump, darkly pigmented, purplish at its center, pink and yellow along the edges. Vincent insists he get it removed.

The mayor is not overly worried. He does not feel weak or nauseous. Removing suspicious lesions is as commonplace as getting a haircut, clipping toenails. Everyone is dotted with moles. Everyone has growths lumping them. Their sunburned skin husks away like the peelings of an onion. The UV exposure, with no ozone layer to filter, cooks them, mutates their cells.

His doctor — a man with an eggishly bald head and a nest of black hair rimming it — seats him in a chair and gives him an opiate that a few minutes later makes everything fuzzy around the edges. “It feels like nothing could ever possibly hurt,” Thomas says, and the doctor says, “I’m sorry to contradict you,” and slices off the top of his ear with a pair of clippers.

He hears the snip. Blood runs into his ear. The doctor smashes a towel against it and tells Thomas to hold it. The pain takes a moment to arrive. A rising heat. Thomas begins to say, “Ah-ah-ah,” and the doctor says, “You’ll be all right.”