Adam Johnson - Parasites Like Us

My vision followed a long, submerged valley, then narrowed into a dramatic, dim canyon whose floors were littered with car axles and upturned outboard motors. A rusty shopping cart stood sentinel over grounds on which people after people had documented their lives with petroglyphs: spanning the walls were hands, palms open, carved one after another, a whole history of hands. A herd of bison, suggested merely by the curves of their humps, ran beneath a spear, in mid-air above them. A peccary was carved on his back, legs up, spine twisted in pain. Higher on the rockfaces, above it all, were spirals, chipped deeper in the rock, holes in the sky to the next world.

Farther up the canyon, way ahead in the water, I saw a flash of gold, layered and shimmery, as if off many scales, and amid the cold and dark, this was clearly the light of the living. Like eyeshine glimpsed on a night’s drive along a country road, you know when something’s alive and interested in you. The gold flashed again, more faintly, then was gone, and I was left only with the sensation of having been seen.

* * *

Back at the university, life seemed so normal as to appear foreign. The sky was clear and sunny, the wind subsiding. Students wandered campus with their hair exposed — parka hoods hanging loose against their backs, unneeded. I walked past a couple students puffing menthol cigarettes as they hung colorful crepe-paper decorations on the kiosks, and ahead, near the anthropology building, young people had gathered in some kind of forum.

When I got closer, though, I saw the students were circled around a large brown van, illegally parked below my office. The van was extended, windowless, and the thing that you immediately noticed, aside from the yip of little dogs inside, was the way it was weighed down, the rear tires almost rubbing the wheel wells. The nose of the van seemed almost to levitate. Then I walked round to the front of the vehicle and saw what had drawn the students’ attention.

The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.

This dog looked into my eyes, its baby-sized tongue darting in excitement as its tiny breaths pompommed the window. Was it begging for help, or wild with savage frenzy? What had someone done to these poor miniaturized beasts? All I knew was this: dogs arose here on the North American plains during the Eocene epoch, and they managed to get along just fine in the twenty-eight million years before they finally met a creature named Homo sapiens. If dogs had an afterlife, I hoped for their sake it was void of humankind.

* * *

In my office, a sheriff’s deputy was inspecting artifacts on my desk. Though his back was to me, I instantly recognized his incredible physique, even through a winter uniform. He was a tiny man, about five foot one, but with a brawny torso and powerful, knotty forearms. His small hand passed over the items in my flint-knapping kit and landed on an antler-handled adze. He picked it up, swung it a couple of times, and seemed surprised when a hanging trailer of ivy fell to the floor. He turned the tool in his little fist, and I remembered the strength of those bully hands. This was Gerry, my nemesis from Mactaw High, though back then he was “Chief Gerry.”

The Mactaw People were eradicated by either the Mandan or the Arikara — each claimed the honor, in the days before they, too, were eradicated. After Parkton’s city councilmen bulldozed the Mactaw’s burial grounds to build our school, they paid tribute to the land’s former tenants by preserving their likeness in the form of a mascot. “Chief Gerry” was famous for his ballgame antics, which included the War Whoop Kickoff Run, a Flaming Spear routine, and the ever-popular Firewater Dance, in which Gerry stumbled over to the other team’s bench, dropped his buckskin breeches, and mooned them.

And here he was in my office. Small though Parkton was, I hadn’t seen him in probably a decade. I looked at Gerry’s blue jacket, a size too large, then eyed his snub-nosed pistol.

“Hey, Gerry,” was all I could muster.

Gerry turned, adze in hand. “Hey, Hanky,” he said. “Man, is this thing sharp. You could kill someone with this. What’s with all the plants?”

From below rose the constant yipping of dogs, but Gerry seemed not to notice.

“What can I do for you?” I asked Gerry.

“Dang, how long has it been, Hanky? Sheriff Dan and I were just talking about you — that got me telling all kinds of stories from the old days. I see you keep a tomahawk on your desk. Go, Tomahawks. ”

“It’s an adze,” I said.

“Sure it is,” Gerry said, smiling. “Gosh, remember how you used to slick your hair down?”

“People don’t call me Hanky anymore.”

He smiled. “Remember how you were the only guy in the Hot Rod Club without a hot rod?”

“Times have changed,” I told Gerry.

His laughter subsided. “I suppose they have,” he said.

Over a hail of dog yapping, I said, “I’m pretty busy right now, if you don’t mind.”

Gerry glanced at the fishing bucket in my hand. “I’m sure your time’s important,” he said, “so I’ll get right to it. I was just over at Glacier Days with Sheriff Dan, and he has one sad little girl on his hands. Sheriff Dan said you were the only one who could help.”

All day, a spear had been hovering in my mind, and now it floated past me, sailing toward the Parkton courthouse, poised to land at the feet of a judge whose every pronouncement over the years had been recorded by Janis and rebutted by Farley, a courtroom where a small, weeping girl would learn that I’d conspired to murder her hog.

I felt a little light-headed. I needed my inhaler. Gerry gave me a concerned look.

“Hey, sorry about the hot-rod joke,” he said. “You’re not still sore about high school.”

He stepped forward, reaching up as if to pat my shoulder. I took a step back. This little guy looked unassuming, but I knew better. During football games, he’d run the field in his headdress, swinging a giant tomahawk, executing incredible gymnastics — successive back springs strung together with double flips, sailor rolls, and pommel leaps higher than you could believe. This guy could be on your back in a heartbeat.

’“Look,” Gerry said, “high school’s ancient history. We’re mature adults now. I’m not the kind of guy who goes around sticking people in cafeteria tubs anymore.”

A chorus of howls rang out. Irritated, Gerry opened the window. “Shut up,” he shouted.

Below, students backed away from the van.

“McQueen better not be getting into my evidence,” Gerry said.

He lifted his eyebrows and mimed the sharpening of a knife.

“I’m going to perform a little autopsy,” he said, in a braggy, conspiratorial way.

“So — those are your dogs?” I asked.

“If you can get McQueen to shut up,” Gerry said, “then they all shut up.”

“McQueen?”

“You know, Steve McQueen from The Great Escape ,” Gerry said. “McQueen’s my stud. Can’t breed him fast enough. This batch is headed to the airport right now.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Fast enough for what?”

“What planet are you on, Hanky? You haven’t heard of Impossible Journey ?”

“Is that a movie?” I shook my head. “Didn’t they turn the theater into a gun range?”

Gerry couldn’t tell if I was joking or what.