Aleksandar Hemon - Nowhere Man

“We are not interested,” the woman said. There was a cavity at the bottom of her neck and a droplet of water in it, slowly sliding down.

“I’m sure you care about the environment,” Rachel said.

“No, thank you.”

“Who the heck is it?” the man yelled again. The woman closed the door and locked it, a wooden hand with flowers painted on it and the word “Welcome” swung first left, then right.

“Let me give you some advice,” Rachel said very quietly, her gaze grazing Pronek’s hip. “Never look inside while you are talking to them and never, never prop yourself on your toes to peek inside. They think you wanna rob them. Look them in the eyes.”

“In the eyes,” Pronek said. “Good.”

The man was in his underwear, with Rudolph-the-Red-Nose-Reindeer slippers — the red nose erected toward them. His shirt was unbuttoned, and Pronek could see the head of an eagle touching the left-nipple circle with its beak. Pronek tried to focus on the man’s droopy eyes, but could not help surveying the man’s whitish underwear with an intermittent yellow stain.

“I’m a hunter,” the man said. “I enjoy killing animals.”

“Many hunters support Greenpeace,” Rachel said.

“Well, I ain’t one of them,” the man said. “Now, leave my property.”

“I like your slippers,” she said.

“Thank you. Now get off my fucking property.”

—

“This is hell. I run out of smiles and kindness quickly.”

“It’s very hard.”

“Do you want to try?”

“No, not yet.”

“You gotta try it at some point.”

“Okay. Not yet.”

Pronek regarded Rachel as she was talking to a pimply Motôrhead teenager; or a Catholic lady with her index fingers stuck between the pages of the Bible; or a college boy wearing a baseball hat backward who told them he hated Chomsky. (“Who is that?” Pronek asked.) He watched her lips part — she would expose her lower teeth, tightening her chin, the dimple deepening, while making an important point. She would roll her lips into her mouth, after she had asked for money, waiting for an answer. He tried to imitate the smile she was flashing at a community-college professor who listened to her enthralled, with a pen and a checkbook in his hand, scrawny and bending forward, as if cancer were breaking his back as they spoke. The college professor glimpsed Pronek with the corner of his eye: Pronek was raising his eyebrows, stretching his eyelids and pulling his cheeks back, keeping his teeth close, replicating a Rachel smile.

“Are you okay?” he asked Pronek.

“Yes, I am,” Pronek said, and tidied up his face into a solemn expression.

They stood at the corner of Washtenaw and Hiawatha. Pronek was smoking, self-conscious, the cigarette tasteless. Rachel watched him, her head tilted.

“The important thing is to listen to them. They’ll tell you things, and they’ll give you money for listening.”

“Why do you call yourself evil?”

“E-V-O-L. Love in reverse. It’s a Sonic Youth album, my favorite.”

“I never listened them.”

“Listened to them.”

“Listened to them.”

“It’s kind of noisy, a lot of guitars.”

“I used to play the guitar.”

“Well, this is different.”

“What do you do in you life?”

“In my life? What is this? Do you Balkan boys always ask questions like that?”

“I am sorry.”

“I do photography in my life.”

“Oh, I like photography.”

“Let’s work now. We gotta make some money.”

They avoided the dark houses, going only to the ones that had lit porches and windows, shadows gliding along the inside walls. She moved from door to door quickly, employing always the same serious, deep voice. Pronek marveled at her resolute moves, at the tautness of her muscles, at the determination in her stride as she hurried between houses, although she once tripped on a hose snaking on the lightless pavement, her clipboard spinning up, then falling and skidding along the pavement.

“Fuck,” she said, sitting on the ground. Pronek offered her his hand, and she snorted furiously, but then accepted it. “I just learned to walk last week.”

“I love Greenpeace,” the man said. “Greenpeace is the greatest.”

“Well, then you can give us a lot of money,” Rachel said.

The man laughed. He had a dark wart resembling a blackberry on his cheek.

“Go get your checkbook. You know we need your support.”

“I’d love to,” the man said, “but I spend all my money on the wolves.”

“On the what?”

The man was smoking. Pronek wanted to ask him for a cigarette, but instead surreptitiously inhaled the smoke coming out of the man’s nostrils and wafting toward him.

“You know, they want to shoot them in Wyoming, wipe them out.”

“Wolves are beautiful animals,” Rachel said. Pronek was grinning and nodding, joining in the wolf appreciation. He remembered the story his father had told him about their Ukrainian ancestor so bent on killing the wolf that had slaughtered all his sheep that he tied his wife to a tree in the middle of winter to lure the beast. But the poor woman wailed and wailed, her toes freezing, and the wolf stayed away.

The man was describing a dying wolf, running wounded from those choppers packed with armed assholes in cowboy hats, running until all his blood was drained and then just dropping down.

“Wow,” Rachel said, and lowered her clipboard to her stomach, crossing her hands over it. Pronek noticed that the man checked out her breasts, and it was the first time that Pronek looked directly at them — they were bulging, stretching her Daydream Nation T-shirt.

“Do you want to see my wolf? I got him in the garage. I’m driving out to the UP tomorrow, we’re going hunting together.”

The wolf’s fur was gray and linty and he looked lachrymose. When he saw the man, he started pacing frantically back and forth in a humongous cage in the space next to a pickup truck. The man put his hand inside the cage and the wolf stepped rapidly toward it. Pronek had an instant vision of the man’s hand being snapped off, blood spurting from the wrist veins. He imagined explaining the situation to paramedics who wouldn’t understand him because of his accent. But the wolf put his snout into the man’s hand and the man scratched it. “Look,” he said to Rachel, paying no attention to Pronek. She shook her head, her mouth agape in admiration.

“You can do it too.”

Rachel slowly put her clipboard on a lawnmower and offered her hand to the wolf’s nostrils — he sniffed and looked up at the man. Pronek was paralyzed — now he could envision both of Rachel’s hands torn off, and he noticed a full moon in the sky hovering over the thick darkness of the street. Rachel held the wolf’s snout, sticking out between the bars with one hand and stroked it with the other. She leaned over and kissed the wolf on the lips. She extended her lips symmetrically, like a flower opening, and the wolf showed his dagger teeth to Pronek. Pronek whimpered, and the man turned toward him and grinned, as if some sinister plan were being fulfilled.

As they were walking away from the house, Pronek decided he needed to busy Rachel with himself in order to make her forget the wolf.

“I like dogs,” he said.

“That wolf was so sad, the guy should just let him go.”

“I had a dog. His name was Lucky.”

“That wolf had some meat rotting inside him,” Rachel said.

Back in Chicago, they walked down Jackson, neon and street lights comfortingly glaring, Pronek half a step behind Rachel, as if trying to catch up. She had her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, so her elbows stuck out, like pool-ladder handlebars.