Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

“If you jump out you’ll get dragged to death,” I told him. “You stay calm, and I’ll keep the ride gentle.”

Nonetheless he kept hooking his feet on the bed the whole way, trying to jimmy his hips onto the edge, and I kept having to take hard turns to shake him back into the box. The roads out there all looked like they led to nowhere. I didn’t mind him thinking maybe he was on his way to get buried. Forcing him out would obviously take more fear than I’d delivered thus far. I didn’t want him to think me incapable of it, and at the same time I struggled not to believe myself capable of it.

No one was about in Ridgecrest. It was the dominion of dust. A bus that would stop here despite the dearth of passengers seemed an idea from the realm of myth or fable, and I bought his ticket half believing that the driver would lose heart and retire before he ever made it to the station. Nonetheless, I spent the time before its scheduled arrival in the bed of the truck with Hugo, explaining to him the stakes of the situation.

“I know the Devil will draw you back to Eli like a magnet,” I said, “so I will be the other pole of the magnet, repulsing you. I will kill a thing you love each time you return.”

His eyes were defiant, but when the miracle bus arrived, I cut the ropes and slipped the ticket to Denver by way of Barstow into his pocket. I left the knife open and loose in my palm, and he got on the bus without complaint. He watched me the whole time with the Devil’s eyes, but I watched him right back with the eyes of the Holy Spirit and I saw, I thought I saw, the spirit in him quell.

ELI

I loved perhaps nothing more about Hugo than his tenderness to animals, but I also wanted to teach him the danger of loving things this way, of loving animals raised for stock or bred for labor. I taught that lesson only to myself. Hugo disappeared from campus. The police weren’t interested. He was young. He’d taken his things. They took my suspicions of Wesley to be a silly grudge.

I took Mavis out all over the compound hoping she’d lead me to Hugo, but I didn’t know whether she found nothing because there was nothing to find or because she was as bad at tracking as she was at everything else. For five days I searched, and I had to consider that falling out of love also had no requisite number of months, that it could go extinct in a moment, that the faucet could simply turn off.

On the fifth night Mavis smelled something out by the nut orchard, near where we’d first found her. She tapped at the top of the irrigation canal with one paw but would not go in the water. After commanding her to sit and wait, I hopped across and walked into what looked in the twilight like a palace of dark colonnades. I scanned the orchard floor for disturbed earth. Then I heard a very poor imitation of a horse’s nicker, and when I looked up there he was.

We made love in the dirt. We said little. We’d said it.

Lying there on our backs, I saw him fighting great emotion.

“I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I won’t come back again.”

“Let’s get you back to your bunk.”

“You don’t understand.”

He was up, pulling his jeans over his naked hips. He tossed his boxer briefs into my lap.

“Don’t forget me,” he said, trotting away toward the road holding his shirt in his fist.

The next day, Mavis disappeared, and I figured she’d followed him off, that maybe he was camping or living somewhere nearby, but I didn’t have anything to track the dog that was tracking him. The week after that, Claude found her floating in the irrigation ditch near where we’d first saved her and where I’d met with Hugo, and I figured she had smelled him on the other side again, and without me there to stop her, had lost patience and tried to get across. Claude and I buried her there in the lane between orchard and field. Then I sent him back, and I ran through the orchard. I searched it by day and by night, by dusk and dawn, but there was no trace of him.

He found me again a month later, with that unmistakable hamfisted nicker issuing from a field of sloping grazeland, and I tramped the grass until I spotted him sitting cross-legged in it, invisible except to me. We flattened a patch of fresh alfalfa that left long red stripes along his back and my thighs. Again I could tell that his instinct was to run off. I’d seen deer and elk before, spooked, their bodies tensed for flight. But he stayed a few minutes because he sensed my need.

“I won’t come back again.” He rolled against me and put his head on my shoulder and rubbed his hand on my belly and said, “This is the most beautiful man.”

I almost asked him then what had brought him here. He was nothing like the rest, whose seeking followed only paved roads. He was so secret. Why had he come to a place for which he knew he was too gentle? But I restrained myself from asking what had brought him so as not to ruin my little dream that the answer he would give me was God.

BATTLE CREEK COLLEGE

All day the ranch had smelled of coal and beef fat. The odor kept in everyone’s mind the sight of great pearly globs of the fat, sheets of it, peeled away and tossed in a trash barrel, there being too much other work to worry about making tallow. They ground the chucks and mixed a vat of meatloaves and Saran-wrapped rectangular portions that stacked neatly in the freezer, displacing loaves of bread that were buttered and grilled to round out the meals. The short ribs, shanks, rounds, and briskets were first on a low fire in the morning so they’d melt in time for dinner. The ribs and a long loin roast were cooked for lunch, but the meal was a somber affair, the ribs eaten slowly, reluctantly. Despite the talk of honoring Columbia by making our best use of her, no one was quite ready to chew on her bones.

By dinner that melancholy had given way to celebration not of the spirit and sacrifice of the stock animal but rather to the conviviality that comes with rich and abundant food, that comes with unctuous chins and hands and the jeans they’re wiped on. An early sunset gave way to a shroud of night around the same floodlights they’d labored under in the morning. The pool of blood had thawed and soaked into the ground, leaving a dark and fertile streak of soil. There was no beer with the feast, but there was singing. No hymns tonight, just songs from high school dances, songs from the radio, songs from the radio of years past, all carrying out who knows how far toward the mountains.

No one asked where Wesley was, but he could hear their song out on the perimeter, where he’d stopped Gawain and turned off his flashlight to offer his ear to the night, sorting the crickets from the frogs and the scattered howling of coyotes and the muffled drumming of drunks shooting target practice on the outskirts of Bishop. The crunch of a man’s boots in the dirt was a different order of noise, its own category, and not hard to tell from the others. But tonight there was nothing. Every sound was organic except, when he set Gawain to walking again, the step of a shod horse. It was a waste of time, anyway. Hugo left long trails of boot prints every time he came, traveling the quarry road that ran a few miles north of campus. If Hugo had come again, it would be clear enough by daylight. Wesley supposed it was time to think about, then, what other reasons had drawn him out here.

No one asked where Eli was, either. They’d gotten used to his truancy, his distance. The first-years barely knew it was different. He was in the barn, standing outside the bolted door of Galahad’s stall. Without exactly meaning to he’d taken note of a pointed shovel within arm’s reach and a hay fork only yards away. If you paid close attention, it only took two to show a pattern. But he had neither tool in his hand. He had oats, and Galahad’s expressive lips were scooping them up, rubbing his palm with the soft rubber of their skin. As long as Eli had food, Galahad let Eli pet him over the ears, above his bulbous eye, and down his long forehead to his muzzle. “How right he was about you,” Eli said to him. Even the nostrils of horses had fine muscles. Every fine little hair had its own luster. He reached down to the bucket for another handful of oats, wondering when he would ever sleep again.