“What, in person?” Mercedes asked. “Where I’ma find a moose, Bishop?”
“I’m just sayin’. Among God’s creatures, you might not find one more dramatic. You’ll find them in spaces where there’s a lot of trees, and sometimes their antlers will have velvet on them.”
“Wait, their antlers have fur?” Mercedes asked.
“Not all the time, but when them antlers first grow, they got a layer of skin on them. That’s called velvet. And that nourishes the bone while it forms. When it’s done its work, the velvet comes off, so if you ever see a moose scratching its antlers against a tree, that’s what it’s doin’. Gettin’ rid of the velvet.” Thinking about moose made him think about when he was once trapped in Maine, lost somewhere in its northern half, wandering trail after twilit trail. And someone sometime long ago had told him something about moose and dusk, so that to distract himself from the constant fear of being killed by someone who didn’t like the look of him, he kept his eyes peeled for antlers. For branches that swayed not from wind but like they’d just been stripped of their leaves by moose-mouth. He lingered by clearings, peered into forests, tried not to kick the dirt too hard in frustration whenever he thought he’d seen moose hide but it turned out just to be shading that leaves cast over the bushes beneath them. A part of him thought if maybe he gave up or were on the cusp of giving up, a moose would reveal itself to save his spirits, and it would point him in the direction of an exit.
But there was no moose, not that time, and no pre-night deliverance from that maze of forest. There was no single sign or North Star to lead him out, but somehow he had escaped and he had established himself farther south, made a community, secured a plot, and made it back up, almost like he had a score to settle. And he’d prepared to spend a week, two weeks, looking for a damn moose, as long as it took, because he knew the poison air and the poison dust and the poison rain couldn’t have killed all of them. If it hadn’t killed him, then it couldn’t possibly kill those beasts.
And almost instantly, at the mouth of a side street maybe ten minutes’ walk into the forest, was a moose, antler-less, with its neck elegantly dipped so that it could sip water from a puddle. With languid movement, it raised its head and stared at Bishop, and he thought he could even see it arch an eyebrow, then it went back to its puddle, and Bishop left, wondering about the nature of grudges and if there were ever a way of holding them that didn’t leave a man exhausted and wanting by the end. But he’d chuckled to himself all the way back home.
And he found himself chuckling now, even as Mercedes pulled to the side of the road.
“This it?” he asked, nudging his door open and stepping out into the mud.
“Nah, a little further,” Sydney said beside him.
He looked down at her with surprise, but she just smiled that impish grin he’d glimpsed on her earlier, then hurried ahead with the rest of the women.
They led him into the forest, and it worried Bishop a little that there were maybe two guns between the four of them and no one had drawn a knife. Especially since the path they walked looked like it had been tread a good bit. Other people had been this way. As they got deeper into the green, he realized that other people was them.
Mercedes slowed down until she was beside Bishop, helping him down ledges and through gaps in stone. A part of him wanted to shrug her off, but that was just pride talking, and he knew it. He wouldn’t refuse the help.
“What’s this surprise, y’all? Is it a new truck?”
Mercedes smirked, and this time, there was some of Sydney’s mischief in it. “Nope.”
“Y’all finally got me a pulpit, but you need me to move it, big strong man that I am.”
“Nope, not it either, Tío.”
They climbed over a log and slid down a little bit of hill. Timeica and Sydney were gone by now.
“Stop guessing.”
“Y’all got me a dolphin. Please don’t tell me I gotta swim to this dolphin.”
Mercedes cackled. “A dolphin? What the fuck? No, it’s not a dolphin.”
“It’s a record collection, that it? Y’all act like y’all don’t care for my music. Y’all think I’m some old head who talks too much, but you found me some Jeezy, and y’all thought ‘aww, Bish would love these.’ You shouldn’t have.” He batted branches away and was grateful for the talk. Felt good to laugh and not worry where harm was gonna come from. It wasn’t like this in cities. Cities, he knew how to move, where to go and how to get there. Needed only a day and a night, maybe half a week at most, and could find everything he needed and quite a bit of what he wanted. Cities called to him. All the places that weren’t cities contrived to hurt him, to confuse him. He didn’t need that mess in his life, not at this age. Not after all he done went through.
“It something we can fit in your car?”
“Um.”
And that was when they got to an opening in the trees. Mercedes stood at his side while, ahead of him, Timeica and Sydney stood or, rather, Timeica stood. Because Sydney was sitting on a horse.
“It ain’t a moose,” said Mercedes.
“No, it ain’t,” Bishop breathed. He didn’t care how loudly the wonder hummed in his voice. Nor did he notice that he’d already cleared the space between him and the horses, that he already had his hand to the side of one’s face. And without realizing, he had both hands against its flank, sensing that it was about to experience distress and heading that off at the pass. “No, it ain’t.”
He remained like that for some time, long enough for every other living thing to move so that it orbited him: Mercedes, Timeica, Sydney, the other horses, even the dragonflies and hornets and cicadas. All these things turned into planets, moons, celestial bodies revolving around him and his horse. Already, it was his horse.
He took his forehead from the horse’s flank and faced Timeica and Mercedes, while Sydney continued to sit imperially on her horse.
“We was thinkin’,” Timeica said, “to bring them back to the city.” She shrugged, looking shy. “Don’t look like they belong to anybody. They just been out here, probably since before Sydney seen ’em maybe a month ago. Winter’s coming, and they’ll need somewhere to stay. And it’d be good for the others, you know, to have something like this. For themselves.”
Mercedes jumped in. “We figured you’d be able to help. Maybe you knew about horses.”
Bishop snorted. “And why would you think that?”
“’Cause you old, nigga!” Timeica shouted, and they all laughed. Even the dragonflies and hornets and cicadas seemed to be laughing too.
ON his mattress, alone, Jonathan plumbed his memory for downloaded evidence of Eamonn’s ancestors, an intimacy deeper than coitus, that data. Eamonn had given Jonathan an access key to his Cloud and, with Eamonn’s superior Net connection, Jonathan had downloaded several folders of data and now waded through the flotsam of proof documented by Eamonn’s ancestors that they had lived here or somewhere like here as long as a century ago. Still photographs, published essays, journal entries, blog posts, social media status updates, so much else.
Across from Jonathan is the yet-to-be-assembled bedframe and in the sunset’s dying light, it blurs, its edges dissolving, until Jonathan slips completely into the simulation, blurring, his edges dissolving.
You’re a student again, and you’re returning to the home the family moved to after Dad died. You spent much of the bus ride working on your cover letter for a summer gig overseas.
But about the time the bus passed the exit for Sandy Hook/Newtown you put away your work and stared past the pretty girl next to you out the window. All bare branches and winding hillside road until you hit Waterbury and you started to see the spires of church towers and the smoke billowing from a nearby factory and the commercial district neatly arrayed before you as you descended the highway. From above, everything looked sharper than you remember. Cleaner. Even when you got into Hartford and there were cleared spaces that you don’t remember, new parking lots, new building façades, all of it seemed sharper. More focused.
You spent most of the trip on I-84, heading steadily east in what proved to be a much speedier route than originally planned. Serendipity had you on that bus after prudence had urged you to get to Port Authority several hours early.
But when you did look out at your home state as it welcomed you back, you felt you were in some kind of shell shock. It all looked crisper. Kinder than you ever remembered it being.
You came home and after Mom picked you up from Union Station and went to bed, you played video games to keep from weeping with joy, all the time filled with images of your state as viewed from that mountain-road stretch of highway, a place that looked exactly and completely like a kingdom.
You were afraid to return to this place, terrified of experiencing the place without your father present. He was a deacon in a church there, Bethel Alliance Church on Stanley Street, but served no truly essential function in the town municipality. He was a gear, necessary the way every gear is necessary. Replaceable, but someone’s machine stops if he is gone, someone’s machine is in need of repair, needs to be fed.
