“When they took… us off the train” my grandfather said, “for one moment … J swear I smelled… leaves. Fat, green leaves… the new green… in them. Then the old smell… The only smell. Blood in dirt. The stink… of us. Piss. Shit. Open… sores. Skin on fire. Hnnn.”
His voice trailed away, hardly-there air over barely moving mouth, and still he kept talking. “Prayed for… some people… to die. They smelled… better. Dead. That was one prayer … always answered.
“They took us… into the woods. Not to barracks. So few of them. Ten. Maybe twenty. Faces like… possums. Stupid. Blank. No thoughts. We came to… ditches. Deep. Like wells. Half full already. They told us ‘Stand still’… ‘Breathe in’.”
At first, I thought the ensuing silence was for effect. He was letting me smell it. And I did, the earth and the dead people, and there were German soldiers all around, floating up out of the sand with black uniforms and white, blank faces. Then my grandfather crumpled forward, and I screamed for Lucy.
She came fast but not running and put a hand on my grandfather’s back and another on his neck. After a few seconds, she straightened. “He’s asleep,” she told me. “Stay here.” She wheeled my grandfather into the house. She was gone a long time.
Sliding to a sitting position, I closed my eyes and tried not to hear my grandfather’s voice. After a while I thought I could hear bugs and snakes and something larger padding out beyond the cacti. I could feel the moonlight, too, white and cool on my skin. The screen door banged, and I opened my eyes to find Lucy moving toward me, past me, carrying a picnic basket into the hogan.
“I want to eat out here,” I said quickly, and Lucy turned with the hide curtain in her hand.
“Why don’t we go in?” she said, and the note of coaxing in her voice made me nervous. So did the way she glanced over her shoulder into the hogan, as though something in there had spoken.
I stayed where I was, and eventually Lucy shrugged and let the curtain fall and dropped the basket at my feet. From the way she was acting, I thought she might leave me alone out there, but she tat down instead and looked at the sand and the cacti and the stars.
Inside the basket I found warmed canned chili in a tupperware container and fry bread with cinnamon sugar and two cellophane-wrapped broccoli stalks that reminded me of uprooted miniature trees. In my ears, my grandfather’s voice murmured. To drown out the sound more than anything else, I began to eat.
As soon as I was finished, Lucy began to pack up the basket, but she stopped when I spoke. “Please,” I said. “Just talk to me a little.”
She gave me the same look she’d given me all day. As though we’d never even met. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow… well, let’s just say tomorrow’s a big day.”
“For who?”
Lucy pursed her lips, and all at once, inexplicably, she seemed on the verge of tears. “Go to sleep.”
“I’m not sleeping in the hogan,” I told her.
“Suit yourself.”
She was standing, her back to me now. I said, “Just tell me what kind of Way we’re doing.”
“An Enemy Way.”
“What does it do?”
“It’s nothing, Seth. Jesus Christ. It’s silly. Your grandfather thinks it will help him talk. He thinks it will sustain him while he tells you what he needs to tell you. Don’t worry about the goddamn Way. Worry about your grandfather, for once.”
My mouth flew open, and my skin stung as though she’d whipped me. I started to protest, then found I couldn’t, and didn’t want to. All my life, I’d built my grandfather into a figure of fear, a gasping, grotesque monster in a wheelchair. And my father had let me. I started to cry.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t apologize to me.” Lucy walked to the screen door.
“Isn’t it a little late?” I called after her, furious at myself, at my father, at Lucy. Sad for my grandfather. Scared and sad.
One more time, Lucy turned around, and the moonlight poured down the white streaks in her hair like wax through a mold. Soon, I thought, she’d be made of it.
“I mean, to hurt my grandfather’s enemies,” I said. “The Way can’t really do anything to them. Right?”
“His enemies are inside him,” Lucy said, and left me.
For hours, it seemed, I sat in the sand, watching constellations explode out of the blackness like firecrackers. In the ground, I heard night-things stirring. I thought about the tube in my grandfather’s mouth and the unspeakable hurt in his eyes — because that’s what it was, I thought now, not boredom, not hatred — and the enemies inside him. And then, slowly, exhaustion overtook me. The taste of fry bread lingered in my mouth, and the starlight got brighter still. I leaned back on my elbows. And finally, at God knows what hour, I crawled into the hogan, under the tarpaulin-canopy Lucy had made me, and fell asleep.
When I awoke, the Dancing Man was sliding down its wire toward me, and I knew, all at once, where I’d seen eyes like my grandfather’s, and the old fear exploded through me all over again. How had he done it, I wondered? The carving on the wooden man’s face was basic, the features crude. But the eyes were his. They had the same singular, almost oval shape, with identical little notches right near the tear ducts. The same too-heavy lids. Same expression, or lack of any.
I was transfixed, and I stopped breathing. All I could see were those eyes dancing toward me. Halfway down the wire, they seemed to stop momentarily, as though studying me, and I remembered something my dad had told me about wolves. “They’re not trial-and-error animals,” he’d said. “They wait and watch, wait and watch, until they’re sure they know how the thing is done. And then they do it.”
The Dancing Man began to weave again. First to one side, then the other, then back. If it reached the bottom of the wire, I thought — I knew — I would die. Or I would change. That was why Lucy was ignoring me. She had lied to me about what we were doing here. That was the reason they hadn’t let my father stay. Leaping to my feet, I grabbed the Dancing Man around its clunky wooden base, and it came off the table with the faintest little suck, as though I’d yanked a weed out of the ground. I wanted to throw it, but I didn’t dare. Instead, bent double, not looking at my clenched fist, I crab-walked to the entrance of the hogan, brushed back the hide curtain, slammed the Dancing Man down in the sand outside, and flung the curtain closed again. Then I squatted in the shadows, panting. Listening.
I crouched there a long time, watching the bottom of the curtain, expecting to see the Dancing Man slithering beneath it. But the hide stayed motionless, the hogan shadowy but still. I let myself sit back, and eventually I slid into my sleeping bag again. I didn’t expect to sleep anymore, but I did.
The smell of fresh fry bread woke me, and when I opened my eyes Lucy was laying a tray of bread and sausage and juice on a red, woven blanket on the floor of the hogan. My lips tasted sandy, and I could feel grit in my clothes and between my teeth and under my eyelids, as though I’d been buried overnight and dug up again.
“Hurry,” Lucy told me, in the same chilly voice as yesterday.
I threw back the sleeping bag and started to sit up and saw the Dancing Man gliding back along its wire, watching me. My whole body clenched, and I glared at Lucy and shouted, “How did that get back here?” Even as I said it, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to ask. More than how, I needed to know when. Exactly how long had it been hovering over me without my knowing?