WE’RE GETTING ON: VIII
The following is an excerpt from WE’RE GETTING ON, part of the Zero Emission Book Project. LAUNCH the book by Sunday, May 9th, and receive a hand-signed copy from the author.
Sam stands on one side of the canal, and I on the other. He crouches down, preparing to leap across it for the second time, as he had to abort the first attempt. With his knees bent, he sways from side to side. He’s having difficulty keeping his balance. I didn’t give him food this morning, which might explain his unsteadiness. But there’s more to his hesitation than weakness. It’s as if he’s forgotten how to jump.
“It’s only four feet,” I say.
“I just need to get my strength,” he says.
When he has repositioned himself, with his fingertips pressed against the concrete lip of the ditch, he takes a deep breath. But rather than flinging himself across the channel, he falls into it and lies for a moment with the water rushing over his head. I reach in and grab him by the collar before he drowns; the last thing I need on my hands is another body.
He rises to his knees and stares at me. His black wool coat is saturated and water is dripping down his face. From my vantage point I can see that the hair on the top of his head, which is lighter in color than his beard, is starting to thin. He looks much older than he is. If I met him on a street corner, I’d think he was forty or fifty. I’ve never asked his age, but I assume, like me, he’s in his late twenties.
“Take off your coat,” I say when he’s on dry ground, and he unbuttons it. We’re standing on a ridge above the property, and one hundred yards below us, Erin is milling about in the garden. Ainsley has either fallen or lain down, but either way, she’s on her side in the middle of the plot. When I announced that we would hunt, Erin smiled, Ainsley frowned, and Sam had no expression. Because of his apathy, I chose him to accompany me. I didn’t want a listless companion—and watching him slowly shed his coat, he is, if nothing else, listless— but I took this excursion as an opportunity to motivate him. I must be very calculating. Ainsley is in greater jeopardy of collapsing, but if I can animate Sam, I think she’ll follow him. I’m simply being efficient.
But I have to wonder how misguided this is. And I don’t mean living on the property. That, I’m sure, is not absurd at all. We’d all survived amidst the crowds for long enough. No, there was nothing unreasonable in this exodus. But hunting without weapons seems presumptuous. How did those prototypical humans do it? I’ve heard that an antelope, if you chase it for three days or so, will collapse from exhaustion. But I doubt Sam is in any condition for that, if there were an antelope to pursue. He couldn’t so much as jump over a ditch. Our best option is to throw something at something, such as a rock at a crow. There is an abundance of stones on the ground, but a dearth of birds in the sky. Perhaps higher in the hills we’ll find one, sitting in a small tree.
We’ve walked some immeasurable distance. In front of us, rooted in the mountainside, is a trunk. I hesitate to call it a tree because it has long since stopped growing. The two limbs that extend from its shaft have been charred, I imagine by a lightning strike. Sam and I sit beside each other with a collection of stones between us. Some time ago I saw a vulture circling overhead. It must have had designs on us, much as we had designs on it, though it failed to alight.
But there’s a hawk, now, rotating around us, and it’s decreasing the radius of its circle with each pass. It very well might roost in our vicinity. In a minute or two, whatever that means, it could settle before us on a limb, and then we would only have to knock it from its perch. I pick up a rock in anticipation. Sam, sitting on his damp coat, seems to have fallen asleep. I don’t dare wake him. If I were to startle him, he might make a startling noise, and then where would we be? Certainly without a carcass. Not that a hawk could feed five people. But what a nice victory it would be.
I stand up, and as if I had willed it to, the hawk lands on the tree. It lifts one wing, preens a feather with its beak, and stares across the valley. I’d like to hit it in the head. That would give me the greatest likelihood of killing it. But, of course, I should be content with striking it at all. It’s more than forty feet away from me, the beast. The rock I’m holding, shaped something like a disc, is smooth, as if it spent some time tumbling along the bottom of a river. When I hurl it, it spins through the air. The bird doesn’t move. But it has no need to. My aim is off by five or six yards, which is such a significant misfire that I have time to pick up a second stone and throw it. Much to my confusion, this one strikes the hawk in the wing and it shuffles across its branch. Assuming I’ve stunned it, I pick up a third rock and run forward. Without stopping to aim I throw again, but my projectile sails over the tree and lands without a sound in the dry grass. I stop to search for another weapon and find a piece of shale, but when I stand to proceed, I see the bird absent its perch and fly unsteadily into the hills.
The walk back with Sam is a slow affair. We haven’t eaten, which doesn’t bother me, but he moves forward with his head down, holding his stomach. Four times already he’s stopped to shit in the dust. It’s amazing how quickly he’s lost his desire for privacy. But deprivation can do that. After a few weeks of starvation, the desire for relief starts to erase one’s propensity for etiquette. I watch him depart from the trail again, which isn’t a trail. He squats ten feet to my left and drops his pants. That’s the extent of his decency. I don’t have to observe him, but I might as well. It’s a form of entertainment. He totters with his legs bent, his right hand tugging on an incisor that’s loosened. His gums are turning gray. Mine are still a rosy pink. Yes, to be certain, I’m flourishing, and he’s struggling.
When we reach the canal again, Sam steps into it, holding his coat over his head. There’s no pretext in this action. He’s weaker than he was when we set out this morning, and he knows that if he couldn’t jump over the ditch then, he can’t now. He seems quite resigned to walking through the water. For a moment it appears that he has no desire to exit, either. The current isn’t strong. He could stand there for years without his legs wearing away. But he doesn’t pause for long. He puts his shoulder on the opposite bank and rolls out so that he’s lying on his back with his arms stretched above him. I assume he’ll rise, but he doesn’t. He might not have the energy. I jump over the channel and consider helping him to his feet. But I want to encourage self-sufficiency. If he can’t get up, he can roll to the garden. In fact, I would like to see him travel in that manner. He’s stored up enough potential energy that he could release it in a mighty tumble down the hill. Out of curiosity and aversion, I crouch behind him, slide my hands beneath his back, and turn him over. When that revolution doesn’t achieve the desired effect, I repeat it, and then once more when the second fails. The third is a resounding success, and he starts to pick up speed. If he were shaped like a cylinder his trajectory might have been more linear. But his hips are narrower than his shoulders and he rolls in a gentle curve, stopping, no doubt to his dismay, a good distance from the camp. I find that I’m almost jealous of his efficiency.
From the embankment I can see Erin kneeling in the garden with her trowel. Ainsley seems to have put herself away in her tent, and Harper, if he ever emerged, is hiding too. Sam is still lying on the ground thirty yards away, stretched out in his previous attitude. He’ll get to his feet or he won’t. But I have a new concern. I realize I’ve made an error—not one that I could have prevented, but an error nonetheless. I should have killed the hawk. Oh, I know that I tried, but that doesn’t absolve me. I’ve formulated a very deliberate plan, and I mustn’t, for all the mistakes I’ve made in the past, be inconsistent now. I suppose I was too impulsive, not having the means to hunt, but hunting regardless. Despite my new hatred of advancement, I can’t avoid it. In order to go backwards I must take small steps forward. For the garden to die it has to have lived. To stop hunting I must have hunted. And if I want to kill successfully, I must have a weapon. A rock won’t do at all. Hawks are far too difficult to stone. I would have done better to sharpen a long stick. The hoe, resting in the dirt where Erin dropped it, has a handle five feet long. That might function ideally. I should reconsider my daily agenda since I’ve altered it irreversibly; this is all so complicated. But let me get my thoughts in order first. The first month was a period of waiting, and because idleness leads to anguishing rumination, I needed a schedule. If I didn’t have to get up this morning for a drink of water, I might not have left the tent at all. And if I didn’t have to check the garden for new growth, I might never have drunk from the barrel. Have I described the characteristics of the barrel? I must remind myself to do that. But I haven’t finished explaining the value of the schedule, or more importantly, why I have to alter it. As I said, the first month was static. Gestation is always a tragedy. The beautiful woman—if she was beautiful to begin with, and often she’s not—becomes quite the corm. As her body distorts, you wonder, very, very often, you wonder, why you’ve stayed around at all. And then there’s a dilation and a scream, an evacuation of fluids and later a body, and the whole trembling mess is suddenly what you feared it would be. But there it is, the infant, the little diarrhetic louse, supine on the table, waiting for you to goad it with your stick. The long slog, or perhaps the very short one, begins. You don’t know how long a parasite can survive outside the body. More than a few days, you’d hoped. Regardless of viability, though, your routine changes when it leaves the canal. It’s very important that you don’t kill the thing, as much as you might hate it. And in order to preserve it, you concoct a new plan, one that doesn’t include checking the garden for new growth three times a day, because there won’t be any for some time, and besides, the pressing issue is that you learn to hunt so when the potatoes sprout, you can depart for the mountains again.
by James Kaelan
