The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy (8 page)

CHAPTER 13
Rites of Passage

Three times the conch shell blasts.

As if answering the call, a super moon rises above the bluff and casts its silver spotlight down on the cove.

“I’m nervous,” Jimmy whispers.

“Me too,” I say, my hands covering my nakedness.

Aunt Salinas blows the shell again, the men begin dancing around the fire, their twisted shadows cast onto the sand. They howl and scream, clouds of breath rising like ghosts against the dark sky. Then they stop. In the sudden silence, I can hear the children giggling from their tent flaps behind us.

“You’s better go to sleep,” Jimmy hisses at them. Then he turns back to me. “Sure ya wanna do this? Ya dun’ have to.”

“I know, but if you’re doing it, I’m doing it.”

The men stand at the fire, waiting. Their heads hung, their arms crossed. The women circle around them. Then they begin to wail, their arms flailing about, their voices riding the night. When they finish, they kneel on the ground, creating a pathway between us and the men at the fire.

Jimmy and I step up, stripped and trembling.

The women reach across the path they’ve made and grip one another’s arms, creating a tunnel, a human arch, writhing, waving, inviting us in. Jimmy ducks beneath them and crawls through the tunnel toward the fire. When he comes out the other side, the men pull him into their circle, his father forcing him to the ground and sitting on his chest. The knife glints like a fish in the firelight as he lowers the blade to Jimmy’s waist. I watch with horror as he tugs and saws, his head bent and focused on his work. Jimmy doesn’t even make a sound. His father finishes, holding up the bloody knife in one hand and the results of his work hanging lifeless and limp in the other.

My legs go wobbly. I think I might faint.

Jimmy’s father pulls him up to his feet and embraces him. Someone paints charcoal on his cheek. Then they circle the fire again, dancing and howling, Jimmy with them now, until they come to rest and stand still, waiting for me.

I drop to my knees, and crawl beneath the arch of arms. They press down against me and I’m trapped in a living canal, forced to my belly, squirming, crawling along the tunnel toward the fire. They press closer, smothering me with their bosoms. My breath quickens and I push forward, harder, faster. They close tight around me and just when I think I’ll surely suffocate, I burst free into the firelight and the circle of waiting men.

Jimmy’s father forces me to the ground and sits on my chest. I smell his sweat, feel the weight of him pressing me into the sand. I see the blade’s shadow as he bends to his work, but I feel nothing. Then he releases me. I lift my head with horror, but other than my nakedness, there’s not much to see.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, feebly, uncomfortable and nervous with everyone’s eyes on me.

“You’s cut already.”

“I don’t see it.”

Jimmy points. “Da cirkemsizhen.”

“Circumcision? They do that when we’re babies.”

“Babies?” he says, looking confused. “That’s barbaric.”

“Is okay,” the eldest man says. “Jest finish the rites.”

Jimmy clasps my hand and pulls me up. Someone paints charcoal on my cheeks. Then I’m swept into the circle, dancing and howling around the fire. Faster now. Everyone. All taut muscle and hot sweat and charcoal dripping. The women skip, turning in the opposite direction, mixing in and out of the men. The moon shines down and the night hangs heavy with joy, the cool air infused with the scents of bodies and salt and fire.

Aunt Salinas blows the conch and everyone stops.

We fall exhausted where we stand into piles and heaps on the ground, everyone laughing and relaxed.

I lean into Jimmy and he pushes my sweaty hair away from my brow. I look up at him and he smiles. I smile. We don’t say it, but we both know that things will never be the same again—never after this night, because after this night we’re men.

We lie beneath the moon and let the fire burn down. A gourd passes filled with some kind of sweet milk. A basket of fruit appears. We eat and drink and breathe, but nobody says a word. When Aunt Salinas blows the conch again, people begin to rise. One by one we all get up and drift away to our tents and retire to reflect in solitude and then drift off into whatever wild dreams might visit us each on this free and uninhibited night.

CHAPTER 14
The Butterfly Waits

Kids crying all night.

In the morning, they crawl tired from their tents itching and scratching their raw scalps.

Jimmy’s mother orders everyone to leave camp so she can turn out our tents and treat the bedding. Jimmy piles with the men into boats and they shove off to drop nets. The mothers take their children to collect crabs for stew, and they march off down the beach, a dozen little arms raised and scratching at a dozen little heads. I stand around wondering what I should do.

“Maybe ya won’t mind collectin’ some poppies?” Jimmy’s mother says, handing me a leather pouch.

“Poppies? You mean the little yellow flowers?”

“Them’s the ones,” she says.

“What for?”

“We grind ’em up and dry ’em,” she says. “Makes a paste to kill the lice.”

With a canteen around my neck and my pockets filled with dried fish, I head out from the cove carrying the poppy pouch.

The bluff above the cove is rocky, the only plants being scrub brush and sawgrass, but farther inland the bluff drops down into a lush valley where I stroll beneath a shaded canopy of trees, on the lookout for the little yellow flowers.

Soon the path turns into a thick tangle of thorny bushes and I use a stick to beat them back. I walk east, knowing that if I lose my way I can follow the setting sun back to the coast and the cove. Tearing through a thick patch of brush, I step into a small, circular clearing where the grass has been bedded down. There, staring at me with large, dewy eyes, is a mother elk with her baby attached to her tit. Her eyes are the deepest black of any I’ve ever seen and my reflection stands there in each one, my stick upheld as if to murder her with it. I’m surprised by her calm and steady gaze, devoid of any fear. A feeling of embarrassment comes over me, as if I’ve interrupted something sacred. I back from the clearing and take another path around.

I find the poppies in the shade of a big oak. They grow in a ring around the trunk, so yellow and bright that they cast a warm glow upward onto the dark bark. It feels almost a shame to pick them, but I quickly fill the pouch.

It doesn’t take me long to realize that I’m lost. The thick canopy hides the sun, and I can only guess which way is west. Every time I think I’ve got it right, the sun peeks through in the wrong place, forcing me to correct course. Around stumps, over the gnarled roots of rotting trees, bypassing impossible blackberry vines covered in thorns, I move on and on and on. After hours of going nowhere, I know I’m walking in circles.

When the rain comes, it comes without warning.

One moment the warm forest is filled with chirping birds, an instant later it’s silent and dark, the rain gushing down all around me. It falls in heavy drops, thrashing leaves overhead, leaning plants, dripping to the forest floor. I’m soaked in sixty seconds. The ground grows muddy. Puddles appear. I splash through them and walk toward what I hope is still west.

The water brings new life up from the forest floor. Frogs croaking, slugs slithering, a giant salamander sliding across my feet in a stream that only a moment ago wasn’t even there. The rain keeps coming until I can hardly remember a time before. A bog sucks my shoes from my feet, the tattered material finally tearing when I try to retrieve them, so I leave them sticking in the mud like abandoned oyster shells and walk on barefoot.

It rains and it rains and it rains.

And then it stops.

As quickly as it began, the rain ceases and the golden light returns to the canopy. Great droplets of water hang from leaves like heavy crystals just waiting to be plucked, dripping onto the forest floor and then growing again. The frogs fade, the birds sing. I push on, whacking drenched growth with my stick, the rainwater bursting into little rainbow showers as I hack them down, and then I step into the most amazing view.

Before me, a strange field of leafy vines stretches almost as far as I can see, dotted everywhere with alien pods. A hundred, a thousand, a million glistening melons, golden in the stormy light of an enormous rainbow arching over the field with the retreating storm clouds piling up behind it.

I inch into the field, not wanting to disturb the moment. Reaching down, I pick a melon and weigh it in my hand—the thick skin pocked and coarse, the melon heavy and cool. I cut it open with Uncle John’s knife and bury my teeth in the fruit. The flavor explodes in my mouth, sweeter than anything I’ve ever tasted. Within minutes, I’m standing with juice dripping down my chin and holding an empty rind. I eat another, and another after that. The rainbow fades.

When I’m stuffed so far beyond full that it hurts, I pick through the vines, collecting the best melons and piling them at the edge of the patch. Some are too green, others too ripe, a few cracked open and rotting with splotches of mold covering them like green fur. But most are just right. It would take six hundred people six months to pick them all, and I quit only a few meters into the patch when I realize my pyramid of fruit is already too tall for me to carry.

I gather them in my arms and start off west into the setting sun, feeling like some loaded lunatic melon juggler walking off in search of an audience to entertain. Every few steps I drop a melon, and when I stop to collect it again, I drop more. My dad would have called it an idiot load. I carry on like this until so many melons have dashed themselves open on the ground that the stack is reduced to a manageable size. I look back once from a hill and see a trail of mangled melons marking my path.

When I get to the cove, Jimmy’s mother is yelling at him.

The camp is swept clean, the tents open and airing out, and everyone mills about listening to Jimmy get admonished in his mother’s tent. She’s telling him about honor, about being a man. About integrity and respecting personal property. And when her voice finally fades I hear Jimmy whimpering in soft apology. Then they step out from the tent and everyone averts their eyes and pretends not to be listening.

Now that the drama is over, the children see me and rush to take the melons from my arms, jumping in little circles and begging to eat them while aunts and uncles warn them to wait until after supper. I hand the pouch of poppies to Jimmy’s mother and she thanks me. Jimmy stands beside her with his head hung. She nudges him in the ribs with an elbow. He looks up and he has tears in his eyes.

“I owe’s ya an apology,” he says.

Then, after another nudge in the ribs, he reaches into his pocket and hands me my father’s pipe.

My father’s pipe!

I’d forgotten all about it these last few months in the cove, hadn’t even missed it. I look at the pipe in my palm and I’m back in Holocene II, sitting at the table with my father, hearing him tell me about how proud he is of me and how my mother would be, too. I look back up at Jimmy and we’re both crying.

He runs off, leaving me alone with his mother.

She takes my arm then, leading me down to the beach and the log where I sat and ate her stew my first night in the cove. We sit side by side and stare off into the setting sun.

“He only took it ’cause he likes ya,” she says. “He likes ya and maybe he jealous some, too.”

“Jimmy?” I ask. “Jealous of me?”

She nods. “He jealous when I care for you while you’s sick. There’s time in a boy’s life when he becomes a man, to become this man he must let his mother go. I’ve had to push my son away more than it feels good to push ... done it for his own sake and that’s been hard for me, see? When Jimmy brought ya to us, you’s in bad shape. Boy, you’s bad off. I wasn’t sure ya’d make it. My time was all yers, see?

I nod, understanding. I want to tell her how much it meant to wake and hear her humming, to feel her arms protecting me in that cave. I want to tell her that I never had a mother for real and that she’s as close a thing to it as I can imagine.

“Thank you,” is all I say.

She smiles and puts her arm around me as if she’d heard all my thoughts anyway in just those two words.

“Pipe was yer father’s?” she asks, after a long pause.

I look at it and nod.

“Ya know,” she says, taking it from my hand and looking at its carving in the fading light, “butterflies are spirit symbols. Many say butterflies represent the change, the stages of a life.”

“Like the chrysalis breaking open and taking flight.”

“The chrysalis?”

“You know, the cocoon.”

“Yes, yes. The second egg. But even more than that, see? The rebirth. Caterpillar dun’ become butterfly—caterpillar die so butterfly can be. A new thing. We all must let ourselves die to be what we will be. But we cling to what we know.”

“Is that why Jimmy clings to you?”

“Yes. And you’s too now. But there’ll be time soon when you’s must be strong, Aubrey. You’s a special boy.”

“People keep telling me that, but I don’t see why.”

“That’s ’cause you’s still a boy. A special one, but still a boy. Trust the heart, child. Always listen and trust. The answer is inside, since the beginning of all time. The butterfly waits.”

When she finishes talking, she squeezes me close, and for a moment, one lingering sweet moment, the world is clear to me, and perfect, and I feel safe and wanting for nothing except to sit here beside her forever in the twilight. Then she releases me and walks back to camp, leaving me alone on our log. A black moth flits by and lands briefly where she sat, and then it too takes flight. I sit looking at my father’s pipe, trying to recapture the moment, trying to absorb the meaning of what she said. But all I feel is the summer warmth leaching from the fall air.

I sit until I hear the call to supper.

CHAPTER 15
The Slaughter

“Whale!”

The cry comes echoing up the cove.

“Whale!”

The camp comes alive. Tents fly open, waking faces blink into the morning sun. The men dash to the cave and drag forth the boats. The women whirl around camp collecting supplies, thrusting things into pouches and draping the pouches over the men’s necks. Jimmy jumps from our tent and races to the high cliffs and disappears into a crack, reappearing moments later carrying an armful of lethal-looking harpoons, their barbed-antler tips wrapped in blubber-soaked skins.

I follow him to the water’s edge and watch as he loads the harpoons onto the waiting boats.

“Can I come?”

Jimmy ignores me, boarding the last boat as it shoves off. “Watch from up there,” he calls, pointing to the bluff as they row away from me. “It’s my first time at the harpoon.”

I clamber up the path and by the time I get to the bluff, the men are rowing clear of the cove and out to sea. I shade my eyes and look in the direction they’re heading and catch sight of their goal a hundred meters offshore.

Massive gray crescents rising from the still water, barnacle-crusted and splotchy, spouting great plumes of mist and rolling before disappearing beneath the splash of their gigantic flukes. The water stills, the mist fades, the boats advance. They surface again farther off, at least a dozen gray whales all moving south along the shelf just past the reefs, where the deep water looks black in the dawn light. Big whales, small whales, mothers leading young—they rise and roll and splash, the loaded boats rowing toward them like slowly approaching arrows launched from the cove. I run along the bluff to keep them in my sight.

Jimmy’s boat reaches the pod first, intercepting a large cow and cutting her off from her calf. She’s fifteen meters long if she’s a foot, and half again as round. Her huge flippers slap at the water as she spins, and then sensing the boat behind her, she dives and smacks her huge fluke, showering the men with spray. They shake themselves dry and row on.

Jimmy hoists up a harpoon that’s twice as long as he is tall and carries it to the front of the boat. His father ties a coil of rope to the harpoon, the other end to the boat. Then he slaps Jimmy on the back to let him know he’s ready. Jimmy climbs onto the bow and balances there, holding the harpoon.

He looks magnificent!

Standing proud at the very tip of the boat, long and lean, harpoon clutched in his hand, he has the look of some wood-carved Viking ship warrior I might have dreamed about seeing.

The whale surfaces not far away. Jimmy points, the men dip their oars faster. The boat advances, the others following behind, and they encircle the whale and turn her out, cutting her completely off from the pod.

She rolls and slaps her fluke and rolls again.

Jimmy lifts the harpoon above his head, and as the boat closes on the whale, he steps onto one leg and crouches, knee-bent and ready, as taut as the string on his spear-gun bow.

And then he leaps—

He leaps high into the air, out over the sea, and he hovers there a moment, suspended, harpoon in hand, looking down upon the whale, and then he falls like lightning onto its back and drives the harpoon home with all his weight.

He releases the harpoon and dives free of the speared and angry animal and swims toward the boats. The whale hits the end of the line, jerking the boat around and towing it behind her as she runs. She blows and her plume is pink with blood.

I feel sick watching the slaughter, and now I’m glad they didn’t let me on the boat. I remember these gray whales from educationals and I know we nearly hunted them extinct. And here they are back in force, and we’re doing it all again.

Jimmy climbs aboard a trailing boat, hefts another harpoon and steps again into the bow. The rowers dip their oars, dip and pull and dip again, passing the tethered boat and chasing down the whale. Jimmy leaps again, and again he drives the harpoon home, the whale now tethered from two sides and Jimmy being flung wildly above the water, clinging to one of the ropes, as the angry whale thrashes and turns. The third boat approaches and another man leaps with another harpoon and now there are three taut lines and three tugging boats and the whale rolls and slaps its fluke and the water turns red all around it.

A wind comes up, rifling across the water, hitting the bluff and kicking sand into my eyes. I look away and see the other whales escaping farther down the coast, the calf bringing up the rear, either not knowing or knowing and having abandoned its captured mother to her fate.

Then I see the ship.

It comes cutting through the black water like an enormous gray mechanical whale hewn of carbon fiber angles and molded steel. It moves fast and silent. The hull rises sleek and tall, and if the ship were closer to shore, the alien wind meters and radar dishes turning slowly from its riggings would be eye level with me where I lie on the edge of the bluff.

I open my mouth to scream, to warn the men about the approaching ship, but stop when I notice the emblem displayed on its side—the green interlocking Foundation Valknut.

Feeling sudden relief, I sigh—it must be a research vessel.

My scream comes when the slots slide open and the guns push out. I scream loud and long and useless into the wind as the ship barrels down on the men tethered to their catch. It’s nearly on top of them when they see it.

And then it fires.

The cannons cut like thunder over the water, and several men explode into red mist and rain down on the already bloody sea. The sun darkens momentarily, brightens again as drones go racing by overhead. Helpless, I watch as the men scramble to make an escape. The ropes cut, the oars turned out—too late, the big cannons fire, this time blasting an entire boat to pieces and blasting Jimmy’s dad to pieces with it. Another boat turns over, flipped by the men now hiding beneath it, just like Jimmy and I did that day the drones flew overhead.

“No!” I shout. “Swim! Get away!”

A shell pierces the upturned hull, detonating in a bloody blast of splintered wood. Men dive from the remaining boats and swim for their lives toward shore. The loud rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns sawing them to pieces, water rising in showers like tracers behind the slugs.

My heart hammers in my chest.

I’m soaked through with sudden sweat.

And I scream again, but if any sound comes I can’t hear it for the ringing in my ears.

Then the ship stops firing and comes about and floats still, its guns swinging in their turrets, slow over the bloody water—looking, waiting, looking.

A splash there.

The gun moves, sights itself, fires.

The water is calm again except for the slow rolling of quiet waves glowing red with blood where the sun shines through.

I lie flat against the bluff and hold my breath.

The ships stands off for minutes and the minutes seem like hours. Waves lap against its side at the waterline, bumping flesh and body parts and blubber wooden-like against its hull.

Still I hold my breath.

The ship turns, and as if powered by the same silent force of gravity that moves the tides, it glides swift and sure back the way it came and disappears down the coastline out of sight.

I gasp out my breath—

And the long scream of horror that it held.