Etta and Otto and Russell and James (13 page)

Dear Otto,

As you know, I always try my
best to correct your letters and return them to you so that you can learn and
avoid those particular mistakes in future. But I have an admission to make,
something I haven’t yet corrected, though maybe I should have. At the end of a
letter, after the signature, one does not need punctuation. No full-stop. I
guess that’s because it’s just one’s name, usually, and one’s name is not, in
itself, a full sentence. However, Otto, I like it. I like that you do it. I like
the finalness, the confidence. So, please, don’t stop.

Yours,

Etta.

Dear Otto,

The school keeps emptying out.
Now Winnie’s gone too. Do you know where she’s gone? Your mother is sick, just
sick with it. She came to my house last night to ask if I knew
anything.

I hadn’t before realized how
much she looked like you.

Mrs. Vogel stood awkwardly on the doorstep, unwilling or unable to cross
the threshold, to come in.

Are you sure you wouldn’t like some coffee? said
Etta. I like an excuse to make it. She held her hands behind her back to hide their
ink stains.

I don’t want to bother you for very long, Etta. Her skin, normally dark
from the sun, was gray-white.

No, I mean it, Mrs. Vogel, it’s too quiet in here. Too dusty too, but
we’ll ignore that.

Are you sure?

I’m sure.

Okay then, said Otto’s mother, stepping, finally, over the doorsill into
the house. And you should call me Grace.

She moved toward the table, but before sitting down, just two feet into
the entrance, she tumbled into her questions, like a waterfall: Etta, do you know
where she’s gone? Did she tell you something? Do you know how?

Etta had retreated to the sink, was washing her hands. I know she wanted
to go. I know she felt strongly.

I know. I know that too. They all did. I just don’t know why. She sunk,
finally, into a kitchen chair. I just thought, with her at least, a girl, my girls,
would be safe.

A beat while she sat down, and then, How do you think she did
it?

Maybe as a nurse . . . there’s a sign-up in town, at the
post office.

No. Not as a nurse. The uniform would make her crazy. And I asked them,
there, too, to be absolutely sure. She hadn’t been by. Not a nurse.

Okay. I’m sorry. Not a nurse.

If you hear anything, Etta.

If I hear anything at all, Grace.

Etta made the coffee as loudly as she could to fill the silence that
expanded between them. She laid the table: cream jug, milk
jug, sugar bowl, sugar spoon, saucers, cups, coffee. Grace Vogel circled her hands
around her coffee-warm cup like it was winter, although the heat was still close and
heavy. You can never stop, Etta, she said. You can never stop being a mother. Never,
never, never.

I mean, I suppose you do all
look like each other to some extent, but she and you especially. The long oval
face, the high forehead, the lean build.

I told her what I could, which
was not much. I know your sister was restless and didn’t want to be a nurse. I
couldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know.

So my class gets smaller and
smaller. Five regular girls, a small coming and going of men and boys, and
Russell, who keeps showing up occasionally even though he made it through all
the material long ago. I’m glad for it. He helps me with whatever needs helping
with, and, besides that, it’s just nice to have a friend around, someone on the
same level, now you and Walter and Wiley, and Winnie, are gone.

He talks about getting a farm
of his own, as so many are going cheap with the farmers gone away or killed. He
talks, sometimes, about running it with you, someday, once you’ve finished
marching and marching and marching.

Etta.

Etta,

We’ve stopped. The marching, the jeeps, the singing, stopped. We’re in a ___
just outside ___ where the buildings are mostly stone and old and damp and cold. We’re camped in a crumbling old house. I don’t know who normally lives here or where they are, but they’ve left all their things. Jackets and trousers still in the closets. Not my size. We’re all in buildings like this around town, __ men here, __ men there, all tucked up inside these places like locals. The jeeps are parked _________, so when we’re all inside you’d never know we were here. We wear this town as camouflage.

We are here, they say, to hold the town. I like the idea of that. Like a kite.

There are a few residents still around, but not many. They seem to be overwhelmingly old and quiet. They pass us in the streets with eyes round and staring. Last time ___ and I were in ___ I bought some candy for any children we might come across, but there don’t seem to be any here, anywhere.

___________________ ____ ___ ____________ if I see her. I am hoping.

Yours sincerely,

Otto.

This was when Otto’s letters started to come with windows. Little
rectangles cut out so that Etta could see her fingers underneath, holding the paper. People, places, and numbers, mostly, had been extracted, carefully cut and kept somewhere else. An office, Etta imagined, in England, stuffed full of these people and places and numbers on their original little rectangles of paper. Passers-by could pay five pence each to stick a hand into the letter slot, rustle about, and pull out

Helsinki

or

Mozambique

or

Sgt. Andrews

or

Carla

or

Seven

or

Five thousand, nine hundred and twelve.

11

J
ames was able to walk again. Which was good because Ontario was proving itself to be huge, twice the length of Manitoba, and then twice that again, with all the ducking and dodging around rocks and lakes.

I had always thought, said Etta, that Ontario was full of people. People and towns and cars and businesses everywhere.

Well, they’re certainly not here.

No. Not unless they’ve been turned to stone.

That’s a possibility.

It was longer now, between towns. Longer and longer. Etta was eating more berries and dandelions. Rationing. She was hungry all the time.

That’s what it’s like
, said James,
to be a coyote.

Being hungry all the time?

Yes, either hungry or sleeping. But, mostly hungry. That’s why we’re able to kill so easily, and why humans aren’t.

Because we’re not hungry enough?

Exactly.

That evening Etta got to her final piece of chocolate and her last chunk of bread. She ate the chocolate and held the bread in her
hands, looking at it.

If you have food, you should eat it
, said James.

No, said Etta.

No?

No, if you have food, you should use it, corrected Etta, to get more food.

She went through her bag until she found the map-in-a-plastic-bag. With James to help navigate she hadn’t been using it much; it was squished down under her clothes. She took the map out of the bag and rewrapped it in socks. Then she took the plastic bag and the remaining bread and started through the trees, toward the nearest lake.

Where are you going?

Being hungry makes you empty enough to kill small animals and it makes me empty enough to eat fish.

Her plan was: take off shoes and socks, roll up skirt, and wade into the lake. Hold the plastic bag open half under the water so it filled. Hold it steady. Break off a few crumbs of bread and scatter them in the vicinity of the bag. Break off one or two crumbs to float in the water in the bag. Hold everything steady and still. Don’t move. Wait.

There were small gray-black fish here, around the size of Etta’s finger, some a little bit bigger, up to two fingers long. Etta was a statue. The water pushed up and back against her knees, up and back. The crumbs she had scattered pushed up and back, up and back, slowly dispersing themselves further and further from her and her bag. Eventually, the fish she had scattered when she first stepped into the water returned, cautious, sniffing the water before and around them with their mouths, unblinking. They ate some of the scattered crumbs, swam in closer, ate more crumbs, swam in closer, until all the
bread bits outside of the bag were gone. They sucked and sniffed and swam closer to the bag, and closer. They looked anything but edible, metallic and wet and alien, eyes always open. One of them was at the edge of the bag now, long as a pointer-finger, its head was just inside, mouth opening-closing, opening-closing. Etta tensed, inhaled, and scooped the bag up around it, as fast as she could.

Which was not very fast. The bag dragged in the water, and the fish zipped away like a pencil line long before Etta got the makeshift net to the surface. So, she tried again. And again, and again. The fish would swim off in a frenzied cloud at her movement, then edge back little by little to the crumbs and bag, then away again, then back, again and again, until it was too dark and too cold to be standing in a lake.

Etta waded back out to the shore with no fish and half as much bread as she’d started with. She ate some dandelions and some half-ripe blueberries and went to bed with the tingling tiredness of hunger sparkling through her legs, belly, and head.

You should eat the bread
, said James the next morning as they were getting up.

No, said Etta. I have a new plan.

She took a pen and stabbed the bottom of the plastic bag, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times. More like a net, she said. Faster. She walked down to the lake, took off her shoes and socks, rolled up her skirt, and tried again. James watched from the shore. Silent. The fish edged toward Etta little by little, eating the crumbs around the bag, carefully, carefully, slowly, slowly, creeping into the bag and then—faster than anything, Etta was sure, faster than anything on land, at least—streaming effortlessly away as she tried to scoop them up. Again and again. Even now that the bag was faster, it wasn’t anything near as fast as a fish. Etta waded back out
of the water. Sat on the rock-beach. Tired. Her bare feet and legs dripped dark patterns onto the rocks. Even when I was young, she said to James, who sat ten meters up, behind her, I could not move fast enough for that.

It’s to be expected, Etta; they know water better than you.
James scampered down next to her, favoring his hurt leg on the slippery, uneven stones. He laid a gray squirrel on the rock between them. Bleeding and still kicking a little.
Eat this.

Isn’t it yours? What will you eat?

I already ate. A ground-dove. You eat this.

But I thought you were always hungry.

I am.

And I thought animals weren’t susceptible to sympathetic or altruistic whims.

Aren’t you an animal too?

True. Still.

Eat it. We need to keep moving.

I don’t know how.

You don’t know how?

Yes. Skinning and deboning and all that. I don’t know how.

Why don’t you just take a bite?

The squirrel had stopped moving. It was on its back. I should have brought a knife, said Etta. I don’t have a knife. She scanned the rocks around them until she found a small, sharpish one, and picked it up. Okay, she said. Tell me, is the tail worth doing, or should I start with the body?

She washed her hands in the lake afterward, the squirrel blood spiraling away in tendrils, her own blood moving again, awake. Thank you, she said to James. They walked all day.

Then another lake, another plan. Etta didn’t want to take James’s
food any more than she had to, and only had three bullets left for the rifle. She took out her two water bottles, clear, hard plastic, one big, one smaller. The small one was still full, the big one was three-quarters empty. She tested the firmness of the sides, pinching with thumb and forefinger. The smaller once bounced back more quickly, so she poured all the water from it into the big one.

I’m going hunting
, said James.
Are you sure you don’t want anything?

Feed yourself, James. I’ll be fine.

Okay. But if you—

I’ll be fine. I have a plan.

She took the dry half-handful of remaining bread, the plastic bag, and the smaller bottle and headed for the lake. Removed shoes, socks, rolled skirt. She sprinkled some crumbs around, squeezed the bottle in on itself, thumb and forefinger almost touching through the sides, submerged it, and waited. Two minutes later the cautious fish returned, sucking down the crumbs on the furthest periphery, then closer and closer toward the bottle. One just the size of her pinkie swam in twitching jerks up to the bottle’s mouth. Just as it had its nose to the lip, Etta released her grip. A gasp of water sucked in and, with it, the fish. Whoosh, whispered Etta. The fish swam in a disoriented flurry, all right angles inside the bottle. Well, said Etta. That’s one.

She caught six fish this way, whooshing them in an unexpected and distressing ambush of current into her bottle. Each time she caught one she would wait until it calmed down a little bit, swimming in slower and slower angles and finally settling into stillness, and then she’d put it in the fishery cage she’d made of the map-bag suspended taut from an overhanging branch into a rock pool. The smallest fish swam away through one of the holes, but all the others remained,
gray and black and marble-eyed, glistening in torpedo shapes, looking thoroughly inedible.

Like she had yesterday, for the squirrel, Etta used a lighter the reporter woman had given her to start a fire. James hated it. He stayed back, far back, in the direction of the lake; he stayed standing, ready.

It’s okay. I built a stone circle. Etta was jabbing the fish one at a time onto a pointed branch. One, two, three, stab. The wet rubber texture of fish skin. Horrible. And again, one, two, three, stab.

It’s still dangerous.

Not always. Now all five non-escaped fish were on the one branch, in a slick, shining row. Their scales made Etta think of insects.

You can’t trust it. Always. And isn’t something you can never trust dangerous, always?

No, said Etta. And then, I don’t know, maybe. She held the skewer over the fire. Hissing, popping, spitting. It’s a good thing I’m so hungry, she said. And then, do you eat the eyes? I wonder.

I usually do.

Etta didn’t eat the eyes. Instead, after dinner, she went back down to the lake once more and rubbed and rinsed off the skeletons, clearing away the face and eyes and the bits of meat she hadn’t been able to get at herself. More little fish came along and ate them, swallowing up the eyeballs in easy mouthfuls. Etta let the spines and tails break off and float away, but she kept the skulls, smaller and softer than the one she already had. I’m sorry, she said. I am just so hungry.

Il faut manger,
they said, one at a time, over and over.

It’s a long long way to go still, isn’t it?

Oui oui oui oui oui.