LAURA PRITCHETT Bluestem

LAURA PRITCHETT | BLUESTEM

We’ve passed John Wayne’s birthplace, the Russell Stover Candy Factory, home of Astronaut Gus Grissom, the House of Corn. Various billboards announce this to us, plus also that Jesus Loves, Abortion Stops a Beating Heart, and Seatbelts Save Lives.

“Our lives are tenuous.” Nova nods at a series of small billboards that warn of the dangers of drinking and driving. “This planet is fucked. We just like to mark it in various ways. Or amuse ourselves in the meantime.”

Then we pass a small white cross that verifies the flimsy world she speaks of, and I know she’s lonely and therefore angry, and so I say, “Yeah, think about that lost life, what dreams went unrealized.”

“Exactly,” she says. “That’s true even for us who go on living.”

Then, as she intended, I register the fact she’s referring to herself. I nod to let her know she’s been heard and turn to put my arm out the window and wave my hand up and down against the rushing air. The car is loud with windroar, a noise created not just by the current wind but the air that’s been rushing in for hundreds of miles, some combo of heat and wind and land and salience of our own demise and fundamental unimportance and it all makes me feel dazed and I wonder what this trip would be like in a new, air-conditioned car. I can’t imagine it, can’t imagine us not being sticky and smelly and burnt with the heat and noise, can’t imagine not having tangles in my long raspy hair, her not having tangles in her long black hair, can’t imagine being sleek and elegant or looking cared for. I equally can’t imagine being fully happy, fully content, and I hate that about me and so I reach out to touch her thigh and say, “There is no wealth but time,” but I don’t actually want to hear her answer, which will be, “No, Ruthie, there is no wealth but love,” or some other bitterness, so I turn up the music to fill the air even more.

The prairie stretches out of sight and the dimming rays of the sun light up the fields in a soft glow. The wheat has started to turn. The green fields are streaked with gold, and there’s a few places where the stalks are a little of both, caught up in the space between living and dying, which is what the song is about, which is what the billboards are about, and I think to say something about this when I see a flash, a brown blur. It happens at once: Nova slams on the brakes, a deep thud sounds through the car, my body is thrown forward, air escapes my mouth in a cry, the car jolts to a stop. A quiet follows, a buzzing silence that presses at my ears. Nova and

I look at each other, and then I struggle to unclasp my seat belt, and Nova turns on the hazards, backs the car up and pulls it to the side of the road. Now I see the bloody deer in front of us. She lies on her side, front legs flailing in the air. A soft, beautiful brown on black pavement.

When we run to her, I see she is shaking in a weird way, deep quivers running through her body. Her nostrils move slightly with breath and blood trickles out her black nose. A dark, soft eye stares straight up at us, then blinks. She tries to move, strains her neck up and kicks her front legs, then lies flat again.

I cover my mouth with my hand and back up, stumbling on the grass alongside the road. Nova looks white and sick, but still crouches next to the doe. Holding her head down with one hand, she runs her other along the deer’s spine. Her fingers stop halfway down her back and I think it is broken, I think I see the lump under the skin where bone has snapped.

The doe strains her neck again, and looks at her hind legs, as if to ask them why they’re not moving. This simple movement, her gazing at her legs in wonder, makes me gag. Then I must pee—or I’ll pee my pants—so I jog off to the barrow. I’m so embarrassed somehow but it’s not a choice. While I’m crouching, I see Nova run for the car, come back with the backpack, and shake the contents out across the road. She can’t find whatever it is she’s looking for. She kicks at the water bottle, paws through the granola bars, throws my art supplies into the road. Then she stands, holding my big utility knife, flicks it open, and walks to the deer. She looks to me for help and then shakes her head in disgust and then looks up and down the road. There are no headlights, no nothing, so she looks at me again, buttoning my pants now, then pushes the doe’s head down. I see her pause. By the time I am near her, I can see that she is palpating the throat just under the jaw and feeling for the esophagus and that detail makes my heart gag and I push my eardrums until I hear only windroar again.

She stabs into the neck and pulls the blade toward her, then turns her head away from the deer, and I too am turning my head, but we know blood is gurgling out. The deer thrashes wildly for a moment, spraying blood as her head breaks free from Nova’s hands. It is horrible, to watch this waste of life, her potential time left unrealized. Finally, the doe stills.

“I didn’t want her to suffer,” Nova says, and I assume she is also referring to

herself. Then she turns and vomits, right onto the pavement, holding her black tangled curls back with one hand. When she’s done, she passes her wrist across her mouth and raises her eyes to the sky.

I want to tell her I love her, out of admiration that she knows such things, for her tenderness and presence of mind. That she can do what should be done, that her history as a ranch kid makes such things possible, and also that she’s honoring her future by giving her bigger dreams a try. That I’m sorry for my silence, for my violence against her in that way. But already she is picking up the hind leg to drag the deer to the side of the road, although the deer doesn’t budge and so I grab the other leg to help, but again the deer doesn’t budge, and I realize the deer is heavier than we are strong. Nova does a sad one-two-three-heave!—and in this way, we lurch her forward until the doe is just past the white line. Then we stand, heaving, and she bends to wipe the blood off her hands in the grass.

I find a water jug and an old towel in the car, pour the water over her hands and hand her the towel. She holds it in her hands and then sighs and says, “We should go home.”

Back by the House of Corn, birthplace of John Wayne, back past the stupid monuments, the worthy monuments, back past the sacred and mundane, back across all those miles in a hot car, wind blowing, our bodies jolting as we’re carried for hundreds of miles, without effort, without much awareness, despite our efforts. “No, no,” she says, seeing my face. “Here. This home.”

The West, she means.

She says, “We’re falling into the middle.”

“Bell-curve and all,” I say, trying to make a sad joke.

But she doesn’t smile. “We said we wouldn’t do this mediocre-middle thing.”

We were supposed to work to change the world, she means. Or the opposite alternative: Escaping to a quiet place to live simply. Not where we are. Not in a city, not in a small house crowded amongst others, not with me wondering about how to best fold the towels, not with her worrying about laundry detergent brands.

I look at the sun hovering behind a bruised cloud and the sky has deepened into a deep shade of blue, an enormous arc of a blue that’s quiet and still.

“It doesn’t matter where we live, Nova. It’s us.”

“But our dreams can’t live in that city. Where are they, our dreams?”

“You can still be a person of consequence and be in the mainstream,” I say, though she’s heard this before, and she knows that I’m right, but also, she is right, and it’s true, we are not heading in the direction we intended.

“I was thinking about our gas mileage before we hit the deer. Thirty-two gallons per mile? Who cares?” Her voice is hard now. “What about the people who die without ever having tasted an orange? Plastic never disintegrates, do you hear me?” She turns to me and speaks softly. “I’m so sorry. I can’t live with you anymore.”

I open my mouth to speak, but before I can say anything, she sweeps her hand across the land in front of us. It’s nearly dark, and now there are different bands of blue—a dark blue earth, lighter blue sky. “No sidewalks, less concrete, fewer lines, more space.”

On the horizon, where she has just waved, headlights appear. We watch as they grow closer and a pickup truck becomes visible. The driver slows when he sees us. “You okay?” A man in a ballcap leans out of the window and squints at us.

“Yes,” Nova says. “Thanks.”

“No town for miles.”

“Deer,” Nova says, nodding in the direction of the dark form. “She’s off the road. No car problems.”

The man eyes the car’s front bumper, which is hanging crooked. If it was lighter out, he could see what I know is there: blood pooled on the road, blood sprayed across Nova’s clothes. But he doesn’t, or if he does, he understands, and he is in a hurry, and he drives on.

When his red taillights disappear, I walk forward to the grass on the edge of the road, where it’s been mowed short, and I walk further to where the stalks suddenly spring up to the height they were meant to be. I stand there for a while, then pull out a blade of bluestem that is nearly as tall as a deer, rub the blade between my fingers.

When I look back up, it’s dark, but I can make out the shape of Nova holding her hands to her head, which is jerking with crying, and as I approach, she backs up.

“The deer and all,” she says in a crumpled voice.

“I know,” I say. And I think I do: not only that we have killed it, but that it happened without our knowledge, our consent, our awareness. What if she’d seen it sooner? What if we’d passed by that spot one minute later? So much depends

on nothing, or nearly nothing, so I walk up and hand her the stalk of Bluestem. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

She holds it to her, then holds me to her. I pull away, suddenly, and I sense the sorrow that comes from her when I do. But it is not what she thinks. I walk over to the dead deer and stand above her silk-brown form before getting down on my knees. I put my hand against her neck, strong and firm, and push my fingers inside the wound. What I feel is warmth—not hair or blood but warmth—and then I feel slick and strength, tendons and dead-weight muscles, all of it so heavy. I press further. I want to feel what we have done. I clutch my fingers so as to feel the deer’s throat, and with my other hand, I touch my own.