with the sumac smeared on her thighs. Despite everything, I still wanted her to think that I was game, that I was up for this, the life we were making together from scratch, the life that other people might not understand. But fuck other people. It was each other we wanted. Us and our Perley and our preparations.
I lay on my back on the bed, hearing Karen breathe on one side of me and, on the other side of me, the breath of the snake. The breath of a snake is canceled sound. It’s silence. It’s the whine of the demon whose bone you’ve stolen. The demon who wheedles to come in. I lay awake and listened. I would swear that my eyes never closed. But I must have dropped off, because each morning I woke with Perley in my arms. He’d climbed back into bed with Karen and me sometime during the long fraught night.
PART II
WOLF TREE
5
PERLEY
The snake has strong beliefs. The snake has strong beliefs about territory my Mama K said when the snake began to sleep with us in our bed. We tried to ignore him, at least I think it was a him. He wasn’t the biting kind, but he had a piss flinty smell which was hard for Mama L to sleep through. The snake considers our home to be its home. Who will say whose home it is? It’s the same with the wasps. We let them nest up there in the rafters they are a bunch of grapes. They sometimes lose their grip and drop onto the sofa like anyone would. They sting you if you sit on them like anyone would. Who will say that this is their fault? What would you do if you were a wasp?
Most of the people I know are women except for the snake and me, we are boys. A small boy, Mama K said, he’s small for his age so we can get rid of Rudy’s friggin shirts. Which we didn’t. When my age was five I stopped nursing. When my age was six I climbed the tree and shook the acorns down onto the blue tarp. When my age was seven the yellow bus rumbled by on the road each day, passed right by the bottom of our driveway, but I didn’t get on it. The thing about me that isn’t like other kids at the IGA or the gas station or down along the road is that I am the only male in the vicinity and I have an extra mom. And I have a Mean Aunt who isn’t fun or anything my Mama K says she’s bitchy and she knows everything. They aren’t like a lot of people but they are mine. My women are always working and I am always working.
This is what we do, me and my women. We hunt in the woods. We gather plants. We fry grubs in a skillet. We roll the dice. We know how to fight. We drill our reflexes. We practice lying down on the ground and then getting up really fast. We practice throwing spears and shooting arrows into bales of straw. Sometimes we get really hungry and then we make a big stew that is dark green and then we get our bellies full of iron my Mean Aunt says. When it is time to kill the ducks, we kill them and eat them, even the extremely cute one named Brownie Starlight. I named him that. We don’t cry.
In the evenings in the summer and also when it rains and also when it snows I build a fire that my Mama K showed me how to build log-cabin-style, little stuff then medium stuff then big stuff then the bow drill. I blow on it so the Smoke Witch dies and the Fire Fairy comes out, and then we sit with our stew and Mama K asks for my report and then she whittles with her sheep-killing knife and I demonstrate everything I know how to do: bowline, klemheist, one-handed push-up, pickle a bean, cure a potato, process a hickory nut, four-strand braid.
A wizard chiseled from the very stone holding a crystal ball that is for sale at the gas station is what I’m not allowed to have. Also cereal from the IGA. Also anything from the mall on the way to the feed store. Also TV, sugar, and a dirt bike like the kids along the road. What I am allowed to have