sprinklers churred round their rotaries. American flags wore gravity’s folds on garage-mounted poles in all God’s neighborhoods.
He had wandered off the path of greatest efficiency and succumbed to sleep in a park tightly bordered by town houses and cul-de-sacs. He was woken by a rooting noise. Something sizable was trying to burrow under the tent. Its odd shadow reared up across the slanted vinyl wall. He stepped out of the tent into the early-morning sun and humidity and came face-to-face with a tusked and rangy animal. The hairs along its scruff were gray and bristly. It looked up at him as he stood frozen with fear. He casually took one and then a second step backward and slowly retreated to the other side of the tent. He was relieved when the mad rooting resumed.
In the distance he saw the herd. They were up the small hilly incline near the glinting jungle gym. A few outliers were rutting under the wooden fence that separated the park from the houses. His own outlier was snorting and shaking the tent and very likely shredding the fabric.
He heard the slamming of a door and turned to see two men stepping out of a truck. One man stretched and yawned. They wore identical dark blue slacks and short-sleeve work shirts and the door of the truck had some kind of decal he couldn’t discern from such a distance. They each pulled from the bed of the truck a rifle with a scope, walked halfway up the incline, and began to shoot the boarlike animals. He threw up his arms and fled. He stood by the stone water fountain watching every member of the herd fall during the noiseless spree. He walked back to the tent. The boar that woke him lay on its side with a dart in its neck. One of the shooters approached smoking a cigarette. His shirt said Downers Grove Park District.
“Is it dead?”
The man shook his head. “We don’t kill them here,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Feral pig.”
He took a drag from his cigarette in the punishing heat, sucking his cheeks in and squinting off into the distance. There his colleague was lifting the first of the pigs by a hoist into the bed of the truck. The man with the cigarette turned back and silently regarded the tent. Languid billows of smoke escaped his mouth as he spoke. “You can’t camp here, you know.”
He dreamed of a resurgent tribe of vanquished Indians. They materialized body and soul from the bloodred horizon of the central plains and walked out of the shores of the Great Lakes. Their mournful spirits had trailed him since the tepee rings in Wyoming. Their business outside the tent was bloody and serious. A collective chanting accompanied their war preparations. He was not welcome on their reclaimed land. He knew as much but he lay paralyzed with fever. Some ravishing pioneer bug, or perhaps heatstroke. The brute inarticulate chanting grew louder as the tribal chief entered the tent and demanded to know the name of the tribe, forgotten by the enemy and the descendants of the enemy who now inhabited the land and by the land itself. He tried vainly in sleep to remember the name. His recall would determine whether he lived or died, but it escaped him. The chief smelled of a popular aftershave. He filliped Tim’s boot with his middle finger and Tim opened his eyes. A middle-aged man with a vigorous tan and a whistle lanyard dangling from his neck squatted in the mesh doorway. He wore a white polo and baseball cap. “I said what are you doing here, huh?”
“Where am I?”
“Christ, I thought you must be some kid,” said the man. “You’re on my field.”
With chills and a fever he decamped from the North Side High School practice field as the sun beat down on the varsity team chanting their songs and running their drills at the vast eastern edge of the corn belt.
He woke on the hard curved pew inside a Methodist church, a small white monument to the simplicity and beauty of the Allegheny Jesus. He raised his head off the hymnal and sat up. He felt the fluid overload slowly drain down his limbs.
From the altar the preacher delivered a trial run of his sermon to the empty pews. Tim would have left were it not that he was lethargic and slow on the uptake. Beams of sunlight radiated through the stained-glass windows. He listened to the final ten