AS BUCK AND HER SUPPLY BAG struck out through the side door, Mother Mom was lurking under the overhang waiting for her prey. She was a resourceful woman and always said she didn’t see any reason not to make use of their bountiful wooded surroundings. Mother Mom had bird feeders set up every foot along the eaves of the house, probably two hundred or more of them, mostly homemade, and she hung out in the shadows with a large green net, catching whatever winged creature landed on whichever seed-filled box.
Her hands were webs of scratches and cuts from transferring the terrified creatures into the large metal cages also swinging from the eaves. She tapped her wrist—the sign that Buck should be home in time to help cook dinner—and they blew noiseless kisses at each other.
Beyond Mother Mom’s bird terrain was Grandma Pete’s shed, where she sat on an old office chair with her cane in one hand and a picture of her dead husband in his military regalia in the other.
“Good morning, Grandma Pete,” Buck yelled.
“Good day, Lady Buck,” she grumbled back. Buck joined Grandma Pete on the porch for the last inning of a baseball game on the radio. Baseball had come into their lives recently, after Grandma Pete found a picture of her dear husband in his handsome youth at the pitcher’s mound. Listening to the game, Grandma Pete hit her cane against the floorboards at all the calls, good or bad, while Buck swung her pitching arm right along with the man on the mound.
“How’s that look, Grandma Pete?”
“Sure,” Grandma Pete answered, “looks like a pitch.” When the game ended, they turned the radio off and listened to the outside world get its noises back. Grandma Pete started up telling the same four stories she always told about her husband: the day he left for the war, the day their daughter was born, the day he brought home a Christmas goose and four dozen roses even though it wasn’t Christmas, and the day he died.
Buck didn’t stay long. She wasn’t in the mood for anything except tossing her ball around in practice for a major league baseball career in a future she hoped was extremely near in time and far in distance from here.
• • •
THERE WAS A THICKET in the woods with a soft grass floor and some low pine branches that made the whole place feel nestlike. There were blackberry bushes thorning their way over every other plant, and the smell of the dropped fruit rotting on the forest floor rose up warm and sweet. The thicket had a big clearing nearby that made a good place to toss the ball. Buck threw the ball one way and then ran over, found it and threw it back the other way. She had colonies of poison-oak blisters on her wrists from bad aim, so in order to improve, she set up targets where a pinecone was balanced on the stump of dead tree. She tried to hit the pinecone so it made a satisfying thwap and its scales detached and scattered like a firework.
When she got tired of going after the ball every time, she threw it up in the air and tried to get right beneath it, opening her hand so it had no place else to land. When she got hungry, she went into her supply bag for a pair of apples.
“You’re eating two apples?” someone’s voice said from out of the bushes. Buck stood up and looked.
“Who said that?” A man in an old gray military uniform came up to sitting. He had a black mustache full of dried mud. “You gonna kill me?” she asked.
“I won’t kill anybody. You’re eating two apples,” he said again.
“One apple makes me hungry and the other makes me full,” she answered.
“You can call me General,” he said, and he put his hand out.
“Buck,” she answered.
He told her, “It’s been lovely to make your acquaintance. If you need anything at all, I’ll be in this sunny spot making a list of what has been lost.”
“You are absolutely certain that you won’t kill me?” She thought about the promise teachers and parents always made her make about strangers. “Or kidnap me?”
“I swear.”
Buck ate the rest of the first apple and the second one too, then wound up and threw the cores. They sailed into the trees and she didn’t hear them land. “And it’s gone!” she said in an announcer voice. The General sat with his eyes squinched up, and Buck chased herself across the tall grass while the bugs rubbed their wings together in one collective grind.
“So is your daddy into cowboys or something? Buck Rogers?” the General asked out of the quiet.
“Yes, sir. Was. But my mom was into First Ladies and they had it out.” Buck’s main plan in life was acting normal no matter what. She tried never to show fear, to always appear as if she was well acquainted with the situation at hand. “My real name is Mamie, after Mrs. Eisenhower, but no one calls me that.”
The General nodded and stretched. “I suppose in this case they both won.”
“I guess,” Buck agreed, watching the General adjust his knee-high boots and his heavy coat, not at all suitable for this hot July day. “Have you figured out what’s lost?” Buck asked.
“Oh, many things. My men. I’m going through their names, trying to remember all of them, first, middle and last.”
“Where did they go?”
“Yanks got them.” The General sighed. “Every time. Yanks.” And this thought seemed to exhaust him in a way he hadn’t expected. His arms flopped out on top of crossed legs. Buck sat as well and studied the two rows of brass buttons and the golden tassels on his costume. The jacket looked sort of like a dress, if a short one, and the pants ended at the knee, where the boots took over. There were a good many holes.
“So anyway . . .” Buck said, hoping this might get them talking. The man only nodded and looked up at the trees. They sat there in the heavy air for a few minutes before Buck got up and walked to the edge of the clearing, where she took her white ball out of her pocket and threw it as far as she could. Then she ran over, retrieved the ball out of the brush and threw it again. She jogged to meet it. The General sat watching while the ball traveled back and forth and Buck after it. After a particularly long throw, the General said, “Excellent throw.”
Buck said, “Thanks. You think it’s good enough for the majors?”
Then the General stood up and moved into position on the opposite side of the grassy space from the girl, who paused, confused for a moment, before realizing that she was being offered a second set of hands. Someone to catch and return.
“Could be, except you’re a girl.” Buck aimed and the General caught. Now it was only the ball that traveled back and forth and, outside of a few steps this way or that and the very rare dive, Buck stayed still.
“So what are you doing here?” Buck yelled.
“Throwing this ball!” the General yelled back.
“No! Here! What are you doing here?” Buck called.
“Being dead!” the General returned, along with the ball that Buck held on to while deciding whether to peel out and run for home or act natural. She was not a fast runner.
“Oh!” she tried out.
“I don’t happen to be alive anymore!” the General explained.
“I see!” Buck yelled back, not really assured. They pitched and caught, pitched and caught, moving together slowly until they were in better talking distance. “Are you going to explain yourself?”
“When I was first killed,” he explained, “I felt very dead. Blank. I could feel that my heart was still and that my spine was shut down. All around me there were other bodies, some in blue and some in gray, but all of them dead too. All of them blank and still. At one point, I stood up before I even realized it didn’t make sense for me to try something like that, and, looking down at my bug-sucked body, I wanted to but could not throw up.”
“Are you a ghost?” Buck asked.
“I’m a man who died. Whatever else that makes me, I don’t know.”
“All right, go on.”
“I kicked and identified my men. Some of them had their arms out as if trying to fly, some faces down, noses smashed into the dirt, some faces up, eyes open, wind scavenging them. Oxygenating. Decomposing.” The General looked at Buck’s face and changed the subject. “I’m sorry. You know much about the game of baseball?” he asked.
“I know my favorite pitcher is Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown because he lost one and a half fingers to a corn shredder.”
“I saw him play a game, as a matter of fact. Chicago, 1908, against the New York Giants. They couldn’t hardly get a hit.”
“You saw him pitch a baseball game in 1908?” Buck asked.
“I have had to keep myself busy. I tried going home to my wife when I was first dead. She couldn’t see me. I sat at our kitchen table and watched her make a pot of soup. I watched her cut up a turnip and three potatoes. I watched her eat the soup alone while I was right next to her.” The General stopped talking and let his head fall back. The trees were a frame for a flat circle of sky whose blue was sharp. “I left. I left before she even knew I was dead.”
“But I can see you.”
“Over time I learned how to toughen up my edges. By then, my Rosie was gone and there wasn’t a home for me to be seen in,” the General explained. “My wife was going to mourn me whether I was in her bed or not, and I couldn’t stand to see it happen. I hoped Rosie and I would get to be dead together someday, and while I was waiting, I went for a walk. For a while it was a fresh sense of freedom every day. I didn’t need to eat or sleep and I didn’t get tired. I went to some ballparks and watched the game of baseball grow up. It was just coming around when I was alive. I found myself some nice spots by the ocean, which I had never seen before, and pretty much just looked out at it.”
“You got bored and lonely,” Buck said.
“I cannot tell you how bored I got. I have been dead for one hundred twenty-two years. My wife never showed up on the other side.” They sat there in silence while Buck tried to imagine that length of time. She was already bored and lonely and she wasn’t even thirteen yet. She stared into the woods, where the trees had their hands up to the sun, their tall noses in as much air as they could reach.
“You know what? No one in my family goes by their real name,” Buck said, a cheerful offering.
“Is that a fact?” The General smiled, grateful.
“That is.”
“If you tell me the story, I’ll keep throwing this ball with you,” he said.
“Better still, we can trade, one of mine for one of yours.” Buck began to tell him the story exactly as it had been told to her. A family history so well memorized she didn’t pause once.
• • •
“POPS, THAT’S MY DAD, who was previously known as Dale, took to the road when he was sixteen on his motorcycle back in the Seventies, not because he was a hippie but because he had gotten wind of the whole free-love aspect and decided he was through hiding his naked magazines in three nested shoe boxes otherwise full of insect, rock and lost-tooth collections. His mother was a cleaner and a duster and he counted himself lucky that she hadn’t stumbled on them yet. The motorcycle had been his own father’s before his own father wasn’t able to ride one anymore due to the loss of his legs in a war that was minor on the books.
“Pops had given himself that name the very minute he got out of his parents’ driveway on his bike. He thought it would make him sound older and like more of an established lover.
“He never made it all the way to San Francisco, but he did talk a lot of long-haired girls out of their clothes, sometimes more than one at a time, and as far as he was concerned, that was all the success a man ever needed. He could conjure up every single one of those girls: name, date and length of leg, perfectly, without missing one. The only thing he added later was a mustache for himself, a nice thick one, when in fact at sixteen he had been little able to get three or four hairs to jut out at the same time from his soft upper lip.”
“This is an awfully racy story for a kid,” the General said.
“There is only one version of this story and I’m telling it to you.”
“Is that the end?”
“That’s the first part. Your turn,” Buck said.
“I thought I might like to be a schoolteacher,” the General started. He said he figured he liked children and he had some time but the whole thing fell through when he needed to produce a valid identity.
“I had no birth certificate or Social Security card or address. I went to the old folks’ home instead, where people were much less concerned with safety. I befriended a few old people who needed someone to reach or water or sort for them, and what I got was company. It was good company too, because the old people had been around for a lot of the time I had. I pretended my knowledge of wars and economic highs and lows was from a healthy appetite for books. I kept them up late. We sat around Formica tables.
“Money came up all the time. What things were worth back then and how much you pay now. A hammer, a newspaper, a case of beer. We also talked about dying, which I had done but they hadn’t yet. I couldn’t warn them about it, though. They’d talk about being afraid to go or who had recently made the move. There was always somebody. I tried to be helpful, saying things like ‘There’s much more ahead,’ but really this thought made me very sad. I would have liked to tell them that they were almost finished.”
Buck spat on the ball and threw it high and hard, but the General was fast and caught it.
“The minute they removed the bodies,” the General remembered, “the manager came and took the plants. She kept the good ones for herself. Her office was a jungle of dead people’s greenery. They wound their leaves around her desk legs and up and out the window. The walls were hardly even visible through the foliage. The rest of the plants, the ones she didn’t want, she lined up outside the dining room. Those were usually the first sign the old people got that someone among them was gone. They guessed by the plant who it might be, tried to remember each other’s apartments: who had a ficus in the corner, who a plot of sweet peas in that window box painted with dancing elephants.”
The General paused.
“We only have what’s growing outside,” Buck said. “Nothing alive in the house but us girls.” She dove for a ground ball.
“Turns out you’ve got hands like magnets,” the General said, at which Buck grinned. It’s possible to pitch without a catcher but you can’t do the opposite, so Buck hadn’t known she was playing the wrong position all along. Here she was jumping and sliding, getting the ball every time.
“I’m pretty good,” she admitted.
“You have a definite talent,” he said as he threw a hard one her way. “I expect you’ll be able to get yourself a scholarship if you work at it. I believe it’s your turn.”
“OK. Mother Mom was born an Annie, but I started in calling her Mother the way Annie called Grandma Pete. But Annie said she’d rather be Mom since she felt old the other way, though instead of swapping out, I just tagged on, and from then on the woman had two names that meant the same thing.
“Annie had become a mom because she wasn’t shy about calling Pops ‘Pops’ and she wasn’t shy about what he wanted from her, which kept him coming around a few nights a week. Though they never intended to make a baby out of the situation, pretty soon he took the saddlebags off his bike and unpacked them into the drawer that had been cleared out, all except for a little hand-sewn sachet of pine needles.
“Now, Grandma Pete used to be Grandma Mae until Grandfather Pete died several years back, and she took it as her personal crusade to make him as remembered as a man could be. That was also when she moved into the fixed-up shed behind our house and when she started in loving the game of baseball. She found an old shot of Grandfather when he was in the service playing a game, him at the center of the triangle and a lot of cottonwoods as a backdrop. Handsomest she ever thought he looked. She wanted to make some more copies of that photograph. Come to think of it, she wanted to make some more copies of a lot of photographs. With the help of Mother Mom and me, she covered every inch of wall in her shed-house with pictures of Grandfather Pete. We blew them up and shrank them down for variety. On a long Saturday, the three of us climbed on chairs, stools and ladders to nail up stacks of those photographs so that, in the end, his face looked in from every direction.
“The only places where he wasn’t staring out were the flat surfaces where Grandma kept her collections of trinkets—bears, moose and fairies. ‘A woman has to have a place for herself,’ she always said, dusting them off with her fingertips.
“When the walls were covered, Grandma walked down to the county clerk’s office and had her name officially changed. The last time she’d been in that room was the day she and her husband-to-be went to get their marriage license. That first time she took his last name, and this time she took his first. She put her old white hand on the counter and asked to be officially renamed in the eyes of God and everyone. The boy filled out the paperwork and got the right signature and sent the old lady out into the afternoon sun with her husband’s name.”
The General encouraged Buck with a steady smile.
“That’s it,” she said. “Since then it’s just been us and the birds.”
“What about your story?”
“My story?”
“Buck’s story.”
Buck scrunched her nose. “It’s the same as my family’s story. As of today I guess I can add that I met you and discovered I can catch even better than I can throw. Your turn.”
“This next part requires acting.”
“Sure,” Buck replied.
The General didn’t know the name of his killer, so Buck stayed nameless. She was told how to spring out from behind a short hill, in this case imagined, and how to weave between bodies. Buck’s important line was “This is your end,” to which the General yelled, “But it isn’t the end of the war!” Before they got there, though, they each fought several other men. The routines were carefully explained to Buck, the General standing behind, his arms wrapped around her, all four of their hands grasping a long branch while they shuffled forward and back, slicing the air. They practiced the scene a dozen times, with Buck ending by hovering over the General every time, her fist around an imaginary knife. “This is your end!” she seethed. She got very good at delivering that final line, her teeth clenched, her face hot.
The light was low by this time, and a fleet of swallows circled overhead catching evening bugs. “I think we’re ready for the real one,” the General said. He handed Buck a short, sharp stick to tuck into her sock. Buck and the General took their places in the clearing and battled imaginary soldiers separately, the sound of their branch-swords making wind as they cut back and forth. They breathed hard and mumbled at their opponents before turning on each other. They followed the steps of their dance perfectly, each putting the other in jeopardy, losing control and trying again. They cursed each other and dove for the ground after dropped weapons. Finally, in the last moments, Buck pulled her stick from her sock and held it over the General’s heart as he lay on the ground staring up, his eyes reflecting the purple of the sunset.
“This is your end,” Buck grumbled, and drove the stick into the General’s chest. She felt more resistance than she had expected. The General yelled back at her, “But it isn’t the end of the war!” and he coughed and spit and made choking sounds that were absolutely realistic.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey. You’re fine, right?”
“The story of Buck is just getting going,” he whispered. He held his chest with one hand and with the other he blew her a kiss. “Catch,” he whispered.
Buck could see real pain in his eyes until he relaxed onto his back and his arms fell away and he was still. Suddenly Buck wasn’t sure about anything. She looked at the man with the stick in his chest and then at her own hands and the pinecones and at the darkening forest, and Buck began to run.
She tore through the woods, kicking up leaves and hitting her shins against low branches. The forest was noisy with evening feeding traffic not limited to the swallows, who continued to swirl overhead. Rustle occurred in the underbrush all around, and bugs occupied the middle region between ground and sky. Buck’s own breathing and stamping and crushing of whatever was on the earth in front of her scared up squirrels, who darted off in every direction.
She got the quilt-squares of lighted windows in her sights. As she approached, she saw her mother lying on her stomach on a flattened plastic sun chair, a cage full of songbirds hanging above her. Buck did not slow her run across the lawn and came to a halt all at once when she could crawl under the chair, her back flat against the sun-warmed stone and her face exactly below her mother’s, whose nose and cheeks were smashed against the plastic. Buck put her hands on the underside of the chair, on her mother’s stomach. The blue weave had absorbed the heat of the body on top. Buck could feel her own heat rising up, the sweat fighting to evaporate against air that was already full of moisture. Her heart had not slowed yet. A drip of spit hung down toward Buck. It was a jewel. Buck took it on her finger and ate it.
Mother Mom woke up suddenly, surprised.
“It’s me,” Buck said, pressing. “I’m home now.”
“Hello, Buck,” Mother Mom said. She did not seem surprised to be acting as her daughter’s protective canopy. “You all right?” Buck nodded and pressed. Mother Mom scooted up so that her face came over the top of the chair.
“Catch anything?” Buck asked just for the sake of niceness, because she could see and hear that her mother had.
“I caught you,” Mother Mom said, and she smiled and reached her arms around and took hold of the small hands below.
• • •
THE STORY OF Buck’s own name was the only one she had wrong, but it wasn’t Buck who was lying. Indeed she had Mamie on her birth certificate, after the president’s wife. But Pops, who had been very angry about the existence of any baby because it meant the end of his roving, ranging, free-love life, and who also had no interest in cowboys whatsoever, had come storming into the hospital room where Annie and the new bald girl were lying. She nursed her and petted her soft head. When he saw the baby, he pulled his wallet out of his front pocket where he always kept it, for safety. “Here!” he yelled, throwing a one-dollar bill at the bed. “This is my contribution! Call that baby Buck, ’cause that’s all he’s worth!”
“It’s a girl, Pops,” Annie said, her eyes sharp.
“Even worse,” he growled as he marched out to his bike, revving it outside the tiny hospital so that it made the baby’s head vibrate ever so slightly on her mother’s chest.
The dollar bill hadn’t floated more than three inches from the place Pops had stood, and it stayed there for exactly one hour while Pops sat on the side of the road throwing stones at the carcass of a smashed cat. He hadn’t expected the baby to look so vulnerable and for Annie to look so beautiful holding it. Truth be told, he hadn’t even gotten around to thinking it might be a real actual living thing, since he’d been busy all nine months stewing about the damper it would put on his excursions. Not that there were really so many excursions anymore. The fact was that Pops had been staying with Annie for months anyway and had tried only once to pull another girl’s skirt up, and up it went, but he, sadly, could not get himself to do the same, so he dropped the girl off at home, having apologized and bought her an ice-cream cone.
But he didn’t go back. He rode on, left his things in the drawer, left the baby with milk passing into her open mouth while her mother dozed. The doctor came and after checking some boxes on a chart, he noticed and took the dollar bill on the floor, stuffed it into his breast pocket, where it traveled all day until it was taken out in the cafeteria in exchange for a bag of unsalted peanuts.
Annie called Buck “Buck” as if it were an apology and a tribute to Pops, as if it were the least she could do. But she never told her daughter the truth of her name. In the family legend, Pops had been a fan of cowboys and had gone off to find a ranch for his own lovely daughter to raise horses on, her hair shining in the dry, red sunset.
• • •
GRANDMA PETE was in the kitchen playing solitaire with the picture of Grandpa Pete propped on the chair next to her. “Hi, Petes,” Buck managed. Her body was buzzing like it was full of a new substance: not blood anymore but something rattling and dry.
“All right, line up,” Mother Mom commanded, and handed out tools. She gave Buck her mallet and Grandma Pete her cleaver, got herself a wastebasket and put a large cutting board in front of each of them. In the center of the table, she put down a platter and a bowl of marinade. Theirs was a well-practiced assembly line.
Buck reached her hand into the cage, where it was scratched and pecked until she caught a bird, and then held it on her cutting board and knocked it on the head with the mallet. There was a delicate crack like a blown eggshell. She passed it on to Grandma Pete, who took its head off and gutted it, her hands slick with red and the bowl in front of her a squirm of guts. Mother Mom plucked it naked, while her own blood-sticky fingers became covered in feathers.
“Do you ever see Grandfather Pete?” Buck asked her grandmother.
“What’s not to see, dear?”
Mother Mom started humming against the noise of wings constantly crashing against the cage bars, striking them so they sang like guitar strings.
As they passed their work around, the women’s hands met for split seconds, the skin at varying levels of elasticity, varying levels of heat. Their fingers were slippery and eager to touch one another. Slowly the room quieted down until there were no more screeching birds in the cage and the plate in the center of the table was a hill of slumped pink bodies soaking in butter and homemade wine.
• • •
BEFORE THE LONG RITUAL of sucking tiny morsels of meat off needle-thin bones began, and while the smells of cooking rose out of the oven, the most delicate underfeathers, having escaped the broom, were airborne again and again with even the smallest human movements.
The women went outside, where Mother Mom and Grandma Pete cheered for Buck, who threw the beaked heads, pitch by pitch by pitch, into the usual place.
“That must have been ninety miles an hour, that one,” Mother Mom hollered, and Grandma Pete said better than that. The woods offered up the many-legged creatures from deep within the bramblebush to catch everything Buck threw. Life crawled over other life, devoured it, opened itself up to whatever it had been given. The whole world squirmed with hunger and desire, in the thick and thin places, in the trees and in the clearings.