Deer Dancer

Kathleen Alcalá

 

 

“HA!” SHE SAID, jiggling the wrench. “I’ve got you!”

The pipe came loose with a grating sound, and she reached in and unscrewed it the rest of the way. Rusty water dribbled out the end as she scuttled from under the house, waving the pipe section in the air. Brownish water spattered her shirt. It felt good.

“Found it! It will be easy to fix!” she said, wondering if they could find pipe the same diameter, and long enough to repair the plumbing.

This was the fifth house she had helped rehab, and Tater was beginning to think of herself as an expert in the undersides of houses.

Shonda took the pipe from her and fingered the rusty hole. “How you going to find the right size?”

“We’ve got a whole pile from the other houses around here. One of them must have used the same size, maybe even the same plumber in the first place. All these houses were built about the same time.”

The sun, mother sun, blazed down, and Tater pulled her hat forward from where it hung down her back on a string.

“We’d better get home.”

It was five bells since first light, and unless they planned to spend the rest of the day under the house, they needed to get back. Walking single file, Shonda took the lead, poking any suspicious-looking soil with her walking stick before proceeding. Tater carefully set her feet in Shonda’s prints until they came to a place where the houses were lively with people preparing for midday siesta.

Chia was just pulling protective burlap sacking back over a patch of taters after digging up a few. The grey nubs did not look like much as they sat steaming on the ground, but washed and sliced into brilliant purple disks, they would glow. Tater’s mom had named her after the naturalized Ozettes. Brought from Peru by long ago voyagers, the potatoes had taken to the northwest like, well, no other plant or animal. Tater was proud of her unusual name, and secretly hoped she was like them, ordinary at first look, but gem-like on the inside. Rooted.

Tater was still carrying the pipe. “What you going to do with that?” asked Chia.

“Match it, then recycle. The rest of the pipes held up good. This one is far enough gone Re-use might be able to smash it into dust for the iron.”

Tater splashed some water on her neck and hung up her hat. Out of the sun now, she rolled up her sleeves and served herself soup she found cooling on the stove. Chia would stay up cooking so that the Day crew would have something to eat when they woke from their midday slumbers around sundown.

Nights worked second shift. It used to be called graveyard shift, but that made too many people sad.

 

What to think when the sun goes down and every light takes on a spectral aspect?

My eyes, my eyes—ever deceitful, ever necessary for one who relies on visual cues, who only trusts the stimuli she takes in through the range of light
and motion.

The angular bounce of light at the solstice,
of sun streaming directly into our eyes as though to make up for all the days when we see no sun at all. How our limbs loosen and we tilt back our heads
with a slight smile, drinking it in.

Who can deny the intoxication of sunlight, the touch of gold as it runs down our arms from our fingertips.
Our thighs grow slack as our lips part to drink
in the pearly heat.

Our pens rest on their tables as our minds glide
away from the task at hand.

 

 

TATER READ A page in her aunt’s diary, then set it aside. She had been given it years before, but had not tried to read it until being assigned to housing rehab. She found it hard to sleep out here on the Edges. Reading the old diary helped. She loved imagining what it was like Before, when the sun was scarce. Tater liked stroking the soft edges. It was the only book she owned herself, and she found herself fingering the pages like worry beads. Tater lay back carefully in her hammock so as not to flip over, afraid of and grateful for the distance from the floor. Not that rats wouldn’t jump or climb up onto the hammock if they felt like it. But Tater still felt better this way.

Now she tried to imagine Aunt Ceci’s life when water stayed in its place and the sun was a welcome embrace against the damp cold. She could barely remember being cold.

“Not sleeping?” asked Shonda as she came in.

“Not yet.”

Shonda unhooked her own hammock from where it hung coiled on the wall and took it outside. She preferred to sleep under the giant Doug fir that sheltered their house, a tree they had defended with guns and clubs early on. Tater could smell the taters cooking. There was an herb with them, something she could not quite place as she drifted off to sleep.

 

 

LATE AFTERNOONS WERE for domestic chores. That included upkeep on the house where they homesteaded. If they could defend it for seven years, the house was theirs.

Most people stayed on waitlists until a house opened up in the Center. But that could take forever. Homesteading on the Edges offered larger properties, enough to grow food. And also, dangers. But even for the Edges, there were waitlists of people stacked sky high in mass housing. Tater barely remembered Before, and there were some things in between that she could not think about at all.

Shonda gently shook Tater awake. It felt as though she had just dozed off, a dream of deer picking their way across a clearing fading gently from her mind.

“Your turn to wash.”

Tater dragged herself back to the waking world. She might have been having a True Dream, but if that’s what it was, it would come back. She would need to let the others know if it did.

When she was a child of eight, it became clear that Tater got the Dreaming. When she was fourteen, she was given her aunt’s journal. Ceci was an original Dreamer, born in Mexico, raised in the US in secrecy by her family. Given every advantage to learn the language, the ways of these people so that she could rescue the rest of her family from the label THEM. Everyone in Ceci’s family, including Tater’s mom, worked every waking moment to keep Ceci, the youngest, in school and living long enough to pull her family through the tortuous knots of the legal system. She succeeded, and her nieces and nephews became US as well. But that was all Before.

 

Dream

Salal, salal, thimble berry, grass.

Smell of humans. Water. Stillness. Stillness.

Light slanting in for longer days.

 

HUMANS TOOK THEIR cues from the animals, and had become diurnal. Afternoons were for chores, but night was for guarding. Second shift got up and had breakfast with the day shift’s dinner.

Tater could spot Nights on sight. Like her, they had a dreamy look, with large eyes and slightly larger nostrils. There was a lot of talk about whether this was adaptation, after so few generations, or just an affinity of Nights for Nights as partners, since that’s who they got to know anyway. Every household had a combination of Days and Nights.

Tater joined the table next to Ana, one of the few Nights she spoke to regularly. “‘Sup?”

“Not too much. Just talking about the bears spotted at the north end.”

“Again? They’ve no fright.”

“Sorrel’s pretty sure she heard them talking again.”

“You mean, like people talk?”

“Yeah. She swears she can almost understand them.”

Sorrel was at the other end of the table describing the bear sighting. She stood up and lumbered down the length of the table, stopping to smell each of their plates, setting them laughing.

“Are the bears changing, or is it just you?” someone called out.

Sorrel took her seat. They were eating eggs tonight, gathered from the summer chickens.

“Could just be me,” she said honestly. “I’ve got so I can smell people coming, even tell sometimes who it is.” Sorrel flexed her powerful hands and set to her meal.

“Tater and me are going to need a full crew tomorrow,” said Shonda. “Five people. Time to replace the roof on the Denny Way house so we can start on the inside. Plumbing’s almost done. Tater’s fast.”

“Who will you work with next?” asked Ana.

Tater blushed and looked down. “Not for me to say.”

“All in good time,” said Chia as she began to clear the table. “She might have other dons she wants to develop.”

Tater thought about that. Sometimes she forgot that she could choose what she wanted to work on, who she wanted to work with, as long as it was for the common good. It hadn’t been like that Before, or even for awhile After. Again, she had the strong feeling of the deer in the ravine nearby, and when she looked up, Sorrel had stopped eating and was staring down the table at her, still and alert.

Tater pushed out her chair and stood up. “I’ve got to dream now,” she said. Shonda pointed at Ana and Chia, who flanked Tater and escorted her out of the kitchen.

 

 

TATER’S TEAM DID not have a room set aside just for Dreaming. She was the only one in their household, and they all agreed it was a waste of space in their small but ship-shape house. But there was a bed in the main bedroom that was set aside for her. It folded out of the wall to offer a deep, safe space, and a clerestory cast a diffuse light in the room during the day.

The bed was lowered, and Tater climbed out of her day clothes into a soft cotton gown that did not inhibit her movement. That gown, of pure cotton from Before, was probably the most valuable thing the team owned. Tater was humbled by their goodness to her every time she put it on.

Ana got a mug of water, and Chia a towel. Sometimes the dreams could be rough, and Tater lost control of her body.

By the time they had tucked Tater into the bed and settled into chairs on either side of her, she was no longer seeing the room and people around her. It had been a few months since she had last dreamed, and the household was in some ways relieved to see what further instructions they might receive. She could still faintly hear their comforting voices.

“Duermete, duermete,” Ana urged.

Sometimes the dream was clear and direct; other times, they could only speculate at what it meant, and what they were expected to do with the information. But no one doubted the authenticity of the dreams.

 

 

TATER WAS TRYING to run through the forest. This was big forest, not trash trees and overgrown Scotch Broom. Vines grabbed at her legs as she ran, causing her to stumble. Snatching at a handful of leaves to break her fall, she felt the painful jolt of nettles in the palm of her hand. Tater gathered all her concentration into her thighs and leaped, now! clear of her human body, bounding without effort through the underbrush.

Something was behind her, but she could not see it. The smell was pungent, like fire, like chemicals burning a hole in a metal container. Her human thoughts soon fled as she spotted another of her kind and followed, leaping sideways and forward so as to throw off any pursuers. She crashed through salal and salmonberry, fiddlehead fern and seeps where freshets rose when it rained. This was the damp country she remembered, the Before of her childhood, when everyone had enough to eat, clothes to wear, homes to live in. When children went every day to school to learn to live in a world that no longer existed.

 

 

TATER HELD THE raised sides of the dream bed and rode it like a little boat, rocking and bucking as she moaned and made strange noises. Ana and Chia were there to try to keep her from hurting herself, as she had on occasion, and to take note of anything she might say out loud while in the grip of her dream. They made themselves comfortable, and didn’t have to say that they were pleased to have finished their dinners ahead of the Dream.

 

 

WHEN TATER WOKE, it was dark and very quiet. She was alone. She listened to the silence for a few minutes before rising. Climbing out of the bed, she walked out to the kitchen. A single lamp burned on the table. The dishes lay scattered, some with food still on them, as though abandoned shortly after Tater left. She stepped in something wet and looked down to see a dropped mug. Walking carefully, she returned to the bedroom and climbed back into the dreaming bed.

When Tater woke again, it was deep night, and again, she was alone in the house. She listened to the silence for a few minutes before rising. The lantern still burned in the kitchen.

Tater took a flashlight and walked out on the porch. The night shift should have been out on the perimeter, making noise, but Tater heard nothing. A strong smell of bear filled her nostrils and she returned inside to bolt and bar the door. Tater could not tell if she was Dreaming or not. This happened sometimes. Her surroundings felt real, but where was everyone? Wouldn’t she have heard something if there had been an attack? Wouldn’t they have taken her with them, even if she was in the throes of a Dream? Tater climbed back into the Dream bed once again, just in case.

Tater woke a third time, her left hand sticky where it had gripped the raised edge of the bed. When she lifted her hand and opened the palm, it was sticky with blood.

Tater woke at ten bells. Chia snored daintily in the chair beside her. Voices came from the kitchen, laughing and the sound of dishes and cooking. Tater pulled on her clothes, folding the gown gently across the coverlet. Chia woke and helped return the little bed to the wall.

In the kitchen, they were greeted with the clatter of dishes being dried and stored. Ana sang a high, silly song, and the smell of nettle soup bubbling on the stove filled the kitchen. Sorrel walked up to Tater and reached out. Tater flinched, and Sorrel stopped before gently bringing her hand down on Tater’s shoulder.

“You’ve got news for us.”

Tater opened her hand to show Sorrel where the stiffened blood had resolved into the outlines of a map, their own settlement at the center, the Edges stretching beyond.

 

 

THEY GREETED THE night with a collective roar. The members of the house were in full regalia, Tater wearing her inherited cocoon rattle leggings. She lifted her canes, one in each hand, and set the tip of each down the way a deer daintily makes its way through the forest. She turned her gaze this way and that in mimicry of the deer, careful not to lose the antlers strapped to her head. The drummer beat a bowl with two sticks turned upside down over a larger bowl of water, creating a booming sound that carried for miles. Ana’s voice wailed a descant. The dancers made their way forward and back, forward and back, turning sideways in unison to appear larger to the unseen enemy.

Arise, arise fair sun, and kill the envious moon…

Dancers from other houses flanked them, creating a front of noise and light against the Outside. Tater felt vulnerable in her soft doe-skin clothing, conscious of how exposed her throat was each time she turned her head, knew that the bandage on her left hand showed she might be wounded. This is how they took back the world—step by step, song by song. At the end of the night, new fence posts would be pounded into place, new fences strung.

Tater lifted and set her canes carefully. The extra points of support allowed her to keep her feet close together as she pounded the ground with them, directing her energy deep into the earth. Tater realized that if she ever had a daughter, she would name her Ozette. This was new, the consciousness that she might have a future beyond herself. Tater’s face shone in the flickering light. It was good to be alive.