The Man and The Woman and The Man with the Gun

The man stooped to see the stone. The rest of the world swam with darkness and the smell of wood smoke. Then the man caught sight of a moon that made its way in the sky and got reflected in the snow on distant mountains, and on a lake that spread out in front of the man, through the trees. He bent again, and the stone grew more clear. He put his hands upon the cold of the stone and his fingertips ached with this coldness. He made out letters and numbers etched onto the stone’s surface. He straightened and turned. Behind him other stones stuck up from the ground, aligned in rows. What remained of a town had been laid out along a rocky street. Moonlight splashed the old buildings, brightened the street in places — circles in the surrounding black.

Near the stone was a tree and the man put his palms against its bark, the bark stinging his skin, shooting into him. He pulled himself  to the tree, inhaling its wood and smoke smell, a bittersweetness. Around the tree, other trees, and  stones  like teeth from the ground.  About the stones bits of tree-stuff, and the man bent to feel the slick stringiness of it, the points on the ends, so that the stuff was like needles. The man remembered that they were called needles, and the trees pines, and that these were pine needles.

The man made his feet move. His feet were clad in thick-soled boots that weighed a thousand pounds. Or, his feet shod in the boots felt to the man like they weighed this much, maybe more. When his hands left the tree the man saw them swinging club-like in front of him, as if his arms hung lifeless from pivots. He struggled forward, towards the road.

In the town the man found no one. The street was broken up in places, crumbled to the dirt beneath, which lay exposed — an underskin. The buildings were dirt sheathed, scorched black, and scrawled with crude messages that the man could not make out, or when he could, they made no sense. One building had “Please Save” spelled out, just legibly, the paint dripped down in squiggles beneath the letters. Some of the buildings were destroyed, caved in by fire and fallen pines, the remains of both tree and house hulking in the dark — massive dead bodies destroyed and toppled together. The rusted frames of vehicles were left stinking and crashed along what looked to once have been a sidewalk. Some of the standing buildings in this ruined town had doors and windows smashed. As the man passed things scurried inside. A squirrel or chipmunk would tumble from the wrecked front steps and kick up dirt and needles around a corner.

The man tried a few doors that remained intact on buildings that did not lean or look about to plunge to the ground in rubble. He found locked doors. At one or two buildings the man heard movings behind the doors and finally at one a human voice rasped out. You’d better get away from the door. I’ve got a gun. The man recognized these words, like he had recognized the few legible words painted upon the buildings. He knew this was a language. He knew that he understood this language, that there were others like him who also spoke it.

The man made his mouth move and it was like a rusty door hinge. He pushed out sounds that came in oomfs. The voice from behind the door said, If you’re not gone in a minute, I’m going to come out there and shoot.

The man felt his clothing, only now realizing — other than his boots — that he wore any. He had on a shirt, what was called a shirt, and he knew also that it was called a long-sleeved shirt. And he had on pants, too. He knew that these were called pants. The man tried again to speak. He said, I am a man and I have on boots and pants and a shirt.

Nothing happened for some time. The man swayed there. He became aware of his fatigue. Now he understood why his arms and legs were so heavy; he was exhausted. A clicking of tumblers falling and rusted metal scraping against rusted metal shot through the otherwise quiet.

A man — another man, bearded and baseball capped, covered with dirt — emerged from behind the door to this building. The moonlight silvered on the barrel of the large rifle the man carried over his shoulder. The man made his whole body appear very slowly. The two men stood there a minute, studying one another. The first man was breathing hard, his lungs filling then evacuating and his whole weight weighed him down. He felt near collapse.

The man with the gun said, You have no gun.

The man shook his head. He hadn’t any gun. He had boots and pants and a shirt. The cold seeped through his shirt and his skin trickled with it. He shook more than just his head — shivered, rather. His stomach seemed filled with stones, like those from the rubble of the road. He felt he would soon vomit the stones.

What do you want? said the man with the gun.

The man could no longer stand so he dropped to his knees, then lay on the cold rubble. He felt the stones beneath him, against his cheeks. He felt what he knew was a beard, his beard, his own bearded face, rubbing against the stones. He tried to remember if he had always had a beard. Something pungent came up from the ground, something rank and mechanical. Something he remembered like the smell of what was called oil. He saw the man with the gun’s boots. His boots were like the man’s own boots: thick-soled, brown. Tough, working boots. The boots stepped closer. Where am I? The man whispered to the man with the gun’s boots.

This was once the town by the lake, the man heard. Now, even the man with the gun’s boots had begun to fade, and the last bit of the moonlight darkened. The man felt something strong under his arms, felt himself lifted. He thought, this must be what happens when you die, you come to what was once the town by the lake.

When the man awakened he lay under blankets, upon an old, stained mattress. The ceiling above the man was caved in in one corner. The branches of a now-dead pine poked through this hole in the ceiling. The day’s blue sky came through the white weathered branches.

The man rose on one elbow. Against one wall on the opposite side of the room was a fireplace, and a fire smoldered inside of it. A window had been boarded up, but rays filtered between the boards. A table and a chair pushed against one wall, and on the table sat a gun that had been picked apart to its pieces, and the materials used for cleaning the gun spread over the table alongside the pieces. To the left of the fireplace was a heavy wooden door.

The man felt the cold of the room outside of the blankets covering him, under which he was warm. He did not want to shrug himself free of the blankets. His stomach ached for food, and his mouth pasted with thirst.

The wooden door swung open and a man entered the room, his arms loaded with pine logs. The man stacked the logs on the hearth beside the fireplace, then piled some onto the smoldering fire.

You feel rested? said the man, when he turned from the fire to the man under the blankets.

The man nodded.

You’ve been sleeping for almost two days. You must be hungry.

The man nodded again.

The logs in the fireplace had sparked in the embers and the flames flickered yellow light on the wooden door.

I’ll get some meat cooked for you, said the other man. He opened the wooden door and left the room.

The man whipped the blankets off. The cold smacked his limbs. The mattress lay on the floor, without a bed frame, and the man pushed himself to his feet. He was weak. He struggled to a standing position.

The man moved gingerly toward the chair and the table with the gun sitting atop it. He pulled out the chair and moved it close to the fire, where the warmth spread into the room.

Old pictures and paintings hung on the walls, wrinkled and faded from wet weather. One painting depicted a  lake nestled in snowy pine-covered mountains. There was a photograph of a family, a mother and father and two boys. The mother had very curly hair, and was beautiful in the homey, other kind of way.

The door swung open again and the other man entered the room, this time he carried a ceramic platter and an iron grill, and upon the platter were thick, fresh cut pieces of meat. Blood swirled on the platter in which the meat swamped.

The man, his arms full of these items, gestured for the man in the chair to move so that he might gain access to the fire. The man moved, and the other man set the platter on the hearth, and fixed the grill, tilting it over the fire that burned well now. Using a knife, the man stabbed the cuts of meat and placed them atop the grill, where they cooked.

Shouldn’t take too long now, the man with the knife said.

The man watched the fire crackle, and the flames licked the meat and the meat sizzled and steamed, and soon drops dripped from the meat down to the fire and the fire flashed with the drops.

How did I get here? asked the man.

You don’t remember.

It was a statement, not a question. It was true. The man did not remember. He did not remember anything.

Maybe it’s good that you don’t remember, said the other man. Maybe it’s good that you don’t remember, said the man with the knife. He flipped the meat on the grill. Black grill marks striped the cooked side.

The man could smell the meat now, and his stomach talked.

The man with the knife finished cleaning his gun, then he pieced the gun back together and leaned it against the wall in the corner, near the front door. He pulled the meat from the grill and set it on the platter.

Not yet, the other man said, when the man reached for the meat. Let it cool or you’ll burn yourself.

The meat was greasy, stringy, a little gamey. The food tasted the way rope felt. The man felt it doing good for him to eat it. What meat is that? The man asked the other man.

Dog, the other man said. Haven’t seen a deer in weeks. Found him rummaging around the trash I’d tossed by the lake. Must have come up the river valley on the old road. Don’t see many dogs anymore.

She found the remains of the dog outside the house. It had been skinned and quartered, its haunches cut away. The head was untouched, its glassy eyes empty, a fly crawling over one of them. The dog’s tongue lapped out of the open mouth, caked with soil and pine needles. It was a mutt, but looked to have some German shepherd in him. She remembered her family dog, how her children had cried when they’d forgotten him at the house. She did not know if this was her dog, dead now and half-feasted upon.

The woman circled the house. A fallen pine had crashed into one corner, and the roof had opened where the trunk careened through. She peered into the windows through slats in the boards that boarded the windows up, and she found the men bundled and asleep inside. In the fireplace embers smoldered.

The woman went to the front of the house, to the thick pine door. She tried the handle and the door was locked. She shouldered her gun, cocked it. The woman blew a hole through the door’s lock. The men inside were already sitting up, shocked into action. The man who had lain asleep on the floor near the fireplace had jumped out of the sleeping bag that cocooned him. He scrambled for the living room’s corner. The woman reloaded her gun. By the time she had cocked the gun again the man had his gun, and he aimed his gun at the woman.

The man curled into the house’s corner, against the wall. He steadied his gun on the woman, as she stood looking at the man in the corner and glancing at the man on the mattress against the opposite wall. The man on the mattress sat up in bed, and stared at the other man and the woman and at the guns they aimed at each other.

These weren’t the men who had helped her, so long ago, the woman did not think. It had been so long. She had had to shoot other men. She might have to shoot these men.

What the hell, lady, said the man with the gun.

Shut up, yelled the woman.

She turned to the man in the bed. Don’t move.

The man in the bed didn’t move or say anything. He looked stupid and confused.

Then a click clicked. The woman turned back to the man with the gun. He had attempted to fire his gun, but the gun had misfired. So the woman pulled her own gun’s trigger. The man with the gun froze and dropped his gun. And then he was only a man, a very hurt man. His shirt tore open with the birdshot, and the blood welled through his shirt. The look on the man’s face was an intense study. He seemed to think very hard about calculus or Hegel. Then the man slumped forward. The blood from his chest pooled around him on the hardwood floors. In the blood showed white reflections from the sky that peered the roof’s hole.

The woman pointed her gun now at the man in the bed.

The man said, I don’t have a gun.

The house was not the woman’s house. Her house had burnt to the ground. The dog was not the woman’s dog. Her dog had suffocated in the smoke from the flames, and the man who had come back to the lake to live after the fires had buried the woman’s dog in the Earth along with hundreds of dead fish and a dead mule deer.

The man did not make any sudden movements and he left the woman to do whatever it was that she did.

In the yard, aspen seedlings poked through the ashy soil.

Mostly the man watched the woman watch the lake.

The man and the woman lived together at the lake and for a long time they did not talk. In time the man and the woman forgot to speak, and so forgot how to speak, and they forgot language altogether. But the man and the woman lived side by side. They communicated in nods and looks welded to meanings. Sometimes they pointed, and exchanged other hand-signals. But neither the man nor the woman made sounds.

The man and the woman watched the gray-furred creatures come in from the newly sprouting forest undergrowth in the evenings. They watched the creatures claw in the ground and come up with the fish and deer bones and the remaining flesh that clung to them that the man and woman had buried after they had eaten. The creatures fought over the garbage. When the man became worried over the viciousness of their growling and hissing, their long curved claws slashing at each other, he yelled and waved his arms to scare the creatures away. Then the creatures would look up at the man, their faces stained with black from the ash and charcoal that still caked the ground.

Soon, the creatures became accustomed to the presence of the man and the woman. They ventured nearer to the old house and scratched and sniffed at the front door and at the lower windows. The man and the woman banged sticks together and tossed rocks and yelled at the creatures, but they still came in the evenings, looking for a meal.

The man and the woman’s house collapsed from a violent wind gust — the eaves shivering, and the frame shifting, until the structure toppled — they built a new house from the arroyo willows that grew upon the shores of the lake.

They cooked and smoked the trout they caught from the lake, strung on lines rolled from dried deer intestines over the fire. The creatures had grown so bold and used to humans that the man caught them stealing fish from the smoke lines.

The man had grown so tired of the creatures that he exclaimed to the woman. I’m tired of those little thieves.

The woman named the creatures. She said, We will call them raccoons, because they are thieves.

The man and the woman lived with the raccoons, and the other creatures that were slowly coming back to inhabit the land around the lake, and the man and woman named the other creatures as they came.

The woman carried her gun, and the man carried his, but they would not point their guns at each other, because neither had directly threatened the other, and it stayed that way. They saw no other men or women. Though the man and woman had reinvented language, and had named the shrubs and seedlings, the fish, and the bears and raccoons, neither could remember his or her name, because no one had called them by their names for a very long time. The man knew that he was a man and so he called himself man. The woman knew that she was a woman, but she would not call herself woman, because it contained the word man inside of it. Instead she called herself Sheila, because it was a name that she remembered from somewhere and some time else and she liked the way that it sounded. The man and Sheila’s conversations sounded remarkably modern—or what we as readers might regard as a modern-sounding conversation:

Man: There is a storm coming, Sheila.

Sheila: I see that, Man.

We should probably get back home.

Okay, let me get one more pine cone.

We can get as many as we want tomorrow.

I know, I’m only getting just this one, this one here, more, and that’s all.

Okay, okay, I’m not giving you a hard time.

You always say you’re not giving me a hard time.

Man and Sheila sounded in every way like a husband and wife. Soon, they were in every way husband and wife. Soon Sheila became pregnant.