Cloven Hooves. Megan Lindholm

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СКАЧАТЬ now of their tiny bell-like flowers, and not yet heavy with round blue fruit. Today I have seen a red fox with a spruce hen clamped in its jaws, and a litter of tiny rabbits just ventured from their burrow. I have seen the green bones of a winter-kill moose acrawl with beetly things, and pushed the bones aside to see the white grubs squirming beneath them. Myriad small creatures besides myself live and hunt here. The faun is one of them.

      He is beside me, likewise lounging on the bank. He is stretched out to the lingering touch of the sun on his belly. He is totally unremarkable and completely marvelous. I love him as I love the sound of wolves at night, and stories of wild horses in thundering herds on the plains. I love him as I love my hands and my hair and my ice-green eyes. He closes the circle of who I am, and makes me complete. In loving him, I love myself. In my mind I call him Pan, but aloud I have never spoken a word to him, nor him to me. We are the closest of friends.

      He has a boy’s face and arms, a boy’s curly thatch of hair atop his head, interrupted only by the nubbins of his horns, stubby things shorter than my thumbs, shiny brown like acorns. He has a boy’s chest, tanned and ribby, flat nipples like brown thumbprints. From the hips down he is neatly and unoffensively goat. His hooves are pale and cloven, slightly yellower than my toenails but much thicker. The hair on his legs is like that on any goat, smoothly brown, growing so closely it hides any trace of skin. His penis is gloved as neatly as a dog’s, held close to his lower belly in its coarsely haired sheath. The most I have ever seen of it is the pointed pink tip, moist like a puppy’s. To my eleven-year-old mind it is a superior arrangement, much better than my younger brothers’ dangling, wrinkled genitalia. More private in a way that is not prissy.

      He rolls to face me, yawning, and then smiling. His teeth are white as only the teeth of young carnivores are white, and his eyes are a color that has no name. His eyes are the color of sunlight that has sifted through green birch leaves and fallen onto a carpet of last year’s leaves. Earth eyes, not brown nor green nor yellow. The color of a forest when you stand back from it.

      He rises and looks at me askance, and I shrug and rise to follow him. My dog falls in at our heels. He pants delicately in the heat of the summer, making hardly a noise at all. Not for him some doggy lolling of a long pink tongue. He is more than half a wolf, my Rinky, with his sleek black coat and his pale cheeks and eyebrows. In the woods with me, he is all a wolf, and I am his cub as surely as Mowgli belonged to Akela. He has taught me everything, this dog, that a young creature must know to stay alive in the forest. From him I have learned to be still and to be silent, and to move with the forest instead of through or against it. I have watched him and seen how well he fills the niche that nature has allotted to him. I, too, will be as he is, perfect in my place.

      We follow Pan, Rinky and I, and he leads us down the slough. We walk in the flat troughs that meander between the hummocks of grass. Short weeks ago, water flowed where our feet walk now. We flow as it did, silent and seeking our level. Pan has neither hips nor buttocks, but only the sleek flanks of an animal and the restless tail of the deer kind. His cloven hooves leave more of a mark than Rinky’s wolf feet, and my sneakers leave the least discernible track of all. Insects chirr around us, and the air is heavy with pollen and sleep. I can believe that, save for us, nothing larger than a shrew is stirring in the forest at this hour.

      Then the duck explodes in front of me, right before my feet, her brown pinions slashing my face as she rises on her battering wings. Her nerve has been shattered; she withstood the passing of Pan and Rinky so close to her nest, but I, a human, am too totally foreign to her experience. I fall back with an incoherent cry, my hands rising to protect my face, but she is already gone. My eyes tear from the slapping they have taken, but that is the sole extent of their damage. When I lower my hands and blink my eyes clear of tears, they are laughing at me.

      Rinky’s pink tongue does loll now, mockingly, dangling over his picket fence of white teeth and his smooth black doggy lips. Pan is worse. He clutches his belly, bends over it, brown curls falling into his eyes as he shakes with silent hilarity. His teeth are very white, his mouth is wide with mirth. Miffed, I ignore both of them, and crouch to examine the nest.

      The nest is a late one, probably the duck’s second effort this year. To the casual eye, it is empty. But with thumb and forefinger I lift the soft blanket of down that covers the fourteen pale turquoise eggs. The eggs are not much larger than grade-AA chicken eggs from the store, but they are much more real. Eggs from the store are cold and bony white, their surfaces dry and chalky, trapped in cardboardy trays. These eggs are warm, and smooth, almost waxy to the touch. I take two and Pan takes one, and we carry them off with us, leaving the duck free to return to her brooding.

      We go back to the sunny bank of the dried-up slough and sit on the moss and eat our eggs. Pan and I bite the ends off ours and spit the crumpled bits of shell aside before we suck out the warm white and the sudden glop of the yolk. Rinky puts his between his front paws and delicately breaks it with his teeth so that he can lap up the egg and eat the shell that held it.

      And that is all that there is to this day, but it needs nothing more. It is complete, like the scene trapped inside a glass paperweight, a whole sufficient to itself. I am eleven and lying there between a dog and a faun. We three make a circle, from human to beast and back again. I love them as I love my hands or my hair, unthinking, totally accepting. They are the two most important creatures in my life and always will be. When we grow up, I will be Pan’s mate and we will live and hunt in these woods and Rinky will always run beside us. I know these things as well as I know that the summer sky is blue and permafrost is cold.

       THREE

      Tacoma

      May 1976

      I hate to shop for clothing. I hate to try things on. I hate the cramped dressing rooms with curtains that gape at the sides, with their floors littered with straight pins and tags. I hate pulling stiff, unfamiliar clothes on over my head, clothing ensorcelled with hidden pins and buttoned buttons that snare me inside their unyielding depths. I hate standing nine inches from a full-length mirror trying to see what I look like in this foreign garment, my hair mussed and my makeup smeared by my struggle to get into it. It makes me sweat.

      Stupid. Stupid is how I look. The bosom gapes hungrily for my nonexistent cleavage. My socks-and-sneakered feet stick out the bottom where sheer-stockinged calves and slender ankles and chic white sandals should be. I smooth the dappled-leaf muteness of the fabric, loving it, wishing I could look as if I belonged in it. But I cannot. I look like a homely carnival Kewpie doll stuffed into Barbie’s prom dress. Ken would be horrified. I claw and fumble the buttons open, begin an attempt to slither out the bottom of the dress. It jams on my too-wide shoulders.

      A saleslady whisks the curtain open. My olivine eyes peer at her from the dress bodice, my pale thighs goosebump in the sudden draft. “Oh, dear,” she says, and I am sure her sympathy is for the dress, not me. “You didn’t like it. Can I bring you a different size, perhaps? Would you like to try it in another color?”

      Another body, I think. Another face. Bring me those, and I’ll try the dress again. “No, thank you,” I say aloud, and her eyes narrow with disapproval. She must be on commission. Mother Maurie and Steffie trip merrily past my compartment. They are having a wonderful time. Both my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law love the gay whirl of shopping, adore endlessly trying on clothes, just for the fun of seeing what they will look like. I, exposed still, shiver as they pass. Another saleslady trails them, her arms heavy with bright garments. “Evelyn,” Steffie calls without pausing. “We are absolutely starved! We’re going to that restaurant, you know, the one down near Fredericks? Okay?”

      “Okay,” I mutter. I don’t know the restaurant, having never been there. I am not even absolutely sure where Fredericks is. It СКАЧАТЬ