The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (151 page)

“No,” Jean answered quickly, although she had no idea what the rules actually were.

“This will be our only stop tonight, then,” Audrey said. “Though we may go for a walk later, to talk to the elk.”

“Have you heard them?” L.D. asked.

“Excuse me?” Jean frowned.

“I say, have you heard the elk?”

“We hear elk all the time. I guess I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.”

L.D. and Audrey exchanged a brief look of shared triumph.

“L.D. is a musician,” Audrey explained. “We vacationed here in Wyoming last summer, and he was very taken with the elk bugle. It’s a wonderful noise, really.”

Jean knew it well. Almost every night in the autumn, elk bugled across the woods to each other. It was impossible to tell how close they came to the cabin, but the sound was forceful and compelling: a long, almost primate screech, followed by a series of deep grunts. It was something she had known since childhood. She’d seen horses stop in the middle of a trail at the sound and stand there, heads pulled up high, breathing sharply out of their nostrils, ears tensed, listening, preparing to run.

“L.D. made several recordings. He found it very inspiring
for his own music,” Audrey went on. “Have you ever lived in a city?”

“No,” Jean said.

“Well.” Audrey rolled her eyes. “Let me tell you, there’s a limit, an absolute limit, to what you can endure there. Just three months ago, I was getting ready to go out on some errands and I suddenly realized I’d taken all my credit cards out of my purse so that, if I was mugged, I wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of replacing them. Without even thinking, I’d done this, as if it was perfectly normal to live that way. And that night I told L.D., ‘We’re leaving; we have got to get out of this crazy city.’ Of course, he was more than happy to comply.”

Jean looked over to Benny, who had been standing quietly through all this, listening. She’d forgotten for a moment that he was there, and she felt the same quick guilt that came when, during dinner, she’d glance around the table and be surprised to see Benny eating with them, sitting between Ed and herself.

“Well.” Jean pushed her glasses back farther on her nose. “We’ve got to get going.”

“Listen,” L.D. said, and he took a flat black disk from his pocket. He slid it into his mouth and made the full screech of an elk bugle ring through the small, heavily insulated living room of Jean’s cabin. She saw Benny jump at the suddenness of the sound. L.D. took the disk out of his mouth and smiled.

“Oh, honey.” Audrey winced. “That’s so loud inside. You really shouldn’t bugle in people’s homes. Don’t be scared,” she told Benny. “It’s just his elk talker.”

Jean had heard one before. A friend of Ed’s was a hunting guide who used one to call in bull elk. He’d demonstrated it for Jean once, and she’d laughed at how fake it had sounded. “You might as well stand in a clearing and call, ‘Here elky, elky, elky,’” she’d said. L.D. had the same device, but his sound was full and alarmingly real.

Benny grinned at Jean. “Did you hear that?”

She nodded. “You do know that you can only hunt elk in season and with a license, don’t you?” she asked L.D.

“We don’t want to hunt them,” Audrey said. “We just want to talk to them.”

“Did it sound real to you?” L.D. asked. “I’ve been practicing.”

“How’d you do that?” Benny asked. L.D. handed him the disk.

“They call this a diaphragm,” L.D. explained, as Benny turned the object over in his hand and held it up to the light. “It’s made of rubber, and you put it in the back of your mouth and blow air through it. It’s not easy, and you have to be careful or you’ll swallow it. There’s different sizes for different sounds. This one is a mature bull, a mating call.”

“Can I try it?”

“No,” Jean said. “Don’t put that in your mouth. It doesn’t belong to you.”

Benny reluctantly handed it back to L.D., who said, “Get your dad to buy you one of your own.”

Jean cringed at the reference, but Benny only nodded, considering the suggestion. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.”

Jean took her coat off the hook by the door and put it on. “Come on, Ben,” she said. “Time to go.”

L.D. lifted Sophia from where she’d been sitting on his boots. One of her antlers had slipped from its masking-tape base and hung like a braid down her back.

“Doesn’t she look precious?” Audrey asked.

Jean opened the door and held it so the Donaldsons could file out onto the porch. Benny followed behind them, small, antlerless. She turned the lights off and left, closing the door. She pulled a skeleton key from the bottom of her pocketbook, and, for the first time since she’d lived in the cabin, locked up.

It was a clear night, with a nearly full moon. There had been no snow yet, none that had lasted, but Jean suspected from the sharp smell of the cold air that there might be some by the next
day. She remembered reading that bears wait until the first drifting snowfall to hibernate so that the tracks to their winter dens will be covered immediately. It was getting late in the year, she thought, and the local bears must be getting tired of waiting around for proper snow.

The Donaldsons were standing on the porch, looking past Jean’s small back yard to the edge of the woods.

“Last summer I got the elk to answer,” L.D. said. “That was a wild experience, communicating like that.”

He slid the diaphragm into his mouth and called again, louder than he had in the cabin, a more powerful sound, Jean thought, than a human had a right to make around there, and disturbingly realistic.

Then there was silence, and they all stared across the yard, as if expecting the trees themselves to answer. Jean had forgotten her gloves. Her hands were cold, and she was anxious to get to the car, and warmth. She reached forward and touched Benny’s shoulder.

“Let’s go, honey,” she said, but he laid his hand over hers in a surprisingly adult manner and whispered, “Wait,” and then, “Listen.”

She heard nothing. L.D. had set Sophia down, and now the whole family stood on the edge of the porch, their antlers outlined against the night sky. They’d best not make their costumes too authentic, Jean thought, or they’d get themselves shot. She pushed her fists down into the pockets of her coat and shivered.

After some time, L.D. repeated the call, a long high squeal, followed by several grunts. They all listened in the ensuing quiet, leaning forward slightly, heads tilted, as if they were afraid the answer might be faint enough to miss, although it was unnecessary to listen so carefully: if a bull elk was going to bugle back, they wouldn’t have to strain to hear it.

L.D. sounded the call again, and immediately once more, and as the last grunt vanished into silence, Jean heard it. She heard it first. By the time the others tensed in realization, she’d already been thinking that it must be a bear making all that noise in the underbrush. And then she’d guessed what it was, just before the elk broke out of the woods. The ground was hard with cold, and his hooves beat in a light fast rhythm as he circled. He stopped in the black frozen soil of Jean’s garden.

“Oh my God,” she said under her breath, and quickly counted the points of his antlers, which spread in dark silhouette, blending with the branches and forms of the trees behind him. He had approached them fast and without warning, making himself fully visible to confront or to be confronted. Clearly, this elk did not want to talk to the Donaldsons. He wanted to know who was in his territory, calling for a mate. And now he stood, exposed, looking right at them. But the cabin was dark and shaded by the porch roof, so there was no way the elk could have picked out their figures. There was no breeze to carry a scent either, so he stared blindly at the precise spot from where the challenge had come.

Jean saw Sophia reach her hand up slowly and touch her father’s leg, but, aside from that, there was no movement. After a moment, the elk stepped slowly to his left. He stopped, paused, returned to where he’d been standing, and stepped a few feet to his right. He showed both his sides in the process, keeping himself in full view, his gaze fixed on the porch. He did not toss his head as a horse might, nor did he strike a more aggressive, intimidating stance. Again he paced, to one side and to the other, slowly, deliberately.

Jean saw L.D. raise his hand to his mouth and adjust the diaphragm. She leaned forward and placed her hand on his forearm. He turned to look at her, and she mouthed the word
no
.

He frowned and turned away. She saw him begin to inhale,
and she tightened her hold on his arm and said, so softly that someone standing even three feet away would not have heard her, “Don’t.”

L.D. slipped the diaphragm out of his mouth. Jean relaxed. Out of the woods came two females, one fully mature, the other a lean yearling. They looked first at the male, then at the cabin, and slowly, almost self-consciously, walked the length of the yard to the garden. All three elk stood together for some time in what Jean felt was the most penetrating silence she had ever experienced. Under their sightless gaze, she felt as if she were involved in a séance that had been held in jest but had accidentally summoned a real ghost.

Eventually, the elk began their retreat. The older two appeared decisive, but the yearling twice looked back at the cabin, two long looks that Jean had no way of reading. The elk stepped into the woods and were immediately out of view. On the porch, no one moved until Sophia said very quietly, “Daddy.”

Audrey turned and smiled at Jean, shaking her head slowly. “Have you ever,” she asked, “in your entire life felt so incredibly privileged?”

Jean did not answer but took Benny by the hand and led him briskly to the car. She didn’t look at the Donaldsons standing at the threshold of her home, not even as she waited for some time in the driveway for the engine to warm up.

“Did you see that?” Benny asked, his voice tight with wonder, but Jean did not answer him either.

She drove with only the low beams of her headlights on, recklessly, veering to the other side of the road, heedless of the possibility of oncoming traffic or other obstacles. She drove the road faster than she ever had before, venting a fury that took her four dangerous miles to isolate, and she did not begin to slow down until she realized that not only had she been manipulated, but she had been a participant in a manipulation. They had no right, she thought over and over, they had no right to do such a
thing simply because they could. She remembered, then, that Benny was still with her, beside her, that he was entirely her responsibility, and she eased her car into control again.

She wished, briefly, that her husband was with her, a thought she immediately dismissed on the grounds that there were already far too many people around.

T
HE DRIVE
from Roy’s house to the center of Verona was twenty minutes through sunflower fields that stretched out on either side, flat and constant as a Midwestern accent. It was a good highway, well-paved and broken by nothing but the horizon and the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad. When Roy’s daughter Emma was young, he had taught her how to ride a bicycle on the yellow line that divided those who were going east from those headed west. It was safe enough; there was less traffic then, and the few cars that did pass could be seen coming from miles away. There was always plenty of time to make a decision, to move over, to be prepared.

About ten miles out of town the grain elevator could be seen, standing with all the arrogance one would expect from the only structure in the area over two stories tall. Roy had just passed that point when he noticed an unfamiliar object ahead which became, as he drove closer, a truck, a white truck, pulled off the road, hazards flashing. He slowed down, read the Montana license plate, and then eased his car so deliberately to a stop behind the pickup that it appeared as if he’d parked there every day of his life.

Roy stepped out of his car and walked a few feet before he saw them in the ditch. He stopped, and slowly reached out his hand until he was touching the hood over his warm, ticking engine. There were two of them, teenagers. The girl was standing. The boy knelt at her feet, slicing one leg of her jeans open at mid-thigh with a jackknife. Roy was startled and then embarrassed by the strange intimacy of the scene: the girl standing with her legs slightly spread, hands on her hips, the boy on his knees, the unexpected flash of the knife, the gradual revealing of more skin as a pair of jeans became shorts.

After a moment, the girl turned and looked at Roy with vague interest. Her hair, short and dark, was pressed damply against her head, as if she had just taken off a baseball hat. She wore a man’s white undershirt, a pair of sunglasses clinging to its V neck with one arm.

“Hi,” she said.

“I saw you were pulled over,” Roy said. “I thought you might need a hand.”

She gestured at the truck. “Yeah. It just quit on us all of a sudden.”

“Fuel pump,” the boy added. “Busted.”

“Want me to take a look at it?”

The girl shrugged. “Just a sec,” she said.

Roy waited while the boy cut through the last heavy inseam and the girl stepped out of the tube, with its hemmed bottom and frayed top. One leg bare, the other in long jeans, she walked to the pickup, opened the door, and released the hood. Roy came around to the front of the truck, noticing the dead butterflies and grasshoppers flattened against the radiator grill. He and the girl looked at the dusty engine block, and she pointed one thin hand through the network of tubes and hoses and said, “Pete thinks it’s this that’s broken. The fuel pump.”