Tributaries
“Just pretend,” his mother said, “that you’re under Lake Agassiz—that big-ass ancient lake that doesn’t exist no more but used to be huge, bigger than all the Great Lakes combined.” She said shit like this all the time, before heading into the woods for the night, bound probably for the town and the bars, and he never knew how to take it. “Pretend,” she’d say, squeezing his cheeks and making hers big like a blowfish, “that you can breathe underwater.” “Pretend, for just a little bit, that you don’t exist,” she’d whisper, promising to be back soon. But this time she didn’t say when she’d be back.
The boy was a Freedom Baby. He had no citizenship, no government name. He was, as his mother explained to him many times, a conscript of statelessness. He was like a ghost, a drifting spirit brought up on the land, off the land. He never knew exactly why they lived out there in the middle of nowhere. He knew nobody but his mother, knew nothing of cousins or grandparents or friendship. His mom had told him once that they were defending the land, defending the silica sand, the finest there was in the world. It was like powder. It was all over the place, on the ground and in the grass. He liked to scoop it up in his hands and blow it into the air like dust. They never stayed in the same place for too long. Some nights he’d be shaken awake in their little tent. “They’re coming for us,” his mother would say. “The miners and their police. They want this sand, and they’ll kill us for it.” And then they’d gather their things and move to the next spot under a starry sky.
She taught him that the sand was valuable. It was used to extract oil because it could penetrate the smallest of cracks. “Agassiz,” she’d say, “is still under us, giving us life, and if you dig far enough you’ll hit fresh water. When these mining companies dig for the sand they corrupt the waters beneath us.” He believed her, believed everything she told him. But, on nights when he couldn’t sleep, he often saw her wander off into the damp woods with strange men. For some reason, these men glowed red as he looked at them, and he thought of the stories she’d told him about vampires and wondered if they could see themselves in a mirror.
Recently, she’d been going away for longer. She’d started taking these pills, you see, pills in a bright orange bottle. He’d seen pills before and knew that they were medicine, because there had been a time when he’d had a fever, and his mother, with him in her arms, had raced into town to procure something that could cure him. The land couldn’t do it. That one trip had taught him the way to other people, and he knew that if he ever needed medicine again he could go there, but it would take a whole day, or a whole night, of walking and fighting the bogs. He’d asked her once why she needed medicine and if she’d be O.K., and she’d said only, “Helps me breathe.”
“So just pretend,” she said, tucking him in to sleep, “pretend that you’re swimming and nothing else matters but swimming.” But the boy waited, waited until she’d left the small clearing of their camp and then followed her. He stepped quietly along a narrow path that he knew would split in two: one way leading to the town and the other to nowhere. It was this way that she went, not toward bars or medicine. It was dark, so he had to follow her sound, her shaky steps, and the eclipse her body made against the moonlit sky. He heard the wild cries and claws of lynx somewhere in the trees. As he walked, the ground became wet and his socks heavy with water. He knew that there were no bogs in these parts. He reached down and felt the water and it was coarse. He kept going, and it got deeper, until it opened up into a lake—the whole of Agassiz, rising and crashing into rocks and trees, snapping off their branches. Ahead of him, his mother stopped, pressed the orange bottle to her lips, and drained whatever was in there. He could see the moon flickering on the water. He heard her crying out in the dark. He couldn’t be sure if it was in sadness or joy or both. And then, in one motion, she dove into the lake, leaving small ripples on the surface. He waited a moment, holding his breath the way she’d told him to, until Agassiz rose and covered his chest, and then he let it take all of him. The water was smoky with sand, silica, and in the distance he could see her drifting gently, her body at the mercy of Agassiz. He watched her, watched her limbs dancing in the hollowness of it. He kept his lips tight and his cheeks big, and eventually, like her, he stopped trying to swim and just floated. ♦