Fiction

Ray Wheeler is a Professor of English at Dickinson State University, where he

teaches courses in literature and creative and expository writing. Though he thinks

of himself as a playwright and has written numerous plays, his fiction, poetry, and

essays have appeared in numerous publications.

  
 SMALL MIRACLES ON THE BUFFALO COMMONS 
 
 
 Fool that he could sometimes be, Willie believed for a time that
Hazel had imagined the whole damned thing. But it turned out to be as
much a mystery as his sudden descent from farming: one day he was doing it
and the next day he wasn't, and whatever time there might have been
between was impenetrably opaque. Except for being unable to seed a
straight row, he had been tolerably good at the craft, though the wavy
grids of his plantings were what hung in his memory now.
 The only farming he did presently was to watch the man across the
road doing it. A profound lack of rain, marginal soils, and great
economic forces, which he did not understand nor even have names for,
had robbed Willie and Hazel of everything except a view of the rolling
fields from the back porch of their Detroiter double-wide, the creature
Willie regarded as the sorriest piece of shit ever dragged onto the
prairie by humankind. He was always careful to look away from it, even as
he threaded his way between the prickly pears to either of its porches, a
journey necessitated by the lack of a door in the Detroiter's backside.
 When he was in an urban mood, he would sit on the front porch.
From there he could see the town whose western limits his Detroiter
defined. Mostly, he could see ten other shaggy trailers all now abandoned,
the charred timbers of the former Union Grain Elevator, and the
tin-covered back of the former V.F.W. Club. There were other things
around, but most of the time they didn't matter because he couldn't see
them from the front porch of his trailer. 
 
 "I wish you wouldn't say trailer," Hazel said twice a month or so.
"They're mobile homes now." She had come to love his Detroiter, even
though it belched rivets all over its insides when the frequent prairie
winds tried to abort it from its pad. But the rivets stuck in her vacuum
cleaner, sometimes shredding its belt and plucking its bristles with lunar
noises which significantly diluted her love.
 Still, never was her love more strained than when the water pipes
and drains froze up in the winter, and Willie had to lift the Detroiter's
skirts and heat up its privates with a propane torch. Going under there
did unearthly things to him, and for days after a visit to its nether
parts, he settled into a brown study.
 Several times he had set it on fire, most recently thinning the
floor in front of the toilet where Hazel's feet would sometimes rest. The
flames also singed much of the hair from Willie's head, leaving only a few
irregular patches which remained unscathed through the grace of God or
some such thing.
 When he returned to the trailer, his hair and jacket still
smouldering, she laughed emphatically enough to eject her upper denture
onto the floor at their blue heeler's feet, whereupon thousands of years
of canine instincts kicked in, and Arnold true to tradition, despite his
years and infirmities, ate three of her incisors before she smote the
sonofabitch on the head with a skillet, convincing him to yield, albeit
with an unearthly howl.
 Holding the denture in her hands like fresh chicken entrails, her
laughter dissolved when Willie said, "Well, remember how we got back them
dimes he ate."
 "That isn't funny," she had said.
 
 
 Hazel received the first of her amazing insights a couple of weeks
later, or so it seemed. In what Willie believed was a dream, she rinsed
off the morning dishes and thought she heard the mailman on the front
porch, a strange detail in support of reality, Willie maintained, since
they hadn't had a postman in fifteen years. Then something out there
snapped. She pushed the curtain aside and was looking right into an old
buffalo's inscrutable eyes. She went into the front room, opened the door,
and told him to get the hell off the porch.
 One of the buffalo's front legs had broken through the decking,
tilting him oddly toward the Detroiter. Still, he loomed massively over
her, robbing her of breath, and for a second she considered dropping to
her knees as people used to do before kings. At this range she could only
see one of his eyes at a time. She had no idea these things were so big.
 "This isn't any place for a damned buffalo," she said as sternly
as she could. "This is a porch."
 Apparently unimpressed with her admonitions, the buffalo dipped
his great head as if to consider the porch and its uses, lifted his foot
out of the hole, and swung casually past her. When his front legs touched
the prairie again, he had hoisted his tail and dropped a steaming load of
pellets onto the decking.
 
 "Up that close, there ain't anything else--that thing is the only
thing," she told Willie that night in bed.
 "Which don't mean you actually saw anything," he said.
 "Or that I didn't?"
 "Dreamers always think they're awake," he said.
 "How about the poop?"
 "I don't know what that stuff came from," he said.
 "It came from that critter's rear end. Seems like something a
grown man would know about."
 "I know about it. I'm the one who tracked it in the trailer," he
said.
 "And the busted board on the porch?"
 "It's an old porch," he said.
 Willie said it was a dream, and the proof of it was that she
wasn't injured or dead. In real life the critter would have walked over
her and through the trailer, and that would have been that. He was
usually right about this kind of thing, so that could have been the end of
it for a time.
 "That's real good," Hazel said, as Willie smoothed the bristles
between her legs with his hand.
 "Maybe you're dreaming this too," Willie said. When Hazel softly
laughed and relaxed her legs, two legions of goose bumps marched down his
tummy. He was pretty damned sure he wasn't dreaming.
 
 A few weeks later, he found a gaggle of pellets off the back
porch. He gave them a quick stir with his boot and then tore into one of
them with an ash twig, but its insides seemed as unremarkable as its
outsides. Like any ex-farmer he knew shit when he saw it, and he knew this
particular form of it didn't come from a cow.
 That afternoon he shuffled over to the former V.F.W. Club, a forty
by fifty tin shack whose shabby innards appeared to have been in a recent
war themselves. In the fifteen years since the owner-bartender, Curt
Wilhelm purchased the place, he hadn't be able to decide on a new name for
it.
 "You seen anything unusual around here lately?" Willie asked. 
 "Every day," Curt said, sliding a lukewarm can of Old Milwaukee in
front of Willie.
 "No, seriously," Willie said.
 "Hell, I'm serious. Come around here and look from this side.
You'll see."
 "Nobody's said anything about seeing anything strange?"
 "Oh, yes they have. Ever' single damn one of them. Twelve-thirty
in the morning, they're all seeing things. Feeling ‘em too."
 "Animals?"
 " Dan Bender saw a unicorn over there in the shitter just last
evening."
 "In it?"
 "Mighta been in the sink for all I know."
 "A unicorn."
 "I guess we don't have ‘em in this country," he said, his mouth
expanding into a great toothless smile. "Maybe it come down from Canada."
 Shortly after midnight, Willie bumped his way home. He had
witnessed nothing strange at the V.F.W. Club, no claims of unicorn
sightings, no astonishing testimonials about creatures great or small, in
or out of their range. 
 Hazel had forgotten to turn on the porch light, and in the
moonless morning he was barely able to make out the shape of the Detroiter
or much of anything else. But even above the effects of the unreckonable
Old Milwaukees he had downed, he sensed that he was being watched. He spun
around as best his sixty-four years would allow, but could make out
nothing behind him. Then something to his right brightly snorted.
 His old heart, or something in there, seemed to rise in his
throat like a fist. He almost dropped to his knees and pleaded, "I didn't
do it," though had he been pressed on the matter, he would have been
unable to say what it might be in this case. And he couldn't see anything
save, perhaps, a great clump of darkness too considerable to have been
contrived by anything but his rickety imagination.
 "Damnation, " he said. His heart sank to its normal lodgings, and
there wasn't another sound about, except the light soughing of the prairie
wind.
 Back in the cramped confines of their bedroom, he hoped to awaken
Hazel by being as noisy as possible. She, however, was slogging around in
the deepest realms of sleep and would have nothing to do with him.
 "There might be something to this," he finally said to her
directly, tucking the covers in just below his chin.
 She said, "Two eggs, over easy and a side of hash browns." Her
tone was so resolutely lifeless that he would have grabbed her wrist and
checked her pulse had sleep, aided by the Old Milwaukee, not claimed him
too.
 
 One afternoon as Hazel slept in her webbed lawn chair on the front
porch, she crouched behind a great sandstone boulder just a few hundred
feet from where the lush grasslands suddenly and unexpectedly lapse into
the Badlands. Before her, a man with his back to her named Chet was
conversing with a buffalo.
 "These people find out you can talk, they'll move on," Chet said.
His grey pony tail extended several inches below his waist, and for a
moment Hazel fancied she was truly looking at the ass end off a horse, one
with of an Eastern accent.
 "Too bad, Chet. We aren't talking to them," the buffalo said.
"Besides, you wouldn't have nothing to do if we scared them off outright."
 "Could be some truth to that," Chet said.
 "I reckon. And, Chet, next time you come out here, bring a couple
of tins of Copenhagen, okay?"
 "Goddamn, you chew too?"
 "I say that, Chet?"
 "You wouldn't object then if I told them your name was Buffalo
Bob?" Chet said.
 "Very funny. Oh, and that lady I called on a while back? She's
right behind you, Chet."
 Chet spun around, his pony tail whirling about, seeming to strike
at the air like a riled snake. Hazel dipped below her boulder, but not
before Chet's rheumy eyes touched her own, kicking an instant snapshot of
him into one of her folds for safekeeping. Great waves of phlegm-ridden,
buffalo laughter rolled in and pelted her like hail. 
 She opened her eyes to Willie's bloodied finger, a mosquito
smashed into the center of its print like an exclamation point. "This one
really nailed you," he said. 
 "Where?" she said, the crust of sleep still muddling her
comprehension.
 "On your temple." 
 Hazel's finger went right to the eye of the bite and received a
bloody kiss. "Maybe we better move somewhere else, Willie."
 Willie looked over his shoulder at the trailers clotted between
him and the VFW Club. He followed the path beaten through the knee-high
grass leading into town, and for the first time he understood that it was
his path, his meandering mark on this prairie, such as it was.
 "Somewhere else," he said blankly. Though the Detroiter was in the
way, he could see the fields blushed tan with swaying grain without end.
They rolled east and west to where the seas held them back for a time.
But there really was no somewhere else. Not for Willie anyway. "I need a
drink," he said.
 
 "Drink has always been part of the problem out here, and that's
why I refrain from it," the fellow who called himself Chet said. Earlier
he had claimed to be from somewhere out east, somewhere Willie had never
heard of. But specifics didn't matter, the direction alone was menace
enough..
 "What entirely is that supposed to mean?" Curt said, sliding
Willie his seventh Old Milwaukee.
 Chet said,"To put it entirely, folks out here get a snootful and
think everything's all right. But I'll accept Willie's offer and have a
Coke."
 "A plain Coke?" Curt said. Willie knew how Curt felt about 
teetotalers, knew why the corners of his lips turned down with
professional
disgust. Someone may as well have pissed on his boot.
 "I got a feeling everything ain't all right by a longshot," Willie
said. A buffalo walked through his mind's eye, paused to rip a prickly
pear out of the dirt, and then winked at him.
 "He's having domestic problems," Curt said.
 "I would have thought that a man your age should be through with
such things," Chet said.
 "His old lady is kinda going off her rocker."
 "She isn't alone, brother," Chet said.
 But Willie was the one who was feeling alone. It wasn't enough
that Hazel couldn't decide whether she was asleep or awake, that the line
between her reality and others' had lost its sharpness. Now he had to
listen to a goddamned foreigner, a grown man with a ponytail, pontificate
about vacating the land that was as much a part of his life as heartburn,
a man who had pointedly dodged every question he had been asked about who
the hell he was except to say that he was an anthropologist.
 "They're folks who study monkeys," Curt had said.
 And Willie said, "That's all right, we don't have any monkeys out
here."
 "You can't help but love the simple people out here," Chet said.
"Not even science can affect them." He had gone on to say that nature had
not intended the prairie for human habitation. The prairie was the
buffalo's domain.
 "Who told you that?" Willie said.
 "It's as plain as the nose on your face," Chet said. He watched
Willie's hand slide up and touch his nose. "That's the first step,
brother," Chet had said. 
 But now it was approaching eleven o'clock and Willie knew that
Hazel would be shuffling about the bathroom preparing for sleep. A time or
two she would look out the window to see if he was coming home, knowing
full well that he probably wasn't and that she couldn't make him out in
the darkness even if he were. 
 "I want to make one more try for it," Willie said. "You're telling
us everybody's going to move out of here, and give the keys to the
buffaloes?"
 "They've been doing it for years," Chet said. "You don't have a
school in this town anymore do you?"
 "Where they all going?" Willie asked. He knew full well that
people had been leaving for years. It seemed like he and Hazel started
every supper with the news that someone was leaving the area. It was just
that they hadn't kept a tally of the total, and the departures hadn't
seemed related particularly. People move on.
 "We don't know where they're going, son," Chet said. "But we know
they're going. Going, going, gone. Figure it out. It's what's been
happening. You don't have a school in this town anymore do you?"
  "Elmer Sumner stores grain in it," Willie said.
 Willie dropped back to the fourth desk of the fifth row in Mrs.
Selma's room in that school. Hazel sat next to him, the champion of
penmanship among the twenty-three second graders. He loved to watch her
form the letters, her left hand embracing the pencil between the first and
third fingers, a habit Miss Selma had failed to undo But it didn't matter
now, because the men were nailing plywood over the windows, and as the
room darkened the augers began to pour in the grain.
 It seemed to Willie that someone should be crying out. But there
was a calm in the room that surpassed sense. Mrs. Selma continued to lick
the little stickers and press them against the papers piled in front of
her. And Hazel was beginning one of her beautiful "R's" on her way to
another extraordinary alphabet. The other children hunched serenely over
their work. As the grain flowed up over his shoes, Willie kept his eyes
on Hazel's pudgy fingers and wondered.
 "I said do you want another beer?" Curt said.
 "No thanks," Willie said. Suddenly he felt incredibly tired and
put upon. He slid off his stool and nearly fell onto the floor.
 "You okay, son?" he heard Chet say behind him. It didn't seem to
warrant an answer.
 But as he pushed against the door it, was as if someone three
times his size pulled it away from him and the bellicose wind tossed him
onto the sidewalk. "Jesus Christ!" he cried out, as the wind stripped his
Dekalb Seed cap from his head and set it sailing into the darkness.
 "Damn it, close the door, Willie!" Curt bellowed from inside the
Club. Willie was about to say that the door would have to close itself
when his hat appeared out of the blackness and sailed past the only
functioning streetlight remaining in town. 
 "Down here, boy!" he shouted, but the hat apparently ignored him..
 As he turned down the path to the trailer court, the wind pushed
so vigorously at his back that walking was strangely effortless. It almost
seemed as if he could just retract his legs and ride the wave of it to
another country.
 The corrugated skirts on several of the trailers were gradually
working free from their moorings. A six foot tongue of one was flapping at
the narrow end of a trailer, its raw edge scraping along the unit next to
it with an eerie metallic shriek. 
 "Whatthehell'sgoingonoutthere?" someone might have screamed from
one of the trailers. But it didn't seem to Willie to be directed to anyone
in particular if it had and specifically not to himself. In the swirl of
things, he had no idea where it might have originated. There were no
lights on in any of the trailers. No one lived in those trailers.
 "Storm's coming," he said, but the words were rejected by the
wind. "Storm's coming." Lightning seethed along the western horizon as
he hurried onto his lot and Willie imagined that it had magically sparked
the Detroiter into life. Along its front face, its defective parts were
being swept free of it as if it were some ill-conceived beast that was
shaking off its fleas. As Willie stepped across the threshold, he got the
sense that the Detroiter and the porch were no longer attached to each
other. The Detroiter seemed to be heading for other parts.
 "I'm afraid, Willie," Hazel said from their close, dark bed.
 "It's just a little shower, honey," Willie reassured her.
 "It's broke half the dishes in there," she said.
 The Detroiter was convulsing with such vigor that Willie had to
brace himself against the wall as he undressed. This was what he had
always imagined it would be like to sail a stormy sea in an unworthy
craft.
 "Could you catch that light?" he asked.
 "The power's out."
 "That figures." He dropped awkwardly into the bed beside her. She
grasped his arm so tightly with her hands that it hurt. For the first
time that he could ever remember, he wasn't sure he could protect this
woman. She was holding on to him, but what in the hell was he going to
hold onto?
 "Shouldn't we get to the basement, Willie?" she said.
 "What basement, honey?"
 "That's right, we don't have one do we?"
 They laughed together; he found her face in the darkness and
kissed her. She kissed back, and they fell asleep
 
 They were awakened in the morning by a meadowlark that sounded
close enough to actually be in their bedroom. It's joyful song gave the
otherwise quiet morning a wonderful, frivolous touch.
 "You're not going to believe what I dreamed last night," Hazel
said.
 "It would have to go some to be stranger than mine," Willie said.
 Hazel put her hand lightly over his mouth. "I dreamed we were in a
tornado, Willie. You just can't imagine how real it was. You just can't
imagine."
 "It picked us up, and we rode all over hell's half acre," Willie
said.
 "You sat up in the bed, grabbed the sheets like they were reins,
and shouted, ‘Ride ‘em cowboy!' like a damned fool," Hazel said, all of
her wrinkles opening into a lovely morning smile.
 "And you said for me to go out there and secure the beans in the
cabinet! ‘Secure the beans,' you kept hollering. ‘Secure the beans,
they're all the hell we've got left, Willie!'"
 "No," Hazel said, "You said that; you said to save the beans. I
said get my robe if you can, Willie, because I wouldn't want to be found
like this."
 "And I said you wouldn't have to worry about it. When this thing
gets through with us, there ain't going to be anything to find."
 "You did say that," Hazel said. "And you crawled over there to the
closet and got me the robe and helped me put it on."
 Willie threw the covers back. "Christ, Hazel, you've got it on!
You're wearing it!"
 Hazel grasped the collar of her robe in her hands. "You don't
suppose," she started, but couldn't complete her thought.
 Willie got up and looked out the window. "Something's not right
out there," he said. "There's wheat out there. Where the trailers should
be. The sun's on the wrong side of the trailer!" He pulled on his boots
and shuffled out to the kitchen, glass and rivets grinding under his
soles.
 Behind him Hazel said, "It broke hell out of the dishes."
 Willie opened the front door to find the porch gone, replaced
now by a section of wheat that had been everywhere flattened by hail. He
jumped down into it and tried to get his bearings. Several hundred yards
or so in the distance he could see what appeared to be the remains of his
porch and beyond that the ruins of the trailer park. Then hardly ten feet
away he saw the old buffalo staring at him. It was so still that it could
have been cast in bronze.
  Even after falling into the darkness of dementia years later,
Willie would sometimes surface and swear to anyone who would listen that
the critter had actually said, "You get the idea, eh Willie?"

© 1998 Ray Wheeler

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Last Update October 20, 2005 by the Writing North staff.