Karen brought me the eggs as a gift this morning and I figured it was a simple gesture and nothing more, that she had too many in her coop. The problem is that Karen is an easily excitable person with pointy ears and humungous teeth, and there’s a widespread and undisputed theory that these attributes lead her to perform outrageous, often spiteful, deeds. She lives three doors down and once threw a live chicken into a fire and that’s why she’s not welcome at the stomp dances anymore. But I still don’t worry when approaching the freckled half-dozen in a basket on my kitchen counter, all rather too oblong and shaded like extra creamy coffee. Maybe because I’m a little inactive these days. Not physically, just where I do my thinking. I heard somewhere that we all are.
They’re warm from the sun when I lift the first egg from its wicker cradle, butter hissing in a nearby pan. I crack it against the tile edge of the counter and empty its contents over the greasy cast iron with the intention of frying them all at once, sunny side up. After a brief glance through the window at the dogwood shedding the last of its purple coat of petals, I notice a tiny geriatric woman in a wet hospital gown lying in the puddle of sizzling egg white, a slick gray braid curled over her backside. Her skin is pruned like a brain, eyes closed, lips sunken between her jaws. She must be over a hundred years old. I scoop her from the pan with a spatula and onto a plate and wave a hand over her to cool down her steaming body. I poke her with a finger in the leg to see if she’ll move but I think she’s dead. And then she twitches and her little slack breast wobbles from her gown. Accepting the fact that there will be no breakfast, I decide it’d be best to open every egg. Carefully.
I break the shells of all six by gently hammering them with the end of a spoon and find three more identical women and two men inside, all with matching blue gowns plastered to their figures and teeny braids that make me think of umbilical cords on puppies, like I should maybe chew them off, but the impulse retreats. I bend down close and hold the spoon over each of their mouths hoping for little patches of fog and am relieved to find them all with working breath, slow as it comes. One by one, I rinse them under the faucet with warm water and then hold a blow dryer over them until their gowns are papery-crisp. The phone rings and I retrieve it from the den, leaving the elderly people in a row on a kitchen towel.
“What did you get?” It’s Karen.
“Only a dick would snatch random eggs from the woods,” I say.
She laughs into the receiver. “Just tell me.”
“I have to go, Karen. I’ll be letting Jerry and Boyd know about this. And I’m going to lock my door from now on.” Jerry and Boyd are Business Committee officials for Thlopthlocco. It’s a tribal town, a stretch of cheap homes with aluminum siding, a community center, a casino, a separate governing body. They’ve threatened to bar her from the poker tables and I think they’ll do it, though I probably won’t call them.
Back in the kitchen the little prunes are stretching their limbs, bathing in the buttery sun. I offer them sips of water from a shot glass, which they refuse. Then a pinch of bread, a potato chip, a shard of Crunch bar. They turn their heads from my offerings, still laying on their sides and backs with their eyes barely peeked open. I ask them to speak, to whisper if they can. They don’t.
I fashion a comfy receptacle using a shoebox and the softest bathroom hand towel I own. They transfer without protest and continue their rest in the darkness, breathing through holes cut in the lid. They ride quietly in the pickup with me to work—a car dealership in Okemah where customers sometimes don’t wear shoes in the showroom. On the way we listen to a Sheryl Crow song on the radio about happiness.
In my office I again offer them water and the corner of a cereal bar but they’re asleep. Toby, another salesman, thinks they look sick.
“You should probably just put them in the freezer or something,” he says.
“They don’t seem like they’re suffering,” I say, the box between us on my desk.
“They look like you.” He prods one of the old men’s feet.
“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“Indians, I mean.”
Toby is fantastically tall with graphic orange hair, brows and lashes. He often inserts race into conversations.
“How long are you planning to take care of them?” he asks.
I shrug. It seems they won’t be living much longer, not at their age.
“They could all be the same person,” he says, “Only with different wrinkle patterns, you know?”
“Because they’re Creek? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, no, no. They just seem like duplicates of one another,” he says, “Clones. I’d say the same thing if they were Korean.”
The old woman in the far-left side of the box swings her arm in the air and Toby flinches. I tilt closer and spot a mosquito smeared across the towel, fresh cherry-red. The woman’s hand is swollen and heated.
“What’s her problem?” Toby says.
“We need bug spray,” I tell him, “And some lotion.”
During my lunch hour I drive to the pharmacy with the shoebox on the floor of the truck cabin. The temperature is 79° F, which is less than 80° F, so I decide leaving them in the vehicle with the windows open while I go inside is permittable, as long as my absence is kept under five minutes. I step from the truck and think, Look at me, I’m thinking like a father now.
In the pharmacy I select more items than I intended to purchase, halting every few feet to consider a package of baby wipes or arthritis cream, tearless shampoo or something for glaucoma. I’m tempted to ask a woman behind the counter what she’d recommend for newly born nonagenarians who refuse to eat, but she’d probably tell me to leave them in the park or put them in the freezer, so I’m forced to use my head and make educated decisions. Butterscotch candies, pacifiers, heating pads, sippy cups, milk and Chardonnay. Then I worry they’re especially carnivorous and grab a bag of beef jerky. From the checkout line I spot a Frank Sinatra CD I suspect they might enjoy and add it to the pile.
When I reenter the truck and open the shoebox, the hatchlings exhibit labored breathing, all of them glazed with sweat. I curse through my teeth. My heartbeat rises. I pound the steering wheel a few times, start the engine, and direct a blast of air conditioning to the floor. I think of phoning my mother in Broken Bow to ask her the signs of heat stroke but it’d lead to an overflow of questions, and in the end she’d just tell me to put them in the freezer or toss them in the trash and wash my hands, so I keep the phone in my pocket. I’ll have to research it on my own, should their condition worsen.
Toby follows me from the showroom when I return to the dealership—zero customers at noon on a Tuesday, which is typical. His fingernails are black with grease and mustard stains freckle the cuffs of his sleeves. He’s missed a spot shaving. He’s carrying an iced tea from a fast food place up the road, a lemon wedge hooked on the lip of the cup.
I place the open shoebox on the desk next to my collection of nice but relatively cheap fountain pens, and then it’s suddenly as if the hatched geriatrics are a mediocre collection of objects, just like any other. This tugs at something inside me, a sadness. It’s as though I might as well put them in the freezer or drop them on the nearest highway underpass. I scoot the pens to the other end of the desktop.
“Nobody’s going to buy a car from you, looking like that,” I tell Toby.
“Nobody’s going to buy a car from me because everybody only wants Ford trucks,” he says, dragging a chair to the desk. He’s right. I’ve seen the shift take place. The roads have been taken over with pickups in either black or white. In Tulsa you’ll find mostly silver sedans. In Shawnee, mostly trucks in red.
I toss a few gummy bears into the shoebox and open the carton of milk. “Can you cut a coffee cup into a little dish?”
He prods one of the women’s backs with his finger. “They’re shivering.”
“It must’ve been the AC.”
“Did you get them sunscreen?” he asks.
“No, why?”
“Do Indians need to wear sunscreen? I actually think they don’t, right?”
“That’s the kind of thinking that causes cancer.”
He frowns. “Did your mother make you wear it before you went outside?” he asks, “When you were a kid?”
“Sometimes,” I mumbled.
“But you’re also part European,” he says, cracking his long neck with the heel of his palm.
He’s always been unusually interested in my upbringing, as if it was a world away from his family’s farm in Cleveland County. Discussing it tends to bore me. “You’re causing cancer, Toby.”
I hear a scampering of claws against cardboard and see it’s the hatchlings bunched at the corner of the box, attempting to crawl over. One little woman has her arms stretched up toward Toby’s iced tea. Their eyes are open wider than I’ve seen since their births. “We need that dish,” I say.
Toby retrieves a paper coffee cup and rips it from the lip down, until it’s a tattered dish two inches high. I take it from him and tip a small stream of tea inside. I see upon lowering the dish to the shoebox that the hatchlings have seized a lemon wedge, one that must’ve fallen to the desk when I lifted his drink.
Toby jumpstarts when he sees them. “Whoa! They’re like little lions on an antelope,” he blurts, “They’re burying themselves in it.”
They suck and chew at the pale flesh with their gums, faces wet with juice, and I worry I’ll need to rinse it from their eyes. One male helplessly gnaws on the rind, salivating rivers down the slick peel, and I pat his back gently, feeling more paternal.
Watching them devour the lemon wedge with such an ache for it…sadness again. I have lemons in my cabinet at home, and the elderly hatchlings are clearly starving. “I wish they would’ve told me they wanted lemons,” I say, “I mean, speak up, you know?”
“They speak?” Toby asks.
A bird squawks from the window ledge, a blue jay. I shake my head, “No.”
•••
The hatchlings grow over the month of July to the size of prairie dogs, draining twenty pounds of lemons weekly, now requiring a larger receptacle for their hours of rest, hours that comprise the vast majority of their day. At times they’ll stand on their feet by gripping the edge of the antique chest I’ve provided and look out into the room—sad, pensive, or just old, I don’t know which. They still join me at work, sleep peacefully under my desk on a plush, unused dog bed. I only leave them when meeting Toby at this tavern near the highway where the women tending bar often wink and blow kisses as we leave. Toby says he’s looking for a girlfriend, but not a bartender. I tell him that for someone of his hair color, he should be less choosy, be happy that the women have jobs and all their teeth. He responds by listing the attributes of his perfect “type.” When he speaks of this I’ve noticed my thoughts always scatter, fork in different directions and take off running. Before long I’ll be wondering if the little prunes are asleep or gazing into the checkered pattern of the living room rug, what they might be thinking, if anything, when they do.
•••
I see Karen one very hot evening, the muggy air soaking up the trimmings of my front lawn and the marshy rim of a pond a few hundred yards off the road, turning the outdoors to some sort of pungent broccoli soup. Toby and I are sharing bourbon in rocking chairs on the front porch like you’d see in a commercial on TV. Ice cubes are cracking in our tumblers. Toby has become very drunk and asked me about my “Indians in the cupboard” and because I’m also drunk I think of swatting him across the cheek, but then I remember that everything is about race with Toby, that he’s burdened with that disquieting shade of hair, so I don’t bother. When the rattle of Karen’s costume jewelry crescendoes up the block, we exchange faces of exasperation.
“I saw your mom at the casino. She wants you to come to the Ground next time,” she tells me, referring to the Stomp Ground, where Karen isn’t welcome.
“I never did the stomp dances, Karen,” I say, pushing the rocker with the toe of my sneaker.
“No shit,” she says, “But she wants you to.”
“She told you that?”
“Doesn’t have to,” she says, climbing the porch steps, “Besides, you live here. You’re a member. You should go.”
Back then, back when I’d help my mother strap box turtle shells, shakers, to her calves and walk to the Ground holding her hand, I had a good time. It was only then that I could stay up all night dancing and eating sofkee and playing stickball, watch the sun rise from the cold, trampled ring-mound of dirt, my clothing permeated with hickory smoke. Somewhere in my teens, though, I was given a choice: attend or don’t. After so many dances, the novelty of an all-nighter outdoors less exhilarating every year, I found the decision wasn’t tough. My mother hasn’t pressed me into attending since, and it’s now rare that I even think about them, the dances.
“What difference does it make to you?”
She leans against the railing, the lumber darkened and damp from the humidity, the screech of insects a deafening white noise over the property. “She used to be really friendly, back when you were younger, back when you spent time with her.”
I’m not sure what to make of Karen’s sentiment. I’m briefly struck with an image of my mother—the brackets at her lips, the veins in her hands.
“How long have you two known each other?” Toby asks Karen, the sunlight underscoring his mass of freckles.
“Since he was a baby. I was ten the year he was born,” she says, her big teeth coffee-stained and wedged with poppy seeds. “And when he was little he did go to the dances.”
I take a gulp of bourbon, tell Karen, “My mother is perfectly content. Relax.”
“She’s mean now,” Karen says, “She’s rude to the dealers, treats them like sun-bleached turds on the sidewalk.”
“How come I’ve never met your mother?” Toby asks me.
I roll my eyes. “I don’t know, Toby. Is there some reason you want to?”
He pulls on his whiskey and makes a bitter face. “I’m just curious about the kind of person who made you.”
“Who made such a jerk, you mean,” Karen says.
“At least I don’t throw animals in fires,” I tell her.
“Huh?” Toby says.
She lights a cigarette and exhales in my direction. “That wouldn’t have happened had a single one of you remembered my birthday.”
Toby scrunches his face into something quite ugly and drains his glass. I ask Karen, “Have you ever considered that everyone knew it was your birthday and chose not to acknowledge it? Would that make you feel better?”
“If that were true,” she says, and pauses before finishing. “Yes, it would.”
I sigh and lean my head against the wooden chairback. Karen believes that we, as people, are rather thin characters, that we’re becoming thinner every day. I told her recently that she watches too many movies, too much tv, that maybe life isn’t meant to be all that dramatic.
“Did you tell anyone your birthday was coming up?” Toby asks her.
As she draws a breath to reply, an unnerving voice comes from behind the screen door. It’s a forceful, ragged whisper.
We all turn to the noise. Toby gasps. I squint past the screen into the kitchen, a course of adrenaline chilling my entire midsection. A female hatchling is at the door’s base, gaping toward me, jaw limp, drooling. She whispers again. The same thing as before. It sounds like the word aardvark.
•••
Karen is pleased that I’d kept my batch of eggs and not hardboiled them or thrown the innards in the freezer, and she visits my home on a more frequent basis in order to watch the hatchlings grow. I don’t much enjoy her company, ever, but she always bares crates of lemons and new gowns for all six geriatrics, which she sews herself, often patterned with daisies and smiling suns.
They say only one word, year after year. It isn’t Creek or any Native American word that’d make sense. Karen believes it’s simply their word, with no link to the African mammal, just a vocal intonation, not unlike the barking of a dog. “It’s a little different every time,” she says, “they’re saying many different things with it.”
It takes three years before the elderly people, whom I’ve grown quite attached to, reach an average size and develop the skill to pilot walkers without tumbling to the floor. I keep them inside the home and backyard, disclosing their existence to no one further, as you would a secret lover, or a hobby few would understand.
I believe the prunes enjoy watching me eat a large meal more than anything else, especially the females, who clasp their hands before their chests and smile serenely while I sit at the table. Afterward they nap as if they’d consumed it all, too. When I read from a novel I’ll do it aloud, choosing stories I feel they may connect with, tender stories from long ago. The words don’t seem to get through to them, but the tone I put in my voice, the delicate flow of the sentences, does. They respond with the soft petting of my knees, the papery backs of their hands on my cheeks.
Toby is continually fascinated by my decision to keep them, always asking questions about their health, always expecting them to die. “What do you guys do all day?”
“We take naps,” I say, “Is that a problem?”
“Are they still drooling all over the furniture?”
He has an obvious frustration with my living arrangement, has been complaining about the racket their walkers make as they shuffle through doorways, the wet lemon rinds left on the floor. He spends more and more time working under the hood of his Buick, and then an old Cadillac, and an even older Cadillac after that. I expect him to succumb to one of the women at the tavern, a pleasant female under forty with mostly perky tits, and stop visiting altogether. But instead he turns a little bitter, as though somehow aggrieved by my situation. At work he tells customers to leave if they’re not wearing a shirt, which is new.
“You don’t even check your email at home anymore,” he says.
“They don’t like computers,” I tell him.
•••
I get older and first notice this shift in my age shortly after my mother dies. Toby comes to the wake service the night before the burial, remarking on the great number of Creeks gathered in one place and the delicious cornbread that was only supposed to be available after the service. The car dealership has closed down and he’s found a new job in Shawnee. I’d quit working after losing the position, and now there’s a life insurance fund that should save me from the growing debt.
“You know, they really don’t look much like you at all,” he says as he studies the crowd. A huddle of old men speaks Muscogee, hushed and reverential, all with bellies that spill from their slacks. I remember the face of one, a head priest for a Green Corn Ceremony I’d attended as a child. In this memory he’s treating the massive fire with medicines, herbs that crackle and flare.
“What kind of car do you think he drives?” I ask Toby, motioning to the man.
“Probably best that he doesn’t drive,” he says.
I purse my lips, thinking it’s probably a green truck, or some unusual color, unsure why I’m interested.
Later, I cry over the casket and the sensation is peculiar, as if this isn’t the place to do it. Toby watches me, fidgeting with the cuffs of his shirt, marking them with grease. I expect him to hug me, though he never has. I can already feel his palm patting my spine, his orange stubble brushing my cheek. But it doesn’t come. He just stands there, hands in his pockets. When I follow the sound of a sniffle across the chapel I’m stunned, though, to find Karen bawling like a mourner you’d see on a television show, wet-faced and hysterical. I wait for us to meet eyes and then I nod, mouth a thank you, and anticipate the return home, where my full-sized prunes, within the refuge of our sturdy brick walls, give the warmest of hugs.
•••
Karen stops visiting as we step quickly—quicker as every year becomes a more insignificant span of time—into the future. She finds moving her limbs becoming painful, as do I. She’s wrinkled and arched like a question mark, slow on her feet, slow with her hands. She stopped acting out against the people of Thlopthlocco a long time ago. She doesn’t try to get a reaction anymore, not from this future world where children ride on drones and computers are built into all the furniture. No more chickens thrown in fires, no more egg hunts in the woods. She says she’s too tired, and I can certainly understand that.
One summer becomes unseasonably warm, the outdoors a bug-riddled sauna. The casino is eleven stories tall now and looms over the trees, dwarfs the community center and draws more strangers to the area than I’m comfortable with. People wear clothing that fits like garbage bags at all of the slots. They drink from jars of dandelions and liquor. They make up new words and attach new meanings to the words existing. Nasty means attractive. Demented means exciting. Or something like that.
My appetite has left me and because of this the hatchlings have refused to eat for several days, as if on strike until it’s returned. They push their walkers, following me as I lean on my own, across the backyard. They’re peaked, struggling with the weight of their own heads. I’m saddened by their state but feel a rather guilty bit of comfort by the level of concern.
We’ve spent the afternoon watching dragonflies helicopter across the backyard, chickadees cracking the sunflower seeds I left in a tray, squirrels barreling silently through the grass. Their bellys groaned and gurgled, and I kept an arm around each of them, one at a time, their wrinkled gowns so soft under my fingers I feel like crying.
I haven’t cried since my mother died, but I’ve come close, when I think about her a little too hard. Sometimes I wish she’d met the old prunes, that maybe she could’ve connected with them too.
With the sun turning orange, I lead them through the grass alley behind our home, thinking of Toby and his violent shade of hair. He married a woman named Tracy before he died, had several children and then grandchildren. His son became a mechanic, which is what Toby should’ve been in the first place. Somewhere in my sixties Toby and I stopped contacting each other, for no particular reason I can muster, other than he had his family now, and I had mine. Sometimes I think I was in love with Toby, that maybe Toby loved me, but it wasn’t something we were ever inclined to discuss. The last time I saw him was through a video call, and he’d commented about my hair, which I’d grown out and let the prunes braid. “You look ridiculous,” he’d said.
Slow as slugs, we wander through chiggers and rocketing locusts, one male hatchling rubbing his cheek on my shoulder. “Aaaardvaaark,” he whispers.
We pass Karen’s house and I know she’s inside sewing quilts, alone. I send a little wave of positivity her way, hoping it sticks, that she won’t feel sad tomorrow, that someone gives her a call just to say hello.
We head down a mostly overgrown trail, into a small segment of forest flush with green. Our little parade of walkers further slows as the natural debris thickens, and we pause now and again to steady ourselves, to breathe. The heat draws heavy fragrances from the soil, trees, vines. Cicadas wail from the branches. Eventually we reach the spot of their conception, a quiet point partly shaded by redbud canopies, partly open to the setting sun.
“Aaaardvaaark,” they murmur, muted tones gaining passion.
We help each other to the forest floor, lay together at the base of a dwarf Meyer lemon tree, a specimen having lived countless years, endured many winters. I know this because Karen heard the stories about the tree from her grandmother and in her later years recounted them over sips of bourbon from a rocking chair. Her grandmother believed its fruit would aid in a longer life, so she’d pick the lemons, slice them in half, dip them in sugar, and give them to her granddaughter to lick like candy.
As a group we hold one another, harnessing a warm energy, the kind you can only feel when you’re with a hatchling, the kind you see in TV shows, where people cry because they’ve found an old piece of jewelry or a photo from their youth. And youth is what I’ve been thinking a lot about. My own youth, the call-and-answer of the songs around a fire, the ribbon shirts scratchy at the seams, the clang of a brass water drum. Every piece of it has taken on the feel of a myth, something I’d heard about but never really experienced. It’s as though my mother, the only real family member I’d had before finding those eggs on my counter, took that world with her when she passed. I stopped hearing about the stomp dances, the town gossip, the food drives at the community center. I didn’t realize customs die, too, if you let them.
The light fades, but the warmth grows on our bed of dead leaf and rich soil. Our limbs are tangled in a haywire fashion, just as the infinite tangle of vines overhead, and I whisper it with them, “Aaaardvaaark.”
Karen was wrong. Not about the world, the town, the people. She was wrong about the language the hatchlings spoke. She misunderstood. There aren’t multiple meanings behind the word. It’s just the only one they know, and the only thing they feel. There’s no direct translation in English. But I find the word easier to appreciate now more than ever, and the key is all in their tone, in the sincerity behind it.
I whisper the word one final time and the air turns rich with citrus, the blood-flow decelerating in our veins, a pair of doves cooing from the adjacent brush. We take our last inhale also as a group, with the common understanding that this energy, this warmth, just might last forever.
