BY CRAFT OR VIOLENCE OF NO MAN

The stranger stops walking at dusk, and makes a cold camp in unfenced woodland, where two barbed wire fences come together at an oblique angle along one side of the ruining highway.

Toward dusk, he grubs in his pack, and draws from it a flute of wood and bone, its oily, dark surface tattooed in whorls of grain that swim into, and then out of the finger holes. A grooved, white cylinder of bone crowns it, and the stranger makes a small music by blowing into this. Then, when night falls, and he huddles deep into the warmth of his bedroll, cradling the instrument against his chest, warming it with his body. At dawn, they rise together, and he tucks it into its case, a tapestry bag that is woven of yarns whose wool was grown, spun and dyed on a mountain overlooking an alien jungle, whence, also, came the cow that gave the bone, and the tree that gave the wood.

He risks a fire, boiling water in his pot for tea. He fills a battered pipe with dry, powdery tobacco and lights it while he waits for his brew to cool. When he has smoked and drunk, he moves on across the water-glutted country.

At noon, he rests, eats some rice, and washes it down with long draughts of flavorless, boiled water.

He is counting the remaining daylight by the fingers between the sun and the horizon when a battered green pickup sporting a mismatched camper-shell pulls up alongside him.

The passenger window groans against sun-cracked rubber, looking like a tooth retreating into ancient, grey gums. A fleshy, pale arm motions to him.

He finishes his count before he goes. The air is cooling and full of rain-smell.

The window frames the face of a woman, a passenger. Red starbursts bloom beneath the nearly translucent skin of her round cheeks. Her green eyes luminesce beneath glasses, her hair red and unbound. “How far you going?”

“All the way,” he says.

“That’s pretty far.”

“It is.”

“Looking for a lift?”

“I am if you’re offering.”

The woman nods, and exchanges words with the driver. As she turns, a new face appears in the window— another woman, older, whose hands clutch nervously at the truck’s steerage.

The one in the passenger seat, the apparent ambassador, speaks. “So, we seen your knife.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to, like, try to murder us with it?”

“It’s not a weapon. I use it for carving sticks, butchering game. I’m living off the land, much as I can.”

“Righteous. You homeless? Hiker? Climber?”

“Tramp.”

She laughs at this, and her voice is incandescent, full of sunshine. “It’s sardines up in here, so put your pack into the bed.”

In the bed of the truck, the stranger arranges his kit atop a threadbare mattress that fills the space. Duffels and three sleeping bags huddle in a nest of garbage, mostly wrappers and empty cups; the rear window gapes.

Above, lightning sheets across low thunderheads in a net of white sparks, and the world shivers. “You best shake it,” the driver calls to him through the open passenger door.

Rain mingled with hail clatters against the roof just as the stranger settles into the old, sun-cracked vinyl of the truck’s passenger seat. Groaning and insubordinate springs probe his haunches with pointed metallic claws, and the truck growls and idles as the wipers slap ineffectually at the rippling grey curtain, chirping and squawking like jungle birds.

“Seatbelt.”

The stranger fumbles for the bit and harness, and secures himself.

“Let’s boogie,” she says, and throws the vehicle into gear.

The younger woman leans out of her bucket seat. “So what’s your handle?”

“Walker.”

Laughs billow from deep in her ribs. “You're going to be Rider for a while, it looks like.”

Walker does not smile, but neither is his face closed to them, and they must sense his openness, or read it written there, because the small one proffers a blown glass pipe, packed, and a plastic lighter. “Do you partake?”

“What is it?”

“The gods’ own herb.”

“I guess I’ll decline,” he says.

“Suit yourself.”

She lights, tokes, holds, and exhales without coughing. Her sister reaches for the pipe, takes her own dose, and then hands it back, reaching past Walker as she does so to thumb a cassette tape into the deck. A pair of voices warble out of the truck’s ancient speakers, decanting a tune popular at dances done in schools twenty years dark. It is sentimental, full of a cheap, counterfeit sorrow rendered in an androgynous tenor, and the giantesses know every lyric, belting its rude and transparent poetry in voices that reverberate like the thunder.

After a time, the hail relents; the rain thins shortly after, and the truck turns onto a stretch of long highway that is flat and straight. In the rear seat, the pipe makes a reappearance, and the sisters refresh themselves. A barely perceptible blue haze drifts within the interior of the cab.

Without warning, the large one stamps down the gas pedal to the rust-blistered floorboard, and the truck bucks and lurches forward with a jerk and a roar. Trees that seem impossibly close gain speed until they are abstract silhouettes shuttling across the panes of window glass like puppets in a shadow theater. For a time, they are transported in this way, like astronaut voyagers, where the rain slicing by them is a cannonade of glinting stars. The sisters scream delight; Walker keeps his silence.

Just after midnight, the highway becomes a white caliche road winding through salt marshes, eventually terminating in an overgrown field where a boardwalk bridges scrubby undergrowth. Beyond, the ocean whispers as the surf rolls across small, round pebbles smoothed by tide and time.

They park in a lot as broken as the highway on which they’ve come, and the sisters leap from the cab with a cry. Loose blonde and ginger hair flashes where fingers of moonlight break through the clouds, and they slip the clothing from their ivory-illuminate skins with gestures that are slight, effortless, as though these meager garments were no part of them, so that, incandescent, enormous, bare and heaving, they go into the sea.

All this, Walker observes. He listens to the cries that drift to him—mingled pleasure and dismay for the cold water; he has not yet removed from the truck. When he finally does, his cramped, stiffened joints report like muffled gunfire. He gathers his kit from the covered bed of the truck. As he crosses the boardwalk, he collects the discarded articles of clothing from where they have fallen, and carries the mound of laundry to the edge of the field. He hangs their things, one by one, from the branches of a sapling elm, out of the reach of the fleas that might be leaping invisibly among the stones of the shore, awakened and invigorated by the cool of the rain.

A quarter mile of beach farther down, a dwarfed, gnarled woodland spreads branches to catch the sun’s light where it arcs southward. Palmate leaves of dark green, under-bitten by parasitic berries, shiver in the oily, salty breath of the gulf. Behind, the sisters gambol and cackle in the waves.

He builds his camp on a gentle slope, his tarp staked and guyed into a pointed wedge, crosswind. He bucks several dead, standing elms into logs with a folding saw, and builds a stacked, tiered pyramid out of them, chinking the bottom tiers with earth before kindling a fire at the top. He lays his bedding within the shelter, and then sits to watch his creation burn. When the air trapped beneath his tarp is warm, he huddles into his bag and blanket and sleeps.

He awakens to a warm body sliding between the folds of his blanket. She has washed, and smells of summer— melon and cucumber—mingled with the perfume of the ocean. The wall of his sleeping bag separates them still, as do his clothes.

“Is this what you do when there’s no one to pick you up?” She gestures at the shelter and fire.

“It is.”

She reaches over his back and caresses his chest gently. “It’s warm in here.”

Walker, who has lied to her about his name, rolls neatly in his sleeping bag beneath her hand, and meets her gaze. His own left hand extends toward her face, and hard callouses catch on the chiffon-soft, pink skin where he strokes her cheek.

A cold dawn cracks above him when he awakens, and finds that the sisters have made their camp next to his own, having set up the mattress from the back of the truck next to his fire, which guttered and extinguished sometime in the night. Arising fully clothed, he covers them with his blanket—they had dressed before retiring— and digs banked embers out of a bed of ashes with a makeshift pair of chop-sticks he fashions from twigs recently stripped from a springy, live branch. His breath quickens, livens them until they catch new fuel into flame.

The surf is close, and the strand of beach meager, but Walker finds a few stones to overturn. Small, black crabs flee in every direction simultaneously. He catches a few of these and transfers them to a scavenged can. From his pack, which hangs from a convenient branch, he retrieves a fishing kit and handline. He loads the line with tackle, spears a crab onto a hook, and casts out into the surf. Almost immediately, he retrieves his line and hauls a speckled drum, gasping and writhing, into the sun.

With his knife—it remained on his hip the night through—he guts the creature, and strips a forked stick into a roasting spit. Onto this, he threads the carcass. He adds larger logs to the fire and waits for them to burn down before anchoring the spit above a bed of coals.

As the fish cooks, the sisters stir. Each clears her throat, and they roll, one into the other, restless within the cramped confines of their bedding. In chorus, they break wind.

The small one sits up, rubs her eyes, puts on her glasses. She scrutinizes Walker, who is crouched near the fire, warming his hands and watching the eyes of the fish as they cloud in the cooking. She makes a small noise of contained disgust. “I can’t,” she says, holding her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I seriously can’t.” She turns away and coughs some more; deep, rattling hitches set her whole body to quivering. “Oh, I can still smell it!” In a motion that belies her tremendous size, she rises and sprints a short distance down the beach, where she heaves, but brings up nothing.

The larger sister is fully awake now, and bolts upright at the sound of her sister’s distress. “What is it, what’s the matter?” The questions spill out of her almost as a single inquiry.

“He’s cooking a fish!” The pronouncement is punctuated by retching sounds.

She looks, sees the fish and her eyes widen. She swears and, too, scampers off to where the other has recovered herself. In voices giddy with shared horror, they laugh and curse and make noises that communicate with the efficiency of words.

They remain apart as Walker consumes his fish. When he digs the eyes and cheeks from their hollows with the point of his knife, the large one cries out to him in protest. “It was innocent,” she says, gesticulating her displeasure. “An innocent animal.”

“Don’t be foolish,” he says to her, gathering the bones. “There isn’t any innocence in nature.” He flings the bones back into the sea.

They break camp.

Walker holds himself aloof until they encourage him to ride with them again, which he does.

A few miles down the road, they come to a town, and pull in at a diner. It had once been the passenger car of a train, sleek chromed steel looking grim and functional. Inside, patrons are few.

They take seats on tall stools at the counter, and the sisters peruse the menu with beleaguered, critical faces. After a moment, they question the matronly waitress. They are vegetarian, they tell her. She nods knowingly and informs them that the vegetable soup is not made with chicken stock, that their veggie-burgers are made in-house on demand, and that both are reported to be tasty and wholesome, though she has never sampled one herself.

The sisters express their gratitude, order, eat.

The large woman peers at him from over bites. “Are you hungry?” She retrieves a fallen morsel of carrot and gestures with it.

“No.” Head shaking nearly imperceptibly, he meets her gaze evenly.

“Is it a money thing? ‘Cause, if it is, I’d rather shame you than sit while you starve.” She bit, chewed, swallowed.

“I’ve got some money.”

“You’re full from that one fish, huh?” The silence between them spun out, and her eyes were steely as the rain-pregnant clouds, or the skin of a fish before being plucked from the ocean to roast over embers of elm-wood. “Order something. I feel responsible to you.”

“You’re not responsible to anybody but yourself.”

Audibly, she sets her fork down. “Pretty far gone, aren’t you?”

In reply, Walker offers silence.

“Don’t you put that guilt on me. Order something. Please.”

He does: a steaming potato chowder which comes within the minute and he gulps it down in a protracted silence while the sisters, sated, watch.

When the check comes, the sisters tell the waitress that they are grateful, and she, in turn, tells that she will pass their gratitude on to the owner. They pay her in cash and tell her to keep the change.

“I don’t know what happened to you, man,” the little one says as she peels truck’s the passenger seat forward, exposing the bucket seat in the back. She gestures as she speaks. Without response or complaint, he clambers over discarded wrappers and crumbs of petrified snacks, oddly mottled with flakes of marijuana bud here and there. He seats himself on the narrow, fold-out bench, and tests the space for leg-room. It is evident that he will be able to stretch out more than he had in the front, but that he will pay for this privilege by being constricted; he is not a narrow man.

“I don’t know what happened to you,” she repeats, settling herself into the front passenger seat, gracefully, adeptly, with a proficiency that speaks to either an intimate familiarity with the space, or an acrobat’s proficient dexterity, or both. “You seem . . . I don’t know. Grab me the blaze kit out from under your seat, would you?”

Though he searches with his customary diligence, he finds nothing.

“She should have said that it’s inside the seat.”

He probes the bottom of his seat and finds it conceals a hollow; inside is a plastic gallon-bag containing a lighter, the blown-glass pipe that had confounded him previously, and a smaller bag in which the dry, unprocessed sinsemilla—seedless female flowers— nested together. He examines these with an intense interest, his pupils narrow and focus as he slowly scans the herb as though searching for its meaning, these organs whose reproductive function had been circumcised in an enterprise of pleasure, and a fleeting euphoria.

“It makes people kinder, you know.”

“Does it?”

“You should try it.” Her round face, curtained by elfin strands of sleep-plaited hair, regards him without crease or wrinkle of fret, ageless and expectant.

Around the corner, they come to a road that dips into a valley, allowing for a long view of deserted asphalt. The smaller of the fey sisters stops mid-breath and slaps at the other’s shoulder with sudden excitement.

The driver protracts a cry of pleasure as she urges the truck into a plummeting descent toward the elusive horizon. Like before, the world blurs into abstraction.

Although they do not see the flash of winter grey that steps its way carefully onto the road, dismay and horror cycle across their faces at the sound of bone grinding against Michigan steel. The driver brakes, wheels. For a moment, she keeps the truck aright before it tips. A hunched tree that has grown leaning toward the road, as though groping for them, their eventual arrival across the years, halts their momentum.

One by one, the three extract themselves from the wreckage, which has come to rest in an overgrown ditch. Sisters stand dazed, while the other busies himself at the rear of the truck. Finding the canvas of his rucksack bruised, but whole, he straps into his pack and sets off across the blacktop.

When he reaches the doe’s crumpled form, he unmasks his axe.

She scrabbles at the blacktop with shivered, liquid legs. Blood drips from her ears and nose; one of her hooves has been peeled away from the bone by impact and friction. She succeeds only in rolling herself off of the road, and when she has come to rest in the ditch, like the corpse of the machine that has taught her a new and alien suffering, she rests herself and awaits death.

It finds her on two legs.

Bit gleaming like a predator’s teeth, the axe sends her out of the world by cleaving her skull in the very place where the electricity of her breath and heartbeat lives.

Across the distance, two human voices outrage, twinning and intertwining their mingled, shocked sorrow, but if the killer hears them, he pays no mind, and carves a joint of meat from the doe’s foreleg.

The Walker stalks away from the sisters, then, who watch him go. In time, they huddle together and shiver and weep, but he does not see.

He does not look back at all.