“All right, that’s enough,” she says, and steps off the road.
“Don’t,” Rogan barks behind her, and then yells, “Alexa!” again.
“Shut up,” Jalena says. Rogan is either too frightened or playing too frightened to leave the truck, even for her lover.
She takes exactly two steps before the prairie grabs her. Just like that, she’s falling, her hands flying up not just to break the fall but to grab the ground, which is going to open, Jalena screams inside herself, is going to swallow me down, but it doesn’t. It smashes into her palms and mouth and punches her breath from her instead.
And in that single, silent moment — her lungs motionless inside her ringing bones, like empty stalls in an abandoned barn — Jalena hears the grass-waving sound again, and realizes that it isn’t grass at all; it’s whispering. A thousand, million whispering voices, just under her bruised hands, under the tissue-thin veil of earth, calling out to each other. Calling her down.
Just the ground, she snaps, inside her own head, where nothing and no one whispers. She makes herself breathe.
“Jesus, Jalena,” Rogan is calling, one leg over the truck side, though even now she seems reluctant to climb down. To touch this ground. “Are you all right?”
Jalena is still caught in whatever tripped her. Sitting up, she reaches back, edges her foot free, and stares at the single tent stake tilting out of the dirt. A big one, at least a foot and a half long. Strips of ragged orange and red cloth stream from it, as though whatever was here got ripped from its moorings and tumbled away down the grass.
“There really was a carnival,” Jalena says. For a moment, she’s relieved. Because her colleagues — friends? Maybe? — have not been lying or having her on. Then the moon seems to switch on, right overhead, giving her a better look at the stake in the ground, which has been driven not just into the earth but through the skull of a little shrew, or mole. Its skin still on it. A single, half-eaten eye leers up at her.
Scuttling backward, feeling wet dirt soak through the butt of her khakis, Jalena stares at that eye, can’t seem to break gazes with it, and even after she does, she can see it in front of her face. She blinks furiously, jams her fingers into her closed lids, and pushes, as though she could shove that poor thing’s face out the back of her brain.
When she opens her own eyes again, Rogan isn’t looking at her anymore. She’s looking at the plains. And her mouth has come open. Whirling, Jalena looks, too, and sees nothing. Just the grass rolling with the landscape, utterly still atop it.
She sees nothing.
Sees nothing.
“Wait,” she says. “Where is everybody?”
Way out on the plain, Frazee screams.
Instantly, Rogan is off the truck bed, sprinting into the grass, and Jalena is up and running, too, but not following. Rogan’s trajectory is wrong, she thinks, she’s veering way too far right. The explosion of gunshot makes Jalena jerk her head up, but she doesn’t even slow, just adjusts direction, heading toward Frazee’s voice. Toward her friend, Frazee, who has always been kind. The grass stays quiet under her feet, but the air has come to life, flapping in her face as though she’s plunging through a bat swarm, and there’s chittering, too, squeaking and cawing. At least one of the noises she’s hearing is her own voice, though the sound she’s making has neither language nor sense in it, is just herself streaming out. Her hands fly around her face as though warding off a gnat swarm, though there are no gnats, have been none. There’s whispering again, now, too. And that ice-cream-truck tinkling. Under her feet, the earth undulates, seems to bow beneath her weight, fling her upward, as though she’s running on a trampoline, on empty air, and she is constantly in danger of falling. If she falls, she knows — she knows—she will keep falling. Into nothing. Into waiting arms. Whispering, one-eyed faces.
She’s climbing a rise, now, and she hears the shouting to her left, all right, knows it’s aimed at her, but she doesn’t stop, keeps going, crests the hill, and just as she does, at the very instant the ground flattens beneath her, Rogan hurtles into her, slamming her sideways off her feet and down, hard, on a humped-up, rock-hard mound of earth. Her back cracks on top of it, almost snaps in half as Jalena throws her hands sideways again, grabbing the grass as she gulps for breath, stares at the billions of stars wheeling overhead, so close to the ground that she swears she can feel their heat in her hair, their feather-white touches on her skin and in her teeth. They are going to pour inside me, she thinks.
They are pouring inside me.
“Oh, God,” Rogan moans, straightens to her knees, and stares at Jalena. At the mound where Jalena lies. “This really is. we’re really here. In the exact. how does that. ”
It’s not true, Jalena knows—cannot be true — that the ground moves beneath her. Kicks, as though it has a fetus inside it.
But she shoves up anyway, jerking even her hands away from the dirt. She looks down between her splayed legs at the earth. “Really where?” she whispers.
Instead of answering, Rogan points ahead. Jalena follows her finger and sees the drop-off, almost completely invisible in the dark, a deeper shadow in a thousand-mile field of shadow. A bona fide cliff. The phrase swims up in her memory, out of some undergrad Western history seminar. Not a phrase she’s ever encountered since she’s actually lived in Montana.
Buffalo jump. Cliffs in the grass, over which the Plains Indians chased whole herds of bison, back when there were herds of bison. When that was almost all there was.
Before there was nothing.
“Rogan. Where are we?” Then Jalena feels it again: that squirming beneath her, the bumping along her legs. And she realizes that she knows what Rogan’s going to say, what they’ve been trying to tell her, all night. Now that she’s one of them.
“We’re where we buried him,” says Rogan. Right at the moment that — just over the lip of the buffalo jump — Frazee starts shrieking.
Immediately, Rogan is back on her feet, racing for the edge of the jump as though she’s going to throw herself off it. Jalena scrambles up, too, knowing the earth is not actually grabbing her. But the second she’s standing, the wind unleashes, crashing through her like a tidal wave, and it has things in it, flapping and gigantic and shapeless as that leaning, empty cowl on the airport terminal roof. There are sounds everywhere, too, in her hair, her ears, inside her skin. Bird wings beating. Locusts buzzing.
Grinding her teeth, flinging her hands across her face, Jalena stumbles off the mound — off David Roemer’s grave — toward the lip of the jump. She reaches it just as the wind passes all the way over, carrying off everything else with it, leaving her so surprised and her movements so unresisted that she almost tumbles into space.
But she doesn’t. She stops, staring down in stunned astonishment as the world opens beneath her, the real prairie, vast and flat and endless and utterly empty. Except for Frazee on her knees at the rocky base of the cliff, tearing at the grass as though she could rip out its heart, screaming, “God damn you. GOD DAMN YOU.”
And there’s Rogan, edging down the switchback path Frazee must have taken to get to where she is. She’s shouting, too. “Alexa, I’m coming!”