Wild Life Read Free Page B

him.
    But Big Darrell had already turned away and was heading for the baggage claim area. Erik wished he could call the question back.
    It was Oma who answered, as she and Erik followed Big Darrell through the light crowd of people. “It’s on account of at the school he went to, there were two Darrells,” she explained. “Can you imagine, in a one-room school with twelve children on a good attendance day, two Darrells? Anyway, tall like he is, he was the big one.”
    â€œOh.”
    They waited in silence for Erik’s suitcases to come around on the carousel, and then he followed his grandparents out of the terminal. They sat in the front seat of a beat-up-looking red pickup truck, with Erik in the middle. His grandmother patted his hand and told him to call her Oma. “That’s how our people do. It stands for Old Ma,” she said. Then she gave a dry little laugh and added, “And I expect I’m old enough.”
    She pointed her thumb and said, “He’d be Opa, for Old Pa, if he wasn’t Big Darrell.”
    Erik glanced out the corner of his eye at Big Darrell, who started the engine looking straight ahead, his face set. Erik wondered what he had done to make Big Darrell mad. He’d just arrived; how could he have done anything wrong?
    As they drove through Minot, he was relieved to see a lot of the same fast-food places he was accustomed to seeing at home, as well as a mall, and a theater showing eight different movies. But when they left the city behind, driving farther and farther west, the world out the window looked more and more unfamiliar. There was so much empty space, so much sky, so much nothing . He could see really, really far…, but there wasn’t anything to see as they drove along what had to be the longest, straightest, flattest road in the country. Nothing except for mile after mile of flat, brown prairie, and corn and sunflower fields so big they seemed to never end.
    Every once in a while, there was a grain silo or a broken-down, old white church with a tall steeple, or things that looked to Erik like big metal dinosaurs bending over to drink, leaning back to swallow, and bending over to drink again. Oma explained that they were rigs to pump oil out of the ground. Fires burned beside some of them, sending flames shooting into the open air. Oma said they were new rigs that were burning off excess methane gas. The fires looked eerie, sending their heat up into the sky.
    North Dakota appeared every bit as foreign and desertlike to Erik as pictures of Iraq and Afghanistan he’d seen on TV. After they’d been driving for three and a half hours, he couldn’t help wondering if they were going to the very end of the world. It had been the end for lots of people, Erik could see that. There seemed to be more abandoned houses slowly sinking into the prairie than there were ones that were inhabited.
    Squished between Big Darrell and Oma on the truck’s seat, he felt oddly tired and wired at the same time. Even if he had felt relaxed enough to doze off, he was sure the rattle and whistle of the truck’s windows would have woken him. The wind seemed to him like some sort of crazed creature that was trying to tear its way inside the cab. Dust and—he could hardly believe it—actual tumbleweeds raced across the highway, with nothing to stop them in all that wide openness.
    Oma knitted and Big Darrell drove, both of them seeming content to pass the ride without talking. Erik wasn’t used to this, and it made him uncomfortable. In a momentary lull in the shriek of the wind he blurted, “Where are all the people ?”
    Neither of his grandparents spoke for a minute. Then Oma said, “Busy. Doing the things people do…” Her voice trailed off vaguely, and she gave a small shrug.
    â€œNo,” Erik said, “I mean, how come there aren’t any people? Or hardly any houses or any stores or any anything