Bearskin Read online

  The big man nodded, pursing his lips. “Some folks like to hunt bar. They got dogs. Got to have dogs.” He turned to the fellow he had come in with, raised his voice to a tenor screech. “Dempsey Boger keeps hounds, don’t he? This feller’s lookin’ to buy him a dog for huntin’ bar.”

  The room quieted, and a palpable wave of public attention washed over them. Rice turned his face away. The caretaker of the Turk Mountain Preserve, a presumed ecofascist, was going bear hunting—it was interesting, but only for a moment. As the hubbub behind them resumed, the other guy shrugged without looking over.

  “Yep, you go over see Dempsey,” the man said to Rice. “Last place up Sycamore Holla fore the turnaround. Bunch a honeybee boxes and a big ole war kennel back a the house. He’s got all kinda dogs.” He nodded once and swiveled back to the bar.

  Rice signaled Karla and ordered more beers for the three of them. When the bottles arrived, the big man next to him lifted his beer by the neck with thumb and forefinger, tipped it back to drink, smacked his lips, and gave a noncommittal grunt, but not a word acknowledging Rice’s gesture of camaraderie. The other man ignored his bottle entirely. Free beer, Rice speculated, must magically appear in front of these two gentlemen on a regular basis.

  Watching the mirror, he noticed three men slouched in a booth across the room, staring at him as they smoked cigarettes and nursed their beers. Probably in their early twenties, they were mill workers like the rest, but they lacked the poise and gravitas of the older men. One was skinny and pale, with a hard, thin-lipped mouth framed by an unfortunate attempt to grow facial hair. Rice recognized the other two. They were big, thick-chested fellows with freckled faces and crew-cut red hair—brothers, Stiller boys. The younger one’s name was DeWayne, he thought, pronounced Dee-Wayne.

  The Stillers were Turpin County gangster wannabes, small-time pot dealers and oxy slingers, part of the surly crowd that hung out weekends at their father’s general store in the nontown of Stumpf, where Rice bought beer and milk and peanut butter when he didn’t feel like driving fifty minutes to the real grocery store in Blakely. The Stillers were also enthusiastic bear hunters, especially Bilton, the father, who enjoyed telling Rice how much he despised the Turk Mountain Preserve, the rich family that had excluded the locals for five generations, and every caretaker they’d ever had, apparently including Rice. The sons had tried to provoke him in the usual manner of alpha-male primates—aggressive stares, muttered insults, pushing into his space, that kind of thing—but conflict would bring attention and Rice had always pretended not to notice.

  He turned to face the three men and raised his beer in salute, but their half-lidded, empty eyes were steadfast, their insolent mouths turned down at the corners, a practiced look of disdain. He grinned, drank from the beer as if he’d toasted their health. He kept an eye on the mirror, and when they finished their beers and got up to leave, Rice asked for his tab.

  Five

  Outside, a streetlight over the parking lot had come on early, low hum and blue-flicker in the warm, still evening. The three men were climbing into a black pickup truck, an older F-350 crew cab that looked like it had been in a wreck and salvaged by amateurs, bloated off-road tires and bright yellow shock absorbers to distract you from the Bondo and patches of flat black primer.

  Rice called out and headed their way at a fast walk. They hesitated, their demeanor going defensive in an instant. He slowed and tried to smile, but it felt like a snarl. The smaller one said something to the others and they laughed and slammed the doors and drove off, big tires spinning in the gravel until they hit pavement with a short screech and the truck roared down the one street in Wanless.

  “Well, shit.” He watched the truck disappear into the forest at the far end of town. He could jump in his own truck and follow, but they’d probably get excited and take a shot at him before he could ask about the bears. Another pickup pulled into the lot, headed for the Stillers’ empty space, and Rice turned away from the high beams. Someone opened the front door of the bar, ZZ Top on the jukebox now. The old couple by the window were long gone.

  Cool air and smells from the river washed into the cab as he drove the narrow road curving through Dutch Pass. Sickly hemlock branches flashed overhead, adelgid-infested and diaphanous against the sky. He slowed on the bridge over Sycamore Creek, thinking, hell, it’s still early, and turned right onto Sycamore Creek Road, a dead-end gravel tertiary winding through a small valley—a hollow—into the mountains. Tiny family compounds had sprouted like mushrooms in the damp blue air, always a weathered frame house close to the road, a clutch of trailer homes behind, fixer-up muscle cars and four-bys on blocks, a defunct, Brobdingnagian satellite dish covered with poison ivy and still aimed at the slot of sky overhead.

  After a few miles, the valley opened up a bit, and narrow floodplain pastures appeared along the road, a handful of grazing Herefords, white faces turning to watch Rice pass. The dusky mountain slopes above were marked with a skein of zigzag logging roads through third-growth hardwoods, patchy clear-cuts coming up in rows of white pine.

  Dempsey Boger’s place was as Roy had described it, sitting at the end of the road in a half-moon lot bitten from the forest, a double-wide trailer home and three tall corrugated-metal sheds, a couple dozen white bee boxes arranged in a neat rectangle on the slope behind. The lawn was tidy, ornamented with a hopeful mélange: concrete sculptures of capering deer and bear, bird baths, and whitewashed tractor-tire planters spewing marigolds, chrysanthemums, violets. Two parallel lines of coarse gravel crunching under the tires led to a kind of courtyard behind the trailer lit by two mercury vapor floodlights. As Rice pulled in, a big woven-wire kennel tucked up against the overhanging forest exploded with leaping, howling dogs of mixed sizes and shapes. Next to the kennel were parked a gray Dodge pickup, a dented International log truck, and two yellow log skidders, one that looked newish, with a big articulated grapple. The other had seen some hard use, and metal kennel boxes were welded on the back where the winch was supposed to go. The guy must’ve retired the old skidder and decided it would make a fine hunting rig. Rice parked beside it, got out, and peered at the five-foot-tall tires with knobs the size of his fist.

  More dogs barked in the house at his knock, and a man answered the door, frowning. He looked about fifty, medium height, with a compact paunch, and dark eyes far apart in a broad face tanned chestnut brown. In the room behind him, a skinny dark-haired woman sat in a chair with a girl child in her lap, looking to see who it was, two faces blue and shiny-eyed in the light of a television screen. An old bluetick standing next to them raised its head to aim a hoarse moaning bark at the ceiling. As Rice introduced himself—his local pseudonym was Rick Morton—the man stepped out and shut the door behind him.

  “You’re Dempsey Boger?” Rice finished.

  The man nodded, peering at Rice’s face. Rice was about to ask if he knew anything about people killing a bunch of bears out of season when some commotion in the kennel set all the dogs to howling and barking again. Both men turned to look, since the noise prevented conversation. Boger yelled “Shut the hell up!” but the dogs ignored him. Rice followed him out to the driveway, where he picked up a handful of gravel to hurl at the kennel without much force. When the dogs finally settled down, Boger turned to Rice. He looked amused, a grin twitching at the right side of his mouth.

  “You got you a bee problem.”

  Rice reached up to touch his lumpy face again. “I was doing some remodel work. There’s a big hive in the wall.”

  “Sure they ain’t yella-jackets? I can’t use yella-jackets.”

  “They’re honeybees.”

  “Ain’t many wild bees left. Varroa mites and spring dwindle done killed ’em off. The ones still around have got a resistance. You want me to come up there?”

  This is serendipity, Rice thought, happening right before my eyes. “You know where I’m talking about? The Turk Mountain Preserve?”

  Boger nodded, patting his breast pocket as if
for cigarettes. Finding none, he folded his arms over his chest. There was a finality to the gesture, so Rice said okay and turned to walk back to his truck. He would ask about the bears tomorrow, after the bees had been taken care of. Somewhere down the valley several cows lowed together in a rough kind of harmony, hollow and melancholy.

  “You leave that gate unlocked,” Boger called out. “I’ll drive up in the morning.”

  Rice thought about that on the way home. He hadn’t left the gate unlocked since the night he arrived. A light squall had blown snowflakes in his eyes and he’d had to hold the frozen padlock between his gloved hands and breathe on it until his key would work. That had been the second day of March—his thirty-fourth birthday—and the weather had followed him all the way from Albuquerque, where he’d spent several days filing job applications, renting P.O. boxes, and pretending to settle down. After weeks of looking over his shoulder, snicking that cold padlock closed behind him had started the unwinding of a string in his mind pulled so taut it had been about to snap. As he made his way up the long driveway that night, two miles through forest, then another mile curving along the edge of the big open field, shifting into four-wheel-drive to get through the leftover snowdrifts, the corrosive stress of excessive vigilance had slowly drained away. He wouldn’t have said he felt safe, but at the preserve he found he could envision more than a few days’ or weeks’ worth of personal future, and that had made all the difference.

  Tonight he opened the gate, drove through, pulled it shut, and wrapped the chain around the latchpost as usual, but he left the padlock open for Boger. It nagged him all the way up the driveway. By the time he’d pulled into the gravel parking area in front of the cabin he was ready to turn around, drive back, and lock the damn thing after all—he could run down early in the morning and open it before Boger arrived. Might sleep better tonight.

  He didn’t cut the engine or the headlights. He just sat there, hands on the wheel, telling himself he’d been careful covering his tracks back in February, that he’d been living here six months without the slightest hint that anyone could have followed him, that the skinned she-bear had spooked him, sure, but let’s be reasonable, bear poaching in Turpin County had no conceivable connection with the real source of his personal peril, saying this stuff to himself but not quite believing it, when a bear shambled out the open door of the cabin in the headlights, a bear coming out the door like a big hound dog rousing himself to see who’d driven up for a visit.

  Six

  The bear was the young male with the hurt ear, the one he suspected had been sniffing around the buildings at night. Probably he’d been driven away by his mother in the spring and was working hard to survive on his own, hungry and clueless, watching over his shoulder for the larger males. His situation was not unfamiliar to Rice, and a surprising wave of interspecies empathy took hold of him. He felt he knew this bear. A skeptical voice insisted that the feeling was one-sided, pure sentimentality, and yet he couldn’t deny its power: a hitch in time’s gait while the bear stood stunned by the headlights, his split ear twitching, nostrils dilating, eyes two bright green coins against the black hump of his body, a thousand bees orbiting his head like electrons. Then he wheeled and galloped around the side of the cabin and into the dark meadow.

  Rice left the lights on and stepped inside to check out the damage to the hive, but the bees drove him away before he could see much. A lump of honeycomb the size of his hand lay where the bear had dropped it, a few angry confused bees still buzzing around. He picked it up and, seeing no bear slobber, pushed in with his finger, crushing the little wax hexagons, and licked a dollop from his fingertip. It was a stronger taste than store-bought. He took a bite, sucking out the honey and chewing the wax into a ball that he spit in the grass.

  The bear’s intrusion wasn’t a surprise, exactly. This was nothing more than a new level of permeability in the boundary between wild and domestic, something he had come to accept while living up here. Last week, for example, he’d almost stepped on a corn snake lying in the doorway to his bedroom, stopped his bare foot inches above its back. The snake raised its head but otherwise didn’t seem alarmed. It was a lustrous, ornamental-looking creature with a chain of rich orange and yellow ovals outlined in black along its length. He’d waited until it calmed, and he eased his hands under it, lifted it a few inches off the floor, cool and firm, sliding mysteriously across his skin. It moved and was gone, behind a door, into the dark hall, hunting the field mice, squirrels, chipmunks, and baby opossums that also found their way indoors. The lodge had been assimilated into the meadow over the past hundred years, and despite his efforts to keep the place up, an irresistible osmosis was always at work, the life outside inevitably forcing its way in. He kept the screen doors shut, and the windows were screened, but flies and moths and cicada-killer wasps got in anyway. In rainy weather he found inexplicable toads on the kitchen floor. Wolf spiders prowled the walls, and orb spiders spun webs in every corner, the ones closest to the lamps growing fat and minatory by late summer. Tiny stab-winged swifts flew down the chimney and out the open flue into the lodge. They vectored from windowpane to windowpane until they were so punch-drunk he could pick them up and carry them outside, light and fragile, coal-gray and smelling like stale ashes. When he opened his hands the birds would revive, rise and slide away in the air as if made of smoke.

  Rice finished the honey the bear had dropped, and the sugar hit his bloodstream in about thirty seconds. Feeling manic, he shut off his headlights and slammed the truck door. What now? The gibbous moon had set, and the brightest stars glowed indistinctly. Blinking fireflies drifted past. A powerful cacophony emanated from the trees at the edge of the forest—lonesome trills and chirps, amphibian screams, the rhythmic shake-shake of katydids—a busy night in late summer, all the little creatures trying to have sex with each other before the season ended.

  In the office, he plugged the old rotary phone into the wall socket. Inside the hard plastic moss-green shell there were two actual brass gongs that a striker rattled against when someone called. He’d taken the thing apart to check. He kept it disconnected to preserve the peace and quiet, not that anyone wanted to call him.

  Cradling the heavy handset against his neck, he dialed the number from the restroom wall at the Beer & Eat and waited. The oscillating table fan on the desk clicked twice each time it changed direction, blowing on his face and whooshing in the phone every seven seconds. It was an antique, made back before they’d decided the screen over the blades had to prevent people from sticking their fingers in. He laid his palm lightly on the top wire, lowered three fingers toward the blades until he felt air vibrating on the pads. He wondered if the blades were sharp enough to chop the tips off.

  A man answered on the sixth ring, and Rice put on his local accent.

  “You the fella wants to buy bear galls?”

  There was a pause, country radio in the background. The guy couldn’t know where the call was coming from. Rice had made sure caller ID was blocked on outgoing calls, one of the first things he’d done after moving in.

  “You got some?”

  “I might.”

  “You might.”

  “Yep. You wan’ talk?”

  “You call me back when you got something you sonofabitch.” The man hung up, and Rice stared at the receiver for a moment before he hung up, too.

  He stood on the back porch, bouncing on his toes, still amped from the wild honey. Something in the forest tugged at his mind: a new attraction, an enticement. Wan starlight, the dark forest speaking its night sounds. Where that bear had run, and where the mushroom picker had come from. For no good rational reason he could imagine, the forest was where he wanted to be. He jogged down the steps and headed up the fire road.

  Seven

  The clatter of a diesel outside, tires in the gravel, Rice waking in a rush, reaching into the open drawer beside his head, sitting up with the .45 in his hand before he remembered he’d left the gate open, that he was expec
ting the bee guy. He settled back into his pillow, rolled to face the window. He’d been having a vague, pointless dream about walking in the desert. Crows cawed, and a light breeze drifted through the screen, stirring the curtain. He reached and slid it aside and the sun came in like a shout. Too bright to see. He hadn’t slept past sunrise in months. His dream was slipping away: a sandy wash, moonlight, thickets of cholla cactus making him careful; he was looking for someone.

  A car horn honked three times. Locals did this, and it wasn’t rudeness but a safer and more discreet alternative to walking up to a rural, isolated home and knocking. A door slammed. His eyes had adjusted now: a Dodge pickup was parked alongside his Toyota, Dempsey Boger in an orange Stihl cap reaching back through the open window to honk the horn again.

  Rice wiped the pistol and replaced it in the drawer, draped with an old T-shirt saturated with gun oil. He’d found a couple of rust spots on the slide in May, and since then he’d worried about the thing seizing up in this Appalachian humidity and not working when he needed it. A full-size Colt Government Model 1911, it had been his father’s, though he didn’t think his father had shot it much. Certainly it wasn’t Air Force issue. The 1911 was an old design but it was accurate and reliable if you kept it lubed and used good magazines. Rice appreciated the tactile pleasure of the thing: the flat, narrow steel slab, its cold heft solid and practical, like a well-balanced hammer, the satisfying slap as the slide racked forward, all of the parts locking into place, ready. The tubby cartridges themselves were proportioned like tiny round-topped beer cans of copper and brass, and they thunked together in his hand with a specific heaviness that made them seem precious.

  His watch lay on the windowsill, stuck at one seventeen, but it started up again when he rapped it on the heel of his hand. He reset it, guessing seven fifteen, wound it, and put it back. When he moved his hand away, the sunlight reflecting from the metallic face projected a clear mirror image on the sun-bleached maple sill: the stick marks without numbers, the hour and minute hands, the sweep-second hand revolving counterclockwise. He watched, mesmerized, as it made one full rotation, a whole minute regained. It was a convincing hallucination of time going backward, and Rice felt an odd, weightless sense of relief. The headlong rush slowed, stopped. Reversed. His nose tingled and his eyes stung like someone had broken an ammonia capsule in his face. Everything would be undone.