Bearskin Read online

  A cloud passed in front of the sun and the reflection disappeared. He swung his feet out of bed onto the cool wood floor. Impossible fantasies depressed him and he shook this one off, tried not to think about it. He dressed and carried his boots out to the porch and sat on the top step to put them on.

  “You want some coffee?” he called out. Boger was leaning into the bed of his truck, sliding boxes onto the open tailgate.

  “Is it made?”

  “Wouldn’t take long.”

  “Nope, I got to get back. You a late sleeper, Mr. Morton?”

  “Not usually. I went for a walk on the mountain last night.”

  Boger nodded as if he thought that was an acceptable explanation. Rice yawned, tying his boots, still wet from the night’s dew. He didn’t sleep much anyway, hadn’t for a while now, but he’d fallen into bed only a couple of hours ago and he felt a powerful need for coffee. Maybe some more of that wild honey.

  Last night he’d walked past the bear carcass to a rock outcrop near the peak of Turk Mountain. He’d sat there for hours, staring out over the dark canyon to the west, sweat cooling on his skin. Waterfalls hissed far down in the canyon, near where it emptied into the Dutch River. The attraction he’d felt back at the lodge had grown stronger, and it seemed to come from the ancient forest in the canyon. He wasn’t supposed to walk around down there, one of the rules of the preserve. Near dawn, he’d thought he heard the baying of hounds, but it was just farm dogs waking up the cows in some hardscrabble hollow off to the east.

  He carried Boger’s white wooden bee box into the cabin while Boger stuffed dry grass into his smoker and lit it with a match. The bear had continued Rice’s demolition work, ripping a torso-size hole in the paneling to get at the hive. He’d worried the bear might’ve driven away the bees, but hundreds were still buzzing around, and the damage to the comb didn’t look bad. He must’ve surprised the bear before he had time to really dig in. Boger had walked into the cabin and was standing behind him.

  “Bear got into it last night,” Rice said.

  Boger didn’t reply, fussing with the lid to his smoker, which looked like a big tin can with a spout pointing forward and a bellows attached to the back.

  “Set that box down here. We’ll put the brood comb in it if your bear left us any.”

  Rice could tell Boger was restraining himself from commenting on the bear-in-the-cabin story. He gently worked the bellows once, twice, then he blew in through the open lid. Smoke lifted and swirled around his face. Finally he said, “It’s no good when a bear starts acting that away. Crossing that line.”

  Rice cleared a spot on the floor, shoving broken paneling aside with his boot, and stood the bee box upright. He thought of the bear walking out of the cabin and standing there in the headlights, eyes glowing green.

  “I’m not feeding them or anything.”

  “You don’t have to. They just know. Bears are a lot like people, just wilder. Sometimes these back-to-nature types forget bears are wild animals, they want ’em to be like pets.”

  Rice wondered if Boger thought of him as a back-to-nature type. He lived up here away from other people, but he had no delusions: he bought his food at the store, the propane truck visited semiannually, and power from the grid arrived via three miles of buried line. His beer came from Colorado, his coffee from tropical countries he’d never even visited.

  “The bears,” Boger continued, “they ain’t no better, you leave the door open they come right in and make themselves at home, but it always turns out bad. Bad for them, bad for you.”

  “Maybe this one was hiding out from the bear hunters. All that honey was a bonus.”

  Boger snapped shut the lid on his smoker. “There ain’t no hunting allowed on you all’s nature preserve. That’s part of your problem, bears up here’ve lost respect for human beings.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Rice said. “A guy came by yesterday and showed me a dead bear he’d found up on the mountain. Somebody killed and skinned it, cut off the paws and took out the gallbladder, left the carcass to rot.”

  Boger stepped up close to the hive and slowly pumped the bellows, thick white smoke pouring out of the spout, filling the ragged hole the bear had made in the paneling. The smell of burning grass filled the cabin.

  “I been finding dead bears, too, galls and paws gone like you said.” Bees landed on Boger’s arms and began crawling around, but he ignored them. “Six this year. One was skinned. Four of ’em was baited, still had popcorn and bread and such in their mouths, and they was shot with arrows, probably some sonofabitch with a crossbow, keeping it quiet. It happened before, back in the nineties. Folks killing bears for the black market. The mafia got into it, they’d pay two thousand dollars for one gall, grind up the bile salt and sell it to the Chinese for medicine. Now I reckon they’re at it again.”

  “The mafia?” Rice pictured Italian guys in dark suits prowling the woods for bears. Toting their tommy guns. Lurking in moonshadows, smoking cigarettes and cracking their knuckles. “So you don’t have any idea who’s doing it.”

  “Hell, no. It ain’t any houndsman. We don’t kill no bears till they’ve done fattening up, ’round November.”

  “When the season’s open.”

  “Meat’s better then. I only kill one a year. Put up a lot more’n I shoot.”

  Rice was disappointed. He’d hoped it would be some nutjob the bear hunters could tell him about. A person Rice could find, and then . . . what? He would think of something.

  Boger handed him the smoker and said to keep the smoke coming, to work the bellows gently so the fire wouldn’t get too hot. Then he brought in a beat-up black and yellow Shop-Vac from his truck, plugged it into an orange extension cord Rice had run from the breaker box, and began vacuuming all the bees he could reach. The bees fetched up, apparently unharmed, in a shoe-box-size plastic container he’d duct-taped into the hose near the motor housing. Rice figured there had to be a screen in there to keep them from getting sucked into the machine.

  “That’s damned ingenious,” he said over the noise.

  Boger waved away the smoker. “You go on and pull the rest of that paneling off, and we’ll see what we got. Who was this fella showed you the bear?”

  “He didn’t tell me his name.” Rice realized he’d never thought to ask. “He said he picked mushrooms, ginseng, that kind of stuff. One of his arms was missing, cut off at the elbow.”

  Boger shook his head. “Don’t know him.”

  Rice found his crowbar and worked his way around the ragged edge of the last section, prying the paneling away from the studs.

  “Don’t squash any. They’ll get mean.”

  “They’re not going to mind me crowbarring the wall off their hive?”

  “They won’t like that much either. But the smoke’s took their mind off it.”

  The paneling broke into several pieces and by the time he’d cleared it away Rice had been stung half a dozen times. The hive filled the space between the studs and stood about five feet high, covered with unhappy bees.

  “That’s a lot of honey right there,” Boger said. “I’ll take enough for ’em to eat this winter, fill up the box, but the rest is yours. We can put it in that crate yonder.” When he’d shut off the vacuum he glanced around the cabin, seemed to notice the demolition project for the first time. “What’re you tearing this place up for?”

  Rice explained that the owners—the Traver Foundation—wanted to turn the summer cabin into a guest house for scientists. They planned to start awarding residential fellowships: a graduate student or postdoc with a research project on the preserve would win the privilege of living there full-time for a semester or two. “It’ll have its own bathroom, kitchen. I can do most of the work myself. I’m no carpenter but I worked construction for a couple of years, back before the crash.”

  “You’re from Arizona?”

  Rice nodded, thinking he would be a lot less conspicuous around here if he could score a set of Virgini
a license plates. Boger produced a kitchen knife and knelt on the floor, cutting the comb away from the studs, slicing pieces that he rubber-banded into frames that fit vertically in the hive box. He moved in an exaggerated slow motion, not brushing away the stray bees that landed on his arms and face.

  “Born out there?”

  “Born in New Mexico. Grew up in Tucson, mostly. My dad was in the Air Force. He died when I was in high school.”

  Boger paused, a tacit expression of sympathy, condolences. Then he said, “You came here to get away from something.” It wasn’t a question. The brood comb, filled with capped cells containing pupae, was heavy and fragile. Boger lifted it tenderly and secured it in a frame. “Usually it’s the other way around, people head west to get away.”

  Rice dumped hand tools from an antique wooden soft-drink crate and lined it with wax paper. Boger cut a slab of what looked like pure capped honeycomb, and when Rice took it he bent his arm and a bee trapped on the inside of his elbow stung him. In that sensitive flesh it felt like an electric shock. He flinched but laid the comb in the crate without dropping it.

  “Here she is.” Boger held up a long, fat bee, a giantess with an abdomen extending far behind her wings. “You got to come with me, girl. Mr. Morton here is fixing up a fancy guest house.” He pulled a plastic case from his pocket, a Rapala fishing lure box with tiny air holes drilled in the top, and shut the queen inside.

  “I’m not sure how fancy it’ll be.”

  “Fancy enough. If you’re a scientist from the university they’ll put you up on the place, but if you’re a bear hunter from down the road you ain’t welcome in the old-growth forest. You got Mr. Morton on your ass. They hired the muscle this time.”

  “Yeah that’s me. Deppity Dawg.” He wasn’t sure how to handle this sudden turn in the conversation. Boger’s tone was light, but Rice had learned that part of the caretaker’s job was to be the focus of animosity toward the Travers and the preserve. “They have that deer hunt in the fall, don’t they?”

  Boger didn’t even respond. The foundation sponsored an annual “nuisance hunt” in cooperation with the state game department and a local hunt club. The idea was to cull the whitetail herd, make a little peace with the neighbors, and provide venison for poor families. It was coming up in mid-November, something Rice dreaded—he imagined a weeklong Tet Offensive obliterating his precious solitude—but at least the hunters had to stay on the lower reaches of the property.

  “I guess you don’t think much of the idea. The preserve, protecting that old-growth forest.”

  “Old-growth is just good timber going to waste. Ain’t right to lock up land and throw away the key like they done here. Ain’t human beings part of nature?”

  Rice grinned at that last bit. One thing they could sure as shit agree on.

  “I reckon we are,” he said. “The Travers decided a long time ago what they wanted to do with their land was to let it be. Hell, they can afford it.”

  “It don’t seem right. Bible says man has dominion over the earth.” This argument sounded perfunctory.

  “The Bible says a lot of things. You a religious man?”

  “Not really. You?”

  Rice smiled and shook his head, remembering the psychotic Santa Muerte and Jesús Malverde cults that had sprung up among the cartels. In the pause that followed, he went ahead and asked his other question.

  “You know anything about what happened with the last caretaker, the woman who was here before me?”

  Boger’s grin fell. He gave Rice a sharp look and turned away, set the Rapala box with the queen on top of the hive box. He acted like Rice had tricked him somehow and he’d just figured it out.

  “Why you askin’?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  Boger picked up his knife and went to work on what was left of the hive in the wall. “I know what everyone around here knows.” He handed Rice another heavy rectangle of honeycomb and Rice laid it in his crate on top of the first, with another layer of wax paper in between.

  “The lady who hired me said Sara didn’t get along with the neighbors.”

  “Huh. I guess you could say that. She lawed folks she caught on the property, and she wrote letters in the paper, stood up at Forest Service hearings, saving the forest from the loggers, that kinda thing.”

  “A tree hugger. Lord have mercy.”

  Boger gave him another glance but turned back to his knife, cutting away the last fragment of honeycomb to stack in Rice’s box. It looked like he would have enough honey to last a year.

  “I know she’s a nice gal,” Boger said. “But people around here depend on the timber business, the sawmill. I heard some complaints. Not that anyone wanted what happened.”

  “Which was what?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  Rice waited.

  “She got kidnapped at those Dumpsters on Route 212, on the way to Blakely. They drove her up Sycamore Hollow to the hunter access road a half mile from my place, took her off in the woods. Beat her up and raped her and left her there. Damn near killed her, but she walked out, crawled, probably. A fella lives near us picked her up on the side of the road, took her straight to the hospital.”

  “Damn,” Rice said. Boger had stood up and was peering at him. Rice realized he probably looked stupid, mouth open, a caricature of dumbfoundedness. “They catch who did it?”

  Boger shook his head. Now he seemed grimly satisfied with the effect this news was having. “Bastards wore masks, put a blindfold on her. Sheriff’s still lookin’ into it.”

  Eight

  Boger motioned for Rice to grab the other handle on the hive box and they lifted it together and carried it outside. Boger climbed into the bed of his truck and slid the hive box forward, snug against the toolbox behind the cab. A bright day, hazy sunshine, a light breeze cooling Rice’s back where he’d soaked his T-shirt with sweat.

  “I ain’t surprised they didn’t tell you what happened.” Boger was securing the hive box against the toolbox with frayed bungee cords. “Now it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire. You comin’ here from out west, I mean.”

  Rice didn’t respond right away. He had constructed a fairly complete identity for Sara Birkeland in his imagination, and Boger’s story was too familiar. Unwelcome reflexes were firing. “You reckon I’m likely to get raped? That’s what they do to the Turk Mountain Preserve caretaker?”

  Boger hopped out of the truck bed without answering, and they walked back into the cabin.

  “I’ll tell you a story about the frying pan,” Rice said. He gathered up the smoker and other items Boger had brought with him while Boger detached the bee-filled catch box from the Shop-Vac.

  “This guy, Gutiérrez, was a big-time dealer, operated out of Phoenix, ran a Sinaloa distribution network in Arizona and Utah: pot, cocaine, black tar heroin, meth. About a year ago he got tagged by the DEA and agreed to testify against some of the top guys in the cartel.” Rice hadn’t talked to anyone about this, and he wondered why he was telling Boger.

  “His testimony was important to a case the DEA, FBI, and the Mexican feds were all collaborating on. They hid him at some general’s estate way out on the coast south of Tijuana, but somebody in the Mexican police gave him up and a team from Los Ántrax shot their way in and kidnapped him. Nobody heard anything for a couple of days, then he turned up at Phoenix Memorial, dumped at the emergency room entrance. Security cameras caught a couple of guys in gray hoody sweatshirts helping him onto a bench. His head was completely bandaged like the Invisible Man’s, and he almost died of shock before someone noticed him and got him into intensive care. They found sutures all around his face and head, but nothing was missing, and the stitching was expert, done by a good surgeon. Gutiérrez remembered nothing; he’d been drugged the whole time. Nobody knew what it meant until the manila envelopes with glossy eight-by-tens started showing up in the hospital room and at the Gutiérrez family hacienda in Scottsdale: crisp, well-lit pictures of his blo
ody grinning skull, the slack bag of his face in someone’s hands. Some fucker wearing it like a mask, fingers holding the eyelids open, his teeth laughing through Gutiérrez’s mouth.”

  “They skinned his damn face?”

  “And then sewed it back on.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “The point was that they could do whatever they wanted. That they were holding back, being merciful. That nobody could imagine what else they might do. Gutiérrez recanted as soon as he woke up. Word spread, and other witnesses got forgetful. Pretty soon there wasn’t enough left of the case to prosecute.”

  They were standing beside the truck now, and Boger had placed the catch box with the bees on the passenger seat, the lure box with the queen next to it. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and reached for a pack of Kools on the dashboard. “I better get on home before these critters start dying on me.”

  Rice pulled out his wallet. He had an expense account with the Traver Foundation. “I thank you kindly,” he said. “What do we owe you?”

  “Hell, you owe me these bees. I told you they got a resistance to whatever’s killin’ all the others, and I’m glad to have ’em. Ain’t no charge. But I wish you hadn’t told me about that fella’s face. It’s goddamn disturbing.”

  “It’s no worse than what your local boys did to Sara Birkeland.”

  “The hell it’s not.” He held an unlit cigarette in his mouth, talking around it and making no move to light it. He’d become agitated and seemed eager to go. “I can’t believe anybody would even think that up.”