Bearskin Read online

  When he returned to the house, the black dog came to the fence as before.

  “Mr. Sensabaugh?”

  There was no reply. Only the inane jingle from a television commercial. The dog sat panting and brushing her tail back and forth in the dirt. He reached over the fence and scratched behind her ears. The old man didn’t appear. Rice wedged three five-dollar bills into a crack in the gatepost, though Wister had said he didn’t have to pay, that he usually just threw out the galls. He hadn’t asked what Rice wanted them for. When he turned his truck around and drove away, the dog was sitting at the gate, ears pricked forward, watching him go.

  On the way through Blakely, he stopped at Marble Valley Rent-All to pick up a pressure washer and a portable construction heater. He didn’t secure the equipment in the bed, so he was careful on the curves driving back to the preserve. He drove pretty slowly these days anyway. A speeding ticket or even a busted taillight could set off a chain reaction in the system—police reports, automobile registration, insurance records—that would turn into an expensive pain in the ass at best and a conspicuous broadcast of his location at worst.

  A fixed wooden ladder led to the impossibly hot loft of the tractor shed, where he tied three lengths of monofilament fishing line to a beam, hanging a pig gallbladder from each. He let them swing back and forth, thinking they didn’t look very impressive and wondering how long it would take for them to dry. He could move them to the cabin, hang them in front of the heater he’d rented, but someone might see them there. He plugged a long orange extension cord into the outlet near the tractor and brought the oscillating table fan from the office. For a while he sat sweating in the loft, watching the three galls twisting in the fan’s zephyrs like bloody figs.

  In the cabin, he balanced on the exposed floor joists and tried to shoo a couple dozen forlorn bees buzzing around the inside of the clapboard wall where their hive had been. He’d torn up the floor yesterday, and he’d called Boger in the evening to tell him there were still some bees flying around in here, and maybe he wanted to come back up and collect them.

  “I don’t need them stragglers,” Boger had said, sounding a little hostile. Rice suspected he had a few beers in him. “You wash off that honey and wax stuck on the wall and they won’t come back no more.”

  He hooked up the garden hose and started the pressure washer. It took about ten seconds to blast away the remnants of the hive. He’d forgotten how much fun these things could be—the cone of water scoured clean whatever it touched, like a magic broom. After he set up the heater to dry the wall before mildew could set in, something he wouldn’t have to worry about in Tucson, he washed the cabin’s front and back porches, the wood steps, the flat step-stones leading to the parking area. He stood in the gravel with the dripping nozzle, the compressor chugging behind him.

  The clapboard exteriors of the cabin and the tractor shed had been restained within the past couple of years and didn’t need washing. He’d stacked a half cord of firewood behind the shed anyway, and he didn’t want to have to move it. Set in the front wall of the tractor shed was a tall sliding wooden door that revealed a big garage where the old John Deere resided. He backed the tractor out into the parking area and power-washed the concrete slab, left the door open so it could dry.

  The compressor still chugging in the back of the truck, he carried the wand up the gravel path to the front porch steps. Had to be something on the lodge that needed cleaning. The central block and two bedroom wings were built on a dry-stack stone foundation naturally decorated with picturesque lichen, and the walls of thick chestnut logs—cut on the property before the blight—shone with a hundred-year-old silvery patina. STP would have him shot if he pressure-washed any of it. He gave up, shut off the compressor, and coiled the long hose in the truck bed.

  Something was making him restless, probably that medieval scene earlier at the Sensabaughs’. Rice wasn’t a squeamish person, but piglets-emerging-from-mule-carcass had been playing in the theater of his mind on a loop. A less sophisticated person, he thought, might look for portents and metaphysics in a thing like that.

  Though he’d never pursued an advanced degree, he had studied in college to be a biologist, and he affected a scientific—or at least quasi-scientific—outlook upon the universe. Superstition, he’d always thought, was a story to explain what you haven’t figured out yet, a capitulation to the human need for superficial existential comfort, a demonstrably unreliable tool for predicting cause and effect. And yet, since he’d moved to the preserve, his dreams had become as real as conscious experience, and he’d had to dismiss an unsettlingly high percentage of conscious experience as “hallucinations.” The presence he’d felt emanating from the forest had become as constant and noticeable-on-demand as tinnitus.

  He opened the storeroom under the porch and dragged the cranky gas mower into the ragged grass of the yard. It started on the seventh pull of the starter cord, possibly a record. The mowing didn’t take long. Each time he cut the grass, he let the meadow encroach a little farther, and the squared-off acre he’d started with in March had shrunk to an irregular quarter acre barely encompassing the lodge and the outbuildings. He liked the unruly tall grasses better than the mowed yard, but come October, once the nesting animals were finished with it, he would have to bush-hog the fifty acres above the lodge, a couple of days mindlessly driving the tractor around in circles. The larger lower meadow had been established in native warm-season grasses, and apparently you burned that stuff instead of mowing it, once every three years, 150 acres of grass put to the flame. He guessed it would be an impressive thing to watch.

  His boots were wet from the pressure-washing and covered with grass clippings. He pulled them off, socks too, and set them in the sun. He lay on his back in the cut grass, trying to relax. A turkey vulture appeared overhead, rising on the transparent thermal. The bird flew in circles, unreeling into the blue-white sky. A cloud of gnats swirled in what looked like Brownian motion until a breeze carried them away and the air was empty, without depth. After his boots dried, he would walk up the mountain and run a couple of scheduled transect surveys. While he was up there, he would keep an eye out for the bear poachers. One of the surveys, his favorite, crossed a section of the primary forest at the head of the big canyon on the far side of Turk Mountain. A survey entailed walking slowly along a particular compass bearing and recording observations in a number of prescribed categories: the status of certain plant species’ flowering and leafing; presence of insects; animal tracks and direct sightings; bird calls; soil moisture. It was old-fashioned biology, but they’d been making systematic observations here nearly without interruption since the late nineteenth century, and the historical continuity of the data made it valuable, especially to scientists studying the ecological effects of climate change.

  He opened the plank door creaking on its hinges and was about to push the mower back into the storeroom when motion on the floor stopped him—a copperhead uncoiling like a spring, striking the air three times in quick succession.

  He felt the usual electric shiver, the ancient jolt of adrenaline. The snake didn’t try to get away, just lay there in a block of sunlight from the open door, neck cocked in a tight S with its neat little viper’s head pointed up at Rice. The strikes had looked more like a warning than a serious attempt to bite him. Its eyes were cloudy and its skin dull and dusty-looking, almost ready to shed, which made it nearly blind, vulnerable, and therefore truculent. It struck again as soon as his shadow fell on it. A copperhead wasn’t going to kill you, but the bite of any pit viper could cause spectacular swelling, necrosis, tissue loss, and potentially gangrene, and was one of the more unpleasant things that could happen to you up here. He leaned into the doorway, reached around to where the shovels and rakes were stacked and pulled out a big aluminum grain scoop he’d used as a snow shovel last March. He would catch the snake, carry it out to the woods with the shovel, and let it go.

  It struck again when he slid the shovel underneath i
t, pinging once on the metal. After a few seconds it seemed to settle down. He lifted it and started to back out the door, but the movement triggered a writhing panic, and though he tried to keep it centered, cradling the shovel like a lacrosse stick, the snake managed to launch itself from the end, landing on the floor with a dry slap. It headed for the back of the storeroom.

  Without thinking about the likely result, he reached over with the shovel to block its path: the copperhead turned away from the blade and, still panicked, shot back toward Rice’s bare feet. It was only trying to escape the shovel, but to Rice’s sympathetic nervous system this looked a lot like an attack. He jabbed with the shovel and the snake was headless in an instant, its body thrashing and painting the floor with wild Pollockian sprays of blood. He cursed and stepped back out into the yard. His skin tingled. He wasn’t supposed to kill native creatures up here, not even angry pit vipers.

  The body was still twitching in the shovel as he carried it with the head out to the edge of the freshly mown grass and left the pieces there for the crows. When he came back to put away the mower, he crouched to examine the blood on the floor, the curved swipes and droplets already losing their bright red luster. Another portent, he supposed. The blood would dry and harden. He lifted the mower and stepped over so he wouldn’t smear the patterns.

  Ten

  Sierra Vista, Arizona. Casita Cantina.

  Apryl Whitson wore her hair in a thick black braid, a magnificent thing that just now rested on her left shoulder like a sleeping mamba. Over the past five days in the Coronado National Memorial, Rice had lost count of the times he’d wanted to hang her up in a cottonwood tree by that braid and leave her there for the javelinas.

  “I don’t think we should work together again,” she said.

  Rice pushed his empty plate to the edge of the table for the waitress, who was clearing things away. The rest of their party had left a few minutes before. Classic rock on the sound system. They used to play ranchera in here.

  “Suits me,” he said. “Dr. Warnicke told me I’d be working solo.”

  “Yeah, you by yourself, that might be best.” She had dark blue, nearly purple eyes and heavy arching eyebrows. Her nose and mouth were almost too big and could come across as sensual when she wasn’t smirking. At some point in the past she had embedded a fine silver loop in the flesh near the outside tip of her left eyebrow. She was ostensibly the team leader, but Rice was her senior by nearly a decade, and the two of them had clashed over everything from where to camp to how much water they and the four grad students should carry to how to hang the bear bags to how to conduct the soil and water tests and barking frog surveys that were the point of their little expedition. One of the doctoral candidates had told him Apryl got to choose the projects she led because she brought in a lot of anonymous funding. Nobody knew who her contacts were.

  The look she gave him now was so comically baleful that he lifted his empty margarita glass and tipped it up to hide his smile. The ice cubes at the bottom hesitated for a moment before submitting to gravity and sliding down to crash against his teeth.

  He rattled the ice in his glass. “You know, you’re kind of a tyrant. Those guys”—he nodded toward the parking lot where the grad students had disappeared—“are terrified of you.”

  She shrugged. “They do their jobs.” Her expression didn’t change. “And you are a fucking know-it-all.”

  Rice hailed the waitress and pointed to their glasses, held up two fingers. She nodded and turned toward the bar. Apryl called out “Y dos sidecars por favor.”

  Rice stood up and raised an eyebrow at her crappy Spanish.

  “Cuts the sweetness,” she said.

  He headed toward the back, looking for the restroom. When he returned, their drinks had arrived but both shot glasses were empty.

  “I poured them in.” She flicked a finger toward his glass. “You’d better stir.”

  He mixed in the extra tequila with a knife, the only silverware left on the table. Apryl watched as he took a long pull, crunched some ice, swallowed. It tasted like sweetened kerosene.

  “The extra tequila helped a lot,” he said.

  “So why haven’t you asked me?”

  No pause, no windup. He drank again from the margarita, giving him time to compose his thoughts.

  “So why are you so damn cryptic?” he asked.

  Before sunrise on the third day, he’d been up having a piss away from camp when he saw her sneak off with her backpack. He followed for a couple of miles, all the way to the border, then across—in this remote area, the line between the United States and Mexico was barely marked. She dropped into a dry wash sloping off to the southeast. Rice had climbed up a slope nearby and used his binoculars. Two four- wheelers and three men in camouflage coveralls that looked like Mexican army uniforms waited on a graveled landing. Apryl approached, pulling a black dry bag about the size of a gallon jug from her pack, and handed it over. They opened it, looked inside, and resealed it. He couldn’t hear if anyone said anything, and after a moment one of them nodded to Apryl, she nodded back, they all turned and separated, and Rice followed Apryl back into the United States. He’d been certain she’d never seen him.

  She sat across the table waiting for an answer, head tilted forward so her eyes appeared even darker than usual, storm-cloud purple and peering out from under those big swooping eyebrows.

  He set his glass down and slid it back and forth in the thin layer of condensation that evaporated as he watched. “Okay, what was in the bag?”

  She slowly shook her head, just once, her elbow on the table now, pinching her lower lip between thumb and forefinger, watching him. After the passage of some period of time that, in retrospect, he found it impossible to gauge, the restaurant blurred around him. Then it began to move in a sickening shimmy, invisible thumbs pressing into his eye sockets.

  He woke up in the front seat of her Jeep, wrists bound behind his back, ankles strapped together with plastic zip ties. Apryl stood in front of the vehicle, looking toward the horizon through Rice’s binoculars. He vaguely remembered her paying the tab and apologizing to the waitress in bad Spanish as the two women half-dragged, half-carried him out to the parking lot. She’d parked up on a sandstone bluff and the country was shadowy blue all around but for a bright salmon blush in the west over unmistakable Baboquivari. They were a long way from the restaurant in Sierra Vista.

  “Don’t drop those.” His voice came out weaker than he’d hoped. He cleared his throat and reached up with his feet to kick open the latch on the door. The door opened, but when he tried to get out he found she had secured his seat belt. He hitched himself sideways, trying to reach the buckle with his hands. He began to feel mildly nauseated.

  She spoke without turning around. “How does a dirtbag like you afford glasses like these?” They were Leicas and he carried them in his pack whenever he was in the backcountry.

  “Heirloom from my father. He couldn’t really afford them either.” The Leicas had been in the box of things his mother had saved for him, along with the .45 Rice kept in his truck and a steel Rolex GMT, a fancy pilot’s watch his father had bought in the Middle East but had seldom worn. It was worth thousands, and Rice had given it back to his mother, told her to sell it and buy something she needed.

  Apryl lowered the binoculars to rest on the strap around her neck and turned, walked to Rice’s side of the Jeep, reaching behind her right hip as she came, producing the slim semiautomatic pistol she’d carried the whole trip in a flap holster, for rattlesnakes, she’d said. She leaned in and pressed it against his temple while he fumbled with his seat belt buckle.

  He cut his eyes so he could watch her face. “That’s a nice pistol, you know. Colt Woodsman. They don’t make those anymore.”

  She stepped back when he disconnected his seat belt, let him hop to the flat rock in front of the Jeep. He stood unsteadily and admired the view for about three seconds before she kicked her heel into the back of his knee, forcing him down in f
ront of her.

  “You had these binoculars. You saw their faces.”

  “Not clearly. It was still pretty dark.”

  “You can’t imagine how bad it is that you happened to see those particular guys. Of all the guys you could’ve seen, you saw those guys. I don’t care if you’re an undercover cop or just a slacker failed scientist who can’t mind his business, which is what I think you are. If they found out you saw them they’d kill you, but then they’d kill me, they’d kill my sister.” Her voice had started to quaver and she paused, then started again with more control. “They’d probably kill our parents too for good measure, though I could give a shit.”

  His head was still muddled from the roofie or whatever the hell she’d put in his margarita, but he was struck by both the gravity and the ridiculousness of the situation. Her feet shuffled on the rock, stepping backward, away from him. A reflex, unconsciously moving away from the bullet impact, the blood she might imagine would spray out. It was good that she didn’t have much stomach for this, bad that she was so close to doing it. His knees were scraped and stinging from where he’d landed on the rough sandstone. He turned to look at her. Apryl Whitson was serious indeed, with frightening dark eyes like some Hindu god of the apocalypse.

  He grinned. He had to admit he had a bit of a crush.

  “Stop acting tough, Rice.” Her voice was shaking again, and it was the first time she’d called him by his given name. “I really might have to fucking shoot you.”

  Eleven

  Rice knelt at the peak of the cabin roof, poking with a screwdriver at the silicone caulking around the plumbing vent pipe jack. The plumbers and electricians had finished the rough-in yesterday, and the inspector from the county—bored and complaining about how far this place was from the road—had bestowed his official approval after barely a glance, so Rice had been looking over their work himself. The sealing around the vent was functional but ugly, and he’d decided he was going to have to cover the jack with metal flashing painted to match the roof. The rest of the work was acceptable, even careful, but the plumbers must’ve assumed no one would look too closely at the vent pipe.