Bearskin Page 7

  Movement in his peripheral vision: a vehicle on the lower driveway, emerging from the forest. He vaulted over to the back side of the roof, gripping the metal seam at the ridge with his free hand, sliding backward until he was hidden from view. He crouched there and peered over. A blue wagon coming fast, still too far away to hear.

  The day was overcast but bright, still hot well into September, and he’d neglected to put on a shirt this morning. The usual half-dozen cicadas wailed in the trees at the edge of the meadow. These insects were much louder than the western version, and most days they were a remarkable acoustic presence, Appalachia’s howler monkeys. He still wasn’t used to them. The plumbers had called them locusts, the same kind that came out every summer. Wait till next May, they’d said, when the seventeen-year locusts would swarm up out of the ground, billions of them, and it would be so loud in the forest you’d have to put your fingers in your ears. Not that Rice was sure he believed them. He’d had to stop the plumbers from killing a six-and-a-half-foot black rat snake they swore up and down was poisonous—their certainty had been absolute, their proof the pissed-off snake’s tail vibrating against the dirt where they’d cornered it with shovels in the crawl space under the cabin. Them blacksnakes they mate with rattlers, they said. Rice had to catch the snake in his hands—the plumbers shaking their heads at his foolhardiness—and carry it all the way down to the forest to let it go before they’d get back to work. He found it puzzling that so many rural people were hostile to—even terrified of—the place where they lived. It wasn’t just that hardworking country folk had no time for the precious concerns of effete urban environmentalists. What amazed Rice was how you could spend your whole life physically immersed in a particular ecological system and yet remain blinded to it by superstition, tradition, prejudice. Out west it was ranchers’ holy war on predators and their veneration of Indo-European domestic animals they husbanded on land too dry to support them. Here in the Appalachians, you saw rugged country men who refused to walk in the woods all summer because they were scared of snakes.

  He tucked the screwdriver into a pocket and settled back on his haunches, watching the car approach. Because the driveway was visible for a full mile as it climbed up from the forest below, the lodge and its two dependencies were almost impossible to sneak up on. He’d noticed that the first morning, back in March, when he’d stepped out on the front porch with a cup of coffee to see where he’d landed.

  The car—it looked like an older Subaru wagon—raised a dust plume that hung above the meadow in the still afternoon air. He didn’t expect his nemesis to arrive in broad daylight in a blue Outback, but whoever it was had made it past the locked gate somehow. He scrambled to the ladder he’d left leaning against the eaves on the back side of the cabin, climbed down, and ran past the shed to slip through the back door of the lodge. In the bedroom he threw on a shirt and opened the drawer beside his bed, reached under the rag, the pistol in his hand. He aimed the thing at the floor and pushed the safety lever down with his thumb, trigger finger straight along the base of the slide—all of this a cultivated reflex—reaching over with his left hand to grasp the slide and ease it back a little, just enough to see the brass glint of a round in the chamber. The slide snicked to battery and he levered the safety up into its notch. Cocked and locked is what people called it, “condition one”: a round in the chamber, the hammer cocked, the safety on.

  Back out the back door—he wouldn’t want to be trapped in the lodge—retracing his steps to the cabin. This was the response he’d planned if a strange car appeared on the driveway: get the pistol and hide behind the cabin. If the visitor was innocuous, he could act nonchalant and saunter out the front door; if it turned out to be a carload of assassins, he would run to the forest. He stepped over the fresh dirt where the plumbers had ditched for the water and propane lines and kneeled in the moss at the base of the corner pillar, leaned down to where he could see the driveway through the crawl space underneath the cabin.

  Glare on the windshield obscured the interior as the car pulled past the cabin and parked beside his truck. The driver got out, legs in jeans, feet in brown sandals, a woman standing in the gravel. He walked through the back door of the cabin, stashed the pistol in an empty cardboard box. Standing on the sheets of plywood he’d laid across the joists, he watched through a front window. She wore oversize dark glasses, white oxford shirt untucked, blond hair loose to her shoulders. She waited beside her car for a long moment, her hand on the open door, breathing deeply and looking around, absorbing, inspecting.

  When he called out from the front door, she turned, startled. In his dreams, the few times when he could see her clearly at all, she’d been petite, bookish. The woman standing on the gravel path was tall and big-boned. Younger than Rice but not much. He wished STP had told him Sara still had a key.

  “Why don’t you answer the phone?” She had a slight southern accent, not local.

  “I keep it unplugged until I need to call out.”

  That made her laugh, a pleasant sound, something he realized he hadn’t heard in a while.

  “Starr said you were odd that way.”

  He walked to meet her in the driveway. She was still smiling when she took off the sunglasses. Her left cheekbone was slightly flattened and marked by a fine vertical scar. Sky-blue eyes, freckles across the bridge of her nose. Broad mouth, whitened teeth. The transformation her smile wrought in her appearance was so dramatic it was like a behavioral display, a peacock opening its tail.

  “What way?”

  She held out her hand. “I’m Sara.”

  “Rick Morton.”

  She laughed again and he realized STP would have told her his real name. Her grip was strong, nearly mannish.

  “Odd in the way of someone who would keep the telephone unplugged. Someone who would use a pseudonym. ‘Don’t make him talk about his past,’ Starr says. So mysterious.”

  They walked together toward the lodge. She kept talking. She had brought him “something from Starr,” and she needed to pick up some books and papers she’d left in the storage closet behind the office.

  In his extended solitude he had developed a high degree of intimacy with his imagined version of Sara Birkeland, and it threw him to be in the presence of the real Sara, a substantial, talkative woman with pale feet in strappy sandals clacking up the board steps to the place that probably still felt like home. What had happened to her, what she’d survived, he couldn’t push it out of the foreground. Not sure what to say—Welcome back? How’s the physical therapy coming?—he kept his mouth shut. As he held the screen door open, his uncertainty must’ve shown on his face because the look she gave him was one of recognition but not invitation. It wasn’t just him; people didn’t know how to act around her.

  She stepped inside and fired a series of breezy questions without giving him time to answer: how did he like the job, what’d he do with the TV and DVD player that she’d talked Starr into buying, maybe he didn’t watch movies, was that how he had time to type in so much of the old logbook data, did he even listen to music, etc. It had been Sara’s idea to digitize the historical natural history data from the logbooks so it could be made available to researchers. She and someone else at Tech had set up the software they were using to build a database portraying the phenology of several dozen plant and animal species. Rice didn’t sleep well, and in addition to reading in the preserve’s scientific and natural history library, he’d spent hundreds of late-night hours typing the observations of long-dead caretakers and Traver family members into the laptop. It filled sleepless nights with something other than his own thoughts, his own memories.

  He wasn’t going to explain his insomnia to Sara, so he led the way to the office, trying to make conversation about the yearling bear that had walked out the front door of the cabin, the honey in the wall, the guy vacuuming the bees. He hit the light switch and instantly he regretted bringing her in here, though there was no other way to get to the closet.

  “
This is nice.” She glanced around half-smiling. Halfway, he figured, between laughter and alarm.

  Three of the walls were lined with bookshelves, leaving space for a small desk next to the north-facing window. The preserve’s laptop lay on the desk next to the current volume of the logbook, open to this week’s entries. The bookshelves were the problem, in that the books were gone, replaced by his growing collection of found objects. It had become a minor obsession, bringing things home from the forest. He thought of them as fetishes, in the shamanistic sense: a defunct hornets’ nest the size of a watermelon, translucent snakeskins, more than a dozen animal skulls ranging from hummingbird to coyote, Indian spear and arrow points, quartz crystals, rodent-gnawed deer antlers, turtle shells, mollusk fossils, feathers of turkey, hawk, owl, vulture.

  “It’s not a very scientific collection.” He reached up to slide the key from the top shelf. He was supposed to keep the closet locked because the preserve’s Winchester Model 52—a fine old .22 target rifle with peep sights and a leather military sling, for shooting rabid skunks and feral cats—was stored inside.

  “I like it.” She lifted a papery segment of shed snakeskin, held it up to the lamp. “This is a timber rattler.”

  “I thought so. Nothing else would be that thick.”

  “I saw a lot of big rattlesnakes here, the kind that people feel it’s their civic duty to kill on sight everywhere else. The biggest ones all seemed to be yellow-phase, for some reason. Really beautiful. It was weird that I never found any of their den sites.”

  He’d already decided he wasn’t going to admit he’d recently murdered a copperhead. Boxes were stacked just inside the walk-in closet, the books he’d moved from the shelves. He’d read most of them in the spring: treatises, essay collections, reference works, and back issues of technical journals—Nature, Science, Conservation Biology.

  “I saw a big yellow one way up on the fire road in August.” He started dragging the boxes out of the way. “It acted like a western diamondback, mad at the world, wanted to run me off the mountain. I thought timber rattlers were supposed to be mellow.”

  Sara replaced the snakeskin on the shelf, and stepped over to the wall beside the window where he’d taped up a composite of USGS 7.5-minute topo maps. The boundaries of the property were outlined in red, and Rice had marked with a pencil where he’d seen bears and other interesting phenomena—bold springs, a salt lick, cave entrances. Two timber rattler dens he’d found when the snakes had come out in May.

  She played her fingertips over the markings.

  “You’ve spent a lot of time up there.”

  He pointed to a penciled “TR” next to the dotted line of the fire road. “It was right here. The big rattler.”

  The closet was the size of a small room, about half as big as the office, fluorescent lighting overhead, its back wall lined with gray metal shelves from floor to ceiling. The long-barreled target rifle leaned in a corner.

  “I’ve found they have surprisingly individualized personalities.”

  “Rattlesnakes?” He stood aside so Sara could get into the closet.

  “Yeah, supposedly king cobras are even more that way, very individual. My little skinks, not so much.”

  She hesitated, and seemed to steel herself. As she brushed past he recognized the scent of her shampoo, a quarter bottle of which he had finished up himself when he’d first arrived at the lodge in March and couldn’t afford to waste anything. He wondered what it had been like for her here, back in January, boxing up her belongings in a daze, hardly recovered from the assault, snow and sleet scratching at the window panes.

  She reached up and put her hand on a shelf at shoulder height filled with cardboard boxes. “Everything on this shelf is mine. A bunch of technical journals I didn’t think I’d need, but a couple of them aren’t online yet, if you can believe it. Now I’ve got a statistical analysis problem I can’t put off solving any longer, and the answer is somewhere in these boxes.”

  She pulled a heavy box halfway off the shelf and was standing up on her toes trying to peer in when it tipped and slid toward her. Rice lunged forward, his forearm bumping her shoulder as he caught the box and pushed it into place.

  The elbow to his head came fast and hard. He might have dropped to his knees if he hadn’t caught himself with his hand on the shelf. At first he thought it was some kind of accident, but when he’d recovered enough to look up, Sara had backed against the wall, as far away as she could get in the closet, a black plastic stun gun in her hand.

  For just a beat, two beats, their eyes locked: predator and prey. She was wild-eyed, her easy self-assurance gone. He saw himself in her face: monstrous, deadly, looming over her and stinking of man-sweat. Something else there too: the raw certainty of to-the-death resistance. He thought of that yellow timber rattler on the fire road, the urgent warning fizz of its rattle.

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.” He raised his hands in what he hoped was a peaceful gesture. The two pointy silver electrodes on the stun gun weren’t arcing, so she hadn’t actually turned the thing on, which he had to think was a good sign. He retreated through the doorway and rummaged in the desk in the office, returning with a red Sharpie. She was still pressed against the wall, eyes closed and weapon lowered, looked like she was concentrating on her breathing, maybe something a therapist had shown her. He leaned in and set the marker on a shelf.

  “Just put an X on the boxes you want, and come get me when you’re ready. I’ll make us some coffee.” He left before she could reply.

  Twelve

  He dumped ground coffee into a filter, poured eight cups of water in the machine, and pressed the rocker switch. His ability to interact with other human beings in a civilized manner had obviously atrophied. Should’ve been more careful, he told himself, shouldn’t have been fooled by her I’m-okay act. After a while, the machine started sputtering. No Sara. He opened cabinets, banging around so she’d know he was busy here in the kitchen and not lurking behind a door somewhere, normal domestic activity, pulling out sugar, mugs, a glass jar of local milk from the fridge. She must’ve had that stun gun in a holster of some sort, hidden under her shirt tail. He felt like an asshole.

  The coffee machine had spat out the last of its water and he was almost ready to go looking for her when she appeared in the doorway, leaning a little into the door frame.

  “That smells good.” The skin of her cheeks and forehead looked damp and she’d brushed her hair back into a ponytail; she must’ve stepped into the bathroom. She seemed drained but composed.

  “It’s a vice.” He pulled a chair from the table for her, but she stayed where she was. “I drink too much coffee. You want a beer instead?”

  “No, coffee’s perfect. And I am so sorry. You were trying to help and I think I may have hit you in the head.”

  Rice waved her apology away and stepped to the sink to wash his hands, realizing that he might have done this before he’d started making the coffee. He was also pretty sure a goose egg was raising up just over his left temple, but it would be hidden in his hair, which was, now that he thought about it, long and scraggly and not very clean.

  “You probably saved me from a broken back,” she said. “I can’t predict what’s going to freak me out. It just happens.”

  “I shouldn’t have rushed you like that.” He started to compliment her on her reflexes, her self-defense technique—clearly she’d had training—but decided it would be insensitive. “I’m just glad you didn’t get me with the stun gun.”

  “Me too. My instructor said he’s seen guys lose control of their bladders when they got hit with those things.”

  Rice grinned, drying his hands on a dish towel. “That would’ve been embarrassing.”

  She watched his face long enough to make him uncomfortable. “Starr said you’re sweeter than you look.”

  Rice had no idea what to say to that, but she didn’t seem to expect a reply. She took the chair he’d offered, leaned back, and crossed her legs. Her long Nordic
face was pale in the indirect light. “She told me about the bear carcass that guy showed you.”

  He guessed this was Sara’s heroic effort to make ordinary conversation, which he appreciated. It made him feel a little less like the kind of guy who terrifies women. He pulled the pitcher and poured two mugs. Sugar and milk were on the table. “You ever see anything like that? Dead bears? One-armed mushroom pickers?”

  “Thanks, black is fine. No, I didn’t. But I have a story for you.”

  He sat in the other chair across from her, poured a shot of milk into his coffee.

  A good friend, she said, a wildlife biologist at Tech, had been working with the state game department on a bear study, looking at ways to manage interactions between rural residents and the growing bear population. They’d radio-collared a bunch of bears over in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but last winter most of the subjects were killed in a three-week period. The poachers apparently tuned into the frequency of the collars and walked right up and shot the bears where they were hibernating. They cut off the paws, cut out the gallbladders, and left the carcasses.

  “Once the researchers saw what was happening, they went out and tranked the bears that were left and pulled their collars, but two more were killed before they could get to them.”

  “How many?”

  “He didn’t say exactly. I know they had maybe twenty-five bears collared at one time. It was on TV last fall.”

  Sara’s energy seemed to have come back. Maybe it was the coffee. The game department, she said, had made a big deal out of publicizing the study while it was going on, and local TV stations had sent crews out with the researchers. The TV people wanted a guaranteed bear, so they only went out when the researchers were tranquilizing collared bears to take blood samples and measurements. The producers liked the high-tech radio collar angle, and it got to be part of the story, how they used the radios to find the bears. The poachers must’ve seen one of those shows and come up with the idea.