This was a Saturday. My mother and Graham were gone, visiting the grandparents in La Pine, while I went fishing along the upper Metolious. It was late afternoon—that time of day when the shadows start to thicken—when I came home. From my fist dangled a stringer of rainbow trout. Soon I would lop off their heads and tear out their bones and guts and bury the whole mess beneath a slab of concrete behind the tool shed so McKenzie wouldn’t get into the bones and needle open her intestines.
Black Answer was an old gelding. Many years ago my father rode him deep into the Ochoco and Mount Hood wilderness, through snow-cloaked forests, in search of elk. But now his back was bowed, his hooves splintery. There was some grayness along his snout. He was good only for petting and feeding carrots, and even then, he snapped at you with his long yellow teeth. At this time he circled the corral at a quick trot, as if trying to find a way out. “What’s gotten into you, you son-of-a-bitch horse?” I yelled and when he heard me, he threw back his head and whinnied.
I approached our front porch—its roof drooped from the weight of so many winters’ worth of so much snow—and saw the dog there. She looked over her shoulder at me and pawed at the front door where she always pawed at the front door, where the paint had worn away in a tan oval. “Hey, McKenzie,” I said and scratched her in her favorite spot, her breast, and she yelped and jumped away from me.
I examined my fingers, warmly tacky with blood. “What happened, girl?”
She huddled a safe distance from me, panting heavily. She is a black dog, making it hard to tell where she was hurt. When I moved toward her she whined, not wanting me to touch her again. So I talked to her in a soft voice, saying, “I’m just looking.” Her snout appeared a little chewed-up and the fur along her hind legs could have been bloody or could have been muddy. “What got you?”
As if she understood, she looked away from me, looking into the nearby woods, and I followed her gaze there, seeing nothing except the shadows among the pines growing blacker every second.
Inside, I headed to the kitchen, to dump the fish in the sink and cover them with ice cubes. A naked 60-watt bulb cast an anemic glow that revealed a house different than the one I left that morning.
The lower cupboards yawned open, many of their doors ripped off entirely. A paw had scooped the cans of Mountain Dew and tomato soup and SpaghettiOs, the boxes of Lucky Charms and Ortega taco shells, onto the linoleum, where they lay crumpled and chewed-up, mixed up with the contents of the garbage can, tipped over and rifled through, its coffee grounds and banana peels and chicken bones and candy wrappers. The bear had somehow managed to get into the fridge. Its door hung open, its glass shelves shattered. Among the shards an unopened gallon of milk lay on its side. I could hear the motor working overtime, trying to keep the whole cabin cold, but I didn’t bother closing the door, just as I hadn’t bothered setting down my fish, too shocked to do anything but look.
A mug of coffee sat on the counter, half full, as if the intruder had been interrupted while drinking it. World’s Best Dad, it read.
“Shit,” I said. There was nothing else to say. And only then, hearing my voice flutter through the cabin and die, did I realize I was alone. McKenzie still sat on the porch, peering in at me, her head cocked with uncertainty. “Come on,” I said to her and she whined in response. I finally laid down my fish and clapped my hands and she lowered her head and stepped hesitantly into the front hall and released a stream of piss onto the hardwood.
It was the smell that scared her. It hung in the air like a dark shambling presence, overpowering the odor of garbage. I remembered it from the canyon.
In Tumalo no one locks their doors. When my mother left that morning, she left the back door open, the screen door closed, to allow for a breeze. The bear had pushed through the screen and in doing so bent the metal frame in half and ripped it from its hinges. I could see this from the living room, just as I could see that the bear had been interested in more than food alone.
Clothes, my mother’s clothes, were strewn throughout the living room and back hallway. Skirts and shirts and jeans. At my feet I found a pair of panties. The old lady kind that go way up your waist and corral the belly fat. I picked them up. They were damp with saliva and ripped along the butt. I imagined my mother inside them, the same teeth that gnawed on a skull gnawing on her.
I think that was what bothered me most, the sight of her panties. The bear had done more than trespass in the name of hunger. As I saw it, he had deliberately violated her, and in doing so, violated all of us.
I went to the back door with the intention of closing it. When I laid my hand on the doorknob, its coldness crept up my arm, along with the feeling I was being watched. I scanned the nearby forest for any movement. A chipmunk worried at a pinecone. A camp-robber bird flitted among the trees. Black Answer continued to nervously trot the circumference of his corral.
I closed the door and the feeling didn’t go away.
My father taught me how to kill things. How to break apart a rifle and run a brush through its cavities. How to fire a bullet uphill and down. How to rub bitterbrush all over my clothes to camouflage my scent. All sorts of hairy information I tucked away in my mind like socks in a drawer.
I drove to Bend, to the Carmichael Candy factory. Everyday the janitors swept from its floors enough cookie crumbs to fill a fifty-gallon drum. For twenty bucks, they let me take all of it, along with a compromised batch of caramel.
At home, in an industrial bucket, I mashed up a few pounds of cookie crumbs and caramel, then added some fish filets from the freezer, dousing the mixture with a can of Mountain Dew. The smell and the sweetness, I knew, would draw the bear. Two hundred yards behind our cabin, way out in the woods, I found a clearing of cheatgrass and there dug a shallow hole to fit the bucket into, so that it couldn’t be overturned by coyotes. On top of the bucket I placed the metal screen of an old rabbit cage, and on top of the screen a small boulder. Only a bear could get into this.
Some hunters, around their bait troughs, douse the dirt with cooking oil. The idea is, the bear gets the oil on the pads of its paws, then tracks the smell around the forest, drawing other bears. But I wasn’t interested in other bears. I wanted only one and I knew he lurked nearby.
My father, in the months leading up to deer season, would drive into the mountains, along logging roads, and park next to clear-cuts. He would set up a lawn chair in the bed of his pickup, and through a pair of binoculars he would peer out over the stumps and huckleberries. He kept meticulous notes about the deer he spotted—where and when they appeared, how long they lingered, their herd size, its doe-to-buck ratio—so that when October rolled around, he was ready.
I, too, wanted to be ready. So I went to Gander Mountain and bought a Moultrie camera. I’m not sure how many dinner shifts at the Tip Top this added up to. A lot of them, I can tell you that. But really, after seven years of collecting two-dollar tips from truckers and blue-haired grannies, what had I spent my money on so far? Soda pop and beer. New tires for my truck. Bullets. The occasional blowjob from a Mexican hooker named Juanita. What else did I need? To go off to college, my mother said, but that seemed like something other people did.
“I’ve got everything under control,” I would tell her, when she got on my back, asking about my plans, my life.
“Of course you do,” she would say.
The Moultrie is a weatherproof digital camera. You bolt it to a tree along a game trail or a bait station. An infrared beam shoots from it. When triggered, the camera snaps a photo, recording the date and time, so that over the course of several days you can begin to understand the patterns of your prey.
I attached the camera to a ponderosa and trained its beam on the nearby bucket. When the bear came, I would see it, frozen in a flash. I would know what I was dealing with.
My family watches a lot of TV, mainly game shows and Law & Order reruns, but I’ll tune in to the occasional nature program so long as a snake is trying to swallow a rat. So here we were, p
lanted on the couch, me and Graham and my mother, my mother smoking one Marlboro after the other so that a gray cloud hung over us.
Since my father left, I’ve been in charge of the remote. I punched its buttons now, flipping through the channels, finally settling on an hour-long special called I, Bear.
“Hey,” Graham said. “Can you believe it?”
My mother didn’t say anything, her eyes unfocused, her mind someplace faraway, but I was right there with him, nodding and smiling. A bear show—he kept saying—a goddamned bear show. It seemed a miracle, as though God had shot a lightning bolt into the satellite dish to make it just so.
We learned that bears have shaggy fur and rudimentary tails and plantigrade feet. Though their eyesight is poor, their noses can decipher dead meat at a distance of at least seven miles. We learned that their ears don’t grow with their bodies—remaining the same size, from cub to silverback—so you can measure the age of a bear like so: the smaller the ears appear in relation to its head, the older the animal. We learned that they are among the most behaviorally complex of animals. “Practically as smart as humans,” Graham said, as if proud, as if the bear had brought something special to our cabin that reflected on us.
Outside, in the stable, Black Answer whinnied. I went to the window and saw the motion-detector light had clicked on, making a pale yellow cone surrounded by so much darkness.
I wondered what had drawn our bear down from the mountains—the smell of bacon frying in a pan—the endless supply of garbage cans and Dumpsters—the trout-filled rivers? Hunger had to be the reason. It was always the reason.
The Tip Top Diner is a square brick building that seats thirty. The booths are mustard vinyl and the floor is checkered linoleum. The menu never changes. The building is over a hundred years old. It’s lasted through a depression, recessions, wars, so many ice storms and sun-soaked summers.
Two bay windows flank its front door, giving me a view of the Three Sisters. They loom over Tumalo, as silent as stone, dormant for several hundred years, but inside of them a hidden life burns redly. In this way they remind me of my father.
The last time I saw him he came to the Tip Top with his girlfriend, Mona. For supper, if you can believe it. They had been at the Drywood Tavern—where she worked—drinking Budweiser and smoking Marlboros. I knew this because of the smells floating off them, the way they moved loosely and spoke at that level of too loud that drunks prefer.
He waved me over to their table, even though it wasn’t my section. I walked there slowly. The clatter of forks and knives, the country music playing over the sound system, all of it fell away. His beard opened up into a smile, as if we were the best of pals. “I want to introduce you to someone,” he said, or something. I wasn’t really listening, my ears thrumming with blood. When she held out her hand, her fingernails painted every color of the rainbow, I let it float there so long and lonely that my father lost his smile.
“Manners,” he said, as if I was the one with lipstick on my teeth.
Over their heads I caught sight of Mary. She stood by the coffee machines, watching me, so I didn’t do what I felt like doing—which was spit or turn over the table or take a steak knife and go slit slit slit across their necks and faces. Instead I looked, only looked, staring deep into my father’s leathery eyes, seeing in them something made of equal parts shame and fury. His beard moved a little, but he said nothing.
That was the last time I saw him, two years ago. Immediately after he left, he called a lot, but then the time between conversations grew from a week to two weeks to five months now. Maybe he got tired of listening to the silence on the other end of the line. He sent me a graduation card. In it he wrote, “Son, I’m proud of you. You’re going places. Love, Dad.” The card was marked up with dirty fingerprints, their swirling prints like the patterned dust off a moth’s wing.
I still have trouble wrapping my brain around it. My father, who never danced, not even at weddings. Who smelled of horses. Who always left the house with a Leatherman multitool attached to his belt. Who ate everything with ketchup. Who on Christmas gave my mother a framed photograph of him and George W. Bush shaking hands, the photo taken after a stump speech the president gave in Redmond. Who, when I was a boy, helped me up into Black Answer’s saddle and laughed when the horse swung his head around and bit me as I dug my heels too sharply into his ribs. Who taught me how to tie a lariat—the running noose with a jammed knot to prevent it from pulling out—and who directed me to sink it over the head of Black Answer and who laughed again when the horse tore off across the pasture, dragging my body behind him.
This same man, my father—who quietly lived in this quiet pine-forested hamlet his entire life—was not only fucking another woman, but had moved with her to Pendleton, where he now worked on a ranch owned by some formerly Californian surfboard developer.
I had heard the rumors, and ignored them, like the faint grumbling of a thunderstorm you hope the wind takes elsewhere. I had seen his pickup parked along the Deschutes River with two shadows inside it. I had listened to him stumble home from the tavern, the noise of the Hideabed unfolding, as he prepared to spend another night in the living room. But still. I hadn’t anticipated his sudden departure. That he could just leave us, like a bunch of old shirts that didn’t fit him anymore, seemed impossible. Even though he must have been planning it all along—just as he planned every hunting season—taking careful notes in a notebook and envisioning the kill long before he actually pulled the trigger.
Like a mountain, there was such stillness to him—you never would have suspected that deep beneath the layers of his skin, as beneath the deepest layers of the earth, existed a channel for fire.
The bear came. Every morning I trekked into the woods and found the bucket empty and on its side, buzzing with flies, like a hollowed-out carcass. The cheatgrass was flattened and there were tracks and seed-filled droppings everywhere. I unbolted the camera and removed its memory chip and took it to the Tip Top Diner. Mary kept a computer in the backroom and I viewed the photos there.
Some of them were washed out. Others revealed a raccoon or a possum or a coyote struggling to claw through the plastic, to push the boulder off the bucket. But many showed the bear.
The sight of him made my stomach feel weighted down with heavy black stones. If I clicked through the photos quickly enough, they made a sort of movie. The bear would untangle himself from the underbrush and move in an unhurried shamble toward the bucket. Every time the flash went off, its light would redden his eyes, making them appear lit with lamps of blood. One swipe of his claw knocked the boulder from the bucket. He ate with great smacking bites I could almost hear—their noise like feet moving through mud—each bite revealing jagged white teeth nested in blue gums.
One time Mary peered over my shoulder and said, “My.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve got him, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I’ve got him.”
“You should let the news reporters know about this. They’d be interested in this.”
“No. I want to kill him. That’s all.”
I heard her breath stop and a moment later start again. She laid a hand on my shoulder and I stiffened under its weight. “Daniel?”
“What?”
“You know you’ve got a lot of anger hidden in you.” It wasn’t a question.
I shrugged and she took this as a cue to remove her hand.
“You hold onto it like it’s worth something,” she said. “But it’s not worth shit.”
Again, I shrugged, but she was already gone, off to restock napkins or refill ketchup containers or something, the same old motions.
I stared at the screen. Because the camera was stationed at such a low angle, it was difficult to judge the size of the bear. I remembered the nature show and studied his ears. They were horribly small.
I always pick up Graham after school. We have two hours together—before I return to the Tip Top for the dinner shift—and I try to ma
ke those two hours count. Sometimes we go fishing. Sometimes we go to the Dairy Queen for a Dilly Bar. And sometimes we drop a Frisbee in the backyard and call it home plate. He stands next to it with a baseball bat cocked and ready to swing. I teach him to hold tight in the batter’s box, while I whip fastball after fastball at him, trying to make him tougher.
“Hey,” he said. “Remember that time, that game against Crook County, when you nailed that guy in the head? And he was like, ‘I’m going to kick your ass if you do that again,’ and then you did it again.”
“What about it?”
“I don’t know.” He had a smile on his face and it wavered a little. “I’m just remembering.”
“Well, quit it.”
“Why?”
“None of that matters now. It was a long time ago.”
“Not that long ago.”
Today we went to Dry Canyon. According to some of the other fifth-grade kids, the riverbed was no longer dry. A stream of blood now ran down it, its currents growing stronger and scabbier every day. Graham wanted to see for himself.
At the Dry Canyon trailhead, I spotted a pair of dirt bikes pitched against a gnarled juniper tree. We soon saw who they belonged to—when we started down the trail, the canyon spread out beneath us like a gaping mouth—two boys with baseball bats.
There, in the dry riverbed, they stood over a large black shape. It was a bear and it was dead. The boys took turns beating it. Every few seconds one of them would steadily lift the bat over his head, as if it were a weighty ax, and then bring it down in a blue flash of metal. It impacted the bear with a meaty thud I could hear from a distance of fifty yards.
They laughed. They pumped their fists, smiling, as if they had won something or conquered something. I knew the feeling. I experienced it every time I brought a rifle to my shoulder, when the safety clicked off and my finger tested the trigger. It felt good, the absolute power that goes along with exercising death. But seeing it secondhand—watching as one of the boys took a home-run swing at the belly of the bear, the bat disappearing into the belly, having torn open a dark gash—I felt something shift inside me.
Refresh, Refresh: Stories Page 22