At night he would crawl from under the porch and practice walking upright. At first he wobbled and stumbled, but then he began to find his balance, a regular, plodding gait he thought respectable. He also tried to speak—with a guttural clumsiness—flopping his tongue, pinching his lips, trying to discover the noises he overheard them making. His heart always hurt when at the end of the night they shut off the lights and in the dark windows he saw nothing but his own reflection.
The husband worked as a handyman. He wore flannel shirts and blue jeans and canvas jackets. He drove a red pickup with toolboxes in its bed. He smelled like oil and lumber. He often came home with sawdust in his hair and grime beneath his fingernails. To his daughter he made silly faces and spoke in a high, singsongy voice that did not suit his size.
Sometimes he would come home from work and go to the living room and pull the coffee table off the rug before rolling it halfway over to reveal a certain off-color floorboard that he would pry up with a knife. Beneath, he kept a pistol and a shoebox full of money. He would add a few bills to it now and then. He called this their Hawaii trust. Hawaii, the bear came to understand, was a kind of dream that was a long way off.
And at the end of every day—when the man walked through the house and shut off all the lights, when the rooms collapsed into darkness and for several minutes the bear could still see a ghostly glimmering in his eyes and then that, too, was gone, when there was only the black jawline of the forest and above that the night sky spattered with stars whose meager light lit his way when he crawled to his burrow beneath the porch—he understood that their lives had become a kind of Hawaii to him.
One day, after the winter’s worth of snow had melted, after the sun had burned through the clouds and dried out the mud-slime that coated the earth, the bear decided he would introduce himself to the woman. He had had a dream about her the night before. In it, she ran her hands through his fur and rubbed his belly and stared into his eyes.
He waited for the man to climb into his pickup and rumble off to work, and then the bear crawled out from under the porch and punched the doorbell and heard its chime echo through the house, heard her footsteps thudding toward him, and then the door opened and she was standing there in a T-shirt and pajama pants, a glass of milk in her hand.
He had watched her so long that on some level, he felt she should already know him. He was about to tell her hello when she dropped the milk. It shattered on the tiles, a white starburst. A stream of it ran along the grouting—toward the door, the bear—and for a moment the woman stared down at it before she screamed and ran into the kitchen and yanked a cleaver from the butcher block. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that seemed to pull back her face with it, her eyes wide and teeth bared.
He was close behind her, trying to calm her, telling her, “No, no, no” in his gruff, barking way. But she could not understand him, could not understand that he meant her no harm, and she slashed at him with the cleaver and opened up a gash on his outstretched arm.
His anger took over then. That old rage that guided him in the woods. For a moment the pattering of blood was the only sound. Then he took in a big gulp of air and released a roar that knocked her back a step and filled her face with terror and thundered through the house and shook the pictures on the walls, the glasses in the cabinets. And then he ate her.
He pleasured in the taste, as she had betrayed and insulted him. He had come to believe he was like her, and her rejection had spoiled that belief. A lunch pail sat forgotten on the counter. The bear noticed this when he rose from the floor and wiped his dripping maw with a dishcloth. He heard, then, the engine puttering up the driveway. Tires chewed over gravel. Boots clomped up the porch.
When the man pushed through the half-open door and complained good-naturedly about his wife letting the flies in, the bear surprised him with a swing of the paw that broke his neck before he could even register the blood and viscera glopping the kitchen linoleum.
The baby woke from her nap and began to wail. For a long time the bear listened to the rise and fall of her crying. As if in response, a breeze came rushing from the woods and pushed the door open farther, causing its hinges to creak and permitting sunlight to stretch across the floor and touch the cheek of the dead man. A fly landed on his eye and buzzed its wings. The bear took a step toward the door, and then slowly toward the hallway. The baby continued to cry—blubbering now, big, wet whimpers. He felt his temper softening.
He had not meant for any of this to happen, and in his fury he had forgotten about the baby. Hearing her now brought a sore feeling to his chest, a heaviness to his eyes. Her crying became the only thing, a presence that threw its arms around him and dragged him down the hall to the bedroom with the pink walls and the white wooden crib in which stood, shaking the bars, howling, the baby.
The bear filled up the doorway. He had to duck his head to step through it. His paw prints carried blood in them, and the floorboards creaked beneath his weight. When the baby spotted him, she immediately stopped crying. She rubbed one eye. Snot hung off the end of her nose. Her chin quivered. The bear was close to her now. He could reach out and snatch her with his paw if he wanted. He wondered if she would begin crying again and what that would mean, what he would have to do.
Instead her cheeks bunched up in a smile, and she said, “Da da da da.”
His paw, without its pads and fur, had healed into something quite flexible. He could pick up stones and toss them. He could turn a doorknob. He could pull open a bathroom cabinet and remove from it a razor and shaving cream. He could knob on the hot water. And he could, with care, shave the fur from his muzzle.
He patted his face dry and studied his reflection in the mirror. This was the first time he had ever seen himself outside of a shadow darkening their windows or a tremulous image reproduced in pondwater. He tried twisting his face into different expressions. When he smiled, revealing a mouth full of sharp teeth and black gums, he realized how monstrous he must appear to humans. He compressed his lips and narrowed his eyes and puffed out his cheeks and thought he now looked at least a little presentable.
The bear remembered the way the mother made the bottle—dumping in several spoonfuls of powder, shaking it up with water—and he did the same now to feed the baby whenever she bawled. For his own hunger he pulled food from the fridge and snacked on the body he had heaved into the basement.
He set the baby in front of the television to keep her occupied, and she burbled and cooed at the images that played across the screen. He felt equally mesmerized. This was their routine over the next few days. He did not bother with diapers and clothes and the floor grew slick with her waste, but neither of them minded. At night he would stand over the baby while she slept, her round head cratering the pillow, her closed eyes trembling with dreams. Her chest would rise and fall with each breath, and to him it sounded like a breeze sighing through cottonwoods, the very essence of peacefulness, as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
He wasn’t sure but he thought he might miss that feeling, a very animal feeling, lost to him now.
Then they ran out of baby food. The bear gave her everything he could find—cans of soda, a moldering orange, a stale bag of potato chips, the rind at the bottom of a bag of bread. She pushed them all away. He tried water from the tap but this did not seem to satisfy the baby, and her skin began to yellow and the fat melted off her arms and legs. When she sobbed, her face went red and tears raced down her cheeks and her chest hitched—and the bear paced back and forth in a panic.
Finally, after many fitful days, he went to the master bedroom—his bedroom now—and nudged open the closet. A pair of overalls barely fit around him. Over them he pulled a canvas jacket, and though it would not zip, it fit snugly, ripping only a little at the seams. From a hook he removed a hat and yanked it down over his ears.
Then he went to the living room and rolled back the rug and found the place where the floorboards tipped and removed from it the shoebox stuffed with m
oney. The gun he tossed aside.
The bear tried to remember what he had learned from the television. He turned the key and pulled the gearshift and stomped alternately on the brake and the accelerator before figuring out how to trundle down the driveway and onto the highway. He huffed with excitement. His hand—not a paw, not anymore—gripped the steering wheel tightly. Traffic rumbled around him. Pale faces stared at him from behind car windows. Semis downshifted, sounding like big animals out of breath.
He recognized the Albertsons from the commercial that cycled constantly during daytime soaps. The parking lot was too hot and the grocery store was too cold and he rattled his cart up and down the narrow aisles feeling claustrophobic, disoriented by the competing smells, the abundance of food stacked everywhere, the fluorescent lights glaring from above and reflecting off the white tile below. He began to grab everything he saw, dragging his paw along the shelves and filling the cart to capacity. Then he realized he had forgotten what he had come for and bombed up and down the aisles, the labels streaking by, until at last he found the containers of formula with the blond teddy bear on them. He balanced several of them on top of the pile of groceries already collected.
At the register stood a thin-necked man with a spider tattoo on his forearm. He was staring at the bear. All around him, people were staring. Everyone in the store, he suddenly realized, was motionless, their eyes fixed on him. No one said a thing. Muzak played from the sound system. In a panic the bear shoved the shoebox full of money at the man and raced his cart out the door, leaving a litter of potatoes and hamburger and canned corn behind.
He had passed a park on his way in and out of town, and a few days later he took the baby there because that was what the fathers did on television. A few parents gossiped and played with their children, but when they saw the bear they quietly gathered up their strollers and diaper bags and departed. He did not think they recognized him for what he was—not with his clothes and his upright posture, they couldn’t, could they?—but they knew him to be somehow abnormal. He was not one of them—and their recognition of this only made him hate and envy them all the more.
The baby crawled through the grass and the sandbox and the bark dust and stopped occasionally to suck on a dandelion or throw a fistful of dirt. The bear watched the baby—watched her slobbering and babbling and eating everything within her reach, naked and sitting happily in a pool of her own excrement—and the sight reminded him of his time in the forest, when things were simpler, mindlessly pleasurable, his tongue and his nose telling him where to go, what to do.
He felt an ache inside him and wanted very badly to get down on all fours alongside the baby and paw at the dirt and lick up the uncovered worms or tear at a tree and breathe deeply of its resin. But then a woman on a bicycle went rolling by and he nodded to her and straightened his posture and said, “Good day,” in a voice louder than he intended.
At home the bear and the baby would sit on the couch and the light of the television would play over their bodies. They would watch game shows, talk shows, soap operas, police dramas, basketball games, the news. The bear would study people the size of long-legged insects walking back and forth across the screen and he would learn from them patterns of language and behavior.
He wished he were like them. He wished he had a job and a family and friends that he could have picnics with or ride boats with or play basketball with, somebody. But there was only the baby. He did the best he could with her. Sometimes he would try out a line of dialogue or mimic the hand gesture of an actor, and the baby would laugh and clap her fat little hands.
He found a pack of Marlboros in the woman’s purse and tried smoking them. The cigarettes kept his lips compressed, his teeth concealed. And the smoke seeping from his mouth formed a cloud that kept him half-hidden. Just one more bit of camouflage, along with the clothes and hats, to distract people from his hulking size.
He wondered if he should apply for a job. He could imagine himself in an office somewhere, telling people what to do.
One day he watched a show on the Discovery channel about a man who had been raised by wolves. There was a shot of him in a white room with too much light. His hair and his beard were long and knotted with mud and sticks. He was loping about on all fours. The camera zoomed in on his face to show his eyes wild and rolling and his mouth lost behind his beard—then the man opened his mouth and howled a song the bear thought he vaguely recognized.
They ran out of baby food again. The baby could be consoled only by sucking on her thumb, a taste of peace. The bear had no money, but he did have the gun.
He waited for the sun to set before he drove again to the grocery store, because television had taught him that robberies take place at night. He sat in the parking lot until it was nearly empty. Beyond the glass-fronted entrance he could see the thin-necked man standing at a register, staring off into nothing. The pistol rested on the console. His long-fingered paw fit around its grip. It was as heavy as a stone. He shoved it in his coat pocket.
The lamps buzzed above him as he stepped from the truck and shuffled through the parking lot, the sliding doors, and across the glowing expanse of white tile to where the shopping carts were lined up. He yanked one away with a jangle. Before he started down an aisle, he chanced a look over his shoulder. The man at the cash register was watching the bear with his eyes and his mouth wide open.
He knew where to go this time. Off the shelves he swept containers of formula and jars of mashed peas and carrots and sweet potatoes. They crashed into the cart until it was full and dripping with the sticky contents of the containers that had burst open. He hurried toward the register, where the man was waiting for him. The bear imagined taking a bite out of his long throat when the lump in the middle of it went up and down and he asked, “Is that some kind of costume?”
The bear did not say anything but held up the pistol. The man knew what to do. He opened the register and filled a paper sack with money and a stream of piss went dribbling down his leg and the bear felt delight at the smell of it, at his power over the man.
At this moment there seemed to be no moral implications. To snatch money from the register was no different from clawing grubs from a log or honeycomb from a bees’ nest. The only law of the forest was hunger and its satisfaction.
In the parking lot, he heaved the cart into the back of the pickup and jumped into the cab and drove away at a reckless speed and lay on the horn for the music it made. Cars swerved off the road to avoid him. He could hear the groceries rattling around in the back. He was laughing, a fast pant that fogged the windshield so that he had to stick his head out the window to find his way home.
Nights, sprawled out on the king-size bed, he did not fall asleep right away but stared at the ceiling. He couldn’t stop thinking. There was too much going through his head. His mind felt like a springtime river glutted with silt, half-rotted logs, winter-killed beaver. He wanted to thrust a paw into his mouth and clean out his skull.
He had always felt that he followed the world, but now he had the strange and growing sense that the world followed him—as if he were a kind of axis to which it was bolted, turning around and around him. Maybe this was what made his mind so exhaustedly busy: all the possibilities and expectations that came with the desire to control, the hunger for knowledge, the weight of responsibility, the crush of the human mind.
The bear flipped through books. He dug through drawers and cupboards and closets. He didn’t know what he was looking for, not exactly. The artifacts of a life. The things humans collect to define themselves. He was hungry not just for answers but for questions.
One evening, when he was digging through boxes in the basement, sniffing at mildewy clothes and studying faded photo albums, there came from upstairs the sharp report of a pistol. It was like a tree snapping against a hard wind. The noise hurtled through the house and bottomed out into a dark echo that filled the bear with dread. And then nothing, a silence interrupted by the low muttering of the television.
The bear did not want to go upstairs. He wanted to stay down in the basement forever. But something—a dreadful curiosity—drew him up. He climbed the stairs and shambled down the hallway that felt as long and dark as a stone canyon. In the living room, beyond the coffee table but before the television, he found waiting for him the smoking pistol and, next to it, the baby.
Its skin was so white where it wasn’t red. Its eyes were open but unseeing. The bear picked it up—yes, it, sexless now in its death—and shook it and licked it, tried to revive it, but its body was as limp and mindless as a pillow, and soon he set it aside.
For a long time he stared at the baby. As strong and seemingly unassailable as humans were as a population, they were individually nothing more than puny bodies that could be tossed around like dolls, crushed and torn to pieces, opened up by a prick of metal.
He felt the blood rushing through him, like a river pressed up against an ice dam, then breaking through, a messy, gushing release. He felt his breath come in and out in hoarse gasps. He felt himself, for the first time in a long time, as a body and not a mind. On television a storm ripped apart the Florida coast. A weatherman stood in howling wind and pouring rain and described the devastation. And then the image went dark as the bear lifted the television over his head and hurtled it across the room, and it exploded, a smoldering ruin of glass and wires and plastic.
Suicide Woods Page 5