“Fuck,” she says.
I feel a bit like swearing, too. Could she tell that Hazel and I knew each other?
We more than know each other. We’re like family. I’m the one who bottle-fed her after Dad hauled her home, a tiny, mewling cub tucked into his jacket. It was early spring, snow still on the ground, and her mother had disappeared. Probably shot by an off-season hunter, Dad said. Hazel’s brother was already dead in the den when Dad heard her whimpering. So I fed her, and now she thinks I’m her mom or something.
She even laughs at my jokes. Sort of. When she finds me funny, her giant head bobs back and forth and one paw lifts up and smacks the ground. I bashed my head on a branch last week, and Hazel thought that was hilarious.
I shake my own head as I hunker next to Sam and put a hand on her back.
There’s probably etiquette, something you’re supposed to do while a girl has a panic attack beside you. I just wait like an idiot, thinking about the smell of shampoo and deodorant and girl sweat, so out of place where everything usually smells like moss.
Thinking about how this is my own damn fault, bringing someone here. If this causes trouble…
“The area’s known for bears,” I say. “Tons of them.” I don’t want to say it. I want to tell her to come back and hike here every Saturday. But of course I can’t.
“I know about bears. I’ve just never been so up close and personal before. I should have listened to you,” she says. She’s getting calmer, slowly. Her breathing has smoothed and she manages a small smile.
“Should we go?” she says.
I offer a hand to pull her up. Once she’s standing, she doesn’t let go. Tingles run from my palm, up the inside of my arm, all the way to my chest. We start down the trail and every time her shoulder bumps against mine, I notice. Her palm is smooth like water-glossed river rock. When the path narrows and she lets go of me to pick her way through the branches, I immediately start searching for ways to touch her again.
Maybe if I didn’t live on the grow, and have fuzzy brown hair and too many freckles, I’d have learned useful social skills. Maybe if I had a life in town and went to school dances or basketball games, I’d know what to do in a situation like this.
About halfway down the trail, as the chanting of druids swells around us, I start to worry about other things. And once my worry arrives, it grows with every step. It grows as the chanting grows.
There are a lot of things you can do if you’re a normal guy that you can’t do if you live on a grow-op. Date, for example. I’ve never done that. And I’ve definitely never hiked to the waterfall with a girl, seen one of our bears and walked the girl out afterwards.
I wonder what Walt would do in my situation.
Then I decide I’d rather not know.
I escort Sam to the very edge of the campground. As we get there, the shadows are spreading and joining, the entire understory of the forest turning to dusk.
When the chanting drops for a moment, I can hear people moving around close by.
I take a deep breath.
“Hey…do you think….” Can girls keep secrets? “Can you not tell anyone about the bear?”
She raises one eyebrow.
“My parents, they’re.…” I don’t want to lie to her, but there aren’t a lot of options. “They’re big wildlife freaks. If we tell anyone about the bear, conservation officers will turn up, and that never ends well for the animal.”
“They’ll shoot it,” she says.
And maybe a few others. I nod. “Can we keep it secret?”
She purses her lips and tilts her head to the side, as if she’s assessing me, not the question. Then she nods.
I turn to go.
“Hey,” she says.
I stop.
“Can we talk about it on Monday?”
“Sure.”
With that, she stalks through the last row of trees and into the campground as if she’s never had a frightened moment in her life. And I turn back uphill, my legs tired but my mouth stretching in an impossible grin. I can actually feel it pulling the skin of my cheeks.
Hazel didn’t ruin my perfect hour after all.
•
When I reach our cabin, Dad’s sitting on the front steps smoking his pre-dinner joint, his eyes relaxed and his cheeks ruddy with sun. Hazel rests on her haunches near his side. Big Bugger lounges nearby.
I find myself arranging the scene to fit on a canvas, mixing the brown that captures his hair and picks up in Hazel’s fur and the flecks in the branches above him.
Mom says I look just like him.
“What took ya so long?” Dad says.
I’ve been considering this question all the way up the trail.
“I found a hiker along the south boundary. Had to head her off,” I say.
With Dad, it’s always better to tell the truth. You don’t have to tell the whole truth, but he can smell an outright lie the way he can smell a whiff of mildew on a handful of bud. He’ll gaze at me with brown eyes full of compassion and disappointment, and it will feel as if he’s stabbed me.
“Hiker? By herself?”
I nod.
He grunts.
Dad’s not big on communication. He talks during Sunday services, he talks to Mom, and he talks to the bears. That’s about it. Unless I start meeting more girls in the woods, I might end up like him.
“She coming back, Isaac?” he asks.
I hope so.
I force a chuckle. “She caught a glimpse of Hazel through the trees. She’s not coming back anytime soon.”
With another grunt, Dad hauls himself up. He gives Hazel a rub on the head before he turns inside.
“Wash up,” he says over his shoulder. “Dinner’s almost ready.”
I head to the rain barrel beside the house to slosh a few ladles over myself. But not before I catch Hazel’s gaze.
Sure enough, her big head is swinging side to side and her paw’s stomping.
I may be wrong about that bear not being human.
There are five bears around the grow. There’s Hazel, the smallest and by far the most tame. Big Bugger is huge and ornery, but tame in his own way. The other three are less predictable. The twins are two years old, still playful, and stupid enough to take half your head off with a swipe if you’re not careful. Queenie is an old female who tends to sit at the edge of the clearing and look down her nose at the rest of us. She’s the least tame of the bunch, though she’s been around since I can remember.
Dad traps some smaller animals, which he tosses to the bears. A few times a year, he takes down a deer, though that’s been harder since his back started bothering him. I haul a massive bag of dog food up the trail every few weeks. The rest of the time, the bears look after themselves.
Except for Hazel.
As I head inside for dinner, she settles by the door to wait for her scraps.
At the table, Dad has opened his Bible. He looks deep in concentration. When Walt lets loose a volley from the corner, Dad doesn’t even flinch.
My grandpa’s been causing problems. Though I haven’t been home all afternoon, I can tell by the tightness behind Mom’s smile as she kisses me on the cheek. That, and the string of muttered curses coming from Walt’s chair. If there were a world championship of swearing, Walt would win gold, hands down.
“Fucking prick fucking prick.”
Our cabin is what you might call rustic. There’s only one main room — kitchen table, a few chairs, Walt’s bed along one wall. Before Judith and I were born, Dad added a loft for himself and Mom. Later he built a lean-to off the side for my sister and me. Now it’s just mine.
We have cold running water piped from the creek, and an outhouse at the back. There’s a small generator if we really need it, but since we have to haul fuel up the trail jerry-can by jerry-can, we save th
e electricity for emergencies and special occasions. A few years ago, Judith started complaining about hygiene, so Dad and I rigged a summer shower outside, with hoses spiraled on the cabin roof to heat the water.
Overall, our place isn’t bad, considering that it’s basically a fort in the woods.
“Fucking prick.” Walt leans forward in his chair and glares at the room.
We could use a little more soundproofing.
He’s not cursing at anyone in particular. And you’d think, after all this time, I could let his words roll off me. But the way Walt produces them, like blasts of venom, they hang in the air. Mom’s shoulders tense and she sucks a breath between her teeth. The words don’t roll off her, either.
“Is it too late for a break?” I ask. “I could take over.”
She’s stirring a handful of nettle leaves into a pot of stew on the woodstove. Some of her dark hair has escaped her braid, and her long thin fingers look frail on her spoon. I feel a stab of guilt.
Almost always, Mom heads out for a walk in the late afternoon while I keep an eye on Walt. She spends most of her time picking medicinal plants, which she mixes into Draft Dodger Dark teas — another infamous family product. But thanks to my gallivanting down the mountain and back today, I’ve sucked away her time.
Her head’s bent over the stove, and I have to lean down to catch a glimpse of her face. The circles beneath her eyes.
She bumps her shoulder against mine and shakes her head.
“Don’t you have homework?”
“Already done.”
“Well, then. You can set the table.”
While I plunk down spoons and bowls, I think about Sam saying she needed to escape for a while. That’s why she came up the mountain. To escape.
It’s not exactly an option for me. If I disappeared, Mom would be caught between Dad’s silence and Walt’s ranting. Plus I’m the only one who goes back and forth to town anymore. How would they get supplies, arrange meets, sell our product? It’s not that I do hours of work around here, but I’m the grease that keeps everything moving. Especially this past year, since Judith moved into town.
I understand why Judith went, but Dad took it as a personal betrayal. I’m not sure he could handle it if I left, too. Maybe only one person in each family is allowed to escape.
I wouldn’t leave anyway. I can’t imagine waking up anywhere but the lean-to, with branches brushing against the roof and birds going crazy in the trees and Hazel waiting patiently outside. I could never live in a city full of crowds and traffic.
“Isaac? Your dad’s ready to say grace.” Mom’s looking at me. While I’ve been standing here mulling, gripping the last spoon, everyone else has sat down. Even Walt.
So I slide the spoon quickly into place, plop myself into a chair and bow my head while Dad says the prayer.
After that, dinner goes downhill.
Grouse stew is a favorite of mine, and I’m as hungry as one of the bears at feeding time, but Walt barely pauses for breath between cussing and chewing. I can tell Mom is trying to hold her smile. She asks Dad about the druids.
None of us can hear his answer.
“Fucking prick,” Walt says, a dribble of gravy running from the side of his mouth. Mom reaches over to wipe it, but he bats her hand away.
Even though Walt is as gray and wrinkled as a seed pod in winter, the guy’s strong. Wiry. I wouldn’t want to cross him.
We eat fast, and we’re mostly done when Mom nudges me. I follow her gaze to Dad. With his head propped in one palm, he’s almost asleep over his bowl. That one joint a day eases his back pain enough for him to sleep, but sometimes it kicks in a little early.
Walt sees us looking, and he chucks his spoon across the table.
“Fucking prick.”
Dad’s eyes snap open as he pulls himself upright. He doesn’t say a word to Walt. Just goes back to scraping up his last bites of meat, the way I am.
Walt was never the kind of grandpa you read about in books. He did half a tour in Vietnam in the seventies as a rear helicopter gunner. That sort of thing doesn’t equip you for story time or baseball practice.
He had the stroke last winter. At least, we think it was a stroke. Mom and I found him slumped in his chair, mouth sagging to one side, and it was weeks before he could get around the cabin again. Since then, he’s able to speak, but only slowly, and it takes patience to understand him. Mostly, he sticks with the cursing.
“Prick,” he spits.
Dad throws his spoon into his empty bowl, where it clatters against the rim. He shoves his chair back.
“Going to feed the animals,” he says on his way out.
“I’ll do dishes,” my guilt tells Mom. “You can get out of here.”
She shakes her head and kisses me on the temple. Then she clears the plates while I fill tubs from the pot warming on the stove. One tub for washing and one for rinsing.
“How come I always wash and you always dry?” I whisper. I whisper so we don’t disturb Walt, who’s nodded off without leaving the table.
“So you don’t snap me with the towel,” she says.
I snap her with the dishcloth instead, which sends drips flying and prompts a squeal from Mom and a startled snort from Walt.
“Sorry,” I whisper. But she’s smiling now, so I’m not really.
I wait while she dries the last plate, then we both slide out the door.
The sky’s blue-black, still fighting off darkness with the last of its late-spring strength. In the dusk, I find Hazel in her usual place beside the steps, her tongue pushing an empty bowl back and forth. She’s the only bear I can see. They probably followed Dad somewhere for their feed. Those animals would follow him anywhere.
Mom takes a deep breath as she settles herself beside me on the top step.
“Your grandpa was in fine form this afternoon,” she says. Which is her way of saying he was acting like Big Bugger with a thorn in his butt.
I think of my own afternoon with Sam at the waterfall. It felt like I was in a whole different world.
A bat swoops between the trees, navigating blindly and perfectly. Then Dad’s shadow crosses slowly toward us, his untucked shirt flapping a little in the breeze.
Dad’s not the best in groups of people. He doesn’t go to town much anymore. To him, town is as foreign as life in our cabin would be to most people. Here, though, he’s perfectly at home. He walks through these trees as if nothing could hurt him, ever. As if he were born here.
Which he was.
“Time to head in,” he says when he reaches us. He ruffles my hair a little, as if I’m still a kid, then lets his fingers trail over Mom’s shoulder.
“You go ahead. Walt’s asleep, and we’ll be right behind you,” Mom says.
We sit and watch the trees become black silhouettes on an almost-black sky. The stars pop out, handful by scattered handful.
Mom sighs beside me.
“I started to wonder, when you were so late this afternoon,” she says.
I shift uncomfortably. “Had to scare off a hiker.”
For a moment, I imagine telling her about Sam. I want to explain the feeling I had at the waterfall today, wanting to draw Sam like I’ve never wanted to draw anything before. Or I could describe what it felt like to touch Sam’s skin. Like the shock you get from glacier water, without the cold.
But the words won’t come out.
Maybe some of my confusion overflows into the night air, because Mom reaches over to pull my head against hers.
“I worry about you sometimes,” she whispers.
“I’m okay. I’m always okay.”
She plants a kiss on my temple.
I wish Judith were here. My sister wouldn’t just smile, then turn inside. She’d lean forward a little until she caught my eyes.
“What’s going on?”
she’d ask.
A gust of wind sweeps down the mountain, pushing the branches against one another.
I have no idea how I’d answer.
3
All the way to school on Monday, I think about Sam.
I imagine weaving through the press of bodies in the school hallway until I find her. In one scenario, we pass and share a quick smile. I breathe a waft of girl shampoo before she disappears. In the other scenario, she sees me and all conversation with her friends stops. She stares as I grow closer. Her friends part like the Red Sea. My arm wraps around her waist. I press her against the lockers, and I kiss her.
I’m guessing that one’s less likely. It sure makes the drive go fast, though.
In the end, I don’t have to scan the hallways. As soon as I pull into the parking lot, I spot her leaning against the cinder blocks near the side door of the school. Today she wears cut-off shorts. Her lips are a shiny bubblegum-pink. A silver twist that looks like a fishhook dangles from one ear.
I’m wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt, the same thing I was wearing Saturday. This didn’t seem like an issue until now.
It doesn’t matter. As she smiles at me, I feel my own grin spreading.
“I’ve been asking around about you, Zac,” she says when I reach her. She turns toward the doors and I follow her inside, into the orange-tiled foyer that echoes with the morning energy of crowded bodies. We push through clouds of hairspray and perfume, floor wax and disinfectant, gym shoes and — once — a waft of pot.
“Asking about me?” I have no idea what people would say. They’d probably have to squint and wrinkle their foreheads to remember who I am. “What did you learn?”
“That you’re a good artist but you’re not serious about it, and you’re a bit of a freak.”
A snort escapes me. Creston is a live-and-let-live kind of place. I doubt anyone spends a lot of time analyzing my life. But it’s interesting to know that this is their conclusion.
I shake my head.
A group of teachers passes us, leaving ripples of coffee fumes and cigarette smoke.
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