Refresh Refresh

by Benjamin Percy

  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.

  I went to them. I started down the canyon at a clumsy run, my sneakers sliding in the grit. I put my hands in the air and unhinged my mouth as far as it would go and started screaming. I didn’t scream anything in particular—I just made noise, like a siren.

  Those two boys, one look at me and pow, they were gone.

  At the bottom of the canyon, I breathed heavily, my hands on my knees. The smell of decay raced in and out of me. Bluebottle flies rose off the carcass and tasted my sweat and I brushed them away in a hurry.

  The bear had a two-gallon jug over its head. Some idiot, I guessed, had used it for a bait barrel. Maybe a foot high with an eight-inch opening, the jug fit tightly around the neck, keeping the bear from drinking or eating or even breathing a fresh breath of air. Scratches and holes decorated the ­plastic—claw marks from the bear trying to remove it.

  The bear was small and thin, no more than a hundred and fifty pounds. Its fur was like a hairy sack draped over a collection of bones. I wondered how long it had wandered around blindly, stumbling over stumps and knocking into trees, eventually collapsing from starvation here.

  Right then Graham came up next to me and took my hand. “Are you okay?” he said and I said, “Of course I’m okay.” Then I did like the fathers do on TV and ruffled his hair. “Sorry if I scared you,” I said.

  He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and shrugged, like: no harm done, I guess.

  “Is that the bear that got the girls?” he said.

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “But—”

  “It’s not the bear, Graham. Okay? Poor fucker just got caught in the crossfire.”

  He swatted at a fly. “You said fuck.”

  One of the boys had left behind his bat. It was plastered with blood and hair, like a bone recently cut out of a body. My hands curled around its grip and my shoulders rolled with its familiar weight as I took a few practice swings.

  “Good bat,” I said and held it out to Graham. “Keep it.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think I want it.”

  “Fine.”

  I leaned on it like a cane and for several minutes we stood there in silence, looking at the bear, breathing in the smell of death. Then Graham ran off to hunt for arrowheads, to see if he could find any rattlesnakes curled up beneath the stones of the riverbed. I stayed with the bear. Inside of the jug, flies banged their black bodies against the plastic, drunk off blood. I closed my eyes and listened to them buzz and tap and imagined they were trapped inside my head, trying to get out.

  When Graham disappeared behind a thick patch of bitter­brush, in a flash of muscle, I turned the cane back into a bat and brought it down on the bear, once, twice, three times, striking the jug until it cracked open. I got down on my knees and grabbed hold of it and pulled—dragging the bear, then bracing my feet against its shoulders—until with a moist sucking sound the jug came off.

  I fell back on my butt—the jug in my lap and still buzzing with flies, like some kind of hive. The bear had its mouth open. A long blue tongue hung from it. I had struck its eye with the bat and this blackberry jelly goop slid out of the socket like tears, dripping down and beading the dust.

  I turned around and looked to the top of the canyon. But no one was there to howl at me like a siren, to tell me to stop. There was only the wind rushing fast-moving clouds through the sky. I imagined what my father would have done—had he been there—squatting in the shade of a juniper tree with a cigarette fitted along the corner of his mouth. “Why don’t you come down and see the bear?” Graham would have asked him. “And be by us?”

  And he would have said, “Rather not.”

  By the end of the day someone had dragged the bear from the canyon and run a rope through its hind leg and hung it from a tree next to the mini-mart. The rope creaked as the carcass turned, blown about by the wind. People came from all around to get their picture taken next to it, some of them holding up their hands like claws, others crossing their arms and frowning, as if bothered by the smell.

  On the news, the Forest Service official—the guy with the salty beard—stood behind a many microphoned podium, surrounded by a crowd of reporters from Z-21 and KOIN 6 and all the other affiliates. “Rest easy,” he said and gave the thumbs-up. “We’ve got our man.”

  But then the paw prints didn’t match up. And when they laid out the bear on a stainless-steel table and ran a scalpel along its belly, they found in it a red spermy pudding—the mashed-up remains of huckleberries, grubs and worms, a tennis ball—but no livestock, no bits and pieces of girls.

  With this knowledge I could sense—all throughout Tumalo—people glancing over their shoulders, as if bothered by some shadow they couldn’t shake. I could relate.

  I knew what I needed to do. After Graham went to school and my mother went to work, I took Black Answer by the reins and led him into the woods. In a manzanita thicket he resisted, trying to tug me back, so I withdrew from my pocket a handful of sugar cubes and urged him forward. When we walked I could see, intermittently between the trees, the mountaintops of the Three Sisters, three glacier-covered volcanoes whose white fangs appeared, then dis­appeared, then reappeared, like something threatening me, or beckoning me on.

  We arrived at the clearing and I loosely harnessed the reigns to a pine tree along its periphery. Yesterday, after seeing what had happened to the bear in the canyon, I had removed the bait bucket. Where it once sat, a patch of strawberries had sprung up overnight, their white flowers forming a rectangle, as if something had been buried and remembered here.

  Around my shoulder coiled a lariat. I also carried a shotgun, a sixteen-gauge Winchester that had belonged to my father, and before him, to his father. It hung from my shoulder by a leather strap. I removed it now and broke it open along the stock and slid two slugs in and closed the breech with a snap and brought it to my shoulder, taking aim at Black Answer. “I never liked you,” I said and pulled the trigger.

  The horse recoiled a few steps, then his legs gave out and he collapsed heavily with the still-lingering echo of the shotgun blast bouncing around the forest.

  It was noon and it was hot, one of the first hot days of the year. Soon the horse would bloat up and the flies and yellow jackets would find it. A stiff wind raked the woods. It would do a good job spreading the smell.

  I rubbed myself all over with bitterbrush and climbed into the low branches of a nearby pine and munched some M&M’S and waited. The sun made its perfect path across the sky. When it at last dipped behind the Cascades, dusk gathered quickly. A thunderstorm had rolled through the other day and now the rain it left behind rose from the ground, gray tendrils of fog that curled around Black Answer like a hand.

  Then the bear came gliding in from out of the trees. It was massive and it was so close. Its giant triangular head. Its muscles surging beneath its spiked black fur. Its claws like knife blades. Right there. It swung its head around in a circle and grumbled in its throaty language.

  Black Answer lay on his side with his legs sticking out straight. The bear snapped its jaws around one of them, testing the flavor. I could hear the grinding noise of teeth against bone. Then, apparently satisfied, the bear released the leg and let out a huff and approached the underbelly of the horse.

  I allowed it to feed. I wanted it relaxed. Around my shoulders I carried a lariat. I removed it now, taking care not to make a noise. I then descended from my perch. My boot scudded against a root or a rock
when I dropped from the tree and hid behind it. At the sound the bear rose up on its haunches and swung its head left and right, its ears perked. I knew from the television program it couldn’t see any better than your average nearsighted grandpa, so I stayed stock-still. It barked once, a warning. The sound was so heavy with bass it would have taken two large men to pick up and carry.

  I felt suddenly small and alone. My hand moved from the lariat to the shotgun and back to the lariat. I could hear the bear smacking its chops. A moment later it returned to its feeding.

  The rope was twenty feet long. I tied its loose end around the tree and then positioned myself as if on the pitcher’s mound, eyeing up my target. I could not bobble this throw and make up for it on the next pitch. This moment was decisive. The rope could not fall off course, could not touch the ground, or I would become hamburger. I judged the distance, some dozen feet. I licked my fingers. I tested the weight of the rope in my hands. And then, in one fluid motion that ended with a snap, I swung and let go.

  I wanted to catch the bear around the neck, but no sooner had the lariat fallen around it did the animal come alive with such suddenness that the noose slipped to its waist. I pulled, to jam the knot tight, and the bear pulled back. I fell forward, sprawled on the ground, then immediately flipped over, scrambling backwards in a crab-walk. When the shaggy tremendous shape began its charge, I flipped over and righted myself and ran like hell.

  I kept my eyes on the ground before me—my feet dodging stumps and clumps of rabbit brush—while the bear swiftly closed the ground between us. I could hear the locomotive breaths huffing from its throat, the flat-footed stomp of its paws. I guessed it had passed the tree by now, which meant the rope would go taut and anchor its charge soon.

  A shaft of heat caressed my neck—a breath, I knew—that sent me reeling around in time to see its mouth open hungrily, almost lovingly, for me. I screamed and the bear bellowed and then the rope went tight and the bear stumbled into a praying position before righting itself again, coming up paws swinging.

  I was just out of its reach, but not so far that I couldn’t feel the air move, displaced by its claws. It wrestled with the rope a moment, like a dog bothered by a leash, then returned its attention to me. A low growl rumbled from deep in its throat. I could feel its eyes, like two heavy weights, on me. It was hungry. And I imagined what its jaws would feel like working around my skull, or through my belly, my flesh sinking into the dark oblivion of its stomach.

  We stayed like this for a time, looking at each other, each afraid and hateful. Minutes passed and the stars wheeled above us and I slowly brought my shotgun down from my shoulder and held it before me. “I should kill you,” I said, a gentle sort of loathing in my voice. “You son of a bitch, I should kill you dead.”

  I could feel the blood pounding through my heart and I could hear the air filling and emptying its lungs. I tried to breathe with the bear and soon our breathing fell into a rhythm where our lungs worked in perfect time with the wind, with the shifting of the branches and shadows. It was as if a rhythm had been beating all along, the rhythm of the land, and finally I had found it, here in the peace of the dark woods, with only one slug and twenty feet of rope between me and absolution.