The Cage

by Audrey Shulman

  Beryl looked over her shoulder at the dump. She could still see a young bear rolled onto her back, staring up at the sky, chewing thoughtfully on a hiking boot.

  During lunch back at the hotel, Butler made a number of jokes about how well David was getting to know Beryl.

  “Hey, David,” Butler said. “You get tired of guarding Beryl in that tiny little sunroof, I’ll take your place.” He made some clicking noises to show enjoyment. Butler smiled at Beryl as he said it, his thick lips curved. He didn’t seem tense or embarrassed. He seemed to think she’d enjoy the joke as much as any of them, perhaps even more.

  Butler wore cologne. He smelled all the time of sweet musk and heat. He wore his shirtsleeves rolled back on his flat large forearms. Beryl’s forearms were freckled, golden-haired and thin. At one time she’d worked seriously at weightlifting, but although she’d doubled the amount of weight she could handle, her arms only looked longer and more sinewy. The glistening heavy men in the health club could bench-press three times her body weight with sharp grunts of satisfaction. She’d moved about them with a constant sense of fear. Once one of them stepped backward laughing at a joke and slapped her hard into the cold metal web of a Nautilus machine. The man moved away and apologized but Beryl had still felt a hot flush covering her neck and arms. If Beryl and Butler had stood back to back, the top of her head would nestle neatly into the hollow between his shoulder blades.

  Beryl looked at the other men for their response to Butler’s joke. She’d be spending a month with them. She tried to look impassive. David looked uncomfortable. Butler laughed hard enough for them all. For a moment Jean-Claude looked away from the tundra to Beryl. In his brief glance she felt a connection, a message passed that she couldn’t yet understand. Then he turned back, scanning for bears. His hands lay loose on the steering wheel. They hadn’t let go the entire day.

  Butler laughed awhile longer. He had one of those complete laughs that Beryl normally liked. The skin of his forehead rolled back as though he were surprised, his eyes opened and then his chest and shoulders began to shake up and down. He laughed like a young muscular Santa Claus. Beryl imagined him laughing like that and a girlfriend leaning up tight against him, blissful, shaking with his movement. Beryl hoped her own life would never depend on his judgment.

  That afternoon it started to snow. The flakes fell thick and wet, covering the garbage of the dump with a pure layer of white. The bears moved through the snow, white on white. She saw them for the first time against a background other than old couches and broken glass. They merged into the blank beauty so that only the black triangles of their noses showed, their dark eyes. The snow muffled all sound except the wet squeaks beneath the pads of their feet and their heavy snorts as they stuck their snouts deep into the snow and sniffed for the scent of food.

  When it got dark Jean-Claude drove them back to the hotel. Beryl sat by the window of her room watching the flakes twinkle down by the hotel’s spotlight. The snow flattened everything. It erased the cars, the road and the mailboxes. Houses became magical palaces of sugar and ice. She had always imagined the North Pole this way, only there would have also been elves working cheerfully and flying reindeer pawing restlessly in their stalls.

  A car turned the corner, drove slow and cautious down the street. The polar bear police car. It had two spotlights and a siren on the roof. The spotlights circled patiently across the snow.

  The next day the gleaming snow covered everything and danced in the wind, shimmering pure in the sun and thin air. The sky above glittered with the light hard blue of thick glass. That evening when she came in from staring out at the snow and bears, her eyes hurt, a slow headache built up from the base of her skull. She had a hard time adjusting to the relative darkness of the hotel and grazed her hand along the faded velvet of the wallpaper as she walked slowly up to her room.

  In the sun the colors of the snow and the bears and the sky reminded Beryl of when she used to get bad fevers as a child. Her temperature would frequently go up to a hundred and five or six. She would pant, her upper lip sticky with the sweat of her effort, her mouth open for her thick tongue. Her parents would take her to the hospital, stand about her bed and hold her hand. They stared in fascination at her pale face with its bright red spot of color on each cheek. She knew each time it happened that they thought once again how unwise they’d been to have a child this late in their lives. They didn’t have the strength to deal with these unexpected events.

  After a few times watching their worry, when she got a fever she would take the thermometer out of her mouth whenever they looked away. When they began to look back, she would slip it quickly back in, keeping her tongue away from it, holding it tight between her cool teeth. Each time they asked her, she’d smile and say she was feeling better, she would get up soon.

  Once when she was seven the fever had been worse than ever, but by then she’d gotten better at pretending. Her parents had still looked worried but hadn’t taken her to the hospital. When Beryl moved her head on the pillowcase the rasp of its material had filled her head. Each thread had crackled and snapped in her ear so harshly she wanted to scream. The slow drip of mucus down her throat kept her awake with its insidious slide. The room glittered. The illness was bad. It was very bad and it got worse during the night. The room seemed to be lit even though it was dark. The air seemed bright and warm and stuffy.

  She could see her Raggedy Anne doll perfectly on the chair by the far wall. They looked at each other, eyes open and shining with fever. Beryl’s skin stretched tight with heat and fatigue. She wanted to close her eyes. Her head slowly rolled over to the side, her eyes still open, and she could feel a hum beginning in her body, a vibration as subtle as that of light. It was then that she saw from the corner of her eye the fingernail on her left pinky. A single white cloud floated halfway up its clear pink length. The cloud was as light and fluffy as an early Sunday morning and just above it was the clear half-moon of the nail’s growing edge, smooth and thin as milky ice. The precision of its curve startled her. She wanted to skate along its cool surface, its smooth moon edge. She wanted to exhale white clouds into its chill night air. She wanted to hear the sharp metal of skates on ice, feel the slight tremor in her ankles, float forward fast and cool. Looking at the cloud on her nail she knew what the world would be like if the sky were pink and sunsets blue. Looking at her nail and its one white cloud, she forgot her tiredness for a while and wasn’t even sure when the vibration receded.

  The third day at the dump they saw a young bear catch on fire. A mattress burned about twenty feet from the van. Beryl knew polar bears had no instinctive fear of fire for there were no fires out on the wet tundra or on the ice. Bears had been known to step right onto a campfire and stand still for a moment before confusion registered on their faces. The young bear lay quite close to the flaming mattress, black tongue neatly licking the mayonnaise out of an open jar that had been lobbed to her from a car. The bears craved fat, and mayonnaise contained lots of it, but the jars baffled creatures who were used to flesh. Their paws couldn’t grip the glass, their tongues couldn’t quite reach the bottom. They played with the jars, fascinated, frustrated, for hours.

  The bear discovered she could control the slippery jar if she used all four paws. As she tried to get to the bottom she rolled slowly backward onto her shoulders, and onto the burning mattress. After a slow moment, Beryl thought nothing would happen, that it would be all right. Then the bear twitched her shoulder. She jumped up, shaking her back violently. Her left shoulder was on fire. She bit at it. Her muzzle started to burn. The fire moved across her face, across her shoulder. She threw her head up in the air. The flames burned faster. The fire moved down her back. She ran away, breathing hoarsely, the wind speeding the flames. They could smell burnt hair and flesh.

  The bear ran over the ridge. David turned off his camera.

  Beryl had begun to get used to the bears’ bodies and sounds and smells: the waddle of their rears, the shorter fronts ready
to charge, the wet snuffling breath. They had a meaty warm smell like an oversized cat. They ambled forward as though they had all the time in the world. The sounds of guns didn’t scare them, for they were used to the much louder crack of sea ice beneath them. They had no natural fear of humans. Even packs of sled dogs didn’t frighten them. The bears simply stepped forward, eyes moving, picking out their first victim.

  At the end of the next week the expedition would move out forty miles to the northeast where the bears gathered in greater numbers and Beryl would get into her cage for the first time. The three men and she would spend almost a month out there, sleeping and eating together in a single bus, returning to Churchill only for the weekends.

  Of the three others, Jean-Claude was the only one who still seemed an unknown. She knew little more about him than she’d learned that first day, except that she’d observed some of his habits. He sat very still during the long days in the van. Unlike most people, each of his movements had a reason: to turn up the heat, to shift the car into reverse, to adjust the rearview mirror for a better view of a bear. Otherwise he sat still, his hands on the wheel. He watched the others with a flat blue gaze. When he spoke his voice was quiet, almost a whisper, as though something might be startled if he talked any louder. He wore a loose gray turtleneck and jeans every day. She wondered if they were the same set, but she couldn’t tell. His cheekbones were wide, his hair long, the back of his hands ridged with white tendons. He liked a lot of butter on his toast.

  During breakfast one morning while they waited for David and Butler to join them, she tried to get him to talk. She asked him how cold it got during the winter.

  He did not look at her while he answered. Instead he kept partly turned away, giving her only a profile. He stared at the wall on the other side of the room and answered her question in as few words as possible. “Negative sixty,” he said.

  “Wow,” she replied. “I can’t even imagine that. Once it got down to ten below in Boston, but I think that was counting the windchill factor.” She smiled at him, trying for eye contact. He looked over at her for one moment, then away. She wondered if he was very farsighted from staring out across such large spaces so much of his life. She wondered if he was shy around women. “What’s spring like?”

  He spoke after a moment. “Fast. Lots of water.”

  She noticed the seriousness with which he thought out his words, as though he were communicating through Morse code and each additional letter was an effort. She started to smile. “You know, something that’s always fascinated me are the muskox. Their hair is amazing, but I sometimes wonder with all those dreadlocks if there’s anything much underneath. Like sometimes when you give a fluffy cat a bath and wet it’s just a skinny little thing.” She picked up her toast, took a bite. “Anyone ever shave them?”

  She couldn’t tell if he knew she was joking. His mouth was a little twisted on one side, but that could be a smile or just tension at having to speak this much. In answer he simply shook his head, turning back to look at the far wall.

  “How big are they really?” she asked.

  “Big as the bears.” He touched two fingers to his nose. “Their breath’s noisy.”

  “You’ve been close enough to hear that?”

  “Yes.”

  She gave up. She knew him no better than before. She thought asking him questions made him nervous, although he never fidgeted or tried to cut the conversation short. Instead he sat still, waiting for her questions to end.

  She could imagine him doing almost anything. Baying suddenly deep and wild as a wolf, or leaving them two weeks into the expedition, simply walking off across the snow heading due north.

  Beryl also asked Butler about the springtime. He had spent several years up here, working on different projects for Natural Photography or the Canadian government. He told her about spring while sitting next to her at lunch. He tended to lean in close when he spoke to her, much closer than he did to Jean-Claude or David. She didn’t know if he was attracted to her or if this was just the way he talked to women. She found herself leaning backward, giving ground. He exuded a warm heat and breathed through his nose with an audible whisper. Even his face was larger than her’s. On her it would have stretched almost down to the base of her neck.

  Butler said, “Spring comes fast and noisy. There isn’t much time for it to get to summer. The temperature suddenly rises into the fifties and the sun shines. The snow melts all at once. The ground never thaws more than a few feet deep, even in the middle of summer, so the water has nowhere to go except into the harbor. It backs up on the unmelted harbor ice.”

  Beryl imagined the water weighing down the still frozen sea ice, building up slowly over the pier back to the first house and then to the second, flooding through the town and forming a thin milky skin in the night as smooth and perfect as glass, shattering each morning with the first door that opened. The waves moved out from that first door, broken ice tinkling outward across the town.

  Butler said, inching even closer to Beryl, “The whole town is flooded. The weather’s already hot. People wear T-shirts with thick winter pants and boots for sloshing through the water. Then one day the ice in the harbor finally cracks. It booms loud as guns. The water runs into the sea, the town’s drained, and the next day the ground is dry and warm.”

  Beryl leaned back full against the booth, her head tucked into her neck in an effort to move back from Butler’s face. David, she noticed, was staring down at his soup, stirring it. Jean-Claude watched her and Butler, motionless, one hand holding out a piece of toast, the blush rising to his cheeks again.

  After a moment, Butler shifted a little away.

  Beryl knew a spring only a week long would surprise her so much she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She would stay up listening to the groaning of the ice, the high-pitched keening of tension as though through a boat’s hull ten miles wide, the sharp clanks like metal against metal, the gentle crinkling of water on her doormat.

  She imagined Butler on the day after the ice broke, standing in the center of a dry warm town, thankful the strange spring had passed.

  CHAPTER 11

  That weekend the temperature plummeted. Three more inches of granulated snow fell overnight and Beryl went for a walk in the half-light of early morning through the still-falling snow. She needed some exercise and wanted to test out her new Natural Photography parka. She wanted to get away from the others for the first time in a week. A month ago, the temperature had hit the seventies; now, walking across town in the early morning, the air was so cold the snow squeaked like Styrofoam beneath her feet. The streets were deserted except for occasional cars that rolled by with steamed windows, blurred warm faces inside. Several people in the cars stared at her. She met no one else walking.

  She walked quickly, trying to make a wide circle through the unfamiliar streets. Her ears filled with the sounds of her own breath and the slide of the parka’s cloth against itself. Within five minutes of walking she unzipped the front and pulled down the hood. She’d been told sweat was the easiest way to die up here. Sweat would freeze quickly against the skin, cooling her body more rapidly than it could tolerate.

  With the hood down she could see and hear so much more. She looked about easily, exhilarated to be the only human walking outside in the snowstorm. She looked through a window into a warmly lit room. A man in a bathrobe shuffled by in his bare feet. Snow fell between them. Beryl felt prepared, self-reliant, a wild creature.

  A police car drove up from nowhere. It skidded to a stop in front of her, bumping half up on the sidewalk. The woman inside thrust open the passenger door.

  “Get in,” she said. “It’s behind you.”

  Beryl turned to look over her shoulder.

  The bear followed only thirty feet away. It came slowly to a halt when Beryl closed the car door after her. It turned its heavy face about, then wandered away down a driveway.

  Beryl looked down at her gloves and saw that her hands had curled into themselves
. In her dreams she’d been much closer to the bear than that. In her dreams she’d felt the area much more clearly, the open space limitless in all but one direction.

  Beryl watched the bear disappear around a building and then looked toward the woman who had rescued her. Beryl assumed she’d be yelled at. She noticed her breath slowing down as though the danger had started only now.

  The thin black woman wore a uniform with polar bear insignias on the shoulders. She said, “That was a really stupid thing to do.” She glanced in the rearview mirror. “Actually, I think that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen a tourist do in my entire seven years in this town. And it’s not like tourists are known for their smarts.”

  The woman spoke with a slight smile that made Beryl unsure whether or not she was supposed to smile back. Beryl assumed the officer was seriously angry, that she might even tell the magazine and they wouldn’t let Beryl go out to the cage to sit among the bears. Panic filled her chest as it had when she was a child and her parents caught her disobeying. When they were mad they denied it, but their hands would shake and they used more force than needed to cut the bread or to brake the car so that everyone inside rocked back and forth with their emotion and the silence was stiff as the white in their eyes.