The Cage

by Audrey Shulman

  Above she could hear David unpacking his clothes and closing the drawers. She heard him lie back onto the bed. The springs creaked with his weight. She heard a pause. He sighed.

  Ten minutes later, David had fallen asleep. Beryl pulled on his ankle. “Grab your camera and parka,” she said. “We still have the observation deck to see.” The deck was an unheated glass room on top of the bus. The bus’s designers said that on average it would stay twenty degrees warmer than outside. Beryl wore Jean-Claude’s Inuit suit. She thought she could test it out in the cold of the deck.

  She climbed up behind David’s boots. When he opened the hatch to the deck, he gasped. She didn’t know if it was from the cold or something else.

  Sticking her head over the edge, she moved from the world of confines, small things and color schemes to the world of immense blue-white beauty. Snow was falling. Rolling ground receded into a distance hard to comprehend. The horizon curved gently out, smooth as the lip of a bowl. Closer in, ice walls stood up at broken angles. The puddles beneath them lay black and deep.

  Churchill was a slight smudge hanging on the horizon behind them, a frozen gray cloud. Space out here was misleading, perspective difficult to grasp, the scale inhuman. She could have been looking across the breadth of the planet. She could have been looking across the landscape of a single cell.

  Snow fell slow and graceful as the universe’s spin. David and Beryl raised their cameras to their eyes without a word and began to shoot.

  After a few photographs, she noticed the cage tied up on the roof behind them. It hunched dark, heavy-looking and small. The cage had seemed much larger when she’d first seen it, contained within a room. Here it sat hard and compact in a world white and open, like a squat creature from a dream, the kind that lumbered after her as she windmilled away even slower, trying frantically for the speed that she could only dimly remember.

  Within ten minutes on the observation deck they saw their first bear. At first she thought the white world had come alive. A boulder stood up, stretched, then moved slowly across the barren plain toward them. It gained slowly. Curious, investigating. She couldn’t yet see the movement of its black nose.

  She and David went back down to have lunch. Her toes and hands felt numb. She moved carefully on the ladder, trying not to show the heavy uncertainty of her feet, the weakness of her hands. She went to her room, took her boots off. Everywhere on her feet she’d had frostbite, her skin hummed with a speed like heat, like cicadas on a hot summer day. She realized the difference between this cold and the kind she’d been used to in the States. There, when she went outside, even for the whole day skiing in a bad crosswind, nose running and face red, the center of her still remained quite warm. Here, she felt a deep cold. She shivered and shivered. Long after her skin had warmed up, the cold inside her wouldn’t go away. Still, she was impressed with the Inuit suit; the other suit had done as badly even inside the protection of a heated car.

  The scabs from her little toes had broken open and bled, probably from walking around, moving her feet around in her shoes. She washed the blood off, put on new bandages, her fingers awkward and thick. It hurt less than she would have imagined. She slowly walked the twenty feet to the dining room, trying to put her feet down more gently, to ease them into each step. Already she walked with a bit of a sway.

  CHAPTER 18

  When she tasted the roast beef at lunch, she felt like she’d never eaten meat before, had just realized she was a carnivore. She felt a hunger that overwhelmed her. She wolfed another bite and another. The beef tasted rich like chocolate cake, satisfying like wine. She felt as if beef were the thing she’d been thirsting for her entire life. She swallowed a small curl of fat and it tasted so good she gobbled down the rest of it before continuing with the meat. At home she ate only beans and vegetables, bread and rice. Red meat had frequently made her feel sick, constipated. Now she ate it with a feeling near to starvation. She reached for a second helping.

  Everyone was looking at her.

  “That’s a lot of food for a little tuck like you.” Butler tilted his head to look at her with one eye closed. “Don’t have a bun in the oven, do you?”

  The others looked at him.

  “I’m just kidding,” he said. “Gawd.”

  Jean-Claude shook again with his soundless laugh. “She’s learned fat is how you stay warm up here. That’s how the Inuit do it. Up to ten pounds of seal blubber or caribou a day. Plenty of water too.” He turned to her. “Make sure you drink water. The livers of the Inuit are swollen with toxins like basketballs. David should eat that much too. He’s going out there.”

  David looked repulsed. Sitting beside him, Beryl saw his hand reach down to touch his flat belly.

  “No.” David shook his head. “I’m a vegetarian.” His hand probed his gut, searching already for expanding organs.

  Beryl continued to eat.

  At two o’clock they arrived at the sea. They actually drove a little out onto it, but the snow was suddenly so choppy that David, who’d been driving while Jean-Claude went to the bathroom, stopped to ask his advice about which way to go next.

  Jean-Claude backed up the bus as fast as it could go. Once they were on even ground, he stopped and pointed back to where they’d been. Water was already pooling in over their tracks. They could now make out the open sea eighty feet beyond that, a white solid kind of water Beryl had never seen before. With each wave the water bobbed up and down like a heavy plastic sheet. A thick mist rose from the waves and formed a solid wall of steam nearly sixty feet into the air.

  “Arctic mist,” Jean-Claude said. “The air is cold. The sea is warmer.”

  By this time four bears were following them. The bears stopped, uncertain, thirty yards back. Noses up, heads moving from side to side, they circled steadily closer to join the three bears already there—one rolled over with its stomach exposed like a huge cat sleeping, another strolling and a third sitting patiently at the edge of the solid ice. They looked to Beryl like people spending the day at the beach, passing time. When the bus had approached, all of them turned, heads up.

  From inside the parked bus David and Beryl spent some time picking a location for the cage. They wanted a good view in all directions so they could film the bears on their own level without the telephoto, get the bears as they naturally lived. They delayed setting up the cage until the next day in hopes that the bears would have accepted the bus by then and wandered away far enough for them to move the cage to its location.

  They didn’t have much to do until morning, so David watched some of the videos that came with the bus’s VCR. It was impossible to pick up any TV channels so far out, so they had to rely on prerecorded shows—movies, sports events and even old episodes of “Gunsmoke.”

  Butler turned on the stereo and listened to music with the headphones. Jean-Claude began to make dinner. Beryl noticed that they seemed quite comfortable being so close, within ten feet of one another, without talking. She found their attitude awkward, like being in a subway car with the people staring fixedly at the posters. She wondered if they were able to ignore one another this easily now, what would be happening in another two weeks.

  Beryl got dressed and went up on the deck again. She could smell the sea along with the subtle musky scent she knew so well. Sitting in the half-dusk, she could not see how many bears were out there. She could only vaguely make out their lumbering shadows below. They paced in and out of the dark around the bus, looking up at its windows. They leaned against its sides and stretched upward with their paws. They crawled under one side and came out the other. One bear at the back of the bus spotted her and crouched repeatedly, swaying its head up and down to gauge perspective and distance. When it jumped, she simply held her breath. The animal hit the bus somewhere below her. The entire bus resonated. The bear staggered away, dazed.

  The bears seemed to be more daring out here, as if they knew, away from town, that humans were the trespassers. Perhaps also, Beryl thought, the bears
that went into town were the weaker ones, the ones who needed an easier meal from the dump or an abandoned house. The bears here had never scrounged for food, had never run from an encounter with a human, had never been darted with a tranquillizer and handled like interesting merchandise. These bears were the real things.

  Jean-Claude came up to the observation deck. He sat down beside her, his shoulder against hers. “David found some canned pears. He’s making tarts for dessert. Dinner’s almost ready,” he said. She enjoyed the feeling of weight and warmth against her shoulder. “This is strange for me,” he said, “being out here in a heated bus. Before I’ve always been on a snowmobile or sled.”

  She couldn’t imagine slogging forward through this white desert, dogs yipping, throwing themselves against the harness. Without landmarks, she couldn’t imagine picking any one place to bed down at night. Or see herself lying there, listening to herself and her dogs breathe upward, the only movement audible for miles.

  They looked for a while out at the world. She could hear what was probably a bear chewing on the edge of a tire below.

  She turned to Jean-Claude, touched his cheek with her glove and then reached forward to kiss him. Again she smelled his fresh wood smell. She tasted his lips, cold and surprised.

  He pulled away, looked out at the landscape for a moment, then turned to her and kissed her back.

  She pulled him closer. He tried to touch her face. His mouth felt warm. The skins between them rustled.

  Someone thumped on the hatch. They jumped. Dimly they heard David yelling from below, “Dinner’s ready.”

  She pulled back. Over Jean-Claude’s shoulder she could see a huge bear yellowed with time, thirty feet away. It paced back and forth watching them, its flat head snaking about.

  At dinner she caught David’s speculative glance. She blushed a bit under his gaze. When no one else was looking he narrowed his eyes, then wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. His face was so mobile, it could be the very mask of lewdness. She looked away, could feel the giggles welling up inside, tried to think only about cutting up her meat. Butler looked up from his dinner in time to catch David smiling widely at her reaction. Butler looked around the table, uncertain what was happening.

  “The first time I met my present love was three years ago in court,” David said. He leaned a little closer to Beryl and added, “We live together even now. It’s a long-term thing. It’s so nice not to be considered just some cheap love slave.” Beryl wouldn’t look at David. She was scared she would laugh. Jean-Claude wouldn’t look up at any of them. He had two high spots of color in his cheeks. Rebuffed by the others, David began to address his remarks to Butler.

  “Anyway, I was in court for running a stop sign, only there was no stop sign there. I had pointed that out at the time to the police officer, but he hadn’t seemed all that interested. Chris was there to lend emotional support to a friend fighting a no-left-on-red rap. When it was time for Chris’s friend to defend herself, she couldn’t even stand up and so Chris did, giving this impassioned speech. From the moment I first heard that voice, I was in love.”

  Beryl noticed that at no time did David slip and reveal a gender. Sitting beside Butler, he leaned in closer, smiling, involved in his story. Butler looked around confused, then a little nervous. He leaned away from David, closer to Beryl. His knee touched her thigh. She crossed her legs, shifting closer to Jean-Claude.

  “I congratulated my true love after the speech and, well, we spent the night together. We’ve been living together ever since.” To emphasize the point, he touched Butler on the hand. Butler jumped. David looked startled, then something else moved across his face, something harder. Beryl watched him reach out deliberately to touch Butler on the shoulder. “Feeling a little tense?” he asked.

  Butler leaned away. David looked for a moment at his hand hanging in the air between them.

  For the rest of the meal, David stared at Butler and occasionally slid his chair closer in order to reach food on that side of the table. He bumped their shoulders together. Butler ducked his head down, turned away. His face reddened like a bashful girl. David smiled a hard lopsided smile.

  She knew Butler’s anger would be terrible.

  When she was sure the others were asleep or at least should be, she tiptoed to Jean-Claude’s bunk. She touched his bare shoulder. He awoke instantly. She could hear the slight change in his breath. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and awkwardly reached forward to touch her face. They returned to her bedroom because Butler slept above Jean-Claude’s room; if David heard he wouldn’t care as much. She pulled Jean-Claude’s body after her into her bunk, closed the door.

  She held him close. He seemed confused about what to do. She wondered if he was uncertain because of his youth or because he met few women on these expeditions. Maybe he knew no one well. He was gentle and awkward. He sighed softly in surprise.

  They weren’t sure how the sound might carry. They breathed as deeply as in sleep, their movements slowed to the restlessness of dreaming. His body smelled sweet as cedar. He was slight and hard, made only of bone and sinew. Beryl thought he wouldn’t change much in age, no fattening or shrinking. He would change little even in death, just a slight stiffening.

  Afterward he cried. Like his laugh he made no sound as he cried, just his slight rocking breath and the water on her shoulder. She pulled him closer into her side.

  In the morning when she awoke, she was alone.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Hey Butler,” David said at breakfast. “You know, that turtleneck is just the perfect color for you.” He smiled at Beryl and raised his eyebrows in anticipation of Butler’s response.

  Butler wouldn’t look up from his cereal. He said, “It’s just a shirt.”

  “But it’s sea bottle green. It brings out your eyes,” said David. Beryl was surprised that he could undertake this baiting of Butler so lightly.

  Butler stirred his cereal around and around. Some of the flakes began to break up. “Hey Jean,” he said, pronouncing it like “Gene,” “why don’t you tell us about the worst time you’ve ever had out here?” He smiled up at Jean-Claude, enthusiastic for this new topic. “Tell us about the last time you went out and everyone didn’t make it back.”

  Jean-Claude put his toast down, looked at Butler and then around the table at the others. They were silent, watching him. Beryl realized she wasn’t the only one who had wondered about the bad things that could happen on this journey.

  Jean-Claude seemed confused by their interest. “Those times,” he said slowly, “weren’t comic books, not stories. People died. People I knew.” He got up from the table. “Excuse me,” he said and left.

  Butler looked embarrassed. “I didn’t think he would …” Beryl noticed that when he was upset his mouth hung soft and unbalanced; his face didn’t look so guarded. “Look, I’ve got some notes to finish up.” He left, carrying his dishes.

  David and Beryl sat there for a moment. “Whew,” said David. “Tension, tension.”

  Beryl laughed nervously and took another sip of her coffee.

  David leaned back in his chair to see if anyone was coming around the corner. He pulled his chair a little closer to her and lowered his voice. “Now,” he said, “while we’ve got a private moment, I’m going to be a busybody. I don’t want to offend you or anything, but I gotta say it’s not a good idea to be sleeping with anyone while we’re locked up on this bus. I’ve seen this happen before with small groups. Once in Borneo, six days out from the nearest town, one guy almost killed another, knocked him down and hammered on his head with a steel water canteen. This bus is just too small, you know? It’s gonna cause problems.”

  She felt the heat rising up her neck. She’d thought they’d been quiet enough. She got up to take her dishes to the kitchen. “I really think it’s none of your business,” she said.

  He followed her and she turned to face him, standing close within the small kitchen. “Look,” he replied, “normally, I would be the first to agree.
But you don’t know what can happen. You haven’t seen it. It’ll affect all of us.”

  “Well, speaking of a small bus,” she asked, “what are you doing with Butler, huh?”

  “Oh, come on.” David looked startled. “That sort of shit he’s doing pisses me off. Acting like I’m contagious. This is an education for him. If there were any justice in the world, he’d be paying me.”

  “You’re scaring him out of his mind. That’s really gonna make for a small bus.”

  He watched her. She could smell the mint from his toothpaste. He blinked.

  “OK,” he said. “OK. Let’s you and me not start in on each other too. Let’s keep our sense of humor about this stuff. Tell you what, I’ll back off of Butler. And I suggest you back off of Jean-Claude. It’s gonna be a long trip.”

  After breakfast Butler took to standing even closer to Beryl than before. He brushed up against her more than he had to, made sure to seat himself next to her at every meal, touched her waist when he needed her attention. He held a lock of her hair at one point, brought it to his nose, asking what shampoo she used. She leaned away, gritting her teeth.

  That day she sat in the cage.

  They took most of the morning figuring out a way to drag it to the right spot and get her in safely. They had assumed that the bears would lose interest and back off enough for them to maneuver the cage around. But the bears still prowled about the bus, even more of them than the night before. They explored the outside of the bus with a single-minded determination, bony with hunger. Many of them hadn’t eaten at all in a month, hadn’t eaten well in four months. This hunger didn’t affect them as much as it would humans. When rearing young, the mothers sometimes went three months without touching food, emerging from their dens emaciated and desperate once the cubs had grown big enough to survive outside.

  To drive the bears away from the bus, Butler first tried opening the front door just enough to shoot a gun into the air. The gun boomed across the snow, the echo shivered into the sky. The animals looked over, slightly curious. Butler handled the gun with an expert’s ease, breaking open the chamber to load it. He aimed lower, closer to the bears. They looked up at the soft whiz of the bullet over their heads. None moved away. Butler shot the gun into the ground near their feet. They stepped forward to sniff the hole in the snow. Butler cursed.