Bearskin

by James A. McLaughlin

  The dogs all leaped up at once as if the ground were suddenly electrified and stood in the fire road baying in the direction of the mountain. When they paused for breath Rice heard the throaty putt-putt-putt of two-stroke engines, ATVs making their slow way down the overgrown switchbacks. The arrogant bastards must’ve cut down STP’s new fence at the end of the fire road. They couldn’t have breached the Forest Service gate: the steel posts were set in concrete, and a welded steel box protected the padlock. You would have to reach your hand up into the box, remove a big active wasp nest, and feel around with the key to open the thing.

  Three four-wheelers drove past the cabin and into the gravel parking area. The dogs had backed into the mowed grass in front of the lodge, still baying, declaring their new allegiance to the caretaker of the Turk Mountain Preserve, provider of canned lunch meat. One of the big red-faced Stiller boys he’d seen at the Beer & Eat that night in Wanless—DeWayne, not Nardo—drove the first machine, and the skinny guy Jesse drove another. Three hounds stood on a metal platform mounted behind the seat of Jesse’s machine. Two older men rode double on the third ATV. They wore baseball caps embroidered with Black & Tan and the figures of hounds. They looked like twins, with bloodshot blue eyes and identical short beards, grizzled and tobacco-stained. The one in back had a lever-action carbine propped on his hip. He must’ve seen the pose in an old Western, some crusty character actor riding shotgun on a stagecoach.

  DeWayne dismounted and caught one of the hounds by the scruff of its neck as the other five shied away and trotted past the porch, out of reach, where they sat on their haunches in the grass to watch. No one seemed to have noticed Rice, sitting on the top step, obscured by the railing. He stood and walked over to the middle of the porch, where they couldn’t miss him. The exhaust from the three ATVs stank of burning oil.

  “Where’s ’is fuckin’ collar?” DeWayne complained. He turned and said, “Hey, Jesse, didn’t they—” but stopped when the other pointed at Rice.

  Rice tossed the hounds’ collars, all strapped together, out into the yard toward DeWayne. Then he retrieved his beer from the top step and set it on the flat top of the railing, leaned forward. Waited. The others shut off their idling machines. DeWayne swatted the reluctant hound open-handed on the side of its head, dragged it over to the bundle, picked one out, and buckled it around the hound’s neck. He rifled through the rest, discarding several, and hauled the dog over to his four-wheeler. It sprang onto the platform behind the seat like a cat and waited for DeWayne to clip on a short leash. DeWayne shut off his motor.

  In the sudden silence, DeWayne said something under his breath and Jesse’s face broke into a brief, horrifying smile, showing a row of crooked brown lower teeth.

  “I reckon you fellows know you’re trespassing,” Rice said.

  “We got a legal right, asshole.” DeWayne spat juice from the snuff swelling his lower lip. “We can come on anybody’s land to get our hounds, and you’ve done committed a misdemeanor taking them collars.”

  “Section eighteen point two dash ninety-seven and one-thirty-six of the Code of Virginia.” Rice smiled. “But you can’t have a firearm with you when you go after your dogs, and you can’t use vehicles without the permission of the landowner. And since this is only the hound practice season, you’re not supposed to have a firearm with you anyway. So I guess we’re even.” He wasn’t going to ask about the bait, didn’t want word getting out that he knew it was there.

  Jesse smirked but DeWayne ignored Rice’s recitation entirely. “Where the rest at?”

  Rice shrugged. “They ran off with the big yellow sonofagun. You might find ’em with your radios—that big one wouldn’t let me take his collar off.”

  The two old men, still sitting double on their machine, laughed at this in ridiculous, high-pitched voices. Rice wondered if they were simple.

  “Cain’t nobody but ol’ Bilton git near ’im!” one of them screeched. DeWayne snarled some sort of insult and they quieted, but the one sitting in back frowned and shouldered his rifle, taking his time, and aimed it at DeWayne’s head. Rice thought he was about to witness a murder, but the man hissed “Pow” in a quiet voice and lowered the rifle. The others paid him no attention.

  DeWayne moved a few slow steps toward the porch. He seemed to be fighting an urge to charge up the steps and strangle Rice to death but after a few seconds he managed a taunting grin.

  “We heard you were lookin’ for us. Heard somebody messed with your truck.”

  Rice smiled back. “Breaking windows and running away is pretty chickenshit for wannabe outlaw bikers, DeWayne.” The man frowned at this but seemed unable to think of a reply right away.

  “I like your dogs,” Rice said. “How much y’all want for these ones that followed me home?”

  “Ain’t but one ourn,” DeWayne said. He stood in the yard and watched as Jesse, who still hadn’t said a word to Rice, fiddled with a radio receiver, and climbed up on the seat of his vehicle, reaching overhead with an H-shaped wire antenna. “And he ain’t for sale.”

  “What about the others?”

  “They Dempsey Boger’s hounds. We don’t hunt with that black sumbitch. You call him if you want to.”

  Jesse was waving the antenna back and forth in a wide, diminishing arc, listening to the receiver’s high-pitched beeps, as if he were dowsing for water. When the waving stopped, the beeps coming fast and regular, the antenna pointed south, toward the Dutch River. He picked up a walkie-talkie and spoke with someone, the other voice loud and angry and completely incomprehensible. Jesse looked at Rice.

  “You gone let us out that goddamn gate of yourn or you gone make us cut the lock?” He had small, close-set gray eyes and skin so pale Rice could see the blue veins branching in his temple.

  Rice considered the question. He sure as hell wasn’t going to let them out, but he hadn’t called the game warden or the sheriff, and he assumed the lock-cutting threat was not idle. He wondered if there was some way he could keep them from cutting the lock on his own. He glanced at his truck, imagined driving down there in front of them, parking the truck to block the gate. But then what? Then they’d have to drive back up the mountain, go back the way they came. That might teach them some sort of lesson, but he didn’t want them driving their stupid machines through the property again. It was a conundrum.

  “You shouldn’t of messed with them collars, motherfucker.” DeWayne had edged closer and closer to the porch, and now he stood in the grass directly below Rice, glaring up at him. His scalp was pink underneath his spiky red hair, sweat dripping down the flushed, freckled skin of his wide, frowning forehead. He reminded Rice of a snapping turtle, dim and single-minded, pale greenish eyes underwater, looking up from the bottom of a murky pond.

  “Come on, DeWayne.” Jesse had started the engine of his four-wheeler, but DeWayne wasn’t finished yet.

  “We hunt up on that mountain whenever we want. There ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.”

  “You’re wrong about that. I’m up there all the time, and there’s lots of things I can do. You’re not going to like me.”

  The older men cackled at this. “Thar’s a neeeuw sharf in town!”

  DeWayne’s face had turned a deeper shade of red, and Rice knew what was coming before he even said it.

  “Then you better watch your back when you’re up in them woods.”

  Rice felt a perverse thrill. This guy was breathtakingly stupid.

  “DeWayne, I believe you just threatened me.”

  He was already on his way down the stairs, not sure what he was planning. DeWayne tensed and took two steps back, clenching and unclenching his thick, red-freckled fists. He was heavier than Rice, not as tall. Funny him being so nervous. From what Rice had heard about the Stiller boys, beating people up was pretty much standard practice.

  “Remember the old caretaker, Sara? Did you threaten her too? Did you show her what a big man you are?” Walking straight at DeWayne, he watched for a reaction and what
he got was pretty ambiguous: a pause, a flash of surprise, maybe, or DeWayne’s guard coming down for an instant. It was enough.

  “What the fuck? We never did nothing to her.” After a moment, he added, “She didn’t steal no fuckin’ collars.”

  “We got to go, DeWayne,” Jesse called. “They down by the fuckin’ river.”

  DeWayne seemed to grasp Rice’s intention before Rice himself, and he reversed his retreat, deciding instead on preemptive aggression. He was shouting, spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth, but Rice couldn’t hear what he said, couldn’t hear anything but a high-pitched whine, a sound like the beehive had made as he broke away the paneling in the cabin and there was that pause before the bees attacked. Now a familiar and not unpleasant sensation of tipping forward, submitting to gravity, like jumping off that cliff after Sara. DeWayne rushed him with his fist raised, elbow cocked behind it. Rice feinted right and slipped left as DeWayne’s forearm shot past his ear, then he stepped in close and torqued a left hook into the side of DeWayne’s face. In his imagination his fist seemed to pass through DeWayne’s skull and out the opposite temple. DeWayne’s head snapped over his shoulder and a wet brown turd of snuff popped out of his mouth. He took a step back and sat down hard on the ground.

  Rice forced himself to break off, to leave DeWayne sitting there, not really hurt. He glanced at the old man with the rifle, he and his twin on the ATV both grinning and nodding their heads as if this were all a farce Rice had staged for their entertainment. He walked to DeWayne’s machine and unclipped the leash from the hound. His left hand wasn’t working very well, should’ve used his elbow like he’d been taught. The hound wagged and panted and hopped off the platform, looking up hopefully at Rice’s face. Was he stealing bear hounds now? There were three more to free, but when he stepped over to Jesse’s ATV those hounds didn’t know him and they crouched back on their haunches and barked. They had big, angry voices that drove into his head like steel spikes. The setter and Boger’s other hounds started barking, too, nervous, alarmed, milling around in the yard. Rice no longer felt like he was in control of the situation. He looked at Jesse, who backed away, holding his radio receiver out in front of him like a shield, then he turned back toward the lodge just as one of the old men—still grinning—came down on his forehead with an oaken club from the firewood pile.

  While Rice lay stunned in the gravel drive, DeWayne staggered over and kicked him once in the ribs, not very hard, he didn’t seem to be feeling too good himself. He leaned down to pick up something, Rice couldn’t see what, probably the old man’s club, but there was a metallic click and someone said unh-unh in a high mocking singsong. DeWayne cursed but he tossed away whatever it was and lurched out of Rice’s field of vision.

  The four-wheelers drove off. He tried to stand but his head felt like it had been split open and he started to black out so he lay there with his eyes closed, trying not to think about anything, until it was nearly full dark. One of the dogs came and snuffled his ear, but he didn’t open his eyes to see which one. When he finally got up, they had all disappeared. It made him unaccountably sad. His left hand was swelling, the first and second knuckles throbbing. Dried blood in his eyes, ears ringing. He washed down six aspirin with the warm beer from the porch railing and lay on the sofa with a towel on his head to soak up the blood. He sensed there would come a time when he would laugh at his performance today, but the pain leaping inside his skull stole his sense of humor. When the aspirin started working he promptly passed out.

  Twenty-Three

  CERESO Nogales, Sonora. Visiting day, number five. He had become a counter inside just like everyone else. Two months, four days in, who knew how many to go, five visiting days, five visits from Apryl. She’s there today in tight jeans, scuffed Docs, and a leather jacket over a black T-shirt. Standard uniform. She was smiling, which meant she was hiding stress. He knew better than to try to extract the source. Before, she’d worried about the danger she’d brought to her sister, but she’d convinced Tracy to move back in with their parents in Scottsdale, a place of at least relative security.

  They sat at their usual table in the corner. The guards along the walls staring straight ahead. Other prisoners at other tables with lovers, wives, families. Low murmurs in Sinaloan Spanish, Rice catching about three-quarters of it. News from home, mostly. What you wanted to hear when you were inside.

  “How you doing?” She watched him closely, smile gone, her concern for him pushing away whatever the other thing was.

  “Healthy as hell. No beer, no tequila, nothing to eat but nutritious prison food. All I do is work out. Raoul is teaching me the way of the sicario.”

  Her eyes widened. He wasn’t supposed to say his cellmate’s name out loud, the one who’d loaned him the knife his first night inside. “Goddammit, Rice. Please don’t expect me to fucking joke about that.”

  “We’re getting along fine.”

  “Stop it!” She’d leaned forward and said that a little too loudly. Heads turned toward them. A few glares, blank stares. She sat back, breathed. “You’re being naïve. I’ve asked around. Fucking DEA had them put you with him on purpose. People don’t get along with him. They survive him, survive contact with him, or they don’t. Usually they don’t.”

  “I’ll survive. Really, the man is misunderstood.”

  He didn’t want her to cave to the DEA and make herself a target of the cartel, so he’d already told her Raoul Fernandez was protecting him. He’d told her to stop worrying. Fernandez was important to the Juarez cartel, and with the Aztecas watching their backs, Rice was a lot safer in CERESO than Apryl was out there in southern Arizona, caught between the DEA and the Sinaloas.

  Naturally, she found his story far-fetched, and now she glared at him long enough to justify a change of subject.

  “I slept with M.,” she said. She didn’t look away, didn’t look down. She raised her left eyebrow.

  “Really?” he asked.

  She nodded. She seemed pleased with herself. They knew now that undercover DEA agent Mia Cortez had infiltrated the cartel in Chicago but recently transferred to the Tucson office. According to Apryl, she swore she wasn’t responsible for Rice’s situation, that it was her bosses who’d insisted on using him as leverage. Apryl was frustratingly cryptic in their visiting-day conversations, but as best he could tell, she’d been playing along, parceling out a few juicy but insignificant tidbits in her role as confidential informant, hoping to co-opt Cortez in some grand plan she wouldn’t talk about, working both sides in a dangerous balancing act that drove him mad with worry.

  “And how did that go?” he asked.

  She gave a little impatient shake of her head, grimaced. “You know what this means.”

  “You’re going to have to put a rainbow sticker on your jeep?” He had to admit he was a little jealous. Then, naturally, he started wishing he’d been there for the act. Mia Cortez was an attractive woman, about Apryl’s height, curvy. His imagination started firing.

  “Rice.” That purple gaze again. She knew what he was thinking.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, acting like he should have a clue what the fuck she was up to. “It’s good news.”

  Twenty-Four

  He dreamed of snakes: thick, arrogant vipers in the lodge, coiled listlessly on the furniture, under the bed, on the kitchen counters. Their heads were grinning ceramic snake skulls and they seemed deadly and invincible as gods, ignoring him as he crept about, trying to live in a place that had never belonged to him. Eventually he realized they ignored him because he was already dead, had been for a long time, he was only a ghost and the snakes were waiting for something that had nothing to do with him. The realization woke him up and he lay for a while on the sofa in the gray predawn, wondering how much his head was going to hurt when he sat up. He’d been having death dreams more often of late. Sometimes he felt like he was rehearsing, as if his subconscious had decided he needed practice, as if we learn how to die in our dreams.

  D
empsey Boger drove up around seven and leaned on his horn once, long and angry. The Stillers must’ve followed through on their threat to cut the lock on the gate. Bolt cutters would be standard equipment for those guys. Boger had turned his truck around so the bed was facing toward the lodge. With his back to the porch, he lowered the tailgate and reached in, pulled the stiff carcass of a dog toward him to rest on the tailgate. Two other hounds watched through the wire doors of their box kennels in the truck’s bed.

  Rice hooked his thumb through Boger’s radio collars and walked out on the front porch barefoot. He shivered. It was only late September, but the crisp morning had the feel of autumn rushing into winter. He’d taped a wad of gauze to the cut on his head, which probably needed stitches. The pain and blood loss left him mildly nauseated and lightheaded. He felt permeable, uncontained; the breeze blew right through him.

  “Dempsey.” The man turned at Rice’s voice.

  “I brought you somethin’.” He lifted the carcass and laid it on the ground at his feet. “We called this one Monroe, on account of his voice.”

  Rice looked at the dead dog lying in the gravel, its mouth slightly open. Monroe, with the emphasis on the first syllable. High and lonesome, no doubt. The dog’s coat was muddy and spotted with blood.

  “What happened?”

  “Well now, Monroe here,” Boger said, “looks like he done got hisself run over after you took the goddamn collars off the goddamn hounds. Found him this mornin’ on the road through the pass. Vet said somebody’d dropped off another’n that got hit, a little setter cross. Some more was wanderin’ along the river.” He paused, staring at the carcass. He had a smoker’s rasp, but the modulation of his voice was smooth and rhythmic, a storyteller’s voice. “One’s still missin’. They ain’t used to cars, roads. I try to keep ’em away from roads.”

  Rice decided he couldn’t stay on the porch. He wondered how much Boger knew about what had happened with Stiller and the others. Walking down the steps, he felt none of the anger, none of the eerie power that had propelled him yesterday. The breeze was chilly, but the sun felt warm on his face. The gravel path dry and cool on his feet. Far down at the south edge of the meadow, a grove of fencepost locusts shed tiny leaves winking soundlessly to the ground like rain.