The Cage Keeper

by Andre Dubus III

  In the bathroom Dean peed but did not flush the toilet. He put the lid down then stood on it, and looked out the window through the bare tops of birch and beech trees to the sky. It was still a deep blue over the house and the slope leading down to the water, but it paled over the middle part of the lake and became a thin pink line just above the trees of the Boy Scout camp on the other side. The water was dark brown, almost black, and from the window the sand beach looked to Dean as white as bone.

  He went back into his room and pulled on a pair of corduroy pants, a T-shirt, and Kip’s blue sweater. He found some socks that didn’t match but were thick, and so pulled them on and laced his boondocker boots on over them. He took his BB rifle from the corner, laid it on his bed, then pulled a sock full of BBs out of the top right drawer of his bureau and tied the hanging bulge to his front belt loop. He picked up his rifle and looked down at sleeping Kip and his pee spot; he thought about waking him up but then saw himself walking through the woods alone with his gun and huge supply of ammunition, not having to take turns to shoot or anything. He pressed the sockful of BBs against his thigh, went quickly down the stairs and out the door.

  The porch was open on all sides and overlooked the water through the trees. Dean stepped off it and made his way down the slope, over exposed pine roots, to the gravel road in front of the lake. He stopped there and looked out over the water at the thin trails of mist that hovered and glided on its surface. Something splashed beside the tall water reeds near the beach and Dean looked and saw the flick of a fin before it went under. He started down the road away from the water and the house into the woods. He saw his breath in front of him as he walked by the summer cottages that were built close to the lake, and when he was past them, he could see the wide bend of the river through the trees. It began on the other side of his house where the lake made a small cove then flowed under a short wooden bridge to the marsh. It widened there then pushed itself all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, about twenty miles to the northeast, his father had told him; his father told him and Kip lots of things, like how moss grows on the north side of trees and it’s better to take a dirty skillet and wash it down on the beach with sand because soap isn’t good for the black iron. His father had been in the marines, a captain, and sometimes before they ate, he would have Jody and Dean and Kip and Simone hold their hands out for inspection, see if they were clean enough.

  Dean walked along the road holding his rifle in front of him with two hands and letting the sockful of BBs bounce and sway against his leg. He was past all the summer houses now and into a part of the woods that was so thick with evergreen trees it was almost always dark here; even in the summer, during the hottest and brightest time of the day, when the mosquitoes would sting everywhere, even through Dean’s clothes, this place would be shadows where only scattered rays of light made it all the way to the ground. But this morning, with the sun still barely on the other side of the lake, the woods appeared so dark to Dean he felt he was almost in a cave. And there was frost everywhere; he saw the thin icy layer of it on the moss patches at the base of the trees, and the brown pine needles that blanketed the floor of the woods were covered with it. He stopped walking and sat beside the road. He rested his rifle on his thighs, unscrewed the long thin tube beneath the barrel, then untied the sock at his belt loop. He reached into it for a handful of BBs and dropped them one at a time into the tube’s tiny hole until his hand was almost empty and he no longer heard the BBs roll down to meet the others but stop just inside the magazine. He screwed the tube back into place, tied his sock to his side, then stood and slapped the cold pine needles from the seat of his pants. The woods were very quiet and he heard only the skitter of what he thought might be a chipmunk or a squirrel, then dead pine twigs falling to the ground, but no birds. Dean knew from his fourth-grade teacher, Miss Williams, that a lot of New Hampshire birds fly south for the winter; but it wasn’t winter yet, just November, and even if the others had left already, the woodpecker and whippoorwill were supposed to stay behind to hibernate in thick nests and tree holes.

  Dean walked farther down the road to where it split off and went in two directions. He stayed on the right fork, which he knew would take him deeper into the woods to where he could no longer hear the big eighteen-wheelers that he began to hear now. The left fork led to those; and Dean started to walk faster; but it wasn’t that he did not like highways and cars and trucks—they were okay—though he found he could not get as excited about them as his friend Clayton and the other boys in school. During quiet time before lunch, they drew pictures of dragsters and dune buggies while Dean read books about Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, and Wild Bill Hickock. And after school, when he would walk one or two or three miles into the woods, it was not to hear the whiz and whoosh of cars and trucks; when he was deep into them, down on the river side in the spring and fall when the mosquitoes were not so bad, when he would come to a place between two trees where the ground was so thick with fallen pine needles that he felt he could almost bounce on it, and so would lie down on it, and look up at the sky past the tips of evergreen trees that must have taken root sometime around the Civil War, Dean felt that there was nowhere else he ever wanted to be. He would hear a bobwhite call out from somewhere near the river. He would close his eyes then catch the dirt scent of the decayed pine needles beneath him. And with his eyes shut, he would feel the bigness of things around him, but it was a big with soft places and nice smells and familiar sounds, and so he never felt afraid there.

  Dean kept walking but did not know how far down the right fork he would go, maybe just as far as that place with all the hemlock trees. The last time he had been there it was a week before last Christmas and he and his father and Kip, and even Simone, had walked to it the day after a blizzard to cut down a Christmas tree. His father had worn his machete at his side and Dean had liked the look of it slapping against his leg as they made their way through the snow. Then Kip found a good tree, and they had watched as their father had cut it down and pulled it out onto the road. The woods had gotten very dark then, and Simone said that her toes were frozen, but she had begged to come and their father had to drag the tree, so he told her she was just going to have to march it out with the rest of the troops. She did, Dean remembered, but she had cried a little bit, too.

  Dean cocked his gun, aimed at the thin white trunk of a birch tree, and squeezed the trigger. He felt the recoil of the spring with his finger and heard the tick of the BB against the wood. He cocked his rifle again then looked for something else to shoot, wishing a bird or a squirrel would show up. Or maybe even a bigger animal. No, not a bigger animal, he thought, and he walked off the road in the direction of the river and sat down, resting his back against the scarred trunk of a tall beech tree. He was aware of his fingers and the tip of his nose, and he wished he had taken Jody’s gloves from her coat pockets. But then he thought how he wouldn’t be able to load and shoot with them on his hands. He rested his rifle on his outstretched legs and tried to ignore the rumble of his stomach, and he remembered that Kit Carson book he read this past summer, the parts about the fur trapping and how Kit would go days sometimes eating only snow and sucking the bark of certain kinds of trees. Dean thought about that: sitting in the snow sucking bark for breakfast. And he thought of that morning last winter when he had gone into the kitchen for another bowl of cereal and had seen his mother and father sitting at the table. His mother was leaning forward and was talking in a quick low voice, and his father was listening, smoking a cigarette, and his face had looked calm, almost peaceful, like it did whenever Dean would see him listen to one of his jazz records for the first time—relaxed, but trying to feel what it was he was supposed to feel—and it didn’t seem to Dean to be the right face to have on because his mother’s was all tight while she spoke. When he saw that, Dean had stopped where he was in the doorway and heard her say, “You goddamned marine.” And he had not known why she had said it like that, because he liked that part about his father. He liked the w
ay his voice could fill up the rooms of the house like his mother’s couldn’t, even when she was mad.

  Dean pulled the trigger and heard the BB dance its way through the branches above him. He stood to cock his rifle, and when he did, he heard the hollow tapping sound of a woodpecker working up ahead of him and to his left. He knew how noises could fool you in the woods, though, especially when there was water nearby, and as he walked forward in a crouch, stepping lightly over sticks and twigs that broke dry under his feet, he looked up at the middle third of the trees and scanned them from east to west. He heard it again, but this time it seemed to be coming from his right. He walked straight ahead until he came to a swell in the ground that dropped steeply to the marsh. He paused there and looked out over it and the river, which he had never tried walking to before because in the spring the marsh was covered with water, and now in fall, almost winter, it looked like it could swallow you; there were clumps of earth covered with grass the color of straw, and in between them were dark ribbons of mud that looked to Dean like they would open up under his feet and suck him under. But in the summer the water grass would be green and yellow and three or four feet tall and when a breeze blew through them, Dean would watch them all bend in dry rolling waves like they were bowing down to the powers of the earth. But now, early in the morning and just before winter, when the straw clumps lay matted and weighted down with frost, Dean thought that the marsh looked as dangerous as ever—a flat wet land a man would have to face to get to the water for pickerel and bass. There was mist on the river, but Dean could still see its quiet swirling surface. Above the trees the sky was bathed in a pale gray light, and Dean wondered what had happened to the sun he had seen the beginnings of on the other side of the lake.

  The air was cold and a little damp, and it felt as if it might even snow. He thought of winter coming, how it’s the only season that stays like it will never leave; and he thought of last winter and how everything first started then; he remembered how he and Kip and Jody and Simone used to all sit together at the top of the stairs to listen and sometimes giggle until their mother would come yell up at them to quit being so nosy and to go to bed. Her face had looked okay then, almost cheerful, but then spring came, and summer, and that’s when all the parties started, that’s when almost every weekend people from his father’s college would come over and there would always be lots of music and loud talk and laughing, and sometimes crying, too. And on those hot late nights after everyone had gone home, Dean could hear his mother and father over the whir and rattle of the window fan. He would go out to the lighted hallway to listen and once he saw his older sister Jody sitting on the top stair in her nightgown. He sat down beside her, and they listened together. They sat there for a long time, and it had felt to Dean that what they were doing was very important, that if he and Jody could only figure out why their mother and father were fighting, then they could go tell Kip and Simone and, together, the four of them could all help to fix it. Then he had heard their mother interrupt their father and say, “Oh shut up! Just shut up!” And Dean had felt afraid, but Jody had burst out laughing and so he did too, and when their mother came to the bottom of the stairs her face had not looked cheerful but tired, very tired, and then angry as she told them, “This is none of your business, now go to bed right this goddamned minute.” And Dean had gone to bed, but later, lying in the dark with his sheet pulled up to his chin, he had felt that something big and dangerous was going on downstairs and that if he ignored it and went to sleep, he would wake up in a house on fire.

  Dean aimed his rifle over the marsh at the river. He pulled the trigger but did not see the tiny splash of a BB. Probably sucked down into the marsh, he thought. He cocked his rifle again then just stood there with it. He liked this picture of himself standing on a hill with his loaded gun, guarding the woods and his family from whatever might try to crawl out of the marsh to get them. And he thought of wolves swimming across the river then making their way through the straw clumps and mud with their tongues hanging out and their fangs all foamy. He would lie down on his belly and pick them off one at a time, but with a BB gun it would be harder because he would have to hit them in the eyes to blind them and he would do it too, aiming, taking his time, then shooting the way his father had shown him, not pulling the trigger but squeezing it, hitting each wolf once in each eye until the whole pack of them would just stop in the marsh to grope and stumble through the mud, bleeding and howling at the darkness.

  Dean listened for the woodpecker but only heard the faint but constant scurrying of what sounded to him like hundreds of ants and termites and spiders and ladybugs and crickets as they finished their morning feeding and went about their day getting ready for winter. And at the thought of food, Dean turned away from the marsh to head back for the road. But then he saw it: to his left and down the slope, almost in the marsh, was a tall dead pine tree. It was stripped of its bark in some places; its branches were thick broken stumps; and the top third of it lay on the ground at its base. The woodpecker was perched at the very top of the broken tree, darting its beak in and out of the hole it had made while its thin legs clutched at the bark. It was the yellow-tailed kind Dean saw mainly in the summer and he raised his BB rifle and put the bird in his sights, but he knew it was too high and out of range, so he lowered his gun and began to walk down the slope. He kept his eyes on the bird as he made his way down the incline, but some of the pine needles were giving way under his boots so he looked in front of him every few steps as he went. When he reached flat ground he felt it turn soggy and he could smell the wet grass from the marsh. It’s a very bad smell, he thought, like crap almost. He heard the woodpecker again, but it had stopped the hard drilling part of its work and was sticking its beak into the hole then pulling it out again, letting tiny chips of wood drop all the way to the ground so close to Dean that he could not believe it did not know he was there. He spread his legs and planted his boots in the soft ground. Then he raised his rifle and put the yellow strip of the bird’s wing feathers in his sights. I’ll hit it there, he thought, right there, and he held his breath and squeezed the trigger. At first it felt like a BB hadn’t left the barrel at all, but just a little blast of air. It did that sometimes, misfired like a real gun, and he lowered it quickly to cock it again, but when he did, he saw two single yellow feathers floating down the length of the tree. He looked up at the woodpecker and saw it pull its beak out of the hole; then it raised its wings and released itself from the tree, but instead of flying forward it flew backward, out over the marsh, treading air with quick awkward flaps of its wings. The bird’s beak was still facing the tree, and it seemed to Dean that it was looking straight into the hole, trying to understand how this had come to happen. Then Dean saw a feather come away, then another; the woodpecker flapped its wings in a flurry, stopped, then flapped them once more before it went still, and dropped straight into the marsh.

  For what seemed to him a very long time, Dean stood with his boots sunk firmly in the ground. His rifle hung down by his side and he held it with one hand. He was looking at the spot where the bird had landed; it was a straw thicket surrounded by a ring of mud and it reminded Dean of the castles and moats in the King Arthur books Miss Williams sometimes read out loud before lunch. But he could not see the bird, and he hoped that it was lying in the straw and hadn’t bounced behind the thicket into the bad-smelling mud. He wanted to go get it and make sure it was dead, but he knew he would not step into the marsh to try. He felt his face flush as he thought of Kit Carson; he knew if Kit had just killed an animal, even a skinny woodpecker, he would not let it go to waste but would eat it, or at least use the feathers for something, like to make an earmuff or a necklace. And he wished his father were out here in the woods with him; then he could watch him walk out into the marsh in his marine boots to get the bird, and if it was still alive, well then they could shoot it real fast in the head to put it out of its misery. Maybe his father could show him how to skin it too. Dean had never heard of anyone ea
ting a woodpecker before, but he knew people ate other little birds, like doves. He looked out at the marsh and the quiet river and the trees beyond it. He felt the woods at his back and he could not remember them ever seeming so quiet. He stepped toward the marsh but his boot sunk in up to his laces and he pulled it out, and stepped back.

  By the time Dean reached the fork in the road it had already begun to snow. It was an icy snow, and it made a thousand little ticking noises through the trees as it fell, but Dean only saw a few flakes and they were the ones that came down through the space between the treetops over the road. The air felt colder to him and he was very hungry. He wondered if anyone was up yet. It was Saturday, a cartoon day, and he imagined Jody and Simone sitting on the floor in front of the TV with bowls of Captain Crunch in their laps. When he came to the summer cottages he could see the woods opening up ahead of him. His rifle was not cocked and when he walked by the last cottage before he came to the lake and the slope leading up to his house, he did not turn to put another tiny hole in the bathroom window that he sometimes shot at for target practice. I don’t need it anymore, he thought as he came out onto the road below his house. He looked up at it and it seemed to him that sleeping was still going on inside of it. Snowflakes landed lightly but wet on his face and he saw that they were beginning to make the hill white, but he knew that it was not cold enough yet and they would not cover the ground for long. He looked out at the lake and saw that the mist had gotten thicker. He could barely see the water and the sky was gray and looked huge and heavy, like it had just come closer to the earth to drop its snow. The dock was white now, too, and Dean turned and began to walk down the road toward the wooden bridge between the lake and the river. The gravel felt hard beneath his boots, but it was dusted white, and he remembered how thick with frost the driveway behind the house was as they all followed their father out to the car, two Sundays ago. Kip and Simone were still in their pajamas and had put their boots and coats on over them, but Dean and Jody were all dressed and Jody even wore her gloves. When they got to the car, Dean had looked into it and seen it packed full of clothes and boxes of books, and he pictured his father staying up all night, loading it while they slept. Their mother had stayed in the kitchen and Dean wished she had come outside, too. Then they heard her crying turn into a long, high wail; and it had sounded to Dean like the noise a deer might make. His father opened the car door and turned to face the four of them. He was smiling but there were tears on his cheeks and in his moustache. He bent down and picked up Simone first, and Dean watched him shut his eyes tight as he hugged her. When he put her down Jody moved to him quickly and kissed him on the mouth before she put her arms around his neck. Their mother’s crying was getting louder in the house and Dean watched his father try to smile again with his wet face as he pulled away from Jody, turned to him and Kip, and then hugged them both together. Dean’s shoulder had hurt pushing against Kip’s, but when he smelled his father’s aftershave lotion, he had kissed him on the neck.