The Hummingbird and the Bear

by Nicholas Hogg

  ‘For what?’

  I looked at the painted brown planks holding the cottages together. ‘It looked grander in the photos.’

  ‘Hey,’ she said, reaching and touching my chin. ‘Come here.’ I leant across and kissed her. ‘I don’t care where we are, really. All I know is that we’re about to close a door on a room that’s ours.’

  I checked us in by writing Mr and Mrs Smith in the guest book. The receptionist read the names and looked over her reading glasses through the window. Kay was taking her bag off the back seat.

  ‘Just give me a call if you need anything.’

  I thanked her.

  ‘But not after nine,’ she added. ‘It’s just you and the critters then. Well, and your wife.’

  I faked a smile, then walked out to the cabin, my steps crunching on the gravel drive.

  Kay was waiting by our cottage, leaning against the front door. ‘Take a good look at those hills,’ she said. ‘Because we’re not coming back out until it’s dark.’

  I didn’t turn round. ‘I’ve seen hills before.’

  When I put the key in the lock my hands trembled. Kay was kissing my neck as I opened the door.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ I joked, taking in the rustic furniture, a huge brass bedstead.

  Kay walked over to the bed, the floorboards creaking. She smoothed down the quilt with her palm and said, ‘Shut the door and come here.’

  I closed and locked the door. I walked over to the bed where we stood and faced each other.

  ‘You hear that?’ she asked. ‘The river, the wind in the leaves.’

  I could hear all these sounds, layered over the bass of my thudding heart. I pulled her hands to my lips and kissed her fingers. ‘You’re cold,’ I said, looking for the fire.

  I flicked on the gas and sparked a flame from the snapping electric. The orange bars quickly glowed, illuminating the room, us.

  She said, ‘If I’d remembered my umbrella, none of this would be happening. Not you in this room. Not me doing this.’ She reached out and started unbuttoning my shirt.

  As she undressed me I felt as if I was being dismantled. The world beyond the door of that wooden cabin lay heaped on the floor.

  Only when I was naked did I lean forward and kiss the nape of her neck, breathe her in. Together we pulled at her clothes, tugged off her boots. I cupped her breasts and took her dark nipples between my lips, gently, until they were hard in my mouth. After unbuckling her belt I pulled down her jeans. She stepped out of them and grabbed my hand, pulling it between her legs. How wet and slippery against my fingers. I bent and kissed her stomach, her hips. The insides of her thighs. I was thrilled to have her standing before me. Thrilled to be stripped, nothing between us but skin. I told her to lie down and knelt on the rug, pushing her legs apart, pressing my tongue against her, both of us trembling.

  ‘Inside me,’ she sat up. ‘I want you inside me.’

  I stood and she pulled me to the bed, on top of her. Then she reached down, gripped me hard in her hand and guided me into her heat. And without words, thought or guilt, I became one with her.

  I SWEAR I COULD hear the Earth turning. I was wired to every sense. The sound of the river, the scent of Kay, her breath steady on my skin where she lay curled against my chest.

  ‘If I could have any power right now it would be to stop time.’ I ran my hands through her hair, kissed her head. ‘Just run this minute on a constant loop.’

  In that bed, beneath a heavy duvet, a wooden roof and a stand of pines, beside a rushing river surrounded by mountains tinged with rust-coloured trees, we’d made a bunker. The two of us naked and warm, wrapped around each other.

  We lay like that till the dusk turned to dark. Through a window that framed the peaks, a tangerine sky deepened to violet, then black, punctured by points of starlight.

  ‘Are you sleeping?’ I asked.

  She kissed my chest, pulled tighter against me.

  We showered together. We took a long time washing down each other’s bodies, studying skin and scars. Over her right shoulder blade was a scarlet patch. ‘I had a tattoo removed.’

  ‘Of what?’ I asked, smoothing soap across her back.

  ‘Can I tell you another time?’

  I rinsed away the suds and wondered what kind of design she might have chosen, why she didn’t want to talk about it. Before she told me anything about her life, the journey that made her who she was, how she arrived at herself, I’d guessed certain histories from the blue veins running along the inside of her forearms, the soft skin scarred.

  We stepped from the shower and I wrapped her in a towel.

  ‘You going to brush my hair?’

  She sat on a chair by the heater. I drew the brush through her long black hair, gliding through the strands, playing it out over my palms and running it between my fingers. Every few strokes I leant forward and kissed her on the temple, her eyebrow.

  And I never knew I could be so haunted by a scent, the aroma of another. Not perfume, but the feral inhalation of a woman who burned in the core of my chest. A spark that had become a flame, crackling, catching my bones the way a brushfire might sweep through a tinderbox wood.

  ‘I could get used to this,’ she said, leaning her head back and closing her eyes, smiling, her whole body glowing.

  WE LEFT WORDS ALONE until we dressed. Silent with our bodies because there was no treachery when we were skin on skin, pressed tight against one another so no thought could get between us. But then came the words, the guilt. After desire, conscience. To try to escape the sin that had broken into the cabin, the sin that sat on the cheap and faded furniture, the patchwork quilt, and then the sinner who watched from the cracked mirror as I combed my hair and buttoned my shirt, we drove out to Woodstock.

  Kay took the wheel this time. She drove fast, confident on the dark bends winding the tree-lined roads.

  ‘Do you think there are bears in the woods?’ I asked, looking into the forest shadows.

  The headlights illuminated the nearly naked branches. Moths like torn bits of paper flared in the beams. I had a flashback of my dream, the woman in the barren wood. I looked across at Kay, focused on driving. What was a dream and what wasn’t seemed a tricky thought right then, in a car on a dark road in a country where I wasn’t born.

  We parked on the main road, outside a boutique clothing store selling designer dresses and hats.

  ‘It’s not the sixties any more,’ I said, looking at the jewellers next door.

  ‘This is a cute town now. You won’t find Janis Joplin raising hell with a bottle of whiskey.’

  We had some minor disagreement choosing a place to eat as we both wanted to defer to the other for the decision.

  ‘Heads the Thai place,’ I proposed, readying the quarter on the tip of my thumb. ‘Tails the Italian.’

  I flipped. The coin came down in South East Asia. And because we had no idea how to act, what to be, we sat and ate like two people on a first date, spending most of the meal looking at each other, reaching hands nervously across the table. The fairy bulbs strung from the ceiling did nothing to put what we were doing into the stark light of reality.

  During a walk along the quiet streets, strolling hand in hand, I wondered if this sight would be a worse one for Jenni to come across than the two of us naked in bed. An ocean away, I was still terrified we’d turn a corner and find her standing there, and suggested to Kay we should head off.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked, knowing I wasn’t.

  I drove back to the cabin, Kay against my shoulder, both of us watching the ghostly branches in the headlights. White as dead coral. I wanted to talk about something, but the words wouldn’t come. I wanted different visions from the one of Jenni sitting there on the back seat. Only when we arrived back in Phoenicia did I find my voice again.

  ‘Not a soul,’ I remarked on the empty road.

  It was very dark off the main highway, and the array of unlit cabins appeared deserted.

  ‘Are we the o
nly ones here?’ asked Kay, sitting up.

  I looked at the glitter of stars above the silver hills. ‘Or the last ones left.’ I switched off the lights.

  We kissed, our lips and the faint wind hissing in the pine the only sounds.

  Not that we were alone.

  When I opened the door and took a moment to stretch, I heard a twig snap under the weight of a heavy step.

  ‘Hello?’ I wobbled.

  ‘Is there someone there?’ asked Kay.

  Another twig cracked, followed by a huffed exhalation of air. ‘Who is it?’ I shouted.

  Then a black mass shot past the front bumper.

  ‘Shit.’ I jumped back to the shelter of the car. ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘Look,’ screamed Kay. ‘A bear!’

  As surprised by us as we were by him, the bear scrambled up a trunk, the sharp claws noisily digging into the bark.

  ‘He’s in the tree,’ said Kay.

  ‘Right above our cabin.’ My adrenalin was pumping.

  ‘My God!’ Kay laughed. ‘You frightened him.’

  I was standing behind the open door. When I flicked on the headlights his eyes burned red, claws fastened in the trunk, watching, working out if we were a threat or not. And he decided we weren’t because he looked at the two of us hiding behind the car and climbed down.

  ‘Get back in,’ I called to Kay.

  We shut the doors and watched him slope down the trunk, his oily pelt gleaming in the bright beams.

  ‘How beautiful,’ said Kay as he dropped to the ground, took one look into the headlights, and ambled away into the darkness.

  I parked as close to the cabin as I could, and we scampered inside laughing with fear that he’d steal us away into the night before I got the door open.

  ‘Quick,’ panted Kay. ‘Close the door.’

  We were playing the encounter up, but both of us were excited by the bear, fooling around like sugared-up children.

  I slammed the bolt across. ‘That was close.’ I was breathless. ‘I wasn’t really scared,’ I said untruthfully.

  Before I had a chance to slow my beating heart Kay pulled me across the room, pushed me on to the bed, and hungrily kissed me.

  The bear had saved us. Saved us from thoughts about others. Fear had reduced us to flesh and blood, body.

  Kay sat astride me, slowly unbuckling my belt, popping the buttons on my jeans and pulling them down to my ankles. Then she crawled back up the bed and took me into her mouth, looking me in the eye, slowly pushing me down her throat. She took me to the brink of coming on her tongue before kissing me again, the taste of myself on her lips. When I put my hands between her legs she stood up and stepped out of her skirt, lost her clothes. Then finally, balancing with her palms on my ribs, she sat back on her heels and slowly lowered herself on to me, very carefully, feeling every moment of the glide. I held her hips and worked a rhythm with her. Each time she came she collapsed over my chest, kissed me, and reached back and put a finger inside herself, alongside me, before sliding it into my mouth. And then into her mouth. So when we kissed the taste was neither her nor me but us. I woke staring at the cabin ceiling.

  My dream about the woman in the wood.

  This time I was running after her. And she was running from what I thought was a bear, slashing his way through the dead branches. But it was a man chasing her, or a half-man, half-bear. Or a man eaten by a bear and become bear himself. I was snagged by the branches, my flesh hooked by thorns. When I woke, before the woman was caught, I checked to see that Kay really was in my bed, not lost in a dead wood.

  ‘You awake?’ I kissed her neck. Sleepily she turned over.

  ‘I am now.’ She kissed me back. ‘You were having some crazy dreams.’

  ‘I know.’ I didn’t want to tell her about the woman. ‘That bear got in my sleep.’

  ‘I’ll protect you.’ Kay planted kisses over my cheeks, draped her hair over my closed eyes.

  But the dream was still playing. Even when I walked barefoot across the wooden floor and into the bathroom. Splashing water over my face I tried to wash the vision from my thoughts.

  ‘Shall we go for a walk before breakfast?’ I called into the bedroom.

  ‘Sure,’ answered Kay. ‘Hike along the river.’

  Clouds dappled the wooded hills with shadow, and the bronze peaks flared and faded with the passing skies. We followed a fast stream, shallow rapids where the river was torn into spray on submerged rocks.

  On a small wooden bridge above calmer waters, we paused to look at our reflections below.

  ‘Like two ghosts washed into the sea,’ said Kay, leaning back from the rail, our mirrored selves. ‘That would be the way to go. Evaporate and fall as rain.’

  ‘Come back to earth in a thunderstorm.’

  She dropped a leaf into the water and watched it float under the bridge. Then she linked her arm around mine and we walked on, not talking much, already thinking about the drive back, the questions without answers.

  IT WAS ON THAT highway south to New York, a pause between conversation with Kay, a pause between reaching across and feeling the warmth of her thigh on my palm, heat pulsed from her thudding heart so I could feel it in mine, when I was suddenly a child again with my sister in Betty’s living room, our neighbour. We were kneeling at the window looking at the angry boil of clouds that towered over the estate.

  ‘How do you know the distance to a storm?’ Betty asked, tipping a mug to her mouth.

  I knew the answer and told her. And my mum, just back from work to pick us up and take us home. ‘Count the seconds between the flash and the bang.’

  Which was what I did when sheet lightning lit the black sky.

  ‘May as well have another cup of tea, Jan,’ said Betty, almost interrupting my careful counting down to the rumbling thunder.

  ‘Four,’ I shouted. ‘That means it’s four miles away.’

  ‘I’d better get the kids’ dinner on,’ my mum replied to Betty’s offer.

  ‘Can we have pilchard pie?’ my sister begged. My mum had made us believe her cheap meals were treats worthy of a restaurant, and I joined in the pleading.

  ‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Get your boots on.’

  We raced to the porch and pulled on our wellies. My sister got to the umbrella first, and we wrestled as to who was going to hold it.

  ‘Neither of you are,’ said my mum. ‘You’re not tall enough to hold it over my hair.’ She was always getting it cut, having it blow-dried and styled. Ten years old, I already knew why. ‘Two kids or not,’ I heard her telling Betty, ‘I’ve no plans on being a single mum for ever.’

  She took the umbrella from my hand. Rain crashed against the frosted porch glass.

  ‘I’m going to run,’ I bragged, opening the door and feeling the fat drops pierce my T-shirt before sprinting across the road to our house, my sister chasing behind.

  The back door was locked. We turned and shouted at my mum to hurry up.

  If the door had been open I wouldn’t have turned and seen her splashing through the puddles, kicking up the rain.

  Neither would I’ve seen the simultaneous strike of light and sound, the thunder-clapped vein of white that connected earth and sky, cracking the glass in our kitchen window, jumping from a metal garage door to the umbrella my mother clutched.

  Like the blaze of the sun that burns on your vision when you turn from its fiery core, for a few seconds it robbed me of my ability to focus.

  Then she stood, as if resurrected, and ran to the house with smoking hands.

  DRIVING BACK INTO MANHATTAN I felt like a shuttle pilot re-entering the atmosphere, the front end of the Mustang glowing with friction. I’d watched the Catskills shrink in the rear view mirror, and then the neat suburbs cluster across the bonnet. And now the rising towers.

  We’d been chatting like children at the start of a friendship, when that remarkable finding of each other feels like a gift, the shared knowledge unwrapped. She’d talked about h
er brother, his childhood illness, how she loved to play nurse, spooning him juice and pretending it was medicine. And her mother, sitting on the deck and painting sunsets. One of her earliest memories was mixing up reds and oranges for the flame-lit skies. Although she spoke with a serious focus, zooming in on tiny moments from decades past, toys and dolls, a dressing-up box filled with the clothes her father left behind, she made fun of herself too, laughed easily at the thought of the little girl playing with imaginary friends. ‘I had whole tea parties with dozens of guests. I set everyone places all over the house.’ She shook her head and laughed. ‘What a crazy kid. My poor mom.’

  But a city climbed up the windscreen, loomed and judged. I nearly said I’d like to meet her mother, but held the thought, the careless words.

  Then she said, ‘We have to talk about them.’

  I’d rather have pumped up the music, U-turned, and spun out at the beginning of a real getaway. But I held south on 87, kept the New York skyline a target.

  ‘How did you meet him?’ I fired the question abruptly, because I wanted to know, but didn’t. I’d have been happy to never hear his name again, have us both lobotomized of past lovers.

  No, no, that isn’t true. To wish that would be to wish the very death of another.

  ‘Don’t let my imagination fill in the gaps,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

  She hesitated, tapped her fingernails on the dashboard, then talked. After jail and rehab meetings, she had to get out of Seattle, away from the same old friends doing the same old things. I knew something about that. In an effort to at least try to escape my old self I’d had to escape my home town.

  ‘I needed a fresh start. Something. I had a few hundred dollars saved from waitressing, thoughts of finishing the performing arts course I bailed out on. So I took everything I had and flew to New York.’

  ‘Did you know anyone?’

  She shook her head. ‘That was a reason to come here. I had to build myself up brick by brick. Away from family, the counselling. It had to be me. I had one month’s rent for a room in Green Point, one month to get a job. I shared a tiny apartment with two Polish girls who spoke about a word of English between them. I walked around a few diners, gave my number to the managers, but nothing in those first days but tired feet. Then one of the Polish girls got sick and said I could have her kitchen job till she was better. Doing dishes, cleaning the ovens. I convinced the owner to let me waitress when the Polish girl came back to work.’