They went first to inspect the pipe, Carl carrying his rifle. Through the clear water they saw, with some amazement, that the beast had piled up a cone of mud around it reaching up to its lip. “He’s got in mind to seal that pipe good and solid.”
“But why the hell is he doing it? He’s already got a pond,” the man said.
“You might ask him next time you see him. We’re going to have to kill him. And his wife.”
The man stood there on the top of the dam shaking his head. “Isn’t there some way to scare him off? . . . And I haven’t seen a wife.”
“She’s around,” Carl said. “They’re juveniles, probably, that got thrown out of the tribe in Whittlesy’s pond. Maybe two or three years old. They go forth to start a new family. They mean to stay.” And waving his arm toward a stand of pines at the far end of the pond that the man had planted as seedlings four decades earlier, he said, “You can kiss a lot of those trees goodbye.”
“I’d hate to kill them,” the man said.
“I don’t like it either,” Carl said, and stood there squinting down at the water. Then he straightened up and said, “Let me try pissing.”
The sun was almost down, long shadows stretched toward the pond, the sky’s blue was darkening. Carl set off down the length of the dam to where the lodge was and stood pissing on the ground near it. Then he returned to the man and stood shaking his head. “I doubt it’ll work. They’ve got too much invested in that lodge.” They heard the splash and saw, down at the end of the pond, that the beast—or one of them—was climbing up out of the water and making his way a few feet from where Carl had pissed, undeterred by the scent of man.
“So much for that,” Carl whispered. “I’d like to get him when he’s out of the water, OK?”
The man nodded. The hateful stabbing joy of the kill moved into him. “Incidentally,” he asked with an ironical smile, “are we legal?”
“As of this year,” Carl said. “They’ve finally decided they’re pests.”
“What about trapping them?”
“I don’t have traps. And what would we do with them? Nobody wants them. I know a guy would take the pelt, but they’re not protected any more.”
“Well, okay,” the man agreed.
“Don’t move,” Carl whispered, and lowered himself to one knee, raising the rifle to his shoulder and cocking it as he aimed at the beast climbing up the side of the dam. Suddenly it turned and scurried down the slope it had been climbing and slid into the water. Carl stood up again.
“How’d he know?” the man asked.
“Oh, they know,” Carl said with some odd hunter’s pride in the beaver’s wit. “Stay here and try not to move.” He spoke quietly, conspiratorially. “I don’t want to hit him in the water or we’ll lose him if he sinks,” he said. Then he took off down the length of the dam, to the far end, where the lodge was, setting his feet down flat lest he kick a stone and alarm the beasts, the rifle balanced tenderly in his hand.
Facing the lodge there was a dense clump of reeds at the water’s edge, some of them rooted under the water. Carl carefully slipped himself into their midst and sat on his heels, the rifle butt resting on his thigh. The man stood watching from the center of the dam, fifty yards away, wondering how Carl could know that the beast would emerge. Carl, he was somehow glad to have learned, had not really wished to kill.
Minutes passed. The man stood watching. Now Carl, he saw through the reeds, was raising his gun very slowly. The shot’s reverberations boomed across the water. Carl quickly stepped into the shallow water and lifted the beast, carrying it out of the reeds by the tail. The man hurried to see it. Carl, holding his rifle in his right hand, held the dead thing up to him with his left and then, suddenly dropping it onto the grass, turned back toward the pond, raised his gun and fired toward the opposite shore. “That was the lady,” he said, and, handing his gun to the man, hurried down the dam and around the end of the pond and halfway up the other side, where he reached down into the water and lifted out the beaver’s mate.
• • •
In the driveway, with the two dead things on the bed of the truck, the man watched Carl stroking the fur of one of them. “My friend’s going to make something out of these. They’re beauties.”
“I don’t understand what they had in mind, do you?”
Carl liked leaning on things and raised a foot to rest it on the hub of a rear wheel, removing his beloved straw hat to scratch his perspiring scalp. “They had some idea, I guess. It’s like people, you know. Animals are. They have imaginations. These probably had some imaginary idea.”
“He already had a pond. What was the point?” the man asked.
Carl did not seem overly concerned about the question. He did not seem to think it was up to him to find a solution to it.
The man pressed on. “I wonder if he was just reacting to the sound of running water coming out of the pipe.”
Amused, Carl said, “Hey. Could be.” But he obviously did not believe this.
“In other words,” the man said, “maybe there was no connection between stuffing the pipe and raising the pond level.”
“Could be,” Carl said, seriously now. “Specially when he’d already built his lodge. That is peculiar.”
“Maybe running water irritates them. They don’t like the sound. Maybe it hurts their ears.”
“That would be funny, wouldn’t it. And us thinking they do it for a purpose.” He was beginning to take to the idea.
“Maybe they don’t have any purpose,” the man said, excited by the prospect. “They just stop up the sound, and then turn around and see that the water is rising. But in their minds there’s no connection between one thing and the other. They just see the pond rising and that gives them the idea of building a lodge in it.”
“Or maybe they just don’t have anything to do, so they stuff a pipe.”
“Right.” They both laughed.
“They do one thing,” Carl said, “and that leads them to do the next thing.”
“Right.”
“Sounds good to me,” Carl said, and opened the truck door and heaved his bulk into the cab. He looked down at the man through the side window. “Story of my life,” he said, and laughed. “I started out to be a teacher, you know.”
“I remember,” the man said.
“Then I fell in love with cement. And next thing you know I’m heaving rocks all over the place.”
The man laughed. Carl drove off, waving back through the window. On his truck bed the two beasts’ bodies wobbled under their fur.
• • •
The man returned to the pond. It was his again, undisturbed. Moonlight was spreading over its silent face like a pale salve. Tomorrow he would have to somehow drag the debris up out of the pipe and get somebody with a backhoe with a long enough reach to extend from the shore over the water and lift the lodge out of the mud it was anchored in.
He sat on the wooden bench he had built long ago beside the little sandy beach where they always entered for a swim. He could hear the water trickling over the drainpipe’s edge through the debris the beast had stuffed it with.
What had been in its mind? The question was like a hangnail. Or did it have a mind? Was it merely a question of irritated eardrums? If it had a mind it could imagine a future. It might have had happy feelings, feelings of accomplishment when stuffing the pipe, picturing a rising level of water resulting from its efforts.
But what useless, foolish work! It seemed a contradiction of Nature’s economy, which did not allow for silliness, any more than, let’s say, a priest or a rabbi or a president or a pope. These types did not take time out to tap-dance or whistle tunes. Nature was serious, he thought, not comical or ironical. After all, a sufficiently deep pond was already there. How could the beast have ignored this? And why, he wondered, was it so disturbing to think about; was it its paralle
l with his sense of human futility? The more he thought about it the more likely it seemed that the beast had had emotions, a personality, even ideas, not merely blind overpowering instincts that drove it to an act that had completely lost its point.
Or was there some hidden logic here that he was too literal-minded to grasp? Could the beast have had a completely different impulse than the raising of the water level? But what? What could it have been?
Or could he have had nothing in his mind at all except a muscular happiness at being young and easily able to do what millions of years had trained his mind to do? Beavers, he knew, were extremely social. Once having stuffed the pipe, he may have imagined returning to his mate asleep in the lodge to signal that he had caused the water level to rise. She may have expressed some appreciation. It was something she had always wanted from him for her greater safety. Nor would it occur to her, any more than it had to him, that the water level was already deep enough. The important thing was the idea itself. Of love perhaps. Animals did love. Could he have been stuffing the pipe for love? Real love had no purpose, after all, beyond itself.
Or was it all much simpler: did he simply wake one morning and with infinite pleasure start swimming through the clear water when, quite by chance, he heard the trickling of the overflow and, steering himself over to it, was filled with desire to capture the lovely wet sound, for he adored water above all things and wished somehow to become part of it, if only by capturing its tinkle?
And the rest, as it turned out, was unforeseen death. He had not believed in his death. The shots fired into the water had not caused him to flee but merely to dive and surface again a couple of minutes later. He was young and immortal to himself.
The man, unsatisfied, lingered by the water, tiring of the whole dilemma. Relieved that his woods would not be ravaged nor his water poisoned by beaver crap, he knew he did not regret the killings, sad as they were, despite the animals’ complexity and a certain beauty. But he would really have been grateful had he been able to find some clean purpose to the stuffing of the overflow. Anything like that seemed not to exist now, unless its secret had died with the beavers, an idea that oppressed him. And he fantasized about how much more pleasantly things would have turned out had there been not a finished pond to start with but the traditional narrow meandering brook that the beast, in its wisdom, had dammed up in order to create a broad pond deep enough for the construction of its lodge. Then, with the whole thing’s utility lending it some daylight sense, one might even have been able to look upon the inevitable devastation of the surrounding trees with a more or less tranquil soul, and somehow mourning him would have been a much more straightforward matter, even as one arranged to shoot him dead. Would something at least feel finished then, completely comprehended and somehow simpler to forget?
The Bare Manuscript
Carol Mundt lay on the desk, propped up on her elbows, reading a cooking article in You. She was six feet tall and a hundred and sixty pounds of muscle, bone, and sinew, with only a slightly bulging belly. In Saskatchewan she had not stood out for her size, but here in New York it was a different story. She shifted to take the pressure off her pelvis. Clement said, “Please,” and she went still again. She could hear his speeded-up breathing over the back of her head and now and then a soft little sniffing.
“You can sit up now if you like,” Clement said. She rolled onto her side and swivelled up to a sitting position, her legs dangling. “I need a few minutes,” he said, and added jokingly, “I have to digest this,” and laughed sweetly. Then he went over to his red leather armchair, which faced the dormer window that looked uptown as far as Twenty-third Street. Sighing, getting comfortable in his chair, he stared over the sunny rooftops. The house was the last remaining brownstone on a block of old converted warehouses and newish apartment houses. Carol let her head hang forward to relax, sensing that she was not to speak at such moments, then slid off the desk, her buttocks making a zipping sound as they came unstuck from the wood, and crossed the large study to the tiny bathroom, where she sat studying a recipe in the Times for meat loaf. Three or four minutes later, she heard “Okay!” through the thin bathroom door, and hurried back to the desk, where she stretched out prone, this time resting her cheek on the back of one hand, and closed her eyes. In a moment, she felt the gentle movement of the marker on the back of her thigh and tried to imagine the words it was making. He started on her left buttock, making short grunts that conveyed his rising excitement, and she kept herself perfectly still to avoid distracting him, as if he were operating on her. He began writing faster and faster, and the periods and the dots over the “i”s pushed deep into her flesh. His breathing was louder, reminding her again what a privilege it was to serve genius in this way, to help a writer who, according to his book jacket, had won so many prizes before he was even thirty and was possibly rich, although the furniture didn’t match and had a worn look. She felt the power of his mind like the big hand pressing down on her back, like a real object with weight and size, and she felt honored and successful and congratulated herself for having dared answer his ad.
Clement was now writing on the back of her calf. “You can read, if you like,” he whispered.
“I’m just resting. Is everything okay?”
“Yes, great. Don’t move.”
He was down around her ankle when the marker came to a halt. “Please turn over,” he said.
She rolled onto her back and lay looking up at him.
• • •
He stared down at her body, noting the little smile of embarrassment on her face. “You feeling all right about this?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, in this position nearly choking on her high automatic laugh.
“Good. You’re helping me a lot. I’ll start here, okay?” He touched just below her solid round breasts.
“Wherever,” she said.
Clement pushed up his wire-rimmed glasses. He was half a head shorter than this giantess, whose affectionate guffaws, he supposed, were her way of hiding her shyness. But her empty optimism and that damned Midwestern affliction of regular-fella good will annoyed him, especially in a woman—it masculinized her. He respected decisive women, but from a distance, much preferring the inexplicit kind, like his wife, Lena. Or, rather, like Lena as she once was. He would love to be able to tell this one on his desk to relax and let her bewildered side show, for he had grasped her basic tomboy story and her dating dilemmas the moment she’d mentioned how she’d had her own rifle up home and adored hunting deer with her brothers Wally and George. And now, he surmised, with her thirties racing toward her, the joke was over but the camouflaging guffaws remained, like a shell abandoned by some animal.
With his left hand, he slightly stretched the skin under her breast so that the marker could glide over it, and his touch raised her eyebrows and produced a slightly surprised smile. Humanity was a pitiful thing. An inchoate, uncertain joy was creeping into him now; he had not felt this kind of effortless shaping in his sentences since his first novel, his best, which had absolutely written itself and made his name. Something was happening in him that had not happened in years: he was writing from the groin.
Self-awareness had gnawed away at his early lyricism. His reigning suspicion was simply that his vanishing youth had taken his talent with it. He had been young a very long time. Even now his being young was practically his profession, so that youthfulness had become something he despised and could not live without. Maybe he could no longer find a style of his own because he was afraid of his fear, and so instead of brave sentences that were genuinely his own he was helplessly writing hollow imitation sentences that could have belonged to anybody. Long ago he had been able to almost touch the characters his imagining had provided, but slowly these had been replaced by a kind of empty white surface like cold, glowing granite or a gessoed canvas. He often thought of himself as having lost a gift, almost a holiness. At twenty-two, winner of the Neiman-Felker Aw
ard, and, soon after, the Boston Prize, he had quietly enjoyed an anointment that, among other blessings, would prevent him, in effect, from ever growing old. After some ten years of marriage, he began groping around for that blessing in women’s company, sometimes in their bodies. His boyish manner and full head of hair and compact build and ready laughter, but mainly his unthreatening vagueness, moved some women to adopt him for a night, for a week, sometimes for months, until he or they wandered off, distracted. Sex revived him, but only until he was staring down at a blank sheet of paper, when once again he knew death’s silence.
To save the marriage, Lena had pointed him toward psychoanalysis, but his artist’s aversion to prying into his own mind and risking the replacement of his magic blindness with everyday common sense kept him off the couch. Nevertheless, he had gradually given way to Lena’s insistence—her degree had been in social psychology—that his father might have injured him far more profoundly than he had ever dared admit. A chicken farmer in a depressed area near Peekskill, on the Hudson, Max Zorn had a fanatical need to discipline his son and four daughters. Clement at nine, having accidentally beheaded a chicken by shutting a door on its neck, was locked in a windowless potato cellar for a whole night, and for the rest of his life had been unable to sleep without a light on. He had also had to get up to pee two or three times a night, no doubt as a consequence of his terror of peeing on potatoes in the dark. Emerging into the morning light with the open blue sky over his head, he asked his father’s pardon. A smile grew on his father’s stubbled face, and he burst out laughing as he saw that Clement was pissing in his pants. Clement ran into the woods, his body shaking with chills, his teeth chattering despite the warm spring morning. He lay down on a broken hay bale that was being warmed by the sun and covered himself with the stalks. The experience was in principle more or less parallel to that of his youngest sister, Margie, who in her teens took to staying out past midnight, defying her father. Returning from a date one night, she reached up to the cord hanging from the overhead light fixture in the entrance hall and grasped a still warm dead rat that her father had hung there to teach her a lesson.
Presence: Stories Page 33