The sun had passed behind the pines and the air had cooled. Her body felt like it had melted and hardened again, her brain like she was still dreaming, and she trembled with a ramping anticipation neither vessel could contain.
She took a hot shower and emerged fluid again, fully stoked in fact, glowing and glistening as she put on fresh jeans and a T-shirt and then ran down the stairs on lightning feet. She’d left the front door open and the evening air stealing in through the screen had drawn her cats from their window perches to investigate. She was sitting on the bottom stair stroking their bellies when the porch stairs creaked.
Like a shot, the girl cat disappeared up the stairs.
When the hiker appeared at the screen door, Laurelie very nearly followed her. The air around him seemed to sparkle and crack, and even after looking down she still felt as if she were being struck by electrical shocks, over and over again.
“Stay, Asa,” he said softly. Laurelie heard the dog’s soft sigh as it settled down on the porch floorboards.
“Laundry’s this way,” she said, standing quickly as he opened the door.
He looked down at his boots. “I was wondering,” he said, almost too quietly to hear, “if I could shower first. It’s been a while since I’ve felt hot water.”
She nodded jerkily. “Okay. But that’s upstairs.”
Once he stepped inside, her body would not remain still. Despite intense effort she continued to shake as, with slow careful movements, he propped his pack beside the door and then removed his hiking boots. He kept his head down with his dark hair falling over his face, and gave her a wide berth as he moved past her and climbed the stairs, but still not until the bathroom door had closed behind him did she breathe, and then she did so with great wheeling gasps, dizzy from both the lack of air and the receding sense of danger.
His pack and boots freshened the threat each time her roving eyes fell there, but she forced herself to keep looking back at them and so was slightly desensitized to it by the time he returned. She found moreover it helped to keep some part of her always moving, not only the eyes but an extremity too, a shoulder circling, a finger drumming a beat on her thigh, and so in this way as he came toward her down the stairs she absorbed in small doses the hair the water had tamed dripping in coils down his neck, the fresh clothes he wore, and the old ones in his hand.
It was his feet that broke her again, bare now and long and a paler, cooler shade than the rest of him, incredibly intimate, flexing there on the stairs. She turned and made for the kitchen in a body no longer her own. The boy cat, who’d been eating kibble in there, leapt onto the bench of the worn wooden table and meowed. But hearing the hiker coming behind her she did not stop to pet him. She kept going until she hit the cracked formica counter and then, wrapping her arms tightly around her staccato heart, she turned around.
The hiker stopped in the doorway. After setting his pack on the floor, he rubbed a slow index finger over the boy cat’s ear. The cat raised its chin for him, and scraped first one cheek and then the other against his palm. Laurelie looked down then, feeling inside her the kicks of small demented creatures, and squeezed herself even more tightly to hold them in.
There came a rustle of canvas, a clink and a snap, and she raised her gaze in time to see the hiker remove the cap from a second green glass bottle with the pad of his thumb.
Keeping his own eyes lowered, he leaned slowly forward and placed it on the end of the table near her, then stepped back again. Picking up the other bottle, he drank long and deep, not stopping until it was almost gone.
The kicks grew frantic as she stared at her bottle. Unseeing at first, slowly her eyes focused, and she read the label: Mead. Written on a plain white label in a tightly curling script, it made the bottle appear archaic, like something unearthed from a long-buried trunk. Even the word sounded ancient as it reverberated in her head, mystical, almost an incantation. Maybe it is, she thought, and then took the bottle in shaking hands and drank.
The first sip was biting and sweet. It slid down her insides and dulled the kicks there. The next one pooled, a liquid center of calm that spread to her limbs as she sipped again.
“This way,” she said, moving down the small hallway toward the laundry room. Entering, she heard him behind her, mouth-breathing in shallow pants and, suddenly realizing she’d been trapped, she backed in deep and pressed her back to the wall, raising her bottle before her like a wand or a weapon. But when his large body filled the doorway he didn’t even look at her. Setting a fresh bottle of mead on the dryer and his pack on the ground, he began loading clothes from it into her washing machine. She took another sip of the mead. When he was done he set the dials and closed the lid with two fingers so that it made no sound, then picked up his own bottle and drained it.
The washer started up with a rumble-whoosh, startling them both.
“There’s soap,” she said.
He shook his head. “Hot water works fine.”
She told him she’d bought food but didn’t really like to cook. He said he did. And then he opened a third bottle of mead and stood at her fridge with his nostrils going light-speed. After a while he began pulling things out, the shrimp, her yogurt, a few carrots, an apple. He started opening her drawers and cupboards next, rustling through them for a pot, a cutting board, a large knife he thumbed and frowned over before putting it back again. After adding a few inches of water to the pot, he set it to heat on the stove. Once it was boiling he lifted the tomatoes by their vine and, grimacing as if they burned, dropped them inside. Tears leaked from his eyes and he wiped them on his sleeve with a practiced motion before fishing them out again. He did the same with the carrots and the apple, and then rinsed the pot thoroughly and set it to heat again. His face had settled into a kind of pulse as he worked, but there was an anticipation to it as well, she thought, an expectation that she would eventually speak and disturb his rhythm. But the shapes of her own observations were too delicate to upset. Heat, she thought, sterilize, watching the steam rise from the produce on the cutting board. She didn’t flinch when he slipped from his front pocket a long wooden-handled buck knife and proceeded to rough-chop and julienne the blanched produce, too focused on the thin ribbons curling up, the silvery blur of his blade. And when she lifted her bottle to her lips and found that it was empty, already he was opening two more.
Then, reaching deeper into his pocket, he pulled out a small brown paper bag and poured from it a handful of paper twists, which he laid out on the table. He selected certain ones seemingly at random and twisted them open to reveal their insides. Bright red threads, golden crystals, a long shriveled black bean. Potion, she thought as he sprinkled these into his pot, his nostrils rippling now with irregular vibrations.
Something brushed her ankle as he stirred, and crooning in surprise, she bent down and scooped up the girl cat, who settled into her favorite spot, draped over Laurelie’s shoulder like a scarf, purring like a gravelly pump.
The kitchen was warm and smelled of the sea, but the porch was cool and smelled of night flowers. The dog’s tail thumped once when she set down the bowl of water, but other than that she wouldn’t have known it was there, for its black fur had rendered it invisible. Across the lane the forest was depthless, just a blacker silhouette against the night. A yellow quarter moon hung above it, full of shadows. She imagined its weak glow was a capsule, inside which she could move without impediment, and the stoked heat she’d felt before the hiker arrived stirred once more, deep inside her, but molten now, and slow. There was no single instant when she became aware of him behind her; it was more of a slow fusion, and then suddenly her heart was racing to handle the extra weight.
“It’s ready,” he said then, and pushed open the screen door.
There were two bowls in his hands, one of which he held out to her. His nostrils were flared hard, and she thought, Smelling me, and then felt the heat inside her bloom and spread its slow tendrils all the way up to her head and down to her feet.
> They ate on the porch but it felt like a restaurant, for never had she tasted anything so good. Creamy leather bellies, sweet mermaid legs—her mind flashed images attempting to match the flavors in her mouth as she mopped up the last rich pools of sauce with bread.
After that it became necessary to recline. Even before her mind had fully processed the determination she was lying on the couch. Her head felt so heavy she imagined it as a planet revolving on her neck, so that first she had to close one eye, and then the other, in order to see straight. She kept the open one always on the hiker, who was revolving some distance away, lying down on the floor beside the open front door with his head resting on his pack and his long legs splayed.
It was some time before she put together the focus of his gaze and the rhythm of his nose with the noises coming from her ancient TV. “What’re we watching?” she said then, and when, after a startled instant, he laughed—wide mouth dark, a perfect audience of teeth—she felt the throb of victory like violence.
Whatever name he gave, she watched it. But in the morning when she woke still on the couch he was gone, and all she could recall were vivid snapshots, a cheerless prison, a man eating too many hard-boiled eggs, then fighting a giant, then digging the same hole over and over again, and then finally dying.
7
The boy insisted on walking this time. Some of the ferns rose higher than his head, tickling him so that he giggled the whole way through. Being with him made her almost remember what being a child was like, when every sensation felt new. She wondered if this was anything like what the hiker experienced too. A week had passed before she dared go back but still it was as if he knew, for he and the dog were waiting for them at the edge of the pine clearing. When the boy ran to meet them, he stuck his hands deep in his pockets and lifted his shoulders but he smiled, a one-corner smile that made her flush, and though his eyes never rose to see it she imagined he knew, from the way his nostrils pulsed.
“She’s hunting again,” was all he said before leading them across the clearing and into the forest on the other side. He picked his way easily through the dense growth of trees. Short and slight, they stuck from the ground like hairs on a giant’s scalp, and she was imagining the three of them were mites and the fallen leaves its dandruff, when the hiker stopped in front of a giant blackberry thicket. It stretched before them in three directions for many yards, and had swallowed up all the other vegetation, even the trees.
He stood for a while in front of it, nose pulsing, before lifting a branch easily twenty feet long and revealing a narrow corridor heading into the giant thicket. Entering first, he held back the branch while she and the boy passed, then let it go and settled down onto the ground near the entrance with his long limbs folded in. After a little hesitation she sat too, with the boy in her lap staring all around at the woody vines sprouting tiny white flowers and sharp thorns.
The hiker had his head turned away from them and was watching a large mossy boulder some yards further along the passage, behind which the thick twining heart of the thicket grew. Suddenly half a dozen striped bundles came tumbling over it, their tiny tails whirling like propellers and the black stripes on their faces smiling like Charlie Chaplin masks. She stared, heart in her throat, as they scaled the hiker’s limbs, some clawing their way up his pants to his lap, others climbing his shirt to his shoulders. One ventured out to the end of his knee and stretched out its nose, black and trembling, to the boy, who laughed breathlessly as his face was explored. That bob-kitten soon dashed away but more followed now that the first had dared, darting up and down them too in a cascade of quivering, shivering fur. The boy’s face was lit with wonderment, but the hiker’s moved like an orchestra as he gazed down at the bob-kitten in his lap and stroked its ears with a long brown thumb.
At first she mistook their mother for a bird. Not until the high-pitched chirrups that called the bob-kittens home had ended and they were back behind the rock did it occur to Laurelie that the bobcat must have been there the whole time, just a few feet away from her, and by then it was too late to feel afraid.
She let the gap widen as she followed the hiker back through the trees. When, she thought as the boy ranged between them, racing first to catch up with the hiker and then running back to her. When, she thought once the clearing was winking through the trees.
The hiker crouched and the boy ran to him. Together they examined something on the forest floor. After the hiker stood and went on again the boy carried it proudly back to her. It was a feather, but no ordinary one; this one was as long as her forearm, and striped horizontally with black and white alternating bands. “Tur,” the boy told her confidently, “tur, tur.” Then he ran after the hiker with it still clutched tightly in his fist. When, she wondered, watching the hiker come to the boy with his canvas ball and show him how to throw it underhand, so that it rose high and the dog leapt for it, jaws snapping, black body twisting, catching it just before it hit the ground. When, she thought, once the sun dropped behind the pines and it was time to take the boy home again. When will he go?
That evening she stood at her screen door looking out at the pines awash in pink light, and saw him coming up the trail, the dog at his heels. Quickly she stepped back against the wall. She held very still and made no sound but when he reached the screen door she heard him mouth-breathing and knew that he knew. Between the sounds of his breaths she could hear leaves shimmering, and it seemed as if his breath stirred them too.
There was a store-bought roasted chicken breast in her fridge, which he proceeded to chop into parts and sauté on her stove along with some dried yellow peels from his paper twists and a sprig of a plant growing against the side of her house that she’d always assumed was a weed. But his nose spasmed arrhythmically as he cooked and he made his way steadily through three bottles of mead. And when the meal was ready he didn’t touch it. Rather, he stood at the counter drinking more mead while she sat at the table eating without tasting, until the silence grew as terrible as a bad chord ringing and she wished that he would leave.
Then he did, or tried to, but he stumbled on the porch stairs and fell down into the dirt, with the dog nosing around him anxiously. Seeing it, she ran to help, and he reared up with both hands as if it were she that would hurt him, and his face worked so painfully she no longer wanted him to go.
“Stay,” she whispered, “please stay,” and once he was slumped on her floor in the breeze from the door with his nose pulsing hectically she turned on her TV. She got the dog some water and some of the chicken and then found another old movie, a Hitchcock this time, about a man who watched others though the window. She didn’t like it much, but the hiker seemed riveted, the slow beat of his nose hypnotic, narcotic, his eyes hanging from the screen like plum weights. As soon as the credits rolled the lids drifted closed, but beneath them his eyes still moved, and so did his nose.
On silent feet then, she ran up the stairs. She found her sketchbook and, returning to the hiker, sitting closer to him than she’d ever been before, began rapidly filling in panels. The same form again and again, drawn with a Rembrandt-like psychological intensity, the same long bones and same capping joints, the same clavicle sharp and instrument-like with its two straight bones and two round ones, her mind playing harmony to the dip in between that throbbed faintly with his every heartbeat. In each panel his sleeping form remained the same; only his face changed, responding to minute air currents and barely audible sounds and infinitesimal changes of light, along with countless other stimuli her senses never even perceived and of which she was only made cognizant by observing his. These, finally, were what filled his thought bubbles—not even thoughts at all but simply all the great quantity of physical stimuli he was receiving, magnified and analyzed, broken down by his body into chemicals and geometries, molecules and coordinates, billions of tiny, perfect subatomic particles.
In the morning the idea came to her. She was in her language philosophy class, the final one of the term. They’d moved on in their
final weeks of the semester to theories of illocutionary acts—how a language, used in certain ways, could perform actions, could actually do something—and now such an act in the language of art was whispering to her skin with each shift of the silk she wore beneath her clothes while she sat on a blanket outside her cottage watching the hiker cook in the ancient stone fire pit tilting on her lawn.
She’d taken the boy to find him again, half afraid he’d already be gone, and asked him to show her how to use it. That evening, as she’d suspected, he seemed more comfortable outside. He was still on his first bottle of mead—and this was crucial, for both needed enough, but not too much, in order for the act to succeed.
And once the meal was ready, he ate. On another hunch, she’d gotten this chicken from a local organic food market she’d ridden past once while riding north on the river road. He wolfed down two pieces. But he savored the mushrooms she’d also found at that market; they ate these slowly, one by one—shiitake, porcini, morel, bai-ling—and each taste unfurled like its body and name, alien, an epiphany on the tongue.
Afterwards he lay back with his hands behind his head and his whole face gone soft, reflecting the slow emergence of night. She felt brave as she headed inside with the dishes, and coming back to the screen door, looking at the shape of him cast by the porch light on the lawn, she quickly she shed her jeans and T-shirt, dropping them to the floor, and tugged down the short silky slip. The night air was chilly and the thin fabric that was now all she wore felt like ice clinging to her breasts and hips, making her tremble. She’d found it in a thrift store far down the alley, after trying things on for the better part of an hour while the saleslady kept the boy entertained with scarves and boas. But in her mind now the snowy silk was not lingerie at all. It was an exorcism. It was proof the body beneath wasn’t forever broken. It was a bridge swinging above a giant crevasse. She pulled open the screen door and watched her body move across the porch, carried along by two strong limbs that were part of her even if she could not feel them, each extension bringing her one step closer to the other side.
The Bobcat Page 5