But long before she reached the hiker, he raised his head. His nostrils flared and he turned his neck. Just one look, that’s all it took, and he was gone.
And then, standing there freezing beneath the weak porch light, she looked down at herself and saw bumps and knobs, blue veins and stray hairs, old scars and fresh bruises. A body that could be wounded but remain alive.
8
She didn’t sleep well that night, and in the morning went through the motions, enervated, rising and eating and riding to campus with no sense that what she did was the realest part of her life. It was a perfect crystalline late May day but she hardly noticed, studying in the library for her finals. In the evening she attended a review session for her philosophy exam. Afterward, instead of going home, she headed back to the library, for the professor had spent the entire hour enigmatically pushing peripheral points she hadn’t studied well. And while she wouldn’t put it past him to purposely muddy the waters, she now had to make sure she understood them because they might appear on her exam tomorrow.
The linguistics major caught up with her at the library door and suggested they go over the points together. It helped, but by the time they were done it was nearly midnight. Driven by the need to sleep, she accepted his offer to put her bike in his trunk and drive her home. It felt good at first, to be speeding along her route in his warm cab. But the longer they drove, the hotter and smaller it grew. She kept stealing glances at his face and imagining it looked calculating, that he was processing just how far from campus she lived, how quiet the dirt lane was, how far she would be from any kind of help at all. By the time he halted in front of her cottage the car had shrunk to a hot ball of nothing. The engine throbbed and growled while outside the windows the black forest looked ready to swallow the car whole. She ran her hand across the door searching for the handle, but the whole expanse felt like one smooth capsule and in her panic she could recognize nothing at all. And then he was on her, his weight suffocating her and his hot breath damp on her neck.
“Here it is,” he said, and pushed.
The interior light splashed on, clinical, surgical, as the door swung wide. She spilled out and hurried around to the back of the car. Pulling her bike from the trunk, she dropped it right there on the lawn and sprinted for the porch.
She heard him beep, a friendly bleat, as she pushed through her front door. She stopped then, just over the threshold, as if by magic it made her safe. She listened to the car drive away. And slowly, as the silence became complete, her heart stopped clattering and her breath evened out, and she perceived that she had not been in danger at all. She stood in darkness but it wasn’t absolute. Knowledge had density, the arch of the kitchen doorway, the rectangle of couch, the staccato ascent of stairs. Holding out her hands, she walked toward where she knew the light switch would be.
Nearly there, she heard a sound and stopped short. Mouth-breathing, she thought and, stomach leaping, felt for the switch and flicked it on, then hurried back out to the porch. But she caught sight of the hiker for only an instant before he slipped beyond the edge of her light.
She dreamed she was in the library stacks, desperate to study all the things she still hadn’t learned in the last moments before her exam. But in the aisles all around her other students were talking and laughing as if they already knew all the things she did not, and some were even screaming, and then she was awakening to a cacophony of birds outside her windows.
The clock read 7:54.
At 7:59 she was racing down the dirt lane. Fifteen minutes later she was accepting an exam from her frowning philosophy professor with sweat still trickling down her sides. She felt the stares of the other students as she made her way to an empty seat at the back. But she did not blush. For inside her still pumped the energy of her ride, and she found it could be projected from her like a shield and then, once she sat down, aimed at the page in a single focused beam.
Hours later she rode back up the lane still thinking about the idea of an internal core of energy, and how it could be centered and focused for use both in defense and to forge a connection. She had parked her bike in the yard and was sitting on the porch stairs drawing figures with energies shooting out of their chests and the tops of their heads when the hiker and his dog came up the trail.
Waiting for them, she felt her muscles tensing and her pulse begin to rush, but she kept her eyes hard-focused and controlled her breath, and in this way her brain stayed calm enough to observe, as the hiker got closer, how his own eyes were half-lidded and his nose thickly pulsed and his stride listed a little as he walked. How familiar he seemed, though she’d known him barely a month. How on his back he carried his pack, and it was heavy, with the roll of his sleeping sack tied at the top and his tent tied to the bottom.
A few yards away from her he stopped and shrugged it off, then, looking down at it in the grass, he began to talk. And though the words came out a little slurred, thoughts a little distorted, slowly it emerged that he was describing to her some documentary he’d once seen. Something about a man who went to Alaska and spent the next fifty years living in the wilderness alone. A kind of visual survival manual, he’d filmed the animals he’d found to hunt and fish, the plants he’d found that were safe to eat, and all the stages along the way as he built himself a cabin and everything that went inside it, figuring out what he needed as he went along, like snowshoes and snares and specialized tools and storage units for food and tricks to stop bears from getting into it.
Every so often while he talked, the hiker would take a step closer. One, and then another, with long pauses in between, so she felt a kind of euphoria building in that slow-closing gap, carrying with it all the anticipation of a touch, so that when he finally did touch her there was no shock, only a deep sense of grounding. His hands came up and they were hard and hot, smoothing her shoulders, exerting a gentle pressure through her muscles to the bones beneath. His eyes were closed, and she closed hers too, imagined herself encased in a glacier, great shards of her carving off.
When the dog barked, the hiker’s hands dropped away and he stepped back, nostrils flaring.
“Here you are! Rowan’s been bouncing off the walls. Finally I had to leave him with the cleaner so I could come down to see what had happened to you.”
The landlady was wearing a flowing white dress and a large matching sunhat. In one hand she held a wineglass, the dark liquid pitching as she descended the hill.
“I had exams,” Laurelie said, reddening. “I told you I couldn’t come today.”
“Did you?” The woman stopped and sipped her wine. “Well, I guess they’re over.” She looked at the hiker appraisingly and, after a moment, smiled. His nostrils flared, but his gaze remained on the ground. “I know,” she said, looking back at Laurelie. “Why don’t you two come up to the garden for a glass of wine? It’s after five. You can keep us company until Rowan’s daddy gets home.”
For a moment the invitation in her eyes shone brightly. But as Laurelie hesitated, it seemed to morph into something harder, more hostile. And when still Laurelie didn’t respond it grew fangs, dripping with hunger and promising pain.
“Sure,” said the hiker softly. “I have a little time before my bus.”
The thing in the woman’s eyes blinked away. She smiled once more at him, but he was still looking down, and there were tears caught now in his downcast lashes.
He left his pack on the porch but kept the dog at his side, which the landlady ignored after a single disdainful glance. She chattered brightly as they climbed the hill but stopped when the landlord’s car turned onto the lane. After parking the car, he strode down to meet them. Stocky and sandy-haired, he wore a gray summer suit and burgundy loafers with tassels that made a slapping sound as he walked.
“You’re early!” his wife told him tetchily. “They wanted to have a glass of wine with me. Unless you’re too tired for company?”
“No, it’s fine.” He gave a curt nod to Laurelie and then turned to the hiker. “O
wen Callis,” he said, thrusting out a hand.
The hiker’s own hands were thrust deep in his pockets, and there they stayed as he regarded the landlord’s hand. His nose began to spasm erratically and his body tensed. If he had a tail it would be puffed and swishing, Laurelie thought, and feared that at any moment he would disappear.
Then the front door of the main house opened, and the boy came barreling down the walk. “Caa caa caa caa caa!” he cried, and Laurelie stepped forward and caught him and lifted him and then turned and pushed him into the hiker’s arms. It was the only thing she could think of to do, and she thought after all it was the right thing, for as soon as the boy had settled against him, the hiker’s nostrils settled into a strong steady pulse.
The landlord frowned, but the landlady only regarded the hiker again. “Rowan’s usually shy of strangers,” she said. Then she led the way around the house to the garden in back with her husband following. Laurelie and the hiker came last. The boy’s small fingers gripped the hiker’s ear as they walked and he leaned close to it, whispering “tur” and “caa.”
The landlords left them in the garden and went inside. Soon the landlady returned with two more glasses of wine. The hiker put the boy down and took one and immediately drank half.
The landlord appeared shortly after with his own wineglass. He had changed out of his suit into a freshly pressed shirt and slacks. “So how are you liking Montague?” he said to the hiker, coming to stand beside his wife.
The hiker raised his glass and finished it.
“He doesn’t go to Montague, actually. He’s been hiking the AT,” Laurelie said quickly.
“Ah!” the landlord said, nodding. “We see a lot of you coming through our little town this time of year.”
“I’ve never understood the thrill of hiking myself,” the landlady remarked, wrinkling her nose. “Dirt, bugs, and wild animals. What’s there to like about that?”
“Caa,” said the boy. He was playing with his trucks in the grass. The dog lay beside him, chin in its paws. The landlady pursed her lips. Laurelie crouched down next to them and wondered how soon they could leave.
Thankfully her landlords seemed to forget all about them after that. They began discussing their new beach house. She told him her countertops still hadn’t come in, but at least they’d finally finished the window treatments, and he told her about a fishing boat company he’d found that for a couple hundred took you to a place where you were sure to catch big fish, and they baited the line and chummed the water, so all you had to do was reel ’em in.
As they talked the hiker drifted away to an apple tree and stood watching a formation of swallows dipping and wheeling across the sky. But to Laurelie, it seemed as if he were leading them, as if he were anticipating the birds’ changes in course even before they made them, his head predicting their direction a fraction of a second ahead. She remembered the feeling of his touch, and felt relief and loss in equal measure, mingled with joy so fat and buoyant she thought she might actually float away.
Then suddenly the landlord slapped his neck with a startled curse, and the landlady began lighting candles all around the deck. The air filled with a strong scent of citronella. The hiker turned around, and with tears on his cheeks and his nostrils in full flight said quietly, “I have to go now.”
“I’ll come back for him,” he said.
She’d followed him down the hill, and now they stood on her porch, eyeing the dog at his side. She was deliberately not looking at his laden pack, whose pale canvas glowed with such melancholic radiance beneath the moth-struck yellow bulb. She could only nod in response, for her throat had seized at the significance of this material link he was leaving behind. Though in truth there was little alternative, since he’d left his truck three hundred miles north to follow the bobcat more than a month before. And now he was taking a Greyhound bus back to it, on which, despite its name, dogs weren’t allowed.
The hiker bent. “Stay, Asa,” he murmured, and then touched the dog’s head and hefted his pack and walked off down the lane, heading for the river road.
9
In the evening, the hiker’s dog marked time. According to some exacting internal interval he would rise and inspect the cottage, high tail slowly sinking as his search came up empty yet again. He ignored her cats, who treated him far less graciously, hissing and swiping at him from the stairs whenever he went by. The reconnaissance continued all night long; from upstairs in her bed Laurelie would wake once more to the click of toenails on floorboards, and half in dream hold her breath as if hoping too, until the dog settled by the front door again with a low drawn-out whine.
Mornings, both were exhausted. The dog would pass out on the front porch, back hairs twitching fretfully, tail thumping feebly whenever Laurelie walked by. The summer semester having just started, she’d have to bike to campus and then endure the slow tick of her new classes with a head that wanted nothing more than to fall, trying not to even think the word “sleep” lest the sibilant liquid sound of it pull her inside. It was her final semester of college, the summer one making up for the spring one she’d lost before transferring from her old university in Philadelphia, and the approaching finish line made it hard to focus on the work still remaining. In between classes she took shelter in the library stacks, where it felt like night and perversely woke her. There she’d sketch fast until the thread broke, her own means of abiding not marking time but rather reimagining it, complex architectures ghosting the edges of her thoughts but only skeletons emerging.
Home again at night, while the dog performed his rounds, she’d back up, add flesh, first to Bobcat’s Den, half a dozen panels of Escherian recursion in which bob-kittens scaled the hiker’s frame and tumbled down again, the thought bubbles drifting above his head graphing their forces and accelerations. And then Night Flight, a sequence of Dali-like vistas in which mosquitoes swarmed and candles flared and the hiker was pursued by a cloud of pungent smoke that vaguely resembled her landlady, with his thought bubbles full of symbols for poison and fire and hazardous waste. Though backgrounded in every panel, the hiker’s form was triangulated to be its focal point, so that the eye returned to him again and again.
The hours they babysat her landlady’s son were the only unalloyed respite from waiting, for both Laurelie and the dog. The boy required all of their combined attention. Fetch was the game now; she’d stroke the stitches of the dog’s homemade canvas ball like a talisman beneath her thumb, waiting for the boy to shout “ray, seh, go!” and then launch it down the lane as far as she could throw, all three of them experiencing the same fierce rush as the dog released himself, a speeding black projectile. But after every few throws she’d have to outsmart him, changing directions at the last minute, else he would start anticipating her, running even before she threw, and then correspondence would fail them all, the boy shouting “no baa daw!” over and over while she waved the ball in the air helplessly, until finally the dog came trotting back.
The dog’s presence seemed to be helping the boy; he’d begun speaking much more, even sandwiching together short phrases, which often resonated with mysterious intent. Like “wok eeen noz,” which she was relieved to discover referred only to a dry mucus ball; it must have formed up there over a period of days, like a pearl in an oyster. Or “mow aaaann swee,” which he intoned for half an hour one afternoon while walking across her porch and striking it rhythmically with a stick. It acted on her and the dog like a soporific, sending them both into a semi-trance, an effect entirely at odds with the ant extermination he was actually performing.
In this way, nine days passed. Then one bright Saturday morning, lying in his usual spot on the porch, the dog saw a truck top a knob in the river road and was off like a shot, reaching the end of the dirt lane just as the vehicle slowed for the turn, and barking and leaping at the driver’s side door until it opened and let him in.
Ancient and green, the pickup clattered to a halt in her yard, and wild-hearted she sat on the top porch
stair and watched the door open and first the dog pour out and then the hiker. He rubbed his neck and smiled down at the ground, and under the high sun his black curls gleamed blue. In each hand he held a brown paper package. One of these he laid on the truck’s hood, and the other he opened to reveal a glistening pink and white marrow bone. The dog rose eagerly to take it, standing on his two hind legs like a trick, so that she thought of the boy in a calming sort of way, and kept thinking of him as the dog ran a dozen mad loops of joy around the man.
But once the dog had settled in the truck’s deep shade and was making his first deep noisy cuts, her vision broadened again, deluging her with an accumulation of fresh detail. The motions of the hiker’s fingers opening the other package. The angle his neck made bent, as he worked his way in a few starved bites through one half of the enormous sandwich it contained. The depth of umber where his elbow creased as he folded the rest of it carefully away, and the rigid climb of muscle up his sleeve when he stuck his hand through the open truck window and pulled out a new canvas ball. Already the dog was scrambling to its feet and tearing away down the lane, and now she perceived what she hadn’t before, that these were the first intricate steps of a ballet. Dog running, hiker waiting, timing it before throwing the ball so low and fast that it shot past the dog and struck the ground exactly a foot ahead, and then the dog snapping it up without ever breaking stride and circling back to drop it at the hiker’s feet.
When finally the dog sank panting to his haunches, the hiker bent and stroked his head. Then he walked around to the back of his truck with the dog following so close that leg and flank stayed in constant contact. Reappearing, he held a large potted plant in each hand. He set these down on the bottom porch step.
The Bobcat Page 6