The Bobcat

by Katherine Forbes Riley

  “I had an African violet once,” she said, after a while. A tiny, furred thing, she’d bought it to brighten her dorm room back in Philadelphia. It hadn’t done well in that small, dim space. But then again, neither had she.

  The hiker’s nostrils flared thoughtfully. “They’re temperamental. Not these.” Lightly he ruffled the head of one plant, releasing a burst of fragrance that seemed too pungent for the yellow florets peeking from its deeply wrinkled leaves. “Water them if they wilt, that’s all.”

  She studied the plants awhile, the way the dark green foliage curled down the stalks, before finally admitting, “They look like they’re wilting now to me.”

  But the hiker only nodded. “It was a long ride.”

  “Why are you making them so big?”

  He was shoveling two holes nearly three feet wide and deep, even though the pots weren’t half that size. “Want it loose. Roots shouldn’t push. New environment shocks them enough.” He breathed around his speech, finishing the holes while she remembered with a physical clarity her own first days in this tiny Vermont town. Ten hours north and the environment had changed so completely. She’d always been cold, and the water had tasted strange, and even breathing had felt wrong, because the air smelled so different.

  Kneeling down now, the hiker picked up a plant. Grasping the stalk where it met the soil, he turned it over and gave it a firm tap before twisting it smoothly from the pot. What emerged took her completely by surprise. Countless white roots no larger than hairs had woven themselves as tight as a basket around the dirt, taking on the exact shape of the pot. Did they grow until they ran out of room, and then stop? She thought of the hermit crab in the boy’s storybook, whose own growth had forced it to leave its shell behind. She wondered what would have happened to it if it had just . . . stayed. And what would have happened to me?

  “They’re the stomach, heart, and brain,” the hiker remarked, nose gently flaring as he traced the path of a single tiny root with his thumb. “You can raze a plant all the way to the ground and it won’t die. Not unless you get the roots.” His voice was soft, proud. She looked at the forest across the lane and imagined all the pine trees as mirror images, half their lives taking place underground. Hidden, she thought, safe.

  The hiker was opening his buck knife now. “Have to cut them or they won’t grow,” he said, and then made a series of deliberate slices through the sides and bottom of each root ball while she tried not to think of pain.

  After loosening the dirt around the cuts, he laid the plants in their holes and scooped back the freshly dug earth, pausing every few handfuls to tamp it down. The soil smelled so good, so rich and round, and she marveled at the sheer quantity of it, at the curled white grubs and long banded worms and black-shelled beetles skittering around. He lined each plant’s base with a circle of wood chips, which after the dirt seemed like mere adornment; it wasn’t until he’d taken his can to her spigot and was watering the plants that she realized his mulch served a purpose too, forming a barrier so the water collecting in those fragrant basins would soak down into the thirsty earth rather than immediately dispersing.

  “So water if they wilt and they won’t die on me,” she said, as he rose again and brushed his hands on his jeans.

  “Not until winter at least.” He glanced at her, and then away again, his eyes moistening as if in sympathy. “Tomato plants aren’t native to this climate. Their roots don’t go deep enough to survive the cold.”

  Now she was thinking of everything in terms of roots, root systems. Like how she understood that this evening would proceed like all the others had. But also how there was new growth too, pushing up from the cut into the black of possibility. Like riding for groceries in his ancient truck with its ragged leather seats and crank windows and analog dials, Fela calling out injustice through the old dash speakers. And the way the hiker drove so deliberately, with his elbow browning ever deeper out the window and his long spare body fitting perfectly behind the wheel. How he smelled all the produce before putting it in the cart and smiled when she said it would make her feel like a monster now to eat anything at all. How they sat on her porch with pints of strong dark beer and watched the sun descend, lightening surfaces and deepening depths until they appeared almost infinite. She’d thought she couldn’t drink beer anymore, but his homemade one went down easy, tasting of dark bread and molasses and mingling with the fragrance-drenched breeze. Long ago someone planted a moon garden here, he told her, and that distant tangle of brush was in fact a thriving colony of night-blooming jasmine and evening stock and primrose, of phlox and gladioli and moonflower. Each time his flickering nose isolated a new perfume he would jog the whole length of the yard to retrieve it, just so she could pair scent and image in her head. And when darkness enveloped them, he planted her at the sink washing produce, which turned out to be the perfect job for her, because she was an integral part of the making of the meal but couldn’t ruin it, and moreover could observe all the minutiae of his own process without affecting it either.

  It was too buggy to eat outside, as she knew he would have preferred, so they settled with their meal on her living room floor in the screen door’s breeze. Afterward he lay back with his hands behind his head and his eyes closed and his nose gently flaring with each waft of night air. She sat upright beside him, hugging her knees, knowing they’d probably watch an old movie soon. But in that moment even the thought felt too tight, like a too-small shell. A Cuban melody drifted through her head. Once it had played in her ears unceasingly, blocking out the miles of Philadelphia streets she’d walked in the months following her rape. Now, after so long, it called to her again. A root cry, a phoenix song. So she rose and put it on, raised the volume until the very air seemed to ripple and bounce, each beat another cut, another growing pain. Holding her upper body still, she let the rest of herself swing loose, not in a walk now, but a dance. And then she was blushing in a headlong rush because his hands had found her waist and were turning her, barely even touching her and yet the torque of him so strong.

  A labyrinth of hallways and stairs. Infinite hallways. Infinite stairs. She’d dreamed of them many times since the frat brother had half-carried, half-dragged her to his room. But now, for the first time, a doorway appeared, out of which spilled the most intense light. She opened her eyes and it was sunlight, pouring on the floor of her living room in her little cottage in Vermont. Pooling on the body next to her.

  So close. They lay curved together like a circle halved. Fur-tongued, fluff-headed, she closed her eyes, remembering his hands, his body brushing hers as they danced. Then guzzling water like life force. Lying down on a blanket, looking into each other’s eyes, falling asleep to the soft sound of her cats’ whistle-wails.

  The hiker shifted then, came out of his curl. Opened his eyes.

  She mimed sleep but after a while he reached over and took her hand. He brought it to his nose, nudged it open like a flower, and breathed her in.

  They sat on the porch, their skins heating in steady increments as the sun inched its head above the pines. The hiker was working his way through the other half of his sandwich while she ate her usual breakfast of yogurt and granola. She was watching the changing velocities of his nose, and wondering what specifically they might reflect, while thinking more generally about how reflections behaved in such a rural place, where there was so much space across which physical stimuli could travel and disperse. So many smells and colors to the earth. So many sounds. So many birds, their calls so complex. So that after a while, because she was thinking all this while looking at him, the silence felt no different than the thoughts in her head, and it hardly seemed she was speaking aloud when she said, “Maybe you were born with it.”

  He startled then. He shook his head.

  Then he rose. He didn’t say that she should stay behind, but she could tell by his nose that he felt it. After he and the dog were gone, she imagined the path they took in her head. The trail down to the river and through the fern field
and the forest beyond, across the clearing where he’d camped and then into the dense new growth on the other side. But there she stopped short, blocked somehow, as if his bobcat’s den were another secret, another shell, another root too deeply bound.

  When he returned it was much later. The sun was hitting everything sideways, making it feel hyperreal. She asked after the bobcat; he said her leg was healed. He said the kittens had doubled in size and were starting to catch their own food now. Probably they said other things as well, but the words seemed to travel a great distance, and they arrived without any impact. She felt like she was standing on the surface of Mars as he turned toward his truck and whistled for his dog. Her eyes kept glancing off him as if he wasn’t there, and in another minute he really wasn’t. There was only the dust stirred up along the lane to prove he’d ever been there at all.

  That night she drew Mars, and Moon Garden, and Cutting the Roots. She drew secret paths through labyrinths of forests, riotous flowers, and the sideways rays of alien suns. She drew black dirt spilling through brown fingers, and a million white roots tightly bound. She drew a buck knife, flashing silver in the sun.

  10

  As the sun stretched toward its solstice, the bustle of Laurelie’s little town grew. Now when she rode to the general store early each morning, the main streets were already full. She imagined the core of energy inside herself was a Tesla coil, sending out shoots, burning holes in her cloak of invisibility, seeking out the other strange circuits that helped power the outside world. And while these egresses felt little worse than pinpricks now, it still stole her breath to remember the pain they’d caused her back in Philadelphia. Looking out at the quiet sunlit alley, she sketched Dead Woman Walking, a series of panels employing Van Gogh-like distortion in which a woman walked a crowded city, experiencing each passing entity as an onslaught, her sensory portals steadily weakening until finally they were destroyed, and then she stumbled along in total affective darkness, unable to feel at all.

  Every afternoon now she and the boy went down to the river, but never once did they see any sign of the bobcat. They searched for her tracks and those of her kittens, but there’d been no rain in a while and the top layer of dirt had turned to a fine dust that was smoothed by the slightest breeze.

  Was she waiting for him, Laurelie wondered, too?

  When finally he came it was late one Saturday evening, without his dog, and long after she’d stopped expecting him. He walked up the trail and then stood at the screen door mouth-breathing, but he wouldn’t come in.

  “Come out with me,” he said.

  He took her to the local pub, the place she’d seen him once before. But on this night it wasn’t quiet as it had been that weekday afternoon. In the doorway he hesitated, taking in the busy hives of families humming at every table, the bar crowded with leathery men watching car races on the flat-screen TVs. The closest one looked over as they entered and a ripple of heads down the bar followed his. She flushed beneath those gazes, conjoined parts of the same giant face taking in the curves of her body and her freshly brushed hair. Beside her the hiker’s face worked hard. She was ready to turn and leave, but he lowered his head and charged in, heading for an empty table in a corner at the back. It was separated from the rest of the room by a no-man’s-land scattered with cords and chairs and boxy amps. Next to it a door onto the alley was pushed wide, and a breeze came through.

  A waitress came over shortly after they sat down, and Laurelie ordered a ginger ale. The hiker ordered two pints of a local beer, and as soon as the waitress returned with them he drank one until it was empty. He didn’t touch the bread she left, just wiped his eyes and drank and panted, his grip on his glass tightening with every chair scrape, every clink of bottle and peal of laughter. The breeze helped, but it could only do so much, for the air was dense with human smells of perfume and sweat and grease. He said nothing; she wasn’t sure he was able to.

  Soon three musicians came and settled down onto the chairs in front of them. She worried he’d bolt as they began sounding off discordant flurries and strums, but once they rolled together into a loud frolicking Celtic piece, his hands relaxed a little and the frantic pulse of his nose slowed. She imagined the music forming a kind of living barrier, blocking not only all the other sounds, but sights and smells as well.

  At the band’s first break all the stimuli came rushing back in. They left then, the potency of the crowd pushing on their backs as they hurried out the door. He took a circuitous route home, following back roads, some of which weren’t even paved, and rutted tracks so camouflaged that they no longer existed when she turned around. The windows were down and Congotronics played and the wind buffeted their faces, warm swells peppered with cold spots she imagined being torn off up in Canada and drifting down. When finally he pulled up to her porch his shoulders were loose and his nose flickered lightly. He sat there a moment, looking out at the night, and then turned to her and smiled.

  Think of Gaiman’s The Sandman, she told herself as they crossed the lane, but once the trail thinned to single file it became a portal to Stephen King. The air was clammy and smelled of wildlife, some of which was no longer living, the slip and crunch of its bones beneath her feet alerting others still very much kicking. A fingernail moon sent down slivers of light but the effect was only disorienting. Large trees seemed to charge at her from the dark, but it was the small ones she feared, aiming their sharp limbs right for her eyes. After she’d stopped multiple times the hiker suggested she hold onto the back of his T-shirt. Thereafter she felt braver, absorbing some of his sure-footedness as she walked in his footsteps. Slowly her memories merged with what she could see, seeping over her line of sight like slow lava and filling in gaps, the granite left by an ancient glacier, the nurse log bursting with pulp, the last curve before the river and then the spongy sloping ground beneath her feet.

  The river shone like a slab of obsidian under the weak moonlight. From it came the sounds of splashing, which the hiker said were frogs and trout and turtles and bats, all hunting the insects that fed on the water’s surface at night.

  Then they were moving again, tramping through ferns that clutched at her legs like sticky hands charged with static. Crossing the needled floor of the pine clearing, the whole forest seemed to hush, and she imagined for a moment she heard druids chanting, far off. Then they were beyond the clearing and moving through the densest section of trees in total darkness, following a path too twisting for her mind to plot until they reached the blackberry thicket that hid his bobcat’s den.

  They didn’t enter this time. The kits are hunting, he said, so they sat down on the forest floor and waited for them. In darkness the silence seemed immense. Without sight or sound it was impossible to gauge whether one minute passed or many before the night exploded. The bob-kittens burst from the brush like the thunder of a hundred bears while all around them a high-pitched keening filled the air, at once animal and resonant with human longing and jealousy and fear. Then it trailed off, and the quiet that remained was full of softly chirping shadows, thumping supple and epiphanic into her lap from the dark, their needle teeth like tiny punishments each time she tried to keep them. They’d grown bigger, but still their mother stayed near, for although Laurelie never saw her, the hiker made a low rumbling sound once, and she answered.

  Their steps were fleet as they headed home, and she imagined they were clothed in leaves and skins, plunging and weaving barefoot through the trees.

  But in the morning all those images from the night before were as nebulous as her dreams. They smoked and curled, drifting away like ashes when she sat up on the blanket and looked around. They hadn’t touched the night before, hadn’t touched since the night they’d danced, and now the space next to her was bare. For a moment she felt bereft, believing he’d left while she was sleeping. But then she heard noises from the kitchen and, wandering in, found the hiker there. He was bent over the oven, poking at something that smelled delicious. And seeing him in that position,
she suddenly experienced an aching so strong that she had to sit down. She stared down at her table, seeing the whorls of wood not as sources but as sinks, and imagined the hiker’s core of energy as like that, never pushing out, only sucking in.

  “Who are you,” she asked quietly, “when you’re not here?”

  He closed the oven and turned around, and she didn’t need to look up to know his nostrils were flared.

  He walked to the sink and turned the faucet on. “I’m a landscaper,” he said, and with his back to her his voice was blurred almost to indistinctness amidst the sound of the water.

  Now she traced one whorl of wood slowly backward from inside to out. Pictured him as if from a bird’s-eye view, a tiny figure toiling in an enormous Eden riotous with insects and flowers and birds. After a while she added rolling lawns and, far in the distance, a mansion. Beside his figure she drew a winding brick path, upon which a woman in a flowing gown approached. She halted beside a rose bed, and as the panel panned in she leaned down to touch one tiny perfect bud. Her fingernails were long and curved, and their color was a perfect match. She looked up at the hiker, and her face was the face of a bobcat.

  He went outside for herbs, and she watched him through the screen door cutting sprigs and tasting them. Coming in again, he passed so close she could smell them on his breath. He paused there for just a moment before moving on, but long enough for her to sense his solidness, all the hard long length of him pushing down on the earth, to see the rise and fall of his chest and hear his quickening breath, to feel it stir her hair, and for that one moment it seemed there were no secrets, no barriers between them at all.