The Bobcat

by Katherine Forbes Riley

Time passed but the scene was so still it could have been a painting. Then abruptly the hiker stood and peered out toward the horizon. His nostrils began flickering erratically, although Laurelie saw nothing where he looked, beyond water and sky. His parents also followed his gaze. The father looked almost like a child with his curls tossed and his eyes expectant and his cheeks still blotchy from the wind. The mother’s hair was as smooth as ever, although loosely bound now at the base of her neck. Even as Laurelie regarded her, soft puffs were growing between her brows. And then she smiled.

  Now Laurelie saw them too. Dark shapes moving through the water fast, maybe fifty feet off the bow. Then they were arcing through the air, one after another in precise formation. After this impressive display, however, they broke ranks completely, some of the dolphins surrounding the boat, others leading it, some hovering alongside it as if to come along for the ride, some circling it as if to alter its course. And meanwhile they filled the silence with their own private conversation, a strangely intimate mix of clicks and squeals, so that Laurelie imagined they were a bunch of comedians making fun and telling dirty jokes and just generally finding it all hilarious.

  Then, like the wind, the dolphins departed. Silence returned, but it felt different this time. The sun was high. The air was warm. The sea rocked as gently as a mermaid’s bed. The hiker took off his shirt and dove in, and the father was not far behind him. The mother dangled her feet over the side and watched them swim. Laurelie moved to the ladder and incrementally lowered her legs down the rungs. She was wearing a bathing suit under her clothes but did not even consider swimming. Every part that was already submerged felt like one great block of ice. She wondered if she’d even feel it if a fish bit off her toes, and drew them out periodically to take their measure.

  When the whale song began she hardly noticed, for it simply added another dimension to the dreamlike intensity of sun and sea. It was the father she noticed first, swimming at a hard crawl back to the boat. He climbed the ladder and then turned with a soft curse in French and regarded the hiker, still some twenty yards out. The mother called out to him but the sound was lost as the whale song swelled, echoing through the water and air, ricocheting up and down the emotional spectrum like some eerily intelligent voice. And the hiker was clearly listening, treading water in a slow circle with his nose pulsing harmony and his eyes wide and weeping, so in thrall to the creature concealed beneath the water that Laurelie imagined he was waiting for it, that it would soon rise from the sea and carry him on its back away from them.

  But the whale surfaced behind him. It made a sound like a giant breathing, and then its tubular mass seemed to slide forever across the break it made in the water before its tail rose in the air like an enormous bird, slapped the water’s surface once, and disappeared.

  The mother went belowdecks after the whale. It was a while before she reemerged, but when she did her smile was back, hard as armor as she passed around plates heavy with tourtière. The father opened a cooler beneath the bench seats and handed out dripping bottles of ginger beer. And now the silence was a veil, shrouding some great mystery whose answer one longed for but would never obtain. Laurelie imagined them as a fresco on the ceiling of some ancient basilica, four pilgrims in a tiny boat atop a flat ocean under a strong sun, partaking of Earth’s flesh and blood while one of its great creatures sang. She felt hungry and ate quickly, savoring the marriage of rich meat and salt air in her mouth, not looking up until her plate was empty. The father caught her eye then and nodded.

  “La mer,” he said, “She brings ze appetite, n’est-ce pas?”

  Later the wind picked up again. It pushed them back toward the mouth of the bay, which appeared to be covered in a rippling net. Immediately the hiker rose and began pulling down sails. The father started the motor. Soon the net resolved into birds, careening between sky and sea. As they got closer the engine’s noisy putter was drowned out by their screams, and their bodies took on shape and color, gray and sleek and fat with white heads and yellow bills. Before long it grew hard to breathe, for the air stank of fish and something worse—dead fish, on mouths of the birds. Speckled buckshot began striking the deck with ugly smacks.

  And then the boat stopped. There was nowhere to go. They were surrounded by the shrieking, jostling birds, who had let the boat into their midst but now would allow them no farther.

  “Zey’re feasting. Ze tide is slack. We must wait until it turns.” Shouting to be heard above the clamor, the father began turning the boat around. But the hiker stood and went to him, and with a murmur took the wheel.

  The father stood next to him, both men tall and still, while birds undulated around them like gigantic molecules. The father looked toward the dock, but the hiker looked between the birds and the water. Back and forth, back and forth. Tears beaded in his eyes and fell, and he wiped at them absently with the back of his hand. Then suddenly the boat was moving, sliding into a space that seemed to come into existence even as they entered it. Again the hiker waited, looking back and forth before driving the boat forward once more. In this way, yard by yard, they made slow progress up the bay. Once, as they went on, Laurelie saw a flash of silver in front of the boat rise almost to the water’s surface. Hundreds of tiny silver fish formed a sphere that stretched and morphed into a bullet shape before whirling away out of sight. Simultaneously she felt the birds lifting, shifting, and the boat trundled into the space the fish had vacated. Now she thought she understood. The hiker was using the fish to track the path of the birds.

  Then finally the birds were behind them, and they were bumping against the dock.

  “Mon Dieu,” said the father softly.

  The mother said nothing at all. Only her hands moved, back and forth, back and forth, smoothing her sundress over her knees.

  Upon returning to the hiker’s house, Laurelie was ready to rest, wanting nothing more than to lie down and close her eyes for a few minutes. But as soon as they got back, the hiker asked her if she wanted to take a drive. He said he wanted her to see the town before she left, and her bus was leaving too early to save it for the morning.

  He seemed excited as they made their way back down the hill, driving fast, squeezing the wheel beneath his hands, a small smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. Once they reached the town, he had to slow. Now they inched down a crowded sunlit hill as a torrent of tourists poured across the road, moving in and out of shops selling everything from African masks and souvenirs to used books and secondhand clothes. A crowd stood outside an ice cream shop. The line was long but no one seemed to mind; those already served lingered in the shade, licking contentedly. Laurelie watched them as the truck crept by, finding a surprising comfort in the familiarity of human behavior after her wild day at sea.

  The hiker’s eyes were watering and his nose was spasming and his knuckles were stretched white over the wheel, but the smile still twitched in the corner of his mouth and his eyebrows were knit into fat satisfied puffs as he drove her through Agamont Park, paused a moment at the Point with its the view of the pier and craggy islands beyond, and, by then panting audibly, exited the town the back way through a bricked maze of alleys full of the clatter of restaurant kitchens and dumpster trash.

  He took a winding road away from town and soon made a sharp right onto a wooded track. Now the truck slowed and bumped its way through the forest for nearly an hour, while slowly his face and body relaxed. At the crest of a heavily forested hill, in the middle of a large meadow of waist-high grass, he brought the truck to a halt. Beyond them, as far as the eye could see, stretched a panoramic view of tree-studded islands, sky and sea. Much closer, only a few yards from the windshield, a battered white Sold sign was planted in the ground, looking in that uncultivated place not unlike some ancient explorer’s flag.

  “It’s mine,” he said, after a while. “I’m going to build a cabin on it. And I was wondering if you’d want to come and live here with me after you graduate.”

  Handing around platters of grilled
corn and crab, the mother asked Laurelie what she thought of the town, and Laurelie for a panicked instant couldn’t remember anything except the hiker’s hands in her hair, the bite of the door handle against her back and the slice of sky as he kissed her with the whole length of his body pressed to hers, how the sunlight cut right through the mountain, splashing fire in its haste to reach the sea.

  “I was showing her,” the hiker said softly, “the place where we’re going to live.”

  To Laurelie then it was like a funhouse mirror, seeing her own emotions twist and distort on the mother’s face. For what she felt was the greedy suck of fusion, the breathless passing of a point of no return, and what she saw was the pain and shock of a severed limb. The mother opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it again when the father laid his hand over hers. The hiker and the father began discussing building plans and timeframes and methods for passive energy construction and ways to minimize costs. And Laurelie, listening, thought of the cold sea and the damp breeze and the eight long months of winter.

  She startled, flushed, when the mother interrupted, saying, “But what will Laurelie do out there?” And then the hiker turned to look at her, and she knew in another moment he’d perceive how the words laid her own fears bare.

  But the father surprised them all. “Beh,” he said, “she can draw ze view! And she can work for us also, if she wants to.”

  The mother stared at him. And then she laughed. The room lit with her laughter, her beautiful mouth parting and her white teeth flashing like flags of truce.

  Before the light faded, the mother took Laurelie out to see her greenhouse. Shaped like a pyramid, only its roof was visible from the top of the lawn, its window panels reflecting back the pinks and yellows of the setting sun. Crossing the grass, they passed an old sugar maple. A wire fence beneath it encircled a tidy little house and yard full of chickens. They had long soft feathers sprouting from their heads that made them look like fine ladies wearing fancy hats. She would have liked to stop and watch them stalking around clucking under their breath, but the mother kept going, busy explaining how the father had built the greenhouse right into the southern-facing hill, so that the winter sun would warm it all day while the slope drained away the excess rain and provided shelter from the harsh north winds.

  Along the front and sides of the greenhouse lay an enormous outdoor garden. For a moment the mother stopped before the thriving rows of vegetation and fell silent, as if letting them speak for themselves. Soon, however, she resumed walking, but more slowly, leading Laurelie up one row and down the next, both inside the greenhouse and out. She paused at each plant, gently pruned some small fruit or leaf, named it and offered it to Laurelie to taste, and then told her what it needed to grow. There were green beans and lettuce and squash and eggplant and okra and kale and arugula and various peppers and much more, including an entire row of fragrant medicinal herbs growing in such small and delicate arrangements that they resembled clusters of jewels.

  While Laurelie appreciated the many names and flavors, understanding the details of each plant’s care presupposed far more horticultural knowledge than she possessed, so after a while she gave up trying to absorb all the information. And in fact over time she came to believe that these details weren’t even what the mother really wanted to communicate, that actually what she was trying to convey was something larger and deeper about living itself, about how for anything to flourish it had to be given the right environment, and while some things were hardy, others by nature or accident were far more sensitive, and it worked out best when everyone involved was aware of this right from the beginning. Then, upon reaching the end of the last row, the mother said that the father would build Laurelie a greenhouse of her own. At which point Laurelie found herself confessing that she didn’t know much about gardening or cooking or building or really anything that involved manipulating physical objects in the real world at all. She expected the mother to be shocked, even contemptuous, but the woman only smiled and gave her a bit of chive flower to taste and told her that sometimes it took many seasons before two plants learned to thrive together in the same ground.

  13

  Now the heat wave in Vermont subsided. The temperatures were cool again in the mornings and evenings, hot and dry in the afternoons. The hiker arrived each Saturday fairly vibrating after the long drive, full of the energy and excitement of his building plans. Laurelie’s own head felt like the sky, huge and blue and dreamy, with emerald hills circling its horizons like promises of things to come. Finally college was almost over; these classes were her last, and moreover all were in some way related to her art. All she had left to do now was to look and draw, and this was exactly what she wanted to do anyway. She looked, she drew. She drew, she looked, images leaping into her mind like chiaroscuro on her bike rides to and from campus and while she was babysitting the boy in the afternoons. Fantastical images, a plant sheltering its fragile child buds from a narcissistic sun; a crowded boat upon a sea of glass and a man riding away from it on a whale that sang; and realistic ones too, like the mother in the park who’d stared off at nothing while her infant tore the air with feral cries, or the old alcoholic in the alley who’d waved his fingers at the boy with a bloom in his eyes and then seen Laurelie watching and dropped both hand and gaze like deadweight.

  Nearly a year after fleeing Philadelphia, she still felt the fear portrayed in her art, of being human, a human among humans, as if once rooted it never completely died. But the feeling no longer only made her want to hide. Now she saw how it made her art vital, alive. And with this understanding came another, a sense that she’d been crawling through a passage that was tight and dark and had finally stepped out into light and space.

  There came a week when posters blocked her regular view through the windows of the grocery. They plastered the windows of the little pub next door too. WAKE UP, one said, and others said LISTEN and COURAGE and WORLD. The art on them was compelling, blocky and spare, a strong man drumming, a blue horse with wings, a pair of black boots stuffed with stalks of golden wheat. One poster was simply full of art quotes in different fonts and sizes, including Art soothes Pain and Art is the INside of the World. At the bottom of each poster were the coming weekend’s dates.

  When the hiker hopped down from his truck that Saturday, she asked him if he knew what they were.

  “Oh, that’s an old New England festival,” he said, nodding. “It’s held every year out in a fairground in the woods. People go and camp for the weekend. I went a couple of times with my parents, years ago.”

  “What was it like?” she said.

  His gaze blurred, turned inward, remembering. “We saw a puppet show. The puppets were huge.” He shrugged. “I was little. But my parents really liked it.”

  Laurelie nodded. “The posters are amazing. Is it only theater?”

  “There was music at night. International stuff. I remember watching some African drumming.”

  “Wow,” she said, and then hesitated. “Were—were there a lot of people?”

  Now his eyes focused in on her, so fully she felt pinned. “No,” he said, after a moment, “it was pretty small actually.”

  “They must prefer it that way. I mean, the posters weren’t like advertisements. They were like . . . secrets.” Her words felt slow coming out beneath the gaze he held trained on her. Fixed. His brow furrowed. His nostrils flared.

  It felt as if a spell were cast as they rocketed north on the sun-drenched highway, with verdant hills undulating on every side and Coltrane rocking the cab like a revolution. The hiker drove with one hand on the wheel and the other cupping hers, and she imagined they were soaring high above the world.

  When the pickup rumbled to a stop at the end of an exit ramp a few hours later, one enchantment slid seamlessly into the next. Now they rambled along a country road with the windows down and the musky scents of field and forest, the heat-charged air and the green-filtered light, the physicality of all things pressing in.

&nbs
p; After a time they came upon a handwritten sign, OXFORD FAIRGROUND 3 MILES. It was stuck in the bare ground with a wooden stake upon which hundreds of little yellow happy face stickers had been affixed. The sign pointed them right onto a rutted track that carved an arc through a field waist-high with wildflowers. Behind the field on one side rose a towering stand of trees. Hemlocks, he told her as they started into the bend, interspersed with red oak and yellow birch.

  Almost immediately he slowed. There were vehicles ahead, stopped along both sides of the track. Some of the cars tilted haphazardly down into the tall grass, while others had barely pulled off at all. Laurelie thought at first there’d been an accident, but as their truck crept past, people appeared, some meandering through the field, others lying on hoods looking up at the sky, or sitting hunched in circles in the beds of pickup trucks with smoke drifting white above their heads. Some beckoned or called as they passed. Smiles flashed on and off like fireflies. The hiker’s eyes were watering and his nostrils spasmed erratically and his hands were tight on the wheel, but he nodded when she asked if he was okay, and even smiled a little.

  Laurelie thought these people seemed strange, but not threatening. Animal but not predatory, she thought, probably because they’re all vegetarians. Then she stared, for ahead the track had straightened out and the scene continued as far as she could see.

  They parked in a dirt lot at the end of the track, an impromptu marketplace overflowing with people selling things from the backs of their vehicles. There were blowing bubbles and glow sticks and frayed beach chairs and even piles of old towels and blankets, but apart from tie-dyes and beaded jewelry, Laurelie didn’t see anything resembling art. Huge black barrels filled with water lined one edge of the lot, and as they got out of the truck a few dozen shouting people tipped one over.