“Is this . . . ?” Laurelie asked, watching them cavort in the muddy spill.
She didn’t finish the sentence, but the hiker shook his head. “Maybe these are just the tailgaters,” he said. Then he turned away and pulled his pack from the back of the truck. “Let’s find a place to camp.”
They followed another hand-lettered sign that read TENT CITY THIS WAY down a wooded path. The sound of music grew steadily louder, until finally the path opened onto a large fairground shaped like a shallow bowl. Its far slopes were swallowed up by forest, but its center was grassy and cleared, although dotted with dancing people now. Many more people were packed around a stage that had been erected at the top of the slope nearest the hiker and Laurelie. The pumping rumba coming from it was deafening as they followed the path behind the stage, and the hiker let go of her hand and covered his ears. Once the stage was behind them, the path traversed another section of trees before reaching a second, smaller clearing. This one was littered with tents and backpacks, but the hiker kept going, heading for the forest on the other side. Soon trees blocked the tents behind them from view. The canopy closed above their heads, making it dark and cool, almost cold without the sun as they made their way down a steep slope to a stream and up again on the other side. Beneath their feet rustled dry needles and leaves, but there was little low growth apart from sporadic clumps of ferns nestled in the thin beams of particle-filled light that escaped the tall trees, and this made it easy to walk along, even though they followed no path.
When the hiker stopped, the only evidence of the festival behind them was a faint thudding sound. He unpacked his tent, and after erecting it on a level patch of ground, unzipped the sleeping sacks and laid them out inside it. Then he pulled a small pack from the larger one and lifted it onto his back.
The crowd around the stage had grown even larger by the time they returned to it. The hiker turned away from it and, skirting the trees, circled around the top edge of the bowl until he reached its far side. There, with deep forest at his back, he sat. Reaching into his pack, he brought out a bottle of mead, snapped off the cap with a hard flick of his thumb, and drank until it was empty.
The sun set slowly behind the trees, the sky in front of them deepening through shades of blue as the night crept in and blotted out the spectacle below. After the Latin band there’d been some kind of electric raga fusion, and now a Québécois folk band played so fast Laurelie’s tapping feet could barely keep up with their blurred four-beat rhythm. The crowd of dancers was fading into darkness, and she was sorry to see them go; from her high viewpoint there seemed such an abandon to their bodies, as if the music were a physical substance filling those vessels and setting them in motion.
But darker is better, she thought. The hiker’s muscles loosened where their shoulders touched. He had closed his eyes, and now she closed hers too. Felt the mead moving through her blood, the music throbbing in her bones, and the tiny flutters around the area of her heart that happened whenever he was near.
She felt him stiffen and opened her eyes to find a pair of large brown ones peering at them. They were hung in a pale moon face whose every feature was stamped by the sun with its own set of contour lines, all of it framed like a buffalo head with shaggy blond dreads.
“Man, I thought . . . I was . . . hallucinating you . . .” The words were croaked out on a pent-up breath, a trickle of smoke punctuating each pause; from one weathered hand dangled a smoldering cigar.
Maybe you are, Laurelie thought, for an instant perceiving this strange creature as birthed from this animal place, possessing a connection to it she’d never share. She looked at the hiker then, at the tears beading in the corners of his eyes and the hard flared nostrils and parted panting mouth, and perceived in him an even stronger repulsion to it, but equally one she couldn’t share.
Then the light was gone and the music was a throbbing blindness of sinuous beats, the bodies below them a single black mass writhing and pulsating beneath it. Occasionally other bodies passed around them, leaving messy, pungent trails. Hours of steadily sipping mead had made the ground into a sea, the hiker beside her a buoy she gripped lest the waves of input carry her away. She wished they would slow for a moment so she could parse them, but instead they only washed up the walls of her mind and then lurched back again, creating a kind of feedback loop that didn’t clarify anything. She thought of the hiker’s pulsing nose and weeping eyes and wondered if this were how he always felt, but even as she grasped it the thought slipped back into the waves again.
When finally they could take no more, the hiker led them back to their camp. The tent city had come alive in the darkness; it was a burning city now, with fires flaming all over the ground and candles set high seeming to float in midair and shadows moving all around trailing thin streamers of light. The voices she heard seemed to make no sense, and she imagined this was Babel, a thousand bodies living together and none of them able to communicate.
Back at their own tent, familiar and warm, she lay down upon the furs and immediately sank into the soft folds of sleep. But the hiker pressed her up again, urged her to eat. The meal was tactile in the dark, and she ate hungrily, hunks of dark homemade bread the hiker handed her layered with his rich strong cheese, and every bite washed down with cool water. She ate until the food was gone and then lay down again, only to find herself wide awake.
Drowning no longer, floating now atop the lingering effects of the mead, senses reading loud and clear, mind as expansive as the night. Next to her the hiker’s warm body, gently breathing. Searching the darkness for a seam, imagining she was a butterfly in a cocoon, a flower in a seed about to burst. Turning and finding his mouth, finding in it the same readiness. Bodies pressing then, hands tugging at clothes, his hardness slow-fusing with her softness, so that what came next would simply complete a transformation already begun.
Then abruptly he sat up. She couldn’t see and so when he didn’t speak she tried to imagine what he might be doing. She pictured his ears, swiveling in the dark like a cat’s. Once her own breathing slowed, she heard him panting.
“What is it?”
“People.” His throat clicked audibly. “They’re trying to be quiet, like they’re doing something wrong. And that’s how they smell too.”
“Outside? How many are there?” Now she sat up and rubbed her fists against her eyes in a useless attempt to see.
“Five guys and one girl.”
“Just one girl?”
There were long blank moments in her brain as she crept through the forest, gripping the back of the hiker’s T-shirt. Then fear would rush in, huge and cold and real, and for a moment only her blindness stopped her from running. He was moving so slowly, silently and tactically, stopping every few step to smell and listen. He only wanted to know what they were doing out here, and that’s why he was taking such pains to remain concealed. But she kept thinking about the girl, where they were taking her, and what they would do to her. He’d said that they were wasted, and that she was too. Had they taken her against her will? Was her own fear rising like flood water as she realized what was happening to her?
Suddenly the hiker made a noise low in his throat and stopped. Out of nothing a tent appeared. A large blue dome, it loomed against the night, flashlight beams canted haphazardly along its walls, casting eerie streaks of light.
Already he was backing away, with no intention of revealing himself now that the threat had been located. But Laurelie stood frozen by the male voices coming from inside. Her heart lost its beat, fluttered and then pounded. Her breath caught in her throat, choking her.
When her fingers dropped from his shirt, the hiker turned back. His eyes watered freely and his nose pulsed hectically, but his physical reactions didn’t restore her; rather they only served to magnify her own.
Then came a feeble moan from inside the tent, unmistakably female, and it was as if the sound propelled her, for she lurched forward, body quaking, hands scrabbling at the door. She tugged up the zipper so that the flap
gaped wide, and stumbled inside.
She registered heat, and sweat, and the detritus of men. A thousand yards of blue floor stretched ahead. At its far end were demons. Massive in the stilted light, they huddled in an inverted star around the slumped body of a girl.
Their heads were down, resting or conferring, so that they didn’t see Laurelie crawling toward them over the dirty plastic floor, past crumpled beer cans and empty cigarette packs and discarded articles of clothing. But when she reached the closest one, it came alive. She heard its low grunt and smelled its stench and time seemed to slow as all reason fled, stretching like taffy as it lifted its head and fixed its gaze upon her.
A high-pitched cry rent the air then. A bobcat’s cry of warning, and longing, and fear. Time snapped, then raced and rippled as all the demons swung their heads, trying to locate the source of the animal sound. Laurelie reached into their midst, grabbed the girl’s arm, and pulled hard.
The girl had looked broken, slumped over her knees, but she roused now and slapped Laurelie’s hand away. “What the hell are you doing?” she cried.
And now Laurelie saw the needle in her fingers, the drugged bliss on her face, the beaded bag open upon her lap with the lighter and spoon spilling out. The other needles scattered around the floor.
Laurelie looked back and saw the hiker crouching just outside the tent door. His face was a twisting rictus in the slanted light, and something, sweat or mucus or tears, dripped steadily from it onto the ground. Beside her she felt more than saw a demon shift, and then she was moving, exploding out the door and into the night, with a thousand demons reaching out to keep her.
They both ran, zigging and zagging through a black maze of trees until they could run no more. The hiker dropped to his knees then, panting, and she sank to the ground behind him, taking great breaths, her pulse slamming in her temples while her heart in her chest spun and crashed and wheeled.
Adrenaline bled quickly, a mortal wound. Somehow, the hiker led them back to their tent. Laurelie was shivering by the time they reached it. Inside, she burrowed deep between the fur-lined sleeping sacks and stared up at the dark walls of a prison. Eyes open or closed, it didn’t matter. The inverted star hung indelible. The bobcat’s cry echoed in her head. And in the mud of memory her own demon fed, and she heard its grunts and smelled its firewater breath, felt the brush of its whiskers and the beady hardness of its gaze.
But these projections were pierced by the hiker’s ragged breathing from the darkness next to her. Because he’d know, she thought, if a demon were really here. He’d smell it, and hear it, and taste it. And now hers faded, and the black walls of the tent became just walls once more, simply a way for him to keep out weather and bugs, while blocking nothing of his perceptions.
“I’m sorry,” she said, finally, softly.
His breath hitched, and then he released it, long and slow.
His fingers, beneath the furs, found hers. “It’s okay,” he said.
In the dawn the air was glittering, white-bright and stifling, and smelling like bees. The hiker packed the tent away and then all that remained of the night before were four tiny holes where its stakes had pierced the ground. In the tent city shadowy indeterminate shapes rose and fell behind synthetic walls and the sounds and scents of partying still came from fire circles, but the stage as they passed it was dark and deserted, and nothing moved in the lot where they retrieved the truck. Beer cans led like crumbs back to the country road where yellow happy face stickers winked and curled in the dust.
14
Laurelie spent two weeks on Demons, studying De Kooning’s women and then drawing her rapist like them, five different versions of him all hulking and wild-eyed, with threatening stares and ferocious grins, blending archetypes from cave men to porn stars to slick Wall Street brokers. The hiker she drew as half-bobcat, half-man. In her panels he terrified the demons with his scream, shattering the inverted star they had formed around their prey, and then carried her from their lair and bounded away on all fours with her through a black maze of forest.
Finishing those panels was like waking feverish in the night and kicking away all the covers, only to later freeze and regret it. For late Sunday evening after putting away her oil sticks, she got on her bike and rode to campus, leaving Demons in her advisor’s office mailbox along with the other panels she’d finished since their last meeting.
Anxious then, indeed adrift, she spent a week drawing the boy simply because he was there. It was her first time drawing the world as a source of wonder rather than fear. She used Matisse’s wild shapes and dissonant colors to portray the boy’s rapidly expanding language, the way he seemed to breathe words now, and how he’d begun to intuit the ontologies of things. She drew the day he realized his toy trains drank the viscous blue substance in his train set tower. Liquids!, said the thought bubble over his head, and surrounding him were more thought bubbles full of diesel and milk, hot chocolate and rivers and rain. She drew the game it became then, of him associating every object with its hypernym, and refining both as new instances were encountered. So boulders became giant rocks, and sugar and salt became sweet and bitter rocks, and at the river there were skip rocks and splash rocks and boom rocks and tinkle rocks, although he didn’t know until he threw them in the water which ones they would actually be.
Wednesday he discovered a pile of scat while they were walking along the trail, and once he understood what kind of rocks those little dried lumps were, he was unceasing in his search for further exemplars, discovering as the days went by half a dozen more, not only on the trail but also scattered up and down the thick brushy edge of the dirt lane.
Then came Friday and she sat once more on a hard wooden chair in her advisor’s office, staring down at her knotted hands while he stood behind his desk, coffee in hand, slowly turning the stiff creamy pages of her panels and rattling off their titles under his breath. “Demons, The Storm, Cutting the Roots, Whale Rider, Bobcat Nocturne, Dead Man Walking . . .”
When he was through he gathered them up again and told her how pleased he was with all she’d accomplished in the three terms since she’d come to Montague. He and his colleagues hadn’t been sure how well she’d do, he said, changing colleges so close to graduation.
“I took the liberty of sharing these with them, and we’ve all agreed,” he continued, carrying them over to the couch. He sank down with a sigh, sending fine particles streaming up into the morning light. “We think you’re developing an interesting approach, between your sampling of masters and your collage of high and low art forms. We’d like to offer you a place in our graduate program this fall. It will give you time and space to pursue your ideas further. And it will keep you here with us a little while longer, as well.”
With a sensation akin to hallucination, she watched his lips stretch over his small yellow teeth and the beveled gray bristles around his mouth rise and fall, as he explained that her tuition would be paid by the department, that she’d have some departmental duties each year, but he thought it would good for her to get some teaching experience, maybe edit the department’s art journal, both of which would help bring her out of her shell and get her interacting more with the other art students and faculty. “We want you to feel like you’re part of a family here,” he said, and then leaned forward, laid her portfolio on the low glass coffee table, and smiled.
On the one hand, there was her future, a black box, its form and function undefined. On the other there was her bike, with its handlebars and seat, its pedals and wheels, the purpose of each so perfectly described. She was atop it now, gathering speed down the hill, laughing aloud with the joy of it, the wind taking it and whirling it around. Fraternity houses flashed past on both sides, and she imagined they were artists’ gables, the artists inside dusted with charcoal dust, the tables piled high with brushes and paints and bottles of rabbit skin glue. Then the road leveled out and she passed the meadow and it was full of butterflies. And it seemed to her as if they were all lighter tha
n air, balancing on the forward edge of time.
When the hiker arrived that Saturday, she took him down for a look at the scat the boy had found. To her relief he said they weren’t from a bobcat. They came from a dog, he said, probably one that had been abandoned by someone who either didn’t know or care that a domesticated animal wouldn’t survive in the wild any longer than most people.
Then they climbed into his pickup truck and headed out on another road trip. The last time, driving to the festival, she’d imagined they were flying. But they’d fallen now, and sped low over sun-scorched earth. She gripped the cracked leather edge of the pickup’s bucket seat, hearing her breath in her ears and her heart pumping the blood inside her veins, and all the thoughts she held inside made her feel like life was reckless and at any moment something might change, so that all she could do was hold on tight.
If the hiker sensed something unusual, his face didn’t show it. For the moment at least, the whirlpool inside her was attributed to the task at hand. They were driving south two hours to her landlords’ new beach house, where they would spend the evening babysitting the boy while his parents went out for the evening. Laurelie’s landlady had basically forced her into it, accusing her of contract infraction and ingratitude when she’d said she already plans, then threatening her with eviction if she did not comply, and finally begging brazenly, saying she knew very well what Laurelie’s plans were, and that her boyfriend could come with her.
The hiker didn’t seem to mind as much as Laurelie did. He talked as he drove of poured foundations and roof trusses for the cabin he was building in the woods five hours north. He still thought she was going to come and live there with him once the summer term was over. And of course she still wanted to. The problem was that she wanted two things now. She wanted to live with him. But despite the demons that resided there, she wanted to live in the world too. She wanted to go to graduate school.
The Bobcat Page 11