The Bobcat

by Katherine Forbes Riley

  High dunes separated the island from the sea. Miles of marsh dotted with birds and the odd fisherman connected it to the mainland. The hiker followed the main island road through a simple grid of numbered streets until they found the right one. They parked in the sandy driveway and then walked around an ultra-modern cape to a deck in back. Laurelie’s landlords were waiting for them there, looking out of place in their evening clothes against the casual backdrop of sand.

  “Now see, Violet, they aren’t late,” the landlord said.

  The boy was down among the dunes, splashing around in a plastic kiddie pool. When he saw the hiker and Laurelie, he tumbled out and launched himself in their direction. The hiker picked him up and listened to his chatter while the landlady showed Laurelie around the house. Resentment still arced off the woman like sparks, and moreover the walls were laden with her heavy-handed landscapes. Laurelie kept her gaze out the windows. The little cape offered near-panoramic views, each a slightly different perspective on three simple horizontal stripes of sand, sea, and sky vibrating like a Rothko painting.

  Down on the deck the three humans were their own study in contrasts, the landlord short and stocky and composed of the same colors as the view, the hiker tall and thin and of tones recalling earth and wood and blood. The boy clung to his shoulder like a little crab, soft and round and pink. As Laurelie watched, the landlord said something and rubbed his pale palms together. The hiker replied with a single word and then turned the boy into an airplane and walked away, flying him around the deck.

  By the time Laurelie came outside again the hiker had put the boy down and was out among the low dunes close to the house, bending over an enormous plant with spiky, gray-green leaves. Purple flowered stalks grew from it like giant spears of rock candy. He brushed them gently with his hand and a dozen fat bumblebees wobbled into the air, bumping his head and shoulders in a slow inquisitive dance before settling back down to their flowers. From the deck, the boy stared open-mouthed.

  “He said he’s from Maine. Whereabouts exactly?” The landlord spoke from an Adirondack chair to one side of the door, startling Laurelie as she came out because she hadn’t seen him there.

  Laurelie didn’t respond. The hiker was crouching now, digging away a bit of sand at the base of the plant, his nostrils pulsing gently.

  “Zzzzzzz.” The boy buzzed over to her, doing a private little dance of his own.

  “Well, in any event, that must be quite a long drive,” the landlord continued. “Violet tells me he’s been doing it every weekend.” He paused and then went on, “And I suppose it’ll only continue, now that you’ll be staying here for graduate school.”

  The hiker’s face froze, and so, for a moment, did Laurelie’s heart.

  “You’re surprised we knew?” the landlady said, coming through the door. She smiled at the expression on Laurelie’s face. “Owen is the provost at Montague. You’ll need to let us know soon if you’re planning to keep the cottage,” she went on. “I had someone calling about it just the other day. Oh, and we may need to charge more, if there’s going to be two of you.”

  Behind them the hiker was moving away. Laurelie’s pulse fluttered with frantic wing beats as her eyes tracked him heading deeper into the dunes. She was certain he’d heard and yet absurdly still hoped he hadn’t and searched for signs of confirmation in the set of his shoulders and length of his stride as her landlords gathered their things and air-kissed the boy and then swept out of the driveway and down the road, waving gaily from their red convertible.

  Once they’d gone she felt the emptiness they’d left behind like a vacuum. Into it the gulls screamed. There was a chill dampness to the air, rising from the sand now that the sun was sinking. The hiker looked small wandering out among the swells.

  The boy ran after him, and Laurelie watched, hardly breathing, nearly weeping when the hiker stopped and turned and bent down to him. And when the boy ran back to her with joy in his face it seemed as if he were pulling the entire horizon with him, for the hiker was returning too.

  They took the boy down to the beach. Laurelie went inside first for snacks and towels, and when she came out again, she found them standing before the open bed of the hiker’s pickup truck. She kept some distance between them, but was still close enough to see that his nose flickered erratically and his eyes were damp. Intent as a surgeon, he was weighing a fishing rod in each hand. The boy stood wide-eyed before an array of brightly colored lures the hiker had made of wood and fur and glass; they looked like children’s toys but for the medieval-looking hooks protruding from their sides. After a time, the hiker set the longer rod aside. He gathered a few lures into a bag, which he then tied at his waist.

  They walked over the dunes, the hiker leading the way with the boy leaping between them, effervescent, crashing into her legs and kicking up great tufts of sand. Down by the sea the sun was low but still heavy and hot, and the air shimmered with reflected heat. It was high tide so she clustered their things on the thin strip of dry sand between the dunes and the water line. The boy ran down to the water’s edge and inspected the treasures deposited there by the foamy fingers of the waves. The hiker stood a few yards away looking out at the ocean, his rod held loosely in his hand. When finally he began stringing it, the boy jumped up, eager to assist, and received charge of the bag of lures. The first one the hiker asked him for was a tiny thing with a preponderance of silky black hair. “It’ll hover on top of the water like a bug,” he told the boy. The next one he requested was a smooth piece of dark wood nearly the length of a butter knife, a thing of beauty with large round eyes and a finely striped and streamlined body that flared out at one end into a wide red circle of mouth. It would glide beneath the water, mimicking the movements of a fish. “The lures I make are like desires,” he said, “more tempting even than the real thing.” He strung both of them, staggering their lines, to make it seem like a pursuit, he said, because sometimes one’s desire could be enhanced by another’s. It was the most he had spoken since the landlords left, and though the boy listened raptly, Laurelie felt unbalanced, even a little deranged by the coldly calculating words.

  But she missed them once they stopped and the hiker began to cast. He caught nothing there, and after a while the boy lost interest in watching him. He and Laurelie began building a sand train. Slowly the hiker drifted away down the beach, still casting and reeling lazily. Laurelie felt the separation like a physical pain, and believed he intended her to. But once the train was finished, the boy noticed him gone and followed him. And so up the beach they all went, heading for a breakwater of rocks that jutted out to sea in the distance, the hiker casting and reeling down at the water’s edge while Laurelie sifted through the powdery sand high up against the dunes. The boy raced ahead and carved circles back, his little legs pumping as he chased seagulls. The birds had no fear of him, even seemed to tease, lifting away like indulgent siblings when he was close enough to grasp their tail feathers, only to land again with a ruffle of wings a short distance behind him.

  When they reached the jetty the boy clambered up onto the black rocks with Laurelie close behind. The hiker sloshed out into the water beside them until his calves were submerged, and then he cast.

  Hardly a minute passed before he was backing out again, reeling fast, his line whipping and blurring as he dragged a slim silvery fish from the dark sea. It arched and gaped there on the sand, bleeding water. The hiker anchored it with his foot and slid his buck knife through its head just above the eye. Then he removed the hook from its mouth. The small furry lure was still attached. He slid the knife up the fish’s belly and swirled both in the water. When they were clean he packed the empty cavity with handfuls of moss he took from his lure bag, then wrapped the whole thing tightly in a cloth and stored it in the same bag.

  Now he restrung the small lure in front of the large one and cast again. He went deeper; the low swells of waves had reached his thighs when something took his line. The thin cord buzzed and flew, nearly emptying h
is spindle before he was able to start drawing it back again. No quick capture this time; it was a battle, soundless and protracted, his pole bending radically as he gave and took slack, Laurelie thinking at any second the metal had to snap. A passing pair of beachcombers stopped to watch, and then another, as the hiker fought to keep his catch.

  Slowly it became clear that the pole was bending a little less, the line coming in a little more with each reel, and then it seemed to Laurelie as if all the watchers gave a collective sigh. There were flashes of silver in the shallow and then it was over. The fish was enormous, head to tail the same size as the boy. Everyone but the hiker took a step back as the heavy body flip-flopped on the sand. The hiker anchored its head and extracted the hook. The small lure still dangled sodden from the filament, but the big lure was gone.

  The small crowd murmured and gasped when the hiker grasped the fish by both gills and dragged it back into the water. It lay still on the sand beneath the lapping waves for a few long beats, and then drifted off with feeble flicks of its tail, as stunned as the humans watching it leave.

  “That would’ve fed me for a month,” one man remarked.

  The hiker shook his head. “You can’t keep the females.”

  Back at the beach house the hiker scraped the first fish he’d caught clean of scales on the driveway and then gutted it. The boy crouched next to him and helped him hold the hose, washing away all traces of blood. Then the hiker brought the fish inside and pan-fried it on the stove with the windows wide, sipping homemade beer while the boy pinched salt for him and ground the pepper mill. The boy even tried a bite when the fish was ready, before tucking into the noodles Laurelie had made him.

  Afterward they sat on the couch watching a Marlon Brando movie on the old movie channel with the boy snuggled down in the middle, his body a bridge between them, draped over them both, hot and soft and dense. He soon nodded off but they left him there until his parents’ headlights turned down the road. Then the hiker carried him off to bed while Laurelie gathered up their belongings.

  The night was quiet as they left.

  “Want to take a walk?” the hiker said.

  They crossed through the dunes and slid down their cool slipping backs onto the beach. It was still and black. The tide was low, the crash of the waves sudden and loud. They walked along the cold hard sand at the water’s edge. Above them wheeled an enormous night, its motion like a flower opening, only perceptible once one had looked away for a long time. And so too did she begin slowly but inexorably trying to convince him of how it could still work, and how much she still wanted it to. Living with him on weekends and vacations, both of them working hard when they were apart so that they wouldn’t have to while they were together, and she’d take the bus so that he didn’t have to drive so much, and did he know that she was very productive in small spaces . . .

  And after a while his mouth quieted hers, and then bound together like a raft, they headed back, pitching between the thunder of the waves and the pull of a million stars.

  15

  “Pick up. Pick up pick up pick up . . .”

  She paced the floor of her cottage with her phone to her ear, casting anxious glances out the kitchen window. Signs of fall had cropped up overnight. The bushes bordering the dirt lane were festooned with bright red berries. Shadows were twice the size of their sources although it was only six o’clock, and the cicadas with their steely screech were already calling down the night. She imagined the boy huddled beneath a berry bush somewhere, afraid of the shadows and the sounds of the coming dark. She imagined him plucking a bright red fruit and then lying unconscious in a pool of vomit, with berry-stained lips.

  Finally the hiker answered his phone. “He’s lost,” she blurted, and then he made her back up and explain how she’d played with the boy at the river all afternoon, taken him home and left him in the grass with his yellow trucks and his mother lying nearby in a lawn chair. With the landlady’s eyes closed and her brow so slack and the boy making his vrooming sounds, Laurelie had thought the scene looked peaceful, but now in her mind’s eye it took on the cast of impending danger, the small boy playing alone on a lawn with a looming forest at his back, his mother lying next to him stupefied by the drugs she’d taken for a root canal that afternoon, valium first and then the novocaine, she’d said, and a codeine afterward for the pain. She’d told Laurelie she must have nodded off, because when she opened her eyes next the boy was gone.

  The hiker asked how long. An hour, Laurelie told him, no more. For that’s how long ago she’d left them there, and her landlady had only just now knocked on her door, hoping the boy had come to her. “And the worst part,” Laurelie said, “is that he probably did, but I wasn’t there.” The crisp yellow light had drawn her out; she’d been riding her bike north along the river road, sucking stones like Molloy and dreaming of the future to come. Guilt flooded her now and she began pacing again, imagining where the boy might have gone.

  “Do you think,” she said, “the bobcat . . . ?”

  She heard rustling noises, the tug of a zipper, the snick of a door opening and closing and footsteps crunching over gravel. Another door, and then an engine rumbled.

  “I’m coming,” the hiker said.

  Laurelie helped her landlady search the main house first. Then they worked their way slowly down the long hill in the fading light, calling the boy’s name with artificial cheer whose only effect was to increase their own anxiety. It was full dark by the time they finished at Laurelie’s cottage and thumped back out to stand in stunned silence on her porch.

  Only one place left to look. Standing there, Laurelie pictured it. The boy, upon not finding her home, going down the trail to the river where they’d spent the afternoon. But what then, she wondered. How much farther would he have gone?

  Bobcats hunted at dusk. She’d read they could take down prey twice their size. Ice slid down her back at the thought of what one could do to a little boy.

  She heard the sound of a car and swung around just in time to see headlights from the river road turning onto the lane. Her heart leapt, though she knew it was too soon.

  “That’s Owen,” her landlady said, and started down the stairs. “I just know he’s going to want to call the police.”

  “Sparkle rocks,” Laurelie called out over a pulsing chorus of frogs and cicadas. They sounded so much louder when one was alone and in the dark. She wondered if the boy thought so too. Branches caught at her hair and clothes and protruding roots threatened to derail her but she kept on, heading down the river trail with only a small flashlight to guide her way. She went through flat rocks and finger rocks, smooth rocks and bumpy rocks, crystal rocks and mossy rocks too, focusing fiercely on playing the boy’s game until her sandals slapped water, and then she just called his name.

  She splashed and slipped across the shallow river to Thinking Rock and then, scrambling up, began scanning the banks, marking a grid with rocks and branches and illuminating every square inch in between, her heart going staccato and her mind filling the grainy dark with images of the little boy’s body broken or bitten or trailing pale into the cold black water. And once she’d searched as far as her light could reach, she started all over again.

  The rock dug into her tailbone as she slid down from it, and the cold water washed through her shoes. Low-hearted, she sloshed back to the bank, and there shined her light over the ferns. They looked like an ocean in the dark. Behind them rose the forest. Its depths seemed infinite, and yet not far within lay the clearing where the hiker had camped for weeks. The boy might remember the way. There would have still been light when he went in. Now, weaving through the ferns and the trees beyond, she followed no path but the one in her head, heard nothing but her heart and her own fast breaths until finally she emerged onto the clearing.

  Running then, she swept her light in great swaths, calling to the boy in a voice pitched low and urgently. When he did not answer, she stood in the center and turned slow circles, incrementally wideni
ng the angle of her light until it struck the trees on the clearing’s far side.

  Somewhere inside them hid the bobcat’s den. Would the boy remember how to get there? He had loved the bob-kittens. Would he have gone alone in search of them? And what would the bobcat do to him, without the hiker there?

  She had to go in there and look for him, but she was afraid, seemed to feel the bobcat just beyond the reach of her light, warning her to keep away. The minutes ticked by as in her mind grew a sinuous mass, a monstrous bramble patch that defended a bobcat’s den, each branch alive and as deadly as the hairs on Medusa’s head.

  She heard something else breathing behind her. Spinning around, her flashlight beam caught the hiker running toward her across the clearing.

  “I just know he’s here,” she said.

  He nodded. Accustomed to the night, his eyes watered at her light, and so she aimed it at the ground as they started off again. But instead of heading for the den he turned back the way they’d come. He strode so quickly through the dark she had trouble following even holding onto his shirt, telling her agitatedly as they went how the landlord had been standing with the police in the lane when he drove in. They’d stopped him and wanted to know what he was doing there, and when he told them, the landlord had decided to go with him, saying he would direct their search at the river while the police handled the second search of the house and grounds.

  The landlord had gone to get his car first, in case the boy had been injured. Lights blinded them as they rounded the last bend in the trail, causing the hiker to stop and cover his eyes with his hands. Her landlord had driven in as far as he could and left the high beams on. They were huge and stunningly blue-bright, yet little more effective than Laurelie’s own small flashlight at penetrating the night forest.