The Bobcat

by Katherine Forbes Riley

  The hiker stood on the porch taking deep slow breaths of the cold pinkening air, while she stood in the doorway taking quick shallow ones, feeling each one like a tiny icy fingernail scraping her stinging lungs.

  She looked at the two prints he’d left in the snowdrift, one coming in and another going out again. But for them he could have been the specter of her long imaginings. In the dusky light his eyes were wide obsidian brushstrokes, his lips a crimson slash. His features looked cut from marble and the tracks his blood took were clearly visible beneath skin gone sallow after so many months without sun.

  In his long coat he appeared larger than she remembered, not only taller but broader as well. It wasn’t black as she’d first thought, but rather a dark brown fur-lined leather, with a trail of darker stain marring the arm he’d placed in the path of the flames. From that hand now he slowly removed his glove. His movements were careful as he opened and closed his fingers, but she thought the skin did not look burned, and after a minute he seemed to agree, for he put the glove back on.

  But his gaze stayed down, and again came the feeling that the scene before her wasn’t real. And the longer it went without him looking at her, the more heightened the sensation grew. How odd, she thought after a while, if he really is here, and the only thing I am wondering is why.

  The dog finally moved, breaking the spell. Trotting down off the porch, he leapt around her yard lapping at the deep snow.

  “Sorry,” the hiker murmured now. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I—I smelled paint burning.”

  “But . . .” Even as she shook her head, she was following his tracks in the snow, back through her yard and across the lane to where they disappeared down the river trail. “But she’s not there. You took her.”

  Leather whispered as he shifted. “She wouldn’t go.”

  Her throat was dry. And his must have been too for he followed her inside, telling her quietly about the bob-kittens, how big they’d grown even if they didn’t act it yet. Hearing his pride, she found herself picturing—still in his cabin clearing, the idea persisting despite what he’d said—him cuffing the young bobcats gently and wrestling with them, as a big brother would. The image was so clear; it was the one before her now that was still so hazy, so undefined. He looked like an old photograph of himself, one taken from far away. She handed him a mug of water and then felt time warp and shift as he upended it and drank it all in one long series of swallows.

  “Sorry. I don’t have any alcohol,” she said.

  “That’s okay. I don’t want any. But a little of that would be nice. I’ve been out in the cold a while.”

  She turned then, surprised to find her pot of hot chocolate still steaming on the stove. Taking his mug, she poured him some and then handed it back again. She poured the rest into a mug for herself, only to find that, lips on cup, she couldn’t sip. Instead she stared out the window at a child’s drawing of winter, and imagined the bobcat prowling across the snow with silent feet. Not safe in his woods, but rather out there all along. The bobcat had stayed in the world with her, after all.

  The hiker had moved into her line of sight and was gently rubbing the leaf of one of the potted plants on the counter by the window. Angered by the sight of their long dead trailing stalks, she’d cut them down one fall afternoon. A week later, after a brief warm spell, she’d been shocked to see they’d sprouted new baby leaves. By now the stalks trailed again down the sides of the pots, and though without summer’s light they hadn’t flowered, still his touch released the sweet perfume of tomatoes.

  “You brought them inside,” he said, and his voice was low and vital, like the one that still murmured in her dreams. “Fruit’s even better the second year.”

  She flushed then, grew hot. “I should check the fire,” she said.

  Hurrying then, birdlike, through the hall, she was relieved to find that with the front door open most of the smoke had cleared. But why was the living room so dark? It took a moment for her eyes to process the fact that what she was seeing was the wall. The entire area above the fireplace looked like it had been splattered with tar. The sticky mass streaked upward from the mantle, thinning away at both sides into charred and bubbling paint. The shocking sight was only made worse by the healthy fire now crackling beneath it, its flames not writhing hungrily, but stretching straight and tall.

  The hiker moved past her. He had removed his coat, and he held it in one hand as he went close to the wall, and with his ear to it slowly and methodically knocked up and down the whole burned width with his knuckles. There was no structural damage, he told her, wiping his knuckles on his jeans, leaving a long black streak. The wall would need to be scraped and repainted, but it was half a day’s work, no more.

  She nodded, focused on the thick gray fisherman’s sweater he wore. She’d never seen it before, but from its rolled collar she caught a glimpse of a familiar hollow and two round bones. His hair was shorter, the commas escaping from his cap so blue-black they made a black hat look gray.

  If he felt her watching he gave no sign—and it was on this detail rather than the others that her mind suddenly fixed. For even from as far back as she stood, the reek of the charred wall was strong, but his nose wasn’t flared, or even flickering. His mouth was closed and his eyes were dry. His face was still.

  Now he turned away from her and slipped the poker from its stand. He prodded the fire and her teepee disintegrated, sending sparks and black feathers floating down onto logs already embedded deep with chunks of glowing embers. They regarded these in silence for a time before he put back the poker and turned back to face her.

  Slowly then, he raised the sleeve of his sweater. “A couple of months ago,” he said, “I cut my arm.”

  She saw it immediately, the thin pink puckered line, perfectly straight as it crossed a stretch of limb she remembered as smooth and dark. He’d been working late one night at his cabin, he told her as he pulled the sleeve down again, cutting a plank of pine for a windowsill. His table saw had caught a knot and flipped the plank back at him. There’d been so much blood that he’d decided he needed stitches, and so he’d wrapped it up and driven to his parents’ house.

  He bent then and took a log from the basket and laid it on the fire. Crouching there, he watched the fire take it with a coiled intensity that made Laurelie see double, and told her how his mother had sewn his arm up again. But he’d smelled her fear while she did it, he said. Not from the cut, which was long but shallow enough. She’d been so careful about cleaning up, he said, that she must have been afraid of all the blood.

  Back at his cabin there was even more of it. His fingerprints were on almost every surface and he’d tracked it all over the floor as well. It had spattered on the wall behind the saw and dripped all over the pile of wood he’d been cutting. It had looked like a murder scene, he said. And standing there taking it in he’d thought about his mother, how she skinned deer and beheaded birds without any qualms. She wouldn’t have been afraid just by the sight of his blood. She’d been afraid of what was inside it.

  He’d started cleaning then, he said, and had kept on cleaning long after he could no longer see his blood, because he could still smell it. Eventually, exhausted, he’d had to stop and face the fact that he’d never get it all. Some of it had already been absorbed into the walls and floor and was now part of the cabin itself.

  “Not safe at all,” he murmured. “Contaminated.”

  He began pulling small bits of kindling from the basket now and feeding them to the flames. He told her he’d called the CDC and left a message with a receptionist. She’d thought he was crazy, but Dr. Waters had called him back the very next day.

  They’d met at the Portland Medical Center, a few hours’ drive away. The hospital had a CDC-affiliated lab and Waters had been able to arrange lab access. The hiker had told the doctor he wouldn’t last even a day; the bright lights and loud machines and smells of sickness made it, for him, a torture chamber. But Dr. Waters had told him that these reacti
ons would be good, that the tests would be more accurate if his symptoms were exacerbated. So they’d agreed that he could camp in the woods next to the hospital, and come to the lab only for as long as he could stand it each day.

  In the weeks that followed Waters had run every test he knew on the hiker’s blood, and all his other body fluids besides. He’d been given neurological and physical exams, and a whole battery of sensory and reaction time tests. Eventually Dr. Waters had even started making up his own tests. Once, the hiker said, he’d had to distinguish a hundred different scents transmitted inside a vapor simultaneously, but that actually hadn’t been as difficult as it sounded, because most of them had been culinary or botanical.

  Peeling back a thick hunk of bark, the hiker said that all the testing had an unanticipated effect—it had helped him learn control. He could spend whole days at the lab now, and hardly react at all. He still slept at his camp, but that was less for physical reasons than mental ones now. It still felt like home, he said. There was a family of deer that slept nearby, and late at night a red fox stole through. A fisher cat screamed sometimes like a nightmare, and some mornings he found signs of black bear.

  Now his voice changed. In a monotone, he said, “No signs of active virus to date,” and because he was staring at the piece of bark, it seemed as if it were a phrase he were reading there. All his senses measured beyond the ninety-ninth human percentile, he said, so they had to compare him to animals. He smelled as well as a dog, he said, and saw like an owl, and heard like a hawk. He tasted as well as a catfish, and his touch was a sensitive as a mole’s. But they still didn’t know how his brain processed the extra data, or how it affected his consciousness.

  He fell silent then, and for a moment she was sure his nostrils flickered. Outlined in fire, the black of his eyes went liquid as he stared into its flickering light, and this made him appear almost otherworldly. And yet after all, he was only a man. He was no Joan of Arc either, for his internal experiences had physical correlates. The stimuli his brain responded to existed outside of his head. It was as if someone had picked up her world and shaken all the pieces loose, and yet the strongest thing Laurelie felt was relief for him.

  She listened to the flames. To her they made a burring, rushing sound not unlike the wind. She was certain however that it sounded different to him, and equally certain she’d never know exactly how. For no matter how close two physical bodies came they never became one. Even connected they remained separate, and responsible first to themselves, and even in love they made no whole but rather two halves of a deeply flawed, almost perfect thing. She pictured this thing, sketched it first and then put it into the fire and heated it, and held it to her mind until it branded deep.

  The hiker was threading the piece of bark through his fingers like a magician’s coin, telling her how Waters had deduced that the virus must have moved through his blood, for this was the only possible explanation of how the sensory receptor replication had occurred over so much of his body. And while there were no longer active virus particles in his blood, no one knew if any were hiding dormant elsewhere. And they wouldn’t ever know unless the virus reactivated so that they could trace its path. That’s why his blood would be tested for the rest of his life. To make sure he didn’t infect anyone else.

  She moved then, and the bark that had been whirling in his fingers froze, poised there like wings. She could surprise him still, it seemed. The room was dark but for the fire, and so she snapped on the lamp as she walked to the picture window. She pressed her forehead to the icy window glass and felt winter’s cold breath slipping through the ancient frame. But the darkness outside was impenetrable, reflecting back only the room behind her.

  “What if someone didn’t mind?” She spoke so softly her breath left no mist, but she saw the bark fall from his hands. The room was so quiet she heard it land. Infected then with what her question had woken, another ancient sickness for which there was no cure. There was only the hiker coming toward her full of his animal grace, his nostrils wide to smell her, his mouth open to taste her, his hands flexing at his sides to touch her even as he came. She turned then and gloried in the meeting of their gazes, the pull so strong it felt like falling.

  Someone tapped out Shave and a Haircut on the front door.

  “Um. Hello? Lars? There’s a strange dog wandering around outside. And by the way, why is your door open?”

  Laughter then, followed by scuffling and scraping sounds.

  “There’s a small mountain blocking our way as well, but never mind. We’ve cleared a path,” Scottie said.

  “I think I may have pulled a muscle, actually,” said Will.

  And then Laurelie’s friends tumbled through the door. They removed their gloves and boots and coats and hats in a snowy flurry of limbs and stacked them around the radiator with a carelessness that bespoke of familiarity.

  Turning toward the living room then Will stopped short, so that Scottie bumped into him. Neither spoke, but they leaned together, taking her in, along with the man next to her. And for a moment, she saw through their eyes, the two faces with their fixed expressions, the contrast of their bodies, one larger and darker, the other smaller and lighter. She felt the hiker sway beside her then; it was almost infinitesimal, the barest brush of his body against hers, as if she had by some strange gravity drawn him in. She felt this even through five layers of clothing, and energy surged outward from her core toward him, silent and fecund, and when it reached her skin she looked up at him, and he looked down at her, and his nostrils flickered, just once.

  “Um, so this is Lucien,” she said then, turning and looking at her friends. “And this is Scottie. And this is Will.”

  “’Allo,” said Scottie. Smiling as he bounced a little on the balls of his feet.

  “Hello,” said Will. His own expression was mostly hidden by his beard.

  Lucien blinked a few times rapidly. His nose wrinkled and his nostrils flared, and then suddenly he turned around and bent down. When he rose again the little girl cat was in his arms, her claws piercing the fabric of his jacket with tiny popping sounds. He stroked the bristles beneath her chin, and in the silence they all heard the crackle in her throat as she began to purr.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said, looking up, and smiled.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you first and foremost to Pamela Malpas of the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency, for seeing potential in The Bobcat and not letting it rest. My many thanks and admiration also to the wonderful Lilly Golden, my editor at Arcade, who lives in the woods too and made a perfect match for The Bobcat. Thank you as well to Emily Labes, Johanna Dickson, and the rest of the team at Arcade/Skyhorse for seeing us through to publication.

  My eternal gratitude goes to the writers Jack Livings and Jennie Yabroff. “We’re all in this together,” they told me, and I’ve come to see it’s true. I’m also unspeakably grateful to the DebutAuthors’19 FB group for their camaraderie and insights during the year and more preceding our respective publications. Also, much appreciation goes to Ken and Christie Gordon and Andrew Miles, who for no benefit of their own took the time to help The Bobcat find its audience. I’m also grateful to my fellow travelers at the American Academy in Rome, where The Bobcat was finished; quietly under the Roman pines we supported each other’s good work (and seriously barbecued).

  Thanks to my pre-pub readers for their encouragement and/or criticism, including Zack Finch, Kelley Hersey, Mary Plourde, Myrna Gabbe, Elaine Sirkin Forbes and her entire book group, Sarah Fineman, Patricia Keating, Diane Blandino.

  Love and gratitude to my Bermudian father, Chris Forbes, for encouraging my first stories and teaching me romantic poetry, and to my Jamaican mother-in-law, Beryl Walters Riley, whose intelligence and beauty have long inspired me.

  Forever and always to Enrico, whose sensitivity never ceases to surprise me, and Alexander and Etienne, those strange and beautiful creatures we produced.

  bsp; Katherine Forbes Riley, The Bobcat