For on the fifth or sixth lap, the skunk presented its asshole and let go. Poor Thingy turned tail and surged into the woods. The smell, I should note, was a multiplication of the dankest weed times the rottenest egg: In it I shuddered.
Then, I said to Haw: “Get this fucking rope off me.” He did as he was told, rope ends whipping as he untied. Once freed I went off through the skunk-smelling thicket to find the Thing. The cat was cowering at the foot of a tree, beneath a bush, in the approximate place we had so recently found ourselves advanced upon by this interloper, Haw. That’d been just about a week prior—each day having remade the terms of life on the mountain, of self-removal. I scooped up the cat and promptly vomited, still holding on.
When I came back to the cabin clearing I told Haw to go get one of the empty plastic tubs and put it on the porch and after he did these things I put the Thing in it gently and told it to stay put and went inside to get some peace from the stink. At this Haw rolled his eyes.
“It’s not like we have any tomato juice,” I rued through the open door, looking around the mess of the cabin.
“Yeah,” Haw said. “But we do have plenty wood ash.”
“Wood ash?”
“What, did you grow up in a city?” And then, again, that crooked smile of his, that greasy scythe. I watched him cross to the ash bucket and scoop a bowlful. I wondered was he playing a prank. He didn’t like the cat, and the cat didn’t like him. But the stench, catching in my every crevice, outstripped my caution.
“Bring ’em here,” he ordered, standing in the kitchen.
I went out and fetched the Thing in the tub. The cat squirmed and yowled as I conveyed it. I wondered how aware it was of its sorry state. It did bat its own nose.
“Now put it on the table.” I did as I was told, and watched as Haw bent over into the tub and began to rub the ash into its coat. At first the cat froze but then started to lean into Haw’s massage.
“You’re such a slut,” I said to it. “Giving it up to anyone.” Though I did not like myself when I said this.
Haw continued to massage the ash into the Thing’s fur. His confidence in this made me sure he had grown up with animals, though he’d earlier denied it. He went on rubbing the cat with the ash. The stench eased up.
When Haw was all done, he washed his hands in the sink and told me, “Put it out.” At first I didn’t know what he meant, but then I saw he meant the cat.
“How come? Doesn’t even smell anymore.”
“Does so. It’ll teach it,” Haw said.
I consented as if hypnotized, transported the cat by its trunk, let it down on the porch to lick and spit. I remembered, then, once lying down on a stranger’s bed, the thick silver frame on the nightstand, the plastic sucking at my thighs. Under Pop’s novelty hypnosis, in that empty and stale house, I wondered if I had learned to obey or simply to tolerate, surviving.
Only one other time had Pop taken me to an empty house. Between the first two cancers, I had gotten sick at school. The hallways had gone liquid. I sweated and dripped and could not follow the story of the day as I usually could. I sat in history, heated. My nose whistled grievously. “Lettuce leaf,” Gene’d whispered in my ear. I hocked. “For godsakes let us leave! Before we’re flooded out!” The teacher continued her lecture about the Defenestrations of Prague. I did not laugh with everyone else at the idea of someone launched from a window, so knew how sick I must be.
“Are you okay?” Ken asked from his nearby seat. I shrugged miserably, put my hood up. Later I would learn that what I thought was a cold was walking pneumonia. I requested reprieve with a hall pass. In the health room the nurse asked did I want to call my folks. I did. Ma was then working as an assistant at the library. Pop was working too, but available, with full agency and rosy cheeks. I imagine he thought he was going to keep living, and then die much later, as an old man. A mistake of duration only.
When the Toyota arrived I laid across its back seat, letting the seatbelt buckle dig into my hip, closing my eyes. It was January, just after break, and ice crystals constellated on the window glass. “You okay, sweetheart?” Pop asked. I said I was fine, and just needed to rest. It was unusual for anyone in the family to admit noncancer illness; as someone else might say: The goalpost had been moved. He told me we just had to swing by one of his properties. I asked him why, looking up into the rearview.
The mirror showed his eyes and brows and a hairline holding fast and lush into his fifties. He told me the last time he’d shown the place he’d been sure there was something crawling in the master bedroom walls. A squirrel or raccoon. He wanted to check again before calling the professional.
“Will they use a have-a-heart?” I asked, for as a teen I was still occasionally sentimental.
He said he didn’t know, but hoped so. A nice lie. He parked. “Do you want to come in?” I said no but he said I should, that it was too cold for a sick girl to stay put.
“Four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a finished basement, an old hot tub any new owner will chuck,” Pop said, as he opened the lockbox and unlocked the door. I sat on the grand foyer stairs, sniffling, and listened to Pop’s steps fade down the upper hall. This house was vacant of stuff, static with anonymity. Soon Pop came down the stairs to report: definitely something in there. He drove me home, then, and sent me to bed.
Later Pop would report that it had been a squirrel, that they’d gotten it out. I’d ask again about the have-a-heart. “Denny,” he’d said. “We’re all just doing best we can.” He was a seller and a shower and spent no sentiment on such things.
I could tell you that this story is how I first set my eyes on the house Ken and I would break into, the house from which my hummingbird knife would be claimed. I wonder about my impulse to identify nonexistent-but-possible coincidences. It’s a desperate habit of making meaning. In analysis it’s embarrassing.
But it was not the same house, merely a big house one neighborhood over in the other direction. This was a story about a squirrel in the wall, on the occasion of a skunked cat, in which there are no coincidences or doppelgangers. It’s only time and impulse that summon its meaning, if any.
All night, post-skunk, while Haw snored horribly, poor Thingy cried outside. The serrated yowls bored into me. I had not heard such sounds from the cat, since—well, since I’d shot it. But I had shot it and then healed it, lost it and then found it. I was not in favor of this Haw-heralded disruption. I’d sat up till Haw walked into the front room, eyes in heavy slits, to ask would I sleep next to him. I consented, though I understood the decision as a betrayal.
All night I watched Haw’s nose hairs flatten under the force of his inhalations. My mouth tasted sour or bitter. I felt myself to be a low-down creep and stayed awake listening, punishing myself this way. I had wronged my last and only friend. That’s the last time I’ll do that, I thought to myself. Of course I’d never have another friend, up here. I’d see to it; it was safer that way.
When the sun began to rise I got up and let the lovely animal in. Its little pink nose was smudged with ash. I scooped the Thing up and addressed it: “Hello,” I said slowly. “Will you ever forgive me?” A trace of the putrid skunk scent draped still. “Oh honey,” I cooed, sounding like someone I didn’t know. By gosh I was indeed getting softer.
Thingy twisted from my embrace and walked back out the front door and arranged itself on the porch, squinting with some kind of accusation I was probably imagining. “I’m sorry,” I called to it. I did want to cry, only my body was not capable of doing so. I did not deserve any cooling release.
Haw emerged from the back. “Who’re you talking to?” he asked. I didn’t answer him, only stood where I was for as long as I wanted to. He didn’t come any closer.
LATER THAT MORNING Haw had oatmeal going on the stove. As we sat at the table to eat, the Thing came in and jumped up on the table, winding itself around our bowls. “Get!” he said, and pushed poor Thingy down onto the floor. It skittered into the far corner of the fr
ont room. Bits of ash still clung to its coat.
“Don’t hurt it!” I yelled, too loudly. This was the smallest gesture that might be expected: Minimum was my specialty.
“It’s not hurt,” he said, rolling his eyes. His chewing made a private, wet noise. “I thought we could go up to the caves today.”
I shrugged and said okay, still sore at him. Sore for the cat and not for the rope burns. The sex was fine or even pleasantly annihilating. This was not enough or worth it really, this human complication in my animal life.
But I did want to see the caves. If this were to be my mountain, my dwelling or planet, I wanted to inspect its insides also. I was hoping that at some point the man would leave me be and I could be mountaintop queen, reigning sovereign, or at least dead. After I cleared the breakfast dishes and Haw went out back to shit, we dressed.
The gun and the hummingbird knife were still next to each other on the table. Haw took the gun and loaded the magazine. When he saw me looking at him, he said, “In case mountain lions.”
I had not seen any mountain lions, the skunk being the largest animal I’d encountered—but I still nodded and then took the hummingbird knife and pocketed it. He looked at me. “For defense,” I said. Once, in green sociability, I’d asked a man whether he’d ever tried a salt lick. Now, I carried a knife because I might need to use it.
“I’m all the defense you need,” Haw said, hooking the electric lantern to his belt loop.
I ignored him and walked out of the cabin, flip and mean and sassy. I was getting impatient with this rank incursion. He followed, muttering.
We crossed the meadow and shimmied along the far perimeter of the lake until we came to its tributary, a creek no wider than a driveway. Haw limped slightly. “This sucks,” he complained of his leg.
“Baby,” I said meanly.
He didn’t complain again.
As we worked upward along the water, it constricted, ran deeper, made elegant noises of rush and fuzz. I saw a crayfish skimming the water’s edge, some small fish in the deep, and two blue herons sewing a crooked hem along the sky. Farther out, a hawk, or so Haw said. “Or maybe an eagle.” For an hour or two or three we worked our way up in clear natural silence, the cat following along like a companionable shadow. Soon we were the highest I’d been since settling in the woods.
Haw stopped. “We’re here,” he announced. From the high vantage in the thin air I could see clearly the lookout tower on the horizon. Before us there was a long flat rock that looked formal as a banquet table in its proportion. Above it was the brief remaining balance of the mountain peak, and I wanted up. But Haw said, “Come on.” I trotted along like I was his bitch but this was a performance built for ease. I was pretty sure I’d get back and do some housecleaning, by which I mean I was pretty sure I’d take the cat and hit the road, drop out somewhere fresh.
Beneath the rock table was an opening about three feet tall and four feet wide and horizontally we shimmied through it: Haw first, then me. The Thing stayed outside, pouncing at flying bugs it couldn’t catch. Once we got inside I saw how the cave opened up, until even Haw could stand with just a little ducking. A few feet more and the cave began to constrict again, into complete darkness. He set the lantern at the cave mouth. There were the low noises of the river water: a trickling, tickling piano.
“This all fills up in heavy storms,” he said. “Would hate to get caught in here.” I had, all over again, that tricky feeling like he was going to do me harm, bind me with ropes, leave me here to drown. I tried to decide if I would care. He began to kiss my neck.
As I pressed closer to him I could feel a hardness at his hip which was not his cock. I wondered how many empty beer cans he’d shot, how many squirrels. Here I believed I was happy for the gun to be out of my custody.
He got real close to me then, put his face astride my jaw, and licked his tongue up the length of my face. “Baby,” he said. Perhaps we would go on spitting the word back and forth into one another’s mouths. He didn’t know me at all, but why should he.
In tandem we undid our flies. He pushed his pants down over the knotted T-shirt and took mine off and shucked them into the cave’s damp. He lifted me onto a shallow ledge and kissed and kissed my neck, whispering: “Baby, baby.” As he entered or lodged I felt myself tighten. “Baby,” he said. I watched the bright mouth of the cave as he began to thrust; the Thing had stuck its head into the opening and was watching.
“Baby,” he kept saying. The Thing was now wriggling through the cave mouth, its whole lissome brown furred body, and I thought, as Haw worked his way in and out, that I had never seen a more beautiful creature than this little cat. We went along this way, the three of us—Haw and I in our unholy congress, sweating and dirty, the cat investigating gently at the edges—until I felt Haw move in a different way, his hand down at his thigh.
The gun was out, loaded. The gesture had started. The shot ripped out a blue echo, which surrounded us. I felt gelded, then enraged. He was still inside me. “It dead?” I asked, breathless. I didn’t want to look.
“Yeah,” he said.
And so presently I rose and set upon him, throwing the gun into the far darkness. It clattered and I renewed my advance. For I was wiry with all this time on the mountain, and my skin was one big bruise. Pain can feel like immortality. I slammed his shoulder into rock. He pushed me back up. We were well matched, similar weights, both of us rangy and strong. First one of us had the upper hand, and then the other; it went back and forth like this for quite some time.
“Get the fuck off me,” he snapped, but at the same time had his hands digging into my flesh. He hoisted me into the air and let go. I fell hard into the water, my bare tailbone hitting rock. Reports of this bounced around the cave.
We began to wrestle down in the cold water, our warm blood splattering across rock and skin. The gravel and pebbles and dirt embedded themselves in every wound.
And at the hot center of this fight, when I could barely breathe, I noted that there had been a distinct lack of confrontation in my life. It’s almost biblical, isn’t it? How I, toasted so gently in the oven of the suburbs, was forced to climb a mountain in order to see a conflagration with my own eyes?
At first it seemed like Haw would beat me down; to tell you the truth I thought I was beat, the way he’d thrown me. But he was meaner than he was smart. As I scrapped for footing he was still down there in the water, distracted by the aftershocking pain of my elbow having dug into his concave chest.
I dropped my full weight atop him from as great a height as I could manage. Then I yoked my arm around his neck. Then I spit in his face, and the spit included a tooth and blood and a great deal of dark energy that I was at last ready to let go. I had him pinned and I did think about picking up his sorry skull by the curls and hitting it against the rock bed until it was time to say goodnight. We were locked together in a fearsome jigsaw way.
“Let me go,” he said. Straddling his chest I dug the hummingbird knife out of my pocket and whipped it open, pressed the blade with a steady light pressure on his Adam’s apple. Its rainbow wash shone.
I looked down to see Haw, to see Rip Van Winkle, I mean, Mr. Hackett, I mean, that painting, I mean, Gene, I mean, Haw: a man who was being haunted by himself as far as I could tell.
“Let me go,” he said, quietly.
I thumb-rubbed the hilt of the hummingbird knife up and down. The only best part of death is that it happens to everyone. Then I drew away the knife and folded it. I pressed where I knew the splinter had been, right on the knot of the shirt. “You fucker!” he screamed. I stood to my height and looked down at this pitiful stranger. His eyes were scared and widening, as though straining to see my great new proportion.
Haw got up and began to back away from me and this movement was like a tonic to me. “Hey you crazy bitch,” he spat.
“What?” I replied to my apt and lovely moniker.
It was perhaps the cast of my eyes, their lack of sex or softness, t
hat taunted him. “Who even are you?” he asked, unspooling his limbs loose and bleeding into the air around him. I stayed buttoned and staunch. “Hey you crazy baby,” he said, moving closer. We were both still working to catch our breath. I wondered if he was ready for another round. I held the knife in my fist. “Hey you crazy, crazy baby.” His mouth was swelling and curdled.
I charged him blindly, so quick he could do nothing but fall.
He didn’t say anything after that. I sucked my body away, and never touched his skin again. I moved apart from our arena. I looked back to see a darker splotch beneath his head where he lay face up. He had fallen on an outcropping of rock. I had or had not made this happen. I did not look at him again. He could be dead or alive. He could still be dead or alive.
I thought: Maybe now he won’t have to worry about infection.
There at the opening of the cave lay my cat’s body and I did not look as I dragged myself out of the cave and waded, naked from the waist down, into the deepest part of the deep part of the creek, letting the cold water nick away all the dirt. The pain came bright and loud and the weather, this autumn day, was clear and gorgeous. I was drawing myself up and out, awake, at last alone on the mountainside, no man or cat or imaginary gent to disrupt the busied noise of the forest—my dumb flopping heart, a secret within it. The secret was that no matter what I did, I was alive, and one day I’d die.
I ran or stumbled downward, semiblind, in a liquidating blur of green and brown and dark brown and gray, attempting to follow the water. When I hit the lake I swam across for no reason but my body wanting it. The water was warmer than its tributary, amniotic, thick with plant life. I swam in a sloppy freestyle stroke with my head above the water, then scaled the dock and sprinted across the meadow. I wanted to be far and farther from the cave and its contents. I believe I would have kept going, all the way down the mountain and into some town, had it not been for the pain which, every few minutes, issued news of injury.
Hard Mouth Page 17