by Tom Bouman
Mag knew the questions I had, but she waited, listening to the surroundings. “He could be anywhere,” she said, meaning Ryan. “He’s like a fox. I let him run. He goes out scouting at night, tells Father what he sees.” When enough silence had passed, she began, “One of the things I feel bad about is that it was your guys’ wedding. I don’t want you to feel …”
“Cursed? I don’t. You are you, and I am me.”
“Sure, okay. You couldn’t see it unless you lived with him. All that day, it’s building. Started even before the wedding. He’s got a comment for everything, and he’s trying me, he’s snapping at the kids. But not until the dancing did I understand. He was truly, truly drunk by then. Out in the dark on the edge of the tent, he … he’s ready for a fight. So I give him one. I tell him if he’s not happy, leave. He stops talking, and something clicks up there, and he says, ‘We ain’t friends.’ Next thing I knew, Father’s car’s gone, Brit’s gone, and they’re nearly to Maryland. I wasn’t sober either. But you don’t expect that. And poor Ryguy, I mean, your father leaves, and he doesn’t take you …”
“Yeah, why did Brit go with him? Or did he haul her off?”
“I don’t know, maybe a bit of both. She probably went with him because she remembers him,” Mag said. “There was a time we didn’t have any money because he didn’t have any work. But he was around. I have to think she’s hanging on to that. How could she even know him? He’s never there. But he can charm a girl. So there I am, do I call the cops, what do I do? I try and try his phone, get him to agree to go to a motel, don’t drive any more until morning, think it over. Which he does. And takes their asses all the way back home in the morning and I’m saying, fuck him. Fuck him. I’m staying here.”
Mag was cold, tired, and angry. Sad beyond words, with no life in her. I’d have preferred some tears. It would have meant something was left. Maybe there had been, the week Miss Julie and I were away in Florida, maybe Mag had got it out of her system, maybe she cried her eyes out, I don’t know. There was hardly anything that could have turned me against Dennis more than Mag’s silence then.
“Ryan will have to go back to school,” I said.
“School isn’t everything,” she said, sounding like Father.
“Have you thought about where to live?”
Then, she did cry. “It’s your place, your beautiful place, you want a home, this is the last thing you want.”
“Never mind that.”
“I know,” she said. “We have to go back down there and sort through this shit, one way or another. After I catch my breath, okay?”
“Just make sure you take Father and Ma with you,” I said, joking.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
IT WAS THE middle of the night, and the Meaghers’ cottage clicked and creaked. I moved from room to room, but knew I’d have to get out into the night again before long.
Since Miss Julie and I had been staying there, I’d had the habit of drifting around from room to room at night, cataloging things, staring at the books on the shelves, trying to make sense of my wife and her family. They were readers, they liked classical music and jazz, they had an entire pantry covered with the three daughters’ art projects from school, the papers now yellow and curling away from the walls. They had a shelf full of field guides—birds, amphibians, trees, mammals, tropical marine fishes, the night sky—but damned if they knew a real thing about the wild. They had guidebooks to European cities that were years out of date. Nowhere a Bible to be seen. They had glass boxes full of light pink seashells. It wasn’t so much the money, but the sheer amount of time they had had to do whatever they wanted. I didn’t hold it against Willard, as I knew he’d been grinding for decades on his businesses and other investments he had. He’d made a magical life for his girls where things just appeared. I’d poached my first deer when I was ten and we needed meat. I shot it in the neck and, with Father’s help, field-dressed it: cut around its asshole and tied it off, cracked ribs and its pelvis bone, slipped my knife under its skin from sternum to crotch, pulled its guts out. I cried the whole time, and tried to give Father the knife back. Anyways.
I’d gone to bed early. Miss Julie’s newly sharp sense of smell demanded clean sheets every day—the Meaghers had a closetful of smooth, cloudy sheets—and she’d collapsed into sleep around nine-thirty. I’d lain with her, with my hand on her thigh. An electric fan hummed on the dresser. I’d fallen asleep with the thought that if we didn’t lose the baby in the first trimester, we’d almost certainly have the baby, and if we had the baby, I could die having done mostly everything I’d wanted to.
A few hours later I woke from a dream where I heard children’s voices in the outdoors, which resolved into a memory of the Ceallaigh kids playing in their yard, which turned into a waking nightmare of my nephew Ryan running for his life from something in the woods. My heart felt like it had stopped and I knew that I had not done enough about the bear or anything else.
As I moved from room to room, I convinced myself not to call over to my own house, get Mag on the phone, make sure Ryan was in his bed. Ryan was fine. He was five miles away from that swamp. The Ceallaigh kids were fine. They were inside. I was the one who was not. I knew my mind was not right, and still I knew I had not done enough.
By the time I was in uniform, Miss Julie was also awake, eating a late-night bowl of cereal. “Can’t sleep, baby?”
“Nah. You?”
“Not when you’re ghosting around the place,” she said. “You going to have any help out there?”
“I’ll call Shaun.”
“Isn’t he all the way in Sayre?” she said. “Oh, your father called. Just before you got home. Sorry, I forgot.”
“I’ll check in with them in the morning.”
“If you live that long,” she said. “You could ask your father for help.”
“No. I’m just going driving. I won’t get out of the truck.”
“Bullshit,” she said kindly. “It’s just a bear, right? A black bear.”
“The bear is just a bear,” I told her. She didn’t have details of the dead man.
“Famous last words. Be careful. We have to be careful.”
“I know it.”
I took the .30-06 and a buck knife. I didn’t call Shaun. I parked on Red Pine Road and followed the driveway up to where it met the cleared acres below the Ceallaighs’ house. From there, I followed the dirt track they ran their machines on, looking for something in the starlight: a disturbance, a smear where it shouldn’t be, something quickly covered over. Always my eyes were drawn to the house. It was shut up tight, with no signs of anyone trying to get in. I shouldn’t have been inside the curtilage without a warrant, but I had to be close enough to the house to touch it, to settle myself.
Up beyond the house, yellow light poured out of the garage door, which stood open. That time of night, I figured that someone had just left it that way by mistake. A silhouette crossed the lit doorway and I stopped dead. Terry was pacing back and forth, a bottle of bourbon in his hand, muttering. I heard curses, not out of anger, but something else. He slapped himself on the side of the head. He took a long last drink, left the bottle on a table, and walked out of the garage door into the night. I let myself sink into the tall grass. He was not twenty feet from me. He looked around him, then up to the sky, slapped himself on the chest twice, and made his way inside.
I crept to the edge of the woods until I heard the creek below. Without letting myself think about it much, I ducked onto a deer trail that led into shadow. Humans had made the path their own; its surface was hard-packed earth. I walked it as if I belonged, slowly and with no purpose, in the direction of the swamp.
Rocks wobbled under my feet as I crossed the creek at a shallow place. I moved out of the trees and into swamp that was not solid, not liquid or air, but all of those things at once. I was thigh-deep in water, then hopping from island to island of tough green grass, always with mist rising between me and the path forward. I stepped around dr
ied reeds clattering quietly. The Milky Way stretched across the sky, beyond time.
There was no scat, no animal noise, and the most I could do was startle a pair of south-traveling loons from their beds. Even they didn’t complain, just flew away into the night sky. I came upon the remains of a Canada goose—just the wings with feathers intact and a scattering of down. And then another set, and another. The rib cage of a beaver. In a small meadow farthest from the houses and machines, I found a lump of shit. Something within it glinted in the low light, and I nudged it with my boot and found a rivet from a pair of jeans, still attached to a scrap of denim. I risked my Maglite and found the scat was seamed with fine, short hair. I clicked the flashlight off. Even with my rifle, I was not top of the chain here.
Nearby was a stand of dried cattails. I slipped into the midst of them, crouched, and waited. The place had a black smell.
As a film of light crept from the east, the quiet suddenly broke open in a scream. Or a howl, I couldn’t tell animal or human at that distance. I launched myself back into the world, in the direction of the road. I hit the mouth of the creek and ran up the ravine.
Next to the bear trap, the white bait bucket lay on its side. The trap’s door had shut. The closer I got, I understood that it was not a bear or a person in there, but a smaller animal, with room to move back and forth from the end of the trap to the rebar cage that formed the door. I shone my flashlight in: a terrier, light brown, with pink in its muzzle and wild, rolling eyes. Seeing me, it backed up. I called to it but it didn’t come.
I laid the .30-06 on the ground, sprang the trap, and crawled halfway inside. It smelled of old ground beef in there. The dog had taken a shit. Its yelps drilled into my ears. I got ahold of a forepaw and dragged it to me. It bit me on my hand and wrist. At the trap’s opening, I gathered the dog in my arms, stood, and began walking uphill toward the Moores’ house.
The terrier squirmed and bit, but I held on, cursing it. She craned her head over my shoulder and let out a string of furious yaps. I turned, and the dog spilled out of my arms and squared off against a massive black shadow not fifteen feet behind us. The bear pounded toward us, swatting the dog aside and into the brush. The black smell from the swamp surrounded me. He took two strides and was on me, his weight pinning my shoulder. His paw spread. I found the handle of my knife with my fingertips. I hit him three or four times with my other hand, but he didn’t care. He turned his head to the side and opened his jaws, and I looked into his pink mouth and breathed in his heavy breath.
Gunshots echoed into the ravine. The bear shuddered, shuddered again, and with a look of surprise, he fell partly off me. I kicked at him and pushed myself backward. He rose and came at me again. I drew the knife. At that moment, Father came running. He fired again, point-blank into the bear’s neck, where neck met skull. The animal deflated right there in front of me. Father stepped on the bear’s neck, aimed, and sent a final round into its brain.
As my breathing slowed and adrenaline seeped away, I heard myself repeating a terrible, obscene curse. Father said, “It’s all right.” He held out a hand and pulled me up. The bear was a male, could have been Crabapple. Father went to get the rifle I’d left by the trap. We found the dog whining in the brush, limping away from the fight. She tried to take off, but I caught her. Her name tag read PUFFBALL.
THAT’S HOW I came to be driving both Crabapple and Carl Dentry down to Harrisburg at the same time, in the same van.
As Shaun Loughlin and I wrapped the bear up that morning, Father tried to lay claim to some meat, and was floored when I told him no.
“We need to look inside of him,” I’d said.
“I don’t want his innards,” said Father.
“He’s eaten a man,” I said.
“You have a point. Listen,” he said, “you ought to take care of yourself. And if you need help and I’m around, just call me. Don’t make the wife do it.”
“Julie called you?”
“Middle of the night, yes, and I don’t mind.” Father had saved my life and reminded Wild Thyme who he was. In fairness, he was not one to boast. Miss Julie, she came from a world where you asked for help and got it, no questions asked. Somewhere in a small, dirty cupboard of my soul full of mouse droppings and broken toys, I grudged them both.
We loaded the bear in the back of my truck and I hied him to the morgue, where we put him in cold storage. From there, I checked in with the sheriff, and he agreed we had a chance for me to dig into Carl Dentry’s life—to visit with his family, to check in with his old department at the Harrisburg PD, with the Department of Education folks, the AG, and whatever else I could find in a couple days. I took a nap while Dally contacted the Dentry family. Then I woke up and kissed Julie goodbye. Now that Crabapple was dead, she seemed glad for me to have this time on the road. I borrowed a van from the sheriff’s department and started my journey midday. Carl was in a heavy-duty box. We had the bear wrapped tight in clear plastic.
Around this time in the season, a lot of skunks had been killed in the county. Their tails rose like surrender flags as cars passed. Some got trapped near peoples’ houses and businesses, killed with .22s and dumped in the woods. There had been so many that it seemed they were in the middle of some kind of mass flight, one step ahead of doom, and we were the ones standing around with no clue. No other animals would eat skunk roadkill, and the township was fogged with it. I ran over a dead one in the van on the way to 81, and the smell followed me halfway to Harrisburg.
North of Harrisburg is a sturdy village named Linglestown, with a little hotel, a café, a bar, and an antique store. Also a funeral home and crematorium. That’s where I was taking Carl. Carl’s wife had arranged that the home would keep his remains on ice for a week before they cremated him.
In the parking lot, a heavyset man in his twenties stood by a blue pickup truck. As I backed the van into the delivery entrance, he walked over, and when I got out to open the van’s rear doors, he stuck out a hand. It was Ray Dentry, Carl’s son.
“Sorry about it,” I said.
“Yeah. You don’t expect this. A heart attack, maybe.”
Two funeral home employees wheeled a gurney out of the door and slid Carl’s box onto it. I heard his head roll and hit the side of the box. So did Ray.
“So he died fighting a bear,” Ray said.
“Not exactly. I was hoping to speak to your mom?”
“She’s not ready today. She’ll see you tomorrow.”
“All right, that’s better for me anyway.” I gave him my cell phone number. “If you want to talk …”
“I better go in and see him while I can.”
“Don’t,” I said.
“I appreciate that, but I’m going.”
“Please don’t. What are you going to get out of seeing him now?”
“I don’t know yet,” Ray said.
“Look, I’ve got somewhere to be before the end of the day, but I can wait awhile. I can meet you at the bar, the hotel bar up the street when you’re done?”
“Maybe.”
Ray disappeared inside the funeral home, and I got in the van and drove to the bar. I ordered a beer and didn’t drink it. The place smelled like most bars do midafternoon when nobody’s in them—beer, bleach, leftover cigarette smoke. In front of me I had a book of poems that Julie had bought for me, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Ray came in, sat down a stool away from me, took off his hat and placed it on the bar. His face was white. He ordered a beer and sucked it down in three great swallows. He ordered another.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
“Some of what you saw, we had to do for the autopsy.”
“Did he suffer?”
“They think he died from a blow to the head. Maybe in a motor vehicle accident? I can’t say. Keep that between us for now.”
“I made them promise to wire his head back on. I know they’re going to cremate him, I just …”
“I get it.”
�
�Them tossing his head in the oven like a football.”
“I told you not to look,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I did so Mom doesn’t have to.” His color returned somewhat. “Tell me what you know.”
While Crabapple waited in the van, Ray Dentry and I talked it over. I told him about where Carl was found, and in what state, and where the head was, and about the raccoons. I told him that the bear had been killed, but not how, and not that I had him with me.
“Well, if all that’s true, how the fuck did he get down in the creek?” Ray said.
“That’s what I want to know.”
“Someone dumped him?”
I shook my head as if to say, Who knows?
We each had a couple beers, and Ray expanded on the subject of his father. “I had no beef with Dad,” Ray said. “He knew how to do things, and he told us. Engines, camping, fishing, fighting. He was not a man to fight with. He didn’t seek it out, but he could handle himself. What kid wouldn’t want him for a father?” There was a long silence. “He kicked us out, one after the other, once we graduated. Four of us. I was last to go. He didn’t have to kick me out. I didn’t want to be sucking around the house. I’m a Marine, like him. One tour in Iraq. Now I sell cars, man, I sell the shit out of cars, Subarus. That’s easy. Easiest thing I’ve ever done. Everybody wants a Subaru. Love is what makes them. I do fine.”