Small animals caught in.., p.3
Small Animals Caught in Traps, page 3
Everywhere he goes, he watches for it. His eagerness borders on desperation.
He’s seen bears before. When he was wandering west after graduation, a black bear crossed the road in front of his truck outside Banff. He saw another in Yellowstone, surrounded by tourists, paparazzi with priapic camera lenses. When they were still new to the Pacific Northwest, he and Janey were camping on the Olympic Peninsula when they watched something big and brown lumber across the beach. No more than fifty yards in front of their tent, it rose up on two legs when the wind shifted off the land, clumsy and impressive at once, and sniffed the air. When it turned in their direction, white teeth and white eyes, the black nose, Lewis knew that it saw them. I see you too, he whispered. Then the breeze shifted once more and the bear could no longer smell them. But they could smell it. Foul and savage. Salt and rancid meat. The brininess of the low tide. It dropped to all fours and continued along its path. They were just a distraction to the bear, but to them the bear was a glimpse of a world that existed in the same place as their own world but remained invisible to most people. A gift. He’s seen bears before, but seeing one here, in Disappointment—in his own town—would mean something different entirely. The wildness he left Massachusetts to find, the kind of place he wanted to live in? Seeing the bear would be proof that he’s succeeded. Gone a decade and still looking to make a point, he thinks, a little ashamed.
But more than that, he wants Gray to live in that kind of world, where bears don’t just exist but roam free in spite of centuries of encroaching civilization, in spite of all the people who view them as intrusive and unwanted. He wants his daughter to live in the kind of world he dreamed of as a kid.
“They should name him,” Janey says one night after a local radio story about the bear’s lingering presence. “Make him a mascot for the town. They could put him on T-shirts or hats or something, raise a little money for the schools.”
“Disappointment the Bear?”
“Well. They’d need to come up with a better name for it. Dipsy, maybe.”
“That’s not better. That’s worse.”
“Beary White?”
“No.”
“Beary Manilow?”
“Jesus. No. Anyway, it doesn’t need a name. It’s an animal.”
“You named Johnson.”
“She’s a dog.”
“Dogs are animals.”
“No,” Lewis says, with unintended sharpness. “That’s just anthropomorphizing it.”
“Maybe you’ve heard of Yogi? Baloo? Paddington? Gentle Ben?”
“This isn’t a cartoon, J. It’s a wild animal. It deserves dignity. Respect.”
Seeing something in his eyes, she lets it go with a nod.
“Fenwick says somebody’s been dumping carcasses in the river.”
“Deer,” Lewis says. “On the fire road.” He’s seen them himself while out running. Bloody hides. Heads. Bones made bare. Lesser organs, muscle and tendon, hooves. Nature deconstructed. Nature made grotesque.
“Why?”
“Someone’s taking them illegally. They’re out of season, but even during the season you’re only allowed one. Whoever it is, they’re taking too many of them.”
“A poacher?”
“I think it might be one of the guides.”
Janey cocks her head, like she does, to show surprise.
“Why do you say that?”
“Hardly anyone else uses that fire road.”
“Will they attract the bear? The carcasses?”
“I don’t think so,” Lewis says. “It’s a dump site. Most of the food’s gone. It’s just scraps now. The birds had already found it when I was there. Crows and jays, a few turkey vultures. It’s more likely to attract rats, possums, and skunks. That bear is looking elsewhere.”
“Like McDonald’s?”
It’s a joke. But that night he spots more sign when he’s out running with the dog, heaps of scat littered with something he can’t identify. When he crouches down for a closer look and aims his flashlight at it, he sees shreds of a Big Mac wrapper.
Maybe Janey is right. Maybe the bear is becoming human.
The disillusionment winds him.
4
The baby grows, and so does the dog, one a pudgy little person with an enormous smile and ears, the other a Newfoundland the size of a compact car. Johnson is protective of Gray. She sleeps at the foot of her crib, follows her from room to room when she’s in her parents’ arms. Gray delights in dog kisses, the big tongue like a wet necktie falling from the gaping mouth. A weird and slobbery symbiosis, a joy to watch.
“Someday a long time from now,” he tells Gray, slipping her out of a diaper so soiled as to feel malicious, “you’ll have to do this for me. And I promise you, pal, my revenge will be sweet.”
She smiles her gummy smile, a stalactite of spit growing in the open cave of her mouth.
“I grow old, I grow old,” he says, recalling one of the poems Finneran made him memorize in high school English, fragments of which still come back to him like birds darting across the sky. “My adult diapers smell like mold.”
It takes him by surprise how quickly and easily their lives absorb her, everything reforming itself like skin healing around a foreign object. After her first few weeks at home, Lewis returns to the river. Summer passes in a blur of clients and boat work, sleepless nights and bottle feedings.
Lying on the kitchen floor one evening with Johnson’s heavy head on his leg, he bench-presses a drooling Gray while Janey plays her cello after dinner. Some nights she practices—formal and repetitive bow exercises monkeying with overpressure, ponticello and tasto, scratch tone and flautando—and some nights she plays. When they first met, she occasionally sat in with a string quartet of other musicians her cello teacher had introduced her to, and Lewis would leave Jimmy’s sore and exhausted, red-skinned from a hot shower, to attend the subdued performances at cocktail hours and charity events. He still remembers how she’d looked in those black evening dresses, red hair spilling like lava over her bare shoulders as she worked the bow. She quit performing in public when they moved to Oregon, instead using her evenings to take classes at the community college in Bend. But she continued to play for herself, and now she plays for an audience of two: him and the baby. Sitting on a pillow on a hard-backed chair with a beer on the floor beside her, she straddles the big instrument like a saddle and chooses a piece of music either to match her mood or to alter it. Supriani’s baroque fingerblisterer “Toccata Decima.” Dall’Abaco’s “Capriccio Primo.” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” She does a mean Pink Floyd cover that can affect the atmosphere in the house, as if the cello itself was somehow transformative, not just a musical instrument but an instrument of change.
But Lewis knows that power does not belong to the cello at all—it belongs to Janey. And he feels it as he lifts and lowers his daughter in sync with the rising and falling notes. He can still smell the Terrebonne on his clothes from his day in the boat with clients, the sun on his skin, fish scales and sunscreen on his fingers. This is my family, he thinks. The accompanying feeling takes him some time to identify as satisfaction.
A family. Satisfaction. He’s never had either before.
Daughter fills father’s heart like the storm filled the river, swelling it beyond capacity until it overflows, until it becomes something else entirely, something strong enough to reshape the landscape that contains it. When she smiles, Lewis feels the hope again. Hope so deep and fast he worries it will wear him away, eroding his cynicism and exposing his optimistic core to the world.
“Hope in one hand and shit in the other and see which makes your garden grow faster,” The Old Man used to say.
Fuck The Old Man.
“Hope is the horse I ride,” he tells Gray. She rewards him with an optimistic dribble of spit. He hands her over to her eager mother and takes the dog outside for a run.
The Old Man never wanted a child. He and Lewis’s mother had an arrangement—one child, hers to raise and love, and in exchange, he would get to spend the rest of his life with her. He had a limited range, a deficit of empathy, but for her he could tolerate almost anything. Her intervals of moodiness. Her desperation for motherhood. Anything except the one thing she’d saddled him with: a life without her, the burden of raising that child alone, a burden she’d thrust upon him two weeks after giving birth when she slit her wrists and lay down in their bed to die with her new son in her arms.
How could The Old Man ever look at Lewis again without seeing that baby, stuck to her body by her own drying blood? The one thing he’d ever loved in this world, and the child who stole her from him. Even then, denied his end of the bargain and stuck with hers, he couldn’t blame her. So he blamed Lewis instead.
Fighting had always been a part of The Old Man’s nature, like the patches of dry skin on his elbows or the freckles on his hands. Determined to make it a part of his son’s nature, too, he gave Lewis a pair of boxing gloves when he was ten. Maybe he thought it leveled the playing field to give him the pretense of fighting back. An asshole’s alchemy, turning abuse into sport.
“Someone’s got to make a man out of you,” he said, like he was doing Lewis a favor. When he laced up the gloves, eighteen-ounce Everlasts the color of fresh blood, Lewis could barely lift them. Then his father pulled on his own gloves and knocked him into the dirt. The Old Man had hands like freight trains. Like fire engines.
That same year he gave Lewis a battered cane Horrocks-Ibbotson, a production fly rod made by cheap labor in overseas factories during the Allied occupation. He could barely bring himself to touch it, whether for its inferiority or its foreignness.
“It’s Japanese,” he said, spitting the word like rotten meat, “but it ought to catch fish.”
Its provenance did not matter to Lewis. For the way it made the rest of his life disappear when he stood waist-deep in the cool water of the Shawsheen River, throwing inelegant casts with flies he’d tied with feathers scavenged from sidewalks, it might as well have been a magic wand.
As he got older, he got better at defending himself, better at punching back. They’d trade blows in the backyard, the basement, the living room, until one of them was spitting mad and one spitting blood. That’s what passed for communication between them. For intimacy. That and fishing, wordless weekends on some New Hampshire trout stream barely acknowledging each other’s existence. That his father loved to fish might have been the bastard’s single greatest quality. Maybe his only redeeming one. Put a fly rod in his hand and he became almost likable, if you allowed for some wide interpretation of likable. And almost. At least he couldn’t take a swing at you if his hands were full.
By high school they’d stopped fishing together, but they still fought, their relationship reduced to a shared and uneasy coexistence in the small, yellow house, the persistent threat of violence like a lodger whose very presence moderated their behavior. Once Lewis began to study boxing, training kept him away from home most nights, and he saw less and less of his father as he spent more time out of the house. With money he earned working summer construction jobs, he bought an old pickup. Weekends he’d drive himself north out of Massachusetts with a map unfolded on the cracked vinyl bench seat, crisscrossing back roads in search of trout streams, camping in its bed or on the ground in its lee, waking beneath low-hanging skies to a thermos of lukewarm coffee, straight-backed and waist-deep in the water by the time the sun rose. The pull of the river centered him. The cold, firm pressure against his legs anchored him to the planet like augmented gravity. It gave him strength. Some mornings he struggled to tie flies to his tippet with his hands swollen from a fight at Jimmy’s the night before, a few rounds against some bruiser with a forehead like a mailbox. Tucking the rod beneath his armpit, he’d sink his hands to the elbows and let the cold water soothe them as the rising sun revealed the world around him piecemeal, one stunning bit at a time. Moss on the river rock. Ferns along the bank. A spider web glistening with dew. It seemed a world away from the boxing gym, draped with serenity. A stillness. A peace.
There was no stillness in the boxing ring. Only motion. A fighter who stopped moving had already lost. But in nature Lewis sought and found stillness everywhere. He struggled to reconcile those disparate parts of himself, the one that fed on violence and the other on the natural world, and realized he was happiest in the overlap.
The natural world contained violence of its own. Fishing in Vermont, he’d seen northern pike as long as his leg drag ducklings below the surface of a pond, splaying a ring of feathers that floated like the petals of a wind-spent flower. Fisher cats killed for sport, toying with their prey and leaving the lifeless bodies on the trail for Lewis to step over. The first deer he’d shot had been a doe, a mistake of eagerness—when he’d opened her belly to peel out her guts, a pair of fawns appeared from the brush and shouldered past him to nurse at their mother’s corpse.
Violence made no exception for beauty. Lewis saw beauty in the gym too. The human body sharpened like a sword, the metronome of sinew as a fighter jumped rope. Abstracts of blood on the canvas. Beauty made no exception for violence, either.
He needed both worlds. Without either he would be incomplete. So he mapped the borders of the two worlds whose parts comprised him and staked a flag where they met.
He wants more for Grayling. He wants her to know all the beauty but none of the disappointment. He wants her never to go a day without knowing her father loved her, that he was proud of her, that he did his best.
A pair of ungainly beasts, he and the dog wind their way through the park and back into town. Near the bank, they round a corner and almost collide with a couple standing listlessly in the shadows, blocking the sidewalk. She’s smoking. He’s fuming. As Lewis slows, he can see it in the man’s body language—the clenched fists, how the strained muscles misshape his stance. He doesn’t recognize them, the couple, which is unusual in a town so small, but he recognizes the anger. The intent. He slows as he approaches. Johnson does the same.
“Can I pet your dog?” the woman says. Though she’s young, her voice is husky with smoke.
“Not friendly,” Lewis says. The man steps into his path.
“It looks friendly.” His voice is a challenge, laced with hostility.
“Not the dog,” Lewis says, taking a step closer so he’s inches from the man. “Me.”
At this range the man realizes his miscalculation. His posture changes. He straightens his back, arches his shoulders. When he moves into the dim light from the streetlamp, Lewis can see that he’s not a man at all, but a boy. A teenager, maybe. Taking a step back, he puts a protective arm around the girl and ushers her away into the night.
A block later, across from the Salt Lick, Johnson stops to go on the sidewalk, leaving a vengeful pile. While Lewis cleans up behind her with one of the plastic grocery bags he carries for that purpose, he sees Littlejohn’s truck in the bar’s lot, parked at an angle across three spaces.
“Pinheads and assholes,” The Old Man used to say. “If you don’t know which one you are, you’re probably both.”
“Come on, girl,” Lewis says. They cross the street to the parking lot and he can smell the sweat and the beer. Music leaks through the walls and windows, raised voices, the sound of pool cues making contact with billiard balls and Keno machines ringing and buzzing. The flag-plastered rear window of Littlejohn’s truck is open. Lewis unknots the bag of dog shit and lobs it into the cab.
The Old Man parented with his fists and his fury. He led with his flaws. With no mother to counterpunch, Lewis looked elsewhere. To Finneran. To Jimmy and Ed. They taught him that any dumb bastard with fists can leave a mark on somebody, but it takes something more to leave one upon the entire world. In their words and in their actions he began to see possibility. He began to see that he did not have to be like his father. That he did not have to become his father. He could be whatever he wanted.
That’s when he started thinking about college. It’s when he started thinking about heading out West after he graduated, starting his own life in a place of his choosing. It’s also when he began developing a code. In books Finneran had given him, he read about the samurai and Bushido, their code of honor. The idea made enough of an impression on him that he studied it until well-versed. He still quotes from it often enough that Fenwick calls him Confucius, conflating not just multiple philosophies but different cultures entirely.
It didn’t take long to find that the limitations of applying a code written for a warrior class of feudal Japan left wide room for interpretation to modern life, so Lewis set out to formulate his own. He bought a cheap black notebook that fit in his pocket and carried it everywhere with him, recording these rules of engagement for life in its pages, rules of honor and respect to help him find his path through a complicated world. Those rules helped get him through.
Just like boxing. Just like fishing.
And now, he thinks, as he turns for home with six miles in his tired legs, he’s going to teach those rules to Gray.
Remembering his own venomous father as he runs the last mile through the night, remembering the things done to him and the things they did to each other, remembering about the darkness that consumed The Old Man and how it’s been chasing Lewis his whole life, he wonders if it will be enough. The code.
By welcoming the baby into his life, he’s also welcomed hope itself, and he can’t help but wonder which it will be that ruins him.
