by Tim Poland
When Matthew inched his way up the steps to the porch, Margie turned to her youngest. “What you got there, sweetie?”
The boy held his hands out slowly. Clutched within his tight grip, a small black tuft. “Bear hair,” the boy said. There was a breathless reverence in his voice. “And there was blood, a big blob of it.”
“How lovely, dear. I see handwashing in your future,” Margie said, and turned to J.D. “So I take it your quest was a success?”
“Yes, damn it all,” he said. “We’d better get going. Got to get back, file a report, and figure out how to handle this one now.”
“It’s going to rain more.” Luke had come out to the porch, his book held to his chest, his index finger still marking the woodpecker page.
The wind had picked up a bit in the last few minutes. Downslope, through the trees, they could make out a hint of darker clouds beginning to roll in over the lower valley.
“You boys go get in the car,” Margie said. “And Luke, tell Mr. Keefe thank you for finding your bird for you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Keefe,” the boy said quietly as he descended the steps with his brother. No sound came from within the bungalow. The brothers walked to the SUV, the younger holding his wad of torn bear fur in his fists, the elder clutching his book.
“What courteous little lunatics I’m raising,” Margie said. “Anyway, thanks for finding Luke his damned woodpecker. You have no idea what that’s going to be worth around the house.”
“Glad he got to see it. They’re beautiful,” Sandy said.
J.D. and Margie left the porch and walked to the SUV. As they got in, Margie called back to Sandy. “I’ll call you later. Where you going to be, here or your place?”
That was the question, wasn’t it, Sandy thought. Not where she was going to be, but rather, which one was her place. “Not sure. Probably my place.” Only as she spoke it did she realize she likely spoke the truth.
“And if you need anything, honey,” Margie said through her open window, “anything at all, you call me.”
“I will.” Sandy watched the SUV roll slowly up out of the clearing, took a long, deep breath, and walked back inside the bungalow.
Keefe had returned to his tying bench, where he sat snipping narrow strands from a wild turkey feather. As Sandy closed the door behind her and looked at Keefe’s back hunched over his workbench, an unexpected sensation bubbled up in her veins, something almost alien to her in regard to Keefe. It felt like anger. Had her constant presence here lately been too much to expect of this very private man? More than likely. Did her earlier concerns about Keefe’s possible disorientation merit further concern? Perhaps. Probably not. But still, being eccentric and aloof was one thing. Being rude was another. And that’s what it felt like to her just now—rudeness. Realizing her teeth were tightly gritted together, she took a breath and consciously relaxed her jaw muscles.
“Are you all right?” she said to Keefe’s back.
“Of course, my dear. Never better,” he said, not turning away from his work.
“It was good of you to find a pileated for Matthew.”
“A what?”
“The woodpecker. For Margie’s son. It meant a lot to him.”
Keefe paused and turned halfway toward her. “Oh yes, of course,” he said.
Sandy went to the bedroom and bathroom to collect what few things of hers she had here at the moment. She stuffed them into a small duffel and walked back into the bungalow’s main room. She nudged Stink from the sofa and opened the door for him.
“I think I’ll go on back to my place tonight.” The words my place rattled in Sandy’s ears. “Got a few things to take care of there.” She had absolutely nothing to take care of there, as far as she could recall.
“Certainly, my dear. Whatever you wish.” Keefe turned in his chair and looked toward her, but Sandy couldn’t be sure if he looked at her or past her, through the open door into the clearing, where the wind lifted early-fallen leaves through the air. The quaint formality in his way of addressing her sometimes, what she had usually found endearing, even charming, made her furious just now.
“Thanks again for the woodpecker,” she said. “Bye.”
“Goodbye, my dear.”
She hadn’t consciously intended it, or so she thought, but the result was undeniable. The door had slammed sharply behind her on the way out of the bungalow.
Keefe at His Workbench: Pale Morning Dun
Ephemeridae. Ephemerella. A short-lived thing. Forms in the deeper water. Slips its natal skin and struggles through the current to the surface. Floats in the warming light, dries its wings, takes flight for a day, a single day. And dies, spinning down to the surface, swallowed back into the inexorable flow. And—Stop. Leave that. Turn away from the outward whirling into unraveling. Turn back to this simple core. Hold fast to the pattern. Cling to its inscribed form. Hold tight. Hold here. The comprehensible world ends beyond the ring of this light. Between here and the banks of the headwaters, a vacillating, unstable world, to be kept at bay, to be kept quiet, if possible. Follow each turn of the thread, close and tight, around the hook shank. Rule and form to the pattern. Adhere to it. The thread winds into body. Over the fattening strands, wrap the sliver of turkey feather, cut from the bands of dun between the bands of chestnut brown. A wing feather. And now, a few thin strands, synthetic, iridescent, looped onto the head of the shank, tufted into the hackle. Tighten the loop to secure it. Tighter. Tighter still. The firm fabrication that will outlast the original. The simulation more durable than the real. Grasp it. Don’t let go. The safety of artifice and imitation—exactly the same, on any given day—lasting, immutable, cast onto the waters to lure the creature waiting within. Hold fast.
12
RAIN PINGED LIKE BB’S ONTO THE CANOPY OVER THE GAS pumps at the Citgo station in Damascus. It had begun as a modest shower just as Sandy jammed closed the old padlock on the fire-road gate when leaving Keefe’s bungalow. By the time she reached Damascus to gas up her truck before heading to Willard Road, the rain had grown to a strong, steady downpour. Stink sat in the truck cab, his head resting on the back of the seat, his eyes staring indifferently out the rear window. The catch on the nozzle was broken, so Sandy had to hold the pump handle open. While fuel poured into her tank, she propped her elbow on the rim of the truck bed and dropped her chin into the palm of her upturned hand. As the force of the rain had increased, her anger at Keefe had diminished. The fury that slammed the bungalow door had dwindled to a dull, persistent irritation. She no longer wanted to thrash Keefe for his aloofness. She wanted only to be free of him for a few days, to go home to Willard Road until this unfamiliar aggravation fully subsided and she felt herself again.
The sound of tires spinning on wet pavement caught Sandy’s ear through the thrumming of rain on the metal canopy above her. She looked up as she tightened the cap back onto her gas tank. A small hatchback scooted quickly across the road from the diner into the lot of the Citgo and pulled up beside Sandy on the opposite side of the pump island. With the squeal of the hatchback’s tires, Sandy looked up to notice the crowd around the diner. The parking lot was full to overflowing, with a few cars and pickups parked along the road to both sides of the lot. A steady stream of vehicles replaced those that pulled away, and a similarly steady stream of people hustled into and out of the diner. Those leaving carried white paper bags and stacks of styrene containers. Some even carried open plates of food, trying to shield their food from the rain as they scurried to their cars.
Small rivulets of water ran down the dark gray sides of the hatchback. The hood and roof of the car were sun-faded a lighter, mottled shade of gray. Its wiper blades screeched over the windshield until the driver cut the engine and stepped out of the car. Sandy could see a tall stack of styrene containers on the passenger seat.
“Better get over there before it’s all gone.” The man wore a plaid shirt and a Carhartt cap. He walked around his car to the opposite side of the gas pump from Sandy and
lifted the nozzle out of its cradle.
“All what?” Sandy asked.
“All of it. Food. Everything.”
Sandy glanced back at the diner. Following a group of three people carrying bags and styrene, two men waddled out, toting a long table that they carried across the lot through the rain and slid into the back of a pickup truck.
“Seems tomorrow’s the big day,” the man said as he began pumping gas. “And since they ain’t gonna need any food in heaven, they’s just giving it all away. What with all I got, I can afford to fill this thing up now. Mighty nice of ’em. Crazy, but nice. Ought to stop over and get ya some before it’s too late.”
“Maybe I will.” Sandy recalled the rumors about the commune and its leader’s prediction of the end of days. She hunched her shoulders and tucked her head against the rain and ran inside the convenience store to pay for her gas.
THE stream of cars and trucks leaving had become larger than the one arriving. Sandy found a space about thirty feet from the entrance, parked her truck, and trotted through the rain into the diner. Inside, the scene appeared to be the ruins of a storm far more formidable than the one drenching the valley outside. It looked as if half of the tables, chairs and benches usually in the diner had been removed. Those that remained were pushed askew toward the walls of the dining room. Here and there, people had found a space at a table and ate from styrene containers and drank from tall plastic glasses. A clutch of four men in muddy work clothes stood to the side of the room, talking quietly as they fisted plastic forkfuls of food into their mouths. Most of the bric-a-brac and varnished placards of Bible verses that normally adorned the diner’s walls were gone.
Squarely in the middle of the restaurant, a small island of order had been maintained. An older couple, likely in their late sixties at least, sat at a table eating the last of their late lunch from mismatched plates. Farming people, Sandy surmised, from the deeply tanned face of the man beneath his startling white forehead. His John Deere cap rested on the table beside his plate. They chewed their food slowly, silently, within closed, grimly thin-lipped mouths. Their eyes darted fearfully around the room, as if to keep at bay the disorder that threatened to disrupt their luncheon.
Along one wall beyond the older couple, three tables were pushed together to form a single long one. On the tabletop, Sandy located the shambles of the diner’s Judgment Day buffet. While his tongue probed for a piece of food lodged between his teeth, the farmer with the white brow watched Sandy as she stepped around the table and approached the buffet.
The long buffet table was covered from one end to the other with bowls, platters, and long stainless-steel steam-table inserts, all heavily picked over. The diner staff had clearly emptied out their larders in preparation for their departure, and the citizens of Damascus, those in the know, had responded to this final act of generosity with enthusiasm. Until two young men walked through the door as Sandy scanned the ransacked buffet, she thought she must be the last person in the valley to arrive at this last supper. She felt a bit tawdry picking over these final remains, but she was hungry and knew damn well, considering her current mood, she wouldn’t feel like cooking much of anything when she got home. Not to mention, she didn’t really know if she had any usable provisions to speak of at the house on Willard Road, given all the time she’d spent at Keefe’s of late. She managed to scrape together the semblance of a meal she might or might not heat up back at her house—flaccid string beans flecked with bacon, brown beans coated with a congealed skin of sauce, a miraculously untouched leg of fried chicken, what she thought was a pork chop, and a crumbling hunk of cornbread. She closed her meal into one styrene container and picked up another. Into the second container she placed the last scoop of scrambled eggs and a pimiento cheese sandwich for Stink. One large bowl on the table was untouched, a full bowl of green Jell-O with tiny marshmallows suspended in it.
Sandy snapped the second container closed and moved aside for the two men who had walked in behind her.
“Told you we should’ve got our asses over here sooner,” said one of the men.
“What the hell,” said the other man as he dragged two chairs right up to the buffet table. “Get what we can. Still free.”
They sat down and began to eat what they could find directly from the remains on the buffet, using the serving utensils.
“Here. You like this shit?” One of the men passed the large bowl of Jell-O to the other.
As she stepped aside, Sandy heard a low mumbling coming from the rear of the diner. Through the pass-through window between the kitchen and the restaurant, she could see the diner staff in the kitchen. All women, all dressed in varied versions of the long denim skirts with the same impossibly long hair, they stood in a circle, hands joined, eyes closed, heads bowed in softly voiced prayer. Sandy made out the word amen as it reverberated around the group of women when they broke their circle and walked single file out of the kitchen and through the restaurant toward the front door. Each held her clasped hands before her, each wore a vaguely serene smile on her lips as they walked straight through the diner and out the door into the rain, gladly leaving their work, their world behind for the world to come. Only one of the women, the last in the line of them, even paused to look back at the decimated diner. Her long hair was flaming red, her face freckled, and the serene smile on her face broke for a moment, revealing a twitch of worry as she gazed a final time on the world she had known, perhaps loved.
From the doorway of the diner, Sandy watched the red-haired woman close herself into a white van with the other women and drive off down the river road toward Wilson Hollow. She glanced once more into the diner. The two men were somehow still finding something to eat on the buffet table. The farmer put his John Deere cap on his head, got up from his seat, and stepped around the table to pull out his wife’s chair as she rose from the table. Sandy held her two styrene containers carefully between her hands and jogged to her truck.
Stink sniffed attentively at the containers when Sandy slid into the truck cab. “I suppose you want yours now.” She set the container with her meal on the floor beneath her feet. Stink’s she opened and placed on the seat between them. Stink took another thorough sniff and glanced quickly at Sandy. “Go ahead. Wasn’t much to choose from. Hope you like it.”
While Stink scarfed his food happily, Sandy flipped on her windshield wipers and backed out of the parking space. She swung her truck to the edge of the parking lot for a closer view of the river where it flowed around the bend behind the diner. The lower Ripshin was barely contained within its channel, the water deep, churning, and muddy. Its current hammered the banks, little more than a foot or two from jumping those banks. If the rain continued much longer—and it showed no sign of abating—the floodgates on the dam would have to be opened and the feared flood would soon roll out into the Ripshin Valley. Sandy shifted into gear and headed home to Willard Road.
Home. We live up there.
Ain’t Been No Mountain Lions in This Part of the Country for a Hundred Years
This cave was not right for a den. Not quite deep enough. The opening too large. Far too close to the human dwelling in the clearing on the other side of the river. But it would do for now. It would have to. She was out of the rain. She was just out of sight in the cave’s scant shadow. She was safe for now. A soft layer of leaves blown into the back of the cave provided a bed on which to rest, to regain her strength, to lick the wound. Already the bloody crease along her flank had begun to sting less, but still there was pain, and she licked the wound attentively.
It had all happened seemingly in an instant, with no opportunity to recognize sequence, cause and effect, the chain of action. She’d caught the upwind human scent and turned to it as the bullet cut a shallow furrow across her rear haunch. She leapt and spun away from the sudden, searing pain. The echoing report of the rifle didn’t reach her ears until her paws had reclaimed earth and she launched into wild flight. The human enemy could only be scented, not seen. N
o adversary to assess. No strategy to calculate. No advantage to exploit. To flee was the only option. There was no choice in it.
She ran. She ran. Downslope into the depths of the ravine, crashing through brush, leaping over deadfall, and the pain leapt with her. And she ran. Up the far slope and onto the next ridge until the scent of the human killer vanished, leaving only the moist, loamy reek of the forest floor and the drifting trace of approaching rain on the breeze. And still she ran. Along the ridge, then down the slope into the next ravine, her long tail aloft behind her, the reach of her stride expansive, stretching the pain in her thigh. And on she ran. Until she reached the surging stream cutting down through the base of the ravine, where she paused, shook her hind leg, licked briefly at the bloody stripe etched into her flank, and then loped downstream.
This occasion of her flight was contained in a single moment of time. It had a beginning, an end, and it was finished. It required no further attention or notice. The scent of human threat had long since been woven into her senses and would remain there intact, at the ready when needed. It was no longer of this moment. Still inviolate in the pulse and throb of her muscled flesh, in the ruthless crush of her fanged jaw, the blood-borne knowledge of her arrant ferocity. Without hesitation. Without doubt. Freestanding and isolate. Pure predator. The bear was larger, formidable, meriting respect, but hampered by hesitation, burdened by curiosity and thoughtful caution—it could be handled. The coyote, in itself, was no threat—what threat it posed came only in numbers. In her intractable solitude, in her stealthy stalk through the leafy shadows, she pawed her path over the forest floor, the most fearsome creature afoot within her range.
She stopped licking her wound and sat upright. The bloody seam on her thigh had begun to dry and scab over. It was not serious. She raised her snout to the scent of the rain falling beyond the mouth of the cave. The squirrel that hopped onto the ledge at the cave opening had hardly acknowledged a source of danger before the paw came down and crushed it. Now there would be a bit of food, too, along with shelter and secure solitude as the rain swelled the headwaters and pelted the ravine outside. She drew the dead squirrel closer and settled deeply onto the bed of leaves at the back of the cave.
