Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  And he looked again.

  He told her at the last to hurry, his shirt undone, and him sitting on a patch of dust between two boulders, pulling at his boots to get them off his feet. As he did she had said Joel over and over as if she’d spent the day with his name in her mouth just as she had the first time. How she’d known his name even then, he didn’t know. He’d never told her.

  And when they were done that day he’d left her in the cleft of rocks. He’d pulled on his clothes and boots and gathered himself for the trail, catching Lost Line Creek just above the farm, and then he had climbed three thousand feet more. At the alpine spring he gazed down at the house and barn far below. He imagined for a moment he could see Myrna white and still in the field, but whatever it was he thought he saw moved and he wasn’t sure if what he was seeing was her at all. He watched until whatever it was disappeared into the trees, a sheep maybe gone astray from the others and not a girl he’d lain with in the swale between the rocks.

  Joel, Joel, she’d howled as he’d left without a word.

  He’d never asked her to be there.

  None of it was his fault.

  Still.

  Now there was the dance tomorrow night. Myrna had told him her father was taking her there. It was going to be the first time ever she’d gone when she could dance most of the dances knowing how. She said her father had been teaching her box steps and walk steps and other kinds too.

  Waltz and polka fell from her lips like magical words.

  He did want Myrna to be there, wanted to dance with her, and it didn’t matter if Alice saw them dancing because he’d be dancing with Alice too if she’d let him. And Myrna wouldn’t tell anyone about what they’d done or did. Not her. Not Myrna.

  The creek and the bridge were behind him now. He’d moved on into the night. As he walked he caught glimpses of the moon’s hook as it kept trying to catch at the rimrock above the cliffs on the other side of the river, its vagrant light lingering among the stunted trees along the alpine.

  A rustle in the brush ahead stopped him, a thick stench creeping.

  And then a quickening, a heat flare, a stink, all of it a thickness moving.

  The night was then an absence, a breath untaken.

  He stood motionless as something coarse brushed against a rock. A stillness and the scrape of sound, the smell of bear and it knowing he was there.

  The sound flowed, an open mouth, a ffhhhhh stretched out, wet air moving over hot stone steaming.

  It was a bear and it had to be a big one come along the cliffs above the canyon, or from the south pacing the creeks below Mad River, or down from the mountain runnels to the dump. One who had come into the village to forage at the burning barrels behind the cabins and shacks, the covered barrels down at the cookhouse. Or not hungry, but walking the path for something other than garbage, walking like this was its place, its land, its right to be anywhere. The trail belonged to the bear, and any beast—bear, wolf, cougar, or man—must step aside. He’d seen what a bear could do. The torn-up body of a faller down on the lakes, a man who thought the forest his to reap, and the bear with its right-of-way, perhaps guarding a nearby kill, a cub to protect, something, or nothing, just a man in its way. A bear could smell death in a man.

  The bear heard him breathe. It matched him breath for breath.

  And in the long quiet he waited, knowing if he tried to run the bear would be on him in seconds. He stood in the stillness and then he heard the bear tear at a rotting stump, a root, a stone.

  Hhhuuuunmfff.

  Deep in the gutter of the bear’s throat, that sound, and he listened as it began to move up the trail. He could feel the steps of the animal as paw after paw placed itself heavy on the earth. He felt the bear’s bulk in his bones, the way it shouldered its way through the bush a few yards ahead of him, leaving behind it a cloy caught on the air, the thick of a boar’s musk.

  He wiped at the smell in his nose, his wrist across his face. The animal had left itself on the night, not just its rankness, but a gravity that inhabited what it was and where it had been.

  Joel waited long, his heart slow, his breathing quiet. The bear had let go of whatever had brought it along the path and it had let go of him. The bear was deep in the night, but Joel walked more carefully now, each small step he took aware, each bend in the trail a moment to breathe, to smell and listen. Twenty feet along the path a fir stump lay in pieces, pulled apart, fragments of wood lying everywhere as if it had exploded. Dry kernels of bark turned to dust under his boots.

  Three bends, a big root in the trail, and the next cabin appeared, the one under the triple aspens. A stove-in bucket was tilted by the door, dandelions growing through the rust holes. Joel knew Oroville was behind those chinked logs sleeping with his skinny wife, their gunny-sack shades pulled tight and bound down with baler twine. He figured they’d heard his footfalls by their window some night back in the spring. They’d stayed hidden after that, but he didn’t need to sneak looks into other people’s lives so much anymore. Not now there was her. And then he wondered which her he meant, Alice or Myrna. He wanted both or none or one, but which one?

  The burning barrel beside Oroville’s cabin was tipped over on its side, half-burnt pork-chop bones, remnant potato skins, tin cans and damp ash spilled across the trail. The big bears mostly stayed away from the village, though Jaswant, the Sikh on the green chain, had told him a week ago he’d seen bear sign marked in the mud by the road leading to the dump. He told Joel the claws alone were two inches long, the paw prints huge, too large for even the biggest black.

  Joel ran his hand over the scuffed fir needles. There were claw marks on the barrel, and in the damp earth beside the overturned barrel was a smudged print. Five long claws in a straight row and not rounded on the paw like a black bear’s.

  He’d smelled the bear just minutes ago.

  Grizzly. A real bear, not a spirit.

  But why come here?

  The great bears got more than enough to eat feeding upon berries in the meadows, salmon on the creek bars, a moose calf. Little Hell’s Gate was many miles north of the village, a sixteen-foot-wide dogleg canyon even the spring salmon couldn’t force themselves through, the river pouring from the twisted gut in a wrench, a gasp of water. He’d seen eighty-pound springs spawning on Cougar Creek across the river from Aspen Flats just north of the village, the bears throwing the huge fish like silver leaves from the shallow waters, then tearing off the tops of their heads for the fat in the brains, ripping open the bellies for eggs, and leaving the mangled bodies for ravens, crows, and gulls.

  The signs by the burning barrel were rough, but Joel knew bear sign and knew the paw print was a grizzly’s. He’d hoped it was just some errant, aging black boar or sow, some oversized yearling come to feed upon what Oroville’s wife, Gladys, had thrown away. Gladys left her waste sometimes unburnt and for that he’d thought a bear might come. But not this grizzly. It had a reason to be here. A grizzly wasn’t a garbage bear. Joel stepped over the charred waste and ducked his head under a limp fir bough. He passed among random stones, an old log with stubs that had to be stepped over careful, and then he was looking down through gravel and brush tangle at the faint glow of a light at the back of the sawyer’s forty-foot trailer. Jim McAllister’s place.

  There was a thick chokecherry bush a little ways down the slope and Joel picked his way down to it. Pushing aside a branch he looked along the side of McAllister’s trailer where a light was coming from an open door farther down. It shone dimly into the shack attached to the side of the trailer. Jim had built it the week after he moved in. Joel had seen it go up on his night walks along the forest path, the stacked cement blocks and crossed railway ties the trailer rested upon, then the framing of the shack beside it. Trailer people called the additions joy-shacks—why, Joel didn’t know. There didn’t seem any joy to the clutter people stored in them. He looked through the joy-shack door at the shadowy boxes and cartons in Jim’s extra room. There were a couple of c
hainsaws, a workbench with a metal box, tools lying out as if Jim had been fixing something, cardboard boxes stacked in the back, and anything and everything else that wouldn’t fit inside the trailer. There was a washing machine, a half-size box freezer, and a tube vacuum cleaner, things there wouldn’t be a use for in the village. Like most everyone McAllister had no electricity. The only places that had power were the Rotmensens’ store and home, the Community Hall, the cookhouse, and the Company house where Claude lived. The mill’s diesel generators lighted those buildings alone, the workers, farmers, and hill folk getting by as they always had with coal oil, kerosene lamps, candles, and flashlights.

  Joel stayed hidden behind the bush and looked up at the muted glow coming through a window above him at the rear of the trailer. Joel knew trailers from back in Nakusp when he’d roamed the night streets. The light was where the bedroom had to be. The narrow window was open, a thin curtain pulled to the side. Joel lifted his hands from between his shanks and settled deeper on his haunches just as Jim’s voice came through the window.

  “This goddam woman,” McAllister said, each word as if bitten off, each sound he made a severed absence as if he was speaking only to himself and to no other.

  Joel waited through the following quiet and then heard a woman cry back, her voice wrenched, a choker cable stretched across the dark. “No, not damned. Not that.”

  And then, strange and sudden and out of place, Joel heard Art Kenning speak. “Don’t curse her, Jim,” he said.

  “I’ll say what I want to say,” the sawyer replied, his voice thin and hard. “Irene’s my woman, not yours.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Art asked. “She’s hurt.”

  Joel could hear the whisky as Art spoke, a soft slur Joel knew was liquor talking.

  He listened as Art told McAllister to let him do what he’d been brought there to do.

  McAllister said again it was his woman to speak to and do with as he pleased and Art asked him to get out of the bedroom.

  There was a long silence. And then Art said, “Why’d you cut her?”

  “Who are you to ask me anything?” Jim said, his voice bent iron straining. “I got you here to fix her, nothing more.”

  It was quiet again and into that emptiness McAllister spoke one word, but not to Art, and not to Irene, his wife, the one who was making with her mouth a sound like wet leaves turned by a boot. No, not to them, but to someone else entirely, who Joel didn’t know. “Women,” said Jim. He spoke as if the world was made entirely of them and therefore entirely damned.

  Not damned, Joel thought, not her or anyone.

  “Get out,” Art said. “Let me do this.”

  Joel leaned forward, his hat low, one hand stretched out, the muscles in his legs tight, his other hand flat on a boulder, dry lichen bristling in his palm. The other gripped the chokecherry branch, a few last berries falling, rattling dry and bitter on the leaves at his feet. He heard then what had to be the bedroom door sliding closed, carefully, not slammed, and then Jim’s horseshoed steel boot heels clicking slow and steady down the trailer toward the front where a second kerosene lamp burned, its glow shining out into the joy-shack. Joel crept farther down the slope until he could lean against the scarred siding below the window at the back, blue aluminum paint dust sifting down on his shoulder, his feet set to run.

  Two small aspen saplings gave him cover as lamplight flowed like burnt water over his head. A grey moth fluttered past his brow, the moth’s wings beating against the limp curtain, flaring as it tried to reach the light inside the room. Then he heard Irene McAllister cry out, her voice soft as a child’s in a strange dream.

  Art Kenning was whispering things to her. They weren’t words. They were sounds, the kind someone would make to a fevered child, croonings mostly, like what women sing to something that’s been wronged, animal, bird, or child.

  Joel thought about what Art was doing in there with Irene McAllister, wanting to hear more and not wanting to know, Art’s hands on her, and then, a little crazed, bewildered by thinking what he was, he climbed up the slope to the trail. He looked back only once, the light from the two lamps still shining, the one from the bedroom where Irene and Art were and the other from the front where Jim was, doing what, Joel could not imagine.

  Standing a little straighter now that he was hidden from the trailer and the road, he walked on past a pile of scrap lumber, tar streaks on the boards, and on from there to a tumbled woodpile, the split fir and hemlock riddled with worms and black rot. He stopped beside a burning barrel, this one upright, balanced on three flat stones, the white ash in the bottom of the scorched oil drum shivering from air that bled through the torch-cut holes in the iron.

  McAllister’s trailer was best left alone.

  He’d heard what Jim had said: That goddam woman.

  No, what the sawyer had said was this, not that. This goddam woman is what McAllister said. It was as if he was trying to make sure of who she was, his woman and no other’s.

  And Art had ordered the sawyer to get out in Jim’s own trailer.

  Joel wondered how bad she was for Art to say that. He’d seen Art sew a logger’s thumb back on one time last winter. The man had come out of the bush with it hanging from behind the knuckle, tied off at the stump with twine to stop the bleeding. The thumb didn’t take after Art put it back on, but it’d been something to watch Art fit the bones together and then sew it on, the stitches at the end looking like a fringed necklace around the logger’s thumb. He remembered the paleness of the bone. It was the first time he’d seen a living bone. Art had told the guy it wouldn’t work, but the logger insisted he try. Art said the thumb was pretty well dead by the time it got to him, but he sewed it back on anyway, the man thanking him for the time he took to do it. Art took the thumb back off a week later because of the smell and sent him down to Kamloops, telling him he’d likely die if he didn’t get it seen to. The man never blamed Art for his own insisting on the trying. He went down on a train that night. He never came upriver again.

  As Joel tried to imagine the shadows of Irene McAllister’s body and wondered what part of her Art was sewing up, he stumbled on a root just past a deserted cabin, sucking in one breath and then another as he pushed down on his crotch, Alice alive in his head. It was like sometimes women were under his hands, the ones he’d sometimes see in the dark, and in the light too, the ones who walked moving like they did and do down the road, the wives sometimes and the daughters too like Myrna. Myrna Turfoot in their hiding place above the trees behind the rocks.

  “Myrna.”

  And then in a whisper, “Myrna,” again, thinking of her laughter, the joy she took in things, in him, her pleasure. He wanted her and didn’t want her. He wanted Alice too mostly because he couldn’t have her. But knowing the didn’t and the did was never going to change the way he felt about the two of them.

  He thought of the men sitting around the bunkhouse at night telling stories. If they talked about women it was about ones who lived everywhere else but the valley, the village where they worked. Some of the men would start drinking heavy and then they’d go on about what they’d done to a girl down in Little Fort or up in Blue River or Jasper. I did this or I did that. Bitches and whores is what they called them. Cunts is what they’d say.

  One thing Joel knew, the men seemed to hate the women they talked about, the ones they said they’d been with. Some of the men when they got really drunk would talk about beating a girl up. Reiner was full of stories like that. He bragged about the times he’d had to bring a woman into line. It was because one had either mouthed off to him or come on to another guy. Or else he said it was because she’d wanted to get hurt, that she was looking for it from the start. It was almost as if Ernie was afraid of women.

  There were some, Art and Joseph and a few others, who wouldn’t put up with Ernie going on about what he’d done to some girl or another. Joel thought maybe it was why Reiner hung around Jim McAllister. McAllister never said much one way or t
he other, but Joel had seen the two of them take off for Blue River on nights when there wasn’t a dance going on in the village. Reiner was always drunk when he got back, but if Jim was he didn’t show it. The times Joel saw them return McAllister never staggered or fell like Reiner did. Art always said they were a strange pair, Jim dead quiet and Ernie a loudmouth.

  The thing was, men never said they missed the women they talked about, wives, girlfriends, daughters. But there were times when Joel would see a man sitting alone, down by the river or up on the high road watching the trucks heading toward the cities, dust riding in rooster tails behind them. The guy would be sitting on a rock or a stump and there’d be a look on his face so lost it made Joel turn away. He knew what that look meant now there was Myrna and Alice. It wasn’t just loneliness the man had been feeling. There was something else in his heart, a need, a kind of wanting, and though Joel couldn’t name what it was, he knew it lived somewhere deep inside him too.

  Something bad had happened back at the trailer to have the first-aid man there, him having to sew up Jim’s wife, and Art talking to McAllister like he did.

  Only the boss could do that and even then Claude was careful around him.

  But Art Kenning did.

  Joel took a step and stopped, resting his back against a dried-out cedar trunk.

  Thick air pooled on the stones at his feet.

  A frog sounded in the tired mud back at the creek.

  Creaak…crik…creaak.

  And a rat in the fir needles rustling.

  Was the owl still down by the river, the bear on the trail to the dump?

  Ernie Reiner sucking on air.

  There was the lean-to behind the store with its pig-wire window.

  Where he was going.

  Where Rotmensen kept Alice.

  This goddam woman. This goddam woman.

  McAllister’s Irene.

  What McAllister could do, anything he wanted to do, to her.

  Scared of the pictures in his head, Joel took a deep breath and bent over, his hat falling off, his hands between his thighs. He felt himself get hard again, the blood in his groin stirring, his cock quick against his palm. He squeezed down, gripping himself, wishing his body gone. He was afraid Alice would be able to smell him when he got to the lean-to and stood on the round of cedar looking down upon Alice sleeping. Standing straight, he leaned his head and shoulders back so the stars were cold on his eyes. He pushed his hand down the front of his pants, pulling his cock up so it rested hard against his belly. Dragging his low-slung belt down, he pulled it tight, binding himself, the leather like a hard lace cutting him. He thought of where he was going, the lean-to, the window, and he struck low at his belly where it was, struck at himself with his closed fist. He punched at himself again, but it wouldn’t go away.