Creature Discomforts

by Susan Conant

  I reversed direction. I’d seen what was to be seen up here. What would obviously not appear no matter how much prowling I did was the answer to the big question: Why? Why had Axelrod taken the abandoned trail? Why had he left it to go to the edge of the cliff?

  Descending to the upper stretch of the Ladder Trail, I was once again tempted to hitch the dogs so I could search for my Rock of Ages without having to worry about safe canine footing. The previous day, of course, the dogs, after liberating themselves, had galloped loose for God knows how long without hurting themselves at all. Common sense should’ve suggested that I was the one whose agility and equilibrium were not to be trusted. Addlepate that I was, the thought never crossed my mind; it simply didn’t occur to me that in hunting for my Rock of Ages, I might once again collide with it. The possibility that did present itself was that Rowdy and Kimi, inspired by the appearance of a squirrel, a fox, or an off-leash dog, might make an unexpected bolt. If they did? They wouldn’t, I told myself. They just wouldn’t.

  “You are to be good dogs,” I informed them. Useless! But we lucked out. Again moving slowly and carefully, keeping my eyes on the ground and on the dogs, I left the trail and headed downhill over the rocky ledges. “Easy!” I cautioned the dogs. “Easy does it!” Luckily, Acadia’s wildlife chose not to reveal itself, and no rival dogs appeared. In almost no time, we’d inched our way across lichen-covered boulders and come to a drop-off. Only ten feet or so below lay the cleft boulder where I’d regained consciousness. Now that I stood on the spot from which I must have fallen, I wondered what, besides discarded bags of rice, I’d expected to gain from returning to the scene of my injuries. Had I nourished some secret hope that the sights, sounds, and scents of the place would magically restore me? I took a deep breath and looked around. Below, Route 3 carved a swath through the woods in the valley between Dorr and what the guidebook and maps had informed me was Huguenot Head, directly opposite, and Champlain Mountain, to the right.

  With no warning, a voice sounded from what felt like no distance at all. “Charlie!” a woman demanded. “Would you mind waiting for Tucker? He is doing his best to keep up, but his legs are simply not as long as yours, and as I have had to tell you more times than I care to remember, this is a family expedition! And furthermore, we need to wait for your father. You stop right where you are and wait for the rest of us!”

  “Tucker always spoils everything,” a boy whined.

  “I do not! Mommy, I don’t, do I? Charlie does.”

  An adult male, sounding dangerously out of breath, snarled, “Tucker, enough of that! Charlie, you wait for the rest of us, or you stay in the car when we get to Sand Beach, and that’s that.”

  Reflecting on the superiority of big dogs to small children—absence of whining, presence of strength and motivation to carry heavy packs—I waited mutely until the family expedition had made its way up what was obviously the nearby Ladder Trail. The ledge on which the dogs and I now stood and, below it, my Rock of Ages were far closer to the trail than I’d imagined. I’d heard every word spoken by young Charlie and Tucker, and their parents. Looking up, I had an unimpeded view of the high cliff above the trail. The cliché about New England weather? It changes from hour to hour, minute to minute. If there’d been thick fog, I’d have seen nothing from here. If the fog hadn’t arrived when I stood here yesterday, or if it had cleared even briefly, I’d surely have been able to see Norman Axelrod at the edge of that cliff. What’s more, he and anyone with him would have had a clear view of me.

  The grimness of my situation hit me. On his own, Axelrod, the notorious tree-hater, would never have left the beaten path. He wouldn’t even have known that the abandoned section of the Ladder Trail existed. Something or someone had lured him upward. And sent him on a lethal plunge. I toyed with the fantasy that by weird coincidence, Stephen King had been hiking in Acadia and that Axelrod, the celebrity seeker, had spotted the novelist and trailed after him. We’ll leave your name out of it, Malcolm Fairley had promised. Anonymity is anonymity. Fairley had known of the abandoned Homans Path. Had he also known of this abandoned trail? I had a clear vision of the lone hiker vanishing upward; he certainly knew that trail. Just as clearly, I saw him skillfully baiting my dogs; he’d done it like a pro. Oh, Jesus! Like a pro? Or because he was one? Because my lone hiker was Horace Livermore?

  I didn’t bother to retrieve the rice, but I did return to the clearing for the dogpacks. Spurred by panic, I set a speed record for the canine-accompanied descent of Dorr. Miraculously, Rowdy, Kimi, and I somehow managed to avoid colliding with the families, couples, and solitary hikers trekking up and down the little mountain. In a manner entirely uncharacteristic of me, I brushed off all admiring comments about the dogs, refused requests to pat them, and answered not a single question about their ever-so-cute packs. Then, having avoided smashing into anyone on the way down, I got all the way to my car only to run into Anita Fairley.

  The dogs and I were on the blacktop next to my old Bronco. They were slurping up water from their folding fabric bowls, and I was swigging spring water from a bottle, when Anita appeared out of nowhere and said, “Ah, the ghoulish impulse to witness the scene of a death! Have a nice hike?”

  I said nothing to her, but right now I feel an uncontrollable compulsion to comment that no one has the right to be that beautiful. The previous night, in the flattering illumination of the campfire and of the floodlights, I’d assumed that Anita’s hair was artificially blond and hoped that daylight would reveal its roots. With luck, it would look brassy, dry, and cheap. Now, in sunlight, her tresses looked naturally pale and naturally wavy. Her skin was flawless, and although a collection of rags would’ve looked fashionable on her, she was dressed in the kind of voguish, earth-toned outdoor clothes I wouldn’t even know where to buy.

  “My idea of a nice hike,” she purred, “is a drive to the top of Cadillac. And here I am about to be stuck on my father’s trail crew with Wally and Opal, grubbing around in the dirt on the Homans Path. Not that I volunteered. I prefer to limit my contributions to the Pine Tree Foundation to nice, clean legal work. But my father had the sense to ask Steve instead of me, and Steve said yes, so what could I do? All for love!”

  I longed to smack her.

  “I’m just dying to meet your father.” Her tone was confiding, but her expression seemed snide. “I’ve heard all about him. He sounds like quite a character!”

  Before I could say anything—what I had in mind was Oh—the rest of Malcolm Fairley’s volunteer crew arrived: Steve Delaney; Opal and Wally Swan, the developers; and Malcolm himself. With Steve were his dogs, whose names I knew better than my own: India, the shepherd, and Lady, the pointer. Opal, Wally, and Malcolm carried long-handled loppers.

  “Is Anita recruiting you?” Malcolm Fairley asked me. “We could use an extra hand. Zeke, our other volunteer, won’t be joining us today. Dogs are welcome!”

  I offered some sort of excuse.

  Anita, standing safely behind both her father and Steve, made a face. “Leave the dogs,” she told Steve.

  Malcolm said, “If you change your mind, Holly, you’ll know where to find us. Just get on that path and look up into the woods for a lot of felled trees. When the Park Service abandoned the path, they cut them down to block it off, but you won’t have any trouble getting past them, and when you get to the steps, you’ll see that the stonework is in remarkably fine shape. A shame that trail was ever closed! It’s a treasure. Off we go!”

  With that, Malcolm Fairley headed across the parking lot toward the Wild Gardens, with Wally and Opal following. Steve’s face was almost impassive; only a hint of pain showed. Nodding lightly to me, he handed Lady’s leash to Anita and then led India toward his van, parked six or eight spaces away from my Bronco. Eager to be with Steve, Lady tried to forge ahead of Anita, who dealt with the behavior by slamming a booted foot on one of the pointer’s fore-paws. Lady, of course, yelped. Steve and India glanced back.

  “Is there a problem there?�
�� Steve asked.

  “No,” Anita told him. “I accidentally stepped on her foot, and she’s being a sissy.”

  India, I noticed, was silently lifting her lip at Anita. Steve looked miserable.

  Approaching Anita, I whispered, “I’m warning you. Don’t you ever dare to hurt Lady again when I’m around, because the next time, I’m going to scream bloody murder about it. Is that clear? And let me also warn you that India knows exactly what you’re up to, and she is very protective of Lady, and she won’t tolerate this kind of thing forever. India doesn’t like you, and she doesn’t trust you.”

  Anita’s beautiful face flushed.

  “Neither do I,” I added.

  Chapter Eighteen

  EXAMINING HIS FACE in the cracked mirror above his bathroom sink, Buck Winter endures a hideous, exciting rush of self-consciousness he has not known since adolescence. His literal inability to see himself clearly is his own fault. Buck, however, blames the crack on global warming, a phenomenon he takes not only seriously but personally. Indeed, so serious and so personal is his resentment of the climatic ruination of the state of Maine that one morning last July when the battered, duct-taped transistor radio propped on his bathroom radiator had the gall to forecast temperatures in the nineties for the next four days, he vented his rage by hurling his razor to the floor, grabbing the damned radio, and slamming it into the first object to catch his eye—namely, the mirror. In Buck’s view, a heat wave represents an infernal violation of Natural Order. Maine, for Christ’s sake, is supposed to be cold!

  When Buck believes, he does so with evangelical fervor. Maine is one of his two religions. Whenever he drives north across the bridge from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the sacred ground, he creates a traffic hazard by bowing his head and intoning loudly, “Entering God’s Country, the beautiful State of Maine!” When heading south on the bridge, he regretfully announces, just as loudly, “Leaving God’s Country, the beautiful State of Maine!” By “God’s country,” he means, among other things, a place where the temperature damned well stays down where God intends it to remain. Buck assumes that he and God have identical likes and dislikes. After all, if God can’t be expected to show some common sense, who can?

  God is of little help to Buck right now. The problem is the Deity’s total lack of experience with human romance. Although it’s been decades since Buck’s last heady infatuation with a woman—Marissa, in fact, his late wife—by comparison with God, Buck is, by definition, a man of the world. Buck’s other religion, dog worship, is of disappointingly little practical help. Bending his massive frame downward to study his face in the uncracked sections of the mirror, he wishes, not for the first time, that he were the kind of creature he knows how to groom and present to best advantage. But he is not and is never going to be a golden retriever.

  Speak of the angel, at that moment, Mandy wanders into the bathroom in the hope that Buck will turn on the shower. If he does, she will exercise her prerogative of leaping into the tub, standing under the water until she is drenched, flying out of the tub, and shaking dog-scented water all over everything. Neither Buck nor Mandy realizes that the cracked mirror perfectly suits the decor of the rest of the bathroom and, indeed, the rest of the house. But today Buck does not turn on the shower. Instead, he addresses Mandy, who is a beautiful and intelligent young bitch, sound of mind and body.

  “Know thyself, Mandy!” Buck advises her. “In the Great Show Ring of Life and Love, see yourself as the judge will see you! And if you don’t like what you see, hire yourself a professional handler!”

  Buck has done so. Although his neglected house and well-kept kennels in Owls Head, Maine, are a mere hour and a half north of Freeport, home of that esteemed Maine institution, L.L. Bean, Freeport has become a shopping mecca that bewilders him. Consequently, he relies largely on Bean’s catalogs and the Bean site on the World Wide Web. An old customer, he pored over the many catalogs mailed to him within the last six months and selected a remarkably suitable gift for Gabrielle Beamon. No one could ever accuse him of stinginess. On the contrary, he gives generously, if eccentrically and often inappropriately: expensive firearms to pacifists, costly fishing tackle and elaborate hunting knives to vegetarians. In contrast, an L.L. Bean dog bed is an outright normal selection. Yes, but which dog bed? Round? With a green fleece top? Rectangular? Rectangular and therapeutic? Blue? Tan? Forest green? With or without a pattern of dog paws? Close study of the chart of the Holiday catalog simplified matters: Rectangular dog beds were unavailable in size small. Therefore, round. Tan he rejected as bland. Faint heart never won fair maid! Bright blue. Like Gabrielle’s eyes.

  “Monogrammed,” he told the customer service representative, a competent-sounding woman with a sweet voice. “‘Molly,’ M-O-L-L-Y. Not I-E. Y. Twenty-five-inch round dog bed, denim blue cover, no paw prints, monogrammed ‘Molly.”’

  Having taken the information about the dog bed, the service representative made what she could not have known was the mistake of asking, “And your next item?”

  “Whatever you like!” Buck cheerfully bellowed.

  Unruffled, she replied, “And what sort of thing did you have in mind? A gift? Sporting goods? Something for the home?” After persistent questioning, she narrowed the field to men’s clothing. “Could you give me some idea of…?”

  “Whatever you like!” repeated Buck, slightly annoyed.

  “It’s a matter of what you want, isn’t it? What your preferences are?”

  “It says here, ‘ Discover all the ways L.L. Bean makes shopping easier for you.’ That’s my preference. Now, what would you think about these chino pants?”

  Once she understood the customer’s request, the representative dealt capably with it. Skillfully inquiring about where he planned to wear the proposed wardrobe, she elicited plentiful information not only about Mount Desert Island, but about Gabrielle Beamon and the number of years that had passed since Buck had set out to court a woman. After a friendly discussion of the beauties of Acadia National Park and the pain of love, the Bean representative consulted her computer listings of items this customer had previously ordered, asked whether he’d gained or lost weight recently, and suggested garments suitable for creating a positive impression on a woman of taste during a fall weekend on Mount Desert Island. It soon became apparent that Buck wanted choices rather than suggestions. Therefore, she chose. Instead of having the order shipped, he arranged to pick it up. He hates paying shipping costs.

  “Hire a professional!” Buck trumpets to Mandy. The thought of a professional handler reminds him of Horace Livermore. And this image leads, as does everything these days, to Gabrielle Beamon. “Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition! And if you want to win, hire a professional!”

  Instead of driving directly north from Owls Head to Bar Harbor, Buck therefore heads south, reaches Freeport, swears at the traffic, and finally finds a place in the L.L. Bean lot. Ignoring such temptations as brightly colored canoes and kayaks in which he pictures Gabrielle gracefully paddling, he follows the friendly L.L. Bean representative’s instructions for finding the customer service desk, where his order awaits him: the monogrammed dog bed, shirts in chamois cloth and Royal Stewart flannel, a fleece anorak, chinos, lightweight hiking boots, and a piece of soft-sided luggage to replace his army-green duffel bag, which appears moth-eaten but has actually been chewed by mice. He bears left and looks upward at the familiar moose head mounted above. He pauses a moment. Several customers observe him. They smile at the sight of this craggy moose of a man gazing happily upward an apparent replica of his own head.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE ENCOUNTER WITH MY FATHER felt like another head injury.

  But I have leaped ahead. Before I bounce back, let me point out that these sequencing problems are well documented in cases like mine. Actually, I’m lucky. The persistent sequelae could be far worse than they are.

  Anyway, my reaction to Buck was perfectly normal; my father has a concussive effect on every
one. Take Quint and Effie, who hailed me as I slowed to a crawl before turning left at the Beamon Reservation parking lot. Effie had a dazed look. “Your father’s here!” she exclaimed, her manner suggesting the breaking of astounding news, as if she’d located a supposedly dead birth parent for me and wanted to prepare me for the shock of an imminent reunion.

  Cracks on the head or no cracks on the head, memory is an unreliable faculty, so maybe I’d better remind you that Effie was not an adoption-reunion professional, but the young potter and weaver married to Gabrielle Beamon’s nephew, Quint O’ Brian, both of whom I’d met at Gabrielle’s clambake. By sunlight, they still radiated New Age wholesomeness. What I could see now was that although Effie’s long, French-braided hair was a deep chocolate brown and her husband’s curls cherubic blond, the couple had identical skin, fair and dewy. The sameness of skin may, of course, have been a meaningless coincidence or a minor source of their initial attraction to each other. Still, I found myself seeing that moist freshness of countenance as the result of a shared regimen of whole-grain loaves, exotic vegetables, and dietary supplements with unpronounceable names in combination with the use of peppermint-scented health-food-store liquid soap.