CLAWS

by Stacey Cochran

  She rolled up his shirt sleeve and saw the lump already forming. She turned on a flashlight and held it up to his arm. His skin was red and swelling where the bee had stung him.

  “Okay, I’m gonna need to take the stinger out,” she said. “Did they sting you anywhere else?”

  “Here,” he wailed, and he pointed to the back of his neck.

  Maggie held the flashlight up and looked at the spot, and sure enough, another red lump of skin was swelling up where he’d been stung. Maggie removed a pair of tweezers from the first-aid kit.

  “I need you to hold still,” she said.

  Chip sobbed, but he tried to calm down. He cried, “It hurts.”

  Maggie leaned in toward his neck. She held the flashlight in one hand and the tweezers in the other.

  “I know it does, baby,” she said.

  With perfectly calm hands, she reached the tweezers forward and removed the tiny stinger from the back of his neck. It came out cleanly, and she applied a dab of Sting-Aid to the wound.

  “That’s cold.”

  “That’ll keep it from swelling up too much,” she said, “and it should help with the pain.”

  Chip could already feel a difference in the back of his neck, and he wasn’t crying as intensely.

  “Now, let me see your arm,” she said.

  It had gotten so dark in the past ten minutes that Chip couldn’t see all the way across the campground, as they both had been able to do just thirty minutes earlier. The flashlight beam was very bright, and Maggie knelt down and inspected the sting on his arm. She faced his torso with her back towards the center of the campground, and Chip sensed the mountain lion before he actually saw it. It came to him in a quick flash that sounded like his daddy’s voice in his mind, as clear as a ringing bell. Look out, Chip, that voice said.

  The mountain lion stepped out from the shadows down by the bridge. Chip saw it in the darkness.

  “Hold still,” she said.

  The cat Chip saw was not the warm and friendly animal he had seen in calendars and on posters, pictures where an adorable mother lion licked her spotted kittens with affection and sunshiny love.

  What he saw was a large animal with tight skin over its ribs. This cougar was not plump like the ones he had seen in the Indianapolis Zoo. It was skinny and undernourished.

  The cougar stopped at the edge of a dirt path that came up from the creek. It stared at Chip and his mother, not with hatred nor with compassion, but with quick analytical eyes that looked at these two creatures twenty-five meters uphill from it.

  “It’s a cat,” Chip said.

  Maggie’s focus went to Chip’s eyes, and she immediately swung around.

  “Where?” she said. “What?”

  The mountain lion had stepped back down into the shadows along the creek.

  “It was right there by the bridge,” Chip said.

  Maggie looked hard into his eyes and realized he believed he’d seen something. Her head swung back around, and she scanned the darkness, but she didn’t see anything that looked like a cat. She heard the roar of the creek, the rustle of tree branches in the breeze, but she saw no cat. It was an hour past sunset and growing cold, and Maggie still had a stinger to remove from her son’s arm.

  They hadn’t eaten since the Burger King up in Show Low, Arizona over seven hours earlier, and they were both hungry. She needed to cook dinner, start a fire, and she wanted to take a hot shower. She needed to make certain that her son was alright and that the bee stings would not grow any worse.

  “What’d you see, Chip?”

  Chip looked into her eyes and said, “It was a big cat.”

  Partly from the cold and partly from the conviction in his voice, Maggie shivered reflexively. Again, she scanned up and down the creek. It was dark and her eyes had been staring at his arm in the bright flashlight’s shine, so everything along the creek looked pitch black to her. She didn’t see anything.

  “Come here, honey,” she said. “Let’s finish up with this arm.”

  And, rather fluidly, she reached the tweezers forward and removed the stinger from his swollen bicep. She quickly applied the Sting-Aid to the red bump, and she said, “Did they sting you anywhere else?”

  “I don’t think so,” Chip said. He kept looking at the shadows down by the creek over his mom’s left shoulder, but he didn’t see the big cat anymore.

  Five

  Jenny Granger and Nick Jacobs were two of the brightest stars Angie Rippard had seen come up through the biology department in a long, long time. They were both nineteen, both majoring in biology, and both making perfect grades in the honors program at the U of A.

  Jenny had first heard about making out on the fourteenth green at Ventana Canyon from a hall mate who lived three doors down in the Arizona-Sonora honors dormitory. Nick thought the idea sounded cool, so the young couple rolled three joints, packed a thick blanket and a six-pack of Coors Light, and drove up into the hills north of Skyline Drive.

  Jenny parked her convertible Jetta in a public lot just off of North Kolb Road, and the couple carried the blanket, beer, and marijuana a quarter mile through the shadows adjacent to North Resort Drive and then walked out onto the Ventana Canyon Golf Course. Once out on the sixteenth fairway, they could see the city lights spread out below them for thirty miles to the south. The lights glimmered in the night.

  The air was cool, and the starlight was peaceful. Nick grabbed Jenny’s butt, and she turned, smiled, and they started kissing. Nick’s hand rose up to her breasts, and she put the beer on the ground and threw her head back. Nick began kissing her neck. His hand caressed her red hair.

  Suddenly, her head snapped up, and she looked around them.

  “What was that?” she said.

  Nick didn’t even look up. He was unbuttoning her blouse, and his mouth was on the warm flesh of her neck.

  Jenny whispered, “Nick, I think I heard something.”

  “Yes,” Nick said. His hands continued southward.

  Jenny grabbed his hands in both of hers, and she stepped back away from him. He finally looked up and into her eyes.

  The warm lights of large homes glowed just a couple hundred meters away.

  “What if somebody is out walking,” Jenny whispered.

  “At eleven o’clock at night?” Nick said.

  Jenny stood there looking at Nick a few seconds more. She thought, he sure looks good. Nick had a charming, devious look about him that excited Jenny. Her head pivoted from right to left, but she didn’t see any further sign of movement.

  “Come on,” she said, and she picked up the beer and started forward across the fairway.

  Nick grabbed the blanket and followed after her.

  Ten minutes later, they found the fourteenth tee box, and they started uphill along the fairway in the direction of the green. There were no houses along the fourteenth, and it was far enough away from the clubhouse that they felt safe.

  Up behind the green, there was a eucalyptus tree that gave anyone on the green total privacy from the rocky hills up above. A giant rock formation stood twenty meters left of the green. It climbed up more than forty feet above ground level. There was a pond back behind the tree, and a ten-foot-wide waterfall poured down from the mountains into the pond.

  They were well up above the city lights and not far from the National Forest Land boundary. Jenny ran up the giant rock formation and got out on top of it.

  She could see over the trees and mansions built farther down the course. Nick spread the blanket out at the back of the fourteenth green in the shadows near the tree. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves. He gazed out at the pond and saw moonlight rippling on the water’s surface. He knelt down and touched the water with his hand; the water was warm enough for a swim.

  He turned and started to say as much to Jenny, but she waved him up onto the rock, and he came to her.

  They both stood there atop the giant rock, looking down the fairway and out over the city lights. Jenny cracked open a
can of beer and felt certain that no one would find them (or hear them) this far up on the golf course.

  They could see the nearest home was a hundred meters or so beyond the fourteenth tee, which itself was five hundred yards downhill from the green. The house was almost a half mile away. Jenny sipped the beer and felt completely at peace. She handed one to Nick, and he too cracked open a beer.

  They both sat down on the rock, and neither said a word. The view was spectacular. Nick put his arm around Jenny, and she draped her left arm over his lanky right thigh and wrapped her hand up around his knee. They just sat there and sipped the ice-cold beer and enjoyed one another’s company.

  “You feel like getting high?” Nick whispered.

  Jenny looked into his blue eyes and smiled. “Come here,” she said. She leaned forward, and they kissed.

  A minute later, she said, “God, I love you.” She looked at his longish brown hair, then into his eyes. “You know that?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think I do. I really think I do.”

  She sipped the beer, and Nick fired up the joint. He handed it to her, and she took a good draw from it. She held the smoke in her lungs a moment, and then exhaled through her nose. She passed the joint back to Nick, and she sipped her beer.

  She glanced back around and down the rock at the blanket laid in the shadows toward the back of the green. Nick inhaled deeply and then exhaled.

  “Look at you,” Jenny said, feeling giggly. “Settin’ up a picnic down there.”

  Nick handed her the joint and finished off his beer. He cracked open another, while Jenny worked the rest of the joint.

  “Yeah, I’m getting kind’a hungry,” Nick said.

  “Not much left,” Jenny said, holding the end of the joint in her fingertips.

  “Just put it out on the rock,” he said. “We don’t want to start a fire up here.”

  Jenny put the joint out on the surface of the rock and just sat there staring out at the city lights, feeling the buzz coming on. The lights seemed to kind of swell and move, and it seemed funny to her. She smiled.

  Jenny pushed Nick backward on the rock, so that he lay back, and then she caressed the denim fabric over his thighs. She felt his cell phone in his right front pants pocket, and she eased her hand up under his shirt and felt the warmth of his skin. He had the lean muscular stomach of a distance runner.

  She started to unbutton his jeans with one hand but could not, and so she had to reposition and use both hands. Nick leaned up and started to unbutton her blouse. The rock was beginning to hurt his back.

  “Let’s go down on the blanket.”

  “Okay,” she said, feeling somewhat awkward with her blouse half open and with Nick’s pants unzipped.

  They both stood up. Nick held his unbuttoned pants, and they walked down the rock toward the blanket. Jenny lifted her blouse up over her head, unsnapped her bra, and ran up behind him and hugged him. She let the blouse and bra fall on the grass near the back of the green. Nick turned around and started kissing her.

  She lifted up his shirt, and they had to stop kissing a moment while the shirt came up around his face and over his head. He threw the shirt on the soft, green grass, and the young couple embraced one another skin to skin in the moonlight.

  Six

  Chip fell asleep next to his mother in the warm glow of a campfire. He’d eaten an amazing two cheeseburgers and two hotdogs, a small bag of Ruffles, and he’d finished off a can of Sprite, and now he lay asleep in a lounge chair ten feet from the soft warm glow of a crackling campfire. Maggie sipped white wine from a plastic cup and stared into the fire as if in a trance.

  It was completely dark around the campground, but their fire was bright and warm, and Maggie sat there in a fold-out chair with her feet propped up on the picnic table bench. She sipped the wine and stared into the fire.

  Chip had quieted down, and Maggie was planning to put him to bed inside the camper. Chip was the kind of boy who would roll up inside a sleeping bag and not make a sound until eight A.M. the next morning. She thought of taking a hot shower, and she glanced over her shoulder at the bathhouse across the creek.

  A single bug-repellent, yellow light bulb hung to the left of the bathhouse door. She saw the payphone, and she saw the crooked sign hanging from the door, and she finished off her cup of wine. Sparks shot up into the air above the campfire, and Maggie toed open the cooler with her hiking boot. She saw that she’d finished half the bottle of wine, and she told herself that she deserved it.

  It was not easy being a single mother, and this vacation was as much for her as it was for Chip. She’d been living with the moniker “widow” attached to her name for so long it was making her a little crazy in the head.

  She’d kept her nursing job at the hospital in Muncie, but she hadn’t been able to afford the mortgage payments on the big house (nor did she and Chip need a five-thousand-square-foot lakefront home anymore) and so six months earlier, she’d moved into a townhouse a mile from the hospital. After the sale of the big house, she had enough money to trade up and buy a nicer camper, and she’d done it, pledging to Chip to work less and to spend more quality time with him. And so, they’d planned this twelve-day spring break vacation out of the lingering gray winter of Indiana on across Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and southwest into Arizona.

  The camper had heat and air conditioning, a TV, a stove, a fridge, an internet outlet, two full-size beds, a utilitarian shower, toilet, and “sleeping room for eight” (or so the owner’s manual described). Insurance on the camper was thirty bucks per year, and the gas stove could cook up a scrambled egg in just under five minutes.

  Maggie stood up and swayed a little, braced herself with her left hand on the picnic table, and then placed the empty cup of wine atop the table. She looked at her sleeping son. He wore a Harry Potter sweatshirt, jeans, and his longish blonde hair hung disorderly down over his forehead. Maggie crossed to him and brushed his hair back. The fire crackled and popped.

  She knelt down and hefted him up in her arms. Chip was getting bigger and heavier each and every day. She cleared her mind and walked to the camper. She opened the door and stepped up inside. She kept her balance inside the camper and carried him to one end and placed him on the mattress.

  She unzipped his jeans and pulled his pants off.

  Chip mumbled something in his sleep, and Maggie unzipped his sleeping bag and struggled to get him inside.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Hush, now,” Maggie said. “Put your feet down here.”

  She got him inside the sleeping bag and zipped him up. Chip looked up at her and smiled sleepily. The shadows of the campfire danced on the wall inside the camper. Maggie leaned over and brushed his hair back. She kissed him on the forehead.

  “I love you, baby,” she slurred. “Now you gesh some sweet dreams.”

  “I love you too, Momma,” Chip said. He curled up inside the sleeping bag and rolled over.

  Maggie stood there looking at her son with so much love that it made her heart ache, and for some strange reason she wanted to cry. He was so clear headed and brave, had so accepted his dad’s death and had moved on, and he was only six years old. Maggie was filled with pride, pity, a touch of envy, and love, and each of these emotions came together in a moment of confluence inside her mind, and she couldn’t hold them down. Maggie stood there looking at her son, and she cried deeply peaceful and cleansing tears.

  She cleared her throat lightly, and she swung around toward the other end of the camper.

  She whispered wearily to herself, “I need a shower.”

  She undressed at the far end of the camper and put on her white terrycloth bathrobe. She eased her feet into her flip-flops, and she picked up her bathroom kit, a clean towel, and a clean pair of underwear. She rolled the underwear up inside the towel and stepped down out of the camper.

  She couldn’t see the cat that stood in the shadows twenty yards away from her.

  Maggie looked once
more at her son and closed the camper door. She saw the cooler still open and crossed to the picnic table, picked up her empty cup, and filled it anew all the way to the brim. She stood there in her white bathrobe and sipped the wine down enough that she could walk without spillage.

  The mountain lion watched her.

  Maggie stirred the campfire around with a stick, centering the glowing embers. She grabbed her flashlight from atop the picnic table, turned it on, and then started down the little driveway of site seventy-three. At the bottom of the drive, she turned and looked at the fire. It looked like it would be okay, and she thought it might be nice to take a hot shower and then lounge in a chair by the fire afterwards. She took another long sip of the wine, and she started off in the direction of the bathhouse.