The Cage

by Audrey Shulman

  CHAPTER 7

  On the bush plane from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba, Beryl had a chance to get to know two members of the four-person expedition.

  David Golding took the seat beside her. He was one of the best naturalist-cameramen, but he had also been picked for his size. He was only an inch taller than Beryl and just as thin. He wore a stylish leather jacket, which she thought not thick enough at all for where they were going. His features seemed slightly exaggerated, like a caricature—oversized nose, sharp and humorous eyes, the lips a thin clean line. She thought he looked like an elf who shopped in SoHo. When he’d introduced himself in the airport his voice boomed out much bigger than his small frame, like a radio announcer she’d seen on TV. She had felt some embarrassment for his rolling voice in the lounge. She could sense people turning around to look at her and the two men. Her own voice dwindled in response, and they’d had to ask her twice how the trip had been so far.

  The second member of the team was the naturalist, Butler. He sat on the far side of David. He would advise them about the bears’ behavior and write the article accompanying Beryl’s pictures. He’d introduced himself only by his last name. Beryl guessed that his first name must be something effeminate, like Cecil or Francis. He wore the practical outdoor clothes of someone who wished for a short and common name with hard consonants, like Nick or Ted. Butler was tall and powerfully built and he kept getting up to stand restlessly in the aisle with his thumbs hooked into his back pockets and his pelvis tilted forward. He didn’t hold on to anything for balance in the erratically bouncing plane. Beryl kept glancing forward to the pilot in the open cockpit to make sure he hadn’t seen Butler ignoring the FASTEN SEATBELTS sign. She felt like she had in fifth grade watching her friends sneak cigarettes in the bathroom.

  David wore a large watch that contained a glowing three-dimensional picture of an open eye. He noticed Beryl looking at it and boomed out, “Like the watch? It’s a hologram of my own eye.”

  Butler glanced toward the watch from the corner of his eye, and Beryl’s own mouth had probably opened a bit, for David laughed and reached forward to touch her arm. He said, “Sorry, I’m lying. I do it all the time. I got this watch for just that moment when people’s eyes sneak down for a second look.” She saw now that the hologram’s eye was blue and his were brown. His touch on her arm felt warm and light but she sat back farther in her seat, for she could feel the push of his voice on her face and smell the cheese-dusted popcorn he’d been eating in the terminal. She sometimes wished she had ears like a cat so she could fold them back as cats did when people pushed their faces in too close.

  He asked, “This your first expedition? You worried? My first was on piranhas, and on the plane ride down I kept examining each of my limbs and wondering how the prosthetics would look.” He snorted.

  She had seen a special on Madagascar that he’d worked on. At one point the camera had zoomed in all the way and followed an eagle hunting. She’d watched the flutter of the feathers across its neck, the strain in its shoulders, its cruel golden eyes. Each time the eagle dipped or turned, its leather-taloned feet kicking empty into the movement, the camera turned with it, not following, but moving in sync. She couldn’t reconcile this noisy man beside her with the skill and instinct in that camera work.

  “Filming the piranhas that time,” he said, “I had to stay submerged in what was basically a clear plastic coffin. The camera stuck out into the water from one end. They wanted the box to be transparent so it wouldn’t cast so many unattractive shadows on the little fishies. I had to lie in this thing underwater every day for two weeks, trying to focus through that brown slimy river. The box didn’t work so well. I got wet. The camera got wet. Two Hitachis died before we just gave in and ordered straight underwater cameras.” He held out an imaginary camera, peered down through it. “The tropics are amazing. Ever been down there?”

  Beryl shook her head, but he kept talking so smoothly she guessed he hadn’t really needed an answer. Behind David, she saw Butler sitting back down in his chair to stare out his window as though he weren’t listening.

  “Anything grows there. Anything, and quick. Plants, animals, fungi. Autogenesis is a fact of life. Even your lunch gets up and steps off the plate if you don’t eat it fast enough. Lizards move so fast, it’s unreal. Smooth as mammals. In the river, staying wet for so long, I grew this amazing orange aquatic mold in my hair, along the roots. As it got larger it looked just like a mutated rooster’s crown. Had to keep my head shaved for three months.” He made a smoothing motion over his head to show nothing there. “Hated it. With no hair, my nose stuck out even worse. I looked like a midget Kojak.”

  He looked sideways at her then. “Ah ha. Caught you. Looking at my schnoz. Fascinated, weren’t you? Sort of squared-off, huh? Like a toaster oven. You were thinking ‘toaster oven,’ weren’t you? Admit it.”

  She stared at him, beginning to smile.

  “When the piranhas came, lots of them would appear all at once in the muck, just a few feet away. Moving quick, right for my face. Scared the shit out of me every time, until they bonked their little bodies up against the glass.” He smiled wide and vicious. She laughed in surprise. He touched her again on the arm. “Hey, you’ve got a nice laugh,” he said. His eyes were a sharp brown, the left one squinted permanently from the camera work. “I think I’ll enjoy working with you. Though, God knows, you talk too much.”

  Beryl felt most people’s touches as either overtly sexual or like small punches meant to keep her back. However, she didn’t mind his touch at all. His hand rested dry and warm on her arm and she felt as though he knew how hard it had been this morning to say good-bye to her parents and get on the plane. Already, his voice did not bother her as much. She guessed he might be gay or had a wife whom he loved deeply.

  “Look, don’t you worry. The hardest thing for me to learn,” he said, “was to keep quiet while the camera was rolling. Some of my best filming has my voice in the middle of it saying things like ‘Shit, look at it go!’ But you do still photography, so you’ve got it made.” Although his face looked young, maybe early thirties, his hair was graying and his neck permanently hunched forward from leaning into the camera. He would also get into the cage.

  After the first hour, David said, “Psst, hey Butler.”

  Butler looked over, standing again in the aisle.

  “Why are you standing so much?” asked David.

  Butler raised his eyebrows. “I don’t like small seats, makes me nervous when you have to stay seated with everyone else sitting too. Makes my bones ache. At least once we get to Churchill I’ll be out in the open, on my own feet.” He held out his arms in the small plane as though taking in the vastness of the prairies. His right hand hit the overhead luggage rack.

  Beryl asked if he’d been born in the country and he smiled and said, “No, lived my first fifteen years in Queens.” David chortled and reached out to touch Butler’s hip. Butler stepped back, then turned the movement into a quick drop down in his seat.

  Later in the afternoon Butler shortened Beryl’s name to Bear and laughed loudly at his own joke. It was with his mouth open laughing that Beryl first noticed how large and soft his lips were. Though the rest of his features were masculine—wide jaw, strong nose—he had thick and sensuous lips that reminded Beryl vaguely of Marilyn Monroe’s. Mostly he kept pulling his mouth wide and tight in an effort to thin his lips. This habit gave his face a rather strained look, making him appear harsher than he might have otherwise.

  David began to tell of the first time he’d filmed the manatees. “They look like someone crossed a walrus with Grandma Walton. Solid fat, big wet eyes. A crowd of them will hang in the water in front of you, heads up like they’re standing. Actually, they all look just like my Aunt Amelia in her flannel nightgown—”

  “Ha,” said Butler. “Manatees are about as exciting as watching cows fart.” He pulled his mouth wide again into a semblance of a grin.

  David smiled polite
ly. His hands stilled and returned to his lap. Butler looked up the aisle.

  Beryl found herself looking from one to the other. She felt responsible for breaking the silence between them. She tried asking lightly how they’d gotten into this field.

  David said, “Oh, I’ve known what my career would be ever since as a child I saw them filming an episode of Mutual of Omaha’s ‘Wild Kingdom.’ I was raised in the city—punchball in the alleys, baseball in parking lots. I can’t describe the awe I felt at the presence of those powerful, brave and silent men who knew the wilderness. My awe continued even after the grizzly bear that Jim had to wrestle was rolled onto the set on a dolly, doped out of its mind.”

  David imitated Marlin Perkins’s slow and deliberate speech, as though he were always chewing on something leathery. David’s mouth and eyes rolled energetically during his performance, and Beryl thought it wasn’t so much an impersonation as an interpretation, a distillation of a character through David’s habitual gestures and expressions. He clearly loved to perform.

  Butler said that he’d had an older brother who used to take him on expeditions through the botanical gardens, where they would pretend they were Lewis and Clark trying to find the Pacific. Butler smiled to himself then and looked out one of the windows. Beryl noticed that he used the past tense in describing his brother. She felt David settle a little in his seat, but neither of them interrupted. Butler said that those times had been the best in his life. He’d decided on this line of work when he’d seen a beer commercial showing a film crew, after a hot tiring day of filming lions on the savannah, drinking beer and singing songs round a campfire. To him, this had looked a lot like what his brother would have chosen.

  “Don’t answer if you don’t want to, but what happened to your brother?” Beryl asked, her voice soft, expecting Butler to describe how he had been killed in a freak accident or by a wasting childhood disease. She could feel the comforting sad expression forming on her face already.

  Butler looked at her and she could tell he thought she was prying. “He ran away,” said Butler, “when he was fourteen. We haven’t seen him since.” He sat back down in his chair, looked out the plane window. She could see only the back of his head now, the pink hollow at the back of his ear. His voice continued more quietly, “His name was Stanley.”

  Beryl tried to imagine growing up thinking about a beloved older brother who had left her behind, who could return at any time. She saw the young Butler on the front lawn each day playing only the games he would want his brother to find him playing. She imagined Butler thinking each day that if he were just a bit better, more the way his brother would want, then his brother would return home. She saw him applying for this job.

  Beryl asked the men if anyone had seen them off at the airport. She wanted to be asked the same question. She wanted to say she had a boyfriend who’d said good-bye to her. She would live with these men for a month and she didn’t want any sexual tension. She had decided to name her boyfriend Max. Max sounded like the sort of name a long-term boyfriend should have. At home she’d left his name on the answering machine to scare off potential burglars.

  David said a friend had kindly driven him in through terrible traffic; Butler had driven himself. Neither of them asked her.

  Beryl knew her life might depend on these two men. She talked with both in turn, listening carefully to their responses. She realized later that they’d discussed their lives only in the past, saying nothing of the expedition.

  CHAPTER 8

  Once they left Winnipeg behind they saw no more cities. After twenty minutes, there weren’t even roads, houses, or cleared land. From the plane’s window, she looked down at the passing scenery for a solid half hour and didn’t see even a power line. She felt she’d traveled back two hundred years. She felt she’d traveled to a different planet. At three in the afternoon they left behind the trees. The land swept on below, flat, gray-green, covered with twisting rivers and lakes of a crystal blue untouched by even dirt, for the Arctic has no substance as complex as dirt, only rock and sand like a newborn world. To have soil, it would need tall trees, crawling worms, bacteria, decomposition. Three feet below the surface the ground is eternally frozen, summer and winter. Time paces differently. A single day can last two months, the sun making slow circles at the top of the sky, round and round like a hawk hunting. Spring and fall don’t really exist. Summer is a fast and desperate lunge.

  Beryl was stunned by the expanse of flat terrain without even hills or mountains as boundaries. In country like this, big creatures could survive, living free for their entire lives without knowing humans existed.

  About midday she noticed a wide brown river, very different from the ice-water blue of the others. She touched David’s arm and pointed down to the brown swath, asking the name of the river. He held up his finger for her to wait and stepped to the pilot. When David sat back down, the small bush plane began to descend with a speed that floated Beryl’s stomach up near her lungs and pushed her back in her chair with queasiness. When they leveled off she looked cautiously out the window. They glided perhaps sixty feet from the ground.

  After a moment she realized she was now looking at a river of caribou. Large deer with small antlers and young that trotted along beside, their heads held up. The caribou rolled on below like water, pouring and eddying. They moved on with the patient, mindless stride of the indomitable. She looked as far back and forward as she could within her flat airplane window and she could see no end, she could see no sides. She’d never seen this many animals together; she’d never seen this many humans together. The movement simply continued, rolling south across land that looked as if it couldn’t sustain life any bigger than birds and small rodents. Not even trees could live this far north. And here were ten thousand caribou.

  The pilot shut off the engine for a minute and they coasted in sudden whistling silence. David held up his finger and mouthed, “Listen.” After a moment she could hear it over the sound of the wind, the subtle echoing clicks of their hooves on the rocks, the hollow booming cracks of their antlers colliding. She strained forward in her seat and listened to the engulfing sound of a species on the move through an area named the Barrens.

  As they flew up farther across the tundra Beryl began to be aware of a lightening in the air outside the airplane’s windows, a clarity. She learned later it was because there was less dust in the air up here, less moisture. As they moved north she began to see details of objects far away, as if she’d been living in a fog all her life and not known it. The outline of a distant lake resolved itself as clearly as in a dream, as though it were pressed right up against her eyes. When she looked around inside the plane, which had been closed since Winnipeg, her fellow passengers appeared darkened and slightly fuzzy.

  The effect would intensify as winter approached. Already snow was forecast for the weekend. She looked back out the airplane window at this new planet.

  At Churchill the final member of the group was late. None of them knew what Jean-Claude, the local guide, looked like, but he would be easy to spot; the airport was empty except for a candy machine and a folding table with tickets spread across it. Beryl, used to the mammoth gleaming airports of New York and Boston, stared at the plain plywood walls enclosing a space the size of a living room. The walls didn’t even have windows, only a single large poster of a woman stepping out of the surf with HAWAII written across her wet T-shirt. Beryl saw Butler and David glance toward the poster and she watched their faces. David simply looked amused. Butler looked from the woman’s face down her body as though she were a real person standing there.

  “Jean-Claude’s only twenty years old,” said Butler while they waited, “but he’s been guiding groups since he was fourteen. He’s earned a lot of respect for his knowledge of navigation and the weather here, but his fame comes from his ability to survive bad situations. Unbelievable situations. Three years ago, one group—financed by some snowmobile company—wanted to cross Hudson Bay in the middle of winte
r for an ad to show the power of their machines.

  “People who haven’t been out in real arctic weather for a while just don’t understand. Materials change. Metal can break off in your hand. Rubber and plastic crack. Even gas gets thick. It doesn’t work so well. The moisture from your breath and sweat freezes instantly on clothes, hair, sleeping bags. There’s no way to defrost the stuff and get the ice out. By the end of a long trip, your sleeping bag can weigh thirty pounds. To unfold it you have to jump on it to break the ice.

  “These snowmobile guys had done all the experiments on their machines beforehand, all these laboratory tests, but they didn’t understand the cold. No matter what space-age clothing you’re wearing, you’ll freeze to death sitting still on top of a machine.”

  David shivered. He touched his nose as though checking for frostbite and said, “I hate the cold. I just fucking hate it.”

  Butler looked surprised. “The cold’s great,” he said. “It makes you feel stronger when you get back inside.”

  “Naw, it doesn’t. I feel like a wet hanky. It gets into my bones. I really prefer assignments in the tropics. I only took this one ’cause they promised me Venezuela in January. Tree slug mating season. They grow to be monsters down there.” He held out his hands to demonstrate. “They actually perform the nasty in midair, on this rope of slime hanging off a tree branch. With my luck the slime’ll break and they’ll land splat on me, still bopping away.” He wrinkled up his face and rubbed his nose with the tips of his fingers. “But at least I’ll come back with a tan.”

  Beryl watched the way Butler pulled his mouth thinner listening to David. She asked how people had gotten around in the Arctic with just dogs before.

  “Oh,” said Butler, “but it’s much easier to get around with dog teams. With dogs you have to keep moving all the time to keep them going: cracking the whip, running alongside, balancing the sled, sometimes pulling right along with them. At night, even after moving all day, you have to run in a fast circle for twenty minutes slapping your gloves together just to get your hands working well enough to set up your tent, to light the fire, to warm your food and unfreeze your water. It’s the strangest thing, cold like that. It works on you slow. Your body just won’t do the simplest tasks.”