by Doyle, Brian
He says he will inform them by all modern means of electronic contact tomorrow. His mom’s in Russia and his dad’s in Kuwait.
Unusual boy, your boy Moon.
I’ll say.
Kuwait?
Kuwait.
I’ve been in Kuwait.
Your turn for the dishes, Jack, said Dave’s mom, and Dave’s dad said, your wish is my command, madam, and he extended his hand to Maria and said won’t you join me, young lady? And she said I accept your invitation, frog king, and everyone cracked up, and that was that, but later Dave looked up Kuwait in his atlas and wondered.
26
THE THING ABOUT ANIMALS, says the trapper, sitting by the fire and ostensibly talking to Dave but pitching his voice loud enough so Miss Moss could hear him in the kitchen, is that we totally take them for granted, and we arbitrarily divide them into categories that don’t actually apply, like domestic and wild. The animals we think are tame would mostly happily escape their prisons given the chance, and the ones who are not fenced in are, in my experience, cautiously interested in human beings. And we are wild animals too, of course. We forget that. We’re just mammals with attitude. In a lot of ways our skills pale before their skills, and in a lot of ways we are terrible at fitting into our environmental niche. Why we achieved this dominance is sometimes a mystery to me, and a dangerous dominance it is too. The whole point of our evolution, it seems to me, is for us to find a way to fit back into the world as it is, rather than try to remake the world to fit us, but not everybody thinks like me.
And a good thing too, or we would all be philosophizing by the fire and keeping Dave from doing his work, said Miss Moss’s voice, wandering out of the kitchen by itself.
Mr. Douglas grinned and got up and left money for his milk shake on the counter and said good-bye to Dave and Miss Moss.
I’m off to the woods for a while now, Miss Moss, he added, but I will be by in October to outfit for the season.
It will be a pleasure to see you when you are back, said Miss Moss, coming out of the kitchen to shake hands. It seemed to Dave that they shook hands very slightly longer than people usually shake hands, but there’s only so much you can read into how long people shake hands, and Miss Moss’s hand was a little moist from doing the dishes, anyway, so maybe that’s why their hands stuck together that extra couple of seconds. Probably that was it.
* * *
Martin sees the trapper leave Miss Moss’s store. Martin is high in a beech tree behind the store, staring down at the jumbled welter of stuff where Dave found his trap. Martin watches Dave wander among the stuff; today, Miss Moss has asked Dave to begin the Count, as she says.
Long past time for someone to know what’s out there and what’s useful and what’s not so we can sell the former and recycle or scrap the latter, she says. You would think the proprietor of the store would know what’s out there, but you would be wrong. The proprietor, in her defense, bought the store with the clearing already almost full of Stuff, and she has not had time or, to be honest, inclination to conduct proper inventory, whereas she was trying to keep body and soul together and the business extant and the wolf from the door.
When did you buy the store? asks Dave.
Many moons ago.
Your folks owned the store?
No, no, says Miss Moss, recovering herself from some sort of reverie. I bought it from the sweetest couple, Mr. and Mrs. Robinson—Alton and Alicia Robinson—just the nicest friendliest gentlest people in the history of the universe. They had owned it for fifty years and they were getting kind of worn and weary, as Mr. R. said. You know them, don’t you? They’re the old couple with that little old black Ford Falcon car. They go everywhere in that car and they never go anywhere without each other. They only travel as two. They live out of town a ways in the woods. I keep telling them they ought to move down into the city away from the ice and snow, but they’ll never leave the mountain. Now those two people are mountain people from the old days of mountain people. I doubt they have been down to the city more than three times in their whole lives. Both of them were born up here and schooled here and worked here all those years and never wanted to live anywhere else. You see them here and there in that little old car. I bet that car is fifty years old too. You wouldn’t believe a little old regular car like that could survive this long on the mountain, but you would be wrong there. I bet that car has half a million miles on it. I kid you not. They sold me the store for a price slightly below what it was worth, I thought. And then they worked for me for thirty days, the two of them together, so I would understand all the little quirks and corners of the business, who could be trusted and who couldn’t and who drank a little and who would deliver supplies when he said he would, that sort of thing. The sweetest gentlest people ever, the Robinsons. They must be ninety years old or more. No one knows how old they are. I don’t think they know how old they are. They might be two hundred years old for all anyone knows. Mr. Robinson in particular likes to play with people’s heads that way and sometimes he says he knew Joel Palmer before he walked over the mountain. That Joel Palmer, says Mr. Robinson, he was a wild kid, wore through a pair of shoes every week, his poor mother was in here buying shoes regular as rain. Old Mr. Robinson, what a lovely man, and Mrs. R. is twice as so. You’ll see them go by in that Falcon sometimes, going about eight miles an hour. You can identify their car by the sound—it sounds like a bicycle with baseball cards in the spokes, pupupupupupupup. We are in no particular hurry, says Mr. Robinson, and this way we don’t use hardly a drop of gasoline. We only use the gasoline going up the mountain, and we just coast down.
Do they still come in the store? asks Dave.
Not so much, says Miss Moss, and she falls silent a moment. Not at all recently, come to think of it. Maybe I should pop out there one of these days and see if they are okay. The nicest sweetest gentlest people you could ever imagine. Much like the woman to whom they sold the store, who seems to be keeping her sole and valued employee from the execution of his duties, isn’t that so, Dave?
* * *
And back out in the clearing, Dave set to work, first counting how many of each thing there was and then hauling and dragging things into cousinish piles—car parts with car parts, tools with tools, various and sundry scraps of wood thrown together into a corner so at least when someone needed wood you would know where to go.
Martin watched from the beech, curious. It is a capital mistake to think that animals spend all their time chasing after food, pursuing romance, engaged in conflict, or at rest—just as it is a capital mistake to try to define human life by such broad and limited categories alone. Much else happens of a subtle and unassuming nature, a good deal of it having to do with curiosity and playfulness and a sort of … what words shall we use? Contemplation, meditation, pondering, a general quiet open absorption in the swirl and seethe of the world? We sit on park benches and beaches and couches and hilltops, listening and dreaming seemingly to no particular purpose. But isn’t it often the case that when we cease to move and think, we see and hear and understand a great deal?
So Martin was still as a stone on his branch and watched the boy and for once did not seek for pattern or calculate how matters below might result in small and delicious meats for him; and the boy worked steadily through the afternoon until finally enough of the chaos had been roughly ordered that he could sit a moment and rest.
It was hot amid the piles of metal and wood and plastic in the clearing, and Dave knew his mountain summers well enough to suspect a breeze in the trees, so he leapt up the pile of wood and into the beech, walked right up a slanting branch like a fence line, and sat down. Indeed there was a lovely breeze right in his face, and he closed his eyes and shivered with the subtle pleasure of being at rest after substantive work, and his sweat dried just enough to be comfortable but not chilled, and then he opened his eyes again, and saw, not five feet away, curled on the branch above him like a furry golden hat, a marten!
27
ABOUT EIGHTEEN THOUGHTS ran through Dave’s head at once—wonder, fear, amazement, hesitation (was this really a marten or a cat with serious muscles or some new species of tree badger or a mink that had totally lost its way or a pygmy fisher or small otter wearing someone else’s jacket or…?), awe, fascination, curiosity, trepidation, astonishment, respect, reverence, something like pride (no one he knew, other than Mr. Douglas, had ever been so close to such an elusive and legendary animal), and finally startled recognition—this was the same marten that ran through the canopy when he ran the river trail! Its color was unmistakable—a sort of deep bronze, a bright russet, a dark burnished golden color utterly not the color brown, although now that Dave was close enough to see detail, he saw the darker legs and feet and the lighter patch of fur on the marten’s chest, looking exactly like the bib he and Maria wore as babies.
They stared at each other. The wind casually commented on the shapes of leaves. A beech tree in September still has a lot of leaves and there was a lot to say. Two crows opportunistically hopped around in the new arrangement in the clearing below, on the general principle that Dave’s labor might well have uncovered or unsheltered small and delicious meats. Very faintly, Dave heard the bell on the front door of the store jangle and the warm tone of Miss Moss’s voice greeting a customer. A truck lumbered uphill outside the store and a small old black Falcon puttered downhill. Martin’s left ear twitched. Dave knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that if he moved even an eyelash, the marten would vanish in an instant.
Martin was fascinated. He had never been so close to such an elusive and legendary animal, and he examined Dave with care, from the worn red sneakers on his feet to the bright red bandanna on his head. A large animal, but perhaps not a predator, was Martin’s initial feeling; he couldn’t see any talons or teeth, though the animal’s scent smacked of danger—this was the scent of highways and dogs and cars and wire snares, all things to be avoided at all costs. Yet this animal was somehow riveting, and Martin noted how its breathing slowed after a couple of minutes, how the muscles in its naked face lifted the ends of its lips toward its eyes, and how it finally made a quiet sound almost like a small creek murmuring.
If I say something, it’ll vanish, Dave thought. But if I make some gentle sound … Can you make a sound that indicates nonviolence? A friendly sound? A sound that is meant and received as hey, we are all good here, how’s it going, lovely day, isn’t it? A sort of noncommittal, nonconfrontational sound? But I don’t know his language and he doesn’t know mine. Or her. It is male or female? How do you tell with martens? On the other hand, he or she doesn’t know if I am male or female, either. What am I thinking about this for? This is not the time to get into questions of gender.
I thought about just humming or singing or something, but what came out of my mouth were words, Dave told Maria later. I didn’t even think about what I was saying. I was just trying to get some quiet things into the air before he vanished. I think I said something like hey, I have a younger sister; what about you? I think that’s what I said but I am not sure. I said it as quiet and gentle and calm and murmury as I could. I was just trying to extend a hand and say hi without moving my hand, you know? And there was a minute there when I was saying something like so my sister just turned six years old, she’s the best sister ever, we don’t have any brothers yet, although who knows in the future, and right then Miss Moss came around the corner saying Dave? And the marten vanished so suddenly that you would swear it just evanesced on the spot, like it de-atomized itself. I swear I never took my eyes off it, and one second it was right there, staring at me, all golden brown with darker legs and that white bib on its chest, and the next second it was just absolutely inarguably incontrovertibly gone.
What did you do? asked Maria.
Climbed down and went back to work.
Did you tell Miss Moss?
I didn’t, no, said Dave. I wanted to but then I just didn’t for some reason, and then the moment to tell her passed. You know how that happens, that the moment you should say something just slides by, and then what you had to say doesn’t fit the next moment?
Yep.
Then later I thought, well, if I tell her, she might tell Mr. Douglas, and he might set traps for the marten.
That’s true.
But I felt bad that I didn’t tell Miss Moss.
Are you going to tell her tomorrow?
I should, said Dave. I really should. I like Miss Moss. Plus, all this happened on her property, so technically she should know, right?
But he didn’t tell her the next day or the days after that. Every time he thought this would be a good time to say, Miss Moss…? the bell would ring, or a truck would rumble past, or she would step into the kitchen just out of range of his voice, and he would go back to work, thinking, alright, I’ll tell her next time I get a chance, this time for sure.
But he didn’t.
* * *
Martin slid away into the canopy as the woman came around the corner and barked, and some instinct in him knew this was not a time to linger. Plus he was hungry. He explored a few interesting cavities in trees, finding nothing to eat, and finally he descended into a clearing, where he explored rotten logs until he found what he was looking for—a vole’s burrow with a vole in it. In Martin’s experience, you could almost always find voles, if you looked assiduously, especially in clearings left over from logging; many small animals flocked to these sudden meadows, where sunlight and piles of brush the loggers called slash provided lots of succulent new plants and cover. The mountain was thoroughly dotted with these cuts, and Martin thought of them as something like pantries, where he could almost always find something good to eat, from voles to mice to shrews to birds to insects to berries.
Late in the afternoon he made his way back to his new den in the cottonwood tree and curled up to sleep just before sunset. He was sleeping more in the day now and abroad more at night as the summer waned, and even in his warm burrow, he could feel the deepening cold in the evenings. He lay half-awake for a few minutes, listening to the world outside and fitting the sounds into the quilt of his experience; the whir and flitter of swifts leaving an old fir snag nearby, the first quiet calls of an owl. The owl got his attention for a moment until he recognized that it was a screech owl, too small to cause him problems, and he closed his eyes again. The last sounds he heard clearly and identified in some deep recess of his brain were that of elk making their way past the base of his tree; one of these animals, at least, must have been very large, for it forced its way easily through a huckleberry thicket so old and dense that Martin had thought it impenetrable to any creature bigger than himself. In the morning, remembering the sounds of the immense elk in the bushes, he found a wealth of scattered berries on the ground and breakfasted with pleasure. Of all the berries to be found on the mountain, from the blackberries near people places to the fat orange salmonberries near creeks, from the blueberries in clearings and meadows to the thimbleberries that tried to hide themselves with leaves the size of birds, huckleberries were the most savory and delicious, and Martin ate so many that he went back up the cottonwood for a nap.
28
TO MOON’S INTENSE SURPRISE, basketball did not begin on December 1, which was listed as the date of the first game of the season, but a mere two days after he signed his name to the tryout sheet. The coach was the mathematics teacher, and he called Moon the next day and told him to be in the gym at noon the day after.
For what, sir?
Conditioning. Officially we cannot practice until October, but we sure can get in shape in September.
Yes, sir.
Wear sneakers and shorts and a white shirt if you have one.
Yes, sir.
No earrings, nose rings, eyebrow rings, nose studs, tongue studs, necklaces, earbuds, rings, bracelets, or hardware or software of any kind.
Yes, sir.
Ever play before, Moon?
No, sir.
Signed up as a joke?
No
, sir. My parents want me to play a sport during my high school years, and I thought I would begin this year and perhaps get better than awful at something over the next four years. I am not much of an athlete.
Refreshing ego you have there, Moon.
Sir?
Admirably small. Refreshing.
Yes, sir.
Why basketball, Moon? Other than you thought we didn’t start for a while.
Indoors, sir. I am not much for the cold.
You live on the tallest mountain in the state, and you are not much for the cold.
No, sir.
Ever pick up a basketball before, Moon?
No, sir.
Any idea of the game at all?
Yes, sir. I have watched thousands of games. Sometimes two or three a day. I like watching the flow and spacing of the game.
You do.
Yes, sir.
The flow and spacing.
Yes, sir.
Moon, how old are you?
Fifteen last month, sir.
Fifteen.
Yes, sir.
Moon, no basketball player who ever played for me ever used the words flow and spacing of the game to me, that I remember, and I have been coaching ball for thirty years, and I remember every kid who ever played for me.
Yes, sir.
Moon, you come to the gym an hour early, and find me. See you at eleven.
Yes, sir.
No earrings or nose studs.
No, sir.
The flow and spacing of the game.
Yes, sir.
* * *
Moon was at the gym earlier than eleven. He was excited. He was terrified. He hoped he had on the right kind of sneakers. What did he know of the right kind of sneakers for sports? He hoped buying the ones he saw on the players in television was a good idea. He was nervous. But he found that he was confident, a little. He wasn’t stupid. He could figure anything out. Dave had often said so. Moon could repair anything with wires and batteries. You just think it through patiently, he said to Dave, and wasn’t basketball a thing with wires and batteries, if you thought about it? Patterns and geometries, ways of passage, angles and energies? So if you could understand the pattern and flow, the way people and the ball moved and why, you would get it, right? He had tried to explain this to his dad last night on Skype. He loved his dad but couldn’t find easy ways to say that, so he explained his theories about basketball at length. His dad, to his credit, listened patiently. He was in Kyoto now. Moon’s mom was in New York, but she was actually on her way home to Oregon for four whole days before she flew to Hong Kong. They hoped to meet in Singapore for a date.
