The Angels Will Not Care

by John Straley

  “Yummy,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

  “Cecil,” she said, sitting down breathlessly and pushing her hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrists. Her hands were coated with wet sand. “This is a great beach. There is loads and loads of food here. I mean, I don’t think I’ve seen anyplace quite so productive. We need to just try a tiny piece of each thing and wait a while. I don’t think we need to worry about red tide but, jeez, the way things are going I guess we should be careful.” She looked at me, smiling, then leaned over and kissed me. As she leaned back her eyes darkened.

  “How’s the doc . . . I mean, you know, the body?” she stumbled.

  “I covered him up with some wood and a piece of old roofing I found. I don’t think the birds are getting to him.”

  She frowned. “I guess it doesn’t really matter all that much now, huh?” She drew on the ground with her finger.

  “No. But I think we should take good care of him. The body is the best evidence to figuring out what happened to him.” I kept shaving long slivers of the fragrant wood.

  “Sounds to me like Mr. Standard threw him over­board.” She kept tracing something in the moss.

  “That could be true,” I replied. “But, why the life ring then? Do you kill somebody and then throw him a ring? I don’t know.”

  “Well,” she said smartly and dusted off her hand. “We’ll take good care of him and flag down one of these boats soon enough. Right now I’m hungry. I found an old shovel head back down the beach. I’ll go get it. I’ll cook us up some real food.”

  “You know, I don’t think I’ve seen you eat much all the time you were on the trip,” I commented to her as she stood up.

  “No.” Her voice dropped as if she’d been reminded of something sad. “No. I haven’t been eating all that much. I don’t know . . .” She brushed her hair back again, looking down and shaking her head. She stood without saying any­thing, with her brow wrinkled as if she were about to speak, but then the mood passed and she stood straight and alert as if coming out of a dream. “But I’m hungry tonight. Listen, honey, you want to cut a little piece of that mussel and rub it on your lips and gums. You know, if your lips tingle and get numb, then we will eat . . . I don’t know . . . we’ll eat the chocolate bars, I guess.” Then she turned and walked briskly down the beach.

  “Yes, honey,” I murmured, laughing to myself.

  As the afternoon wore on the bugs found us out. I started a nice smoky fire and made a kind of tall coatrack for my red float coat. It was just a “Y”-shaped stick that I could zip under the coat. I hoped to use it to wave at a passing boat. I could put it some six feet in the air and move the bright red coat back and forth in a larger, more noticeable arc. My gums did not grow numb when I rubbed the mussel against them so Jane Marie sliced and pounded the various sea slugs and intertidal creatures and steamed them up on the shovel head propped up on the edge of the fire.

  The food tasted like the beach. Jane Marie had been right: There was plenty and it warmed me up. The long eve­ning turned toward lavender twilight. The high clouds kept the rain at bay. There was a fresh breeze from the north­east and high streaky clouds began to move down from the northern interior. The forests of the islands across the sound lit up as the sun lowered to the west. Each tree seemed etched very clearly in light and shadow. The mountains sat squat and velvety, their robes folded out to the rocky shore. We sat enjoying it for only a short time, then went back to work gathering driftwood for our fire. We hoped to build a large enough fire to attract the attention of any skiff or ship that passed by. Our plan was to take turns tending the fire and keep a lookout for running lights going past on the water.

  I was working down the beach alongside Jane Marie who was holding three small chunks of spruce in her arms when I saw strange fresh tracks in the sand to my left. I jumped up on a hemlock butt and saw two bare feet dragging along the sand in a jerking motion. They disappeared behind a rock outcropping.

  When I turned the corner next to the rock outcropping, the brown bear had the doctor’s body by the shoulder and was whipping it back and forth like a rag. The bear saw me and dropped the dead man as if it had been charged with a jolt of electricity. The bear stared toward me, sniffing, scan­ning, sniffing. Its great coffin-shaped nose swung back and forth in the damp air. I started to back away slowly. The bear lunged forward with a guttural howl I had never heard be­fore. The sound was almost a bellow or a braying that came from a huge set of lungs. The bear snapped its jaws and this sound was like a cleaver snapping through meat.

  “Hello, bear!” Jane Marie was standing next to me now. She was speaking loudly to the big animal. She took my hand and held it above our heads. She held her other hand up in the air. To the bear we may have looked like one very large creature.

  “Hello, bear.” Jane Marie called out again. “We are just poor stupid human beings. We are trying to get something to eat. Thank you for letting us use your beach. We mean you and your family no harm.”

  “Where’s your bear spray?” I whispered frantically out of the side of my mouth.

  “Hush,” she whispered back to me.

  The bear continued to sniff. It backed up and stood over the doctor’s body. The black rind around its muzzle curled above the long yellow canine teeth. Its snout wrinkled: The leathery nose, wet and shiny, sucked in our scent.

  Jane Marie continued speaking. “My friend was just say­ing that we mean you no harm. We could not hurt you if we wanted. We have no weapons. If you would like the body of this human being, of course you can have it. But I am just asking that you leave it for us so we can take it back to his family.”

  The bear lunged forward six feet in one jump, about a quarter of the distance to us. The tiny black eyes showed nothing, seeming lost in the giant head. But the head it­self seemed small against the massive hump between the shoulders.

  “But again . . .” Jane Marie cleared her throat. Her voice was quavering and unsteady but she kept it from break­ing. “It is completely up to you.” She took a step back. Hands still above our heads, we backed away steadily.

  Seconds later our backs were against the stone out­cropping. Ravens hopped on the rocks above us screaming, laughing and making their odd sounds like breaking stones. We could hear the bear snuffling and pitching at the sand with its claws. We heard grunts and then the ripping of thin cloth.

  To our right was the edge of the trees. One large spruce had dead limbs all the way to the mossy forest floor. There was a crook high in the tree where a major limb had been lost and overgrown some ages ago. The crook was thirty feet in the air. I nodded to Jane Marie but saw that her eyes were closed and both of her hands lay flat on her lower belly as she stood stock-still, taking fast shallow breaths. Then, there was another grunt and the shuffling sound came louder, close to the edge of the rocks where we stood. The ravens fell silent. Then they were gone.

  “Let’s climb a tree,” I said as softly as I could.

  “That would be fine,” Jane Marie said with her eyes still closed. “You got one picked out?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Follow me and we’ll walk to it as fast as you can. Don’t look back and don’t stop no matter what,” I said and I didn’t wait to discuss the matter. I pulled on her hands and we set off, moving stiffly like race walkers through the patch of sand and then awkwardly like children scrambling over the rows of drift logs.

  The bear’s bellow burned into my back like the heat from a furnace. It was a deep ferocious bawling that seemed to reach into my chest and push me to the ground. I did not look back but nudged Jane Marie ahead of me as we ran the last two yards to the tree.

  I have no memory of climbing the spruce tree. I sim­ply remember sitting in its crook some thirty feet in the air watching the brown bear tear at the sand below and shake its big head back and forth as if it had been stung in the ear. Next to me, Jane Marie held my
hand very tightly. I remem­ber I was light-headed and dizzy, feeling like I might burst out crying or throw up, although I don’t think I did either of those things.

  As the minutes passed, the bear walked around our tree and then back over to the body in the sand. The bear charged the ravens who sat on the corpse’s torn shoulder. They fluttered just a few feet away, making a mocking and disrespectful sound.

  Finally, I asked Jane Marie, “Why did you talk to the bear that way?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and hugged the spruce trunk. “Alfred Tom’s grandma told me to talk that way. She said be respectful and tell the truth. She also said try not to lose your own dignity. Bears don’t like that, apparently.” Her hands were trembling as she squeezed my fingers. “I thought it was worth a try,” she added.

  Alfred Tom’s grandma was a Tlingit woman who lived down the block from us. She gave us herring eggs in the spring and Jane Marie helped her put up jelly in the late sum­mer. She was a good Christian woman, active in the Rus­sian Orthodox church, but apparently she knew a lot about bears.

  Eventually, the long evening gave way to darkness and a light rain began to fall. We stayed in the tree for hours. A skiff came by close in to the beach. I think they’d seen the smoke from our fire but no matter how much we yelled or waved from the cover of the tree, nothing we did attracted their attention.

  The bear snuffled through our camp, ate the last of our dinner, then ate the candy bars, paper and all. The bear found the pressurized can of bear spray and pushed it around with its nose. The can had spent many months in Jane Marie’s pack rubbing against bag lunches and in­numerable candy bars. The scent of food must have been thick on the six-inch aluminum cylinder. The bear took it in its teeth and broke the safety mechanism. Jane Marie and I watched and grimaced in expectation. When the trigger was pulled on an aerosol spray of caustic pepper designed to bring a charging omnivore to its knees, a cloud of eye-stinging, vomit-inducing spray would be released. This may have been of more abstract interest to us if it weren’t for the fact that the bear kept nosing the canister closer to our perch.

  But on this evening the bear’s luck held better than ours and after sniffling, licking, and gently chewing on the canis­ter, the bear, who I was certain was a large old boar, simply spit it out, then shambled off into the woods.

  We waited half an hour up in the tree. The canister was beneath us and finally I climbed down and retrieved it. After twenty minutes more we saw the running lights of what looked to be a large fishing boat coming in from the outside waters. Our fire had burned down to coals that were prom­ising to be extinguished by the soft rain and I decided to go back to our camp and see if we could rebuild it in time to catch the attention of the boat.

  I built up the fire but the boat went on by. I could hear the diesel engine and the chatter of a marine radio on the back deck. If there had been any call out for us, any organized search, boats would have been notified by the Coast Guard. There would be helicopters in the air, but instead there was the drone of a single boat and its running lights disappearing in the rain.

  Jane Marie climbed down from the tree about another half hour after I had. She dared not move toward where the bear had apparently left the doctor’s body but she did bring another armload of wood to our fire. The flames moved up to eye level as the last sounds of the boat wake washed weakly up on the shore. Jane Marie stood in bright flickering relief from the fire.

  “The tides come way up, Cecil. If the doctor’s body is down the beach we’ll lose it for sure.”

  “I think we may have lost it already.” I poked a small dry stick under the flaming pyramid of logs.

  “I’m going to go look” was all she said and she walked away from the fire.

  I grabbed the pepper spray and pulled a stick from the fire to try and light my way after her.

  The light was weak and mostly distracting as we rounded the black rock outcropping where the bear had been. We heard only the water on the sand, a light patter of rain falling on wet driftwood, the distant fire popping. I pushed the smoking ember of the stick into the sand so my eyes could adjust to the darkness.

  There was a pit in the sand with only some bits of fab­ric on the edges. The bear’s tracks had been rounded smooth by the rain so they appeared as dinner-plate-sized depres­sions in the wet sand. There were parallel lines where the doctor’s heels had dragged across the ground. These lines moved up the beach and disappeared into the rocks. There was a bright splash of blood on a yellow cedar tree and just beyond that was a chunk of meat the size of a fist. When I picked it up I felt one side was raw and wet with blood while the other was smooth skin covered with black curly hair.

  We curled up in our shelter for the rest of the night. The firelight flared at the mouth of our hut across the slick wet rocks. We curled with our arms around each other, our faces in darkness, our boots and pant legs lit. All around us in the darkness the trees whooshed and moaned, the small waves scrambled up the rocks, and drops of rain pattered on the walls. Once, I jerked my head up, catching myself in sleep, and I heard the shuffling of paws in sand and the close breath from a massive set of lungs.

  12

  Skagway

  I thought I stayed awake all night, as the fire burned down and the sky began to lighten. It might have been so, but I also believed that this night both Jane Marie and I had turned into bears. We were curled against each other’s thick brown fur deep in a burrow. Snow had piled around the mouth of our cave and our warm breath had crystallized on the roof. Outside a great storm was clattering, blowing pieces of my house back in Sitka around and around like the twister in The Wizard of Oz, but in our burrow we were warm and safe. Our breath was sour with mice and skunk cabbage, dead salmon, and seaweed. Our hides were thick and knotted with burrs and tiny flecks of fish bone. I curled in deeper toward Jane Marie’s body and when something kicked at the sole of my foot I lunged forward with my fists clenched.

  Toddy stood in the ashes of our fire. He was kneeling down, peering in. He looked vaguely startled but stood his ground.

  “Excuse me, Cecil. I don’t mean to disturb you, but I was concerned that you might have succumbed to the effects of hypothermia.” He said this very carefully.

  I rubbed my eyes and shook my head, trying to shake the sleep out of my brain.

  “No. No. We’re fine, Todd. Listen, I’m sorry we . . . you know . . . didn’t let you know we were going to be gone for a while. I hope you didn’t worry.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t all that concerned,” Todd said and he reached out and shook my hand as if we were meeting for a business lunch. He was wearing his nice traveling coat and his low-cut leather shoes. He pumped my hand and went on, “No, in fact I wasn’t aware that you were off the ship. I just assumed you were enjoying one of the many entertainment options that seem to be offered on the Westward.” There was not a trace of irony in Todd’s voice. This is one of the most unnerving things about Todd: Irony and sarcasm are unknown to him.

  Jane Marie crawled toward us on her knees, squint­ing into the clear morning light. Sonny Walters walked up behind Todd.

  “You’re all right then?” he said. It sounded like an accusation.

  Sonny was wearing a snappy blue windbreaker and his spotless leather Top-Siders. He had a ball cap on and for some reason he reminded me of an actor playing one of the Apollo astronauts.

  “You missed me. I can tell, Sonny,” I told him.

  Sonny Walters grunted as if the idea of this was too absurd to even consider.

  “Listen, you two,” Sonny said as he took off his ball cap and patted his hair. “First, I’ve got to say that neither I nor Great Circle Cruise Lines had anything to do with leaving you here on this beach overnight. I was not told of this situa­tion until late last night. I was told by the first officer that you were searching for evidence. They would tell me noth­ing more. I don’t know what is going on.” So
nny’s voice was building in pitch. “Several of my passengers are extremely agitated. The medical staff apparently has shut down the clinic. We’ve got rumors galore and apparently Dr. Edwards has been disciplined or is sick himself. And frankly, I don’t know what in the Sam Hill is going on!” His voice reached a peak. “I’ve got shore excursions happening right now, and a gold rush revue supposed to take place in two hours, and I’m out here looking for you two.” He glared at Jane Marie and me as if we were tardy for school. “Just what in the hell kind of evidence were you looking for?”

  I took a deep breath. I was thinking about how to launch into the explanation when we heard a voice yell down the beach.

  As we came around a tall pile of drift logs on the beach where the sand lay below the tide line, I could make out the words, “Hey! Hey! You go on! Get out of here, you son of a bitch!” It was a man’s voice, deep and very agitated.

  There on the sand sat a helicopter with its rotors stopped and the engine turbine whining down. The pi­lot had one foot on the rubber pontoon and the other in­side the aircraft. And he was frantic. “You see that son of a bitch? You see him?” He was pointing up to the woods. But the rest of us were looking down at the sand some six feet from the chopper. We all stopped and stared stupidly at the scene.

  The doctor’s body was naked. He was bent with his head under his chest, as if he were a rag doll thrown down stairs. The flesh across his shoulders and his abdomen was punctured. Several chunks of flesh were missing; a bone pro­truded from the forearm. The pilot’s eyes were wide and he appeared to be hyperventilating.

  “That son of a bitch just carried it out of the woods and threw it down! He just threw it down here! He’s still up there in the trees. Get in! Get in now! I’m getting this damn thing in the air.”

  “Oh my God in heaven,” Sonny said as he began to choke. Todd was about to ask a question, but I put my hand on his shoulder and pointed.