I'm With the Bears

by Mark Martin

  “Fewer, right. So what I’m saying is, more likely it’s your screech or flammulated or even your great gray. Of course, we’d have to hear its call to be sure. The spotted’s a high-pitched hoot, usually in groups of fours or threes, very fast, crescendoing.”

  “Call, why don’t you,” Sierra whispers, and the silence of the night is no silence at all but the screaming backdrop to some imminent and catastrophic surprise. “So you can make it call back. Then we’ll know, right?”

  Is it his imagination, or can he feel the earth slipping out from under him? He’s blind, totally blind, his shoulders hunched in anticipation of the first furtive blow, his breath coming hard, his heart hammering at the walls of its cage. And the others? They’re moving down the road in a horizontal line like tourists on a pier, noisy and ambling, heedless. “And while we’re at it,” he says, and he’s surprised by his own voice, the vehemence of it, “I just want to know one thing from you, Andrea—did you remember the diapers? Or is this going to be another in a long line of, of—”

  “At what?”

  “It. The subject of stealth and preparedness.”

  He’s talking to nothing, to the void in front of him, moving down the invisible road and releasing strings of words like a street-gibberer. The owl sounds off again, and then something else, a rattling harsh buzz in the night.

  “Of course I remembered the diapers.” The reassuring thump of his wife’s big mannish hand patting the cross-stitched nylon of her daypack. “And the sandwiches and granola bars and sunblock too. You think I don’t know what I’m doing here? Is that what you’re implying?”

  He’s implying nothing, but he’s half a beat from getting excruciatingly specific. The honeymoon is over. He’s out here risking arrest, humiliation, physical abuse and worse—and for her, all for her, or because of her, anyway—and her tone irritates him. He wants to come back at her, draw some blood, get a good old-fashioned domestic dispute going, but instead he lets the silence speak for him.

  “What kind of sandwiches?” Sierra wants to know, a hushed and tremulous little missive inserted in the envelope of her parents’ bickering. He can just make out the moving shape of her, black against black, the sloped shoulders, the too-big feet, the burgeoning miracle of tofu-fed flesh, and this is where the panic closes in on him again. What if things turn nasty? What then?

  “Something special for you, honey. A surprise, okay?”

  “Tomato, avocado and sprouts on honey wheat-berry, don’t spare the mayo?”

  A low whistle from Andrea. “I’m not saying.”

  “Hummus—hummus and tabouleh on pita. Whole wheat pita.”

  “Not saying.”

  “Peanut butter-marshmallow? Nusspli?”

  A stroll in the park, isn’t that what she said? Sure, sure it is. And we’re making so much racket we might as well be shooting off fireworks and beating a big bass drum into the bargain. What fun, huh? The family that monkeywrenches together stays together? But what if they are listening? What if they got word ahead of time, somebody finked, ratted, spilled the beans, crapped us out? “Look, really,” he hears himself saying, trying to sound casual, but getting nowhere with that, “you’ve got to be quiet. I’m begging you—Andrea, come on. Sierra. Teo. Just for my peace of mind, if nothing else—”

  Andrea’s response is clear and resonant, a definitive non-whisper. “They don’t have a watchman, I keep telling you that—so get a grip, Ty.” A caesura. The crickets, the muffled tramp of sneakered feet, the faintest soughing of a night breeze in the doomed expanse of branch and bough. “Tomorrow night they will, though—you can bet on it.”

  It’s ten miles in, and they’ve given themselves three and a half hours at a good brisk clip, no stops for rest or scholarly dissertations on dendrology or Strigidae calls, their caps pulled down tight, individual water rations riding their backs in bota bags as fat and supple as overfed babies. They’re carrying plastic buckets, one apiece, the indestructible kind that come with five gallons of paint at Dunn & Edwards or Colortone. The buckets are empty, light as nothing, but tedious all the same, rubbing against their shins and slapping at the outside of his bad knee just over the indentation where the arthroscope went in, scuffing and squeaking in a fabricated, not-made-for-this-earth kind of way. But there’s no talking, not any more, not once they reach the eight-mile mark, conveniently indicated by a tiny day-glo EF! sticker affixed to the black wall of a doomed Douglas fir—a tree that took root here five hundred years before Columbus brought the technological monster to a sunny little island in the Caribbean.

  But Tierwater wouldn’t want to preach. He’d just want to explain what happened that night, how it stuck in him like a barbed hook, like a bullet lodged too close to the bone to remove, and how it was the beginning, the real beginning, of everything to come.

  All right.

  It’s still dark when they arrive, four-fifteen by his watch, and the concrete—all thirty bags of it—is there waiting for them, not ten feet off the road. Andrea is the one who locates it, with the aid of the softly glowing red cap of her flashlight—watchman or no, it would be crazy to go shining lights out here—and the red, she explains, doesn’t kill your night vision like the full glare of the white. Silently, they haul the concrete up the road—all of them, even Sierra, though sixty pounds of dead weight is a real load for her. “Don’t be ridiculous, Dad,” she says when he asks if she’s okay—or whispers, actually, whispers didactically—“because if Burmese peasants or coolies or whatever that hardly weigh more than I do can carry hundred and twenty pound sacks of rice from dawn to dusk for something like thirty-two cents a day, then I can lift this.”

  He wants to say something to relieve the tension no one but him seems to be feeling, something about the Burmese, but they’re as alien to him as the headhunters of the Rajang Valley—don’t some of them make thirty-six cents a day, the lucky ones?—and the best he can do is mutter “Be my guest” into the sleeve of his black sweatshirt. Then he’s bending for the next bag, snatching it to his chest and rising out of his crouch like a weightlifter. The odd grunt comes to him out of the dark, and the thin whine of the first appreciative mosquitoes.

  In addition to the concrete, there are two shovels and a pickaxe secreted in the bushes. Without a word, he takes up the pick, and once he gets his hands wrapped round that length of tempered oak, once he begins raising it above his head and slamming it down into the yielding flesh of the road, he feels better. The fact that the concrete and the tools were here in the first place is something to cheer about—they have allies in this, confederates, grunts and foot soldiers—and he lets the knowledge of that soothe him, his shoulders working, breath coming in ragged gasps. The night compresses. The pick lifts and drops. He could be anywhere, digging a petunia bed, a root cellar, a grave, and he’s beginning to think he’s having an out-of-body experience when Andrea takes hold of his rising arm. “That’s enough, Ty,” she whispers.

  Then it’s the shovels. He and Teo take turns clearing the loose dirt from the trench and heaving it into the bushes, and before long they have an excavation eighteen inches deep, two feet wide and twelve feet across, a neat black line spanning the narrowest stretch of the road in the roseate glow of Andrea’s flashlight. It may not be much of a road by most standards, but still it’s been surveyed, dozed, cleared and tamped flat, and it brings the machines to the trees. There’s no question about it—the trucks have to be stopped, the line has to be drawn. Here. Right here. Our local friends have chosen well, he thinks, leaning on the shovel and gazing up into the night where two dark fortresses of rock, discernible now only as the absence of stars, crowd in over the road: block it here and there’s no way around.

  They’re tired, all of them. Beat, exhausted, zombified. Though they dozed away the afternoon at the Rest Ye May Motel and fueled themselves with sugar-dipped doughnuts and reheated diner coffee, the hike, the unaccustomed labor and the lateness of the hour are beginning to take their toll. Andrea and Teo are off in
the bushes, bickering over something in short, sharp explosions of breath that hit the air like body blows. Sierra, who has an opinion on everything, is uncharacteristically silent, a shadow perched on a rock at the side of the road—she may want to save the world, but not at this hour. He can hardly blame her. He’s sapped too, feeling it in his hamstrings, his shoulders, his tender knee, and when he tries to focus on anything other than the stars, random spots and blotches float across his field of vision like paramecia frolicking under the lens of a microscope. But they’re not done yet. Now it’s the water. And again, their comrades-in-arms have chosen well: shut your eyes and listen. That’s right. That sound he’s been hearing isn’t the white noise of traffic on a freeway or the hiss of a stylus clogged with lint—it’s water, the muted gargle of a stream passing into a conduit not fifty feet up the road. This is what the buckets are for—to carry the water to the trench and moisten the concrete. They’re almost home.

  But not quite. There seems to be some confusion about the concrete, the proportion of water to mix in, and have any of them—even he, son of a builder and thirty-nine years on this earth—ever actually worked with concrete? Have any of them built a wall, smoothed out a walk, set bricks? Teo once watched a pair of Mexican laborers construct a deck round the family pool, but he was a kid then and it was a long time ago. He thinks they just dumped the bags into a hand-cranked mixer and added water from the hose. Did they need a mixer, was that the problem? Andrea thinks she can recall setting fence-posts with her father on their ranch in Montana, and Tierwater has a vague recollection of watching his own father set charges of dynamite on one of his jobsites, stones flung up in the air and bang and bang again, but as far as concrete is concerned, he’s drawing a blank. “I think we just dump the bags in the trench, level it out and add water to the desired consistency,” he concludes with all the authority of a man who flunked chemistry twice.

  Andrea is dubious. “Sounds like a recipe for cake batter.”

  Teo: “What consistency, though? This is quick-set stuff, sure, but if we get it too runny it’s never going to set up in two hours, and that’s all we’ve got.”

  A sigh of exasperation from Sierra. “I can’t believe you guys—I mean three adults, and we come all the way out here, with all this planning and all, and nobody knows what they’re doing? No wonder my generation is going to wind up inheriting a desert.” He can hear the plaintive, plangent sound of her bony hands executing mosquitoes. “Plus, I’m tired. Really like monster-tired. I want to go home to bed.”

  He’s giving it some thought. How hard could it be? The people who do this for a living—laying concrete, that is—could hardly be confused with geniuses. “What does it say on the package? Are there any directions?”

  “Close one eye,” Andrea warns, “because that way you don’t lose all your night vision, just in case, I mean, if anybody—” and then she flicks on the flashlight. The world suddenly explodes in light, and it’s a new world, dun-colored and circumscribed, sacks of concrete like overstuffed brown pillows, the pipestems of their legs, the blackened sneakers. He’s inadvertently closed his good eye, the one that sees up close, and he has to go binocular—and risk a perilous moment of night-blindness—to read what it says on the bag.

  King Kon-Crete, it reads, over the picture of a cartoon ape in sunglasses strutting around a wheelbarrow, Premium Concrete. Mix Entire Bag with Water to Desired Consistency. Keep Away From Children.

  “Back to consistency again,” Teo says, shuffling his feet round the bag, and that’s all that can be seen of him, his feet—his diminutive feet, feet no bigger than Sierra’s—in the cone of light descending from Andrea’s hand. Tierwater can picture him, though, squat and muscular, his upper body honed from pumping iron and driving his longboard through the surf, his face delicate, his wrists and ankles tapered like a girl’s. He’s so small and pumped he could be a special breed, a kind of human terrier, fearless, indefatigable, tenacious, and with a bark like—but enough. They need him here. They need him to say, “Shit, let’s just dump the stuff and get it over with.”

  And so they do. They slit the bags and let the dependable force of gravity empty them. They haul the water in a thickening miasma of mosquitoes, swatting, cursing, unceremoniously upending the buckets atop the dry concrete. And then they mix and slice and chivvy till the trench is uniformly filled with something like cold lava, and the hour is finally at hand. “Ready, everybody?” Tierwater whispers. “Teo on the outside, Andrea next to Teo—and Sierra, you get in between me and Andrea, okay?”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” This is Andrea, exhausted, but reclaiming the initiative.

  He looks round him in the dark, a wasted gesture. “No, what?”

  A slight lilt to the tone, an edge of satisfaction. She’s done her homework, she’s seen the movie, memorized the poem, got in touch with her inner self. She has the information, and he doesn’t. “The essential final step, the issue you’ve been avoiding all week except when you accused me of forgetting it—them, I mean?”

  Then it hits him. “The diapers?”

  Eighteen per package, at $16.99. They’ve had to invest in three different sizes—small, medium and large, for Sierra, Andrea and Teo, and himself, respectively—though Andrea assures him they’ll use them up during the next direct action, whenever and wherever that may be. Either that, or give them away to volunteers. They’re called, comfortingly enough, Depends, and on her advice they’ve chosen the Fitted Briefs for Extra Absorbency. He can’t help thinking about that for just the smallest slice of a moment—Extra Absorbency—and about what it is the diapers are meant to absorb.

  There’s a moment of silence there in the dark, the naked woods crepitating round them, the alertest of the birds already calling out for dawn, when they’re all communally involved in a very private act. The sound of zippers, the hopping on one foot, arms jerked out for balance, and then they’re diapered and the jeans rise back up their legs to grab at their bellies and buttocks. He hasn’t worn diapers—or pads, as the professionals euphemistically call them so as not to offend the Alzheimer’s patients and other walking disasters who have to be swathed in them day and night—since he was an infant, and he doesn’t remember much of that. He remembers Sierra, though, mewling and gurgling, kicking her shit-besmeared legs in the air, as he bent to the task on those rare occasions when her mother, who performed her role perfectly, was either absent or unconscious. They feel—not so bad, not yet anyway. Like underwear, like briefs, only thicker.

  And now, finally, the time has come to compete the ritual and settle down to slap mosquitoes, slumber fitfully and await the first astonished Freddies (Forest Service types) and heavy machine operators. They join hands for balance, sink their cheap tennis sneakers into the wet concrete as deep as they’ll go, and then ease themselves down on the tapered bottoms of their upended buckets. He will be miserable. His head will droop, his back will scream. He will bait mosquitoes and crap in his pants. But it’s nothing. The smallest thing, the sacrifice of one night in bed with a book or narcotized in front of the tube—that, and a few hours of physical discomfort. And as he settles in, the concrete gripping his ankles like a dark set of jaws, the stars receding into the skullcap of the silvering sky and every bird alive in every tree, he tells himself Somebody’s got to do it.

  He must have dozed. He did doze—or sleep, would be more accurate. He slumped over his knees, put his head to rest and drifted into unconsciousness, because there was no sense in doing anything else, no matter his dreads and fears—nothing was going to happen till seven-thirty or eight at the earliest, and he put all that out of his mind and orchestrated his dreams to revolve around a man in bed, a man like him, thin as grass but big across the shoulders, with no gut or rear end to speak of and the first tentative fingers of hair loss massaging his skull, a man in an air-conditioned room in blissful deep non-REM sleep with something like Respighi’s “The Birds” playing softly in the background.

  And what does
he wake to? Is it the coughing wheeze of a poorly tuned pickup beating along the road, the single mocking laugh of a raven, the low-threshold tocsin of his daughter’s voice, soft and supple and caught deep in her throat, saying, “Uh . . . Dad. Dad, wake up?” Whatever it is, it jerks him up off the narrow stool of the bucket in one explosive motion, like a diver surging up out of the deepest pool, and he tries to lift his feet, to leap, to run, to escape the hammering in his chest. But his feet are locked in place. And his body, his upper body, is suddenly floundering forward without support, even as the image of the burnt-orange pickup with its grinning bumper and the swept-back mask of the glassed-in cab comes hurtling down the road toward him, toward them . . . but the knee joint isn’t designed to give in that direction, and even in the moment of crisis—Jesus Christ, the shithead’s going to hit us!—he lurches back and sits heavily and ignominiously on the bucket that even now is squirting out from under him. “Stop!” He roars, “Stop!” against a background of shrieks and protests, and somehow he’s on his feet again and reaching out to his left, for his daughter, to pull her to him and cradle her against the moment of impact . . . Which, mercifully, never comes.

  He wouldn’t want to talk about the diapers, not in this context. He’d want to address the issue of the three intensely bearded, red-suspendered timber people wedged into the cab of that pickup, that scorching orange Toyota 4x4 that comes to rest in a demon-driven cloud of dust no more than ten feet from them. And the looks on their faces—their seven-thirty-in-the-a.m. faces, Egg McMuffins still warm in their bellies, searing coffee sloshed in their laps, the bills of their caps askew and their eyes crawling across their faces like slugs. This is the look of pure, otherworldly astonishment. (Don’t blame these men—or not yet, anyway. They didn’t expect us to be there—they didn’t expect anything, other than maybe a tardy coyote or a suicidal ground squirrel—and suddenly there we were, like some manifestation of the divine, like the lame made to walk and the blind to see.)