Marry or Burn (33 page)

“Yeah.” Diana leaned around to me. “What about you, back there? You look wiped out.” She rattled her nails with their arched moons against the compartment with Eddie's CDs. “It's that guy, isn't it. Poor thing.” She made a pout of sympathy.

“Him or me?”

“You. What about you, would you do that for him?”

“Nope,” I said.

“One person in a thousand would,” Shelley said. “Maybe would have the presence of mind. Maybe. See out there? They call these the Alps of America.”

Diana didn't look to either side: at a plunge into treetops on one and bare rock cut by a narrow waterfall on the other. After a bit she laughed and shook her finger at Shelley. “You would.” She faced around again to me. “She would, wouldn't she. Your sister.”

Shelley said, “No way.”

“You would. You'd do it for me.”

“Sure wish I could say that was true,” Shelley said. “Think I'd be under the bed.” We both laughed, but not Diana.

“Oh, oh, don't you think she would?” Diana went on in a kind of stern baby talk. “Don't you think so?”

“I just can't really say.”

“Come on, you're her sister. You know how she is.”

“She's pretty brave.”

“She's that kind,” said Diana, turning back to Shelley with satisfaction. “Yes you are.” She put her feet in their glowing leather boots up on the dashboard. She was going to be too hot in those, on the east side of the mountains.

“You could bust a femur like that,” said Shelley. “I took care of the dog from an airbag wreck.”

“So it happened to a dog.”

“It happened to a kid. The dog was in the back.”

“You're always saying what can happen,” said Diana. “Anything can happen. Let's just get that out of the way.”

Shelley didn't answer and after a while Diana took her feet down and went back to sleep. I thought of putting on
Fred the Cat
. It was one of Eddie's favorite car CDs, another one by his favorite old guy Hovhaness. The dead cat goes up a mountain to heaven. Hovhaness was a celebrator of mountains. Eddie's plan for his own funeral was for somebody to play “Fred the Cat Flies to Heaven.” I was in a mood to tell Shelley this and play the CD for her, but while Diana was asleep she drove in silence, over the two passes and down the other side, speeding a little on the curve of the Liberty Bell cirque, where the mountains, with their avalanche chutes and crusts of snow, swing back to show the dusty greens and the cream and tan stone and floating hawks of the valley.

WHEN HE WAS introduced to Gerda, who had come back to Seattle to pack up the house she had locked three years before, our father was already familiar with the story. Soon after it happened he had heard it from Karen, who had had all those talks with our neighbor Lois. Later, news of it came from wild animal vets in touch with wildlife people who had made a brief plea for the bear to be removed to a farther range. But hurt a second time, the animal was a worse threat than before, and local feeling said it had to be shot.

No reprieve for stopping in mid-attack. People had their theories as to why an animal not mortally wounded, not even gushing blood, leaving only a spray of drops on the river rock, would have quit like that. It was weak from hibernation. It didn't have the use of one arm. Bad teeth. Pain. Fate.

Yet it was not uncommon for that to happen, an animal to obey some impulse of its own, native to it, our father said, with his new willingness to expand on a subject. The same way no two people will do exactly the same thing. No, he had never treated a bear but he had done a lot of reading since meeting Gerda. Often a bear just took off, ran for cover. A bear had been a cub. A bear had racked up experiences. About bears he wouldn't use the words
good
and
bad
. He explained this to me in the no-such-thing way he had explained
satanic
when we were little. No devil. No hell.

Then . . . no heaven?

No. No, probably not.

All this about the bear was between the two of us. I knew he would never say any of it to Gerda. He was willing to admit that she had in fact met the wrong bear, the one most mercilessly wrong. Although if you started to think about it, it might have been the hour of the day putting them all at the river that was wrong, or the hour of another day the fall before, when a hunter
had shot the bear in the shoulder and when it rose on its hind legs blown off half its paw, or the hour when the sun warmed and woke the bear in its den. If it had a den. Dad said they didn't always have one. But: time. Time being the villain. Some aspect of time. Some cruel aspect.

“What does that get you?” Eddie would say.

Wait. If everything—and not only living things—carried inside it its particle of time. And if no two particles were in concurrence or accord. They could be, but they didn't have to be. They might be in some violent magnetic opposition. Two of these bits of time might be like nuclear fuel rods, not meant to touch. Needing cooling water between them. But no one, ever, knowing this.

“Then . . . ?” Eddie would say. Every
if
had to have its
then.

The three-inch claws had mauled Gerda in one stroke, but with her the sinking in of incisors never got started, the grinding done with the molars, according to our father, that turns of itself into something unstoppable. Or seemingly unstoppable. For the bear dropped its head, wagged it, flung off blood, leaned onto one forepaw and then the other, and then, instead of launching itself at Gerda, wheeled around and shuffled away.

Bob was close to death. The husband. He had a little more than an hour left to live.

“He was ready to go,” our father said, with the care his voice had when he said it about a dog. “He was that bad hurt.”

 

THE PINES HAD a fire pit, encircled by a little Stonehenge of log benches and stumps. We were welcome to sit in the circle if we wanted to but not to cook in the pit, or on the old iron charcoal grill next to it, because there was a burn ban. Nearby were two picnic tables; the Burneys would bring out the food.

The wedding was a package. The Burneys, who owned The Pines and specialized in weddings, were providing the meals.
We were responsible for the cake. It was one of those rum-filled, heavy, dozen-egg cakes that need an industrial mixer, but not having one I had drunk the rest of the rum and beaten the batter by hand until my arm cramped and I had a relapse and called Eddie, and hung up on his voicemail. He had left the car for me without coming up; I could see it parked a little way down the street. He must have been on his way somewhere himself, to drop if off early like this, confident that I still had my key. Where was he going, not saying a word? Not even flipping a pebble at the window behind which we had been lying mere weeks before with our naked legs entwined.

The next day, the day Shelley and Diana were arriving, my friend Kitty came over with a pastry bag to help me. “Whoa, this thing is
preserved
,” she said, sniffing the cake and hoisting the weight of it on the foil-covered board. When it was thickly iced she splashed red food coloring into what was left and stuffed the bag full and fluted a messy border of roses. She licked her fingers and studied her work. “She won't mind. This is a woman who killed a bear.”

“She didn't kill it.” Because that was part of it, wasn't it? The giant exertion, the muscles afire with effort. A divided effort, to murder and save. The ax thrown down. And then life going on. People in the room with you talking. People offering you a ghostly respect.

I had to admit that I was afraid to meet Gerda, afraid she might be crazy. “I don't think so,” Kitty said. “Think of who we're talking about. Who would your father fall for? It would have to be someone special.” But I was afraid our father might have said to himself,
Now or never.
He might not have seen, in the time they had spent together, that the word
survivor
, by which we mean one who has more or less made a comeback, might not describe the woman who had lived through this event.
Special
,
survivor
: more of those words. She could be crazy. Even a normal death could affect your mind indefinitely.

Mrs. Burney had a thin face and slender, careful hands, one of them walking its fingers up the banister beside her as she led the way. Each of her statements had two parts, which she uttered as one, to soften the fact that they were warnings. “This is the bath, watch the hot tap in all the baths.” We had already seen my room. Since I was alone I didn't have a cabin, but a room downstairs in the main house just big enough to hold the four-poster heaped with pillows. Mrs. Burney apologized because the dresser was in the closet. I said, “No, this is just right.”

Diana winked at me and said to Mrs. Burney, “She lived under the table as a kid.”

Mrs. Burney let us look into the bridal suite, where a pink dress hung in a plastic bag. Our father and Gerda had arrived the day before; they were off on a little hike, said Mrs. Burney with an affirming smile. “You people,” Diana said to Shelley. I hate hiking but I almost wanted to defend the practice. Work, or aimless play—did not the hike put both to shame? No getting around the fact that the genie of it had touched to life a holy order all over the trails of our state, all over the Northwest. Shelley was in the order. Our father was, on a rare Saturday when he didn't work. Eddie was, I was not. Still, I didn't feel I was in Diana's category.

They had already rehearsed the ceremony, Mrs. Burney said. “Or rather, they went over the vows,” she said, glancing at us to see if we were anticeremony. She and her husband were Presbyterians, she said, but she had been ordained a minister of the Universal Life Church. “Oh, you have to be. We came out here in the Sixties and that's what people wanted, and now they want it again.” As she closed the door to their room with her soft
alertness I wondered what had happened in between. At any rate you could tell that she was used to people occupying the honeymoon suite before the wedding.

Mrs. Burney watched as we lifted the cake, in its splotchy collar of roses, out of the box. “We weren't exactly pastry chefs,” I said.

“It's lovely, see if we can slide it back onto the board so it won't—” She made a delicate adjustment with the heels of her hands, and quickly flashed a spatula to remodel the side where the sun had hit the icing in the car.

“My husband had a fall, watch the porch steps.”

With one wrist in a splint, holding a beer in his finger and thumb, Mr. Burney sat in front of the TV in a little den off the kitchen. He kept waving to us with splint and beer as we admired Mrs. Burney's elaborate trays for the next day and the pies she had made for the weekend, and unwrapped flowers and greenery and stood them in her vases.

She filled the vases with water and turned politely to her husband, who had received some signal to switch off the TV and join us. He was not a fat man but he had on a too-small polo shirt and he wore his belt low, under the belly. He had a gray, Sixties ponytail and a mustache that dangled at the corners of the theatrical smile he had assumed as he was tilting himself out of the recliner. “Why don't you show them where the tables, oh, careful—” She steadied the vases as he braced himself against the counter.

“Pardon,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat.

 

AN AFTERNOON WIND had kicked up. Mr. Burney, breathing hard in the heat, sat on a log bench answering Diana's questions about forest fires. You could see how she would go about taking a deposition. Burney was giving up all he knew: lightning strikes,
fires that ran underground along tree roots and exploded upward, fires that chased herds and leapt rivers.

“Anything can happen,” Shelley said.

“You got it.” Mr. Burney threw his arms out, sloshing beer at the trees. As a fire precaution they had been limbed thirty feet up; all around us they stood like huge table legs. Put a wind like this with fire, he said, and sayonara to inn and cabins, not to mention thousands of acres of the national forest that surrounded us where we sat.

The wind, loud in the branches, was bashing the wooden seat of a long-roped swing against the tree trunk. “That'll let up,” Mr. Burney said, as it whipped our jeans and swept ashes onto the stone lip of the fire pit. You could see the big trunks of the ponderosas rocking. “That'll let up, no problem,” he repeated, as if we might want our money back. “Don't you worry, we'll have that ash out of there. Can't have any smudges on the bridesmaids.”

“It's OK, we forgot to bring bridesmaids,” said Diana. She went back to her questions and while she ticked them off, swinging her crossed leg and stroking the air with her long fingers, Shelley watched for minutes, chewing on a piece of grass, like somebody using binoculars on an animal as it roamed. Mr. Burney had spent himself. Every so often the hand holding the bottle would tip as if he had gone to sleep, and Diana would have to repeat her question. Finally she said, “So I mean, if all this stuff has to be done, limbing and burn-banning and smoke jumpers and all the rest of it so we'll be safe, why are we out here?”