Martin Marten (9781466843691) (10 page)

Near the end of the afternoon Maria sits by this lady and they get to talking and the lady says now, Maria, I am
so
honored to have been invited to your celebration, and I thought long and hard about what to give you as a present. I am not in a position to buy things, but I have the sense that you are not the sort of young lady who measures things by their price as much as by their worth, am I right? So my present seems small, but I hope you will find her companionable, and she opened a small papery box in her lap, and out hopped a finch, who hopped right up her chest and onto her shoulder. The lady reached up gently and slipped her finger under the finch and put her on Maria’s shoulder. The finch whistled suddenly and Maria laughed aloud in surprise and pleasure. The lady smiled and explained how the finch had come to her, but she thought Maria would be a much livelier and more mobile companion for a creature who really ought to see more of the world than an Unabled person could offer, so that if it was okay with Maria’s family, perhaps the finch could live with Maria, and the two young beings could travel together, as it were, and keep an eye out for each other’s welfare. So that is how Maria came to be walking home from her birthday party with a finch riding on her shoulder as Dave and Moon carried the picnic baskets, and Dave’s mom and dad brought up the rear, holding hands.

20

WE HAVE THIS IDEA
that there are
Domestic Animals
and
Wild Animals
, but it’s not such a clean dichotomy, of course; there are lots of animals who live between those worlds, who are wild in nature but quite comfortable around people and their domiciles and habitats.

Some are readily seen, like raccoons and sparrows and deer and squirrels and coyotes, who are all flourishing, tribally, what with the vast and savory dining opportunities that people provide, consciously (bird feeders, tossing nuts to squirrels, salt licks for deer) or unconsciously (providing cats for coyote appetizers, garbage cans for deft raccoons, warm basements and bulging pantries for our friend the house mouse). But some are not so readily seen; the smallest, of course, like the myriad insect and arachnid clans, and the quietest, like the swifts living in the chimney and the swallows under the eaves of the toolshed. And then there are the many creatures who populate the edges of our settlements, the abandoned houses, the empty mills, the derelict cottages, the riddled boats, the slumping cabins heavy with moss, the logging-camp barracks where once a hundred men wrestled and roiled, now left for the forest to reclaim.

And this is especially true of Dave’s village. There are deer living in three houses on the east side of town, where a developer’s dream failed and not even the county saw a point in maintenance; those three houses, each exactly the same, were to be the vanguard for a resort community, for which the streets were platted and the rights of way cleared through the timber. But now many years have passed, and the only way you can tell what were to be streets are the lines of young alder trees between the ten-times-taller firs.

Deer in the dining rooms and kitchens, deer in the garages, deer in the downstairs bedrooms; all sorts of birds living upstairs and squirrels in the cramped attic; garter snakes in the laundry room, warmer than the rest by virtue of its soundproofing; the porches front and back colonized by bees and wasps, the chimney filled with swifts, ten generations of moles aerating the faint remnants of the lawns; shrews under the driveways, possums in the playhouse, carpenter ants slowly grinding the walls to the finest golden dust.

For a while one family lived in one of the houses, waiting the population of the others, to no avail, and finally they surrendered and returned to the city, leaving behind scraps and shards of their lives, now turned to use by other families. See, the small daughter’s red wagon, filled with rainwater, the common pool and spring for sparrows and juncos and robins. The bag of compost fallen from the father’s truck, now thrilling with earthworms. The latticework cupola in the garden, now a city of spiders and occasionally a rest stop for a haughty heron between ponds. The doghouse, so painstakingly and meticulously built by the son as a form of therapy and concentration and penance and prayer after a sea of troubles; for the last five years it has housed a pair of foxes whose kits annually explore the yard and garden and houses with awe at the wonders of the world. Were there ever fox kits like these, so well housed in carpentered wood? Who found, hidden and wrapped in a blanket in the garage, the very rifle once fired at their great-grandmother, to no avail? Who found, hidden beneath the floorboards in the third house, a small bag filled with a white powder that smelled so much like medicine that no creature would eat it, though the fox kits happily licked the vestiges of salt from the sweat of the boy’s fingers on the bag and left the powder to sift away in the eddying winds of winter in the room.

*   *   *

Subtly, gently, without obvious sign or signal, it became clear to Martin that his mother and his sister would stay together in the third den, and he would leave and make his own way; so in his wanderings farther and farther afield, he began to look for a den of his own. He explored likely holes in old trees, he investigated windfalls, he poked cautiously into burrows that looked uninhabited and unattended—although this, he discovered, was a chancy business; twice he was challenged by furious residents with flashing teeth, and once he evaded being bitten on the nose by an angry marmot by a hint of an inch.

For some reason, he found himself drawn to possible dens right at the line where the biggest trees gave way to smaller juniper and alpine fir; for one thing, there seemed to be an endless supply of squirrels and chipmunks in the tiny meadows and rockslides there, and for another, he felt a curious security with the open face of the mountain looming behind him. Above timberline he was dangerously exposed to eagles and the bigger hawks, and even to the rare enterprising owl who ventured up this far after Rodentia, but there was an endless supply of good denning possibilities among the rocks, and he was close enough to the canopy to escape easily from any serious threat. Plus he found himself drawn somehow to the lodge; while he had no urge to den anywhere near it, he did find himself passing it regularly in his rambles, and often he would perch lazily far above it on a warm rock in the broad light of the alpine afternoon and watch with interest as people and dogs and cars milled about below him, the people in their jackets and sweaters as bright as birds, the dogs addled by the alluring scents of chipmunks and sandwiches, the cars climbing eagerly up and then wearily retreating back down toward the city. Occasionally Martin would turn his attention to the people who slid down the mountain on pieces of plastic, some of them screaming as they did so, but they were not as interesting as the activity around the lodge. It was the lodge that interested Martin most. He could not have explained, even in a common language, why all this interested him so; it just did. Some things fascinate us and some do not. Some things call alluringly and some do not. Some things sing and some are mute.

21

DAVE RAN AND RAN
and ran and ran. He ran in the morning and he ran in the evening. He ran down along the river and back up along the highway. He ran the track at the high school. He ran along the corridors in the woods cut by telephone crews. He ran along game trails. He ran loops around and above and below the lodge. He ran up empty ski runs through grass as high as his waist. He ran around lakes and ponds. He ran mountain bike trails. He ran off-road vehicle trails. He ran around and through golf courses. He ran logging roads. He ran Forest Service roads. He ran up ravines above timberline that were arid and dry in summer and twenty feet under snow in winter and roaring with snowmelt in spring. Once a week he ran with Moon who started their runs gasping and barfing and then slowly got his wind. Once he ran with his dad, who quit after half a mile, laughing at how ancient and useless he was, like an old horse; I should probably be traded in for a new model down at the dad store, he said. Twice he ran with older guys from the high school track team, who did not speak to him and pointedly pulled away over the last mile. Once he was running along the river and a tall thin shirtless guy with long hair floating behind him like a cape pulled alongside, running as effortlessly as a breeze, and they ran together for three miles, and then the guy said thanks for the run and he vanished into the woods suddenly. Once he was running down the river trail when behind him he heard a cheerful voice shouting,
watch out Dave watch out!
and Cosmas shot past him going what sure seemed like eight thousand miles an hour. That time Dave had to stop running because he was laughing so hard his breathing got messed up. You would laugh too if you saw a huge guy dressed in an orange jumpsuit rocket past you on a bicycle while singing at the top of his voice.

The thing is, said Dave’s dad later at dinner, you can never tell what
song
Cosmas is singing. Isn’t that the great mystery of our time? What
is
that man’s music? If you could find that out, you would have the key to everything. It’s like the secret code to the universe, the Song of Cosmas. Or a new book in the Bible. But you never can tell because all you ever hear is a loud snatch of it as he goes by like a freight train. And why the orange jumpsuit? There are so many pressing questions in this life, don’t you think? Pass the butter?

*   *   *

It was Dave’s mom’s habit when she worked the day shift in the laundry at the lodge to sit and eat lunch with Emma Jackson Beaton outside the lower laundry delivery door, where she and Emma sat like the queens of the nether reaches, as Emma said, and ate their sandwiches. Sometimes they sat silently all through their sandwiches and watched ravens float around the mountain chuckling in their dark amused voices, but often they had interesting conversations that took interesting leaps and turns, like today.

Tell me about the eminent Mr. Billy Beaton, superstar surfer, said Dave’s mom. Is he in Hawaii today or Australia or Africa?

Mr. Billy Beaton, said Emma through her sandwich, is off the grid at the moment, you could say.

Due home anytime soon?

Not to my knowledge, said Emma. Have you ever noticed that ravens croak one way when they are aloft and another way when they are stationary? Do they have a flight vocabulary and a landed vocabulary?

I hadn’t noticed, said Dave’s mom. You have a sharp eye for the birds, Emma J. B.

I like the ravens, said Emma. They have a sense of humor. I mean, they can tear a dead animal down to the bone in an hour, but they have a sense of play about the whole thing. I admire their panache, you could say. I used to think about being a biologist.

And then you met the eminent Mr. Billy Beaton?

Then I ran out of money and got this job where I get to be interviewed by my esteemed and gracious colleague Gracious McGracious.

Haw, said Dave’s mom, and being actually a gracious and perceptive soul, she bent the conversation toward other matters, but she did wonder then and later about Mr. Billy Beaton. What was the story with Mr. Billy Beaton, and why, even if someone casually looked through sports sections of newspapers and past issues of surfing magazines at the library, was there no mention at all of Mr. Billy Beaton? Were there such things these days as superstars no one knew? Many things were changing these days, and perhaps there was now a new kind of superstar who quietly asked reporters and bloggers not to mention his feats, perhaps for spiritual reasons or for some incredibly deft and subtle marketing effort; could it be that the more mysterious you were, the more famous you became? If your face was never seen and your voice never heard and your actions legendary but undocumented, but there were rumors and intimations of your existence, did you exist? Can someone be mythic and real at once? It’s awfully tempting to be merely logical here and begin to wonder if there even
is
a Mr. Billy Beaton, thought Dave’s mom as she and Emma brought their chairs back inside the laundry, but then again, that which a lot of people call God operates on exactly this principle. It’s a puzzle.

22

UP AND UP COMES
a very old bear through the thinning juniper and alpine fir and into the tumbled rock fields, and Martin watches from a high stone pillar. This is an ancient bear; her fur is grizzled gray on her haunches and a brilliant white on her muzzle, and she picks her way slowly and painfully up the slope, paying no attention to the scurry and scuttle of marmots and pikas in the rubble around her. Her enduring idea is to go higher to die for reasons no one will ever know and no biologist could ever really explain; something deep inside her mind wishes to finish her story high above the dense moss and green light of the forest, and lie down for the last time amid sharp rocks, under a blue sky, near the ice, maybe even
in
the ice if she can get that far.