Martin Marten (9781466843691) (28 page)

And Martin had this gift in spades, partly because he had made his way alone in the world from a very young age and had survived in part by cultivating and trusting this mysterious gift—more times than he could count, he had leapt away from disaster at the exact right moment or struck a killing blow in the dark without clearly seeing his prey. He had also been given something like a gift of geometric calculation and was already, not even two years old, a master at gauging a chipmunk’s desperate direction, a squirrel’s final leap, the dart of a fish in a pool. And as we already know, he was also given gifts of unusual size and … what word should we use here? Courage, bravery, fearlessness, defiance—don’t they seem a little too
human
as labels to describe Martin’s unusual attitude? If we spoke marten, as it were, perhaps we would know the word for what drove Martin in the next few minutes, but without that word, we will have to just account what happened.

*   *   *

The fox, knowing that she would have but an instant’s advantage, struck at the leading marten, thinking that a killing blow there would allow her to spin and attack the second before the second could flee; it was none of her concern which was first on the trail, the male or female—although given a choice, she would kill the male, who offered more meat.

But the first on the path was Martin, and even before the fox launched herself from her crouch in the ferns, he felt … something. Did he hear the infinitesimal quiver of her muscles as she tensed? Did he smell an iota of her slaver in the dark? Had he somehow screwed his senses to an extraordinary pitch, given the darkness and the dense vegetation crowding the trail?

So Martin was ready to dodge, before the dodge that saved his life and that of his companion; but the fox, slashing savagely as it shot past, sliced a long deep wound in Martin’s hip. The fox spun and came for Martin again, but to her shock, this first marten, the large one, was leaping directly at
her
, and before she could recover, she had been bitten deeply on her snout and slashed so deeply in her right eye that she could not see. She staggered for an instant, and then, incredibly, was attacked again, this time from two directions—the large marten almost under her, clamping its jaws in her throat, and the smaller one tearing and shredding at her right leg, on her blind side.

For the first time in her life the fox was terrified. She had been fearful before, she had been in fights before, she had been attacked before, but never by two animals at once, and
never
by marten. In her experience, marten fled instantly into the canopy when pursued. Instead her attack had missed, she had lost an eye, she was in screaming pain, and she was now being throttled by one marten and bitten by another. She clawed desperately at the one at her throat and kicked furiously at the one behind, but she could not get her killing jaws into play. Suddenly, her rage gave way to a despairing urge to get away, to shake off these savage little creatures and sprint away and huddle in her den and lick her wounds; but for all she clawed at them, they kept their jaws locked in her, and now her breathing staggered and slowed; Martin ground his jaws deeper and deeper into her throat with a grim fury that only his own death would have quelled; she choked and gagged, and a moment later she died. The marten at her throat, sensing her death, drove deeper and tore her trachea in half before releasing his grip.

For a moment now, the little clearing was silent. The two marten lay exhausted and bleeding; some of the bruised and crushed ferns slowly tried to stand again. Nighthawks flew past, wondering at the three spent bodies below. A beetle detoured around the massive thicket of the fox’s tail. For a moment, not a sound, as if the world held its breath; and then Martin staggered upright and began to lick his companion’s wounds. She did the same for him a moment later, and then, wearily, hungrily, they tore the fox open and ate their fill.

55

WHEN DAVE ARRIVED
at the store for work he found a note on the door that made him smile. The last time Miss Moss set foot outside the boundaries of the store during hours of operation was known only to the owls, who knew everything, as Dave’s mom said.

Just as he turned the soup pot back on to simmer, as instructed, Emma Jackson Beaton came in and sat at the counter and asked for soup, and as soon as it was simmering, Dave served her a bowl.

What is this exactly? This is terrific.

I think it’s Miss Moss’s Everything Soup.

This happens every Wednesday? I’ll be back for this. There are things in here I never saw before. I think there’s okra, and I am pretty sure I saw a persimmon. Plus if I am not mistaken there’s antelope in there. This is incredible. Also there’s a chess piece. And a turtle.

Really?

No. Great soup, though.

I’ll tell Miss Moss.

Dave, have I ever told you how much I admire your mom?

No, but I see how you get along. You’re always laughing. Not everyone gets along like that with people they work with.

Your mom is a very wise being.

I know.

Do you? Many teenagers don’t see their parents for who they really are at all. I sure didn’t. I was a jerk to my parents.

Really?

Really really. I left home at seventeen mostly because I knew I was being a jerk but couldn’t figure out how to stop. Are you a jerk to your parents?

Pardon?

Are you?

No. Yes. Well, I don’t think so. Well, I was for a while these past few months. I mean, I really respect them and how hard they work, but they treat me like a kid, and I am a man. Almost. Partly.

At fifteen?

Fifteen and a half.

Is there more of this soup? I think I tasted rutabaga or maybe bear.

Dave gets her another bowl, and she closes her eyes and inhales redolent tendrils of steam.

What do you want to do when you graduate high school, Dave?

I don’t know.

College?

My folks want that.

Job?

Maria wants me to be a mapmaker so we can start a map company. She loves maps.

What do
you
want?

I don’t really know. I like to run. I like living here. Maybe coach and teach, I guess. Although I wouldn’t be much of a teacher. I was a jerk to my teachers this spring, I think. I feel bad about it now. I was rude to Mr. Shapiro.

Why?

Not sure. I just felt … weird.

Weird like?

Like everybody wanted me to be something I didn’t know
I
wanted to be. You know what I mean?

Yup. Although for me, it was the other way around—I didn’t know I wanted to be something I didn’t know I already was.

Pause.

What? says Dave.

Emma laughs.

Dave, listen, she says. There is no Billy Beaton. There never was. I invented Billy Beaton so I could act married because I was tired of guys asking me out. I like guys, but I think I love a person who happens not to be a guy. It took me a long time to get to there. It takes a long time for people to figure out how to make joy soup, you know what I mean?

I think so.

Ah, what do I know? I just think you are luckier than you know, maybe. Your mom is a very wise woman, and your dad is a kind man, the best kind. You already know your sister is the coolest person ever.

She’s decided to be governor, you know. Dad wants her to try for president, but she says she doesn’t want to leave the mountain, that she can be governor from here.

I don’t think I was ever so scared as when she was lost.

Me too, says Dave. Me too.

For a moment they are both caught in the blizzard again, terrified, and then Dave says she still won’t talk about that night. She says she knew she would be found and that she knew Edwin would know where to look. She says we should remember that while Mr. Douglas gets credit for the save, it was Edwin who carried him to the right place. She says Edwin is sort of a genius, and he just doesn’t say anything about it, because he’s not a boaster. She says Edwin has a minor ego and doesn’t need the strokes. She says Mr. Douglas is right about Edwin not liking to be wet and there’s an amazing story why that’s so. She says Edwin loves honey because he long ago did something for the honeybees in the city, and now they look out for him and deliver honey if necessary. She says there are about a thousand more stories like that about Edwin, and someday she will write them down if he will allow it.

I’d read
that
book, says Emma, and just as she pronounces the
k
in
book
, the doorbell jangles, and Moon comes in, and Emma buys him a bowl of soup just because.

*   *   *

Dave’s mom had a name. Sure she did. She had lots of them. She’d been given one at birth by her mother, overruling the one her father wanted to give her (Dandelion!, complete with the exclamation point), and she’d been given her dad’s surname, as was customary in the culture into which she had been born. And then she was given the middle name of an aunt to whom her parents owed a thousand dollars for their mortgage deposit; the name paid the debt. Then she got another name when she was thirteen, as was customary in the religion into which she had been born, and then she took another name when she was nineteen, as the result of an experience with drugs, and then she took a name made up of numerals for a while, as an act of protest against the dehumanizing economic system into which she had been born. Then she was briefly married to a man whose surname she took as her own, as was customary in the culture to which she had been born, but when that man turned out to be a liar and a thief and a stain and a blot on the world, she handed him back his name on the day she concluded their six months of marriage—actually handing it back to him one morning on a piece of paper between two slices of buttered toast, a divorce sandwich—and then again assumed her father’s surname as her own, partly for the peace and safety of being again huddled beneath the long name she had as a child. But when she met Dave’s dad and married him, she did not then accept his surname as her own, as was customary in the society into which she had been born, but adopted her mother’s first name as her new surname, reasoning that she had long worn her father’s name and had once worn another man’s name, and now she would wear her mother’s name as a form of reverence and respect—a decision to which Dave’s dad, as he said to Dave with a smile, could only assent, debate not being part of the program, and your mom’s decision about her names being her own decision, of course, names being personal things and really only labels and bits of sound when you think about it. And besides, I adore
her
mother, your grandmother, a woman of remarkable grace, so much so that I think
I
will adopt her name too as a surname, one of these days, if she will let me. I think you have to fill out a form or something and then get it stamped by a butterfly and submit it to your grandmother for review. Something like that.

*   *   *

Here’s a question for you: why do we use the word
mate
when we talk about nonhuman animals achieving a physical confluence of bodies and spirits? Why do we not use the word
mate
with human animals? We use all sorts of
other
words for human animals when we describe moments and relationships like this, but none of them have the flat ostensibly neutral rudeness of
mate
. It’s inherently inaccurate simply by the limit of its nuance. It’s not a big enough word. It doesn’t look into the corners and levels and languages and confusions and epiphanies and subtleties not just of the physical moment of confluence but the layered dance that ideally leads to and enhances the moments of shiver and serenity. So why do we force such a poor word on animals? Did you think that human animals were the only animals who seethed and boiled and sagged and sang with feelings as complex and staggering as the thousand kinds of wind? Did you think we were the only animals whose bodies sometimes wrapped and coiled and curled and slid and slipped and wrestled and grappled as the brains and hearts inside those bodies swirled in eight directions at once, and then after it all, they both subsided, came to rest, achieved equilibrium, tired and thrilled, and everything afterwards was different? For that is the case for all animals, including, early one morning in late July, Martin and his companion; and inside her, the seeds for two kits are now set in place, side by side, to wait patiently through the winter and be born in spring, long after the last page of this story.

56

SPEAKING OF COMING TO REST,
speaking of subsiding and equilibrium, nowhere in this book have we come to a point of utter stillness, when all beings are at rest. It’s been action action action all the way, go go go, walking and running and sprinting and riding bicycles and cars and a large horse, fights and arguments, a woman with no legs hauling herself sobbing through the mud to help a friend, a small girl huddled inside a tree listening to a howling snowstorm. But let us here pause and rest. Let us see beings at rest. Let us choose a moment when the labors of the night are done and the labors of the day not yet launched. Let us range about the hamlet and the woods and the river and the west side of the mountain and visit each being with reverence and affection. We have been with them a long time in this book, and we have come to know and appreciate them a little, at least, and let us go together and look at them sleeping and wish them well and savor their slow, regular breathing and pray for them by our silent witness.

So here is Dave, sleeping on his right side, facing the slim moon, snoring gently. Here is Maria, asleep in the bear den, maps pinned on every surface, even her blanket a map of The Journey of Joel Palmer on the Glacier, woven by her mother. Here is the finch, sleeping in a nest of old shoestrings Maria made for her in the corner of the windowsill so the finch could see her natural element. Here is Martin, asleep in his den in the cottonwood tree, and there is his companion, asleep in her tremendous fir tree in the middle of a creek, her den smelling ever so faintly of honey. Here is Mr. Shapiro asleep on his couch, sitting up, the only position in which he can sleep because of his back, and there is the dog asleep on the reading chair, and neither of them remembered to turn out the reading light. Here is Dave’s mother asleep curled against Dave’s father like a vine against a fence, both of them dreaming of Maria. Here is Louis asleep in a bed of ferns while near him sleep his wives and children, one of his sons sleeping on his back with his legs folded against his chest like the biggest hairy praying mantis ever. Here is Emma Jackson asleep on her left side, facing the slim moon, and the morning waitress on her right side, facing the huge poster of a surfer that she and everyone else always assumed was Mr. Billy Beaton, though it is not. Here is Martin’s mother, asleep in her new maternal den in a cave in a ravine with her three new kits; and here is her daughter, Martin’s sister, asleep in her own first den, a former red squirrel nest high in a fir tree that Joel Palmer himself had once leaned against for a moment to smoke a meditative pipe and eat gobbets of dried salmon. And here are Mr. and Mrs. Robinson together in their grave, garlic and tomato and bean plants rising from the soil above them. And here is Mr. Douglas asleep in his cabin in the last days he is an unmarried man sleeping alone, wearing nothing but his threadbare wool socks under a blanket made from all the old beach towels his mother had ever given him as a child in their shack by the sea. And bobcats and coyotes and trout and herons and snakes and beetles and turtles and toads asleep, and the pike that ate the raccoon asleep, and the armies of the frogs asleep. Here is Cosmas asleep outdoors on a burlap sack on the very pillar of stone high on the mountain from which Martin saw the bear slowly climb to her ending in the approaching shadow. Here is Miss Moss asleep in her bed with her spectacles placed carefully on a table exactly eleven inches away so that in the morning her right hand can reach for them without her mind being involved quite yet. Here is Edwin asleep standing up in his shed, and in his dream he is speaking the language of bees, and they are laughing in their strange electric way, because he is telling jokes about human beings and their odd and confusing adventures bumbling through the delicate and impatient world. Here are Moon’s parents asleep in their bed, so big it has an area code, as Moon says; but their feet are touching. Here is Moon asleep at his desk, the right side of his face pressed against a page about Bill Walton in a book about the greatest basketball players ever, pressed so firmly against the page that in the morning, ever so faintly, if you looked very carefully, you would see Bill Walton’s headband on Moon’s cheekbone. Here is Dave’s running coach, asleep, and Moon’s basketball coach, asleep, and falcons and snails and swans asleep, and everyone in the lodge asleep, and trees and bushes and sedges and asters and ferns asleep, and fleas and midges and mosquitoes asleep, and even all the little lakes around the mountain for an instant are still as glass, unrippled, shining, frozen without ice. For an instant, all over the west slope of the mountain, for a sliver in the river of time, every single thing animate and inanimate is utterly still … except the Zigzag River, which never sleeps and is always a story that wants to be heard by the sea.