I see you everywhere (30 page)

tie he wore the first time we met and, on his head, the nippled dome of a capitol building, vulgar and white as a wedding cake. This vision keeps Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 201
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me from suggesting that he organize the contents of his lower intestinal tract. Which is good, because Conehead signs off on everything from how much toilet paper we order to whether a pesky bear—that is, a bear who, like Doris, knows that condos and big-butt cars are essentially neon signs advertising fast food—will be trapped, drugged, and either shipped off to Yellowstone (bear Levittown) or euthanized. Killed for exercising common sense.

When I tell him we’d like to see the relocation happen sooner rather than later, he says, “It’s a hefty chunk of the budget, this early on.”

“Better than a hefty chunk of someone’s child who bikes around the corner at just the wrong time.”

“No mincing words, that’s you, Miss Jardine.” He chuckles, his we’rein-this-together laugh. “But let’s not jump too fast. See how things play out and we might save ourselves a whole lot of unnecessary expense. And effort.”

“You are so right, Marty. Wouldn’t want you to put in any overtime, now would we.”

That’s the end of chuckling from Marty, but after a silence I refuse to break, he says, “Okay. Shoot me a detailed plan.
Organized,
Miss Jardine.”

“Well, Mr. Cone, that just happens to be my middle name. Miss Organized Jardine is on the job.”

Chuckle, chuckle.

When I get off the phone, Buzz and Jim applaud. “Whoa,” says Jim,

“are you Mack the Knife or
what.
”

“Yeah, well,” I say, “he is still the boss of me.”

Our shared contempt is basically childish, but it moves us along, like a current, against the notion that we are merely part of a pipeline, somewhere in the middle. We think of ourselves as lucky in what we do for a living, as mavericks or nonconformists, but we are part of a system that’s not a whole lot different on paper than life insurance or widgets.

∞

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We never did tag the cubs; another decision deferred. Now, and it’s a shock, you can tell those cubs apart easy, because Tipper’s grown so much bigger than Danny, even just through the long winter trance. This isn’t normal; in the bear kingdom, boys are always a good deal bigger. So I have to wonder as I see Danny sitting back to let his mom and sister do most of the tidying up after their meal. As they retreat, up through the pines and over a steep ridge, he lags behind. Near the top, before they disappear from view, Doris takes a backward glance but keeps on trucking along. I can’t help thinking of that book Mom loved reading to me and my sister, the one where the little bear and the little girl accidentally change places as they follow their mothers in search of berries. Those moms never seemed upset enough to me. Realistically, wouldn’t they have been traumatized, reduced to whimpering terror and contrition on the one side, pure bestial rage on the other? But then I guess the book was warning us, whether the author knew it or not, that laggards and daydreamers will be left to their own devices. Mothers will provide, that’s their job, but children had better toe the line. This ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around!

I haven’t been home in three days. I’d like to open my door to the easy attentions of a cat or a dog or even a chatterbox canary, but it wouldn’t be fair. When I rented this place—a trailer in the middle of nowhere, plunked down here thirty years ago for some ranch hand who’s no longer needed, the ranch house now a rustic hotel—I knew I wouldn’t be here often. So today, like most days, I open my door to silence, the sight of my breath in the rattle-bone cold, and my beckoning phone machine. I turn up the thermostat and take a beer from the fridge. I find a bag of taco chips. I sit at the kitchen table, wearing my jacket till the heat cranks up; nights will stay frigid well into summer.

I stare at the machine. It’s not that I dread any calls in particular, just calls in general. Since leaving the coast, where I used to work with seals and other ocean creatures, I feel as if the curious comfort of being land-Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 203
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locked, one I welcomed at first in the temporary notion that I’d finally found someplace roomy and wild and deserted enough to call home, has mutated into smug isolation. Not loneliness, not quite, but a way of having to face that I’ve intentionally closed all the windows and doors of my soul (if you believe in souls, which, if pushed to a philosophical wall, I don’t). You’d never know this in public. At work, I’m the one who does the tough stuff, like calling Conehead when we need Daddy’s approval to trap a bear or let Sheldon loose to do a “procedure.” (Sometimes our work feels like a grown-up version of Captain May I. You can’t so much as trim a bear’s nails without permission. I exaggerate, but still.)

“Oh God,” I say when I play back my messages, because three out of five are from my sister. (The ones from Buzz and Jim, left the day before yesterday, are moot. NO ONE knows to look for me at R.B.’s place, and it has to stay that way.)

Five months ago, Louisa was diagnosed with breast cancer. Before she went in for the biopsy, her doctors told her it would be nothing, and I agreed. She was thirty-six, healthy, not living in Chernobyl, etcetera. So I did my scientific bit, told her about all the quirky benign possibilities, like a waitress reading the off-menu specials:
Tonight we have cysts; we
have calcifications; I need to check with the kitchen, but we might still have a
necrotic gland or two.
But I felt guilty, because somehow I knew. I just knew. And while I waited for the bad news to whip around and hit me, boomerang style, I couldn’t stop thinking how if anyone should have cancer, it’s me. Never mind that I’m younger. Biology is the study of life, right? Yet sometimes I wonder if I chose this field as a grand compensation, not just something I happen to love. Sometimes I feel cut off from life, or from mine. I feel as if what I thought was going to be My Life (the Siamese twin) quietly severed our ties when I wasn’t looking, then snuck off on her own and chose a different fork in the trail. Sometimes our two paths cross, so I bump into My Life by accident, and I say, “Here you are! Where have you
been
?”

My Life is cordial but cagey. And we hang out together at the same campsite, maybe for quite a while. We boil water from a nearby stream, heat Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 204 204

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our freeze-dried meals, eat in contented silence. We commune without speaking. We toast marshmallows. We wash our grungy clothing in the stream and hang it out to dry on the limbs of an overhanging birch. We consult our topo maps and hike about, pick berries, swim together, read novels on a sunny rock . . . but then one morning I wake up shivering alone in my sleeping bag. The campfire’s out, the coals have crumbled to dust, and once again My Life, that sneaky creature, has struck ahead on a route I can’t determine, taking with her all the maps (and the marshmallows, too). I pack up my gear and can only make a random guess at which path she might have chosen. Sometimes all I can do is flip a coin. I have to believe we’ll meet up again, though I’m never sure when that will be. Meanwhile—because you can’t help compare—I look at Louisa, and even if I’d never in a million years choose New York or a job that’s so completely cerebral, I recognize that she’s made a life of color, ambition, the deliberate mess of wanting one true love and kids, the social kaleidoscope of living in a city. She’s made some crazy decisions, and sometimes it drives me nuts the way she wears her neuroses and her complaints like colorful floating scarves, but she lives with a boyfriend nearly everyone declares to be a Good Man, she invests her savings, and she seems to have all the right instincts, the nesting ones, the ones I’m missing. She holds her life
tight,
never letting it out of her sight for a minute. So how could
she
be marked?

It’s stage one, her tumor, which means there’s plenty of genuine hope. Louisa had surgery, then radiation. She called me every few days for a while, and I always called right back if she left a message. Sometimes she cried, and then she’d scold herself for not being a saint. (What I loved was when, in the same evening, Mom would call and go through the very same sequence.
I’m going to lose a daughter! . . . I’m a horrible mother!
) Other times Louisa was hysterically cheerful.
I’m going to be fine, I have to
believe that! My job is great, and everyone understands! At least I don’t live
in Bosnia!
That was worse than the crying. Sometimes I wondered if I should fly out and be there, but I never offered, and she never asked. It wasn’t the money; our parents, or even R.B. if I’d asked him, would have Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 205
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picked up the airfare. The truth is, I didn’t want to be near the disease. When I came to this conclusion, wide awake in the middle of the night about a month after Louisa’s treatment started, I just hated myself. You are a numb, misanthropic, self-serving bitch, I told myself. Now Louisa’s going through chemo, which is much worse, but she no longer calls that often. I think she’s joined a support group. So I have to worry now: three times in three days?

I finish the first beer and get a second before I pick up the phone.

“Sheldon,” I say, “something’s not right with that little guy.” We’re having our weekly meeting over breakfast in Dubois. Sheldon looks at me skeptically. “ ‘Not right’?”

“He’s too small. I think we should put in for tagging them now, forget about relocation. Figure that part out later.”

“Trap them twice?” says Jim. “That seems excessive. I’m not even sure Doris will fall for the trap again. She’s no fool.”

“I think Sheldon needs to have a look at Danny. A close look.”

Sheldon’s glance meets mine, but only in passing—en route to the waitress, whose attention he ropes with his best Beach Boy smile. He does a little dance with his wrist to ask for a refill on coffee. She smiles in return and hustles over. Slowly, his handsome gaze circles the table.

“Anyone other than Clem have a good look at that cub this season?”

“R.B.’s seen him,” I say, though it’s only a guess. R.B. doesn’t attend our meetings.

Sheldon stares at me. “The houndsman.” If he condescends to the biologists, he regards R.B. as inhabiting some sort of intellectual subsub-basement. Sheldon is an in-your-face vegetarian, openly contemptuous of hunters, even those who do it to feed their families. (“I’ve evolved past predator. Anyone can.”)

“Yeah. But what would
he
know,” I say. “Please excuse me.”

“It’s just that he’s not responsible for these decisions.”

Trying hard to lose the sarcasm, I tell Sheldon that I will take
responsi-
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bility.
I say nothing more about R.B. I can’t tell if Sheldon suspects. I do know he’s never forgiven me for refusing to go home with him from a party the first month after I got here. So he has to wonder what I’ve got going instead. I couldn’t refuse him over
nothing.
Not gorgeous, brilliant
him.
Vern, a peace-loving guy who offers no opinions except when we’re talking vegetation, when the bears are eating pine seeds or berries, signals for the check. He offers me a sweet, knowing smile. “Practice at five. Ball field across from the tackle shop.”

He knows how to cheer me up, just a little. He’s talking about our softball league. Games are about forgetting all the political and personal crap that builds up between us. They’re good that way. Despite his gymnified physique, Sheldon throws like a girl. And when I send a ball his way, he sometimes ducks. I’m sorry, but that does give me pleasure.

“If he’s ill,” I say to Sheldon, “you’d treat him, wouldn’t you?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“That is so complicated, you cannot begin to imagine,” he says.

“No imagination, count on me for that.” I throw a ten-dollar bill on the table, stand, and grab my jacket. I am shaking. I think about his lousy throw, all the catches he’s blown, all the runs he’s cost our team. Mild consolation.

“Clem, it’s not like I
couldn’t,
” he says. “You know how Marty is.”

“Don’t blame everything on Marty,” I say. But I know what he means. He means the whole system, the pipeline. Marty’s just a valve. R.B.’s breathing is inaudible; he never snores, as cunning in sleep as he is on a live trail. Maybe stealth is a habit. Against the wall, in their own beds, the hounds sleep, too, but more noisily: an occasional yip, a wet snort. The clock face taunts me with its lurid green: 4:12, fifty-five minutes since I last looked. All I can think about is Danny, that lethargic little cub. Marty called today, not long after the breakfast meeting. He says Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 207
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we’re to relocate before another “encounter situation” takes place at the condos. I was still on the phone with Marty, almost speechless at his sudden one-eighty, when Buzz passed me a note. One of the condos belongs to the daughter of a state representative who’d love to see the Endangered Species Act go the way of Prohibition. So just like that, Marty has a green light from the Feds and reluctant support from the Park County sheriff, who’d probably rather mount the bears over his mantelpiece than let them loose in his woods. You’d think we were sending him a trio of known child molesters.

We’ll drive the traps up the mountain tomorrow and hope for the best. Sheldon’s got a new fast-acting sedative they’re using on lions up in Glacier: it has a temporary paralyzing effect, which sounds just awful to me. R.B. can dart them by gun if the traps don’t work. Jesus Christ. R.B. sleeps on his back. His mouth hangs dumbly agape, the skin in front of his earlobes weary and lax, the creases dating him like rings in a tree. I take the opportunity to examine his face, every pore. He’s got twenty-five years on me. Within hailing distance of sixty, married, wrinkled, an unapologetic killer. I’m with
him
? Yet I know exactly how and why he suits me. I like his nose—so big, it’s a declaration—and his height, and the strength he never flaunts, and his way of keeping calm no matter what. I know, too, that falling in love is not an option. Because this, whatever we have, isn’t “real.” It can’t last, and I can’t let myself even begin to hope that it will. He knows that I know this, that he never has to say a word. That’s why it works so well. I heard about R.B. my first week out here, when I met the rest of the grizzly team and the other pods of biologists, studying everything from pine blight to packs of wolves. Yes, students of LIFE in all the forms it’s chosen to take in this part of the world, some of those forms suddenly quite tenuous or fragile. R.B.’s an oddball here. He’s a guy who’s paid the rent for most of his life by bringing down wild animals, exotic fearsome animals. Twenty years ago, R.B. hunted tigers and elephants. He was a skilled hunting guide to some of the richest men in the world, the one who made sure they took home a prize. But his skills are just as useful to Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 208 208