Martin Marten (9781466843691) (19 page)

No, sir, says Maria from the roof, where she is scraping moss.

Make sure of your footing, remember.

These are my magic sneakers, Dad.

Ah yes, says her dad. Indeed, they are. In about an hour, you’ll grow out of those sneakers, you know, and then they go up on the mantelpiece with old Joel Palmer’s shoes. I think we ought to build a shoe museum for the greatest shoes ever. Imagine the shoes we could get for the museum. There’s Jesus’s sandals and Gandhi’s sandals and Meher Baba’s sandals. What is it with spiritual visionaries and sandals? Mohammed wore sandals, too. Although Mandela wore sneakers, didn’t he? And old Dorothy Day too. Although she lived on the beach and probably wore boat slippers. Probably a lot of the great visionaries wore sneakers but their hagiographers thought sandals were cooler for the hagiographic paintings. I bet Jesus wore high-tops.

What’s hagiography?

It’s when someone cool is reduced to only being a saint. It’s like a polite insult. You need help up there?

No, sir, says Maria. I think I am done. Can we go get a milk shake now?

Sure. Listen, can I ask you a question?

Sure.

Is something bothering Dave? He seems grumpy lately, and when I ask him, I get a lot of no answers.

He seems a little … remote.

You guys still talking at night before bed?

Not as much. I miss that. I miss Dave. Can we get a milk shake now?

You can get one for each mom you have, how about that?

*   *   *

Martin’s first birthday was the first wide-open wild-blue unclouded balmy gentle warm everything-melting-at-once day of April, and he celebrated by dozing most of the day, a habit he had developed during the long winter; there had been many cold days when he had been out hunting and eating for all of four hours and sound asleep for the other twenty. But day by day now, he felt something stirring in him—not just more energy, and a hunter’s utilitarian pleasure at lovely newborn things to eat, but some gnawing curiosity he had never felt before. He found himself ranging farther and farther afield again, much as he had in the fall when searching for the right den, but he did not know what it was that he wanted.

His travels this time took him all the way around the mountain, far up into the ice fields, and far enough down the mountain that he explored orchards and tree farms for the first time, marveling at their unnatural geometry. He met and sometimes bristled at, and three times fought with, other male martens; he met and was interested in but did not further pursue the first female martens he had seen other than his mother and sister. He briefly saw and certainly clearly scented an animal that looked very much like a very large marten and might have been a fisher; he saw scrawny tousled bears tearing up rotten logs for grubs and gorging on anything green they could find in bulk. Twice he saw the enormous elk who had shoved casually through the huckleberry jungle under his den, although both times he and the elk were more than twenty miles from Martin’s home in the cottonwood tree.

There is much else to report about Martin’s first winter, but it
is
his birthday, so let’s celebrate the manner in which he has not only survived, as many marten kits do not, but flourished. Before he was a year old, he struck out on his own, established a territory, found and furbished a suitable dwelling, became a skilled and enterprising harvester of meat and fruit, explored a great deal of a tremendous wilderness, survived a number of attacks and battles, discovered the first rudiments of a fishing technique unique among his species, and later familiarized himself with the doings and dwellings of human animals sufficiently to satisfy his curiosity without endangering his life, became an accomplished and soon-to-be-legendary robber of nests in his endless search for the golden glory of fresh eggs, learned how to catch and eat snakes without being lashed by their whipping tails, and discovered what amounted to a secret village of easily accessible squirrels and chipmunks around the lodge, a food source he wisely tapped only when he was very hungry on the general theory that the less he was seen, the safer he was. He had also discovered that the chipmunks in particular had relatively short memories—if he took one every other day, they became cautious and skittish and increasingly hard to kill, but if he only visited once a month, sliding out of the canopy at dusk and along the wall of the outdoor swimming pool and into the drainpipes, he was assured of a fat careless chipmunk scrabbling for the last scraps of food spilled on the trails around the lodge. Indeed, for his birthday present, let us give him just such a gift, which he snares with a sudden lightning dash from the drainpipe and carries back up into the canopy to eat in peace.

39

DID I EVER TELL YOU ABOUT KUSHTAKA,
the Otter Man, who saves kids from freezing to death in the woods? says Mr. Douglas to the counter where Miss Moss would be if she was not in the kitchen making soup.

Yes, you did, says her voice, winding around the doorway where people have written their phone numbers for many years; if you squint a little, you can see Mr. Robinson’s first phone number, written in 1939.

Did I?

Several times. A number of times. Perhaps twelve. Or twenty.

A consistent peccadillo of mine, he says, smiling. Among many others. An incalculable calculus, Ginny. Your move.

You move for me, says her voice. I am amidships the soup.

I wouldn’t think of moving for you, he says, coming around the doorway with the phone numbers; he notices Mr. Robinson’s number with a pang. No one can do anything for you. That’s sort of the problem.

I have a problem? she says dangerously.

That’s not what I meant, he says. I mean that you don’t let me do anything for you, and I would very much like to do things with you. For you.

Garlic, she says.

He crushes a head of garlic in his fist and hands it to her. What’s the soup?

Miscellaneous general kitchen whatever vegetable. Deliveries are tomorrow.

Would you like to come for a ride on Edwin? He’s restless.

He is or you are?

It’s a yes-or-no question, Ginny. No need to get terse.

I’m awfully busy.

I see.

And Dave’s not due in for an hour.

Noted.

But yes.

Yes?

Yes.

Yes, yes?

Yes to going for a ride on Edwin.

He and I are honored. Back in a bit.

No no—I’ll come with you now. The soup can wait. God forbid you ride up on a horse and sweep me away.

Would that be so bad?

Yes.

Yes, yes?

Yes, no.

*   *   *

It had been a long winter for everyone and everything. Moon’s father had politely asked Moon’s mother to vacate the premises after something somewhere somewhen had happened that neither Moon’s dad nor his mother would explain to Moon. I think it has something to do with wandering affections, said Moon to Dave. My dad explained it without explaining it. He’s good at that. I think that’s why he gets paid a lot of money by his company. He explained
around
it, you know what I mean? My mom wasn’t coming home anyway for another three weeks, so it’s sort of a moot point, their separation. Can you be separated if you are already separated? Isn’t that a double negative, which inherently negates the proposition?

The bobcat population had taken a serious hit from Mr. Douglas’s traps, as had the foxes, although the marten and mink populace had only lost a few members; numberswise it was a whopping bobcat year for Mr. Douglas, and among the pelts he brought in to the store for registration was the old hermit bobcat who lived over to Hood River and had long defended his territory with adamant guile. He had stepped into the simplest of traps, in the most obvious of settings for a trap, and Mr. Douglas was so startled to find him there one morning, asphyxiated but not yet frozen, that he spent an hour tracing the cat’s movements prior to arrival at the scene. If it didn’t sound so damned weird, he said quietly to Miss Moss, I would say that he did it on purpose. I tracked him from his cave up in the rocks right to the trap, a straight line, no hesitation. It wasn’t an accident that he got caught. He knew right where the set was, and he walked right into it like he decided to call it a day and get it over with quick. From his prints I think he might have stood by the trap for a while thinking god knows what before he just stepped right into it like you would step through a door. Which is what he did, I guess. Average bobcat this year is about a hundred dollars, but I will get three hundred for him. I feel weird about it, though.

On the other hand, Dave’s dad had been promoted to maintenance chief at school, and Dave’s mom had finally gone to the doctor and been diagnosed with vitamin deficiency, which she had addressed with dietary change and the construction of a rudimentary sunroom in the southwest corner of the cabin. Maria had designed a lesson plan in mapping, geography, and satellite-based navigation systems for grades one through four, which she led so successfully at those grade levels that Mr. Shapiro had asked her to consider offering it for grades five through eight. The Unabled Lady had completed a song cycle based on the music of falling snow, which she played through twice at the adult center in Gresham, though her head now nodded forward over the piano lower by the day as her neck and shoulder muscles grew infinitesimally weaker. Moon has actually made the second team in basketball, against all expectations and predictions, although he never played a single minute in games and only got to wear an official practice jersey in practice when one of the other players was sick or missing, which is why sometimes he wore jerseys that hung almost to his knees and other times jerseys so short and tight that as the other players said it sure looked like Moon was wearing a sports bra or a tube top rather than a basketball jersey; but he laughed too.

Also Dave had finished the cross-country season third on the top team, behind only the sophomore who ran like an antelope and one of the senior captains. He learned to draft behind other runners for the first mile; he learned not to try to stay with the sophomore no matter how tempting it was to match pace with him; he learned to ignore remarks and comments and elbows and hips from other runners; he learned that rhythm was his best friend and adrenaline his worst enemy except in the last few hundred yards; he learned how to attack hills and how not to cruise downhill but maintain speed; he learned what it was like to be spiked by runners both ahead and behind him; he learned how to run in mud and how to look for the driest line of firm ground across moist meadows and fields of muck; he learned that the brightest sunniest days were harder on runners than cold cloudy days; he learned to hold his spot in a knot of runners and keep his balance and pace when jostled; he learned that the thing he loved best when running alone was available to him still in a race—a sort of mindless, almost musical pleasure, if he could manage the vagaries, as the coach said—the prime vagaries being adrenaline and opposition. You cannot ignore the other runners or the course, said his coach, nor can you disregard your own excitement and nerves and insecurities. The trick is balance. I can’t teach you that.
You
have to teach you that. It comes from experience. Get your rhythm down, know where everyone else is, set your goal based on your pace, and then fly. If you can see the leaders in the last half mile, try to catch them. I don’t care if you win a race. I care if you did better than you did last time. My goal is that everyone sets personal bests every race. Will that happen? No. Might it happen? Yes. Has it ever happened? No. Could it happen? Yes. Will I be annoyed if you don’t get better? No. Should
you
be annoyed? Yes. Listen, I want you to have fun, but I want you to push too. I want you to enjoy this but see what else you have inside you. It’ll hurt to find that out sometimes. Deal with it.

*   *   *

It was Cosmas who found Mr. and Mrs. Robinson the morning after the storm. He had been walking up the road when he saw a broken vine maple bush. Something had sheared away half the bush and crashed into the woods. The snow was infinitesimally shallower where that something had passed. He followed the trail of shallow for a few yards into the silent forest and found their car. It was so covered with snow that the only sign of automobility was the radio antenna, itself capped with a tiny fingertip of snow. He knew whose car it was. He knew what the silence and undisturbed snow meant. He felt some great twist or throb in his chest like a sudden wave crashing. He walked around the car and saw Mrs. Robinson’s open window, and he bent and peered in and bowed his head. Mr. Robinson’s hand on her shoulder was the most gentle blue color imaginable. Mrs. Robinson’s door was locked, but Mr. Robinson’s door was not. Cosmas opened Mr. Robinson’s door gently. At such an angle you would expect the driver to fall out or slump out, but Mr. Robinson was unmoved. There was frost on his eyebrows and on the tip of his nose and on the rims of his spectacles. Cosmas closed the door again gently. He noticed that liquids of two colors had wriggled downhill from under the car in tiny creeks, probably from the smashing the underbelly of the car had endured as the car plowed through the forest. By now the melt had begun, and Cosmas could hear dripping in every meter and rhythm imaginable. As he stood by Mr. Robinson’s door, the tiny fingertip of snow slid off the top of the radio antenna, and the loss of weight made the antenna sway ever so gently for longer than you would think. You wouldn’t think such a tiny thing would make such a big guy as Cosmas weep, but you would be wrong about that. He wept silently and helplessly into his beard for a few minutes, and then he went around to Mrs. Robinson’s side of the car and opened her door and rolled her window up gently just in case ravens started getting ideas, and then he walked as fast as he could back to the road and down to Miss Moss’s store where there was a phone and the phone numbers of the police and fire station and Forest Service and doctors and nurses. Those phone numbers were at eye level on the doorway to the kitchen, about halfway between Mr. Robinson’s phone number in 1939 and the phone number of the kid from Rhododendron who was about eight feet tall and ended up playing college ball and one time wrote his phone number so high up that you couldn’t read it unless you stood on a chair.