Shelter (1994) (41 page)

At night he can wake up in a sweat, gasping, thinking Dad's hand is jammed between his teeth, and he sits up straight in bed and sees where he is, and he's glad about all of it again, glad Dad can't come back, and he feels lucky for the way it went.
Lucky Devil:
the words float into his mind in pictures from the tattoo on Dad's arm. Buddy is a devil too, he knows, for what he did, and he peers through the dark and sees the God's eye Mam made him, hanging from the ceiling over his bed. Mam made it from white yarn and peeled sticks after camp closed and hung it up to watch over him because God's eye never closes. What does the eye think, he asked her, and she told him it doesn't think, it only sees and knows, and the white shape moves at night at the end of its tacked thread, turning. The blanket hangs from the ceiling too, the blanket Mam put up when Dad came. They left the blanket up to make Buddy a separate room, and the blanket stirs a little, like Dad might be behind it, but he knows Dad's not, and he listens for Mam's breathing and the sound of her comes to him, quiet and steady, the sound he listens to so he can sleep again. In the dark at night he can see the half-size bookcase against the wall beside his bed, the space so close he can reach out and touch the objects on each shelf, objects Buddy brought from the shack when the camp closed. The bones are laid out separate, and the fibrous snakeskin, and the flashlight and the piece of knife. He thought he could watch over them because winter will come and he won't go to the shack anymore then, or to Highest camp. The trails will fill with snow and the rock by Turtle Hole will be hung with ice, sheets of ice like veils, and icicles thick as a man's legs, and Buddy will walk round the snow oval of Turtle Hole and slide its frozen face on his sled, just near the edge like Mam tells him. Or maybe this year in a hard freeze he'll run right across the middle, whooping and screaming, see it all laid out hard and shining around him, gleaming. But now the water is blue, azure as the sky, and the evergreens beyond toss and stir like giant flower points in the drenched colors of the leaves, and Buddy stands up and begins to dance, slower at first and then faster, jumping like a banshee, turning and whirling, yelling out loud, and beneath his stomping feet plummets the world within the rock and the world beneath that world, the black world, escaped, vast and deep and no bigger than his mind, what he sees when he closes his eyes and watches it all from far, far above. He watches from so high, the road and the camp and the lip of the rock and the long green sward of the mountains flatten out like a picture, a picture he could send to Lenny with writing on the back.

It's when he comes down the rock, past the entrance to the cave no one can see now, and he sits down to tie his shoe, shoes like the ones he saw Lenny put on in the shack, that he sees the rabbit, a small one, a young one looks like, sitting still beside the path. He's downwind, that's what, or the rabbit is hurt maybe and can't move, but no, he sees it hop once, twice, and sniff the air. Even from here, he can see how its body moves when it breathes, its furred sides palpitating. It holds its head still and looks, no whites in the eyes but a shine like tears. Buddy sees the rabbit from one side; the surface of its visible, bright eye rounded and reflective as a little mirror. Slowly, so slowly, he stands up, begins edging away, around behind it. Still, completely still, moving on the balls of his feet, choosing steps, his body poised; in his mind he picks up the rabbit, holds it in his hands, and he moves toward that image, yearning in silence. A crow's hoarse caw rents the air, ricochets off the broad wall of the diving rock, and Buddy freezes, but the rabbit only lowers its tight round head and smells the ground. The erect ears go flat. It should be running for cover at the call of a circling crow; Buddy has seen crows drop in sprung glides to rip rabbits and chipmunks apart, fast, like tearing open a wet package. Throwing the parts around, digging for the heart. Even young squirrels, anything small enough to carry away. And rabbits, they got nothing but speed, and hearing fine-tuned as a bat's. Squirrels can bite pretty nasty, fight off birds sometimes. But rabbits got nothing but knowing, Buddy thinks. He stands behind it now, where it can't smell him, and the rabbit's bunched brown body blends into the colors of the path, the autumn reds and browns of pieweed and devil's lantern, and he knows it by the nearly imperceptible trembling of animal breath, a slow flutter in the weeds and plants of the highgrown edge of the trail. Buddy begins to creep closer, even-paced. Slowly he closes the distance and the rabbit jerks alert, ears turned, and Buddy doesn't pause, he bends down and has it in his hands, the soft body enclosed in his two palms. He picks it up smoothly, with such dexterous care, holds it chin level and looks down, afraid to bow his head and startle it; he looks down the plane of his own nose and mouth and sees the rabbit's head, the sweep of its whiskers. The animal has gone dead still, frozen, and Buddy peers farther, like looking over a cliff, he thinks. He tilts his head and sees the tender, inner curve of the ear, mauve brown like a bruise. The whiskers move, twitch involuntarily, and Buddy sees that its left eye is limned with a milky glaze. One-eyed. Big enough to be on its own but won't make first snow, all the foxes and stoats gluttonous with instinct, storing up in themselves for the long cold. Buddy can't tell if the rabbit's just blind or something maybe took that eye, but there's no wound he can see. The eye holds still, smooth orb with a skin like an egg. The rabbit blinks. Buddy holds it to his mouth, to his nose, and begins the walk home. He'll take it to Mam. She'll think it's pretty, she'll have a bottle to feed it.