The Cage (11 page)

The man and Beryl were both extremely ticklish and spent hours torturing each other, springing for the other's weak spots in unexpected moments and trying to defend their own, wriggling and laughing, begging for help. Once when they were going out to dinner, walking along a crowded city sidewalk all dressed up, he'd reached beneath her jacket as though to hug her waist closer to him and instead yanked her underwear halfway up her back. She yipped and twisted in pain and they fell to the sidewalk screaming insults and grabbing at each other's underwear. People passing them paused, looking back, faces blank and hostile.

After six months he brought up the possibility of moving in together. She told him she would think about it. That same week she drove the otter and him to a lake near the Maine border. At the lake the otter shot out of the car and down the mud bank on its smooth belly, tucking its head at the last moment into the water as if putting on a dress. It dove and frolicked, until it lay exhausted on its back in the water, its flat feline face tilted toward the sun. The man then stripped off his clothes and dove in, chasing the otter around the lake. At one point it scrambled up his back and onto his head, pushing him underwater with its weight so he surfaced sputtering.
The otter swam back to nuzzle his coughing face, and the man grabbed its tail from behind to dunk it.

She watched them, feeling the sun on her back while she dabbled her toes in the cold black water. She sucked it all in with sharp bright happiness, the kind of happiness that made her skin prickle. She knew she would remember this day forever. She wondered if other people had a lot of these easy simple days. She thought if she moved in with him she'd be able to have this type of day all the time, and she felt a tight and vicious greed.

After that day at the lake, she felt more needy around him. She wanted that sort of happiness more often. She wanted nothing to threaten it. She watched for changes in him or in her feelings toward him. He said she should move into his place because it was bigger. When she went over to his house now she felt lucky each time she turned the front doorknob, a large wooden smiling sun. Each breakfast she ate there, she chose her spoon with care from his mismatched set of yard-sale silver. She felt pleasure holding each utensil, feeling its well-made balance and age-smoothed surface. She thought if she moved in there each detail would become normal instead, expected. The house would narrow with her knowledge and its repetition, and at the first fight it would become a cage. She knew sooner or later he would lose interest in her, he would tell her what to do. Every other man had done so. She began to fear this more and more, to withdraw from him. She said she wasn't so sure she wanted to move in at all.

Confused at first, he'd finally begun to argue with her.
Each time he yelled at her she felt joy, for she understood that this wasn't half so bad as she had imagined.

On the last day they fought with the kind of frenzied cruelty that can only pass between people who love each other. Fearful, the otter bit the base of her thumb badly. She still carried the scar, the clear imprint of sharp animal teeth across the meat of her palm.

Each day it got colder. At the town dump, Beryl began to have problems with her cameras. They stuck and the battery needed to be warmed against her belly before it would work. She felt stupid that she hadn't anticipated the extent of this problem. Back in Boston she'd thought if she just kept a spare camera warming inside her parka at all times, she could switch them as needed. However, when she developed some of the film in the town newspaper's darkroom, she found the pictures had fine lines etched across them as though she'd shot them through the glass of a broken lens.

When she showed David, he said, “Oh, that's the emulsion freezing and then cracking. What a ridiculous climate. Why on earth do people live up here while Florida still has lots available? Keep the cameras warm and be real careful rewinding the film. Do it slowly, by hand. In this sort of cold, static electricity builds up. If you rewind quickly, the static'll
discharge and you'll get a pretty lightning fork across your best images.”

In spite of their care David and Beryl's problems increased. They stacked spare cameras near the car heater, but the buttons still stuck, the batteries slowed. David would push at the controls again and again, swearing.

Butler phoned the magazine's headquarters in New York for some heaters for their cameras, but he said they couldn't expect anything for at least a week. David began to keep his camera plugged into the car's battery for extra electricity, the long cord snaking across the van and sometimes winding around David's feet six or seven times while he followed the circuitous movements of a bear. Beryl continued to keep two extra cameras always inside her parka, a single layer away from her skin, switching cameras every five minutes. Even with long underwear between her stomach and the cold metal, she would feel the slow chill, the numbness sneaking across her hips and up her back.

In this cold, her hands also began to slow up. She could feel the lethargy in her fingers as she tried to focus, then shoot. She fought the frustration. She wanted that picture, that one now. Her fingers moved too late. The gloves fumbled. The camera hummed sickly, trying to wind itself forward. After twenty minutes with her upper body out of the van, she could feel the cold invading her movements. When David touched her shoulder, her descent took long seconds, her knees complaining.

One day when she was rewinding some film it actually
snapped clear through the center, the knob spinning free. When she opened the camera in the darkroom the broken ends of the film were shattered as finely as glass. There'd been a picture on that roll of a bear lying on its back, arms limp across its flat chest, looking toward her with its dark eyes. The bear had looked sleepy, patient and very human. It didn't have the flat gaze of a bird or fish; it had regarded her with an expression, a presence.

In this cold she felt much older, an aging woman whose body didn't work properly. She understood why Jean-Claude walked so slowly, why he didn't smile. Once you had known the power of such cold for extended periods, every movement would seem an effort.

She knew her slowness might also be caused by lack of sleep. Each night that week she'd snuck out with Maggie for the first three hours of her watch, then Maggie would drop her back at the hotel. Each night Beryl climbed slowly up the stairs to her room, fumbled with the keys, her fingers wooden. She had to work even to pull her gloves off. She would run cold water across her hands and face, feel the water burn, the prickling. She turned the temperature of the water up slowly and the skin of her face itched as it warmed. She rubbed cream into her skin, then crawled into her bed, the clean rustling of the sheets surprising her, any sounds surprising her other than the car's hum and the slow beat of the windshield wipers against the snow. Beryl closed her eyes, seeing only the snowy dark houses rolling past the windows.

She'd yet to see a bear when she was with Maggie on the night patrols, very unusual for this time of year. Maggie said she was seeing five to seven of them after Beryl left in the hours before dawn. Maggie and Beryl continued to drive slowly about the town, scanning, watching. Beryl needed to see a bear striding calmly through the town, owning it, far from the dump and the mayonnaise jars. She wanted to see a bear in the depths of the night, judging the height of a window, the people inside sleeping.

As Beryl developed her early pictures, she found that she hadn't captured the arctic light at all. Those pictures undamaged by the cold looked almost like cleverly disguised zoo shots. She wanted the crystal bright light, the wide-open space, the bear's swaying amble forward. She tried slower, then faster film, different filters, wide-angle lenses. After a while she got the sense of space, the size of the bear, but still she hadn't captured that light within her camera, trapped it on her film. She wanted to bring that light back with her.

Friday morning Butler told the group about a man who had been stalked and killed the previous year while driving a bulldozer along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

“Bears,” Butler said, then paused to take a sip of his coffee. He sucked the hot liquid in through his teeth with his lips grimacing wide. Beryl guessed he had picked up that habit while drinking coffee from thin metal cups on camping trips. He probably thought it made him look tougher. “Bears
have no fear of large machinery. They are used to ice shifting beneath them, to cracking sounds and loud movement. The bulldozer operator couldn't hear anything over the motor. He was strapped into the seat. I mean, even if he'd heard the bear's steps behind him, what could he have done? A bulldozer won't move faster than five miles an hour. There was nowhere to hide or run. Just flat snow, rocks, gravel in all directions. Just the road he drove on leading back to base. Everything flat.” Butler pushed his plate away and stretched his arms out across the back of the booth. His shoulder cracked.

Beryl was sitting beside him and she glanced up at his arm lying just above her shoulders. She had to lean forward a bit to avoid resting her head against the inside of his elbow.

Butler continued. “They think the bear started eating the guy while he was still on the moving machine.” Butler looked down at Beryl beside him, searching her face for disgust. She found it difficult to look tough returning his stare when she was crouched slightly forward.

“The road,” said Butler, “lay so straight, the bulldozer ran on for another mile before it got stuck in a wall of snow it had built earlier. They think the bear took the man's body away a little before that. They found what was left of the body about a mile away.”

Beryl considered this type of death. It might be sudden and you wouldn't know what had happened, but just as likely it would be slow. The bear wouldn't care if you were dead or alive just so long as you were immobilized. You'd be thinking
your normal thoughts on a normal day, your hearing dulled by the loud machine you sat astride, only your vision remaining. You'd see an empty flat landscape, scarred straight down the center by the road. You'd fidget in your seat in hopes of speeding this day along, of getting to the end of it to your TV and some dinner.

Abruptly a force grabs you, so powerful you don't even feel the pain. Just a wind, a crack at the back of your head. You're twisted about, blinking, looking up at a creature whose size and violence you'd never have believed, whose eyes are black and wet and small and when it leans forward to bite the flesh of your belly, you feel the rough thick hairs of its neck against your face.

“The man's body was completely mauled,” Butler added, leaning in a little closer to Beryl. He did not look at Jean-Claude or David while he told the story. He was watching for her reactions. She saw his nostrils flare a little as he breathed in the smell of her skin. “Beryl, tell me if this is too gory for you, but he had no right leg.” Butler watched Beryl for weakness, some trace of disgust or terror.

“He had no right leg and—you know how bears like body fat—he did not have much skin left.” Butler paused to gauge her reaction to this information.

She tired to keep her face slack. His eyes narrowed slightly in irritation. She'd begun to feel uneasy around him. She didn't think she would feel this way if they spent less time around each other, but she spent most of the day within ten feet of him. If she'd met him in Boston she might've enjoyed
his company for the stories he told. She might have felt attracted to him. Instead she knew she was going to be spending the next month with him in a small bus. His body weighed almost twice as much as hers. The fabric of his shirt stretched and wrinkled with the slow movements of his breath. He stood closer to her than she liked people to stand.

Butler continued. “They don't know how long he lived after the bear attacked him. But the doctors said that no one of his wounds was fatal. He could have lived through all of it, died slowly after the bear left, of cold and loss of blood, lying on the snow.” Butler held out his heavy hand warped into claws, moved the thick paw forward slowly to touch her face, to run the nails along her cheek. He wanted to scare her, to force her to show fear. The rest of the team watched her reaction.

She moved back from his reach, not out of fear of the bear, but out of revulsion at Butler's warm moist flesh. He smiled.

She thought that being mauled by a bear was a better way to die than most. It was better than listening to the uneven rasp of your respirator.

Saturday morning, someone knocked on the door of her room. When she opened the door she was surprised to see Jean-Claude. He held out a bag of wiring and batteries. “I think I can make a heater for your camera,” he said. Standing face to face with him, she realized he was only two or three inches taller. She wondered if he'd been fed properly when he was a child; perhaps the expeditions he'd been on at fourteen had stunted his growth. Or maybe he had simply needed to be short, to eat less, to move fast in order to survive. His white eyebrows gave his serious face an almost comical look of shock.

He helped her rig a small battery-operated heater on the bottom of her camera. He worked methodically, explaining the steps. He spoke clearly, succinctly. He checked each connection three times. She wondered what his parents were like, his childhood. She wanted him to talk about his trips,
about the Arctic, the cold and death, what he thought of walking across the snow away from a pile of clothes filled with something once alive. She watched his movements carefully. His hands were large and calloused. His right hand seemed bigger than his left. After a few minutes of staring she realized that his left hand had only three fingers; even the knuckle of the fourth finger had been removed. His fingers moved precisely, gracefully. She wondered if his mind was also moving the finger that was no longer there.

Next, as Jean-Claude watched, she constructed a heater for David. She watched her own hands and tried to move them as precisely as Jean-Claude had moved his. She imagined that her whole life depended on the success of this machine. No backup wiring or batteries. No shelter or extra food. Not even time. She rechecked the links again. Turned it on. The warmth rose, slow and comforting.