The Cage (16 page)

They looked for a while out at the world. She could hear what was probably a bear chewing on the edge of a tire below.

She turned to Jean-Claude, touched his cheek with her glove and then reached forward to kiss him. Again she smelled his fresh wood smell. She tasted his lips, cold and surprised.

He pulled away, looked out at the landscape for a moment, then turned to her and kissed her back.

She pulled him closer. He tried to touch her face. His mouth felt warm. The skins between them rustled.

Someone thumped on the hatch. They jumped. Dimly they heard David yelling from below, “Dinner's ready.”

She pulled back. Over Jean-Claude's shoulder she could see a huge bear yellowed with time, thirty feet away. It paced back and forth watching them, its flat head snaking about.

At dinner she caught David's speculative glance. She blushed a bit under his gaze. When no one else was looking he narrowed his eyes, then wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. His face was so mobile, it could be the very mask of lewdness. She looked away, could feel the giggles welling up inside, tried to think only about cutting up her meat. Butler looked up from his dinner in time to catch David smiling widely at her reaction. Butler looked around the table, uncertain what was happening.

“The first time I met my present love was three years ago in court,” David said. He leaned a little closer to Beryl and added, “We live together even now. It's a long-term thing. It's so nice not to be considered just some cheap love slave.” Beryl wouldn't look at David. She was scared she would laugh. Jean-Claude wouldn't look up at any of them. He had two high spots of color in his cheeks. Rebuffed by the others, David began to address his remarks to Butler.

“Anyway, I was in court for running a stop sign, only there was no stop sign there. I had pointed that out at the time to the police officer, but he hadn't seemed all that interested. Chris was there to lend emotional support to a friend fighting a no-left-on-red rap. When it was time for Chris's friend to defend herself, she couldn't even stand up and so Chris did, giving this impassioned speech. From the moment I first heard that voice, I was in love.”

Beryl noticed that at no time did David slip and reveal a gender. Sitting beside Butler, he leaned in closer, smiling, involved in his story. Butler looked around confused, then a
little nervous. He leaned away from David, closer to Beryl. His knee touched her thigh. She crossed her legs, shifting closer to Jean-Claude.

“I congratulated my true love after the speech and, well, we spent the night together. We've been living together ever since.” To emphasize the point, he touched Butler on the hand. Butler jumped. David looked startled, then something else moved across his face, something harder. Beryl watched him reach out deliberately to touch Butler on the shoulder. “Feeling a little tense?” he asked.

Butler leaned away. David looked for a moment at his hand hanging in the air between them.

For the rest of the meal, David stared at Butler and occasionally slid his chair closer in order to reach food on that side of the table. He bumped their shoulders together. Butler ducked his head down, turned away. His face reddened like a bashful girl. David smiled a hard lopsided smile.

She knew Butler's anger would be terrible.

When she was sure the others were asleep or at least should be, she tiptoed to Jean-Claude's bunk. She touched his bare shoulder. He awoke instantly. She could hear the slight change in his breath. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and awkwardly reached forward to touch her face. They returned to her bedroom because Butler slept above Jean-Claude's room; if David heard he wouldn't care as much. She pulled Jean-Claude's body after her into her bunk, closed the door.

She held him close. He seemed confused about what to
do. She wondered if he was uncertain because of his youth or because he met few women on these expeditions. Maybe he knew no one well. He was gentle and awkward. He sighed softly in surprise.

They weren't sure how the sound might carry. They breathed as deeply as in sleep, their movements slowed to the restlessness of dreaming. His body smelled sweet as cedar. He was slight and hard, made only of bone and sinew. Beryl thought he wouldn't change much in age, no fattening or shrinking. He would change little even in death, just a slight stiffening.

Afterward he cried. Like his laugh he made no sound as he cried, just his slight rocking breath and the water on her shoulder. She pulled him closer into her side.

In the morning when she awoke, she was alone.

“Hey Butler,” David said at breakfast. “You know, that turtleneck is just the perfect color for you.” He smiled at Beryl and raised his eyebrows in anticipation of Butler's response.

Butler wouldn't look up from his cereal. He said, “It's just a shirt.”

“But it's sea bottle green. It brings out your eyes,” said David. Beryl was surprised that he could undertake this baiting of Butler so lightly.

Butler stirred his cereal around and around. Some of the flakes began to break up. “Hey Jean,” he said, pronouncing it like “Gene,” “why don't you tell us about the worst time you've ever had out here?” He smiled up at Jean-Claude, enthusiastic for this new topic. “Tell us about the last time you went out and everyone didn't make it back.”

Jean-Claude put his toast down, looked at Butler and then around the table at the others. They were silent, watching
him. Beryl realized she wasn't the only one who had wondered about the bad things that could happen on this journey.

Jean-Claude seemed confused by their interest. “Those times,” he said slowly, “weren't comic books, not
stories
. People died. People I knew.” He got up from the table. “Excuse me,” he said and left.

Butler looked embarrassed. “I didn't think he would …” Beryl noticed that when he was upset his mouth hung soft and unbalanced; his face didn't look so guarded. “Look, I've got some notes to finish up.” He left, carrying his dishes.

David and Beryl sat there for a moment. “Whew,” said David. “Tension, tension.”

Beryl laughed nervously and took another sip of her coffee.

David leaned back in his chair to see if anyone was coming around the corner. He pulled his chair a little closer to her and lowered his voice. “Now,” he said, “while we've got a private moment, I'm going to be a busybody. I don't want to offend you or anything, but I gotta say it's not a good idea to be sleeping with anyone while we're locked up on this bus. I've seen this happen before with small groups. Once in Borneo, six days out from the nearest town, one guy almost killed another, knocked him down and hammered on his head with a steel water canteen. This bus is just too small, you know? It's gonna cause problems.”

She felt the heat rising up her neck. She'd thought they'd been quiet enough. She got up to take her dishes to the kitchen. “I really think it's none of your business,” she said.

He followed her and she turned to face him, standing close within the small kitchen. “Look,” he replied, “normally, I would be the first to agree. But you don't know what can happen. You haven't seen it. It'll affect all of us.”

“Well, speaking of a small bus,” she asked, “what are you doing with Butler, huh?”

“Oh, come on.” David looked startled. “That sort of shit he's doing pisses me off. Acting like I'm contagious. This is an education for him. If there were any justice in the world, he'd be paying me.”

“You're scaring him out of his mind. That's really gonna make for a small bus.”

He watched her. She could smell the mint from his toothpaste. He blinked.

“OK,” he said. “OK. Let's you and me not start in on each other too. Let's keep our sense of humor about this stuff. Tell you what, I'll back off of Butler. And I suggest you back off of Jean-Claude. It's gonna be a long trip.”

After breakfast Butler took to standing even closer to Beryl than before. He brushed up against her more than he had to, made sure to seat himself next to her at every meal, touched her waist when he needed her attention. He held a lock of her hair at one point, brought it to his nose, asking what shampoo she used. She leaned away, gritting her teeth.

That day she sat in the cage.

They took most of the morning figuring out a way to drag it to the right spot and get her in safely. They had assumed that
the bears would lose interest and back off enough for them to maneuver the cage around. But the bears still prowled about the bus, even more of them than the night before. They explored the outside of the bus with a single-minded determination, bony with hunger. Many of them hadn't eaten at all in a month, hadn't eaten well in four months. This hunger didn't affect them as much as it would humans. When rearing young, the mothers sometimes went three months without touching food, emerging from their dens emaciated and desperate once the cubs had grown big enough to survive outside.

To drive the bears away from the bus, Butler first tried opening the front door just enough to shoot a gun into the air. The gun boomed across the snow, the echo shivered into the sky. The animals looked over, slightly curious. Butler handled the gun with an expert's ease, breaking open the chamber to load it. He aimed lower, closer to the bears. They looked up at the soft
whiz
of the bullet over their heads. None moved away. Butler shot the gun into the ground near their feet. They stepped forward to sniff the hole in the snow. Butler cursed.

He tried flares next, set them off and rolled them onto the snow. The smoke billowed out. The bears snorted, rubbed their noses in the snow and coughed. They moved upwind of the flares and sat down to wait.

Standing behind Butler, Beryl heard the bear before she saw it. A displacement in the air, breathing, the thud of snow. She couldn't see where it was coming from. Butler slammed
the door shut. They heard a grunt from outside, some sliding. Silence. Butler swore at them all.

Jean-Claude finally tried plain noise. The bus had been supplied with several old and calming records: Willie Nelson, Frank Sinatra, the Osmonds. He played an old Osmonds record at the highest volume and broadcast it using the microphone hooked to the outside speakers. The noise rolled out, horrific, with a feedback squeal. It boomed out into the land of shifting silence, of barren winds and the creaking of ice. “
AND THEY CALLED IT PUP-PY LO-HA-HA-OVE
.” The bears shook their heads, swiveled their ears and laid them down flat. One by one they began to move uneasily away.

Butler and Jean-Claude dragged the cage to the spot they had picked out forty feet from the bus. They half-ran, breathing raggedly in the cold. The bears stood a hundred yards away, nothing between them and the people. Carrying her camera equipment, Beryl followed the two men. She wore Jean-Claude's suit again. The fur shifted easily against her skin with each movement. She felt almost nude. The fierce cold startled her lungs each time she inhaled. Still, inside the suit she remained fairly warm.

The music continued to play. The noise outside felt all wrong—music meant for small rooms, heat and crowds, smoke and confines, thin summer clothing. This place was too large, too white. The words got distorted by the wind. This place was meant for deep silences and the fierce howls of storms a hundred miles wide.

Jean-Claude and Butler stopped, looked all around and
dropped the cage. No difference between this spot and the next. The men ran back. Beryl looked around at the bears. It would take them ten seconds to cover the distance to her, she thought. She pulled hard to open the cage door, then harder, before she realized the latch was turned. She opened it quickly and got in. Closed the door, locked it by twisting the two bars in two different directions at the same time. It took a moment for her gloves to get traction on the steel, to turn the bars correctly. The designers had assured her that this type of lock couldn't be opened by mistake, couldn't freeze shut. She hoped her hands would stay warm enough to unlock it.

She put her cameras with their heaters down in front of her, the extra gloves, the walkie-talkie. She organized the cameras, the Nikon closest, then checked the lock again.

She swung with all her weight on the lock, testing it just to make sure. Stretched her legs out one last time, then tucked them back in. The music died with a squeal as Jean-Claude closed the bus door.

She sat in the cage. It fit as she'd imagined.

The bears sniffed the air and trotted slowly in.

She could hear their methodical breathing, the thump of their feet approaching through the snow. Their heads held low, they trotted directly toward her. She could feel the cold creeping up her legs and across her buttocks, which pressed against metal. She ignored it. She wanted to stay out here for at least ten minutes.

She forced herself to put a camera up to her eye, to shoot,
saw the thick metal bars of the cage define the approaching bears. The big yellow bear Beryl had spotted last night ran forward ahead of the others, her mouth open. Beryl had never seen the bears from ground level, sitting down. They were huge, as tall as a standing person but wider. They ran easily toward her, their fur rolling loosely, their heavy paws slapping forward. She wanted to stand up, to run away from them. She tasted bile in the back of her mouth. The big female didn't slow down as she got close. Her shoulder hit the bars. The whole cage rocked back. The bear grunted. Beryl's skull slapped back against the bars. She felt a reverberation in her head like something wooden hit hard. Beryl pulled herself forward quickly, away from the bars, a high-pitched hum in her ears.

The bear's heavy head swung up over the top of the cage and looked down at Beryl. The bear sniffed the metal. She tried to push her snout in. Her massive body filled Beryl's vision. Seated, Beryl felt even smaller. The thick white fur of the bear's chest stuck though the bars in front of her. Hesitantly, Beryl reached one hand out to touch the fur, took a picture of her small black glove against the white tufts of the chest. She was in the cage. Her head hurt.