Authors: Charles Hayes
Pansy (3 page)
Mandy would sit for hours on a haystack shielded from the sky by an extended roof meant to protect the hay from wind and rain. The spot offered lots of bright daylight. She would read here in this light, sometimes aloud with Pansy standing or lying nearby. Frequently she would put her book down and groom Pansy as if preparing for a 4-H show. But there was no show. It just made her feel good, and Pansy too. She knew this because it seemed apparent that Pansy would have purred if she were a cat.
Mandy didn’t have any close friends that she was seeing regularly, so there was no one she could tell how special Pansy was, except Randy and her dad, and they were more than skeptical; they seemed downright hostile to the idea that cows were anything beyond mindless meat. Pansy, however, was clearly in a class by herself, although she was subtle about letting on that she was a sentient creature. At least, that’s what Mandy would have said if anyone asked.
Her mother’s death and her father’s extended absences had given Mandy a desire to look far beyond her own family’s lifestyle for a better way to live. She was reading books she knew her father wouldn’t approve of, and she was beginning to take positions she knew would be totally contrary to his about matters he thought were important. As she became more and more fond of ideas she knew he would find fault with, her enthusiasm surged and she ordered more books.
The reading had given her clear ideas about what might be wrong with her cousin, and she had been buying books for him with that thought in mind. It seemed to be working a bit. She had her book orders delivered to a store in town that really wasn’t a bookstore, but they were happy to act as middleman. These purchases now represented a substantial investment, and she was becoming quite knowledgeable. Her confidence had grown enough that she felt she could defend her ideas forcefully. She wondered if the way she felt was the way famous activists feel when they develop a deep and burning desire to change the world. That’s precisely what she wanted to do: change the world, one animal at a time.
If her dad only knew what she thought and why, what would he do or say? When was she going to tell him how she really felt about the future and what she wanted to do with her life? Soon, it should be soon. What about Pansy? Should she tell Randy and her dad about what Pansy had done, or should she wait and see if it happened again? She had to tell someone. It was all she could think about. If all cows were like Pansy, wouldn’t eating them be like eating dogs? She knew, of course, that all cows weren't like Pansy, but then there were lots of examples of intelligent cows. People just weren't paying attention. Maybe she could change that.
Ed liked to drive to Anchorage or anywhere in Alaska that covered a long distance. It gave him lots of time to think. The scenery added something special to the art of reflection, but at times the beauty of the landscape became aesthetically numbing as he sped by. Instead of thinking, he just seemed to be in a stupor. He needed to decide when he was going to tell Mandy about his plans to move. No, that wasn’t it. He just needed to tell her as soon as possible.
Dave Tupelo was going to offer him a job as a state trooper in Idaho. He’d hinted as much, anyway, although he hadn’t actually said so. Ed liked the work; he missed it terribly, in fact. He figured there was something to the old saying, “Once a lawman, always a lawman.” He liked farming and ranching too, but as a hobby and not as a full-time worry, which of course is what it was, especially in Alaska. Hell, here it was nothing short of crazy.
He also needed to figure out how to talk to Randy and his suspicions about PTSD. He remembered clearly how, at the end of Randy’s first deployment in Afghanistan, the two of them had joked about the ridiculousness of PTSD, and how Randy had mentioned more than once that his platoon leader had started every day saying, “That that which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Ed had, in fact, recalled the motto often over the past couple of years. It seemed to help him cope at times with his own worries. He and Randy agreed that the whole notion of PTSD seemed to have gotten out of hand. Surely not everyone who had been severely traumatized in battle would go through the rest of their lives either cowering in the face of conflict or going berserk at the drop of a hat. Surely not Randy.
When Ed was a state trooper, he’d had numerous occasions to arrest Vietnam veterans who claimed to be suffering from combat fatigue. In most cases, he simply hadn’t believed it, although he usually tried to appear sympathetic. Ed had been a few years too young for Vietnam and too old for Afghanistan and Iraq. By default, then, he would have joined the millions of between-war men who spend their lives wondering how they would have behaved in combat, except that his days in law enforcement were proof enough to him that, if he had fought in a war, he would have performed well.
There were two ways, he reckoned, men looked at the situation of not being in the service in a time of war: either you were lucky or you missed an opportunity. In his case, he felt lucky, but at times he had doubts. There was no question in his mind about his nephew, though. Something was wrong. Randy was simply not the Randy he used to be, and if he didn't get a grip on his emotions soon, it could wind up ruining his life.
It was mid-May, a little over a month away from what qualified as perpetual daylight in interior Alaska. The morning after Ed’s departure, Randy got up at three o’clock and was readying his four-wheeler by half-past. He would ride to Kellogg Mountain and leave the Honda on a plateau, then hike the narrow and heavily jutted trail up the mountain to the valley on the other side. Maps didn’t indicate such a place as Kellogg Mountain. Ed said it was a family name declared by Martin Kellogg the first time he laid eyes on it, and everyone that knew him had been calling it Kellogg Mountain ever since. Saying it was a mountain was something of a stretch, too, because it wasn’t that big, but it made up for its size by the sheer nature of its ruggedness.
Ed had always maintained that Methuselah lived on the other side of Kellogg Mountain, but he never said why he thought so. Only once in the years that he’d observed the death and destruction left behind by the beast had Randy caught a glimpse of him, and to this day he wasn’t sure it wasn’t just his imagination. But when asked, he would declare that he had indeed seen the bear. “And he is blond,” he would always add.
He parked the four-wheeler in a stand of alders so it couldn’t be seen from the trail. Not that he thought he would meet anyone, but you never knew in these parts. He was getting more and more introspective and philosophical these days, something that was new to him, and he owed it all to his cousin. All morning he’d been wondering if there was something to the fact that Mandy’s name was so similar to his. Surely it wasn’t a coincidence, but now no one was left alive to explain the reason except his uncle, and Ed would not likely discuss it. Every time something came up about the family’s past, Ed would get testy and defensive.
He stopped on the steep trail up the mountain, took off his flannel shirt, and stuffed it in his pack. The day was getting warm, he noticed—no, hot, really hot. Not Afghanistan hot, but hot enough and a bit unusual for this time of year. The sun ducked in and out behind puffy white clouds, and every time it shone clear, the temperature climbed at a better clip than he was making up the mountain on foot.
When he reached the summit, he removed his pack and sat down on a fallen log. Eating his sandwich, he found himself wishing Nadia had made it for him, not only because of her personal touch, but because the deli was the source of the best sandwiches in two hundred square miles. She was in his thoughts more and more now, just as he was drawn to the grocery store in Delta Junction where she worked.
Nadia, he had heard, was from a family of recent immigrants from Ukraine or someplace near there. Her Russian accent was still very pronounced, although she was picking up English pretty fast—probably a lot faster than he would pick up Russian if he were living over there. Her melodious broken accent was part of her appeal, he thought, apart from her simply being beautiful. Randy guessed she might be twenty, maybe twenty-one, but he hadn’t had occasion to ask her yet. When he ate his lunch at one of the tables in the deli, he would frequently catch her looking his way. Then she would catch him doing the same thing. Sort of like today’s sun playing peek-a-boo with the clouds.
Randy resolved that when he got back to town, he would ask her for a date, unless of course he lost his nerve, which was a distinct possibility. He had started to ask her several times before. Not that he was a bashful sort; it was just getting too important to him that she say yes. He was beginning to realize that if she refused him, he would be hurt. Not only that, but it might make him decide to reenlist in the Marine Corps. He was beginning to have serious doubts about doing that, because he was changing his mind about war being a justifiable option for settling human affairs. Considering what he’d done in Afghanistan, though, it was a little late to be getting sanctimonious.
Down the far side below and beyond Kellogg Mountain, Randy caught a glimpse of movement in a creek gully. “Looks like blond fur,” he thought. Slowly he began making his way down the steep incline. He was feeling it again. He was sure this time. It was real, exactly the same. It was the adrenalin rush that comes with excitement, just like his dreams. This wasn’t combat, but it would do. Until now he hadn’t realized that he missed this feeling so much. But he did miss it, and for a moment the thought saddened him.
When he reached the creek, he could see huge bear tracks in the wet ground, and one of the tracks was still filling with water. He flipped the safety off his rifle and held it before him as if he were about the engage in bayonet practice, something he could do in his sleep. Taking slow, deliberate steps, heel down first, he walked quietly ahead. His breathing changed from deep to shallow and back. As he stepped into a dense stand of alders, he heard a noise to his left, and before he could turn fully to look, he was hit by an enormous paw. He felt no immediate pain, but the force knocked him off his feet and his rifle landed somewhere behind him.
Then nothing. No bear, and no sign of one. There was no movement save the furiously swaying bushes. Lying still and waiting to get his breath, he could see deep tracks in the wet creek bottom. After what seemed like ten minutes, he struggled to his feet, pain engulfing his whole left side. He checked his arm and shoulder to see if they were broken, or even still there, because the impact had been so powerful. They looked okay. But, God, he hurt. If he’d been hit by a cement truck at forty miles an hour, he wouldn’t have felt much different.
He picked up the rifle, found a large rock, and sat down to clear his head. Then he turned in the direction he’d come down the mountain and began making his way back to the top, one agonizing step at a time. Near the crest he found a ledge, an outcropping of sorts, that would give him a good view of the valley below. And there, standing on his hind legs like a taxidermy mount in the airport, was Methuselah. The bear was a little over a hundred yards away and still looked huge. He didn’t seem old, weak, or tired. He looked instead like the king of Kellogg Mountain.
Carefully Randy swung his rifle into position to fire; it would be an easy shot. But then his training kicked in. He had been so stunned by the trauma to his body that he hadn’t thought to check the barrel of his weapon. Sure enough, the rifle had landed barrel-down in the mud, and several inches of dirt were lodged in the bore. If he had fired, the barrel might have blown up in his hands—as if he wasn’t already beat up enough. Before he had time to think about how to remove the mud, he looked again for the bear. Methuselah was gone. No sign, just gone. And then, on a branch nearby, Randy could see a clot of blond fur, a calling card of sorts.
He cleared the rifle barrel of mud with a straight willow twig and cut off a piece of his shirt tail to use as a patch to clean the bore. Proceeding slowly, he sat down every few minutes, his side still sore to the touch. Because of the force of the impact, he was having a hard time believing that he wasn’t in some way seriously injured. When he reached the place where he’d left the four-wheeler, something felt wrong. The brush didn’t look the way he’d left it. Then it was clear. The four-wheeler was turned on its side, and stuffing from the seat was strewn all over the place. The old bastard had attacked it. How the hell was he going to explain this to Uncle Ed?
Just as he was about to turn the vehicle upright, blond fury exploded from the brush with the intensity of an IED. Before Randy could shoulder his rifle, the bear grabbed him by the thigh on his right side and pitched him into the air. In a flash, he found himself imagining that this was what a helicopter crash would be like, with the earth and sky changing places in kaleidoscopic fashion. Then he was still. He was afraid to move, but he knew he had to. It was too much to hope that the bear was gone this time. He listened but heard no movement or sound, nothing at all, not even a bird call or the whisper of sprouting leaves in the breeze.
What was really disturbing was not the wound in his thigh or that it was clearly going to require too many stitches to count; it was the simple fact that for the first time in months he felt fully alert. How insane is it, he wondered, to think you must be attacked by a grizzly bear simply to enjoy the thrill of being alive? No sense speculating about whether or not he had some form of PTSD. Now there was little doubt, even though he found it painful to admit. Wasn’t this proof? What struck him now was that he felt that he would actually rather reenlist than seek help. Maybe this was like drug addiction. Maybe the disease was better than the cure, if you could keep it going. But then again, didn’t the odds for living like this run against reaching old age or having a family like normal people? There were no easy answers.
Right now he needed to act. He needed to stop thinking, tidy up his gear, and get moving. The gash in his leg was starting to throb. If he could get that flannel shirt out of his pack, it might help stop the bleeding. The pack was within reach, and he set to work wrapping the shirt firmly into place.
The only thing Randy was sure of was that he didn’t want counseling at the VA. At the same time, his reading had put his reflective thoughts at odds with his deeper drives. Past experience was pulling on him to seek something that he was learning to abhor. It was confusing to say the least. He pushed himself up and started haltingly toward the four-wheeler. Summoning an image of Nadia, he began to feel calm, still excited but in a different way, a peaceful way.