Refresh, Refresh: Stories (27 page)

Ma says, “It’s almost time for supper, Hannah, so maybe you should go get Grandpa from the barn. Tell him to wash up.” She spoons some lard into a pan and knobs the burner to high and notices Hannah still staring at the darkened TV screen. “Hannah? Should you go get Grandpa?”

Hannah shrugs, says, “If you want.”

“If you want,” Ma echoes and throws up her arms. “Pshaw!”

Right then the phone rings and Ma wipes her hands before picking it up. “Yeah? Yeah, Gertie.” Her voice gets all cheery and high. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

For a minute Hannah and I watch the dead TV. Then she says, “Something stinks.” There is a
woomph
sound followed by a scream, the scream just enough after the
woomph
to seem its echo.

I see fire rising from the pan. I see Ma dropping the phone. It shatters against the floor and a silver-crowned battery rolls into the living room and under the Christmas tree. “Oh no,” she says. “Help,” she says. “You’ve got to help.” But I don’t. I don’t even breathe. I watch when she picks the pan off the stove and puts it down on the linoleum to drop a towel over. The towel smokes a second before catching fire and Ma says, “Help me,” kicking the whole flaming mess out the door and into the garage. On the floor is a smoking black circle with a brown comet’s tail.

Hannah follows the tail to the door and disappears through it. I can hear Ma crying. Between gulping sobs she says, “Should have used soda or salt. Or covered it with a pan.”

She comes back inside with Hannah in her arms, Hannah carefully wiping the tears off Ma’s cheeks with one tiny white hand.

“Oh no,” Ma says, noticing the floor. “Oh for Heaven’s sake, what next?”

Right then the smoke alarm goes off and I have this vision.

I see myself in a flaming house. I see myself at the bottom of a river. I see myself shot in the head. I see myself in a totaled car, my liver punctured and leaking a darkish green bile. I see my body in a coffin in the United Methodist. I see Dad taking Ma’s hand and pressing it to my chest, making her say good-bye. And I see Hannah wearing a little black dress, sitting in the front pew, her lips moving—in prayer or lullaby—as she colors in her coloring book, looking up now and then when the pastor’s voice cracks, her face innocent like you wouldn’t believe. I see months pass. I see spring arrive. I see Dad out in the fields—without me—plowing, disking, picking the rocks brought up by winter. I see him seeding and spraying and fertilizing and before long tiny green shoots of soybean and corn would shoot up.

“What next?” Ma says.

I say, “Good question.”

When the Bear Came

Nothing had happened in a long time. Every now and then someone wrecked a truck or got divorced or shot a six-point elk or dropped out of college or shipped off for Iraq or bought a thousand-dollar Lotto scratch ticket at the gas station—and you know how those kinds of things get around in a small town like Tumalo—but otherwise, the sand kept blowing, the bulls kept lowing, and the air kept on smelling like it always smelled, like juniper and sage. Irrigation pipes got moved around. Barbed-wire fences got mended. The occasional thunderstorm boiled over the Cascade Mountains and lit a barn on fire and flattened the alfalfa crop and eventually rattled apart into a collection of black clouds that made the sky look full of bears drinking from a big blue bowl. That’s about it.

Really, nothing had happened around here since the train came off the tracks and five of its cattle-cars rolled through the mini-mart, leaving behind a twisted snarl of lumber and metal from which bubbled soda pop and blood. That was five years ago. The only other thing I can think of is Josh Henderson, who they found at the dump, dead and apparently dragged behind a car—back and forth along a strip of county two-lane—his skin unpeeling against the asphalt in a long red trail that drew crows and magpies from all over the county. And that happened eons ago, before I can hardly remember.

There’s the train—there’s Josh Henderson—there’s the Deschutes County Fair and of course the weekend stock-car races and the fat-bellied trout that drift along the shadowy banks of the Metolious River and dozens more diversions, all tiny and meant to distract me from the big spell of nothing that had settled over Tumalo. So when the bear attacks began, things changed and that was just what I needed.

I was on break and finishing off an order of biscuits and gravy, left half-eaten on Table 5 along with a perfectly good strip of bacon, when the door jingled and old Mr. Russell ran in and held up his arms like some kind of prophet. “Everybody!” he said.

This was the Tip Top Diner—9:30ish on a Sunday morning. The Lutheran church hadn’t let out yet, so
everybody
consisted of three customers, and Mary, who owns the Tip Top and smells like fryer grease and presently stood behind the counter, leafing through the
Bend Bulletin
. With every turn of the page she licked her forefinger as if it had some sweetness to it.

Mr. Russell, his eyes were so big I thought they might pop out of his skull and roll around on the linoleum. It took him a minute to say what he said next—his chest rising and falling beneath his flannel shirt—but with an out-of-breath gasp interrupting every other word, he eventually got it out: “Girls camping in Dry Canyon got mauled by a bear.”

It only took a moment for the diner to empty. Pow, those customers shot out of their chairs like in the cartoons, ghost-gone with a cloud of dust in their wake. They left their plates stacked with pancakes, their mugs steaming with coffee, their checks unpaid. One lady even left her purse. Goes to show how hard up we are for entertainment. A semi tips over on the interstate or a heifer births a two-headed calf and you need only open a window and cup a hand to your ear—in the wind, you’ll hear it—phones ringing, hands swiping keys off kitchen counters, garage doors rumbling open, the streets clogged up with trucks and dirt bikes. People want to see.

So in the middle of an empty diner, I’m standing there, gravy on my face, hands in my pockets. And what does Mary do? She folds her newspaper shut and walks to the front door and flips the sign from Open to Closed. “Might as well see what there is to see,” she says and off we went.

It was one of those depressing March days, no rain, but cold, the wind tunneling into your ear so you had to cover it with your hand.

Mary drove one of those Jeep Wagoneers with the fake wood paneling on the side. She parked in the parking lot that edged the canyon, the canyon three miles long and about as wide as I can throw a baseball. A file of cars steadily pulled in behind us—the whole town, it looked like. I forgot my jacket, so I hugged my arms to my chest the second I stepped out of the Jeep and into the wind.

A shelf of black lava rock angled downward and then opened up into a trail, a steep series of switchbacks that took us deep into the canyon. The sunlight fell away and a blue shadow took over. The burrs found their way into my socks when I stepped delicately along the trail, making sure, in my sneakers, not to trip over a root or lose traction on a wash of pumice.

After a hundred yards, the trail bottomed out and followed the curve of a dry creek-bed before vanishing into yellow crabgrass. Up ahead, peopled milled about, and soon I was among them. Their feet left craters in the desert dust and stirred up the smell of calcite. They snapped photos with Kodak disposable cameras. They put their hands on their hips and shook their heads as if this was a hell of a thing, a hell of a thing. Two boys raced by, playing tag, the boy in pursuit yelling, “I’m a bear!” in a high joyful voice. Five men stood in a circle and conferred with one another, gesturing with their cigarettes, taking off their seed caps to scratch their scalps. Women, in their Sunday dresses, walked barefoot, carrying their high heels in their hands. A man in a cowboy hat sat on a boulder drinking coffee from a stainless-steel thermos. His eyes were fixed on some far-off point in the landscape. The hat threw a shadow across his face and I peered into its darkness, thinking I recognized—in his broad face and quiet presence—my father. But I was wrong. It was just a man.

I spotted two deputies and a ranger in the near distance and made my way toward them, where a basalt outcropping hung over a flat patch of sand. To the girls this had seemed a safe place, I guess, a place to pitch their little tent and hide from the big black night. The deputies, dressed in their khaki uniforms, stood before the campsite. There was blood all around them, rust-colored ovals and smears that in their ragged designs revealed where the girls had been dragged and thrown and chewed. Near the charcoal remains of their campfire, I noticed what could have been a shard of shale or bone. The tent looked less like a tent and more like an organ excised by blunt scissors. The ranger was busy making a plaster of a paw print. It was the size of a catcher’s mitt. The deputies motioned their arms authoritatively, emphatically, as if they were trying to guide, with glowing wands, a plane along the tarmac. They wanted people to back away, and no, they couldn’t answer any questions now, damn it.

The voices all around me fell away as the wind picked up, its invisible hand passing through the sagebrush and making it tremble. In the air something lingered. If I flared my nostrils and breathed deeply, I could smell it. It smelled a little like my Labrador, McKenzie, when she comes in out of the rain. Musky.
Hairy.

I turned around to look for the man in the cowboy hat and he’s gone—there’s only an empty hole on the boulder where he sat.

We always watched the news while eating supper—me and my mother and my little brother Graham—and on the news that night the KOIN 6 reporter stood at the bottom of Dry Canyon.

“Hey!” Graham said. “That’s here! That’s
our
canyon!” He wore this look on his face. It was the look my mother used to wear when back in high school I now and then appeared in the sports section for pitching a no-hitter, making the ball blur at speeds close to eighty. But anyway.

You know how on-site reporters are always trying to make things dramatic? Like, if there’s a flood, they’ll stand hip-deep in water, or if there’s a hike in gas prices, they’ll hold the microphone with one hand and with the other hang up the pump as if they just topped off their tank. That’s what was going on here, as this reporter—who wore a fleece jacket that couldn’t hide how nice her boobs were—walked along the dry creek-bed until she reached the campsite, mimicking the passage of the bear.

In the background people waved like people do when in front of a camera. “There’s Joe Simpson,” I said, and if my father had been there, if my father had been sitting at the head of the table, forking through his hamburger casserole, he would have paused in his chewing and narrowed his eyes at the television and grunted his amusement, Joe being a hunting buddy of his.

There are essentially two types of cowboys. There is the drugstore cowboy, who wears Tony Lama boots and irons his jeans and keeps his cheeks smooth and sweet-smelling with aftershave. He loves the idea of lassoes and spurs and bandanas and galloping toward a blaze orange sunset and the whole rigmarole of Wild West bullshit, but aside from a few guided horseback tours, this guy doesn’t know his ass from a bridle. And then there are men like my father. Before he left us, he was a ranch hand at the Lazy H outfit, responsible for breeding and grooming horses, breaking the occasional stallion shipped in from Montana. He wore Carhartt and Wrangler. His breath smelled like coffee and cigarettes. Every few months he collected enough proofs-of-purchase to send off for a new shirt or windbreaker from Marlboro. He liked the pulp novels of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. When he took off his hat he revealed a white band of skin along his forehead, as white as the skin of his legs. The parts of him that saw the sun, his arms, his face, were cracked and brown, like beef jerky. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, his voice rolled out of his mouth in a measured baritone you paid attention to. I felt about him as you feel about a bear, fearful and full of awe, wanting at once to reach out a hand and back away with your head bowed.

On the TV, the reportress explained what had happened. Sometime in the early morning, when only a red vein of sunlight brightened the horizon, a bear happened upon the campsite. The girls, two teenage girls from Prineville, had left their food and cooking supplies out, rather than washing it and bagging it and hanging it from the highest branch of a juniper tree. Springtime bears possess a terrible hunger, having slept through the long winter, and this one was no exception. One slash of its claws parted the nylon like a zipper. Their screams didn’t scare it away, only encouraged it, as it fit its jaws around the head of one girl, chewing her, her scalp finally sliding off her skull. The other, in trying to save her friend, was hurled against the canyon wall, then mauled. They played dead or fainted in their pain and after so many minutes the bear abandoned them. Now both were in critical condition at St. Charles Memorial in Bend.

The reportress interviewed a Forest Service official with a salty beard—just like the one my father grew in the winter—who enjoyed long pauses between words and moved his hands when he talked, pointing in all different directions, making complicated hand-chopping motions that in their effect, I think, meant that it was only a matter of time, the bear would be found.

When she asked him, “What then?” he looked at her boobs and made his hands into a rifle and said, “Bam!”

People went a little crazy. At the tavern, over bottles of Budweiser, they spoke of how nice a bear fur would look hanging from their wall, among their pool cues and trophy fish and beer-stein collections. They wondered if it was a kind of cannibalism, tasting the meat of an animal that had tasted human flesh. They stalked the woods and sat in tree stands, their rifles oiled, ready to fire. They baited traps with raw hamburger. On the hood of his F10, Joe Simpson laid down a square of carpet and screwed in an eyebolt. There he chained his dog, an old hound dog named Cooter, the two of them driving up and down county roads, hoping for the scent that would make Cooter throw back his head in a howl.