The Third Bear (6 page)

We lived in a land of gentle hills, farms, lakes, and small towns. We lived on an orange grove in the middle of the state of Florida, near a place that's now a favorite truck stop on the freeway, Okahumpka. The attraction called Dog Land lay to the west and Orlando to the east - a sleepy town that didn't know that Walt Disney's touch would one day awaken it. My parents had died in an automobile accident when I was four. I had a confused memory or two of life with them that involved the snow in Minnesota and bulky, uncomfortable coats, but nothing more. At age five, after living for a few months with a cousin who didn't really want me, I was sent to live with Aunt Etta, who, it soon became clear, wanted me mostly for the modest life insurance my parents had left for me. Etta Mary Pitkaginkel was her full name, but no one dared call her that because no one could say it without laughing.

She worked for A. C. Pittman, who owned over ten thousand acres of orange groves all over the state. She'd started off cleaning and taking care of his big house, which he never lived in because he had taken a mistress in Cleveland. Pittman's wife lived in California, at their other house. Aunt Etta also helped with the orchards next to the house during the picking season, assisting the foreman. Sometimes it seemed like she was the foreman. In the off season, with almost no one around, Aunt Etta took up the position of being in charge almost by default.

I'd like to think that the Aunt Etta I met as a child was very different from the Aunt Etta from before, that the rare hints of good humor and of kindness had once been a fireworks display. She, like me, had come from up north, from near Minneapolis, and she had also been fleeing disaster: a bad marriage, and dead-end jobs afterwards that never matched up with the comfortable, even rich, life she'd had before. She never talked about her brother, my father, but she'd so loathed those crappy jobs that she still muttered about them, couldn't let go of past slights and injustices. Other muttering came from resentment over Pittman keeping an exhaustive catalog of the house's many treasures - and having someone come and check that they were still there every six months, "as if I'm not to be trusted." Revenge for Aunt Etta came in the form of pretending she was related to Pittman, and using that to control the foreman, in a variety of ways.

She had what looked to me like a boxer's hands, all knuckles and calluses, and she used them like a boxer sometimes, too. The pickers, behind her back, called her "Auntie Dempsey" after Jack Dempsey. A tall woman with some meat on her, she used to boss the Mexican immigrants around - she stood over them like a stern, plump statue of liberty. They all feared her, endured her.

For my part, as soon as I had sense enough to understand Aunt Etta, I tried to keep out of her way. The rest of the time, I obeyed her the best I could, and looked forward to each and every day of school at Littlewood Elementary and, later, Westwood Middle School. I didn't make many friends, never felt comfortable, but at least other kids were around. No kids on the Pittman land, except for the children of the Mexican laborers, and they wouldn't play with me by the bungalow because of Aunt Etta. I had to sneak off into the groves. Even then, they were wary as the deer that sometimes appeared at dusk, while I, husky and my face ruddy with acne, felt like some clumsy monster barging in on their peace and quiet. Sure, there were kids at the Episcopalian church we sometimes went to on Sundays, but with Aunt Etta it was always go in, worship, and, as she put it, "get the hell out." I always wanted to "get the hell out," too, so in a way perfunctory church-going formed a bond between us.

I guess maybe that's why I said yes to Sensio in the first place - to have someone to play with, even if a rabbit was just a couple steps up from a doll. It was a summer day, I remember. I was just hanging around the pond behind the bungalow, in my bathing suit, watching the water ooze into the soil and wondering how the smell of oranges could have gone from smelling good to being an awful stench, and then a nothing, a scent that had no texture, no impact. I was in that good, silent place where the sun's warm on your skin and the breeze moves lazily over the hairs on your forearms.

The man was a presence leaning over me, and then a shadow through the sunlight from which appeared a darkened face, alongside a voice like the soft rasp of weather-beaten leather that said, "Would you like a rabbit?" Then through my squint the figure resolved into a withered old man with only one eye and one arm. Where the eye should have been there was just an obsidian-black hole. Where the arm should have been, there was just a blue sleeve flapping in the breeze. He had a strange whispering rasp to his accent that drifts away from me whenever I try to identify it. A vague thought in my head that maybe he'd served in the War, although I didn't know much about "the War" beyond what I'd heard some men at the church say.

He carried a cage full of rabbits with the other hand. His remaining arm was what an adult would have called hypertrophied, the muscle in his bicep, triceps, and forearm thick, shoulders almost splitting his shirt seam.

"I'm not supposed to talk to strangers," I said. For some reason, he was a curiosity to me. I didn't feel threatened even as I said the words.

"Then don't talk," he said, and set down the cage. He reached down and undid a latch, and suddenly there was something soft and white and heavy on my lap. The man said, "His name is Sensio," and then he was lurching away with the cage, saying over his shoulder, "Tell Aunt Etta I said hello."

I stared after the man long enough for him to become a flicker of light and dark moving through the orange groves. Then I turned to the rabbit.

Sensio was nuzzling up against my shoulder as he searched for a carrot or a lettuce leaf. To a bored kid in an orange grove in Florida, he looked like any old rabbit. He looked like my best friend.

I never told Aunt Etta the truth about where I got him. Something about the way the man said, "Tell Aunt Etta I said hello," had bothered me. It wasn't that I wanted to protect Aunt Etta; in my kid's logic, she was as much of a problem as she was the person feeding me, putting a roof over my head. It was more that I didn't know how the man knew Aunt Etta. What if she hated him? Did that mean she wouldn't let me keep Sensio?

Aunt Etta kept giving the photographer suggestions that he didn't take to, like "Move the tripod to your left, young man, so you can get the trees behind me." She had an odd sort of pride about those trees, I realized later. A kind of pride not in keeping with her actual role as servant, as if she thought she owned the orchard.

"Ma'am," the photographer would say, "the light won't be right if I do that." Or, "That will take another half hour."

Whatever patience the man possessed had been used adjusting to the oddness of the assignment. He was a young man, yes, but he had shadows under his eyes, and wrinkles at the corners. I remember thinking that his face shone oddly in the same way as Sensio's as he suffered his humiliation bound to the post.

As Aunt Etta tried to settle down for the photograph, even as she kept primping and fussing, I almost said something to her, but it was Sensio who broke in first.

"Take the picture," he said in his voice, which always had a gruffness to it. "Take the picture and be done with it."

The photographer stepped back, knees bent. The cigarette fell to the grass as his mouth opened so wide his jaw must have hurt. He looked like he'd just realized he was standing in quicksand or something.

Aunt Etta cackled, jumped up and down, which looked less dramatic than it sounds because of the length of her dress. Every utterance from Sensio's mouth must have sounded like a celestial chorus of dollar bills to her.

Sensio first spoke one night in my room, about a week after he came into my life. I had the windows pulled open because of the heat, hoping for a cross-breeze or anything to stop the sweat. I was on top of the sheets, naked except for my underwear. I was in a typical wretched, self-pitying mood. I had no friends. I was bored. I would never have a life in this place. The moon through the window was like a huge round cross-section of bone. The strange cries of nighthawks seemed to come from that whiteness, not the darkness into which their silhouettes disappeared.

Sensio was in the cage in the corner near the closet, next to my old dolls and other toys. I'd told Aunt Etta I'd found him cowering under an orange tree, even attached a crude splint to his paw to support my lie that he'd been injured, needed my help. "He must have been someone's pet," I said.

I don't know if she believed me, but she'd let me keep him, making it clear that if he became a nuisance, "into the pot he'll go." Although she'd never killed an animal in her life except mice, Aunt Etta loved rabbit stew. She said it reminded her of "her youth" growing up in Minnesota. I thought there must be better memories than that, even if my own childhood hadn't yet amounted to much. Still, four or five times a year, she paid the Mexicans to get her rabbits. They tended to be stringy things, marsh rabbits taken from the shores of nearby lakes.

That night, as I lay there, so uncomfortable, staring out the window, listening to the sound of mosquitoes kissing the window screen, I heard a voice.

"Let me out of my cage," it said, gruffly. "Let me out."

I sat bolt upright in my bed, grabbed a plastic doll for protection. I listened carefully but heard nothing except my own breathing.

After a minute, I lay back down, chest tight and heart devouring my blood.

But a little later, the voice spoke again: "Please let me out of this cage, Rachel."

This time when I sat up brandishing my doll, I dared look over at the cage. Sensio was staring at me, his white fur darkly glowing against the cross-cut shadows.

"Was that you?" I whispered, almost hoping it had been, and not someone who had broken into our home. An absurd little part of me was almost more afraid of waking up Aunt Etta than of a talking rabbit.

"Yes, it's me. Sensio."

I couldn't see Sensio's mouth, but the sound definitely came from his cage.

That's when I thought I must be asleep, and that the heat was giving me strange dreams. I would wake soon.

In the meantime, it was the most natural thing in the world to climb down off my bed made for an adult and kneel down in front of the cage and say to Sensio, "If I let you out, will you go back in when I tell you?"

Those eyes, so full and dark against the ghost-white of his face, saw me.

"Yes, Rachel," Sensio said.

Had I, in my loneliness, created a voice for Sensio? Something like this thought passed through me.

Watching myself do it, I opened the cage, and even then it was as if I had opened more than just a cage. I flinched from the slight electrical discharge as the latch shocked me.

But nothing odd happened afterwards, not really.

Sensio hopped forward, snuffled against my knee, asked in a low, deep voice, "Do you have any lettuce? Any carrots?"

Just like any rabbit.