ESP.LITERATURE

They had given him the job as a favor. Seven weeks had passed since Nichols had returned home from his military service. Everyone had shaken his hand. The mores of a small, mountain town had recreated him larger than life. The hero. They had insisted on the job.

For seven weeks he had done next to nothing. He had moved into a cabin near the mill. He had unpacked a box of books. He had repacked his uniform carefully in a trunk. A small box containing a medal and an envelope containing his discharge papers were squared up on top of the uniform. The trunk was locked. Black beans and rice, sometimes with onion, sometimes with jalapenos, filled his belly. And bananas. Nichols liked them a little green with no bruising down their spines. And coffee. Black.

Nichols’ father informed him of the position that the Forest Service had offered. An offer, his father had added, that would not be ignored.

“Get off your ass,” his father had said. “People beginning to talk. Damn war’s done.”

Below the dark blue coat of his dress uniform, his dress trousers lay carefully creased and folded. A .25 caliber automatic that nestled comfortably in the palm of a man’s hand was cached beneath the pants. A gift from an admirer. In case he wished to put a bullet up his nose.

Now Nichols trudged through the dirty knee-deep snow of late spring cursing himself, his father, and the Forest Service generally. Sweat burned in the corners of his eyes, and he drew the soft sleeve of his flannel shirt across his forehead. With his thumbs wedged beneath the chest straps of his pack, Nichols bent forward as he plodded on, bent forward to hitch the bulk of the pack up so that he could reposition the load slightly higher on his hips, cinching the waist belt tighter, plodding on.

Somewhere a raven cawed; some other answered.

Braying like jackasses, he thought. Or at one.

“Gonna send you out to Devil’s Mountain,” said Crump, USFS Administrator for Legal Affairs.

Speaking of jackasses.

“Not gonna be rousting teen-age boys drinking beer and poking their girlfriends. No sir.” Crump handed Nichols a manila folder. “Read that over. Tell you about poaching. Not talking about eggs here neither.” And he had grinned his wide, thick lipped smile. “You’re plenty wood-smart, son. See what you can see.”

Nichols had been out on the mountain for three days and had seen nothing. Sweat dripping off the end of his nose. Deer shit. Rabbit. Bird squawk and twitter. Taking the job had been one asinine move. Making the forest safe for multiple use. Stupid.

You seem to have a talent for it, Nichols, he told himself.

Stupidity.

“Uniform suits you,” said the woman who ran the post office. “And puts you back on Uncle Sam’s tit. There’s worst things.”

Worst.

Well, at least the job gives you quiet. That’s no small thing.

Quiet.

He worked across a draw, post-holing through a bed of wind blown snow. Up the opposite bank, sidehilling around a thick clump of alder and maple. He remembered a clearing the far side of the creek. He would check that and call it good. Road 27 crossed three miles below the clearing, and would take him back to his Forest Service rig. Carefully, methodically, he worked around the hillside.

Neither snow nor terrain gave him any warning. The snow layer simply collapsed under foot. He had weighted his foot to step up and the snow broke suddenly tumbling him down into the sudden darkness of a small cave. Later Nichols remembered only those first few moments of fear and exhilaration as the snow released beneath him, remembered his father standing naked on their balcony in the frozen moonlight bellowing, Avalanche, at the top of his lungs, remembered skiing the upper ridges after a heavy snowfall on some clearcold winter’s day and how the cornices would fracture unexpectedly beneath your weight and fall away in a rush to the canyon below.

In that first instance, he had thought of cornices fracturing, and the hollow feeling in his chest, the sudden jet of adrenalin and clarity, the time he had fallen with the cornice, somersaulting, bumped and buffeted, coming up waist deep in rushing snow and the manic heave to throw himself free and the wildness of his body and the cold, clear certainty of his mind.

He landed in a heap in the sudden darkness. He knew at once that nothing was broken. It was a silly little fall and nothing more. Looking back through the hole he had made, Nichols saw that he had broken through a foot or so of snow pack and then a layer of dark humus. A tunnel of black to a patch of blue.

Nichols stretched his legs, wiggled his toes, moved fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders. He thought he might live.

Look at it. Laugh at it. Whose line was that? One of his Crazies. They all had spirals tattooed between their shoulder blades. They did the hokey pokey. You put your right foot in … ha ha. See if it dont get blown clean off.

The smell and quiet puling raised the hairs on the back of his neck, his breath short in his throat, listening. He rolled to his knees. Slowly, he loosened the straps of his pack and let it drop behind him. He stayed still and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

They were the size of cocker spaniels, but rounder and fluffier, balled in the back of the den. They whined and stared with eyes wide open. The two black cubs began to squirm and stretch and stumble towards him. They tumbled over each other, puling still, to plop together in his lap.

Nichols laughed out loud to see them. Finishing their first winter with mom, he thought. Probably weaned. Had mom been in the lair he would, by now, be crow bait. But she wasn’t. His luck. Better to be lucky than good. He did the quick visual. Could recall no tracks of any kind nearby. No scat. Nothing. He should do a widening perimeter search. That was the drill. Two grunts circling in widening loops. Like fuckin buzzards on a breeze. Collins’ line. His first sergeant. Waddled when he walked. Nichols stroked the cubs, let them lick and mouth his hands. Hungry little beasts.

“Hungry little beasts,” he said out loud.

His first night out a light snow had fallen, and he was sure that she had not returned to her cubs since then. Nichols dug in his pack and mixed up a thick soup of water, jerky, and crackers. He put half in his bowl and left the rest in the pot, then nudged the cubs to the back of the den with their breakfast. He turned to the low side of the cave and saw the outline of the entry hole, kicking the snow and debris away with his boot. He made a hole through the remaining snow just high enough to keep the cubs contained. For a while anyway. He poked his head out.

“And turned it all about,” he whispered. Same blue sky, but with the hillside rising above him now and this lower shelf backfilled with drifting snow.

“Mama, if you’re planning on ambushing my ass, I’d appreciate it if you would reconsider.”

But mama is long gone, he told himself.

Crawling through the hole and out. Standing. Wound tight. Edgy. Sounds of tongue lapping. A soft ruffling through the upper branches. Susurrus. Latin for ‘hum.’ He spit, and smiled. He began to hum a verse of ‘Your Cheating Heart.’

“I’m coming, mama. You just hold fire, would you. I’d appreciate that.”

If you’re out there.

Hank Williams always sang those ‘hurtin’ songs, he thought, stepping out, circling. Cheating songs. Crying songs. Moving slowly, he carefully placed each step. Three ravens  lifted from branches and crossed above him. A squirrel scolded. He whistled softly and moved to the base of a cedar tree.

Skeat, point man first platoon, had started this singing business. Heading into a fire zone, a little crooning just eased the tension back a notch or two. Skeat’s song was always ‘House of the Rising Sun.’ Most times he just whistled it low and slow.

Fill your glasses to the brim and pass the cards around.

Nichols rolled his shoulders. Fuck it. He circled about the den, widening the radius of each loop every time he passed the den mouth. Twenty-five yards below the lair, he found a foot shaped depression that had been swept with an alder branch. Ravens and jays continued to flit in and out of the branches. A flutter of wings, and some fairly fresh branch breaks. Then faint traces in the snow from their fire. He found day-old coyote tracks and a place where the coyote had slunk belly down, stopped, then circled three times before coming in to dig. The coyote had not had to dig deep.

Something must have scared it off, Nichols thought, looking at the carcass. And now he saw how they had potted her, saw where they must have erected their blind, and how they must have sat patiently waiting, listening to her cubs cry, the cries leading her on, coming quickly and taken suddenly. Two rounds, broken shoulder and a rib.

“Why’d they leave the cubs?”

No answer.

Never is.

They had not buried her carcass particularly deep, but all traces were efficiently covered. They had taken the head. A bonus, besides the glands and internal organs. Parts sold to jobbers who sold to markets in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. Hard to keep your head on straight thinking about those Asians.

Gooks.

Different from you and me. Like night and day. Yet all the same.

The day passed. By nightfall, Nichols and the two cubs were still two hours from the ranger station. When they finally arrived, Crump was asleep in his chair. His wife came to the door. She left him standing on the porch, backing slowly away to get her husband, eyes fixed on Nichols’ truck.

“Now what  the hell you bring them along for?” the man said, throwing a hand in the general direction of the bear cubs. “Who’s gonna look after them now, those bears? We didn’t hire you for specimens, Nichols. Forest Service isn’t gonna be looking after no bears. Who’s gonna do it? Damn pests, those bears.”

“I am,” Nichols told him.

“You are hell. That’s a fulltime job and you already got one.”

“I’m quitting,” he said, and handed him his report on the poaching. Hand written, crumpled, torn from his spiral notebook. He nodded at the man, turned, and walked slowly back to his old truck.

“Are you out of your god damn mind?” His father standing on the porch of the cabin, the front door open, the latch torn from the jamb.

“Maybe so,” Nichols replied calmly.

They stared at one another.

Anger lay folded beneath sorrow somewhere in Nichols’ chest. The little automatic held one round in the chamber. The face of his father was his face. He began to hum ‘Summertime.’

His father ran a hand over his cropped grey hair.

Nichols couldn’t remember his mother’s face.

“Want you off my property,” his father said. “That shack other side of the pond should suit you. Get them big enough to take care of themselves, then they go. You go with them. Don’t come back.”

They stared at one another.

“Half-wit,” his father said, spitting, then pushed past his son and walked stiffly across the yard.

The cubs soon made a shambles of the little cabin by the pond. Nichols built an enclosure off the back corner. As they grew, he enlarged the pen. A six foot cyclone fence around the perimeter of a half acre wooded lot took two weeks of work and  a bank loan. He shot a local dog that had begun running the outside of the fence line, snarling and barking at the bears. Curly, the bigger of the two, began to ignore Nichols; but Moe would whimper and whine each time he left her.

No dignity, that bear. He would stand watching the pair. Doing their jail time. “Won’t be long,” he said to them. Getting big enough. Won’t be long.

If captured, weren’t a lot of options. Just don’t let’em make you beg. That’s all. An NCO from St. Augustine, Florida, had told him that. Forgotten the man’s name. He had met Ray Charles. Listening’s a good thing, too. Got to close your eyes and let your ears work. The NCO had done four tours. A short, skinny man who always stood ramrod straight.

One Saturday morning, early, Vivian Burris, a teacher at the grade school, drove into the yard. Nichols met her just off the porch.

“Mr. Nichols,” she said.

“What is it you want?”

“Those bears, Mr. Nichols. People are talking,” she said. “It’s not right to keep wild animals. Not right. Must be awful for the bears, and hard for the community. People are fearful. Those bears belong in a zoo,” she told Nichols. “They would be far better off. Furthermore, it is illegal to keep wild animals. One must have a permit. I have taken the liberty of calling Fish and Game.”

A silence.

“It is for the best,” the woman insisted.

On the following Tuesday, a letter from  Fish and Game waited for him at the post office.

“Had to come,” said the post mistress.

The letter informed Nichols that if an individual wished to keep wild animals such as bears or cougars or elk, for that matter, it was necessary to obtain permits from both the county of residence and the state. However, since neither the counties nor the state would issue such permits to an individual under any circumstances, they must remove the bears and house them at a proper facility. He had forty-eight hours to file an objection. 

For two days and nights Nichols sat with the bears. On Friday night, he loaded Moe and Curly into his pickup and drove them to the end of the logging road just below the peak of Devil’s Mountain. He had not fed them that morning and now he scooped out mounds of dog food onto the ground. While they ate, he drove away.

“Heard about the bears,” Crump said. Nichols had stopped the truck short of his cabin and sat looking at the man. He had put on weight. Lost some hair. The man lifted a six pack of beer. “Been waiting on you. Thought we might talk. Thought you might be looking for a job.”

Nichols stepped out of the truck.

“Same as before,” the man said. “Have the new rig  again. Working on a nifty little house for you, too. Be a good thing.”

“Not looking for a job,” Nichols told him.

“Well, yeah, know how you feel. Lost a dog once … ”

“Good night, Crump,” Nichols said and walked by the man into the cabin.

When he woke the next morning, Curly and Moe were back. The two bears had collapsed the gate to their pen and were curled up against each other in  a hollow beneath a fallen tree, sleeping soundly. Nichols repaired the gate. They waited. He fed them kosher dill pickles from two large jars. Moe mouthed his hands and snuffed. Curly sat on his haunches licking his paws. The post mistress arrived first.

“Gonna have some visitors, Nichols,” she told him. “Thought you might want to know.”

“Thanks, Pat. Been expecting them.”

They arrived just after noon. Crump drove in with the truck from Fish and Game.

“Sorry about all this,” Crump said.

The bears were sedated and in thirty minutes were loaded and gone.

After that, Nichols saw the bears only once. The zoo had provided a large enclosure with a natural setting. They were separated from the public by a moat and a low fence. While he watched them, they sat dull and listless. Moe licked her foot pads. Curly slept. Nichols did not care for the smell of the caged animals and left.

If captured …

Some months later he heard that the bears were sold to a zoo in Chicago. He heard that they were shipped away, and that the male had become sick in transport and that he had remained sick in Chicago. He heard that they had separated the two bears, finally, and that the female was sent off to St. Louis for mating.

The male was, eventually, put down.

Euphemism: a word  from Greek for ‘suspicious’, ‘sounding good.’

Nichols never pursued St. Louis at all.

For several months he thought often and graphically what might be done to Vivian Burris. He had moved into a squatter’s shack east of the mountain and sold firewood for food and drink and cigarettes. Splitting rounds, he considered Vivian Burris.

In the end, he decided on extenuating circumstances. No court martial for her. Guilty she was. Guilty as hell. Guilty as any captain of infantry leading a company of men into a firefight who does not listen to his intuition and the intuition of his point man and who, instead, obeys orders and goes by the book and ends it with 80% dead or captured.

You put your right foot in …

Extenuating circumstances.

Always were.

He had packed his uniform carefully in a trunk. A small box containing a medal and an envelope containing his discharge papers were squared up on top of the uniform. Below the uniform jacket, his uniform pants lay neatly creased and folded. A .25 caliber automatic that nestled comfortably in the palm of a man’s hand was cached beneath the pants. A gift from an admirer. In case he wished to put a bullet up his nose.

Come winter, Nichols figured on shoveling a little snow.

Wintertime.

With all that grey cloud. Grey cloud carefully folded within the cold dark mass and sharp crease of bitter, metallic regret.