“Be in the I Don’t Know.”
“What?” she said, sounding irritated and weary.
“Zip,” I said. “Remember Zip?” Of course, I was the one doing the remembering, how life with Zip was my happiest time on the coast. I detoured to a memory of his favorite T-shirt, which said, in letters so small you could read them only when you were intimately close, THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING. He was generous and honest, and completely without meaning to, he made me feel increasingly unworthy.
“Oh, Zip,” said Louisa. “I liked him a lot.”
“Another good one I let go, right?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
Don’t start in about you, I warned myself. I said, “So. How’s life at the big lub-dub?” Louisa works at a glossy magazine called Artbeat.
“Uneventful. Thank God. The August issue is thin. Curators are just like shrinks. They go to the beach, every single one, for the entire month.”
“Weird,” I said, “to have a job where you’re always living three months in the future.”
“Right now I’d give anything to be living three months in the future.
This hell would be over. If it were August, I’d have all the bad news behind me.”
I was hungry and had been making myself a turkey sandwich while we talked. I couldn’t hold back any longer from eating it. Better than pointing out that, obviously, all the bad news is never behind you. The big bad news is always, in fact, out there waiting to claim you. The worst news comes last.
“I’m interrupting your dinner,” said Louisa.
“Not at all. I’m just eating between meals.”
Lately, that’s our code for having a nervous breakdown. She laughed.
“You laughed,” I said, my mouth full. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Menopausal, but okay. I have to be okay, don’t I?”
“Smile if it kills you,” I said, another of our mother’s signature sayings.
“It’s a long way from my heart,” she said. Still another.
“Maybe we need to update that one,” I said. “How about, ‘It’s a long way from your ovaries’?”
For a minute, I thought she might start crying again, that this was the cruelest joke I could have made, but she said, “That’s good, Clem. I like that. I’m going to use it on Ray the next time he complains about a headache or a sore neck.”
“I want you to be happy, Lou.”
“I believe you,” said my sister.
I look at R.B.’s clock: 4:33. Out the window beside the bed (a window smeared with paw prints), a faint chestnut haze gathers above the jagged butte. The sky will go from brown to red to fire to saffron to a bright buttery glow; if you watch like a hawk, you can see just an instant of green, like a new leaf, before the lasting blue appears. I know these colors all too well.
I get up as quietly as I can and go into the kitchen. I stand there pondering: coffee now and get dressed, or water and back to bed? My stealth was useless, since of course Rosie and June are at my side, expectant.
“Good girls,” I whisper, bending to stroke their necks. They begin their morning tap dance on the linoleum, hopeful that today involves a hunt: when people rise this early, there’s a very good chance. Their tails slap the cupboards in haphazard rhythm.
R.B. groans from the bedroom. He calls out, hoarse, “Miss Inky, get back here.” That’s his name for me on what he calls my dark mornings. It comes from Inclement, the name he’s given my black, insomniac, inside-out self. My inner Tom Waits, the voice of decomposition, decay.
I drink water from the kitchen tap, dry my hands on my T-shirt, and then I am under the covers again, pressing against him gratefully. He looks at the ceiling but holds me close. He is waiting for me to speak.
I say, “How can you ever get happy again after bad news, I mean like permanent bad news, about yourself?”
“What, like about who you are, your character? Like if you find out you’re a thief or a cheat?”
“No, no. I’m thinking about Louisa.”
R.B. sighs. We’ve talked about her cancer more than once. “It’s normal to freak out,” he says. “But she’ll get back on the trail.”
“Yeah, okay.” I decide that I don’t really want to discuss the kid thing with him. It might sound like it’s about me, not Lou. “But I guess I wonder how anyone gets happy. Tell me, bwana: what is this thing called happy?”
“Inky, you’re at it again.” He squeezes me hard against his side, rib to rib.
“At what?”
“Don’t bullshit me. You are chewin’ the wound raw. Ain’t she, Rosie Larosa, Miss June?” The hounds are staring at us, resting their long freckled snouts on R.B.’s side of the bed. They know he won’t tolerate whining, though prodding’s allowed.
“Seriously. Is it a stupid thing to wonder, Moronic Science one-oh-one?”
“Stupid to brood about.” R.B.’s free hand meanders toward my hip. “Some people just make their own happiness, like a clean plain hotel bed, and lie right down in it. Hospital corners ‘n’ all.”
“Do you?” I say. “I mean, is that what you do? You seem happy.”
“All I do, doll, is get busy. Busy leaves no room for gloom.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“I’m more nurturing than you give me credit for.” He taps the hounds on their noses. “Scoot, girls,” he says, and they back off, disappointed but patient. He begins kissing my right ear. “Stop thinking,” he says to me. “You are always thinking, thinking, thinking. You’re gonna use up that overschooled little brain before its time.”
“Thinking’s busy.”
“Wrong kind of busy.” And he takes me down, like a submarine. Down, down, down we go, and finally I stop thinking. Down periscope, that’s the last thought I have in actual words.
I am riding in the first truck and begging myself not to cry, not in front of Sheldon. He might not notice, because his full attention is on the driving, negotiating ruts in the logging road. He can’t see me anyway, since between us sits Dave, the new intern, a towering grad student in ecology (the new, shinier, sexier biology). Dave’s head nearly grazes the top of the cab, and he is talking a mile a minute, high from the novelty of what he’s just seen. It’s his first time out in the field with the whole team, and he is blown away by the operation, from the darting and sedating to the taking of blood and hair samples.
Once the traps were hitched to the trucks, we set off like a gypsy caravan. The traps look like something out of Jules Verne, heavy and cylindrical, mounted on tires. We watch for patches of ice, rare but potentially lethal. With the bears in tow, we can’t afford to skid.
I keep thinking of R.B. taking aim at Danny, the dart finding its mark on the cub’s neck, the way he slumped to the ground without a moment of combat. Even Sheldon was visibly impressed. The bear dogs were with us, but we didn’t need their intimidation. Poor Danny had been waiting, passively, beside the trap holding his mother and sister, who somehow managed to squeeze in together. When we arrived, he looked more bewildered than fearful.
It doesn’t help that I was right, that he weighs in at fifty pounds shy of his sister’s heft. Sheldon whistled when he held the stethoscope to Danny’s chest, the disk buried in his thick dark fur as he lay on the webbing we’d use to haul him up in the air for weighing, then pack him in a cage.
“What is it?” I said.
Sheldon repositioned the stethoscope and listened further. He shook his head. “I need an EKG.”
There was too much to do, in too little time, for any of us to stand around quizzing Sheldon about Danny’s heart. We had no choice but to get the bears on the road before the sedation wore off too much. I had to show Dave how we label and bag the vials of blood, pack them in the cooler. Vern and Jim were hitching the trucks to the traps, Buzz organizing the equipment. We have it down to a science, this science of ours, but that doesn’t mean we can do it in a leisurely fashion. There was a lot of heavy breathing, a lot of
cursing, a lot of barking orders, but there was very little talk until Sheldon got off the radio phone. “We’re taking them all to the station,” he said, “not the relocation site.”
So here I am in the truck wondering what the hell we are doing, how the hell we are pulling this off. Dave’s puppy-dog enthusiasm, his lack of ambivalence, his exclamations of wow and cool and sweet (sweet!) put me on edge, pulling the tears closer. I wish I had chosen to go with R.B. in his truck. He was trying to catch my eye while Sheldon examined Danny back at the trap site, but I wouldn’t let him.
“Call the station,” Sheldon says. “Tell them we’re fifteen minutes away. Tell them the bears will stay overnight. Make sure they’re ready.”
Conehead answers, not Vern. He’s just arrived from Cheyenne, and now that he knows he’s here for more than just some bland local coverage of a routine relocation, I can only imagine that he’s suiting up to play the role of some big-zookie game hunter who skipped the gory part but gets to take the credit. I picture him posing with Doris as if he’s bagged her, one cowboy boot on her big blond head, that big white cake on his.
“Success?” he barks at me.
“I suppose you could call it that,” I tell him, my voice crimped to conceal my emotion. “We’re en route with all three.”
“Then I suppose you suppose right, Miss Jardine.”
I ask for Vern.
“This is so fuckin’ cool,” says Dave for about the sixty-third time.
“What will be cool,” I say when it’s clear that ignoring him won’t dampen his exuberance, “is when these animals are safe and sound, out of our clutches and back in the woods where they belong.”
We are out on the blacktop now, cruising along, though Sheldon’s careful not to speed up too much. He lets the wipers run, just long enough to clear the dust off the windshield, then clicks on the radio, low-volume country. All three of us are quiet now, nobody singing along.
“Without surgery, his heart will fail. It’s that simple,” I say.
“So can they—can you guys do heart surgery on a bear?” asks Louisa.
“There’s a vet on the team, and if …” I sigh at all the ifs I can’t even name.
“If what?”
“If he gets help, he says he could do it.”
Danny has a congenital defect called VSD, a hole in his heart, a defect that nowadays, if Danny were a child born with good insurance in a modern city, would be corrected through surgery. A big deal but not that uncommon. From Danny’s heart rate, from his respiration and the edema in his limbs, Sheldon’s pretty sure he won’t live much longer. Weirdly, Sheldon seems less cocky and more certain all at once. Already, he’s tracked down a cardiac surgeon in Laramie who says he’ll consult for travel expenses alone. Experience of a lifetime. He can be here in two days, with machines and a tech.
The alternative—which even Buzz reluctantly favors—is releasing the little guy without intervention, letting nature take its course.
“So do it,” says Louisa. “Get the help!”
“It takes a lot of red tape to get permission for this sort of thing. Never mind the money.”
This sort of thing. As if the situation is vaguely routine. Louisa takes for granted that it isn’t absurd—all this radical effort to save the life of a single unexceptional animal, nobody’s pet, just an anonymous creature from the woods. Yesterday, as I listened to Buzz and Jim and Marty catalog the pros and cons, I said far less than I might have. I felt off balance, even terrified, because to me the choice was obvious when I knew it shouldn’t be. Because this creature and his life aren’t anonymous to me. Did I cross a line somewhere? To me, Danny’s life is priceless—the same life that’s worth nothing more than the joy of pulling a trigger to an army of Joe Blow Davy Crocketts who’d use the EPA to wipe their butts.
I’m at my desk in the lab. It’s late, and everyone else has left the station. The bears are in a concrete holding pen out back. Doris and Tipper have to be on the road within a day or two—and Danny, if we’re simply sending him off to die.
“I’ll let you know what happens,” I say to Louisa. “But what’s with you? What new torture have they devised for you this week?”
“They gave me a drug,” she says, “to pump up my white blood cells. It hurts like hell. I feel like some invisible assailant is slugging me, randomly, all over, with a baseball bat.”
Among the people I know, only Louisa would use a word like assailant so naturally. “Yikes,” I say. “Sounds awful.”
“It is. I’m going to rent a movie, something funny but not romantic. Maybe something with Danny DeVito or Denis Leary. I need mean funny, not nice funny.”
“Is Ray there?”
“He got back yesterday. He’s being very sweet. It helps.”
“That’s good,” I say. “I have to go. I have to fill out a bunch of forms.”
“Good luck.”
“Luck’s irrelevant,” I say.
“Well, same here,” says Louisa.
Why does this conversation leave me sadder, more depleted? Louisa sounds better than she has in a while. Her white cells are set to do battle. Her Good Man is home. He loves her. He doesn’t have a wife in Sarasota.
I browse my bulletin board, its scatter of papers: the softball schedule, a long article on forest fires in Yellowstone that I keep on meaning to read, the menu from the nearest pizza joint, a chart of the radioed bears in our unit, their movements since emerging from their dens.
There are only two photos: me posed with a knocked-out bear in the field (I’m lying down in the pine needles, grinning, my arm around the bear as if we’re in bed together); me at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, swimming in the kelp forest, all suited up, feeding the fish. Zip took that picture. I like it not because it’s flattering—you can hardly tell it’s me—but because it’s me in another world, reality suspended (though if you look close, you can see the flash, and a silhouette of Zip, reflected in the glass wall of the tank). There are no photos of family. No parents, no Louisa.
Danny has his mother here, but I feel responsible for him. I pull the cot out of the supply room; I lie down, assuming I won’t go to sleep. But then I wake to early sunlight, the sound of a key in the lock.
“Hey,” says Buzz. He doesn’t seem surprised to find me here.
“Hey,” I answer.
“Don’t sound so cheerful.”
When I come out of the bathroom, he’s put away the cot. “Have some cardboard java.” He hands me a stained mug with coffee from the ancient Mr. Coffee that refuses to die. “They seem okay,” he says brightly. “I had a peek on my way in.”
“We’ve fucked it up, though. They should’ve gone straight to Fox Creek.”
“Nah,” says Buzz. “Sheldon wants to do some tests on Tipper, then we can have ’em on the road by tomorrow.” Buzz is our Boy Scout, the one who acts like everything’s fine and dandy, no matter how much scat hits the fan. I used to despise people like that. Now it’s complicated.
I don’t mention Danny. It looks as if Sheldon and I are the only ones who want the surgery to happen, whatever it takes. In for a penny, in for a pound. No letting go; no giving up.
I drive to the diner where I meet R.B. when it’s just the two of us, a place the others would never dream of going. It’s popular with truckers, the ones who drive the logging rigs over the pass. He isn’t there yet. I claim a booth and ask for coffee; it’s not much better than the cardboard java back at the station.
At the counter, two middle-aged guys are joking and laughing together, eating platters of eggs with steak and biscuits. Because I have nothing to read, I eavesdrop. They’re talking girls and fish. One has a wife; the other doesn’t.
When the one with a wife gets up to go to the men’s room, the one who doesn’t sneaks a backward look and catches my eye. “Morning,” he says. He swivels his stool to face me. His shirt strains across his middle, and his face looks older than it should, too many scattershot veins, but he gives me a bright, clean smile
.
“Morning,” I answer.
“On your own? Join us?”
“I’m waiting for someone. Someone who’s always late. But thanks.”
“You some kind of cop?” He makes a show of peering at my shoulder patch.
“Game and Fish.”
“Ma’am.” He salutes me.
His friend returns, sits down, and swings around to face me as well. “I leave for two seconds and you get yourself in trouble with the law, Jack?”
Jack ignores the friend. “Just so you know, officer, the guns on that rack out there are licensed.” He nods toward the parking lot. He’s flirting, something I’d enjoy if I weren’t so tense.
“Not to worry. I’m just a high-minded head-in the-clouds biologist.”
Now it’s the friend’s turn to ask if I’ll join them. He makes the time-worn plea that they’re two harmless dudes away from home, hungry for a little female company. Jack informs him that I have a date on the way.
I ask where they’re from. Turns out they’re down from northern Idaho, from mining country, to try a little fishing. When I ask them why now—why not wait for the warmer weather, true summer?—Jack says, “The price of silver.”
I laugh. “The price of silver?”
“Shot up to six,” he says.
His friend explains to me how mining, up where they live, is practically obsolete—how they’re holding down some of the last few dozen jobs—but this spring there’s been a sudden demand, a spike in the price of the commodity they blast and wheedle from the earth. Their prosperity’s tied to that number, a number that’s no doubt published every day in newspapers all across the country. I wonder what it’s like to see the value of what you do quantified to the decimal point. Its meaning to the world is out of your hands.
“Wow. Congratulations,” I say.
“Oh, it’ll sink again. You can count on that. But we figured, why not celebrate now?”
“Get it while you can,” says Jack.