All the Dead Yale Men (17 page)

On the way back to the stone house, the bear came out of the shadows. We were at the spring where the watercress grew, and the bear was a blur on gray black, and its fur was the color of a can of black shoe polish, with that muted sheen. It came out of the abandoned orchard where the trees looked like what had been left over after a forest fire: trees without bark, just that hard white wood. The bear moved with a steady, sloppy gait. It was fat from grubs and, I guess, the garbage. Usually, at this time of the year, late winter, bears have just woken up and are skinny. But this one wasn't skinny. Maybe the Girls Club threw away donuts and cheesecake, bacon fat and pancakes. Its belly swung from side to side and it moved its head one way and then another, its path going downhill, toward the stream. It stopped at a deadwood, a tree that had died a long time ago, and the bear tore at the trunk, its claws as white as the dead apple trees in the orchard, and as the punky bits came out, you could see the chips, the shreds, the black debris of half-rotted wood. Like something exploding. The bear found a grub here and there, ate it like a man consuming peanuts, and then continued downhill.

It stopped. It was as though the bear was tasting the grubs, or what it had found in the deadwood, or maybe it was thinking about going all the way down to the bottom of the gorge, where it would just have to climb up again on the other side of the stream. Maybe it was getting tired of the routine, of that struggle
to get to the top of the other side of the gorge. Then the bear turned its head with a muted and yet piercing fatality, his eyes going over the landscape with the most profound sense of farewell, of letting go of the place where it lived, although when he came to us, it stopped. The bear's eyes appeared, with the white snout but black fur above it, like an entrance to a world we could never understand. The eyes had a sheen to them, like black marbles. Then the animal stepped toward us, its fat sides swaying just a little in that measured gait, which so clearly showed a sort of rumination, a thinking that was done not in the mind but in the body, in the way the claws touched those cinnamon-colored ferns, the way his old and probably arthritic joints squeaked, in the lingering taste of the grubs.

“Stay still,” said my father.

The thing kept on walking, coming back up to the watercress, where it stopped to have a drink in the spring and then went back to staring at us. My father stood without moving at all, not a quiver, not a breath, his pale eyes showing some deep consideration, some memory that he was still trying to make sense of: the flak that rose around him, his time in the air, swinging in his parachute like a target in a shooting gallery. I was just beginning to learn something about regret, just the first hint that there are things hidden away in the future and that we are trained not to think about them. For my father, the future had arrived.

But there it was: he got through things by keeping his mouth shut or telling lies. And, of course, what did I know about that ticking clock, how the hand was moving, getting ready to point him out?

The only movement was a few strands of hair on the side of his head that lifted and settled, feathers falling from a shot bird. The bear was close enough for its smell to come downwind: the entrails of a deer, the clean, silver scent of the stream, like dirty
socks and the bitter sweet stink in the bottom of a garbage can, and something else, too, a wild, arctic perfume, not smelled but felt as when you can feel that snow is on the way.

That odor became stronger, and for a moment it reminded me of a fish market, of the ocean. The bear breathed with a slow, laboring effort, all the more alarming because it seemed to be unexcited. It kept its eyes on my father, as though it knew (by scent, by my father's gray hair, by his old clothes) that this was between the two of them. The bear stepped closer, not so much that we could touch it, but enough so that the nose was dark as a piece of coal.

“The color of flak,” said my father. “Right after the red part, after the explosion.”

The bear made that slow, steady
huff
,
huff
, and it was cold enough for the breath to show. Its head dropped, as though something important was on the ground, and when it looked up, its eyes settled on mine. The eyes fixed me, like the lens of a camera. I stared back, even though a bear takes this as a sign of hostility, of evidence that a fight was coming.

In the woods, in front of the bear, my father turned his pale eyes on me, their expression one of mystification, not so much as in what he understood, but in his inability ever to sum it up. I guess all he really wanted to give me was the refusal to panic. He hadn't panicked ever, not even in Poland. In fact, just the opposite was true: at the absolute worst, he panicked the least.

“All right,” he said. “Let's take care of this fucking thing.”

The bear turned away, its fat belly swaying, its claws clicking when they touched the field stone that stood up between the trees, and as it walked downhill, a black snake flowed downhill, too, its skin like patent leather, its eyes like beads made of coal. It flowed around the stones, water going downhill.

“Timber rattler. Just out of a den,” said my father. “Aren't many left.”

The bear looked over his shoulder at us, taking inventory. Yes, it seemed to say, we'll meet again.

And so my father and I walked up to the stone house, where we got the stove going, and with the damper open it made a
huff
,
huff
,
huff
, just like the bear. The stove had been made in Sweden, and it had three compartments to hold the smoke, one on top of another to get all the heat.

“So,” said my father. “We've made the hard decision.”

He sipped his drink. The stones of the house began to warm up and he sat there, looking out the window where he expected to see that bear.

He gestured toward me, one hand out, fingers open, as though offering something and asking for something in the same moment: the sound of the stove, that
huff
,
huff
, so much like the bear now that it seemed like a hint of mortality. Did that make the coming moment, which could take almost any form (an exploding piñata, for instance) all the more real? Was he trying to tell me it was coming? Was that it? If I wanted to speak, I better do it then? So, I was left with the bear, my father, the unspoken thing, whatever it was, all in that sound, so asthmatic, so desperate for air.

He sloshed more bourbon into my glass, although, at least, he didn't add sweet vermouth. The stove made that
huff
,
huff
,
huff
. The clinking of ice in his glass matched that huffing, mean-spirited, ominous sound. He seemed to be back in Poland, because he said out of the blue, “Blood sausage.” The snow in Poland, the camps, the barbed wire, that violent, ghastly world that everyone seemed to think was disappearing but that was really just reconfiguring itself, finding new places to emerge again, to do its worst. I thought about that young man who had found a way to get between my daughter and me.

“Tomorrow we'll deal with that bear,” said my father.
We knew what the bear's run was. We even knew what its mother's run or its father's run had been, since we had been here for generations. We had bacon and eggs and toast, the eggs cooked in the grease in the pan while the stove made that sound. That
huff
,
huff
,
huff
. My father looked at me across the table when we ate those basted eggs, clouded over from the hot grease he had used to cook them. We sat there, as though we had nothing to say, which is how people appear when they have everything to say. Then we went out the door in our coats, our blue jeans, our boots, my father with that Mannlicher. We closed the wooden door and it made a sucking hush in the frame.

We went downhill in that light just before dawn, which is not the darkest but the most blue, with the trees emerging like imploring shapes, the limbs black on blue as though that world where all the phantoms exist gives up its hold on the earth grudgingly, and no more grudgingly than when a man and his son go out into the blue light to look for a bear. We went down the path, going almost by smell, since the watercress was strong after the cool night. The woods were silent, although as the black became dark blue, the first of the birds made a noise, but it wasn't cheerful, wasn't anything but a sound that pierced me, since here we were, in that dusk, in that chaos before the light.

We went along that formal path, and then we turned uphill, into the woods that were a combination of red oak and white oak, bark as gray as an elephant. Spruce grew here, too, the needles as green as money. We kept to the high ground, up there where the rocks stuck out and where the lichen showed on them in gray-green blotches. And all along my father went ahead, bent over a little, going slow, carrying that Mannlicher (round chambered, safety on) in his right hand. Then he turned to me. His eyes were filled with tears.

“What is it?” I said.

“Oh, you'll see,” he said. “Give it some time.”

He bit his lip and then we started along that ridge that went above the stream.

We were halfway up the slope, surrounded by that timber he thought we should sell some day, the trunks tall and cathedral-like. Down below, at the bottom of the gorge, the stream, Trout Cabin, flowed along, not frozen either in this odd, warm winter, from one pool to another, one silver spout above another. Then the sun began to rise and long slanting rays cut through the haze. We sat there, breathing, the mist from our breath rising.

The bear came out of the haze with that gait, its fur looking as though it had been tinted silver by those spots of water that slipped from one pool in the stream to another: the silver of silvers, the shine of shines, that existed here only for the moment when you are up against something that cries out to be said but can't be heard. Mortality, love, the power of one generation being passed to another: all these things were in that silver glint, which seemed to flow back and forth with the bear's lumbering gait. I could smell it, since we were downwind: a sort of damp, moldering odor, like the stink of a deer that emerges from the snow in the springtime, a sort of vague rotting, dog-like scent that has something else underneath it, the reek of vitality, of attraction, of resistance. Its breath seemed to carry along, too, and it had been eating some garbage or carrion, or maybe more grubs found in the logs.

The bear went right along beneath us, its head swinging a little from side to side, its claws flinging out and flopping down in a way that was almost funny, but maybe that was just the work of perception of all those movies that tried to make bears cute. This was not cute. My father slipped off the safety of his rifle.

“Head or heart?” he said.

The bear stopped next to one of those pieces of stone that
rose out of the ground like the prow of a sinking boat. It looked one way and then another, and with the sun rising behind us, we must have been hard to see, but nevertheless, in spite of the wind, in spite of the difficulty of the light, it stopped and faced us. Its eyes were filled with the double suns, one in each eye. It raked one claw over the ground, as though a grub could be found there. Behind us, from a roost, the wild turkeys descended, and the flap of wings, like some unknown presence, shuddered down to the ground. The bear glanced from the birds to us. It waited.

“Head is faster,” I said. “No blood trail to track.”

“Yeah,” said my father. “It's a harder shot, though.”

“It's not much range,” I said.

“No,” said my father. “Not much.” He swallowed. Then he shrugged. The sky above the trees was precisely the color of his eyes, and a black cross appeared here and there: a hawk looking for something to eat.

He put the safety on.

“I'll tell you what,” he said.

The bear moved its head from side to side.

“I'll leave this bear for you to kill one day. You may have to. Even though you don't want to. You'll be alone. You'll have done your best. It might not be good enough. That's what haunts.”

The bear turned to the side: it was as though he was offering the perfect shot, just behind the foreleg, right where the heart was. He waited, his head turned toward us. He was doing his part, and what about us? Then he looked uphill where more wild turkeys fluttered off the roost with a rush of wings, and then the bear went into the mist and turned downhill, toward those silver spouts in the stream.

My father unloaded the Mannlicher, the bright hulls wheeling like gold coins in a pirate's hand. Then he gave it to me.

“It's yours now,” he said. “Not just to keep in your study. But yours for good. You're going to need it.”

The open woods appeared like gray fur, although here and there the ferns had yet to grow and were a rusty color. The turkeys moved.

“Strange weather,” said my father.

THE NEXT WEEKEND
,
early February, a greenish puddle of hydraulic fluid formed on the apron beneath the Audi in front of my house, as though to make me feel that as much as I had tried to escape being my father's son, this liquid, so slimy and yet critical to the way things worked, was there to remind me that I had been kidding myself. His character was sneaking up on me not only in my impulses but through my cars, too. Well, I wasn't going to take it the way he did. That is, I wasn't going to drive around with the emergency break and, as he would have put it, “a wing and a prayer.” Or in his case, maybe just a prayer.