In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (19 page)

By the time I had gathered the shrouded foundling into my arms and stepped back through the door onto the last dirt, by then
the bear was already up again, climbed free and turned back, her bone-limited expression impossible to read at that distance. And then fragments of that bone flying loose as she shook her body, freeing the dirt from her shell. And then snot and spit and bloody worse roping out from her mouth, out of other holes, wounds, opening sores. And then with each step, more dissolution, more disintegration of what shape she had held for so long—and as her body shattered all around her, perhaps she did understand what had happened, or perhaps not.

It did not matter, not then, not to me.

The bear hesitated for some moment, rolled her gaze between me and the still-unopened house, as I stepped forward with my wife’s son held again against me, close in my care. She righted her stance, then proceeded to the house, where with her new paws she battered it as she had thrashed the logs of our first home. Here it seemed the bear held no power over the seams of the house, nor the strength of its walls, and her blows had no effect besides their terrible booming racket, echoed throughout the large chamber. The bear roared, her voice senseless with frustration, even if diminished, and I saw how in her anger she became more an animal, dumber and more dangerous, and while she worked her toothless jaws against my wife’s unencroachable doorjamb I went another way.

Let the bear try for the house, I said. She will gain no entry, and follow us instead.

How sure I meant to speak, but how worried I might have sounded, and more so when I felt the fingerling’s smirking shapes, all moving, all growing faster, radiating from my stomach and everywhere else: He was in my throat and in my spleen, in my liver and in the cork of my bones and flush throughout my head, so that my skull felt too full, so that all my thoughts were pressed
in upon. I had not long left before he had the whole of me, but with that time I believed I could at least reach the lake. With every step its water pulled me more, its shimmer tugging at the shape that awaited within or else just outside my shell, an aura ready to be made flesh.

To have my breath stolen away. To stumble, one knee kissing the dirt. To stand and to struggle forward, and then to feel my voice lifted out of my throat and into the air, loud as my dry mouth allowed, and with it came the words the fingerling had waited so long to say, loud betrayals flung back toward the bear, her thrashing at the sound structure of the house:

SAVE ME
, the fingerling said.
SAVE ME INSTEAD OF YOUR CUB
,
AND I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU
.

I WILL NEVER DIE
, he said.
I WILL NEVER AGE
.

I AM A CHILD WHO IS A GHOST WHO IS A CANCER AND I AM FOREVER
.

I CAN KEEP YOU STRONG
,
AS I HAVE KEPT THIS WEAKEST MAN
,
AND TOGETHER WE WILL HAVE ALL THE LAKE AND DIRT AND WOODS WE WANT
.

The fingerling said,
KILL MY FATHER AND EAT HIS BODY
,
AND WITHIN HIM
,
YOU WILL FIND ME WAITING
.

The fingerling said,
HURRY
,
FOR HE IS ALMOST INTO THE WATER
, and then the bear cracked the air with her anger, turned inside the sound of her voice. She bounded across the dirt, in pursuit of my burdened limping, and while I could have ensured my escape by casting aside the foundling I was unwilling to create an impasse where I held the lake and the bear held the shore—and then in only a few steps I was at the water’s edge—and there the bear struck me just once, a terrible blow landed in haste, at the shallow threshold of the water and the land, the dirt and the lake.

T
HE BEAR’S FIST OF BONE
struck me from shoulder to hip, through my back, scraped against skin and muscle and organ and rib, and by its force I was dropped into the water, the foundling still held tight against my chest, and as I fell I tucked him within my motion, curled his dead body in the curve of my still living one, and then in the shallows came the shift, the slide sideways into another shape so that I was no longer who I had been, or else I was still him and also something more, and then from behind me came the splashing of the bear following me out into the water, into the waves that spilled up to and then crested over her heavy head.

My next transformation was not about a mouth that became a beak, was not merely arms and legs that became tentacles thickened with hooks and suckers. Even the eyes of squid were not pathed as the eyes of men, and so new-sighted mechanisms had to be made in this instant, a second long enough. I was adept now at making do with what time there was, and so here there was time enough for one last plan, the quick purposing of my new body, the filling of it with its task: to kill this bear, this mother I pitied but
whom the rules of this world would not let me save; who had frustrated me for so long; who had tried to kill me and had killed the foundling instead; whom I too had hurt, but whose forgiveness I could not earn.

And what was the fingerling’s role in this fight, and whose side would he take?

Perhaps he had imagined he would be able to again frustrate me, but now it was I who frustrated him, with a body made strange, its hollows unfamiliar tunnels: If he lived part of his life in my spleen, where would he go now that I had no spleen? Where were my new lungs, my new gall bladder, my new arms and legs? For the fingerling, who had besieged my bones to bending, where was there to go when I had no bones?

Only one place, a chamber clenched.

The squid had reshaped my body but it was not all a part of me, and so I too was a passenger or else a pilot, as the fingerling had been between my bones, and while the squid first jetted toward the center of the lake, away from the bear, it soon began the long arc back, by my command. The bear was still bellowing through the shallows when we struck her the first time, raking a hooked tentacle from out the water and across her bony trap-scarred snout, and she howled in pain or frustration. The squid pressed, circled, pressed again, put our hooked and barbed tentacles to their use, all our arms with more reach than even the bear’s own long grasp, and also with a beak the equal of her mouth, if not its better, the bear’s now loose of tooth and weak of jaw, but still the squid did not bring our full fight upon her, not while she was able to stand in the low water. Instead we pulled and tore her flesh, her facing flank, and with quick blows we lured her on, and when she began to falter and to wail only then did we taunt her failing courage
with the shrouded shape of her once-cub, the foundling pushed out into the lake, floating bloated upon the surface and waiting to be claimed.

How the bear bellowed then! Grayest water shook from off her roaring head, her bone mantle glistening in the false light sparkling all the surface of my wife’s new-sung world, and then the bear charged into the deeper water, fast again, fast as she had moved between the trees of her own woods. When her feet left the lake floor, without hesitation she swam on, her armored legs pumping beneath the water, churning her path as she struggled to keep her snout above the surface, pointed at the floating shroud still out of reach. The water was deep and cold, deeper and colder than its small circumference suggested, and into those depths the squid dove, and from those depths we rose again to strike at the bear, to rake our hooks across her belly, the bones of her armor, and despite those gouges we could do no real harm, would never except in that space the fingerling had shown me, that bone-bare stretch of her throat that we could not yet reach. As the bear swam, the squid frustrated her with our speed, with our ability to attack then quickly retreat, moving from her floundering shape to the floating body of the foundling, and there was no danger to me then, so deep inside: From this new station I was never once afraid of the bear, as I had been on the dirt and in the woods and in the house. All my years upon the dirt the bear had seemed to master me, and now I would master her.

As we fought, the fingerling moved within the corridors of the squid shape, assuming new posts and positions, and as the squid swam around the bear so also the fingerling was set in motion inside that movement, testing every space. The fingerling approached an organ
much like the stomach he had claimed, and when he was wormed deep inside that clenched and puckered sac, then at my command the squid charged up through the depths toward the struggling bear, and there I said goodbye, goodbye to son and ghost, goodbye to bear and other-mother, other-wife who was never mine, and if they did not wholly deserve this end they got, at least they were ended, and what mercy I believed that was: To steer the squid to swim before the bear, leading her on, then to turn our body back. To feel the squid release into the water the contents of our ink sac like a fist opening, the unfolding of a hand holding some smoky darkness, holding blackness, my blackness, yes, all that ghost I had named the fingerling when it deserved no other name, and now that son, caught there in that organ, and now that son expelled at last, swimming out into obfuscation, into a cloud of camouflage, into a cloud of grief through which the squid swam, my past floating outside our body, and still I felt nothing, still I saw with the dispassionate yellow gaze of the squid—or else how could I have done what I did—and the voice and the voices of my only son surrounded us, made a cloud that was not just ink, and in it the squid saw everything and the bear saw nothing, and the water churned with the stuff of our ink and the unmakings of the fingerling, torn and threaded by the sharp slimness of that expelling orifice, and as this animated ink he floated in streaks and flumes around the bear, whose mouth filled when she growled to smell him, the clotted stink of something rotten unbirthed, gestated too long.

The squid was a hunter and a trapper too, and I was the squid, and the squid was me, and we shot through the ink toward the bear, searching for that thin breadth of bone-spaced chance, and as we jetted through that horror I heard the fingerling’s voice call out to me, call out in many voices for me to save him, to take him
back in, begging as only a child can beg. Despite his treacheries he was sometimes somehow still a baby boy, and had I been a man his drowning might have undone the taut strings with which I had shut my heart.

As a squid?

As a squid I saw only a food we would not eat, flesh of my flesh, poison if I made the same mistake again. His blackness streamed around us, but all the squid cared was how it hid our long shape, masked our sharp scent. We swam the wet length of our clouded boy, and when the squid reached the bear we sought again to strike her where she needed to be struck, and against us and against the fingerling the bear struggled to surface, her mouth and eyes and ears filling with the bodies of my son, with the minnowed shapes of him. And what shapes they were! Not just ink and boy but already hunger and hatred clumping, solidifying, becoming new shapes, new forms of ancient and angry swimmers, each frustrating the bear, then tearing at her eyes, then dismantling the last solid sockets of her jaw, then eating her tongue from out her mouth.

Soon the bear was blind and belligerent, confused so that she did not know up or down, and the squid circled her flailing once, twice, amid the ink. I wanted to speak to her, to reach out and say some parting words—to say
sorry, sorry
again—but the squid did not have the same brain as a man, nor the same vocal cords, and without the fingerling I could not have translated her replies, and anyway what right words were there to say.

The squid dragged our hooks across the bear’s stomach, this time breaking her weakened bones across new perforations, leaving furrows for the black ghosts of the fingerling to crack wider, and when that succeeded we laid down more cuts, across the hump of the shoulders and both halves of the hips, across the plates of
the bear’s back and head. I needed the squid to strike the throat, craved that hit, but could not help my marveling at our thoroughness, the glory of this hunter’s shape, so different from my trapper’s form upon the land, for the squid was an exquisite killing machine and within it I an exquisite killer. The ghosts of the fingerling hungered, desperate outside my strong-shelled body, and with no other source in the empty lake they redoubled their attack on the bear, tore strings of marrow from out her bones, and with them they grew quickly larger, shaped more like fish, then more like eels. Black scaled and dark slimed, they wiggled in and out of the bear’s armor, and when they slipped away it was with gulping throats, bloated stomachs.

All around me was the squid, and all around the squid was the black of our ink, my own personal black, a trap carried for so long so that it might snare the bear, so that within it the squid might drag her down, and I wondered then: Did she remember the first squid, in the lake above, how he too showed her the bottom of his lake? How there he promised her its future?

Did she realize that future had happened, and that here at last it was at its end, the last of the present, the beginning of the forever-past, and the bear was no human woman anymore, no bear-mother either, but some other thing, adversary made killer made legend: And although I might have felt remorse at the killing of a woman, how could I feel the same for a myth, this unlovable story?

We sensed only the slightest resistance as our hooks swung through the slice of space between the bear’s head and neck, just a small snag and then another as those sharp edges dragged through the windpipe and the jugular and the carotid, and then the squid pushed forward, shoved our head into that space as another squid had entered into my chest, and with our beak we
tore the bear until a loud rising of air filled the water, then pink foam, then black, and then and then and then, and then to be the squid and to have the squid be me, to together be a hunter who had hunted: to swim unflinched as the bear jerked inside our embrace, then to feel her loosen, limp out. And after we finished tearing loose her throat, then we released her bulk to swim arcing away, so that her unblubbered bones might slowly sink, burdened by the heavy weight of the many fingerlings, their shapes come hungry to feed.