Sacrament

‘Are you finished with your pictures now?’ he wanted to know.

‘Near enough.’

‘You should have gone down to Churchill. They’ve got a lot more bears there—’

‘—and a lot of tourists taking pictures of them.’

‘You could take pictures of the tourists taking pictures of the bears,’ Tegelstrom said.

‘Only if one of them was being eaten.’

Peter was much amused by this. His arranging of the lights finished, he climbed down the ladder and switched them on. The children clapped. There isn’t much here to keep them occupied,’ he said. ‘I feel bad for them sometimes. We’re going to move down to Prince Albert in the spring.’ He nodded into the house. ‘My wife doesn’t want to, but the babies need a better life than this.’

The babies, as he called them, had been playing with Adrianna, and at her bidding had gone inside to put on their Hallowe’en masks. Now they reappeared, jabbering and whooping to inspire some fear. The masks were. Will guessed, the shy wife’s handiwork: not gleeful vampires or ghouls, but more troubled spirits, constructed from scraps of sealskin and bits of fur and cardboard, all roughly daubed with red and blue paint. Set on such diminutive bodies they were strangely unsettling.

‘Come and stand here for me, will you?’ Will said, calling them over to pose in front of the doorway.

‘Do I get to be in this?’ Tegelstrom asked.

‘No,’ Will said bluntly.

Affably enough, Tegelstrom stepped out of the picture, and Will went down on his haunches in front of the children, who had ceased their hollers and were standing at the doorstep, hand in hand. There was a sudden gravity in the moment. This wasn’t the happy family portrait Adrianna had been trying to arrange. It was a snapshot of two mournful spirits, posed in the twilight beneath a loop of plastic lights. Will was happier with the shot than any of the pictures he’d made at the dump.

Cornelius was not yet home, which was no great surprise.

‘He’s probably smoking pot with the Brothers Grimm,’ Will said, referring to the two Germans with whom Cornelius had struck up a dope-and-beer-driven friendship. They lived in what was indisputably the most luxurious home in the community, complete with a sizeable television. Besides the dope, Cornelius had confided, they had a collection of all-girl wrestling films so extensive it was worthy of academic study.

‘So we’re done here?’ Adrianna said, as she set about making the vodka martinis they always drank around this time. It was a ritual that had begun as a joke in a mud-hole in Botswana, passing a flask of vodka back and forth pretending they were sipping very dry martinis at the Savoy.

‘We’re done,’ Will said.

‘You’re disappointed.’

‘I’m always disappointed. It’s never what I want it to be.’

‘Maybe you want too much.’

‘We’ve had this conversation.’

‘I’m having it again.’

‘Well I’m not,’ Will said, with a monotony in his tone Adrianna knew of old. She let the subject drop and moved on to another.

‘Is it okay if I take a couple of weeks off? I want to go down to Tallahassee to see my mother.’

‘No problem. I’m going back to San Francisco to spend some time with the pictures, start to make the connections.’

This was a favourite phrase of his, describing a process Adrianna had never completely comprehended. She’d watched him doing it: laying out maybe two or three hundred images on the floor and wandering amongst them for several days, arranging and rearranging them, laying unlikely combinations together to see if sparks flew; growling at himself when they didn’t; getting a little high and sitting up through the night, meditating on the work. When the connections were made, and the pictures put in what he considered to be the right order, there was undeniably an energy in them that had not been there before. But the pain of the process had always seemed to Adrianna out of all proportion to the improvement. It was a kind of masochism, she’d decided; his last, despairing attempt to make sense of the senseless before the images left his hands.

‘Your cocktail, sir,’ Adrianna said, setting the martini at Will’s elbow. He thanked her, picked it up and they clinked glasses.

‘It’s not like Cornelius to miss vodka,’ Adrianna observed.

‘You just want an excuse to check out the Brothers Grimm,’ Will said.

Adrianna didn’t contest the point. ‘Gert looks like he’d be fun in bed.’

‘Is he the one with the beer belly?’

‘Yep.’

‘He’s all yours. Anyway, I think they’re a package deal. You can’t have one without the other.’

Will picked up his cigarettes and wandered over to the front door, taking his martini with him. He turned on the porch-light, opened the door and leaning against the door-jamb lit a cigarette. The Tegelstrom kids had gone inside, and were probably tucked up in bed by now, but the lights Peter had put up to entertain them were still bright: a halo of orange pumpkins and white skulls around the house, rocking gently in the gusting wind.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ Will said. ‘I was going to wait for Cornelius but…I don’t think there’s going to be another book after this.’

‘I knew you were fretting about something. I thought maybe it was me—’

‘Oh God no,’ Will said. ‘You’re the best, Adie. Without you and Cornelius I’d have given up on all this shit a long time ago.’

‘So why now?’

‘I’m out of love with the whole thing,’ he said. ‘None of it makes any difference. We’ll show the pictures of the bears and all it’ll do is make more people come and watch them getting their noses stuck in mayonnaise jars. It’s a waste of bloody time.’

‘What will you do instead?’

‘I don’t know. It’s a good question. It feels like…I don’t know…’

‘What does it feel like?’

‘That everything’s winding down. I’m forty-one and it feels like I’ve seen too much and been too many places and it’s all blurred together. There’s no magic left. I’ve done my drugs. I’ve had my infatuations. I’ve outgrown Wagner. This is as good as it’s going to get. And it’s not that great.’

Adrianna came to join him at the door, putting her chin on his shoulder. ‘Oh my poor Will,’ she said, in her best cocktail clip. ‘So famous, so celebrated, and so very, very bored.’

‘Are you mocking my ennui?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought so.’

‘You’re tired. You should take a year off. Go sit in the sun with a beautiful boy. That’s Dr Adrianna’s advice.’

‘Will you find me the boy?’

‘Oh Lord. Are you that exhausted?’

‘I couldn’t cruise a bar if my life depended upon it.’

‘So don’t. Have another martini.’

‘No, I’ve got a better idea,’ Will said. ‘You make the drinks, I’ll go fetch Cornelius. Then we can all get maudlin together.’

VI

Cornelius had spent the dregs of the afternoon with the Lauterbach brothers, and had a fine time of it, watching the wrestling flicks and smoking their weed. He’d left as darkness fell, intending to head back to the house for a couple of shots of vodka, but halfway along Main Street the prospect of dealing with Adrianna had loomed. He wasn’t in the mood for apologies and justifications; they’d only bring him down. So instead of heading back he fished out the fat roach he’d connived from Gert, and wandered down towards the water to smoke it.

As he walked, weaving between the houses, the wind carried flecks of snow from across the Bay, grazing his face. He stopped beneath one of the lamps that illuminated the ground between the back of the houses and the water’s edge and turned his face up to the light so as to watch the flakes spilling down. ‘Pretty…’ he said to himself. So much prettier than bears. When he got back, he’d tell Will he should give up with animals and start photographing snowflakes instead. They were a lot more endangered, his gently befuddled wits decided. As soon as the sun came out they were gone, weren’t they? All their perfection, melted away. It was tragic.

Will didn’t get as far as the Lauterbach house. He’d trudged maybe a hundred yards down Main Street – the wind getting stronger with every gust, the snow it carried thickening – when he caught sight of Cornelius, reeling around, face to the sky. He was obviously high, which was no great surprise. It had always been Cornelius’ way of dealing with life, and Will had far too many quirks of his own to be judgmental about it. But there was a time and a place for such excesses, and the Main Street of Balthazar in bear season was not one of them.

‘Cornelius!’ Will yelled. ‘Cornelius? Can you hear me?’

The answer was apparently no. Cornelius just kept up his dervish dance under the lamp. Will started down the street in the man’s direction, cursing him ripely as he went. He didn’t waste his breath shouting, the wind was too strong, but part of the way down the street he regretted not doing so because without warning Cornelius gave up his spinning and slipped out of sight between the houses. Will picked up his pace, though he was tempted to head back to the house and arm himself before pursuing Cornelius any further. If he did so, however, he risked losing the man altogether, and to judge by his stumbling step Cornelius was in no fit state to be wandering alone in the dark. It wasn’t so much the bears Will was concerned about, it was the Bay. Cornelius had headed in the direction of the shore. One slip on the icy rocks and he’d be in water so cold it would stop his heart.

He’d reached the spot where Cornelius had been dancing, and followed his tracks away from the comfort of the lamplight into the murky no-man’s-land between the houses and the tidal flats. There he was pleased to discover Cornelius’ phantom figure standing maybe fifty yards from him. He’d given up his spinning and his sky-watching, and he was standing stone-still, staring out towards the darkness of the shore.

‘Hey, buddy!’ Will called to him. ‘You’re going to get pneumonia.’

Cornelius didn’t turn. In fact he didn’t move so much as a muscle. What kind of pills had he been popping? Will wondered.

‘Con!’ he yelled again. He was no more than twenty yards from Cornelius’ back. ‘It’s Willi Are you okay? Talk to me, man.’

Finally, Cornelius spoke. One slurred word that stopped Will in his friend’s tracks.

‘Bear.’

There was a cloud of breath at Will’s lips. He waited, as still as Cornelius, while the cloud cleared, then scanned the scene to the limit of his vision. First to the left. The shore was empty as far as he could see. Then to the right; the same.

He dared a one-word question.

‘Where?’

‘Ahead. Of. Me.’ Cornelius replied.

Will took a very slow sideways step. Cornelius’ druginduced senses were not deceiving him. There was indeed a bear maybe sixteen or seventeen yards in front of him, its form barely visible to Will through the snow-flecked murk.

‘Are you still there. Will?’ Cornelius said.

‘I’m here.’

‘What the fuck do I do?’

‘Back off. But, Con: very, very slowly.’

Cornelius glanced back over his shoulder, his stricken face suddenly sober.

‘Don’t look at me,’ Will said. ‘Keep your eyes on the animal.’

Cornelius looked back towards the bear, which had begun its implacable approach. This wasn’t one of the playful adolescents from the dump; nor was it the blind old warrior Will had photographed. This was a fully grown female; a good six hundred pounds.

‘Fuck…’ Cornelius muttered.

‘Just keep coming,’ Will coaxed him. ‘You’re going to be okay. Just don’t let her think you’re anything worth chasing.’

Cornelius managed three tentative backward steps, but his equilibrium was poor after the dervish act, and on the fourth step his heel slid on the slick ground. He flailed for a moment, then recovered his balance, but the harm was done. Hissing her intentions, the bear gave up her plod and came bounding at him. Cornelius turned and ran, the bear roaring in pursuit, her body a blur. Weaponless, all Will could do was dodge out of Cornelius’ path and yell himself hoarse in the hope of distracting the animal. But it was Cornelius she wanted. In two bounds she’d halved the distance between them, jaws wide in readiness—

‘Get down!’

Will threw a glance back in the direction of the voice and there, God save her, was Adrianna, rifle raised.

‘Con!’ she yelled. ‘Get your fucking head down!’

He got the message, and flung himself to the frozen dirt, with the bear a body’s length from his heels. Adrianna fired, and hit the animal’s shoulder, checking her before she could catch up with her quarry. The animal rose up with an agonized roar, blood staining her fur. Cornelius was still within swatting distance, however, if she chose to take him out. Ducking to make himself as small a target as possible. Will scrambled towards him, and, grabbing his trembling torso, hauled him out of the bear’s path. There was a sharp stink of shit off him.

He looked back at the bear. She wasn’t finished; nowhere near. Roaring so loudly that the ground shook, she started towards Adrianna, who levelled her rifle and fired a second time, at no more than ten yards’ range. The animal’s roar ceased on the instant, and again she rose up, white and red and vast, teetering for a moment. Then she reeled back like a breaking wave, and limped away into the darkness.

The entire encounter – from the moment Cornelius had named his nemesis – had perhaps lasted a minute, but it was long enough for a kind of delirium to have taken hold of Will. He got to his feet, the snowflakes spiralling around him like giddy stars, and went to the place where the bear’s blood had splashed on the ice.

‘Are you all right?’ Adrianna asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said.

It was only half the truth. He wasn’t hurt, but he wasn’t whole either. He felt as though some part of him had been torn out by what he’d just witnessed, and had fled into the darkness in pursuit of the bear. He had to go after it.

‘Wait!’ Adrianna yelled.

He looked back at her, trying his best to block out Cornelius’ sobbing apologies, and the shouts of people on Main Street as they came sniffing after the bloodshed. Adrianna was staring straight at him, and he knew she was reading the thoughts on his face.

‘Don’t be a fuck-wit, Will.’ she said.

‘No choice.’

Then at least take the rifle.’

He looked at it as though it had just pumped its bullets into him. ‘I don’t need it,’ he said.

‘Will—’

He turned his back on her; on the lights, on the people and their asinine questions. Then he loped off towards the shoreline, following the red trail the bear had left behind her.

VII

Oh, all the years he’d waited. Waited and watched with his dispassionate eye while something died nearby, recording its passing like the truthful witness he was. Keeping his distance, keeping his calm. Enough of that. The bear was dying, and he would die too if he let her go now; let her perish in the dark alone. Something had snapped in him. He didn’t know why. Perhaps because of the conversation with Guthrie, which had stirred up so much pain, perhaps the encounter with the blind bear at the dump; perhaps simply because the time had come. He’d hung on this branch long enough, ripening there. It was time to fall and rot into something new.

He followed the bear’s trail along the shoreline parallel to the street with a kind of exulting despair in him. He had no idea what he would do when he caught up with the animal; he only knew he had to be with it in its agonies, given that he was to some degree their author. He was the one who’d brought Cornelius and his habits here, after all. The bear had simply been doing what she would do in the wild, confronted by something threatening. She’d been shot for being true to her nature. No thinking queer could be happy with his complicity in that.

Will’s empathy with the animal hadn’t totally unseated his urge to self-preservation. Though he followed the trail closely most of the way, he gave the rocks a little distance when he came upon them, in case there were more animals lurking there. But what little light the lamps of Main Street had supplied was now too far behind him to be of much use. It was harder and harder to make out the bloodstains. He had to stop and study the ground to find them, for which pause he was grateful. The icy air was raw in his throat and chest; his teeth ached as though they were all being drilled at the same time, his legs were trembling.

If he was feeling weak, he thought, the bear was surely a damn sight weaker. She’d shed copious amounts of blood now, and must be close to collapse.

Somewhere nearby a dog was barking, her alarm familiar.

‘Lucy…’ Will said to himself, and looking up through the flickering snow saw that his pursuit had brought him within twenty yards of the back of Guthrie’s shack. He heard the old man shouting now, telling the dog to shut up; and then the sound of the back door being opened.

Light spilled from it, out across the snow. A meagre light by comparison with the streetlamps half a mile back, but bright enough to show Will his quarry.

The animal was closer to the shore than to the shack, and closer to Will than either: standing on all fours, swaying, the ground around her dark with her free-flowing blood.

‘What the fuck’s going on out here?’ Guthrie demanded.

Will didn’t look at him; he kept his eyes fixed on the bear – as hers were fixed on him – while he yelled for Guthrie to go back inside.

Rabjohns? Is that you?’

There’s a wounded bear out here—’ Will shouted.

‘I see her,’ Guthrie replied. ‘Did you shoot her?’

‘No!’ From the comer of his eye Will could see that Guthrie had emerged from his shack. ‘Go back inside will you?’

‘Are you hurt?’ Guthrie called.

Before Will could reply the bear was up, and turning her bulk towards Guthrie, she charged. There was time as she roared upon the old man for Will to wonder why she’d chosen to take Guthrie instead of him; whether in the seconds they’d stared at one another she’d seen that he was no threat to her: just another wounded thing, trapped between street and sea. Then she was up and swiping at Guthrie, the blow throwing him maybe five yards. He landed hard, but thanks to some grotesque gift of adrenalin he was on his feet a heartbeat later, yelling incoherently back at his wounder. Only then did his body seem to realize the grievous harm it had been done. His hands went up to his chest, his blood running out between his fingers. His yells ceased and he looked back up at the bear, so that for a moment they stood staring at one another, both bloodied, both teetering. Then Guthrie spoiled the symmetry and fell face down in the snow.

Still standing at the doorstep, Lucy began a round of despairing yelps, but however traumatized she was she plainly had no intention of approaching her master. Guthrie was still alive; he was attempting to turn himself over, it seemed, his right hand sliding on the ice as he tried to lift himself up.

Will looked back the way he’d come, hoping that somebody was in sight to help. There was no sign of anyone on the shoreline; perhaps people were making their way along the street. He couldn’t afford to wait for them, however. Guthrie needed help and he needed it now. The bear had sunk down onto all fours again, and by the degree of her sway she looked ready to keel over entirely. Keeping his eyes on her he cautiously approached the place where Guthrie was lying. The delirium that had seized him earlier had guttered out. There was only a bitter sickness in his belly.

By the time he reached Guthrie’s side the man had managed to turn himself over, and it was clear that he was wounded beyond hope of healing: his chest a wet pit, his gaze the same. But he seemed to see Will; or at least sense his proximity. He reached out as Will bent to him, and caught hold of his jacket.

‘Where’s Lucy?’ he said.

Will looked up. The dog was still at the doorway. She was no longer barking.

‘She’s okay.’

Guthrie didn’t hear him reply, it seemed, because he drew Will closer, his hold remarkably strong.

‘She’s safe,’ Will told him, more loudly, but even as he spoke he heard the warning hiss of the bear. He glanced back in her direction. Her whole bulk was full of shudders, as though her system, like Guthrie’s, was close to capitulation. But she wasn’t ready to die where she stood. She took a tentative step towards Will, her teeth bared.

Guthrie’s other arm had caught hold of Will’s shoulder. He was speaking again. Nothing that made much sense to Will; at least not at this moment.

‘This will…not come…again…’ he said.

The bear took a second step, her body rocking back and forth. Very slowly Will worked to pull Guthrie’s hands off him, but the man’s hold was too fierce.

The bear…’ Will said.

‘Nor this…’ Guthrie muttered, ‘…nor this…’ There was a tiny smile on his bloody lips. Did he know, even in his dying agonies, what he was doing; holding down the man who had come with such sour memories, where the bear could claim him?

Will had no choice: if he was going to get out of the bear’s way he was going to have to lug Guthrie with him. He started to haul himself to his feet, lifting the old man’s sizeable frame with him. The motion brought a howl of anguish from Guthrie, and his grip on Will’s shoulder slipped a little. Will stepped sideways in the direction of the shack, half-carrying Guthrie with him like a partner in some morbid dance. The bear had halted, and was watching this grotesquerie with black-sequin eyes. Will took a second step, and Guthrie let out another cry, much weaker than the first, and all at once gave up his hold on Will, who didn’t have the power left in his arms to support him. Guthrie slipped to the ground as though every bone in his body had gone to water, and in that instant the bear made her move. Will didn’t have time to dodge, much less run. The animal was on him in a bound, striking him like a speeding car, his bones breaking on impact, the world becoming a smear of pain and snow, both blazing white.

Then his head struck the icy ground. Consciousness fled for a few seconds. When it returned he raised his hand; saw the snow beneath him red. Where was the bear? He swivelled his gaze left and right looking for her. There was no sign. One of his arms was tucked beneath him, and useless, but there was enough strength in the other to raise him up. The motion made him sick with pain, and he was fearful he was going to lose consciousness again, but by degrees he bullied and coaxed his body up into a kneeling position.

Off to his left, a sniffing sound. He looked in its direction, his gaze flickering. The bear had her nose in Guthrie’s corpse, inhaling its perfumes. She raised her vast head, her snout bloody.

This is death. Will thought. For all of us, this is death. This is what you’ve photographed so many times. The dolphin drowning in the net, pitifully quiescent; the monkey twitching amongst its dead fellows, looking at him with a gaze he could not stand to meet, except through his camera. They were all the same in this moment, he and the monkey; he and the bear. All ephemeral things, running out of time.

And then the bear was on him again, her claws opening his shoulder and back, her jaws coming for his neck. Somewhere far off, in a place he no longer belonged, he heard a woman calling his name, and his lazy brain thought: Adrianna’s here; sweet Adrianna—

He heard a shot, then another. Felt the weight of the bear against him, carrying him down to the ground, her blood raining on his face.

Was he saved? he vaguely wondered. But even as he was shaping the thought another part of him, that had neither eyes to see nor ears to hear, nor cared to have either, was slipping away from this place; and senses he had never known he owned were piercing the blizzard clouds and studying the stars. It seemed to him he could feel their warmth; that the distance between their blazing hearts and his spirit was just a thought, and he could be there, in them, knowing them, if he turned his mind to it.