Ordinary Bear, page 4
“Jesus, Rebecca.”
“I bet he gave that, that, that . . . beast . . . indigestion. I bet he gave it some awful gas, Farley.”
More sloshing, as if she were slipping under the bath water or pouring another drink.
“But you know what?”
He waited. Tethered to the bed by tubes and electrodes, what else could he do but wait?
“I was married to him for eighteen years. I knew his body like the back of my hands. And I’ll tell you what. That bear probably used John’s dick as a toothpick.”
6
THE LAST PERSON I COULD EVER MISS
The hospital released Farley in August. Though he faced months of physical therapy and carried a doctor’s firm referral to a trauma shrink, without pause he flew back to the village on the first available flight. As he tested the new limits of his body and the boundaries of his injuries—deplaning twice, limping down the aisles with his cane, collapsing into the tiny seats of the puddle jumper—Farley held on to an almost frivolous hope that, despite what he’d seen, despite what he knew, despite the months that had passed, Abril might yet turn up alive.
That hope kept him afloat, buoyant with possibility. Until it popped like a balloon just a few hours after he landed in Nanuqmiut and Farley crashed headlong into misery and pain.
After that, all hope was gone. Twin bears of despair and physical agony filled the empty space where it had been—where Abril had been—like a den for hibernation. Those bears tried to kill him from within, mauling him all over again, leaving him alive and wounded, deeply scarred, devastated by guilt, having already taken away the only thing he loved in this world.
Thinking he might need Abril’s mother’s absolution, he flew to Portland to seek it. His plane hadn’t even taxied to the gate at PDX before he realized what a stupid idea that had been. On protesting legs, he shuffled to the baggage claim and, from there, hauled his only luggage—a camo dry-bag backpack big enough to carry a body—to the taxi stand. He watched the driver try to lift it into his cab and fall over beneath the substantial weight. A compact man, a midsize sedan. Farley helped him back to his feet and wedged the pack into the trunk.
When they reached Nirva’s house—a Hawthorne neighborhood craftsman she shared with her new husband, a lawyer named Sawyer—he unfolded himself from the Ford with some difficulty, shouldered his pack, and limped up the path. The front door opened. His ex stepped onto the front steps and overhanded a hot skillet at him, still sizzling with diced calabaza or hanks of goat for soup joumou or whatever it was she’d been cooking. The pan failed to reach him and the food spilled out onto the lawn.
“You missed me,” he said, leaning on his cane. The weight of his pack drove the tip into the damp grass, and he stared at the growing divot, unable to look her in the eyes.
“You’re the last goddamned person on this earth I could ever miss, Farley.”
Her voice still had the Haitian lilt he’d always loved. Even now it felt good to hear it. Or maybe he just could no longer distinguish between good and familiar, like when an old song he knew came on the radio. She’d been crying when she opened the door, had probably been crying since the Alaska State Troopers called about Abril. Had maybe been crying long before that, even. Maybe since she put their daughter on the plane in Fairbanks, or since she agreed to let her visit him at all. Or maybe since she met him so many years ago, tying her future to him before she recognized him as the anchor that would root her in place.
Is misery infectious? If something as common as a cold is contagious, why not sadness?
She stepped closer.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Of course it hurts.” He looked up, defensive, but she stepped closer still and touched the scars on his face with a gentleness that surprised him. “Oh, that,” he said. “It’s fine.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been touched by anyone not changing a bandage or connecting an IV and hadn’t realized how much he missed it. What would it do to a man to go weeks or months or more without being touched by another human? What would it do to someone to never touch or be touched by someone they love again? Something told him he would find out the hard way.
“It looks bad,” she said. Her voice held empathy. Or sadness.
Or pity.
Abruptly she pulled her hand away. Somehow the temperature dropped in the yard. In Portland. In the whole Pacific Northwest.
“Why are you here, Farley?”
“Because I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
“I came here to tell you I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
He recognized the challenge but did not know how to face it. This was new territory for him, all of it, and all he could do was wander, lost.
“We should . . . There should be a service.”
“There was.”
“A funeral. Something.”
“There was.”
“For Abril.”
“There was, Farley. Goddamnit, there was.”
“There was?”
“Yes. Yes.”
He repositioned his cane, shifting his weight to take the burden off his devastated muscles. “When?”
“July.”
“While I was in the hospital?”
He waited for her to explain or elaborate, waited for her to apologize. She did not.
“Why? Why would you have it when you knew I was still in the hospital?”
She said nothing.
“Why would you have it when you knew I couldn’t come?”
She reached out again. Like an addict who’d been given a taste, he shivered anticipating her touch. But instead of touching him, she slapped his cheek. Hard. Her eyes burned with anger, or worse.
“Because you don’t invite the killer to the funeral.”
Slumped beneath the weight of his preposterous backpack, Farley began to cry. The tears irritated the fresh scars, clinging like rain to a dry riverbed and following them down his body. The scars ran the length of him. The scars held him together in the place of what once had been, pain where once was connective tissue, a circulatory system of grief pumping through his body. But he could not remember, now—had he ever been anything else but damaged?
He lifted his head—all the effort he could muster—and managed somehow to meet her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Nirva.”
“I believe you, Farley.” She reached down to retrieve her skillet. “Now get the fuck off my lawn.”
7
WELCOME TO THE GODDAMNED NEIGHBORHOOD
After leaving Nirva’s, Farley wandered Southeast Portland on foot, walking for hours, limping beneath the brutal weights of his pain and his pack. He walked until his muscles and bones and scars screamed in dissonant harmony. His hand blistered where he gripped his cane.
The Portland he wandered felt like an immeasurably different world from the one he had left a decade earlier. Once so familiar, it now felt foreign. Alien. The city had grown, and he’d lost all sense of scale living in a tiny Arctic village. The sheer chaos terrified him: endless traffic, idling cars and buses, bearded men hurtling sidewalks on long skateboards, women on motorized scooters carrying yoga mats and shopping bags. No longer a small charismatic city, Portland had become a migraine. The constant stimuli battered his shell-shocked brain. In need of a drink, a rest, a bathroom, something to numb the pain constricting his heart like a python, he stepped into a dive bar he remembered from late nights home on leave. As soon as he walked through the door he knew it had changed too. While it still looked like a dive bar, the decrepit furnishings and vulgar art felt like an affectation, like buying jeans with pre-ripped knees. He remembered a clientele of professional drinkers: bottom-feeders, bar fighters, relics, lushes. But now the stools and dark booths were occupied by young people with tattoos and piercings, asymmetrical haircuts, their faces lit by smartphones and laptops.
He found an empty stool and leaned his pack and cane against the bar. A woman in an anachronistic black top eyed him and his gear with suspicion and approached cautiously to take his order.
“Canadian Club,” he said. “Neat.”
“This is a cocktail bar.”
“I just want a whiskey.”
“We only do cocktails and craft beer.”
“You’re a bartender?”
“I’m a mixologist.” Dark tattoos covered her pale arms and the backs of her hands and she wore lipstick the color of a maraschino cherry. “How about an old-fashioned?” she asked. “Toronto? Sazerac? Remember the Maine?”
“I just want a shot. Canadian Club. I can talk you through how to make it.”
She glared, impassive. A hipster sphinx.
“Irish coffee? Hold the coffee?”
“I’ll make you a Manhattan.”
“Shaken,” he said. “Not stirred.”
“You never shake a Manhattan. It bruises the rye.”
As he walked the streets some more, the alcohol warming him from within, he had to admit, she made a damned good drink. But what had happened to this city? What had happened to the world? What would become of him now that nothing remained to tether him to it? And still he walked, pressing on without promise or purpose or pause, letting the city continue to reveal itself to him until he understood that the chaos was why he’d come. Not for Nirva. Not for rest and recovery. He’d come because he knew the city would assail his senses. It would not allow him a moment’s peace, and he did not want peace.
He didn’t deserve it.
“The human body is remarkable,” the surgeon had told him in the Anchorage hospital. “It will heal if you give it time. What doesn’t heal will adapt. But go too far too fast and it will adapt poorly. You’ll damage the other parts of your body that step in to compensate.”
Already he could feel it, his misaligned back, feet cramping his boots, how his shoulders felt like he was still being bitten.
The pain was what he wanted.
The pain was what he deserved.
He’d taken a disability settlement from work, surrendered the company house, left the truck for Mayor Nell. She’d need a ladder to reach the cab—if she could even find the keys—but he had no use for it anymore. He did not want it anymore. He had no home to return to in Nanuqmiut and did not want to be there, in a landscape littered with bones and memories and ghosts.
Before he left, he’d rented an apartment in Portland through an agency, sight unseen, a month-to-month lease to see him through while he sorted things out with Nirva. With himself. After wandering most of the afternoon, summoning the pain, augmenting it, embracing it, he found himself standing in front of his rental as night fell on the city. A small two-bedroom in a nondescript Southeast Portland apartment building in the neighborhood equivalent of a flyover state: no restaurants, bars, or shops to serve as destinations, just bus transfer stops, proximity to the train station, and easy access to the parkway and highways. The steady roar of traffic and noise rose and fell in waves but never stopped. Forklifts raced around a nearby industrial lot, beeping like a race of metal creatures communicating. Music spilled from passing cars, the heavy bass roiling his stomach when they stopped at red lights. Some people loved the noise. They loved the bustle of the city. Farley had loved Portland despite it, the way you tolerate a lover’s flaws, but his years in the village had stripped him of any immunity he’d built. He would never again find peace in a place like this.
Which made it perfect.
Fatigue washed over him like an incoming tide. He’d been walking all day on a broken body, a good ten miles with his cane and heavy pack. Though he wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep, the idea of finding the super, picking up keys, and settling into an empty apartment felt beyond him. The idea of crossing the street felt beyond him.
“Are you moving in?” a voice behind him asked.
Farley turned to find a disembodied head and neck popping out of the fly of a ratty sidewalk tent that sat on a tarp for a ground cloth, like a turtle with a nylon shell. The tent was one of about a half dozen set up alongside tarps lashed to the fence, sleeping bags on cardboard spread on the ground. The beginnings of a homeless camp.
“I am.” Farley looked back at the building, wondering which windows were his.
“That’s good, man. That’s good. These camps, they’re like restaurants. Nobody goes into the empty ones. Right? We need people. We need tents. We need a presence. That will attract the others.”
Farley looked at the man again, slow to recognize the misunderstanding.
“Safety in numbers, right, man?” He had a voice like he’d taken a shotgun blast to the lungs. He wore filthy Carhartt coveralls, construction boots with duct-taped toes, a wool hat over a deeply lined face. Farley wondered what he’d been through, what he’d seen. The man stared at Farley’s face without embarrassment, but without challenge either—at the milky eye, the scars—maybe wondering the same thing.
“The more of us there are, the harder it’ll be for the fuckers to kick us out.” He smiled a mouth full of teeth so crooked they seemed to be fleeing one another. “Lemme ask you something. What do you do with a spaceman?”
Not understanding the question, Farley wondered how he’d gotten so deep into this conversation without following any of it. His fatigue had begun to swallow him. After moving up his legs and torso and past his shoulders and neck, it seemed to have reached his brain, which felt addled and inadequate.
“A spaceman?”
“Yeah.” The man grinned through knackered yellow teeth, his eyes wide with expectation. “What do you do with a space, man?”
“I don’t know.”
“You park in it, man!” The man laughed silently, a wheeze that became a cough. When he regained his breath, he nodded. “That’s a good one.”
Farley said nothing. A wave of exhaustion that felt existential had begun to wash over him, his maligned body shutting itself down. He turned to leave, or tried to, but his body failed him and he stood rooted to his spot.
“Do you have a tent?” the man asked.
“A tent?”
“Oh, man. You must be new to this. Don’t worry, I’ll look out for you. I’ve got an extra tarp you can use. But just for the night. I need it back, OK?”
He extended a filthy hand. Farley shook it tentatively, too tired to resist, too tired to explain.
“I’m Wayne. Everybody calls me Insane Wayne.”
“Why?”
“It’s just my street name, man. Everybody’s got a street name.”
“So you’re not crazy?”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. Absolutely. But my real name’s just Wayne. What’s yours?”
“Farley.”
“Farley. Cool. Do you have a street name?”
Farley shook his head no, the effort both dizzying and excruciating.
“OK, Farley. I’m glad you’re here, man. Set up anywhere you like. I’ll go find you that tarp. Welcome to the goddamned neighborhood.”
Unshouldering his pack as the man left, Farley dropped it to the ground with relief. All day it had seemed to grow heavier, impossibly heavy, until it felt as if he were carrying all the world’s sins. Or at least his own. Now that he’d put it down, he could not convince himself to lift it again. Instead he lowered himself beside it, no easy task in his condition, and sat on the sidewalk.
The hard concrete pressed through his clothing, through his tender flesh and distraught muscles and straight to his bones. The discomfort embraced him.
Wayne returned with a small green tarp, leprous with holes and rot. Stains of uncertain provenance, Farley thought, letting his sadness, his exhaustion, his pain overtake him.
“I can show you how to rig it if you want,” Wayne said. “We can tie it to the fence.”
Farley waved him off and wrapped the tarp around his shoulders like a cape. Without another word, he lay down on the cold ground right where he’d been sitting. The relentless traffic, the exhaust fumes, the overbright streetlights felt like a lab experiment to test his capacity for suffering. His grief dwarfed it all.
Within minutes he was asleep.
The next morning he awakened in the same position, confused about his whereabouts. The day came into focus around him as he struggled to his feet, his entire body stiff, wet with dew or rain or both. Everything hurt and he felt awful.
That cheered him immeasurably.
He folded the tarp into a tight triangle, like a flag, and returned it to Wayne, who sat on a five-gallon bucket outside his own tent smoking strenuously.
“Oh, hey, Farley. I wanted to tell you, man. There’s a pretty good army navy surplus store on MLK. They’ve got, like, a consignment cellar. You can get used camping gear there if you can scrape together a few bucks, man.”
Farley thanked him and limped away to find breakfast. He found a coffee shop a few blocks away where he used the bathroom and fed himself before returning to his building. Once again he found himself standing on the sidewalk in front of it, looking up, unable to persuade himself to go inside. People came and went around him. They passed him by, parted around him like the current around a piling, but he did not move.
He could not move.
After a while he left. All day he walked and walked and walked. Each step ripped through his central nervous system like a fire alarm, each step like triggering a landmine, his waterproof pack of sins bearing down on his disintegrating muscles and tendons.
Before it closed for the day, he bought an old military bivouac tent and used sleeping bag at the army navy store Wayne had told him about. The ancient tent was made of canvas and weighed more than it should. The sleeping bag smelled like something had died in it. It felt aspirational. He would use his pack for a pillow because he only planned to sleep in the camp for another night or two. Just until he felt like he’d punished himself enough.
But how much was enough? What amount of punishment would be sufficient? How long would he force himself to suffer? And what would it take to forgive himself?
