Ordinary Bear, page 6
Her face puckered involuntarily, like she’d bitten into a strawberry expecting sweetness but instead it tasted like bitter rhubarb.
“No. No, that’s . . . no.”
“Or, like, they go both ways?”
The guide stared at the man, doing whatever mental yoga necessary to bring her smile back to her face.
“‘Sexually dimorphic’ means females and males of a species show different characteristics,” she said finally. “Like humans. Male polar bears can average nearly a thousand pounds in the wild, and females about half that. But that’s just the average. Individual bears can actually get much bigger. Males can weigh as much as fifteen hundred pounds—as much as a smart car. And the largest one ever recorded stood more than eleven feet tall on his hind legs.”
The ones that came for Abril and John had been males, Farley thought. They must have been. He’d never seen anything so big. Legs thick as oaks, snouts like cast iron. When the bear grabbed him, it felt like getting hit by a train.
“Polar bears follow something called Allen’s rule,” the guide said, “which states that cold-climate animals adapt with shorter limbs and appendages than warm-climate animals. Their paws are covered with dermal bumps called papillae. Like treads on bike tires. Those bumps give the bears traction when walking on ice.” She mimed a bear walking, shoulders arched, legs spread apart. “They have two layers of coat, underfur and guard hairs, which, along with those four inches of fat I mentioned, do such an efficient job insulating them that they’re more or less invisible to infrared sensors. Pretty cool, huh?”
He’d been somewhat immunized to the presence of bears fairly quickly upon his arrival in the Arctic, though not until the initial shock of seeing them in the wild wore off. They wandered Nanuqmiut like stray dogs, coming and going with both regularity and impunity. The oil company had put him through a two-day training on Arctic survival to earn an NSTC cert needed to travel without an escort on the North Slope. Most of the certification was safety and hazmat-related, but one of the six sections of training had been devoted to the Arctic environment. Carry Arctic-rated gear at all times. Maintain high situational awareness—what they’d called “head on a swivel” in the army. Both brown bears and polar bears roamed the Slope, and if you worked there, you learned to watch for them. The oil companies used thermal imaging to detect them, and employed bear guards trained in a hierarchy of nonlethal discouragement methods—flares, noisemakers, bean bags—on patrol. When “nonlethal discouragement” failed, they shot problem bears.
The Iñupiat relationship with bears was more confusing; it seemed to vary with the context. Culturally, they gave the animals a mystical history and role in their lore but, at the same time, saw them as food.
“Polar bears are apex predators, perfectly adapted to hunting their prey,” the guide told her group. “They have forty-two teeth—the same amount as dogs, but ten more than you or me—and deeply scooped claws that make it easier to dig through ice to get to seals.”
Finally, the audience looked interested. Nothing like bloodlust to pique curiosity. A hand went up. The guide pointed at a boy not much older than Abril would have been.
“Do polar bears eat people?” he asked, somewhat predictably. Farley reached for the scars on his face, which had begun to burn.
“Well, that’s a good question. The short answer is yes, they do.”
A collective gasp rose from the group.
“Most species of bears have attacked humans on occasion, but for different reasons. Brown bears—you might think of them as grizzly bears, though there are other kinds of brown bears as well—attack humans only when startled. If you surprise one in the woods, for example. Or when it’s eating something it’s killed. But polar bears? They’re stealth hunters. That means they sneak up on their prey. So most humans attacked by polar bears aren’t even aware of the bears’ presence until it’s too late.”
Farley’s legs had begun to ache too, and he found himself clenching his muscles so tightly that the bench rattled against the ground beneath him.
“Brown bears rarely eat humans. They maul them and flee. But when a polar bear kills a human in the wild, it will eat them. That’s just its nature. And nature is a powerful thing.”
One of the kids in the group pointed at the habitat. The bears had arrived. The voices of the crowd rose as everyone rushed past the guide to get close to the fenced-in enclosure. Farley didn’t get up, didn’t move from his seat. He didn’t move at all. In fact, he found himself somewhat paralyzed.
Not by fear. By something else.
Slowly the bears came into view. From his bench, he caught glimpses of them through the crowd. The two zoo bears did not look like the same species the guide had just described. These bears did not look dangerous or fierce; these bears did not look like apex predators. They looked lazy. Ignoble. Jolly. Fat. They rolled into the pool, played with beach balls, chased each other playfully around the habitat. These bears looked domesticated, their coats yellowed with age, nearly green, almost unrecognizable from the bears that had changed his life irreparably.
“Algae growing in the guard hairs causes the discoloration,” the guide explained. “That’s a side effect of the warmer temperatures here in Portland as a result of climate change.”
The crowd clearly loved the zoo bears, but Farley hated them. He hated every bear in existence, polar, brown, black, and otherwise—even koalas, which weren’t even bears. He hated every bear seen and unseen, known and imagined, hated every single goddamned bear in existence because of the actions of two of them. He wasn’t naive—he knew they had not acted out of malice or intent, but out of hunger, instinct, nature—so he hated nature too, hated it for designing bears that way and hated the world for accommodating them. He hated humanity for causing the climate to shrink the sea ice and force the bears onto land to seek new avenues of food. He hated the oil company that had employed him for profiting off the land and contributing to climate change.
But most of all he hated himself for not stopping the attack. He hated himself for being here to remember it when Abril was not. He hated himself because all he could do was sit there on his bench staring at those yellowed bears with mustard on his lips, seething in all his impotent and pathetic hatred as the crowd cheered and laughed and pointed.
10
A PILE OF TATTOOED PAPER AND DIRTY RAGS
One of the zoo’s giraffes needed an impacted molar removed, and since the procedure required an entire team of people, Lissa got pulled in to assist. She did not often get to help with such procedures. Her usual assignments more often involved collecting massive stool samples, monitoring skin infections, or restraining animals during vitamin shots or blood draws. Excited to participate in something new with one of the more exotic animals, she rushed over to the Africa habitat and made herself available.
Once the animal—a male Masai named Nolari—had been anesthetized, the senior vet called Lissa over to hold the animal’s tongue while she reached in past it with a goosenecked inspection camera and light. The thick and purple tongue stretched the length of her forearm and shimmered weirdly as the bright light passed over it.
“Why is it purple?”
“To protect it from the sun.” The vet was a woman not much older than Lissa but effortlessly confident, with a dimpled chin and blue eyes, her voice muffled by her proximity to the animal’s gaping mouth.
“So it’s a vestigial feature here in Portland?” Lissa said. The vet laughed and looked at her as if wondering who she was, though they’d worked together for three years.
“Feels that way lately, doesn’t it? The rain is more oppressive this year than usual.”
“Why is it so slimy?”
“The rain?”
“The tongue.”
“Good observation. Gelatinous saliva. It keeps the tongue from getting scratched by thorns when they eat in the wild.”
“That’s . . .” Lissa started, unsure how to finish. What was it, exactly? What word would impress the vet?
“Cool?”
“Yes! It’s cool.”
“Yes. It is.” The vet smiled at her before sticking her head back inside the giraffe’s glimmering mouth, and it was the closest thing to the sun she’d seen in weeks.
Brimming with excitement, Lissa told Olive about the procedure on the bus ride home that evening. “Giraffes have the same number of teeth as humans—thirty-two—but they’re arranged differently,” she said. “There’s no top teeth, just dental pads. Big flat things. Because they don’t use their front teeth to chew like we do. They use them to comb leaves from branches. They chew with their molars, which are concentrated in the back.” She pulled her mouth open like she was landing a fish and pointed to her own molars. “These teeth,” she said, her words slurred and muffled by her fingers.
“Gross, Mom.”
“It’s not gross. It’s . . . cool. It’s how they eat.”
“Not them. You. Putting your hands in your mouth on a public bus is gross.”
Lissa looked around at the filthy seats and handrails, the rain-soaked passengers, the trash littered around the cabin. Conceding her daughter’s point, she pulled hand sanitizer out of her purse.
“Did you know that giraffes give birth standing up? The calves can drop as far as five feet. That’s higher than you are tall.”
“That’s cool,” Olive said approvingly. Rubbing her hands vigorously, Lissa flushed in a way that made her feel needy and wondered if her daughter’s approval would always matter so much to her. Or everybody’s approval.
As the bus neared home, she saw the sprawl of the homeless camp come into sight like a dystopian Oz.
“Put your hat on and get ready to run,” she said. “Our stop is coming up.”
“I know, Mom.”
“Maybe we’ll get burritos for dinner.”
“We had burritos last week.”
“We also had ice cream for dessert last week, so I guess that’s out too?”
Olive rolled her eyes. She could be infuriating, Lissa thought, zipping her raincoat. She struggled with the elastic to adjust the hood, which had a tendency to fall forward over her eyes. The bus pulled to the curb at the corner before the stop, avoiding the camp entirely. Despite their height disparity, she had to walk quickly to keep pace with Olive, who ran down the aisle and out the doors into the rain. Rushing to follow, Lissa stepped off the bus into a puddle deep enough to fill her boots.
“Damn it.”
But Olive didn’t stop. She walked quickly along the sidewalk by the curb, deftly navigating the obstacle course of the homeless camp as she weaved her way around shopping carts, torn suitcases full of junk, a teetering stack of pallets. Lissa hurried to catch up, wet feet squishing in her boots with each miserable step.
When they neared the corner, Olive veered to push the crosswalk button. Before she could reach it, a bull-headed Staffordshire mix with legs thick as Lissa’s own leapt out from behind a tent, barking ferociously. Lissa had seen the dog from her window, threatening passing cars and frightening pedestrians. As it lunged, Olive froze in terror, little arms frozen at awkward angles like broken wings. She’d been bitten by a friend’s Vizsla at age two, punishment for the high crime of trying to pet it while it ate. Lissa understood the animal’s instinct but found it heartbreaking too, a noble beast reduced to defending a Tupperware of machine-processed kibble from a toddler. Olive had gone white as bone when she saw her own blood pooling on her hand, and now Lissa watched that fear resurface in her daughter’s wide eyes and stepped in front of her.
That only annoyed the dog, which barked louder and more fiercely. The barking cut at her like a scythe. When the dog lunged again, so did she, her maternal instinct putting her at risk to protect her daughter. She saw that the dog was tied to a sign pole with a length of filthy rope, the end of which it had not yet reached, and snatched Olive away by her backpack.
The dog lunged closer still, slobber pooling on its thick snout.
“The fuck you doing to Smoke?”
She hadn’t seen the man and it took her a moment to register him. His black eyes bored into her so intently she could almost feel his stare. Even with his tattoos buried beneath rain gear, she recognized him from the index of the camp’s residents she’d begun to keep. She’d called him The Asshole for the way he seemed to bully others. He waved a baseball bat whose metal surface was pocked like his skin.
“The fuck you doing to my dog? Huh?”
Without waiting for her to answer, he swung the bat, connecting hard with the sign pole. The dissonance of metal on metal blurred with the bone hum of the dog’s barks, nauseating her.
“I see you up there watching.” He pointed the bat at her windows like Babe Ruth calling his home run. “You like to watch me, bitch?”
He stepped closer still, pure menace. Lissa backed away—a flinch, really—just as Olive came up behind her and they collided. Too late, she turned to grab her daughter and watched her fall backward into the street. Olive landed face up in a puddle slick with oil, where she lay like a fallen angel amid the floating condoms, candy wrappers, and cigarette butts.
Lissa heard the horn, looked up to see a truck bearing down on them, and had time only to scream. The wall of water hit her like a fist, cold and dark and sudden. Water entered her open mouth and nostrils, forcing itself into her eyes and ears. It worked its way down the collar of her coat and chilled her instantly. For a single, terrifying moment, she could not see, the world sodden and out of focus, chaotic.
Then the wave crested and subsided. The truck was gone. In its place stood the biggest man she’d ever seen. He held Olive in his arms, water pouring off them both.
“Olive!” Lissa’s voice fought its way out of her throat like an escaping animal, finding a measure of strength when it saw the light of day. “Let her go! Let go of my daughter!”
The man held Olive out at arm’s length, presenting her to Lissa.
“Take her home,” he said, his voice deep and loud and rough. “Dry her off. She’ll be fine.”
Olive felt cold and wet and deadweight heavy in Lissa’s arms. Her limbs hung limply at her sides, her blue lips trembling with shock or fear or both.
Relieved of his burden, the man stepped onto the sidewalk and brushed past Lissa toward the outraged dog. Sensing something on him, or scenting it, the dog stopped barking and whimpered, backing down with its ears flat against its head and its stub tail tucked.
“The fuck you do to my dog? The fuck you do to Smoke?”
Lissa couldn’t track what happened next because of the speed and her angle of view. The big man said nothing but took another step toward The Asshole, dwarfing him. The Asshole swung the bat and she heard a dull thud. Then, as if he weighed nothing, she saw the big man lift him like a pile of tattooed paper and dirty rags and throw him through the bus shelter wall.
The glass splintered into a million pieces that fell to the wet ground like rain.
The big man turned back to her. She saw the scars across his face, the one milky eye, the other dark as a bruise.
“Go,” he said. “Now. Go.”
11
YOU WERE LOOKING AT MY SCARS
Lissa called in sick to work for the rest of the week to stay home with Olive. Though she watched her daughter closely for signs of lingering trauma, she showed no adverse effects—not outwardly, at least—and even seemed to enjoy the idea of a minivacation with Mom. They ate boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese, frozen burritos, sleeves of canned tuna. Olive spent hours in front of her favorite cartoons while Lissa watched out the window as the Portland Police Department, the transit police, and volunteers from a housing advocacy nonprofit cleared the homeless camp.
When she called the police the night of the attack, the dispatcher told her the camp was scheduled to be cleared that week anyway. “It’s part of the mayor’s broader initiative to sweep the camps in more visible public locations in an effort to encourage the under-homed to seek out shelters and other sanctioned locations,” she said.
“I don’t care why you do it,” Lissa told her. “Just get them off my goddamned street.”
The effort took some doing. The crews closed the bus stop temporarily and brought in a dumpster that filled quickly with bags of trash and human waste. Under supervision, the campers packed up their gear and left with their carts to find somewhere else to haunt. Lissa hadn’t noticed it right away, but a truck from the Multnomah County Animal Welfare Department had also joined the fray, collaring and removing campers’ dogs.
She did not see the giant but wished she’d had a chance to thank him. She would keep an eye out for him. Even in a city the size of Portland, it couldn’t be easy to hide someone as distinctive as him. Nor did she see The Asshole—at least, not at first. After the garbage trucks and the social workers and housing advocates had left, after the last police car had turned off its lights and pulled away from the bus shelter, after the sidewalk had been cleared completely and pedestrians reappeared for the first time in months, she watched mindlessly from her window until one of them stopped, turned, and stared directly up at her from across the street.
She jumped in her seat.
You.
He lifted a hand and pointed at her. Then he dragged a finger across his tattooed throat. Lissa quickly pulled down her shade.
“Fuck you,” she said.
“What’d you say, Mom?” Olive said, looking up from the TV.
“Nothing, honey. Go back to your show.”
After the weekend she hired a babysitter to pick Olive up at school for a few days and bring her home rather than sending her to after-school care. Lissa couldn’t really afford the luxury, but it let her get back to work without having to rush off. Having missed a few days at the zoo, she expected to be punished, and having time for extra credit might help.
On her first day back, she held Olive’s hand tightly at the bus stop as the rain fell around them. Though the glass shelter had yet to be repaired, a TriMet crew had swept up the broken pieces and taped the edges. Lissa shuddered, wondering what had caused the stains that lingered on the sidewalk where the camp used to be. She’d never been so grateful to step onto a filthy bus.
