Immortal North Two, page 11
While the mother’s billions of children fed on sugars and passed gases that began slowly rising the dough, the trapper cleaned up and then over by the shed split wood and brought in armloads. When he passed Jack he told him or her a late lunch would be served soon enough. His route to stack the split wood by the stove had him walking back and forth past the table of supernovas and blackholes.
Town
Outside the door to the bar it was very cold in the wintry night. A man who had lost a lot was leaning on the railing looking out at the street. His jacket was open. The trapper’s father only smoked when he was drinking, gambling, or after he did something bad. He was standing on the cement sidewalk leaning against the cold metal railing under the fluorescent green sign buzzing high overhead. A small group was off to his right, likely having a final bullshit before dispersing homewards. Another man whose “Hey” he didn’t acknowledge was off to his left. The trapper’s father stood alone.
The same cigarette that a few minutes ago had dangled unlit from his lips was now half-smoked. How to tell the bad news, how to phrase it. Looking at the empty street in front of him, he shook his head like he disagreed with who or what travelled it. His anger at the fool who risks so much on a draw: the man who risks what he has, to gain what he doesn’t need. That fool.
Standing there in the cold of the night it dawned on him whose motel he had earlier checked in at.
Off to his right some few dozen paces away someone from a group of three leaked out three words louder than the rest, “No self control.” Prior to those comments, any voices he had heard were mostly murmurs, or broken pieces of stray sentences about poker in general, though earlier he thought he heard his name, “Charles.” He tried to ignore them. Whether or not they were even talking about him, whether or not they even knew it was him over here. People tend to think others are thinking or talking about them more than they actually are. Mostly people are just thinking and talking about themselves. Though that comment caught his attention, he kept his ruinous gaze on the desolate street, where around the corner lay his sled outside another man’s hotel. Motel. He gave a weak little booting motion to the snow at his feet. He’d already dismissed those three words and didn’t care to hear any more.
But having been raised in the woods, ears like a predator, his hearing was very good.
“Maybe ’cause of his Indian blood. Drink got to his head most likely. You know they mixed blood a ways back. I heard that.”
Well now. Charles pulled on his cigarette whose grim glow reddened his face, and not like a blush. Like another red. Now he didn’t have to guess. Now it didn’t matter. He didn’t turn to them, he just dragged long and slow and the paper burned and the red got brighter and the smoke churned in his hollow belly. If right then someone were to walk down that street and see his face it might not look so displeased. Like one at a sweet shop considering an indulgence. He dragged on the smoke and the burning core consumed paper and tobacco and the other shit they put in those cancer sticks romantically marketed by corporate lizards packaging addiction and decay in pictures of cowboys and models. Held that smoke curling within him a second. He straightened. He flicked from two fingers the unfinished cigarette away and it cartwheeled through the air, tracing a red burning circle, like the first small performance at a carnival to stoke the crowd while letting them know greater acts are to follow. It hit the snowy street in a splash of sparks.
He started walking in that group’s direction, exhaled straight ahead, then walked through his own smoke like emerging from some brief confusion. Halfway to them, ten paces or so, he took off his heavy winter jacket and didn’t look at the railing just laid it over its top rung. Two hundred thousand years as modern humans and millions more as some primate version highly attuned to even subtle social cues of the other monkeys—body language displaying interest, invitation or threat—and the group of three casual bullshitters picked up on the hint of aggression no slower than a band of baboons.
The least sober of them set down his bottle in order to free up his hands. The most sober of them tipped his up, draining it, then gripped the empty bottle by its neck. The third man, either a pacifist or a coward, or holding a pocketed knife, kept his hands in his jacket.
Charles’ father, Norman, was a good storyteller and he probably would have come up with something clever to say in approaching those men. This man here was quieter, the type to let his fists articulate his inner feelings. Faulty as his reasoning at the poker table turned out to be, he applied a similar process here. Figured the eyes of the hands-pocketed man were the least narrowed and thus showed the least threat, and the man who’d set the bottle down was a step behind the foremost, and so whatever his intentions his greater relative distance made him for the moment less of a concern. Charles’ focus was on the foremost man who wielded a weapon when it was three against one.
In the span of half a second he considered coming in and delivering a side kick to that man’s knee or lunging for a superman punch to his head. Both of those could work, but as underdog he figured he’d need the most surprise possible, and surprise is aided by speed. Fewer than ten paces away, he stepped into a dead run.
The closest man half-raised the bottle but didn’t have time to get it any higher before Charles landed his shoulder hard into his chest. He stumbled backwards then tripped on the drunk behind him and dropped the bottle and both those men fell. The third did withdraw his hands from his pockets and they held no knife—that man looked shocked and unthreatening, and to confirm it Charles threw a heavy right to the man’s open jaw and that man was asleep before he lay down and Charles did not care and did not watch what happened to his head hitting the pavement only thinly covered in trodden snow.
The drunk in back lay with the other man on top of him and both were trying to get up. The top man scrambled halfway to standing and Charles kicked him hard in the stomach and he groaned and fell back again towards the drunk but not directly this time. The drunk managed to roll to the side, out of the way, then used the outside wall of the pub to help right himself, and before even fully standing he landed an off-angle punch directly on Charles’ chest. It had little effect. The drunk felt fingers scrabbling on his scalp and then his gripped head bounced off the brick wall, hard enough to knock him out, probably not so hard to crack open that skull. He dropped like a sack and didn’t move.
While Charles had seen to the drunk, the man now no longer with a bottle, had gotten to one knee. From that low and braced position he threw and landed an uppercut to his groin. The pain arrived higher than where he’d been hit; his stomach quickly felt hollow-sick. He wheezed and bent partways over and coughed more than once and that man got to standing and sent a left hook just back of Charles’ temple. That rattled him. His vision blackened. It almost faded out entirely. He managed to straighten up in time to see the man swinging a right hook. He dodged that hook not by moving away but by moving even closer to his opponent—the same counterintuitive evasion his son would one day use to confound a swiping bear—and in dodging the punch with a forward motion he used its momentum to deliver home a nasty headbutt. Just brutal. Barred even in modern cage fighting. Where his cropped hairline met his forehead, right at the aptly named widow’s peak, he landed with devastating impact a headbutt to the man’s nose.
The man’s nose broke horizontally along its bridge and from that particular fracture little blood came, while from his nostrils it flowed profusely like some gothic fountain. His eyes watered up heavily as they tend to do from a struck nose, and though still standing he was effectively incapacitated. He was breathing heavily through his gaping mouth where blood over his upper lip thickly poured. His heavy exhales sprayed little blood drops into the air. To that ugly and gaping mouth, the trapper’s father landed a straight right. Two top teeth broke away from their gum and flew as if possessed to the back of the man’s mouth. He choked, both from the force of the blow and also out of a reactionary spasm to not swallow his incisors. He dropped to one knee. Then the other.
In his kneeled and dizzy state he was fully at the will of a man whose violence was of the worst kind: you might neutralize an aggressor whose actions arise from an urge to steal or defend—just give him what he wants or leave him alone. Harder to restrain a man who fights for the love of the fight.
The kneeling man was too absorbed with the fatness of his mouth to feel the cold concrete against his knees. He tongued his cratered gums. He had enough faculty to consider whether he should spit out the teeth, or squirrel them to a cheek for safekeeping and reassembly. He should have applied that faculty to wiping his bleary eyes and throwing up his arms in protest or protection from the heavy boot coming towards his head.
Whether this man by saying those dirty and racist words was deserving of this other man’s boot; and whether this man would have broken that beer bottle on the other man’s head and then tried to slit his throat; and whether this man was just a by-product of his environment and history; and whether this man was just an unfair target for misplaced rage by another drunk who had recently lost so very much and failed himself as well his family—his head looked like a football that though it had burst its stitching was still waiting to be kicked. The buzzing fluorescent sign overhead hued this man’s face weeping blood in a tinge of green. To the man indulging his anger: Green for go. He might just punt that broken head now choking on its own teeth clear off its stump.
Charles deliberately took two steps back so as to deliver the kick with his more adept right foot. Such a subtle consideration in the intensity of this moment is only for those who are not short-circuited by impulse. His violence was thoughtful.
The injured man slightly leaned forward, more likely from pain than prayer. But if he was in fact praying, his devout pose only gave the kicker a better angle.
Like a placekicker Charles pointed the fingers of his lead left hand at the man’s head. Then something in his head told him not to. Then something in his head told him to. He listened to that one. He took the first step towards the bowed man while lagging his loaded kicking leg and his eyes are narrow for violent acts and he sights them on the leaking skull and closer now his left hand raises a bit to fully jack that boot swing and he sweeps that strong and loaded leg just above the concrete towards its cranial target and he puts all his effort into the kick now halfway delivered and building speed and then feels two strong and arresting arms around his chest. He hears a word too short to hold much of its speaker’s accent: “No!”
The arms under the jean jacket of that logger had a thing or two in common with the trees they felled. “No.” A thick Ukrainian spoke that word again with not such a thick accent. “He’s not worth it.”
It was cold outside. So cold. Cold enough to freeze this frame. The green lighting could almost hue these men as not so different trees in some peculiar wilderness.
Woods
He lifted the towel covering the bowl and the fragrance was sweet. The dough had risen higher at its centre, tiny bubbles pockmarking its skin. His Raynaud’s hands often white were a baker’s blessing, as less dough stuck to those cool digits. He handled the dough delicately; any undue pressure would deflate it and further limit its total rise. He tipped the bowl then eased out its pillowy contents. Stretched the far side of the dough outwards then folded that wing back over on itself, then same for the left and right sides. For the closest side to him, he stretched it and elongated it greater than the others and wrapped that dough sheet over the entire top of the dough ball, like a big bottom lip swallowing its head. He kept shaping that gaseous mound along the wood counter. It lightly stuck to the counter and that friction allowed him to draw the boule tighter and the dough to mound up taller. He dusted down more flour to its top, then deftly gathered it up and eased it to the proofing banneton basket. He set it closer to the warmth of the stove for its final proofing stage. With an iron poker he raked the coals flat and he put the heavy and empty cast iron Dutch oven directly on the coal bed.
A couple hours to kill. Not to kill, he corrected himself, just a couple hours. He took a book and sat by the window, just outside of the table’s event horizon. The effort of pretending to ignore those items of keen attachment was approximating the effort it might take to face them. He’d made no progress on what to do with them and dreaded the confrontation and figured he’d already considered all available options and had ruled each one out.
Reflecting back on the sauna, he knew some of what he had been doing in there had roots in one of his guided hunts years ago. A client had challenged him to go a minute without a thought. He’d talked with that client about it during the following days, had talked about it years later with his wife, with his boy too: Just watch your mind. Watch it? Yeah, watch it, but tell me if you have a thought. There, I had one. I think. Do pictures count? Yeah, they count as thoughts. Oh…then I had one, I saw a squirrel. That boy.
Wearing thick oven mitts he withdrew the Dutch oven from the stove then placed it on top. When he lifted its lid a small cloud of smoke rose. Wanting to not lose the heat he moved swiftly and shed the mitts and in his left hand picked up the basket now with a fully proofed and risen dough all rotund and pillowy, and he placed his right hand palm-side down stretched wide over the top of the dough. He tipped the basket upside down into his supporting right hand but very gently. He set down the banneton and got his other hand underneath that precarious pillow. The pot walls were deep and scorching hot and it was Gran who’d taught him these tricks and Gran who’d taught him how to carefully lower it and Gran who’d teasingly laughed at the boy when he singed his paws most times he tried. There are those with the pedagogical belief that positive reinforcement is a better teacher than negative punishment. But that boy still part of the trapper here could testify to the acute lesson of singed skin. He lowered with full concentration the dough into the iron pot, nearly as wide as that unbaked boule itself. The heat on his fingers and hands. His nails grazed the bottom and then he eased his fingers out from under the loaf and retreated them between the dough and the hot walls. He unclipped his knife without looking at it and thumbed the blade open and slashed the dough four times to score its top in a hash. Zorro got his start as a baker. Lid returned. Dutch oven laid to bake on the coals. Book in hand, back pretending to read.
Under the bottom of the hot loaf he played his fingers like piano keys. The tightening crust sang small snaps and cracks as it cooled. He listened to its tiny music. Its surface a Scandinavian pageant: mostly blondes, some brunettes, occasionally darker. Where he’d scored the top of the loaf, it had expanded in the slashes and that square island hash, one shade lighter than a char, had curled up at its edges. Thin and caramelized crust with aromas of tang and sweetness. The incredible fragrance of fresh bread. One of life’s best smells. He could go to any corner of the cabin, even the porch, even the loft—though of course he would not—and he’d be in a cloud of this sacred aroma. He asked himself what else even compares. Coffee. The smell of rain in the spring. It’s not pretentious to say the spring because fragrances trapped all winter in the soil are finally hydrated by the rain and released from the earth so it is in fact a spring rain which is more fragrant than a summer or fall one. What else? Fall leaves, he said. Yes. Red and orange and yellow fallen leaves in the fall, that smells like fall. Fall is your world. What else? A woman. Yeah. That woman. Yes. The smell of her hair. Of her skin. Her skin. Turn back, he told himself, your world is all landmines.
Nearly lost in a reverie like a corn maze where every cob was a face from the past, it was the loaf burning his fingers that returned him from his daze. He tapped at the bottom’s centre. Had it sounded dense and flat he’d have returned it to bake, but that thump sounded hollow as a drum. He set the bread in the empty dishrack so its crumb would continue forming up and its flavours would further enhance. The smells were intoxicating and so he left the cabin as he knew he’d cave. On his way out he took the last nub of crust from the old loaf to the porch to feed the bird.
He stepped out onto the porch, leaving the cabin and its reveristic wormhole. He watched an icicle hanging from the roof sweat its existence. The rays warm on his hands. On his face. His face involuntarily melting of its frown. The rays stopped at his skin; their shine was not so penetrative as to thaw his soul’s wintry discontent.
It was silly and maybe it was stupid and it was just a bird that he was anthropomorphizing. He could acknowledge that the part of himself which earlier had noted that his sympathy for the avian critter was masking an attempt to bring the boy back had sleuthed something. Some sort of conflation of kindness and an affection that coloured outside the lines of the shape of his son. But still. The opportunity for a mostly harmless distraction and a little selfless deed and tiny company of his new whisky pal was, to this broken man, rattled and spiritually shook, in this moment…it was not nothing. So why belittle life’s unexpected simple pleasures? Lately, finding moments of relative levity and any pleasure in life at all made him feel guilty, pleasures that included the sight of the sun, and the smells of and appetite for fresh bread. The boy loved bread, a part of himself reminded. But he was convinced there was enough pain in the world already and he wanted less of that. So with strenuous fidelity to his value of kindness, he tried to be nice—even to himself. That was not so easy. Stop framing it as whether you deserve it or not. Whether you’re guilty or sorry enough. Whether bread should smell like bread or decay. Your skin’s starting to look like scar tissue entirely, so just go easy on the self-inflicted wounds for a minute. The broken man agreed to just accept any small pleasures if they came. One more prescription on his lengthening list of medicines. He walked the last nub of crust to the porch corner to feed the bird.
The bird was gone.
