T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

INSIDE THE CAR with the engine running, he was in a dream, a trance, as if he’d plunged to the bottom of the sea with Cousteau in his bathyscaphe and all the world had been reduced to this dim cab with the faint green glow of the dash lights and the hum of the heater. Ontario was there beside him, a dark presence in the passenger’s seat, her head nestled in the crook of his arm. They’d agreed to run the car every fifteen minutes or so — and then only briefly — in order to conserve gas and still keep the engine warm enough to deliver up heat. And that was all right, though he kept waking from his dream to a kind of frantic beating in his chest because they were in trouble here, deep trouble, he knew that no matter how much he told himself the storm would tail off and they could wade through the snow to the lodge. And what of the car? With this heavy a snowfall the road would be closed till spring and the car would be abandoned until the snow melted away and revealed it there at the side of the road, in the ditch, and he’d have to beg a ride to work or squeeze onto one of those noxious buses with all the dregs of humanity. Still, it could be worse — at least he’d filled the gas tank before they’d started up the hill.

“Zach?” Her voice was murmurous with sleep.

“Yeah?”

“There’s nothing to worry about, you know. I’ve got two strong legs. We can walk out in the morning and get somebody to help — snowmobilers. There’s sure to be snowmobilers out—”

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, I’m sure,” and he wanted to add, gloomily, that this wasn’t suburban Massachusetts, that this was the wild, or at least as wild as it got in Southern California. There were mountain lions here, bears, pine martens, the ring-tailed cat. Last summer, with Jared, he’d seen a bear cub — a yearling, he guessed, a pretty substantial animal — out on the highway, this very highway, scraping the carcass of a crushed squirrel off the pavement with its teeth. They averaged twenty-plus feet of snow per season at this altitude and as much as forty during an El Niño year, and with his luck this would turn out to be an El Niño, no doubt about it, because it was coming down as if it wasn’t going to stop till May. Snowmobilers . Fat chance. Still, there was the lodge, and if they could get there — when they got there — they’d be all right. And the car would keep — he felt sick about it and he’d need a new battery maybe, but that was something he could live with. The cold he didn’t think about. Or the killing effort of slogging through knee-deep snow. That was for tomorrow. That was for daylight.

They’d spent a good hour or more trying to get the car out, the carpets expendable, his Thomas Guide, even his spare jacket and two back issues of Nature she’d brought along to pore over by the fire, but the best they’d been able to do was give the rear wheels a moment’s purchase in order to shove the front end in deeper. By the time they gave up, he’d lost all sensation in his toes and fingertips, and that was when she thought of her cell phone — and he let her take it out and dial 911 because he didn’t have the heart to tell her that cell phones were useless up here, out of range, just like the radio.

“Tell me a story,” she said now. “Talk to me.”

He cut the engine. The snow had long since turned to powder and it fell silently, the only sound the creak and groan of the automobile shutting down. The dark was all-embracing and the humps of the gathering snow clung to it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know any stories.”

“Tell me about the animals. Tell me about the bears.”

He shrugged in the darkness, drew her to him. “They’re all asleep now. But last summer — at the lodge? — there was one out back, a big cinnamon sow they said that must have weighed three hundred pounds or more. Jared and I were playing eight ball — there’s a nice table there, by the way, and I’m challenging you to the world championship tomorrow afternoon, so you better limber up your fingers — and somebody said, The bear’s out there again , and we must have watched the thing for half an hour before it lumbered off, and lumber it did. I mean, now I can understand the meaning of that word in a whole new way.”

She was silent a moment, then she said, “The California grizzly’s extinct, but you knew that, right?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I meant this was a black bear.”

“They shot the last grizzly in Fresno, probably sniffing around somebody’s sheep ranch, in 1922. Boom. And it was gone forever.” There was a hitch in her voice, a sort of downbeat, as she settled into the arena of certainty, of what is and what was. The snow sifted down around them, a white sea in fragments — the dandruff of God, as his father used to call it when they went skiing at Mammoth over Christmas break each year. She paused a beat, then her voice came to him, soft as a prayer. “Did I ever tell you about the Carolina parakeet?”

IT WAS STILL SNOWING at first light and the wind had come up in the night and sculpted a drift that rose as high as the driver’s side window, though he didn’t know that yet. He woke from a dream that dissolved as soon as he opened his eyes, replaced by a sudden sharp apprehension of loss: his car to be abandoned, the indeterminate walk ahead of them, the promise of the weekend crushed like a bag full of nothing. All because he was an idiot. Because he’d taken a chance and the chance had failed him. He thought back to yesterday afternoon, the unalloyed pleasure in her face as she tucked her bag into the trunk and settled in beside him, the palms nodding in a breeze off the ocean, the traffic light — lighter than he’d ever seen it — one great tune after another on the radio, all beat and attitude, his fingertips drumming on the steering wheel and how was work and did the boss say anything about ducking out early? He wished he could go back there, back to that moment when she slid in beside him and the precipitation hadn’t started in yet and he could have chosen the main road, the one he knew would get them there, snow or no snow. He wished he’d sprung for chains too. He wished a lot of things. Wished he was at the lodge, waking up beside her in bed. Or lingering over breakfast by the fire, big white oval plates of eggs and ham and home fries, mimosas, Bloody Marys, the snow hanging in the windows like a wraparound mural…

The car was cold — he could see the breath trailing from his lips — and the windshield was opaque with the accumulation of snow and the intricate frozen swirls of condensation that clung to the inner surface of the glass. Ontario was asleep, the hood framing her face, her lips parted to expose the neat arc of her upper teeth, and for a long moment he just stared at her, afraid to wake her, afraid to start whatever was to come. What had she told him the night before? That the wild was shrinking away and the major species of the earth were headed for oblivion and there was nothing anyone could do about it. He tried to dissuade her, pointing to the reintroduction of the wolf in Yellowstone, the resilience of the puma and black bear populations in these woods, the urban invasion of deer, opossums and raccoons, but she wouldn’t listen. This was her obsession, everything dead or dying, the oceans depleted, the skies bereft, the plains and the forests gone preternaturally silent, and she fell asleep in his arms reciting the names of the creatures gone down as if she were saying her prayers.

He listened to her breathing, the soft rattle of the air circulating through her nostrils and lifting and deflating her chest in a slow regular rhythm, and he watched her face, composed around dreams of the animals deserting their niches one by one. He didn’t want to wake her. But he was cold and he had to relieve himself and then formulate some sort of plan or at least figure out where they were and how far they were going to have to walk, and so he turned over the engine to get some heat and cracked his door to discover the drift and the chill blue light trapped within it.