Thomas McGuane - Crow Fair - Stories

Jack came back in through the tent flap, slapping it open abruptly. He crouched down, staring at Tony. Then he said, “He’s dead.”

Tony sat up. The zombie paperback splattered on the dirt floor. He stood and walked straight past Jack, out through the flap, then came back in, kicking the book out of his way, and lay down again.

“He sure is,” he said.

“So what happened?”

“He took something.”

“Jesus. Did you see this coming?”

“No. I thought it was an act.”

“Is the food in there with him?”

“He hauled it back up the tree. Where the bears couldn’t get it.”

“Bears. Jesus, I forgot about bears.” Jack dashed out of the tent once more. When he returned, dangling Hewlitt’s gun by its barrel, he had a wild look in his eyes. Tony knew what it was and said nothing.

“I’ll get a fire going,” Jack said. “We’ve got to eat something. Why don’t you get the food down and see what we’ve got.”

Outside they felt the strangeness of being alone in the camp, the cold fire, Hewlitt’s silent tent. The boat meant everything, and separately they checked to see that it was still there. Tony ended up crouched by the fire pit, shaving off kindling with his hatchet, while Jack puzzled over the knots on the ground stake: the rope led upward over a branch, suspending the food supplies out of reach. Once the rope was free, he was able to lower the supplies to the ground and open the canvas enclosing them: steaks, potatoes, onions, canned tomatoes, girlie magazines, schnapps, eggs, a ham. He dragged the whole load to the fire and stood over it with Tony, not quite knowing what to do next.

“If I’m right about what’s ahead, we go for the protein,” Tony said.

It was getting darker and colder; the flames danced over the splinters of firewood. Jack was quite still.

“What’s ahead, Tony?”

“The boat trip.”

“Oh, is that what you think?”

“That’s what I think.”

Jack looked up at the sky for a moment but didn’t reply. Instead, he lifted two of the steaks out of the cache and dropped them onto the grill.

The bedrolls became cocoons without refuge. They were in a dead camp with a dead fire and a corpse in a tent. They thought about their wives — even Jan’s misery and Gerri’s demand for freedom seemed so consoling now, so day-to-day. Tony’s small slip with the scalpel was now nothing more than a reminder of the need for vigilance — a renewal, in a sense. Jack had a home and all his forebears buried on the edge of town. He could wait for the same. No big deal, just wink out. Nothing about this bothered him anymore. He had sometimes pictured himself in his coffin, big belly and all, friends filing by with sad faces. He belonged.

They couldn’t sleep, or they barely slept; if one detected the other awake, they talked.

“I don’t know what the environmentalists see in all these trees,” Jack said.

“Nature hates us. We’ll be damn lucky to get out of this hole and back to civilization.”

“Well, you want a little of both. A few trees, anyway. Some wildflowers.”

“You try walking out of here. You’ll see how much nature loves you.”

There was no point worrying about it, Tony said; they would have the whole day tomorrow to work on their problems.

“So what do we do with the body?” Jack asked.

“The body is not our problem.”

It couldn’t have been many hours before sunrise by the time the bears came into the camp. There were at least three; they could be heard making pig noises as they dragged and swatted at the food that had been left out. Tony tried to get a firm count through a narrow opening in the tent flap while Jack cowered at the rear with Hewlitt’s gun in his hands.

“It’s nature, Tony! It’s nature out there!”

Tony was too terrified to say anything. The bears had grown interested in their tent.

After a moment of quiet they could hear them smelling around its base with sonorous gusts of breath. At every sound, Jack redirected the gun. Tony tried to calm him, despite his own terror.

“They’ve got all they can eat out there, Jack.”

“They never have enough to eat! Bears never have enough!”

Tony went to the flap and tied all its laces carefully, as though that made any difference. But then, as before, the sound of the bears stopped. After a time he opened a lace and looked out.

“I think they’re gone,” he said. He hated pretending to be calm. He’d done that in the operating room when it was nothing but a fucking mess.

“Let’s give them plenty of time, until we’re a hundred percent sure,” Jack said. “We’ve got this”—Jack held the gun aloft—“but half the time shooting a bear just pisses him off.”

Tony felt he could open the flap enough to get a better look. First light had begun to reveal the camp, everything scattered like a rural dump, even the pages of the girlie magazines, pink fragments among the canned goods, cold air from the river coming into the tent like an anesthetic.

Tony said, “Oh, God, Jack. Oh, God.”

“What?”

“The bears are in Hewlitt’s tent.”

Jack squealed and hunkered down onto the dirt floor. “Too good, Tony! Too good!”

Tony waited until he stopped and then said, “Jack, you need to take hold. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

Jack sat up abruptly, eyes blazing. “Is that how you see it? You’re going to tell me to behave? You’re a successful guy. My wife thought you were a big successful guy before she was fat. So tell me what to do, Tony.”

“Listen, start by shutting up, okay? We’re gonna need all the energy in those big muscles of yours to get us out of this.”

“That’s straight from the shoulder, Tony. You sound like the old guinea from down by the meat processor again.”

“I’m all right with that,” said Tony. “Up with the founding families, piss poor though you all are, it must have been hard for you and Jan to know how happy we were.”

“Somebody’s got to make sausage.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Linguini, pepperoni, Abruzzo. Pasta fazool.”

“I can’t believe you know what pasta fazool is, Jack.”

Jack imitated Dean Martin. “ ‘When the stars make you drool, just like pasta fazool.’ Asshole. Your mother made it for me.”

He was gesturing with the rifle now. When the barrel swung past Tony’s nose, the reality of their situation came crashing down on them as though they had awakened from a dream. Jack, abashed, went to the front of the tent and peered out. After a moment, he said, “All quiet on the western front.”

Tony came to look over his shoulder, saw nothing.

“They’re gone.”

The two men emerged into the cold, low light, the gray river racing at the edge of the camp. There was nothing left of the food except a few canned goods scattered among the pictures of female body parts. The vestibule of Hewlitt’s tent was torn asunder, to the point that the interior could almost be inspected from a distance. Jack clearly had no interest in doing so, but Tony went over gingerly, entered, then came out abruptly with one hand over his eyes. “Oh,” he said, “Jesus Christ.”

They picked through the havoc the bears had left until they’d found enough undamaged food for a day or so in the boat. They put their bedrolls in there, too, but the tents they left where they were. Any thought of staying in camp was dropped on the likelihood of the bears returning at dark.

“We’ll start the motor when we need it,” Tony said. “All we’re doing is going downstream until we get out.”

Jack nodded, lifted the anchor, and walked down to the boat, coiling the line as he went.

The river seemed to speed past. As they floated away, Tony thought that this was nature at its most benign, shepherding them away from the dreaded camp; but Jack, looking at the dark walls of trees enclosing the current, the ravens in the high branches, felt a malevolence in his bones. He glanced back at their abandoned tents: already, they looked like they’d been there for hundreds of years, like the empty smallpox tepees his grandpa had told him about. This might be good country if someone removed the trees and made it prairie like at home, he thought. With the steady motion of the boat, he daydreamed about the kinds of buildings he’d most like to see: a store, a church, a firehouse.