It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (26 page)

It was six inches too long for the office fridge.

“Bugger.”

He went down to the stockroom. There were glue traps lying about with dead mice and beetles on them, but it was cooler there than upstairs. Uneasily, he placed the fish in the drawer of an old metal filing cabinet.

For the rest of the afternoon he worked on new rental listings. His eyes were burning when he stopped. It was late, and he had to hurry to the tube station. Sweating and panting, he emerged at Charing Cross just in time to get the six-forty.

On the train, crowded with weekenders, he found himself thinking of Marie. They couldn’t afford hotels, so they used to pretend she was a client, interested in one of the properties listed with his firm. Every home they entered was a different world. Making love in the “sumptuously appointed Victorian maisonette” or the “cozy garden flat” was an adventure into a series of possible lives, each with its own reckless joys: one afternoon they were rich socialites; the next a pair of bohemian students . . . For three years he had felt the happiest man alive, and the luckiest. Marie never asked him to leave his family, and he had regarded this too as part of his luck. And then, abruptly, she had ended it. “I’m in love with you,” she’d told him matter-of-factly, “and it’s beginning to hurt.”

His wife was waiting for him outside the station.

“Where’s the salmon?” she asked.

A sudden horror spread through him.

“I—I left it behind.”

She turned abruptly away, then stared back at him a moment. “You’re a fool,” she said. “You’re a complete bloody fool.”

At first they thought the white things in the trees were plastic bags. You saw that back in Brooklyn all the time, scraps of sheeny litter caught in the branches of sidewalk ginkgoes and sycamores. But out here in the middle of the French countryside it was a shock.

“Human beings,” Craig said calmly, “are disgusting.”

But as they came closer, they saw that what they were looking at were in fact cocoons, with shadows of caterpillars moving inside them.

The trees were pines, and the caterpillars had anchored their cocoons to the bendy twigs of different branches, using them for tension like the guy ropes of marquees. Clusters of needles had been trapped and flattened under the skeins of milky webbing.

Craig peered in at them. “I guess it’s some kind of tent caterpillar.”

Caitlin smiled cautiously. “Oh well. At least it’s not people . . .”

He shrugged; it wasn’t his style to recant.

Luke, his son, poked at one of the cocoons with a stick. The branches moved, but the dense, opaque fibers stayed intact. He poked again, harder.

“Don’t do that,” Craig told him.

They walked on, passing through vineyards and a long orchard of almond trees. On the far side of this they came to another stand of pines with the cocoons in them. There were more of them this time, and the trees looked more blighted than the others, the branches around the webby fabric drooping downward, with clusters of dead brown needles dangling from their twigs. The three hurried on past.

At lunchtime they picnicked under a stone watchtower on a hill. The trees up there were oaks and birches, and there were no cocoons in them. But when they moved on, turning onto the trail that led back to the hotel, they passed again through pinewoods, and there were white cocoons lodged in the green branches wherever they looked. Around each one, large volumes of needles had desiccated and turned brown. Inside, among the moving shapes of caterpillars, were strangled clusters of brown needles showing milkily through. Dead branches hung crookedly from the trunks. On some of the trees there were ten or twelve cocoons in different places.

Caitlin turned to Luke. “They look sort of like invalids, don’t they, the trees? Covered in bandages?”

The boy gave her the unnerving sidelong look that had so far greeted most of her attempts to befriend him.

Back at the hotel the owner told them the cocoons were made by processionary caterpillars,
“chenilles processionnaires."
They were called that, he explained, because they traveled in long lines joined head to toe. Most years the winter killed enough of them that they weren’t a problem, but the past few winters had been warm, so now there was an infestation. He smiled as he said this, as if it were something to be proud of.

Craig asked if they were everywhere in this area. The man nodded enthusiastically.
“Ici, oui, partout. ”

Wagging a finger, he added:
“Faut pas les toucher
...” You shouldn’t touch them, or you could get a painful rash.

They had been planning to do another walk from the village the next day, to a cave with an underground lake. But after this conversation Craig said it would be too depressing to spend another day surrounded by half-dead trees and that they should leave early in the morning instead.

“Let’s head on up to the mountains.”

“What about the cave?” Luke asked.

“There’ll be other things to see.”

So the next morning they drove to the mountains. Their ears popped as they climbed. The air grew cooler. Vineyards gave way to stony lavender fields and sheep pastures bounded by low stone walls. Above these a vast pine forest began.

The three fell silent, staring out through the windows. The trees looked healthy enough, tall and straight, their branches spreading a pelt of deep, dark green over the bony ridges and slopes of the mountains. On the steepest slopes the trees grew more sparsely, and you could see the gray mountainside rubble between them, but even in these places they seemed to be flourishing, their massive, upward-curving branches bearing thick swaths of unblemished black-green needles.

Only as the forest became interspersed with pasture again did Caitlin see a cocoon, just the one, glistening like a tuft of cotton candy high in the branches of a tree above the road. She didn’t say anything; the others seemed not to have noticed.

The road turned to gravel, following a shallow river until it arrived at the stone buildings of the farm where they were staying. After they had checked in and eaten lunch, Craig spread out the hiking map. There was a pair of
bergeries
in the area that he wanted to see; old drystone sheepcotes that had been designated historic sites. According to the guidebook, you could get to them only on foot, which was a part of their attraction as far as Craig was concerned. They were set below a high ridge, and the woman who ran the farm restaurant pointed out a ringwalk they could do that would bring them past each
bergerie
before circling back to the farm in time for dinner.

The first part of the trail led over a saddle of grassland with sheep grazing on it. There were no pylons or cell phone towers to upset Craig, and for this Caitlin was grateful. Not that she liked these things any more than he did, but his diatribes had an unsettling effect on her. Since being with Craig, she had found that it was necessary to guard, rather carefully, what remained of her affection for her own species.

Over the saddle the trail fell through a valley to a stream where it entered a dark wood of deciduous trees. The stream was deep in places, with pools of green water under ledges of moss-covered rock. Along its banks were patches of buttery yellow that turned out to be primroses. There were also purple flowers that Craig said were hepatica.

“It’s nice here,” Caitlin ventured.

“Not bad,” Craig agreed.

As they came out of the wood and began climbing again, they saw something on the path ahead of them that appeared to be a long dark snake, moving very slowly forward over the red dust.

Luke ran toward it.

“It’s the caterpillars!”

They walked up and stood over the creatures. They were an inch and a half long, gray, with an orange stripe along the top, and covered with pale spikes of fur. Each shiny black head was attached to the tail of the caterpillar in front. Their progress along the path was slow, but the quilted, rubbery pouches of their bodies moved in vigorous undulations.

Craig squatted down. After inspecting them closely for some time, he called to his son. “Come here, Luke.”

The boy squatted beside him.

“We don’t kill animals, do we?”

“No. Mom does. She kills mice.”

“Okay, but I don’t and you don’t and Caitlin doesn’t. But these animals, I’m thinking—they aren’t part of nature, exactly. They’re here because the winters haven’t been cold enough to kill them, and you know why that is, right?”

The boy thought for a moment.

“Oh,” he said in a dull voice, “global warming.”

“Right. Which makes them partly a human phenomenon. Now, look at those pine trees.” Craig pointed to the wooded ridge ahead of them. “These guys can probably smell them from here. I imagine it’s a good smell to them. They’re going to go up there and start making their cocoons, which means pretty soon that whole forest is going to be infested like the one we saw yesterday.”

The boy blinked, then gave a grin.

“Are we going to kill them, Dad?”

“Yes, we are. But I want to make sure you understand why. Do you?”

“Yes, yes. How are we going to do it?”

“Like this.”

Craig stood up and stamped on the first caterpillar in the column, bursting it under the thick sole of his hiking boot. The line started breaking apart immediately, each individual uncoupling itself and striking out in its puff of fur with an appearance of panicky disorientation. The boy jumped on a group of them, crushing them to a dark pulp in the dust. Then he and Craig proceeded to obliterate the entire column.

“That takes care of that,” Craig said.

But a little farther along the trail they came upon another procession, crawling slowly up toward the ridge. This time father and son set about destroying them without any discussion, Luke yelling gleefully as he jumped about, Craig preserving a neutral air, as if he regarded himself as the instrument of some purely impersonal force of necessity.

They didn’t see any more caterpillars after that. The path climbed through an area of the sweet-smelling scrub of juniper and wild rosemary they had learned to call
garigue.
Luke and Craig were chatting, at ease with each other for the first time in days. Caitlin walked behind them, conscious of the need to give them their space.

As their trail turned for the final, steepest part of the ascent, they saw something shiny rising toward them over the brow of the ridge, a couple of hundred yards ahead. It was a car, a silver SUV—the small kind they had here in France—and it was driving down the footpath. A moment later another one, identical, appeared behind it, then another, and then another. Very slowly the four vehicles came down the near vertical-looking top section of the trail, before turning onto the horizontal path that branched off along the ridge toward the
bergeries.
There, in tight convoy, dust puffing up from their tires, they rolled slowly onward, disappearing into the trees.

“What the fuck was that?” Craig said.

He urifolded his map.

“They’re on a footpath,” he said. “There’s no road there, and there’s no road on the other side where they came from either.” He folded the map back up, quickening his pace toward the ridge as if he thought he might be able to catch up with the cars. They were out of sight, of course, by the time the three of them reached the intersection. But the smell of their exhaust hung in the air, and you could still hear the sound of their engines over the tinkle of sheep bells down in the valley.

“They’re driving on a goddamn footpath!” Craig said.

They took the same turning as the cars had taken. Once they entered the woods they saw that there were in fact cocoons all over the pine trees. Caitlin glanced at Craig, but he didn’t seem interested in pursuing the implications of this. His jaw was set tight, his gray eyes glaring ahead along the trail. His bearing, as always, was calm, but she could tell he was furious. He would have liked to crush the cars, she sensed, just as he had crushed the caterpillars. Suddenly he stepped off the path into the woods. He stooped down for something, then came out backward, dragging the bleached trunk of a fallen tree.

“Luke, give me a hand!”

The boy helped his father drag the tree across the footpath.

“What are we doing?”

“We’re giving those people something to think about when they come back from their expedition. A little roadblock.”

“Oh. Cool.”

“In fact maybe a series of roadblocks,” Craig said, scanning the woods again. “Make sure they get the point. It’ll be like those stations of the cross they had outside that first village. Some little opportunities for reflection. There’s another tree . . .”

He and Luke dragged out several other trees as they walked along, setting them across the path every fifty yards or so. Caitlin looked on, unsure this was a good idea, but not wanting to get into an argument. With Craig you had to be utterly convinced of your position if you wanted to disagree with him, and she suspected her misgivings might be nothing more than cowardice. Besides, she didn’t want to interfere when he and Luke w
^r
ere getting along like this.