Last Summer at Mars Hill (32 page)

And opened his eyes to the muddy bank oozing between black and velvet paws.

Perhaps it was the years spent in cramped spaces—his knees drawn to his chest in capsule mock-ups; sleeping suspended in canvas sacks; eating upside down in metal rooms smaller than a refrigerator—perhaps the bungalow had actually seemed
spacious
when Howell decided to purchase it over his son’s protests and his accountant’s sighs.

“Plenty of room for what I need,” he told his son. They were hanging pictures. NASA shots,
Life
magazine promos. The Avedon portrait of his wife, a former Miss Rio Grande, dead of cancer before the moon landing. “And fifty acres: most of the lakefront.”

“Fifty acres most of it nowhere,” Peter said snidely. He hated the country; hated the disappointment he felt that his father hadn’t taken the penthouse in Manhattan. “No room here for anyone else, that’s for sure.”

That was how the old man liked it. The bungalow fit neatly into a tiny clearing between glacier-riven hills. A good snow cut him off from the village for days: the town’s only plow saved Sugar Mountain and the abandoned lake colony for last. “The Astronaut don’t mind,” the driver always said.

Howell agreed. After early retirement he took his pension and retired, truly retired. No honorary university positions. No airline endorsements. His investments were few and careless. He corresponded with crackpots, authors researching astral landing fields in rain forests, a woman who claimed to receive alien broadcasts through her sunglasses, an institutionalized patient who signed his letters Rubber Man Lord of Jupiter. During a rare radio interview, Howell admitted to experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs and expressed surprising bitterness at the demise of the Apollo program, regret untempered by the intervening years. On spring afternoons he could be seen walking with his English cocker spaniel on the dirt roads through Kamensic. The village schoolchildren pointed him out proudly, although his picture was not in their books. Once a year he spoke to the fifth graders about the importance of the space program, shyly signing autographs on lunch bags afterwards: no, the Astronaut did not mind.

The old man sighed and walked to his desk. From his frayed shirt rose a skull barren of hair, raised blue veins like rivers on a relief globe. Agate blue eyes, dry as if all the dreams had been sucked from them, focused now on strange things. Battalions of pill bottles. Bright lesions on hands and feet. Machines more dreadful than anything NASA had devised for his training. The road from Sugar Mountain lay so far from his front door that he seldom walked there anymore.

The medicine quelled his coughing. In its place a heaviness in his chest and the drug’s phantom mettle.

“I wish the goddamn car keys were here,” he announced to Festus, pacing to the door. He was not supposed to drive alone. Peter had taken the keys, “for safety.” “I wish my goddamn dog could drive.”

Festus yawned and flopped onto the floor. Sighing, the astronaut settled onto the couch, took pen and notebook to write a letter. Within minutes he was asleep.

Andrew staggered from the sound: the bawl of air through the trees, the cicadas’ song a steady thunder. From beneath the soil thrummed millipedes and hellgrammites, the ceaseless tick of insect legs upon fallen leaves. He shivered and shook a ruff of heavy fur. The sunlight stung his eyes and he blinked. The world was bound now in black and gray.

He sneezed. Warm currents of scent tickled his muzzle. So many kinds of dirt! Mud like cocoa, rich and bitter; sand fresh as sunlight; loam ripe with hidden worms. He stood on wobbly legs, took a few steps and stumbled on his clothes. Their rank smell assaulted him: detergent, sweat, city gravel and tarmac. He sneezed ferociously, then ambled to the streambed. He nosed a crayfish shell, licking it clean. Afterward he waded into the stream and lapped, long tongue flicking water into his eyes. A bound brought him to the high bank. He shook water from his fur and flung his head back, eyes shut, filled with a formidable wordless joy. From far away he heard low thunder; he tasted the approach of rain upon the breeze.

Something stirred in the thickets nearby. Without looking he knew it was a rabbit, smelled milk and acrid fear clinging to her. He raised his head, tested the air until he found her crouched at the base of a split birch. He crept forward, his belly grazing the dirt.

When he was scarcely a muzzle-length away, she spooked, hind legs spraying leaves in his face as she vaulted into the underbrush. He followed, slipping under grapevines and poison ivy, his dew-claws catching on burdock leaves.

The rabbit led him through a birch stand to a large clearing, where she bounded and disappeared into a burrow. He dug furiously at the hole, throwing up clouds of soft loam, stopping finally when he upturned a mass of black beetles clicking over a rock. Curious, he nudged the beetles, then licked up a mouthful and crunched them between his long teeth. The remaining insects scurried beneath the earth. Suddenly tired, he yawned, crawled inside a ring of overgrown ferns heavy with spores and lay there panting.

The air grew heavy with moisture. Thunder snarled in the distance. How could he ever have thought the woods silent? He heard constantly the steady beat, the hum of the turning day beneath his paws. Rain began to fall, and he crept deeper into the ferns until they covered him. He waited there until nightfall, licking rain from the fronds and cleaning the earth from between his footpads.

At dusk the rain stopped. Through slitted eyes he saw a stag step into the clearing and bend to lick rain from a cupped leaf, its tongue rasping against the grass. Nuthatches arrowed into the rhododendrons, and the bushes shuddered until they settled into sleep. He stretched, the hair on his back rustling as moisture pearled and rolled from his coat. In the damp air scents were acute: he tasted mist rising from the nearby swamp, smelled an eft beneath a rotting stump. Then the breeze shifted, brought a stronger scent to him: hot and milky, the young rabbit, motionless at the entrance of its burrow.

He cocked his ears to trace the faint wind stirring the rabbit’s fur. He crouched and took a half step toward it, sprang as it bolted in a panic of flying fur and leaves. The rabbit leaped into the clearing, turned and tripped on a fallen branch. In that instant he was upon it, his paws hesitantly brushing its shuddering flank before he tore at its throat. The rabbit screamed. He rent skin and sinew, fur catching between his teeth, shearing strings of muscle as he growled and tugged at its jaw. It stopped kicking. Somewhere inside the fox, Andrew wanted to scream; but the fox tore at the rabbit’s head, blood spurting from a crushed artery and staining his muzzle. The smell maddened him. He dragged the rabbit into the brush and fed, then dug a shallow hole and buried the carcass, nosing leaves over the warm bones.

He stepped into the clearing and stared through the tangle of trees and sky. The moon was full. Blood burned inside him; its smell stung his nostrils, scorched his tongue so that he craved water. An owl screeched. He started, leaping over the rank midden, and continued running through the birch clearing until he found the stream, dazzling with reflected moonlight. He stepped to the water’s edge and dipped a tentative paw into the shallows, rearing back when the light scattered at his touch. He crossed the stream and wandered snuffling across the other bank. A smell arrested him: overwhelming, alien to this place. He stared at a pile of clothes strewn upon the moss, walked to them stiff-legged and sniffed. Beneath his tongue something small and rough itched like a blister. He shook his head and felt the string around his neck. He coughed, pawed his muzzle; buried his face in the T-shirt. The talisman dropped from between his jaws.

On the bank the boy knelt, coughing, one hand clutching the bloody talisman. He crawled to the stream and bowed there, cupping water in his hands and gulping frantically. Then he staggered backward, flopped onto the moss to stare exhausted at the sky. In a little while he slept uneasily, legs twitching as he stalked fleeing hares through a black and twisted forest.

Rain woke him the next morning, trickling into his nostrils and beneath his eyelids. Andrew snorted and sat up, wiping his eyes. The stream swelled with muddy whirlpools. He stared as the rain came down harder, slicing through the high canopy and striking him like small cold stones. Shivering, he grabbed his clothes and limped to the cottage. Inside he dried himself with his damp T-shirt, then stepped into the tiny bedroom. It was so narrow that when he extended his arms his fingertips grazed opposing walls. Here sagged an ancient iron-framed camp bed with flattened mattress, hard and lean as an old car seat. Groaning, he collapsed onto it, heedless of dead moths scattered across the cushion. His crumpled jeans made a moist pillow as he propped himself against the wall and stared at the ceiling.

He could come back here every day. It was dry, and if he pulled up all the pokeweed, swept out the dirt and fallen feathers, it would be home. He had the stream for water; a few warm clothes in his knapsack for winter. At night he could hunt and feed in the woods, changing back at dawn. During the day he’d sleep, maybe go to the library and look up survival books. No one would ever find him. He could hide forever here where the Tankiteke had hunted.

It didn’t have to drive you crazy. If you didn’t fight it, if you used it in the right places; if you didn’t care about family or friends or school. He pulled fiercely at the string and held the amulet before his eyes.

They would never know. Ever: no one would ever know.

Howell’s treatments stopped that winter. One evening Dr. Lancaster simply shook his head, slid the latest test results into the folder and closed it. The next morning he told Howell, “No more.”

The astronaut went home to die.

As long as there was no snow, he could walk with Festus, brief forays down the dirt drive to check the mailbox. Some afternoons he’d wait there with the spaniel for the mail car to pull up.

“Some winter, Major Howell,” the mailman announced as he handed him a stack of letters from the insurance company, vitamin wholesalers, the Yale hospital. “Think we’ll ever get snow?”

Howell took the mail, shrugging, then looked at the cloudless sky. “Your guess is as good as mine. Better, probably.”

They laughed, and the car crept down the hillside. Howell turned and called Festus from the woods. For a moment he paused, staring at the brilliant winter sky, the moon like a pale eye staring down upon the afternoon.

That night he dreamed of the sky, ice melting into clouds that scudded across a ghostly moon so close that when he raised his hands his fingers left marks upon its face, tiny craters blooming where he touched. When he awoke the next morning it was snowing.

The blizzard pounced on Kamensic Village, caught the hamlet as it drowsed after the long Christmas holidays. A brief and bitter autumn had given way to a snowless winter. Deer grew fat grazing upon frosty pastures. With no snow to challenge them, school-bus drivers grew complacent, then cranky, while children dreamed of brightly varnished toboggans and new skis still beribboned in frigid garages. In The Fallows a fox could find good hunting, warm holes to hide in; the door blew off an abandoned bungalow and leaves drifted in its corners, burying a vinyl knapsack.

Beneath a tumbledown stone wall, he’d found an abandoned burrow, just large enough to curl up in and sleep through the bitter days. He avoided the cottages now. The fetid scent of men still clinging to the forsaken structures frightened him, ripe as it was with some perplexing memory. He yawned and drew his paws under him, tail curving to cover his muzzle and warm the freezing air he breathed. Above him the wall hid the remains of the grouse he’d killed last night. The faint rotting smell comforted him, and he slept deeply.

He woke to silence: so utterly still that his hackles rose and he growled softly with unease. Even in the burrow he could always hear the soft stirrings of the world—wind in dead leaves, chickadees fighting in the pines, the crack of branches breaking from the cold. Now he heard only a dull scratching. Stiff-legged he crept through the tunnel and emerged into the storm.

Stones had prevented snow from blocking the entrance to his den. He slunk through the narrow burrow and shook himself. Snow fell so fast that within moments his fur was thick with it. Everywhere branches had collapsed. Entire pines bowed toward the ground until they snapped, dark trunks quickly and silently buried. He buried his muzzle in the drift, then reared back, snarling. Abruptly he turned and leaped atop the stone wall. As he did so, he dislodged a heavy ledge of snow that fell behind him without a sound.

From the wall he tested the wind. Nothing. It blew his ruff back until he shivered beneath snow so thick that he could not shake himself dry. He slunk down, stumbling into a drift, and sniffed for the burrow entrance.

Gone. Displaced snow blocked the hole. He could smell nothing. Frantically he dug at the wall. More snow slid from the stones, and he jumped back, growling. From stone to stone he ran, pawing frenziedly, burying his muzzle as he tried to find a warm smell, the scent of frozen blood or spoor. Snow congealed between his pads, matting his legs so that he swam gracelessly through the shifting mass. Exhausted, he huddled at the base of the wall until cold gnawed at his chest. Then he staggered upward until he once again stood clear at the top. Bitter wind clamped his muzzle. His eyelids froze. Blindly he began to run along the wall’s crest, slipping between rocks and panting.

The wall ended. A wind-riven hill sloped away from him, and he leaped, tumbled by the storm until the snow met him and he flailed whimpering through the endless drifts.

Howell sat before the window, watching the storm. The telephone lines linking him to the village sagged drearily in hoary crescents. He knew they would break as they did during every blizzard. He had already spoken to Peter, to Dr. Lancaster, to Mr. Schelling, the grocer, who wondered if he needed anything before the store closed. He could snap the lines himself now if he wanted. There was no one else to talk to.

He no longer cared. The heaviness in his lungs had spread these last few weeks until his entire chest felt ribbed in stone, his legs and arms so light in comparison they might be wings. He knew that one by one the elements of his body were leaving him. Only the pills gave him strength, and he refilled the plastic bottles often.