Road to Thunder Hill (8 page)

8. The Failed Hermit

F
OR SOME TIME BEAR
has been calling himself “a failed hermit.” This after he used to call himself “a failed freak.” Right after our farm got busted, he decided that trying to live with lots of people in harmony was impossible. Perhaps it would be better for everyone if he was to become a hermit. Yet, every year, he throws a huge gathering in August and calls it his “Failed Hermit Party.”

Once, when we were helping him get ready for one of those parties, Alana asked him how he thought he had failed.

He turned away from the pot of venison and turnip stew he'd been stirring and said, “Look, I've been living here alone for all these years. I have my own water and heat source, I grow almost everything I need, but look at me!”

We looked. After all, there's a lot of Bear James to see, which is how he got his name; well, that and because of all the hair. Whenever he slips into hermit mode, Bear grows out his hair and beard. He says he does this to keep the ladies away so they won't distract him from serious hermit business.

Underneath all that hair is a handsome face. He has strong cheekbones and soft brown eyes like a deer's. Dark curls tumble over his forehead and around his ears.

Whenever he shaves off his beard, even Gayl's friends go on about how hot he is.

“We're still looking at you, Bear,” Alana said, poking him because he seemed distracted by the stew.

“And we're still waiting to hear why you've failed as a hermit,” I said.

He turned away from the stove and waved the wooden spurtle he'd been using to stir the broth. I quickly held out my hand to catch the dripping stew. Last Christmas, he gave every household in Thunder Hill one of his hand-carved stirring spurtles. No one, not even Olive, who has the weirdest gadgets in her pantry, had ever heard of a “spurtle.”

“I am a failure as a hermit because of how much I need people, like you two, for example.”

“Us?” Alana said.

“Me and Alana?” I said to make sure I heard that right.

“What's wrong with needing us?” Alana said, “We're your best friends.”

“Hermits shouldn't need anybody,” he growled. Then he pointed to the bag of corn out on the back steps. Would we girls mind shucking it?

Of course we wouldn't, we said; we were his willing slaves. He once joked that unless he found someone like Alana or me, he'd stay alone forever. Of course, we were flattered. And, he added, if it ever came to pass that Danny or Ray dumped us for younger, firmer women, he'd be there for either of us. Thanks a lot, we told him, adding that he probably should have shut up a line or two back.

There were times when he got so lonely that he took to advertising in the city paper. His ad read, “Wanted: Female cabin mate. No electricity/phone. Must like woods.” If he thought they were nice, or hot, he'd invite them to “try it out,” meaning the hermit life. Danny and Ray thought this was a great scam, but Alana and I said we hoped he'd find someone to share his life. We advised him not to make a big deal of the fact that the outhouse was a two-seater, although he seemed to think this was a selling point.

All sorts of women came to try out the hermit life with Bear back then, just because of this ad. Two were artists. One was there to oversee the installation of the gas pipeline over in North Harbour. A few were simply looking for an escape from something. He ended up living with about half of them for a couple of months until he began to miss that lonesome feeling and he'd ask them to leave so that he could continue his hermit work. This is what he would tell us.

These women adored him. They raved about what a great guy he was, how sensitive, how considerate. If they were lovers, they might add something about how generous he was in bed, how attentive, blah, blah, blah. Alana and I would offer them more tea, or beer, or whatever, and before long, it would come out.

“Say, do either of you guys have any idea just how
big
of a guy he is?”

“Big?” we'd say, innocently peering over our tea mugs. “How do you mean,
big
?”

“I mean, gigantic!” the pipeliner had said, illustrating with her hands.

Unfortunately, by the time this sort of talk came out, they were days or even moments away from parting company with Bear. When we ganged up on him for an explanation (we had particularly liked the pipeliner), he shook his head and said, “One thing I've learned is that two hermits are one too many.”

Bear may love Alana and me equally, but I think he trusts me the most. We've always been able to talk about most everything, from the sense of spirituality he feels whenever he's in the woods to roadkill. Around here there's lots of roadkill, with everything from deer to porcupines wandering down off Thunder Hill onto the highway that runs between the hill and the strait. It's likely due to the cottages built between the road and the shore. The cottagers want to feel like they're spending their summers in the country, so almost every plywood shack has its own tidy vegetable garden. And that's why you can't drive down this stretch of road in the summer without passing a mound of mangled fur that used to house a hungry animal. One year, Bear brought this to the attention of the county and found himself in charge of cleaning up roadkill. He'd tell us about it, listing off the numbers of fawns and raccoons he'd had to pick up. Once, he'd even had to remove a moose.

“And there's no such thing as a car hitting a deer. What usually happens is the deer attacks the car.”

I still can't drive at night without expecting an ambush from a light-crazed deer.

I'm even comfortable talking to him about his love life. I'm one of the first to know how lonely he gets. He just can't picture ever settling down with one woman is what he usually tells me. One night, we'd all been sitting out on his porch watching shooting stars. Everyone had gone inside because of the dew, but Bear and I hadn't gotten our fill of comet tails. So after a blue streak scratched the sky he suddenly blurted right out,

“Yeah, that Sharon was nice.”

“She really liked you too. So what happened?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Of course I can.”

“Good,” he laughed. “So can I.” Then he got all serious and said, “Okay, okay, if you must know, it's because of the size of my … my size.”

I laughed then because I figured he was still joking around. One would think a large penis might be an asset. But then I didn't know what to think when he said that women found sex with him painful. Everything else about their relationship might be great, but the whole thing was doomed because of his size.

“How do you know?” I said, “You're always the one to break up with them!”

He winced and said, “Because I see it coming. It's okay for a time, but then they start tensing up when, you know,
it's
coming at them and soon sex becomes painful or even impossible for us both.”

We stood there awhile, listening to the dew dripping off the trees. I guess he thought I was uncomfortable with this information, and he was probably right, because he dropped the serious voice and started joking around again, asking me if I thought it would be a good idea if the next time he ran his ads to ask that only women with roomy vaginas need apply.

I laughed then, but was surprised to feel this tug happen all the way up to my womb at the thought of Bear pushing into me. I mumbled something about it being time to get home, and I hurried inside the cabin to find Ray.

And here I thought I'd gotten over these feelings for Bear. Back when we all lived on the farm, Bear had built a tree house in the big old maple by the barn. It was a very impressive tree house complete with a sleeping shelter and a cooking area. He had a rope ladder he could throw over for visitors but he and I were the only ones who could climb up the tree without it. One lazy summer day I went up for a visit and we'd gotten sleepy after smoking a joint and drinking the beer I'd brought up in a backpack. We crawled under the little tent he'd rigged up for a nap. It was that innocent, really. Somehow in our sleep we'd moved closer to each other and were now face to face and I fairly squirmed under his hand that was pressing me even closer to what felt like a big zucchini in his pants, I realized that I was not the only one pretending to be asleep through it all. I bet we could have fully done the deed and later woken up to yawn or stretch and look at each other as if nothing had ever taken place. That's if Ray's voice from below hadn't interrupted our dreams and made us jump apart like we were on fire. Which we were, but you'd never know it by how coolly we reacted.

“Hold on there buddy,” Bear said. “Ladder coming down.”

“Did you remember to pick that lettuce for the salad?” I called down to Ray.

I don't think Bear and I dared to look at each other for a whole week after that.

A flash of lightning causes Bear and me to crash back into the pool table.

“Whoa!” says Bear.

“That was freaky,” I say. “Lightning in a snowstorm.”

“Only it's more like freezing rain at this point,” Bear says. We can hear it clicking on the window.

A low roll of thunder causes Suzie to tremble and she paces around our chairs. The lights start flickering, so that doesn't help matters much.

“Poor, poor Suzie,” I say, smoothing my hand over her worried face. “Scared of thunder.”

“Me too, me too,” says Bear. So I reach out and pat him on the head too.

The cards lie scattered across the table where Perry had flung them. Clayton Card is passed out on the couch over by the fridge and everybody else left some time ago.

When Bear and I came through the door a few hours ago, the place had been far livelier. There was Mary-Lyn Carty and her sister and her sister's year-old baby taking up the couch. And there was Clayton Card lurching in front of them. He was rambling on, as he's known to do, about absolutely nothing that anyone can understand. When he's drunk, which is almost always, it's like a wire in his brain short circuits and he babbles about things he may or may not have done.

“…That time me and Bugger Larch took a taxi all the ways up to Moncton to hear Pink Floyd. Best concert I ever saw.”

“You mean the best concert you
never
saw,” Perry called over from where he was loading the fridge with beer. “Pink Floyd never played in Moncton.”

Clayton froze for a minute, his hand high in the air, before saying to Perry, “You're just jealous because you missed that concert.” Then, clenching up his face, he started playing air guitar for the girls on the couch. All this time they'd been twiddling their hair and not paying attention to anything. In fact, the baby was the only one who looked our way when Bear and I walked through the door.

I must say I didn't think Mary-Lyn Carty would go so far as to bring her sister and her baby to a place like this. It was obvious she'd been into the beer fridge a few times herself, because not long after we came in she stood up and started slow dancing with herself to Shania Twain and Clayton Card joined her, throwing his arms over her shoulders. Then she threw her own over his until their heads were touching and they were really just holding each other up. You'd think they'd discovered each other for the first time, instead of having known each other since kindergarten. Meanwhile, Mary-Lyn's top had ridden up over her leggings and, let me tell you, she has one serious butt. I wouldn't think that dancing with Clayton Card could be any great thrill either. He's one of those stubble-faced types who think all women want him.

Mary-Lyn hollered over to her sister, who was getting hit up on by Perry.

“You keepin' an eye on him over there?”

Perry had given the baby a case of empty beer bottles to play with, and so far he hadn't broken any. In fact, he seemed pretty happy to suck away at them. Ronnie tossed beer caps at the sister's chest. The sister blushed every time a cap landed down the front of her blouse, but then she'd make a big show of pulling it out from between her breasts. I got to watch all this, which was a thrill a minute. Eventually, Mary-Lyn came to her senses, or maybe sobered up enough to see who she was dancing with, because she pushed Clayton onto the couch, where he must have given up on any idea of romance or life, because so far, since then, he hasn't moved. Mary-Lyn wasn't about to let her sister get romanced by Perry Card either, because just as Perry was in the act of fetching his own bottle cap from down her sister's chest, Mary-Lyn yanked on her arm so hard that Perry almost got jerked right off his feet. They left after that, roaring down Perry's lane in Mary-Lyn's pick-up.

One of the windows out back began rattling even louder than before and the lights continued to flicker on and off. Just before Perry left, he'd tried to phone his buddy down in Diligent Brook, but then he slammed the receiver down. “Just my fucking luck! Now the phone lines are down too,” he'd said, kicking the door open into the night.

His
luck? Think of the mess
my
luck was in. The phone lines were down, Bear was in no shape to drive out there in the storm, and even if I did get home I had no kitchen stove to keep me warm, let alone a man. It looked like we'd be stuck in Hog Holler this Saturday night, with nothing to do except to ride out the storm.