Sacrament

  Words first. No more than a murmur. But that was all he needed.

  These will not come again—

  Steep was speaking, his voice majestic.

  Nor this. Nor this—

  And as he spoke, the pages appeared in front of Guthrie’s grieving eyes; the pages of Steep’s terrible book. There, a perfect rendering of a bird’s wing, exquisitely colored—

  Nor this—

  And here, on the following page, a beetle, copied in death; every part documented for posterity: mandible, wing-case, and segmented limb.

  Nor this—

  “Jesus,” he sobbed, the roll of tape dropping from his trembling fingers. Why couldn’t Rabjohns have left him alone? Was there no corner of the world where a man might listen in the wail of the wind, without being discovered and reminded of his crimes?

  The answer, it seemed, was no, at least for a soul as unredeemed as his. He could never hope to forget, not until God struck life and memory from him, which prospect seemed at this moment far less dreadful than living on, day and night, in fear of another Rabjohns coming to his door and naming names.

  “Nor this . . .”

  Shut up, he murmured to memories. But the page kept flipping in his head. Picture after picture, like some morbid bestiary.

  What fish was that, that would never again silver the sea? What bird, that would never tune its song to the sky?

  On and on the pages flew, while he watched, knowing that at last Steep’s fingers would come to a page where he himself had made a mark not with a brush or a pen, but with a bright little knife.

  And then the tears would begin to come in torrents, and it wouldn’t matter how hard the northeasterly blew, it could not carry the past away.

  ii

  The bears did not make a liar of Adrianna. When she and Will got to the dump, the remnants of the day still with them, they found the animals cavorting in all their defiled glory, the adolescents—one of them the best proportioned female they’d yet spotted; a perfect specimen of her clan—scavenging in the dirt, the older female investigating the rusted carcass of a truck, while the male Adrianna had been so eager for Will to see surveyed his fetid kingdom from atop one of the dump’s dozen hillocks.

  Will got out of the Jeep and approached. Adrianna, always armed with a rifle under these kind of conditions, followed two or three strides behind. She knew Will’s methodology by now: He wouldn’t waste film on long shots; he’d get as close as he could without disturbing the animals and then he’d wait. And wait, and wait. Even among his peers—wildlife photographers who thought nothing of waiting a week for a picture—his patience was legendary. In this, as in so many other things, he was a paradox. Adrianna had seen him at publishing parties grinding his teeth with boredom after five minutes of an admirer’s chit chat, but here, watching four polar bears on a piece of wasteland, he would sit happily mesmerized until he found the moment he wanted to seize.

  It was clear that he was not interested in either the adolescents or the female. It was the old male he wanted to photograph.

  He glanced over at Adrianna and silently indicated the path he was going to take between the other animals, so as to get as close to his subject as possible. She’d no sooner nodded her comprehension than Will was off, surefooted even on the ice-slickened dirt. The adolescents took no notice of him. But the female, who was certainly large enough to kill either Will or Adrianna with a swipe if she took a mind to do so, ceased her investigations of the truck and sniffed the air. Will froze; Adrianna did the same, rifle at the ready if the bear made an aggressive move. But perhaps because she’d smelled so many people in the vicinity of the dump, the bear wasn’t interested in this particular scent. She returned to gutting the truck seats, and Will was off again, toward the male. By now Adrianna had grasped the shot Will was after: a low angle, looking up the slope of the hillock so as to frame the bear against the sky, a fool-king perched on a throne of shit. It was the kind of image Will had built his reputation upon. The whole paradoxical story, captured in a picture so indelible and so inevitable that it seemed evidence of collusion with God. More often than not such happy accidents were the fruit of obsessive observation. But once in a while, as now, they presented themselves as gifts. All he had to do was snatch them.

  Typically, of course (how she cursed his machismo sometimes), he was going to position himself so close to the base of the hillock that if the animal decided to come after him he’d be in trouble. Creeping close to the ground he found his spot. The animal was either unaware of, or indifferent to, his proximity; it was half turned from him, casually licking dirt off its paws. But Adrianna knew from experience that such appearances could be dangerously deceptive. The wild did not always like to be scrutinized, however discreetly. Far less adventurous photographers than Will had lost their limbs or their lives by taking an animal’s insouciance for granted. And of all the creatures Will had photographed, there was none with a more terrible reputation than the polar bear. If the male chose to come after Will, Adrianna would have to bring the beast down in one shot, or it would all be over.

  Will had by now found a niche at the very base of the hillock that suited him perfectly. The bear was still licking its paws, its face now almost entirely turned away from the camera.

  Adrianna glanced back at the other animals. All three were happily engrossed in their sports, but that was of little comfort. The geography of the dump allowed for there to be any number of other animals scavenging close by yet out of sight. Not for the first time she wished she’d been born with the eyes of a chameleon: side-rigged and independently maneuvered.

  She looked back at Will. He had crept up the slope just a little and had his camera poised. The bear, meanwhile, had given up cleaning its paws and was lazily surveying its wretched domain. Adrianna willed it to move its rump, turn twenty degrees clockwise, and give Will his picture. But it simply raised its scarred snout into the air and yawned, its black velvet lips curling back as it did so. Its teeth, like its hide, were a record of the battles it had fought. Many of them were splintered and several others missing; its gums were abscessed and raw. No doubt it was in constant pain, which probably did nothing for the sweetness of its mood.

  The animal’s yawn afforded Will a chance to move three or four yards to his left, until the bear was facing him. It was clear by the caution of his advance that he was perfectly aware of his jeopardy. If the animal took this moment to study the ground rather than the sky then Will would have a couple of seconds at best to get out of its way.

  But luck was with him. Overhead, a flock of noisy geese were homing, and the bear idly turned its gaze their way, allowing Will to reach his chosen spot and settle there before it dropped its head and once again sullenly surveyed the dump.

  At last, Adrianna heard the barely audible click of the shutter and the whir of the film’s advance. A dozen shots in quick succession, then a pause. The bear lowered its head. Had it sensed Will? The shutter clicked again, four, five, six times. The bear let out a sharp hiss. It was an unmistakable warning.

  Adrianna leveled the rifle. Will clicked on. The bear did not move. Will caught two more shots, and then, very slowly, began to rise. The bear took a step toward him, but the garbage beneath its bulk was slick, and instead of following through the animal faltered.

  Will glanced back toward Adrianna. Seeing the leveled rifle he motioned it down and stealthily stepped away. Only when he’d halved the distance between the hillock and Adrianna did he murmur, “He’s blind.”

  She looked again at the animal. It was still poised at the top of the hillock, its scarred head roving back and forth, but she didn’t doubt what Will had said was true. The animal had little or no sight left, hence its tentativeness, its reluctance to give chase when it was not certain of the solidity of the ground beneath its paws.

  Will was at her side now. “You want pictures of any of the others?” she asked him. The adolescents had gone to romp elsewhere, but the female was still sniffing around the
truck. He told her no; he’d got what he needed. Then, turning back to look at the bear, he said, “He reminds me of somebody, I just can’t think who.”

  “Whoever it is, don’t tell them.”

  “Why not?” Will said, still staring at the animal. “I think I’d be flattered.”

  V

  When they got back to Main Street, Peter Tegelstrom was out at the foot of his house, perched on a crate nailing a string of Halloween lights along the low-hanging eaves. His children, a five-year-old girl and a son a year her senior, ran around excitedly, clapping and yelling as the row of pumpkins and skulls was unraveled. Will headed over to chat to Tegelstrom; Adrianna followed. She’d made friends with the kids in the last week and a half and had suggested to Will that he photograph the family.

  Tegelstrom’s wife was pure Inuit, her beauty evident in her children’s faces. A picture of this healthy and contented human family living within two hundred yards of the dump would make, Adrianna argued, a powerful counterpoint to Will’s pictures of the bears. The wife, however, was too shy even to talk to the visitors, unlike Tegelstrom himself, who seemed to Will to be starved for conversation.

  “Are you finished with your pictures now?” he wanted to know.

  “Near enough.”

  “You should have gone down to Churchill. They’ve got a lot more bears there—”

  “And a lot of tourists taking pictures of them.”

  “You could take pictures of the tourists taking pictures of the bears,” Tegelstrom said.

  “Only if one of them was being eaten.” Peter was much amused by this. His arranging of the lights finished, he climbed down the ladder and switched them on. The children clapped. “There isn’t much here to keep them occupied,” he said. “I feel bad for them sometimes. We’re going to move down to Prince Albert in the spring.” He nodded into the house. “My wife doesn’t want to, but the babies need a better life than this.”

  The babies, as he called them, had been playing with Adrianna and at her bidding had gone inside to put on their Halloween masks. Now they reappeared, jabbering and whooping to inspire some fear. The masks were, Will guessed, the shy wife’s handiwork Not gleeful vampires or ghouls, but more troubled spirits, constructed from scraps of sealskin and bits of fur and cardboard, all roughly daubed with red and blue paint. Set on such diminutive bodies they were strangely unsettling.

  “Come and stand here for me, will you?” Will said, calling them over to pose in front of the doorway.

  “Do I get to be in this?” Tegelstrom asked.

  “No,” Will said bluntly.

  Affably enough, Tegelstrom stepped out of the picture, and Will went down on his haunches in front of the children, who had ceased their hollering and were standing at the doorstep, hand in hand. There was a sudden gravity in the moment. This wasn’t the happy family portrait Adrianna had been trying to arrange. It was a snapshot of two mournful spirits, posed in the twilight beneath a loop of plastic lights. Will was happier with the shot than any of the pictures he’d made at the dump.

  Cornelius was not yet home, which was no great surprise.

  “He’s probably smoking pot with the Brothers Grimm,” Will said, referring to the two Germans with whom Cornelius had struck up a dope-and-beer-driven friendship. They lived in what was indisputably the most luxurious home in the community, complete with a sizable television. Besides the dope, Cornelius had confided, they had a collection of all-girl wrestling films so extensive it was worthy of academic study.

  “So we’re done here?” Adrianna said, as she set about making the vodka martinis they always drank around the time. It was a ritual that had begun as a joke in a mud hole in Botswana, passing a flask of vodka back and forth pretending they were sipping very dry martinis at the Savoy.

  “We’re done,” Will said.

  “You’re disappointed.”

  “I’m always disappointed. It’s never what I want it to be.

  “Maybe you want too much.”

  “We’ve had this conversation.”

  “I’m having it again.”

  “Well I’m not,” Will said, with monotony in his tone Adrianna knew of old. She let the subject drop au moved on to another.

  “Is it okay if I take a couple of weeks off? I want to go down to Tallahassee to see my mother.”

  “No problem. I’m going back to San Francisco to spend some time with the pictures, start to make the connections.” This was a favorite phase of his, describing a process Adrianna had never completely comprehended. She watched him doing it: laying out maybe two or three hundred images on the floor and wandering among them for several days, arranging and rearranging them, laying unlikely combinations together to see if sparks flew; growling at himself when they didn’t; getting a little high and sitting up through the night to meditate on the work. When the connections were made, and the pictures put in what he considered to be the right order, there was undeniably an energy in them that had not been there before. But the pain of the process had always seemed to Adrianna out of all proportion to the improvement it was a kind of masochism, she’d decided; his last, despairing attempt to make sense of the senseless before the images left his hands.

  “Your cocktail, sir,” Adrianna said, setting the martini at Will’s elbow. He thanked her, picked it up, and they clinked glasses.

  “It’s not like Cornelius to miss vodka,” Adrianna observed.

  “You just want an excuse to check out the Brothers Grimm,” Will said.

  Adrianna didn’t contest the point. “Gert looks like he’d be fun in bed.”

  “Is he the one with the beer belly?”

  “Yep.”

  “He’s all yours. Anyway, I think they’re a package deal. You can’t have one without the other.”

  Will picked up his cigarettes and wandered over to the front door, taking his martini with him. He turned on the porch light, opened the door, leaned against the doorjamb, and lit a cigarette.

  The Tegelstrom kids had gone inside, and were probably tucked up in bed by now, but the lights Peter had put up to entertain them were still bright: a halo of orange pumpkins and white skulls around the house, rocking gently in the gusting wind.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” Will said. “I was going to wait for Cornelius but . . . I don’t think there’s going to be another book after this.”

  “I knew you were fretting about something. I thought maybe it was me—”

  “Oh God no,” Will said. “You’re the best, Adie. Without you and Cornelius I’d have given up on all this shit a long time ago.”

  “So why now?”

  “I’m out of love with the whole thing,” he said. “None of it makes any difference. We’ll show the pictures of the bears and all it’ll do is make more people come and watch them getting their noses stuck in mayonnaise jars. It’s a waste of bloody time.”

  “What will you do instead?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a good question. It feels like . . . I don’t know—”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “That everything’s winding down. I’m forty-one and it feels like I’ve seen too much and been too many places and it’s all blurred together. There’s no magic left. I’ve done my drugs. I’ve had my infatuations. I’ve outgrown Wagner. This is as good as it’s going to get. And it’s not that great.” Adrianna came to join him at the door, putting her chin on his shoulder. “Oh my poor Will,” she said, in her best cocktail clip. “So famous, so celebrated, and so very, very bored.”

  “Are you mocking my ennui?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.”

  “You’re tired. You should take a year off. Go sit in the sun with a beautiful boy. That’s Dr. Adrianna’s advice.”

  “Will you find me the boy?”

  “Oh Lord. Are you that exhausted?”

  “I couldn’t cruise a bar if my life depended upon it.”

  “So don’t. Have another martini.”

  “No,
I’ve got a better idea,” Will said. “You make the drinks, I’ll go fetch Cornelius. Then we can all get maudlin together.”

  VI

  Cornelius had spent the dregs of the afternoon with the Lauterbach brothers, and had a fine time of it, watching wrestling flicks and smoking their weed. He’d left as darkness fell, intending to head back to the house for a couple of shots of vodka, but halfway along Main Street the prospect of dealing with Adrianna had loomed. He wasn’t in the mood for apologies and justifications; they’d only bring him down. So instead of heading back he fished out the fat roach he’d connived from Gert and wandered down toward the water to smoke it.

  As he walked, weaving between the houses, the wind carried flecks of snow across the bay, grazing his face. He stopped beneath one of the lamps that illuminated the ground between the backs of the houses and the water’s edge and turned his face up to the light so as to watch the flakes spilling down. “Pretty . . .” he said to himself. So much prettier than bears. When he got back, he’d tell Will he should give up with animals and start photographing snowflakes instead. They were a lot more endangered, his gently befuddled wits decided. As soon as the sun came out they were gone, weren’t they? All their perfection, melted away. It was tragic.

  Will didn’t get as far as the Lauterbach house. He’d trudged maybe a hundred yards down Main Street—the wind getting stronger with every gust, the snow it carried thickening—when he caught sight of Cornelius, reeling around, face to the sky. He was obviously high, which was no great surprise. It had always been Cornelius’s way of dealing with life, and Will had far too many quirks of his own to be judgmental about it. But there was a time and a place for such excesses, and the Main Street of Balthazar in bear season was not one of them.