Sacrament

  “Cornelius!” Will yelled. “Cornelius? Can you hear me?” The answer was apparently no. Cornelius just kept up his dervish dance under the lamp. Will started down the street in the man’s direction, cursing him ripely as he went. He didn’t waste his breath shouting, the wind was too strong, but part of the way down the street he regretted not doing so because without warning Cornelius gave up his spinning and slipped out of sight between the houses. Will picked up his pace, though he was tempted to head back to the house and arm himself before pursuing Cornelius any further. If he did so, however, he risked losing the man altogether, and to judge by his stumbling step Cornelius was in no fit state to be wandering alone in the dark It wasn’t so much the bears Will was concerned about, it was the bay. Cornelius was headed toward the shore. One slip on the icy rocks and he’d be in water so cold it would stop his heart.

  He’d reached the spot where Cornelius had been dancing and followed his, tracks away from the comfort of the streetlight into the murky no-man’s-land between the houses and the tidal flats. There he was pleased to discover Cornelius’s phantom figure standing maybe fifty yards from him. He’d given up his spinning and his sky watching, and he was standing stone still, staring out toward the darkness of the shore.

  “Hey, buddy!” Will called to him. “You’re going to get pneumonia.”

  Cornelius didn’t turn. In fact he didn’t move so much as a muscle. What kind of pills had he been popping? Will wondered.

  “Con!” he yelled again. He was no more than twenty yards from Cornelius’s back “It’s Will! Are you okay? Talk to me, man.”

  Finally, Cornelius spoke. One slurred word that stopped Will in his friend’s tracks.

  “Bear.”

  There was a cloud of breath at Will’s lips. He waited, as still as Cornelius, while the cloud cleared, then scanned the scene to the limit of his vision. First to the left. The shore was empty as far as he could see. Then to the right; the same.

  He dared a one-word question: “Where?”

  “Ahead. Of. Me.” Cornelius replied.

  Will took a very slow sideways step. Cornelius’s drug-induced senses were not deceiving him. There was indeed a bear maybe sixteen or seventeen yards in front of him, its form barely visible to Will through the snow-flecked murk

  “Are you still there, Will?” Cornelius said.

  “I’m here.”

  “What the fuck do I do?”

  “Back off. But, Con, very, very slowly.” Cornelius glanced back over his shoulder, his stricken face suddenly sober.

  “Don’t look at me,” Will said. “Keep your eyes on the animal.”

  Cornelius looked back toward the bear, which had begun its implacable approach. This wasn’t one of the playful adolescents from the dump, nor was it the blind old warrior Will had photographed. This was a fully-grown female, a good six hundred pounds.

  “Fuck . . .” Cornelius muttered.

  “Just keep coming,” Will coaxed him. “You’re going to be okay. Just don’t let her think you’re anything worth chasing.” Cornelius managed three tentative backward steps, but his equilibrium was poor after the dervish act, and on the fourth step his heel slid on the slick ground. He flailed for a moment, then recovered his balance, but the harm was done. Hissing her intentions, the bear gave up her plod and came bounding at him.

  Cornelius turned and ran, the bear roaring in pursuit, her body a blur. Weaponless, all Will could do was dodge out of Cornelius’s path and yell himself hoarse in the hope of distracting the animal. But it was Cornelius she wanted. In two bounds she’d halved the distance between them, jaws wide in readiness—

  “Get down!”

  Will threw a glance back in the direction of the voice and there, God save her, was Adrianna, rifle raised.

  “Con!” she yelled. “Get your fucking head down!” He got the message, and flung himself to the frozen dirt, with the bear a body’s length from his heels. Adrianna fired, and hit the animal’s shoulder, checking her before she could catch up with her quarry. The animal rose up with an agonized roar, blood staining her fur. Cornelius was still within swatting distance, however, if she chose to take him out. Ducking to make himself as small a target as possible, Will scrambled toward him, and, grabbing his trembling torso, hauled him out of the bear’s path. There was a sharp stink of shit off him.

  He looked back at the bear. She wasn’t done, nowhere near.

  Roaring so loudly that the ground shook, she started toward Adrianna, who leveled her rifle and fired a second time, at no more than ten yards’ range. The animal’s roar ceased on the instant, and again she rose up, white and red and vast, teetering for a moment. Then she reeled back like a breaking wave and limped away into the darkness.

  The entire encounter—from the moment Cornelius had named his nemesis—had perhaps lasted a minute, but it was long enough for a kind of delirium to have taken hold of Will. He got to his feet, the snowflakes spiraling around him like giddy stars and went to the place where the bear’s blood had splashed on the ice.

  “Are you all right?” Adrianna asked him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  It was only half the truth. He wasn’t hurt, but he wasn’t whole either. He felt as though some part of him had been torn out by what he’d just witnessed and had fled into the darkness in pursuit of the bear. He had to go after it.

  “Wait!” Adrianna yelled.

  He looked back at her, trying his best to block out Cornelius’s sobbing apologies, and the shouts of people on Main Street as they came sniffing after the bloodshed. Adrianna was staring straight at him, and he knew she was reading the thoughts on his face.

  “Don’t be a fuck-wit, Will,” she said.

  “No choice.”

  “Then at least take the rifle.”

  He looked at it as though it had just pumped its bullets into him. “I don’t need it,” he said.

  “Will—”

  He turned his back on her, on the lights, on the people and their asinine questions. Then he loped off toward the shoreline, following the red trail the bear left behind her.

  VII

  Oh, all the years he’d waited. Waited and watched with his dispassionate eye while something died nearby, recording its passing like the truthful witness he was. Keeping his distance, keeping his calm. Enough of that. The bear was dying, and he would die too if he let her go now, let her perish in the dark alone.

  Something had snapped in him. He didn’t know why. Perhaps because of the conversation with Guthrie, which had stirred up so much pain; perhaps the encounter with the blind bear at the dump; perhaps simply because the time had come. He’d hung on this branch long enough, ripening there. It was time to fall and rot into something new.

  He followed the bear’s trail along the shoreline parallel to the street with a kind of exulting despair in him. He had no idea what he would do when he caught up with the animal; he only knew he had to be with it in its agonies, given that he was to some degree their author. He was the one who’d brought Cornelius and his habits here, after all. The bear had simply been doing what she would do in the wild when confronted by something threatening. She’d been shot for being true to her nature. No thinking queer could be happy with his complicity in that.

  Will’s empathy with the animal hadn’t totally unseated his urge to self-preservation. Though he followed the trail closely most of the way, he gave the rocks a little distance when he came upon them, in case there were more animals lurking there. But what little light the lamps of Main Street had supplied was now too far behind him to be of much use. It was harder and harder to make out the bloodstains. He had to stop and study the ground to find them, for which pause he was grateful. The icy air was raw in his throat and chest; his teeth ached as though they were all being drilled at the same time; his legs were trembling.

  If he was feeling weak, he thought, the bear was surely a damn sight weaker. She’d shed copious amounts of blood now and must be close to collapse.

  Som
ewhere nearby a dog was barking, her alarm familiar.

  “Lucy . . .” Will said to himself, and looking up through the flickering snow saw that his pursuit had brought him within twenty yards of the back of Guthrie’s shack. He heard the old man shouting now, telling the dog to shut up, and then the sound of the back door being opened.

  Light spilled from it, out across the snow. A meager light by comparison with the streetlights half a mile back, but bright enough to show Will his quarry.

  The animal was closer to the shore than to the shack, and closer to Will than either: standing on all fours, swaying, the ground around her dark with her free-flowing blood.

  “What the fuck’s going on out here?” Guthrie demanded.

  Will didn’t look at him; he kept his eyes fixed on the bear—as hers were fixed on him—while he yelled for Guthrie to go back inside.

  “Rabjohns? Is that you?”

  “There’s a wounded bear out here—” Will yelled at him.

  “I see her,” Guthrie replied. “Did you shoot her?”

  “No!” From the corner of his eye Will could see that Guthrie had emerged from his shack “Go back inside will you?”

  “Are you hurt?” Guthrie hollered.

  Before Will could reply the bear was up and, turning her bulk toward Guthrie, she charged. There was time as she roared upon the old man for Will to wonder why she’d chosen to take Guthrie instead of him, whether in the seconds they’d stared at one another she’d seen that he was no threat to her: just another wounded thing, trapped between street and sea. Then she was up and swiping at Guthrie, the blow throwing him maybe five yards. He landed hard, but thanks to some grotesque gift of adrenaline he was on his feet a heartbeat later, yelling incoherently back at his wounder. Only then did his body seem to realize the grievous harm it had been done. His hands went up to his chest, his blood running out between his fingers. His yells ceased and he looked back up at the bear, so that for a moment they stood staring at one another, both bloodied, both teetering.

  Then Guthrie spoiled the symmetry and fell face down in the snow.

  Still standing at the doorstep, Lucy began a round of despairing yelps, but however traumatized she was she plainly had no intention of approaching her master. Guthrie was still alive; he was attempting to turn himself over, it seemed, his right hand sliding on the ice as he tried to lift himself up.

  Will looked back the way he’d come, hoping that somebody would be in sight who could help. There was no sign of anyone on the shoreline; perhaps people were making their way along the street. He couldn’t afford to wait for them, however. Guthrie needed help now. The bear had sunk down onto all fours again, and by the degree of her sway, she looked ready to keel over entirely. Keeping his eyes on her he cautiously approached the place where Guthrie was lying. The delirium that had seized him earlier had guttered out. There was only a bitter sickness in his belly.

  By the time he reached Guthrie’s side the man had managed to turn himself over, and it was clear that he was wounded beyond hope of healing: his chest a wet pit, his gaze the same.

  But he seemed to see Will, or at least to sense his proximity. He reached out as Will bent to him, and caught hold of his jacket.

  “Where’s Lucy?” he said.

  Will looked up. The dog was still at the doorway. She was no longer barking.

  “She’s okay.”

  Guthrie didn’t hear him reply, it seemed, because he drew Will closer, his hold remarkably strong.

  “She’s safe,” Will told him, more loudly, but even as he spoke he heard the warning hiss of the bear. He glanced back in her direction. Her whole bulk was full of shudders, as though her system, like Guthrie’s, was close to capitulation. But she wasn’t ready to die where she stood. She took a tentative step toward Will, her teeth bared.

  Guthrie’s other arm had caught hold of Will’s shoulder. He was speaking again. Nothing that made much sense to Will, at least not at this moment.

  “This will . . . not come . . . again, . . .” he said.

  The bear took a second step, her body rocking back and forth. Very slowly Will worked to pull Guthrie’s hands off him, but the man’s hold was too fierce.

  “The bear, . . .” Will said.

  “Nor this, . . .” Guthrie muttered, “nor this . . .” There was a tiny smile on his bloody lips. Did he know, even in his dying agonies, what he was doing: holding down the man who had come with such sour memories, holding him where the bear could claim him?

  Will had no choice: If he was going to get out of the bear’s way he was going to have to lug Guthrie with him. He started to haul himself to his feet, lifting the old man’s sizable frame with him. The motion brought a howl of anguish from Guthrie and his grip on Will’s shoulder slipped a little. Will stepped sideways in the direction of the shack, half carrying Guthrie with him like a partner in some morbid dance. The bear had halted and was watching this grotesquerie with black-sequin eyes. Will took a second step, and Guthrie let out another cry, much weaker than the first, and all at once gave up his hold on Will, who didn’t have the power left in his arms to support him. Guthrie slipped to the ground as though every bone in his body had gone to water, and in that instant the bear made her move. Will didn’t have time to dodge, much less run. The animal was on him in a bound, striking him like a speeding car, his bones breaking on impact, the world becoming a smear of pain and snow, both blazing white.

  Then his head struck the icy ground. Consciousness fled for a few seconds. When it returned he raised his hand; he saw that the snow beneath him was red. Where was the bear? He swiveled his gaze left and right looking for her. There was no sign. One of his arms was tucked beneath him, and useless, but there was enough strength in the other to raise him up. The motion made him sick with pain, and he was fearful he was going to lose consciousness again, but by degrees he buffed and coaxed his body up into a kneeling position.

  Off to his left, a sniffing sound. He looked in its direction, his gaze flickering. The bear had her nose in Guthrie’s corpse, inhaling its perfumes. She raised her vast head, her snout bloody.

  This is death, Will thought. For all of us, this is death. This is what you’ve photographed so many times. The dolphin drowning in the net, pitifully quiescent; the monkey twitching among its dead fellows, looking at him with a gaze Will could not stand to meet, except through his camera. They were all the same in this moment, he and the monkey, he and the bear. All ephemeral things, running out of time.

  And then the bear was on him again, her claws opening his shoulder and back, her jaws coming for his neck. Somewhere far off, in a place he no longer belonged, he heard a woman calling his name, and his lazy brain thought: Adrianna’s here, sweet Adrianna—

  He heard a shot, then another. Felt the weight of the bear against him, carrying him down to the ground, her blood raining on his face.

  Was be saved? he vaguely wondered. But even as he was shaping the thought another part of him, that had neither eyes to see nor ears to hear, nor cared to have either, was slipping away from this place; and senses he had never known he owned were piercing the blizzard clouds and studying the stars. It seemed to him he could feel their warmth that the distance between their blazing hearts and his spirit was just a thought, and he could be there, in them, knowing them, if he turned his mind to it.

  Something checked his ascent, however. A voice in his head that he knew was familiar to him, yet he could not put a name to.

  “Where d’you think you’re going?” the voice said. There was a sly humor in it. He tried to put a face to the sound, but he saw only fragments. Silky red hair, a sharp nose, a comical mustache.

  “You can’t go yet,” the interloper said.

  But I want to, he said. It hurts so much, staying here. Not the dying part, the living.

  His companion heard his complaints and would take no truck with them. “Hush yourself,” he said. “You think you’re the first man on the planet who lost his faith? That’s all part of it.
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  We’re going to have a serious conversation, you and me. Face-to-face.

  Man-to—”

  Man-to what?

  “We’ll get to that,” the voice replied. It was starting to fade.

  Where are you going? Will wanted to know.

  “Nowhere you can’t find me when the time comes,” the stranger replied. “And it will come, my faithless friend. As sure as God put tits on trees.”

  And with this absurdity, he was gone.

  There was a moment of blissful silence, when it crossed Will’s mind that maybe he’d died after all, and was floating away into oblivion. Then he heard Lucy—poor, orphaned Lucy—howling out her heart somewhere close to him. And coming on the heels of her din, human voices, telling him to be still, be still, he was going to be all right.

  “Can you hear me, Will?” Adrianna was asking him.

  He could feel the snowflakes dropping on his face, like cold feathers. On his brow, on his lashes, on his lips, on his teeth.

  And then—far less welcome than the pricking snow—a swelling agony in his torso and head.

  “Will,” Adrianna said. “Speak to me.”

  “Ye . . . s,” he said.

  The pain was becoming unendurable, rising and rising.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Adrianna said. “We’ve got help coming, and you’re going to be all right.”

  “Christ, what a mess,” somebody said. He knew the inflections. One of the Lauterbach brothers, surely; Gert, the doctor, struck off the register for improper distribution of pharmaceuticals. He was giving orders like a field sergeant: Blankets, bandages, here, now, on the double!

  “Will?” A third voice, this one close to his ear. It was Cornelius, weeping as he spoke. “I fucked up man. Oh Christ, I’m sorry—”