The Cage Part 3

Once when she was seven the fever had been worse than ever, but by then she'd gotten better at pretending. Her parents had still looked worried but hadn't taken her to the hospital. When Beryl moved her head on the pillowcase the rasp of its material had filled her head. Each thread had crackled and snapped in her ear so harshly she wanted to scream. The slow drip of mucus down her throat kept her awake with its insidious slide. The room glittered. The illness was bad. It was very bad and it got worse during the night. The room seemed to be lit even though it was dark. The air seemed bright and warm and stuffy.

She could see her Raggedy Anne doll perfectly on the chair by the far wall. They looked at each other, eyes open and s.h.i.+ning with fever. Beryl's skin stretched tight with heat and fatigue. She wanted to close her eyes. Her head slowly rolled over to the side, her eyes still open, and she could feel a hum beginning in her body, a vibration as subtle as that of light. It was then that she saw from the corner of her eye the fingernail on her left pinky. A single white cloud floated halfway up its clear pink length. The cloud was as light and fluffy as an early Sunday morning and just above it was the clear half-moon of the nail's growing edge, smooth and thin as milky ice. The precision of its curve startled her. She wanted to skate along its cool surface, its smooth moon edge. She wanted to exhale white clouds into its chill night air. She wanted to hear the sharp metal of skates on ice, feel the slight tremor in her ankles, float forward fast and cool. Looking at the cloud on her nail she knew what the world would be like if the sky were pink and sunsets blue. Looking at her nail and its one white cloud, she forgot her tiredness for a while and wasn't even sure when the vibration receded.

The third day at the dump they saw a young bear catch on fire. A mattress burned about twenty feet from the van. Beryl knew polar bears had no instinctive fear of fire for there were no fires out on the wet tundra or on the ice. Bears had been known to step right onto a campfire and stand still for a moment before confusion registered on their faces. The young bear lay quite close to the flaming mattress, black tongue neatly licking the mayonnaise out of an open jar that had been lobbed to her from a car. The bears craved fat, and mayonnaise contained lots of it, but the jars baffled creatures who were used to flesh. Their paws couldn't grip the gla.s.s, their tongues couldn't quite reach the bottom. They played with the jars, fascinated, frustrated, for hours.

The bear discovered she could control the slippery jar if she used all four paws. As she tried to get to the bottom she rolled slowly backward onto her shoulders, and onto the burning mattress. After a slow moment, Beryl thought nothing would happen, that it would be all right. Then the bear twitched her shoulder. She jumped up, shaking her back violently. Her left shoulder was on fire. She bit at it. Her muzzle started to burn. The fire moved across her face, across her shoulder. She threw her head up in the air. The flames burned faster. The fire moved down her back. She ran away, breathing hoa.r.s.ely, the wind speeding the flames. They could smell burnt hair and flesh.

The bear ran over the ridge. David turned off his camera.

Beryl had begun to get used to the bears' bodies and sounds and smells: the waddle of their rears, the shorter fronts ready to charge, the wet snuffling breath. They had a meaty warm smell like an oversized cat. They ambled forward as though they had all the time in the world. The sounds of guns didn't scare them, for they were used to the much louder crack of sea ice beneath them. They had no natural fear of humans. Even packs of sled dogs didn't frighten them. The bears simply stepped forward, eyes moving, picking out their first victim.

At the end of the next week the expedition would move out forty miles to the northeast where the bears gathered in greater numbers and Beryl would get into her cage for the first time. The three men and she would spend almost a month out there, sleeping and eating together in a single bus, returning to Churchill only for the weekends.

Of the three others, Jean-Claude was the only one who still seemed an unknown. She knew little more about him than she'd learned that first day, except that she'd observed some of his habits. He sat very still during the long days in the van. Unlike most people, each of his movements had a reason: to turn up the heat, to s.h.i.+ft the car into reverse, to adjust the rearview mirror for a better view of a bear. Otherwise he sat still, his hands on the wheel. He watched the others with a flat blue gaze. When he spoke his voice was quiet, almost a whisper, as though something might be startled if he talked any louder. He wore a loose gray turtleneck and jeans every day. She wondered if they were the same set, but she couldn't tell. His cheekbones were wide, his hair long, the back of his hands ridged with white tendons. He liked a lot of b.u.t.ter on his toast.

During breakfast one morning while they waited for David and Butler to join them, she tried to get him to talk. She asked him how cold it got during the winter.

He did not look at her while he answered. Instead he kept partly turned away, giving her only a profile. He stared at the wall on the other side of the room and answered her question in as few words as possible. "Negative sixty," he said.

"Wow," she replied. "I can't even imagine that. Once it got down to ten below in Boston, but I think that was counting the windchill factor." She smiled at him, trying for eye contact. He looked over at her for one moment, then away. She wondered if he was very farsighted from staring out across such large s.p.a.ces so much of his life. She wondered if he was shy around women. "What's spring like?"

He spoke after a moment. "Fast. Lots of water."

She noticed the seriousness with which he thought out his words, as though he were communicating through Morse code and each additional letter was an effort. She started to smile. "You know, something that's always fascinated me are the muskox. Their hair is amazing, but I sometimes wonder with all those dreadlocks if there's anything much underneath. Like sometimes when you give a fluffy cat a bath and wet it's just a skinny little thing." She picked up her toast, took a bite. "Anyone ever shave them?"

She couldn't tell if he knew she was joking. His mouth was a little twisted on one side, but that could be a smile or just tension at having to speak this much. In answer he simply shook his head, turning back to look at the far wall.

"How big are they really?" she asked.

"Big as the bears." He touched two fingers to his nose. "Their breath's noisy."

"You've been close enough to hear that?"

"Yes."

She gave up. She knew him no better than before. She thought asking him questions made him nervous, although he never fidgeted or tried to cut the conversation short. Instead he sat still, waiting for her questions to end.

She could imagine him doing almost anything. Baying suddenly deep and wild as a wolf, or leaving them two weeks into the expedition, simply walking off across the snow heading due north.

Beryl also asked Butler about the springtime. He had spent several years up here, working on different projects for Natural Photography or the Canadian government. He told her about spring while sitting next to her at lunch. He tended to lean in close when he spoke to her, much closer than he did to Jean-Claude or David. She didn't know if he was attracted to her or if this was just the way he talked to women. She found herself leaning backward, giving ground. He exuded a warm heat and breathed through his nose with an audible whisper. Even his face was larger than her's. On her it would have stretched almost down to the base of her neck.

Butler said, "Spring comes fast and noisy. There isn't much time for it to get to summer. The temperature suddenly rises into the fifties and the sun s.h.i.+nes. The snow melts all at once. The ground never thaws more than a few feet deep, even in the middle of summer, so the water has nowhere to go except into the harbor. It backs up on the unmelted harbor ice."

Beryl imagined the water weighing down the still frozen sea ice, building up slowly over the pier back to the first house and then to the second, flooding through the town and forming a thin milky skin in the night as smooth and perfect as gla.s.s, shattering each morning with the first door that opened. The waves moved out from that first door, broken ice tinkling outward across the town.

Butler said, inching even closer to Beryl, "The whole town is flooded. The weather's already hot. People wear T-s.h.i.+rts with thick winter pants and boots for slos.h.i.+ng through the water. Then one day the ice in the harbor finally cracks. It booms loud as guns. The water runs into the sea, the town's drained, and the next day the ground is dry and warm."

Beryl leaned back full against the booth, her head tucked into her neck in an effort to move back from Butler's face. David, she noticed, was staring down at his soup, stirring it. Jean-Claude watched her and Butler, motionless, one hand holding out a piece of toast, the blush rising to his cheeks again.

After a moment, Butler s.h.i.+fted a little away.

Beryl knew a spring only a week long would surprise her so much she wouldn't be able to sleep. She would stay up listening to the groaning of the ice, the high-pitched keening of tension as though through a boat's hull ten miles wide, the sharp clanks like metal against metal, the gentle crinkling of water on her doormat.

She imagined Butler on the day after the ice broke, standing in the center of a dry warm town, thankful the strange spring had pa.s.sed.

CHAPTER 11.

That weekend the temperature plummeted. Three more inches of granulated snow fell overnight and Beryl went for a walk in the half-light of early morning through the still-falling snow. She needed some exercise and wanted to test out her new Natural Photography parka. She wanted to get away from the others for the first time in a week. A month ago, the temperature had hit the seventies; now, walking across town in the early morning, the air was so cold the snow squeaked like Styrofoam beneath her feet. The streets were deserted except for occasional cars that rolled by with steamed windows, blurred warm faces inside. Several people in the cars stared at her. She met no one else walking.

She walked quickly, trying to make a wide circle through the unfamiliar streets. Her ears filled with the sounds of her own breath and the slide of the parka's cloth against itself. Within five minutes of walking she unzipped the front and pulled down the hood. She'd been told sweat was the easiest way to die up here. Sweat would freeze quickly against the skin, cooling her body more rapidly than it could tolerate.

With the hood down she could see and hear so much more. She looked about easily, exhilarated to be the only human walking outside in the snowstorm. She looked through a window into a warmly lit room. A man in a bathrobe shuffled by in his bare feet. Snow fell between them. Beryl felt prepared, self-reliant, a wild creature.

A police car drove up from nowhere. It skidded to a stop in front of her, b.u.mping half up on the sidewalk. The woman inside thrust open the pa.s.senger door.

"Get in," she said. "It's behind you."

Beryl turned to look over her shoulder.

The bear followed only thirty feet away. It came slowly to a halt when Beryl closed the car door after her. It turned its heavy face about, then wandered away down a driveway.

Beryl looked down at her gloves and saw that her hands had curled into themselves. In her dreams she'd been much closer to the bear than that. In her dreams she'd felt the area much more clearly, the open s.p.a.ce limitless in all but one direction.

Beryl watched the bear disappear around a building and then looked toward the woman who had rescued her. Beryl a.s.sumed she'd be yelled at. She noticed her breath slowing down as though the danger had started only now.

The thin black woman wore a uniform with polar bear insignias on the shoulders. She said, "That was a really stupid thing to do." She glanced in the rearview mirror. "Actually, I think that was the stupidest thing I've ever seen a tourist do in my entire seven years in this town. And it's not like tourists are known for their smarts."

The woman spoke with a slight smile that made Beryl unsure whether or not she was supposed to smile back. Beryl a.s.sumed the officer was seriously angry, that she might even tell the magazine and they wouldn't let Beryl go out to the cage to sit among the bears. Panic filled her chest as it had when she was a child and her parents caught her disobeying. When they were mad they denied it, but their hands would shake and they used more force than needed to cut the bread or to brake the car so that everyone inside rocked back and forth with their emotion and the silence was stiff as the white in their eyes.

"Hi," the woman said, "I'm Margaret Johnson. What's your name?"

Beryl looked at her hands again. "Beryl Findham," she said.

"I'm the polar bear watch. You can call me Maggie." She drove back out onto the street and added, "Actually I lied just now. The stupidest thing was this tourist out at the dump-not a young boy either, but a man who had survived to his early thirties. He rolled down his window to pat the head of a bear. Now that's stupid." Maggie glanced over at Beryl, then turned to look again. "You OK? Don't feel light-headed do you? Where you from? How on earth did you survive this long with the brains of a turkey? Jesus, you're pale. You going to be sick?"

Maggie pulled the car over to the side of the road. She turned to Beryl. "You going into shock? Look at me."

Beryl looked.

"Open your eyes. Wider."

Beryl opened her eyes as wide as they would go.

"I think they're dilated. Breathe. Don't forget to breathe. It's important. Look, don't you go schizo on me, not while you're in my car. And don't you vomit. I'm not cleaning that up. Look at me." Maggie grabbed Beryl by the ears. She shook her hard three times and screamed into her face. "Wake the f.u.c.k up! You're fine now."

Beryl stared at her in amazement.

Maggie asked, "What year is it?"

"Nineteen ninety-four," Beryl said.

"Who's the U.S. president?"

"Clinton."

Maggie sat back. "OK, I guess you're fine. Sorry." She started the car and drove out onto the street. "They train us to do things like that. They say to get your attention. Focus you on something other than fear. First time I've had a chance to try it. Did that hurt?"

Beryl grinned. "Yeah, quite a bit. I think I heard something crack."

"Really?" The right side of Maggie's mouth jerked up. "Sorry. At least you don't look like curdled milk anymore."

Beryl found her hands slowly uncurling and she took off her mittens to look at them curiously. She felt the width of her smile. "I'm the photographer for the Natural Photography team here in town. I'm from Boston." Beryl listened to the words. No hesitation. "Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts," she added.

Maggie nodded. "I've heard of it. I'm from Atlanta, but I hate the heat more than anything." She looked off to the left quickly, but Beryl saw that it was only a snow-covered car. "I've always figured there's only so much you can sweat, but you can always put on more clothing."

Beryl laughed at that and saw with surprise the small shyness of Maggie's smile.

"No, really," Maggie continued, "I like the cold. I eat more up here and my body heats up. In Atlanta I was always feeling a little sickly, like I couldn't breathe in all the way. Here I can breathe." She tapped herself in the chest with her fist. "You sure your ears are all right? Is there anything that can be hurt there? Some sort of important muscle or something? Look, it's not my fault. They said to shock you out of it. Your ears just looked handy."

Beryl nodded and touched her ears. They felt hot.

"I also moved up here for my kids. I want them to grow up where there's enough room to play."

The frozen plains spread out from them in every direction. Beryl laughed. This time Maggie looked surprised that she had said something funny. Beryl realized she hadn't laughed much since this trip had started.

They continued to talk together until the sun rose and Maggie's watch was over. They went into the hotel for breakfast. Maggie had a huge meal: waffles, eggs, Cream of Wheat. "It's not only the cold," she said. "It's terror. I see just one of those things moving through the night, big as a G.o.dd.a.m.n boat, and these pancakes are completely gone." She patted her belly and snorted. She was a stringy woman, the kind who was always eating Yodels and Snickers and moving quickly, heat pouring off her. "In Atlanta, the biggest, scariest thing I ever saw were Dobermans, and they only weigh eighty pounds."

"How'd you get this job?" Beryl asked.

"Oh, they had signs up about it for months. No one wanted it. Not out all night in the cold, not looking for hungry polar bears. But I wanted it. I needed it. Money, you know. They wouldn't let me take it at first. I'm a woman, hmm, and black." Maggie looked straight at Beryl for a second, and Beryl wasn't sure exactly what her face should be showing. "It's not like they said anything about the black part, but they talked a lot about the woman part, me being weaker and stuff. Like the biggest beefed-up man would be able to take a polar bear charge any better than little old me. Also, the town still thought of me as a tourist, practically from the tropics. I mean, I'd been here a whole year by then but they still figured every day would be the last straw, that I'd pack up and go."

Maggie rubbed her thumb slowly around the lip of her coffee mug. "Then this kid got mauled out in the rocks by the beach. Mauled bad, the skull cracked before the bear lost interest. The kid's head was in the bear's mouth, kid screaming, when it just spat him out and walked off. Kid lived, but he lost his sense of balance. His legs are perfectly fine, but you stand him upright and he falls over like the room tilted."

Maggie let go of the cup, put both hands in her lap. "So after that they hired me. I like the job. These two months each year are a kind of vacation to me. My husband, Gerry, has been gone six years now, back down south. Couldn't deal with things up here. The one winter he spent here, he practically lived in the fireplace." Maggie smiled, looked away. "These two months pay for all the extras the kids and I need for the rest of the year, the things I can't handle being just a mail carrier. For these two months the kids stay at the neighbor's. I live alone in the car. I carry a gun, wear a uniform. I'm tough. For two months I'm no mother. I'm f.u.c.king Dirty Harry. You know, it's different."

Maggie and Beryl agreed to meet that night so Beryl could photograph a night watch. Beryl didn't tell anyone else on the team. She left dinner early, put on her warmest clothes. Maggie told her it got cold sitting still in the car all night. Beryl snuck out the back of the hotel.

She stepped out of the double doors into a cold that made her think at first, Well, that's not so bad, but even before she'd walked the ten steps to the car, the cold began to slide its way under, pulling tight about her limbs. It didn't tingle like the cold she knew. It numbed her skin and slowed her movements. Sitting in the car she found herself thinking about itching her nose for a while before she actually did it.

They began to drive slow methodical circles about town, pa.s.sing down each back alley and driveway, scanning in the bright s.h.i.+fting light of the headlights every building and backyard. Light and dark slid across the snow in wild movements. Everything looked as if it were a polar bear motionless and staring, or leaping quickly away across the landscape.

The first time they reached the end of town near the dump, Maggie stopped the car. She looked around carefully and said, "This is where most of them sneak into town, once they've decided the dump doesn't have enough food for them." She put her hand on the door, picked up the rifle and said, "Stay here." She stepped out of the car.

Beryl felt the cold harsh against her face and then the door slammed and the car's heater hummed on. She hesitated before jumping out the other door. The snow squeaked beneath her feet and she was conscious of the dark behind her and the boulders off to her side. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" she asked.

Maggie roared, "Get back in the car!"

Beryl felt the voice like wind on her ears. She got back in the car, sat with both hands open in front of her. She watched Maggie raise the binoculars and sweep them slowly across the rocks between the car and the dump. Maggie looked small against the darkness. Her hands held the binoculars by her face and she pointed her elbows out front as though waiting for a blow. The rifle hung over her shoulder. When she was done, she got back in the car.

Maggie put the rifle down and sat with both of her hands on the steering wheel. "Don't you ever," she said, "ever step out of this car. Not while it's night and I'm on a patrol. I don't care if a bear is playing jump rope with my intestines, you will not step outside. Is that clear?"

Beryl nodded. She sat very still.

"You're looking pale again." said Maggie. "Stop that." She looked away and then back. "G.o.d, you can look sickly." She started the car and backed out slowly onto the road. "I'm sorry. I should've warned you about that. The reason I get out of the car is 'cause I can spot them better. I've seen more bears there than anywhere else. Sometimes I can stop them from going into town. I shout or drive them away with the car. It's not like they're scared. More embarra.s.sed. I think I've saved some bears that way.

"I stand out there and look, about three times an hour, thirty times each night, and I never feel calm about it. The rifle is mostly for my own comfort. It's a nice weight, you know, on my shoulder. I'm not allowed to shoot them unless it's clearly their life or mine. Sometimes I hope the sound of the gun will work as a distraction."

"Once, two years ago," Maggie said, "when I was out of the car, doing the circle, I turned too slowly. Something was glittering halfway up a hill. Couldn't make out what it was. When I continued my turn, I was suddenly looking through the binoculars at fur."

Maggie made a wavy gesture with her hand. Beryl didn't know if it was to show fur or to describe her emotions at the time.

"I pulled down my gla.s.ses. It was like I was trying to move quickly, but everything got slower and slower. There was this bear, this huge bear, running at me, you know, swaying like they do, so G.o.dd.a.m.n big. Breathing, I could hear it. Black nose." Maggie put her fingers against her nose and held them there for a moment, thinking.

"Forty-five, fifty feet away, running forward. That nose for some reason was the thing I fixed on. Its black nose, all wet. I threw my binoculars as hard as I could at it, turned and got into the car. Still so d.a.m.n slow. I had this thought, you know, this thought like someone else's voice in my head, that I wouldn't make it. I felt bad for my kids." She touched the car door on her side.

"I was pulling my left leg in when the bear hit the door, the window shattered in around me and the door slapped down on my calf, breaking it. I didn't feel the pain. I sort of heard a noise, but didn't feel anything. I looked out. This bear's face just filling my window. These furry jaws not four inches from my nose, not even a windowpane between us.

"It was so beautiful-the fur so clean. Very white. A young bear. It had bad breath, like a dog on a wet day. And then I was driving away, fast. The bear fell back to the ground. I don't even remember touching the gas."

Many times that night Beryl watched Maggie step out of the car, out into the dark silence of the Arctic. The snow squeaked loudly beneath her. Each time Maggie turned slowly in front of the car, scanning the rock piles ahead through the infrared binoculars, searching the night for white fur against white snow, or perhaps the bright reflection of eyes close enough to pick up the headlights. Each time Beryl scanned the snow also, watching for bears. She thought if anything happened, Maggie would have the gun. Beryl could do nothing but watch.

Beryl stared out the window into the dark. She imagined herself alone and warm, striding out across the snow, coming to a halt at the sound of the car, watching its bright lights whirl busily about in a tight circle, the two heads inside facing forward. She watched it depart, the sound of its engine m.u.f.fled by the snow, her heavy white face turning to see its lights fade away around a corner.

"Why do you care about the bears?" Beryl asked.

Maggie said, "I don't really know. It's many things. To me they're beyond most animals 'cause they're unpredictable. They don't react the same way every time, like seals always diving, or muskox facing you, horns first. I've seen the same bear charge a car one day and run away the next. I even saw one roll over on its back and toss snow up in front of the headlights, wanting to play."

Maggie rubbed at her lower jaw with the inside of her thumb. "Once Jeff Shelbourne, a purely mean b.a.s.t.a.r.d, threw a steak out to a mother at the dump and while she was getting it, he shot both her cubs. In front of people too. Well, of course he was fined, but it's not like prison or anything." Maggie turned to look at Beryl, then back to the road. "Within a week that mother got Jeff while he was carrying the garbage out onto the porch. It was like she'd been waiting for him there on his porch, just sitting. I think she tracked him, I don't know. Jeff was the last polar bear fatality in this town. Three years ago."

Maggie worked the controls of the spotlight, its circle of visibility rolling silently across the snow. "I have great respect for the bears. They truly scare me."

Through the night Maggie and Beryl sang country ballads, camp songs, the themes from "The Brady Bunch" and "Speed Racer." Toward morning as the cold was even seeping into their mouths, Beryl told Maggie about how she wanted to go to all the wild places in the world photographing animals. "It's what David, the camera guy from the group, does for a living. But I want to do it differently. He likes the warm sunny places Club Med hasn't quite discovered. I want to go to the extremes: the Gobi Desert, Patagonia, Siberia. I've lived in a city all my life. The majority of my food comes wrapped in plastic. My home has central heating. My car has air-conditioning. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I can't remember which season it is.

"I want to learn to survive on my own, to face extremes. I won't have really lived otherwise, not by the terms of this world, where there are rhythms like drought and cold, thirst and plenty. This may sound silly but sometimes I feel like my cat, still recognizable as a wild creature but neutered and declawed, made cuddly. She sits all day in the sun on the window ledge, watching life through the window."

Beryl realized they'd been talking for a while. In the long night, time pa.s.sed differently. The sky was still black above but the drifts had begun to glow slightly in the dark. They'd seen nothing moving on the landscape all night long except the hissing dances of the snow.

Maggie nodded. "For me," she said, "I don't want travel. I want nothing but this place." She paused at an intersection, twisted about on the seat trying to see all around. She drove off to the right. "I'd like to stay up here, raise the kids. They won't live here when they're grown. I know that already. Still, I want my time with them. Sometimes when they say something new, I wonder where the h.e.l.l they came from." Maggie touched her belly and added, "Not from here."

The car heater clicked on. Beryl felt a blast of heat across her face as dry as from an oven. Maggie said, "And I'd like to continue these patrols. To see the bears."

Beryl mentioned cautiously, "My dreams up here have been pretty weird." She glanced at Maggie, then looked at her hands held open on her knees. "A lot of them are about the bears, but not as if they're bears. They're dancing or we're having dinner. Isn't that weird?"