“Don’t do it drunk,” his mother had warned him once—drunk herself, the two of them sipping Pink Squirrels from a lukewarm bottle in her bedroom. “You ever seen a drunk dog?”
“No,” Andrew giggled.
“Well, it’s like that, only worse. You can’t walk straight. You can’t smell anything. It’s worse than plain drunk. I almost got hit by a car once, in Kamensic, when I was drunk.” She lit a cigarette. “Stayed out a whole night that time, trying to find my way back … ”
Andrew nodded, rubbing the little talisman to his lips.
“No,” his mother said softly, and took it from him. She held it up to the gooseneck lamp. “Not yet.”
She turned and stared at him fiercely, glittering eyes belying her slurred voice. “See, you can’t stay that long. I almost did, that time … ”
She took another sip. “Forget, I mean. You forget … fox or bear or deer, you forget … ”
“Forget what?” Andrew wondered. The smoke made him cough, and he gulped his drink.
“What you are. That you’re human. Not … ”
She took his hand, her nails scratching his palm. ‘’They used to forget. The Indians, the Tankiteke. That’s what my grandfather said. There used to be more of these things—”
She rolled the stone between her palms. “And now they’re all gone. You know why?”
Andrew shook his head.
“Because they forgot.” His mother turned away. “Fox or whatever—they forgot they once were human, and stayed forever, and died up there in the woods.” And she fingered the stone as she did her wedding ring, eyes agleam with whiskey tears.
But that night Andrew lay long awake, staring at his Mets pennants as he listened to the traffic outside; and wondered why anyone would ever want to come back.
Howell woke before dawn, calling, “Festus! Morning.” The spaniel snorted and stared at him blearily before sliding off the bed.
“Look,” said Howell, pointing to where tall ferns at wood’s edge had been crushed to a green mat. “They were here again last night.”
Festus whined and ran from the room, nails tick-tacking upon the floor. Howell let him out the back door and watched the old dog snuffle at the deer brake, then crash into the brush. Some mornings Howell felt as if he might follow the dog on these noisy hunts once more. But each time, the dawn rush of light and heat trampled his strength as carelessly as deer broke the ferns. For a few minutes he breathed easily, the dank mountain air slipping like water down his throat, cold and tasting of granite. Then the coughing started. Howell gripped the door frame, shuddering until the tears came, chest racked as though something smashed his ribs to escape. He stumbled into the kitchen, fingers scrabbling across the counter until they clutched the inhaler. By the time he breathed easily again, sunlight gilded Sugar Mountain, and at the back door Festus scratched for entry, panting from his run.
The same morning found Andrew snoring on the cottage floor. The bottle of gin had toppled, soaking the heap of old newspapers where he lay pillowed. He woke slowly but to quick and violent conclusions when he tried to stand.
“Christ,” he moaned, pausing in the doorway. The reek of gin made him sick. Afterward, he wiped his mouth on a wild grape leaf, then with surprising vigor smashed the bottle against a tree. Then he staggered downhill toward the stream.
Here the water flowed waist-deep. Andrew peeled off T-shirt and jeans and eased himself into the stream, swearing at the cold. A deep breath. Then he dunked himself, came up sputtering, and floated above the clear pebbled bottom, eyes shut against the shadows of trees and sky trembling overhead.
He settled on a narrow stone shelf above the stream, water rippling across his lap. His head buzzed between hunger and hangover. Beneath him minnows drifted like willow leaves. He dipped a hand to catch them, but they wriggled easily through his fingers. A feverish hunger came over him. He counted back three days since he’d eaten: the same evening he’d found his mother …
He blinked against the memory, blinked until the hazy air cleared and he could focus on the stream beneath him. Easing himself into the water, he knelt in the shallows and squinted at the rocks. Very slowly, he lifted one flat stone, then another. The third uncovered a crayfish, mottled brown against chocolate-colored gravel. Andrew bit his hand to stop it shaking, then slipped it beneath the surface. The crayfish shot backward, toward his ankles. Andrew positioned his feet to form a V, squatting to cut off its escape. He yelped triumphantly when he grabbed its tail.
“Son of a bitch!” Pincers nipped his thumb. He flung the crayfish onto the mossy bank, where it jerked and twitched. For a moment Andrew regarded it remorsefully. Then he took the same flat stone that had sheltered it and neatly cracked its head open.
Not much meat to suck from the claws. A thumb’s worth (still quivering) within the tail, muddy and sweet as March rain. In the next hour he uncovered dozens more, until the bank was littered with empty carapaces, the mud starred with his handprints like a great raccoon’s. Finally he stopped eating. The mess on the bank sickened him. He crawled to stream’s edge and bit his lip, trying not to throw up. In the shadowy water he saw himself: much too thin, black hair straggling across his forehead, his slanted eyes shadowed by exhaustion. He wiped a thread of mud from his lip and leaned back. Against his chest the amulet bounced like a stray droplet, its filthy cord chafing his neck. He dried his face with his T-shirt, then pulled the string until the amulet dangled in front of him.
In the late summer light it gleamed eerily, swollen as a monarch’s chrysalis. And like the lines of thorax, head, wings evident upon a pupae, the talisman bore faint markings. Eyes, teeth, paws; wings, fins, antlers, tail. Depending on how it caught the light, it was fox or stoat; flying squirrel or cougar or stag. The boy pinched the amulet between thumb and middle finger, drew it across his check. Warm. Within the nugget of stone he felt a dull buzzing like an entrapped hornet.
Andrew rubbed the talisman against his lips. His teeth vibrated as from a tiny drill. He shut his eyes, tightened his fingers about the stone, and slipped it beneath his tongue. For a second he felt it, a seed ripe to burst. Then nausea exploded inside him, pain so violent he screamed and collapsed onto the moss, clawing wildly at his head. Abruptly his shrieks stopped. He could not breathe. A rush of warm air filled his nostrils, fetid as pond water. He sneezed.
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.”