'You asshole,' she said.
'Big man, are you?' This voice came from behind my right ear, and I wrenched my neck around to see it was her husband.
'What the fuck?' I saw a couple people from the bar were standing around me. 'He was watching me in the bar,' I said. 'He was standing out here waiting for me.'
The woman straightened up. 'Ricky's gay,' she said.
I was panting, my face burning hot. 'What?'
Her husband let go my arm. 'You think you'd teach him a lesson? You got a problem with people like Rick?' He stepped away from me as if I was contagious.
'Listen,' I said, but they weren't going to. The frizzy-haired singers had helped the boy to his feet and were leading him back to the bar. The woman shot me one more look, started to say something and then just shook her head instead. No one I hadn't slept with had ever made me feel so small. She went back to the bar with the others, one hand protectively on the boy's back, and I realized way too late that Ricky was her son.
Then I was alone with her husband.
'I didn't know,' I said.
'Could have asked him.'
'You have no idea what my life is like.'
'No.' He shook his head. 'I don't. Don't want to know. Don't know where you're staying, either. But you should move on. You're not welcome here.'
He walked back to the bar. As he opened the door, he turned. 'I'd be surprised if you're welcome anywhere.'
The sound of the door shutting behind him left just the rain.
— «» — «» — «»—
Nietzsche said that men and women of character have typical experiences, patterns of events they seem destined to undergo time and again: things of which you have to say, 'Yes, I'm like that.' I think it was him, anyway: it could have been Homer Simpson. Whichever, they probably had something more positive in mind than fights in places no one had ever heard of, taking paranoia out on people who didn't deserve it. I'd done the same thing the night of my parents' funeral, unbelievably, pulling a gun in a hotel bar and scaring a bunch of corporate types and also myself.
Relent finally showed me this was no way to live. As a girl had told me three months before — a girl who had first-hand experience of what the Upright Man was capable of — there was only one person for the job I had to do. I had to stop running. I had to turn around, and chase.
By four o'clock the next day I was in San Francisco, and by the end of the evening I finally had a trail.
3
Dawn found Tom crouched at the bottom of a tree, wild-eyed and frozen solid. It found him and tried to put him back, but he was awake and couldn't be returned. He wasn't going to be denied a morning now, even if this was a day he hadn't expected to see.
When he'd woken in the night everything happened fast. His back brain found the flight pedal and stamped with all its weight. It didn't allow for rampant malfunction in all other quarters, and Tom was sprawling before he was even on his feet. With awareness came a terrible understanding of how badly messed up he was, but then the smell cut through again and the naming part of his mind woke up like a siren — BEAR! BEAR! BEAR! — and he was moving.
At first he was on hands and knees more than his feet, but claw-fear got him upright fast. He ricocheted off the sides of the gully until it came up to reach the forest floor, and then scrambled up over the muddy lip and was good to go. He went.
Not looking back was easy. He didn't want to see. Reports came in from distant outposts — head messed up, ankle screaming, don't have the flashlight — but he over-rode them and went twisting into the darkness. All pains and disappointments were as nothing to what it would be like to be caught by the BEAR, and he ran in a way that short-circuited everything his species had learned since the ice age before last. He ran like an animal, driven by pure body magic. He ran like a fit. He ran like diarrhoea. He pinballed through bushes and over logs, tripping and running, eventually bursting out into an area where the trees were more widely spread.
As he scrabbled towards higher ground he noticed it had snowed again, long after the information had filtered to him through the loud crunching of his feet. This combined with the whacks of thin branches and the wailing in his lungs to make such a cacophony of panic that it took him a while to realize these were the only sounds he could hear. He slipped, crashed down on hands and one knee. Struggled up but slipped again, momentum lost. He stopped, turned around. He was near the top of a small rise in the forest floor. Ready to run again, or die, whichever came first.
No BEAR.
He quick-panned his eyes back and forth across the low hill. Thin moonlight, blue-white reflections, no depth of field. He couldn't see anything. Couldn't hear anything, either, even when he held his breath to stop the panting. His chest hurt like fire.
He backed up a little, into the proximity of a large tree. He knew trying to climb it wouldn't help. The BEAR would be far more adept than he, not least because it probably wouldn't be so close to passing out. But being near the tree felt better.
He waited. It stayed quiet.
Then he thought he heard something.
Something down at the bottom of the rise, deep in the inky darkness and frosty shadows. A cracking of twigs.
His body went frigid with dismay, but he couldn't move. He'd run out of panic and had only terror left. Terror didn't know how to work his limbs.
He just stood, absolutely still, and didn't hear the noise again.
Finally he turned, making a full circle, staring and listening. Nothing. All he could see was snow and shadows. All he heard were dripping sounds, a soft nearby whoosh as a handful of snow sloughed off a branch. He didn't know what to do.
So he stayed where he was.
— «» — «» — «»—
By six a.m. he felt appalling. He could have balled up all the other hangovers in his life and dropped them into this without touching the sides. A bump on his right temple — presumably a result of the second fall — added its own whirling note. Parts of his body ached shrilly whenever he shifted his weight: the ribs on his right side were mouth-open painful whether he moved or not. The cold squared the whole effect up into the unquantifiable. He realized he'd never been truly cold before. He would have liked it to have stayed that way. At one point in the night he had gotten to the point where it felt like every inch of his skin was covered with bugs, and he'd spent much of the next few hours trying to keep moving, shifting silently and in what he hoped was a very small and invisible way. He wriggled his toes, or tried to. The response was increasingly hard to gauge. He kept his hands wedged into his armpits, occasionally removing them to rub meagre warmth over his face and ears. He drowsed off a few times, but never for long. He was in far too much scared discomfort to realize that at some point he'd stopped trying to die.
He felt nauseous too, dry-retching through the night, and was visited by half-memories that failed pill suicides left you with some key part of your innards badly screwed up. Was it the liver? Kidneys? He couldn't recall. Neither sounded a good state of affairs. Quite early into his vigil he'd worked out the reason he was still alive. It was stuck to the front of his coat, an icy substance with pill-shaped deposits. He'd thrown up in his sleep. He'd been too drunk, after all that. His body had jettisoned some of what was ailing it, and a lot of the drugs had come up before having a chance for effect. His upright position had prevented him from choking in the process. Perhaps the sickness had stopped the pills from having enough time to mess him up. Perhaps.
As the air around him gradually seemed to deepen, to allow shades of colour back into the monochrome flatness of night, Tom began slowly to accept that he was going to survive into another day. He didn't know what came after that. He was scared, pissed at himself, pissed at life, and most of all, he was monumentally pissed at the old fool in Henry's. If you were trying to scare people, and bears were likely, surely you mentioned them? What kind of rancid old scaremonger didn't tell about the bears? Impenetrable woods are one thing. The same woods plus huge carnivores famous for intractability are something else entirely. You owe it to your audience, especially the suicidal ones, to bring up the fucking bears.