you back.
That house in Detroit. That burning house.
The fire.
I looked down at it. I had to look down. The white bones, the flesh… Black. Blacker than the bear. Blacker than the dirt. Blacker than evil.
They were burned. The bodies were burned. The bears didn’t do this. The bears didn’t kill these men.
And the bears weren’t attacking Vinnie. It was Vinnie who was attacking the bears. He saw what they were doing, saw the bears digging here in the ground, desecrating this shallow grave of dead burned men. He had tried to drive them away.
Vinnie was bent over now, with his face in his hands. There was blood all over his arm. He dropped to his knees. “Oh my God, Tom, oh my God.”
“Vinnie,” I said. “Vinnie.” I grabbed his shoulders from behind.
He sat back on his heels and cried. The stream went by, the bears moved through the woods. The sun went behind a cloud and it got colder. The bodies of five men were spread all around us, some piece of each man above the ground, another piece below, and some inside the bears.
I dug into the dirt, took it in both hands, and threw it over what was once a man’s head. I did it again and again, digging with my bare hands and covering the bodies. Vinnie stayed still. I worked all around him, spreading the dirt over everything I could see. My hands were hurting, scraped raw by the rough earth. But I kept at it. It was a primitive need to bury something dead and that was all I was capable of doing.
When I had done as much as I could do, I went to Vinnie and pulled him up by the armpits. I turned him around and held his head on my shoulder. He didn’t fight me.
I looked at his left arm. A bear had raked a claw down his forearm, right through his coat, leaving three deep cuts. I needed to clean his arm off and wrap it up. That was the next thing I had to do. “Come on,” I said. “We have to go.”
I grabbed his other arm. He was holding something tight in his hand. “What is it, Vinnie?” I said. I lifted his hand and looked. It was a watch, caked with dirt, the crystal shattered.
“Come on,” I said. “Come on.” I led him back down the stream. He walked slowly, staring at the ground, his eyes half closed, as if he could barely stay awake. I took him back to where the trail led down over the ledge, next to the waterfall. I tried to help him climb down, but he was moving automatically, with no thought. We both ended up sliding down in the muck until we landed hard at the bottom. I found one of the water bottles there, opened it, and poured the water into his mouth. He swallowed it. I took a drink and then put it in my coat pocket. “We’ve got to move,” I said. “We’ve got to take care of you. Okay?”
I picked him up, helped him out of the mud and onto the trail. He finally started to resist me. “No,” he said. “No, no.”
“Come on, Vinnie.”
He looked behind us. “No.”
I pushed him. “Let’s go.”
“No,” he said. But he was too weak to fight me. He had nothing left. I turned him like a robot and pointed him south.
“Let’s go, Vinnie.”
We walked all the way back, three miles down the trail. I kept Vinnie’s body moving forward, but I had no idea where his mind was. I couldn’t even imagine. A good hour later, I had him back in the cabin, sitting at the kitchen table. I filled the big pot with water and put it on the stove to boil. I didn’t see a first-aid kit anywhere, so I stripped down and took off my undershirt, and tore it into strips. I threw the strips in water, and added the dish towel that had been hanging on a nail in the wall. Vinnie sat there the whole time, looking at nothing.
I looked around the place while the water was heating up, on the off chance there might be a first-aid kit lying around. There wasn’t. I left him there at the table for a minute while I went outside to check the little shed by the dock. When I opened the door, I saw an outboard motor leaning against the back wall, and several life preservers hanging on hooks. Two five-gallon gas cans sat on the floor. That was it.
I was about to close the door when a horrible thought came to me. I picked up both gas cans, shook them, and remembered that Guy had done the same thing yesterday. At the time, he had been surprised that so much gasoline was gone.
Ten gallons of gasoline.
I dropped the cans and slammed the door shut. Vinnie was still sitting at the table when I went back into the cabin. He hadn’t moved, not an inch.
“Vinnie,” I said.
He just sat there, staring straight ahead.
“My God,” I said. “Vinnie.” It all washed over me in one moment, how tired I was, how hungry, how much my back hurt for some reason, how miserable my feet felt in the wet boots. I couldn’t solve anything else, so I focused on the small stuff. Get Vinnie cleaned up, and then get these boots off.
The water was finally boiling. I stirred it all up with a big spoon, and then I fished out the dish towel. I grabbed the little bottle of dishwashing soap, went over and sat down next to Vinnie, and went to work on him.
“This is gonna hurt,” I said as I put his left arm on the table, pushing the sleeve of his coat up. As soon as I touched his arm with the hot towel, he stood up and pushed me away.
“Tom,” he said. “I’ve got to help Tom.”
“Vinnie, get back here.”
He went out the door and jumped down off the front porch. “I’ve got to help him,” he said. “The bears.”
I chased him down, grabbed him around the waist.
“The bears,” he said. “The bears.”
“They’re gone,” I said. “Come on, Vinnie. Sit down. The bears are gone.”
I pulled him back to the porch and sat him down on it. We were back outside in the cold air now. I took a deep breath and tried to clear my head. Then I squeezed out the soap onto the hot towel and pressed it onto his arm. He closed his eyes.
I washed him off as well as I could, starting with the cuts in his arm, then his face. The blood turned the towel pink. “Stay here,” I said. I went into the cabin and took the pot off the stove, brought it outside and put it down next to him. I took out a strip of fabric and pressed it against his arm.
“These cuts aren’t as bad as I thought,” I said to him. “It’s a good thing you had this coat on.”
He looked at me. For the first time since I found him up there, he looked right at me. His eyes were red.
“We’ve got another problem,” I said. I took another strip out of the pot and wrapped it around his arm. “The plane came back a while ago. It circled around a couple of times and then it landed. Or at least I thought it did. But when I got back, the plane wasn’t here.”
With the fabric wrapped around his arm, I took two more thin strips out of the pot and tied them around the edges, tight enough to keep the bandage in place.
“The plane didn’t land on the lake, Vinnie. It must have gone down in the woods.”
Vinnie kept looking at me, until it finally sank in. He turned his head and looked out at the lake.
“You can’t land anywhere else,” I said.
As soon as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. You can land somewhere else. There were other lakes. If you flew over this lake and kept going north, and you saw that the bears were uncovering your secret, the secret you had buried in the loose ground on the side of the stream, you would know that Vinnie and Alex were about to become your biggest problem. And so you would circle back and land your plane, but not on this lake. You would land on a different lake.
I thought back to our trip up here, flying over the trees. The other lakes, all strung out like pearls on the ground, connected by the thin streams. There was one lake, to the south of this one. I tried to remember how far away it was.
You land on the nearest lake. You get out of your plane. You know these woods. You know there’s a trail to Lake Agawaatese.
You come quietly.
“Vinnie,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.” I stood up and looked around, leaving Vinnie on the porch. I
