Savard didn’t finish bear number two, if finishing meant carving a complete bear down to the ground; in fact, he never attempted another complete bear. He’d gotten the second bear’s poker face almost right away-this one was even more ambiguous, if that was the word-and was sawing his slow way down to the chest when he lost focus. As he worked, he began to find himself watching not the side of the chain where the bear was emerging, but the other side, the tree side. For no reason, he decided to make bear number two half-bear, half-tree. There was a… relationship between the bear and the tree, a complicated one, not especially pleasing to either of them, if that made any sense. It took Savard four months to reach that point with the second bear. Bear three began the next Saturday.
By now Savard had lost track of the number of bears he’d carved with his chain saw. Many had ended up in the woodstove, making floor space for new bears. Not that anyone looking at the recent ones would have identified them as bears. Savard was interested in only two things now: the struggle, if you could call it that, between the bear and the tree, and the pokeriness, if that was a word, of the face, even though there no longer was anything resembling a face. Struggle and pokeriness, his terminology for what he was doing with the bears. It didn’t have to make sense because he never discussed it with anyone. No one else ever came inside the cabin; no one else had ever seen them.
Savard lit the woodstove, dragged the floor lamp-the only piece of furniture in the place-into position, switched it on. He surveyed his latest bear, a big one because the trunk was big: old, slow-growth cedar, with thin-spaced rings and a grain that felt like satin. His latest bear-a massive, twisting shape, almost too massive to be able to twist, but it did-locked in combat with some force in the wood. He knew the force was real, having felt it through the saw. Strapping on his Kevlarlined chaps-he’d had over thirty stitches in his legs by now, didn’t want more-he filed the teeth and rakers in the chain as sharp as he could get them, put on his headphones. In the beginning he’d kept his ears uncovered, lost in the sound-much quieter than a gas-powered saw, but still whining and buzzing nastily as metal turned wood to dust. Later, noticing that his hearing wasn’t as sharp as it had been, he’d worn protection. Now he preferred music, Django Reinhardt specifically. That was the way he worked: Paris singing in his ears-he’d never been to Paris, never been anywhere, really, except Vietnam, but Paris must have been something like Django’s music, if it wasn’t still-Paris singing in his ears, the saw throbbing in his hands, sawdust shooting through the yellow pool of lamplight, swirling past the blazing windows that faced the setting sun.
Joe Savard worked all night. When dawn came, and the east side windows lit up, first milky, then butter- colored, he saw what he had seen so many times before, that he’d only made things worse. Still, as in all those other times, he felt good just the same. Hard to explain. A feeling kids get when they stand in a doorway pressing their arms against the jambs, then quickly step free, arms levitating by themselves, as though weightless; a feeling like that, but all over.
A good feeling, followed by ravenous hunger. Savard closed up and drove to Lavinia’s, a diner he liked a few miles up 101. Black coffee, bacon and scrambled eggs, side of hash browns. While he waited for his order he asked for a phone book. He found a listing for the Little White Church of the Redeemer in Lawton Ferry, on the eastern border of his territory.
Food came. He ate it all, almost ordered the same again; would have, even a year or two ago. But he was up to 220, and that was the limit.
“How about a blueberry muffin, Joe?” asked Lavinia. “Baked personally in the oven of yours truly.”
No refusal possible. He ate the muffin, but without honey, even though he was very fond of honey.
“I like appetite in a man,” Lavinia said, clearing his plate, refilling his cup.
“Sure you do,” Savard said. “You own a restaurant.”
She gave him a look, a complicated one that he didn’t meet for more than a second. He had no desire to get closer to Lavinia. Not true: he had a strong desire to get closer to Lavinia, but only once or twice, and that wasn’t for him.
Savard drank up, paid his bill, leaving a bigger tip than usual, and was halfway out the door when he paused, then went back inside and picked up the pay phone. He dialed the Little White Church of the Redeemer.
“You have reached the house of God. No one is here to take your call right now.”
Savard left a message after the tone.
22
“Ah, right on the dot,” said Roger, standing beneath the statue of George Washington, Sunday at ten. “Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.”
“It is?” said Whitey, red-eyed, yellow-faced, blue-lipped, rumpled, as though he’d spent the night drinking and then slept, or passed out, in his car. But he didn’t have a car, and where had he slept, come to think of it? An unknown factor, quite certainly inconsequent; still, it was a relief to remember that Whitey wouldn’t be around much longer.
“Just an expression,” Roger explained, at the same time calculating with some precision the time remaining to Whitey-thirty-three hours, at most, thirty-two and a half, at least. A romantic concept, in a way: hadn’t innumerable potboilers been based on the conceit of a character given only a short, fixed time to live? Although not, Roger thought, a character like this. He found himself smiling at Whitey.
“Never heard of it,” Whitey said. Not a conventionally likable character, but a character nonetheless, in his silly leather jacket and pointy cowboy boots, beyond vulgar.
“No matter. How about some coffee?”
“Now you’re talkin’,” said Whitey.
They walked out of the Public Garden, waited for the light to change. Just as it did, Roger caught sight of a large, well-dressed family coming out of the Ritz across the street: an unmatronly mother with upswept blond hair, two tall young adults, some teenagers, one smaller child, and then the father. Something familiar about the father, and in that instant, Roger said, “Go.”
“Huh?” said Whitey.
There were people in front of them, blocking at least their lower selves from view. Roger ground his heel on the toe of Whitey’s cowboy boot. “Fast. Be back in one hour.”
“What the fuck?”
But then the light changed and Roger had no choice but to step off the curb and start across the street, couldn’t look back to see whether Whitey was following instructions, or tagging after him and thus aborting his plans, possibly forever. Roger’s path intersected that of the monstrously teeming haut-bourgeois family, and in its rear guard the father-Sandy Cronin-spotted him and said, “Hello, Roger.”
But therefore, if spotting now, hadn’t spotted him earlier, as he waited for the light. “Sandy. Well, well. And all the little ducklings. Merry Christmas.”
“And to you, Roger. You and Francie both.”
“Thank you, Sandy. I’ll make a note to pass it on.”
Roger walked on, across the street, along the side-walk, to the awning of the Ritz, and there, passing behind a top-hatted doorman, he glanced back. The Cronins were well inside the park now; the little one had tossed a chunk of ice at one of the bigger ones, and they all seemed to be laughing. Sandy himself, in his camel-hair coat, was patting a snowball into shape. What kind of justice was this, that a mediocrity like Sandy could so prolifically pass on his mediocre genes, while he, Roger, had been denied? Beyond justice, for justice was merely a human construct, after all, what kind of science was it? How could nature select Cronins over Cullingwoods, unless the degradation of the species was the goal? In his mind’s eye he saw again that ineradicable microscopic image of deformed sperm-his-twitching spastically in the petri dish. Ineradicable, yes, but also ineradicable was his suspicion that somehow, in some way yet unknown, it was Francie’s fault: Francie, with her babbling of adoption, missing the whole point.
Roger noticed that the Cronins were gone. Noticed, too, that there was no sign of Whitey. The Cronins hadn’t seen Whitey-more important, had not seen the two of them together. The plan remained viable, but it had been a near thing. Roger recalled chaos theory, how a butterfly fluttering its wings in the wrong patch of sky could destroy the world. No amount of planning could permanently overcome the inexorability of the natural forces. But all he required was thirty-three hours, to keep those butterflies at bay for thirty-three hours.
