I know my neighbors by their dogs. I knew Bear a couple of years before I
learned Martin's name. Each morning Bear
jumped into the cab of Martin's red pickup and rode with him to work. Each evening Martin dropped Bear off before
he went out drinking.
Sometimes Bear crossed the street to my front lawn,
sniffed and pawed at my
newly-planted
heather, then casually lifted his leg.
Martin called him back out of neighborly concern, even though I never
complained.
Bear had the dense coat and pale staring eyes of his
lupine ancestors. He carried the
bleached femur of a large kill in his jaws and thought nothing of leaving it
unguarded on his front lawn.
Neighborhood dogs knew better than to challenge Bear. He was an alpha male with nothing left to prove.
Bear’s coat grayed in the two years before I actually
met Martin. When the clocks changed to
daylight savings, Bear basked in whatever late afternoon sun he could find
after Martin left him in favor of his own pursuits. He retrieved his bone from its depository of
the day before; occasionally he’d lower his head and gnaw. He never barked or howled. Summer evenings at dusk when instinct
prevailed and every other dog bayed at the rising moon, Bear was silent.
Last year, Martin pulled a large wood plank out of
his garage and stored it in his pickup; in the morning, he set one end on the
ground and the other in the truck.
"He's got arthritis," Martin told me. “Cold mornings pain his hips.” Bear walked up the ramp into the truck bed
and settled down on a tattered mattress that reeked of mildew and
marijuana.
"He must miss riding up front with you.” I’d finally got to talking to our
neighbor.
“Nah. The
important thing’s just getting to go along.”
My husband Jack didn’t pay much attention to the
day-in day-out of our lives, like who lived next door or across the street or
who owned which dog. He was a
botanist. I wrote a weekly advice column
for the local paper. I was hungry for
the meat and potatoes of daily existence, of someone like Martin, and although
my reality seemed remote from his – measured in light years, not city blocks –
sometimes his was the reality I craved.
"How old is Bear?" I asked Martin.
"I don't know exactly. He wasn’t a pup when I got him at the shelter. I'll tell you one thing though. When they bury him, they may as well bury me
alongside him."
It came to me that he didn’t take Bear with him when
he went out drinking because he didn’t want the dog hurt if he had an accident.
Martin was grizzled, short – about my height, five
feet five inches or so – with lank black hair, lost somewhere in indeterminate
middle-age, preserved by years of drinking.
Dark stubble permanently shadowed his jaw and I figured he had a
two-pack-a-day habit, based on his cough, the smell of bleach and smoke in his
tee shirts and the color of his fingertips.
His worn truck had the green-yellow-red insignia of a Viet Nam war veteran on the dented
rear bumper, which probably explained a lot.
Last winter, Bear stayed home; he watched for Martin
all afternoon. I could tell the dog was apprehensive. He circled the front yard, pacing as the high
broad August days narrowed into fall and shortened into winter. The first time I heard Bear howl was during a
windstorm, when the winds off the Columbia River raced through the gorge to our
small Oregon
town, whistled down the backbone of the neighborhood, taking power, fences and
saplings with it, discouraging newcomers from unpacking their belongings. The wind rattled the windows, the dishes, my
teeth and bones. It pulled a wall of
cold in after it.
One night, a sound emerged above the frantic knocking
and scraping. I opened the front door
and listened.
"It's Bear," Jack’s voice said somewhere
behind me, disembodied in the noise. I
flipped on the porch light. I could
barely make him out at first, but then I saw him. The winter moon rose high and
clear, just short of full. The brilliant
stars of the winter constellations were a chilly array that I recognized from
stargazing as a child. The neighborhood
and its secrets were revealed with unusual and unflattering clarity. I could make out Martin now too, a dark
shadow, sound asleep in the crotch of a leafless tree. I grabbed something warm and ran to him. When
I shook him, one hundred proof fumes nauseated me in early-pregnancy. He opened his eyes slowly, one at a time,
careful not to disturb whatever equilibrium he had established. Jack stood at my side. "Let's get him inside," I said.
"She won't let me in," Martin mumbled and
nodded to his wife’s shadow in their kitchen window, there a moment, then
gone. A row of amber glass, empty fifths
of bourbon, lined the windowsill.
"Then we'll take him home with us," I
decided. Jack looked at me. I knew that look. "Well, we can't just leave him out here,
can we?" I turned to Martin. “Can you walk?”
“Not without a net.”
He laughed, then sobbed, then turned his head away and threw up onto the
ground.
The wind broadsided the tree just then and almost
shook Martin loose. He got down, took a
step with us and crumbled. We supported
his weight, each of us taking one of his arms around our shoulders, and dragged
him across the street. Even as dead
weight, Martin was surprisingly light.
Jack took him inside, tumbled him into the spare bed in what was
supposed to become our baby’s room and I went back across the street to see
about Bear. He wouldn’t come to me when
I called, just stood in the driveway and watched, his gaze opaque with
cataracts but steady as a lighthouse beacon.
A week later, I saw Martin staggering around in his
back yard. His worn jeans were undone
and he held his penis out like a divining rod, followed it unsteadily as he
doused Marian’s flower beds. When he saw
me, he quickly zipped his fly and, head down, heel-toed to his truck.
I didn't see much of Martin or Bear for months after
that. I was busy, being pregnant,
staying alive through winter, tending the woodstove, convinced that if the
low-banked blaze went out something terrible would happen. The relentless winds
eroded everything in their path, including my psyche. Jack called these the Prozac months. He counted and measured trees for the Forest
Service. He didn't share my
foreboding. He was preoccupied with work
and his presence was something felt more than heard. Any insight on his part was unexpected but
when he offered an analysis, however brief, it was mathematically precise. I had long ago learned to trust in his love
for me by what he did, not by what he said.
"There must be an Indian name for these
winds," he said, soon after we moved to the area, just after he finished
graduate school.
"How about 'fucking-pain-in-the-ass,' " I
said.
I had more difficulty adjusting to Oregon than Jack did. I'm a New Yorker. I considered my living here on the edge of
civilization a concession and an aberration.
The town was like an ill-fitting new suit. Marriages dissembled; wives left their
husbands here. They didn't look
back. They moved to the city – to Portland, or home to their families in Utah
and Colorado and Arizona
and California,
anywhere the sun was bright and the winds didn't blow. Their husbands went mad – or became very
eccentric.
Our first winter here the next-door-neighbor's wife
left; her husband had Tourette’s; I felt sorry for him until warm weather
arrived and we opened our windows. Then
a woman up the street left when her husband sold their jeep, built a sled and
let his dogs pull him around the neighborhood.
He’d pass by every day or so, cheeks flushed, hair blown back on the
winds, laughing crazily out at the universe.
Iditerod Todd, they nicknamed him.
What I learned about the town came mostly from
word-of-mouth, which I devoured at the local Thriftway market. One neighbor fell off his roof during a repair
job, ended up in halo traction and was branded forevermore: Frankenorman. His Halloween costume was screwed into his
skull. The new barber drove a yellow
Harley. She was fifty-ish, with copper
skin and seal-sleek black hair – television commercial hair. The local men were smitten. Not just the ones entering or leaving
mid-age, but their fathers and sons and grandsons. Soon all the men in town were shorn and
clean-shaven. She was like a carnival
come to town.
The town was rich with stories that became folktales
with a season of retellings.
Still, I took my time calling this ‘home’ until one
morning I walked out back of our house and saw a young deer grazing in my new
venture – a vegetable garden. She
peaceably harvested young carrots and tomatoes, broccoli and lettuce, fallen
apples and cherries; skittish at my presence, she disappeared into the early
mists that rose off my property. But she
became a regular visitor after that, studied then cautiously accepted me. The garden tied me to my strange new
world. The deer tied me to the
certainties of a patch of land.
I made several trips to the hospital that winter –
the winter that Martin left Bear at home.
Each time the obstetrician stopped my contractions with an intravenous
drug that dried my mouth and drove my heart rate up to barely tolerable. What at first floated blissfully began to
swim, and then stopped and didn’t start up again. My last visit to the ER, the doctor showed me
the ultrasound. I knew what I was
supposed to see; I didn’t see it. No
movement, no heartbeat. It was like
looking into deep space: pale nebulae, milky white smears floating in darkness,
something that might have been. The rest
was a blur. Jack and I didn’t talk about
it then or ever. He just held my hand
the whole way home. We hadn’t planned on
making kids anyway.
I’d been too busy to pay attention to Bear or Martin,
but I knew Martin’s wife had moved out.
Martin seemed sober, or at least more in control, self-contained
even. His five-o’clock shadow
disappeared and his hair was styled.
He’d been to the barber. He was
building a low brick wall around his property.
By trade, Martin was a mason.
Bear placidly watched him, sunning himself, shedding his mangy winter
coat in patches on the early spring lawn.
Our community, carved out of forest
that tried to reclaim it every spring, healed.
The inhospitable winter winds were erased from memory, at least for the
next few months. Each year we forgot
anew.
Martin waved from across the street one morning.
“Hi,” I called, then walked over to see him and
scratch Bear behind his ears. He rolled
onto his back and gave me his stomach to rub.
"I heard your wife left. I'm sorry."
"Yeah," he said; "maybe it's for the
best. I'm taking medication now, trying
to straighten out my life. It's time to
start over.”
I couldn’t agree more.
"Good for you," I encouraged him, mustering
cheerleader enthusiasm from my distant past.
“I know you lost…” he nodded toward my stomach, then
stopped and just stood there. “I never
thanked you for that night.”
“It’s been a long winter. As you said, time to start over.” Maybe I wasn’t so different from Martin as I
thought; we were all on this journey together.
I touched his hand, then went back across the street.
That evening I told Jack about Martin. He was busy but mumbled something.
"What?"
I had the water running in the kitchen sink and couldn't hear him.
"I said he'd be better off in AA. Drunks are notorious for falling off the
wagon. If he’s on antabuse…"
"Don’t be so negative,” I called to him. But I began to worry about Martin. If you drank and took antabuse you got
sick. It was simple.
I’d check on Martin if I didn’t see him for a couple
of days, call him or go knock on his door.
Jack said I was just being weird.
Maybe I was, but Martin seemed fragile.
"You started it," I said.
Martin invited us to a party at his house. He had a new girlfriend and a new brick
barbecue he had built that summer in his back yard. It was mid-October, the last warm day before
the Prozac months returned. Frankenorman
came, Iditerod Todd was there, and the new barber. We brought steaks and sparkling cider. Bear sat under our table, awaiting fallen
scraps. The entire block turned out.
I still tired easily.
When we left in early evening we looked for Martin to thank him, but
couldn't find him. I stretched out in my
new hammock, slung between two sturdy firs by Jack. I closed my eyes; the fiery red sunset played
against my closed lids. I inhaled the
mixed scents of the turning, of a new season as it rounded the sun.
Later, a commotion of sirens, flashing lights and a
young woman's frantic cries drew us inevitably to our kitchen window. The EMTs worked on Martin’s body, splayed out
on his front lawn for the universe to judge; Martin’s heart had stopped and
they couldn’t start it up again. One
moment Martin was standing, the next he was dead. It was sure, swift, merciful in its way – no
lingering, no feeding tubes, no nurse’s aide to wipe and change him, which
Martin wouldn’t have liked at all. They
found two empty fifths of Wild Turkey in his bathroom sink. Jack rode with Martin in the ambulance. I brought Martin's girlfriend home with
me. As the ambulance drove away, I heard
Bear howl for the second time. Martin
was pronounced dead in the ER.
After that, Bear spent time on our front lawn. He didn’t exactly move in with us. He watched his old house. Martin’s ex-wife didn’t want him; neither did
the girlfriend. One afternoon I fell
asleep with him, curled into his heavy coat for warmth in the cool November
sun.
Martin's house was up for sale. And then it sold. And the new neighbors assumed Bear was
ours. And Bear finally came inside.
***