Bill & Charlie (a love story)

Mammals.

BILL & CHARLIE (a love story)

William Bergal wasn’t a survivalist, nor was he an outdoorsman. He had something to prove--to himself and his God. He had to repay the gift of life itself. This urge resulted from a lifelong disdain for the crowd, and from a very deep affinity for nature in her staggering totality. Bill hurt and he didn’t know why. He only knew that it was a sweet pain, and nobody’s business but his own.

But a seeker should be an outdoorsman, minimally, if his spiritual calling outweighs his good sense to the point he’s willing to tackle Washington’s Mount Rainier, at the onset of winter, with nothing more than street clothes and a backpack full of trail mix, a tin heating cup, a notepad and bruising literature, and a fanny pack containing utter essentials: compass, disposable lighters, flashlight and extra batteries, multivitamins…Bill also brought along a good strong hunting knife, though he’d never used one, and a silly philosophy defining the only real food as that which is self-attained. To support this idea he carried a pouch holding fishing line and hooks: he’d heard fishing was the easy part; throw in your line and relax over instant coffee. Salmon are known to leap right into frying pans.

Odd.

This sure wasn’t the cherry-cheeks cold of snowball fights and toboggan races. This weather dug into nerves. It tore simultaneously through mouth and nostrils, strangling a man from the inside. Bill was seriously ill on the second night out, and his unexpected staple diet of trail mix and ice water was taking a further toll. The salmon had to be jumping into competitors’ pans. But Bill’s sights were irrevocably set on a strangely sedate hill--he reckoned three thousand feet up; a soft peaked snowball amid streaked majestic peaks. The view would be staggering.

Yet it just kept getting colder; seeming to drop a degree for every hour he pushed on. And there were drifts, crevasses, lurking stones and roots. Those gorgeous stately white pines appeared to close behind with impenetrable resolve. The third day found him hopping and slapping his thighs, building petering fires, quoting King James, Herman Hesse, and Euell Gibbons. He must have made a most comical impression on the small band swinging up from the northwest.

The lead man strode right up.

“You see a wounded animal? Brown bear, maybe three feet high at the shoulder. Hit once in the left upper hip.”

“Hit?”

“Shot.” The man raised his rifle symbolically. “We’re hunters. It’s season.” He swung that rifle in a lazy arc. “I’m Russ Vaden. This is Derrin, there’s Sam, and that’s Jacques.” The mentioned men watched with barely contained amusement. Vaden squinted curiously. “If you’re lost, mister, just bear downhill. Always remember that. Folks don’t settle in the hills.”

“No,” Bill muttered after a hard moment. “I’m up here to find myself. There is great beauty in the mountains…everywhere.”

“Nature boy,” Jacques snickered. Derrin snickered back. Sam laughed snot out his nose. The huntsmen relaxed.

“Come on,” Vaden grinned. “We’ve got hash and fresh salmon.” He rolled his eyes. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

“No,” Bill whispered. “Not a vegetarian.”

“What he means,” Sam appended as they made for a flat space between trees, “is that some guys go off on the whole nature thing. Politics, womenly rights, ecologeewhiz--save the animals, kiss the babies. Stuff.”

Derrin shook his head. “Each to his ever-lovin’ own.”

The salmon and hash were sizzling bliss, the hot coffee, heaven. Bill had probably lost five pounds; not superfluous weight in the wild.

Vaden watched him eat with a twinkle in his eye. “Friend…”

“It’s William. Bill.”

“William Bill. I don’t know anything about your leanings and whatnot, but I think, as a man among friends, you just might find that this fulfillment you’re seeking is right back home where you left it. Makes no sense for a fellow to be up here suffering if he don’t have to. For profit, sure. For sport, maybe; that’s on the individual.”

“There are things,” Bill tried. “Deeper…” He knew he was desperately out of place. “Things bigger than me and you. Abstract things. Immortal things.”

Derrin spat grounds in the fire. “So you’re looking for God up here, is that it?”

Jacques jumped to his feet and spread his arms. “There he goes! Zhooom!”

Bill studied him drearily. Jacques was one of those annoying class clowns whose sole claim to friendship was weary tolerance. Six centuries ago he’d be talking his way out of another round in the stocks. “No. Not as you put it. God, nature, beauty, life, death, friendship, this fire, that turkey buzzard--it’s all the same thing. I suppose I just had to get out of the city. People running around with their heads up their rectums. The soul wasn’t designed for that.”

Sam sighed. “Sentiment in the mountains…I give you a week, maybe two. It takes a certain constitution, neighbor, to grit your way through another day. A man don’t need God or poetry. He needs to know who he really is, and where he actually stands.”

“Mountain Law,” Vaden said. His eyes gleamed. “And I wouldn’t do too much talking about rectums around these guys.”

The men all laughed.

Off to Bill’s right, Jacques made a series of obscene gestures. He wasn’t all that subtle. Bill dropped his eyes.

“Nothing wrong,” Vaden said, “with a man trying things, so long as he keeps his mind ordered the way nature intended. We’ve seen your bright sticky dens, Friend William Bill, and we know exactly what goes on in the cities.” Derrin scooted to Bill’s far left. Vaden and Sam were anchored at ten and two o’clock.

Bill studied his clasped hands. “I’m not gay,” he said quietly.

Jacques, batting his lashes, cried, “I’m just experimenting!” Sam laughed and gave him a good manly sock on the bicep.

Derrin ran his fingers up Bill’s calf. “Y’know, Willy, you get less wind resistance when you shave ’em down.”

“Cut it out,” said Vaden. He rose and, aggressively cocked hands on hips, searched the broken crystal skyline. A minute later he looked back down and kicked Bill’s thigh. “You got any ideas about getting friendly with my friends, friend?”

“I am,” Bill snarled, “not gay!”

“What are you then?” Vaden grabbed him by the hair and yanked him to his feet. Derrin and Jacques took the arms while Sam walked a tight circle, looking menacing.

“Who are you?” Vaden delivered a savage kick to the scrotum. “Answer!” Bill hit the snow, mauled by Jacques and Derrin while Sam maneuvered for random kicks to the head. Vaden didn’t even pause for breath. “Who sent you? What are you doing up here? Who do you work for? What you got on us? How much do you know?”

“Nothing!” Bill gasped. “Nothing!” He scooped snow between his thighs.

Vaden slapped Bill’s cheeks. “Just to show you we’re not the bad guys, I’m provisioning you for the trek back down to your tea rooms and opium dens.” He hauled a backpack from the hunters’ common pile, heaved Bill to his knees, strapped it on. “There’s a good ten pounds of jerky and dried salmon in here. Now, you’re gonna march downhill until you get to civilization. You didn’t see nothing up here. You tell your friends this is no place for a soul-searching sissy. Do your seeking in the gay bars. If I see you again I’ll kill you.”

* * *

Before he’d descended a hundred feet, Bill knew he was going back up. He had to get higher, to that place too desolate for the human animal. He gave the hunters’ site wide berth as he made for the white hill. Watching for tracks and anomalies gave him a bizarre pride--he was learning the wild.

And it just kept getting colder. Bill’s hair and beard froze over. His naked hands showed a purple-white gradient fading to blue, his legs and arms stung, went numb, stung some more. He halted only long enough to realize that to pause was to die. And the little hill beckoned. He managed a dozen feet, reeled, managed a dozen more. Forcing each step, Bill sank and recovered, sank and recovered, made the hill’s basic slope, pushed himself on.

The cold was unbelievable…and now it had stopped being cold. He wasn’t just numb; he was--Jesus: Bill stamped his feet and felt nothing. His hands were locking up, his eyes swimming, his breath searing. The whole world went white…snow blind, frostbitten, dying in place…Bill hopped around, trying to feel his blood, and found only floes. He wheeled his arms, fell in a hollow. An ice grave. No! He banged his way out, saw a black recess in the blue-white field. A cave, a hundred feet up, a hundred miles away. And he swam for it, hope’s madman--a place to lie down, rock instead of snow. The animal instinct was there…a place to die out of the open. A cave, a vault, a tomb. And he reached it, somehow, fell inside, struggled along a surface that did not yield, found a space between facing boulders, and passed.

There came a rhythmic noise to his left; sibilant, very close. Like a bellows pumping, but faster. Closer to death than to fear of death, Bill jacked up his torso with an elbow and came nose to nose with a panting brown bear.

“You,” he managed, “startled me.” The animal’s lids parted and closed. Bill quietly collapsed, but after a minute pushed himself back up. The bear was stretched out on its side, exactly parallel. Bill could see why: the bear had taken a shell in the back just above the butt, where the left hip joined the flank proper. The action of infection was monstrous; a great festering mound rose out of the fur. The bear was battling both terrible pain and massive hunger.

“No need for us both to suffer, friend.” Bill gnawed some life back into his hand and fought out a huge hunk of jerky. The animal’s nostrils quivered, the jaw creaked open, the tongue extended like an unfurling carpet. Bill’s fingers stung from the wet warmth. No sane man would allow any part of his body to loiter between those stiletto teeth, but he knew the animal probably lacked the strength to manipulate the food otherwise, and anyway a frozen corpse with one hand is as good as a frozen corpse with two. He fed the bear one mouthful at a time, and his hand, while gently masticated, was never harmed. The warmth of that mouth kissed his fingers with life; Bill found himself feeding with greater facility…pushing the jerky down, reaching into the pack for a new fistful of salmon, pushing the salmon down. When the meal was done Bill whispered, “Thank you,” clasped his hands above his heart, and laid back down to die. He gradually grew conscious of a heaving presence, spreading along his legs and flank, slowly covering his frame, heavy but not crushing, warming, warming. Bear’s breath in his face, noxious, suffocating…warming, warming…fur in his hair, paws on his arms. But softly. Warming, warming…nature’s latest victims locked in a warming embrace; odd bugs in amber, pinned in a naturally refrigerated morgue for two. A strange way to die.

* * *

Bill dreamed of calving glaciers, melting upon impact. His subconscious sketched fingers and toes that no longer belonged to him; pus-yellow dragging coals fastened by lichen-green ligaments. He dreamed his way into a grayscale grave nestled in stone, and woke in a rank pool of sweat. The bear simultaneously opened its eyes. Bill rolled his face from under that heaving muzzle, trying to flex his fingers. There was sensation. He ran his hands through the bear’s warm fur, then rubbed them into the hot skin. His fingers began to sting. “Thanks again,” he hissed. He made to wiggle his toes. The feet, smothered in bear overnight, were absolutely numb. But it was the good-numb. He was able to bend his arches and crimp the toes at their bases. The bear moaned. Bill could have kissed it: he’d survived frostbite intact.

He lifted the bear’s foreleg over his head, slid out his legs an inch at a time. When his limbs worked again he gently placed his hands on the bear’s side and leaned over the wound. “Listen, girl. I’m not some fancy naturalist or anything, but I can tell from a casual glance that no vital organs are involved.” He followed the flank down, inspecting further, and at last blew out a sigh. “I neglected to tell you that I’m also not a biologist, and one thing you’re most certainly not is a girl.” He shook his wet head. “Doesn’t it figure…here I am, stuck with a pansy panda. Maybe those mountain creeps were right. I was gonna name you Charlotte, or something like that, but--hey, how’s about Charles? Can you deal with that?” The bear groaned from the depths. “Charles it is, then. William and Charles.” He arched his brows. “Too formal for outcasts? Okay, my friend. It’s Bill and Charlie.” He hands gently explored. The bear’s respiration quickened. “Er…listen, Charlie. There’s one other little thing I failed to mention…and that’s that I’m no veterinarian. But I’m letting you know, right up front and just between friends, that you’ve one hell of a humongous infection. That’s what’s causing the pain, not the bullet.” He very tenderly worked his hand toward the festering wound. Charlie’s groans elongated. “The bullet must come out, Charlie. No way around it. Kindly remain seated.” He limped outside and came back with his arms weighed by virgin snow. “Ice to numb the pain.” Bill eased out his hunting knife. “Technology to reverse the damage.” Some instinct made him display the blade. Charlie’s eye rolled up, rolled back down. Bill made two hills of the ice. Into one he plunged the blade to further the chill. The other mound he scooped onto the hot purple wound. The bear sucked air, relaxed. Bill now sat as for yoga, eyes closed, palms smothered in fur. One hand found the chilled knife’s shaft, one eye opened to further its course. Bill bent to his task like a researcher to his lens. “Good boy.”

* * *

January was much harsher, rarely climbing above 5^oF. Sometimes the wind-chill factor made sedentary activity life-threatening. But Bill recovered from his ordeal, and Charlie from his wound. One irony of the wild: hardship makes a steady physician--the single-minded pursuit of day-to-day brute existence causes the entire system to perform at peak levels. And genuine cold heats the blood. A healthy animal keeps moving or dies.

Bill and Charlie turned the little cave into a home as well as a survival chamber. Bill insulated the rock walls with dirt and dead branches, Charlie showed Bill where to fish for the fattest salmon. Charlie did the rounds as watchdog, Bill demonstrated the fine art of fire building, and even constructed a hearth with a highly efficient flue. Bill liked to tell long boring stories of his childhood; Charlie followed as best he could, prone as he was to nodding. They had songfests; Bill took lead while Charlie harmonized, sounding more like a drunken sea lion than a rightful accompanist. The hard winter was much less so at Bill’s & Charlie’s.

They took hikes in the afternoons. Charlie knew just where to find the best berries; Bill dreamed of yeast. And it was on one of these brief walks--a pair doesn’t dare loiter in sub-zero weather--that Bill, fighting to build a baby fire, grew increasingly annoyed at Charlie’s typical whining dissertations on the high-scented outdoors. He tried a snowball or two, but that didn’t work; Charlie only became more vociferous, and somehow Bill wasn’t really surprised when Vaden’s voice poked out of the pines:

“Anybody for beans and weenies?”

Somebody laughed--it may have been Sam--and then they were all oozing into the clearing. They came from four corners: bear and man were surrounded.

Bill quickly stepped to Charlie’s side, ran a quieting arm around his neck. “We don’t want any more trouble.”

A bullet almost took off Bill’s hand. He stared in horror. Charlie lay bleeding, half-buried in snow. Vaden tucked the pistol back under his belt.

“We don’t either.”

* * *

Vaden, looming against the false dusk, stirred the small fire with a branch, sporadically watching his bound and seated prisoner. Maybe twenty yards away, three silhouetted ghouls were busy round a larger blaze.

“You know, to be perfectly honest, I have to admire a man with the gumption to come out here all on his lonesome, at this time of year, with nothing more than the grits God gave a gopher.”

“Let the bear go, mister.”

“Russ.”

“He’ll live if he gets a chance to recuperate. I sincerely do not give a good damn what you do with me. I’ve seen enough.”

“That’s a shame. But we’re hunters. And that’s a bear, not a waif.” Vaden looked off pensively, aurorae in his eyes. “So did you find Him out here? God, I mean.”

“I think it’s pretty obvious what I found out here. Let the bear go.”

“You sound like a guy talking to his son’s kidnappers.” Vaden rocked the rifle on his thighs. “Tell me something, Friend William Bill. How can a fella have the guts of a man and the stomach of a sissy? How does a man, armed with the iron gonads forged by fifty thousand years of goddamned evolution, end up playing canasta with a brute capable of chewing his oh-so civilized heart out?”

“That’s a mammal. It will respond to compassion as well as to maltreatment.”

“That’s a wild animal.” Vaden crisscrossed his arms over his head. His friends whooped and hunched over Charlie.

Bill’s voice caught in his throat: “Listen, sir, I didn’t see anything and I don’t work for anybody. I don’t know or care what you’re doing up here. It’s none of my mortal business. Tell them to let the bear go. I’ll head back home like you want and wipe this whole scene from memory. I swear. Just let the bear go.”

Vaden stared hard. Determined to try again, he came down in a hunching crouch; forearm resting on extended left knee, right leg facing out at an angle. He looked inward, at peaks locked in solid by winter, and said, meditatively, “You know, you shouldn’t be all that surprised by those boys’ behavior. It’s not only unnatural, it’s downright wrong for a fellow to carry on about a dumb animal. You don’t act like a man; why do you expect to be treated like one?”

“Get it over with, then. Kill us both, but be quick about it. You talk about men--what kind of man torments a helpless creature?”

Vaden cocked his head. “What kind of man treats a varmint like a woman?”

“Get it over with, you b*****d.”

Vaden pushed himself back up. “Don’t be in such a hurry. What kind of man executes another without first giving him a last supper?” His expression was odd; not vindictive, not humored, not angry or sad.

Indifferent.

“You like bear?”

* * *

Bill screamed each time Charlie roared in agony. The torturers weren’t laughing any more; that was only at the start, in response to Bill’s bellowing pleas for mercy. Screaming took all the fun out of it. But not the thrill, and certainly not the camaraderie. They’d laughed hysterically while jabbing out the bear’s eyes, hooted and howled with each application of torch to fur. Now the clubbings and stabbings were waning in response to Charlie’s abbreviated calls. The party was winding down. Vaden, standing midway between the action and his captive, swung his rifle side to side to indicate a halt.

Bill wasn’t only screaming with horror. He’d used his feet to scoop a large ember from the fire, and managed, through a herculean effort of contortion, to jam this ember up between his wrists and their hide binding. The leather and his flesh were breaking up at roughly the same rate; he could smell his skin burning through the tears.

Vaden walked up casually, a lilting figure made spectral by backing firelight. He let the rifle swing down until the bore was positioned directly between Bill’s streaming eyes.

“I told you once, friend, that if I saw you again I’d kill you.” He nodded, more to himself than to Bill. “Mountain Law.” He scrunched up his nose and looked around. “Christ. Something stinks something awful.”

In a heartbeat Bill was on his feet. He tore the rifle from Vaden’s hand and clubbed his skull with the butt.

Shouts of surprise from the men. Bill saw Derrin and Sam go for their rifles and dropped them flat. Jacques stood splayed, torch in one hand, air in the other. Bill was just getting a bead when a grunt from Vaden caught his ear. He whirled and shot the man in the throat even as the pistol was rising.

Jacques yelped and bounded into the drifts. Bill grabbed Vaden’s ammo pouch, stalked across the clearing, clenched his fist, stopped. He stood over Charlie without looking down, the breath gurgling in his throat. The bear whined pathetically. “Oh God,” Bill said, and let the barrel descend until it snagged in the fur above Charlie’s ear. “Oh God, oh God.” He wept like a baby. “Oh God--” Bill squeezed the trigger and stepped over. The world quaked round him.

But there was a bug out there, floundering in white. Bill shook away his tears and took his time reloading. “Whatsoever a man soweth…” he puffed, and raised the rifle, “…that shall he also reap.” He gripped his coat against the weather and began to march.

For Bill, this was dead-familiar turf. Every time Jacques stopped to get his bearings or wave surrender, Bill got off a shot or two. And if passion could afford room for self-analysis, Bill would have had to admit that he was aiming more to inspire terror than to kill. Yet the shots kept getting closer, and his blood brought him focus despite the cold. The course was relentlessly uphill: Jacques’s fear caused him to mindlessly recede from the steadily stalking automaton; he was blind to an intelligent retreat. He thrashed like a drowning man, trading the obvious proximate hazards for a long snowy grade offering sporadic cover round a friendlier keel. But Bill knew this slope particularly well; he’d traversed it, in good company, a hundred times and more. He took a shot at Jacques’s head. The aim was wide; Bill followed up with a trio, then with a volley. Jacques screamed at the dusk-bound figure pausing to reload. He stared at the graying hilltop, took a terrible breath, and scampered up screaming all the way.

Bill was weeping as he fought the grade; he could tell by the quick bite of new ice on his cheeks. Jacques lost his footing in a drift and clambered out, close enough to exchange looks. “No, mister. No!”

Bill wasn’t taking real aim now. He cocked and fired with one hand, cocked again. A white nova appeared a foot from Jacques’s shoulder. The man waved his arms frantically, as though to ward off a blow. A cracking report preceded a puff of snow between his feet, and another, eighteen inches higher. “No!”

Now Bill’s whole face was contorted by ice. He couldn’t stop the tears, he couldn’t keep his mouth from shivering. Jacques disappeared behind a bank of glistening boulders and Bill stopped to shake the rifle.

“Mountain Law!” he bellowed.

He plunged the rifle’s stock into the snow and used it for leverage as he clung to stunted branches with the other hand. Up to his waist in white, Bill nevertheless stormed the dimming hill, saw Jacques looking around desperately, saw him scramble into the cave.

A strange quiet came over the hill. Bill could hear his heart beating; he’d never heard it before. Animal business was at hand: his senses were sharpening in direct relation to the cave’s proximity. He could sense things he’d never felt, feel things he’d never sensed. Bill smelled prey. How better was he, then, than the basest of animals; in what secret way did this very private experience rightly become an evolved man; a man of intellect, of spirit, of self-analysis and compassion. Bill listened some more. Inside were a scuttling, a whimpering, a stifled cough. He cocked the rifle, mumbled, “Father, forgive me, for I know not what I do,” and kicked his way inside.