Baroque wished he and Marlboro were back at the house watching medical shows with their sister, Susie. Instead, they were in a truck with Denton, their brother-in-law. Baroque wasn’t used to Denton being this close. Denton was an accountant, and Monday through Friday he was at work all day. When he came home, he usually disappeared into the back bedroom after dinner. Of course Saturdays and Sundays Denton was around more, and often in the front of the house, and it was starting to take just a little thing like opening the refrigerator door for their brother-in-law to give Baroque and Marlboro a look, a real unfriendly look. One night Denton had called him and Marlboro lard-asses and claimed they lacked ambition and would never amount to anything if that didn’t change.
He’d said it just the one time, but Baroque could tell Denton had thought it more than one time. He and Marlboro had even sat on the porch for a few minutes yesterday, just to get somewhere Denton wasn’t.
But they were with him now and they sure couldn’t get away from him in a truck cab, and the three of them were riding up a bumpy dirt road in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, doing something that Baroque was pretty sure wasn’t just a little illegal, like smoking pot or running a stop sign, but a lot illegal, like getting sent to prison, regardless of Denton saying it was a public service. When Baroque asked why they had to go bear hunting this particular day, Denton said this cold spell would soon send the bears into hibernation. Marlboro had asked what hibernation was and Denton had answered that it was when dumb, lazy creatures laid around for months doing nothing.
The dirt road came to a dead end. Cinder blocks marked the parking lot, and there was a trail on the other side. Denton told them again everything they were supposed to do and handed Baroque the cell phone, then left with the pistol and knife strapped around his waist. Once up the trail a few yards, Denton was suddenly gone, like the woods had just swallowed him up. It made Baroque feel spooky, but everything about this bear business had been spooky. Like the way two weeks ago Denton had brought a big carton home after work and pulled out a steel trap, a pistol, a yellow box of bullets, and then a knife. A big knife, the kind Baroque had seen only in movies where maniacs hacked people to death, maniacs who always had some mask or hood covering everything except their eyes, which made it worse, because it could be anybody who was the maniac, even the person in the movie who seemed most normal. Like Marlboro, Baroque wore only a regular shirt and a sweatshirt. The warmth from the heater seemed to have whooshed right out the moment Denton opened the truck door. Baroque and Marlboro hadn’t been with Denton when he set the bear trap, but Baroque wished now that Denton had made them come then instead of now, because it had to have been a lot warmer that day. His breath clouded the windshield and Baroque felt his body start to shiver. He looked at the trail, then cranked the engine and put the heater on high.
“Denton said we shouldn’t do that unless we got real cold,” Marlboro said.
“Well, I am real cold,” Baroque said, “aren’t you?”
Marlboro nodded and clapped his hands together and rubbed them.
“How cold do you think it is?”
“Eighteen degrees,” Baroque said. “That was the number on the bank sign.”
“I don’t think we’ve ever been in weather like this,” Marlboro said.
“No,” Baroque agreed. “It’s probably never been this cold in Florida, except maybe during the Ice Age.”
“I wish Susie could have come down to Florida to help us get a job there instead of up here.”
“That would have been better,” Baroque said, “but there’s nothing we can do about that.”
“I guess this is our first job,” Marlboro said, “being here, I mean.”
“Yes, I guess it is.”
“You think we’ll lose our nose and fingers, like that guy on the medical show?”
“No,” Baroque said. “That guy was stuck on a mountaintop three days. We won’t be here that long.”
“I sure hope not,” Marlboro replied. “I don’t think I could eat if I couldn’t breathe through my nose.”
“You’d learn to get used to it,” Baroque said. They listened to the heater hiss against the cold.
“You think he’s really going to kill a bear?”
“That’s what he said,” Baroque answered.
As the cab warmed, the breath fogging the windshield evaporated, but all Baroque could see were woods, woods where someone or something could be watching him and Marlboro right now.
“It’s sort of spooky when there aren’t any streets or houses around,” Marlboro said, evidently feeling the same way.
“It wouldn’t hurt to lock our doors,” Baroque said, “just to be on the safe side.”
They pressed down the locks and for a few minutes didn’t speak. It was Marlboro who broke the silence.
“He wouldn’t just leave us out here, would he? I mean, he’s not acted very friendly lately.”
“No,” Baroque said. “He’d have made us get out of the truck and driven off if he was going to do that.”
Denton felt better as soon as he left the truck. Being that close to his brothers-in-law made him feel like a fungus was starting to grow on him. They both had a moldy sort of smell, like mushrooms. Which was no surprise, since Baroque and Marlboro moved about as much as mushrooms. They never left the house, and got up from the couch only to eat or go to the bathroom. Hell, mushrooms probably did more than that. They actually grew. They were finding nutrients, some kind of work was going on down there in the soil.
Baroque and Marlboro had been with him and Susie two months, up from Florida to find jobs, they claimed. Evidently they expected the jobs to haul themselves up to Denton’s front porch and wait for Marlboro and Baroque to step out the door and be whisked away. Denton blamed a lot of it on their being from Florida. He’d never met anyone from the place who didn’t get on his nerves, like all the Florida retirees who drove ten miles an hour on any road that wasn’t straight and wide as an airport runway. Admittedly, Denton hadn’t been around many younger Floridians, but his brothers-in-law were indictment enough.
Baroque, whose name sounded a lot like “a roach” to Denton, was the older of the two by eleven months. Their father was a self-proclaimed “free spirit” who’d drifted like a spore—that’s the way Denton always envisioned it, anyway—into Colorado and attached himself long enough to find Susie’s mother and have a baby with her. Then the three of them drifted on down to Florida, where Baroque and Marlboro were born. It was the father who’d named the two boys.
Susie didn’t know how the name Baroque had come about, but Marlboro had been named after the Marlboro Man, the cigarette cowboy. Susie said it was meant as a comment on society. Thank God that Susie, at thirty the oldest by six years, had been named by the mother. Susie wasn’t a Floridian, in Denton’s view. She’d been born in Colorado and had gotten out of Florida quick as she could, earning a scholarship to Gulf Coast College, in Alabama. She met her first husband there, a fifty-year-old admissions counselor.
As soon as Susie graduated, they married and moved to North Carolina, so mountains could blot out some sun. The first husband had problems with psoriasis. But he had at least gotten her to North Carolina, where she and Denton met.
Susie’s first marriage hadn’t worked out any better than Denton’s. Her first husband had made Susie wear his dead aunt’s Sunday church hat every time they had sex. An awful thing, but Denton’s first wife had been even worse. The admissions counselor’s aunt might’ve been dead but at least the man hadn’t lain there like he was dead. Denton’s first wife was so frigid that each time they had sex she might as well have been embalmed. Eventually, every time they did it he’d hear organ music inside his head, the same kind that oozed out of funeral home walls. It was a wonder he and Susie could ever touch another naked person after the two partners they’d had.
The two of them had overcome a lot, no doubt about that, but now they had a nice marriage and a fine house and Denton had a good job as an accountant and Susie was the head nurse at the county clinic. Which was why she’d let Baroque and Marlboro come up from Florida in the first place. She’d wanted to help her brothers improve themselves, and Denton couldn’t blame her for that. After all, hard as it was to believe, they were her brothers. She was even trying to get them, or at least Baroque, interested in medicine. Baroque was sort of smart, Susie claimed, and if Baroque got a job as a med tech maybe Marlboro could be an orderly or something. She’d taken them to the clinic with her for a day, and now she had them watching the medical shows. It might inspire them, she claimed, though Denton was of a mind that a good kick in their lardy asses would inspire them more.
Susie watched the medical shows as much as she could. She might need to know this sometime, she always said when Denton complained. He understood it could be helpful to someone in the medical field, but Susie didn’t watch the shows about a heart transplant or a knee operation or a woman having a baby. Susie watched shows with names like Medical Mysteries or I Survived, shows about hundred-pound tumors or people who’d lost all their toes to frostbite or who internally combusted, and it all gave Denton the willies.
He would go in the back room and watch the fourteen-inch TV on the bureau, catch the news on CNN and then maybe one of the business shows, or get on the computer, where he’d been doing the bear research. Anything was better than the medical shows. The worst thing to Denton was how they always ended. There’d be upbeat music and the announcer would talk about miracles, and the person who’d had the hundred-pound tumor or the man whose leg had been snapped off by a shark always acted like it was a good thing this had happened. Now Susie had Baroque and Marlboro watching them every night, probably even a few about bear attacks.
They did at least watch them. Whenever Denton ventured into the front room, their eyes were always on the screen. They weren’t talking and seemed to be paying attention. Of course Baroque and Marlboro never did talk a lot anyway, not to Denton, or even much to Susie. They just sat next to each other, in the exact same posture, like twins. Part of that was surely their being less than a year apart in age, and also because Baroque and Marlboro did look like twins, at least in the face and especially their eyes, which changed when they shifted them in a different direction—less green to more brown or vice versa. It reminded Denton of his twelfth-grade biology project. The teacher had given every student in the class a jar of fruit flies, and after a while the fruit flies’ eyes were supposed to change, and everybody else’s fruit flies had changed eye color except Denton’s. His just crawled around on the glass for an hour and then died.
He got a D− on a major nine-week project, which was totally unfair. Denton hadn’t picked out the flies or put them in the jar. He hadn’t asked for them. They were just there on his desk one morning. He got no college-scholarship offers like Susie, and instead had to work his way through. The damn fruit flies had made sure of that. Susie saw Baroque and Marlboro’s interest in the medical shows as a step forward. Still, neither of them had actually left the house to apply for a med tech program or orderly job, and though Susie hadn’t actually said it, Denton suspected even she was tired of her brothers being around.
It had pretty much shut down their sex life, because their house was a fine house but a small one. Baroque was in the spare room with just three inches of drywall between him and their bedroom. Marlboro was on the couch, and if Denton and Susie could hear the springs squeak whenever Baroque or Marlboro turned over, then they sure as hell could hear what he and Susie were up to. After the nightmare sex of their first marriages, there had been issues to work out, which they had. Until the brothers-in-law showed up, Susie tended to moan some and rock the bed a good bit, but there wasn’t much of that anymore, and now Denton was starting to have some problems, and Denton had never had problems, at least with Susie.
He stopped to rest a moment, checked to make sure the double-ply plastic bag was still in his coat pocket. Paws and gallbladder—that was all he needed. Denton had to hand it to the Chinese. They were smart, and had been smart a long time. They’d invented gunpowder and a lot of other things, even spaghetti. The Chinese also knew how to cure certain male problems without having to explain them to a doctor and then after that having to take the prescription to a pharmacy where some eighteen-year-old cashier would stop chewing her bubble gum just long enough to do something stupid like say your name and the name of what you were picking up out loud, maybe even say it over a speaker like it was a frigging pep rally. No, the Chinese understood better how to do things than Americans. They explained what cured a problem and explained where to get the cure and even how to prepare it. It was the right way of doing things, which was why they pretty much owned the United States now. The way he’d been feeling the last few months, Denton wasn’t sure he’d mind the Chinese taking over America completely, because everybody over there worked. If they didn’t they starved. Sure, times were hard here. Denton understood that as well as anyone. He’d barely survived a layoff himself. But unlike his brothers-in-law, he’d have found something to do if he’d been laid off, even if it was picking up cans and bottles out of ditches.
Denton moved on up the trail, wondering if a caught bear would stay quiet or make a ruckus. The only sound was the water, and not even that except where a waterfall or rapid was, all the stream’s slow parts covered with ice. No other sounds like a chain saw or car or dog, because this was real wilderness he was in now, and it was so cold the birds and squirrels were using their energy just to hunker down and survive. Denton felt cold even with his thermal underwear, gloves, and wool coat, and it would only get colder, because though it was midafternoon, the sun would soon start to fade behind the mountains. At least the cold would be good for preserving the bear paws and gallbladder. Denton wouldn’t even have to stop and get ice for the cooler, which meant five minutes less time before he could get some distance between him and his brothers-in-law.
Denton looked down through the trees to see if he could glimpse the truck but didn’t see it. All Baroque and Marlboro had to do was sit and wait, that and lean on the horn if a ranger appeared. Even they would have trouble screwing up those directions. Then again, Denton wouldn’t put it past them to drive over to Bryson City for something to eat or a six-pack of beer, then forget where the hell they’d been parked. That was the worst of it.
Most people were smart at something. There were guys Denton had known in high school who weren’t able to spell cat, but at least they could change their spark plugs or replace a blown fuse. Baroque and Marlboro didn’t even possess smarts like that. Having clogged up the commode three times, Marlboro, it was clear, couldn’t even figure out how to properly wipe his ass, and Baroque had driven the truck like a drunk ten-year-old the one time Denton allowed him to take it to town. Denton thought about calling them, just to be sure they hadn’t driven off, but then he remembered they would actually need money to buy a hot dog or six-pack. Still, Denton was beginning to feel uneasy about bringing them along.
He went on, breathing hard because he was climbing steep ground, and having to be more careful too, since ice was on the trail this far up. That was something else. He’d figured, wrongly, that the cold weather would drive Baroque and Marlboro back to Florida. Florida. Denton said the word out loud. What kind of name for a state was that?
It wasn’t a word with any backbone to it, like the hard C in the first syllable of Carolina. You could look at Florida on a map and see that it drooped down from the rest of America like a limp peter. It was a wonder the Founding Fathers hadn’t just sawed the damn state off and let it drift away. A state where the most famous person went around pretending to be an eight-foot-tall mouse. Every kid in the state had probably been to see that thing, walked up to it, and shaken its hand or paw or whatever believing it was a real mouse. Growing up to think a big animal like that wouldn’t be dangerous. No surprise, then, that when the kids grew up they’d think piranhas and pythons and walking catfish were a good idea for pets, then go dump them in some nearby swamp or river, thinking that was another good idea.
And now it was as if the whole state was like those catfish, crawling up the Eastern Seaboard into North Carolina and taking over, because here in this very park there were people—people who were supposed to be in charge—who acted like bears were pets. Letting them wander along the roads so dumb-asses could throw marshmallows and french fries at them, like it was trick or treat and the bears weren’t real bears but idiots in costumes. Doing it even after some fool had nearly had his arm torn off by a bear he was feeding from a car window, and probably would have had his arm torn off if someone in the car behind hadn’t tossed out a bag of Cheetos. Denton had seen the whole bear spectacle firsthand just a month ago when he’d driven to Cherokee to see a client. The bears were actually lined up on the shoulder waiting for handouts. One had gotten out on the road in front of Denton’s truck and stayed there with its big red tongue slobbering, like it was owed a meal. That was another thing the Chinese had going for them. They weren’t big on pets. Hell, they ate their pets, or what passed for pets over here.
Denton finally saw his marker and left the trail. He paused but didn’t hear anything so, if the trap had worked, maybe the creature was already dead. Denton had to admit he was relieved. If he’d caught one and it was dead, all he’d have to do was cut off the paws and do a little surgery to find the gallbladder, which shouldn’t be that hard, since he’d seen the photos—greenish, shaped like a fig. If the bear hadn’t died, he’d have to shoot it. He’d grown up in a place where you were supposed to enjoy being out in the woods shooting things, but he had never enjoyed being outdoors.
Denton liked being able to decide how warm or cold he was going to be, and having a toilet, and knowing exactly where everything was and knowing it was close by. But here he was, way up in the woods with a pistol and knife and trap like he was Daniel frigging Boone. And what if he got caught? Having Baroque and Marlboro as lookouts probably increased the chances about a thousand percent. He’d lose a good job at the least. Maybe end up in jail, because having the gun with him meant two federal crimes.
But there was no bear. The store-bought ham he’d hung from the limb was gone, the trap sprung. Denton looked closer, saw two silvery-brown nails and a few hairs. The bear had leaned over the trap as if reaching over a counter. Dumb luck on the bear’s part, Denton knew, but at least the damn thing might be scared enough now to think twice before going after human food again. Screw it, Denton thought, bear, medicine, and, most of all, the brothers-in-law.
Denton had eighty bucks and a credit card in his billfold. He’d take Baroque and Marlboro to the bus station in Asheville. And buy two one-way tickets to Florida. They might eventually wander back, but it’d take those two screwups months or even years to get enough money to return. Susie had sent them money to come the first time, but there was no way in hell that Denton would let that happen again. As he began the walk back, Denton suddenly felt better than he had in a while. Everything was going to be all right.
Even freezing his tail off on this mountain had been worthwhile. That was another thing the Chinese believed, or at least the Buddhists among them, that you went up a mountain to gain wisdom. And he damn sure had, finally realizing what to do about the brothers-in-law.
Denton made his way back down the trail, going slow because the afternoon light was waning. He started thinking about how he’d deal with Baroque and Marlboro if they didn’t want to go. Just as he decided if it came down to the pistol he wasn’t above that, Denton tripped on a root and his ankle veered in one direction and the rest of his body in another. He didn’t stop tumbling until he was off the trail and into the stream, ice shattering around him as he entered the tailwater of a wide, long pool face-first.
Soaked from his head all the way to his waist, Denton crawled up on the bank. His teeth chattered and he could feel his hair turning into icicles. He knew that whatever else bad had happened in his life—embalmed wife, deadbeat bears, brothers-in-law—this was worse. A whole lot worse.
He took off his gloves and pulled out the cell phone, praying it would still work. The cell phone, unlike him, had been totally immersed, but by some kind of miracle it wasn’t dead. Denton’s fingers were numb but he was finally able to press the right numbers and the call went through. On the eighth ring Baroque picked up and Denton explained what had happened, or at least as best he could, because his brain was clouding with every passing second, and his words didn’t match up with his thoughts the way he wanted them to. It felt like years passed before Baroque understood.
“We’re coming,” Baroque said. “How far from the truck are you, time-wise?”
Denton didn’t speak for what felt like a full minute. The connections of time and space were not so clear anymore.
“Maybe thirty minutes,” he finally answered.
Denton heard Baroque speak to Marlboro, then the sound of truck doors slamming shut.
“We’re on our way,” Baroque said. “But we need to know if you feel cold or hot.”
Denton realized that though his teeth chattered and icicles had formed in his hair he actually was, if not hot, at least warm.
“Hot,” he said.
“You got to get back in the water, then,” Baroque said. “You’ve got hypothermia. A boy on one of the shows fell in a pond and being under that cold water was all that kept him from freezing to death.”
Denton tried hard to figure out if Baroque knew what he was talking about. It seemed Denton had heard of such a thing, maybe on the news, and the fact that Baroque had learned a word as long as hypothermia, even pronounced it correctly, struck him dimly as some kind of progress. Besides, the water would cool him off.
“You can’t wait any longer,” Baroque said. “In a couple of minutes you won’t be able to move. We’re on our way.”
Denton looked at the pool, covered in ice except around the falls. Somewhere deep inside him an alarm bell went off, but it was so soft Denton couldn’t figure out quite what the warning was. Baroque was still talking, telling Denton he had to do it now. Denton set the cell phone on the bank. Baroque’s words were blurring. It seemed Baroque was talking real fast, though maybe that was because Denton was starting to think real slow. Breaking the ice to enter the pool seemed too much work, so Denton crawled onto the rocks above the waterfall and slid feetfirst into the pool, going in smooth as an otter.
At first they didn’t see him, just the cell phone’s blue-tinged screen.
“If he crawled up in the woods, he’s a goner for sure,” Baroque said.
Then they saw Denton hovering in the pool’s center. The ice was so clear it looked like Denton was part of a magic trick.
“His eyes are open,” Marlboro said.
“Of course they are,” Baroque said, “and he can probably see us and hear us.”
“He’s not blinking.”
“That’s because it’s like a coma, everything’s shut down but his brain. His heart, I bet it’s less than one beat a minute by now.”
“I didn’t think he’d be that blue,” Marlboro said.
Baroque took a football-sized rock and threw it into the pool above Denton’s head. The ice shattered, but Denton’s body drifted only a few feet before it snagged on more ice.
“We’ll have to go in and get him,” Baroque said. Marlboro looked at the water reluctantly.
“I guess so.”
“Let me get his cell phone first,” Baroque said. “He’d be mad at us if we left it. Anyway, we’d better get him to the hospital. I’ve been thinking more about that show. The announcer might have said fifteen minutes, not fifty. I don’t guess you remember?”
Marlboro shook his head.
Baroque picked up the phone and put it in his pocket and they waded in, the water over their ankles as Baroque set his hands beneath Denton’s shoulders and Marlboro lifted his feet. Once on the bank, they set Denton down. Marlboro parted his legs and positioned himself between them as if hauling a stretcher.
“His being stiff does make it easier,” Marlboro said.
They made their way down the trail and arrived at the parking lot. As the day’s last light fell behind the mountains, they leaned Denton against the truck.
“Should we put him in the middle?” Marlboro asked.
“We can’t do that,” Baroque said, “not unless you want to drive all the way to town without heat. A human can’t be thawed out but once.”
Baroque opened the tailgate and they slid Denton in feetfirst, placing two cinder blocks, one on each side, so he wouldn’t shift as much. Marlboro took the lid off the Styrofoam cooler and wedged it gently, almost tenderly, under Denton’s head.
“And he can still see and hear us?” Marlboro asked when they’d finished.
“Sure.” Marlboro stared at Denton.
“I can’t think of anything to say to him.”
They got into the cab and after a couple of tries Baroque found first gear and they made their way down the dirt road.
“He’s been pretty good to us,” Marlboro said. “He can be grouchy but he has let us stay with him.”
“I’ve been thinking maybe we haven’t really held up our end as much as we should have,” Baroque said. “Next week I’m going over to the community college to see about that med tech degree. What we’re doing helping Denton makes me feel useful.”
Marlboro nodded.
“If you do that, I’ll go see about an orderly job.”
The road went downhill and the woods thickened. Everything was shadowy now and at the bottom of the hill was a bridge. Baroque knew from movies this was not the kind of place where anything good ever happened. A maniac or a man with a steel hook for a hand or a mutant could be hiding under the bridge. He risked shifting into second gear and found it and the truck sped up and rattled on across. Baroque let out a grateful sigh as the road rose again and the woods opened up.
“If Denton is okay, do you think they’ll put us on one of the medical shows?” Marlboro asked.
“Probably,” Baroque said.
“And they’ll give us medals?”
“I don’t know about that,” Baroque said, “but if they do they should give Denton one too. The way he got himself under the ice—that was real smart.”
“What do they need to get him going again?” Marlboro asked. “It doesn’t have to be a special kind of hospital?”
“No, they’ve all been trained to do it.”
“That’s good,” Marlboro said, as the dirt road ended at an asphalt two-lane.
The truck stalled when Baroque shifted into reverse instead of neutral. He didn’t try to turn the engine back on but simply stared out the windshield, unsure which way to go. Baroque looked in one direction, then the other, but he couldn’t see much because it was real dark now. The headlights would have helped, but he didn’t know how to turn them on.