That night the lodge was hopping. Tourists had begun to trickle in and there were ten or twelve fresh faces at the bar. I ate a chicken pot pie and a can of cold beets in the solitude of may cabin, wrapped a tacky black-and-gold scarf round my neck, and ambled through the dark featureless forest to the lodge. As I stepped through the door I smelled perfume, sweet drinks, body heat, and caught the sensuous click of the poolballs as they punctuated the swell of riotous voices churning up around me. Holiday cheer, oh, yes, indeed.
Jill was tending bar. Everyone in the development was there, including the old wives and the walleyed poetess. An array of roaring strangers and those recognized vaguely from previous seasons stood, slouched, and stamped round the bar or huddled over steaks in the booths to the rear. Marshall was behind the grill. I eased up to the bar between a bearded stranger in a gray felt cowboy hat and a familiar-looking character who shot me a glance of mortal dislike and then turned away. I was absently wondering what I could possibly have done to offend this guy (winter people — I could hardly remember what I’d said and done last week, let alone last year), when I spotted Regina. And Boo. They were sitting at a booth, the table before them littered with empty glasses and beer bottles. Good, I thought to myself, an insidious little smile of satisfaction creeping across my lips, and I glanced toward Jill.
I could see that she was watching them out of the corner of her eye, though an impartial observer might have guessed she was giving her full attention to Alf Cornwall, the old gas bag who sat across the bar from her and toyed with a glass of peppermint schnapps while he went on ad nauseam about the only subject dear to him — i.e., the lamentable state of his health. “Jill,” I barked with malicious joy, “how about some service down here?”
She gave me a look that would have corroded metal, then heaved back from the bar and poured me a long slow shot of Wild Turkey and an even slower glass of beer. I winked at her as she set the drinks down and scraped my money from the bar. “Not tonight, Michael,” she said, “I don’t feel up to it,” and her tone was so dragged down and lugubrious she could have been a professional mourner. It was then that I began to realize just how much Boo had affected her (and by extension, how little I had), and I glanced over my shoulder to focus a quick look of jealous hatred on him. When Jill set down my change I grabbed her wrist. “What the hell do you mean ‘not tonight,’” I hissed. “Now I can’t even talk to you, or what?”
She looked at me like a martyr, like a twenty-eight-year-old woman deserted by her husband in the backend of nowhere and saddled with an unhappy kid and a deadbeat sometime beau to whom the prospect of marriage was about as appealing as a lobotomy, she looked at me like a woman who’s give up on romance. Then she jerked her arm away and slouched off to hear all the fascinating circumstances attending Alf Cornwall’s most recent bowel movement.
The crowd began to thin out about eleven, and Marshall came out from behind the grill to saunter up to the bar for a Remy Martin. He too seemed preternaturally interested in Alf Cornwall’s digestive tract, and sniffed meditatively at his cognac for five minutes or so before he picked up the glass and strolled over to join Boo and Regina. He slid in next to Regina, nodding and smiling, but he didn’t look too pleased.
Like Boo, Marshall was big. Big-headed, big-bellied, with grizzled hair and a beard flecked with white. He was in his mid-forties, twice divorced, and he had a casual folksy way about him that women found appealing, or unique — or whatever. Women who came up the mountain, that is. Jill had had a thing with him the year before I moved in, he was one of the chief reasons the walleyed poetess hated men, and any number of cross-country ski bunnies, doctors’ wives, and day trippers had taken some extracurricular exercise in the oak-framed waterbed that dominated his room in the back of the lodge. Boo didn’t stand a chance. Ten minutes after Marshall had sat down Boo was back up at the bar, a little unsteady from all he’d had to drink, and looking Jill up and down like he had one thing on his mind.
I was on my third shot and fifth beer, the lights were low, the fire going strong, and the twenty-foot Christmas tree lit up like a satellite. Alf Cornwall had taken his bullshit home with him; the poetess, the wives, and two-thirds of the new people had cleared out. I was discussing beach erosion with the guy in the cowboy hat, who as it turned out was from San Diego, and keeping an eye on Boo and Jill at the far end of the bar. “Well, Christ,” San Diego roared as if I was half a mile away, “you put up them godforsaken useless damn seawalls and what have you got, I ask you? Huh?”
I wasn’t listening. Boo was stroking Jill’s hand like a glove salesman, Marshall and Regina were grappling in the booth, and I was feeling sore and hurt and left out. A log burned through and tumbled into the coals with a thud. Marshall got up to poke it, and all of a sudden I was seething. Turning my back on San Diego, I pushed off of my stool and strode to the end of the bar.
Jill saw the look on my face and drew back. I put my hand on Boo’s shoulder and watched him turn to me in slow motion, his face huge, the scar glistening over his eyebrow. “You can’t do that,” I said.
He just looked at me.
“Michael,” Jill said.
“Huh?” he said. “Do what?” Then he turned his head to look at Jill, and when he swung back round he knew.
I shoved him, hard, as he was coming up off the barstool, and he went down on one knee before he caught himself and lunged at me. He would have destroyed me if Marshall hadn’t caught hold of him, but I didn’t care. As it was, he gave me one terrific shot to the breastbone that flattened me against the bar and sent a couple of glasses flying. Bang, bang, they shattered on the flagstone floor like lightbulbs dropped from a ladder.
“Goddamnit,” Marshall was roaring, “that’s about enough.” His face was red to the roots of his whiskers. “Michael,” he said — or blared, I should say — and then he waved his hand in disgust. Boo stood behind him, giving me a bad look. “I think you’ve had enough, Michael,” Marshall said. “Go on home.”
I wanted to throw it right back in his face, wanted to shout obscenities, take them both on, break up the furniture, and set the tree afire, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sixteen: I was thirty-one years old and I was reasonable. The lodge was the only bar in twenty-six miles and I’d be mighty thirsty and mighty lonely both if I was banished for good. “All right,” I said. “All right.” And then, as I shrugged into my jacket: “Sorry.”
Boo was grinning, Jill looked like she had the night the bear broke in. Regina was studying me with either interest or amusement — I couldn’t tell which — Scooter looked like he had to go to the bathroom, and San Diego just stepped aside. I pulled the door closed behind me. Softly.
Outside, it was snowing. Big, warm, healing flakes. It was the kind of snow my father used to hold his hands out to, murmuring, God must be up there plucking chickens. I wrapped the scarf round my throat and was about to start off across the lot when I saw something moving through the blur of falling flakes. The first thing I thought of was some late arrival from down below, some part-timer come to claim his cabin. The second thing I thought of was the bear.