Sister Beast

Alex’s aunt, a motorcycle enthusiast and force of nature, presented me with the dogs just before we left. They were two of her favorites out of the existing pack of a dozen or so, and I was genuinely touched. “I want you to take Cleo and Honey with you,” she said, showing me where she’d packed their food, crates, and gear into a corner of the already-stuffed truckbed. “It gets lonely out there in those camps. Or not lonely enough, if some roughneck bachelor gets a whiff of you, gorgeous.” She hooted and smacked my ass, cackling at her own joke and at my reddening face. We started out for western Pennsylvania the next morning, the whole caravan: one F-250 pickup, one Harley Davidson, one cowboy biker, one girl far from home, Cleo the aging Yorkshire terrier, and a young red-nosed pitbull named Honey.

As we drove, the rising sun traced a slow ellipsis around the caravan. Eyes half-closed, I sketched some of these June dawn images in my mind: my feet stretched up on the dash, Honey’s soft snoring weight sprawled across my lap, Alex scratching Cleo’s neck, the glint of the skull ring on his left hand as he easily maneuvered our one-ton metal bulk, cigarette smoke curling up from his handsome face. He had bought a sunken trailer that sat on a hill at the far end of camp. A steal, he told me; the old couple who had lived there prior had died suddenly and were found by the groundskeeper when he went to check on them that winter. “I’m sorry if that creeps you out,” he said, glancing over. “The owner of the grounds wanted to sell it quick. No one came to see it this winter, what with the death and all.”

I smiled. “Not creeped out. If anything, it’ll be good for the book.”

He laughed, relieved. “Well, good. There’s a gun in the back that I’m gonna show you too, in case anyone gets to acting funny. I’ll be gone for some long days, baby. I’ll worry about you.”

“Don’t worry at all, babe. I’ve got this killer,” I joked, flipping one of Honey’s velvet ears over. She snorted in her sleep and dug her nose deeper into my leg.

“See, you think she’s a gumpy puppy now but wait til somebody looks at you and I’m not there. You’re about to be alone on a campground full of nothing but horny roughnecks and not all of ‘em are as sweet and charming as your own personal horny roughneck.” He leered playfully, causing me to snicker. “And this girl here,” he continued, tapping Honey on the haunch, “is from my aunt’s prize bitch’s last litter. She’ll put a hurt on somebody, trust me.”

I rolled my eyes. “Alex, everything is going to be fine. You act like I’ve never dealt with a sleazy dude in my life. I do not need a guard dog or a gun. You’re being super dramatic.” I stroked Honey’s side, watching the sunlight come through the window over the rumble of highway, onto her white-and-chestnut marbled coat. “Besides, we’re just there for the summer. I’ll work on the book, and explore a little, and find a good pond to skinny-dip in.” My new charge was twitching her feet in pursuit of some dreamworld animal and I felt my heart surge with a familiar comfort. I missed my dog back home.

“You better not go anywhere without that dog,” Alex told me sternly. “I’m serious. You think because it’s not the city that there ain’t anything dangerous out there.”

“Ok! I will take the dog everywhere with me. Happy?” I leaned over to poke him in the ribs. He caught my hand and kissed my knuckles, the smoke from his cigarette unfurling over my skin.

***************************

It rained for several days when we first arrived and began to settle in. The trailer was spacious, with a large rear bedroom, a sunny kitchen, and lovingly maintained garden beside a flagstone fire pit. Someone had carved a forest god’s face into a huge oak just outside. We shook out our clothes, went grocery shopping, and hiked around camp; we were among the first there for the job, with just a couple lone men in truckbed campers or pup tents peering curiously out at us. Alex made sure to loudly greet them in his deep drawl, his arm resting lazy and muscular over my shoulders. Honey stuck close to my leg and watched both Alex and the men.

It wasn’t hard to keep my promise. Cleo was more suited to lapdog duties, her fluffy black-and-tan little body constantly wedged up under my elbow or between my legs as I sat at the table with my manuscript. This was perfect for the rainy weather, and it wasn’t until I was kissing Alex goodbye in the thin 6am light and watching him roar off on the bike on the morning of the fifth day that I turned to Honey and asked: “Run?”

We three fell into a pattern with ease and not a small amount of pleasure. Sleep til the sun lays across the upper headboard of the big bed. Make breakfast and coffee while we played our favorite music. Rush outside to gambol up and down the hill with abandon. Some days we’d take the truck to the town library some forty minutes away; some days we’d hike the hills and meadows around the camp, shrieking and barking at rat snakes; some days we’d sit out on the warm flagstone and nap, or read.

The late afternoon and evening were for writing. When the sun finally began to set, I’d take Honey with me up the road to the showers, careful to avoid the men who stood around fires drinking Jack Daniels from the bottle. We’d get back to the trailer after I’d washed my hair and eat dinner – pasta and wine for me, ground beef with kibble for the dogs. If you’ve never gotten slightly drunk on a perfect summer’s night with two furry friends, a skyful of fireflies, and the blissful exhaustion that comes from sore calves and a good day of editing, let me take this opportunity to recommend it.

That summer, the dogs and I were together in a universe of our own making. Alex was working rounds of sixteen-hour shifts on a rig a short drive away, and we only saw him when he came home to sleep - which sometimes wouldn’t be for days on end, since the rig had bunks. On those nights, he felt more like a guest. His confidence about Honey had backfired a little; she didn’t like him touching me, and if we wanted to have sex we’d have to shut her outside the bedroom, or tie her in the yard. She was getting bigger. The mastiff in her was starting to deepen her chest, and now she almost fit into her comically large paws. Every day she looked less like a rangy puppy and more like a brawny adult.

I found myself surprised about the dissonance between Alex and Honey. Before, I’d paralleled myself with Cleo, and assumed that the other two musclebound creatures would somehow easily sync to each other. Cleo was from the city too, and like me – a round and soft animal who seemed to subsist mostly on naps, affection, and carbohydrates. But as Alex was around less and less, I began to understand the two dogs to be more like dual sides of my own nature, and also more behaviorally complex than I’d initially thought them to be. Cleo liked to sunbathe while Honey and I romped, it was true, but she was also the first one of us to charge and chase off a snake that got too close, her imperious high-pitched bark ringing around the meadow. Honey did want to race and wrestle, but she was always the first into bed at the end of the day, impatiently waiting for Cleo and I to turn in so that we could all fall asleep snuggling. I realized that I didn’t miss Alex at all; I was making incredible progress on my manuscript and frankly was relishing the time alone, free from sexual demands or tense conversations about what I was going to do after the summer. His physical distance sharpened my vision– I saw that he liked keeping me in this easy-access pastoral bubble where I could be content and placid and quickly found. Just because that was working for me right now, I told myself, didn’t mean that it would work when autumn came.

The first scream happened around 3am, a week or so since I’d last seen Alex. I sat bolt upright, cold rippling through my body, and automatically reached out in the dark of the bedroom for the dogs. Honey whined and licked my wrist; Cleo yawned and shifted beside me. A short beat of silence, and the same scream again– this time longer, higher, and more drawn out. My pulse hammered in my ribs. I eased out of bed and went to the window. The night was clear and the moon shone down on the very normal view of the garden, no screamer in sight. I didn’t know what I was looking for and I didn’t want to go outside, so I got back into bed and huddled around Honey’s comforting bulk, forfeiting sleep entirely until the sun rose. That afternoon, while collecting the mail at the camp office, I asked the groundskeeper’s daughter about the scream. Had she heard it? Had I just been dreaming?

She regarded me warily. “I don’t know what you heard about that old trailer but my dad cleaned it out himself after those two were found dead. And to be blunt, ma’am, the owner isn’t gonna take kindly to a refund situation. Y’all bought that place sight unseen and the paperwork’s all done.” She rapped her knuckles on the desk to illustrate the finality of the thing.

I blinked at her, nonplussed, before I realized what she was saying. “Oh, no– I don’t think it’s haunted or something,” I laughed. “I just wondered about the sound last night.”

Visibly relaxing, she laughed too. “Well, you get all kinds of strange noises out here at night, especially this time of year. You know, there’s owls and geese and deer, and rabbits getting themselves killed by coyotes and such. Things that are dying always sound a little spooky.” She tapped a stack of papers into place and hesitated. “I was worried that you were coming up here to ask because you’d heard about how they died. Those two were such nice people. It’s too awful what happened.”

I cleared my throat. “What was it that happened, exactly?” I asked, a little too casually. “Alex never really explained. I won’t freak out, I promise– I’m a writer, I’m always on the lookout for stories.”

“Oh, well. He killed his old lady and then himself. Murder-suicide, you know.”

Ok, so I had a ghost. I took the news calmly, being fairly friendly with death, and on some level violence. Now when the scream came, I knew that I could talk to her. I wrote her letters when I couldn’t sleep. On my next trip to the library, I looked up barn owl sounds. As it turned out: a short, piercing screech, not unlike a human woman’s scream. Far from rationalizing my ghost away, this only made me search the trees around the meadow at dusk, straining my eyes to see her shape: winged, eerie, watchful.

One hot twilight at the end of July, I was busy searing a salmon filet, a glass of white wine in one hand and my hair scraped up into a knot, humming along to a cello sonata with my back to the dogs. Cleo was sitting at the door, as far away from the heat of the stovetop as possible, her small nose pressed up against the screen and her old rheumy eyes surveying the garden. Honey lounged, panting, on the couch, head on her paws. So fixed was my attention on the scent and texture of the fish, something that I rarely prepared, that I’d forgotten to take my usual steps of switching off the porch light and bolting the front door. It was almost entirely dark.

Honey saw the coyote first. Suddenly, her mass of fur and muscle was launching past the smaller dog; she didn’t make a single sound but hit the doorjamb precisely with her muzzle and the screen door flew open. I barely caught a glimpse of the flash on a pair of strange yellow eyes, low to the ground and intently fixed on Cleo’s plump little form, before the shape of the interloper’s body was eclipsed by my pitbull, who sprang into the night, seized the coyote by the neck, and tumbled with it out of the dim circle of lamplight.

I screamed and dropped the wine glass, which shattered as I snatched Cleo up from the door and pushed her further inside. Grabbing the closest thing to a weapon that I could see – a sturdy-handled broomstick – I lunged blindly out after Honey, slamming the front door behind me.

I heard the sounds of the brawl further into the woods behind the trailer. A yip, a yelp, a snarl, a harsh bark; leaves crackling and branches snapping. Crashing into the brush, I followed the noises, dumbly clutching the broom with my heart pounding in my throat. Alex’s voice rattled in my head: girl, what are you going to do with that broom?! Get your city ass back inside. I set my jaw. I couldn’t see a damn thing, but I could still hear Honey’s bark up ahead, and I went deeper into the dark fragrant woods, scraping my bare feet on thorny underbrush and banging my shoulders against the tall bodies of trees, their outlines just barely visible in the deepening night.

After what seemed like hours but was probably only a hair-raising few minutes, I screamed again when a dark, low shape came bounding suddenly toward me. Honey stuffed her nose into my hand and I sank down onto the ground with her, sobbing. She licked my face happily, tail swinging madly, no trace of the streamlined beast who’d just defended her little family so ferociously. She was back to being my silken silly baby – the only difference being the spatters of thick, hot blood that stained my chest as soon as I threw my arms around her.

We went back toward the edge of the woods, the ridges of Honey’s big head under my hand and the other fist numbly gripping the broom handle, my whole body weak with relief. I saw the quick shine of wild eyes above us and reflexively tensed, only to breathe out again when the huge, graceful form of a barn owl silently unwound its enormous wings and sailed out into the meadow ahead of us, disappearing from sight just past the far end of the trailer. I shut my eyes briefly to send out something like a prayer – thank you barn owl, thank you rat snake, thank you forest god, thank you dead guardian of our home, thank you coyote for letting us come and stay and live, for leaving our small precious bodies intact, for letting us all three see another perfect sunrise. I felt the forest smile quietly around us, a silent host, and us the interlopers.

I sprayed and combed the tack of coyote blood off Honey with the garden hose, checking her for any injuries. Besides a small tear just over her left eye, she was unharmed. Inside, the smell of badly burnt salmon and a particularly distraught Cleo greeted us. I cleaned up the wine, the glass, the fish; I wasn’t hungry anymore. I just wanted to sleep. Tomorrow, I would phone Alex at the rig and tell him about the woods. He’d buy Honey a steak on the way home and call his aunt to boast to her about the good dog she’d given me. I would listen to his loud, rough voice and run my fingers through Cleo’s long tan coat, Honey dozing at my feet, all three of us just waiting for him to leave so that we could be in our own universe of wilderness again, just women and beasts, hearts beating together.