The Skeleton Tree Read online

  I watched him go, feeling a warm sort of wonder, a longing to touch him again. I hoped I had not scared him away forever.

  “When you’ve finished playing with the bird we’ll go fishing,” said Frank, who was still inside the cabin.

  “He’s already gone,” I said.

  “Good.”

  A few minutes later, we went too. The gray dawn became a beautiful morning, all bright and crisp, with the waves breaking in blue streaks.

  Frank started catching fish right away, and he whistled a song. For the first time in ages I was really happy. I kept thinking of the raven and the feel of its feathers. Hoping it would come again to the tree at the edge of the river, I sat close to the falls to clean the fish.

  It was a job I could do without thinking, and I quickly lost myself in the swirling water and the circling fish, in the numbing sound of the falls. It was like staring into a fire, and my thoughts were carried away. When, all at once, the gulls rose in a cloud and vanished, I barely heard the roar of their wings.

  “Hey,” said Frank. “Look who’s here.”

  On the other side of the river, just a hundred yards away, a bear was plodding toward us.

  “Ursus horribilis,” said Frank in a dead sort of voice. “A grizz.”

  A grizzly bear, he meant. A strange smile appeared on his face as we watched the bear come nearer.

  It walked like a machine, swaying from side to side, each huge foot swinging slowly forward. It moved along steadily, as though nothing could stop it.

  “We should go back,” I said.

  “No.”

  Frank didn’t look the least bit worried. His feet wide apart, he stood slapping the gaff against his palm, like a policeman in a riot squad.

  The bear just kept coming. Every step carried it exactly the same distance in exactly the same direction, over stones and pebbles, over logs and rocks, over anything in its way.

  “I bet he weighs half a ton,” said Frank. “But no one in the world could outrun him. He can go thirty miles an hour.”

  I hadn’t thought that Frank cared much about anything, but he seemed nearly awed by the bear. We could hear the clatter of stones as it walked.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I said. But Frank wouldn’t move.

  “We have to stand our ground,” he told me.

  “What?”

  “This is our territory.”

  “No it’s not.” I said.

  “It is now.” Frank flashed the same smile I’d seen many times on Uncle Jack. “That’s how a bear thinks. This side of the river is ours, and we have to protect it.”

  My heart thumped in my chest, sweat trickled down my ribs, and I had a terrible sense of waiting. I could see the bear’s claws flashing white; I could hear them tick against the stones. In a minute or two it would reach the pool.

  But suddenly it stopped. It thrust its muzzle down among the rocks and snuffled loudly. It rolled aside an enormous rock and gobbled up the little crabs hidden underneath. Then it raised its head and sniffed. Its black nose twitched.

  “He can’t see very well,” said Frank. “But he knows we’re here. Don’t move.”

  I hardly breathed. The bear stood up on its hind legs. It looked around; it sniffed, then dropped slowly onto all fours again and turned toward the trees. It strode up the beach and over the logs—over the logs as though they weren’t there—to slip into the darkness of the forest.

  For a few moments I could trace the bear’s path by the breaking of branches and the swaying of big trees. Then everything seemed still and quiet.

  Frank kept smiling. In some strange way, he was enjoying himself. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get some fish.”

  “No way,” I told him. “We don’t know where that bear’s going.”

  “But we know he’s gone,” said Frank. “He doesn’t care about us. He’ll go up the river and scoop his dinner from a shallow spot.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he’s a lazy old bear,” said Frank. He went back to his fishing, crouched by the side of the pool as though nothing could scare him.

  I couldn’t concentrate on the salmon I was cleaning. I kept looking around, down along the beach and up toward the forest. And soon the bear appeared again.

  It stepped from the bushes at the top of the falls, just a few yards from where I was cleaning the fish. “Frank,” I called quietly. “It’s back.”

  He stood up at the side of the pool, the gaff in his hand. “Stay right there,” he told me.

  The bear waded out into the river, right at the brink of the falls. When I looked back at Frank I was amazed to see him smiling. The closeness of the bear excited him.

  At that moment he was my uncle Jack. The daredevil. I heard my mother’s warning: You have to be careful of men who love danger.

  The bear waded halfway across the river, then stepped down into the falls, to a rocky ledge where the river broke into creamy curls.

  “Hold your ground,” said Frank.

  The bear swept its paw through the churning water. It ducked its head into the froth and came out with a salmon trapped in its jaws, an enormous fish that writhed and flapped. But the bear carried it easily, to the top of the falls and on up the river.

  Frank watched it go with that expressionless look of his. He was somehow satisfied now that we had faced the bear, and he began to collect the fish that we’d caught. We carried them back to the cabin, where we split them open and hung them to dry. The cabin already seemed crowded with fish. “They’re supposed to grow a crust,” said Frank. He peered at one of the first fish we’d caught, then tapped it with his knuckles. A little swarm of flies rose up and buzzed around him. “I guess it hasn’t happened yet.”

  We ate another dinner of fish and seaweed. Frank brought a handful of grass that he called sedge. It was stiff, with triangular edges, and it stuck out from each side of our mouths as we chewed, until we looked like a pair of cows. Then Frank pretended to be Snidely Whiplash, twirling a green mustache. That made me laugh, and he laughed too, until we rolled on the sand with our hands on our stomachs.

  But that night I heard Frank crying. His sobbing woke me up, and I didn’t move a muscle, though my hip pressed painfully on the floor. At first, I didn’t want him to know I could hear him. But he must have cried for hours, smothering the sound in his mattress. The wooden bed groaned every time he shook. He sounded so sad that I became afraid.

  “Frank?” I finally said, as quiet as the raven’s whisper.

  Instantly, his sobs turned to little gasps as he tried to control his crying.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Just shut up,” he said.

  The bed creaked as he rolled over, turning his back toward me. I heard him sniff and snuffle.

  “Frank, what are you thinking about?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Are you thinking about your mom?” I thought often of mine. “You know what? I bet my mom knows something’s wrong. She always feels it. I bet she’s looking out the front window right now. That’s what she does when she’s scared. She stands with her arms crossed, looking out that window. Hey, Frank, what do you think your mom’s doing?”

  “Getting drunk.” He made a little snorting noise. “That’s what she does when she’s scared. That’s what she does when she’s happy. That’s what she does when she’s sad. That’s what—”

  “Do you try to help her?” I asked.

  “No, she gets drunk just fine on her own.”

  It didn’t sound as though Frank spent much time thinking about his mother. I wondered if he missed his friends, and that was why he was crying. According to our wall calendar of scratches and gouges, school had started already. I imagined Frank had tons of cool friends who stood around flicking their hair. He probably had a girlfriend.

  That made me think of Alan. I pictured him going alone to school. Everyone else would be running along, laughing, and Alan would puff his way along the hall looking onl
y at the tiles on the floor, at the dangling laces of his enormous sneakers. He would feel as lonely there, in that busy place, as I felt in Alaska. We’re all of us castaways.

  Frank sniffed once more. He said, “Tell me about your dad.”

  “Why?” I said. “What about him?”

  “I dunno,” said Frank. “What was he like?”

  It seemed an odd thing to ask. I doubted if Frank cared at all about my dad. He just wanted to hear me talk, to somehow fill his loneliness, the way he might have turned on a radio back home.

  “When he was a kid he was really good at everything,” I said. “He was in this huge spelling bee once, and he was the third-best speller in the whole country. And he played hockey. He could have been a forward in the NHL. A scout from the Oilers even came to see him, but—”

  “I mean as a father,” snapped Frank, interrupting. “What was he like? What did he do for fun?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Why are you so angry?” I asked. “He just didn’t have fun, that’s all. He never did anything.” It sounded pathetic, even to me. “Except when I was little—he was happy then,” I said. “We used to play games and go on treasure hunts.”

  “Like pirates?”

  “Yes.”

  Frank was quiet for a while. “So what happened?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Moron. Why did he stop having fun?”

  I ignored the insult. It took nothing to make Frank angry. “I guess he didn’t have time to have fun,” I said. “He was always busy. Always working. He started going away on business trips all the time. It was like he didn’t want to be home anymore.”

  “So where did he want to be?”

  “Just somewhere else, I guess.” I hadn’t really thought about that. “He didn’t choose where to go; he was just sent places. But he never took pictures, and he never brought home souvenirs.”

  “Did you ever think he was like a hit man or something?” asked Frank.

  I laughed. My father the hit man—it was such a crazy idea. He carried a spare tie in his briefcase, just in case he spilled something on the one that he wore. In his pocket he kept a little wad of toilet paper that he refreshed every morning, probably counting out the exact number of squares. He tried to get Mom and me to do that too. “Trust me,” he told us. “You don’t want to touch the paper in a public bathroom.”

  He had become boring, that was the thing. Old and boring.

  “What about his trips?” asked Frank. “Did he have fun on his trips?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” I said. “He was always happy to go away, that’s for sure. And when he came home he seemed sad.”

  “Oh, really?” said Frank, as though he found that interesting.

  We talked until dawn. Through the boards on the window, a gray light appeared. Then the raven arrived and perched on the sill. He tapped on the plastic pane.

  I wriggled out of the space blanket and stood up. “I’m going to let him in,” I said.

  “Don’t,” said Frank.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s like Dracula.”

  That sounded so stupid, it made no sense. I pushed aside a slab of salmon and stared at Frank on the bed. “How’s he like Dracula?”

  “Don’t you know anything?” said Frank. “Dracula can’t go into a house until he’s invited. But if you ask him in, he’ll kill you.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said.

  I grabbed a board and pulled it loose. The raven stood on the sill, a black bird shape against the plastic. I tore off the rest of the boards and spread the slit in the plastic flaps. “Come in,” I said.

  He hopped through the window without a care, as though he had done it a thousand times. He hopped straight down to the floor, and in his funny, lurching way explored every part of the cabin. He looked under the bed and under the table. He pecked at the things in the orange box, and especially at the shiny little whistle. “You want to play with that?” I asked.

  He turned his head and blinked at me, as though he understood. When I took the whistle out of the box he twitched like a cat that had seen a mouse. He pounced on it when I put it down, and rolled it across the floor with his beak, chasing it into the corners of the room.

  I laughed out loud, and the raven made little cackling sounds. But Frank didn’t even smile. Into the corner, the raven chased the whistle. He batted it out with his beak and sent it rolling under the bed.

  He looked up at me.

  “Go on,” I said. “Go get it.”

  But he wouldn’t go under the bed. Instead, he looked at Frank, who was lying on his side on the mattress.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Frank. “I’m not going to get it for you.”

  The raven’s eyes were bright and shiny. He shook his tail and said, Lousy birds. And he laughed again, in his rattling way.

  “He’s weird,” said Frank. “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to have a raven in the house?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s a bad omen.”

  A bad omen. I laughed. Actually, I sort of giggled. And that was enough to make Frank angry again.

  “They’ve got lice, moron. They bring diseases,” he said. “Death and ravens go together, so don’t laugh.” He threw off his jacket and pushed his way through the drying fish, heading for the door.

  The raven fluttered quickly out of his way, up to the chair, up to the window. He perched there, panting, until the door closed behind Frank. Then he came down again and stood right beside me.

  •••

  I was not used to having a pet. Every year, at Christmas and my birthday, I’d asked for a dog, and once for a snake because I thought the kids might like me if I showed up at school with a python around my neck. But Dad didn’t care for dogs, and Mom despised reptiles in general. Then Dad broke down and got me a hamster. But it lived for less than a month. When the raven came into the cabin and chose me for his friend, it was as though my birthday wishes had suddenly come true. For three mornings in a row he pushed through the cabin window, and each day he stayed a little longer. But he was always gone before dark.

  He was a funny, clever thing, and I thought I would never get tired of watching him. He invented little games, sometimes clinging by his beak to a slab of fish while I pushed him like a kid on a swing. When I laughed, his eyes took on a special twinkle. It pleased him to make me happy.

  But I was always startled to hear him speak. I hate you, he’d say. Lousy birds. His voice was eerie and ominous, and it made my skin crawl.

  “Can’t you teach that thing new words?” asked Frank. But if I had somehow taught the raven to recite Shakespeare, Frank would not have been satisfied. He told me over and over, “I hate that bird.” Or, “I don’t want that bird coming anywhere near me,” as though there was any fear of that. The raven wanted only to be with me.

  Maybe Frank was jealous. I doubted he had ever been the kid picked last for baseball games, the one left without a partner for a classroom project. But whenever I began to feel sorry for him, he found a way to change my mind.

  “You know that bird will fly away when winter comes,” he told me as I sat feeding the raven. “It doesn’t care about you; it’s only hanging around ’cause you feed it.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “It’s like the bear. It thinks only about eating, sleeping and surviving. If you stopped feeding it, I bet it would peck your eyes out.”

  “Sure,” I said again.

  “Just wait and see.” Frank went away in a huff. The raven watched him go, then tipped his head and gazed at me. Hate that bird, he said very clearly.

  That evening I counted the marks I had made on the wall, realized with a fright that nearly three weeks had passed and tried to figure out what day it was. My poor dead watch didn’t even have a calendar. So I asked Frank.

  “It’s Sunday,” he told me.

  Of course he didn’t know; he just mad
e it up. But Sunday was as good a day as any, and I counted back from there to the day I’d found my raven in the bushes. Thinking like Robinson Crusoe, I named him Thursday.

  He liked to perch on my shoulder, like a pirate’s black parrot. Sometimes he faced forward, and sometimes backward, and he pulled at my hair with his beak, or nibbled gently at my ear, though that always made me squirm and laugh. Frank watched, smoldering with jealousy.

  On our twenty-second day the wind shifted to the south and rose to a gale. Enormous waves thundered on the rocks. Rain pelted through the forest with machine-gun sounds, and the trees swayed and creaked around us. It was the first real sign of winter coming, a hint of what the months ahead would bring. West Coast weather was always predictable. Once the winds shifted to the south, storm would follow storm, and the sun would disappear. Rain would only end when it turned to snow instead.

  Thursday kept close beside me. As the wind gusted he whistled low notes that sounded like wailing creatures.

  “He’s evil,” said Frank.

  “Well, I like him,” I said. I drew Thursday up onto my lap and tickled the feathers on his belly. “Didn’t you ever have a dog or anything?”

  “I did when I was little,” said Frank. He was lying on his back on the bed. “All I remember is that he was a really old dog, and his name was Ghost.”

  “That’s weird,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I had a hamster called Ghost.”

  “That is weird,” said Frank. The wind gusted, and the raven whistled.

  “It was Dad’s idea,” I said. “I wanted to call him Sleepy because he slept all day. I never saw him except at night. Then Dad said, ‘Call him Ghost.’ ”

  Frank smiled at my little story. “You should have called the raven Ghost. He’s spooky.”

  I leaned back. Thursday hopped up to my shoulder and rubbed his beak against my lips. I opened my mouth and let him peck the tiny shreds of salmon between my teeth. Frank groaned, but he grinned as well. “That’s disgusting.”