Animal Tracks

Carleton had run out of words. He was snoozing, open-mouthed. Asleep, he didn’t look eighty-seven. He looked innocent. Old, but not disgusting, as her mother had said. She turned off the recorder and closed her own eyes. Her fractured jaw was hurting less now, and she didn’t feel so listless. With her mouth wired shut the last five weeks, she’d lost eighteen pounds. She wasn’t always hungry, either; that was the best part. A frump no longer. No lard-ass bitch now. Someone had yelled that from the audience during her last presentation to deluded middle-class parents on why they had to vaccinate their children. There was usually an uproar from the anti-immunization loonies who never missed one of her talks, but it was more often, “How much are the pharmaceutical companies paying you?” or “Keep your hands off our kids,” not lard-ass or bitch. A public-health nurse’s lot was not a happy one these days in California, where every nuthouse myth was taken for fact.

“Did you go to sleep on me, Leslie?” Carleton was awake. She opened her eyes. “Where was I, anyway?”

“You were in Alaska, the part just after the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor in ’42.” He’d finally stopped saying Jap after she’d corrected him twenty times. It had been her mother’s idea, the oral-history project, something to keep her busy during her medical leave, and certainly Carleton had lived an interesting life, but her mother was aghast to learn that out of all the potential candidates available, she’d chosen to interview her renter.

“I’d been drafted, supposed to be for one year, but after Pearl Harbor I knew I was in for the duration. It was a sad day in more ways than one. Uncle Sammy had me by the short hairs.”

“Carleton, remember, kids are going to be listening to this tape.” He fidgeted: he wanted a cigarette but knew she’d leave if he lit one. He’d been raised in the wilds of upper Michigan; an older sister had made him get his high-school diploma. His father had been a trapper. Carleton understood the outdoors better than anyone she’d ever met, could name all the trees, the rocks, the birds, could read tracks as though they were talking to him. And didn’t carry his past around like a sack of stones—only talked about it. He had no regrets.

Oddly enough Carleton had owned small businesses most of his life—a gas station, a dry-cleaning place, a restaurant. Made a point of never paying into Social Security all those years and ended up on food stamps and a small pension the va paid to low-income veterans. He hated the U.S. government. Had never voted. One of these days she was going to point out the contradiction: after all, the government was supporting him. But he’d picked up a sideline as a taxidermist. His finished work hung on the walls, ready for his clients: mounted heads—deer, elk, a bighorn sheep, a full body snarling bobcat for some museum diorama. They looked better in his front room than they ever had in the wild. Taxidermy was an art form in Carleton’s hands. Museums loved his animals.

“Let’s get out of here, tree hugger,” he said, standing up. “Take a walk and see what we can see. Do you feel up to a gander in the hills? I got a surprise for you.”

“If you go slow enough so I can keep up.” They both thought that was funny, that he was fifty years older than she was and could walk her into the ground. She grabbed her day pack, and they were off. She felt better outside, more awake. She could smell smoke from the fire on Jackson Ridge over in El Dorado County, miles from her place, carried down on the wind. It was only August, but the fires were already starting. Lightning strikes. And more ahead. September was the hottest month of the year, with...