Baroque wished he and Marlboro were back at the house watching the medical shows with their sister, Lisa. Instead, they were in a truck with Denton, their brother-in-law. Baroque wasn’t used to Denton being this nearby. Denton was an accountant, and Monday through Friday he was at work all day. Weekday evenings he usually disappeared into the back bedroom after dinner. Of course Saturdays and Sundays Denton was around more, and more 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 him and Marlboro a look, a long unblinking 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 that 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 you 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.

The dirt road came to a sudden 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. Up the trail a few yards and suddenly gone, like the woods had just swallowed him up. That made Baroque feel spooky, Denton disappearing like that, 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 opened it in the living room in front of Baroque and Marlboro. Denton took out a steel trap and then pulled out a pistol and a yellow box of bullets and then the knife. A big knife, the kind Baroque had seen only in movies where maniacs hacked people to death, and they were 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. To kill bears, that’s what Denton said when he took the trap and pistol and knife out of the box.

Like Marlboro, Baroque was wearing only a regular shirt and a sweatshirt and he was getting real cold. The warmth from the heater seemed to have whooshed right out the moment Denton opened the 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, 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 once and rubbed them. “How cold do you think it is?”

“Eight 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 Lisa 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.”

“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 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 he was going to do,” Baroque said.

The heater continued to pour out heat and 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 seemingly 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 Lisa 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, and who were always arguing at the grocery store about coupons or discounts. 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 Lisa’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. Lisa didn’t know how the name Baroque had come about, but Marlboro had been named after the Marlboro man, the cigarette cowboy. Lisa said it was meant as a comment on society. Thank God that Lisa, the oldest by six years, had been named by the mother. Lisa 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 Lisa graduated, they married and moved to North Carolina, so mountains could blot out some sun. The first husband had problems with psoriasis. Which had at least gotten her to North Carolina, where she and Denton could meet.

Lisa’s first marriage hadn’t worked out any better than Denton’s. Her first husband had made Lisa wear his dead mother’s Sunday church hat every time they had sex. An awful thing, but Denton’s first wife had been even worse. The admission counselor’s mother 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 every time they had sex it was like she’d 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 Lisa could ever touch another naked person after the two partners they’d had.

They’d both 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 Lisa as 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, Lisa 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.

Lisa watched the medical shows as much she could. She might need to know this sometime, she always said when he complained. Denton understood it could be helpful to someone in the medical field, but Lisa didn’t watch the shows about a heart transplant or a knee operation or a woman having a baby. Lisa 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, at least lately, 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 Lisa 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 but seemed to be paying attention. Of course Baroque and Marlboro never did talk a lot anyway, not to Denton, or even much to Lisa. They just sat next to each other, in the exact same posture, like identical twins might. 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. But Baroque and Marlboro had to move their eyes for that to occur, so it didn’t happen much. Anyway, the eyes were something Denton wished he’d never noticed about his brothers-in-law, because it always reminded him 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 grade, 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 when he came into the classroom one day. He got no college-scholarship offers like Lisa, and instead had to work his way through. The damn fruit flies had made sure of that.

Lisa saw Baroque and Marlboro’s interest in the medical shows as a positive step forward. Still, neither of them had actually left the house to apply for a med tech program or orderly job, and though Lisa hadn’t actually said it, Denton suspected even she was getting tired of her brothers being around. It was pretty much shutting down his and Lisa’s sex life, because their house was a fine house but a small one. Baroque was in the spare room with just three inches of Sheetrock between him and their bedroom. Marlboro was on the couch, and if Denton and Lisa could hear the springs squeak whenever Baroque or Marlboro turned over, then they sure as hell could hear what he and Lisa were up to. After the nightmare sex of their first marriages, there had been some issues to work out, which they had. Until the brothers-in-law showed up, Lisa 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 Lisa.

He stopped to rest a moment and checked his pocket to make sure he hadn’t lost the double-ply plastic bag—for the bear’s gallbladder, which was the part the Chinese said you needed. Denton had always admired the Chinese, had even taken a class in Chinese history in college. The Chinese were smart, and they’d been smart a long time. They’d invented gunpowder and a lot of other things, even spaghetti. They also knew how to cure certain male problems without having to explain them to a doctor and then after that having to take a 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 did. 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 just stay quiet or make a ruckus. The only sound was the stream, and not even that except where a waterfall or rapid was, all of 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 mid-afternoon, the sun would soon start to fade behind the mountains. At least the cold would be good for preserving the bear paws and gallbladder on the way back. 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.

He looked down through the trees to see if he could glimpse the truck but didn’t see it. Baroque and Marlboro now had their first job since they’d been in North Carolina—waiting at the parking lot in case a ranger saw the truck and decided to investigate. Denton hoped they were still down there. He wouldn’t put it past them to drive over to Bryson City to get 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 have 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 ten-year-old the one time Denton had 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 some money to buy a hot dog or six-pack.

He went on, breathing hard because he was climbing steep ground. 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 walked around pretending to be an eight-foot-tall mouse. Kids in Florida probably heard about that mouse every day. Every kid in the state had probably been to see that thing, walked up to it, and shaken its hand or paw or whatever it stuck out there thinking it was a real mouse. Growing up to think a big animal like that, a rodent, 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 a nearby swamp or river, thinking that was another good idea.

This pet thing was happening in California, too. There had been those chimp attacks, but Denton wasn’t going to think about those. They were too horrible, too much like the medical shows Lisa and her brothers watched. He immediately wished he’d never started thinking about California, because now he’d have to keep trying not to think about the chimps.

But it was all connected. Denton wasn’t sure exactly how, but what mattered was it had somehow contaminated North Carolina. Because up 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 in costumes like that mouse. 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 it torn off if someone in the car behind hadn’t tossed out a bag of Cheetos. Even after that nothing had changed. 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 just 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 a bear moaning, so maybe it 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 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. Denton had grown up in a place where you were supposed to enjoy being out in the woods shooting things, but he’d never gone hunting, not even when his father tried to get him to come along. Denton hadn’t liked fishing or hiking or camping either. He’d never liked doing anything outside, really. He 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 if he got caught, which Baroque and Marlboro as lookouts probably increased his chances of 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. The hell with it all, Denton thought, and all included Baroque and Marlboro. They’d become a black hole for everything Denton thought or did lately. Absorbing him.

But that was going to end, end right now, today. Denton had eighty bucks and a credit card in his billfold. He’d take his brothers-in-law to the bus station or the airport. Put them on one or the other today. One-way tickets. They might eventually wander back, but it’d take those two screwups months or even years to get enough money to get back here. Lisa had sent them money to come the first time, but there was no way he was going to let that happen again.

As Denton began the walk back, he suddenly felt better than he had in a while. Everything was going to be all right. Even freezing his tail 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. He 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 went sprawling, his ankle veering one direction and the rest of his body in another, and 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. He wasn’t totally immersed, because at least he hadn’t fallen into the pool’s center, but wet from his head all the way down to his belt. 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 and 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 hit 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 weren’t matching up with his thoughts quite the way he wanted them to. It felt like years had passed before Baroque understood.

“We’re coming,” Baroque said. “How far up the creek 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 frozen 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, had 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 feet first 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 was like he 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.”

“Of course he’s not blinking. It’s like he’s in 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 farther 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 so that it was more like 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 of him 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 become an orderly.”

The road went downhill and the woods thickened. Everything was shadowy now and at the bottom of the hill was a bridge and 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. Baroque risked shifting into second gear and found it and the truck sped up and rattled on across. He 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?”

“Yes and they should give Denton one, too,” Baroque said. “The way he got under the ice—that was pretty smart.”

“What do they need to get him going again? It doesn’t have to be a special kind of hospital?”

“No, they’ve all been trained to do it,” Baroque said.

“That’s good,” Marlboro said.

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. Baroque looked in one direction, then the other, but he couldn’t see much because it was getting real dark now. The headlights would have helped, but he didn’t know how to turn them on.

Illustration from a photo by Alan Vernon