The Bobcat Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Katherine Forbes Riley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-94892-409-2

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-94892-411-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Enrico, Alexander, and Etienne

  A picture held us captive, and we could not seem to get outside of it. For it lay in our language and our language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Physically the fog signaled only the tail end of a long Vermont winter. But nature assumed a kind of sentience, given space. So it pillowed against Laurelie’s windows as a soft asylum wall and leaked its internal fluids on the sills and acted as a deranged refractor on the view, magnifying the crags and pores down her cottage’s stone walls into dizzying cliffs, while drowning the yard and forest beyond in uniform gray particulate.

  Laurelie sat for a while with her forehead pressed to the screen, imagining what it would feel like if she’d woken to a dawn in which there really was no one else left. Then she got down on the floor and pulled her body through its stretches while sketching the panels for Apocalypse in her head, each image carefully and almost playfully brutal, modeling them after Frida Kahlo. Mountain pose, a cottage beside a pine forest. Cat-cow, a rising mist. Downward dog, the scene panning out to show the ground around the cottage crumbling away to jagged cliffs with black oblivion beyond. Pigeon pose, a shadow appearing in one cottage window. Lunge, panning in again to focus on a face. Corpse pose, a thought bubble extending from its open mouth, containing one word: Safe.

  But when she finished her exercises and looked outside again, half the world had reappeared. While above the lilac trees the cloud mantle still hung impenetrable, now spiderwebs sparkled cheerfully on her new spring grass. Her dirt lane plunged bravely through lingering trails of mist, and the towering pines on the other side of it looked rather comical with their heads still lost in fog.

  Suddenly, a blur of motion, a change of light—something threaded through their trunks. Instantly she stepped back and pressed her body to the wall beside the window. Her heart flailed like a bird in her chest, trapped by her own rapid shallow breaths, as she searched the gloomy understory for further signs of life. The fog light heightened contrasts, turning the trunks dark and the low growth bright, and the air between them almost blue. But though she remained there watching for a long time, nothing else moved.

  Later she rode her bike down the dirt lane to where it met the river road. There, ice computed a massive geometry, drifting white in shards down the new black water that came and went to her right through the trees. Woods lined the first half of this stretch of the road, which followed the arc of the river east for two miles or so before both turned southward. Above her birds swooped and perched, their clamor swelling and subsiding with her breath. When she emerged from the forest, fog-dampened and winded, the sky showed blue patches like puzzle pieces. The sun laid a warm hand on her back. She basked a little, letting the road’s slow torque carry her along a meadow sprouting bluebells and snowdrops and the occasional surprised tulip. Forested hills undulated beyond it all the way to the horizon where rose, still obscured by cloud, the silhouettes of mountains.

  Then came a sharp bend, where the road followed the river south, and she turned left and headed up a steep hill lined with the beer can–littered yards of Greek fraternity houses, cheap white clapboard structures in various states of disorder and disrepair. She kept her head averted as she climbed but it made little difference. Still she was trembling by the time she reached the top, where the road became High Street and intersected Main Street, the commercial district of Montague, Vermont. Across the intersection lay the campus green of Montague College, the small school that shared the town’s name. Encircling the green’s far side were the half dozen ivy-covered buildings that constituted the college itself. Even on this warm spring morning they seemed to huddle in, their shoulders hunched against the wilderness crowding in behind them. The scattering of people coming and going looked like ants against the great backdrop of trees. And yet, even as she joined them, Laurelie felt herself apart. Putting on her headphones and casting down her eyes, she felt no more weighted than they but rather like a storm cloud, gathering darkly and unseen as she walked to meet her senior thesis advisor about a series of panels she fervently wished he’d never seen.

  She’d started making them after arriving in Montague the prior fall, following more than a year of not drawing at all. The first set of panels had come to her during a ride to campus one late November morning so cold she’d actually thought she wouldn’t make it. Eyes blinded by sun bouncing off two inches of freshly plowed snow, lungs so frozen they could hardly expand, she’d stopped feeling her fingers halfway there and had to hope they’d stay wrapped around her handlebars. Upon cresting the hill into town, she’d stumbled into the first door she found open and received its jangle of bells and heated rush of air like life returning. It was a little shop on High Street tucked in the corner of the little alley that ran along behind Main and turned out to be the local general store. Full of cramped overflowing aisles that sold everything imaginable and more, it also had an old machine that spat hot drinks and half a dozen scarred school desks pushed up against the windows on its side wall. From the corner desk she could see the post office and the backs of other shops across the alley, as well as a slice of intersection and the green beyond. On that frozen morning it had seemed that everyone but her knew to stay inside, for she had sat drinking cups of sweet hot chocolate and nursing her fingers and ears for almost an hour before anyone else came into view through the murky diamonds of the lead-pane windows. The woman she finally saw was old and frail and covered in black from head to foot. Laurelie watched her cross the empty street and then climb the post office stairs, and after a while the scene began to feel so much like a slowly changing still life that she had taken out her sketchpad to try to capture it. There were twenty stairs and the old woman had paused a full minute between each one, maybe taking care with her footing or maybe just catching her breath, but either way not holding onto the railing and never, ever looking up. Afterward, the panels had reminded Laurelie of Whistler’s Mother, done as they were all in gray and black, composed of only a few simple shapes, the square framing wall of the building behind her, the sharp-edged stairs, and the pronounced curve of the old woman’s body. She’d arranged the panels in a
sequence to show the woman’s slow progress up the stairs, like a comic strip except not funny at all. Later she’d added thought bubbles extending from the woman’s head. The one on the bottom step reflected a buxom young maiden, who then slowly morphed through each panel into a careworn matron on the middle stair, and at the top became the old crone herself, except far older, impossibly ancient, her face etched with her journey’s pain.

  After that Laurelie had started going to the general store every morning. Sometimes the bell would jingle as a customer came in, but at that early hour no one else sat at the windows. There was only one clerk and she sat and read magazines up at the register; it felt like Laurelie was the only one there. She’d down cups of hot chocolate while looking out the window, waiting for the urge to draw to return. The Montague students and professors who passed her corner view never sparked it, and neither did the hippies or Appalachian Trail hikers who were legion in Montague, flashing dreadlocks and tattoos like nonconformity beacons. The second time it didn’t even come from outside. It was a kid hunched over a laptop inside the general store. No older than twelve or thirteen, he should have been in school, at his own desk, not hers. She was about to turn around and leave when he looked up at her and scowled. More than an expression, it was an illumination, exposing the general size and shape of his pain. She sat behind him then, at the very last desk and spent the rest of the morning trying to capture it. She modeled these panels after Caravaggio’s Narcissus and again used the comic strip format, with his body in each panel leaning a little closer to a screen in which only his own reflection appeared. Everything else was black except for those twin faces, and the thought bubbles coming from their angry mouths were filled with tiny statements of computer code.

  The last set of panels she’d only just completed. They depicted a man she’d seen slumped against the wall of the little pub next door to the general store on her way in one day. After a week of warm weather no one was wearing a coat anymore, but he was still bundled in heavy winter outerwear. Some of it had looked military, and his face was heavily bearded, and the lines of his hands were embedded with dirt. As she’d ridden past she’d imagined him trapped somewhere so deep inside himself that he couldn’t feel the heat. His panels she’d based on Picasso’s Guernica, the scene a picturesque town but its streets as he walked them littered with images of violence only he could see, a woman on a corner grieving over a dead infant, a severed hand in a gutter, a figure in a doorway entrapped by fire, and the thought bubbles coming from his head were filled with “Pows!” and “Whams!” and his own screams.

  For half a year she’d worked on these panels in isolation, and now, pulling open the Studio Art Department door, she felt the vulnerability of an animal emerging weak after long hibernation, a feeling that only intensified when she encountered her advisor standing in the entryway collecting his mail. She thought he resembled some small predator, stocky and hairy with shoulders that sloped precipitously and a belly that pouched like a laundry bag over heavily muscled legs. He greeted her, she imagined, rapaciously, showing all his small teeth and the dark wet space behind them as he held his office door open for her. The room was like him, small and overstuffed; in addition to his own desk he’d fit a large pillowy couch on one side of a coffee table and squeezed in two wooden chairs on the other.

  She sat down on one of the chairs and he settled onto the couch, whistling “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” He always chose the couch and so she always chose a chair, because the one time she hadn’t she’d smelled his meat breath and flinched every time he moved and couldn’t process a single word he said. He soon stopped whistling but the words of the song continued looping in her head while he sat looking at her across the table and she sat looking down at her hands. Meanwhile something high and finely tuned was gathering force inside her, rising in both volume and pitch until it filled her throat and she was sure she would choke.

  “The lilacs are budding,” she blurted. And then, leaning over so that her hair hid her face, she rummaged through her backpack, first for her pen and then for her notebook and finally for nothing at all except to keep her body folded over her knees. The word “budding” had done it, she realized too late, and her horror at having uttered it was only magnified by the fact that it was true: now near the end of April, the leggy trees that grew like weeds all over Montague were sprouting hard green protrusions all up and down their branches.

  Hearing pages rustle, she looked up. Her advisor had the manila folder she’d left in his mailbox spread open on the coffee table and was riffling through her pages. The Truant flashed past, suicide-eyed, and then the tired body of The Crone. Reaching the last page, her advisor sat back again, leaving the mad grimace of The Veteran exposed.

  “Well, there certainly is a lot of effort here,” he said.

  2

  She rode down the hill wishing the fog would return, so that the sky did not feel so exposed. Her advisor had spent the whole meeting posing questions to her that felt like attacks, although he had assured her they were only hypothetical, their greater significance something for her to ponder as she developed her ideas for her senior thesis. But they were questions too bureaucratic to ever have a clear answer. Like, what did she intend to convey through her “high art” references? And was her use of “low art” techniques meant to disarm the high art references and make them less intimidating? What if instead they were seen as demeaning, or even defacing the old masters’ artistry? He had wondered, moreover, what motivated her choices of subject matter, and why she had chosen to only represent people at the periphery of society, and what message she intended to convey by manifesting their private agonies through cartoon. The ability to replicate other masters’ styles did not make her a master, he’d said. Copying was a useful learning method, and one that even the old masters had employed, but they didn’t become masters until they developed their own styles, and that had taken them many years.

  The entire hour had gone like that, and though she had written down her advisor’s remarks, she didn’t want to think about them later. Pondering them only made her feel like she was losing her grip on the desire to draw at all, and this was too much like losing her grip on everything.

  Leaving Montague behind, she saw not the dismal yards of fraternity houses nor the meadow shimmering under the sun nor the slow curve of the river road around it, but rather a crowded Philadelphia street and her own form walking along it with her headphones on and her head down. Whenever this particular image filled her mind and panic climbed inside, she would immediately superimpose another one upon it, one of herself boarding the Greyhound bus that had carried her away from those streets the previous fall. In her mind she again watched more cities come and go through the bus windows as it brought her north, until all signs of civilization faded away and only wilderness remained, fractured by a single stripe of road and countless evergreens, all those hundreds of thousands of trees seeming to stand sentry, bounding and guarding her escape.

  After parking her bike at her cottage, she climbed the hill to the main house. There she found the little boy she babysat each afternoon kneeling in the grass, pushing around his yellow construction trucks with his head bent low to watch their wheels, soft growling sounds escaping his lips. She bent and ruffled his golden hair, and when he raised his arms to her she lifted him onto her hip and whispered hello into his ear.

  The boy’s mother was standing a few yards away, looking down at an easel and frowning. She wore an immaculate white smock over a pale linen dress and a wide-brimmed white sunhat perched atop the polished waves of her gray-gold bob. In the winter when Laurelie had come to pick up her son she’d be freshly groomed and on her way out, but since the weather had warmed she had started taking a class on landscape painting. The teacher, she’d confided to Laurelie, was a hunk, and most afternoons now when Laurelie arrived she was outside practicing her technique. Currently she was painting three hills in the distance. With their new spring foliage Laurelie saw them as softly
feminine, the curves of a woman reclining in a fuzzy green gown, but her landlady’s use of thick impasto made them threats, hunkering dark and brutish at the horizon.

  “Be sure to have him home by six,” the woman said, dabbing critically at a feather of cloud. “He’ll need to be bathed and dressed. You always bring him home so dirty, and we’re having guests tonight.”

  Laurelie nodded, already moving off down the hill. The boy in her arms began to wriggle, anticipating what came next. As soon as they were out of sight of the house, she put him down and took his hand, and together they began to run.

  After nearly eight months in Montague, Laurelie’s dread of human contact felt no less visceral than it had back in Philadelphia, but in certain cases she could now force herself to overcome it. Like meeting with her advisor so she could finally finish college, and renting the cottage from the boy’s parents so that she did not have to live on campus. Lacking funds to pay the entire rent, she’d had to arrange to babysit their son in partial payment. But she’d never even met her landlord, and although she saw her landlady every afternoon, the woman kept these interactions brief. The boy himself didn’t trigger the dread; in fact despite his gender he had the opposite effect. She thought this was because he was only two and a half and possessed so little in the way of personal substance. To him the whole world was new and he knew nothing for certain yet. And when she was with him her own fears loosened their hold, so that curiosity and even pleasure sometimes emerged, as hungry and furtive as the field mice in her cottage’s walls.

  She and the boy spent most of their time outdoors. His father worked in the upper echelons of Montague College and their manor house sprawled atop a large grassy mound a few miles from the town green. At the bottom of it, tucked away in a corner, sat Laurelie’s own cottage, once the servant quarters. The whole parcel of land was surrounded by a hundred miles of forest preserve, and a dirt lane encircled the private land, separating it from the preserve and connecting it to the river road that Laurelie rode each day toward campus. Across the lane and directly opposite her cottage, a trail wound its way down to the river. Since discovering it, she and the boy had gone down there nearly every day.