BEAST OF THE WOODS

Chapter 4

Auntie beamer cackled, jumped up and down, which looked less dramatic than it sounds because of the length of her dress. Every utterance from Groger's mouth must have sounded like a celestial chorus of dollar bills to her.

Groger first spoke one night in my room, about a week after he came into my life. I had the windows pulled open because of the heat, hoping for a cross-breeze or anything to stop the sweat. I was on top of the sheets, n***d except for my underwear. I was in a typical wretched, self-pitying mood. I had no friends. I was bored. I would never have a life in this place. The moon through the window was like a huge round cross-section of bone. The strange cries of nighthawks seemed to come from that whiteness, not the darkness into which their silhouettes disappeared.

Groger was in the cage in the corner near the closet, next to my old dolls and other toys. I'd told Auntie beamer I'd found him cowering under an orange tree, even attached a crude splint to his paw to support my lie that he'd been injured, needed my help. "He must have been someone's pet," I said.

I don't know if she believed me, but she'd let me keep him, making it clear that if he became a nuisance, "into the pot he'll go." Although she'd never killed an animal in her life except mice, Auntie beamer loved mole stew. She said it reminded her of "her youth" growing up in Minnesota. I thought there must be better memories than that, even if my own childhood hadn't yet amounted to much. Still, four or five times a year, she paid the Mexicans to get her moles. They tended to be stringy things, marsh moles taken from the shores of nearby lakes.

That night, as I lay there, so uncomfortable, staring out the window, listening to the sound of mosquitoes kissing the window screen, I heard a voice.

"Let me out of my cage," it said, gruffly. "Let me out."

I sat bolt upright in my bed, grabbed a plastic doll for protection. I listened carefully but heard nothing except my own breathing.

After a minute, I lay back down, chest tight and heart devouring my blood.

But a little later, the voice spoke again: "Please let me out of this cage, Rachel."

This time when I sat up brandishing my doll, I dared look over at the cage. Groger was staring at me, his white fur darkly glowing against the cross-cut shadows.

"Was that you?" I whispered, almost hoping it had been, and not someone who had broken into our home. An absurd little part of me was almost more afraid of waking up Auntie beamer than of a talking mole.

"Yes, it's me. Groger."

I couldn't see Groger's mouth, but the sound definitely came from his cage.

That's when I thought I must be asleep, and that the heat was giving me strange dreams. I would wake soon.

In the meantime, it was the most natural thing in the world to climb down off my bed made for an adult and kneel down in front of the cage and say to Groger, "If I let you out, will you go back in when I tell you?"

Those eyes, so full and dark against the ghost-white of his face, saw me.

"Yes, Rachel," Groger said.

Had I, in my loneliness, created a voice for Groger? Something like this thought passed through me.

Watching myself do it, I opened the cage, and even then it was as if I had opened more than just a cage. I flinched from the slight electrical discharge as the latch shocked me.

But nothing odd happened afterwards, not really.

Groger hopped forward, snuffled against my knee, asked in a low, deep voice, "Do you have any lettuce? Any carrots?"

Just like any mole.

The photographer laughed weakly when he'd recovered his composure. He turned to me and pointed and said, standing straight again, a new cigarette held in one shaking hand, unlit: "Nice trick, kid. You should take that act out on the road." While Groger stared up at him from his position as prisoner at the post.

Auntie beamer became livid, all the cheer dropping from her face and a pink blush steadily moving up her face from her neck.

"It was the mole, you i***t!" she shouted at him, her lipstick a ragged blood-snarl in the heat. "You heard it! You heard it speak! You heard it and you think she could do that? That stupid little kid?"

The photographer stared at Auntie beamer much as he'd stared at Groger. I was staring, too, but Auntie beamer hadn't really said anything I hadn't heard before.

He worked much faster after that, and Groger said nothing. Nothing at all. But from the look he gave me, I thought there was must be much more he wanted to say.

At first, we talked mostly at night, when I thought Auntie beamer couldn't hear us. I'd forgotten the strange ways in which that old bungalow could carry sound, or I'd just decided to risk it. I can't remember.

These weren't conversations like the ones between two people. For one thing, I sometimes still believed I'd made it all up and was talking to myself. For another, Groger sometimes made sense and other times talked in riddles, or with some kind of veil between what I wanted him to mean and what he actually meant. I mimicked Auntie beamer's mutterings for a while around the cottage, but my favorite phrase was "Just the tip of the iceberg," to remind me of larger mysteries. My forehead became taut with the strain of thinking all the time, trying to interpret Groger.

"How come you can talk?" I asked him this question the second night; I hadn't had the nerve to interrogate what seemed like a miracle the night before, had been afraid it might turn out to be a dream, or a nightmare.

"I have always been able to talk," Groger said, with the stiffness of a Russian count from a fairy tale. "It is just that no one could understand me."

"What do you mean?" That was a favorite question of mine at the time, along with "Why?"

"I do not mean anything," Groger said, and nibbled on a carrot.

"How old are you?"

"I do not know. Very old."

For a mole? For a person? Groger did not know.

Then I asked a question that I kept coming back to in my feverishly alert child's mind - about the man who'd brought Groger to me.

"That man. The one who gave you to me. Who was he?"

"A friend from another country."

"What's the country?"

"A place far from here."

I paused, frowning. I tried a different approach.

"Where did you come from?"

"Somewhere else."

"Where?"

"A place far from here."

"Have you ever been to school?"

"What is school?"

"A place where you learn things."

Groger had nothing to say to that, but he seemed to give me a disapproving look. I tried again.

"How long have you been able to talk?"

"As long as I have been able to talk."

I really didn't like that answer. Impatient, almost imperious, I asked, "Are you the only mole that can talk?"

"I am not a mole."

And there it was: I am not a mole. Even now, so long after, it makes me shiver. But at the time, it made me giggle. It seemed like a funny answer. Of course Groger was a mole. He looked like a mole, ate like a mole, and definitely crapped like a mole.

"So what are you then?" I asked. "A ham sandwich? A can of beans? A witch?" I was delighted with myself for these guesses.

"I am not a mole," he said again.

This time I didn't giggle. It was said with such a sense of aloneness, that it's impossible to convey. It made me stop asking questions, because I felt I understood him. He was just like me.

That was the day before Auntie beamer found out.

After the photographer had taken his pictures and left along with all of his strange equipment, giving us a brusque promise of samples in a week, we stood there for a little while. It was dusty. It was uncomfortably hot. My throat felt parched and the green of the orange groves quivered in an air thick and humid.

Auntie beamer licked her lips, asked Groger, "Don't you have anything to say?"

Groger said nothing.

"Not one damn thing?" Auntie beamer asked again.

Groger still said nothing. I felt the moment turn,

like we were all balanced on the same thin plank high in the air, and at least one of us was going to fall off.

"Not one damn thing," Auntie beamer muttered. "You've got nothing to say to me after all of that. I feed you, I give you shelter, and you won't give me one word when I need it."

"There is nothing to be said," Groger growled after a moment.

Turning his head to the side in a very unmole-like way, Groger stared up at Auntie beamer. Auntie beamer stared back, just as implacable.

Right then, the rope in Auntie beamer's hand looked less like a leash and more like a fuse.

"Remember, it's just an animal," Auntie beamer said to me, during that first meal after she discovered me talking to Groger. This was back when she thought she might flatter Groger into cooperating with her plans. I know she was wearing something else, but in memory she is wearing the same outfit as she did to the photo shoot.

We sat, the three of us, at the dining room table in A. C. Pittman's house, which almost qualified as a mansion. Eating there was something Auntie beamer did rarely, and only when she wanted to impress. Sometimes the foreman - a tall, rangy Mexican originally from Tijuana - would visit, and the two of them would walk up to Pittman's house laughing, with some bottles of beer, and be gone for hours. That was the happiest I ever saw her, and the house had something to do with it.

Chandeliers from Paris, Waterford crystal, decanters of brandy, rosewood chairs and tables, carpet from the Orient, and even an awful lion's pelt rug in the study. Pittman made money from more than just orange groves, and he spent it on only the most obvious things.

The dining room table could seat twenty along its length, and its surface was a rich, shining mirror from which none of us could hide. Auntie beamer sat at the head of the table, me to the left, sullen and on edge. Groger sat on the other side - balanced atop five cushions to begin with, Auntie beamer having, absurdly I realize now, pulled up Pittman's ornate French chair from the study to impress the mole.

After a time, Groger hopped onto the table, onto his plate.

"Rachel, move that for him," Auntie beamer snapped at me. Since she'd found out Groger could talk, her whole world had been Groger, except when she needed something done.

"Isn't this nice?" she said to Groger.

That afternoon, when she'd burst into my room in the bungalow and admitted she'd been listening at the door on and off for a while - when she saw I had neither imaginary friend nor actual friend - she'd at first let out a kind of horrible shriek, followed by the hiss of an intake of breath. Her face had seemed for a moment to crumple. Ever since there had been in her eyes a light that was too bright. Her actions, her movements, were also too "bright," as if under such tight control that she might at any moment explode.

Isn't it nice?

Perhaps, in that moment, I did find it nice, almost as if I were younger and having a teddy Beasts' tea party in the orchard by myself. Those Beasts had talked to me, too, but I'd always known what they were going to say.

But Groger said nothing in reply. The tock-tock of the inlaid mother-ofpearl grandfather clock in the hall became oppressive. Even the savory but thick smell of dinner cooking in the kitchen added weight to the air.

"Your friend is a little shy," Auntie beamer said to me.

I shrugged, not sure what to make of the situation. Auntie beamer's discovery that Groger could talk had been a different kind of shock for me. It meant that Groger's ability was definitely real. There was relief in knowing I wasn't imagining things, and another kind of relief in hoping that the mole might create a kind of truce between Auntie beamer and me.