These Silent Woods: A Novel(11)

Finch looks at me, her green eyes wide in question, like she wants me to confirm that this is how things will happen.

I nod. “Sounds about right.”

Although I’m not so sure that’s how it happened for me. With Cindy, there was this initial feeling that reminded me of one of those amusement park rides, where you ride up and up and then they let you drop, all of this controlled with some grand mechanics, but still, the sensation that you are falling fast and hard and your body is dropping without your heart. That’s how it was. Like I couldn’t catch myself, like there was nothing to hold me up. But then things shifted and all of that feeling of being lost turned into something different, something savage and animal. Then there was only Finch and me, staying alive, and me holding on to her and taking care of her and knowing nothing could keep me from doing that.

“I have a loose tooth,” Finch says, remembering, and like that, her sadness seems to dissipate, float off into sky. There is some comfort in this, I suppose—the way a child can swing right up from grief. The way there is always something else, something beyond just the sadness. She opens her mouth and tilts her head, pointing and wiggling the tooth. “See?”

Scotland obliges, leaning in and taking a look. “Won’t be long,” he says, throwing me a glance. “You gonna put it under your pillow so the tooth fairy can come and give you a dollar?”

Finch cocks her head to the side, narrows her eyes. “I’m eight, you know.”

“No harm in pretending.” He nods in my direction, winks. “For your daddy’s sake.”

She grins. “I’ll put it under my pillow and Cooper will probably keep it, knowing him. I mean the tooth. He’ll put it in the yellow Raisinets tin on the shelf, where he keeps the lock of hair from my first haircut and his dog tags from the military. Won’t you, Coop?”

“Oh, I reckon so, Finch.”

Scotland rises and walks to me. “What’re you gonna do about supplies?”

I shake my head. “Don’t know yet.”

“I almost forgot,” he says, sliding off his backpack and setting it on the ground. “I brought something for you, Finch.”

She is whittling a piece of wood with my pocketknife, but she stops, looks up and smiles. “What is it?”

Scotland eases down beside her and slowly pulls something else from his backpack, something the size of a large human head and wrapped up like a mummy. I stop trimming.

“Careful, now. I got it all wrapped up because it’s fragile.” Scotland peels off the layers of fabric: a blue sweatshirt, a pink shirt, a purple scarf. Good Lord: girls’ clothes. Now, why would he have those things?

Scotland unravels the scarf to reveal a skull, clean and white and completely monochromatic, the eye sockets two gaping holes, the teeth long and menacing.

Finch gasps. “What is it?”

“It’s a bear skull.”

“Can I hold it?”

“Sure, just be careful. Hold it by the bottom. The jaw’s not attached.”

Over the past year or so, Finch has developed an intense fascination with skulls and bones. Not sinister, but maybe strange. When we find them in the woods, as we sometimes do, she brings them home to add to her collection. Whenever Scotland shows up, she asks him what animal it is, and he always knows. That’s a raccoon, he’ll say. This one’s a groundhog. You can tell by the teeth. See how they curl up like that? That means it’s a rodent: its teeth never stop growing. This little guy’s a porcupine. This one’s a deer.

Now, she runs her fingers along the top of the bear skull, the little dip in the middle, the gaping spheres where the eyes would’ve been. She traces the long, white teeth. “It’s so beautiful.”

“Isn’t it? Found him in the woods a few weeks back. Whole body, actually, though I just took the head. Sawed it off. Had to use a chain saw, the spine was so thick.”

I picture it: Scotland out there with a chain saw roaring and stuttering, cutting the head off the rotting corpse of a bear, like that’s a normal thing to do. I’m telling you: the man has no boundaries.

“Didn’t find any wounds on him,” he says, “so I’m guessing he was just old. His time had come, and he just lay down in the woods and let the scavengers have him, let the earth take him back.” Scotland tilts his head to the sky. “Not a bad way to go, if you think about it. Just lie down and surrender yourself to it.”

“How’d you get it so clean?”

I’d been wondering the same thing myself. The skull almost glows white, every scrap of flesh picked clean: not natural, especially if it was true what Scotland had said, that he’d found the bear dead in the woods just a couple weeks ago.

Scotland runs his finger over the dip of the bear’s nostril. “Well, I got these bugs. Flesh-eating beetles. Dermestids, they’re called. Useful little critters. I keep them in a big metal drum, and anytime I got a skull, I just drop it in there, and it’s all done within ten days or so. They pick it completely clean, all the hair and flesh, eat every morsel till there’s nothing left but bone.”

“Cool.” Finch turns the skull over in her hands. “Can I see them sometime?”

“No,” I say, throwing Scotland a glance and then jabbing my thumb on a thorn. I decide not to ask him why, exactly, he has flesh-eating beetles in his possession.