Bears Discover Fire

“What was that?” the kid says as I throw on the brakes. He started zipping up his oversuit and got two zippers jammed. It was the first time I’d seen him get excited and I had to laugh. He thought we were having a wreck. I had my oversuit zipped up and my mask on—it protects your face and eardrums—before he looked in the rear-view mirror and saw what we had hit.

“You don’t want to be getting out,” I said. I sprayed my throat with C-Level and stuffed the can in my pocket.

“Hand me that Boy Scout hatchet from under the seat,” I said.

He was watching it in the mirror, gray-white, the color of gravestones, and at least thirteen feet across the claws. I doubted he’d seen one before, alive. Not many people have. “You going to kill it?” he asked. “It’s still flopping.”

Once you crack the shell, they’re dead from decompression, but dying can take all day. I hadn’t gone looking for it, but since it came to me—I flipped down my mask and climbed across the kid, since the airlock is on his side. I crossed under the truck and approached it carefully. It was still venting steam out of the cracks in the shell where my truck had passed over it. I had missed all but one claw. There’s about sixty pounds of meat under the back but High Top Meat won’t buy lob out of the shell. With the hatchet, jumping in, I cut off the one big and four smaller claws I hadn’t marked, tossing them under the truck. Since the lobster was dragging itself away from me, toward the shoulder, I turned my back on it. After all that activity, I needed another shot of C-Level, which means lifting your mask for a second. I gathered up the claws and I was about to strap them onto the spare tire rack with a bungee cord when, next thing I knew, the thing had pulled my leg out from under me and was dragging me toward the side of the road.

It was the tire-marked claw. I should have cut it off and tossed it away. I shouldn’t ever have turned my back on it. It had me by the boot and was starting that slow sideways cut even while it pulled, and I knew I was in trouble. He still had six legs, each as big as a fencepost, and he was taking me home with him.

I reached for but missed the tire rack. I reached for but missed the hatchet. I reached for the big, soft rear trailer tire, even though there’s no place to grab it—then I saw two shots crack the lobster’s shell. You don’t hear shots in a near vacuum. I looked back and saw the kid ducking under the truck from the other side, shooting. Even with the big gloves on he hit it twice more, but you can shoot those things all day long. They’re like snapping turtles. I pointed at the Boy Scout hatchet, waving my arms, but the kid was falling. I hadn’t left any breath spray for him. He was sealed in his suit and turning blue. But just as he fell he pushed the hatchet close enough for me to reach it.

Thank God for the Boy Scouts. I chopped my foot free, and wearing the claw like a clamp on my leg, dragged the kid under the truck, up the ladder and into the cab. Even inside in the air, he could barely breathe. The fall had knocked his mask loose, and his tongue and throat had swelled up from decompression. Luckily they make a spray for that, too, and I had some in my first-aid kit under the seat. I’ve had it used on me and it’s bad. It puckers you up like eating a green persimmon but it works. It’s called GAZP.

I pried the claw off my boot and stuck it up under the seat. When I was sure the kid was breathing, I went back out and got the 9 mm where he had dropped it. The lobster was gone and the claws I had cut off were gone, too, so the whole thing was a waste. I wasn’t surprised. They say he eats them.

“Well, kid,” I said when we were in gear again. “You saved old CD’s butt back there.”

“Weren’t nothing. You get the claws?”

“Just the one he had me with. It’s under the seat. That’s that smell.” Landlobsters smell like piss on coals until they’re decompressed, and then it’s gone.

The claw wasn’t worth anything because it was tire-marked, but I didn’t mention that.

All that talking wore me out, and the kid too, I guess. I looked over and saw he was asleep. I was in high third.

On either side of the highway, nothing but miles and miles of stone. It’s amazing to me that so many people could live for so long in those little mountains and leave so little sign. Twenty miles further and the road got steeper, going down. I had to gear down to low fifth. I popped in Hank Senior and the kid whimpered a little from a dream. At that minute I might have been driving past his great-grandaddy’s grave. I could tell from the way he talked it was up here somewhere—somewhere between eastern Kentucky and western North Carolina, northern Virginia, and east Alabama. Somewhere in those endless wrinkled little hills that got unwrinkled and raised up, and rolled their children out into the world, rubbing their eyes and wondering when they get to go home.