Maxim Loskutoff - Come West and See: Stories

THANKS TO MY TEACHER, DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, FOR HIS wisdom and kindness, which guide me to this day, Deborah Landau, Lydia Davis, Zadie Smith, and the rest of the faculty and staff of the MFA program at NYU, my friends, whose stories inspired this book, and most especially my parents, Candace and Doug, whove been the first to read my writing since I was five years old. Thanks to my agent, Chris Clemans, for his kindred spirit in guiding the manuscript to completion, my editor Tom Mayer, for lifting it higher, and the following organizations who supported me while I wrote: the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Jean Kennedy Smith Foundation, the Brush Creek Foundation, Writers Omi at Ledig House, Jentel Arts, Caldera Arts Center, Ox-Bow, Mineral School, Vermont Studio Center, and Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.

The following stories have been previously published, some in slightly different form: The Dancing Bear in the Minnesota Review; End Times in Narrative; Come Down to the Water in the Southern Review; Ways to Kill a Tree in the Chicago Tribune Printers Row; Stay Here in Ploughshares; Prey in Willow Springs; Too Much Love in Fiction; and Harvest in Hobart.

Inspired in part by actual events, Come West and See is nevertheless in all respects a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. None of the dialogues recounted in these pages ever occurred; none of these characters ever lived.

Copyright 2018 by Maxim Loskutoff

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Book design by Chris Welch

Production manager: Lauren Abbate
JACKET DESIGN BY OLIVER MUNDAY
TITLE HAND LETTERING: OLIVER MUNDAY
HAND LETTERING ON AUTHORS NAME: JOEL HOLLAND
JACKET ART: APPALACHIAN, PAINTING BY GEORGE B. BOORUJY

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Loskutoff, Maxim, author.

Title: Come west and see: stories / Maxim Loskutoff.

Description: First edition. | New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017059973 | ISBN 9780393635584 (hardcover)

Classification: LCC PS3612.O7733 A6 2018 | DDC 813/.6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059973

ISBN 978-0-393-63559-1 (e-book)

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For Mom and Dad

Who knows what the future holds
Or where the cards may fall
But if you dont come out West and see
Youll never know at all.

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

FIRST, SHE WAS THE SOUND OF A BREAKING BRANCH. A SPLINTERED knucklecrack shattering the quiet of these western Montana woods. It is a heavy quiet here, and no good comes when it is broken. Red men, gunslingers, and all manner of gold-crazy down-and-outs plague this wild country. My heart went to scampering.

I took up my Winchester and crept to the door. Early light played on the mud-daubed timber walls. I built this cabin ten years ago with naught but a hatchet, five yards of rope, and Ezekiela mule by then more dead than alive. Damned if I would give it up without a fight.

Another branch snapped and I toed the door open. The smell of dew-wet pine wafted in. I slid the rifles nose into the crack. I held my breath.

She was up on her haunches, weight backall six hundred pounds of it, her arms raised, like the dancing bear I saw in Barnum & Baileys Fantastic Roadshow when I was a boy. But this was no dancing bear. She was a grizzly. Eight feet tall and used to having her way in the world. Her dinner-plate paws thrashed apples from my apple tree. She huffed and snorted, blowing clouds of steam. She was gorging on fruit, preparing for hibernation, and I believe she was enjoying herself. The rising sun smoldered the crest of Scapegoat Ridge above her massive head.

I thought to shoot her. Even leveled the Winchesters barrel. Her pelt would have fetched a hefty price. But I could not pull the trigger. She was magnificent. All the dreadful beauty of this territory was bound up in her figure. She ate the apples whole, holding them up between her paws and crushing them with her molars. Her fur shimmered and rolled in waves, like the windy prairie where I was born. Her pink tongue swept stray apple chunks from around her mouth.

I wondered if she had lips.

She stood to her full height, reaching for an apple high in the branches. Her body was shapely: trunk thighs widening into hips, slimming a bit through her middle before expanding again into the muscled bulk of her shoulders. She jumped and swung and caught the apple on her first clawher index clawand, with a snarl, tore it from the branch.

I had planned to save the apples and enjoy them as a treat on cold winter nights (nights when my cabin is a lump in the snow), but I was not angry at the bear. I was happy to watch her. I wondered if there were breasts beneath her fur.

I suddenly realized I was erect. Confusion and shame roiled my gut. I had never thought to lie with a bear before, but once I began I could not stop. I knelt, hiding my swollen cock behind the doorjamb, and, instead of thinking of protecting my home, I imagined running into her great hairy arms. Licking her throat. Inhaling her smell. Finding her tongue with mine, tasting apples. Tumbling back into the grass, her legs clamped around my buttocks, both of us sticky with apple juice. Warmth. Brown eyes. A roaring tangle of limbs.

I was dizzy, the rifle slack in my arms. She looked at me, wiped her jaws, and ambled back into the woods as the sun rose over Rattlesnake Canyon.

SHE CAME BACK the next morning, and the next. I took to waiting for her, first in my long johns and then naked. I stood in the doorway letting the morning sun draw the chill from my skin. She would watch me, sometimes for several minutes, unconcerned, before returning to the apples. I squared my shoulders and stuck out my chest.

My days fell into a friendly pattern. There is a deep pool in a bend of Rattlesnake Creek just east of my cabin. It is fed by melted snow from the Mission Mountains. After the bear made her way back into the forest, I would run, still naked, and plunge into the icy water. I slid around the rocky streambed like a trout. I emerged dripping, every inch of my body a-tingle, feeling younger than I had in years. Then I would wrap myself in a blanket and make coffee over the stove.

I spent the afternoons hiking through the woods checking my traps, killing and skinning what I caught. Boulders fill a ravine cutting down from the highest point on Scapegoat Ridge. Each day I carried one as far as I could, hoping to impress the bear with my strength. I stopped cutting my nails. When they were long enough, I sharpened the ends. I had the notion that, if we were to make love, she would want to feel my claws in her back.

I treated myself to a cup of whiskey in the evenings. I sat by the creek with my back against a birch as the first stars showed themselves. I sipped the whiskey and whittled toys for the furry, indistinct children that wandered around the edges of my mind.