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Marta Maretich

The Bear Suit

In a varied career, Marta Maretich has been a teacher, a publisher, a journalist, an editor, and a fiction writer. She is the author of three novels: The Merchants of Light (2015), The Possibility of Lions (2011), and The Bear Suit (2017). Her short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in many publications and been anthologized in collections including Inspired Journeys: Travel Writers in Search of the Muse (2016). She has been awarded artist residencies at the Eastern Frontiers Educational Foundation at Norton Island and Yaddo.

Born in Nigeria and raised in California, Marta has lived in London since 1995.

Open Door

First published by Gemma Open Door for Literacy in 2017.

Gemma Open Door for Literacy, Inc.

230 Commercial Street

Boston MA 02109 USA

www.gemmamedia.com

© 2017 by Marta Maretich

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

978-1-936846-55-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

Cover by Laura Shaw Design

Gemma’s Open Doors provide fresh stories, new ideas, and essential resources for young people and adults as they embrace the power of reading and the written word.

Brian Bouldrey

Series Editor

Open Door

For Brian Bouldrey, who loves the trail and the transformation.

PROLOGUE

Like all gifts from the gods, the bear suit first came to Rollo in dreams. One night in the middle of winter, he dreamed of finding a black bearskin on a trail in the woods. It lay across his path, and at first he thought it was a real bear asleep on the ground. As he came closer, he saw that it was an empty skin.

For some reason, he wasn’t sure why, Rollo walked toward it. He picked the skin up and ran his hand over the dusty, rough brown fur. Then he turned it over and looked at the raw underside. It was yellowish and dry, with the texture of beef jerky. The hide was light as a leaf, long and flat as a plank, hollow as a husk. He sniffed it and found it smelled of old muscle and the ghost of blood. It was complete: the fangs in the mouth, the claws at the ends of the paws, the round, leathery pads at the bottoms of the feet. The eyes of the bearskin were shut tight. There was no telling what was behind the lids. The black nose was hard and shriveled as a prune.

Just add water, Rollo thought in his dream. Just add water, the spirit of the dried-out bear told him, speaking inside his mind.

ONE

April came. The snow was still deep in the passes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the foothills were covered in pale green grass. From the town where he lived down in the valley, Rollo could see the foothills on clear days. They seemed to float up from the valley floor. Behind them, like a film set, rose the high mountains with white snow capping the peaks. When Rollo looked at them he felt an ache in his heart. In his mind, he ran over his plans for escape.

Rollo endured the winter in town because he had no choice. Living there meant living in the messed-up, manmade world like everyone else. He hated every minute of it. At twenty-seven, he still lived in the converted garage at his mother’s house and worked at a supermarket for money. He had no car, no girlfriend, and no friends, unless you counted people he knew from high school. He sometimes saw familiar faces in the mall. He rode his bike everywhere and took classes in environmental science at the junior college. School had nothing to teach Rollo. He knew everything about nature already, but taking the courses kept his mother quiet. More and more these days, she worried about his future.

He used to tell his mother that his future was in the mountains. But then she got the idea that Rollo planned to become a park ranger. For a while, this thought made her happy, and she went around telling her friends that Rollo “had his heart set” on joining the Forest Service. She liked the idea so much that she kept bringing it up, asking him what steps he had to take to join the service, what certifications he would need. When she offered to give him money to buy his first uniform, he finally told her the truth. Angrily, he shouted that he would never in a million years want to become a park ranger. He thought park rangers were just a kind of police force for nature. He would never, ever agree to be part of anything like that.

His mother started to cry when Rollo told her that what he really wanted was to become part of the park.

Rollo tacked up a row of maps on the walls of his room. He placed them so they lined up perfectly and made one big, continuous map of the length of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The maps were very detailed, the best Rollo could find. They showed all the landforms: rivers, forests, hills and valleys, lakes. They showed the steepness of the mountains using fine brown contour lines that swirled like fingerprints around the peaks. Where the lines were far apart, it meant the land rose gently. Where they were close together, it meant the grade was steep.

Rollo stood in front of the wall of maps for hours at a time. He traced routes with his index finger and imagined hiking along them. He chose the steepest paths, the ones that cut straight up the close-packed contour lines. He could almost sense how hard those hikes would be, and how he would feel when he reached the top of the mountain and stood there, alone. He laughed loudly to himself.

“Are you all right in there?” It was his mother, calling through his locked door. Her ears were as sensitive as a bat’s.

Rollo didn’t bother answering her. He felt trapped. He couldn’t wait another minute to be away from here. To be in the mountains. He dragged his old green pack out from under his bed. For many seasons, that pack had been his only friend as he hiked through the wilderness. He opened the top and turned it upside down. A small pinecone and a handful of glittering mica dust fell onto his bed. He put his face inside the pack and breathed in the smell of woodsmoke and pine needles. It calmed him down. He stayed that way, with his head in the pack, until he heard his mother go away.

TWO

Rollo’s idea of paradise was a wilderness without people. It was the Garden of Eden after the angel with the burning sword had thrown Adam and Eve out.

It wasn’t that he hated other human beings on a personal level. He wasn’t one of those crazy guys who showed up in public places with guns. He just didn’t see the point to people. He wished they would painlessly disappear forever. They annoyed him with their silly questions and their demands. He wasn’t interested in the things they made, like cars and computers and buildings. He had no use for the stupid gizmos, like cell phones, that they got so excited about. What good were cell phones when all you could do with them was talk to other human beings?

But although Rollo didn’t really hate people, he did hate what they were doing to the planet. He thought about this all the time. It kept him awake at night. He followed the news about climate change and believed that human beings were causing it by burning too many fossil fuels. He knew that many animals were dying out because humans were destroying their habitats.

All this made Rollo angry, but it didn’t surprise him one bit. It was exactly what he expected from mankind. Human beings were big fat hogs, in his opinion. There was no limit to how much of the earth they would take for themselves. They would leave nothing for plants or animals—or for people like him, who only wanted to be left alone.

Rollo could see the changes all around him. He watched his town grow and spread like a stain across the flat floor of the valley. Every year it got bigger. It ate up the fields where farmers once grew crops and littered the earth with cheap little houses and huge discount stores. At the same time, the air became more and more polluted because there were more and more cars. Rollo’s town now had the worst air quality of any town in the whole United States! He had read that in a magazine, but he could have guessed it. When he rode his bike on days when the air was bad, his lungs burned like they were on fire.

Rollo knew he wasn’t the only one who thought about these problems. Some people marched in the streets about them. Some people signed petitions. Some people went to the state capital or to Washington, D.C., and held demonstrations. Rollo thought all that was a total waste of time. He would never join any group or sign any petition. Human beings would never stop being greedy and selfish, no matter what he did. His answer was to turn his back on the whole human mess and lose himself in the mountains.

The trouble was, he had never found a way to do it permanently. He wanted to arrange things so he didn’t have to come back.

* * *

Dried noodles, powdered milk, granola: Rollo started making the list of food to take on his summer hiking trip.

Making this list always frustrated him. Food was Rollo’s weakness. No matter how carefully he planned or packed, he could never carry enough to last him more than a few weeks. He ate very little and always lost a lot of weight during his trips. Sooner or later, though, the food always ran out.

When this happened, he’d live off nuts for a few days, eating them straight out of his greasy pockets. Sometimes he’d try eating plants and roots he found by the trail, but these always gave him a stomachache. Once he tried eating a caterpillar, but it tasted so bitter he had to spit it out. When he gave up on finding food in the wild, he’d go without eating for as long as possible. Five days was his record. But eventually, hunger and weakness would force him down into one of the tourist towns.

These towns lived off the summer vacation traffic to the mountains. After the silence of the high trails, they felt busy and noisy. They were full of revving motorcycles and giant, square white camper vans and whining, sunburned children. They made Rollo feel rattled. He walked through them with a scowl on his face, cursing the crowds of tourists, the fake log-cabin gift shops, the trash cans brimming with sticky paper plates. He’d grit his teeth and head straight for the local store, desperate to get his shopping over with and to escape back into the wild.

Usually, there was only one grocery in town, set up like an old-fashioned general store you’d see in a Western movie. These shops had a little bit of everything. They were the only places in town to buy food, so prices were sky-high. You could pay five dollars for a package of cheese, three for a box of crackers! This made Rollo mad. He sullenly gathered his food and paid in silence, only grunting when the cashier tried to talk to him.

Rollo felt defeated every time this happened. He had given in to his hungry, human side again and broken the magic spell of the mountains.

But that would never happen again, Rollo thought. He had dreamed of the bearskin, so it was all going to be different from now on. The dream had given him a brilliant idea.

THREE

The man at the costume rental company gave him funny looks when he went to rent the bear suit. He stared at Rollo, seeming to size him up. He asked him questions. He checked his ID.

“Is there a problem?” Rollo asked finally. “Do you have a bear costume I can rent or not? Should I go somewhere else?”

“No, no,” the man said quickly. He was old and bald. His narrow shop was crammed with racks of colorful costumes. He turned and went into the back of the shop and returned with a furry brown shape on a hanger. The sight of it, empty and waiting, gave Rollo shivers.

The man said, “It’s just that you don’t strike me as the kind of person who’d go to a party dressed as a bear.”

“What makes you say that?” Rollo asked, feeling offended.

The man shrugged and handed Rollo the costume.

Rollo tried it on in the curtained changing booth. It was heavy and made out of artificial dark brown hair. Like everything in the old man’s shop, the bear suit had been used for many years. Its seams were worn, and it looked like some patches of fur had been gnawed by moths. There were places where the dark coating had rubbed off the claws, revealing the white plastic underneath. The costume had a strange smell that was

like a mix of dry-cleaning chemicals, peanuts, and stale sweat. Rollo lowered the hollow bear head over his own and looked out through the bear’s open mouth.

He studied his reflection in the mirror. His worst fear was that he’d look like a cute teddy bear in the suit. That would be embarrassing. But he thought he looked all right. “Raar,” he said quietly, taking a swipe at the mirror with one paw.

“Excuse me?” asked the shopkeeper, from the other side of the curtain.

“I said, I’ll take it,” Rollo said. His voice echoed in the bear head and sounded loud in his own ears.

The last thing his mother said to him before he left for the mountains was, “Whether you like it or not, son, I’m moving to the beach.”