‘Jaws’ meets ‘Deliverance,’ with bears

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

That’s what I call a novel of mine that my agent is trying to sell: “Jaws meets Deliverance, with bears.” The working title is Chimera River.

I came up with that because one of my graduate school mentors, novelist Ben Greer, once told me an anecdote about how a publisher asked him for a three-page novel summary, then asked for a 100-word description of the work, and then asked him if he could describe the novel in just a sentence. “Be prepared,” Ben said, “to condense the greatest effort of your life, tens of thousands of words, into ten words of marketing copy.” 

Those friends and colleagues who have read the manuscript have liked it well, although one friend who read the novel, and who some weeks later came for a summer-weekend visit to the cottage out here, said jokingly to me, “I wondered if you were kinda like a serial killer when I read this.”

I assured her that all novelists are serial killers and there was nothing to worry about. Think about how many people (characters) Herman Melville, Patricia Highsmith, Flannery O’Connor, or Cormac McCarthy have killed. All fiction makers at some point must consider how their people must die, and then do them in.

In Chimera River, some of that happens this way:  

As Sig ran toward the rear of camp, going past Liz, she reached out and plucked the .480 out of the small holster. She threw herself forward, somehow getting on her feet, feeling a strange, time-slowing smoothness within her, and she swung the gun so the high front sight fit right into the middle of Radic’s back and she pulled the trigger. The blast roared in all directions with a bright yellow flash and she rocked back on her buttocks.

Hearing the shot and seeing its flash, and feeling no fire or pain, the bear understood that the people could not see him, and had no chance to hit him if he again moved as quickly as he could. He took off.

Liz watched Radic collapse atop Ben, and she turned the gun toward Sig and lined up the sight on his chest as he spun around at the sound of the shot. He saw her clearly in the lantern light, and saw the dull glint of the gun. She heard the sound of the bear over the sound of the rain, and she waited as Sig, too, realized he heard something real, not hallucinatory. She kept the gun up, watching Sig and his gun hand, and she saw the shape of the bear come out of the shadows and blossom darkly into huge form in the green light of the camp.

The bear flew into the courier, seizing his thigh in his jaws, and raised him up and shook him in a blurring swirl of human limbs and sparkling, lamp-lit rain. Sig at first felt as if he was falling, and felt an incredible pressure on his leg. But then the bear’s teeth grated against bone and everything instinctive and hard-wired in the man blazed through the methamphetamine and he screamed. The bear’s horrendous wet-body odor filled Sig’s throat and lungs and it made him retch as he screamed so he let out a terrible gargling sound.

The big animal pressed the man into the muck as he finished tearing at the leg. The bear them clamped his jaws around the man’s shoulder, and grasped the man’s head with his claws. He bit and pulled, and felt the funny little animal coming apart.

 Awakened by the revolver blast, Andrey glanced up, saw the bear, and reflexively pulled Liz down next to him so they both could play dead. She kept her thumb on the hammer of the gun and watched in awe as the bear yanked Sig along the ground, biting down savagely on the man’s upper body, his claws tearing his head. The bear churned up the mud with his hind feet as he shoved his prey along.

 Ben had detached himself from Radic, and lunged for the rifle on the chair. He had just grabbed the AK when the bear crashed into Sig, and he slid down on his side, the rifle in his hands, as he stared through the rain and mist at the great bear taking his prey.

The bear stood with his forepaws atop Sig as he peered at the man with the rifle. He saw the rifle and the man holding it, and was wary of it, but he waited for the man to move. His heavy, wet body quivered and flung water, shimmering like a small god in a strange green sunlight.

* * * 

Funny thing about that friend: She had a very pleasant summer stay, and so visited again, in the autumn, despite her prior assessment of my deepest character. By the time of her second visit, I had put up all the split firewood in readiness for weather like today’s. She had wandered into the backyard while I was loading the car, and I heard her exclaim, “Oh, my god!”

I strolled around the cottage to find her staring at the two stacks of wood, one maple, in the back, and the other black locust, closer to the house. She turned and looked at me, and said, “You are a serial killer.” 

“Why do you think that again?” I said. 

“Look at that” — she pointed — “Who stacks wood like that? It’s like Lincoln Logs. It’s totally symmetrical. It’s like you built a little house with split wood.” 

I explained that this was how I had learned to stack wood to create circulation among the pieces to keep it dry. She explained that anyone who stacked wood so perfectly was kooks, and anyone who wrote “Jaws meets Deliverance, with bears” and stacked wood like this was, in fact, a potential danger to humanity. 

Despite such an assessment, we remain fine friends. I didn’t admit to her, however, that I thought the wood stacks are actually a bit sloppy.