The Woman Who Married a Bear (15 page)

Or just about. “Tell me about Louis and Emma.”

“There were some bad years. I was on the outside, but I knew Louis was not happily married.”

“Did he beat his wife and kids?”

Walt looked down into the mouth of his glass. “Yeah, I think he did. You've got to understand. I loved Louis. He was my good friend. When we were young and we drank we never got in much trouble. But later, he drank when something was hurting him … and anger came out. Then he stopped. Those last years he was as good as I'd ever seen him.” Walt swirled the whiskey around in the bottom of the glass.

I looked at Walt. The skin around his temples seemed thin, almost translucent. The weariness on his face was cut into the lines around his eyes and mouth. The Judge had been a boy who had waited all of his life to be old and venerable, but Walt was a young man whose body had grown old. His hair was thinning and flecked with gray, his skin was no longer taut over the muscles underneath. His hand didn't shake but his voice quavered slightly as he spoke.

“You can never know how a thing will turn out. I used to read to De De when she was little. Right after her bath. She wore this scratchy robe and her hair was wet and all. I'd read and let her turn the pages. She was so damn smart. Even when she couldn't read she knew when to turn the pages. You can never tell how things will turn out. I loved Louis but he wasn't all good. De De was all good but she got killed, too. I don't know how to make sense of it. I suppose I could have had things a lot better in my life. I could have done things differently, maybe. I could have avoided some bad luck. But I don't know. I don't think it would ever break down that way. She was a beautiful girl, and she was mine, and maybe that's all the luck I'll ever have in this life.

“Then there was Emma. That was good, but it was never lucky.”

He looked up at me, embarrassed. “Loving a woman who is married to someone else is like winning the lottery with a forged ticket.”

“Were you in love with Emma?”

“Yeah, I think I was back then.”

He got up and walked around the cabin. “You ever think that memory is just a dream, Younger?”

I smiled up at him. “Most of the time.”

He looked a little confused but continued. “Well, when I think about those times it really seems like a dream. Things seemed like they were always in an uproar. Louis and Emma fighting, and me trying to console them both, but really only wanting to be with Emma. I was lying to my best friend. It was not all that good a dream.

“Louis had a girlfriend who was very powerful. She was a Yupik woman with a big family. Her name was Rachel. She was different from Emma; she was quiet and strong. Louis said that being with her was like being in a safe anchorage. We all knew that as far as Em was concerned he was a lying bastard, but I think he was really in love with that Yupik woman. Just before they left Stellar there was a big confrontation, where Em called her brothers up from the lower forty-eight and theythreatened Louis. It was ugly and racist, the brothers swaggering around like they were the keepers of righteousness. Nothing ever happened. They made their wishes known and left. Emma and the kids, even Louis, were no better off really. Things simmered down and Louis promised not to see Rachel, but he did on the sly for years. Before the murder, I heard that they were seeing each other a lot.”

“She still around?”

Walt poured me some more whiskey and set the bottle down between us.

“Six months after Louis was killed she drowned in the river. Her skiff turned over. She was all alone, which was strange, and she hadn't packed any gear.”

“What does her family say?”

“They say it's too bad she's dead. Other than that, they don't talk much to me or anyone else.”

“Is Edward related to Rachel's family?”

“Your friend Edward? Yeah, I think so.”

The cinder of my brain kept expanding. I had been fooled plenty of times into mistaking drunkenness for knowledge but there was a distinct edge to this feeling, an edge that led away from certainty, which made me suspect that knowledge might be behind it.

“Maybe we could go to look at the cabin. Although I'm not sure what good it would do.”

“If you can get to Juneau I'll take us out to the cabin in my boat.”

I heard a truck pull up and then a knock on the door. It was Hannah and she had come to pick me up.

She said we had just enough time to walk down by the river before I had to catch my plane. Hannah smiled at Walt as we stood in the doorway. She smiled and shifted from one foot to another. I knew she could smell the whiskey and she could see the glasses. She wasn't going to say anything then and I doubted she was ever going to mention it, but I knew she was not going to come in and have a drink instead of walking down by the river.

“I'll call you.” I turned and extended my hand.

“Or I'll get a message through to you. Let's not wait on this thing. It's gone on long enough.”

I turned and walked with Hannah to her truck. She looked down at the ground.

“Do you trust him?” she asked the tips of her boots.

“This whole case is a gray area in my brain. I don't believe or disbelieve anything, I just store it away. I tend to like him but that is all the more reason to be skeptical. He's in the gray area.”

“Where am I now?” This time she asked the steering wheel.

“You? Right now you're taking me to the river.”

She put the truck in gear. I felt a nervousness as Walt's hut went out of sight. Later I would recognize that as the first sounds of cracking glass above the orchids.

THIRTEEN

AS WE GOT
out of the truck I held out my hand but she smiled and looked at the sand. From a plane, this section of the river would look like a twisting intestine, looping and curling back on itself. From the beach it was a series of short vistas. Curves and corners that, once rounded, revealed nothing but the river, moving and cutting away at the sandy bank. A few willows but mostly the brown water, at this point being pushed downstream, pushed by the downward slope of the mountain miles away, pushed slowly like a coasting car on the flats. There was a black and white swallow in the willow. I suppose it was telling me to be alert, to watch, to watch what was coming, but I was tired and I knew what was coming was a romantic daydream of what my life with Hannah might have been.

I
remember picking berries with her in summer, behind the police academy in Sitka, in a graveyard tucked into the glen of young trees and salmonberry brambles. We walked from town late in the morning when the air was warm off the ocean and the smell of the harbor was sweet as the spray of surf. Back from the water the air was calm and the warmth radiated up from the ground. We crossed the main road that went out to the mill and walked the short gravel road down toward the graveyard. The road ran parallel to a river and the salmon were running upstream to spawn. The banks of the river were strewn with the decaying bodies of the spawned-out fish, and the air was pungent with rot. The only thing marking the entrance of the graveyard berry patch was a shoulder-high hole in the bramble where we ducked in, as if it were our childhood fort. Under the canopy of small spruce trees were the toppled markers of graves and the desiccated petals of plastic flowers.

We passed weather-worn headstones:

Anna Todd
1906-1940
Daughter-Mother

Russell Collette
1912-1944
Soldier

The sun dappled in through the canopy of the limbs and Hannah moved slowly around the graves to the edges of the clearing where the berry bushes crowded each other, reaching for the light. The berries were soft and thick with juice, loosely hung on their stems; sacks of color and flavor like eggs ripe in the bellies of the salmon running up the stream. There were wild flowers among the graves: shooting stars, bog orchids, and the deadly monkshood.

I remember feeling I could have been underwater watching her swim naked over a tropical reef, but she was walking in and out of shadow, reaching up for the berries and gently placing them in the plastic bucket she had hung around her neck. Sometimes the upper limbs of a bramble would catch her blond hair and as she stepped forward one of them would lift a strand into the light as if it were a broken web blowing out from a doorway.

Kids had partied in the graveyard and Hannah picked up their beer cans and put them in her pack.

Tessa Malovitch
1896-1936
Committed to our Lord

Ivan Bruce
1956-1959
With the angels

I remember picking each berry. The stains on my fingers and thumb. The sweet bitter taste of the seeds resting in the back of my tongue and my teeth. I held one berry up to the light and looked at the tiny hair coming from each sack. I saw the membrane surrounding the juice as thin as the surface tension on a drop of water. An occasional horsefly would create a small disturbance in the still air and the wind would stir the trees above us, mixing the shadows in a warm broth.

We did not talk, but I could hear her humming faintly as her fingers worried over the limbs of each particular bush. It could have been a Scottish air or a sentimental dance tune. I watched her as she squatted low, working under the lower limbs to find the sweet berries near the warm ground, and then I saw her stand and stretch on her toes to reach the top of the bush. Her shirt came untucked and I saw the small of her back curve to the roundness of her thighs.

At least I think I remember seeing these things. I have a hard time sorting out memory and longing.

For instance, I wouldn't swear that we went home and I stayed sober and we made love tenderly that night, but I believe we did. I remember tasting the sun and the berries on her lips and the wind billowing through the curtains in our room as I kissed her breasts and her belly. I remember her fingers stretching against the side of my face, her saying my name over and over again. And I remember her dense taste mixing with the air, with the berries, with the memory of the sun as the darkness came on.

Walking along the river I guess I didn't care if these things really happened this way or not. I would prefer to be drunk and remember making love soberly to a woman in a memory of a truth that may have never existed, rather than suffer the certainty of an accurate recollection. These dreams that inspire loneliness are as sweet and as bitter as the seeds of berries picked in the graveyard and later found under the tongue.

S
he looked down and swept her hair from her face. Her shoulders rolled in the awkward, deliberate gait that goes with walking on river sand.

“Poor Cecil,” she muttered. She looked up at me and I saw the curves of her face under her eyes and around her mouth. She looked younger than in our last days in Sitka. Somehow her face was softer, as if the lines, for so long taut with frustration, had relaxed. I could hear the river pushing past us and I saw an edge of the sand bank break away into the water and begin its drift toward the sound.

“You just can't leave it alone, can you? It's your sickness that has to keep moving ahead. If there is a little security and resolution in a person's life you have to come in and stir things up.”

There was a mocking tone to her voice. I walked behind her a few steps and watched the swallow ruffle his feathers in anticipation of flight. He reached up under one wing with his beak, perhaps to pick at a small mite burrowing into his skin. Birds, whatever their cognitive limitations, don't have to listen to sermons from their ex-girlfriends.

“Listen, what do you want? I let you go. You packed up and walked out on Todd and me and I didn't stop you. What do you want? It seems a little late for insights.”

The swallow flew, simply tipped forward and stretched, and with three strokes was out of sight beyond the curve of water and bank. A lesser woman would have thought I was picking a fight, but Hannah smiled again, and spoke out toward the water. There were slight cauliflower forms from the current blooming onto the surface.

“You act like the world isn't big enough for anything else but you. You act like when your ego swells the whole world stretches tight. Look around, Cecil, there's plenty of room. There's plenty of space left when you're around. Why don't you leave this case alone and try my way?”

I thought of that day in Sitka, standing in the wake of the door slamming. I thought of standing on the empty runway, watching the airplane bank over the sound, and I thought of geese flying overhead, an ever-widening V—away.

Of course, there is enough room in the world, but there's no use arguing with a person who has recently come to Christ. I turned and started back toward the truck by myself.

“Wait.”

“I can't wait, doll. I've got to go. Listen, I've tried to feel the way you do. Even in the most watered-down form. I've tried. I sat in those community rooms and drank cup after cup of coffee and tried to accept ‘a force greater than myself but … I can't….”

“It's because you're a man, the son of a judge.”

“Bullshit. It's because there is so much happening and I spend so much of my time confused. What about “the force” between you and me, and “the force” that took a shot at Toddy. Are those the same thing? You weren't there. I held him in my arms and his chest was ripped open. You weren't there. I don't know how much room there is in the world, but there is too much fucking room when that can happen to Todd. Or that girl in Bellingham.”

She looked at me and her eyes were wet. “You love mysteries so much, Cecil, I think you've made a virtue of confusion. Faith is a mystery, but you don't see that. You're like a cop when it comes to this. You only see the facts. You jump ahead to the conclusions. And then you feel empty again because you've missed the story.”

The swallow landed, nearer to us. The bird was perfect in its detail. The feathers and their fishbone delicacy, the sparkle of sun on the thin liquid of its eyes. It ruffled and then tipped forward again. If its head was a cup left out, what could it be filled with?

She watched the bird. “We are free to do what we want.”

“Would you stop? You're free to leave. Somebody's free to shoot Todd, and I'm free to get drunk as six hundred Indians if I want.”

“There is a better way.”

“I could have a lobotomy and go door-to-door with pamphlets.”

She walked ahead of me, shoulders rolling, trying to hold her temper.

“You could give up the fight you are never going to win.”

I stopped walking and looked down at my shoes. I had my hands in my pockets. I knew she was right, sort of. I knew I could never convince her of a truth that I couldn't define. This argument was not just about love, or about the dream that comes on after the third drink. This was about everything else: the flow of the river, and the cycle of water, Todd's shooting and my compulsive curiosity.

We both knew there was more than one force greater than me, and some of them conflict, like the one that shaped Todd and the one that wanted to kill him. These have to be at least two different things and that's okay with me. In fact, I prefer it, because for me to believe that God did this to Toddy is somehow to collude with it, to be a party to it. And that's not an option. That's crazy.

But I'd be willing, if He'd just come and take me, and that's crazy, too. Sometimes when I think about it, just for happiness, just to feel what it would be like to be a regular human, I'd surrender unashamedly. I'd live with Hannah and water my garden boxes above the channel and go to church twice a week and I'd call it heaven. But … I'm stuck with the world: with the rocks, with the brown water, and with the salmon that spawn, die, and drift like ghosts out to sea. I'm willing to go to the river but I can't go further, not for love, not for curiosity. I couldn't go with her because I love the river so much. I looked at Hannah and tried to imagine the words for the unimaginable faith.

The swallow appeared again and stayed perfectly still above us in the willows.

“Cecil, why do you have to be this way? Let the police figure this thing out. Stay with me and love me. I have room for you, you know.”

“Just forget about Todd and De De and the rest? This whole case is just about my vanity; I give that up and you and God will take care of me?”

“Listen to yourself. The reason you do this is because you believe there is a solution out there somewhere. You have some sense of justice that requires you to find out what happened. That's faith, buster. It's twisted up, but it's faith.

She started to shake her finger at me the way the old woman in the home had done: the universal gesture of certainty.

The black and white bird lifted forward again and fell toward the water rising at the last moment to pulse along its surface with short wing strokes.

I dug my feet into the sand like a guilty little boy. The more I did it the more I became aware of it and the angrier I became.

“No,” I said, and left it at that, afraid of what might come after.

The discussion ended. She was not angry or surprised by me or my answers. Then that started to irritate me. We veered to the left and walked up the steep sandy embankment to a fringe of firm but unstable ground. Hannah went first, and when we cleared the top we both stopped and looked over the tundra. In its expanse it was abstract, but up close it was crowded with detail: the bunched moss and the thin clumps of grass, a ptarmigan's gray mottled feather tucked under a hillock and the thin tracings of a rabbit track going away from the river. Then, unexpectedly, she turned to me and took my hands in hers. She was crying. The tears were like crystals in the brief light. She rubbed her mittened hands over the red skin of my bare knuckles.