The Woman Who Married a Bear (16 page)

“You think that I'm stupid. You think that I'm too weak to live with these ‘heroic' contradictions that you live with. And you think that I don't love you. But that's not true. None of that is true. You built the barrier, not me. Not faith, not your father, but you. And you know that's true.”

“It could well be true. …” I felt my anger rise and disappear above the river. I brushed her hair away from her eyes and moved the back of my hand against her cheek. “But I can't recognize the truth until I know exactly where I am.”

She hugged me. Even through her thick coat I could feel the muscles running down her back tense in quick powerful spasms. She snuffled on the back of my collar and planted a quick kiss on my ear and then she whispered, “This isn't all about you, you know.”

“I know,” I said and we walked toward the truck.

FOURTEEN

WE DIDN'T SPEAK
as she drove me to the airport. In the parking lot I bought a pint of Kentucky bourbon for $25 from a cab driver who had religious medals hanging from his rearview mirror.

Edward was there at the single gate and he smiled as I went toward the plane, and then he walked over to me. He put his arms on my shoulders and then looked down at the ground.

“There is a story about a human being who marries a bear. Maybe you should hear it.”

“How does it end?”

“Depends.”

I looked at him and squinted. “You, too? What are you, running for office? You're not making sense.”

“It depends on where you are. It depends on who the bear
is.

“I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.”

He smiled. And his eyebrows arched in the circle that completed the curve of his cheekbones. “Be careful, Cecil. You are going to drink. But don't ruin your luck.”

“I'll try. Don't listen to me. It's somebody else talking.”

“Okay.”

We shook hands and I turned and climbed the stairs to the plane. I leaned against the window and watched Hannah walk with Edward back to his truck. I opened the bottle and drank deeply. There is something ardent and romantic about getting drunk. I feel like it's a homecoming and a departure all at once.

I
am sitting in the central tube of a riveted aluminum spear, being driven deeper and deeper into my seat as we lift off the runway and then, as we ease up and bank over the south, I am astride a trumpeter swan gliding easily along the currents of subarctic air.

I don't want to, but I force myself to take six long swallows to finish the bottle so the flight attendant will not think I'm rude or hiding anything when she offers me a drink. Somehow there is music, a string section playing “Norwegian Wood” above the constant grinding drone of the Rolls-Royce engines. The pressure builds up behind my eyes and my head begins to feel slightly unhinged from my neck. I plug my nose and blow out. Air gushes out of my ears and new sounds flood in. The liquor cart is being unfolded and the blond flight attendant with the purple mascara bangs it gently on the bulkhead and I hear the sweet tinkle of the tiny bottles.

Taking hallucinogenic drugs is very much like taking a trip: leaving one place and going to another. But getting drunk is like hiring a sitter and staying in. There are no lightning blasts of clarity or luminous burning bushes, but only the vague warm sentimentality that seeps in around the edges like the sliding chords of a steel guitar. The back of my throat and the bottom of my stomach fill with iron filings, and I feel the pressure of my peripheral vision narrowing.

T
he plane climbed through the cloud cover and we poked into the uniformly sunny world of high altitude. The cart was loaded and happily jingling down the aisle. I was by the window and the woman on the aisle heaved a long breath and said to herself and to me: “Thank God we're out of that hellhole.”

She was white and wearing a crisp business suit, straight navy skirt, pleated white blouse, and oversized amber trade-bead necklace. Her fingernails were manicured to shapely clear talons. She clenched and unclenched her fingers as we rose to cruising altitude.

“To what do you owe the good fortune of getting out of Stellar?” She looked at me and her eyes seemed to be gay as paper lanterns at a country picnic.

“It was time to go,” I said.

“Exactly!” And she thumped the padded armrest with her fists. Her silver bracelets tinkled briefly as the liquor cart pulled abeam and I bought her a scotch and soda. I had bourbon. We talked about something inane and I had a sense she knew it was inane as well. We were talking out of tension, and all the while I kept thinking about Hannah and Toddy and that dismal avocado in the salad. My seatmate was a CPA and I remember her saying that she didn't use a pencil and she “did cities and not books.”

I smiled a knowing kind of grin like I knew what she was talking about and had turned it into some sort of double entendre.

She was glad to be leaving Stellar because she was afraid she was going to get stuck there for weeks trying to sort out the books for the city.

“These are Stone Age people, for Christsakes. Not that they are to blame, I suppose, but they don't have any real notion about fiscal responsibility. They don't understand the … the …” She traced a perfectly shaped nail down the tip of her nose to her tongue. “—The substance of good accounting.”

I was chewing that one over when we hit an air pocket and nervous laughter rose from all the passengers. The cabin was growing dark now and the reading lights were coming on. Thick-bodied travelers jiggled in their seats. Strapped in. Some were asleep with their mouths open in corpulent repose. We were all hurtling through the air at 450 miles per hour inside a pressurized aluminum tube. Far below I imagined the sound of our engines falling on a bull moose. He might have startled and lifted his head slightly.

I dimly remember changing planes in Anchorage. I remember trying to convince my racist accountant friend to come with me to the Baranof Hotel in Juneau or to the Red Dog Saloon. I remember the angry expression of some large white man with folded arms who had apparently come to meet her at the airport. I remember the tinge of potential violence in the air or maybe it was the edge to someone's voice.

I don't think that I got into a fight.

I slept and drank from Anchorage to Juneau and I stole bottles off the cart when I walked back to the coffin-sized bathroom. The flight was continuing to Seattle, and there were three people in tweed coats and rubber shoes waiting in the Juneau airport.

Someone offered me a joint in a bathroom, maybe in the airport, and I turned it down. I remembered three years ago I had sworn to a sixteen-year-old girl that I would never smoke pot without her and we would only do it in the Pike Place Market in Seattle. This sworn oath is clearer now than any moment of the plane ride. I sat down on the toilet in the airport bathroom and put my head in my hands.

I
'd been looking for a guy in Seattle, and thought he worked at one of the fish stands. He might have been a witness to a boat fire in Ketchikan the fall before. I met her in the morning on the corner near the bus stop where the tattoo parlor used to be. She had short black hair and she offered to keep me company. She had two joints in a plastic soap case that looked like it was stuffed with her important papers. We smoked the joints slowly and intermittently at various points around the market. We squatted by the green pillars and listened to Baby Gramps play “Teddy Bears' Picnic” on his steel guitar. We watched the men throw salmon over the counter to be weighed, and laughed when they dropped them, slippery and comic like an old movie. The fish were beautiful silver swimmers, split down the middle, their red flesh flashing like a starlet's lips.

We kissed on the balcony over the waterfront. We watched tourists shuffle around the panhandlers, and we ate calamari and baklava sitting by the window in an upstairs cafe, trying to guess where all the ships were bound for. We stepped out into the sunshine and her skin was a golden slippery pink, like a little girl in her first two-piece bathing suit. We drank coffee and white zinfandel. An old man dressed like a logger did silly and obvious sleight of hand, but she laughed and put change in his hat.

She had a few belt buckles made from elk horn that she was going to sell but she had given them to a friend to keep and he had traded them off for a pizza and a bottle of apple wine, which he at least offered to share with us, but we declined.

At six o'clock we kissed by the stainless steel flower bins that were empty except for the bright blue and red smear of petals across the bottom. A bus blew the pages of a magazine across Pike Street in the wake of its exhaust. There were long shadows toward midtown. A Chinese man squatted by one of the green pillars and knocked spit out of his harmonica.

We bought fresh raspberries and shrimp and tried to cook the shrimp over a barrel fire on the waterfront, but the wood was soaked in creosote and the shrimp turned to tar. She ate raspberries and cried. She cried until her mascara ran like the water stains under a roof spout. It was the snotty, awkward crying of a child, and I held her and kissed the top of her head and promised.

She had a theory about unhappiness. She let herself be really unhappy a little every day, and that way she would not save it up for when she was old. She said she would never end up like her mom. She told me this and she wiped her nose on her sleeve. We finished the last of the joint and the raspberries and we burned the shrimp. Then I drove her out to her aunt's house in Woodinville, where the yard was matted down and muddy, with a pit bull chained to an outboard motor in the corner. Bugs swarmed the porch light. Her aunt turned the TV down when we knocked, but stayed sitting on the couch. We kissed good-bye and I promised to meet her at the market the next day. But when I saw her she snubbed me. I think she had gotten into some kind of trouble because there was the crescent of a fresh bruise under her makeup. I waved and she smiled faintly and turned her back.

Later I heard from a guy who knew her uncle in jail that she'd hung herself in a halfway house on the Olympic Peninsula. I never got any more details but I didn't disbelieve the rumor. My father told me that the first rule of unhappiness is that you can accept the way things are, or change. As long as you live drunk or with an acceptable daily level of unhappiness, you can avoid this rule al-together. But some people find that no matter what they do, unhappiness is cumulative. Some people mistreat their lovers and stay drunk so they can live the exclusive romance that's found in memory and cheap sentiment.

I
was sitting in an airport bathroom thinking about my own theory of unhappiness. I had this idea that if someone would only love me with enough conviction and if I could understand just what the fuck the “substance of good accounting” was, everything would come clear.

I tried to add things up: There was a hole in Toddy's back the size of a softball. There were papers and reports and photographs about a murder that didn't add up to a story. There were Lance and his sister, both less than forthcoming, but then I was a lot less than worth coming forth to. Emma Victor with her tight smile and milky stare. Louis Victor dead and eaten by the bears. De De flopped like a rag doll on a pier in Bellingham and Walt Robbins with his earnest faith in his daughter. And in the midst of this there was someone trying to kill me before I got to something that I couldn't at this point even imagine existed. I tried to add it up, and I couldn't understand the substance of good accounting. I was rocketing around in one pressurized tube after another, with facts swirling around me like mosquitoes.