The Woman Who Married a Bear (17 page)

T
he Juneau airport shines with etched glass and makes you think you've really arrived in a city. I sat in the bar and looked out over the highway and I could see the lights of the department stores and video shops nestled under the lip of the glacier. The glacier has a massive presence like the sound of a bear ahead of you in the brush. I drank and twisted my napkin into a knot. Someone asked me about Toddy and I talked about my father. I remember getting angry and I remember thinking about getting something to eat. Someone, perhaps another large white man with folded arms, suggested that I go downtown. A cabbie fronted me the fare. I don't know why.

It was raining hard and I stood under a theater marquee for ten minutes until I saw someone I thought I knew and we walked the bars. I remember stuffed animal heads and a woman in a tank top with a bloody nose. I remember a waitress dropping an entire tray of drinks and I think I remember someone playing the saxophone out in the rain on the dock by the big mural of the raven. Warm rain, I thought, and a fried food smell up from the vents. Behind me the mountain was a tangle of trees and stone and quick little rivulets running into iron culverts rolling under the streets.

On the edge of town the empty mines were quiet, the rocks piled like empty shells in the middens. Rain and the salt breath of the tide flats. Whiskey and popcorn. Coffee, sour and bubbling like thermal mud in the urn at the shelter. The boys sleeping at the bus stop were wearing two sets of clothes. Billy was dancing in the street and flashing his Indian money around, his grandma bundled up and leaning on her cane under the bus-stop roof. Billy doing an old dance, Billy muttering in drunken Tlingit. His grandma, sober and watchful, too wise to be really ashamed but too old and tired not to be hurt by his foolishness.

There was a fire in a trash bin behind one of the hotels and a bottle being shared. I remember landing on the sidewalk in front of the lawyers' bar. Diamonds on the slick cement sidewalk. I remember angry voices and Billy chanting and yelling just out of hearing. I remember hands on the back of my jacket, pulling me up as I was lying facedown. I think I was choking. Long flight of stairs inside a brown stairwell. Popcorn again and a booming woman's voice coming up from below as if she were in the back of a cave, music swelling and sirens, squealing tires and music, dance music, and popcorn and sour butter, salt, and jostling up the stairs, looking at the weave of mildewed carpet and row after row of cracked brown door frames.

It was about 9:00
A.M.
when I woke up. Someone had thrown some sofa cushions on the floor and my face was crushed down in the crack between them. I felt like I had an anvil on the back of my neck. I was able to turn my head and see two Indian men sitting on a couch without cushions. They were wearing brown canvas work clothes and one was wearing a baseball cap. The other was fidgeting with his lighter and balancing a cup of coffee on his knee. The TV was on and there was some commotion in the bathroom. The one with the coffee cup turned to his companion.

“Where's Auntie?”

“She's in the bathroom ragging on Calvin about how he's butchering his deer. She says he shouldn't have it in the bathtub.”

They stared out toward the bathroom and then down at me.

“Who's he?”

“Some guy that Auntie wants to talk to.”

Calvin came out of the bathroom. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His hands were bloody, and in one of them he was carrying a hunting knife with a curved blade. He had shoulder-length black hair and his eyes were sparkling.

“You got a better stone than the one in the kitchen? I dulled this blade on the hair, and she wants it boned out just right.”

“Yeah, I'll take a look.”

The hatless one stepped over me to the alcove that had been the kitchen. There was a counter with a gap of darkened wallboard where the dishwasher had been. There was a camp stove set up on the countertop. There was a roll of butcher paper, scissors, tape, and a felt-tip pen. The hatless one rummaged in the drawers. Calvin bent down over me and smiled.

“You really disappoint me, man.”

His breath was in my face. It was warm and smelled sweet, like bacon. I tried to sit up, without luck. My head felt like a collapsing melon. I lay back down. He squatted down next to me on the floor and stared at me, grinning.

“I've been studying white people for years, and I am bitterly—I mean bitterly—disappointed.” He gestured toward the TV. “Look on television. Private detectives are not supposed to be like this. You people are supposed to be in charge! You are supposed to have a cool apartment and a fast car. Man, you are supposed to be following beautiful women and making deals. I mean, what I see of you guys on television and what I've got here now are … inconsistent.”

The hatless one came back toward us. “Hey! Here.” He handed Calvin a rectangular piece of marble, smooth on one side and rough on the other.

“Yeah, thanks.” He looked back down at me. “And look at you … drunk. I see so many of your people drunk. It must be the pain of running the world. Is that it, Kemosabe? The pain of running the world? I mean, I'm smart enough to know that you don't walk around like pilgrims with three-cornered hats and big buckles and shit. I've seen TV, man. I know what you are supposed to be, but you … you're a mess. Where did Auntie find you anyway?”

I looked up at him and he was still smiling sweetly.

I made it up on one elbow and said, “I
am
fucking in charge. Just tell me where I am, who you are, and if I have a broken nose or not.”

He laughed loudly and patted my head as if I were a favorite pup. “Just so, man. Just so. I don't think your nose is broke.”

A familiar old woman's voice came from the bathroom. “Calvin, bring that knife back in here.”

“Just stay here, she wants to talk to you.”

“Okay, but I need to use the bathroom.”

Now he frowned. He took a long breath as if he were amazed at his own patience with me. “Auntie, can we get in the bathroom a minute?”

I heard an muttering back out of the bathroom and disappear down a hallway. I made my way to my feet and stood still for a second. I had been in these apartments before. They were above the movie theater and the cafe. The window was open a crack and the vent for the cafe was a few feet underneath. I could clearly smell fried potatoes. Out past the vent I could see the flat roofs puddled with rainwater along the old buildings of Front Street, and I could see the mountains of Douglas Island. I heard the television and the grinding chug of the garbage truck in the alley. I heard breaking glass and someone yelling at a busboy in Spanish. There was a raven on a TV antenna ten feet from the window and an eagle drawn out wide and gliding over the channel.

I walked to the bathroom and opened the door. There was a deer hanging from the shower nozzle, with its hind legs resting in the tub. It was a buck. He was hanging by a cord knotted around his neck. His head and horns were intact and the hide was lying in the tub, puddled at his feet as if he had undressed to take a shower. His head was cocked at that impossible angle of a hanging death, and his tongue lolled out the side of his mouth. The hair on his delicate head and ears was fine and soft brown in comparison to the white sheen of the layer of fat that covered his exposed musculature. His chest was split open and cleaned out. His eyes were black opaque marbles.

Calvin stood behind me. “We got him over on Admiralty. Brought him back on my uncle's skiff. Auntie came from Sitka and wants to take some back with her and I was going to give the rest to her family.”

“You going to can him or freeze him?”

“I think we're going to eat him tonight or the next day. I don't know. Listen, you're just going to wash, right? I mean you can't do anything else in here with him, you understand. Just wash and wash up good and don't touch anything.”

I heard an old woman's voice croak behind him. “Calvin, get back in there and bone that deer out. I want to take some to the Home. Mr. Younger, come with me into the other room.”

Calvin stood aside and I saw Mrs. Victor in her wheelchair. Her fists knotted around the rims of her wheels and her jaw jutted up at me. Now my stomach was a dark burrow of sleeping animals again and I turned white at the thought of how bad my case had become.

“One second.”

I washed my face. The bathroom was clean, and there were clean towels, blue and pink, on the rack. The tile was coming off around the tub and the toilet ran continually but there was hot water. I gingerly washed around the fresh scab on my nose and I examined myself for any other damage. I tried to pull myself together. I tucked my shirt in. I was both drunk and hung over at the same time: self-conscious and queasy but still a little spinny. These are the times that one makes the meaningless promises to stop drinking. But I was old enough to know better.

I went into the bedroom. There was a stool and a cot set up in the corner. Mrs. Victor positioned her chair in the middle of the room and rolled around to face me.

“Do I pay you for your hours in the bars?”

“No, ma'am.”

“What have you found?”

I briefly considered telling her how sick I was, thinking that would illustrate the state of the case, but I knew I was being selfish. I sat on the stool and rocked from one cheek to the other. My mind was blank. It was like snorkeling a hundred miles offshore, looking down into the ocean and seeing only the gray-green screen of deep water with the corona of the sun marking a big zero in every direction that I looked. Then a few thoughts swam by.

“Your grandchildren are angry, and Walt Robbins thinks that they know more than they are telling.”

“Yes.”

“Your daughter-in-law is lying to me and I don't know why.”

She nodded her head, continuing to stare.

“And someone is trying to kill me, but he is not very direct. And that tells me that he is a thoughtful person and not just crazy mean.”

“Is that all?”

I nodded and looked down at the old scabs on my fingers. She took another breath and spoke slowly to me as if English were my second language.

“Do you know about the trouble in my son's family?”

“Some of it. Do you?”

“Some of it. It had to do with a girlfriend and Louis being too … too … mannish.”

She rolled closer to me, almost touching my knees with hers.

“Walter Robbins called me yesterday and told me you were coming and he told me that you would be drunk. He told me to get you cleaned up to meet him on the city dock. Last night my nephews found you out on the street and brought you here. I flew to Juneau to talk to you. Walt will be here today.”

“I don't know that much. I'm sorry but it's a wasted trip. I don't know what you can talk to me about.”

She lifted a finger as if to begin drawing a picture in the air. Her eyes were focused somewhere behind my head.

“I used to tell all of my children and my grandchildren this story. It was told to me by my father's people in Yakutat. My uncles told it to me. It is a true story. I know you will not believe it is a true story. White people do not believe these stories. Just try and listen.”

Calvin and the hatless one came into the room and Calvin gave me a cup of coffee and then they both sat down on the floor with their backs to the wall looking up at their auntie.

“A long time ago there was this girl. She had brothers. Her brothers were good hunters and they never were hungry. The girl walked a long way away to pick berries and bring them back to her brothers and they were happy with her. This girl married a brown bear. She met him in the berries and the brothers did not know about him. She would go out and meet him and they would pick berries together. This girl married the bear and just about the time she was becoming a woman she moved away from the village and did not tell everything to the brothers. The brothers were not so happy but the girl would still bring them berries and they would eat.

“She loved the bear and they had two babies that were … I don't know … kind of half-bear and half-people. These babies could pick berries and hunt and these babies were good fishermen, too. Their uncles never knew about them but they were curious about their uncles. When they got older and older they began to hunt closer to their uncles' village. One day the uncles saw the bear-human babies. The babies ran and told the girl. The girl told her husband. This girl, she loved her husband so much. The husband said that they had to move their den farther away from the village. This girl—she was so pretty. She cried and cried and said that she did not want to live far away from the village. Her husband said that if she would not leave their den he would go back to his bear wife because it was not safe for him there. He told her he was going to go hunting. He asked her to pack all of their baskets and blankets and he would come back for them later.

“Then the bear went hunting. This bear was big, and a good hunter, too. After this bear went hunting the girl called her babies inside and asked them if they loved their father, this bear. She told them to wait for him to come back from hunting. To wait for him down on the white sandy beach. To wait on the sandy beach and when he came back they were to kill him. They were to eat him and put his skin out on the rocks so the uncles would find him and know the bear was not hunting near the village. The babies listened to their mother, this girl who was so pretty—and when their father came back from hunting they did just like she said. And they ate him and laid his skin out on the rocks for their uncles.”