The Woman Who Married a Bear (6 page)

Another look.

“Sacred Harp chorus. Get to the good stuff.”

His voice was taking on more of a biting tone. There were no happy lines around his eyes. “The good stuff. Well, your daddy wanted you to be a lawyer, so he set you up as an investigator with the Public Defender Agency, hoping that if you carried enough briefcases for snotty little lawyers younger than you, you'd be shamed into going to law school. But you got in some trouble that involved cocaine and a small matter of suborning perjury. You did a little time—very little time—and your record was wiped clean. You moved to Sitka and played at being Sam Spade with your sister's money. You stayed sober until your daddy died, and then you played the drunken aesthete until your girlfriend left you. Now your roommate is shot in the chest and may die.”

“What's the point?”

“The point is this, friend. This is real life. This is Toddy's life. I'd feel a little better about all of this if you had gotten shot, but you didn't. So go home, get drunk or fucked up any way you want. But stay out of this. What happened tonight is a real crime, Younger. There is no room for a damaged, confused rich kid roaming around fucking up this investigation.”

I should have thought of some icy retort that would have shown him how cool and incisive I was. I should have said something that would have thrown the entire weight of his disdain back on him in three or four words.

“Oh, yeah? Make me.”

“Get out of here, Younger. Get drunk. Get stoned. Just stay out of the way.”

He walked out the door and I settled back in the chair by the window. Across the road there was a street lamp above the water and the reflection was milky white on the surface of the bay. I thought of broken bones.

Toddy lay in bed surrounded by blinking machines and tubes. His face was as white as a plaster mask. I wanted to shake him, scold him for being so lazy as to be in bed. I wanted to wrap him up and take him home to our house, the fire, the halibut, and the certainties of the encyclopedias. The nurse came in and told me to leave. I was not to have any more meetings in Todd's room and there was someone else outside to see me.

It was a nice young cop outside the room who was embarrassed about not taking my shirt at the police station. It was useless to put up much of a fuss. Even through his embarrassment he had a stiff way of asking questions that became even stiffer as Doggy passed in the hall. He slipped the shirt into a paper bag and, after stapling it closed, he thanked me. He told me to have a nice evening. I wanted to go home.

The rain was hardly noticeable as I walked down the main street past the cathedral. I turned at the Pioneer Home. My jail pants slowly became heavy and damp, my hair matted down. I had my jacket on with no shirt underneath. It seemed to be darker than usual. The street lamps were like stepping-stones of light. I walked from one to another with my head down, my hands jammed into my pockets. If someone was trying to kill me, I would be an easy shot but I didn't much care. The blood that had dried to a dark crust on the rims of my fingernails was liquid again in the rain. I could smell blood on my skin. I thought of the surf breaking in the darkness on the outer rocks, and I thought of someone trying to kill me.

On the waterfront, the bar was clogged with fishermen, hooting and telling stories. The cracked speaker on the jukebox buzzed as another Bruce Springsteen song limped out of it. It was bingo night at the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall. A Tlingit kid was riding his tricycle at the door, skirting the edge of the sidewalk as his brother watched him. As I walked by he looked over his handlebars and whispered, “Hi, Cecil.”

Down at our house the cops had finished digging the slug out of the door frame and there was yellow tape strung over the entrance. A hand-painted sign that said, “
CRIME SCENE. DO NOT ENTER
” was taped to the door. Upstairs, a white linen curtain billowed out of an open window.

I thought of Peter Pan, never wanting to grow up, lifting children in their nightgowns out of open windows. The curtain, soaking in the rain, popped in the breeze once, and I thought of a white plume of air escaping a sinking ship.

FIVE

I SWEAR TO GOD
, when I saw my father lying dead on the floor of the casino, with five-dollar gold pieces raining down on his chest, I thought, ‘That lucky son of a bitch.” His skin was a pale gray against the green of the carpet. Lights were flashing, a siren throbbed, all announcing the winner of the super $100,000 jackpot. The photographer from the publicity department arrived before the paramedics. Two women with golf gloves on their lever hands eyed the machine and the money sparkling down on the dead man, and they were caught in their own swirls of calculation: randomness, inevitability, and luck. They watched and flexed their fingers into fists and then were hustled off to new machines and given complimentary tickets to the floor show. The pit boss nervously twisted his wedding ring, and a man in cowboy boots and a security uniform talked into a handheld radio.

He had died of a stroke while the slot machine came up with three gold nuggets that read “Motherlode.”

The Judge was not a big fan of irony, and it probably pissed him off to die in Las Vegas. He also did not believe much in chance. At least for himself. Chance was the agent of randomness, and randomness was only visited upon those who were out of control. Thousands of defendants had stood before him over the years and in their many pleas they always said the same thing: Their lives had somehow gotten away from them. They stood before him and he looked at them clinically, without anger or blame. He looked at them as an emergency-room doctor might look at the victims of a tornado, clutching their crying babies and gesturing to their household goods strewn down the street.

“The big mistake,” he used to say, sitting on a spruce stump, cradling his rifle on his lap, “is to blame nature. Nature is orderly. It is not necessarily benevolent but it has purpose. It is not God's responsibility to bring you good luck. It is your business to pack everything you need and put yourself into the way of good fortune.” And then he would usually sit very quietly on his stump, blow a deer call, and wait.

By the time he was thirty the Judge knew the name of every bird he encountered on his hunting trips—both the common and the Latin names. He carried field guides in his hunting pack, one for birds and one for plants. He carried
Meditations on Hunting
but I never saw him read it. He planned out every hunting strategy by numerical navigation, using the topographical map, a compass, and a six-inch ruler he carried with him in his pouch. The first thing out of the skiff, he would sit on a stump, smoke a cigarette, and plot a course. He figured the wind, the temperature, the moisture, and the time of day in relation to the time of year. Often, he would read through his journal from the previous year to try and reconstruct a pattern. The Judge hunted by intellectual calculation. The deer were his objective and he was plotting a conquest.

The older he got, the more strategy he relied on: trying to foretell the deer's patterns and call them to a precise place at a precise time. When he was younger he had broken through the thick tangles of salmonberry and alder to get to the top of the ridge by first light. He said that he used to rush the deer on the first day of the season as if he were in rut. But by the time I was old enough to go with him he was a flirtatious hunter: gesture, feint, and unspoken intent.

I've always been a blundering hunter. The fact that I ever got a deer at all is a testimony to the fallibility of the species. The Judge said that I was good for the country because I was obviously culling the stupid genes from the pool.

I would clatter around in the brush and with each step my boots would make a loud slurp while coming out of the mud. At first the Judge would wince when hunting with me, suffering to try and make me move quietly. Then he began to plant himself on a stump and send me off to circle around and hunt back on the game trails toward him. Most often I would be moving through the woods and hear the crack of his rifle ahead of me. I would stop for a moment and, almost in time with my own breath, I would hear the next, finishing shot. I'd shoulder my rifle and walk briskly on, glad I didn't have to keep up the hunt.

Once into the clearing I would usually find a buck hung on a low limb and the Judge, with his sleeves rolled up, wiping the last of the blood off his hands with a clump of moss. He would be smoking a cigarette, and as I'd come through the opening of the brush he'd turn and ask how I did. I would tell him I'd seen some sign but didn't get off a shot. He'd look at me briefly, with that long stare, then jerk his head toward the deer and say, “Well, he won't walk to the skiff himself.”

It didn't always happen that way. Once in mid-October, when I was a senior in high school, a buck turned back on his course toward the Judge and his high perch on the spruce stump. My rifle sling was frayed, and I was sitting on a fallen log trying to shorten it past the worn spot of leather. I imagine the Judge would have said I was “just half there.” I was thinking of the girl who sat in front of me in physics class and how her blouse hiked up off the small of her back so that I could see the walnut dimples of her backbone disappear down into her skirt. I might have been thinking about her breath in my ear as I fiddled with the stiff leather of my sling.

When the buck snorted, my rifle leaped out of my hand and fell like a walking stick next to the tree. He was a small Sitka blacktail with spindly forked horns. His neck was thick, and he had the dark brows on his forehead that folded down neatly into the light, almost feathery, shimmer around his throat. His muscles were tight and his stance was low with a slight crouch. His eyes were dark and would have been impassive if it weren't for the bundled energy of his body. Watching him was like listening to a guitar string being tuned up higher and higher, until the anticipation of its breaking almost hurt.

I reached for my rifle, fully expecting him to explode past me into the trees, saving us both. I touched the grips, still expecting him to run. I put it to my cheek and I peered down the sights. He stood there, perhaps believing he was invisible, perhaps denying the reality of this figure, the motion of the hand, as much as I was. I wasn't sure I wanted the deer but I was certain I wanted to carry it into the clearing in front of the Judge. I pulled the trigger and the buck popped like a balloon and fell to the ground. There was not much blood and there was not much drama, but what was once muscle, bone, and movement became an empty bag.

I carried it into the clearing and the Judge looked down and said, “Well, you're going to have to eat that thick-necked bastard.” And he hopped off the stump and headed for the skiff.

It had only been ten months since Las Vegas and the bluster of well-wishers and practiced mourners. My sister in her dark glasses and rumpled cotton suit, getting off the plane into the desert air, saying, “My God, it's dry. Let's get a drink.” And I had one, the first in six months. My sister knew that, as she ordered me more rounds. We listened to country western music in the airport bar, and we talked about luck, gambling, and anvils falling from the sky.

T
hese memories—of my sister, the Judge, and the blacktail deer—clung to me like a dusting of pollen when I woke up the next morning. I swung my legs over the side of the bed. I rubbed my eyes and saw the line of blood encrusted in the cuticles on my right hand. I called the hospital and asked about Todd. The nurse asked who I was and I told her that I was from the Lakeview Thoracic Trauma Center in Seattle. Her tone changed and she told me Todd was sleeping well and had stabilized overnight although his doctor was concerned about a fever developing. I thanked her and told her I would contact the doctor directly.

I called a friend who worked at the Pioneer Home and asked a couple of favors. I asked her if anyone had been to room 104 in the last two days. She said, “No one besides Mrs. Victor.”

I called the airline and made my reservation to Juneau.

I called the prison to tell them I was coming to interview Alvin Hawkes.

Dickie Stein called to check in with me and to tell me that it didn't look like the D.A. was going to press his investigation my way but for me to watch myself. I said I would be watching.

I packed my duffel bag. One white shirt, socks, underwear, rubber rain shoes, two phone books, a buckskin pouch with my shaving kit, two spiral notebooks, four number-two pencils with the fat pencil-cap erasers, my handmade Gouker skinning knife with the harness leather sheath, and a microcassette tape recorder that I like to carry in my coat pocket when I'm looking for something and not sure when I'm going to find it. I thought of bringing a bottle of Wild Turkey, but didn't. Drinking whiskey out of the bottle when someone is trying to kill you is probably not a good idea unless they are matching you drink for drink.

I made a sandwich out of Todd's halibut. I mixed it with mayonnaise and chopped onions. I spread it on black bread and drank a glass of tomato juice. As I ate, I looked at the bookshelf where Todd kept his series of picture books that he had agreed to buy after speaking for a half hour to a friendly salesman. Even though we never paid for them, we still received the books along with notices from collection agencies. There was a Richie Rich comic book stuck as a bookmark into a thin volume with a painting of a ship on the cover. I drank a beer, then a shot of bourbon.

Todd's father called from a logging camp west of Ketchikan. He was drunker than I was, and crying. He wanted to know how much the medical bills would be. The police had contacted him by phone and asked about Todd's relationship to me and asked about drugs and guns. He wanted to know what was going on.

I told him that I would take care of the bills and he could come up and visit when he got out of the woods. He said he would like to visit but his boss was riding him hard. He would see if he could make it by plane sometime in the next week. He asked why someone had shot Todd. I told him I didn't know. Then he threatened to cut my nuts off if I had anything to do with it. I thanked him and hung up.

I called a local junkie who drives a cab and owes me a lifetime of free rides to the airport and told him when my flight was.

The bourbon and the beer were working softly at the edge of my unhappiness. I suppose a narcotic would have been more direct, especially with the added thrill of my imminent murder. Narcotics work great but not if you have a plane to catch. I thought of having another drink. I was drunk enough to be stupid but not drunk enough to be helpless. These are tough decisions.

The junkie took me across the bridge to the airport. He was nervous about doing a freebie for me and thought for sure every passing car would know the meter wasn't running. He mumbled something about Todd and asked me for a loan. I hinted around for a touch of dope but he was spooky and I was uncertain.

Bloom was standing at the security gate. I went into the bathroom.

My unhappiness was becoming more and more mysterious as I walked up to Bloom at the gate. Before my bag even went through the scanner he took it and pawed through it. He took out my hunting knife.

“This is a weapon, Younger. You can't have this in the cabin with you.”

“So?”

“So you'll have to check it as luggage.”

I watched the attendant tag my knife, then I watched it move past the rubber curtain on the conveyor belt. It was small and vulnerable, and I hoped it would be all right, but in fact I never saw it again. A Gouker skinning knife is the finest knife a man can own, and someone else recognized that, too.

Bloom needed to frisk me and he backed me up against the glass partition of the security area and ran his hands under my coat and down my pants. I was thinking of Miles Davis and trying to remember one of the riffs in “Funny Valentine.” Bloom's hands felt damp and soft as they kneaded the muscles down to the small of my back.

“How's someone like you stay in shape, Younger?”

“Hard work, clean living, and a nice smile.”

He stood up suddenly and I thanked him. He patted me once on the back as I went out through the doors of the terminal. I looked around and told him to have a nice day.

The plane was late in taking off and they served champagne. The stewardess had an appropriate perky smile but dark eyes that looked like holes in a painting. Our fingertips brushed slightly as I took the plastic cup of champagne from her hands.

Just after we took off, the jet banked steeply to the east and we flew back over the airport. I looked down on my little toy town. Toy post office and windup trucks. I thought about the book from the woman who used to love me sitting on the bench of the Pioneer Home. I could see my house with the blue flower boxes hanging over the water on the second floor. I thought I saw someone pedaling a bike with thick tires and a large basket past my front door.

I didn't notice I was crying until a stewardess came by and gave me a tissue to blow my nose in. Her arm and wrist were slender and they formed a pretty arch, like the limb of a fruit tree, as she poked the tissue into my clenched fist. She didn't look at my eyes. It was a perfect gesture, an expression of indifference and concern, which is the most a drunk can ask for.