Dancing Bear

by James Crumley

  “Whatever you say, dude, you got the blade.”

  “You got a rig?” I asked. “I don’t want blood and vomit all over mine.”

  He bobbed his head sourly, spit again, then led me down the street to a battered pickup, a 1965 Dodge Power Wagon, the best back-country rig ever to come out of Detroit City. Maybe I was too busy admiring it, but as we eased into the cab he got away from me. We engaged in a very silent, very tense struggle that ended with my blade under his ear and with the .38 snubnose he had hidden in the crack of the seat partially blocked by my left hand, but still nuzzling coldly into my left thigh. He didn’t seem sick or drunk now; he seemed to fill up the whole cab.

  “What we’ve got here, dude, is a Mexican stand-off,” he finally said, his lips barely moving.

  “My buddy’s behind you with a .357,” I pointed out. Simmons had his piece out, the barrel resting on the window ledge and shielded by his leather overcoat.

  “A .357, dad, will make mush out of both of us at that range,” he said.

  “A Mexican stand-off,” I said, the sweat freezing on my face. “I’ll be crippled, Charlie, but you’ll be dead.”

  “I don’t much give a shit, man.”

  “Neither do I,” I said, and was surprised to discover that I meant it. “If you’re going to pop that cap, sucker, do it now because this conversation is over.”

  “Whoa, man, hold it,” he said quickly as he let the revolver fall to the cluttered floorboard. I let him slide, trembling, to the far side of the seat, where he buried his face in his shaking hands, moaning, “It ain’t even loaded, man, ain’t even loaded.” I picked it up and checked it. Empty. When I looked at him, Charlie Two Moons looked like a much smaller man.

  “Afraid of doing yourself?” I guessed, and he nodded with shame.

  “What do you want with me, man?” he whimpered. “I ain’t done nothing to nobody. Not in a long time.” I put the photograph in his lap. He took one glance and handed it back. “Bad medicine,” he said quietly. “We should’ve never killed that grizzly. It’s all gone to shit since then. I lost my job a week later, my old lady split, then I got drunk over in Butte, got the shit kicked out of me by two miners in the alley behind the M&M Bar, and they cut my braid, man, they cut my braid. Bad medicine.” He sat silently for a bit, staring at his huge hands as if he couldn’t believe they had failed him. “So what’s going down, dad?” he said. “It’s clear you’re not Fish and Game or Park Service, not with that cute blade-in-the-armpit number. So what is it? The goddamned Sierra Club hiring hoods now, putting out contracts on poachers? Ducks Unlimited, maybe?” Then he laughed, the taut, bowstring squeal of a man on the edge. “Goddamned liberal phony white folks…”

  “Who’s the other guy?”

  “Johnny Rausche,” he said, “calls himself Rideout now. He’s a brother.”

  “A brother?”

  “Yeah, dad, we used to share the same accommodations over at Walla Walla.”

  “Who did you guys work for?”

  “Well, I used to run a fork lift at that wholesale grocery warehouse down in Meriwether,” he said, “and Johnny, he was a long-haul trucker—”

  “No, not that,” I interrupted. “The gang?”

  “The gang?” he said, seemingly honestly amazed.

  “Poachers, you know, don’t jerk me…”

  “Poachers?” he said, then loosed a fairly healthy bray of laughter. “Who the hell do you work for, man?”

  “That’s a damn good question,” I admitted. I turned to look out the side window, fogged now with our breath, and cleared a small circle, a peephole, but all I could see was the snow rustling down the gray street, a few cars and pickups parked in front of the line of bars, some idling in the cold, banners of exhaust wind-whipped out of their tailpipes, others abandoned to the frozen drifts.

  “Where’s the grizzly hide?” I asked, even though I already believed him. There was no gang of poachers. Or if there was, Charlie Two Moons certainly didn’t belong to it. I wondered if Rideout/Rausche had been stringing Cassandra Bogardus along just to keep her around, or if she had been blowing angel dust in my ears to, to…to what? To keep me around. Hell, all she had to do was blow in my ear, and I’d follow her anywhere. To keep me away? From what? Shit. “Where’s the hide?”

  “In the hock shop across the street,” he said. He took out his billfold and found the pawn ticket. “Two hundred bucks,” he said.

  “Let’s go take a look at it.” I knew in my bones that he wasn’t lying, but I wanted to see the grizzly hide, anyway, wanted to touch it, as if the coarse, thick hair held the answer to questions I hadn’t even been smart enough to ask yet.

  The chubby old man behind the counter smiled when the three of us came in, kept smiling even after Charlie told him he wanted to redeem his pledge, but his smile didn’t blunt his hard, greedy eyes, and I could tell the old man had just been waiting for ninety days to pass so he could claim the hide for himself. But he had to live in the same town with Charlie. He didn’t mutter as I counted out two hundred, didn’t grumble as he led us to the fur storage vault in the back. The hide and head, wrapped in a tarp, looked like a humpbacked pig on the floor, and when Charlie and I picked it up, it felt as heavy as a slaughtered hog.

  “Good God,” I grunted as I followed Charlie out of the pawnshop. Simmons took my end from me and nearly fell with the weight.

  “Old Ephram,” Charlie said, “carries one big skin. Where’s your car?”

  “Over there. Why?”

  “You just bought yourself a grizzly hide,” he said. “Best job of mounting and tanning I’ve ever done, but Brother Bear is yours now, dad, and I’m damned glad to be rid of his spirit sitting on my medicine.”

  “But I—ah…”

  “Don’t even say thanks, dad,” Charlie said as he and Simmons lowered the bundle gently into the bed of my pickup.

  “Hey, how can I be sure this is the same bear that you and—”

  “Sleep on it,” Charlie said happily, “sing to the spirit of Brother Silvertip. You’ll know.” Then he hoofed back toward the bar. He stopped at the door, opened his arms wide to the clean, windy sky, and shouted, “Hey, brothers, can I buy you a drink?”

  “I think I just went on the wagon,” I said, much as I hated the idea.

  “What now, boss?” Simmons asked as we got back in the pickup.

  “I’m tired of being dead,” I said. “Let’s get your rent car, check out of that crappy motel and into the Riverfront, and try to live up to our clothes.”

  “You sure, boss?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Only Jesus Christ and Mark Twain ever made the evening news when it turned out that the reports of their deaths had been exaggerated.”

  Simmons chewed on that until we were halfway back to Meriwether, then he said, “I don’t know what we’re doing, boss, but I do know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This shit’s crazier than the war.”

  Chapter 11

  In spite of my leanings to be among the living again, there were too many advantages to staying among the dead, so I let Simmons check us back into the Riverfront as Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Autry. It took four trips to pack our arsenal, luggage, and the bearskin up to the room the back way. We unrolled the hide, and it nearly covered the king-size bed, but the head looked too alive dangling off the foot of the bed, so we turned it around, propped the giant head on the pillows, and let the glass eye stare blankly at a terrible painting of a romantic mountain valley, waterfalls and crags, mists and dancing fawns.

  “That son of a bitch weighs a ton,” Simmons sighed. “What the hell are you going to do with it?”

  “Sleep under it.”

  He giggled nervously. “Smother under it, more likely,” he said.

  I gave him some money to buy gun-cleaning supplies, and while he was gone I considered the grizzly, wishing I had a drink. I ordered half a dozen stinking shots of peppermint schnapps from room service, but when they arrived I le
ft them sitting on the table. “I’d almost rather be sober,” I said to the hide. Brother Silvertip didn’t give me any answers, just raised questions in my mind, stories, memories.

  A friend of mine had been on the trail crew that found the bodies of the three girls killed by a grizzly at the Granite Park campground up in Glacier back in 1967. Over a bottle of Jack Daniel’s one night, he told me about the body he had found. “Nothing left but bones,” he kept saying softly, “nothing but bones from hipbones to collarbones, nothing but bones.” And I talked to a park ranger once who had lost his tail bone and seven inches of his colon to a grizzly sow as he scrambled up a piss-fir. He had mastered an interesting sound effect to imitate the sound of her teeth on his bones, a sound he said he heard not with his ears, but through his bones. About the closest I had ever been to Lord Grizzly, though, was on my third honeymoon. My new wife and I sat on the porch of the Granite Park Chalet in Glacier, sipping unblended Scotch and watching, at the safe distance provided by our binoculars, a sow with two cubs cavorting by the side of a small lake down the mountainside. I wanted to get closer; she didn’t; that marriage didn’t make it back to town.

  I didn’t know how many grizzlies were left—six or eight hundred, at the most—and here was the dead hide of one of the last few, draped over my bed in a goddamned motel room.

  “You deserve better accommodations than this, old man,” I said, then choked down one of the shots. It was a beautiful piece of work Charlie Two Moons had done, but I thought he perhaps deserved forty moons more of bad medicine. I didn’t know, though, that poor Johnny deserved to fry the way he had. Maybe just beaten with a stick every day for the rest of his life. Except for the occasional poached cow elk or white-tailed doe, I hadn’t hunted for years, and looking at the obscenity on my bed, I quit forever. I went into the other room, away from the hide, to use the telephone.

  The woman at the Friends of the Dancing Bear Wilderness Area took my message for Carolyn politely enough, but she had trouble with my name. “Mr. Grandfather Timberland,” I repeated slowly, “it’s an old Native American name.” She got so effusively apologetic that it drove me into a sulk. If the hunters and the Sierra Club ever went to war, I suspected I would like to sit on the sidelines and drop 81mm mortar rounds at random on the field.

  I called Sarah’s number, with no luck—with no hope, really. Somehow in all the confusion, I suppose I had resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to find the old woman or Gail. Not by myself. So I called the colonel. Since I was afraid the lines were still tapped, I wouldn’t give the receptionist my name, and she wouldn’t let me talk to the colonel without a name, so I gave her Jamison’s name, and she put me through. When the colonel heard my voice, he said, “It’s okay, Milo. The taps are gone.”

  “Dying helped, sir.”

  “Jamison told me. Both of us are somewhat concerned, Milo, about the trouble you seem to be in. Very concerned, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’m in so deep, sir, that if you reached out a hand for me, you’d go down too.”

  “Please try to remember that I am not without resources, Milo.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “that’s why I called. I want to hire the firm to mount a search for Mrs. Weddington and—”

  “I already have some men on it,” he said, “and I thought we had located them through the young girl’s mother—or rather, through her telephone records; she had nothing to say to the operative who talked to her in Minot—located them at the Hilton in Seattle, but by the time we checked, they were no longer there. An older woman and a young girl had been registered under the name of Hildebrandt. The descriptions were too vague to make a positive identification. But they had paid cash, which is in itself suspicious…”

  “The world has gone to shit, sir—”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “—when cash is suspicious, sir.”

  “It’s not the world we made, Milo, just a world we have to live in.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Thanks for taking this on yourself, Colonel Haliburton.”

  “Please remember that it was my telephones they tapped, Milo,” he said tartly. “But I would like to know—”

  “I’ll make a tape, sir, and mail it to myself at the office, and if I turn up dead, at least you’ll know as much as I do.”

  “Not a very pleasant thought.”

  “What the hell, sir, I’m getting used to being dead, and I’ll check back in every afternoon, sir.”

  “You need any expense money, Milo?”

  I told him no, thanked him again, and rang off. I sat there, running the whole number back through my mind one more time, the whole knotted string of events, as I held the receiver in my hand. The dial tone didn’t have any answers either. I hung up the phone, and it rang before I could get my hand off it.

  “Goddammit, I hate that,” I grumbled as I jerked it back up.

  “Hate what, Mr. Grandfather Timberland?” Carolyn said over the wires.

  “Everything.”

  “I got your message,” she said. “I’m glad you called, I’ve needed to talk to you…”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the office.”

  “Why don’t you meet me in my room?” I said, and she said she would within the hour. I went back into my bedroom, where the bearskin and the schnapps waited.

  Simmons returned shortly, and when he sat down at the table in his room to clean the guns, I asked him if he wanted a drink. Since the two drinks in Stone City still sat uneasily on his stomach, he thought not, but he did wonder, shyly, if I really had done up all the cocaine.

  “All of that,” I said, “but there’s this.” And I retrieved the packet from the briefcase and chopped two large lines of the heady shit from the trunk of poor Johnny’s car. Two lines, too large, perhaps, then two more too quickly. By the time Carolyn knocked on my door, Simmons was cleaning arms in a frenzy and trying to tell me his life story at the same time. He had gotten as far as his second pre-adolescent sexual experience with his third cousin by his mother’s second marriage, or second cousin by her third marriage…But when he heard the knocking, he picked up the .357 and cocked it.

  “Easy,” I said, “easy.”

  “Maybe I’m too nervous for this shit, boss.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but uncock that son of a bitch, Bob, and put it back on the table.” He did, carefully, and I released the breath I had been holding. “Thanks.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No sweat.”

  Since it was closer, I went to Simmons’ hallway door, stuck my head out, and whistled at Carolyn.

  “Cute,” she said, “lover boy.”

  “Lay off the lover-boy shit, okay?” I said as I stepped out of the way to let her in.

  When she saw the guns scattered around the room, she stopped dead. “Are you guys starting a war?” she asked, wide-eyed.

  “Finishing one,” I said, then took her arm and led her into my room.

  She liked the grizzly hide and head even less than she had the arsenal. I kicked the connecting door shut with my heel, and said, “Now, before you give me your latent-homosexuality and hunting lecture, I want you to know that I didn’t shoot that bear, I’ve never shot a bear, never intend to, and it’s not even my bearskin, it’s a piece of evidence, in a—ah, very important case, and before you bother to ask what it’s about, let me tell you that I can’t tell you…”

  She held up a finger to stop me, used it to tug down one of my lower eyelids, then walked over to the table and picked up my sunglasses, saying, as she handed them to me, “It’s about a quarter gram beyond reality, Milo, so put these on before your eyes start bleeding.”

  “Huh? Right you are,” I said. “Sorry.” I threw down a shot of schnapps and a glass of water, then opened the drapes and the sliding door to the balcony for a lungful of fresh air. “Hey, it’s goddamned dark, for Christ’s sake.” And it was. Even after I took off the sunglasses.

  “Busy day, huh?” she said
, then took off her full-length down coat and lit a cigarette. “Nice weather,” she added, “but why don’t you shut the door.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Anything for a lady. Why don’t you sit down, make yourself comfortable. Can I get you a drink? Dinner? Anything?”

  “You’re in a good mood, aren’t you?”

  “Great,” I said. I shut the door and drapes, and held her chair for her at the table.

  “Looking good, too,” she said. “You should wear a suit more often, Milo.”

  “Right,” I said, laughing as I took off the suit coat and draped it over a chair.

  “And a shoulder holster less often.”

  “You got it,” I said, unstrapping, and I took the Airweight in to Simmons.

  “Maybe I’ll have that drink now, boss man,” he suggested. “Either that, or clean all these goddamned guns again.”

  “Sure. A pitcher of martinis for us, Beefeater, and whatever you want, lad—call room service.”

  When I got back to Carolyn, she had already snubbed out her first cigarette and started another. “I’m glad you called,” she said, tapping her long nails on the table. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”

  “Me? Why? I’m supposed to get in touch with you.” I hadn’t forgotten why I had called Carolyn—Cassandra Bogardus—but I just couldn’t seem to keep it in my snowy mind long enough to mention the name. “Why?”

  “Well, you know that night we were here…” she began slowly. “When we left, I sat in the parking lot downstairs while I let the motor warm up, and I heard about the fire, about your house, on the car radio, so I knew you were still alive. When I—ah, we left, you were lying on the bed, depleted but alive, and I wondered about the reports of your death…By the way, I am truly sorry about your house, Milo, I know what it must have meant to—”