The Bear in a Muddy Tutu

by Cole Alpaugh

  Off in the distance, a lion roared again, or maybe just hacked up something else. Someone swore and someone else laughed. Music he didn’t recognize faded in and out on the breeze, and Flint could smell the bacon sizzling over the fire. He struggled to put his finger on what had been missing, and it came to him slowly as he turned to watch a small pony with colorful cloth pieces woven into its shaggy mane trot down to the water’s edge. The pony lapped at the salt water but then shook its head and backed away, not happy with the taste.

  There is suddenly life here, the warden thought. Maybe it had been missing because so much of him had died inside, or maybe it was all the pesticides. Perhaps this wasn’t the sweetest life, like salt water to a pony, but Clayton Flint decided the circus needed to stay.

  Chapter 14

  Lennon Bagg smacked his Jeep Wrangler’s dashboard with the palm of his hand, cracking the plastic vent hinge but in no way improving the functioning of the struggling air conditioner. Snapping the fan lever from high to low and back again also didn’t help.

  The radio still worked, so he turned the dial until he found the closest thing to rock and roll.

  Bagg was a reporter for the Atlantic County Beacon, a mid-sized daily newspaper based in Pleasantville, New Jersey, ten or so minutes west of Atlantic City, with seven small bureaus spread out around the county from Buena to Egg Harbor to Brigantine. Bagg was in no real hurry to get to this particular spot news assignment. A news event that a few months ago would have sent him flying out of the parking lot, breaking a dozen traffic laws, and risking life and limb in order to get to the scene as fast as possible. A few seconds could mean everything, especially if he was ahead of the photographer, because Bagg also took pictures. Although it was far and away better to witness events firsthand—humans being incredibly unreliable and inaccurate witnesses—getting the story was usually a simple matter of piecing together bystander and cop accounts. But while you could recreate events with words, once a jumper jumped or a fireman doused the fire, the best photo opportunity was gone.

  The dark cloud of malaise that had come over Bagg was the same one that enveloped the entire newsroom. The Beacon’s publisher and executive editor had called a mandatory meeting for all editorial staff a week earlier to announce that the distinguished, award-winning, eighty-seven-year run of the paper was coming to an abrupt end.

  “It’s just about over, folks,” their Ukrainian-born publisher, Semen Gnatenko, said with what appeared to be a truly heavy heart. “We have maybe two weeks, the accountants tell me. You all have been a part of my family, and this is the saddest day of my life.”

  Mr. G, as he was affectionately known, had tried everything from raising advertising prices to slashing the hell out of advertising prices. He had tried pushing his editors to get the investigative reporters to uncover dirty political secrets; he had tried pushing the same editors into having the reporters cover up the dirty politics to keep everyone happy. Mr. G had tried everything, which eventually resulted in subscribers, business owners, and all the local politicians distrusting the content of his newspaper. Roughly half the letters to the editor these days were filled with profanities and threats against the news staff.

  Not that anything the publisher could have done stood any real chance of working. Even the top newspapers in the country with Pulitzer Prize winning reporters and nationally syndicated columnists were failing, one by one. It was the Baaton Death March of words, a Trail of Tears. It was a My Lai without the cover up. Newspapers were sick elephants, dropping away from the herd as if heeding the call of mythical dying grounds. Like a last heavy bundle of papers tossed from the back of a delivery truck with a banner headline saying “Farewell,” the elephant dropped to the dirt next to the bones of its ancestors.

  The staff of the Atlantic County Beacon listened, some crying. This was the only working life most of these people had known, Bagg included. There was no escape from the back of a dying elephant. If you were lucky, you just moved to the back of another, buying yourself a little more time. Bagg and the rest exited the newsroom, left the meeting in shock, squinting into the afternoon sun on what should have been a beautiful spring day.

  To Bagg, though, his stint with the newspaper was just another segment of his life to mourn. And this mourning was a piece of cake compared to the last five plus years following his divorce and the disappearance of his little girl. Mom had loaded her on a plane bound from Philadelphia International Airport to somewhere else, probably far, far away. The police were sympathetic at first, but sympathy meant nothing if it wasn’t followed by action.

  “She’s with her mother, right?” a detective had rhetorically asked Bagg.

  “She’s been gone three weeks,” Bagg had said. “I have a court order.”

  But to these cops, the rolled up court order in Bagg’s hand, with the official looking raised seal and explicit wording dictating who had custody and when, might just as well have been a supermarket sales flyer.

  “We have season passes to Sesame Place.” Bagg had lowered his head into his hands, slumping in a chair in the detective’s small cubicle. Family photos lined the walls of the miniature office. In one, the detective flashed a huge grin while towering over his son, who awkwardly held out a string of brook trout. Both wore baseball caps with the same insignia. In other photos, the same boy flashed a thumbs-up while sitting in a go-kart and a chubby-cheeked baby girl, a pink ribbon clipped to a tuft of fine blond hair, was cradled in the arms of the detective’s wife.

  Bagg’s entire life changed when his daughter was stolen away. He’d dealt okay with the divorce and, although it hadn’t been his idea, he hadn’t fought it. There had been plenty of fighting already. He was pretty sure his wife had slept with one of her coworkers, and that was something you could never take back. Maybe they’d been in crazy mad love when they’d first married seven years before the divorce, but if someone asked Bagg about the love of his life, he’d immediately think of his daughter, Morgan.

  Morgan Bagg was almost five years old and just about to finish Pre-K when she went missing. Bagg learned that when a parent stole away a child in New Jersey, it wasn’t called kidnapping, but it sure felt like it. That summer was going to be perfect, with weekends spent at Sesame Place, and the joint-custody arrangement gave them a full week together in August. He’d collected tourist brochures in diners to plan the best week ever. Trips to a wave pool, the shore, and a real cave. And they’d catch movies any night they weren’t too worn out.

  Bagg had coached Morgan’s soccer team, which was a little like herding puppies up and down a miniature field. Morgan had wanted to play again, especially after she and her teammates had been given trophies at the team pizza party following the last game.

  The trophy was still on her bedroom dresser at Bagg’s apartment. Bagg knew it was there, although he hadn’t looked at it in more than five years. He’d stayed in the same apartment so she could always find him, but Bagg couldn’t go back into that room. He kept the door closed but would sometimes stop outside and just lay the palm of his hand on the wood door. Once, when he’d gotten drunk off a bottle of cheap gin while watching an old black and white movie on television, Bagg had lumbered down the hall and pressed an ear to his daughter’s bedroom door.

  He’d stood propped against the door, tears running down his stubbly face, the gin bottle dangling from one hand. Bagg had held his breath and listened as hard as he could. And from what seemed a million miles away, Bagg had been certain he’d heard the ocean. Waves breaking over a sandy beach and seagulls squawking, bickering above.

  Bagg’s legs had gone weak and he’d struggled to keep his ear to the ocean as he slid down the door. He had sat there crumpled on the floor listening, gin pooling around the seat of his pants as the bottle slid from his grasp.

  “Where are you?” Bagg had whispered, but there had been no answer and he’d eventually fallen asleep, taken away by the ebbing tide.

  There, in a puddle of juniper scented alcohol, Bagg had dr
eamed. Dreamed his ex-wife had shown up with their daughter as scheduled. After helping with dinner, Morgan had lain on top of her father during the next two cartoons then brought up the same dozen reasons bedtime wasn’t as important as the next show.

  As it had always been with his daughter, time slipped away practically unnoticed. Then came that quiet time just after the cat had fallen asleep but the hamster had not yet awakened to activate his maddening squeaky wheel. Teeth had been brushed after a last chance on the potty, followed by the fluffing of pillows and the tucking of blankets. This was a broken home, which made the rituals all the more important.

  “I have a brand new story,” Lennon Bagg told his little girl, as he sat on the edge of her bed, somewhere near her pudgy and scuffed knees encased in the too-small footy pajamas. Despite some squeezing and sucking in of breath, these jammies had not been replaceable. So what if she could no longer zip them anywhere near her chin?

  “I don’t want a new story,” Morgan said, sounding a little worried that her dad might not be teasing. “Our story is perfectly fine.”

  “A story about a friendly witch who only kidnaps naughty children.”

  “Our story is about a circus,” she said.

  “Okay, it’s about a circus.”

  “And there’s a bear!” she squealed.

  “Of course there’s a bear. A proper circus has a bear.”

  “A dancing bear?”

  “Who’s telling this?” he asked.

  “Okay.”

  “So there was this circus, and there was a happy dancing bear named Sally,” Bagg began.

  “Sadie.”

  “Okay, Sadie. But she wasn’t always a happy dancing bear. In fact, she’d been taught how to dance by a very bad man, in a very bad way.”

  “He hurt Sadie?”

  “Well, he was very mean to her, yes. He had this long whip made of braided black leather, and he would lift it above his head and snap it forward, making a sound just like a crack of thunder.” Bagg told this part in a soft voice, empathizing with just how frightening the whip must have been. “That was how the man taught her to be a dancing bear. And whenever there was a lightning storm, Sadie would huddle in her cage and feel very sorry for all the other bears being made to dance in the world.”

  “I’m a little afraid of lightning, too,” Morgan told her father. “Did Sadie want to run away?”

  “Yes, she really did. But Sadie was afraid to run away. She’d been taken away from her mother as a very young cub and had never learned to catch fish or find berries. Imagine what it would be like to be stolen away from your family and forced to live among bears?”

  “So she stayed with the mean man.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Bagg said. “And she learned his dances while he snapped his whip at her paws.”

  “Did she wear a tutu?”

  “Yes, a pink one. The very nice magician’s assistant made it for her because she understood that even a girl bear should not dance without any clothes on.”

  “Daddy!”

  “It’s true!”

  “Tell me about the magic.”

  “Well, Sadie and the magician’s assistant spent a lot of time together because neither was allowed to explore the towns the circus traveled to,” Bagg explained, and there began the first yawns and rubbing of eyes as the story settled into its less scary parts. “And Sadie thought the magician’s assistant was really wonderful. She had made her such a beautiful tutu and could do almost all the tricks the magician knew. The kind lady made flowers appear out of a little black stick, although they didn’t taste like flowers to Sadie.”

  “Sadie ate the plastic flowers?”

  “How’s a bear to know?” Bagg shrugged his shoulders as he always did. “Anyway, the assistant could turn a quarter into a puff of smoke and make a torn-up dollar bill whole again. But Sadie’s favorite trick the assistant performed for her—you see, the assistant really wanted to be a full-time magician—was turning objects into lovely white doves.”

  “What kind of things could she turn into doves?”

  “Well, she turned a man’s watch into a dove.”

  “And what else?”

  “Um, she turned a little boy’s half-eaten candy bar into a dove.”

  “Ew! That didn’t happen!”

  “She turned a woman’s broken pair of sunglasses into a very beautiful dove.”

  “So she could turn anything into a dove?”

  “Well, she could try to, but she was still just a magician’s assistant, not a real magician.”

  “Did Sadie want her to turn something into a dove?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose you could say that,” Bagg said. “You see, Sadie thought it must be the most marvelous thing in the world to be a dove. Doves, as you know, are very pretty animals and nobody ever thought a dove was going to bite them. And even the meanest of mean people would never think to crack an awful whip at a dove. Why, that would just make a dove fly away.”

  “Nobody would ever be mean to a dove.”

  “Yes, nobody would ever be mean to a dove.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, one night, when the mean bear trainer was off doing mean things with other mean people, Sadie slipped out of her collar and went to visit the magician’s assistant. In her bear language, she asked the magician’s assistant to do a magic trick for her.”

  “What trick?”

  “To turn her into a beautiful dove.”

  “Did she?”

  “Well, the magician’s assistant was very worried. She didn’t think she could. After all, turning a bear into a dove might just be the greatest magic trick ever performed.”

  “So she wouldn’t even try?”

  “She didn’t want to disappoint Sadie by failing, but she could see all the sadness in her eyes. Who could turn down a dancing bear on the verge of tears?”

  “Dad, what are crocodile tears? Mommy said I cry crocodile tears.”

  “Hmm.” Bagg paused. “They’re pretend tears.”

  “Crocodiles pretend to cry?”

  “Maybe they cry to make other animals feel sorry for them, so they can get close enough to eat them.”

  “Sadie would never do that.”

  “Off course not,” Bagg said. “So, the magician’s assistant pulled out the magician’s special black handkerchief and tried to cover Sadie with it.”

  “It was too small!”

  “Yes, it was too small. So she had to go find a magic bed sheet to cover the great big bear.”

  “And she said the magic words?”

  “Abracadabra ziggity-zam,” Bagg held his hands up over his daughter, who covered herself like Sadie, except for her eyes. “If your heart is filled with love, may the magic powers make you a dove!”

  “Did it work? Did she turn into a dove?” Morgan lowered the blanket beneath her chin.

  “No, she did not.”

  “But …”

  “Not right away,” Bagg interrupted. “You see, there’s a lot more to turning a bear into a dove than just a wristwatch or wedding ring. The magician’s assistant repeated the words four more times, then added a little sparkly magic dust, and voilà!”

  “Voilà?”

  “Yes, the bed sheet suddenly dropped to the floor, all crumpled up, where a big bear had been sitting patiently, hoping and wishing.”

  “There was something under the sheet, right?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t a dove.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “But it was a creature meant to fly, just the same. And even though it wasn’t a beautiful white dove, it was still quite lovely.”

  “What was it?”

  “Well, out from under one corner of the big bed sheet poked a tiny little antenna, followed by another,” Bagg said in a low voice. “It prodded the air on the other side of the sheet, twitching this way and that, making sure the coast was clear. And then one orange wing appeared, followed by another.”

  “A butterfly!”r />
  “Yes, a butterfly! And the butterfly swished her beautiful orange wings and danced up into the air in the magician’s assistant’s tent.”

  “Did she fly outside?”

  “Oh, certainly she did,” Bagg told his daughter. “The magician’s assistant, who from that moment on became a full-fledged, top-of-the-line magician, opened her tent flap and allowed Sadie to fly into the night, far from the mean trainer, to where there were endless meadows of flowers.”

  “And she danced from flower to flower?”

  “Yes, Sadie the dancing bear …”

  “Dancing butterfly!” Morgan squealed.

  “Sadie the dancing butterfly lived happily ever after, dancing from flower to flower.”

  “Will you tell me the story again?”

  “Tomorrow night, honey,” Bagg said, leaning down to kiss his daughter.

  Had that been the last time he kissed her? Had she been too busy getting her papers and crayons stuffed into her backpack when he dropped her off Sunday afternoon? She had worn a plain white short-sleeved shirt and jean shorts. Pink and white sneakers with a picture of one of the Disney princesses; he couldn’t remember which one. Morgan’s brown hair was short, had just been cut. A tiny freckle on the left side of her nose, which you could only see close up. Her eyes were blue. A little girl; she looked like a little girl.

  Bagg now sat behind the wheel of his Jeep, not really any better or any worse than he’d been when Morgan first went missing. He’d found that as the parent of a stolen child you daydreamed a lot. When fragments of happy memories appeared out of nowhere, you tried to hold onto them, even if it meant getting honked and sworn at while sitting at a green light by someone who didn’t have a giant hole in their heart.

  “Wake up, shithead,” the female driver shouted as she pulled around Bagg, laying on her horn, almost hitting him as she swerved around and in front of his Jeep.

  Calls had come into the newsroom reporting a bear attack at one of the local golf courses, and Bagg was daydreaming at stoplights instead of getting his ass to the scene.