The Bear in a Muddy Tutu

by Cole Alpaugh

  “This is one great day, you little bastards!” Tommy shouted at a group of small children splashin’ around in a backyard kiddy pool, making a left turn for the sake of makin’ a left turn. The road was still steaming off the last of the rain, and the LeBaron’s ass-end tried to pry loose. Accidentally spinning out and killing a group of preschoolers in a plastic pool too close to the fucking road would make him a legend. Especially in a jacked ride, oh boy! Tommy was tempted to make a u-turn but remembered the Rollins Band cassette in the inside pocket of his leather jacket on the passenger seat. Time for some tunes. He drove with one hand and slammed the tape into the car’s player and cranked the knob.

  “Ha, I knew swipin’ a ninety-five was for a motherfuckin’ good goddamn reason!” A car with a cassette player might have been dumb luck for your average criminal, but everything was shittin’ gold nuggets for the badass behind the wheel of this ride.

  The voice of Henry Rollins began preaching out of four speakers. Henry Rollins was the God of all gods, the toughest of all punks. There was heavy metal, and there was hardcore industrial grunge. And then there was Henry Fucking Rollins, far and away the toughest mo-fo to ever live. Rollins told gruesome stories and could cave any motherfucker’s skull with one punch. Tommy had every Black Flag and Rollins Band tape made, including all the pirated versions he could get his hands on.

  Tommy was gonna get the same SEARCH & DESTROY tattoo across his shoulders, which was the coolest ink on the face of the planet, once he got out of the fat fuck’s house. For now, Tommy mouthed the words to “Liar,” because that’s exactly what he was. The song was a story, split up by blastin’ riffs and intense motherfucking vocals.

  “I’m a liar; yeah, I’m a liar!” Tommy shouted to the music, pounding the steering wheel to the throbbing beat. It was an epic song, the blow by blow of Tommy’s own screwed up life. The music and lyrics bounded from fast to slow, then back to fast, and Tommy totally understood the pace, the frustration, the need to be fucking heard.

  “Anybody around better know that everything I say and all the nice friendly smiles, were all just lies to burn up their wussy souls.” Tommy spoke these words slowly, mixing in some of his own. He could do it because the song belonged to him, too. He personalized it like a dog pissin’ right on top of some other dog’s piss. “Yeah, I’m a nice fellow, a sweet talker. I let you feel good and warm inside, until it’s time to cause hurt and some really bad fucking pain.”

  “’Cause I’m a liar!” Tommy shouted along with Rollins, swerving the LeBaron to almost hit a rabbit darting out onto the narrow road, which was smooth as silk under his hot rubber. “Nobody gets in Tommy’s way, ’cause I’m a liar, baby! A liar!”

  Tommy took another hit off the joint, choked on the smoke, then popped the burnin’ roach into his mouth and chewed it up. Amped on the tunes and buzzed from the pot, he stomped the accelerator to the floor on a road that was as straight and long as a freakin’ runway. The LeBaron’s engine thundered as the white arm of the speedometer slid across the one hundred ten mark.

  Scraggly trees skimmed past like a picket fence, and even the music became lost to the howling wind. Tommy’s hands were clamped to the wheel in a death grip, arms straight out, head tilted back for some serious speed. Stealin’ a quick glance, he just about had the needle pinned at one hundred thirty miles per hour when something large and black came lumbering up out of the marsh grass from the right side of the road. It was the biggest fucking dog he’d ever seen and he didn’t have time to even consider moving his right foot from the accelerator to the brake. Instead, to avoid a head-on collision, Tommy shifted the wheel ever so slightly, clippin’ the ass-end of the monstrously big dog and what appeared to be some sort of pink dress covering its hairy ass.

  “What kind of asshole puts a dress on a dog?” Tommy asked, as the wind surged under the car, lifting both right-side wheels up in the air. A tornadic gust snatched Tommy’s leather jacket and it took off like a startled bat, while the horizon assumed an entirely different perspective. It was one insane, fucked-up instant, but Tommy had enough time to imagine he was up at Six Flags riding the Nitro. Man, that was one sick ride, Tommy thought, as the road was now over his head, still rushing by at an impossible speed.

  In the next seconds, there was a whole lot of crunching metal and breaking glass, as the LeBaron slid along Great Bay Boulevard upside down, finally coming to a dripping and ticking halt, one tire still spinning like crazy.

  Had Tommy Bonjovi survived the impact, he might have heard the whimpering circus bear.

  Chapter 40

  The smells were sweet and sour and everything in between. The sun was warm and the mud was deep and squishy. The marsh over in this spot was filled with big bugs clinging to the tops of grass blades, and when you got close, their wings spread out and they took flight, whirring crazily. The vibrating air tantalizing, Gracie imagined these playthings must taste delicious, although she couldn’t quite seem to get hold of one.

  Gracie’s small brain actually came close to making the connection between the truck that spread that awful tasting water and the lack of bugs, and how the marshes farther away from her good man’s nest were alive and buzzing. But awareness came and went, and there was all the chasing to do.

  Gracie ran across the marsh to see what all the commotion was with the big white birds who were huddled up, barking at one another in bird language. As usual, the birds scattered when they saw her coming, abandoning an especially large and prehistoric looking horseshoe crab they’d been snacking on.

  Waste not want not, thought Gracie, who gummed away at the dead crab’s belly, the jealous seagulls skulking around at a safe distance, not the least bit happy with this development.

  That’s when Gracie first noticed the most beautiful bug she’d ever seen in her bear life. This bug flew like a bird but danced like a bear. It even wore a beautiful orange dress, as it fluttered high and low. Gracie was hypnotized by the elegant magic its wings created. The bug came to visit Gracie, seemed set to land on her nose, but changed its mind at the last second. Instead, it flittered here and flickered there, and the entranced old bear left the remaining crab for the cranky gulls in order to follow the delightful bug.

  Gracie rose up, stirred into her own dance, as the butterfly wobbled and wiggled ahead of her. The bear had been a little worried about her new pink tutu, which her good man had been too drunk to help her take off, but his oversight had turned into a wonderful bit of luck. Gracie strutted for the bug, managed a pirouette of her own, showing off her own pretty outfit. She pawed at the air in her least menacing way and tried to mimic the graceful moves on display above her.

  Gracie marveled at the bug, who was sometimes caught in gusts of wind, occasionally toppled in the crazy turbulence. But there was no need to panic when you had such fine wings. The breeze was blowing the exquisite orange butterfly across the marsh and Gracie did her best to keep up. Imagine being able to dance and fly at the same time?

  Gracie was nearly swooning from happiness when she followed the mesmerizing creature up out of the marsh and onto the hot pavement, where another movement caught her eye.

  The old bear might have screamed if she’d had more time, but what she really wanted to do was say goodbye to the butterfly, who had risen way up high in the air, away from the sudden danger down below. Gracie was wistful and sad she didn’t know the bug’s language. But surely the butterfly, who had witnessed Gracie’s graceful dance, must know her thoughts, the spirits of these two dancers bridging any barrier of mere language.

  Gracie’s last words, right before being struck dead by the Chrysler LeBaron, were, alas, spoken with gratefulness and hope in her own bear language.

  “Goodbye, little friend, and thank you for the dance.”

  Chapter 41

  Some ran and some walked, but every last person made their way back over the Fish Head Island bridge on foot to investigate the terrible sounding crash. The screeching metal against unforgiving pavement was a
shrill summons.

  A few had made daily trips into the town at the end of the road, while others had only been on the rushed scavenger hunt sorties. The Laundromat business in West Tuckerton was booming, its owner raking in buckets of quarters from the muddy circus people. But for some, like bear trainer Slim Weatherwax, this was the first time off the island since the procession of tired circus trucks had arrived, himself pinned under the hurriedly stowed canvas tents.

  Slim hadn’t seen Gracie since she’d wandered out into the marsh to do her early morning business, which almost always included rechecking a hundred of the same snake and groundhog holes as the day before, pooping, sniffing the tide line for new smells, then going back to see if there were any snakes or groundhogs to interrogate. The routine had mostly kept Gracie out of Slim’s hair so he could drink in peace, and she wasn’t pouncing on napping roustabouts as often, so they left him alone, too. With all the cottontail rabbits darting here and there, often tantalizingly close, hunting down a snoring human was only fun when she was feeling lazy and only up for some easy prey.

  Slim’s gut was telling him something bad as he walked up and over the bridge, where they all got their first clear view of the single car crash that was smoking and steaming, a few hundred yards up the road. By the look of the wreck, they were gonna need a big spatula to remove whomever was ridin’ in that mess of metal and glass. It barely even looked like a car. Heck, if they’d been walking on a runway, the wreck could have been a plane. In a junkyard, it could have been mistaken for a tangle of appliances.

  But what tore at Slim’s gut was what had caused the crash in the first place. There were no trees along here to slam into. There were no second cars, no train tracks, and there were sure as hell no icy spots on this slab of hot top.

  “Maybe the sand.” Slim ambled closer, looking out into the marsh for his Graceful Gracie. “Maybe them tires lost it in the sand.”

  From beyond the pile of metal, people crowded around what must have been the driver or passenger, farther up the road. There were the sounds of sirens carried on the wind, along with a horn that whined like an air raid siren. Slim looked up in the sky for enemy aircraft, but there was just one old biplane off to the south. It pulled along a flapping sign for some brand of suntan lotion, or a beer special at one of the crazy dance clubs up on Long Beach Island.

  “Slim!” someone called back to him from the group of people who’d run and jogged up ahead of the rest. About a dozen were standing or kneeling down, all worried and upset.

  “Why the hell you callin’ my name,” Slim said, low to himself. “I sure as hell ain’t no doctor.”

  But Slim knew.

  Fact was, when you lived your whole life in a traveling circus, you came to expect the worst damn things to happen. Bad things. You started feelin’ good and comfortable, and they’d come right up outta wherever the hell those things slinked around in. They yanked you right down. They’d get you by the ankle or right by the head. Sometimes they’d pull you down by your heart.

  Slim knew it was his heart up there in the road.

  Slim Weatherwax walked past the mangled car without more than a glance and was thirty feet or so from the circle of folks. His feet stopped moving as they all turned their heads to him, every eye boring into him like he was one of them freaks passing off a tumor as a horn, or something.

  “Why the hell you lookin’ at me?” Slim said, barely loud enough for them to hear over the sirens wailing in the distance. Slim stood his ground, knowing if he didn’t get any closer, just maybe things would stay like this. Knowin’, but not knowin’. Slim looked away from the group of people, some of them crying like babies. He looked out at the marshes on the side of the highway. Right then and there, he swore to God he’d give his entire life to see his Gracie still runnin’ free like the dumb old bear she was.

  Slim stood in the middle of the hot highway, with the smell of burning rubber all around, and the sirens getting closer and closer. That stupid bear was like a magnet for ticks, Slim thought, looking out over the grasses where the little bloodsuckers lived. Slim would spend hours pickin’ the damn things off her as she lay back, showin’ her fat belly to him. Gracie would have nosed at the kerosene filled peanut butter jar to let him know she was ready, get all in his face with her hot, stinky breath until he did what she wanted. It wasn’t the worst job in the world. He’d also scratch her favorite spots under her armpits and rub up under her ears. If a man didn’t have a dog, he’d do well to have himself a big old bear. Least a bear didn’t have barkin’ fits and chase its tail like the other mutts around this place. And Gracie could bite you all day, leavin’ just a purple smudge and some spit.

  “Slim?”

  But Slim didn’t want to answer. No, he was just going to stand there in the middle of this goddamn road for a while. He’d already had his share of hurt. Hell, he’d had enough shares of hurt for two people and then some.

  “I don’t need no more hurt,” Slim said, but nobody could hear him as the ambulance slowly passed the group of people surrounding the dead bear. Slim tilted his weathered face to the sky, eyes closed. A half-smile crossed his sharp features as he could almost feel Gracie’s rough tongue giving him slobbering thank you kisses for the belly rubs.

  The ambulance rolled by the tall, skinny man in the middle of the road. If Slim’s eyes had been open, he might have seen a butterfly flitting high overhead, nudged here and there by the salty sea breeze.

  Chapter 42

  Sheriff Jaroslaw’s name meant fierce and glorious back in Poland. A good name for a cop walking the beat in Warsaw maybe, but in Ocean County, New Jersey, it just seemed to evoke endless dumb Pollack jokes. The sheriff’s father and grandfather had been policemen in Gdansk, a city of a half-million people on the Baltic Sea, which was perhaps why Jakub Jaroslaw had been drawn to the coast here in New Jersey, thirty years earlier.

  Sheriff Jaroslaw, neither fierce nor glorious, had survived his three decades as a peace officer by adopting a credo he’d picked up from American movies, from which he’d also learned the language and a healthy respect for how things could blow up in your face when you least expected it. He repeated this philosophy whenever he pulled up on a call, or even when he went to deposit his paycheck in the bank. He’d even said it while walking up the front steps of a strange woman’s house, flowers in hand, on his first and only attempt at a video date.

  He said this: “I don’t want any trouble.”

  The sheriff looked down at the envelope he’d been sent to deliver to the so-called offending characters who’d taken up residence at the end of Great Bay Boulevard. The cease and desist letter was from an attorney hired by that damn cop who’d had that damn kid, who’d gotten himself killed in that damn stolen car. These things usually smelled like a lawsuit, but Jaroslaw figured the cop just wanted to cause whatever trouble he could for these people. Didn’t matter that the kid stole some family’s car and then went racing down a highway at a hundred miles per hour, plowing into a circus bear, killing it and his own stupid ass self. One more good reason for Sheriff Jaroslaw to be thankful no women had been inclined toward a second date and possibly burdening him with a kid of his own. Kids brought more trouble than anything.

  Jaroslaw had even allowed the letter to sit right there on his front seat for two whole days before making this drive. He had every intention of giving the traveling circus ample time to pull up stakes and hightail it out of his county. After all, he didn’t want any trouble, thank you very much.

  But as the sheriff slowly pulled up and over the bridge to Fish Head Island, he was dismayed to see nobody had gone anywhere. He’d more than half-hoped they’d pulled up stakes on their own, figuring trouble must be on its way. In all his years, he’d been down to this end of the boulevard maybe a half dozen times, and most of those calls were checking for runaway kids. This was, after all, a good place to make yourself seem lost for a while.

  Jaroslaw parked his sheriff’s department car next to a lopsided b
uilding that seemed to be sinking into the mud on one side; somebody had screwed up setting the pilings. It stood precariously between two large tents, an air conditioner poking from one side window. There sure as hell wasn’t supposed to be a building down on these mud flats, Jaroslaw knew. He wondered what these people had been up to, then immediately erased the concern as best he could. The sheriff grabbed his hat and the letter and slid his large body out of the car and into the oppressive heat. He was aware of all the people barely outside of his view, back in the shadows of tent flaps.

  “I don’t want any trouble,” the sheriff whispered and then climbed the two steps to the front door of the crooked building.

  “Afternoon, officer.” Billy Wayne Hooduk greeted the sheriff, cool air rushing out from behind him, as the sheriff held out the letter. “What’s this?”

  “You in charge?”

  “You could say that.”

  Jaroslaw let go of the envelope, which was the moment of serving papers that always made him feel like he’d taken the lid off of a bottle of something that stank.

  “I’m sorry.” Sheriff Jaroslaw turned his back on the pudgy little man who stood staring at the envelope in his hands. The sheriff would be just fine if the guy waited until he was miles away before reading the bad news.

  The sheriff dropped his heavy frame back into his car, which rocked on its springs, placed his hat next to him on the seat, and began to back away from the building. More than ever, Jaroslaw felt eyes on him, but now he didn’t feel threatened. What he was getting from this place was the sense of sorrow, of the tragedy that had recently gone on around here. Probably the accident, Jaroslaw figured. Now they’re getting their asses shut down, like it or not. And if they weren’t gone in seven days, Jaroslaw would have to trudge back down here with whatever court order the lawyers for the dead kid’s father managed to get signed. Maybe even a criminal complaint, a big pain in his fat Pollack ass.