The Woman Who Married a Bear

by John Straley

  “That could be anybody off any fishing boat in the North Pacific, Doggy. Who’s the woman who saw him?”

  “I don’t know who she was. She wasn’t from here. Who was the guy? Do you have any ideas? What do you think?”

  “Stop asking me. I don’t know what I think. How in the hell should I know who stole the rifle?”

  “Were you drinking tonight?”

  “No—a couple of beers.”

  “A couple of beers.”

  “I drank a lot last night.”

  “I know that. I already talked to Duarte. Sounds like a big night. By the way, he gave me this.”

  He reached into his bag and handed me my credit card.

  “He said you left this at the restaurant. I think he may have been on the phone all morning. I’ll call the company and tell them you might have some funny charges, if you like.”

  “Thanks, I’ll take care of it.”

  Being in debt to a cop is a bad way to start off an interview. Doggy knew exactly that. He smiled a kind of mean avuncular grin.

  “Listen, Cecil, I know you’re not supposed to talk about your cases but it looks like someone tried to whack you tonight. What are you working on?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. A stupid real-estate claim, a Workers’ Comp. neck-brace thing, and a couple of piddly sexual assaults where the guys are going to plead out. Nothing to get killed over.”

  “You had a bunch of papers in your house about an old murder case.”

  “Louis Victor. That’s right.”

  “You’ve got to talk to me, Cecil. I’m trying to help you. If you know anything, you should tell me. This is obviously bigger than you bargained for. No matter what it is.”

  “It’s nothing, Doggy. It’s a writing job. The old lady in the home wants to die happy. I’m going to tell her what she wants to know and then send her a bill. Doggy—you know that the Louis Victor case is already solved.”

  We stared at each other for a long awkward moment until we both realized that we were staring. And then we paused to see who could get out gracefully.

  “Yeah, I know.” Doggy smiled again. “It’s just that I’m a little concerned about you, Cecil. I knew your father. I’m sorry about him. You and I don’t know each other real well but I know a lot about you. I don’t want you to get in trouble or hurt.”

  “Doggy, you don’t know shit about me….”

  “Now, Cecil, that’s not quite true,” he said firmly, with the tone of a patient day-care worker. He reached into his bag and brought out a file, replaced his half glasses, and started reading.

  “You are… let’s see… thirty-six and you were born in Juneau. Your dad, of course, is…was”—he looked up with that sympathetic look that addresses my family’s disappointment—“‘the Judge.’ Your sister’s earned a good name as an attorney and now teaches at Yale. You studied music and art history at Reed College until you were thrown out. You got into drugs. The drugs weren’t the problem at Reed. You got tossed for never showing up for lectures or exams.”

  He looked up with a cute little “fuck you” grin and kept reading.

  “After Reed, in ’73 you traveled in Africa and Asia, studying religion and music, and … I don’t suppose you call it ‘contemplating your navel,’ do you? No. You worked for a time in the oil patch in Wyoming and on the tugs on the Inside Passage, and you traveled around the South singing in choirs—?”

  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 swi
rls 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.

  These 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.