by Tom Bouman
“Where are your brothers and sisters, they coming in?”
“Of course. Two sisters and a brother. Denver, Orlando, Atlanta. They got far away from this little nowhere town.” The bartender was an older man with long white hair and fading tattoos. He had begun listening to the conversation, and rolled his eyes. “I’m youngest, I was last to go, so I knew Dad best,” Ray continued. “They all have their problems with him. He did whatever he wanted, Mom didn’t have much of a life for herself, whatever. He was a good dad. A good dad.”
“He talk about his work?”
“Back when he was a cop, yeah. Stories from the street. After that, no. He seemed less happy, but maybe that was him getting older, I don’t know.”
“Anything stand out now?”
Ray shook his head.
“No problems with the estate? No debts?”
“Not that I know. Truck, Harley cruiser, trailer goes with it, camping gear, all that shit. Mom won’t want it. Maybe we ought to sell it.”
At this, the bartender approached. “Who’s your old man?”
“Carl Dentry,” said Ray.
“He was a customer. Sorry about it.” The bartender took a bottle of whiskey from under the counter and poured us each a shot. “I’d buy his cruiser from you.”
Ray and the older man traded stories and names for a while. The bartender asked, “How’d he die?”
“A bear ate him.”
At this, the bartender burst out laughing. “That’s one way to go. I’m sorry.”
I left Ray at the bar and stepped into the sunlight. The future is coming fast: no meat, no guns, no hate, no violence, no want, no mistakes. One big community of ourselves, respecting each other and moving forward. Strong, brave, happy, beautiful, free. Just turn on the TV. We need these lies. We need these things. But we’ll never have new selves, no matter how many things we buy, no matter how many ones and zeros we absorb from our computers. We don’t even have old selves. What we do have is what all animals have: life. In the light of the future it’s easy to forget that the animal world is all around us, and we human beings are in it—we are it—until we die. I’m not trying to preach. I’m just trying to say that if you’ve got to go, why not feed a bear while you’re at it.
The Mid-Atlantic Wildlife Research Center was headquartered in a black glass box on the eastern bank of the Susquehanna River, south of town. I parked by the lobby doors and went in to let them know who I was, and that I had Crabapple with me. The center was on the ground floor of the building, through another set of glass doors. A girl in a white lab coat sat at a reception desk in a smaller lobby full of stuffed animals, including a coyote and two yearling black bears. I asked for Dr. Weaver and the young lady went to get her. Mary appeared, almost unrecognizable in nice slacks and a pink shirt, with the girl pushing a stainless steel dolly cart behind.
“You meet Becca?” Mary said. The young lady and I shook hands. “She’s stuck with me for a semester, getting a microbiology degree at Penn State.”
Becca pulled on a pair of blue rubber gloves and handed me some. We went out to the van. As Mary watched, Becca and I dragged Crabapple out of the back of the rear doors and lowered him gently as we could onto the dolly.
“When’d you get him?” Mary asked.
“Dawn.”
“You get him yourself?”
“My father, actually.”
“Sounds like a story there.”
“Bear’s been on ice at the morgue all morning.”
“Okay, not bad. Whatever he’s got to tell us, we’ll find out today.”
“Today.” I felt suddenly tired.
“Yes, today. Time is money. All you have to do is watch. Or don’t; I don’t mind what you do, but we’re cutting him open today.”
In a cold, small room with no windows, Becca followed Mary’s instructions, beginning by cutting away the plastic containing Crabapple’s body. That released bear scent into the room, along with a rush of roadkill. Out in the open, the bear flattened even further. Seeing him again didn’t give me a flashback or any fear. Under all his fur, he was slim, not much extra on him, like all wild things that live right up against it.
Mary noticed this. “He hadn’t bulked up that much for winter,” she said. “That could be why.”
“At least it wasn’t personal,” I said.
Much like dressing game, Becca slipped a sharp blade and two fingers through the bear’s fur and unzipped his skin from his rib cage to the tuft of his dick. She cut around his genitals and anus and pulled that section free of the pelvis, tying off the small intestine. She cut into the bear’s throat and separated the top of his esophagus, tying that off as well. Then out came Crabapple’s whole guts from throat to intestine, sliding free of the body in a bloody pile. The idea was, if they could find anything human in the bear, then they could be reasonably sure we’d removed the right animal from the population. And the farther down those human contents were in Crabapple’s system, the more likely he’d had a hand in Carl Dentry’s death, and hadn’t just stumbled upon him. But by my count, as many as seventy-two hours had passed since this bear would have had access to Carl’s body, so it was hard to imagine what there was to learn from digging around in him. Anyway, they did, and got some samples from the slurry in Crabapple’s stomach, which included whole berries, feathers, scraps of skin and bone, hair, and a lot of other treasures from lower down in the intestines, all removed and separated in small hexagonal dishes.
We left Becca to run these samples through her computer system, which identified strands of DNA by species, and could match specific animals, too. Becca would also take dental tools to Crabapple’s mouth in search of scraps. It would take a while, but she said she’d call if she found something.
“Where are you staying?” Mary asked me.
“I’ll give you my cell number,” I said. “I’m going to find a motel somewhere and sleep.”
“A motel, nonsense. Stay with me and my husband. We’re right over in Camp Hill. Your own bedroom, clean sheets, no bugs.”
“Thanks, no.” I didn’t feel like eating. Plus I wanted the freedom to pass out, or to wander in a place that was totally gray and dominated by man. Night was falling.
Yet somehow I ended up following Mary’s car over a bridge, across the Susquehanna, and into a neighborhood where all the streets were named for old colleges. Mary and her husband Alex lived in a white-painted brick house with a neat, weedfree lawn. I parked in the driveway and we went in, leaving our boots in a tiny mudroom off the kitchen. I had my duffel bag with me. Alex stood at a counter with a knife, slicing green onions. He kissed Mary on the forehead, raised an eyebrow at me and my bag, and offered us both some of the wine he was drinking. Jazz floated from a stereo in another room.
“Good, now go clean yourselves up,” Alex said. “Out, damned spot.”
Mary led me upstairs to a clean guest room with maroon bedding. “There’s a bathroom, towels, what have you, you’re good.”
I sat on the bed, in a safe old house, behind a closed door and a drawn curtain, with a trumpet insisting on the stereo downstairs, and breathed the dry wine in and out of my mouth, resisting the bed’s pull. After I had taken my shower and got into street clothes, I did lie down for a minute that turned into an hour, and was woken by a knock on the door and Mary’s singsong invitation to dinner.
We ate at a battered old table in the kitchen. Alex had made a huge bowl of noodles with crispy tofu and vegetables cooked just barely past raw. The noodles were coated in a red spicy sauce that did not look too good to me after watching Crabapple get cut open, but there was no meat in the dinner, just a bright garlicky spice. We had finished eating and were on our second bottle of wine before Mary asked about the bear’s death.
“I thought I was in for more of a fight than I got,” I said. As I told the story, I could see Alex getting pulled in.
“What happened to the dog?” he asked.
“She’s okay as far as I know. We took her
to her owners up the hill. Scared, beat up. But she’s a dog.”
“She stood up for you,” Alex said. “Mary won’t let us have a dog.”
The wine had puzzled me and loosened my tongue. “I haven’t felt like owning a dog in a long time,” I said.
“You struck me as a dog person.”
“I was. We had beagles. A few of them, growing up. Pearl, Abraham, McGillicutty, who we called Cutty. They—it was good we lived in the country, because when they bay … These were good hunting dogs, and—things weren’t ever very funny in our house, but these dogs, they were a laugh. Cutty was a problem. He disappeared, then came back, and some months after that, down came a neighbor lady with a basket full of Irish terrier–beagle puppies. Bright red beagle ears, so cute.”
“Are you married?” Alex asked.
“Yessir, just.”
“Kids?”
“On the way. We’re supposed to be taking a class on how to change diapers and all that but … that’s not what worries me.” I realized then how desperate I was to bring this feeling into the light. It felt safe with these people that my wife would never know.
“What worries you?” said Alex.
“Never mind,” I said. Mary leaned back in her chair and looked at me.
Later in the evening, as wine and fatigue began to overtake me, she and I sat in a small library wall-to-wall with books and photographs of family, of Mary in her younger days with a different man and a couple kids from infancy to college age. “Me in another life,” she said. We had lowballs of gin and ice burning slow in our hands. “It was hard to change. But he’s worth it.”
“Sure.”
Mary said, “You think that bear had any cubs?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did you start seeing him around?”
“Summer,” I said.
“He’s a young enough animal,” Mary said. “It’s possible he was chased off from his territory by an older, tougher bear. And he had to adjust to new territory, and adjusted the wrong way. Or found the wrong territory.” She sighed. “I don’t know if he had any cubs.”
“Does it matter?”
“No, actually. You know, female bears have this thing, I don’t know if you’d call it a capability. Delayed implantation. That means they can be impregnated by more than one male at a time, and the embryos wait to develop until Mom bulks up enough to support the pregnancy. Cubs from one litter can have different fathers. But the fathers aren’t about raising the cubs. They’re about eating, sleeping, and getting their rocks off.” She swirled the icy gin around in her glass and drank. “Humans are different.”
“We sure are,” I said. I thought of Crabapple, free to follow his ways of the world. If he’d had cubs, they’d never know their father, and they’d never miss a thing.
I slept in a comfortable, clean bed without a dream or a care. I slept for what felt like an instant and then the smell of good coffee and the clatter of a morning routine woke me.
“THEY TOLD ME not to talk to you, but I had to know.” Carl Dentry’s wife June was young, with short blond hair and a pleasant round face. You think “widow” and a certain picture comes to mind, but June was only about sixty years old, sixty like forty. She sat across from me at a booth in a Linglestown diner.
“They told you not to talk,” I said.
“People … from his work. They said to wait, that it was important …” She searched for words and hit a dead end.
“I thought Carl was retired.”
“Well, he is now. Sorry. Yes, he retired. He worked for PDE, that’s the Pennsylvania Department of Education? Then for the AG’s office for a short time. He was an investigator. Before that, a cop in Harrisburg. He liked being a cop least. He got out of that and did other things.”
I’d seen his employment history, the broad strokes. He’d left the force just a few years before full pension. He must have really hated it. “So who told you not to talk to the police?”
“Not any police, just … Carl had a friend, Allie. She works for the attorney general. She said she’d look into things, that she couldn’t say more yet. Talk to the state police if they come, but … not anyone local. I guess that’s you, but what could I possibly tell you that you don’t know?”
“When was this?”
“Oh, yesterday. I called her after you called me.”
“And when was the last time you saw Carl?”
“Days ago. At least four. Four days ago was the last I heard from him on the phone, I think. He had his bike, camping, fishing. When it all comes down to it, I want to sleep in a bed. And he always wanted an outdoor life. He’s a rambler in his old age. He loved the road.”
“On his motorcycle, or in his truck?”
“Motorcycle, of course. You don’t have it up there? Anyway, he had gear with him to camp. There were times he’d meet old buddies.”
“Was that what he was doing this trip, meeting someone?”
“He didn’t mention it.” But she gave me the names of a few men who had gotten together in the past.
“And it was nothing to do with any investigation, far as you knew?”
“Investigation? No. He was licensed, he took on a local job here or there for a friend, but not for some time.”
“So what was the trip for?”
“For fun, as far as I knew.”
I didn’t like her answer, but I let it go, partly because of her shift in tone. I waited and said, “Any particular connection to Holebrook County you know of?”
“No. None.”
“He ever race motorcycles, motocross?”
“Uh, no. He cruised at the speed limit.”
“Enemies?”
“He had people he didn’t like, but not enemies, no.” She leaned back in the booth. “I thought … Ray said a bear?”
“Yes,” I said. “But that may not be how he died. And nobody can figure out why he was in the county in the first place. I was hoping you’d have that answer.”
June shook her head. “As we got older, we were happy to grow apart. Not separate, just apart a little. We had different interests. He had friends I never knew. He probably got drunk and slept around a bit when we were kids.” I must have looked uncomfortable at this. “It’s okay,” she said. “We loved each other. He grew out of it, and I look at the big picture. But I can’t understand this.”
As we parted, I asked her for someone to call or see in the departments where he worked. The only name she had for me was Allie DeCosta, who had started out working for Harrisburg PD, like Carl. She had gotten him his job at the Department of Education.
I placed a couple calls to the AG’s office, and was told each time that DeCosta was unavailable. I left my name, said it was important. Once, I got through to her voice mail, mentioned Carl Dentry’s name, and said I’d be around all day. I parked on Market Street and walked up and down the couple blocks there, exploring, looking up at the high buildings covered in Harrisburg soot, and decided it would be too much to try to talk my way into an office at that point. Instead I ambled up in the direction of the state capitol with its bright green-and-gold dome.
I took a seat on a bench in the sun and watched the government people walk to and fro in suits. Eventually my cell phone did ring, and it was an unknown number. I picked up and Mary Weaver was on the line.
“You got your bear,” she said. “He could have done it.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Meat takes about thirteen hours for a bear to digest. But you know what doesn’t break down that quick? Hair. We matched hair in the animal’s intestine to your victim. We couldn’t have done that unless we had a follicle, that’s where the genomic DNA is, but Becca found one, and there you go. So he could have killed the victim, but not necessarily. He definitely ate the victim, so in that sense you got the right bear.”
“What if there was more than one?”
“What if? But not likely. Bears have territory, the males especially. You can tell the family. That oug
ht to give them some peace.”
“What are you going to do with Crabapple?”
“Who?”
“The bear, I mean.”
She thought a moment. “We’ll do right by the bear.”
I wandered the grounds of the commonwealth capitol and the downtown streets, appreciating this concrete place that man had tamed. And I was just thinking how civilized, not a sign of the ceaseless struggle of living things, when of course I happened to see a few scattered homeless people wedged into doorways. I got to the river and my heart reached for the wild, open space. There, I found another bench and my phone rang again. The woman on the line said she was Alexandra DeCosta.
“So you’re calling about Carl.” DeCosta had a thick mid-Penn accent with the muffled vowels, everything turned to an o sound except o itself, which became a. Questions said like statements, l’s dropped from the ends of words. There was a sorrow in her delivery that was real and put-on at the same time. “Poor Carl. How can I help, hon.”
“I’m trying to understand what happened to him. I don’t even know what he was doing up in our county.”
“Well, me neither.”
“It couldn’t have been work-related?”
“What work? He was retired, finally. And this is what he gets.” Her voice caught. I gave her a moment.
“You were close.”
“He was like a brother.”
“Is there any reason, anything you can think of, where Carl might have … taken an interest in someone up my way?”
“Oh … sure. There were some matters that never got to the next stage. No evidence, no will to prosecute. Some that bothered Carl, some that bothered me, men who we dug up in PDE investigations that went nowhere, but … nothing connected to Holebrook County I can find. I’ve been looking.”
“What about at the AG’s office?”
“Can’t say.”