Chasing the Bear Read online

  “This has got nothing to do with pushing people around,” my father used to say. “This is all about a sound mind in a strong body. It’s about being as complete as you can be, you know?”

  I sort of knew.

  Chapter 7

  “And were you able to make use of your sex education?” Susan said.

  “Nowhere near as soon as I wanted to,” I said.

  “But you had girlfriends,” Susan said.

  “I guess,” I said. “Once I asked my father why he never got married again. ‘Your mother was the one,’ he told me. ‘I met her early and lost her early. But I was with her for a while. I never met anyone else who was the one.’ ”

  “But he dated a lot,” Susan said.

  “Sure,” I said. “He liked women. He just never loved another one.”

  “So while you’re growing up out west someplace and Susan Silverman nee Hirsch is growing up in Swampscott, Massachusetts, you’re waiting to meet her?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s crazy,” Susan said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “But you believe it still,” Susan said.

  “Can’t not,” I said.

  “Given my first marriage,” Susan said, “I’d have been better off to wait for you.”

  Some pigeons came by to see if we were feeding anyone. We weren’t and they waddled off. They should have checked with the squirrel.

  “Your uncles feel deeply about her?”

  “My mother? Yeah. In a different way they loved her as much as my father had.”

  “And you were her legacy.”

  “Yep.”

  “But you had girlfriends, before me,” Susan said.

  “Hell,” I said. “I had to keep looking. I didn’t even know your name.”

  Chapter 8

  Jeannie Haden wasn’t my girlfriend. She was a girl who was my friend. We spent a lot of time together. Things were bad at home for her. Her mother and father were getting divorced, and they fought all the time. Jeannie was scared of her father. She only went home when she had to.

  “He’s so mean,” she used to say. “So mean.”

  She told me once her father had a bunch of places, “hideouts,” she called them, scattered along the river, on islands. He didn’t own the land. He just patched together some shacks here and there that he could go to and drink or whatever.

  “He’d go there and get drunk and sometimes bring women there,” Jeannie said. “I heard my mother and him fighting about it. So I snuck out and looked once. I was scared all the time. If he caught me, I don’t know what he woulda done. But I had to see.”

  “Mighta depended on how drunk he was,” I said.

  “He’s pretty drunk a lot,” Jeannie said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Everybody in town knows,” she said.

  “I guess they do,” I said.

  “But they don’t know about the hideouts,” she said. “The one I saw was a filthy, stinky place. I don’t know what kind of woman would go there.”

  “The kind that would go out with your pop, I guess.”

  “Ick,” she said.

  “Your mother liked him,” I said. “She married him.”

  “She was pregnant with me,” Jeannie said. “I think he was kind of handsome then.”

  “She must have liked him some, you know, to get pregnant,” I said.

  “Well, sure,” Jeannie said.

  “She his girlfriend at the time?” I said.

  “Well, she wasn’t a one-night stand, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Jeannie said.

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  “My mother tries very hard,” Jeannie said.

  “I know she does,” I said. “I didn’t mean to say anything bad.”

  Jeannie nodded.

  “I know,” she said. “Poor Momma.”

  “She ever talk to you about it?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know?” I said.

  “I know when they were married,” Jeannie said. “And I know when I was born.”

  I nodded.

  “And it was him?”

  Jeannie was outraged.

  “You think my mother was a slut?”

  “Just asking,” I said. “Patrick says you don’t ask questions, you don’t get answers.”

  “The hell with him,” Jeannie said.

  I shrugged.

  “Well, my mother wasn’t sexing around, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I said. “I was just wondering. I mean, wouldn’t you be glad to find out he wasn’t your father?”

  She started to cry.

  Chapter 9

  “Not what you had hoped for,” Susan said.

  “In those days,” I said, “I knew less about why women cried.”

  “And now?”

  “I understand why men and women cry,” I said.

  “The advantage of maturity,” Susan said.

  “Being young is hard,” I said.

  “Being grown is not so easy either,” Susan said.

  “But it’s easier,” I said.

  She nodded. We were quiet for a moment.

  Then Susan said, “You hunted.”

  “Sure,” I said. “We all did.”

  “You don’t hunt now,” Susan said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Because you disapprove?”

  I shrugged.

  “When we hunted, we hunted for meat,” I said. “It was a way to feed ourselves. Had a vegetable garden too, and in the fall we’d preserve stuff for the winter. We were pretty self-sufficient.”

  Susan smiled.

  “How surprising,” she said.

  “I liked self-sufficient,” I said.

  Susan smiled again, wider.

  “I’ve always suspected that,” she said.

  “Are you making sport of me?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I figured that right out,” I said.

  “I know,” Susan said. “You’re a detective . . . So the hunting wasn’t just for fun.”

  “Not so much,” I said. “Although it often was fun. Especially bird hunting. I liked working in the woods with the dog.”

  “Did you train her to hunt?” Susan said.

  “No. It’s probably genetic. They range like that and come back, without any training. And they’ll point birds without training. But they have to be taught to hold the point. Otherwise they’ll just rush in on the bird and flush it before you’re ready. Before she was trained, Pearl would occasionally get one and kill it.”

  “Why not just let her do that? Kill them for you instead of shooting them?”

  “It’s harder on the bird, for one thing, and by the time you get there, the dog’s got it half eaten.”

  Susan nodded.

  “Was it ever scary?” she said.

  “Pheasants rarely turn on you.”

  “I mean, did you ever get lost or anything?” she said.

  “Me? Pathfinder?” I said. “No, I didn’t. I’d been in the woods all my life. Besides, the dog always knew how to get home.”

  “Did you shoot anything else?” Susan said.

  “Sure, antelope, elk, deer, nothing dangerous unless it fell on you.”

  “Never anything dangerous?” Susan said.

  “Ran into a bear once,” I said.

  “A grizzly?”

  “No, a black bear, big enough, 150 pounds maybe, bigger than I was, for sure.”

  Chapter 10

  We were bird hunting, my father, and me, and the dog, in an old apple orchard that hadn’t been farmed in maybe fifty years. You had to go through bad cover to get there: brambles and small alder that were clumped together and tangled. My father was about thirty yards off to the right, and the dog was out ahead, ranging the way they do and coming back with her tongue lolling out and her tail erect, checking in, and then swinging back out.

  All of a sudden I he
ard the dog bark—half bark, half growl, kind of hysterical—and she came loping back, stopping and turning every few yards to make her hysterical bark/growl, and then she reached me and stood with her front legs stiff and her tail down and her ears flattened back as much as long ears can flatten. She stood there and growled and the hair along her spine stood up. Must be a hell of pheasant, I thought. And then I saw what had spooked her. It was a black bear and he had been eating the fallen apples in the abandoned orchard. The apples had probably fermented in his stomach. Because he was clearly drunk. He was standing upright, swaying a little. The dog was going crazy, growling and whining, and the bear was grunting. I had bird shot in my shotgun. It might have annoyed the bear. But it certainly wouldn’t have stopped him. But I didn’t have anything else, and I was pretty sure if we ran, the bear would chase us. And bears can run much faster than people. And I didn’t know what the dog would do.

  So I stood with my shotgun leveled, hoping that maybe, if he charged and I hit him in the face, it would make him turn. The dog was going crazy, dashing out a few feet and barking and snarling and running back to lean hard against my leg. Everything seemed to move very slowly.

  And then my father was beside me. He hadn’t made any noise coming. Later he told me he heard the dog and from the way she sounded, he was pretty sure it was a bear. He had a shotgun too, but it was no better than what I had. But he also had a big old .45 hog leg of a revolver that he always carried in the woods. He took it out and cocked it and we stood. The bear dropped to all fours and snorted and grunted and dipped its head and stared at us awhile. Then it turned around and left.

  Chapter 11

  “My God,” Susan said. “What did your father say?”

  “He said, ‘Dog’s no good for birds for the rest of the day and we probably ain’t either.’ So we went home.”

  “And he never said what a brave boy or anything?”

  “He said I was smart because I’d lived to hunt another day. Then we went home and sat at the kitchen table with Patrick and Cash and I told them about what happened. Cash got up and got a bottle of scotch from the kitchen cabinet and four glasses. Then my father poured scotch in three of them and some Coke in the fourth. And we drank together.”

  “You’d acted like a man,” Susan said. “So he treated you like a man.”

  “In his way,” I said.

  Susan smiled.

  “‘That brown liquor,’” she said, “‘which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank.’”

  “William Faulkner,” I said.

  “Very good,” Susan said. “For a man with an eighteen-inch neck.”

  “I told you they read to me a lot.”

  She said it again, “‘Not women, not boys and children.’”

  “Sounds sort of sexist, doesn’t it?” I said. “Ageist too.”

  “Maybe we can have his Nobel Prize revoked,” Susan said.

  “Good thing was, that whenever I was in trouble, I’d think about that bear and it helped.”

  “Because you were brave then?” Susan said.

  “I guess, although to tell you the truth, I really think more about sitting around the table drinking soda while my father and my uncles drank their scotch.”

  “The ritual,” she said. “More than the event.”

  “I guess,” I said. “I thought a lot about it when I was in the woods with Jeannie.”

  “Jeannie?” Susan said. “In the woods?”

  “It wasn’t what you think,” I said.

  Chapter 12

  I was hanging outside the variety store with Pearl and some guys when Luke Haden’s car pulled up at the stoplight, with Jeannie in the front seat. I had never seen her riding with her father before. She saw me through the rolled-up window and mouthed the word HELP at me. HELP. HELP. I started toward the car and the light changed and the car moved forward.

  There was a trash truck behind it, much slower to move.

  “Pearl,” I said. “Go home.”

  Then I stepped up onto the back of the trash truck. There were plenty of places to stand and plenty of places to hang on. We used to ride the trucks a lot. See which of us could get the furthest before some cop spotted us and pulled the truck over and made us get off. I knew from experience that the drivers normally had the right-hand rear-view mirror set wider so they could see the next lane, and, therefore, they never saw us. I stayed on the right-hand side of the truck, peering ahead at Luke Haden’s car. It wasn’t much of a car, a big old Ford sedan, with cardboard taped over the back where the rear window got smashed in. It had been maroon, maybe, when it was new. But what with dirt and rust and stuff it was a little hard to say what color it was now.

  The car turned right, onto River Street. I knew that River Street was short, and as the truck slowed at the intersection, I jumped off and ran downhill after the car. When I got to the end, the Ford was parked on the side of the road, empty. There was a path that led to the river. I went down it, moving slower, being more careful. At the end of the muddy path was a little jetty with a couple of rowboats tied to it. I heard the sound of an outboard motor. I stepped out onto the jetty and looked. Jeannie and her father were in a bass boat with her father in back at the motor and Jeannie sitting sort of hunched up in the front.

  I stared after them as they disappeared around the bend. I felt something nudge at my leg. It was Pearl; she must have followed the trash truck and tracked me down River Street.

  “Okay,” I said. “I can’t leave you here.”

  I got into one of the rowboats and gestured Pearl in after me. She sat up front, and we pushed off after them.

  There was a single oar in the boat and it was broken, so I had only a short handle with a blade. It wasn’t much use, but I was able to get the rowboat out into the middle of the river, where the current took over. Pretty soon, the sound of the motor faded. I used the broken oar to steer. I wasn’t going to catch them at this rate, but maybe I could find where they went. Besides, I didn’t know what else to do. And if I found them, then what? All I had was a jackknife. I didn’t know what to do about that either. So I just drifted, following Jeannie down the big river, under the dark arch of trees that grew out from both shorelines. I felt like I was in a tunnel, without much choice about where I was going. And with no clear idea of what to do when I got there.

  Chapter 13

  “How old were you?” Susan said.

  “Maybe fourteen,” I said.

  “Weren’t you scared?”

  “I was terrified,” I said.

  “You couldn’t tell the police or your father?”

  “I’d have lost them,” I said. “I didn’t know where they were going. I figured when they got to the river that they were going to one of his hideouts. But I didn’t know where that was, not even which direction, you know? Upriver or down.”

  “And you had no time to think,” Susan said. “And you were fourteen years old.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “How about the dog?” Susan said.

  “She was kind of comforting, actually. She’d been on the river with me a lot over the years, and she liked riding in the boat.”

  “Why did you do it?” she said.

  “Go after her?”

  “Yes. Why didn’t you say, it’s an issue between a father and his child. It’s not my business.”

  “I never thought about that,” I said.

  “But you were fourteen years old and alone.”

  “It seemed like the right thing to do,” I said.

  “I’m not saying it wasn’t,” Susan said.

  “My father used to tell me, ‘Every person is afraid sometimes. Thing is not to let it run you. Thing is to go ahead and do what you need to do.’ ”

  Chapter 14

  An occasional turtle splashed off a log into the water as we drifted past. In the front of the rowboat Pearl was very interested in the turtles. As she was with the frogs that jumped or the jays that flew about under the high treetops
. On a small island in the middle of the river we saw a huge snapping turtle that made an odd noise, between a hiss and a grunt, at us as we floated by him. Pearl laid her long ears back flat and hunched a little at him.

  She’d hunted enough and been trained enough so that she never made any noise in the woods. She’d bark at people from the front porch of our house. But in the woods she never made a sound unless we ran into a drunken bear.

  Occasionally we passed a fishing camp or a little summer cottage with a boat dock. And, of course, here and there along the riverbank, with wide empty spaces in between, there were towns and roads and cars and ma-and-pa stores and people doing the stuff that people do. But on the river, mostly, we were as alone as if we had gone back in time.

  White perch broke up from under water now and then to snap a dragonfly, and if I looked straight down into the rust-colored water, sometimes I’d see a channel catfish. The river smelled swampy, and along the shoreline among the trees were a tangle of wild blueberry plants and the little thorny vines that I didn’t know the name of that caught at your ankles when you were hunting.

  The banks of the river were muddy and the roots of trees that grew close to the river were exposed. Tree roots are not good looking. Once I saw a doe come down through the underbrush and the root tangle to drink from the river, picking her way so lightly it was like her feet were reaching down to touch the ground. Above us all, a hawk circled and banked without any effort. Once in a while he would suddenly drop like a rock into the water and fly off with a fish or a frog. He would disappear for a while and then he would be back, circling and banking effortlessly. Pearl watched him for a long time.

  I wasn’t wearing a watch, but the sun was very low when I spotted the bass boat. It was pulled up onto a small muddy area at the edge of a big island in the middle of the river where the river was at its wildest. The motor had been tilted into the boat, so that what I saw was the naked propeller staring out at me.