Chasing the Bear (2 page)

And we left.

“How
come he didn’t arrest you?” I said to my father when we got home.

“Known Cecil most of my life,” my father said.

“But wasn’t it against the law?” I said. “What you did?”

“There’s legal,” my father said, “and there’s right. Cecil knows the difference.”

“And what you did was right,” I said.

“Yep. Cecil would have done it too.”

“How you supposed to know that what you’re doing is right?” I said.

“Ain’t all that hard,” my uncle Patrick said. “Most people know what’s right. Sometimes they can’t do it.”

“Or don’t want to,” Cash said.

“But how do you know?” I said.

My father sat back and thought a minute.

“You can’t know,” he said. “But you think about it before you do it, if you got time, and then you trust yourself.”

“How ’bout if you don’t have time to think and you done it and it was wrong?” I said.

“Did it,” my father corrected me.

He was a bear for me saying things right. Even when he didn’t always say it right himself. When he wasn’t around, I talked like all the other kids talked, and I think my father knew that. As long as I knew how to talk right, then I could choose.

“Sometimes you make a mistake,” he said. “Everybody does.”

“It sounds too hard,” I said. “How do I know I can trust myself?”

“It’ll be pretty much instinct,” my father said. “If you been raised right.”

“How do I know I’m being raised right?” I said.

My father looked at my uncles. All three of them smiled.

“None of us knows that,” my father said.

I nodded. It was a lot to think about.

“How ’bout, what’s right is what feels good afterwards,” my father said. “It’s in a book, by a famous writer.”

My father wasn’t educated. Neither were my uncles. And they didn’t know what they were supposed to read. So they read everything. Not long after I was born, my father bought a secondhand set of great books, bound in red leather, and he and Patrick and Cash used to take turns reading to me every night before bed. None of them had any idea what was considered appropriate for a little kid. They just took turns plowing on through the classics of Western literature in half-hour chunks every night. I didn’t understand most of it, and I was bored with a lot of it. But I loved my father and my uncles, and I liked getting their full attention.

“
Were
you scared?” Susan said. “After the fight in the barroom?”

“No,” I said. “I was never scared with them.”

“And you felt important to them,” Susan said.

“Very.”

The swan boats, escorted by ducks, moved slowly around the small lagoon, under the small bridge, around the other small lagoon, and back.

“Much of what you know,” Susan said, “you learned at home.”

I nodded.

“Where you felt safe.”

“Sure.”

“With people who loved you,” Susan said.

“Absolutely.”

“And they took turns,” Susan said. “Reading to you and all.”

“They took turns with everything,” I said. “So none of them got ground down, so to speak, by being the only parent.”

“And all of them trusted each other to look out for you,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“Did you like the books they read to you?” Susan asked.

“I guess,” I said. “Sometimes I remember something and understand it in retrospect.”

“Probably better than you would if it had been taught to you in school.”

“Remember the Paul Simon song?” I said.

Susan smiled and sang. Badly.

“ ‘When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.’ ”

“How come someone as perfect as you can’t sing a lick?” I said.

“It’s the flaw that highlights perfection,” Susan said.

“Like a beauty mark,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said.

A squirrel darted toward us and stopped hopefully.

“Do you have anything to give him?” Susan said.

“No.”

“Sorry,” Susan said.

The squirrel lingered until it was clear we were a waste of time. Then he darted off.

“So it wasn’t all about being tough guys,” Susan said to me.

“It was never all about being tough guys,” I said. “It was more about knowing what to do. They were big on knowing how to do what you needed to do. Read, fish, hunt, fight, carpenter, cook.”

“Better to know than not know,” Susan said.

I grinned. “They taught me about sex, quite early too.”

“And well,” Susan said.

They’d
read to me after supper.

Before supper, every other day, one of them boxed with me. They would put on the mitts and let me hammer away with one of them, my father or one of my uncles, calling out the punches.

“Left jab, jab, right cross, left jab. Jab. Jab. Left hook to the head . . . left hook to the body . . . right uppercut . . . hammer punch off the uppercut . . . right back fist.”

The workout was exhausting, but it got me in shape pretty quick.

“Too many bullies in the world,” Patrick used to say. “It’s good to know what you’re doing.”

I liked the boxing. I was an energetic kid and they were all careful not to hurt me. And I liked the feeling that I might win a fight if I had one.

“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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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 heard 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.