Chasing the Bear (5 page)

“No.”

“Poor devil,” I said.

“Poor wife and daughter,” Jeannie said.

“You don’t like him at all,” I said.

“I hate him,” Jeannie said.

I had nothing to say to that.

Big drops of rain began to splat on the water, sending out wide ripples. I looked up through the leaves and the sky was dark. It got darker as I watched. And the rain came harder. Pearl didn’t mind being wet. But she didn’t like the feel of the raindrops hitting her. Jeannie unrolled the blankets and put one over Pearl. She offered me the second one.

“No,” I said. “You.”

“But what about you?” she said.

“I’m a Spenser,” I said. “Tough.”

She smiled and put the blanket over her head and around her shoulders.

“My hair must be a mess,” she said.

“Kind of,” I said.

“You didn’t have to agree so quick,” Jeannie said.

“But you still look good,” I said.

“Ha!” Jeannie said.

The rain came harder. It was quite dark under the trees. The river meandered mostly, in big looping curves, so that ten miles on the river might be one mile as the crow flies. At the moment we were in one of the more or less straight stretches, and ahead of us I could see something through the murk. It might have been a bridge. The rain came straight down and fast. It was hard to see through it. We drifted toward whatever the something was, and when we got close enough, we saw it was a railroad bridge.

“Maybe it won’t be raining so hard under the bridge,” I said.

“But if it’s a railroad bridge,” Jeannie said, “won’t it just be a trestle? You know, ties on a bridge frame?”

“Maybe there’ll be some sort of solid cover at each end,” I said.

“Can’t be worse than this,” Jeannie said.

I steered us with my broken oar toward the near end of the bridge. As we got close to it, I made out a sign. It said:

I could feel the current quicken a little even as I was reading the sign. I steered the boat to the shore under the bridge and tied it to a sapling.

“Far as the boat’s gonna take us,” I said.

We were under a support arch of concrete at the near end of the bridge, and it did protect us from the rain. Pearl looked around at me as if to say, “It’s about time.” With the blanket draped on her head she looked like a painting of a Dutch peasant woman my father and I had looked at once in a museum in Denver.

“When the rain stops,” I said, “we can climb up onto the bridge and follow the railroad tracks. Eventually they’ll take us someplace.”

“Soon, I hope,” Jeannie said.

“Sooner or later, tracks lead someplace,” I said.

We sat for a while under the bridge. But the rain kept coming. I was already soaked through. But it wasn’t cold, and there was no wind. Once you get soaked, you get sort of used to it. We sat some more. Pearl sat under her blanket and looked at the river.

Then from upriver, a long way off, I heard something. I leaned forward trying to hear better.

“What?” Jeannie said.

I pointed upriver.

“Listen,” I said.

We listened.

“My God,” Jeannie said.

I nodded.

“It’s the bass boat.”

“What
do you think he will do if he catches us?” I said.

“He’ll be drunk,” Jeannie said. “He’ll be very angry.”

“So what do you think?” I said.

Jeannie looked at me for a while. Her eyes steady on mine. Her face perfectly still.

Then she said, “I think he’ll kill you.”

“And you?”

“I don’t think he’ll kill me,” she said. “But he’ll give me a fearful beating and drag me off to live with him God knows where.”

I nodded.

“He’ll probably kill Pearl too,” Jeannie said.

I nodded again. It was like there wasn’t much emotion in either of us. Like if we let it go, it would just roll over us and we’d be paralyzed. So, there we were sitting in our little boat on the river under the bridge in the rain, talking about being killed or kidnapped like we were planning to skip school.

Thanks to all the curves in the river, I knew he wasn’t that close to us.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get up on the bridge.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I am not gonna let him do any of it,” I said.

“What are . . .”

“Come on,” I said. “Take that bottle of Coke.”

The crackers and cookies were a soggy mess in the bottom of the boat. I stuffed the jar of peanut butter in my shirt.

The three of us climbed out of the boat. Jeannie and Pearl headed up the bank. I wedged the broken oar into a space between the seat and the side of the rowboat. I draped the two soaking blankets over it. Then I took the coil of rope and put it over my shoulder and kicked the rowboat out into the river. It bobbed gently for a moment and then slid sort of sideways as the current caught it and turned it and began to drift it under the bridge.

In the narrowing distance the sound of the bass boat motor was getting a little louder. I turned and scrambled up the riverbank toward the bridge. Pearl and Jeannie were at the top.

“You and Pearl get behind the bushes over there,” I said. “Pearl will probably want to come with me, but don’t let her. If she causes you any trouble, give her a little peanut butter. She’ll lap it off your finger.”

“What are you doing?” Jeannie said.

Her voice was sounding panicky.

“Stay right here until I come back,” I said.

“What?”

I shook my head and turned and ran to the center of the railroad bridge, bending as low as I could. The bass boat was closer. I looked over the edge of the bridge, and the caution sign was there, nailed to one of the bridge timbers. I lay flat and reached over and with both hands bent the bottom of the sign up toward me. It pulled loose. I dragged it up onto the bridge and laid it across the ties, with the writing facing up.

I started to get up and the bass boat came around the bend of the river. I dropped back flat again, lying against one of the big creosote-stinking timbers, trying to be invisible.

He probably wouldn’t have seen me even if he looked up. The hard rain in his face would make it difficult to see. As the bass boat got closer, I could see that he was drinking from a mason jar. As he came to the bridge, he looked up. He was so close I could see him squinting against the rain.

Then he was under the bridge, and I was looking straight down at him. I was so still I’m not sure I breathed at all while he was beneath me. He was wearing a yellow slicker and a nasty-looking felt hat. I couldn’t see the bowie knife, but I knew it was there, inside the coat.

When he was past the bridge, I swiveled slightly to watch. Ahead of him my rowboat with the blankets bunched in the back was drifting along in the murk. He must have seen it too, because I heard the motor on the bass boat rev a little higher. Then the rowboat drifted around the bend, and, closing on it fast, the bass boat disappeared right after. I stood and ran to the shore where Jeannie was.

“What?” she said.

“Stay there,” I said.

I ran past her through the woods, toward the bend in the river. I got to the bend in time to see my rowboat go over the falls. The motor on the bass boat was screaming as Luke tried to turn and go back upstream. He couldn’t. The current was too strong. It pushed the bass boat stern first to the top of the falls. Luke stood at the last moment as if he could dive into the water and swim to shore. Which he couldn’t. The boat went over before he got out of it and he was gone.

Behind him on the river, bobbing in the current, was the nearly empty mason jar, which, before it went over the falls, filled with water and sank.

We
walked west along the railroad tracks, Pearl galloping ahead, exploring the woods, occasionally putting up a woodcock and looking at me in puzzlement when I didn’t shoot it.

“You saw him,” Jeannie said.

“Yes.”

“He was dead?” she asked.

“Floating facedown,” I said. “I watched him for five or six minutes. He banged round in the white water for a while and then floated downstream.”

“Dead,” Jeannie said.

“Had to be.”

“Good,” Jeannie said.

Pearl appeared from a clump of alder and looked at me and wagged her tail. I nodded, and she dashed off again into the woods. The rain didn’t seem to bother her. And she didn’t seem depressed about having a couple of Oreo cookies to eat. She seemed to be having a pretty good time.

“How do you feel?” I said.

“Glad,” she said.

“Nothing else?”

“Relief,” she said. “I mean, I know he was my father in a, you know, scientific way. But he was never a father. He was always just something to be scared of.”

I looked at the bruises marking her wrist and nodded. We kept walking.

“He used to smack my mother around,” Jeannie said. “Me too. Even after my mom threw him out and they got divorced, he used to show up drunk sometimes and try to make her . . . do stuff.”

I nodded.

“She ever call the cops?” I said.

Jeannie shook her head.

“She was too embarrassed,” Jeannie said.

“Too bad you didn’t tell me more about it,” I said.

“You’re a kid, what were you going to do?” Jeannie said.

“I’da told my father,” I said. “And my uncles.”

“They would have done something?”

“Yes,” I said.

The rain kept coming as we walked. It was kind of amazing how you adjust to stuff. We were wet through and had been wet through for so long that we didn’t pay much attention to it anymore.

“When we get out of the woods,” Jeannie said, “are we going to tell people what happened?”

“Not until we talk with my father and my uncles,” I said.

“So what do we tell people?”

“That we got lost in the woods,” I said.

“But you’re going to tell your father the truth,” Jeannie said.

“And my uncles. They’ll know what to do.”

“How do you know that?” Jeannie said.

“They always know what to do,” I said.

“They do? My mom never does,” Jeannie said.

Pearl had tired of the woods and was now trotting along the tracks in front of us. Jeannie put her hand on my arm, and we stopped for a moment. She looked straight at me.

“You saved me,” she said.

I nodded.

“You knew what to do,” she said.

“Didn’t have a bunch of choices,” I said.

In front of us, Pearl stopped suddenly and raised her head and began to sniff the air. I walked to where she stood and sniffed. There was a smell. I sniffed some more.

Someone was frying bacon. I heard a car horn. The three of us went on down the tracks, around a curve, and there was a town.

“What
did your father say?” Susan asked me.

“Actually it was my uncle Cash that came to get us,” I said. “We were about twenty miles downriver, and we told him what happened on the ride home.”

“And what did Uncle Cash say?”

“Not much. He never had all that much to say anyway.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He said, ‘Sounds like you done pretty good. We’ll talk with your father about it.’ ”

“Your father was the man?” Susan said.

“It was mostly like a house with four equals in it,” I said.

“Including you.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but in retrospect, I guess my father was a little more equal.”

“And you?” Susan said.

“Maybe a little less, until I was older.”

“They must have been out of their minds with worry,” Susan said.

“Probably, though I gotta say they didn’t mention it.”

“So what was your father’s reaction when you got home?”

“Mostly like Cash’s, Patrick too. They both said it sounded like I’d done what I had to do and done it well.”

“That must have made you feel good.”

I nodded.

“Did,” I said.

“How about Jeannie?”

“My uncle Cash told her that she could think of us as family and anytime she needed help come to one of us. Patrick and my father said that was so.”

“And?” Susan said.

“And she started to cry.”

Susan nodded.

“Finally,” she said, “someone to depend on. Must have felt good for her.”

A couple of pigeons came to where we sat on the bench and stood giving us the beady eye. We had no food to give them. So after a long accusa tory moment, they waddled to the next bench.

“Did you know,” Susan said, “in certain tribal cultures of the early Middle Ages, the child of a princess was raised by her brothers?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “Why did they do that?”

“Something about keeping the question of bloodline in-house, so to speak,” Susan said.

“A little-known fact,” I said.

“I have a PhD from Harvard,” Susan said. “I know many of them.”

“All of them as useful as that?” I said.

“Oh, heavens no,” Susan said. “But I do have a question.”

“Of course you do,” I said. “You’re a shrink.”

“How did you feel?” she said.

“Me?”

“You. You were fourteen years old and you’d just killed a man.”

“At the time, I didn’t know quite how I felt,” I said. “I’m not sure I do now.”

Cash
drove Jeannie home. I took a shower and put on clean clothes. There were biscuits left over from breakfast. My father cooked up some antelope steaks and fried some green tomatoes. When Cash came back, we sat down to supper at the kitchen table.