Dancing Bear Read online

  JAMES CRUMLEY’S

  DANCING BEAR

  “If you like your detective fiction tough and tenacious you will love James Crumley….No one does it better.”

  — THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

  “Crumley works with fever on the brow, and the most lyrical and true English sentences I’ve seen lately. Dancing Bear is a wonder of compression, truth and wisdom.”

  — BARRY HANNAH

  “Top-notch…an imaginative narrative sense, chaotic and even manic, but violently dramatic…excitingly new.”

  — THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “A clear triumph.”

  — THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

  “Dancing Bear is a powerful novel by a writer of extraordinary power who mixes humor with blood, environmental issues with cocaine jangles and post-coital blues, the Dancing Bear Wilderness Area of Montana with peppermint schnapps and hopelessness.”

  — THE EL PASO HERALD POST

  “Extremely well-written.”

  — THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  ALSO BY JAMES CRUMLEY

  The Wrong Case

  The Last Good Kiss

  One to Count Cadence

  First Vintage Books Edition, September 1984

  Copyright © 1983 by James Crumley

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Random House, Inc. in 1983.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Crumley, James, 1939-

  Dancing bear.

  I. Title.

  [PS3553.R78D3 1984] 813′.54 84-40008

  ISBN 0-394-72576-X (pbk.)

  579B86

  eBook ISBN 9781101973561

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by James Crumley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  For the Dump Family Singers

  — Orris, Nelon, Young Eugene, Ma,

  and Little Shorty

  …and remember, my little grandchildren, in the old days there were more bears than Indian people, black bears and brown bears, cinnamon bears and the great grizzly, and we had no honey, no sweetness in the teepees, and Brother Bee was always angry, going around stinging the Indian people. The bears always found the bee trees before the Indian people, ripped them apart, ate the honeycomb, and stole the honey with their sharp claws and rough tongues. And the bees were always angry, because the bears, poor souls, did not know about the sacred smoke to make the bees feel friendly, and the bears did not know about the songs of thanksgiving so the bees would forgive them, but worst of all, the bears suffered from greed and they always took all the honey, left none for the bees. The bears knew about honey but not about bees, so the Indian people had no sweetness in the teepees.

  Then one day, little grandchildren, a young man of peace, Chil-a-ma-cho, He Who Dreams Awake, came upon a ruined bee tree. Even though there was no honey left for him to take and even though the bees were very angry, he smoked his pipe with the bees and sang the songs of thanksgiving for all the good things of the earth. And when the bees smelled the sacred smoke and heard the songs, they settled down and went about their business. In return, the Grandmother Bee gave Chil-a-ma-cho a vision.

  When he woke from the dream, he blessed the Grandmother Bee for her wisdom, then followed the tracks of Brother Bear across the mountains to the edge of a chokecherry thicket by the meadows where once we dug the camas root, singing the songs of thanksgiving and the songs of sadness as he went along. In the thicket he found Brother Bear sleeping, his breath still sweet with honeycomb, and Chil-a-ma-cho prayed to the spirit of Brother Bear for forgiveness, then plunged his lance into the bear’s throat. Once again, as we always should, little grandchildren, Chil-a-ma-cho prayed for forgiveness for killing one of Mother Earth’s precious beasts. Then he skinned the hide from Brother Bear, ate the liver and the heart dipped in gall, scraped the fat from the hide, saved it, then worked the skin for three days and three nights with the brains until it was as soft as a deerskin shirt. For another three days and three nights, he purified himself with fire and fasting and bathing away his man smell. Then he rubbed his skin with the fat of Brother Bear and put the hide on his shoulders.

  When the moon rose high over the meadows, little grandchildren, Chil-a-ma-cho walked on all fours into the open, grunting and snuffling, speaking the bear language the Grandmother Bee had given him. When the other bears around came to greet their new brother, Chil-a-ma-cho began to dance the steps the Grandmother Bee had given him. The first night the other bears thought their new brother must have come from someplace beyond the mountains where the bears were crazy, so they went back into the lodge-pole pine to watch. The second night a few danced with him to be polite, as we must be to our brothers from beyond the mountains, and on the third night they all joined in, danced and danced in the sacred circle, danced until all the bears dropped.

  The next day as the bears slept, Chil-a-ma-cho led the Benniwah as they followed the bees, the bees whose legs were hairy with pollen, led them to the bee trees and the honey. The People were happy, in a hurry for honey, but Chil-a-ma-cho made them make the friendly smoke, made them leave half the honey for the bees, made them sing the songs of forgiveness. The bees forgave the Benniwah, and stopped going around stinging everybody.

  After that we had sweetness in our lodges—except for Chil-a-ma-cho, who gave himself to the dancing and the bears and never ate honey, and it is for his memory that the Benniwah forsake honey during the days of the Bear Dance before we harvest the honey with the sacred smoke and sing the songs of forgiveness for sweetness in the lodges.

  Of course, as you well know, little grandchildren, sometime later the white man showed up, and now there are not too many Indian people and even fewer bears, and even Brother Bee, bless his spirit, lives in a little square house and works for the white man. There has not been much sweetness in this world, or the next, since then, not much dancing either. Even He Who Dreams Awake, Chil-a-ma-cho, sleeps.

  — A BENNIWAH TALE

  Chapter 1

  We had been blessed with a long, easy fall for western Montana. The two light snowfalls had melted before noon, and in November we had three weeks of Indian Summer so warm and seductive that even we natives seemed to forget about winter. But in the canyon of Hell Roaring Creek, where I live, when the morning breezes stirred off the stone-cold water and into the golden, dying rustle of the cottonwoods and creek willows, you could smell the sear, frozen heart of winter, February, or, as the Indians sometimes called it, the Moon of the Children Weeping in the Lodges, crying in hunger.

  I worked the night shift for Haliburton Security, though, and didn’t see or smell much of the mornings that fall, since I spent them wrapped in a down comforter with the creek-side window open wide to the cold morning breeze, only my nose, stuffy with cigarette smoke and the sweet stench of peppermint schnapps, exposed to the wind.

  On this particular November morning, though, when a rumbling clatter crossed the loose boards of my front porch and a sharp rattle at my screen door jerked me halfway out of a hangover sleep, the cold breeze in my nose told me it was nowhere near noontime, far too early in the morning
for civilized behavior. In the first confused moments of waking, I thought it might be a bear rummaging in my trash cans. Then I remembered it was fall, and the bears usually came down out of the Diablo Range in the spring after a hard winter sleeping. Besides, the city of Meriwether had grown up the canyon over the years, a flood of houses and people that stretched for miles beyond my small log house nestled at the head of Milodragovitch Park, so the bears did not come down to my house anymore. Even if they chanced a journey through all the pastel plywood houses, they wouldn’t find an easy meal waiting in a tin trash can, but all my garbage securely bound in a fifty-five-gallon drum with a locking lid. A meal only a grizzly could eat; and nobody had seen a silvertip on this side of the Diablos in forty or fifty years. The only danger to my garbage can came from the huge new automated trucks that picked them up; sometimes the front lift held the cans too tightly, ruptured them like rotten fruit, or banged the sides flat as the lift dumped the trash into the bed of the tasteful blue garbage trucks. Progress, they called it: garbage untouched by human hands, safe from hungry bears.

  Then the pounding on my front door brought me back to the present as it clearly became the rap of knuckles falling directly on the large plastic sign that politely asked that I not be disturbed before noon. During the two years and four months I had been working for Haliburton Security, I hadn’t been sleeping very well. The boredom of the work—rattling doorknobs, guarding twenty-four convenience markets, and holding the hands of lost children in shopping malls—had caused a sudden, and unseemly in a man of my years, affection for cocaine. I slept through the mornings, true, but badly, lightly. I had taken the bell out of my telephone and put the sign on the front door, but it seemed nothing helped.

  The pounding went on, a dull echo bound within the thick log walls, booming inside my head. I hadn’t been asleep long enough to have a hangover; I was still half drunk. I feared I knew whose fist tolled for me. Sometimes my next-door neighbor came over in the mornings after her husband had left for work. Usually she wanted a toot or two, then some sordid business in my bedroom. She was young and athletic and not bad-looking for a mean, skinny girl, and I might have enjoyed her visits a bit more if I hadn’t known that her husband worked two jobs just to keep her outfitted in a rainbow’s hue of ski clothes and lift tickets and to keep up the payments on her new white Corvette. Ignorance might not be bliss, but too often knowledge took the fun out of some parts of life.

  As I rolled out of bed and struggled into my jeans I tried to think of some way to put her off, but I had run out of exotic venereal diseases and disabling prostate disorders. Resigned to my fate, I stumbled to the door. But when I opened it, a postman in a summer uniform holding a clipboard stood on my porch, his hairy fist raised for another resounding knock. He looked as bad as I felt and as if he didn’t care if he hit me or the door.

  “Can’t you read?” I groaned, jerking a thumb at my sign.

  “Of course,” he grunted, “but she said it would be all right.” Then he nodded to where my next-door neighbor was standing in her driveway, dressed in a heavy sweater and a down vest while she serenely washed the dew and pulp mill smog off her beloved automobile. She smirked wisely, an eyetooth glistening in the curl of her thin upper lip.

  “Special Delivery Certified Mail,” the postman announced with chattering teeth. “Sign here,” he said, then prodded me with the cold metal ring atop his clipboard.

  “Ouch,” I said, then looked at him.

  He stared at me out of two painfully bloodshot eyes sunk into a swarthy, unshaven face. His short-sleeved shirt and short pants fit him like a dirty sack. Even his shoes looked too large, and when he danced as the cold breeze licked his legs, his shoes didn’t move.

  “Sign here,” he said again.

  “Who’s it from?” I asked. Back in the old days when I worked as a private investigator out of my own office and when I made enough money to afford the string of ex-wives I had somehow accumulated, I learned the hard way not to sign for mail I didn’t want. “Well, who’s it from?”

  “What the hell difference does it make?” he answered, then held the clipboard to his chest. “Just sign the son of a bitch before I freeze to death.”

  “No way,” I said, then briefly wondered if it was against the law to impersonate a mailman to deliver a subpoena. “I’ll just pick it up at the post office,” I said; “maybe your supervisor will be kind enough to tell me who it’s from.”

  “Stuff my supervisor,” he said as he got me in the belly with the clipboard again. “Either sign here, man, or I’ll shit-can it, and you can whistle Dixie, asshole.”

  “I’m a taxpayer, jerk,” I said, which was partially true, “and you’ve got a dirty mouth for a government employee. What’s your name?”

  “No more shit,” he muttered, dancing in a small circle, the clipboard raised, “no more fucking shit.” Then he broke the clipboard over my head.

  For a moment both of us were too stunned to move, then we went to the ground growling like a pair of rabid dogs, snarling and snapping, biting and scratching as we tumbled off the porch and onto the dew-damp grass, our hands at each other’s throats, our teeth bared, too mad to consider technique, and if my next-door neighbor hadn’t turned her hose on us, we might have hurt ourselves, but once we were wet, we were just too cold to fight.

  Things took a bit to straighten out, but ten minutes later we were warm again, sitting at ny breakfast bar wrapped in blankets and huddled over cups of coffee and shots of schnapps while my next-door neighbor ran the postman’s uniform through her dryer. We compared wounds and laughed at ourselves, discussed the long-term tensions of marital discord. He had spent the night before drinking and fighting with his second wife, and when he passed out on the kitchen floor in his boxer shorts, his wife, in some demented vision of revenge for unnamed sins, gathered up every stitch of his clothing and threw them off the Dottle Street Bridge into the Meriwether River below. Unfortunately, the only uniform he could borrow that morning was dirty, summertime, and three sizes too large. She had done things like that before, he added sadly. Once she had cut off the left legs on all his pants, and another time she had snipped the toes out of all his socks. I had been there before, far too often. Ah, women, I thought, God love ’em. And especially my five ex-wives. But, Lord knows, don’t piss them off. They can be fiendish in search of revenge. I kept my thoughts to myself, though, and when my next-door neighbor brought his uniform back, we shook hands and parted, if not friends, at least veterans of the same wars.

  All’s well that ends well, I thought contritely as I poured myself another shot of schnapps. The postman had a dry uniform, slightly cleaner if no better fit, his pride, and my signature; I had my mail, slightly damp; and my next-door neighbor had her morning’s amusement.

  I had only glanced at the envelope while we talked, just long enough to see that I didn’t know who had gone to such a fuss to write to me. I picked it up again, the heavy butternut bond of envelope rich against my fingers, and stared at the return address embossed in gold script. Mrs. T. Harrison Weddington, of 14 Park Lane, Meriwether, Montana, had something to say to me. The message on the deckled-edged stationery had been written in brown ink with a spidery but firm, old-fashioned hand trained in the Palmer method.

  My dear Mr. Milodragovitch, since I have been unable to reach you by telephone, either at your office or at your home, I have taken the liberty of writing you. If you find this to be an intrusion upon your personal privacy, please accept my deepest apologies in advance. However, it is imperative that we meet at your earliest convenience. I may have a case for you.

  The note was signed “With kindest regards, Sarah Weddington,” and included a postscript in another, more modern and casual hand with the telephone number. When I looked at the letter again, it didn’t seem to make much sense. The text was clear but the words seemed strung together oddly, as if they had been written by somebody who had learned English in another country. And the name, Sarah Weddington, seemed fami
liar, but I didn’t know why. And the phrase “a case”…My god, even when I worked for myself, I never got cases. Whiskey came in cases; the sort of work I did came in crocks.

  I hadn’t had my own office in nearly five years, not since the day the trustees of my father’s estate evicted me from my own building because of a small matter of six months’ back rent. Actually, it wouldn’t be my building until I turned fifty-two and finally came into my father’s estate.

  A case, I thought, then dug out my city directory, which told me nothing more than I already knew. Park Lane was a short twisting street in an old residential neighborhood, the McCravey development, just west of the campus of Mountain States College, and the houses along Park Lane were all old Victorian dowagers set on two- and three-acre lots. Just the taxes and utility bills on one of them would keep me in steaks and cocaine for a year. Even if this “case” turned out to be a crazy old woman who had lost her favorite cat, I suspected I would be well paid for my time, so I called the number.

  A young woman’s voice answered the telephone, said she was not Mrs. Weddington, said my call had been expected and I could see Mrs. Weddington at either eleven that morning or four that afternoon. I thought about dumping a shift at Haliburton’s so I could have a nap and go at four, but I settled for eleven. No sense in losing a day’s pay for a wild-goose, or -cat, chase.

  “You wouldn’t know what this is in regard to, would you?” I asked the young woman.

  “Nope,” she answered, then hung up.

  Even though I had just over two hours to make the appointment, I found myself hurrying to my closet to see if I had any appropriate attire in which to call upon rich folks. But I had torn the knee out of my blue pin-stripe three-piece courtroom suit and lost one of my black boots in a scuffle on the courthouse steps a few years back after I had testified in a rather messy divorce hearing, and my last wife’s cat had thrown up the remains of a garter snake on my only sport coat. Not a thing to wear, I thought, then saw myself in the dresser mirror. It wasn’t going to make a bit of difference what I wore. A scrape on my forehead still bubbled watery blood and my left eye was already turning black.