Dancing Bear Page 4

  “Please,” she murmured, “thank you.”

  As I led her back to the couch her arm quivered beneath my hand, a frail and pitiful anger trickling through her body. This time she slept. I found an afghan and folded it around her legs, watched her until she fell into the regular sputtering breath of a sleep near death, then I took her cold cup of coffee out on the balcony, where I smoked and stared blindly back up the Hardrock Valley. I would have given anything for a good stiff drink.

  In July of 1952 my outfit was making its third assault up the ruined slopes of Old Baldy, the one west of Ch’orwon, when a two-hundred-and-forty-pound Hawaiian staff sergeant from G Company of the 23rd jumped into the shell hole where I had taken cover. He broke three of my ribs and my collarbone, and my left wrist so badly that it had to be pinned. He probably saved my life. In the nine days of fighting over Old Baldy, my outfit took eighty percent casualties.

  Six weeks later, when I was at the Oakland Depot waiting for my medical leave to begin, the chaplain came by my bunk to tell me my mother had just died. It wasn’t much of a surprise, since she had been in and out of hospitals for years, at first with imagined complaints but later with liver and stomach complications as a result of her secret drinking. Then the chaplain switched to his Dr. Kildare voice and gave me the kicker: she had hanged herself with a silk stocking at a fat farm in Arizona.

  I spent my leave at the Mark Hopkins, smoking cigarettes and staring through the foggy afternoons at the Bay as if I could see the great ocean rolling beyond. Somewhere out there, the war, where I would not go again. Somewhere behind me, back East, my mother’s grave, which I never saw. After my discharge I went to Mexico for the first time, lost myself in a sea of mescal until I felt like an agave grub floating in the clear, fiery liquid.

  Standing on Sarah’s balcony, I wanted to fall back into the bottle one last time, bottom-out in some open sewer, but when I went to work for Colonel Haliburton, I had promised him that I would quit trying to kill myself with a whiskey bottle. So I drank schnapps, which I hated, and stayed fairly sober, but right then I longed for an ocean of whiskey, one last chance with self-destruction.

  —

  Twenty minutes later Sarah woke and excused herself shyly, then limped slowly toward the upstairs hallway. When she came back, she had combed her hair and freshened her light make-up, but the cosmetic changes weren’t even skin-deep. She looked tired, afraid, sick unto death, but she forced a game smile, a sly wink, even a small lilt into the dark huskiness of her voice.

  “I know you noticed the binoculars when you came in,” she said, “and I assume you didn’t think I was engaged in bird-watching.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Because of my view of the neighborhood, because of my loneliness, perhaps because of my addled mind—whatever, I have taken to watching my neighbors. It is an ugly habit, true, but I keep what I learn to myself.” She paused. “And I am willing to pay your usual daily rate plus liberal expenses and a substantial bonus…”

  “To do what?” I asked, wondering if I had missed something.

  “To satisfy an old woman’s curiosity,” she answered, “nothing more than that. Nothing illegal, I assure you, nothing complex or dangerous.”

  “How?” I said, surprised that I felt a small pang of loss at the promise of nothing illegal, complex, or dangerous.

  “Come with me,” she said as she raised herself slowly from the couch. I took her arm and followed her outside to the balcony. “See that small park?” She pointed south-southeast to a wedge of green between Park and Virginia. “Every Thursday afternoon for the past six weeks, two cars park there, a man in one, a young woman in the other—he looks to be in his forties and rather scruffy, and I would guess she is in her late twenties, an attractive young woman—and they sit in her car for an hour or so, talking, it seems.” Then Sarah turned to me. “I would very much like to know who they are, what they talk about, why they meet like this. Could you do that for me?” When I didn’t answer immediately, she added, “Or more to the point: Will you?”

  “Well…ah, I don’t know, I’ve—”

  “What these people do is probably none of my business,” she said as she led me back into the solarium, “but I can afford to indulge my curiosity.” She opened the drawer of the small table where the binoculars sat, took out a long white envelope, and set it on the table. “This envelope contains five thousand dollars in cash, an assortment of my credit cards, which have been cleared for your use, and the license-plate number of the man’s car—a Washington plate—the young woman arrives in a different automobile each time, rented, I assume. Are you interested?”

  “I don’t know what to say, ma’am. This is a little weird, you know.”

  “I’m sorry, my dear boy,” she said, smiling, “but rich old women are eccentric, not weird.”

  “Of course.”

  “Take a few days to think about it, if you like,” she said, putting the envelope back in the drawer and closing it slowly. “If you would just let me know by Thursday morning what you decide. If you decide against it, perhaps you can recommend one of your colleagues.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “And one last favor?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “See that huge globe in the far corner?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It is, in fact, a liquor cabinet,” she said, smiling again, “and inside you will find a large brandy snifter and a bottle of cognac. Would you please bring me three fingers and the joint sitting beside the snifter.”

  Although it wasn’t much past noon, I felt like joining the old woman, but the day had been so crazy already, I knew I wouldn’t stop.

  After I settled her in a lounge chair with her drink and the lit joint, she thanked me, and added, “Please think about it seriously, Bud, but whatever you decide, please visit again, whenever you like.”

  I promised both things, then kissed her soft old cheek and said goodbye.

  —

  Downstairs, I wandered toward the rear of the house until I found the large kitchen, where Gail was leaning against the counter, a textbook in one hand, a batter-coated beater in the other. I watched the tip of her pink tongue slide slowly up one of the blades.

  “Lose your way, cowboy?” she asked without looking up.

  “I need a broom and a dustpan,” I said. “There seems to be a broken cup and saucer on the sidewalk.”

  “Clumsy jerk,” she muttered.

  “What time do you get out of lab tonight?” I asked.

  “About ten. Why?”

  “Want to meet someplace for a drink about eleven?”

  “You married?” she asked.

  “Not now.”

  “You as old as you look?”

  “Not nearly.”

  “You going to wear normal clothes?”

  “What’s normal?”

  “Okay, why the hell not,” she said, then smiled. “I’ll be at the Deuce about eleven. You know where that is?” Her smile grew wicked. The Deuce of Spades was a mountain-hippie, biker, deadbeat hangout, complete with watered drinks, bluegrass stomping, and aging freaks. Also my cocaine dealer, Raoul, spent most of his free time there.

  “Sure,” I said, “it’s a date.”

  “It’s a drink,” she said. “I’ll let you know when it’s a date.”

  “Okay.”

  “And that’s the broom closet,” she said with a motion of her thumb.

  When I came back inside to empty the dustpan, Gail asked me how Sarah was feeling.

  “Tired,” I said. “Those hikes down memory lane ain’t always easy. But when I left, she had drink and smoke and sunshine.”

  “She is one beautiful old lady,” Gail said.

  “You should have seen her back when.”

  “I’ve seen pictures,” she said. “Do you look anything like your father?”

  “Some.”

  “Are you anything like him?”

  “A lot poorer.”

/>   “That’s probably to your advantage,” she conceded. “Is that your cowboy Cadillac hidden out front behind the lilacs?”

  “You got it.”

  “How many miles do you get to the gallon?”

  “No idea, love,” I said. “When it gets empty, I give some Arab a twenty-dollar bill and he gives me half a tank of gas.”

  Gail gave me a sharp frown that should have cut me to the quick, or at least shamed me into a Volkswagen diesel Rabbit.

  Outside, when I paused to unlock the door of my pickup, I glanced northwest and saw the high, telltale horsetail haze drifting swiftly south. Gail had been right: weather. The first serious wave of winter forming for an assault on the Meriwether Valley. Even in the sunshine I shivered and thought of Mexico. This winter, for damned certain sure, I would go. Even if I had to finally sell the last and only thing I owned in my name, my grandfather’s three thousand acres of timber up in the Diablos, land he had stolen from the Benniwah Indians—a legal theft, but an outright theft nonetheless. I had had three recent offers: one from a rich kid from Oregon who wanted to horse-log the timber; one from an automobile-parts company in Detroit that wanted to turn it into a corporate hunting lodge; and one from the government, which wanted to include the land in the proposed Dancing Bear Wilderness Area.

  The kid struck me as a smart-ass and he tried to impress me with a suitcase full of cash, the people from Detroit seemed bored by the whole deal, and the government…well, to hell with them. Wilderness areas were good ideas, but I still like chain saws and snowmobiles and four-wheel-drive vehicles too much to have them outlawed on my own ground in my own lifetime. As it was now, they had blocked my access to the land, so that I had to drive seventy miles out of my way—up to the Benniwah Reservation in the foothills of the Cathedrals, then across the old C, C&K Railroad sections, up past the abandoned mine to Camas Meadows—seventy miles, just to poach an elk on my own land.

  Maybe Gail was right, and bulldozer and cowboy boot mentality had ruined Montana. Or maybe the Indians were right, and the land belonged to itself. Whatever, this particular piece of rough, sidehill timber and open meadow belonged to me. Maybe, I thought as I climbed in my pickup, trying to ignore the cold front coming, maybe I would do Sarah Weddington’s crazy job, grab her money and take the sort of Mexican vacation my father would have loved.

  Chapter 3

  The swiftly moving Arctic front hit Meriwether in midafternoon with thundering gusts of wind that swept the street clean of all those people still dressed in light clothes who believed in Indian Summers that lasted forever. Then a stiff, cold rain began to fall, sliding down the wind. By the time I headed across town to pick up a car at the Haliburton offices, the temperature had dropped into the thirties and the raindrops hit my windshield in slushy pellets.

  As I swung left off Railroad onto Dottle, I noticed one of Haliburton’s armored trucks parked at an odd angle in the lot in front of Hamburger Heaven. The driver, leaning out his door, his revolver dangling from his hand, shouted at the passing traffic, occasionally lifting the pistol and aiming it at the cars. During the few moments it took me to drive down the short block of Dottle, I saw four cars and a beer truck bolt like frightened cattle right through the red light.

  The driver’s eyes glowed in the ashen light, drunk or drugged or simply crazed. The man, whose name I couldn’t remember, was one of Colonel Haliburton’s basket cases, a Vietnam vet with a good war record and a terrible employment history. The colonel was a born do-gooder, one of those unusual career military men who also think of themselves as soldiers in God’s compassionate army. He had given this guy a chance at a steady job, but things didn’t seem to be working out too well.

  After I parked my pickup on the other side of the armored truck, I tore my uniform coat open, loosened my collar and tie and mussed my hair, thinking that if I looked as disheveled as the driver did, he might not waste me out of hand. I had never been a master of disguise, though, and when I stepped around the back of the truck and said hello, the driver dropped out of the door into a combat stance and laid a bead right on the old trembling thorax area.

  “What the fuck are you doing here, man?” he asked, his voice shaking and his knuckles white on the butt of the .38.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, “I don’t exactly know.” And I meant it.

  “Just like over there, right, dad? Nobody fucking knew.” I didn’t have to ask where there might be. “Nobody knew, and you don’t know shit from wild honey about it, dad, what it was like.”

  “I spent time on the line in Korea,” I offered lamely.

  “Korea?” he sneered. “The line? Well, kiss my rosy red ass.” Then he lifted the revolver straight up into the gray, windy rain, pulled the trigger six times, six flat ugly splats as the hammer fell on empty chambers. He laughed wildly as he tossed his piece onto the front seat of the armored truck. “Tell the colonel to stuff his charity, right, and his goddamned empty guns. I ain’t much into limited warfare, man. If I’d gone to Canada, dad, I’d have both my kidneys and all my marbles, right? Ain’t it the shits.” He sighed, shook his head, then stumbled off toward the nearest bar, the Deuce down on Railroad, his lank hair poking wetly from under his uniform cap.

  I stood there a long time, it seemed, the cold rain seeping down my collar, then decided I wasn’t going to wet my pants or collapse into a frightened puddle, so I locked up the truck, took the keys and the empty .38, then drove very carefully across town, trying not to look at the bars. Some security outfits, I had read, equipped their rent-a-cops with rubber guns for their own safety. Symbolic fire power, I thought, an idea whose time has come. The .38 that I carried at work, wrapped in its holster belt on the front seat of the pickup, was, like the driver’s, empty. By choice. A few years back, when I still worked for myself, I had killed two men at close range, and although I couldn’t bear to throw away all that lovely, lethal machinery I had collected over the years, I did throw all my live rounds into the Meriwether River.

  —

  Haliburton’s had me working relief that shift, filling in for piss-calls and dinner breaks for the first four hours, easing around the now freezing streets in my yellow Pinto with the little blue light on the roof—barbecue pits on the hoof, we called them—my door unlocked and my seat belt off. As happened every winter, most of the drivers in Meriwether seemed to have forgotten all about ice during the summer months and they drove as if the streets were bare and dry, which made my job more dangerous than philosophical discussions about war as an arm of diplomacy with armed crazy people. Dangerous, but so goddamn boring. And I felt like a clown dressed in my brown-on-brown uniform with its old-fashioned Sam Browne belt like a mule’s harness across my chest.

  At least the last four hours of my shift would be warm and safe, off the streets, sitting behind a sheet of one-way mirrored glass in the back room of an EZ-IN/EZ-OUT twenty-four-hour convenience market and filling station out on South Dawson. Warm because I had a small electric heater for my feet, and safe because we had video tapes of the guy we were trying to catch who had been knocking over convenience markets all over town, a tall, skinny kid in a ski mask who we knew owned a police-band radio because he only hit stores when the police were busy with fires or drunken wrecks out on the interstate, and who held the clerks at bay with what looked like a starter’s pistol. In Montana, where we have more guns than people and cattle, maybe even trees, this dude had been knocking them down with a goddamn blank pistol.

  After I checked in with the Haliburton dispatcher on the company band, I settled into the little room, turned on the police scanner and the CB radio, checked the television cameras and the tape monitor, then made a fresh pot of coffee. Sipping that first good cup out of the pot, I thought about Sarah, the way she savored the smell, enjoyed her tiny sip. Most of the time, instead of considering old age and preparing myself for some wise gentle assault on those last years, I thought about fifty-two and my father’s money. My final days might not take too long when they came around
, but I intended to enjoy them.

  The CB crackled in the background. Out on the interstate where it sliced through the northern edge of the city limits, long-haul truckers were complaining about the slick roads, their piles, and Smokey the Bear. On the police scanner, all the units were too busy with a rash of fender benders and resultant fistfights to complain. Ah, winter wonderland, I thought as I leaned back in the swivel chair and stared through the one-way glass, down the aisle, and out the glass front of the store. Across the street, the blue blinking light of the Doghouse Lounge made it look like a more romantic and mysterious place than it really was. It was a workingman’s place, and the parking lot was full of pickups with rifles racked in the rear windows. At least they served whiskey there, and I could think about a drink as I watched the customers string through the store, grumbling not a bit about the thirty percent extra they paid for convenience.

  Two teen-aged girls on their way to the movie down the street used the mirror side of the glass to make certain that their eyelashes were as thick and furry as tarantula legs, giggling about some poor unsuspecting lad named Shawn they planned to surprise at the theater, then they gaggled away in a cloud of youthful laughter. A bit later a lanky kid came in, swiped a can of Coke and a package of red licorice rope, stuffing them into the game pocket of his 60/40 parka, then spent a few minutes working on his zits in the mirror before he left, paying for a package of gum. I started to hit the shoplifter switch, but the clerk behind the counter had his nose in a motorcycle magazine, and I decided this shoplifter was Shawn of the giggles and already in more trouble than he could handle, so I let him walk. In the days before juveniles had legal rights, a shoplifting bust could be worked out between the parents and the store manager. But legal rights meant paperwork, which in turn meant records, and no governmental body of any size, shape, or function had ever found a way to dispose of records. After the kid had gone, I went out front, paid for the candy and Coke, and made sure that the clerk rang up the sale instead of skimming it.