Dancing Bear Read online

  About nine-thirty, with an hour left on my shift, a seven-car pile-up blocked the Dawson Street bridge, and an “every available unit” call went out on the police band. Fifteen minutes later out on the Interstate, a semi load of frozen turkeys locked its trailer brakes, skidded on the iced pavement, and jackknifed into the median, spreading toms and hens like small boulders all over the landscape.

  Meriwether lived off lumber, and with interest rates up and housing starts down, two mills had closed their saws forever the previous summer, and the pulp mill had been on half shifts for three months. So Meriwether was chock-full of surly unemployed folks facing a Thanksgiving with little to be thankful for and a Christmas even more grim. When news of the turkey wreck swept through town by CB radio and telephone, a lot of unhappy people piled into their four-wheel-drive rigs and headed for the highway, muttering “Thanksgiving” under their collective breaths, “Christmas.” I cheered them on. They might as well have the turkeys because the USDA would show up the next day, condemn the meat, and consign it to the dump.

  As riots go, it didn’t sound like a big one, but large enough to involve three sheriff’s deputies and two highway patrolmen. No fatalities, either, just two broken legs when a drunk on a snowmobile ran down a housewife in the median, and a minor concussion when her husband knocked the drunk off the snowmobile with a well-aimed twelve-pound hen.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention to business. When I stopped laughing long enough to glance up, a tall skinny kid in a ski mask held a small pistol behind a loaf of white bread while the frightened clerk shoveled bills and change into a paper bag between frightened looks cast my way. I wasn’t ready; the rusty snap on my holster took forever to open and I couldn’t have loaded my piece if I had wanted to. I hit the silent alarm, even though the police units were all busy, slipped out the door, hid behind the upright Coke cooler. When the bandit turned away from the cashier, I leapt out into the aisle to do my bit for law and order and the American way of life.

  “Police!” I shouted. “Freeze!”

  Well, it works on television. But this guy jumped three feet in the air and got off two rounds at me before his bandit shoes hit the tile floor. Starter’s pistol, my ass; the video tapes had lied. I dove back behind the cooler, then bellied over to peek under the potato-chip rack just as the kid hit the front door. He didn’t make it out, though. Two fiery muzzle flashes flamed out of the Doghouse parking lot, followed by the roar of high-velocity hunting rifles. The kid spun wildly, scattering folding money and change as he fell into a rack of motor oil and antifreeze beside the door. A whole shelf of onion-and-sour-cream-flavored potato chips exploded over my head, and a rack of Coke cans crashed through the glass doors and fell on my back, hissing like angry snakes.

  Two more muzzle flashes came out of the parking lot. The rounds popped through the plate glass, spraying fragments like grenade shrapnel, ripped out whole shelves of dry and canned goods, snipped through the glass doors of the beer cooler behind me, releasing a sea of foam.

  “Had enough in there?” somebody shouted from across the street.

  I, for one, certainly had, but I was curled too tightly into a damp ball to answer. The bandit, though, grunted “Fuck you, white-eyes,” then let off a useless round into the ceiling. The rifles answered with a four-round volley, and the whole interior of the store seemed to explode. Even a row of fluorescent lights on the twelve-foot ceiling disintegrated, the shards of tubes drifting like snow through the dust.

  “Enough now?” the voice shouted again, laughing.

  “Enough!” I screamed, then started to throw my piece out into the aisle until I remembered I was supposed to be one of the good guys. I stood up, praying the bastards could see my uniform under the soggy coat of chips. Behind me I could hear rivers of cold beer rushing and a punctured aerosol can wheezing in a slow circle. Out front, two men darted across the street like some dream of combat infantrymen under attack. When they didn’t shoot, I stuffed my empty revolver back into the wet holster, then went up front to separate the dead from the dying.

  Somehow the clerk hadn’t been hit. When he saw me, he leapt from his hiding place beneath the counter, vaulted over it, and ran out the door into the freezing rain without a jacket. I knew the kid in the ski mask had been hit, knew it was going to be bad, with the way hunting rounds mushroomed and fragmented on impact and killed with hydrostatic shock. He looked dead, too, where he lay in a pool of antifreeze, oil, and blood. But when I tried to pry the cheap .22 revolver out of his hand, he had live resistance in his fingers.

  Two guys wearing down vests over flannel shirts, their scoped elk rifles at port arms, charged through the front door. I asked for their help as I tried to ease the kid out of the muck, but they were too busy admiring their handiwork. When I asked a second time, louder, the nearest one said “Fuck him” and nudged the bandit’s arm with a heavy hunting boot.

  “Hey, that’s right,” I said, standing up, “we’re the good guys and we don’t have to mess with shit like this.” When I tried for a good-old-boy grin, it felt as if my face cracked. “Damn good shooting,” I said. “What the hell you guys using?” I reached for the nearest one’s rifle. He let me have it rather absent-mindedly as he stared wide-eyed around the ruined store. When I hit his buddy in the forehead with the rifle butt, he still didn’t seem too concerned. He had enough sense left to shake his head at me once, but maybe he didn’t shake it hard enough. I took him out, too, then dragged them outside and cuffed one’s wrist to the other’s through the front-door handle. Up close, there seemed to be some family resemblance between them, except that one’s forehead hung over his eyes and the other’s nose was three inches wide and flapjack-thick. Then I quickly unloaded their rifles and made junk out of them against the curb.

  When I got the bandit out of the slippery mess to a fairly clean part of the floor, I slid off the ski mask, and a long string of bubbly froth looped out of his mouth. He was just a kid, maybe twenty, with the dark coppery skin and flat round face of a Benniwah. When I cut off his shirt and jacket, I saw that he had the small delicate chest of a malnourished child. The round had taken him just below the right collarbone. Because the bullet must have been wobbling after passing through the plate glass, it caused an unusually large entrance wound, and the exit wound through his shoulder blade was as large as the bottom of a beer can. The round must have clipped the top of his lung, too, because both wounds were sucking air. Finally I found enough gauze pads on the shelf to pack them, and I bound them tightly with tape.

  By then the inevitable crowd had begun to gather from the bar and the theater and the vehicles parked along the street to see the real blood, the real dying. While I was working on the kid they had stayed back, staring through the ruined windows, and they shied from my glances as if they had seen a caged animal they were afraid to recognize. As usually happens, too, some had come to help. One man held the crowd at bay, another took a flashlight and waved passing cars past the store, and a stout young woman wearing glasses and a full-length leather coat pushed through the crowd. She slipped out of her coat, under which she wore a long pink wool dress. “I’m a nurse,” she said calmly as she came through the door and draped her coat over the kid. “Are you okay?” she asked as she patted my cheek.

  “A little shaky,” I said, “but the kid’s hurt bad.”

  We knelt beside him and noticed that his breath turned sour and shallow, rattling, bloody spittle snaking out of his mouth. She took his pulse, and it seemed I could feel his blood flow dwindle to a thread under her fingers.

  “We’re losing him,” she said quietly, staring at me over the narrow, bottomless gulf.

  She got on his chest, and I propped his chin back, checked to see if he had swallowed his tongue, then pinched his pug nose and started the mouth-to-mouth. Sometimes we can breathe for each other, muscle the heart. Somehow we kept him going ten, maybe fifteen minutes until the EMS technicians arrived with the ambulance. He seemed to be breathing on his own w
hen they strapped him onto the stretcher. The nurse tossed her coat to a man she seemed to know—a husband or a date—and the two of us leaned against the counter breathing hard for ourselves, then we fell into each other’s arms so hard that it knocked off her glasses, held each other like old lovers. Over her shoulder I could see her date or husband or whatever holding her bloody coat as if it were something he had found in the street.

  —

  After most of the police had come and gone, after I had stood ankle-deep in the back cooler for half an hour, breaking my schnapps vow and drinking beer after beer, then promptly throwing them up, I went out front to stand in the freezing rain with Colonel Haliburton and the chief of police, Jamison, my old buddy, asshole buddy from childhood, Korea, adopted father of my son. The three of us stood outside, even beyond the roof overhang, as if somebody had died inside the store, and watched three Haliburton uniformed guards set up sawhorse and rope barricades around the lot. The young couple who managed the store, dressed in matching maroon bathrobes and white flannel pajamas covered with tiny red and green reindeer, huddled in the dim, smoky light just inside the front door. Occasionally one or the other would break into a tiptoe trot through the mess to pick up a can of dog food or a box of breakfast cereal off the floor, place it carefully on the shelf, then gently straighten the row.

  “They might as well have used hand grenades,” the colonel said softly, shaking his head.

  “Fucking assholes,” I muttered.

  The colonel lifted his flat cap off his balding head and frowned into the darkness, away from me. In spite of all his years in the Army, profanity still embarrassed him as much as it must have when he was a good little Lutheran farm boy growing up outside Grand Forks, North Dakota. He cleared his throat in disapproval, then stared even harder into the distance, as if he were watching the fresh snow on the Hardrocks. “I don’t know how you do it, Milo,” Jamison said sadly. “I don’t know how you get into so much trouble.”

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  He looked at me hard and for a long, silent time. We hadn’t been friends since I was bounced off the sheriff’s department for looking the other way from some illegal punchboards. Then he married my first ex-wife and adopted my son, which hadn’t improved our affairs.

  “I would like to see you in my office tomorrow morning,” Jamison said bluntly, “eight A.M. sharp, Milo, not one minute later.” He paused and ran his hand through his rain-wet hair. “Why did you have to break up their rifles?” he added. “Why?”

  “The heat of passion,” I said.

  “Just be there,” he said, “because I think you’ve bought the farm this time.” Since Evelyn—my ex-wife, his wife—had recently left him to take up residence with a twenty-eight-year-old vegetarian French professor at Reed College in Portland, Jamison had trouble focusing his anger on me. “Just be there,” he repeated.

  “Ah-hem,” the colonel said, “my lawyer will be there also.” Then he walked over to comfort the young couple. I started to follow him.

  “Just a minute, Milo,” Jamison said. “I’ve been meaning to call you. Evelyn has this idea that we have to be civilized about all this shit.”

  “Civilized,” I said. “What shit?”

  “You and me and her and the boy,” he sighed, “and whatever it is she lives with. She says we should all be adults about this, and she’s got tickets to the Washington State-Stanford game, and she wants all to gather on neutral ground to watch the boy play.”

  “How’s he doing?” I asked. Eric played defensive end for the WSU Cougars.

  “Great,” Jamison said, nearly smiling. “He’s started the last three games. Kicking ass. Or so I read in the papers. I haven’t been able to get away for a game this year.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, “even though I don’t want to.”

  “Call me,” he said, “and I’ll see you in the morning.” Then he stalked away in the rain, some of which had turned to sleet. The tiny white pellets gathered on the stooped shoulders of his tweed overcoat.

  When I turned around, the colonel had his hands on the younger couple’s arms, reassuring them all over again that his men would hang plywood sheets over the broken windows and would watch the store for the rest of the night. Then he gave them a gentle shove toward their Toyota pickup. The wife burst into tears and her husband looked as if he wanted to do the same, but he just clutched a milk carton to his chest so tightly that it leaked down the front of his robe as they walked away.

  The colonel strode over to me, saying, “I want you to know that the entire legal resources of the corporation are at your disposal, Milo.”

  “Even if I quit?” I said.

  “Even if you quit,” he said, “but don’t quit.” The colonel had some romantic notion that because I had once worked a one-man office he had to keep me employed just in case he ever needed my old-fashioned, peculiar talents. “Don’t quit.”

  “Sir, I can’t stand any more of this monkey-suit business.”

  “Boredom and the bottle,” the colonel said, looking at his ox-blood cordovans. His wife, it was rumored, drank. “Oh, Lord,” he whispered, “there’s just no call these days…but I did get a query from an outfit on the Coast today. They needed someone to tail a woman for a couple of days until they can get their own security people on it. I don’t know the outfit, but I’ll accept the job, and you can do it, then take a week or so off, with pay of course, to think about it.”

  “Jesus,” I said, suddenly so tired that my head seemed to spin. “Sir, I just don’t know—”

  “Two weeks,” he said, “as a favor to me.”

  “Only because you ask.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I want you to know that you handled that incident with Simmons this afternoon perfectly. I do appreciate that, Milo.”

  “Simmons?”

  “The driver of the armored truck.”

  “Never can remember that kid’s name,” I admitted. “I just happened to be passing by, sir, and I really didn’t do anything.”

  “Which was perfect,” he said, then added to nobody in particular, “I’ve got to get that boy some help, somehow.” Then he turned back to me, extended a hand. “I do thank you, though.”

  “Anytime,” I said, shook his hand, then loaned him my handkerchief so he could wipe the sticky Coke slime off his hand.

  “I’ll leave the woman’s name and address with the dispatcher,” he said, “and you can pick it up after your, ah, chat with Jamison…You don’t mind if I ask about the trouble between the two of you?”

  “A long story,” I said. “History.”

  “I see,” he said, then waved aimlessly as he marched off toward his gray Mercedes, a staunch, stocky, erect figure of a man, a good soldier to the end. The colonel had retired to Meriwether and started a small security service so he could afford his fishing trips, but he was too good at the business. It kept expanding. First into alarm systems, then into armored transport, then into branch offices all over the Mountain West. I knew for a fact that he hadn’t wet a fishing line in over two years.

  When he started the engine of his Mercedes, the diesel clattered loudly. I wondered what sort of man tried to keep aging detectives out of the bars, to provide jobs for half-crazed Vietnam vets, and drove a thirty-five-thousand-dollar automobile that sounded like a truck, wondered, as always, what to think about the colonel. Usually, professional military men and successful businessmen gave me a pain in the ass, but I liked the colonel. I didn’t even mind that he had stolen my handkerchief.

  When I walked around to the rear of the store to pick up the Pinto, the cold beer in my shoes felt like frozen slush, and most of the glass had been blown out of the little tin car by errant rounds. Only a railroad embankment behind the store had saved the two vigilantes from spreading misery and mayhem throughout the neighborhood. I wiped the shards of safety glass off the front seat, as best I could in the darkness, then drove across town to pick up my truck, the sleet funneling into my face thr
ough the broken windshield.

  —

  By the time I had showered the soda syrup and chips out of my hair and off my back, changed clothes, and indulged myself in a short toot, I felt as old as I was ever going to get. Even though I was already an hour late for my meeting with Gail, I heaved myself off my couch, eased the pickup over the icy streets down to the Deuce, where a bluegrass band fretted through its last set. She was nowhere to be found in the crowded bar or among the dancers stomping on the floor. Even Raoul, my dealer, had gone home. I saw a biker gang I knew, but we didn’t exchange greetings, and the armored-truck driver, whose name I had forgotten again, still in his Haliburton uniform, sleeping at a table in the shadows beside the back door. I gave up and walked across the street to Arnie’s, a bar for serious drinkers, where nobody either cared or noticed if your hands trembled so badly that it took both of them to get a shot of schnapps to your mouth.

  I saw my postman there, though, also still in the baggy sack of his borrowed uniform, but he had a fat lip I hadn’t given him, so I had one shot, then went home to my little log house in the canyon.

  —

  Since the colonel’s lawyer—a sharp young dude dressed in Western clothes and wearing, fastened to his string tie, what looked to be the piece of turquoise the size of an elk turd that I hadn’t bought—and I were both on time the next morning, the police took my statement politely and with a minimum amount of fuss and bother. Jamison didn’t even show up.

  When I got out to the Haliburton offices, the colonel hadn’t come in either, so I picked up the name and address from the dispatcher. A wildly impressive name, Cassandra Bogardus, but a rather shabby address over on the north side beyond the tracks, 1414 Gold. None of the women I knew on the north side could afford the sort of trouble that called for a two-hundred-a-day tail. I didn’t really care, though, because I was so glad to be out of uniform. Two days of this, I thought, then I can do Sarah Weddington’s crazy number and head south.

  I signed for a white Chevy van without checking the fake magnetic signs on the doors, transferred my surveillance gear to the van from my pickup, and headed for the north side of town. By ten o’clock that morning I was on station half a block down Gold from the Bogardus house.