Dancing Bear

by James Crumley

  “Moses Lake,” I said, “heading for Seattle. But don’t tell anybody if they ask.”

  “Why would anybody ask, Milo? Are you in some sort of trouble?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “Just doing a little free-lance work.” My crimes were all mine, and I didn’t want to make the colonel an accessory after the fact.

  “Enjoying yourself?” the colonel asked pleasantly, and I had a little trouble answering him. “Still drinking schnapps?”

  “My goddamned tongue tastes like fucking peppermint stick,” I said, and decided to do something about it immediately. He told me to be careful and have fun, then we rang off. I went straight to the nearest market, where I bought a Styrofoam cooler, a bag of ice, and two six-packs of Rainier, then to a secondhand store to buy a trunk that locked and loaded the guns, grenades, and coke in it. Even if the Washington state patrol popped me for drinking and driving, they couldn’t open the locked trunk without a warrant.

  I felt pleased with myself, fairly or unfairly, as I headed west on 1-90, but I still kept an eye out for the law, checking all directions before I took a drink of beer on the highway, watching my ass. And that’s how I saw them watching me.

  There were four of them and they were good. A four-wheel-drive Chevy pickup decked out for show, big tires, and a chrome roll-bar with quartz lamps on it. A green Ford sedan, company car stripped, with suits and shirts hanging in the back seat. A Volkswagen van. And a dude in a red Porsche 924 who thought he was the cutest one of all. These people had some money to spend, too. A four-car tail, a tap on the colonel’s telephone line. Cute. I didn’t seem to mind, though, it got the juices flowing. I sort of wished that I hadn’t locked up the two M-11s and the grenades, but I didn’t think they would try to take me out on the highway. At least not after I found a state patrol car and dogged him at fifty-seven miles an hour all the way into Seattle.

  I took the boys downtown to get in line for the Bremerton ferry. I got the silenced Ingram out of the trunk, emptied my knapsack, and put the gun in it. Then I went back down the line of waiting cars, collecting a few ignition keys. They knew what was in the sack, so they went along nicely. Except for the big dude in the Porsche. First he tried to play dumb, then he acted like he wanted to get Western right in public, but I slapped him in the throat with the suppressor and he didn’t have anything else to say. I even took his billfold, but it contained even less information than Rideout’s had. Ninety-seven dollars in bills but nothing else.

  After the ferry docked and the lanes in front of me cleared, I turned around and left the ferry traffic blocked for half a mile, headed south down the freeway to the Sea-Tac airport, where I swapped cars one more goddamn time. I wanted a Corvette, but nobody had one, so I settled for a black T-bird. I made it back to Nobby’s just in time for the five o’clock rush, really pleased with myself now, pleased enough to order a Chivas on the rocks.

  The bartender was too busy to talk, so I waited for business to die down, waited too long, and found myself ambushed by a two-for-one happy hour, and suddenly, miraculously, sweet gift of whiskey and fatigue, it was nearly nine o’clock, and I was drunk as a pig. I didn’t care who those guys had been. In fact, I thought about looking for them, but I finally stopped the bartender and showed him Rideout’s fake license. Like any good citizen, he wanted to know why. I flashed my old Meriwether county deputy sheriff’s badge, but he wasn’t buying any of that. So I stacked up the change from a fifty.

  “Maybe I’ve seen him a few times with the ferryboat crowd,” he said sadly, fingering the sheaf of bills. “But not in a long time.”

  “Which ferryboat?”

  “Usually the last one. Sometimes he came in after work and stayed until the last boat. But like I say, it’s been a while.”

  “Vashon Island or Port Orchard?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Ever say what he did for a living?”

  “I think he was a long-haul trucker,” he said, “coast-to-coast number.”

  “But you’re not sure?” I prompted, nudging the bills closer to him with my finger.

  “Not at all,” he said, then leaned back and shoved the bills toward me. “Listen, buddy, you mind if I say something?” I shook my head. “You keep your money there, and use it to get a room or something, because, my friend, you look like a dead man, and you are somewhat drunk.”

  “You mind if I say something?” I asked, and he shook his sad, pale face, the face of a reformed drunk. “I been listening to bullshit bartender advice all my life,” I said. He didn’t look angry, just sadder. I dropped a ten-dollar tip on the bar and staggered out. Pretty picture. My first lungful of cold air off Puget Sound sobered me up a little bit, and I started to go back to apologize, but I had learned the hard way that drunken apologies to strangers usually just confuse them.

  I got lost among the side streets of West Seattle looking for some of the Colonel’s chicken, then lost again, gnawing on a drumstick, as I tried to find the ferry dock. I think I meant to show Rideout’s picture to some of the boat crew, but before I had a chance, I got hassled for smoking on the car deck, then for drinking beer on the passenger deck, then severely chided when I held up disembarking traffic on Vashon because I couldn’t remember which one of the six sets of keys belonged to the T-bird.

  I had been on Vashon Island once before in daylight and knew there was a tavern on the short main street of the small town in the middle of the island, but in the dark, salt-misty night, I couldn’t find my ass with either hand. I spent what seemed hours wandering around before I found the main street and the tavern, and I was wildly surprised to discover it was still open.

  As soon as I walked in, though, I knew I had made a mistake. It was a real hometown bar. Everybody knew everybody else, and nobody wanted to talk to a weird drunken stranger who looked as if he had just escaped from the federal lockup on McNeil Island. Nobody. Especially a swarthy fellow at the end of the bar who looked like an ex-con and who reminded me of the hapless postman. As I wandered down the bar, trying to start drunken conversations, he watched me carefully out of the corner of his eye, and when I pulled up on a stool near him, he chugged his beer and scooted out the back door. Even though the Supreme Court doesn’t buy it, cops can smell the bad actors. I went out right behind him.

  “Hey, asshole,” I said when I caught up to him in the alley, “why don’t you just hold it right there.”

  “Shit,” he groaned, “why don’t you fucking guys get off my ass.” And they can smell the cop stink, too. “Just leave me the hell alone,” he added, but when he turned around to face me, his shoulders slumped, as tired as his voice. He had been in the joint a long time, had his ass kicked by pros. “Alone,” he whined.

  “How long you been out?”

  “Three and a half years,” he said, “and I can promise you, man, I ain’t doing nothing, ever, to go back.”

  “Relax,” I said, slapping him on the arm lightly. He flinched anyway. “Take it easy,” I said, “I ain’t the man no more.”

  “Right,” he said, “sure. Let’s just get it over with.” He pulled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt so hard that he popped the cuff buttons, and presented me with the insides of his elbows. Somebody had been rousting the poor guy.

  “That don’t mean shit,” I said, trying to sound like somebody in authority. “Just take a look at this picture.” Even in the dim light I could see his eyes cloud and the old practiced lies forming on his mouth. “Don’t jerk me around, asshole.”

  “Okay,” he sighed, “what the hell. He told me his parole was up a long time ago.”

  “Can you put the right name to the face?”

  “John. That’s all I ever knew,” he said, “but I ain’t seen him in six or eight months. Not since him and his old lady split.”

  “She live here on the Island?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Here?” I asked, showing him the small snapshot. He nodded. “Where is it?”

  “Somewhere on the south end, toward
Tahlequah,” he said. “I was only there one time, and it was dark and raining, and we were—”

  “—Fucked up?”

  “Right,” he said sadly.

  “I’ll find it.”

  “Not on a night like this,” he said with bitter humor as he lifted his hands into the foggy mist.

  “Don’t sweat it,” I said, trying to sound tough and competent. “Just tell me how to find a motel.”

  “A what? Oh, sure,” he said, smiling around broken teeth. “Hey, you really ain’t the heat, are you?”

  “Maybe something worse,” I said.

  “It shows, man,” he said, his smile growing larger, then he gave me a set of rather complicated directions to the only motel on the Island. I gave him a ten and told him to buy himself a beer, and he whistled down the alley into the murky night.

  It took me a number of beers and a length of time that should have been counted in years instead of hours as I roamed the black wet roads for me to realize what the ex-con’s smile had been about. No motels on the Island, no ferryboats back to the mainland, no way I could take a chance, not with all the crap in the trunk of the T-bird, on sleeping in the car beside the road or on the ferry dock, and no way I could drive around all night. Although it had been only two nights with little sleep, my body said sleep.

  When in doubt, go right to the source. I remembered passing a King County police substation on my meanders, so I backtracked until I found it, then parked in the lot, put a note on my windshield explaining that I was a tourist, lost and drunk and ignorant of ferry schedules, then climbed into the back seat, where I slept far better than I had any right to.

  At five-thirty a patrolman rapped on the side window until he woke me up. I climbed out to stretch and thank him. The mist had turned into a light rain that couldn’t wash the fog out of the air. When I yawned, the cold damp filled my lungs, like trying to inhale wet wool. The policeman was surprisingly pleasant for that time of day, even complimented me on my good sense. I shook his hand and thanked him again.

  “No problem,” he said, yawning too. “Happens all the time, all the goddamned time.” Then, as he walked back to his unit, he added over his shoulder, “Goddamned islands.”

  On the ferry back to West Seattle I stood on the bow in the cold wet wind and tossed the four sets of car keys into the dark pulsing waters of the Sound. On a bright sunny day I could have seen Mount Rainier looming like a misshapen moon on the horizon, and even through the fog and rain I thought I could feel its rocky weight. I drove back out to Sea-Tac to the large anonymous motels nearby, parked the T-bird in the lot of one, checked into another, paying cash and signing a false name. Unlike that person of the evening before, bloated with expensive Scotch and fake self-confidence, this guy wanted a few hours of untroubled sleep and no truck with the bad guys.

  When the wake-up call came at noon, I was still scared, tired, hung over, and suffering that terrible morning-after, horny itch. I thought of how cool Gail’s body might feel next to mine, how warm the comfort of Carolyn’s heavy breasts, and the icy fire of Cassandra Bogardus’ face. Nothing but hangover fantasy, though. No repeaters, Carolyn had said. The way of all flesh, down the toilet of life, said Gail. And I was still half angry at the Bogardus woman for dumping me so easily at the airport. I took a cold shower and stopped torturing myself. I had things to do.

  —

  First, I needed a new image. The bad guys were going to be looking for me with a vengeance. Professionals did not like to have their ass kicked by anybody, much less an alcoholic security guard. It took a ton of Sarah’s money, but I bought a new image. A four-hundred-dollar blue pin-striped three-piece suit. Black loafers with tassels for a hundred and thirty bucks. A forty-dollar blow-dry haircut. A zircon pinky ring out of a pawnshop on 1st Avenue. Fifteen bucks.

  While I waited for the alterations on the suit, I sent the colonel a hand-delivered-only telegram, telling him to have his telephones, office, and house swept for bugs. I sent Gail a telegram telling her to get Sarah out of town. Then I went over to pick up the suit. As I looked at myself in the triptych of mirrors, I thought about what the athletic young man with the wedding band had said when he finished cutting my hair. Even looking at my dirty, wrinkled Levi’s, my bloodstained Woolrich shirt with pine needles still clinging to the back, he turned me around in the chair, patted the helmet of hair on my head, and said, “It’s you, sir.” I turned to the salesman, watching me look at myself in the mirrors, and said, “It’s me.” He didn’t even raise an eyebrow. I went crazy and treated myself to one of those wonderful London Fog trench coats with a zip-out lining and a gray Tyrolean hat with a bright feather in the brim. “Motherfucker, it is me,” I said to the salesman, but he just thanked me sincerely. Then I drove this new, well-dressed me out of Seattle for safety’s sake, down the interstate to Renton, where I checked into a fancy motel under another cash-paying name. The new me and the old me, we did a couple of lines of that wonderful cocaine, then drove back up to West Seattle and the Vashon Island ferry to look for the former Mrs. Rideout.

  Although there were no Rideouts listed on Vashon, it only took me half an hour to find the little frame house by the meadow. Even in the daylight, the low gray clouds and the drizzle made it feel like night. The three children had grown since the picture and they were dressed in matching yellow slickers that glowed in the ashen light. When I pulled into the muddy driveway, the smallest one looked at my car with the frightened eyes of a startled animal, then darted around the side of the house toward the dull, clumping sound of a splitting maul, but the largest, a pale blond boy who looked as if he lived in the rain, put his arm around his little sister and waited, his thin shoulders pulled tall and erect under the loose slicker. When I climbed out of the T-bird and walked toward him, he saluted smartly. Without thinking, I returned it, and he smiled.

  “My daddy was in the Army for a long time,” he said proudly.

  “So was I,” I said, thinking, The rockpile army.

  “He was a captain,” he added.

  “Then I should have saluted you,” I said, “because I was only a pfc.”

  “That’s right,” he said very seriously, and we exchanged salutes again, in the proper order this time.

  “And what’s your name, sir?”

  “John Paul Rausche, Junior,” he said, “and this is my sister, Sally.” I shook the boy’s hand, but when I offered mine to the little girl, she turned away shyly to hide her face against her big brother’s shoulder. “Sally’s got a cancer behind her eye,” the boy explained, “and she don’t like people looking at her.”

  “Is your mother home?” I asked. The name wasn’t Rideout, but this was his father’s son.

  Before he could answer, though, she came around the corner of the house, the splitting maul held like a club in her raw, chapped hands. The smallest child clung to her left leg, but she walked steadily, as if she had become so accustomed to his weight that she might limp without it. Sweat drenched her red, plain face, and rain had beaded like a damp cloak across the shoulders of her buffalo plaid wool shirt.

  “You kids go inside,” she said, her voice as flat and hard as the slap of a piece of kindling wood against starched jeans. “Now.” John, Jr., and I exchanged salutes again, but quickly, and the children disappeared into the house like sparks dropped into wet grass. “If you be looking for John, mister, he ain’t here. He ain’t been here in a long time, and if I got anything to say about it, he won’t ever be here again.”

  The body hadn’t been identified yet, and I wasn’t about to be the one to tell her what had become of her ex-husband.

  “You wouldn’t know where I might find him?” I said. “I am—”

  “Like I told that fella last week,” she interrupted, “I ain’t seen hide nor hair nor support checks for eight months and two weeks…three weeks now.”

  “I don’t know where he is either,” I said, making it up as I went along, “but I owed him some money and I’m on my way to California, movi
ng out of this damned rain, and I wanted to pay him before I left.”

  “Ain’t nobody ever owed John money,” she said suspiciously. “It’s always him does the owing.”

  “He did some work for me,” I said, “but he took off before I had a chance to pay him.”

  “That’s my Johnny,” she said, some sort of perverse pride in her tone. “Elk season must’ve opened.”

  “Maybe I could give it to you,” I suggested, “and you could hold it for him.”

  “Maybe,” she said quietly as I dug out my billfold, fat with Sarah’s money, and started pulling out one-hundred-dollar bills, meaning, I think, only to take a couple, maybe three, but I had to make myself stop when I got to ten. God hates a piker, I said to myself, Jesus loves the little children of the land. Then I counted ten more. When I handed her the money, her face dropped, then grew bright, not with greed, but with sheer joy. “What in the name of the Lord did John do for this much money?” she asked, stammering as she counted. “Kill somebody?”

  “He hauled a couple of loads for me,” I said.

  “Loads?” she said.

  “This is his bonus,” I said. “He did a good, quick job.”

  “I didn’t even know he was hauling again,” she said, still counting.

  “Who was he hauling for before?” I asked, but she wasn’t listening. She brushed a damp strand of hair out of her eyes, wet her thumb, kept counting.

  “Holy Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” she said when she finished.

  “This other guy who was looking for John,” I said, trying to get her attention, “what did he look like?”

  “Like you,” she answered without looking up, “except he drove a Lincoln.”

  “What did he want?” I asked, hopelessly, great cross-examiner that I am.

  “Huh? Oh, he said John owed him money,” she said, “but I just laughed in his face.” Then she sprang at me, gave me a fierce hug and a wet kiss on the cheek. “Lord, thank you, mister,” she said. “You know he’ll never see penny one of this, don’t you?”