Dancing Bear

by James Crumley

  “Home,” he said, waving away the patrol car, which must have brought him in from the airport, “home.”

  “I ain’t got no home,” I said, “you dumb straight-arrow son of a bitch, I ain’t got no home.”

  “My house,” he said as I wept into his shoulder, “my house.” Then he stuffed me into the pickup.

  —

  Surely in this vale of tears we call life, the ill, the halt, and the lame find it curious that some people with constitutions like bull calves sometimes consider their good health and strength a curse rather than a blessing. It can be, though. In fistfights, even beaten senseless, we don’t fall down nearly soon enough; the joys of drug abuse don’t seem to take their proper toll; and, sometimes, when we try to drink ourselves to death, we fail miserably. Miserably.

  My mother’s father, whom I only met once when he drove from Boston to Meriwether in his seventies, started drinking a quart of Jamaican rum and smoking at least ten cigars a day during the great Spanish influenza epidemic of 1917, a habit that he maintained saved his life while thousands of others died, a habit that he maintained until he died at eighty-two. My father’s father drank a fifth of whiskey and smoked Prince Albert cigarettes every day from his twenties to his seventies, then he quit and lived another twenty years. God might know what it means; doctors don’t. Have a good constitution and don’t be miserable? I don’t know either.

  But after twenty-four hours on Jamison’s couch and a bait of steak and eggs at a truck stop west of town where I hoped I wouldn’t run into anybody I knew who would ask me why I wasn’t dead, I should have been happy, but strolling out to my pickup, I realized I had to face the troubles, had to stop running, start working.

  Driving through Meriwether on my way to look at the remains of my house in the daylight, I let my mind drop into idle for the slow drive. In my absence, the blizzard had blown itself out but left its heartbroken tracks behind. A gray, heavy overcast loomed dark over the afternoon as Meriwether dug itself out of the snow to face another long winter. The clotted wood-smoke smog drifted like a noxious, killer fog over the city, the mountains ranging like shaggy ghosts somewhere beyond it. The faces of the people on the streets seemed pale and empty, small animals huddled beneath fur caps and woolen scarfs or tucked into hoods. Although I knew it wasn’t true—most of these people lived there because they wanted to live there, and wintertime was a cheap price to pay—it seemed that laughter had gone into hibernation for the season. Maybe just my drunken laughter, my cocaine giggles.

  When I got to my house it seemed to me that the random lumps bellied up under the snow could have been anything, a battlefield, a pile of frozen corpses, the debris of a melting glacier, anything. While I was parking in front, my next-door neighbor came rushing out of her house, waving her arms and weeping.

  “Milo, Milo,” she shouted into my window, “you’re alive!” I had forgotten I was supposed to be dead. “Come in,” she said, “come in—for coffee or something—I’ve got some mail they delivered, and come on in. For coffee.”

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t see how I could refuse.

  Sitting at her kitchen table, sipping instant coffee, I opened my mail. Mostly bills, but a few reminded me what sort of world we live in. Three people, who evidently did not read the newspapers very carefully, wanted to build me a new home as soon as I got the insurance settlement. The city wanted to know what sort of arrangements I had made to clean up the debris, which constituted a public health hazard. Also, they had delivered the briefcase I had mailed from Seattle.

  “Listen,” I said to my next-door neighbor, “I’ve got a large favor to ask you.”

  “Anything,” she said, “almost anything.”

  “You know, you introduced yourself the first day you moved into this house, and we’ve known each other for a year or so…” She smiled when I paused, and I realized that I had never really looked at her, never really even thought about her except as something that came by occasionally and did the dirty number. Behind that facile sneer of a smile dwelt a real live woman, probably massively unhappy, certainly confused, if she took up with somebody like me for casual carnal carnage. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t have any idea what your name is.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I realized that a long time ago and decided I sort of like it that way. Oh, and I had a wonderful cry, Milo, thinking about you dead and not even knowing my name…Ann-Marie.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Ann-Marie, I have a huge favor to ask you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t tell anybody I’m not dead for a while,” I said as I unwrapped the briefcase and stuffed my wonderful mail inside.

  “Why?”

  “That’s the favor,” I said, “you don’t ask why.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Thanks.”

  I split the stitches on the briefcase handle, pulled out the rolled packet of cocaine, and gave her a half-gram-or-so present. She couldn’t thank me enough, but I didn’t have time for that.

  —

  The AMC Eagle was still parked in front of Abner’s house, so buried in plowed snow that I was sure it hadn’t been moved during my absence. Simmons had waited, like a good lad, but when I opened the front door and found him sitting on the couch next to Abner and Yvonne sipping tea, with his little finger cocked in the air like a dog’s leg, nibbling gingersnaps, and laughing at Richard Dawson’s wisecracks between the families feuding, I wondered if I should have left him there.

  He even stood up, blushing, when I came into the room. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, and then, “Oh, excuse me, Mrs. O’Leary—I didn’t know what to do, boss, when you didn’t come back, so I just waited…”

  “You did fine,” I said. I could tell that Abner, hopping from foot to foot, wanted to introduce me to the simpering Yvonne, but I told Simmons to get packed. “Excuse me a second,” I added, “I’ll be right back—I promise.” Then went back outside and down to the surveillance house.

  Through the windows I could see that somebody had cleaned up, the rooms were empty, sparkling, the kitchen walls repainted, the floor tiles replaced, even the appliances changed. Neat, professional work. I wondered what they had done with the garbage, how they had disposed of the bodies. I pulled out the pocket notebook to look at the men’s names for the first time since that night. Willis Strawn. Ernest Ramsey. I had to assume that Strawn had torched my house out of some terrible grief over the death of his partner at the hands of my dumb joke of a booby trap, and then had waited for me to take his perverse revenge. Rather than kill me, he had left me with an image of death I would carry to the grave. There was so much I didn’t understand. How did he know I would find him? Maybe he had seen my tracks in the snow the night I had peeked in his window. I just didn’t know. Like so many things in life, an artful guess was the best I could come up with.

  Heading back to Abner’s, I felt so tired that the snow seemed to suck at my pacs, to hold me frozen in a block of cold, icy ignorance. Maybe I could find some answers in Seattle amid the past lives of Strawn and Ramsey, behind the doors of something called Multitechtronics, Inc. Maybe Simmons and I could catch the afternoon flight. But as I glanced at the sky, the overcast seemed to settle lower over the valley, leaving only the bases of the mountains visible. Even if planes were taking off from the Meriwether airport today, I didn’t want to fly through that rough, freezing tumble of clouds, which meant driving twelve hours or more, long hours on black ice and snowpack to Seattle.

  Back at Abner’s, the old man refused to take any more money, and I was too worn out to argue. Simmons and I thanked him, said our goodbyes, and headed west.

  The interstate was clear traveling until we were west of Missoula, but a fresh storm began its assault outside of Alberton, horizontal snowfall skidding across the icy road. We stayed sober, clean-nosed, creeping through the blizzard, but even at that, we lost it just before midnight, spun out on the east side of Lookout Pass and into the barrow pit in ab
out four feet of snow. It only took an hour or so of serious labor to dig out the pickup and get the chains on all four wheels, serious labor in a wind chill of forty below. Once, while we were warming up in the pickup cab, Simmons turned to me and asked through his chattering teeth, “You reckon them old folks are getting it on?”

  “Abner and Yvonne?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what the old goat has in mind,” I said, trying to grin with a frozen face.

  “You know, when you’re young,” he said, “you’re just so damned dumb. I never thought about old folks doing it, you know, and I wondered how, ah, they go about it, you know.” I couldn’t tell if he was blushing or finally getting some blood back in his face.

  “Are you implying that I’m old enough to know, bud?”

  “No, nothing like that, boss,” he said. “I just thought old men lost it, and old women…”

  “With courage,” I said, “all things are possible.” And we laughed. “Now let’s get that last chain on, and get out of this mess.”

  But even the chains didn’t help. We had to get the sixteen-pound sledge and a steel stake out of the toolbox to give us an anchor for the winch. As we were pounding the stake into the frozen roadbed, Simmons stopped hammering to catch his breath.

  “I hope he’s banging the holy hell out of her at this very moment,” he said, smiling into the wind. “I really liked that old son of a bitch, you know. I ain’t never been around old folks much before—just the daytime winos in the Deuce—and them two old people are cool.”

  “And I’m freezing to death, son,” I said. “Get on that hammer.”

  Before long, winter driving began to seem like an Arctic expedition—chains off on the other side of Lookout Pass, back on for Fourth of July Summit in Idaho, then off, then on again for Snoqualmie Pass, then off—and for all the good it did, we might as well have stayed in Meriwether, where I would have been warm, wrapped in dreams of Cassandra Bogardus.

  When we got to the Mercer Island address I had for Strawn and Ramsey, we found a burned-out hulk beside the calm gray waters of Lake Washington dimpled with light rain.

  “What are we supposed to be looking for, boss man? Burned houses?” Simmons asked, then laughed, brittle with fatigue.

  “Some serious bad guys,” I said, “serious.” And Simmons’ hand crept under his vest to touch the butt of the .357, shivering perhaps with fear or with the memory of the freezing wind and snow.

  “Easy,” I warned when I noticed a woman coming out of the house next door bundled in a bright-blue rain parka and heading toward us.

  “Hi,” she said quietly as she walked up to us. She had one of those intelligent, perky, expensive faces you expect to find on Mercer Island, the second, younger wife of a doctor or a lawyer or a rich Indian chief. “Can I help you?” she asked politely.

  “We were looking for Mr. Strawn or Mr. Ramsey,” I said, “but I can see they’re not home.”

  “Then you didn’t know,” she said softly. “I hope you weren’t friends of theirs…”

  “Associates,” I said, and she nodded as if she knew what I meant.

  “A terrible accident,” she offered, “the furnace exploded, and they never had a chance…”

  So that’s how they cleaned up the garbage, brought the bodies to Seattle and blew up a house, which also meant the bad guys had enough clout to buy an arson investigator, an autopsy, and a police report. Poachers, my ass. Cassandra Bogardus was crazy.

  “I was never very fond of policemen,” she continued. “The sixties,” she added, as if that explained everything. “But Willie and Ernie were different than you would expect…Excuse me, I hope you gentlemen aren’t policemen.”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, and Simmons muffled his laugh with a cough.

  “They were so nice, you know, quiet and neighborly, both of them wonderful French cooks, and they had the most fantastic collection of big-band records and a stereo system that covered an entire wall, and now it’s all…ashes.” The sad little smile looked painted onto her pert, liberal face. “I’ll miss them so much,” she added. “My husband always claimed they were, you know, odd—ah, homosexuals. But I always maintained that they wouldn’t, you know, let homosexuals be policemen—would they?”

  “No, ma’am, I wouldn’t think so,” I said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t care if they were,” she whispered in a rush as two large tears bloomed in her eyes.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said as Simmons and I retreated toward the pickup. Driving away, we watched her standing in the driveway, her figure bent with grief as she gazed across the ashen water like a woman whose man went to sea years and years ago. A small bit of life, light, and laughter had dimmed forever in her snug suburban nest.

  “You’re still not going to tell me what this is all about, are you, boss?” Simmons said.

  “Even if I knew, son, you’re better off not knowing,” I said, “but it’s bad enough that if I were you, I’d get out now.”

  “Not a chance, boss man,” he said. “They can’t put you in the slammer because you’re dead, or me, because I’m crazy.” He sounded almost happy about it.

  “Jail is the least of our worries, the least,” I said, but the kid kept smiling.

  —

  Multitechtronics turned out to be an empty office over a porno shop on 1st Avenue just south of Pike Place Market, a mail drop, an answering service, defunct. I tried the painless dentist next door, but he was feeling so little pain that the only thing he could tell me was what he had drunk for lunch, and I had already smelled the bourbon and ether fumes in the hallway. I had a number of choices, checking with the owner of the building, digging out the incorporation documents, but I thought I had better have another, less personal conversation with Ms. Bogardus, so I found a hungry, lanky young lawyer named McMahon, gave him a retainer, and set him on what I assumed would be a paper maze to track down the owners of Multitechtronics, Inc.

  Then we went down to Ivar’s for lunch, where I had three dozen raw oysters, which disgusted Simmons so much that he couldn’t even eat his chicken-salad sandwich.

  On the way home that night we crashed in Ellensburg, and I dreamed not of Cassandra Bogardus, but of the fat lady cocaine dealer. Oddly enough, it wasn’t a bad dream, as my dreams go, and for that I was grateful.

  —

  Back in Meriwether the next afternoon, we checked into a truck-stop motel east of town, showered the tire-chain mud and slush and cold off ourselves, and then I called Jamison at the station. His greeting seemed distant, uncomfortable.

  “I guess I owe you a vote of thanks,” I said.

  “Milo, I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Get twisted?”

  “Survive,” he said.

  “It’s my hardy-pioneer genes,” I said, and Jamison coughed disgustedly. When my great-grandfather was sheriff of Meriwether County, he founded the family fortune on a string of opium dens, gambling hells, and cotes for soiled doves.

  “I don’t think I can keep you dead much longer, Milo,” he said.

  “A few more days,” I said, “whatever you can manage.”

  “I’ll try,” he said, “but the arson investigator is pressing me. He also mentioned that although he can’t find anything, he smells something hinkty about the fire.”

  “Well, I can promise you I didn’t torch my house for the goddamned insurance money.”

  “I know. I’ve already checked that out.”

  “I need one more favor, Jamison.”

  “Lock you up for your own protection?”

  “Not just yet,” I said. “I need permission to visit the Benniwah kid in the hospital lockup. The one from the EZ-IN/EZ-OUT.” The only people I knew up on the reservation I knew from my days as deputy sheriff, and not a single one would talk openly to me, not even the police. Maybe the kid felt as if he owed me something, maybe he would give me a hand trying to find the Indian in the photograph with Rausche and the grizzly bear. “Okay?”

&n
bsp; “That’s easy,” he said. “Our Good Colonel Bleeding Heart has arranged for his lawyer to handle the defense, so you’re his investigator, right.”

  “Right. A Mr.—ah, Grimes from Seattle. Thanks.”

  “And, Milo…”

  “Yeah?”

  “The game is Saturday after next.”

  “Right,” I said and hung up. “Rich man’s clothes,” I told Simmons, and he sighed as if that were the worst chore of all.

  On the way out to the hospital I stopped long enough to buy another Tyrolean hat and a pair of expensive sunglasses. Rich dudes can afford to wear sunglasses even in the worst snowstorms.

  —

  The Benniwah tribe was notoriously suspicious of strange white men. And with good reason. The first white trader to discover the small peaceful tribe, an Alsatian by the name of Benommen, gave them a corrupted version of his name (they called themselves the Chil-a-ma-cho-chio, the people of Chil-a-ma-cho) and swapped them blankets from smallpox victims of the Mandan tribe for prime beaver pelts. The survivors fled into the high valleys of the Cathedral Mountains, where most of them slowly starved to death. The remainder, although they never shed a drop of white blood, watched as their ancestral lands were slowly stripped and stolen by various government officials, including my great-grandfather of the hardy-pioneer spirit, who had paid a quarter an acre for the three thousand acres of timberland. Finally the tribe managed to secure a small reservation on the north and middle forks of the Dancing Bear River between the Cathedrals and the Diablos. What little they had left, they meant to keep. Unlike many tribes, they never sold or leased land to white men, not even to those few who married into the tribe, and when you drove across the reservation, even the children stared darkly at your pale face as if they still smoldered with racial regret for rivers of white-eye blood unshed.

  —

  For somebody who had taken a .30-06 round in the recent past, Billy Buffaloshoe looked remarkably hale and hearty sitting propped up against the pillows, staring at the green placid walls of his unhospitable cell. When the jailer on duty at the door unlocked it, Billy turned slightly, just enough to bump the elbow of his cast against the metal bed rail. His face became instantly gray, and I waited politely, staring through the heavily meshed one-way glass until he regained his naturally high, burnished color. Then I told Simmons to wait for me in the lobby, and went in.