by Jack Cady
Sugar Bear sat unmoving. His shoulders slumped. He seemed fatalistic, resigned. He obviously did not even think of running, or hiding, or digging foxholes.
Chantrell gave a little moan. His eyes widened, the way eyes do in animated cartoons. A fine tremble developed in his hands. Bertha did her best to steady him.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she whispered. “It ain’t got a thing to do with you . . . or does it? Do we need an alibi?”
Chantrell plucked aimless as a dying man at the front of his shirt. A necklace of illegal stuff might be soaking up sweat beneath that shirt. Chantrell looked guilty enough to hang, to have precise hallucinations when it came to jail.
Bertha glanced toward the cop, listened to whispers and the click of pool balls at her back, and Bertha gave a little giggle, then felt calm. The cop was still checking her out. Her giggle was not enough to get rid of her anger, but enough to keep her from doing something idiotic.
“He don’t care a thing about you,” she told Chantrell. “Act normal as you can. All he knows is you’re a health violation.”
She turned from Chantrell and looked over the crowd. People would drift away if the cop did not leave. For one horrible second Bertha imagined a gloomy and empty bar, the windows beaten by a dry wind, and no one to cast away the gloom. She imagined Sugar Bear sitting alone in the center of gloom while carnival music danced from the tape deck and across an empty dance floor. Bertha shuddered, turned back to the bar. The cop had knocked back his first lemonade. Now he motioned to Chantrell for another. Matters were getting serious.
She paused, thinking if the joint emptied she could get Petey to stay. They could have the privacy they needed . . . then Bertha told herself she must be nuts. She was not going to drive away the best crowd of the summer just so Petey could practice some line he learned from a movie. Nesting instinct or not, business was business. She changed the tape deck, discarding pop music in favor of guitars and country boys.
She stepped behind the bar, trying to look official but not too tough. If the cop did a number on himself it would be dumb to break the spell. Every eye in the house was on her. It was like being on stage.
“Missing children?” she asked the cop. Up close this cop was more interesting. From a distance she had not seen little crow’s feet around his eyes, or beginning wrinkles on his forehead. His mouth didn’t really seem cop-like, being a little on the smiley side; crinkles in the right places. He looked like he should be a forest ranger, or a fifth grade teacher . . . something to do with wildlife.
“Tough afternoon,” the cop said, then went into a sort of explanation, and his explanation was mostly a crock. Bertha watched him check out her ring finger. She began to feel a teensy bit warm.
“You got a nice place.”
“Plain folks,” Bertha said. “Just hard working folks.” She leaned forward, like this was intimate, and whispered, “Folks will feel more comfy when you ditch the suit.”
The cop was only mildly dense. He picked up on what he figured was an invitation, while Bertha silently wondered if she should cuss herself.
“Got to get moving,” the cop said. “I’ve done a hand of work in my day.”
“Just plain honest folks,” Bertha said, and watched the cop “show off” as he stood in the doorway with his back to the crowd. When the cop walked toward his car, Bertha went to the door and watched. He climbed in, tired as a winded horse; an outcast driven from among his own kind, but, Bertha mused, the damn fool brought it on himself. No one asked him to be a cop.
Nobody asked her to extend an invitation, either. She announced that the cop was gone, then returned to her seat. The three pool tables began clicking. Murmurs started to liven as Bertha turned up the hick music. She told herself to take a couple minutes and figure things out.
She should have told the cop that lemonade at China Bay was the way to go. Instead, she somehow managed to tell him to come back when he ditched the cop suit.
She sat, vaguely aware that Petey leaned on his cue and whispered, and Petey looked like a hustler who had been hustled. He whiffed another shot. The logger watched in cynical disbelief, because Petey does not shank easy shots unless he’s hustling.
“Gotcha,” the logger said, “or at least I gotcha if I don’t screw up.”
“Run ’em out,” Petey told him about the game. “That cop . . .” and Petey nearly strangled on the words, “that cop is gonna be back. That cop saw something interesting.”
“As long as it wasn’t my hot chainsaw,” the logger said. “This is the last time I do business with teenagers. They ain’t discreet.”
“He seen the bartender,” Petey said in a tentative way, like he wondered if he could trust the logger.
“Chantrell’s been busted before,” the logger said, “it’s not like he’s a virgin.”
Petey shut up, because he wasn’t talking about Chantrell, and the idea of virgins makes him break out in hives.
“Maybe,” Petey said and changed the subject, “this wind will put that car to the bottom of the ditch. Maybe it will clean the whole shoreline.”
“Cars weigh a helluva lot,” the logger said, his voice a little tense because he was in the middle of a run.
“They don’t weigh much under water,” Petey said. “The water lifts ’em, sort of.”
Bertha listened in a half-hearted way, being not a little distracted. Bertha generally thinks honesty is the best policy when dealing with yourself, so figured she must be lonesome. The first fine-looking man who came along, and who smiled at her . . . and she fell for it. She acted as innocent and dumb as Annie. She told herself, sure as the wind blew, if that cop came back wearing work clothes she’d forget he was a cop. She would not lie to herself and say she felt a little too warm just because of a warm evening.
“And if the shoreline gets cleaned,” Petey said, “some problems around here might get cleaned up too.” He glanced toward Sugar Bear who sat in the center of the room like a mountain of sadness.
“He sure is takin’ it good,” the logger said, and his voice filled with admiration. “Sugar Bear just sat there and faced that cop down. He didn’t run away, or nothin’.”
The Dead Guy Disappears
It wasn’t twenty-four hours before news of Sugar Bear’s standoff with the cop spread along the Canal. The story started with the simple mistake that Sugar Bear had the moxie to face down a cop. By the time the story hit Rough and Randy, it bloomed into a titanic struggle between a giant cop and a giant blacksmith. Accusations were said to have passed back and forth. Blows were struck. Sugar Bear prevailed, but now had a big price on his head. Guys at Rough and Randy took pride in loudly claiming they would not turn a buddy in, even for a million bucks, but some looked sneaky when they said it. By the time the story was twenty-four hours old, it claimed the Canal was about to be overrun by a task force composed of National Guard, Marine MPs, and every state cop west of the Cascade Mountains.
As the story spread south it grew more sophisticated. Storytellers know the bartender at China Bay. That bartender can spot a snow job faster than Jubal Jim can spot a barroom sausage. The story claimed Sugar Bear had something on the cop, or the cop and Sugar Bear exchanged looks that said they were in cahoots. Maybe (the story said) the cop shacked up with a rich lady from the development, a lady whose husband spent time doing business in far places. The story figured the cop had enough evidence to hang Sugar Bear, but Sugar Bear had so much evidence the cop could not make a move. This story went for quiet drama. Rough and Randy adores John Wayne. China Bay discusses Casablanca.
Meanwhile, the dry wind blew. Weather forecasters on TV puzzled over a high-pressure zone camped above the Canal, while on either side of the Canal rain pizzled in typical northwest manner. As dry wind blew, needles on firs browned and dropped. Chop on the Canal rose, became waves, and churned against the shores. The entire Puget Sound area between Olympic Mountains and the Cascades range was once covered by a mile-thick sheet of ice. The Canal is a giant trench p
lowed over millions of years by three separate glaciations. It’s shallow near the shore, then plunges to deep, deep water. Wave action against the shore moves debris. Banks and shores are glacial moraine and will collapse with little more than a whim. People build houses near the shore, but not too near.
Above the shores stand third growth trees, or blackberry bushes, or, sometimes, nothing. There are stretches of rock shingle where even a cactus would feel deprived. It is along these shingles that cars usually go in. It was along one of these shingles that Sugar Bear dunked the dead guy. And, it was to this place that Sugar Bear, on late nights, visited. He came rain or shine, calm or raging storm.
═
Darkness covered the forest as Sugar Bear left his small house and drifted along a familiar path. He carried a flashlight. Wind swept the sky of clouds. Up high, wind hollered and yelled, blowing even harder than on the surface. Sugar Bear’s hair and beard and mustache blew all curly, sometimes in his eyes. Sugar Bear told himself he had seen some wind in his day, and, telling himself that, felt experienced and old.
And it is true he was older than Annie, but younger than a fisherman who also sometimes strolled through dark hours. The fisherman wended his solitary way because he was a man who thought too much, although folks claimed that what he thought wasn’t worth the time it took to think it. The fisherman occasionally encountered Sugar Bear. Sometimes they walked together, silent, each engaged with matters he did not care to discuss.
At other times, Sugar Bear, or the fisherman, might encounter Jubal Jim Johnson whose specialty is to run all night. Except for those three, and for whatever it was that made the road turn ugly, night seemed untouched except for the pounce of owls, the squeak of doomed mice, the eternal wash, and shush; the liquidly speaking voice of the Canal.
On this night of brilliant moon when waves crashed against the shore, and wind sucked moisture from the forest like soda pop up a straw, Sugar Bear stood at the site of the dead guy in the dunked car. He believed himself alone, but was not. Annie crouched nearby. Annie was on her own errand, plus the fisherman walked somewhere in the neighborhood.
There being no one around to talk to, or at least no one Sugar Bear knew about, it seemed natural to talk to the dead guy; since, by then, Sugar Bear was sick of talking to himself.
“All this had to happen,” Sugar Bear explained toward the water. “There’s stuff that’s gonna happen no matter what anybody does, and this was some of that stuff. That don’t mean it’s right.” His voice, which after this much time should have been steady, trembled with grief.
“When I was a kid,” Sugar Bear explained to the Canal, or the dead guy, or maybe to the wind that snatched his tired words, his sad words, and blew them over the forest and out to sea, “I seen some bad stuff. Then I grew up and there was more bad stuff.”
On the Canal, a running light, red-right-returning, showed a fishing boat beating its wet way home. Overhead, stars shone so clear it seemed they might start to click, and movement among the stars showed a satellite that no doubt broadcast weather, or TV pictures of clowns in dressy paint, dancing before trained poodles in a cosmic circus.
“So maybe you saw bad stuff, too,” Sugar Bear said to the dead guy. “Only how come you acted one way and I acted the other? And, now look at the mess.”
Water boiled at Sugar Bear’s feet, and wind took tops off waves so the Canal lay like churned milk beneath the moon.
“There ain’t no way to make this right,” Sugar Bear said to the dead guy. “I can’t alibi you. I can’t alibi me. I don’t like either one of us, you sonovabitch, but I’m sorry.”
The fisherman, standing silent nearby, told himself he would-be-damn. He knew Sugar Bear took stuff too serious, but never believed Sugar Bear took it this serious. The fisherman figured he’d better make some noise.
“I said it before.” The fisherman spoke casual as if they sat among folks at Beer and Bait. “This was gonna happen. The guy was a goner. If you blame yourself, it’s like blaming yourself for earthquakes.”
“I figured you might be out here tonight.” Sugar Bear did not turn around. He kept watching the Canal. “It’s one of them no-sleep deals, ain’t it?”
“The souls of fish,” the fisherman said. “On my conscience I got the souls of maybe a million fish. That includes some championship halibut.”
Sugar Bear slumped. Starlight and moonlight lay so in tense that shadows of trees ran blackly toward the water. Waves broke against the shingle. “I got a problem with you,” Sugar Bear told the fisherman. “I never know when you’re flipping b.s. and when you’re actually talking.”
“I got the same problem,” the fisherman admitted, “but I think right now I’m talking.” He stepped from shadows to stand beside Sugar Bear. “I ain’t never killed a fish, not even a dogfish or a shark, that wasn’t more important than that guy.”
“You can’t compare.”
“You can,” the fisherman insisted. “A shark does what sharks do, because sharks don’t know any better. They got no choice.” The fisherman put his hand on Sugar Bear’s shoulder. “Man, you’ve got to get past it. This is messing you up.”
“If it don’t rain real quick,” Sugar Bear said, “we’re going to lose the forest. I shouldn’t have built the shop in the middle of all them trees.”
“And you accuse me of b.s.”
“It’ll be a punishment, I reckon,” Sugar Bear told him. “I’m not exactly changing the subject.”
“Sure,” the fisherman said. “In order to punish you, the whole damn forest will burn. That’s getting pretty universal.” The fisherman stepped toward the shoreline, looked into the surf, looked farther along the shoreline. “You got a bigger problem,” he said quietly, “or else you got no problem at all. Bring that flashlight!” He walked across the shingle and into a small stand of trees. Sugar Bear followed.
The car had either been washed or dragged sideways. It sat in surf a good forty yards from the original dunk site. Under starlight strong as beacons, the car sat like a small, steel stain in churning water. Its hood stood buried beneath surf, but its rear end rose above water level. The rear end looked like a clamp had twisted against the fenders until the trunk lid popped open. The trunk lid stood above the surf like a small imitation of the police crane, like a shorebird fishing.
“Let’s hope that trunk is empty,” the fisherman said, “Because otherwise this job is running over time.” He worked his way through trees and small brush. The car trembled as surf crashed against its front end. Nothing, except the rear end, seemed bent or squashed.
“Flashlight,” the fisherman said. He took it from Sugar Bear. “Empty,” he said about the car’s trunk. He ran the beam of light up and down the shore. Nothing tumbled in the surf, not log or flotsam or corpse.
“I’ll be honest,” the fisherman admitted, “this is scaring the living crap out of me.”
“I think,” Sugar Bear said, “I’m going home and wait until this plays out. I almost wish the sonovabitch was there, or maybe I don’t.” He stood quiet for a moment, watching boiling water, watching whitecaps and stars and moon. “You’re a good friend,” he said to the fisherman. “Better than I’ve got coming, probably.”
“I keep feeling like somebody’s watching us,” the fisherman said. “Maybe that’s why this is scary.” He backed away, passed the flashlight to Sugar Bear, and made his way through brush and trees to the road. As he did, there was small movement among the trees where Annie still hid.
She crouched, not wanting to be seen, but wanting to help. As the two men stepped onto the road and parted company, Annie told herself everything was going to work out. Some part of her spell had meshed. The dead guy was gone.
She felt the wind move through trees, and felt, really felt, the starlight. Then she told herself not to get feeling too smart, because there was still plenty to worry about. Maybe she had done something dumb, because wind might cause the forest to burn. It seemed that work only caused more work, because n
ow attention must be paid to knocking down wind and bringing rain. As she stepped onto the road, and headed for home, she shivered because of an unaccustomed feeling. She had the feeling that something or someone was watching.
Interlude: Jubal Jim Smells Something Dreadful
Night holds the mountains like darkness is welded to rock. Night clasps roots of trees and rhododendron and blackberry, and the bug-running litter beneath fallen leaves. Night defeats a brilliant moon where shadows fall. Owl-light, as it fades to darkest dark, signals a time for night creatures to scurry, glide, tramp, or scatter. It is time for hounds to run.
Jubal Jim Johnson, who, during the day could be taken for a goldbrick, oozes serpent-like from the porch of Beer and Bait. The Canal lies black as tunket behind him, and mountains stand bountiful and dark with smells. It’s a smorgasbord for the nose out there, at least if one is a hound.
In light from neon, Jubal Jim looks like a black-saddled, but otherwise white apparition fading into the forest. His ordinarily smiley face with its little brown eye patches, and the blue ticking on his brisket, can’t be seen. His eighty-pound body stretches long, lithe, muscular, and he can run twenty miles in a night.
Hound sense being what it is, Jubal Jim makes do with half-a-hunt, for he has no hunter following. Jubal Jim can run a fox to ground, make a raccoon wish he was in Topeka, and tussle a bear in a manner that leaves both parties bloody and unsatisfied. If he had a hunter, or had a pack to run with, Jubal Jim would be a fulfilled hound. As it is, he has vague longings.
Of sin he is innocent because he doesn’t know what it is; or gives a smidgen. In his doggish way he understands that men stand around pool tables and things go click. He understands that brown paper bags sometimes contain interesting things to eat. Dog-like, he knows some humans can be trusted, and some cannot, and he knows the bar smells of sweat and beer like he knows the back of his paw. In the field of crime Jubal Jim is innocent, although he once secretly peed behind the piano, possibly through a whim, or possibly because during winter months Bertha keeps the doors shut and forgets to let him out.
