The Woman Who Married a Bear

by John Straley

  “I know,” I said and we walked toward the truck.

  FOURTEEN

  WE DIDN’T SPEAK as she drove me to the airport. In the parking lot I bought a pint of Kentucky bourbon for $25 from a cab driver who had religious medals hanging from his rearview mirror.

  Edward was there at the single gate and he smiled as I went toward the plane, and then he walked over to me. He put his arms on my shoulders and then looked down at the ground.

  “There is a story about a human being who marries a bear. Maybe you should hear it.”

  “How does it end?”

  “Depends.”

  I looked at him and squinted. “You, too? What are you, running for office? You’re not making sense.”

  “It depends on where you are. It depends on who the bear is.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  He smiled. And his eyebrows arched in the circle that completed the curve of his cheekbones. “Be careful, Cecil. You are going to drink. But don’t ruin your luck.”

  “I’ll try. Don’t listen to me. It’s somebody else talking.”

  “Okay.”

  We shook hands and I turned and climbed the stairs to the plane. I leaned against the window and watched Hannah walk with Edward back to his truck. I opened the bottle and drank deeply. There is something ardent and romantic about getting drunk. I feel like it’s a homecoming and a departure all at once.

  I am sitting in the central tube of a riveted aluminum spear, being driven deeper and deeper into my seat as we lift off the runway and then, as we ease up and bank over the south, I am astride a trumpeter swan gliding easily along the currents of subarctic air.

  I don’t want to, but I force myself to take six long swallows to finish the bottle so the flight attendant will not think I’m rude or hiding anything when she offers me a drink. Somehow there is music, a string section playing “Norwegian Wood” above the constant grinding drone of the Rolls-Royce engines. The pressure builds up behind my eyes and my head begins to feel slightly unhinged from my neck. I plug my nose and blow out. Air gushes out of my ears and new sounds flood in. The liquor cart is being unfolded and the blond flight attendant with the purple mascara bangs it gently on the bulkhead and I hear the sweet tinkle of the tiny bottles.

  Taking hallucinogenic drugs is very much like taking a trip: leaving one place and going to another. But getting drunk is like hiring a sitter and staying in. There are no lightning blasts of clarity or luminous burning bushes, but only the vague warm sentimentality that seeps in around the edges like the sliding chords of a steel guitar. The back of my throat and the bottom of my stomach fill with iron filings, and I feel the pressure of my peripheral vision narrowing.

  The plane climbed through the cloud cover and we poked into the uniformly sunny world of high altitude. The cart was loaded and happily jingling down the aisle. I was by the window and the woman on the aisle heaved a long breath and said to herself and to me: “Thank God we’re out of that hellhole.”

  She was white and wearing a crisp business suit, straight navy skirt, pleated white blouse, and oversized amber trade-bead necklace. Her fingernails were manicured to shapely clear talons. She clenched and unclenched her fingers as we rose to cruising altitude.

  “To what do you owe the good fortune of getting out of Stellar?” She looked at me and her eyes seemed to be gay as paper lanterns at a country picnic.

  “It was time to go,” I said.

  “Exactly!” And she thumped the padded armrest with her fists. Her silver bracelets tinkled briefly as the liquor cart pulled abeam and I bought her a scotch and soda. I had bourbon. We talked about something inane and I had a sense she knew it was inane as well. We were talking out of tension, and all the while I kept thinking about Hannah and Toddy and that dismal avocado in the salad. My seatmate was a CPA and I remember her saying that she didn’t use a pencil and she “did cities and not books.”

  I smiled a knowing kind of grin like I knew what she was talking about and had turned it into some sort of double entendre.

  She was glad to be leaving Stellar because she was afraid she was going to get stuck there for weeks trying to sort out the books for the city.

  “These are Stone Age people, for Christsakes. Not that they are to blame, I suppose, but they don’t have any real notion about fiscal responsibility. They don’t understand the … the …” She traced a perfectly shaped nail down the tip of her nose to her tongue. “—The substance of good accounting.”

  I was chewing that one over when we hit an air pocket and nervous laughter rose from all the passengers. The cabin was growing dark now and the reading lights were coming on. Thick-bodied travelers jiggled in their seats. Strapped in. Some were asleep with their mouths open in corpulent repose. We were all hurtling through the air at 450 miles per hour inside a pressurized aluminum tube. Far below I imagined the sound of our engines falling on a bull moose. He might have startled and lifted his head slightly.

  I dimly remember changing planes in Anchorage. I remember trying to convince my racist accountant friend to come with me to the Baranof Hotel in Juneau or to the Red Dog Saloon. I remember the angry expression of some large white man with folded arms who had apparently come to meet her at the airport. I remember the tinge of potential violence in the air or maybe it was the edge to someone’s voice.

  I don’t think that I got into a fight.

  I slept and drank from Anchorage to Juneau and I stole bottles off the cart when I walked back to the coffin-sized bathroom. The flight was continuing to Seattle, and there were three people in tweed coats and rubber shoes waiting in the Juneau airport.

  Someone offered me a joint in a bathroom, maybe in the airport, and I turned it down. I remembered three years ago I had sworn to a sixteen-year-old girl that I would never smoke pot without her and we would only do it in the Pike Place Market in Seattle. This sworn oath is clearer now than any moment of the plane ride. I sat down on the toilet in the airport bathroom and put my head in my hands.

  I’d been looking for a guy in Seattle, and thought he worked at one of the fish stands. He might have been a witness to a boat fire in Ketchikan the fall before. I met her in the morning on the corner near the bus stop where the tattoo parlor used to be. She had short black hair and she offered to keep me company. She had two joints in a plastic soap case that looked like it was stuffed with her important papers. We smoked the joints slowly and intermittently at various points around the market. We squatted by the green pillars and listened to Baby Gramps play “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” on his steel guitar. We watched the men throw salmon over the counter to be weighed, and laughed when they dropped them, slippery and comic like an old movie. The fish were beautiful silver swimmers, split down the middle, their red flesh flashing like a starlet’s lips.

  We kissed on the balcony over the waterfront. We watched tourists shuffle around the panhandlers, and we ate calamari and baklava sitting by the window in an upstairs cafe, trying to guess where all the ships were bound for. We stepped out into the sunshine and her skin was a golden slippery pink, like a little girl in her first two-piece bathing suit. We drank coffee and white zinfandel. An old man dressed like a logger did silly and obvious sleight of hand, but she laughed and put change in his hat.

  She had a few belt buckles made from elk horn that she was going to sell but she had given them to a friend to keep and he had traded them off for a pizza and a bottle of apple wine, which he at least offered to share with us, but we declined.

  At six o’clock we kissed by the stainless steel flower bins that were empty except for the bright blue and red smear of petals across the bottom. A bus blew the pages of a magazine across Pike Street in the wake of its exhaust. There were long shadows toward midtown. A Chinese man squatted by one of the green pillars and knocked spit out of his harmonica.

  We bought fresh raspberries and shrimp and tried to cook the shrimp over a barrel fire on the waterfront, but the wood was soaked in creosote an
d the shrimp turned to tar. She ate raspberries and cried. She cried until her mascara ran like the water stains under a roof spout. It was the snotty, awkward crying of a child, and I held her and kissed the top of her head and promised.

  She had a theory about unhappiness. She let herself be really unhappy a little every day, and that way she would not save it up for when she was old. She said she would never end up like her mom. She told me this and she wiped her nose on her sleeve. We finished the last of the joint and the raspberries and we burned the shrimp. Then I drove her out to her aunt’s house in Woodinville, where the yard was matted down and muddy, with a pit bull chained to an outboard motor in the corner. Bugs swarmed the porch light. Her aunt turned the TV down when we knocked, but stayed sitting on the couch. We kissed good-bye and I promised to meet her at the market the next day. But when I saw her she snubbed me. I think she had gotten into some kind of trouble because there was the crescent of a fresh bruise under her makeup. I waved and she smiled faintly and turned her back.

  Later I heard from a guy who knew her uncle in jail that she’d hung herself in a halfway house on the Olympic Peninsula. I never got any more details but I didn’t disbelieve the rumor. My father told me that the first rule of unhappiness is that you can accept the way things are, or change. As long as you live drunk or with an acceptable daily level of unhappiness, you can avoid this rule al-together. But some people find that no matter what they do, unhappiness is cumulative. Some people mistreat their lovers and stay drunk so they can live the exclusive romance that’s found in memory and cheap sentiment.

  I was sitting in an airport bathroom thinking about my own theory of unhappiness. I had this idea that if someone would only love me with enough conviction and if I could understand just what the fuck the “substance of good accounting” was, everything would come clear.

  I tried to add things up: There was a hole in Toddy’s back the size of a softball. There were papers and reports and photographs about a murder that didn’t add up to a story. There were Lance and his sister, both less than forthcoming, but then I was a lot less than worth coming forth to. Emma Victor with her tight smile and milky stare. Louis Victor dead and eaten by the bears. De De flopped like a rag doll on a pier in Bellingham and Walt Robbins with his earnest faith in his daughter. And in the midst of this there was someone trying to kill me before I got to something that I couldn’t at this point even imagine existed. I tried to add it up, and I couldn’t understand the substance of good accounting. I was rocketing around in one pressurized tube after another, with facts swirling around me like mosquitoes.

  The Juneau airport shines with etched glass and makes you think you’ve really arrived in a city. I sat in the bar and looked out over the highway and I could see the lights of the department stores and video shops nestled under the lip of the glacier. The glacier has a massive presence like the sound of a bear ahead of you in the brush. I drank and twisted my napkin into a knot. Someone asked me about Toddy and I talked about my father. I remember getting angry and I remember thinking about getting something to eat. Someone, perhaps another large white man with folded arms, suggested that I go downtown. A cabbie fronted me the fare. I don’t know why.

  It was raining hard and I stood under a theater marquee for ten minutes until I saw someone I thought I knew and we walked the bars. I remember stuffed animal heads and a woman in a tank top with a bloody nose. I remember a waitress dropping an entire tray of drinks and I think I remember someone playing the saxophone out in the rain on the dock by the big mural of the raven. Warm rain, I thought, and a fried food smell up from the vents. Behind me the mountain was a tangle of trees and stone and quick little rivulets running into iron culverts rolling under the streets.

  On the edge of town the empty mines were quiet, the rocks piled like empty shells in the middens. Rain and the salt breath of the tide flats. Whiskey and popcorn. Coffee, sour and bubbling like thermal mud in the urn at the shelter. The boys sleeping at the bus stop were wearing two sets of clothes. Billy was dancing in the street and flashing his Indian money around, his grandma bundled up and leaning on her cane under the bus-stop roof. Billy doing an old dance, Billy muttering in drunken Tlingit. His grandma, sober and watchful, too wise to be really ashamed but too old and tired not to be hurt by his foolishness.

  There was a fire in a trash bin behind one of the hotels and a bottle being shared. I remember landing on the sidewalk in front of the lawyers’ bar. Diamonds on the slick cement sidewalk. I remember angry voices and Billy chanting and yelling just out of hearing. I remember hands on the back of my jacket, pulling me up as I was lying facedown. I think I was choking. Long flight of stairs inside a brown stairwell. Popcorn again and a booming woman’s voice coming up from below as if she were in the back of a cave, music swelling and sirens, squealing tires and music, dance music, and popcorn and sour butter, salt, and jostling up the stairs, looking at the weave of mildewed carpet and row after row of cracked brown door frames.

  It was about 9:00 A.M. when I woke up. Someone had thrown some sofa cushions on the floor and my face was crushed down in the crack between them. I felt like I had an anvil on the back of my neck. I was able to turn my head and see two Indian men sitting on a couch without cushions. They were wearing brown canvas work clothes and one was wearing a baseball cap. The other was fidgeting with his lighter and balancing a cup of coffee on his knee. The TV was on and there was some commotion in the bathroom. The one with the coffee cup turned to his companion.

  “Where’s Auntie?”

  “She’s in the bathroom ragging on Calvin about how he’s butchering his deer. She says he shouldn’t have it in the bathtub.”

  They stared out toward the bathroom and then down at me.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Some guy that Auntie wants to talk to.”

  Calvin came out of the bathroom. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His hands were bloody, and in one of them he was carrying a hunting knife with a curved blade. He had shoulder-length black hair and his eyes were sparkling.

  “You got a better stone than the one in the kitchen? I dulled this blade on the hair, and she wants it boned out just right.”

  “Yeah, I’ll take a look.”

  The hatless one stepped over me to the alcove that had been the kitchen. There was a counter with a gap of darkened wallboard where the dishwasher had been. There was a camp stove set up on the countertop. There was a roll of butcher paper, scissors, tape, and a felt-tip pen. The hatless one rummaged in the drawers. Calvin bent down over me and smiled.

  “You really disappoint me, man.”

  His breath was in my face. It was warm and smelled sweet, like bacon. I tried to sit up, without luck. My head felt like a collapsing melon. I lay back down. He squatted down next to me on the floor and stared at me, grinning.

  “I’ve been studying white people for years, and I am bitterly—I mean bitterly—disappointed.” He gestured toward the TV. “Look on television. Private detectives are not supposed to be like this. You people are supposed to be in charge! You are supposed to have a cool apartment and a fast car. Man, you are supposed to be following beautiful women and making deals. I mean, what I see of you guys on television and what I’ve got here now are … inconsistent.”

  The hatless one came back toward us. “Hey! Here.” He handed Calvin a rectangular piece of marble, smooth on one side and rough on the other.

  “Yeah, thanks.” He looked back down at me. “And look at you … drunk. I see so many of your people drunk. It must be the pain of running the world. Is that it, Kemosabe? The pain of running the world? I mean, I’m smart enough to know that you don’t walk around like pilgrims with three-cornered hats and big buckles and shit. I’ve seen TV, man. I know what you are supposed to be, but you … you’re a mess. Where did Auntie find you anyway?”

  I looked up at him and he was still smiling sweetly.

  I made it up on one elbow and said, “I am fucking in charge. Just tell m
e where I am, who you are, and if I have a broken nose or not.”

  He laughed loudly and patted my head as if I were a favorite pup. “Just so, man. Just so. I don’t think your nose is broke.”

  A familiar old woman’s voice came from the bathroom. “Calvin, bring that knife back in here.”

  “Just stay here, she wants to talk to you.”

  “Okay, but I need to use the bathroom.”

  Now he frowned. He took a long breath as if he were amazed at his own patience with me. “Auntie, can we get in the bathroom a minute?”

  I heard an muttering back out of the bathroom and disappear down a hallway. I made my way to my feet and stood still for a second. I had been in these apartments before. They were above the movie theater and the cafe. The window was open a crack and the vent for the cafe was a few feet underneath. I could clearly smell fried potatoes. Out past the vent I could see the flat roofs puddled with rainwater along the old buildings of Front Street, and I could see the mountains of Douglas Island. I heard the television and the grinding chug of the garbage truck in the alley. I heard breaking glass and someone yelling at a busboy in Spanish. There was a raven on a TV antenna ten feet from the window and an eagle drawn out wide and gliding over the channel.

  I walked to the bathroom and opened the door. There was a deer hanging from the shower nozzle, with its hind legs resting in the tub. It was a buck. He was hanging by a cord knotted around his neck. His head and horns were intact and the hide was lying in the tub, puddled at his feet as if he had undressed to take a shower. His head was cocked at that impossible angle of a hanging death, and his tongue lolled out the side of his mouth. The hair on his delicate head and ears was fine and soft brown in comparison to the white sheen of the layer of fat that covered his exposed musculature. His chest was split open and cleaned out. His eyes were black opaque marbles.