The Woman Who Married a Bear (14 page)

“In the morning, he was gone. We found Hawkes ranting about bears and voices from the center of the earth. That's when we called the troopers.”

“You told the troopers you never came up on deck that night.”

“So?”

That was my kind of retort. “So, now you're saying that you
were
on deck that night. Has your memory improved over time?”

Norma twisted her fingers near the nape of her neck. Lance did not look at her.

“Our memories are bad, and neither of us knows when we were on deck but we told the police the truth.”

“Well, I can't help worrying about the two people who could place you on deck. But I suppose you don't have to worry. They'll both be gone for a long time.”

“What people?”

“Alvin Hawkes is one.”

Lance almost smiled, his lips parting as if he were thinking of taking a bite of something. “He's reliable, isn't he?”

“But at least he's alive.”

“What are you talking about?”

“De De is going to be away for a long time, isn't she? Why don't you tell me about her? Then maybe I'll get out of your way.”

Lance turned to me, this time more sad than angry. “Now, there's a mystery for you to solve, Younger. There's something you could do. Why don't you ask Walt Robbins how his daughter died? He's been dogging me all over the country, hinting and pushing me about De De…. Hell, he was down there when it happened. He knew about her married boyfriend, and that she was pregnant. But he wants to put me in the middle of it. I was seven hundred and eighty-six air miles away when she committed suicide, but he wants me mixed up in it. Why?”

“Does he think you killed her?”

His head jerked up as if he heard a twig snapping in the brush.

“She used to like me. She had a crush on me in school. Somehow, he thinks I'm to blame. But he can't think I'd kill De De.”

“Were you sleeping with her around the time she died?”

I realize now that this wasn't the most tactful question. But I was still a little bent out of shape about the torque-wrench situation, and in my own cowardly way, I wanted to rap him. All my experience needling people didn't prepare me for his reaction.

Norma saw it immediately. At first she backed away but then she went to him.

“You better get out of here,” she hissed at me. “I'm not kidding. You better get out of here.”

She was right; one look at Lance confirmed it. He was bent double with his head buried in his hands. He was groaning in heaving breaths from a source that was somewhere deeper than his stomach. His muscles were tight. He rocked on his haunches and his sister tried to murmur into his ear. His fingers were knotted together and were hardening into a bone white and pink fist. I knew I didn't want to be around when he got back from the place he was in.

I looked downstream and saw Edward's truck idling beside the embankment. Edward sat behind the wheel smoking a cigarette, watching. He was not making any moves, he was just watching. He could have been there forever.

Norma looked up at me. “You'd better get out of here,” she repeated. “Jesus,
please.”

I walked the sandy shore in the direction of Edward's truck. I walked slowly and didn't bolt. I could feel the force of Lance's rage. I walked slowly and tried to think good thoughts. I looked over my shoulder once and he was standing upright, his body swaying and his head cocked to the wind. His hood was down and it was a strange effect because his hands and head appeared too big compared to his body. When he saw that I was looking at him, he froze, and his sister gripped him tighter. He stood stock still. Then he shook his head as if bitten in the ear and turned suddenly and walked back into the darkness of the iron container. I moved up the slope to the truck.

The heater blasted the dusty heat of a hairdryer into my face and swirled cigarette smoke around the cab. Edward smiled and squinted at me as if I were still a long way off.

“I see you found them.”

“Jesus, I almost got my dick knocked in the dirt, back there. How did you know to come here? And what were you doing anyway?” He reached under the seat and brought up a hunting rifle. A Seko stainless .375 magnum with a Bushnell scope. For walrus, charging polar bear or rhino. This was a serious piece of equipment.

“I was just thinking. You need someone to tell you a story, but I don't think that you're going to live long enough to hear it. You make people mad. Where do you want to go?”

“Somewhere I can hear a good story.”

“Let me take you to Walt Robbins.”

“Is he going to tell me a good story?”

“Don't know. I'll take you there to see.”

TWELVE

LATER, AFTER ALL
of this was over and I was sitting in the cathedral back in Sitka, I thought of that moment confronting the children and I imagined another.

I remembered reading a poem about Theodore Roethke as a child trapped up on the roof of his father's greenhouse. In my mind, I could see the boy paralyzed with fear above the adder-mouthed orchids and the steamy heat of the glass bubble. I imagined the cacophony of glass and clay pots shattering as the boy pictured himself falling to what might be his death. He conceived many stories in that moment, stories that would unravel only years later when he was a fat and eccentric old professor. Stories that would continue to unravel as he tempted insanity. I thought of a scared boy, tenuous above the beautiful and the familiar, facing a stupid, violent death.

As I said, I only thought about this much later, after I was warm and well fed. It took me some months to realize that, from the moment I rocked Toddy in my arms to the time I climbed into Edward's truck, I was perched on top of the greenhouse glass. My confrontation with the children by the river made me realize I had crawled out onto a dangerous perch. Looking down at the beautiful world I felt both light, and heavy with fear.

T
he sand road slid under the windshield and Edward lit a cigarette. My body bumped along like a bag of clothes. I couldn't make out the kids playing on the side of the road or the song being played on the radio. Fear, after danger has passed, has a way of making the light shimmer and my breath go shallow. Sounds take on a rounded tone, muffled and indistinct. This is fear like a sick nostalgia or a particularly bad hangover. If enlightenment feels like the top of your skull becoming infinitely large, my mind felt like a cinder.

He stopped the truck in front of a Quonset hut. There was a six-inch stovepipe jutting out of the low section of vertical wall that eventually doglegged up above the roofline. This structure had an iron roof. In fact, it was mostly iron roof. Edward turned off the key in a casually ceremonious way. I knew he wanted to talk to me.

“Talk to Walt Robbins. Don't make him mad.”

“Hey, do you know something more about this than you're telling me? I mean, are you playing the mysterious guiding hand of fate or something?”

He looked at me with a dazzlingly confused look on his face.

“I don't know shit, Cecil. Talk to Walt Robbins. Okay?”

“Right.”

I hopped out.

I was looking for the ravens. There were none. I was hoping to see something that would bring me luck. There was nothing. Cynicism is no protection, and the need for love does not bring luck. I had to solve this muddle on my own. I heard Edward drive away and I felt like I was standing on a distant planet. When I turned, he was already out of sight.

The Quonset hut had a nicely made front door of wooden panels that looked as if it had been rubbed with oil. There was a heavy steel door handle. The door frame was made of whitened river driftwood.

Before I could knock, Walt Robbins came to the door. “You're that investigator from Juneau. Want something to eat?”

He turned quickly and walked into the warm room. He went to the oil stove and began stirring a spoon in a big pot. “All I got's some stew. It's thin but by God it's hot.”

He was maybe six two, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He was wearing a clean hickory shirt and black jeans. He had on wild fuzzy blue slippers that were matted with chips of wood and sand. Just as everything about Lance's body seemed to turn in, everything about Walt Robbins's body turned out. He was well muscled, but his shoulders were set loose and his arms were relaxed. His eyes were pale blue and sparkled from his face. His jaw was square, but the mouth was not tight. His hands were big, as if he could palm a water bucket and crunch it up like a pop can. He had sandy brown hair and looked like he could have crewed on any fishing boat in the Pacific.

“Got some bread. I didn't make it but it goes down good. Want something to drink? Coffee? Something stronger?”

I was back up on the greenhouse roof. “I'm sorry. How did you know I was here? How did you know it was me?”

“Hell, man. Younger, isn't it? Where the heck do you think you are? I heard about you before you got your bags off the airplane. There's lots of room around here but this is still an awfully small town. I've been waiting for you to get here.”

He handed me a bowl of stew. It looked thick and hot. He started buttering a piece of white bread. He interrupted himself and poured some whiskey into a water glass. He balanced the buttered bread on top of the glass and set it on a plywood table next to the window.

“I heard from my relatives in Juneau that Emma was steamed about someone messing around with the old woman. I heard she was flying back and forth to the home there in Sitka trying to sort it all out.”

“Wait a minute. When did she make those trips? I had a friend get me the airline manifests. She wasn't on them.”

He looked up at me, concerned and puzzled, like someone waking a sick baby up from a nap.

“Hell, man, she wouldn't be on the manifests. She wouldn't fly commercial to Sitka. She would fly her own plane.”

“She's a pilot?”

I took a drink: warm and smoky. I felt like the cinder was soaking it up and expanding.

“She flies that plane better than most. Louis was always wanting her to do it as part of his business but she never would. Mr. Younger, there's a lot more to this than Emma wants anyone to find out.”

“She seems to think the same thing about you. Her two kids down by the river seem to want to put you in the middle of it, too.”

“Those two ‘kids' are meaner than pet snakes. They know something but they're never going to tell. They know something about De De and what happened in Bellingham.”

He sat in a straight-back chair across the corner of the rough-hewn table. He looked at me without fear. His eyes and the features of his face were relaxed but sad, as if he had learned to live a long time with sorrow. He smiled and blue ice sparkled from deep down. I wanted to turn away but I couldn't.

“My girl's dead, Mr. Younger. She saw something, she knew something. She didn't kill herself. I don't care what anybody says. I knew about her boyfriend; I knew she might be pregnant. Hell, we fished together after her mother died, we hunted together. She was tough.”

“What about her diary?”

“She was worried. I'm not saying she wasn't scared. But that last stuff. That last stuff wasn't her.”

“Do you think someone else wrote it?”

“No. It's her handwriting, all right. We've written back and forth enough for me to know her writing. I think someone scared her. I think she was frightened about what was happening, what was going to happen at that trial. But she didn't kill herself.”

I dished a bit of onion and moose meat into my mouth and chewed, then swallowed, grateful.

“Two things. What the hell did she see? And whatever it was, how could it be important enough for anyone to risk killing her? I mean, Alvin Hawkes was going down. Nobody, not Sy Brown or my sister, was going to make a self-defense claim fly, no matter what your daughter saw.”

“Yeah, I've thought about that, too. But I don't think they—” and he nodded out the door and by that I knew he meant the brother and sister down by the river. “I don't think Lance wanted to take any chances. He is mean, Mr. Younger. He's mean but at the same time he's completely devoted to his mother and to Norma.”

By the way he stopped talking I knew he was assessing how much he should trust me. We had blundered into a kind of friendship without knowing anything about the consequences. That was fine by me. In fact, I preferred it, but Walt had lost a daughter, and he was a good hunter; he knew he could never catch anything if he made too much noise. He lifted his glass to the light and looked at it as if he were appraising a gem.

“I think Lance killed her.”

I let it sit there. I could tell he wasn't comfortable with the false theatrics of the pause that I was forcing between us. I also knew this guy wanted to talk. He lived alone, he was not practiced at playing these kinds of games.

“I don't understand it all, Mr. Younger; I only understand a few things. I know that my girl had a crush on Lance in school but he never looked at her twice.”

“Then why would he kill her?”

“Before the trial started, De De told me she knew Louis and Hawkes had been fighting. She said that she had been on the bow of our boat checking the anchor and saw them fighting. When she told Lance about it, he got upset. She got spooked. I don't know if you've ever seen him mad—?”

I shook my head, trying not to commit.

“Well, he gets … crazy. De De said he got that way when she told him she'd been out on the bow that night.”

“She was seen drunk down on the waterfront the day she died.”

“She drank, but she was a dock rat, Mr. Younger. She had taken spills in the water as a kid; she could scramble out. She wouldn't panic and try to shinny up a piling like a drunken logger.” He took my bowl and ladled out some more stew, with large slices of potatoes and a fatty piece of meat. He handed it back to me.

“Well, Emma thinks that you just want to hurt her family. She says you were passed out drunk in the fo'csle when you should have gone ashore with Louis. Maybe you could have prevented this whole thing.”

He sat down near me again and moved closer to me than was comfortable. “You don't know how many times I've thought of that myself. If I'd been there on the beach, both of us could have handled Hawkes. She knows I've thought about it a million times. You know, Mr. Younger, maybe I could have gotten the gun and hidden it in one of the places Louis used to lock away rifles when the hunters were drinking in camp. We could have dealt with Hawkes if there were no guns lying around loose. But that's not the way it happened, and there is nothing I can do about it now.”

“So why are you anxious to get into the case now?”

“I was going to let everything lie. I guess you could say I was pretty much done with the whole thing. Nothing can bring her back. Even if Lance did kill her. I thought about it a lot and no matter what, I have good memories of my girl. No matter what happens with the law or in the rest of my life, I have good memories of her.”

He pointed behind his shoulder. In the back of the hut was his cot, and above it, seemingly floating on the wooden walls, I recognized a picture of a brown-haired girl holding a king salmon by a gaff hook. The girl's head was tossed back, and I could imagine the throaty laugh going out over the sunny beach. The salmon was bright silver and thick in the body.

“I have those, and no matter what else, Emma Victor doesn't have those memories. Her mind is filled with … I don't know what its filled with.” And he took another drink. “She talks a lot about how important her family is but I don't think she even thinks about them anymore. I mean, really thinks about them without getting angry.”

“Your memories …”

“I was telling you. I was done with it. I was happy living here, fishing and taking out a few tourists. But then the kids came back to town and I saw them walking around and I saw them fishing the creeks, I saw them laughing and eating food at picnics. It all came back. They're alive, De De's dead. You know, it's not fair that my girl didn't have a future like these two do. But even then I didn't care that much. I just pushed it all back into my mind”—he lifted up his glass—“and into the bottle maybe a little more than before.

“Then I heard about that shooting in Sitka. When I heard that the old lady hired a detective and someone tried to kill him, I thought, well, great. Don't get me wrong. But I was happy. It meant that it was real. Does that make any sense to you? I knew this wasn't just in
my
mind. This wasn't just craziness or drinking. This was happening to someone else.”

He stood up and looked down at me. “And I was happy because I counted on you looking into it. And I thought that I could help you figure it out.”

“What do you have, besides instinct, to go on?”

“Nothing. But there must be something out at Prophet Cove where Louis died. I can't tell you what it is but I have a feeling that it's there.”

I took a drink. “I've got to mention that you match the description of the guy who stole the rifle on the night Toddy was shot.”

“Doesn't that seem just a little bit odd to you? A gun theft and the description matches me. Doesn't it point to one thing?”

My head hurt and I took another drink.

“No, it doesn't point to just one thing. There are lots of stories that could come out of this mess. Nothing, in my experience, ever points to just one thing.”

“I was on a plane to Stellar the night your friend was shot. You can check my tickets.”

I didn't want to check his fucking tickets. I suddenly didn't want to be there in his hut, eating good food and drinking free whiskey. The mind has a certain tolerance for confusion and ambiguity, and mine had reached its limit.