Too Close to the Falls (7 page)

Today was the first time we were there when the family was stirring. Mad Bear was sometimes seen in town at a bar, but his wife was never off the reservation. (At least, I'd never seen any of the family before.) Mad Bear was known to “tie one on,” as my father termed it, and when he took to kicking fire hydrants and yelling, Constable Lombardy stuffed him in a cruiser and drove him home. Roy told me it took the whole Lewiston force of three, plus volunteers, to get him in the car.

Roy went to the door and I stayed outside to explore their yard. It was a museum of rust, littered with the intestines of old machines, which I found interesting. I liked to put stones in the old cement mixer and twirl them. I also found the old cars and parts on the lawn a remarkable ancient element of the landscape, especially since some had weeds growing out of them. I knew that Mad Bear had a lot of kids and I hoped that one was a girl my age who would see me out of the window and come running out to play Fox and Geese with me.

Roy had remained inside a long time. Getting bored and feeling lonely, I went around to the side of the house and saw a deer hanging up with parts of its body cut out. It looked as though someone had just been hungry and ripped off the occasional limb. Most of the windows were broken in the back of the house and were stuffed with oily rags to keep out the cold.

Mad Bear had the kind of house that never quite gets finished. It was covered in large squares of black paper which were bound
to the house with giant silver staples and each sheet said “Bethlehem Steel” in silver lettering. I thought how perfect the name was for the holiday season.

Roy called me to the front door. Mad Bear seemed to have burned out before building a front porch so I stretched my Santa-mitten-tipped arms up and Roy had to hoist me into the house through the windowless storm door. As I was still in his arms, he looked into my eyes and said in a tone of quiet nonchalance that he needed me to be a big girl and do just what he said. I had never heard him pull rank before so I knew his insouciant tone was an act.

Inside their home, which had curling linoleum set on top of unfinished wooden planks, I saw an exhausted Mad Bear sitting in a kitchen chair breathing heavily with his spent arms dangling at his side. As I blinked the snowflakes from my lids, I noticed he had a deep gash on his arm. It was so lacerated you could see a shiny twisted white muscle that was still trying to hold things together, but a large slice of the red tissue was coming out like a crinkled Christmas ribbon. I thought a human arm had only a bone and blood, and was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed to see all of the different tissues — I realized the human arm looked no different from a flank cut of meat at Helms's grocery.

Mad Bear's teenage son, also named Mad Bear, was standing at the entrance of the bedroom door with his arms outstretched on each side of the door frame. One hand held a bloody knife. He was not yet as tall as his dad but he was already wider, sturdier. His father's eyes were set far apart and looked like a black cat's-eye marble, and his own were the same except the size of aggies. He hung his head and his thick ducktailed hair hung forward,
covering one side of his scratched face. He had stretched brown skin over broad cheekbones and a high forehead. His dusky thick lips looked like they were outlined in grey velvet. In my mind he looked more like an Indian than his father, who was no longer taut and had even lost his facial definition. They both looked as though they'd been fighting, but the elder Mad Bear looked defeated.

The room was hot with the heavy breath of the two men. The teenager pounded the door sill with his swollen fingers, saying to no one in particular, “That's the last time, the last time.”

I was sure the teenage boy had been very bad and fought with his father, and Roy was going to have to straighten him out. Fighting with your father in this beastly way, right before Christmas, was going to ruin the holiday for everyone, and I looked at Roy to let into him. However, Roy put his hand on the boy's arm and said, “He got drinkin', inside too long, hadn't renewed his medication, then he started up. You did what you had to do.” The teenager with the ducktail and slit eyes never looked up. Roy continued in a soothing voice. “There's no phone so I'll have to take your father into Forest Lawn. He's lost some stuffing. They can probably sew him up there and knock him out for a week or two.”

I blinked. Forest Lawn was the
loony
bin. No one went there unless they talked to themselves, or were like my friend Gretchen's aunt who thought one of the Marx Brothers was swearing at her.

“Cathy, I'm going to stay here between the Bears and I want you to get four pills for Mad Bear and take them to him in the kitchen.” Elder Mad Bear provided no resistance when I plunked down the plastic jelly glass with Pluto on the side and told him to
take his pills and drink up. Then Roy said very softly to me, “Mad Bear is dangerous, so I'm going to leave you here and come back for you after I drop him.” Leave me
here
? I was shocked. But I remembered that Roy said I had to be a big girl and it was time to forget the Davy Crockett games and do what I was told. I could tell he was counting on me. I nodded and he leaned down and I felt his Brillo-pad hair brush against my face as he whispered in my ear and squeezed my shoulder. “This is a time when a woman needs another woman.”

I was bewildered by his remark on a number of levels. I had no idea I was a “woman,” and I had absolutely no idea what a woman did for another woman, or that females were somehow paired in the universe at certain mysterious times. Finally, I didn't see any woman there other than myself, the new-found woman. Roy led Mad Bear out the door, and as it closed behind him, I looked into the bottomless eyes of the teenager holding the knife, who frankly looked far more dangerous to me than the elder. I then sat on the only kitchen chair, which was still warm from Mad Bear. We said nothing to each other and it seemed as though hours passed. The young Mad Bear never moved from the bedroom doorway, as though he was resigned to always standing guard. I began to hear muffled cries from the bedroom and searched the younger Mad Bear's face for signs of recognition, but he remained impervious. The muffled cries turned into whimpers and then sobs. As I sat on the vinyl I began to itch from prickly heat. It was no wonder as I was still wearing my red plaid boiled wool coat with the velvet collar and my red beret. I wanted to punch some of the rags out of the windows to let in some cool air, but I was afraid to make any move at all for fear of setting him off.

Finally I couldn't stand it any more and decided to answer the smothered cries of pain that pulled at my heart. Besides I couldn't sit any longer. However, to reach the bedroom I'd have to walk right under the arm of the young Mad Bear, who still held the knife. As I scurried beneath his arm in a scary game of London Bridge, I held my breath and closed my eyes and walked as fast as I could without looking alarmed. I kept repeating to myself what Roy had said about being a big girl.

When I opened my eyes I saw rivulets of red blood that had coagulated while running along the cracks in the linoleum. The walls were smeared with dried brown blood and the bedsheet was saturated with purple blood which still splashed down on the floor. The room smelled of urine and terror. Crouched up on the bed was Mad Bear's fat wife, lying on her back, and a boy about my age was huddled against her — the child I'd hoped would come out to play Fox and Geese. There was some sort of creature that looked like a gingerbread man not quite ready to come out of the oven yet, lying in a pool of blood, and there was a cord and a lot of pulpy flesh attached to it. Mad Bear's wife was bleeding from somewhere below her stomach and had cuts on her face where she had been hit. The little boy started crying again and she leaned over and covered the pulpy thing with the edge of the sheet. She looked at me through her terrified puffy black eyes and I knew we were both somehow in the same boat. She whispered to me, “He said he wasn't havin' no more babies.”

“He's gone now,” was all I could think to say.

“He'll be back,” she said, turned, and faced the wall.

There was no phone and Roy and I had to do the best we
could. As we silently departed, I noticed the temperature had dropped since we'd gone in and, shuddering, I got into the passenger seat. Roy went straight to the trunk, emptied a box of Upjohn unicap multivitamins and carried the empty casket into the house, leaving it just inside the door. Roy stomped back on the frozen ground and we rode silently back to the store. It was pitch-black but I was too tired to look for war parties on the cliffs.

We managed to get back to the store before it closed at 9 p.m. and Roy and I shared the unspoken knowledge that we would never tell what we'd seen. I didn't want my parents to know that things like this happened. I knew I was alone with my own feelings of responsibility and shame. If only we hadn't been fooling around, eating Christmas fruitcake and drinking Christmas cheer, going to Shim-Shacks and getting so carried away with Cisco and Pancho, we would have gotten there earlier and given Mad Bear his medicine so it wouldn't have happened.

My mother was sent by central casting to play the role of the fifties housewife. She could just as easily have been given the role of a spy exploiting her remarkable talent for
fitting
in while not
buying
in. The only giveaway was that her public persona, the typical woman of the Eisenhower era, was a bit too pat. She was like a
foreign agent whose English was too perfect for her to have been a native speaker. While she was “the spy who came in from the Buffalo cold,” my father and I made her American-small-town-stay-at-home-1950s-wife-mother caricature possible by providing the camouflage and picking up the pieces that made her impersonation believable.

She had no tradition to lean on, so she simply refused to participate in what was expected. She did just enough to drift into the Betty Crocker landscape; however, in terms of her behaviour at home, she was more radical than anyone who ever joined the Bader-Meinhoff gang. The strength of her passive resistance put Gandhi and Martin Luther King to shame.

Mother was tall and thin and pretty. She adhered strictly to all the fashion rules. In the cold weather it was tweed Pendleton wool suits with matching sweater sets or three-piece Butte knits for the meetings that filled her calendar. In the summer she had a collection of cotton flowered shirt-waist dresses. Shorts were for gardening in the backyard only. Straw hats were
de rigueur
for her garden club, with white eyelet gloves and white shoes which she touched up nightly with cakey Esquire liquid applied with a tiny pom-pom applicator. On Labour Day, a holiday my father referred to as a “communist's day off,” all white garments and accessories were packed away and fall clothes came out of the cedar chest, where each item was wrapped individually in tissue paper. From Easter to May 31, you could wear pastels, and then the whites came out again June first.

On Labour Day weekend Mother took me on what seemed like an arduous trip from Lewiston to Buffalo, where I picked up my monogrammed pencils for the upcoming school year. Then we
went to Hengerer's Department Store to buy back-to-school clothes and Mother's winter outfits. On this occasion we dined in Hengerer's tea room, where I ordered “the-cow-jumps-over-the-moon” from the children's menu. This translated into a grilled cheese sandwich cut into eight parts, potato chips, and a tiny white pleated paper cup of cole slaw. The beverage was chocolate milk, which I assumed was the “over-the-moon” part of the meal.

After lunch while our food was settling (digestion was a big issue in my family) we needed to do sedentary shopping, so we trekked up one flight to the shoe department. “Our” salesman was Mr. McTeer, and if perchance he was at lunch we patiently waited for him, relieved when he dashed off the escalator in his clan tie and rushed to our sides saying, “It wouldn't be Labour Day weekend without the McClures, now, would it?” First we were x-rayed by standing erect and putting our feet under a large grey box that whirred and we could see our foot bones glow in green. (Mr. Wolfson, our scientist neighbour, said that he thought x-ray machines in shoe stores were bad for people and were actually giving us a bit of Hiroshima in every x-ray exposure; my father said that Mr.Wolfson didn't even cut or weed his lawn and voted for Adlai Stevenson so he was hardly an authority.) Then our exoskeletons were measured with a black metal foot which marked length, and width was measured by a piece that extended out of the side of the metal foot like a slide rule fanning A, B, C, or, God forbid, D. Our arch height was never neglected and we placed our feet on a dark purple foot pad which gave a carbon imprint of our foot, leaving a white spot indicating our arch location and height. Armed with an exact size and arch angle, Mr. McTeer went straight to work. I assumed that behind his curtained stockroom
Hengerer's had thousands if not millions of shoes in every size, width, and sundry arch angle and only Mr. McTeer could summarize this information and choose the right pair.