Dancing Bear

  “I’ve tampered with evidence, obstructed justice, over a bunch of dumb-ass poachers,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. “Where’d you get this?”

  “A little background,” she said, holding up one long slim finger. “The last time I came back from Beirut, I promised myself to give up all that foolishness, gunfire and all that, dead bodies stacked like cordwood, so I came out here to take pictures of peaceful things—snowfields in the winter sun, glaciers in slow drift, elk calves at play—and I just stumbled onto this.

  “I was up in Glacier Park, on the south side of Upper Quartz Lake, back in September, climbing toward the rim to take some sunset shots, when I stopped, looking back at the lake through my telephoto lens, when I saw this. I took a half-dozen shots, but this was the best after I developed and enlarged. But I knew I was on to something. Really, I mean, these two guys weren’t park rangers disposing of a rogue boar or anything.

  “So while they were skinning it, I hurried back down to the head of the lake, watched them load the hide and head on a raft, bring it back to the campground, then pack it on a mule they had tethered there. I tried to follow them out, but by the time I got to the trail head at Lower Quartz, the Indian and the hide were long gone, and I only caught Rideout because he was changing a flat. I followed him across the Flathead to Polebridge, then down the North Fork Road, and when he stopped for a beer in Columbia Falls, I went into the bar behind him. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  “How did you get him to talk?” I asked, and a warm, lovely flush rose across her chest and flamed up her neck.

  “How do you think?” she said, touching herself between her breasts as if it were somebody else’s body.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Listen, will you wait here a bit. I need to think and I can’t—”

  “—look at me,” she said sadly, twisting her mouth and cocking her head, her neck bowed, it seemed, by the lovely burden of her face. “Of course.”

  When I went out of the warm, damp bathroom, I was surprised to see Carolyn still sitting at the table. I had, shamefully, forgotten she was there. She stubbed out a cigarette into the overflowing ashtray, then sipped at the watery remains of one of the old martinis. I couldn’t say anything, I just nodded as I walked past her, opened the sliding door, and stepped out onto the balcony. “Too hot for you in there, lover boy?” I heard her say as I closed the door.

  Outside, the sweat froze quickly on my face, and I knew the frostbite would be with me a long time that night. The storm still raged, cloaking the black waters of the Meriwether with frozen froth. With the first lungful of cold air, a thousand questions formed and dissolved in my mind, but the image of the woman remained clear. Like a moonstruck teen-ager, I sniffed my index finger but only smelled the cold, clear bite of the snow. I felt as if I wouldn’t be able to think clearly anywhere for a long time, so I went back. Carolyn ignored me this time.

  “Why Thursdays?” I asked as I barged into the bathroom. “Why that business at the airport? What’s your stake in this?”

  “Easy,” she crooned as she finished wiping her body down with the towel, then wrapped herself back inside it. When she faced me, she said, “Shut the door. You’re letting the steam out.”

  “How much does Carolyn know about this?” I asked, closing the door.

  “Nothing,” she said, mounting the counter around the sink with a single graceful motion, “nothing at all. Just that I’m in trouble, that she’s a friend trying to help. Now, what were those other questions?” I repeated them. “Thursdays, because that was his day off—”

  “From what?”

  “He never said. And as for the airport…after all his warnings, I began to be careful, a little, and I saw your white van parked three different places in the neighborhood the day before, saw the police take you away, saw you follow Carolyn, called her early the next morning, heard what a wonderful man she had met, a rent-a-cop with a Russian name, so when I saw your van again the next morning I took precautions…the wig and the tweed suit belonged to Don Johnson, a very kinky fellow—”

  “I know,” I said, “I went through the house.”

  “—and the idea came out of a novel, and my stake in this is exactly nothing. Not after what happened to poor Mr. Rideout, darling. I’m not about to die to protect the wildlife habitat of the northern Rockies. What’s your stake, Mr. Milodragovitch?”

  “My life,” I said. “The bastards have tried twice, they’ve been on my ass like warts on a toad, and”—I thought about Sarah and Gail, missing—“and there are some other considerations, but mostly I want to talk to somebody in charge, to let them know that as far as I’m concerned, I don’t know shit…”

  “Add my vote to that,” she said, wiping sweat off the wings of her cheeks. “I’ve burned my notes, burned my tapes, and lost my memory. If you find them, tell them that, and that I’ve gone as far away as I can get from all this.” Then she dropped both towels in the puddle at her feet. “This has given me too much pleasure to see it turned into charcoal—don’t you agree?” She moved into my arms, her fingers busy at my belt buckle and the buttons of my jeans. “Just a touch, darling,” she whispered as she pushed down my pants, pulled me to the counter, and into her sweet warm body. “Just a touch, because I don’t have my diaphragm with me, darling.” A touch like dying inside her, then she shoved me gently backward, and knelt before me.

  —

  Afterward, as she shut off the steam and turned on the shower, I tried to say something, but all my words were jammed in my throat.

  “You’d like to see me again?” she said calmly. “Of course. But not here. Not until this—this mess is cleared up. And someplace warm, darling. I find I’ve lost my taste for winter.”

  “Me too,” I croaked, “someplace warm. And this rabbit hole is cold but too hot. When you’re someplace warm, and safe, call Goodpasture’s Used Cars in Albuquerque, tell him—tell him that the fat lady called, and leave a number where I can reach you.”

  “The fat lady?” she asked, smiling sedately around the shower door.

  “Like they say, the opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

  “How quaint,” she remarked and closed the door.

  —

  Locked in a daze as Carolyn and I watched her dress, put on her clothes as if she had been born for nothing else, and dazed through the goodbyes—one bitter, one sweet—I lay back on the bed, holding the photograph of the hunters and the grizzly, but staring at the ceiling, I stayed, unbuttoned, dismayed, for a long time, nearly sleeping, thinking I dreamed, until Simmons knocked lightly on the connecting door and came in when I was unable to raise an answer.

  “Boss, I think you better see this,” he said as he walked over to my television, snapped it on, and found a local channel on the cable. Meriwether sometimes thought of itself as a city on the make, and the local stations had joined in the community spirit, had gotten themselves a mobile news van and a remote camera for live news events. And dead ones. In the hazy colors of the motel set, they showed live coverage of a burning house, firemen and hoses, innocent bystanders, the lot—my fucking house. Even at that, I had to have a snort of coke to bring my limp body to life, to button up, grab my parka and race Simmons down to the car. But by the time we got to my house, it was real life, not television, my house.

  —

  The police had blocked off the only road to my house, and I had sense enough not to argue with them. Simmons turned around, drove back to the apartment complex, where we parked, then plunged into the thickets of the park, heading for the dull red glow in the north, rising and falling on the wind like the northern lights.

  By the time we got as close as we could, another fire truck had arrived, but they had already lost. The cedar shake roof had already fallen in on the west side, and the old logs of the walls burned like rubber tires, the thick coats of shellac funneling black smoke into the storm-tossed sky. The two large cottonwoods beside
the creek had caught, then toppled under the weight of the water from the fire hoses. A blue spruce in the backyard exploded into flame and burned like a giant torch.

  “It’s gone, boss,” Simmons said.

  “It’s been gone for a long time,” I said.

  The same year my mother donated the land to the city for a park, she had also sold the big house to the country club—they had cut it into four sections and moved it out to the golf course—and donated all the family pictures and artifacts to the county historical society, but she had missed an old safe from my grandfather’s bank and a portrait of my great-grandfather dressed in a Cossack uniform, carrying a knout and wearing his Meriwether County sheriff’s badge. When the trustees evicted me from my office, I donated those two bits of memorabilia to the historical society.

  “Are you okay?” Simmons asked.

  “Not too bad,” I said. “Why?”

  “You seem awfully calm for a man whose house is burning down.”

  “I say: Don’t get mad, get even.”

  Back at the Eagle, I picked up the M-11 and tucked it under my parka, and Simmons followed me upstairs to the dark apartment. It took two tries to kick the door off its hinges, and even less time to check out the empty apartment. Before anybody bothered to see what the noise had been, we were on our way back to the motel. As we packed, Simmons asked, “Where now?”

  “Mr. Haynes’ for a minute,” I said, “then I’ll let you know.”

  Abner wasn’t all that glad to see us, until I explained that somebody had just burned down my house, and then he was so angry that I felt guilty for being calm. But it made sense. Abner’s house was his home. What he hadn’t built himself he had worked to pay for. But my little log house had come to me because of my name, not because I had worked for it. Our investments were much different, and I understood the old man’s anger and my calm, even if he didn’t.

  “Take it easy, Mr. Haynes,” I said, but the old man kicked his living-room rug so hard that his house shoe flew across the room and crashed into the venetian blinds. “You two wait right here,” I said, “until I get back.”

  “Where are you going?” Simmons asked.

  “Reconnaissance,” I said, checking the submachine gun one more time before I went out.

  Every light in the surveillance house down the street was on, blazing into the storm as if a late-night party still raged. I crept around the house and a silence that seemed louder than drunken conversations and rock-’n’-roll music roared into the night. When I peeked through the living-room shades, the stack of radio equipment still sat in a pile, the black-and-white television on top, Johnny Carson looking wry as the picture rolled. One of the men seemed to be sleeping on the floor beside the equipment. The other sat at the kitchen table, facing the back door, his service revolver on the table in front of him. Occasionally, he spun it idly, as if trying to start some engine inside himself. He didn’t look much like an imitation traveling salesman anymore. He had the gray, rumbled look of death in his face.

  I stood on the back porch watching him and I found myself filled with a confusion so intense that it washed the need for revenge right out of me. I was almost willing to think that my house had burned down by accident. The time for gunfire had passed. It was time for talking. I waited until the man at the table had his face in his hands, not touching the revolver, then I covered him through the glass with the Ingram, and tapped the silencer on the window.

  “It’s open,” he muttered without looking up, as if he had been waiting for me.

  I reached for the doorknob and he went for the .38. I meant to give him every chance, meant to keep my trigger finger still until the last possible moment, but when he lifted the revolver, he put it in his mouth instead of pointing it at me, and blew the back of his head all over the kitchen.

  If you have been unlucky enough to see something like that, you don’t want to hear about it, and if you haven’t, I promise you, you don’t want to know what it looks like.

  I did what I had to do, numb for now, slipped out of my pacs at the back door, walked in my socks, careful not to disturb the gore. The guy in the living room wasn’t asleep but dead, a dark ugly bruise over his crushed trachea. He must have ducked as he went into my back door, and caught the handball bolt right in the throat. Holding on to numbness as if my life depended on it, careful about fingerprints, I went through his wallet, writing down the information, then did the same with the dead man on the kitchen floor.

  They were both retired Seattle cops, both held current Washington State driver’s and PI licenses and Multitechtronics employee cards, and both had the same home addresses on Mercer Island east of Seattle, a neighborhood usually too expensive for retired cops.

  Finished, still numb, I let myself out into the blizzard, the soft drumming of the snow that had muffled the sound of the shot. Thinking of any number of things I should do—let the cops know, let Abner and Simmons know, call the FBI and let them hunt for Sarah and Gail—I went back to the Blazer and drove to the nearest bar.

  After my second whiskey with a beer chaser, I called Jamison at home. He was sorry about my house, which he had seen on the newsbreak, and he asked if he could help.

  “Remember that favor?” I asked.

  “Sure. Anything, Milo.”

  “Tell the reporters that you have it on good information that Milton Chester Milodragovitch III was in the house at the time it burned down.”

  “What?” he said, suddenly excited. “You think somebody torched it?”

  “A favor,” I said, then hung up.

  I think I meant to go back to Abner’s, but I stayed in the bar until last call. And for last call I ordered two fifths of Seagram’s and a case of Rainier beer. When I checked the glove box to be sure the cocaine was still there, it was, and when I slammed the glove box shut, it sounded hollow, like cheap tin, so I drove out toward the interstate, turned west for Missoula and my pickup. But things got in the way—snowstorms, shitstorms, the dull muffled roar of a .38 or a 12-gauge or a silken noose…

  Whatever, at ten o’clock the next morning I was parked in front of the Eastgate Liquor Store and Lounge in Missoula when Janey, the best damned daytime bartender in America, opened the bar, and I went inside like a man on his way to his own funeral.

  Chapter 10

  On the third morning when I sat backward on the toilet lid in the Eastgate chopping up the last of the cocaine, I heard the bathroom door open, so I stopped the click of the razor blade on the porcelain. But somebody kicked the stall door and the latch popped and whistled over my head, then the same somebody grabbed my collar and jerked me off the stool, stood me against the wall, and started slapping me. Jamison.

  “Aren’t you a little bit out of your jurisdiction, sir?” I said, slumped with the giggles.

  Holding me up with one hand, Jamison brushed all the coke to the tile floor, and I whimpered, and then he opened the toilet lid and pulled my face toward the bowl as if it were a mirror where I might see myself, a pool where I might drown in my own image. “Look at that,” he said, shoving my face closer to the bloody froth. “Janey says you been puking blood for two days.”

  “Damned old tattletale,” I said, giggling again.

  Jamison shouldered me into the wall, grabbed me by the vest, and began to bounce me off it until I heard the plaster crack behind my head. When he stopped, his fingers were working at the Kevlar mesh inside the vest. “What the hell are you doing wearing this?” he growled, but I didn’t have an answer. “Why?” he asked, and bounced me again.

  “I forgot.”

  “Forgot what?”

  “I don’t know, man,” I said, “that’s what ‘forgot’ means in our language.” I must have thought that was funny because I started laughing again.

  “What kind of trouble are you in?” he asked, and slapped me again when I didn’t answer.

  “I’m dead,” I said, “don’t you read the papers?” Then I had one of those flashes of memory that sometimes come in
the worst parts of dog-shit bottom-out, a memory of reading about my death in the Missoulian, and telling Janey not to tell anyone I was alive. “But I’m not dead, am I?”

  “It was your idea, son of a bitch,” he said, tears in his eyes, “and if I wasn’t an officer of the law, I think I’d kill you myself, or at least let you kill yourself.”

  “You ain’t got it anymore,” I whimpered, “and I ain’t got it anymore—dead people suck.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “Having a taste of whiskey,” I said, “and a touch of nose—or least I was until you came in—and then I was going out to the airport to get my trusty old pickup—”

  “Your pickup?” he interrupted. “Shithead, your pickup is parked out front.”

  “Huh,” I said, giggling again, “spaced that out. Wonder what I did with the Blazer…burning down poor Sarah’s credit cards…”

  “Who’s Sarah?”

  “Nobody you know, a better class of people than you’ll ever know, you piss-ant, small-town hick copper…”

  “Milo, Milo,” he said softly.

  “Sorry ’bout that, chief,” I said with more giggles, “lemme buy you a drink, chief.”

  “Sure,” he said, but when he led me out of the john we went right past the bar. When I tried to resist, he put me in an arm lock as easily as he might twist a soft pretzel. “Thanks, Janey,” he said, “for calling.”

  “Yeah, thanks, you old tattletale,” I said. “Fu—oops, sorry, Jane. Onion off, okay?” Janey didn’t much like the f-word, always made me say “onion” instead. That’s how you can tell if you like a bartender—you appreciate their foibles no matter how twisted you are. “Onion-off, and thanks but no thanks, okay?”

  “I’m sorry, Milo,” she said, her eyes as soft and kind as a mother’s. “I don’t mind your having a good time, but if you’re going to kill yourself, you can’t do it in my bar, okay?”

  “Prig,” I said as Jamison hustled me out the door. “Where the hell you taking me, ossifer?”