Dancing Bear

  After I cleaned up as best I could, showered and shaved, I went down into my basement to my mad-money cache. It had gotten thin, but I took it anyway. On the way back I patted the haunch of the cow elk I had poached with my trusty crossbow the weekend before. Meat for the winter, skinned and aging in the cool cellar light. Steaks and roasts, sausage and chili, and the memory of the elk’s wide dark eye glistening in the spotlight as she leaned over the salt block. I patted her flank again, thankfully, then headed upstairs and out to my beat-up old Ford 4×4 red pickup.

  Carlisle Drive skirted the eastern edge of Milodragovitch Park, sixteen wildly overgrown brushy acres that had been my backyard when I was growing up rich, then plunged out of the dark, shaded canyon into the full daylight filling the valley of the Meriwether. The air was clear, but a high hot haze made the sunshine diffuse and painful, almost like snow glare, and I fumbled in the glove box for my sunglasses, as blindly as a junkie coming out of a shooting gallery into unexpected daytime, but I couldn’t find them. So I stopped to buy gas at the corner of Main, slipped into the john for two quick snorts of coke off the end of my pocketknife blade, then drove on out to the shopping mall on the south side of town, where I dropped nearly five hundred bucks on a new pair of Dan Post lizard boots and a Western-cut leather jacket. Only by the grace of God did I manage to avoid a string tie with a hunk of turquoise the size of an elk turd on it. Western clothes are all the rage these days, even back East, I understand, but when I climbed back into my pickup in the mall parking lot, I may have looked like a fashion plate, but I smelled like an old leather couch and creaked like a new saddle. Maybe these rich folk would look at my clothes and not notice my worn-out, battered face.

  —

  Meriwether was one of those old Western towns where every one of the early developers of residential neighborhoods had expressed his God-given and constitutionally guaranteed individuality by laying out his streets at cross-purposes to those of the surrounding neighborhoods. And the McCravey development was the most cantankerous of all, an absolute maze of wandering lanes, nooks and crannies, irregularly shaped lots, dead-end streets, circles, and tiny parks in the most unexpected places.

  Even though I knew the neighborhood, I still missed the angled turn off Tennessee into Park Lane and had to go around to Virginia and come back to Park Lane. A few of the grand old mansions on Park had been cut up into student apartments or converted into fraternity or sorority houses, but most were owned by ancient professors at the college or survivors of the original families.

  Number fourteen was the largest and most impressive of all, a grand old Victorian, sparkling with a new coat of paint in the fall sunshine, a great dame spreading her majestic wings, adrift on a small sea of mature, well-tended greenery, an eccentric old lady given over to whim and fancy: an off-center porch, a tower here, a cupola there, bay windows of rounded glass trying to balance French doors on the other side; and on the south side of the second story a huge solarium with a balcony on three sides looked as if it had been lifted bodily out of another, more modern house.

  It was the old McCravey mansion, and I kicked myself for not remembering. The house had changed hands several times since the McCraveys had taken their mining and timber fortunes on to rape and pillage larger and more distant economic horizons. Whoever owned it now had restored it beautifully, expensively. I could almost feel my wallet expand, and began to consider a vacation somewhere south for the winter months.

  Two towering blue spruces flanked the entrance to the brick driveway, but I didn’t want to park my pickup like a soiled dove beside the dowager queen, so I pulled up to the curb and tried to hide it behind a lilac bush. I walked back slowly along the spiked wrought-iron fence to the gate, trying to keep the leather noise down, trying to keep my new boots from eating my feet, but the silences of my pauses just made the animal squeal of the dead hides that much louder, and my little toes were already as sore as boils.

  The lower story of the house seemed dark, draped behind heavy velvet, so I rested my dogs on the porch steps. Above the oak double doors, a stained-glass fanlight glowed faintly in a dull, unfinished wink. Before I could turn the brass handle of the bell, though, the front doors jerked open wide.

  “So,” came a voice from the gloom, “you’re late. She said you’d probably be late. And now I’m late. For my graduate organic lab. Thanks a bunch.” The voice paused while I wondered what sort of madness I had blundered into. “Well, don’t just stand there like a knot on a log. Come on in.”

  Before I could step inside, a young woman stepped out on the porch to glance at the high haze. “Weather,” she said calmly, meaning, as they always do in Montana, bad weather coming. She wore a pair of white painter’s overalls, a cashmere turtleneck, and a chamois shirt-jacket. A small knapsack full of books dangled off her left shoulder. She stared at me through a pair of oval gold-rimmed glasses.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said.

  “Weather,” she repeated, “goddammit. And you’re late. And I’ve missed my chem lab. But what the hell, Sarah could have used the elevator. I can make it up tonight, so come on in…”

  As she rattled on, I followed her inside, and she shut the heavy doors with a crash that should have pulverized the stained glass of the fanlight. For a man with sore feet, I thought I managed to step aside quite deftly. She swung her daypack off onto a walnut deacon’s bench, then headed down the broad hallway toward the wide stairs. The cleats of her hiking boots clattered on the polished parquet floor, and I expected to be showered with wooden tiles as I followed in her noisy wake. She rushed up the stairs, and I wondered where the elevator might be, then I wondered why she had swaddled such a nicely pert butt beneath the baggy overalls. Halfway up to the landing she realized she was talking to herself, so she stopped, turned, flipped back the tails of the chamois shirt, sighed as she hooked her thumbs into the side loops of the pants, and her young breasts rose sweetly under the thick layers of fabric. When she shook her head, her short blond hair ruffled shortly.

  “Are you coming or not?” she asked sharply, then added as I hobbled up the first few steps, “New boots, huh? You guys drive me crazy, you guys in those silly goddamned boots. You might as well bind your feet like a Chinese whore—”

  “Chinese princess,” I interrupted.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned, that’s the major problem with this whole goddamned state…”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Cowboy boots and bulldozers, that’s what,” she said, “goddamned romantic affectations. And I’ll lay odds that you haven’t been horseback ten minutes in your whole life…”

  Although she waited on the landing for me, her mouth didn’t slow down a bit. My feet hurt and I was trying to stop the cocaine sniffles, so I didn’t hear much of what she said. Something about animal skins and latent homosexuality, about poor harmless iguanas slaughtered to satisfy the vanity of dudes. When I finally caught up with her at the top of the stairs, I grabbed her elbow.

  “Fuck a bunch of horseback,” I said. “You want to see my saddle sores?”

  “Nice talk,” she said, but she smiled.

  —

  The solarium was even larger than it looked from the street, filling the whole south third of the second floor. The sunlight flooded the huge room through three walls of French doors and two huge skylights; so much light so suddenly that I seemed not only blinded but somehow deafened too. White wicker furniture with gaily flowered cushions rested peacefully among a forest of large potted plants, mostly ornamental citrus trees and fan-leafed ferns. An array of Oriental throw rugs broke up some of the light as it reflected off the pale oak flooring, but most of the sunlight glanced off the floor and plunged like tiny knives into my already bleary eyes. I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.

  Between spasmodic blinks, I watched the young woman thump across the room and out to the balcony, where an ol
d woman leaned lightly against the rail, her face lifted into the fall sunlight. I heard their voices but not the words, and they seemed far away, as if we all stood in the brilliant salt-air haze of some Mexican Pacific beach, paralyzed by the sun and the softly pounding surf, reduced into an infinite languor, language lost in the muffled, sun-struck crash of the waves in the throbbing air. I felt like falling on the nearest couch for a long winter’s siesta. The old woman raised a finger to her smiling lips, and the young woman stopped jabbering, lifted her hand to her mouth, but a stream of giggles slipped quicksilver through her fingers.

  The old lady turned toward me, the sunlight catching her fine white hair, the polished burl of the cane in her left hand, and the stainless-steel brace on her left leg, then she came toward me out of the sun, slowly, limping, but with the grace of long-practiced motion, and when she paused just inside the French doors to set a pair of binoculars on a small table, her hand seemed to float in the air.

  “No problem, Sarah,” the young woman said, her hand placed lightly under the old woman’s elbow, “I’ll just hit the night lab, and —” Then she banged her forehead with the heel of her other hand. “Oops. Forgot the coffee. Be right back,” she added, patting the old woman’s elbow.

  “You do drink coffee?” she asked as she stopped in front of me. When I nodded, she looked at my face. “Jesus,” she said, “some shiner.” Then she darted past.

  The old woman started to walk across the room. My hand rose to finger my swollen eye and the scrape on my forehead, and I had to wipe the blood off my fingers before I could take her extended hand.

  “Sarah Weddington,” she said in a gently hoarse voice. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Milodragovitch, on such short notice,” she added with a smile, “and please forgive me for being so mysterious in my note.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. Her voice seemed oddly familiar, so I moved to the side slightly to get the sun out of my eyes.

  “You don’t remember me at all?” she said. “Do you, Bud?”

  “No, ma’am,” I admitted, “I’m sorry…” Then I looked at her again.

  She wore a white linen suit and a raw-silk blouse that set off the sun-tanned flush of her finely boned face. Even her sensible, low-heeled shoes looked expensive and handmade. Her years, as they too often are to women, had done their cruel work to her face, but she hadn’t tried to recapture her lost beauty with cosmetics but had let her face grow old with character and repose, with a serenity only highlighted by the hard touch of time. Although her blue eyes had paled, when she smiled, as she did now still holding my hand, they became clear, the limpid blue of the dawn sky rising over a mountain ridge.

  “Oh, Bud,” she said, grinning now, “and you had such a reckless crush on me back then.”

  My given name is Milton Chester Milodragovitch, III, a name chosen by my great-grandfather, Anglo-Saxon names chosen to leaven the Slavic curse of our surname. My grandfather was called Milt, my father Chet, and my mother tried and failed to call me Milton. My friends called me Milo. Only my father had called me Bud, and when he blew his head off with a shotgun when I was twelve, the name died with him.

  “Seven Mile Creek,” she said softly, and it all came back.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” I whispered, and she lifted her cane, took a small step into my arms, and we hugged each other tightly, our arms wrapped around all the dead years.

  —

  My father grew up rich and useless, the scion of an old Meriwether family, interested only in fly-fishing, expensive whiskey, hunting, and any woman who wasn’t my mother, which was the main reason my mother made him write his will to keep the family fortune out of my hands until I turned the ripe, and hopefully mature, age of fifty-two. She planned some useful life for me, working for a living at a job, making some small contribution to society. A life she had probably planned for my father when she met him in Boston the fall before he was asked to leave Harvard for drinking, gambling, and shooting squirrels in the Harvard Yard with a Colt .44 Dragoon pistol.

  All her plans failed. My father never had a job in his life. When she said “social contribution” to him, he wrote a check and told her that was his job. Even her body betrayed her. After seven wild and painful years in Meriwether she left him, only to become morning-sick with me on the long train ride back East. I failed her too, even after her death. Except for a tour of duty in the Army during the Korean War, ten years as a Meriwether County deputy sheriff and this last terrible stint at Haliburton Security, I never held a steady job in my life.

  Although I gave up fly-fishing years ago and only hunt for meat, I certainly inherited my father’s taste for aimless sloth, whiskey and philandering, even without his money. And I still admired his taste in women, since Sarah Weddington was the only one of them I had ever met. Forty years ago she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and the first time I saw her I fell asshole over teakettle in love.

  We had been fishing up Seven Mile, my father and I, at the end of a long summer’s afternoon, hard into the evening hatch and catching pan-sized cutthroat trout with each cast, when a random gust of wind or an artless back-cast lodged a 04 Royal Coachman all the way through my right ear. My old man couldn’t find his wire cutters to clip off the barb, so we trudged through the lengthening shadows of the Hardrock Peaks across a newly mown hayfield toward the nearest house, a small farm house with a collapsing barn and a concrete-block toolshed behind it. I remember Sarah coming to the front door, a grown woman as shy as a girl, apologizing because her husband was away on a long trip and hadn’t left her the keys to the toolshed, then apologizing still more because she didn’t even have any coffee to offer us. My father, usually as glib as an auctioneer, must have been taken by this vision, this dream woman standing before us, because he too stood as silent as a stone. Her rich blond hair fell straight to her waist, the late afternoon sunlight glowed brightly across the smooth angles and planes of her lovely face, and her lush body seemed on the point of bursting through the thin housedress she wore. She asked if she might look at the fly in my ear, and I cocked my head like a daffy pup. Her long white fingers were cool on my blushing face. Finally my father found his voice: when he mentioned that he had a thermos of coffee down by the creek, she smiled and nodded slowly, almost sadly, as if she already knew what was about to take place.

  We all hurried back across the hayfield to the creek, the Royal Coachman resplendent in my ear. They had coffee, then whiskey, and the next thing I knew, my old man and this strange, lovely woman were heading back hand in hand upstream through the willows.

  “Keep working that hole, Bud,” my father shouted over his shoulder, laughing, “and if worst comes to worst, stick your head in the water and see if you can catch some of those little bastards on your ear.”

  At the time—I must have been seven or eight—I didn’t think that was very funny. I sulked on a cool gravel bar, kicking rocks into the shallows, occasionally pausing to wiggle the fly riding on my ear, tugging it forward until I could just catch a glimpse of the hackles at the edge of my vision. It didn’t hurt, but it tickled, and I grew enamored with the idea of wearing this gaudy decoration like a totem for the rest of my life. Or at least around the neighborhood for a few days. Until, perhaps, I felt the woman’s cool fingers on my skin once more.

  When Sarah and my father came back in the long mountain twilight, their arms around each other’s waists, flushed and smiling, a deep, hollow ache filled me, followed by a flood of anger. I fled the creek side, leaving my fly rod and tackle box and the gunnysack of trout, plunged through the brush, snagging the fly on leaves and branches until I felt the string of warm blood eddy down my neck and across my chest, and ran breathless to where my father’s Cadillac was parked beside Seven Mile Road.

  “He’ll be all right,” I heard my father say. “He’s my little buddy.”

  As always, on the way back, we hit a couple of bars, my father drinking, silent and darkly grave, me silent, spinning on my bar stool, refusing the
money he offered for the pinball machine. Finally he reached over, ruffled my hair, smiled, and said, “You look like a pirate, Bud, or one of those goddamned Hottentots.” I thought he had said “hot-to-trot” and I found that pretty funny, until I got home and showed my mother the fly in my ear and mentioned proudly that I hadn’t shed a single tear. I also asked her if she didn’t think I looked like one of those hot-to-trots, and she slapped the living hell out of me, Royal Coachman, bloody ear, and all. Hours later, when I finally fell asleep upstairs, I could still hear their angry voices rumbling in the huge old house.

  After that, we fished Seven Mile two or three times a week during the season. Sometimes while my father worked a hole, standing thigh-deep in the cold water, his fly line stacked like a gossamer string over his head, Sarah and I sat on the bank, our feet cooling in the water, and she told me tales of men at arms and jousts, mountain glens rich with the smell of crushed heather. But never a word about her life.

  Then, suddenly one summer, we no longer fished Seven Mile. In fact, my father packed his fly rod in its case and never took it out again. That fall, with an accident so carefully arranged that it took me thirty years to understand what had happened, he committed suicide late one night. I heard him tell my mother that he smelled a skunk and that he was going to get his shotgun; then as he lifted the Browning over and under out of the gun cabinet, he caught the trigger on the bolt of his elk rifle, and blew his head all over the living room.

  Chapter 2

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Weddington,” I said as we sat down on one of the wicker couches facing the sun, “it was so long ago, and this house…I’m sorry.”

  “Please call me Sarah,” she murmured, then cradled her hands on the crook of her cane. “And please don’t apologize, Bud. I meant it to be a pleasant surprise, not a shock.”