Dancing Bear

  The freezing rain and sleet had, as the weatherman had predicted, changed to snow, and the temperature had stabilized in the low twenties. Weather, as Gail had said. But it didn’t bother me; I had all the comforts of home. A snowmobile suit and down booties kept me snug and warm as I lounged in the plastic web of a lawn chair in the back of the van. If I leaned forward a bit, my eye nestled easily against the 25X spotting scope that hid behind the smoked glass of the rear window. On my right I had a huge thermos of coffee, on my left lunch—a bag full of homemade sandwiches, egg salad on light rye with a slice of Walla Walla white onion as thick as my finger—and if nature called, I was ready. In the corner of the van sat a Port-a-Potty like a faithful robot companion prepared for duty. I might not know why I was doing what I was doing, but I had done it enough in the old days to know how to do it in comfort.

  The Bogardus house sat on a large corner lot. An untrimmed hedge and clumps of shrubbery drooped under the load of heavy wet snow. Two vehicles were parked in the driveway—a beautifully restored 1964 Mustang convertible with New Hampshire plates, and a brand-new three-quarter-ton 4×4 GMC pickup with a load of firewood in the bed and Maryland plates. Firewood, neatly split and stacked, also covered most of the side porch. In the backyard, a huge compost pile stood next to a large garden already winter-bedded and covered with straw. The small window in the front door showed no light in the gray, snowy day, and the other windows were dark behind half shutters and tie-dyed drapes. A wisp of woodsmoke trickled out of the chimney, though, curling among the large drifting flakes.

  I settled in for the waiting, oddly excited to be working again. During the next two hours, while nothing happened, I decided that Sarah’s job might be fun—picking up two unknown people, filling in their history, finding out what sordid little secrets drew them to their weekly rendezvous. An old Chicago cop had taught me how to tail by choosing a perfect stranger off the street and making me dog the man or woman for days on end, put them to bed at night, wake them up in the morning. I was surprised to find out how few strangers, when I watched their lives for a few days, turned out to be perfectly boring. Almost everybody, it seemed, led at least one secret life. Except me. I was the watcher, the uninvolved observer. Sometimes a boring job, but usually safe.

  Or so I thought until I was halfway into my first sandwich and somebody started pounding on the side of the van. With the blackout curtain hanging behind the front seats and the smoked glass in the rear windows, I knew nobody could see inside, so I sat very still until a face peered blindly through one of the back windows. I peeked out from the other one. It was a wiry old man in house slippers, shiny black slacks, and an old-fashioned undershirt. He wore a huge mustache, yellowed with age but neatly trimmed and combed, long enough to nearly reach his defiant little chin. The hands of a much larger man dangled off his corded arms. He raised one of them and slapped the smoked glass hard enough to shake the van.

  “I know you’re in there, you lazy son of a bitch!” he shouted, then slapped the glass again while I ducked away.

  When he grabbed the rear bumper and began rocking the van, I gave up. “I’m coming,” I shouted, “I’m coming.” Then, swaddled in the snowmobile suit and as clumsy as a drunken bear, I wrestled through the blackout curtain and out the passenger door.

  “I called you sons a bitches yesterday afternoon,” the old man said when he saw me, “yesterday goddamned afternoon. And you promised you’d be here before noon. So what the hell do you do? Show up and take a snooze right in my front yard.” Then he shook a fist the size of a steer’s kneebone under my nose, and tiny drifts of snow fell off his bare shoulders. As he looked at me, his eyes didn’t seem to focus correctly, and I saw the pinched creases on the bridge of his nose where his glasses usually rested.

  “Why me?” I muttered as I stepped backward to see what sort of sign hung on the van’s door. Not Floral Delivery or Washing Machine Repair, not Knife Sharpening or Housecleaning Services—nothing safe for me—but TV REPAIR in large black letters.

  “Well?” the old man said, raising his fist again.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “You must have talked to the girl in the office.”

  “Didn’t talk to no girl,” he growled, “talked directly to you.” Snowflakes gathered in his eyebrows and on his thin hair began to melt, but the old man ignored the icy water trickling down his wrinkled face.

  “Not to me,” I said, “you didn’t talk to me.” Then I chanced a glance at the sign. “Not to me—Clyde ‘Shorty’ Griffith,” I read.

  The old man looked at me as if I was crazy. He raised one woolly eyebrow as if to say, “What sort of damn fool has to read his name off a sign to remember it?” Then he squinted at the sign again, shifted his shoulders, and grumbled. I thought I had him until he said, “Did so.” Even caught in confusion and blindness, the old man wasn’t about to retreat. “Damn sure did.”

  “Couldn’t have,” I said, retreating myself. “I…ah, I was out with the flu.” Then added with a whine, “And I wasn’t taking a nap, I was having lunch.”

  “Whiskey flu,” he said, “and a two goddamned hour whiskey lunch.”

  “No way,” I said, but the old man had me backing up so fast that I didn’t even believe myself anymore. “Not true.”

  “Well,” he said, licking the snow water off his mustache, “you damn sure promised, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is, to have my TV fixed before one o’clock”—he tugged a large Hamilton railroad watch out of his pants, consulted it about six inches from his face—“and I’ve got a lady friend coming over in forty-seven minutes to watch General Hospital, and if my set ain’t fixed by then, I’m gonna call the Better Business Bureau, maybe even the county attorney…you people think you can treat old folks like shit…well, I’m here to tell you that don’t go with Abner Haynes—”

  “Okay,” I said, thinking I had run into enough crazy people in the past two days to last me a lifetime. If my cover hadn’t already been blown, it certainly would be if I spent any more time in the street debating the issue with the old man. I needed to move the van now, anyway, so maybe if I took a few moments to run his set downtown to a repair shop, leave it, and rent a loaner, then I could race back, drop it off, and find another location quickly. I glanced at the Bogardus house. Nothing had moved. Maybe it would work, unprofessional as it was. Maybe I had been a security guard too long. “Listen, pops,” I said to the old man, “I don’t know nothing about this call, okay, but I’ll take a quick look at your set—I can’t promise to fix it here, may have to run it to the shop and pick up a loaner—”

  “Don’t you ‘pops’ me, you big ugly bastard,” he grunted when he found his voice under the anger. He was giving away sixty pounds and twenty-some-odd years, but he didn’t care. Either I apologized, and quickly, or he was going to take a poke at me.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “My name is Abner Haynes,” he said, his fists still clenched. “Mr. Haynes to you, by God.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Haynes,” I said. “Now if I could take a look at your set?”

  Abner shrugged and sighed, then led me toward his little frame house. The sidewalk in front of his yard, his walk and his porch steps had been shoveled often enough since the snow started so that they were bordered by substantial drifts, and the old man had carefully scattered rock salt on the concrete. The rose bushes by the porch had been pruned and wrapped in burlap, and even under the six inches of snow I could tell that Abner’s lawn lay as smooth and level as a golf green.

  When I stepped out of the cold and into Abner’s living room, I broke into an immediate, showering sweat. I wiped my forehead and Abner chuckled.

  “That old sawdust furnace works like a charm,” he said proudly. “Smells good and don’t smoke at all, and,” he added, “those goddamn environmentalists with their smoky wood stoves…Ha! Fools. Almost every house in the neighborhood had wood or sawdust furnaces when they were first built. Then all those fools who though
t they was progressive, they switched to natural gas—ain’t nothing natural about burning something you can’t see or smell, something that’s as likely to turn a man’s house into kindling wood as keep it warm…”

  Abner carried on about the state of the world and the nature of progress while I looked at the wall covered with framed pictures above the television set: Abner in his gandy dancer days, young and cocky, as lean and tough as the hickory handle of his pick, as sturdy as the stack of ties he leaned against in some mountain pass, his mustache as black as India ink and as big as the switch on a cow’s tail; Abner’s wedding picture with him standing a head shorter than his large blond wife; Abner as brakeman, fireman, conductor…Abner’s life captured in fading yellow prints.

  “…so what’s with my TV?” he asked and tried to poke me in the ribs through the bulk of the snowmobile suit.

  I didn’t have any idea—it looked as if the bottom half of the picture had folded itself halfway back up the tube—but I knew how to make it work long enough for me to move the van and take off those goddamned signs.

  “Well, what you’ve got there, Mr. Haynes,” I said, “is an ABS forty-two-slash-eleven tube going bad on you, and I can tell you right now, sir, that I ain’t got one on the truck, maybe not even one in the shop—don’t get much call to work on that model these days—but I can make it work for a couple of hours, and I’ll put that tube on order just as soon as I get back to the shop.” Then I began to disconnect the set, wrapped the cord around it, and picked up the huge old-fashioned, misnamed “portable” color set.

  “Where the hell you going with my TV?” he asked.

  “Well, sir,” I grunted, “I’m gonna set it out on the porch here and let that ABS tube cool off—you see, when it gets too hot, the resistance builds up and it pulls off the aim of the gun—”

  “The gun?” he interrupted.

  “Trust me,” I said. “I’ll leave it outside while I finish my lunch, then at five to one I’ll carry it back inside and hook it up for you.” Abner looked extremely doubtful. “Believe me, sir, it’ll work,” I said. “One time I watched the whole second half of a Raider-Jets game sitting in a snowstorm with a garbage bag over the top of my set—”

  “A garbage bag?”

  “God’s truth,” I said, and it was.

  “Well,” Abner said, tugging on the corner of his mustache, “I guess we can give it a try, but if it don’t work, I know Yvonne’ll sneak over to that damn Tyrone’s, even though he’s only got a black-and-white, to watch her soap…”

  Abner opened the front door, still worrying, and I put the set down on the porch and headed for the van before he could find a new argument, promising to keep an eye on his TV while I finished my lunch.

  Nothing had changed at the Bogardus house, and nothing happened while I waited. The whole neighborhood seemed frozen, still, except for two small children, who looked like bear cubs in their snowsuits, and a malamute pup playing in a yard down the street. At five to one I lugged the set back into Abner’s house and connected the antenna wires, and it worked like a charm. Once again I promised to order him a new tube, and Abner reached into his pocket and asked how much he owed me.

  “On the house,” I said.

  “Don’t need nobody’s charity,” he grumbled but left his hand in his pocket. “Thanks,” he added, and we shook hands.

  “That’s some ’stache,” I said on the way out, and good old Abner grinned somewhere behind it.

  I was halfway back in the van when a tiny old woman with a painted face that looked as if it had been left too long in the weather minced down the sidewalk toward Abner’s walk. She tried out a smile on me, an expression so coy and phony that not even a child would have fallen for it. Lord knows what a stand-up dude like Abner saw in a piece of fluff like that. Then I wondered if perhaps Abner and Sarah might want to double-date with Gail and me some night. I drove away, laughing.

  My new location on the cross street didn’t give me quite as good a view. I couldn’t see the front door, but both vehicles were still parked in the driveway. Still more nothing with snow. If I decided to take Sarah’s job, I hoped the weather would clear by Thursday. The money would be great, but it seemed a little crazy to me. And when I worked for myself, I had done some insane shit—divorces and child custody cases so obscene and degrading that only a month of whiskey could get the taste out of my mouth; repossessions of everything from combines to tropical fish; and once I had flown to Hawaii to steal back a dual champion Labrador retriever at the Honolulu airport from a Japanese businessman who had stolen it from a Texan in southern Alberta. However strange the jobs had been, though, they had a purpose, and somehow the satisfaction of an old lady’s curiosity seemed a bit too eccentric for me.

  It would be an easy job, sure, tagging two people who weren’t thinking about somebody tailing them—if they were worried about tails, they wouldn’t have met at the same place so many times—maybe too easy for a man of my talents…

  But as I was complimenting myself, a police car pulled in behind the van, good old Abner glowering in the passenger seat. Nothing is ever simple or easy in my work. This took an hour to straighten out, an hour at the police station.

  The colonel finally got Abner to stop shouting about lazy, crazy bastards who gave him a line of crap a mile long then set his TV out on the goddamned porch in the snow and call it fixed. He stopped because the colonel promised that Haliburton Security would buy him a new television set, which Mr. Milodragovitch would personally deliver the next morning. Then the colonel and Jamison both shook their heads and gave me the sort of look you give a puppy who brings back a dog turd instead of the stick. I even had to give Abner a ride back to his house. All the way, Abner kept his nose curled as if I was the dog turd.

  Chapter 4

  This time I parked two blocks west of Abner’s house down Gold, nearly three blocks away from the Bogardus house, and I had to keep my eye on the spotting scope constantly. At three-forty, I got to log my first entry of the surveillance. A slender brunette in slacks and a blue down parka emerged from the side door of the house and began to scrape the windshield of the Mustang. As she leaned over the hood, her tight gray slacks stretched rather nicely over good strong legs and a great ass. I didn’t put that in my report but I did make a note of it.

  Then she climbed into the convertible, backed out of the driveway and took off like a shot east on Gold. By the time I had lumbered into the driver’s seat, started the cold engine, and performed a full-bore three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin instead of a U-turn on the icy street, the Mustang was nearly out of sight. If she hadn’t caught a red light at Dawson, I might have lost her. When she bounced across the old rail bed on Main, the bump knocked the snow off the bottom of her license plate. “Live Free or Die,” it said.

  The Mustang led me east on Main and into the parking lot of the Riverfront Lodge, where the woman parked and locked her car and headed for the bar entrance, her buttocks jingling with muscle each time her boot heels hit the pavement. She was a pleasure to tail. I gave her a minute while I struggled out of the snowmobile suit and booties—winter exercise, changing clothes to match the temperature—and back into my new boots and a Japanese tractor “gimme cap.”

  Inside the plush bar, all mirrors and wood and décor abounding, I saw the woman up on a bar stool, chatting with the daytime bartender, my old friend Vonda Kay. I slid into a dark circular booth and tried to hide, but Vonda Kay spotted me. She charged over to pull me out of the booth, cursed me for not saying hello, then dragged me over to the bar to meet a new friend of hers. When she led me up to the woman, I tried to look anonymous, but when she started to introduce us, I gave up.

  “Hey,” she said as she tapped the lady on the arm, “I want you to meet an old friend of mine.” The lady turned and smiled. “Carolyn Fitzgerald, shake hands with Milo Milodragovitch. Carolyn’s new in town—with the Forest Service or some crap—and Milo’s a rent-a-cop.”

  Carolyn Fitzgerald, whoever she
might be, shook my hand warmly and asked, “And just how much does it cost to rent a cop these days?”

  “One shot of schnapps,” I said, then excused myself to go to the john and call the colonel.

  He apologized for not giving me a description of Cassandra Bogardus, then told me to let it go for the day, to pick up the tail in the morning.

  “Like flies on shit, sir, I promise.”

  The colonel coughed politely into the telephone, told me where to pick up Mr. Haynes’s new television, then wished me luck.

  Well, sometimes you get lucky. Carolyn Fitzgerald’s broad, flat face was too blunt to be pretty, but she had grand, unfettered breasts bobbing and weaving beneath her soft gray sweater, and something even better, something women who own their own lives often find in their thirties, an intelligent, happy mind, a generous smile, and an honest laugh. We smoked and drank and exchanged those inevitable details of our histories. She had grown up in Burlington, Vermont, where her father and mother both taught government and economics in the local high schools, and she had a master’s from Cornell in recreational management, whatever that might be, and had just finished a law degree at Georgetown, and had been hired as a legal consultant by the Friends of the Dancing Bear Wilderness Area to keep an eye on the Forest Service land swaps and purchases.

  “And I’ve been trying to get hold of you for weeks,” she said as she crushed a cigarette butt in the ashtray. “You don’t seem to answer your telephone,” she said, “or my letters.”

  “I took the bell out of my telephone,” I admitted, “and I don’t even open that kind of mail.”

  “Philistine,” she said.

  “With a vengeance.”

  “Oh, that’s true, honey,” Vonda Kay said from the back bar, where she was making something tasteless in the blender. “Don’t believe a word he says.”