"What did you do?"
"Well, the dog was going crazy now, growling and making a kind of high whining noise, and the bear was reared up and grunting. They sound more like pigs than anything else. I had a shotgun full of birdshot, sevens, I think, and it might have annoyed the bear. It sure as hell wouldn't have stopped him. But I didn't have anything else and I was pretty sure if I ran it would chase me, and they can run about forty miles an hour, so it was going to catch me. So I just stood there with the shotgun leveled. It was a pump. I had one round in the chamber and three more in the magazine, and
I prayed that if hecharged and if I got him in the face it would make him turn. The dog was in a frenzy, dashing out a few feet and barking and snarling and then running back to lean against my leg. The bear reared up, swaying, and I can still remember how rank the bear smelled and the way everything moved so slowly.
And then my father was beside me. He didn't make any noise coming.
Afterwards he said he heard the dog and knew it was something, probably a bear, from the way the dog sounded. He had a shotgun too, but he also was carrying a big old.45 hogleg, a six-shooter he'd had ever since he was a kid in Laramie. And he stood beside the dog, next to me, and took that shooter's stance that I always can remember him using, and cocked the.45 and we waited. The bear dropped to all fours, and snorted and grunted and dipped its head and turned around and left. I can see us like a painting on a calendar, my father with the.45 and the dog between us, snarling, and yipping, and me with the shotgun that, if he'd charged, the bear would have picked his teeth with."
It was dark now outside the Ritz bar, and the rain coiling down the windowpane looked black. Susan had finished her cashew and was leaning back in her chair, holding her drink in both hands, watching me.
"The dog was no good for birds the rest of the day, and neither were we, I suppose. We went back to the lodge we were staying at and put Pearl in our room, and fed her, and then my father and I went down to the bar and my father ordered two double 23
scotch whiskies. The bartender looked at me and looked at my father and didn't say anything and brought the whiskey. He put both of them in front of my father and my father pushed one of them over in front of me.
" `Ran into a bear in the woods today,' my father said without much inflection. He still had the Western sound in his voice. `Kid stood his ground.'
"The bartender was a lean, dark guy, with a big nose. He looked at me and nodded and moved on down the bar, and my father and I drank the scotch."
"And he never said anything to you," Susan said.
I shook my head.
" `That brown liquor,'" Susan said, " `which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank.' "
"Faulkner," I said.
Susan smiled. "You're very literate for a man who has to buy extra-long ties."
"I had acted like a man, in his view, so he treated me like a man, in his view."
" `Not women, not boys and children,'" Susan said.
"Sounds ageist and sexist to me," I said.
"Maybe we can have his Nobel prize posthumously revoked," Susan said.
CHAPTER 4
PAUL and I were driving out Route 2 toward Lexington to break into Paul's mother's house. It was the first day that had felt like fall this year. And it was still raining, a lighter rain than last night, but steady so that the streets glistened and the cars had their lights on even though it was well after sunrise.
Pearl was sitting in the backseat looking steadily out the window on the passenger side, mostly motionless except when she turned her head to look out the other window. She had wanted very much to come and neither Paul nor
I could quite think of a reason sufficient to leave her staring after us with that look.
A school bus passed us going the other way and I felt the pang I always felt in early fall, the remembered pang of school. So many days like this
I remembered in the brick elementary school, the lights on inside, the day wet and shiny outside, cars moving past the school with their wipers going, and the smell of steam pipes and disinfectant and limitation and tedium, while outside the adult world moved freely about.
"How was it last night?" I said. I was drinking a cup of coffee as I drove, something I prided myself on doing with the cover off and never a drop spilled. Paul drank his out of a hole he'd torn in the cover. A boy still, with things to learn.
"She's good," Paul said, "very interesting. Essentially it's just a one-woman show, like, ah, whosis, Lily Tomlin, except a lot more angry and foulmouthed."
"I never heard of her," I said.
"I know her from New York," Paul said. "She's just a regular downtown performer, like me, trying to find performance space someplace in the East
Village, except that she was lucky enough to be denied an NEA grant. Now she's making big money. And playing high-visibility theaters. And getting written up in Time."
"Have you thought of applying?"