In an hour he could breathe more easily. The front seat was strewn with postcards, seventy or eighty postcards all showing the same thick-bodied bear with a red snout coming out of the black trees. ‘Must be worth about eight dollars,’ he said aloud and took a cold pleasure in the minute gain.
The land levels as he comes down out of the trees and into miles of vineyards, the crooked branches crucified on wires. The Coach jars along a road knotted with tar patches, unraveled along the edges, the crumbling asphalt mixing with the gravel, weeds, rows of creosoted posts with winking reflectors, angled tops. But the land as monotonous as a lawn, and on he goes past the tourist cabins with their tiny porches and metal chairs, the gas pumps and whirligig ducks, the metal signs saying Nehi.
The sky grows. Yellow dirt roads cut away to the north and south. Plaster ducks on withered lawns, snapping flags in the wind coming down the flat rows. A dog races beside the car for a hundred feet.
In the steamy warmth of the Olympia Cafe he eats thick pancakes with Karo. The coffee is heavy with chicory. He leans his elbows on the counter watching the cook. A kid parks his Indian motorcycle and comes in. He pulls up his goggles, exposing white circles of skin.
‘Dogs’ he says to the cook. ‘Dogs gonna dump me yet. I hit one son of a bitch come out and went for my leg.’
‘That right.’ The cook presses the potato with his crusted spatula. ‘It better not a been my Irish setter. Rusty, just up the road here at my place.’
‘Might a been,’ says the kid. ‘No, no, I’m just kidding you. It was a black one about five mile back. Big son of a bitch. Size of a cow, damn near. It wasn’t no Irish setter.’
In Pennsylvania the vineyards are spaced farther apart. The grapevines fade, cornfields swell up. The levelness of the land disturbs him with its easiness. The road is a slab seamed with asphalt ridges that strike the worn tires, jar his hands and shoulders, on and on. Cars turn off the highway onto side roads ahead of him, raise dusty billows. The radio is nothing but static and broken voices crying out a few words. ‘Jimmy Rodgers … pray to God … happy birthday… in the European theater … goodby folks … Pillsbury … organ inter … Duz does … the story of a … oh … hello folks … Jesus said … our listeners write in …’
He passes old trucks humping along on bald treads. He is worried about his own tires. He turns off onto a gravel road but the stones fly up, dust chokes him. Grit in his mouth. When he rubs his fingers against the ball of his thumb he feels hard grit. And turns back onto the concrete.
Miles of snow fence. A peregrine falcon balances on a forgotten hay bale. The flatness changes, the earth’s color changes, darker, darker. Prayers and long silences out of the dusty radio. In the autumn rain the houses become trailers among the trees. Oaks come at him, flash, burst into thickets, into woods. H&C Café, EATS, Amoco, GAS 3 MI. AHEAD. Fog. A little night fog. The sod in Indiana a deep brown-black. The cattle sink into its blackness. Southering geese spring up from the sloughs and ponds, scissor over him in the hundreds. The water is streaked with the lines of their angular necks, fractioned by dipping heads and beaks.
In the diner hunched over the cup of coffee he wonders how far he is going.
THE BEAR, LIKE MANY BEARS, had led a brief and vivid life. Born in the late winter of 1918 in a stump den, he was the oldest of two cubs. In personality he was quarrelsome and insensitive to the subtle implications of new things. He ate the remains of a poisoned eagle and nearly died. In his second autumn, from the height of a cliff, he saw his mother and sister backed against an angle in the rock by lean bear hounds. They went down in squalling that drew nothing but dry rifle fire. He was hunted himself the same year but escaped death and injury until 1922 when a coffin maker’s charge of broken screws swept up from the shop floor smashed his upper left canine teeth, leaving him unbalanced in mind and with chronic abscesses.
The next summer McCurdy’s Lodge, a massive structure of dovetailed spruce logs and carved cedar posts, opened on the eastern side of his range. The bear’s sense of smell was sharpened by hunger. He came to the Lodge’s garbage dump and its exotic peach peelings, buttered crusts and beef fat that melted in his hot throat. He began to lurk impatiently in the late afternoon trees for the cook’s helper with his wheelbarrow of orange peel and moldy potatoes, celery stumps and chicken bones, trickles of sardine oil.
The helper was a lumber-camp cook learning the refinements of carriage trade cuisine. He saw the bear in the dusk and ran shouting up to the Lodge for a ride. Hotelier McCurdy was in the kitchen talking Toumedos forestier with the cook and went to look at the bear for himself. He saw something in the hulking shoulders, the doggy snout, and told the Lodge carpenters to build benches on the slope above the dump. They set the area off with a peeled sapling railing to mark the limits of approach. The bolder guests walked twittering through the birches to see the bear. They touched each other’s shoulders and arms, their hands sprang protectively to their throats. The laughter was choked. The bear never looked up.
Through the summer the guests watched the bear flay the soft, fly-spangled garbage with his claws. The men wore walking suits or flannel bags and argyle pullovers, the women came in wrinkled linen tubes with sailor collars. They lifted their Kodaks, freezing the sheen of his fur, his polished claws. Oscar Untergans, a timber-lot surveyor who sold hundreds of nature shots to postcard printers photographed the bear at the summer dump. Untergans came again and again, walking along the path behind the cook, picking up any fetid rinds or dull eggshells thrown from the jouncing wheelbarrow. Sometimes the bear was waiting. The cook pitched the garbage with a pointed spade. He hit the bear with rotted tomatoes, grapefruit halves like yellow skullcaps.
Two or three summers after Untergans snapped the bear’s image they ran electric line to the Lodge. One evening the bear did not appear at the dump, nor was he seen in the following weeks and years. The Lodge burned on New Year’s Eve of 1934. On a rainy May night in 1938 Oscar Untergans fell in his estranged wife’s bathroom and died from a subdural haematoma. The postcard endured.
6 The Violet Shoe in the Ditch
MERNELLE SLOGGED DOWN the steep road, the snow packing into her boots. The dog plunged into her tracks, up and out, like a roller coaster. ‘You’re knockin’ yourself out for nothin’,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s sendin’ you no letters or postcards. No penpals for dumb dogs. I can guess what you’d write. Stuff like “Dear Fido, Send me a cat. Wufwuf, Dog.”’
Later Mink would get out the snow roller that the town had sold him cheap when they went over to the snowplow and hitch it to the tractor. The roller was a slatted rolling pin of a thing that crushed the snow down into a smooth pack. After the roller went up and down the truck still couldn’t make it, even with chains. In November, before the big snows came, Mink parked the truck at the bottom of the road. He hauled the forty-quart cream cans down every morning with the tractor.
‘Leave the truck up here, we run the risk of bein’ trapped for the winter. This way we got at least a chance if the place catches on fire or somebody gets hurt bad. Get down to the road, we got a ride.’ That was Jewell talking through Mink’s mouth. Jewell was the one afraid of accidents and fire, had seen her father’s barns burn down with