Bear

I remember Bear leaping through the snow like a little kid. That’s how I remember it starting anyway, the whole thing, the whole trip, Bear hopping, sinking knee deep, falling down, getting up again, and running to the next bank like he’d never seen snow before. He was nothing like a bear, but we called him that for short, because his mother had always called him Teddy Bear and so it just got shortened as he grew up. That’s kind of funny in itself – shortened as he grew. In any case, even Bear’s mother called him Bear now. No one ever called him Theodore or usually even Ted. Bear’s father called him Bonehead or Moron or Ya Yousy Bastard, anything along those lines, but that was a sore spot and not altogether fair, so we stuck with the original nickname. To tell the truth, Bear was kind of a bonehead, but we let that go, because, after all, who’s

not? Besides that, Bear’s father was the meanest living son-of-a-bitch this side of Cock Suck, Colorado, so we figured he was hardly one to talk.
Alan was there. I can see him in my mind’s eye, standing by the old beat up Ford, lighting a cigarette, laughing at the Bear. Alan was the oldest. In the summer he worked at the pizzeria and in the winter he went to school, Pacific University, and studied God-knows-what. We never asked. We figured he knew what he was doing. Alan had lots of girls, he was always having another girl, and so he had lots of stories to tell, which amused the remainder of we five no end, being younger and less experienced. Alan also owned three of the four rifles we’d brought, so he was kind of necessary; actually, as it turned out, indispensable.
Kim was next in age to Alan, chronologically speaking. He had just turned 18 and he had managed to sidestep a low number in the lottery – 3 it was, for Christ’s sake – by being a Quaker. Not that he was really a Quaker in any practical sense, but his mother and father were Quakers – his mother by choice, his father under duress – and so they could show a documented history of religious pacifism. The truth was, Kim had not been to church in maybe five years and had no more use for it than for weddings or funerals or Sunday teas. Nonetheless, his mother was able to sway the pastor in his favor, even to the point of maybe telling a white lie or two – it was all for the cause – and he wrote a letter – notarized even – regarding Kim’s faithful attendance at church and his heartfelt loathing of killing and such-like. There was no way Barbara Foster’s boy was going to the other side of the world to fight zipper-heads in the Nam, so sir. I think that’s somewhere close to the way she would have put it – or at least the spirit is there.

We had all called him Foster for as long as we could remember. No one called him Kim, except for his mother, of course, beause it was obviously a stupid name, a girl’s name; although now, in the last few months, Quaker-Boy was catching on as well.
The youngest of us, at 16, was Eric, half brother to Jacob. We did not think of them as brothers, nor did they think of themselves that way, and so they got along quite well. It was as if each out of his way – perhaps by mutual agreement, who knows – to maintain a healthy sense of the separation they came with. Eric ran interference with mother, Jacob with father, and they always said your mom and your dad, never ours. They had not changed their names, perhaps because their parents had not yet forged the kind of permanence together that would justify talking such a step, but that was just fine with the brothers – in fact better, best. They were Eric Schimmelheffer and Jacob Jones, and forever hold their peace.
And then there’s me, Thatcher Beauchamp. Thatch, naturally. Or Bo, or Champ, or Chump. Or also Beechnut, like the gum. Remember?
Now Eric and Jacob and Kim had joined the Bear, digging around in the snow bank, throwing mushy clods at each other, their pants, their shirts bearing dark round spots wherever the clods had hit. Everyone for himself.
Alan shook his head slowly, his shoulders moving up and down with the laughter he kept behind his lips. He flicked his cigarette into the mud by the tire, walked a few paces to the nearest snow bank and knelt to scoop up a handful of snow. He motioned to me and I joined him there, gathering a handful of m own.
“What the hell,” he said. “Ambush!”

And so we joined the fray, charging in to attack from the rear, not minding the soggy pelting we took, giving out better, sloshing and scrunching and slogging from one frozen white island to another, sweating, panting, laughing, shouting. It was one of the last times any of us would enter into life like that, not looking, not thinking, not guessing nor fearing. It as one of the last times ever that we would be young.

****

It was still only early May and we had driven the cars up Squirrel Creek Road as far as we could get them, Alan and I in the Ford; Eric, Jacob, Kim and the Bear in Kim’s old hump-back Dodge. The Ford had front wheel drive, so we had gotten through the first couple snow banks without much difficulty, Alan blazing the trail, as it were, and the Dodge plodding along behind. Every time I looked back through the cab window of the Ford and through he Dodge’s front windshield there seemed to be some kind of pandemonium going on, everybody bouncing, arms flailing, heads sticking out windows, and so I was glad to be with Alan. Alan was cool, he was laid back, he was mellow as we used to say. Oh, he knew how to have fun and could be just as boisterous as anyone else, but he knew when to lie back too. He thought about things, he pondered things, and he spoke of these things with a slow deliberation that I found appealing, enviable. It was something to be sought after on a personal level. Alan had chosen me to ride shotgun in the two seat Ford and so I was proud and felt honored, special. Along the way, from the city to the wilderness, we had talked about University life, about girls, about the Vietnam

War, about hippies and draft dodgers, about Elvis Presley, the Stones, the Beatles, rock and roll.
“Credence Clearwater’s just country boys like us,” Alan said. “They put on the whole hippie trip to fit in and get the big gigs, but really they’re just country bumpkins, especially John Fogarty. Take that song, Back in old Lodi. It’s no different than Johnny Cash or Elvis, you know?”
I did.
“Those boys aren’t on drugs like the others, you can tell.”
“Then how come you can’t understand what they’re saying?” I asked.
“Well, Thatch, that’s just what makes you a city boy and me a country boy, ‘cause I can understand every word just fine.”
“What about that one with the jungle then? You know, ‘bout runnin’ through the jungle.”
“Oh, that’s just about the Nam.”
“I know, but what are they saying?”
Alan waved the question aside.
“Nothin’,” he said. “That’s not even one of their better cuts. It’s just about the Nam. Everybody’s got to have a song about the Nam.”
So we talked like that. We talked about Gordon Lightfoot. Alan loved Gordon Lightfoot. He loved hat song about the ghost in the wishing well. If you could read my mind, Love, what a tale my thoughts would tell. He’d sing that one all the time, under his breath. And he loved that that one about everything having a season, turn, turn, turn. I

don’t remember who the song was by, but it was from Alan that I learned the words were from the Bible. Alan knew a lot of stuff and yet remained a free man, captivated by nothing. That’s the only way I can think to describe him.
I remember Alan.

****

The Bear lay on his back in the snow. Somehow he had become everybody’s target. That wasn’t really unusual. The Bear had a way of antagonizing people in general, even those otherwise allied with him in snowball fights. Now he lay on his back, arms out at his sides, legs together, snow melting on his forehead and in his crotch, under his collar, in his ear.
“Ouch,” he said.
The rest of us were walking away. I think we were all feeling a bit stupid for getting wet and we were all trying to stick to the warm patches where the sun came through the trees. Each of us had brought a pack, but not one of us had brought much in his pack. . Foster had a tape recorder that was much too heavy for the trip really and five hours worth of music on three big spools. He had also brought a pair of binoculars. I supposed we each had a change of clothing. We had all brought coats but these were left in the cars because the weather was nice, quite warm for having just turned May, and we figured, both unanimously and unreasonably, that it would stay that way. Each of us had a sleeping bag. Four of us had rifles.

There were two 30-30s, one 30-06, all belonging to Alan, and then Foster’s 22. Alan, always cautious, pulled back the bolt on each of his rifles, checking for an empty chamber. Then he distributed the rifles between Eric, Jacob and me, leaving the Bear without. Somehow that seemed to go without saying for the rest of us, but naturally the Bear objected.
“What about me? Where’s mine?”
“I don’t know, “ Alan said. “You leave it at home, Bear?”
“Nah, but that’s not fair. How come everyone else gets to carry a gun?”
“You can carry mine,” I said, having quickly realized how heavy the damn thing was and how the strap would soon be cutting into my shoulder.
The Bear’s eyes lit up.
“No he can’t,” Alan said.
“But Beechnut just said I could.”
“Ain’t Beechnut’s to say about.”
“Well shit,” Bear said.
“Hey . . . here . . .” Eric had picked up a rifle-like stick from the tangled forest floor beside the road. He aimed the stick and said Bang. “You can use this, man.”
Oddly enough, Bear seemed quite pleased. He could surprise you that way. He was always ready to enter into a joke, just as ready to be the butt of the joke.
“Cool,” he said, aiming the stick. “Nifty.”
“Here,” Alan said, “you can carry some bullets too.” He dropped a box of 30-30 ammo into Bear’s backpack.

“Aww, Alan. You still love me?”
“Always Bear; forever,” Alan said.
We double checked out gear, all of what we did not have. Alan figured we had 10 miles to walk.

****

The Lake Resort was nestled high in the Cascades, propped along the North shore like a primitive little village. And primitive it surely was. It had begun with Bear’s grandfather, whatever his name was. He had built half the cabins himself, and then Bear’s father had built the rest over the years. There were 15 in all. In the early years they had served mostly as simple, utilitarian shelters for hunters and fishermen. They would come to fish for Brook Trout and Rainbow and Kokanee, for German Brown and Cutthroat. In the spring and in the fall they would come to hunt for deer and elk and in the late fall for bear. There was no running water in the cabins, there were no fixtures of any sort save for the shelves which grew out from the walls as if part of the same wood, like pine knots, and the single table jutting out like a stubby branch. There were one or two sets of bed springs in each cabin, depending upon that particular cabin’s size, and a mattress which hung over the rafters when not in use to keep the nice from making nests. Back then there were 36 miles of single lane dirt road to drive from the highway to the Resort. It was not for the faint of heart, nor the mechanically challenged, for this road


had teeth for tires, fists for mufflers, and an insatiable appetite for any fuel injection engine that came its way.
It seemed that my father himself had a story for each of those early years – the time the Ford dropped its muffler and he tied it to the chassis with fishing line – the time he had brought his own parents to see paradise and had two flat tires and one spare only and had to walk 10 miles back to the highway and hitch a ride to the gas station at Government Camp – the time when I was a kid, though I do not remember – when a stealthy rock, arrow-shaped actually, shot with such improbable precision from beneath the right front tire and punctured the radiator hose of the red Pontiac. How was it that he loved the place so? How is it that these memories seem fond to me?
Over the years of course, as the men came home from wars, as the country went to work on itself again, as the cities crept outward and the wilderness turned a shoulder inward upon itself; as the cars got tougher and the engines grew minds and paradise of any and every sort became both more common and more accessible, the approaches flattened out and the thickets opened up and the narrow ways relinquished their stubborn miles to the wide. Roads swelled like rivers and streams at flood and put out tongues of stone and tar into places once virgin and secret.
There was money to be made.
One by one, Bear’s father remolded the cabins – nothing special, just enough to make them livable if not necessarily inviting to at least the more hardy wives – tile topped counters, a cupboard with a mirror, dressers, built in propane fixtures for two-burner hot plates, a vegetable crisper on the porch. He secured a permit for wood cutting

off the logging roads thereabouts and twice a month brought chunks of sugar pine and Douglas Fir and birch and hemlock and cedar to piles shared between the cabins. He and the Bear, that is; for Bear had been employed – conscripted, rather – from the earliest age, set about whatever task he could handle – and the expectations in this regard were high. Bear hated it, of course. What kid wouldn’t? He had not spent a single summer in his home town but was bundled off in June and carried away to the woods, hid away there till September. While the rest of the kids made their summer connections, continued friendships, started romances, went to the movies and loitered at the ice cream shop the
Bear cut wood and washed out rowboats, filled kerosene lamps door-to-door, ran the cash register, repaired shakes on roofs – you name it, the Bear learned it and did it. It seemed nothing unusual to me back then – it was just the Bear – yet I think of it now and I’m amazed, for I myself barely know one end of a hammer from the other, a shake from a single, a ten penny from a two. Yearly we came to the place they had made – Bear’s grandfather, Bears father and mother, the Bear himself – and thought not much of it other than that it had been set down whole, just there like the forest itself or the shore of the lake or indeed the thin dirt road that winded there.
This was our destination, and over banks and slopes of snow we came………………






“Hey y’Alan, hey y’Alan,” Bear was saying. “Hey y’Alan, I got a question.”
We had decided to walk the wide, bare swath that ran roughly Southeast to Northwest beneath the huge steel towers which conveyed electricity to the central part of the State, passing high over the superfluous wilderness. The towers looked like giant men, heads to the sky, long arms outstretched, feet planted in the rocky ground amid the parched tufts of huckleberry bushes and stunted pine trees. The lines, lifted high to the blue from steel fist to fist, emitted a constant faint buzzing sounds. There was power above, and in the earth power, and then we five young men between. We had no idea, really. No young man does.
Bear was trotting to catch up with Alan. His pack thumped and rattled. Alan had long legs, Bear’s were short.
“Y’Alan!”
“What, Goddammit?”
Alan slowed his pace, let the Bear catch up. We all caught up. It was midday and the sun on the barren track had grown hot. Our clothes had dried.
“I just wanted to ask,” Bear said, huffing and puffing.
“Ask what, Bear?”
“About pussy. What’s pussy feel like, Alan?”
“Oh Jesus.”
We groaned, falling into the character of Alan’s response – let we walked just a bit faster, got a bit nearer.
“Come on, Alan?” Bear said, “I gotta know.”
Alan stopped. “Rest he said.” He shrugged off his pack, unshouldered his rifle. Alan sat down on a patch at the foot of a tower and shook a cigarette from his pack.
“Are we almost there?” Kim asked. He was the heaviest of us and his brow and hair were wet with sweat.
“Come on, Alan,” Bear said. “What about pussy?”
“What the hell’s wrong with you, Bear?” Alan said.
“I dunno.”
“Well shit, what’s does it feel like?” Jacob said.
That made us laugh. We leaned a little closer to Alan.
“I’m gonna shoot my rifle,” Kim said.
“What the ricchochets,” Alan warned.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kim said, “yes sir, Alan sir.”
Alan took a long drag and blew out a long stream of thoughtful smoke. He leaned back against the giant’s leg.
“You know the lard that congeals on your mother’s stovetop?” he said.
“Yeah,” Bear answered.
“Well next warm day that comes along, you take and stick your pecker in that.”
“Gross,” Bear said.
“You asked.”
One could almost see mental lad swimming through the Bear’s mind.
“Well, does it come out all gooey then too?”
“Depends,” Alan said.

“On, what?”
“On hell, on whether she’s got the clap or not. What the fuck’s wrong with you Bear?”
“I dunno,” Bear said. “I just curious.”
“That you are,” Alan said.
Now I had a question. I did not really want to ask it, but on the other hand it had invaded my mind with such force that I was ultimately unable to stop it from coming out of my mouth.
“Well then, does it smell like lard too?” I asked.
That set the others to laughing, except for Alan. Now that the subject had been opened, he seemed to become quite serious about it.
“Could you use it to cook with?” Bear said.
The half brothers were practically rolling in the dirt now.
“You know bagels and lox?” Alan asked.
“Locks?” Bear said.
“No, it’s a Jewish thing,” I said. “Some kinda fish.”
Alan nodded his head, acknowledging my comment. I felt brilliant.
“This whole thing sounds kinda disgusting,” Bear said.
“Whole thing sounds kinda fishy to me,” Kim said, having tired of firing his rifle for the time being.
“Jewish?” Jacob said.
“I don’t get it,” Bear said.
“And you probably never will get it” Kim said, “so why bother asking?”
“Right,” Alan said, pushing himself to his feet, back against one leg of the giant. “May as well join the Quaker convent with gun-boy here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean,” Kim asked.
Another shook another cigarette from his pack but instead of lighting up he twirled it between his fingers like a baton.
“Means you get to have all the peace you want, but no piece.”