Judy and I always stopped at the cage to say hello to Mose. Mose trudged forever back and forth inside the bars, swinging his head, turning ponderously at the corners. Sometimes he would give a sigh that seemed very human. He wasn’t very big, and his coat had a dusty look. His muzzle was blunt. He had little weary-looking piggish eyes. “Poor old Mose,” Judy would say. “Poor tired old Mose.”
On rare occasions Mose would stop his pacing and heave himself up and stand with his forepaws against the bars. It made him seem much bigger. He could look you in the eye. He would stare out and grunt and drop back down and continue to plod back and forth.
As I made the turn on the highway a gray ambulance passed me, heading back into town. It was traveling within the speed limit, its siren silent, no red dome light flashing. There were many cars and a lot of people at the stand. Mose was dead in his cage. His blood looked very dark on the rough cement floor. The stand itself was closed. The shutters had been pulled down and locked. People stood and looked at the dead bear.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later, long after the funeral, that Martha Baer told me in detail how it happened. They both had a hot dog and a coke and they were standing close to the cage, watching Mose pace back and forth. I can still see how it would have looked. The two girls, one dark and stocky and one slim and fair, watching the dusty bear in his highway prison. Judy was wearing sandals, a white skirt, and a yellow sweater. The hair of both girls was still damp from swimming. Judy, between hungry bites, was crooning to the bear, saying, “Poor old man Mose.”
Martha said they were standing quite close. Mose did his trick of heaving himself up onto his hind legs. Martha said she instinctively moved back a half step. Mose was peering out through the bars in his piggish way. Martha said she took a drink from her bottle of coke just then, squinting her eyes against the sun. Just as she lowered the bottle she heard an odd thick heavy sound. She said it was sort of a damp sound, as though someone dropped a soaking wet wadded towel onto a tile floor. She saw Judy fall, the top of her head ruined. She saw the white skirt and yellow sweater against the dust, the bottle rolling as the coke spilled, the hotdog roll bursting apart. Mose dropped to all fours and began pacing again.
She said she got over being faint after they had covered the body, before the ambulance arrived. She said she watched when the state trooper killed the bear. She said she wanted to see the bear killed. The trooper had stood, biting his lip. He waited with the muzzle of the gun between the bars until Mose plodded into close range. With the gun almost against Mose’s head, the trooper had fired. She said Mose stood for a moment, looking down at the concrete floor. Blood dropped from his muzzle and then he collapsed. The trooper fired all the rest of the bullets in his gun into the bear’s body. Martha said dust puffed out where each bullet hit. She said she had wanted to see the bear killed, but it hadn’t been just the way she had expected.
My life seemed unreal to me for about two years. I could not comprehend that this thing had happened. After two years I came back into focus and stopped a lot of damn foolish activities and went on to college, just two years behind schedule. I had rolled in my own martyrdom long enough. But things never became for me what they had once been.
I remember now that during college when I spoke of Judy to any other girl, and I am afraid I did that too often, I would say that she had drowned. It was more understandable to them. There was something too macabre and even elusively comic to say she had been killed by a bear. Comic is a shocking word to use under such circumstances, but it is true. It is the first instinctive reaction before the realization of horror. Horror is there in the incredibly quick blow of the cruel paw that smashed the fragile skull.
But this is also the memory of shame. And that, too, must be admitted. The incident happened in September, the month after her death. I certainly knew better. I have no excuse. Or, if there is any excuse permitted, it is that I was young and bitterly hurt, and the young have fetishes about the display of emotion.
It was a thick misty afternoon, a day of mild rains. I was on the front porch of our house with a friend named Don Ailery. Don’s little brother was there, too, an active pest five years old. My family was out. The front porch extended around the corner of the house. We were around the corner, Don and I, sitting on the glider, our feet on the railing, talking. The talk was about Judy and the bear. I guess the whole town had talked about it for a month. My awareness of my own loss was something that came in great waves. The worst was to wake up in the morning and remember that this would be a day without Judy. One more day out of the thousands ahead of me.
The smaller brother was thumping around on the porch, playing some game of his own. I was talking about Judy. I was proud of my control. A hard guy. You didn’t bleat about loss. You played your minor role in “Hell’s Angels,” judiciously accepting the bad flip of the coin.
I hear my own voice. “She wasn’t a bad kid, Don. Not a bad kid at all. She could be a pest sometimes. I guess you remember how she looked in a bathing suit, all right. Judy could be a hot little number.”
Don was looking beyond me, his face strangely blank. I turned and saw Mr. Hoover standing there looking at us. He had a box in his hand. It was a small cardboard box tied with brown cord. He looked at me. He had heard me. He looked at me without anger. He looked tired and puzzled. He held the box awkwardly. No one spoke. Even the little brother seemed quelled, though he could not have understood the implications of the situation.
Mr. Hoover turned abruptly away and walked back down the porch to the steps. I followed him slowly, and there were no words I could say. I could not say that my words meant nothing, that I bled inside, that by my disloyalty to her memory I was salting fresh wounds. It started to rain, harder than before, as he walked out to his car. He stopped by the car in the rain and looked back at me, still with that look of incomprehension. I can see him standing there. The car is high and square. He wears a wide mourning band on the sleeve of his gray suit. He got in and pulled the door shut and drove away.
I never learned what was in the box. I guessed that it contained some of Judy’s things, things they thought I might like to have. She died ten days before my birthday, and I wondered, too, if it was the present she had bought me before it happened. I have often wondered what was in that box.
That is my special memory of shame. Yet on this day, driving at sixty-five toward receding mirages, I knew that the meaning of the memory had changed. The loss and the sadness were there, but I could no longer think of what might have been had she stepped back away from Old Man Mose. Now, no other end seemed thinkable for her. It had happened long ago and far away, and distance had given it the flavor of inevitability.
The loss remained. I glanced at my wife. Her hand was on her thigh, clamped into a square small brown fist, lightly freckled. This was Betty, and I knew her well — every shade of mood, every inch of body, every intonation. The twins, children she had given me, were singing in their small sweet toneless voices.
I thought of my love for her, summoning it up, cloaking myself in that love.
It is the only defense I have. Because every time I remember Judy, it seems to me that I have spent my whole life among strangers.
And I do not care to be so alone.
A Romantic Courtesy
When the port engine developed oil pressure trouble, John Raney’s pilot, Sammy Dowd, informed Raney he was going to alter course and set the Twin Beech down at San Antonio to get it checked. Raney felt irritated by the delay. He was anxious to get back to his ranch, north of Fort Worth, early enough to take a long swim in the pool and horse around with the kids and relax from the tensions of the past few days.