Judy was good. I do not mean that in a moralistic sense. She was stubborn as mules, sometimes moody, often capricious. But she was gay, honest, intelligent. And pretty, and clean as a cat.
It happened on the twenty-third day of August. It was a Friday. I was pumping gas that summer, paying off the loan that had gone toward my Model A Ford. I had permission to take it away to college with me — if I paid off the loan. The station was owned by a man named Shinley. It was on Bay Street, near the railroad crossing. It was a little after three in the afternoon, a hot afternoon. I knew that Judy had gone swimming at the West Hudson Country Club with Martha Baer. Had I not been working I would probably have been there, too. It is a small inexpensive club with a big pool.
I brought change to a man and, when he drove away, I saw Martha Baer standing there looking at me with a strange expression. I still don’t know how she got there. She was a stocky girl with glossy black hair and a happy smile. She wasn’t smiling. She seemed to be looking at something right behind me, so intently in fact that I turned around to see if Judy was sneaking up on me.
I asked Martha what was up. She answered me in a flat, sing-song, recitative voice. “Mose killed Judy. Mose killed Judy a little while ago.” She turned and walked away, a dumpy girl in red slacks, walking slowly through the August afternoon.
It took a long time for the words to make any sense. It was like throwing a rubber ball at a wall, aiming at a hole just big enough for the ball. It keeps missing and bouncing back. Then it goes through the hole. The afternoon stopped. Everything stopped. I felt like ice. Then I realized I was in my car, going too fast toward the edge of town, half crying so that it was hard to see.
You could get sandwiches and cold drinks at the club, but it was expensive. We used to walk down the highway from the club to a lunch stand run by a bald man named Goekel and his red-headed daughter. They did a good business. In June Mr. Goekel had acquired a bear. It was a black bear, not large. Some friend of his had acquired it somehow in the Adirondacks. Mr. Goekel had it in a big sturdy cage, and he planned to turn it over to a zoo when the weather got cold. In the meantime I imagine it improved business because a lot of people would stop to look at it. I believe it was Ginny, the redheaded daughter, who named him Mose, old man Mose.
Judy and I always stopped at the cage to say hello to Mose. Mose seemed to trudge endlessly 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 occasion Mose would stop pacing and heave himself up and stand, his forepaws against the bars. It made him seem much bigger. He could nearly 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 a lot of 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 had dropped a soaking wet wadded towel on 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 just 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 of any kind.
It was a misty afternoon, a day of mild rains. I was sitting on the front porch 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 small 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.”