John D. MacDonald

The Bear Trap

We had been driving through country baked hard by summer. At about three in the afternoon I stopped at an isolated gas station. We were tired and I thought a gas-and-coke stop would freshen us up.

The gas station was a cluttered affair, with frayed and faded pennants, a souvenir stall bright with cheap dusty pottery, a fat owner who served us with condescending joviality. Cars thrust by at high speed and fading Doppler whine, whipping up dust circles. I drank half my coke and looked around for the children. They were examining something in a cage.

I walked toward them, the sound of my approach lost in the oncoming roar of a truck. I saw Janet cautiously extending her fingers toward the cage bars. An old fear came strongly into my mind, vivid and shocking. I pulled her back roughly and without warning. It hurt her a little and startled her a great deal. She began to cry. And so, of course, did Janice, her twin. Buddy, their younger brother, moved back with feigned indifference when I ordered them harshly not to touch the cage.

The proprietor kept two furtive coyotes in a makeshift cage too small for them. There was a rank smell about them and their cage needed cleaning. Though even at best they are not prepossessing beasts, there was something baffled and helpless about their tucked-in flanks and evasive pacing that was quite touching and sad. It was perhaps that flavor of bewilderment which made Janet wish to offer the passing comfort of a touch.

As I took the children back to the car, Betty came from the women’s room behind the gas station. I sensed from the way she walked and from the expression around her mouth that her fastidiousness had been offended by the facilities. And I knew also that this stopping place, though at first agreeable to her, would become my fault — hence both reprehensible and punishable.

She looked at the twins and said, in an edged way, “Now what?”

Janet, amid snufflings, said. “Daddy hurt my arm.” She said it with a faint odor of that special primness which signals a parent at fault.

“Really, Hal!” Betty said.

“I pulled her back before one of those coyotes took her fingers off.”

“Couldn’t you have just spoken to her?”

“Let’s go,” I said. I wanted to be away from there quickly. But I did not leave the memory behind. It came with me, undamaged by the years, astonishingly vivid. It was a memory I had not examined for a long time. It was a memory that shamed me.

We drove along the burned road through the dry land. There was a quality of rigid silence in the way Betty sat beside me. The twins made damp muted noises. We had over two hundred miles to go.

“I’m sorry I hurt your arm, dear, but I was scared you’d be hurt by the coyote.”

“He wasn’t going to bite,” Janet said. “He didn’t like it in that cage.”

“When I was young,” I said, hunting carefully for the right words, “not much older than you are right now, I had a friend named Judy Hoover. She got too close to a cage where a bear was, and he reached out and hit her and killed her.”

The twins gasped and Buddy lunged forward and asked with great eagerness. “Was there a lot of blood? Was there?”

“Why,” demanded Betty icily, “do you make up such ridiculous things to tell them? What do you expect to gain?”

I glanced at Betty. Her face was angry. “It happened,” I said. “It really happened.” I glanced at her again and saw a questioning uncertainty in her eyes.

“All right. It happened, Hal. That’s no reason for telling the children.”

“I was telling Janet so that she could understand why I was unintentionally rough.”

“You were rough, Hal, because you’re always irritated when we have to stop. Your idea of a trip is to keep traveling until everybody is a ragged ruin. You were rough because you were cross.”

“Was there any blood?” Buddy demanded.

“We are not going to talk about that ridiculous bear.” Betty said firmly. Buddy sat back where he belonged. Janice whispered something to Janet and the twins giggled.

I was content not to talk about it. I had never told Betty about it. I had never told anyone all of it.

It had happened when we were living in West Hudson, the summer before I went away to school. We had moved to West Hudson when I was ten and in the fifth grade. Judy Hoover was a year younger and in the fourth grade. I cannot remember how I met her. She was on the fringe of my awareness and she moved gradually and steadily into focus. I remember that she was not a pretty child. She was brown and blonde and skinny and active, very fleet of foot. In the dusk games of summer evenings she was very difficult to catch, and even more difficult to evade. She seemed to be constantly in motion. I cannot remember her ever being still as a child, yet I know I must have seen her quite still. I used to help her with arithmetic, and, later, plane geometry and algebra. She was bright in everything but math.

She was an only child and she lived with her father and mother in a big old house two blocks from us. I used to go over there and we would go up to her room and I would try to hammer the plausibilities of mathematics past the bland incomprehension of her blue blue eyes. I remember when, after I had turned thirteen. Mr. Hoover suddenly made a rule that we could not study in her room. It seemed to both of us to be an incomprehensible ultimatum. He changed toward me that year. He had always been very friendly and jolly. He grew cooler. I thought it was because I had offended him in some way. I did not understand until much later.

In school in the early years I was popular enough and husky enough to be able to risk having a girl as a good friend. And Judy was a good friend. We both read a lot, read the same books, talked about them. After reading a book we particularly liked, we would go about being characters out of the book — until the next good one. I would not say we were inseparable. That came later. Sometimes we would not see each other for a week. But we always picked up where we had left off without effort.

I was fifteen and beginning my second year of high school when Judy entered high school as a freshman. The beginnings of awareness have been so exhaustively dealt with that it is hard to speak of what happened between us without uncomfortable triteness. We both thought it was our special miracle and had never of course happened to any other two people in exactly that way. I can even remember the very moment when she stopped being Judy, my friend, and became Judy, my girl.

I was walking along the second-floor corridor of the high-school building toward the drinking fountain. Adolescence had filled me with curious imaginings and lurid dreams. With my new awareness of the flesh I watched a blonde girl walking ahead of me, watched her good legs and the swing of her skirt and the feminine shoulders. She turned and I saw with amazement that it was Judy, and saw that she had somehow become pretty. It was never the same again.

High-school children did not go steady then as much as they do now, but we became an entity in the social life of the school. Judy and Hal. Hal and Judy. It was unthinkable that either of us would go out with anyone else. My parents accepted the situation more readily than hers. Judy told me many an account of household combat over our design for living. But Judy had a firm line of jaw and it was eventually accepted — though not with the best of grace. She told me once that her father had tried to get a transfer so they could move her away from me. I said that if that happened we would run away together. She said that was the only possible thing we could do.

Mr. Hoover was always cool with me. He was a tall loose-jointed man with many awkwardnesses of posture and movement. He spoke in an abrupt jerky way. His hair was very dark and his skin had a glossy yellowish look to it. I thought him quite old, but now, looking back, I realize with a feeling of shock that he was young. His awkwardnesses I would now classify as boyishness. They had married very young. Judy’s mother was a handsome woman who played a harp, an instrument I thought exotic.

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.”

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 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 down the porch steps. I followed slowly; 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 sadness were there, but I could no longer think of what might have been had she stepped back. 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 rested 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.

Content

John D. MacDonald
The Bear Trap