Ordinary Bear, page 1
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“Set against the icy terrain of an Alaskan village and Portland’s seamy underworld, C. B. Bernard’s latest novel is both an unexpected detective story and, truly, a shattering exploration of what we struggle to do to save others—and to redeem and save ourselves. Ordinary Bear is, well . . . extraordinary.”
—CAROLINE LEAVITT, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF PICTURES OF YOU AND CRUEL BEAUTIFUL WORLD
“From its opening pages, Ordinary Bear grips readers so tightly they’re barely able to breathe . . . Rich, dense, and beautifully written, Ordinary Bear is a testament to the power of storytelling . . . and Bernard’s immense talent.”
—KRISTIN BAIR, AUTHOR OF AGATHA ARCH IS AFRAID OF EVERYTHING
“This is no ordinary bear. It is more of a teddy bear of a book that you want to curl up with, racing through the pages as the characters struggle to save a child.”
—AUDREY SCHULMAN, AUTHOR OF THE DOLPHIN HOUSE, THREE WEEKS IN DECEMBER, AND THE CAGE
“A masterful tapestry of resilience and atonement, skillfully intertwining its characters’ lives . . . It’s written with a blend of wit, vulnerability, and danger that makes the experience of reading it as exhilarating as it is profound . . . If any of Richard Russo’s characters had cracked ribs and chipped teeth, they’d be C. B. Bernard’s characters.”
—ADAM J. SHAFER, AUTHOR OF NEVER WALK BACK
“There’s nothing ordinary about Ordinary Bear . . . This timely novel kept me up late, made me laugh, and broke my heart. I can’t wait to see what Bernard does next.”
—DIANE JOSEFOWICZ, AUTHOR OF L’AIR DU TEMPS (1985)
“Ordinary Bear is a dark, comic, and soulful crime story. C. B. Bernard has a keen eye for the details of misery and redemption, whether in the far-flung villages of the Arctic or the eccentric backstreets of Portland, Oregon. This novel is deeply moving and exciting to read.”
—JOHN STRALEY, SHAMUS AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF THE CECIL YOUNGER AND COLD STORAGE, ALASKA NOVELS
“A hero’s journey unlike any I’ve ever read—strange, harrowing, and funnier than it has any right to be . . . A heartfelt page-turner I can’t recommend highly enough.”
—C. MATTHEW SMITH, AUTHOR OF TWENTYMILE
BOOKS BY C. B. BERNARD
novels
Ordinary Bear
Small Animals Caught in Traps
nonfiction
Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now
ORDINARY BEAR
C. B. BERNARD
Copyright © 2024 by Chris Bernard
E-book published in 2024 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design by Larissa Ezell
All rights reserved. This book or any portion
thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner
whatsoever without the express written permission
of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations
in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 979-8-200-85053-2
Library e-book ISBN 979-8-200-85052-5
Fiction / Literary
Blackstone Publishing
31 Mistletoe Rd.
Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
For Kim above all . . .
And for everyone I’d fight for,
and all who’d fight for me.
“We carry nemesis inside us.”
—Robert Stone
CONTENTS
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part II
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part III
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Part IV
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Epilogue
Ordinary Bear
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PART ONE
1
STAINS OF UNCERTAIN PROVENANCE
The bear stood on Farley’s sofa ripping foam from the cushions, day-old seal blood crusted on its jaws and chest. The sofa—a shade of green not readily found in nature—had belonged to an oil company investigator named Hennessy. When Hennessy left Alaska a decade earlier for Sandpoint, Idaho, to marry a Russian woman he’d met online, Farley inherited the sofa along with his job, his company house, and the rust-hollowed Ford F-150 he drove. Some days Farley thought he’d inherited his lingering existential ambivalence as well. Too big for the house, the sectional extended the length of the living room and angled into the galley kitchen like a threadbare peninsula, blocking the fridge from opening more than a foot. It looked tiny beneath the bear, which dug through the cushions with a kind of joy, throwing stuffing behind it like snow. The real snow had melted early this year across much of the Arctic. The pack ice too. Watching from across the dump, Farley wondered if the bears had resorted to trying to make their own in the face of climate change.
This fucking world, he thought. Not for the first time.
That morning, Mayor Nell had stood in his kitchen and demanded he get rid of the sofa before Abril arrived from the Lower 48. “You can’t expect your girl to sleep on them sofa, Farley. Sofa’s covered in fleas. Sofa’s got stains of uncertain provenance. Them rusty sofa springs give her tetanus if she rolls over at night.”
Farley raised his chin at the mayor. “Uncertain provenance?”
Nell put a knuckle of chewing tobacco in her cheek and rolled it around thoughtfully. “What, Farley? You don’t think I read library books?”
“New sofas are expensive,” he said. “I’d have to ship one up from Fairbanks.”
“I think you got plenty of good oil field money, Farley. Maybe spend some on furniture ’stead of food.” She spat tobacco into the sink, which was nearly level with her shoulders. “Maybe then you don’t get so fat, neither.”
Well over six feet tall, and built like an Oldsmobile, he towered over all the Iñupiat in Nanuqmiut and most of the whites, too, not fat so much as thick, big-boned, though he conceded he’d gone soft since the army. After a few gin and tonics, his mother liked to joke to his girlfriends that her ob-gyn had needed a forklift to deliver him.
“It’s all your akutuq and muktuk,” he said, patting his belly amiably.
“Bullshit. Seal oil makes you smart. It’s all them whiskey and frozen pizza that makes you fat.”
“What if I sleep on the couch?” Farley asked, conceding the point. “Abril can have my bed. I fall asleep there watching the news most nights anyway.”
The mayor spat again into the sink, leaving a dark spatter on the cracked porcelain. “I think maybe we find you a new couch for your daughter’s visit so she don’t get fleas for souvenirs. Jeffrey will help you get rid of your rotten green couch OK.”
For the first time, Farley noticed one of Nell’s sons—the mute one, Jeffrey—standing in his doorway and wondered how long he’d been there. Nell had been the village mayor for almost twenty years and he had no idea how old she was. Maybe forty. Maybe seventy. The high Arctic had a way of wearing people down. She had skin like a baseball glove, eyes that could strip paint, and eleven kids that spanned a range of ages from diapers to divorces. Dozens of her grand- and great-grandkids scurried around the village like voles. She ruled family and residents alike with matriarchal poise, and Farley knew there was no point in arguing with her. The discussion was over. He’d already lost.
Jeffrey helped him drag the couch from the house and onto a sled he pulled to the dump with his four-wheeler. Nell rode behind her son, arms wrapped around his stomach, yelling into his ears like a jockey as the quad belched black smoke. Farley followed on foot, having misplaced his truck keys. By the time he got there, his eyes still watering from the exhaust, the two of them were already standing around chewing Skoal and watching the big white bear shred the cushions.
“Bear’s got something in his mouth,” Nell said, spitting tobacco juice through her brown teeth. “What’s he got in his stupid mouth?” Mute Jeffrey spit too, a kind of shrug. Farley squinted at the bear, which shook its head and sent a shiny black object skittling into a pile of trash and bones.
“I think it’s my TV remote,” he said. Nell smiled br
“Ha ha, Farley. You never checked them cushions? No more watching the news for you. Why do you watch the news so much anyway, Farley? What good did news ever do you?”
“I like to know what’s happening in the world.”
Nell looked at him crossways. The village transmitter got its news broadcasts two days old from a Phoenix affiliate cheaper than it would cost to pay the Anchorage stations for air rights, and the twice-a-day broadcasts were neither timely nor relevant, with overtly tanned blonds reporting stories about blistering heat, immigrant border crossings, and big-city crime. She scratched an armpit beneath her sweater and spit into the dirt thoughtfully.
“If you still want to know some stuff about the world, why did you move up here to Nanuqmiut anyway?”
“For the company, I guess.”
Nell’s spasmic laugh doubled her over, halving her to little more than two feet in height. Before it subsided, she slapped Jeffrey hard on the back. Farley watched him swallow his tobacco and turn the exact shade of green as the sofa.
2
A MAN’S GOT TO HAVE STANDARDS
Farley had seen Abril just a few times since he’d moved to the Arctic to work on the North Slope, and always at home in Portland. The first few years after he’d taken the job, he’d flown back for the holidays and rented a cheap hotel room on Burnside, where they’d eaten tacos in front of the wooden cabinet TV watching grainy Christmas specials. That was the best arrangement he’d been able to get her mother to agree to at the time.
“You can’t negotiate with terrorists,” his lawyer had told him. “Just do what she says and it will be better for all of us.”
It took two more years to convince her to let Abril visit him in Alaska—and then only under protest. Their split had been acrimonious. It hadn’t even been a split, really, so much as the unsurprising conclusion of a few months together while he was still in the army, as if they’d pulled the pin out of a grenade the day they’d met. They both knew it would explode sooner or later.
If he thought of his life in baseball terms, Farley had expected a line drive, not a home run, but when she told him she was pregnant it curved wide and fast and dropped into foul territory with a thud. He left the army to be with her without asking if that’s what she wanted. It was not.
Now she had custody, he agreed that was best, and they “co-parented” uneasily from different states with two thousand miles and a buffer country between them. For Abril to reach Nanuqmiut, they had to overcome a litany of logistic challenges and expenses together. Their particular form of co-parenting meant her mother resolved the former and Farley absorbed the latter. He purchased two tickets. She would fly with Abril from Portland to Seattle, Juneau, Anchorage, and then to Fairbanks, a complicated series of deplanings and connections made necessary by the remoteness of the destination and scarcity of flights. In Fairbanks, she would put Abril on the fifth and final leg to Nanuqmiut alone rather than risk seeing Farley for even a short while. The only plane in or out of the village each day was due around 2 p.m., which, historically, meant it might arrive anytime between 3 p.m. and Tuesday. Village custom dictated that if you had someone coming in, you waited until you heard its laborious approach before heading to the airport.
Many of the North Slope workers’ shifts ran three weeks on, one week off. They lived in spartan dorms on the oil fields instead of in the village and flew back home to the Lower 48 for downtime. They knew to bring sleeping bags to the airport in case the daily didn’t make it in and, realistically, knew it had a fifty-fifty chance. It wasn’t just the weather, which could be unpredictable. It was that tourism as such did not exist in Nanuqmiut, so the flights carried mostly Slope grunts, geologists, wildlife biologists, and village residents returning from city doctor visits; the sole airline felt no urge to meet customer expectations. We’ll get there when we get there, the unofficial motto. There was also the risk of a pilot making a detour that delayed the flight unexpectedly. Though many of the Arctic villages were dry, enterprising pilots would sometimes make unscheduled landings at bush airfields with a couple cases of booze they’d picked up in Anchorage to sell. The last thing Farley needed was to explain to his ex that their ten-year-old had gotten stuck alone in Kivalina for the night. She’d been looking for more excuses to hate him for years, and though he’d been quite generous with them, she hungered for more.
A half hour before the flight was due, Farley was looking for the keys to his truck when the phone rang. On the other end he found Pastor John McTeague, who spoke without preamble or greeting, his voice the deep baritone of a radio disc jockey.
“We’ve got a sofa in the rectory you can have.”
Farley had stopped being surprised at the lack of privacy village life afforded a long time ago. News passed through at an alarming rate, rumors even more quickly—they called it the Bush Telegraph, but it was just gossip.
“There are no secrets in Nanuqmiut.”
“Secrets are bad for the soul, Farley.”
“What color is it?”
“The soul?”
“The couch.”
“Well, now, I didn’t realize you were in a position to be picky.”
John and Rebecca McTeague had come from Alabama with the stated goal of serving Iñupiat who’d found Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and converting those who had not. Nearly two decades later, they remained preternaturally upbeat about their mission despite underwhelming results. Every other Thursday Farley played poker in the church rec room with Nell and John and a rotation of village irregulars. If John proselytized as poorly as he played poker, it was no wonder the villagers had yet to find salvation.
“A man’s got to have standards.”
“It’s kind of a salmon color. It’s got coffee stains from the AA meetings and it smells like smoke, but the mayor assures me it’s an improvement over your current situation.”
“I’ll swing by with the truck as soon as I find my keys.”
“You might bring your daughter to Sunday service while she’s here, Farley.”
“What for?”
“Just because you’re going to hell doesn’t mean she has to.”
“Sartre said hell is other people.”
“L’enfer, c’est les autres. You read Sartre?”
“No. An ex-girlfriend had it tattooed in a semicircle on her lower back.”
“T. S. Eliot said hell is oneself.”
“Did he?”
“Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from, and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
“You’re describing life here in the village.”
“My wife would agree with you.”
“So which is it? Is my hell me or you?”
“The Bible tells me what to think, Farley. What do you think?”
