Ordinary Bear, page 3
The world did not work the way she’d been led to believe. Her youthful naivete still embarrassed her. But a part of her missed it too. Maybe that’s why she’d waited a few weeks after the camp appeared before calling the police, half-hoping it would migrate to another block and save her from Progressive Guilt. Anywhere but Portland she’d be a screaming liberal; here she always had to push herself to keep pace with the ever-more-extreme positions pushing people far to the left.
But hadn’t the Joads been dealt a bad hand? Hadn’t they been seeking work, looking for ways to keep the family together? The campers seemed only to want to be able to shoot up without shame, throw empty bottles at passing cars, panhandle aggressively, and piss into the street at will.
“The under-homed are not currently an enforcement priority for the department,” the dispatcher told Lissa when she called the police nonemergency line. “Mayor’s orders.”
“Under-homed?”
“Ma’am. We’re supposed to call them that now. Officially, I mean. Or ‘people living outside.’ Mayor’s orders to leave the camps alone.”
“My daughter and I have to pass by them twice a day to ride the bus. She shouldn’t have to see that.”
“Why don’t you want your daughter to know about poor people, ma’am?”
“My daughter already knows about poor people. We’re poor. That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is the problem, ma’am?”
“It’s not poverty. It’s behavior. They yell at us. Sexually suggestive things. Crazy things. They do drugs out in public. My daughter has seen more penises at the bus stop than I’ve seen my entire life.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“No, ma’am.”
“It’s not funny. The situation is unsafe.”
“Ma’am. I advise you to avoid the bus stop, then. You could take a cab. Or an Uber.”
“That’s too expensive. I’m a single mother.”
“What about public transit?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. That’s why I called. They’ve taken over the bus stop entirely, like an occupation of enemy troops.”
“Sounds like a TriMet issue. I can give you their number.”
But Lissa had already called the public transit authority with dominion over buses, trains, and light rails. “I called them first,” she explained. “They said it was a police issue. They told me to call you.”
“Have you thought about moving to a better neighborhood, ma’am?”
Every day she took her lunch break at two and rode the MAX light rail into the city to meet her daughter at school. They walked together to Olive’s after-school program at the Multnomah County Library, and Lissa took the MAX back to work at the Oregon Zoo. The trip took up her entire allotted lunch hour—either she ate on the train or she didn’t eat at all. After work she took the six o’clock bus to the library so that she and Olive could ride the six-thirty home together. The bus driver had begun dropping passengers at the far corner to avoid the camp, which grew by the day in both size and depravity, spreading down the block like a homeless city so populous it had created its own urban sprawl.
A few campers had dogs tied to street signs in front of their tents. Pit bulls, mostly, or pit bull mixes. As an animal lover and vet tech, she didn’t buy into the widespread panic about pit bulls—she’d met plenty of sweet ones—but nature had designed the dogs to cause damage, and in the hands of a shitty owner, they would. And that capacity for destruction seemed to attract an awful lot of shitty owners. The camp dogs barked at passing traffic, barked at pedestrians, barked at disembarking bus passengers. They barked at all hours of the day and night. Nearly every time Lissa passed the camp, some of the residents yelled at her to give them money, to fuck off, to get off their lawns. They shot up with God knew what and flashed their genitals while pissing on the glass bus shelter.
Some nights she rushed Olive across the street and into their building with a coat over her eyes like a celebrity being perp-walked into court rather than expose her to someone’s exposure.
A few days ago, the camp had begun to expand beyond the sidewalk, encroaching on the shoulder of the street with a stable of shopping carts parked at the curb stuffed with purloined and scavenged goods: pillows, sleeping bags, backpacks, gas cans, tires, coolers, license plates. Anything at all that might be used or sold or bartered. If a camper filled a cart, they stole another from the Fred Meyer and tied it to the first, and so on, building caravans four and five carts long piled high with trash bags and objects they pushed down the street like some nomadic tribe. Like a Mad Max movie.
“Move to a better neighborhood? How am I supposed to do that?” she asked the dispatcher. “I’m a single mother making fifteen bucks an hour with student loans to pay off.”
“Ma’am. I don’t know what to tell you. We have our mandates. Our hands are tied. Maybe vote differently in the next election if you want tough on crime.”
Each night on her bus ride home from work, Lissa noted the other homeless camps throughout the city. There were many of them, of varying sizes and configurations. Some included the shells of stripped cars or vans, one a ramshackle cabin built out of pallets, and one even boasted a bright-blue porta-potty some enterprising resident had stolen and engineered a way to relocate. But the one on her block had grown dramatically bigger than the rest, with dozens of residents arriving seemingly every night. She’d been keeping track of their comings and goings in a notebook. Methodological. Scientific. She noted and recorded an increase in drug use, a parallel increase in the flagrance of it. People shooting up on the wet curb during what passed for daylight, smoking heroin beside a fire lit on a public sidewalk, dealing in the great wide open. The rain seemed to provide cover for their activity. Rather, it facilitated their boldness by keeping everyone else under cover and out of sight.
She called TriMet again. They referred her to the police. She called the police again. They referred her to the mayor’s office. She called the mayor’s office, but her calls went unanswered, the voice mailbox already full. Her next call would be to the newspaper or one of the TV stations. Fox News, maybe. Though she despised the network and all it stood for, its highly calibrated sense of alarmism and opposition to all liberal points of pride meant it would at least pick up the story and rally an army of aggrieved flag wavers to bombard city hall with complaints and grievances about the mayor’s embrace of the under-homed.
She had some empathy for the campers. Hell, at any given moment she was only a paycheck or two away from eviction herself. And she recognized a high degree of mental illness among them from her observation. Addiction. Veterans suffering PTSD. She’d always felt something for the homeless. If not empathy, exactly, it wasn’t pity either. Not exactly. Like most Portlanders, she saw them as a necessary part of urban life and a symptom of the city’s laudable progressive tendencies. But the problem had grown until it overran Portland, and soon the homeless were panhandling relentlessly in city squares, sleeping in the doorways of shops and markets, squatting in neighborhood parks, and bathing in urban creeks and ponds.
On the TV news and in the local papers, the statistics staggered her. Portland alone had almost four thousand homeless residents, and enough shelter space for just half of them.
And now they’d taken over her bus stop. Their behavior had inured her to their plight. They’d sanded the edges off her empathy, and she feared they were making her a bad person. Housing advocates said the homeless deserve dignity just like the rest of us. Lissa wanted to believe that. But where was the dignity of the man with his pants around his ankles grinning up at her window while shitting into the storm drain across the street?
5
A LANDSCAPE LITTERED WITH BONES
After being airlifted out of the village on a medevac, Farley spent three months drifting in and out of consciousness in an Anchorage hospital, medicated against pain. Pain racked him anyway. Ghost bears scuttled through his feverish mind, mauling him, snatching Abril over and over again and again and again. Each time his brain settled or his heart rate slowed, the sedatives doing their work, another bear appeared out of the darkness of his memory to decimate him once more.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game flew field biologists into Nanuqmiut. They were joined by Alaska State Troopers, Fish and Wildlife feds, and hunters from the village. National press picked up stories from the Fairbanks News-Miner and the Anchorage Daily News, and network camera crews descended on the village, breathlessly awaiting word.
But within a few days of the killings, a buffet of walruses appeared on the spit. For weeks after that, their blood covered every bear near the village, making it impossible to distinguish the human-killers from all the others. An ursine “I’m Spartacus” moment.
Officially, the task force comms team called the joint effort a “Search and Rescue for Abril Hebert and John McTeague.” But it wasn’t a SAR. It wasn’t even a recovery operation. John and Abril were gone, along with all hope of finding them. Best case, it was a revenge mission—if the search teams found and identified the culpable bears, they would put them down. Once bears had a taste for blood—once they started to think of humans as food they could pluck as easily as cocktail shrimp from an hors d’oeuvres tray—they had to be destroyed.
Destroyed. That was the state’s word for it. Actual humans outside of a bureaucracy might use different words, Farley thought, but they all meant the same thing.
As the days wore on, the search and rescue ops diminished in frequency. And then one day they ended altogether, and that was that. The feverish media coverage died along with John and Abril, and all that remained was the pain.
When Farley had first moved to Nanuqmiut, he’d stood out. Not just for his size but for his temperament and personality. He was markedly different from the taciturn, noncommittal Iñupiat community, and the locals eyed him with unease. Until Mayor Nell arrived on his doorstep one day. Not just the mayor but also the unofficial village matriarch, she’d designated herself as the Welcome Wagon too. Invisible beneath the peephole she could not reach, she’d had to knock a second time when Farley failed to answer.
“Some people believe that when bears go back to them dens to hibernate, they remove them skins like a coat,” she’d told him when he’d answered the door. “Underneath, them bears look human.”
The oil company that had hired Farley provided housing in the village because it required him to live off-site, outside the barracks, to discourage relationships with the people he’d be investigating. Human Resources had provided a binder of materials to prepare him for transitioning to Arctic village life; he’d read it on one of the legs of his inaugural flight north. It barely touched upon Iñupiat culture but devoted what felt like a worrying amount of space to the presence of polar bears in the region. Nell told him the bears held a special place not just for the Iñupiat but for all Inuit, who knew them as Nanuq, king of the iqsinaqtuit.
“Those who inspire fear in humans,” she said.
Still, Farley did not immediately make the connection she seemed to want him to make.
“What does that have to do with me?”
She spit tobacco juice into the dirty snow on his front stoop, a motion he would later come to associate with her.
“Some people see big old giant like you walking ’round them streets and think maybe one of them bears forget to put them coat back on before he go looking for food.”
After the task force left town, Nell’s sons and some of the other village hunters kept up the watch. Though the Iñupiat people had a complicated relationship with polar bears, they mostly did not mind shooting them. Bears provided food. Fabrics. Artifacts. Oil. In all, the hunters took eight of them that summer, but no one recovered John’s and Abril’s bodies.
How do you find a few bones in a landscape littered with them?
A month after the incident, while Farley was still in the hospital, his phone rang, the ringtone a second-chair instrument in a symphony of beeping medical equipment monitoring his health and progress. The world had all but ceased to exist for him outside the borders of his pain and grief and guilt. Painkillers. Hospital food. How much television could a person watch before it crossed the line from entertainment to torture? He’d murder somebody for a bottle of whiskey and a cheeseburger. The phone vibrated on the bedstand, the effort to reach it a cruelty. A war crime. How did it still hold a charge? Maybe a nurse had plugged it in under the mistaken belief that he had anyone who loved him. He stabbed at the screen and laid it on the pillow beside his head.
“Do you think the dead know they’re dead, Farley?”
He didn’t recognize the number, but he recognized the voice immediately. Though it had changed, sharpened, honed by grief, it remained honeyed even in its pain.
“Rebecca.”
“Do you think they wander the earth like spirits? Ghosts? Just following their old routines? Going to work, brushing their teeth, tinkling and messing, forever frustrated that their loved ones are ignoring them, unaware that they’re not part of this world anymore?”
Farley did not know the answer to her questions. Nor did he know any grown woman who talked about pissing and shitting as “tinkling and messing.” Maybe it was a southern thing. Or a religious thing. Rebecca had not been fond of him in Nanuqmiut. But neither had she seemed fond of anyone, including her husband, John. Including herself. She’d carried herself as if the world itself were somehow an unbearable burden, the effort of breathing too much to ask, her own heart’s efforts to beat inside her chest an imposition. Farley doubted she would be any more fond of him now.
“Did you know John had three brothers, Farley? One of them became a marine. A war hero, killed by a sniper in Afghanistan. The bullet splattered his brain into a billion pieces all over the inside of his helmet. They put him back together for the wake. I looked at his body in the coffin and he didn’t look dead. Just asleep. Peaceful, almost. All I could think was that maybe they could hollow out my head and scatter my brain and it wouldn’t be so bad. Not if I could feel as peaceful as he did.”
Her southern accent sounded stronger, more pronounced, as if she’d been tempering it as long as he’d known her but now it had overrun her voice like weeds in a neglected yard or cobwebs in an abandoned house.
“Another one of his brothers died in a car accident. Someone driving the wrong way on the highway, drunk or tired or stupid, hit his car head-on. The state police said the force equaled a rocket ship going into outer space. The G force or whatever it’s called.”
Po-leece. Gee fo-ahs.
“His body tore right out of the seatbelt, flew through the windshield, and landed so far from the wreck that at first they weren’t sure he was part of it.” She paused. “It was a Cadillac.”
Farley said nothing because there was nothing to say and, anyway, because it did not matter to her. But when nearly an entire minute passed and she did not say anything else, he became emboldened, maybe, by painkillers or pain or boredom or anything but curiosity.
“What about the third brother?”
“He’s an actuary. In Akron. Do you know what that is, Farley? An actuary?”
“Yes.”
“Can you imagine that, then? The one brother who lived spends his days calculating the odds of dying in all the different ways. All four brothers were athletes when they were younger, Farley, healthy and active and so alive. But now the actuary is the only one left. If their mother weren’t dead herself, she’d have him under armed guard twenty-four hours a day, don’t you think?”
She had not asked Farley how he was doing, and he did not tell her. He didn’t know what she wanted or hoped to accomplish by calling. Maybe she blamed him for John’s death and wanted to accuse him. Or maybe she just wanted to commiserate over their shared experience. How many people on earth could understand what she’d been through? How many had seen what she’d seen, felt what she’d felt? On this entire planet, maybe a handful.
Fewer.
On this entire planet, maybe him and him alone.
“Do you remember how it happened, Farley? How fast it happened? How John and your daughter were there and then they weren’t?”
“Do I remember? Goddamn it, Rebecca, I still have staples in my wounds,” he snapped, painkillers and patience both wearing thin. “Do I remember? It’s all I can fucking think about.”
In her silence, he heard her breathing, heard splashing, as if she were in a bath or swirling a drink around a glass, or both. He heard something else too: tears. She was crying. Then the tears turned to sobs, rising in substance and volume.
“Rebecca,” he said. But it took just a few seconds to recognize his mistake, to realize they were not sobs, that she was not crying, that she was in fact laughing a ruthless, humorless laugh.
“They haven’t found John’s body, Farley.”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet? Fuck you, Farley. Fuck you.” Whether because of the alcohol or the anger, her primness of speech had vanished. “You know why they haven’t found his body? Because that bear swallowed him whole and shit out the bones in the dirt.”
If they’d been together in person, face-to-face, Farley thought he could choke her to shut her up, throttle the life and breath out of her just to stop the words. Because the words didn’t just recall what had happened to her husband; they recalled what had happened to Abril too. They’d never found her body, either.
He began to fear that he would forever be haunted not just by Abril and by John and the bears that took them but by Rebecca too, and when she laughed again he knew he could choke her. But for a reason he did not understand, a reason he could not identify—a reason for which he hated himself—he could not hang up on her.
“John’s skin was the texture of an old basketball. You know that? He had moles on his back that looked like gunshots. Like he’d been shot with a paintball gun, but instead of paint the bullets were loaded with shit.”
