The Woman Who Married a Bear Read Free Page A

investigator. The scar above my right eyebrow is my only dramatic feature. I got it in the sixth grade when Eric Hoffert pushed me into the water fountain. It’s the outward sign of my heroic inward suffering.
    I like where I live and that hasn’t been a disappointment yet: a three-story frame house built on pilings over the water. It has everything I need—office, kitchen, bedroom. Two years ago, we used to flush our toilet and hear the water drop right into the Pacific Ocean under the house. But now the city has a new system so we can flush the toilets and it will travel along an elaborate system of drops and pump stations and be deposited several miles across the island—into the Pacific Ocean. I like where I live, only it seemed a little far away on this particular morning.
    I was teetering the boxes down the street, sweating, cursing alcohol, and needing a drink. I stopped in front of the bar and leaned against the wall to talk to a fisherman I knew. I was hoping he would be able to fill me in on what had happened last night—specifically to my charge card. No luck. He had been practicing his saxophone down on his boat all night and he was very excited that he had finally learned to play “In a Sentimental Mood.”
    He explained that he was a former folk musician taking that twisting musical road into the nineties.
    â€œPretty twisty,” I said, and shouldered my boxes up. I told him to drop on by and play for me sometime and reminded him not to leave my old Sonny Rollins records next to the exhaust manifold, that my Willie Dixon records had never survived his blues period at sea. I had given all of my records and tapes away and it hadn’t occurred to me yet to buy a CD player, but I still didn’t like the thought of my treasures being abused.
    It was a rare clear morning at the end of October, but it was bound to change. The fishing season was slowing down and most of the boats were in their slips in the harbor. Music was playing from their pilothouses, and the air was filled with the romantic ambiance of gulls calling to the air and diesels blowing out their cooling systems. Someone had had bacon for breakfast, and there were groups of three or four men and women standing around the dock thumbing through engine manuals with their cups of coffee perched on the electrical meters.
    Sitka is an island town where people feel crowded by the land and spread out on the sea. This morning to the north and east, the mountains were asserting their presence by showing off the new snow that dusted them down to the two-thousand-foot line. A woman on a troller threw a bucket of breakfast scraps off her back deck and an eagle dove, lifted a blackened crust of bread, and flew off toward the trees where the deserted graveyards lay.
    I banged the front door with my feet and Toddy came down the first flight of stairs to help me. Toddy is my roommate—actually, I’m his unofficial guardian. An old friend from Social Services asked me to look out for him until other arrangements could be made. That was two years ago.
    He and I were born in the same year under the same sign. We’re 1950 models and Cancers. He has a crew cut, and his glasses have lenses so thick that when he stares up at you, his eyes swim around his face as if he were trying to balance half-dollars in his eye sockets. He is continually sliding his glasses up his nose with his index finger even when he doesn’t need to.
    I first met Todd in jail. He had been arrested for stealing a pair of shoes and several women’s suit coats. When I went to interview him in his cell he was wearing inmate’s blue pajamas. His head was shaved and he sat on his bunk, rocking back and forth, twisting his finger as if he were braiding cable.
    The police and the shopkeepers never put all of the facts together: Money was never missing, there was never any vandalism, but every so often a gray woman’s suit jacket would vanish and