The Woman Who Married a Bear Read Free Page B

once a pair of brown leather pumps was gone from its cardboard box. Store employees were subjected to long straightforward interviews of the “It will be all right if you just want to get it off your chest” variety. It was suggested that a polygraph machine would help them to get it off their chests. But it wasn’t until a janitor at the elementary school found a gray woman’s suit coat hanging above some sensible shoes in the back of the furnace room that the whole spectacular crime unraveled. Todd, an assistant janitor at the time, was sitting behind the hot-water heater with his head in his hands, weeping.
    After he was placed under arrest, the police prided themselves upon solving a particularly puzzling crime. The Social Services people were assured that their suspicions about Todd were well founded. He was designated as a “person in need of aid,” handcuffed, and taken to the jail.
    Some people say Todd is retarded. At Social Services they said he was “mentally and emotionally challenged,” but the woman who used to love me said he had too gentle a heart to live in the real world.
    He was charged with criminal mischief. I was sent by his attorney to talk to him about his defense. First I had to go to the law library and find out what the elements of criminal mischief were and then interview Todd and see if it was true that he was a mischievous criminal. I intended to talk to him about times, places, motives, and maybe an alibi; instead he told me about his mother.

    T odd’s mother had been a teacher at the elementary school; his father had been a mechanic working out in the logging camps. When he was six, they had ridden on a friend’s small trailer out to the logging camp at False Island. After his dad finished work on one of the light plant generators, he and some of his friends in camp went down to the dock to drink and listen to the radio. They were drinking beer and whiskey, telling stories, and every once in a while when a good song came on through the static, his dad would grab his mother and spin her around on the dock to dance. Todd remembered how her laughter seemed to bubble out of her mouth like birdsong. He was laughing when his father twirled her an extra flip and she fell into the bay, and everyone was laughing when they hauled her out. She stood with water beading off the strands of her hair, embarrassed and shivering, trying to giggle. Someone gave her another drink of whiskey to warm her up. It was a cool fall afternoon and everyone thought she was going down below to change her clothes, but when someone checked on her later they laughed again because she had passed out with her wet clothes on. The radio played up on the dock and Todd sat down below in the boat watching her teeth chatter. He was worried when he saw that she’d broken one of her teeth chattering so hard. He put a blanket over her. He wished his father would come, but gradually he stopped worrying when she stopped shivering. I’m not sure if he realized he had watched his mother die of hypothermia, but, if he did, it didn’t seem to bother him because his mother had since told him not to worry.
    The cell was the green cement of an old railroad station. The bunks were metal slats and damp blankets. The tags that said, “Do not remove under penalty of law” were missing from the mattresses. On the back wall was an elaborate chalk drawing of a trolling boat with its poles down, lines in the water, sailing toward a black setting sun. Underneath in blue ink someone had written “Seiners Suck.” There was a radio playing, and the guy in the next cell was doing pushups to the beat of a Bruce Springsteen song.
    â€œIt’s a funny thing,” Todd said, and he squinted at me. “When Jesus was alive, how was he connected to the earth? By his feet, just like the rest of us, except he didn’t wear shoes because his spirit went right into the ground like lightning.