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.