The Silver Bear

couple of years before him. Receiving a letter was one of the few joys a boy could have at Waxham, so I sent him one just about every day. He had to know I had made it, there was something to look forward to, something to dream about in the darkness of that damn rat cage. He had to know I had received a paycheck, was opening a savings account, was waiting for him when he got his release.

It was on the way to the bank to cash my new check that I met her. I didn’t know how to open an account, but Father Steve’s brother had explained to me how easy it was, how glad the banks would be to hold my money each week. I was wearing a clean shirt, and my pants were only slightly dirty. I felt good.

She grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around. “Louis?” she had said. My instinct was to watch out, to protect myself, so seldom had I let someone touch me. But for some reason, as firm as her grip had been on my shoulder, I didn’t feel threatened.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, I thought you were my brother.”

I felt a smile coming. Her laughter was real, exposed, infectious. “I’m sorry,” she finally finished, catching her breath, and then her hand extended toward me. “From the side, you looked exactly like my brother. I’m Jake.”

“Jake?”

“Jacqueline. Jake. I like Jake better.”

I nodded, grinning like a madman, and shook her hand. Damn, did it feel soft. “I do, too.”

Her eyes narrowed, still smiling, and she examined me almost with affection. “I swear. From the side, I thought Lou had come to town.”

“Yeah?”

“It was uncanny. I was just heading in to have a coffee, and bam, there goes Lou, walking right past me.”

“Except it was me.”

“Yep. From the side, the spitting image. Man, that’s something.”

The way she said “something”—she sort of lifted up on her toes and then rocked back on her heels—I melted like candle wax.

“Say, you want to go in and have that coffee with me?” Somehow, I found my voice. “Yeah. I’d like to.” I’d never had coffee in my life.

EVERY day for a week, we met at the frog pond and watched the tourists take their shoes off and wade in the ankle-high water. She talked a lot, and I loved to hear her husky voice tickle my ears like a feather. God, that girl could talk, and I would have done anything to stay there, my head in her lap, watching the tourists pass by.

“My philosophy is this. We don’t owe anything to our family, to our parents, just for conceiving us and putting a roof over our heads for so many years. The question becomes, do you like these people? Do you want to spend time with them, have a coffee with them, eat dinner with them? If the answer is ‘no,’ then so be it. Why should you waste your time with them if you don’t even like their company? What society deems appropriate is contrary to rudimentary truths. Life is precious. Life is fleeting. Life is fragmentary. It’s here today and whip! it’s gone before you know it. One second you’re a little girl asking if you can please, please, please get the Barbie Easy-Bake oven for Christmas and the next minute you’re twenty-one and you have nothing in common with these people you call mom and dad. They don’t understand anything about you. You are speaking a foreign language to them. So why do you care about them at all?”

I just stared up at her chin as it bobbed up and down in the rhythm of her words, and it didn’t matter what she was saying, the voice wafted down and covered me like arms. A couple walked by holding hands and smiled at us and I thought, My God, that couple is us. We are them. For once, for the first time in my life, I felt loved.

I didn’t see Vespucci coming. There was no portent of evil rushing my way, no accumulation of dark clouds on my horizon. As I said, things were good. I had been loading beer for several months, piling the cases onto pallets, spreading shrink-wrap around the cases, and hauling the pallets onto the trucks. It was difficult but fulfilling work, the kind that exhausts and exhilarates at the same time. I was good at it, my arms having grown strong in Cox’s living room and the weight room at Waxham.

The way it worked was one shipping boy was assigned to one truck driver on each load, working until the truck was filled and ready to depart. Then the next truck would come in, get loaded, and take off. There was no order to the trucks, and we would work with nearly all the drivers in the course of a week. The aspiration of the shipping boys was eventually to get to drive the trucks, which meant greater pay and at least part of your day in the air-conditioning or out of the rain. When a driving vacancy occurred, Father Steve’s brother promoted from within based on driver recommendations. This meant all the shipping boys busted their asses for all the drivers, so coveted were those recommendations. It was a good system.

One of the drivers was Hap Blowenfeld, and every shipping boy looked up to Hap the way some people look up to movie stars and ball players. He was larger-than-life, with perfect hair, a quick smile, and pearl white teeth. He had huge arms, could load a truck faster than anyone, and bought a six-pack of Coke for the shipping boy who helped him each day. The day you got assigned to Hap was like winning the lottery, and if you got him twice in one week, you were the envy of every other shipper in the crew.

“What’s your story, Buck?” he asked me after I had worked there a couple of months. We were loading Budweiser, and it was hot outside. We hadn’t said much to each other, both concentrating on stacking the cases on to the wooden pallets. I wasn’t much of a talker, and the question caught me off guard.

“No story,” was all I could mumble.

Hap looked up with the hint of a grin, his arm leaning on one of the beer cases. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. I spent my time in Juvenile, too.”

I didn’t say anything.

“That’s right,” he said, starting to lift the cases again. “Five years in a place called Skyline Hall in Sacramento for choking a kid to death. I grew up on the West Coast, in Arcadia, outside Los Angeles, went to school with mostly Mexicans. Well, this one bean-eater stole my daddy’s billfold, and I didn’t like that too much. I didn’t know I’d kill’t the poor bastard until someone pried my fingers off his throat.” He stopped and wiped his head with the back of his hand. “I was thirteen years old. I thought I was gonna play college football.”

I didn’t know what to say, and for a moment we resumed loading the crates onto the pallets and the pallets onto the truck in our comfortable rhythm. I was beginning to think maybe Hap’s story was all in my head. He broke the silence again.

“So what’s your story, Crackerjack? And don’t go soft on me.”

Hap wasn’t the kind of guy I was prepared to lie to, so I just spread it out before him like I was unfolding a map, starting with my first venture inside the Cox house and finishing with my release from Waxham. Before I knew it, my story was over, the truck was completely loaded, and Hap and I were leaning against the back bumper sipping Coke out of bottles through pharmacy straws.

“You didn’t kill him?” Hap asked, gnawing on his lower lip a little bit.

I shook my head side to side.

“But you wanted to.”

“Yep.”

“I’d’ve liked to get my hands on that sum-bitch.” He stared down at his hands, as though he could see it happening, what Cox’s throat would look like caught in his massive fingers, squeezing the neck until it caved in on itself.

Hap looked at me sideways. “You think you had it in you to finish him?”

“If I could’ve, I would’ve.”

Hap grinned. “I’ll bet you would. I just bet you would.”

He drove off a few minutes later, and I went to get my next assignment, feeling a slight pull in my chest.

A week later, I had completely forgotten about my conversation with Hap when a Cadillac limousine pulled alongside me while I was walking home from work. A dark window slid down and an olive, moon-