The small bear woke in his nest of oak leaves and rolled over onto his back to attend the sky. The great ball of fire burned down between the leaves, warming his stomach and his snout. He sniffed the air, searching for food. He had not eaten anything of value in two days. Since the day when the large bear ran him off, cuffing him over and over with his paws until finally the small bear gave up crying to his mother for help and loped off into the strange woods. Which became stranger the longer he traveled. The place where he was now was a long wooded hill that ran down to a creek, then to a long white line that smelled gritty and strange, a smell that made the small bear grind his teeth and swallow. He kicked his feet up into the air, he closed his eyes and concentrated on finding food. A smell of something fine and new came to him, distant and alluring, and he rolled over onto his feet and followed it down the hill and across the creek and found the source of it beside the water. A crackly, ugly exterior he had trouble swallowing and then, a lovely salty taste. It was the small bear’s first potato chip. An unopened sixty-nine-cent bag of chips a lady on a diet had flung from the window of a GMC Jimmy on her way home from a camping trip. That’s it, she had decided. Out of sight, out of mind. A minute on the lips, forever on the hips.
The bear finished the bag and the chips and stood up to look around for more. On the white line huge animals went by at such a speed it seemed there was nothing to fear from them. Their smell was very bad, however, and he climbed back down into the creek to think it over. Mixed with the bad smell were other smells, good things to eat, fine new things to eat. He would wait until dark, then travel along the line to trace the smells. He crouched beside the water. He drank of it. He waited.
Minette had married Dell one May. The next May she had graduated high school. In between she had DuVal. Then she had two abortions. Then she got smart. Now she was a checkout girl in the Wal-Mart and her mother took care of DuVal and Dell was still good to her but he was depressed. He was working at the chicken-plucking plant and he hated the work. He had never intended to marry Minette and have DuVal and be stuck in a job, but here he was and the only relief he got was when he was drunk. He only got drunk on the weekends. He never touched a drop from Monday to Friday afternoon.
“There’s a bear loose in town,” he told Minette when they met by the garage after work. They had come driving up within a minute of each other. Minette hadn’t even had time to take off her apron or go and get DuVal.
“One comes in every spring,” Minette told him back. “Don’t you remember that black bear we had last spring and they treed him by the bakery. It was on TV. You didn’t see it?”
“Of course I saw it. Come here to me. What’s that on the front of your dress.” Dell moved in on her and she almost gave in and let him make her laugh. Then at the last minute she fought it off. “I got to go get DuVal. Momma said if I was late one more time she’d stop taking him. She’s been down in the back. He’s driving her crazy.”
“He’s a crazy little boy. Got a crazy momma.” Dell pressed her against the hood of the Chevrolet. He nuzzled her with his chin.
“You need a shave, Dell. Go take a shower and get the chicken feathers off of you. I’ll be right back. I’ll fry you a chicken if you’ll get it out of the freezer while I’m gone.” She pushed him away and walked out past the car to the Jeep and got into it and drove off to get DuVal.
The small bear was getting very unhappy. There was food everywhere but he couldn’t find it. When he found it the bark wouldn’t come off. He had broken a claw trying to break open one of the shiny containers with the food inside that sat beside the clearings. He had found some food but no more of the fine, salty things he had found beside the creek. Deep in his brain a signal kept going off calling for more of that ambrosia. He loped along behind the line of trees he had found that morning. It seemed a very long time since he had been playing with his mother and his brothers. It seemed as if he were on a search that might never end. Go on, his brain told him. You can find it if you look.
DuVal was packed and ready and standing on the porch. He had his things in his little backpack and he was holding a package of Lay’s potato chips his grandmother had bought on sale at the IGA. They had eaten part of them in the swing. The rest were still in the sack, secured by a long green and red clip his grandmother had attached to it. “Don’t eat any more of those chips until after dinner,” she had said. “I’m lying on this sofa resting my neck. You wait on the porch if you like, but don’t go down them steps.”
Minette drove up waving and DuVal ran down the steps and got in. He was very coordinated for a three-year-old. One good thing about Dell, Minette was always saying. He takes DuVal off to play ball. “Got you some chips,” she said, leaning over to give him a hug. She fastened his seat belt. “Sit down then. Let’s go home and cook some dinner for your daddy. Momma,” she called out. “We’re going.”
She waited a minute, until her mother came to the door and waved. “She’s all right,” Minette said to DuVal. “She always thinks there’s something wrong with her. It’s just her way.”
Minette did a U-turn on the street in front of her mother’s house and drove fifty miles an hour down the side road and over to the housing development where their blue house stood on its acre and a half of ground. Dell had inherited it from his aunt. Someday that house and land would be worth some money, they were always saying to each other. If we just keep the taxes paid and hold on and wait, this house will put us on easy street. It was true. Fort Smith was growing so fast no one could keep up with it. Every year the outskirts of town grew nearer to the development, which had been way out in the country when Dell’s aunt had spent her salary as a nurse to buy the blue house. Some people in the family said she never married because she had seen too much death. Others said it was because she was ugly. Dell’s mother said she didn’t like men. Anyway, out of all her nieces and nephews she had picked Dell to get to have the house. Of course he was the only one who was a father when the aunt died. Maybe it had been because of DuVal. Now they had the house and except for having to keep all that land cut in the summer it was a nice little nest. The taxes on it were three hundred dollars a year but they could pay it. DuVal loved the big yard with its trees. Practically the only thing he talked about when he learned to talk was about trees and birds and squirrels.
While Minette was frying chicken, DuVal walked out the back door and began to play around in the cleared place where they kept his toy trucks and his wagon and the tricycle he never rode because he was too small to ride it but Dell had bought it anyway one night when he was about half drunk. He couldn’t wait to have a child who could ride a bike and he had gone on and bought this tricycle that only a four- or five-year-old could even reach the pedals.
The small bear lay in the curve of the cherry tree. There were small bitter berries on the tree and he had eaten several pawfuls of them, then chased the taste away with a pawful of grass. He lay back against the smooth bark. There were other fruit trees in the area and something about the place reminded him of better times. His stomach was small and flat again. Tonight he must try again to batter the bark of the shiny containers. Now he would rest in the heat of the late afternoon. Time had no meaning for the small bear. There was only heat and cold and smell, only pain where the big bear had scratched him on the shoulder and the smooth curve of the tree limb and the hot white ball in the sky. He lay back and closed his eyes, and slowly at first, and then more surely, he barely sensed and then smelled the potato chips. He sat up and reveled in it.
DuVal was taking the potato chips out of his pocket and putting them along the edge of the road he had built for his tractors. He lined them up. Every piece that was left in his pocket.
“Dell, bring the baby on in here and get him cleaned up,” Minette called out. “Go on. I read in the paper that fathers never spend more than thirty minutes a day with their children. That’s why so many of them go bad.”
Dell got up from the television set and walked out the back door and scooped up DuVal and rode him on his back. “Your momma is frying a chicken, son. Proving once again that wonders never cease.”
The bear sat for a long time smelling the fine, rare smell. It was mixed with other smells now, each one finer and rarer than the last. He shook his head and stood up on his hind paws and scratched at the tree. Then he began to move in the direction of the feast. The last rays of the sun moved down between the leaves. He squinted his eyes against the light and followed the smell.
A little brackish creek ran behind Minette and Dell Tucker’s place. Dell had built a stile over the backyard fence so DuVal could climb it and think he was going somewhere. That had proved to be a mistake as Minette couldn’t turn her back on DuVal without him starting climbing. In the end they had to put a little gate on the top and put a lock on the gate. “It makes the yard look like a prison,” Minette said, when all the work and the additions were done. “I don’t know why we started this in the first place.”
“Because he needs to think he’s going somewhere,” Dell said. “When I was little we went anywhere we wanted to. We weren’t all walled in all the time like he is. I was dreaming the other night about him trying to get out of the yard. That’s why I built it.”
“You are the craziest man I could have married,” Minette said. “That’s why I married you.”
“Oh, yeah,” Dell answered. “We’ll see about that. I’ll show you crazy.” And he tackled her and laid her down on the sofa and started pretending to tickle her. “If I get knocked up I’m getting an abortion,” she told him. “You just be prepared for that.”
Now the small bear moved along the side of the brackish creek. The lovely smell was getting closer. He was lost in it. It smelled of ten good things all mixed together. He warmed in the smell. He moved happily along the ground, bringing his stomach with him.
On the back screened-in porch with the patched and ratty screens and the old painted table with its wobbly legs and the green chairs with the tall backs, Minette and Dell and DuVal feasted on the fried chicken. There was a platter of it on the table. Plus fresh boiled corn and butter and mashed potatoes and the blue and white dish of green peas and carrots. There was also a round loaf of Hawaiian bread, which was Dell’s favorite and Minette’s downfall. Tonight neither of them was paying much attention to the bread. The chicken was hot and crunchy and had been prepared by a combination recipe of the way both their mothers had fried chicken. It was dipped first in egg the way Dell’s mother insisted it be done and then shook up in a brown paper bag with flour and salt the way Minette’s mother did it. The deep hot fat boiling in the thick pan was agreed upon by everyone they knew who knew a thing about frying chicken. The fat was on the back of the stove where DuVal could never reach it. The table was set. The Tucker family was at dinner.
“I might make him a little baseball diamond,” Dell was saying. “Back where we had that garden last year. It won’t be long, Minette, he’ll be playing T-ball.”
“He won’t play T-ball for three or four years. You got to quit rushing him into everything. He won’t like it when he gets there.”
“I wish we could have another one.” Dell looked right at her when he said it.
“Another what?”
“Another one. A little boy or a girl. I think all the time what if something happened to him. Where would we be? It’s too big a chance. Only having one.”
“And how would we live then? On just our salaries? We can’t do it, Dell. We wouldn’t even be able to pay the taxes or for the roof. What if I got sick? What would happen then? I don’t think Momma would take care of two of them. She complains enough as it is.”
“I only said I wished we could. I didn’t say to do it.” Dell reached for a third piece of chicken. He brandished it before he took a bite. He ate it with lovely manners. He was just a lovely man, Minette thought. But that didn’t mean she was having any babies. A breeze stirred from the south. Beyond the fence the clouds were gathering. A front was coming up from Texas. It would be there by midnight. She helped herself to corn and ate it daintily. He wasn’t the only one who could have manners.
DuVal was making a dam in his mashed potatoes. He had two sides built up but the melted butter kept dripping out of the other sides. He put his finger in it and sucked it off. “Get down,” he said. “Getting down.” He squirmed down out of the high chair and moved around the table to the door.
“Let him go,” Dell said. “He’s had enough. He was only playing with his food.”
“Momma gave him potato chips,” Minette said. “I told her not to, but she does it anyway.”
DuVal had forgotten about the potato chips. Now he went into the kitchen and retrieved the bag where his mother had put it on the counter and carried it out the kitchen door to the backyard. They watched him going down the stairs carrying the bag. “Let him go,” Dell said. “He looks so cute. What do you say, honey, is he the cutest child that ever lived?”
“He might be,” she answered. They watched him moving out into the yard, the bag of chips dragging along in his hand.
The small bear arrived at the stile at precisely the moment that DuVal moved past the circle of toy trucks. The smell was now so overpowering that the bear ran up the steps of the stile and beat on the gate with his paws. When it wouldn’t budge, he climbed around it and fell down the steps into the yard. DuVal froze. He had never seen a bear. He didn’t know a bear from a hole in the ground but something in him knew to scream. The first scream was low-pitched. The second was bloodcurdling. The third was so terrible it stopped the bear in its tracks. By then Minette was out the door. “Oh, God,” she screamed. “It’s the bear. Get the gun.” She ran toward her child. She ran twenty feet in a second. She grabbed him up and started toward the house. Dell was behind her with a 12-gauge shotgun in one hand and a pistol in the other. Minette reached the circle of toy trucks. Dell pulled her behind him. He drew a bead on the bear, which had moved toward them across half the yard.
“Don’t shoot it,” DuVal screamed. Minette had made it to the porch with him now.
“He hates that noise,” Minette yelled. “Let me get him inside. Then shoot up in the air. It said on TV to shoot up in the air.”
Dell wavered. The bear had stopped moving. Then, as they watched, he picked up the bag of potato chips and began to devour it. He bit into it, plastic bag and all, and chomped it down in five bites. Then he glanced their way, shook his head, bent over, and began to lick up all the crumbs.
“Throw him some chicken,” Minette suggested. “Throw him the corn.”
“Call the police, Minette,” Dell answered. “Get the police on the phone.” He moved back into the porch. He put down the pistol and picked up the plate of chicken and moved it to the end of the table near the door. He took a bite of a wing, then sailed it out over the bear’s head toward the stile. Behind him Minette got the Fort Smith police on the phone.
Later, after the police had shot the bear with the tranquilizer and the photographers had been there and the television cameras, and Minette’s mother had shown up at just the wrong time, Minette and Dell wrestled DuVal to bed by promising to tape the photos of him on the ten o’clock news and after they did that they got into their four-poster bed and made love two and a half times before they finally fell asleep. It almost tied the record they had the time they went camping by Lee Creek. “Now everyone will know where we live and come and rob us blind,” Minette said, cuddling down into her almost sleeping husband’s arms. She was pretending to be helpless and dumb. “I’m going to be afraid to be alone a minute after this.”
“No, you won’t,” Dell muttered, trying not to fall right asleep after the article she had made him read in New Woman magazine about women hating you to go to sleep after you made love to them. “You never are afraid of anything.”
“Yes, I am,” she said, but he was all the way asleep by then. She kept on saying the rest of what she had to say just the same. “I’m afraid of dying and I’m afraid I’ll lose my job and I’m afraid of getting bit by spiders. I’m afraid something might happen to DuVal and I’m afraid you might start liking someone at the plant.” Since he was definitely asleep and the moon was bright outside the open window and they had had such a narrow escape, she decided to let it all hang out. “I’m afraid of getting pregnant and I’m afraid if we wait too long I might never have a daughter. I’m afraid Fort Smith is getting too big or if it gets smaller we might both be out of work. I’m afraid we looked stupid on that television story and everyone will tease me to death tomorrow. I was afraid you’d shoot that little bear. As soon as you aimed at him I was about to cry thinking he’d be all blown up and bloody like people in Bosnia or somewhere. Well, to hell with it. We’re the ones who caught him. If it wasn’t for us he’d still be on the loose. What would you have done if you were me, that’s what I’ll say to them. We had DuVal to protect, for goodness’ sake. To hell with it. What a day.” Minette moved her body back over onto her own side of the bed and went dead to sleep. The moon moved across the sky. So did the earth we’re riding on. Not that anyone notices it anymore what with all that stuff there is to keep up with on television.