The Woman Who Married a Bear by John Straley Page A

him up and take him home to our house, the fire, the halibut, and the certainties of the encyclopedias. The nurse came in and told me to leave. I was not to have any more meetings in Todd’s room and there was someone else outside to see me.
    It was a nice young cop outside the room who was embarrassed about not taking my shirt at the police station. It was useless to put up much of a fuss. Even through his embarrassment he had a stiff way of asking questions that became even stiffer as Doggy passed in the hall. He slipped the shirt into a paper bag and, after stapling it closed, he thanked me. He told me to have a nice evening. I wanted to go home.
    The rain was hardly noticeable as I walked down the main street past the cathedral. I turned at the Pioneer Home. My jail pants slowly became heavy and damp, my hair matted down. I had my jacket on with no shirt underneath. It seemed to be darker than usual. The street lamps were like stepping-stones of light. I walked from one to another with my head down, my hands jammed into my pockets. If someone was trying to kill me, I would be an easy shot but I didn’t much care. The blood that had dried to a dark crust on the rims of my fingernails was liquid again in the rain. I could smell blood on my skin. I thought of the surf breaking in the darkness on the outer rocks, and I thought of someone trying to kill me.
    On the waterfront, the bar was clogged with fishermen, hooting and telling stories. The cracked speaker on the jukebox buzzed as another Bruce Springsteen song limped out of it. It was bingo night at the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall. A Tlingit kid was riding his tricycle at the door, skirting the edge of the sidewalk as his brother watched him. As I walked by he looked over his handlebars and whispered, “Hi, Cecil.”
    Down at our house the cops had finished digging the slug out of the door frame and there was yellow tape strung over the entrance. A hand-painted sign that said, “ CRIME SCENE. DO NOT ENTER ” was taped to the door. Upstairs, a white linen curtain billowed out of an open window.
    I thought of Peter Pan, never wanting to grow up, lifting children in their nightgowns out of open windows. The curtain, soaking in the rain, popped in the breeze once, and I thought of a white plume of air escaping a sinking ship.

FIVE
    I SWEAR TO GOD , when I saw my father lying dead on the floor of the casino, with five-dollar gold pieces raining down on his chest, I thought, ‘That lucky son of a bitch.” His skin was a pale gray against the green of the carpet. Lights were flashing, a siren throbbed, all announcing the winner of the super $100,000 jackpot. The photographer from the publicity department arrived before the paramedics. Two women with golf gloves on their lever hands eyed the machine and the money sparkling down on the dead man, and they were caught in their own swirls of calculation: randomness, inevitability, and luck. They watched and flexed their fingers into fists and then were hustled off to new machines and given complimentary tickets to the floor show. The pit boss nervously twisted his wedding ring, and a man in cowboy boots and a security uniform talked into a handheld radio.
    He had died of a stroke while the slot machine came up with three gold nuggets that read “Motherlode.”
    The Judge was not a big fan of irony, and it probably pissed him off to die in Las Vegas. He also did not believe much in chance. At least for himself. Chance was the agent of randomness, and randomness was only visited upon those who were out of control. Thousands of defendants had stood before him over the years and in their many pleas they always said the same thing: Their lives had somehow gotten away from them. They stood before him and he looked at them clinically, without anger or blame. He looked at them as an emergency-room doctor might look at the victims of a tornado, clutching their crying babies and gesturing to their