Setting Free the Bears

Then I drove to Singerin for eggs and coffee. And when I came back, she had a fire going, with too much wood to cook on. But she'd also spread open the sleeping bag and dragged it back up into the woods, way above the water. Embarrassed, I saw she'd hung my hangies on a stick - a spear stuck in the ground and the hangies waving, as if the wearer lay buried under this crude marker.

We ate a lot. I found a very old loaf of bread too - in the rucksack, where it must have been stashed a week or so ago. But it toasted very well in the grease in Freina's pan. Because I make it a policy never to really clean the pan. That way you remember all the good meals you've had.

Gallen still dried her hair. She brushed it down over her face, then she gave a puff and blew a strand of it away from her - baring just her mouth and nose. Her hair danced alive by itself; she played with it across from me, and I gave several fake moans and crawled up in the woods, plopping down on the bag. Bigger than any bedspread, set better than any tablecloth - with trees all around it, and pine needles packed under it. Soft as water; you sank in it.

But Gallen went futzing around with the fire, and washing her hands in the river. She'd changed back in her corduroys again, and hadn't been so bold as to fly her huggies in the same way she'd chosen to immortalize me.

I faked some more exhausted grunts from my great bed in the woods. Then I shouted down to her, 'Aren't you sleepy, Gallen? I could sleep all day, myself.'

'But you wouldn't,' she said, 'if I came up there with you.'

Well, such conceit seemed to demand some firm resolve on my part, so I bolted out of the woods and charged her on the riverbank. She raced into the field. But I never knew a girl who could really run. It's their structure, I'm convinced; they're hippy, whether there's much flesh or not, and that structuring forces their legs to swivel out sideways when they move.

Besides, I'm tireless in short bursts. I caught her when she tried to double back to the woods to hide. She said, all out of breath and as if she'd been thinking deeply on it all along, 'Where do you think we should go next? Where do you want to go?' But I wasn't to be that easily thrown off. I carried her back to the sleeping bag; she tied me up in her hair again, even before I set her down. But I noticed how she genuinely winced when I rolled over her.

'Gallen, are you sore?' I said. She looked away from me, of course.

'Well, a little,' she said. 'It's not anything wrong with me, is it?'

'Oh no,' I said. 'I'm sorry.'

'Oh, I don't hurt a lot, anyway,' she said. Meaning it, because she didn't untangle her hair from around my neck.

Lord, in the daylight, I thought - embarrassed, myself. But she surprised me.

'You don't have any hangies on under,' she said.

'I've just got one pair,' I said, sheepish.

'Graff, you can wear mine, you know,' said Gallen. 'They stretch.'

'These are blue!' I said.

And Gallen said, 'I have a green pair, a blue pair and a red pair.'

But she only had that one bra, I knew - having seen some of the packing.

'You can have my soccer shirt,' I told her.

And seeing the shirt off to the side of our spread, I remembered a loon of a boy who was on my old soccer team in high school. He hated the game as much as I did, I'm sure, but he had this special knack in that awful situation when you're running to kick the ball and the other man is running toward you, to get the ball first. You don't know who'll get to kick it, but if he does he'll probably kick it in your face or you'll catch his toe in your throat. But this loon I knew would always start yelling when he got in that situation. He wouldn't shy off, he'd dig hard for the ball, very serious - but yelling as he ran, 'Yaaii! Yaaaiii!' He'd scream right in the face of the fellow opposite. He terrified everyone, just by showing them how scared he was.

He was a very good player because of it, I'm convinced. He beat everyone to the ball. It sort of took your edge off to have him blubbering like that, as if he were charging a machine-gunner's nest.

And I thought: That's true. We should all be loudly afraid when we are - just so no one confuses the hero with the loon. It's the loon who makes you laugh, and makes you think he's crazy. But it's the hero who's stupid. He's full up with platitudes and vague notions, and he doesn't really care if he gets to the ball first. Now take me - I'm the loon, I thought.

And Gallen said, 'Graff?' Probably embarrassed that I wasn't looking at her, having prepared herself to have me see.

She was no statue; she was soft, despite the bones around. Someone shouted, above the river:

Bless the green stem before the flower!

It must have been Siggy, speaking prone - droning in the candlelight by the Grand Prix racer, '39.

'Why do you have hair there?' said Gallen.

There's always a swamp where you least expect it, I thought. And I lay my head down quickly between her high, small breasts. This time, I wanted no distractions. No frotting deer by the winter river, or tended to by a shepherd-like Siggy. I thought - and surprisingly, not until now - I might be going mad. Or just bizarre.

It frightened me so, I wouldn't close my eyes. I looked down her long waist; I saw where her pelvis moved, if that's a pelvis. I looked up her neck - saw the pulse beating at the thin-skinned spot, but didn't dare to feel it. Her mouth opened and her eyes looked down at me - still surprised, no doubt, at where I had hair and where I didn't.