Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

“It’s not?”

“Sorry about that. This here is a Colt Lawman. American-designed revolver parts made in Spain or somewheres. Double action. Four-inch barrel.”

“OK,” she said.

“Now, Colt does a.357-caliber version of this and they do a.45-caliber but what you have, what you will have here, is a plain old.38-caliber version. Six shots. Firing.38 slugs. With double action, you don’t have to squeeze the trigger hard to cock it. You use your thumb.”

“Well good for little me. But I can’t stop a damn bear with this, can I? I can’t stop a crack-crazed gangsta. So what good is it?”

“Very accurate weapon.” Peterson watched her sign the form for the revolver “You OK, Rowan? Everything all right?”

She gave him a quick affectionate glance with her striking blue eyes. He was at a disadvantage with Rowan Smart because, although he was a married Mormon and a bishop of the stake, he had been to bed with her.

“I mean, you attending your program? Everything like that?”

“What are you, Max, my parole officer? My confessor? My political commissar?”

“I hear your old man was a major Communist,” he said. “That’s what they say in town. Some ranchers say.”

“Damn right,” she said. “Mom was the same. Mom’s buried in the Kremlin wall. I’m gonna be buried there too.”

“The fact is, Rowan,” Peterson sighed, “I’m worried about you. I wouldn’t have put you on enforcement but it’s not up to me.”

“There you go,” she said. “I don’t work for you either.”

Peterson flushed. “Now that’s where you’re wrong, sweetheart. Every law enforcement officer in this county works for me. And you, pal, you work under my direct personal supervision. You’ll be subject to regular testing. I catch you stoned and armed, I swear I’ll put you in the penitentiary.”

“I’m clean, Max.”

“Things are perverse,” he said. “I got little Mormon farm boys giving each other hand signs like they’re Crips and Bloods. I’m up against it. I’m trying to protect the public. Do I have to protect them from you? Were you clean when you like to rode that quarter horse to death up by Sutler’s Bar? I heard about that.”

She frowned deeply, childishly.

“I told you, man, I’m clean.”

Peterson fidgeted.

“You’re the only officer we got around here with a Ph.D. That’s supposed to mean you’re smarter than the other guys. So don’t go all dumb on me.”

“I don’t have a Ph.D.,” she said. “I never finished my dissertation.”

“Goddamn it, Rowan,” Peterson said, “I don’t give a good blip what you got. I need some law and order. I need this park not to be a hangout and I need you to help me. You know I like you,” he told her. “I’m an easy guy to get on with. I just want you to be responsible.”

“You are an easy guy, Max,” she said. “When I first met you I thought you were one of the twelve Nephites who walk the earth.”

He flushed further at her invocation of the Mormon tradition and then laughed. He had been to college and taken a sociology degree at a state university down in Utah and done a few years as a social worker in prison. He was a member of the Mutual Improvement Society and a scoutmaster.

“Just don’t blow it, baby.”

“Don’t worry, Max.”

As she started out, her.38 buckled on, Peterson closed the door she had opened. She looked at him puzzled.

“I don’t know how to put this, Rowan. I mean, I don’t want to embarrass you. You gonna wear those boots and britches on patrol? With your weapon?”

“I got mounted patrol tomorrow,” she said. “Why not?”

He paused and then spoke slowly.

“I don’t know how to put this.”

“That’s what you just said. What don’t you know how to put, Max?”

“For … psychological reasons,” he said, looking at the floor, “I don’t think female law enforcement officers should wear provocative clothing. And I think you look good enough to … I think you look real nice in that rig. And with your gun belt, you know … you’re kind of provocative.”

“You mean I’m a leather trip, Max? Sort of S-and-M like.”

“I mean I know how bad guys think. How men think. Makes me wonder what you got in your own mind. So there it is. I don’t like you getting yourself up like that.”

“It’s standard service uniform.”

“Oblige me, Rowan.”

“Male bullshit,” she said.

“Jeez, you called it. Not me.”

“All right, all right,” she said. “I’ll see you around.”

There was a stretch of road, a time of afternoon when he could see the great peaks to the west shining. As the sun declined toward them, they seemed to remove themselves from sight. As he drove, a sudden storm came out of the east. The pinon-dappled hills were higher now and fingers of lightning struck the taller trees and set them ablaze, blackening the trunks and the ground around them. But in a few minutes the storm was gone, except for the smell of ozone and pine smoke, and there was hardly any rain.

The road ascended by degrees, among ponderosa pine. A highway marker declared him to be entering Shoshone County, whose state university, still a hundred miles away, would be the site of his reading. The road approach to Shoshone County, which appeared to constitute a modest rise, was proclaimed by its marker to stand at seven thousand feet above sea level.

He swung round a turn and encountered an orange MEN WORKING sign. Just beyond it stood a young flagman, about college age. He had on a Day-Glo vest over a poncho and a yellow hard hat from which his long blond hair protruded.

“Five minutes,” the boy said when Smart rolled his window down a crack. He kept staring at Smart, holding up a red hand-sign that said STOP, shielding his eyes from the restored sunlight.

“Are you William Smart?” he asked the poet finally.

“Bless you, son,” said Smart. “Yes, that’s me.”

“They had your picture in the cafeteria yesterday.” The young man kept on gawking stupidly. “I read your poem. We had to read one in class last year.”

“Good for you. Which one?”

“Umm,” said the young man. “Not sure.”

“You don’t remember it?”

“It went like … it had like fields in it. Like roads in it?”

“Right,” Smart said. “I have a few like that.” He was quite ready to see the funny side. “How appropriate, since we’re on a road at this very moment. And there are fields out there.” He cleared his throat to keep his temper. “Do you go to Shoshone?”

“They had your picture in the cafeteria yesterday,” the youth said.

“Think it’s still there?” Smart asked.

“Huh?” A distant siren had sounded. The youth reversed his sign so that it read SLOW. He seemed to be pondering an answer as Smart rolled up his window and drove on, passing workmen along the shoulders, their rollers and asphalt trucks.

A poem with fucking roads in it, Smart thought, cackling. A field in it! Of course they were little morons at Shoshone State, he reflected. But pretty kids, grandchildren of Mormon ranchers and Basques and Cornish miners. The cafeteria sold pasties. It was adorned with his picture that week because he was on his way to read there.

He turned the radio on and found himself within range of the college transmitter. There was a nice flute piece by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. When it was finished the announce^ who had apparently struggled in speech course to overcome some palatal impediment, declared, “Together we can make cystic fibrosis history.” Smart turned it off.

But one couldn’t blame the kids. The faculty were incompetent and corrupt. Enraged ex-nuns, paroled terrorists of the left and right, senile former state legislators. But to whom, he wondered, did he owe his own inclusion in the sacred syllabus? So that the very yokels at the crossroads were provided the exultation of forgetting his field and road poems.