Growing up in Montana, the only person I knew who had a convertible was Frankie’s Uncle Calvin. Calvin lived on the Reservation. He got more government money than his any of the other Indians. He had oil on his section or something.
Everyone knew when Calvin was in town. He’d park his big pale yellow convertible on the downtown block that was forbidden to us kids. Calvin always left the driver’s door open when he got out. I thought that when you were really rich, you didn’t even take time to close the door of your car.
One time Calvin took his nephews, Frankie, Tom, Harold, and me up to Glacier National Park. We had to leave he top of the convertible up because it was early spring and still cold. Calvin was so rich that he had boxes of Baby Ruths, Hersheys, and Big Hunks in his car. We could eat all we wanted. After a couple of hours and a lot of candy we pulled over to go down to look at a stream swollen with spring rains. It didn’t look like the llittle stream we waded in here last summer.
I watched with dismay as a family of ducks swimming the swollen stream. The sky was overcast. The water looked like angry liquid lead pocked with little whirlpools. The ducklings spun like crazy tops going in all directions but they managed to stay close to their mother. As we started back up the incline to the road, Harold yelled, “Uncle Calvin, there’s something in your car!”
Calvin had left the driver’s door open as usual. Now that space was filled with a bear’s butt. Candy wrappers were scattered on the ground. The bear grunted as he moved from side to side. He took a step back, then moved forward. He growled.
Calvin said, “He wants out but he don’t know how,” I believed that since Calvin was an Indian, he probably understood “The way of the Bear.” We watched for several moments. The bear moved farther into the car and got his hind feet up onto the driver’s seat. He kept scooting his butt around. There was a terrible growl and tearing sound. His paws and then his head pushed through the convertible top. He pulled his whole body out making the hole even bigger. Pushed up edges of the roof looked like a black lily with broken metal veins.
The bear lumbered to the opposite side of the road and into the woods. We stood in silence afraid of what Calvin would do. We imagined our parents screaming, cussing, and even yelling at us, if a bear destroyed their car. Calvin started to laugh and with a wondrous relief, we all did. Frankie laughed so hard that he fell on the ground, curled his knees up and held on to his stomach.
Calvin took out his special little bottle and drank from it. It was flat and silver. He never offered it to us. We knew it was a secret thing and never mentioned it to our parents or even to each other.
Calvin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, put the flat bottle into his back pocket, and kicked the rear tire with his snakeskin cowboy boot. He said, “Yep, that bear was just Mother Earth telling Calvin it’s time to get a new car.”
No comments:
Post a Comment