Reedly, an 1800s gold rush town in the Tahoe foothills, had once been called Hangtown due to the impromptu justice that took place behind the sheriff’s back. Supposedly, in the basement of the town’s post office was the stump, the tree of sacrifice, cut down God knows when. But Dick, the town’s long-time mail carrier, had never seen it, and Postmistress Mavis just brushed it off. “You've got to be kidding. Don’t we have enough trouble here with marauding bears and such?”  Each spring, hungry after hibernation, the bears brought their cubs into town, though no one had ever gotten hurt.

Now, though, probably only a hundred or so people lived in Reedly, most of the houses so well-encroached by forest that anyone who took the wrong exit off Highway 50 might think they’d ended up in an abandoned settlement, a former habitation. But California was full of squat towns where people didn’t want to be found, though downtown Reedly sported a general store and, of course, its own post office, proudly displaying its 95472 zip code. And that was okay with Dick since he’d no interest in urban living or a tourist existence, though Lake Tahoe and the Truckee River were pretty enough. But Tahoe had always had a serious bear problem. A recent San Francisco Chronicle story that Dick read spoke of bears swiping food off picnic tables, terrifying tourists, or sprinting off with residents’ garbage bins tucked under their front paw like a football. But so far, nothing fatal. 

Inside a little room in the post office where Mavis sold stamps and such, she kept up with Reedly’s rogue bears, the ones known for causing trouble, their pictures hanging alongside the FBI’s Most Wanted. Right now, there were only two: Bear 023 Big Brute and Bear 037 Mama May, who usually commandeered a litter of trailing cubs. No one had been hurt yet, but there had been property damage—cars broken into with slobber inside, a cat or two missing, though that could have been coyotes, foxes, or even a mountain lion. Every spring in the local El Dorado Voice, in Letters to the Editors, locals raged, some for euthanizing, some for relocation, and the crazies feeding them, leaving food out on their porches.

Then one day in spring, Dick noticed mail piling up at Norma Farber’s, at 562 Aster. Sitting in his truck outside the old lady’s one-story ramshackle, he noticed some of her fence pickets had been knocked down, others bent, twisted, and her garden overturned. He thought about getting out, investigating. After all, he was a federal employee. But something told him not to. Loretta would kill him. While thinking about what to do, he pulled out his wife-packed lunch, an egg salad sandwich on wheat, an apple, a bag of chips, as if he were a school boy, the son he and Loretta had lost years ago. 

Mavis confirmed that 562 Aster hadn’t ordered a vacation hold, that she hadn’t seen the old lady for a week. But the old lady had done that before, occasionally missing her weekly stamp purchase. “Friendly enough but not that friendly,” Mavis said, except she always bought “twenty stamps at a time, usually small florals, since she didn’t like the bigger gaudy ones. ’Don’t fit right on envelopes,’ she said. And once I asked her about her people, and she’d said, ‘Just that damn bear. Big Brute.’” 

“Will you report it to the sheriff, Mabel?” Dick asked. “562 Aster. Meanwhile, I’m going back over.”

“That wise? Haven’t you been through enough? You and Loretta.”

“Just call please, will you?” He turned and left.

He didn’t like people talking about his business, things no one knew, things he was ashamed of. He thought of Liam—he’d be eleven now—over in the cemetery. Loretta had him walled up in a mausoleum, despite his son’s fear of the dark. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but he’d been in no position to argue. She’d also insisted on affixing a picture. But it was gruesome, his boy’s eyes staring back at him, red from the flash, when they were, in reality, a cloudy blue like his. 

 In his truck, he cut the wheel sharp and headed back. Driving as fast as the truck could, the plastic crates of undelivered mail and packages sliding around in the bed, he had no idea what he was doing, except that Loretta would kill him. 

When he pulled alongside the house again, the scene looked the same, and he wondered if anyone else driving past had noticed. He turned off the engine and got out, and for a moment, standing there, felt foolish in his post office shorts, with not even a whistle or a canister of pepper spray on him. 

Stepping over the knocked-over pickets, Dick crossed the yard through the ruined garden. And then he saw them in the dirt—the prints. Six inches wide, round, with five stubby toes, they almost looked like human hands. Dick laid his own hand over the print and shuddered. He looked back at his mail truck, a doorless relic that barely made thirty miles per hour. Even if he made it back, the bear could probably outrun his truck. 

If only the sheriff had arrived. But, still, Dick couldn’t cower. His conscience was already bad enough. He had no memory of the accident that killed Liam or what he’d told everyone while he’d been in the hospital. After the funeral, they wouldn’t even show him a picture of the car. “Just a little crumpled pocket that saved your life,” was all Loretta had said. Of course, he’d wished it had been Liam in the pocket.

Up on the porch, Dick approached the large shattered glass window, glass crunching beneath his feet. With some shards still attached, the opening looked like a giant square mouth.

He looked back at his truck again, hoping to see the sheriff pull up.

Dick gingerly lifted one leg through the opening. “Mrs. Farber?” He still found it hard to believe that a bear could be so brazen. Maybe it was drunk kids, a hoax, a faux print, Dick was hoping as he pulled his other leg through and stepped into the living room. 

Other than some dirt, the living room seemed undisturbed—the wood floors, couch, coffee table, upright piano with open sheet music. Dick pressed down on a key. Loretta had wanted Liam to learn Moonlight Sonata and Fur Elise. But Dick wasn’t sure he could afford a piano, let alone lessons. The post office never paid that well, except in benefits, like medical insurance, which took care of his hospital bills. The accident broke him in different ways—femur, tibia, ribs, clavicle, wrist, ankle, the airbag saving him from worse. Two years later, he still walked with a slight limp; mornings, his body ached. “You’re a lucky man, Dick,” he remembered the doctor saying. But coming home to the walls of his dead boy’s room didn’t make him feel lucky.  

Dick headed toward the kitchen. His foot slipped, and he almost fell. It was scat, and he froze. He knew he shouldn’t run. Surely, he told himself, if the bear was still here, he would have already heard it. It would have charged him, its claws clacking on the floor.

“Mrs. Faber!” he called out again. 

He tried to rub the scat off his shoe, and then he stepped into the kitchen. It was a wreck there. The table and chairs were overturned, fridge and cabinet doors all open, floor covered in a liquid mishmash of melted ice cream or milk, shattered crockery, forks and knives, oil, coffee grounds, beans, egg shells. On the counter was a torn open Betty Crocker box.

It wasn’t the first time his mind skipped a beat. Home for lunch one day, he’d found an empty house and a loaf of bread in the middle of the kitchen floor, a blood smear on the wall, and a long black tail coming from behind the toaster oven. He’d told himself it wasn’t there, that it was just a faulty synapse. At that time, it had only been a cowering rat the cat had dragged in. Now, though, it was a blood-stained terry slipper, a pool of blood near the stove, a foot. He’d never seen Liam’s body, never went to the funeral, his own body too broken.

 He took a few steps closer, then heard sirens in the distance.

When Dick got home, Loretta rushed at him, word already out. 

“Where were you? Why didn’t you call?” She wrapped her arms around his neck and held him tight.

 Pulling away and heading toward the kitchen, he said, “They kept me there, questioned me. Then I had to clean up.”

“Clean up?”

He looked down at his shoes. He’d already hosed them down.

Loretta put two mugs of coffee on the table.

He sat down and hung his head. He really didn’t want to talk, but he knew she’d hammer him. It was the same after the accident, except then she’d held off until he’d recovered. And even then she’d been careful, which had been to his advantage. Besides all the broken bones, he’d had a mild concussion, so she believed him when he’d said it was all fuzzy. But at least this time it wasn’t Liam. Just a poor old lady a bear had fed on.

“Are you all right?” 

Dick looked over at her pained face. Pity was the last thing he wanted.

“Smelled like a thousand wet dogs,” he said. 

“Dogs?”

It was just something he’d heard and now had no idea why he’d said it when the old woman’s kitchen actually smelled of sugar and maple syrup. He thought of the sickly cakes Loretta baked, the Betty Crocker frosting, how the cake sat on the counter beneath a clear, bell-shaped cover. After dinner, Liam always wanted whipped cream on his. 

“You mean the bear was still in there?” Loretta pressed her palms on the table and pulled back as if ready to flee. She usually did the same thing on the dashboard when he drove too fast.

“I saw her—Mrs. Farber. Mavis said she’d been complaining about a bear. Big Brute.”

Loretta got up and checked the kitchen door. Back, she sat down again. “They’re going to capture the bear, right?”

“I suppose. I mean I don’t think it meant to hurt the woman. At least not at first. The bear probably felt trapped.”

“Trapped?” Loretta looked perplexed. 

She had an annoying habit of repeating his words, of thinking out loud. But he let it go. “She must have surprised it, tried to fight it off. Half her hair was missing.” That was true too, and now he wanted to tell Loretta everything, to let the truth tumble out—the bites, the cavity where the bear had fed, how one eye was missing, the other open, looking right up at him. The truth had always been his intention.

“But you can’t have a bear like that running around. A murderous bear.”

Dick almost chuckled at seeing Loretta incensed, though the old lady’s death wasn’t the least bit funny. It was horrible. God knows he’d seen his fair share of bears, risen from winter slumber, at the roadside, indifferent, hungry, like a neighbor you bumped into at the market. Or maybe that was all an act, the bear really leering, feigning disinterest.

Later that night, after Loretta had fallen asleep, Dick slipped out of bed and went down the hallway to his son’s room. He turned on the lamp and sat on the bed. Mrs. Farber’s mauled face, her one good eye still looking at him, the gaping cavity in her midsection. “They go for the liver first. It’s normal. What they do,” the sheriff had said, trying to calm him, as the paramedic examined him, checking his pulse, pumping up the blood pressure cuff.

He looked around the room, at the bookshelves, the story books from Liam’s younger years: Sleep Tight, Little Jim, Where the Wild Things Live, Boy Beneath the Stars. Beside them stood action figures poised to kill and a silver beaded necklace Liam liked to wear. He always had to wear this or that, especially certain socks, and would throw a fit if he didn’t get his way. But he’d outgrown all that well before he’d been killed.

Dick got up and went over to the dresser. He opened the top drawer. Thanks to Loretta, knotted socks, folded underwear, everything laid so neat, so ordered, the way no child ever kept a room. Some days he wanted to turn the room upside down, yank all the drawers open, toss everything up in the air, strip the bed to a bare mattress, smash his fits into the walls. 

He was shot by a hunter, by accident, in the chest, and bled out in the forest. When he was alone and out of town, it was easy to lie about his personal business. But the sympathy only made it worse, and lying was exhausting when all he ever really wanted to do was confess how he’d killed his own boy, falling asleep behind the wheel of his own car. But no one would believe him—dependable Dick, rattling down Reedly’s pitted roads, stuffing mailboxes. Plus, it had been raining that day, roads slick, visibility poor. 

 What the town also didn’t know was that after Liam’s death, he sometimes read their mail, steaming open the flaps of handwritten letters. Of course, what he delivered now was mostly impersonal: advertising, bills, a rare postcard. He’d never been curious about other people’s lives. And after Liam’s death, he’d never gone to support groups like he was supposed to. If he ever got caught, he couldn’t say exactly what had prompted him the first time. But he could say it was always a hand-addressed envelope that got him, inside usually a letter about the personal details of someone’s life, their tribulations, their victories, or maybe just a grandparent rattling on to their grandchildren who they never got to see, a small amount of cash tucked inside. These he just sealed right back up. But there were a few he kept copies of.

Loretta had her TV shows, the occasional book, coffee and gossip with her friends. Where was the harm in what he was doing? Sitting in his boy’s room, during his saddest times, Dick liked to bring a copied letter, one of those rare gems, as he did now, unfolding it, despite the pang of guilt he always felt for his eavesdropping. No doubt, he could have gone about it better, found a pen pal, an imprisoned man, a murderer scheduled for execution. But so far, there’d been enough local letters to satiate him. 

Dear Pokey,

By the time you get this letter, I will look totally different and you will see a new person. I don’t want you to be too shocked at how beautiful I am now (just kidding!). My nose is still swollen. Mama and I didn’t realize how much my nose was changing over a week though.  

At first, I wasn’t sure I did the right thing, but I look soooooo much better. By the time all the swelling goes down, I’m afraid there won’t be any nose left though. 

A girl at school the other day told me I looked different, good, but she couldn’t say why. A boy said it was because my butt shrank—what a jerk. I can’t wait till I make it to the cover of Cosmo or Glamour (just kidding!).  

Love You,

Leah Ann

Dick couldn’t say why this letter about an adolescent girl’s shrinking nose fascinated him as he sat quietly in his boy’s room and thought about all that he’d seen today, the wretched Mrs. Farber and her bloody slipper, the bear crap. Had the bear crapped before or after it killed Mrs. Farber? The silent piano in her pretty living room. 

Maybe it was the innocence, the humor, the pure glee of being alive. No doubt the girl who wrote the letter was oblivious to it. But for Dick, it both cut him like a knife and saved him from walking off into the woods, abandoning his life. Silly as it was, there was purpose in the girl’s letter, hope. 

Dick folded the letter, slipped it in his pocket, and turned off the lamp. Before he got up, he glanced at Liam’s clock, its glowing face still telling time.

A few weeks later, Dick found out from Mavis that Big Brute had been trapped, a necropsy done. “Opened his stomach and found poor Norma in there—her hair, her teeth, pieces of her terry robe,” is what he expected Mavis to say. But what she said instead startled him. “Found nothing. Just some berries, nuts, a few measly bugs. Poor bastard.”