The boy was walking through the woods when the bear jumped out and almost ate him. He quickly asked the bear if he was hungry, and the bear said yes, so the boy offered to buy him a hamburger in the restaurant in town. All he hed to do was walk down through the woods to the center of town, and the boy would buy him a hamburger. “I’m going there myself,” said the boy. “You can come with me.”
The bear didn’t really know what a hamburger was, so the boy described it: melted cheese on top, sometimes a tomato and onion and lettuse and maybe even relish. But the bear didn’t know what any of this was. The bear decided to go along with the boy and try it anyway.
Along the way they met a dog, and asked him if he wanted to go with them to the restaurant to get hamburgers. But the dog was too busy chasing a cat. “The cat got out into these woods,” said the dog, “and she may stay out here forever if I don’t catch her and bring her home.”
They ran into a raccoon who was busy with some garbage that he had stolen in a dumpster in town. They tried to make the raccoon feel guilty about stealing garbage, but he didn’t feel one way or the other about it. They tried to describe the hamburger to him, thinking if they got him on hamburgers it would improve his diet, but the only thing that really appealed to him was the onion, since he knew what that was, and he only had a vague sense of what a hamburger was or what it would be like to actually walk through the center of town.
So when they got to the conter of town it was just the boy and the bear, and the bear waited outside the restaurant while the boy went in to order the hamburger. Or rather, he hesitated, in the street, trying to decide whether to just walk in. While he was there a meter maid came to give him a parking ticket. Her reasoning was, he was taking up the space and not plugging the meter, so it was her job to write him a ticket.
But she had a hard time getting any information about him. He claimed that his name was only “Bear,” and if he had a middle name or a family name he’d never known what it was. He also didn’t really have an address, though he was perfectly happy right where he was, and he made it clear he wasn’t about to pay some fine, or go to court, as these things always ended up bad. “But you can write me whatever kind of ticket you want,” he said. “I have probably broken half a dozen laws and you can write me up for all of them.”
The first, she said, was walking downtown without any clothes on. He explained that he was a bear, so his fur kept him warm, and kept everyone from looking too hard to see what was beneath it. He said he never had any problem walking around without any pants or shirt, but when a hat took his fancy he would certainly walk around in that for a while.
Just then there was a large explosion coming from the building across the street. The boy was just coming out of the restaurant with the hamburgers, so the boy and bear ran down the street together. The meter maid followed them because she didn’t want to have an almost-finished ticket that she hadn’t given to the offender. The bear pointed out that she couldn’t expect him to pay for a parking spot that was about to be blown up, so she might as well pitch her little ticket book and come with them and share hamburgers.
The three of them ended up out in the train yard in some weeds, where someone had made a little fire pit out of rocks and had left a few apples strewn about. The boy didn’t care much for wild apples but to the bear this was a big treat, right up there with coming upon some fisherman’s bucket full of thrashing fish he had just caught and then walked away to answer a phone call. The bear in fact went on a story-telling ramble that included all the fine supplies he had run across in his colorful life, mostly based on the fact that he wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone, and he’d made friends pretty easily.
The police came around looking for someone who had bombed the newspaper office across the street from the hamburger restaurant, but all three of them said they were there but had no idea who could have done it. The policeman asked them questions about who they might have seen coming and going while they stood there in the street outside the office, but only the meter maid and the bear had been standing there; the boy hadn’t, but the boy remembered somebody unusual in the restaurant while he was ordering the hamburgers and waiting for them.
Apparently somebody bombed the newspaper because they had published a cartoon of the president. But there was also a cartoon of a bear, so the policeman had a lot of questions for the bear. Were you aware of the cartoon? Do you consider it wrong to make a cartoon of a bear? The bear was perplexed. He had never really thought of a cartoon of a bear. To him, everything was like a cartoon anyway. Fast-moving, violent, in wild colors, that’s how he saw the world.
But they tried to describe to him what a newspaper looked like. To the bear, newspaper had other functions in the woods. You wouldn’t consider reading them. Or even looking at a cartoon.
While they were standing there, a train started up and the bear jumped on it. He had learned how to jump on trains back when he lived in the city. The only problem was when someone was already up there in the boxcar, but that wasn’t the case with this one, and he scrambled right up there and waved good bye at everyone. The policeman was wondering whether to arrest him or what, but he decided that was too risky and the bear rode off into the sunset. The boy knew he’d catch up to the bear later, so he decided to go home for dinner. The problem was, he’d forgotten which way home was. But the policeman knew his dad, and showed him the way. They decided to let whatever happened at the newspaper office go, since they really weren’t involved.
Tom Leverett, ~Sept., 2020
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