A Bear for Trying

He just needed to get rid of all the little animals super glued to his dashboard. It wouldn’t be easy. Some of the figures were glass or china, and the ones that weren’t looked to be made of some kind of dense plastic. He could envision the wreckage it would leave, the miniature china legs snapped off and mired in glue, presenting a hazard for children (not that he knew any)—for all people, really, reaching in the dark—the plastic ones tearing away chunks of dashboard vinyl and paint or else leaving behind pieces of themselves like some kind of alien gumbo. So he waited. Mornings, starting on his way into work he’d see them there, impervious to all weather and temperature changes with their stupid fixed expressions of pleasant neutrality, nothing like real animals—a deer and fawn, cow, pig with a peg-leg, sheep, mother bear, two squirrels, an eagle and a rabbit—and he’d remember all of his conviction to deal with them, soon, possibly even over the weekend. Chisels and sandpaper. Some kind of solvent too, he supposed, though he’d need to research that first, call his buddy Fred at the Ford dealership and endure his jokes—Finally decided to quit playing Noah’s fucking ark, huh?—to find out which brands might do the least harm. And then stuck at stoplights, the way people would glance at him and glance again, smiling nervously sometimes, bobbing their heads, but also occasionally laughing and pointing, some days it was all he could do to keep himself from just bashing a hand down on the whole menagerie to make it go away—diabolical, reverse genesis. But aside from the mess and potential lowered resale value on his truck, potential need to replace the whole dash (not something he could afford just now), as well as the real risk of cutting his hand in the process, something in one of the animals’ expressions always stopped him—something pathetic and harmless that reminded him of all pathetic, harmless things. And though his brother might at times have seemed deserving of pity, Karl knew from experience that Eber was in fact anything but harmless or pathetic; still, he worried that if he did anything to uproot or deface the animals he might, by some unwitting force of voodoo, wreak havoc on Eber’s situation. He’d read somewhere that the greater the level of uncertainty and instability in any person’s life, the more likely that person was to find himself turning to these things like astrology, numerology, scientology, voodoo, and the like. And he had to admit, with Eber gone, a certain something—call it stability, excitement, purposefulness—had gone missing in his life. So he gritted his teeth and held back. Parked in the farthest possible employee parking space, away from anyone else, locked up, and went across the parking lot to the paint store. As he went, he ran down one of a handful of familiar one-sided internal dialogues with Eber to rev himself up for the day ahead and put things in perspective—none of which changed the fact that Eber was gone now the last four and a half months, in California presumably with their mother, whose leaky heart beat three different ways the same as Eber’s, no indication he’d ever be back, and all of this largely because of his own, Karl’s, stupid behavior while Eber had been recovering in the heart wing. They’d thought he might be dying. Who knew?

Glimpsing himself in the glass of the shop door—beard, square-rim glasses, company shirt, name stitched over the breast pocket—he’d remember the other promise he was always making himself and forgetting or pushing aside: get a gym membership at the yuppie twenty-four-hour place up on fifty-seventh. Do some free weights and cardio. His heart might be steady and pinhole-free, unlike Eber’s, but he wasn’t doing himself any favors letting things slip this far. Once, they’d been potential college running backs, he and Eber...