‘She’ll be mean,’ one of the guys standing there said. We were going to stay at his house. He was the guy who shot the bears. He was a good friend of Uncle Jarv’s. They had played together on the high school football team during the Depression.

A woman came by. She had a sack of groceries in her arms. She stopped and looked at the bears. She got up very close, leaning over towards the bears, shoving celery tops in their faces.

They took the bears and put them on the front porch of an old two-storey house. The house had wooden frosting all around the edges. It was a birthday cake from a previous century. Like candles, we were going to stay there for the night.

The trellis around the porch had some kind of strange-looking vines growing on it, with even stranger-looking flowers. I’d seen those vines and the flowers before, but never on a house. They were hops.

It was the first time that I had ever seen hops growing on a house. That was an interesting taste in flowers. But it took a little while to get used to them.

The sun was shining out front and the shadow of the hops lay across the bears as if they were two glasses of dark beer. They were sitting there, backs against the wall.

‘Hello, gentlemen. What would you like to drink?’ ‘

A couple of bears.’

‘I’ll check the icebox and see if they’re cold. I put some in there a little while ago… yeah, they’re cold.’

The guy who shot the bears decided that he didn’t want them, so somebody said, ‘Why don’t you give them to the mayor? He likes bears.’ The town had a population of three hundred and fifty-two, including the mayor and the bears.

‘I’ll go tell the mayor there are some bears over here for him,’ somebody said and went to find the mayor.

Oh, how good those bears would taste: roasted, fried, boiled or made into spaghetti, bear spaghetti just like the Italians make.

Somebody had seen him over at the sheriff ’s. That was about an hour ago. He might still be there. Uncle Jarv and I went over and had lunch at a little restaurant. The screen door was badly in need of repair, and opened like a rusty bicycle. The waitress asked us what we wanted. There were some slot machines by the door. The county was wide open.

We had some roast beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy. There were hundreds of flies in the place. Quite a crew of them had found some strips of flypaper that were hanging here and there like nooses in the restaurant, and were making themselves at home.