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Surf music plays. A male voice says:
Christopher Gronlund presents Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors. Read by me, the author, Christopher Gronlund.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“A Visit from Bubba”
I was so happy to hear Dad believed me. When you’re thirteen, it’s easy to think nobody gives you any credit, but I realized on that trip that it wasn’t so much that I was ignored, as much as I’d reached a level of maturity that adults began expecting more from me. “Dad, I think the car is possessed and I’m scared!” would work for a seven-year-old, but it’s not something adults want to hear from a teenager. So having my father believe me was a big thing at the time. I felt safer; in my mind, since Dad knew the car was possessed, nothing bad could happen. I felt great! Everyone seemed to be in an excellent mood, too. It was like we were all a real, model family. I had to give it another shot.
“Hey, anyone wanna sing Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall?” I said.
“Not now,” Mom said, recounting her money for the umpteenth time since winning.
“No, shut up!” from the twins.
“I don’t know the words and I ain’t no good at countin’.” Aunt Margie said.
Dad said, “Looks like we’re out-voted.”
Okay, so maybe we weren’t a model family, but we were making big strides.
We rolled into the Texas Panhandle as the sun was going down. First thing, bright and early in the morning, Dad wanted to visit the Cadillac Ranch, where ten Cadillacs were partially buried in a wheat field and called “art.” To everyone but my Dad, it was something that could easily be skipped, but it was one of those places he waited years to finally see.
We pulled off I-40 to a campground a few miles off the highway. Mom wanted to stay in a hotel, to celebrate her big bingo win, but Dad insisted he was too tired to drive any further. In reality, Dad wanted to sleep outside in a tent on hard-packed dirt. Mom did her normal, “What about bears?” speech and Dad assured her all was safe.
“The only bears in Texas are in zoos,” he said.
We paid for our space, pitched the tents, and started a campfire. Our space was at the back of the lot and the campground wasn’t very used; it was almost like roughing it for real.
“Goody, we’ll get to finally roast marshmallows!” the twins said.
“Yeah, you sure will!” Dad said, setting some twigs on tinder. It didn’t matter that we lived in a urban nightmare; on these trips, my father was just like Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. He blew on the dried grass he’d collected, nursing a hot ash started by a flint and steel set he carried with him everywhere since his Boy Scouts days (be prepared—never know when an insurance salesman will need to start a primitive fire, after all). With a little POOF, the grass gave way to flame and spread to the twigs. He stacked bigger pieces of wood on until we had a good fire going. The twins pulled out a bag of marshmallows and sticks.
“Youse two put those back!” Mom said. “You need to eat a healthy dinner, first!”
The “healthy dinner” consisted of hotdogs, pork and beans, and greasy potato chips, all washed down with soda pop. I’m guessing, while a bag of marshmallows didn’t have much in the way of nutritional value, that meal wasn’t far behind. After dinner, Mom and Aunt Margie lit up and Dad kicked back, relaxing.
“This is the life!” he said, rubbing his belly. “Nothing like a meal cooked over an open fire and a clear sky above. Can you hear that?”
We all listened. “I don’t hear a thing,” Mom said, looking around nervously.
“Exactly!” He laughed. “That’s what I mean! This is great—we don’t get this back home.”
“We don’t get chewed on by bugs, either!” Mom said, swatting at invisible mosquitoes. “If I get malaria, you’re never going to live it down.” As she swatted at another bug only she could see, she knocked her Coke over, spilling the can’s contents all over the log she was sitting on. She stood up, Coca Cola dripping from her clothes.
“This wouldn’t have happened if we stayed in a hotel!”
The twins looked at Mom, ignoring her dilemma. “Can we roast marshmallows, now?”
“Sure, go ahead,” she said as she grabbed napkins and wiped her bottom. Then she screamed!
“What?” Dad said.
The twins screamed and Aunt Margie joined in.
“What?!” Dad looked at me. I screamed too.
“WHAT?!” he shouted. I pointed to the two-hundred fifty pound black bear standing behind him! Not a monster by any stretch of the imagination, but in Mom’s eyes it was a two-ton, twelve-foot tall, fire-breathing Kodiak with a taste for fat women from New Jersey. It justified all her notions that if one sleeps outside—no matter where they are—bears will descend upon their camp and devour them in the night.
“I told you, James O’Brien!” Mom shouted as we all ran for cover. “I told you bears would get us!” The only place to run was the Inferno.
I got there first. “The doors are locked and the windows are up!” I yelled.
“They shouldn’t be—we left them unlocked!” Dad said. It was the first time he saw the kind of things the car was doing to me all along. Just like the night it tried choking me to death, it was now trying to kill my family by not letting us in and leaving us to the bear. Dad picked up the twins and threw them in through the broken window, followed by me. Aunt Margie was next, even though Mom tried forcing her way toward the window after we were safe. When Dad tried putting Mom through the window, she got stuck!
“James, if that bear bites my ass, you’re dead!” Her legs were kicking; her underwear exposed to the wilderness of Liam McGuy’s Campground. “Next time you’ll listen to me about the bears!”
The bear was still at the campfire, though, rifling through our food. It devoured the twins’ marshmallows, filling its belly full of goopy, sugary goodness before moving on to hotdogs, potato chips, and desserts. When it was done devouring everything we had, it headed our way. Dad picked up a nearby stick to fend off the beast. As it lumbered toward us, I noticed it wasn’t nearly as large as it seemed when it suddenly appeared behind Dad.
Dad stomped his food and thwacked the stick on the ground, trying to appear menacing. “Yo, bear! Get back, bear!” he shouted. Mom started screaming.
“I’m gonna die in this crap car and it’s all your fault, James O’Brien!”
Dad stood like a mountain man doing his best to fend off a feral beast. The bear stopped and stood on its hind legs; I thought for sure it was going to attack, but instead, it sniffed the air. It wasn’t looking to maul our family—it was looking for food! Dad caught on quick.
“Michael, do me a big favor, Buddy. Grab anything from the cooler and slowly hand it to me.”
I gave him some old sandwiches. He tossed them to the side and the bear ate them, bag and all. It made its way through the sandwiches in no time and turned its attention back to Dad. “Anything else?” he said.
I handed him a stale marshmallow I found on the floor. Before he could toss it, the bear took it from his hand. Dad thought it was cool. The bear licked his hand and Dad said, “That’s it—nothing else.” The bear stood up and sniffed the air again; it was still picking up the scent of something sweet. It moved to Mom and licked Coke off her butt.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!” she screamed. “IT’S MAULING ME!!!”
Dad pulled the bear back like it was a big dog trying to hump someone’s leg. From the trees near camp, we heard someone shout, “Bubba! Bubba Bear!”
A skinny guy in a cowboy hat stepped out. A belt buckle as big as a wrestler’s champion belt held his bootcut jeans at his waist. He walked right up to the bear and started petting it.
“There you are, Bubba,” he said. “You messing with these nice people?” He pulled out a candy bar and fed it to his pet. For the first time, I realized Bubba had no teeth. Years of consuming sweets ensured he at least wouldn’t have been able to bite us if he were feral.
“Your bear?” Dad said.
“Yep—he got out of his cage. I’m really sorry.”
“He’s tame?” Dad said.
“Harmless as a bunny-rabbit.” He extended his hand to Dad. “Name’s Lance.”
Dad shook his hand. “James.”
“Nice meeting you.”
Dad started helping Mom out of the window. Lance, realizing his bear was the cause of the problem, gave a hand without even asking. Bubba joined in, too, returning to lick more Coke from Mom’s rear.
“You’re a dead man, James O’Brien,” she said. “Hear me? Dead! When we get back to Jersey, it’s ladle time for you!” I knew she would never hit me or the twins with the ladle, but even Dad looked like he wasn’t sure if she was kidding, or serious.
Once Mom’s feet were back on solid ground and Lance had Bubba away from her, the rest of us got out of the car. Dad asked if we could all get a picture with Bubba; Lance took a picture of all of us, except Mom, standing with the stinky bear. Lance explained he bought Bubba several years before from a guy who owned a gas station. The gas station owner put Bubba in a cage near the pumps to attract customers; he had bought Bubba from a small circus that went under and couldn’t afford to keep him. Dad took a couple more pictures of us with the bear before Lance said he had to get back home.
As I watched him walk off with Bubba, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the bear and all the other animals we’d seen along the way. In a cage or a wading pool on the side of the highway wasn’t the way animals were supposed to be viewed. I thought about the hawk and deer we saw at Aunt Margie’s back in West Virginia—that was the way things were meant to be.
I like to think Bubba escaped from Lance and wandered back to his birthplace in the hills, but the reality was he probably died with a belly full of sugar, on a concrete slab surrounded by chain-link fence.
* * *
Surf music plays. A male voice says:
Thank you so much for listening to Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors–it really means a lot to me.
Theme music is provided by Belgium’s best surf band, Pirato Ketchup.
And if you want to know a little bit more about me and the other things I do, check out ChristopherGronlund.com.
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