John Riebow

The bright flashing red and blue lights pulled me from my drowsy reverie as I drove to work that tepid June morning. I only had one cup of coffee before I left the house and had not shaken off the effects of a late night with an old friend I hadn’t seen in a few years, so the recollection is a bit hazy. It was warm and the air conditioner in my vehicle was acting up, so I was sweaty as well as sleepy. Only three blocks from the fixer-upper rancher I bought in foreclosure and had been almost single-handedly renovating for the past three years, I drove around the curve adjacent to a strip of brush and saw two cops in black uniforms standing between their white patrol cars. They huddled, appearing to be joking and laughing. Yellow crime scene tape draped between the trees and dangled in the wind. I didn’t stop, of course, but slowed to crane my neck. There was not much to see but the story did make the following morning’s edition of the local paper, which I read online during a brief respite from the store floor.

The body of an old man had been found in the brush alongside the seldom-used railroad tracks by a divorcee walking her dog. The golden retriever had slipped his collar and went bounding after a fleeting squirrel. The animal was pawing at the body in the weeds when the woman caught up to it. She thought Maize had found a bag of trash and the sight of the wrinkled pale flesh was shocking. “I saw an outstretched arm first, then the little white head.” 

The deceased man was a local resident and survivor of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, often seen walking around the neighborhood in his USS Arizona baseball cap—as the obituary picture attested—a retired machinist whose wife had been dead almost a decade. For the past five years, he had been a resident of the Cedar View assisted living facility over on Walnut and Fifth and was known to enjoy monthly trips to the local casino, where he was said to be a deft blackjack player. The story also noted that he was an artist, recognized regionally for crafting silhouettes of bears out of steel, and had been a manager/bouncer of a notorious local go-go bar in the 1970’s. 

I never knew Mr. Rick Mueller, though I do recall seeing rusting bear silhouettes that could have been his creations slinking in yards about the area; by the slightest chance, I happened to bump into his niece, Miss Kathy Stag, quite literally, when I failed to realize how close my vehicle had come to hers at a stop light and accidentally rear-ended her with my Chevy Silverado. There was no noticeable damage to my pickup, but her gray Toyota Camry suffered a crushed trunk hatch and two broken taillights—the crunch of the impact, a sickening sound that continues to haunt me.

We pulled over to the side of the road to exchange information, and amid my profuse apologies, she told me that she was on the way to her uncle’s viewing. At the time I had no idea she was related to the Rick Mueller I had read about, whose bear silhouettes lingered in local gardens. During a phone conversation I initiated because I had written down her license plate number incorrectly, she mentioned, when asked,  if the viewing, service, and burial had gone well. “At least the weather cooperated.” I felt compelled to ask how the man died and was suddenly able to understand the connection between man, bear, and rail yard. “I can’t believe that place just allowed a man with dementia to walk out the door.”

I am not the type of guy who shops at garage sales. I have enough stuff of my own and take little interest in other people’s junk, but last Saturday, as I was on the way to pick up a few groceries and a case of beer, the sight of what could have been a Rick Mueller original compelled me to pull over. It was carelessly propped up on the shaggy lawn, alongside a scratched oak bookshelf, half hidden behind a brass floor lamp with a cigarette-yellowed shade.

I pulled into the gravel driveway. The gray stones crunched underfoot and a rather overly made up woman gave a slight wave as I approached. The collection was sad, the contents scattered haphazardly, like the old house had been tipped on its side and shaken clean. Not interested in the slightest in the tables full of glassware, or tools, or the racks of outdated clothing, I moved to the rusting metal plate. It was heavy. Who knows how the woman managed to get it onto the lawn?  

The bear must have been outside for a time. Some of the black paint had flaked off, the exposed steel rusted to red. The feet were caked with dried soil for the 3” or so it had sunken into the ground in its former location. The $30 price was written in white chalk in the middle of the chest but the remnants of the former $50 asking price were still visible. The sight of the letters “RM 1985” cut into the back of the plate drove me to put down the $10 I had in my pocket and retrieve the remaining twenty from the local ATM. 

Sanded, washed, and newly coated with three layers of brown rust-resistant paint, the bear now resides in my back yard, in front of the wide holly with the dark red berries beside the tall grasses, where I can see it from my kitchen window when I’m doing the dishes. The animal is on all fours, in a walking pose that captures it mid-step, back legs in a v-formation, the front right paw lifted slightly off the ground. One ear is up, the other flopped over, head outstretched, like it’s searching. The curve of the nose leads to a mouth slightly agape that looks from a certain angle like a beary grin, not dissimilar I like to think, to the smile of Rick Mueller himself.