Chasing the Bear by Robert B. Parker Page B

me.”
    “That kid been crybabying about me?” the man said.
    “That kid is my son,” my father said. “The gentlemen leaning on the wall are his uncles. We’re here to kick your ass.”
    The man looked at his five friends and stood up.
    “Yeah?” he said.
    They all stood up. My father hit the man and the fight started. Pearl and I stayed quiet, watching. Behind me, I heard the bartender calling the police.
    By the time the cops arrived, both the men who had teased me were out cold on the floor. The man in the red plaid shirt was lying outside on the sidewalk. I don’t quite know how that happened, except that my uncle Patrick had something to do with it. The other three guys were sitting on the floor looking woozy.
    The cop in charge, a sergeant named Travers, knew my father.
    “Sam,” he said. “You mind telling me what you boys’re doing?”
    “They harassed my kid on the street, Cecil,” my father said. “Stole his milk.”
    Travers nodded and looked at the bartender.
    “I believe I been telling you, Tate,” he said, “to keep the drunks inside the saloon.”
    “They got no call to come in here and beat up my customers,” the bartender said.
    “Well,” Travers said. “They got some call. Your kid gets bothered by a couple drunks, you got some call.”
    He looked around the room and then at my father.
    “Maybe not this much call,” he said. “Probably gonna get fined, Sam.”
    “Worth the money,” my father said.
    Travers smiled.
    “Known it was you three,” he said, “I’d have brought more backup.”
    “Ain’t supposed to bring no dog in here either,” the bartender said. “Board of Health rule.”
    “We’ll go hard on them ’bout that,” Travers said.
    My father came over and took me off the bar.
    “Probably have to appear in court to pay the fine,” Travers said.
    “Lemme know,” my father said.
    He walked toward the door. Pearl and I followed him. My uncles closed in behind us.
    And we left.

Chapter 4
    “How come he didn’t arrest you?” I said to my father when we got home.
    “Known Cecil most of my life,” my father said.
    “But wasn’t it against the law?” I said. “What you did?”
    “There’s legal,” my father said, “and there’s right. Cecil knows the difference.”
    “And what you did was right,” I said.
    “Yep. Cecil would have done it too.”
    “How you supposed to know that what you’re doing is right?” I said.
    “Ain’t all that hard,” my uncle Patrick said. “Most people know what’s right. Sometimes they can’t do it.”
    “Or don’t want to,” Cash said.
    “But how do you know?” I said.
    My father sat back and thought a minute.
    “You can’t know,” he said. “But you think about it before you do it, if you got time, and then you trust yourself.”
    “How ’bout if you don’t have time to think and you done it and it was wrong?” I said.
    “Did it,” my father corrected me.
    He was a bear for me saying things right. Even when he didn’t always say it right himself. When he wasn’t around, I talked like all the other kids talked, and I think my father knew that. As long as I knew how to talk right, then I could choose.
    “Sometimes you make a mistake,” he said. “Everybody does.”
    “It sounds too hard,” I said. “How do I know I can trust myself?”
    “It’ll be pretty much instinct,” my father said. “If you been raised right.”
    “How do I know I’m being raised right?” I said.
    My father looked at my uncles. All three of them smiled.
    “None of us knows that,” my father said.
    I nodded. It was a lot to think about.
    “How ’bout, what’s right is what feels good afterwards,” my father said. “It’s in a book, by a famous writer.”
    My father wasn’t educated. Neither were my uncles. And they didn’t know what they were supposed to read. So they read everything. Not long after I was born, my father bought a secondhand set of great books, bound in red leather, and he and Patrick