"Big Bald Bear" by Devin James Leonard

My dad never let me come to Jasper’s with him, and that was likely ‘cause he didn’t want his boy to see him and his buddies turn into animals when they were boozing.

Quickest way there, you walked out back of our house and hiked straight up the hill into the woods, then cut to the west until you mosey into a clearing, and there was Jasper’s place. The adults would drink in the garage, with the big door rolled up, the lights on, and music bursting from the surround sound speakers nailed to the ceiling for all the county to hear. Sometimes I’d catch it from home, half a mile away. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a start, ears ringing, and sounding like Lynyrd Skynyrd had come back from the dead for a reunion concert outside my window. Longer the nights dragged on, the louder the music would get, the reason being, my old man had once told me, was because drinking made you hard of hearing, so the more they drank, the more that volume knob got cranked.

Arnie and I would sneak up there on occasion, but we never saw nothing worth seeing besides a group of men carrying on and hollering like kids, acting like they were our age instead of the full-grown adults they were alleged to be. Oh, but there was a calendar of ladies posing in the nude tacked above a mechanic’s toolbox, which was always a treat to set our eyes upon when a new month rolled around.

First time we ventured there, we heard the music long before we arrived. Meant they had quite a load on. Was easy to find the place if you brought a flashlight. My dad had trekked through them woods so often, he’d stomped himself a trail, and even if you couldn’t locate the path, you had the loud tunes to keep you going in the right direction.

They were in a good mood this night—my dad, Jasper, and two others I’d never met before but came to know as Shot Scott and Johnny Fencepost. Arnie and I waddled in, and they let us stay awhile, even gave us our first sip of alcohol, one beer each, before they sent us back on our way.

As we departed, my dad told me, “Stay your ass home now, Daryl. This place is for us grown-ups. Not you kids.”

Well, being twelve-year-olds, we didn’t listen. We kept going back. Same as before, the men would give us a beer and allow us to hang around until we finished them, and then they’d send us packing. Arnie took a liking to the drink. Not so much the flavor, he said, but the way it made him feel.

“If I feel this good after one beer,” he said, “I want to know what two or three or four will do.”

Me? I had enjoyed the relaxing effects and slight inebriation from a single beer, but watching my dad and his pals act like deaf, dumb fools was reason enough not to wish to partake in more than one. Arnie was dead set on going back, though, and so I joined him.

This time I’m telling now, making our way up the hill the second time that night, we searched for the trail and realized too late that we’d forgotten our flashlights.

“Shit,” I said, “if one beer makes us this forgetful, I’m not so sure I want to drink another.”

“Don’t be such a wuss,” Arnie said.

“I’m not scared. I’m saying I can’t see.”

“We don’t need to see. Just follow the music.”

I heard it off to my left, the faint reverberation of heavy rock cannon fire. Only as soon as we started in that direction, the music cut out, and all I heard next was the trees shifting in the summer breeze and the skittering of nocturnal varmints at my feet.

“Arnie, where’re you at?” It was pitch black, no moon or stars. I shut my eyes because, hell, they weren’t doing me any good open, and stuck out my arms, swatting and patting the air, till I felt my hand touch Arnie’s shoulder.

“Found me,” he said.

“Now what?”

“Just keep moving in the same direction. Try not to get turned around.”

“Which way might that be?”

“The way you’re facing now.”

I could determine by touch that Arnie was facing the opposite direction from me.

“You’re not facing forward,” I said.

“Am too.”

“Well, one of us is looking the wrong way, because I’m looking this way.”

“Which way are you looking?”

“Over here.”

“Where’s that?”

“Christ’s sake, the opposite of where you’re looking.”

Arnie belched. “Oh, boy.”

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“No, I’m not,” he said. “I just lost my sense of direction.”

“Because you’re drunk.”

“I can handle my liquor better than you.”

“Well, we didn’t drink liquor—we drank beer—which you clearly can’t handle.”

“You wanna pitch a tent and camp here all night, or should we quit arguing and find our way out?”

I could have sworn I was facing the correct direction and confidently decided we go my way. Few steps into my journey, my shoes crunching down on sticks, Arnie let out a gasp behind me.

“Wait up, Daryl! I can’t see!”

“Just figured that out, did you? Here, take my hand,” I said, sticking out my arm.

“I ain’t holding your goddamn hand.”

“Then quit your whining.”

“Fine, where you at?”

I kept my hand extended, hearing him scuffle closer. His hand landed on my forearm and gripped it tight with a sweaty palm. “Go slow,” he said.

“Who’s the wuss now?”

“Okay, I admit it. I’m spooked. We’d better get there quick,” he said, “before the fear sobers me up.”

It was a long, careful walk, but it didn’t take too much time to spot the garage light slowly emerging from the sheet of blackness. Once it was in our sights, Arnie took his greasy hand off my arm and sped off like a shipwreck victim paddling toward a lighthouse. I maintained my cautious pace, as the moving in the dark, on top of the buzz the one beer had given me, had disoriented me to where all I wanted once I reached the garage was a glass of cold water and an invasive lightbulb shining in my peepers.

I stumbled out of the brush and into the driveway, and found Arnie standing stock-still outside the open garage door. Gravel crunched loudly under my feet as I approached. Arnie whipped his face at me, placing a finger to his tight lips, gesturing for me to be quiet. I tiptoed closer.

Earlier, it had been my dad, Jasper, and Shot Scott, but now it was just Jasper. At the far end of the garage was the refrigerator, where they housed their beer, and leaning against it, fast asleep, was Jasper. He was not sitting in front of it, but leaning against it whilst standing. His eyes were shut, his legs were stiff, and his upper body lightly swayed. His pants and shirt had been removed, revealing a droopy gut that sagged so far down his crotch that his tighty whities were barely visible. If he had had to rock an urgent piss, I bet he’d likely need a five-minute head start to locate his dick before he wet himself. Jasper was bald and burly, big as a hairless grizzly bear, and even resembled one that I’d seen on this animal documentary channel. The bear had been standing on its hind legs, rubbing its back against a tree to scratch an itch it couldn’t reach. The way Jasper was wobbling from side to side, it looked like he was using the fridge as his back scratcher. He was teetering ever so slightly and seemed on the brink of tipping over at any moment. He’d lean forward, snoring away like an oinking pig, then fall back and bop his head on the fridge, which momentarily halted his snuffles.

“Where are the others?” Arnie whispered.

“My dad must have taken the road home,” I said.

“Think there’re beers in the house?”

“No, they keep them right there,” I said, nodding at the fridge.

“Fine, let’s beat it.”

“Hold up. Don’t you want a beer?”

“How?”

“Roust the bear.”

Arnie considered Jasper and shifted from one foot to the other before shaking his head. “Naw,” he said.

“This’ll be fun.” I cupped my hands around my mouth and screamed out, “Jasper! Wake up!”

Arnie leaped at me, wide-eyed and waving his hands in the air, but aside from Jasper’s constant rocking back and forth, he made no reaction to my voice.

“He ain’t waking up,” I said, no longer whispering. I stepped under the roof of the garage and picked up two empty green beer bottles off a nearby workbench. Stepped back outside and said, “Lob these at him.”

“Man, what the hell for?” Arnie said.

“Why the hell not? I’ll smash ‘em on the floor, he’ll wake up, mosey on into the house, and you’ll get your beer.”

“What if you hit him?”

“I won’t,” I said. “Ready?”

Arnie stepped off and hid around the side of the garage, his head sticking out from the corner. In my right hand, my throwing hand, I held a bottle by the neck, cocked my arm back, and pitched it into the garage, hard as I could. The bottle soared straight at Jasper’s face, and his head tipped to the side just in time to evade the glass projectile. It hit the fridge two inches from his ear and exploded into a million pieces. The sound was loud, but either Jasper was in a deep sleep, or he was deaf from all the drinking, or perhaps both. Instead of waking, he only twitched from the flying bits of glass that hit him in the face, neck, and shoulder. His eyes fluttered like a dog dreaming, but stayed shut.

Just then, as I was shifting the second bottle from my left hand to my throwing hand, Jasper tipped forward and dropped like a felled tree face-first on the concrete floor. Man was so large, I felt the ground shake beneath my feet. His face made a gruesome splatting noise that sounded like a tomato squashed under a boot. He woke up with a gasp, his bloody face snapping up toward us, his nose flat and gushing.

“Jesus, Jasper, you all right?” I said.

Jasper pushed himself up on his knees and waved his hands in front of his eyes as though he couldn’t find his face. Then he gently touched his nose and screeched like a dog that got kicked in the balls. “My schnoz!” he said. “What the hell happened?”

“You fell,” I said.

Jasper swung his gaping eyes at all the bits of broken glass around him. He glared at me and said, “You throwing bottles at me, boy?”

“Huh? Naw.”

His furrowed brow deepened, his face contorting. He pursed his bloody lips. Blood was running all the way down his chest, dripping down his fat, glistening belly. “The hell’s that you got there, then?” he said.

I looked where he was looking, which happened to be the other bottle I was holding down by my leg. I said, “Oh.”

Jasper roared like King Kong, jumped to his feet, and charged forward. Arnie took off behind the garage, and I ran the other way, both of us ending up in the same place, the back of the structure, crashing into each other in the dark. 

Neither of us was certain which direction Jasper went, only hearing a torturous howl out front of the garage and him shouting, “Wait till I tell your daddy what you did, boy!”

We sprinted to the woods, and not long after, Arnie said, “Slow down, Daryl. He ain’t coming.”

I hit the brakes before I wound up smashing into a tree. I was huffing and puffing, breathlessly hissing like an opossum backed into a corner. We regained our composure and walked the rest of the way, and at some point, I realized I was still clutching the other beer bottle I hadn’t thrown, and chucked it into the bushes.

We were locked out of my house when we got to it. My bedroom was on the second floor, so we climbed up the lattice to my window, crawled through, and just as we were about to lie down and crash, the not-so-distant screeching of classic rock tunes traveled to my ears. Wasn’t coming from Jasper’s garage, but the inside of my house.

I went downstairs and found my dad sitting at the kitchen table, drinking and smoking.

“Early for you to be back, ain’t it?” I said.

“What are you doing up?” he said.

Seeing as Jasper had threatened to tell my dad what happened, I told him first. He kept a straight face through it all, but near the end, he ducked his head and scratched his nose, containing the smile sneaking across his face like sunlight peeking through a curtain. I could tell he was enjoying the story, but didn’t want to show it.

When I finished, he said, “All that trouble for another beer, uh?”

I nodded. “Beers we didn’t get.”

“Hell, I know that. Every time we’re in the garage, Jasper falls asleep leaning on the fridge. The sumbitch is impossible to move. Can’t nobody get to the beers. That’s why I’m back home. Where’s your buddy?”

“Upstairs.”

“Go get him,” he said.

I went up and got Arnie out of bed, and when we came downstairs, my dad had two cans of beer on the table, the aluminum sweating in the heat. He cracked each can and slid them over to us. “You earned them,” he said.

“How so?” I said.

“Might not have scored yourselves a beer,” my dad chuckled, “but you’re the first to move Jasper when he’s passed out and rooted in front of the fridge like a drunk stump. Cheers, boys.”

We toasted our beers, clanking cans with my dad, and after that beverage, Arnie and I drank two more each. That made it four apiece, and all eight ended up on the bed later on while we slept.

I never wanted to go back to the garage or drink alcohol ever again. Whether it was the hangover or the fear of the big bald bear’s retaliation, I swore off both for a great long while. Devin James Leonard’s tales often take place in rural, blue-collar settings, featuring working-class characters who go to great lengths to avoid legitimate work. His writing has appeared in over forty magazines and anthologies, including Flash Fiction Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, BULL, Maudlin House, Literally Stories, and Fiction on the Web. His debut novel, The Buddy Snatchers, was recently acquired by Crystal Lake Publishing and is set for release in October 2026. You can find his publications on Instagram @devinjamesleonard