Free Tunes for Bears to Dance To by Robert Cormier Page A

Pleading in his voice.
    Taking a deep breath, Henry ran out of the doorway, brushing by the grocer, sending him spinning, out into a torrent of rain, instantly soaked, shivering, bumping against a mailbox, almost falling. Regaining his balance, he looked back to see the grocer standing in the rain, wet and dripping, a pathetic figure calling, “Please, Henry, come back, you must come back.”
    Henry shook his head, whirled, ran again, ignoring the rain and his soaked clothing, ran until, out of breath, he paused at the entrance of an abandoned theater. Shrank into the shadows, shivering, not from the rain but because he knew at last what Mr. Hairston was.
    He huddled miserably in the doorway, waiting for the rain to stop.

T hey moved back to Frenchtown three weeks later, the day after his father was discharged from the hospital. “It was a mistake coming here,” his mother said. “You can’t run away from the past. We tried to forget Eddie and that was wrong.”
    His father was not cured, of course, and still sat quietly for hours at a time. But he smiled sometimes and actually helped pack up their belongings for the trip home. “It’ll be good to go back,” he said as he closed a suitcase. Henry and his mother exchanged smiles of gratitude.
    In the days following the destruction of the old man’s village, Henry avoided walking by the grocery store and did not approach the craft center. He also was careful to avoid encountering the old man at eight in the morning and late in the afternoon.
    He looked in the newspaper for a story, either about the exhibition at City Hall or the smashing of the village, but did not see one.
    He did not have nightmares but awoke sometimes to a strange sound in his bedroom and realized that the sound was himself crying.
    He began hanging around the yard behind the store, hoping to catch a glimpse of Doris. Occasionally, a woman appeared on the second-floor piazza and hung clothes on a reel or banged a mop on the banister, sending a blizzard of dust down below.
    Finally, he saw Doris coming down the stairs, moving tentatively as usual, library books cradled in her arms.
    He waited until she was into the alley, then stepped in front of her.
    Startled to see him, she drew away. “Are you all right?” she asked, whispering even away from the store.
    “I quite my job,” he said.
    “He said he fired you.”
    Henry shook his head. “Don’t believe him. I know he’s your father but he’s. …”
    “What?” she asked. “What is he?” Curiosity curling her words, she leaned forward, as if she was about to learn for the first time who her father was.
    Henry avoided the word he wanted to use. How could tell the girl that her father was an evil man? “Your father’s weak, Doris,” he said. “And he’safraid. You have to stand up to him. Don’t let him call you clumsy and hurt you anymore.”
    She stepped back, looking fearfully over his shoulder, and he knew she was looking to see if her father had followed her.
    “He got me to do a bad thing, Doris,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it but I did it. Then he wanted to give me rewards for doing it. But I didn’t take them.”
    He could see that his words meant nothing to her and he knew he could never explain to her, or to anyone, even a priest in confession, what had really happened that night.
    “The important thing is that I stood up to him,” he said. “And there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing. Stand up to him, Doris.”
    “He’s my father,” she said, with simple terrible truth.
    He knew then what he had to do. Even though he was moving away, he had to help her. Had to come back, whenever he could, no matter the distance, to see her. He didn’t know how he could do this but knew he was pledged to do so.
    “I’ve got to go,” she said. “He expects me back to help in the store. He gets mad if I’m gone too long.”
    “We’re moving, Doris. Back to Frenchtown,” he said.
    A flash of something in her