Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories

by Terry Bisson

  COMMONWEALTH IN UPROAR

  CARIBBEAN MEMBERS REGISTER SHARP PROTEST

  BRITS TO BASH BIG APPLE?

  The British and American papers were held up side by side on BBC. Navigation experts were produced, with pointers and maps, who estimated that on its current course, the south (now north) of England would nose into the crook of New York harbor, where Long Island meets New Jersey; so that Dover would be in sight of the New York City skyline. Plymouth was expected to end up off Montauk, and Brighton somewhere in the middle, where there were no place names on the satellite pictures. Harrison kept a map under the bar for settling bets, and when he pulled it out after Our Daily Log, Mr. Fox was alarmed (but not surprised) to see that the area where Brighton was headed was dominated by a city whose name evoked images too lurid to visualize:

  Babylon.

  On the day that Lizzie got her first visit from Scotland Yard, Mr. Fox saw a charter fishing boat holding steady off the shore, making about three knots. It was the Judy J out of Islip, and the rails were packed with people waving. Mr. Fox waved back, and waved Anthony’s paw for him. An airplane flew low over the beach towing a sign. On the telly that night, Mr. Fox could see on the satellite picture that Brighton was already in the lee of Long Island; that was why the wind was dropping. The BBC showed clips from King Kong. “New York City is preparing to evacuate,” said the announcer, “fearing that the shock of collision with ancient England will cause the fabled skyscrapers of Manhattan to tumble.” He seemed pleased by the prospect, as did the Canadian earthquake expert he interviewed; as, indeed, did Harrison. New York City officials were gloomier; they feared the panic more than the actual collision. The next morning there were two boats off the shore, and in the afternoon, five. The waves, coming in at an angle, looked tentative after the bold swells of the mid-Atlantic. At tea, Lizzie was visited for the second time by Scotland Yard. Something seemed to have gone out of her, some of her fight, her spunk. Something in the air outside the tea room was different too, but it wasn’t until he and Anthony approached the cricket ground that Mr. Fox realized what it was. It was the wind. It was gone altogether. The boys were struggling to raise the same kites that had flown so eagerly only a few days before. As soon as they stopped running, the kites came down. Anthony ran and barked wildly, as if calling on Heaven for assistance, but the boys went home before dark, disgusted.

  That night, Mr. Fox stepped outside the Pig & Thistle for a moment after supper. The street was as still as he had always imagined a graveyard might be. Had everyone left Brighton, or were they just staying indoors? According to Our Daily Log, the feared panic in New York City had failed to materialize. Video clips showed horrendous traffic jams, but they were apparently normal. The King was . . . but just as the BBC was about to cut to Buckingham Palace, the picture began to flicker and an American game show came on. “Who were the Beatles,” said a young woman standing in a sort of bright pulpit. It was a statement and not a question.

  “The telly has arrived before us,” said Harrison, turning off the sound but leaving the picture. “Shall we celebrate with a whiskey? My treat tonight.”

  * * *

  Mr. Fox’s room, left to him by Mr. Singh, the original owner of the Pig & Thistle, was on the top floor under a gable. It was small; he and Anthony shared a bed. That night they were awakened by a mysterious, musical scraping sound. “Woof,” said Anthony, in his sleep. Mr. Fox listened with trepidation; he thought at first that someone, a thief certainly, was moving the piano out of the public room downstairs. Then he remembered that the piano had been sold twenty years before. There came a deeper rumble from far away—and then silence. A bell rang across town. A horn honked; a door slammed. Mr. Fox looked at the time on the branch bank across the street (he had positioned his bed to save the cost of a clock): It was 4:36 A.M., Eastern Standard time. There were no more unusual sounds, and the bell stopped ringing. Anthony had already drifted back to sleep, but Mr. Fox lay awake, with his eyes open. The anxiety he had felt for the past several days (indeed, years) was mysteriously gone, and he was enjoying a pleasant feeling of anticipation that was entirely new to him.

  * * *

  “Hold still,” Mr. Fox told Anthony as he brushed him and snapped on his little tweed suit. The weather was getting colder. Was it his imagination, or was the light through the window over the breakfast table different as the Finn served him his boiled egg and toast and marmalade and tea with milk? There was a fog, the first in weeks. The street outside the inn was deserted, and as he crossed the King’s Esplanade and climbed the twelve steps, Mr. Fox saw that the Boardwalk was almost empty too. There were only two or three small groups, standing at the railing, staring at the fog as if at a blank screen.

  There were no waves, no wake; the water lapped at the sand with nervous, pointless motions like an old lady’s fingers on a shawl. Mr. Fox took a place at the rail. Soon the fog began to lift; and emerging in the near distance, across a gray expanse of water, like the image on the telly when it has first been turned on, Mr. Fox saw a wide, flat beach. Near the center was a cement bathhouse. Knots of people stood on the sand, some of them by parked cars. One of them shot a gun into the air; another waved a striped flag. Mr. Fox waved Anthony’s paw for him.

  America (and this could only be America) didn’t seem very developed. Mr. Fox had expected, if not skyscrapers, at least more buildings. A white lorry pulled up beside the bathhouse. A man in uniform got out, lit a cigarette, looked through binoculars. The lorry said GOYA on the side.

  “Welcome to Long Island,” said a familiar voice. It was the African. Mr. Fox nodded but didn’t say anything. He could see the girl on the African’s other side, looking through binoculars. He wondered if she and the GOYA man were watching each other. “If you expected skyscrapers, they’re fifty miles west of here, in Dover,” said the African.

  “West?”

  “Dover’s west now, since England’s upside down. That’s why the sun rises over Upper Beeding.”

  Mr. Fox nodded. Of course. He had never seen the sun rising, though he felt no need to say so.

  “Everyone’s gone to Dover. You can see Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, all from Dover.”

  Mr. Fox nodded. Reassured by the girl’s silence so far, he asked in a whisper, “So what place is this; where are we now?”

  “Jones Beach.”

  “Not Babylon?”

  “You bloody wish,” said the girl.

  * * *

  Mr. Fox was exhausted. Lizzie was being harried like the fox she herself had hunted with such bloodthirsty glee in Scotland. As Major Mackintosh closed in, she seemed to take a perverse pleasure in the hopelessness of her situation: as if it bestowed on her a vulnerability she had never before possessed, a treasure more precious to her than the Eustace family diamonds. “Mr. Fox?” asked Mrs. Oldenshield.

  “Mr. Fox?” She was shaking his shoulder. “Oh, I’m quite all right,” he said. The book had fallen off his lap and she had caught him sleeping. Mrs. Oldenshield had a letter for him. (A letter for him!) It was from his niece, even though it was only the tenth of the month. There was nothing to do but open it. Mr. Fox began, as usual, at the ending, to make sure there were no surprises: But this time there were. “Until then,” he read. As he scanned back through, he saw mention of “two ferries a day,” and he couldn’t read on. How had she gotten Mrs. Oldenshield’s address? Did she expect him to come to America? He folded the letter and put it into his pocket. He couldn’t read on.

  That evening BBC was back on the air. The lights of Manhattan could be seen on live video from atop the cliffs of Dover, shimmering in the distance through the rain (for England had brought rain). One-day passes were being issued by both governments, and queues were already six blocks long. The East (now West) Kent Ferry from Folkestone to Coney Island was booked solid for the next three weeks. There was talk of service to Eastbourne and Brighton as well. The next morning after breakfast, Mr. Fox lingered over his tea, exam
ining a photograph of his niece, which he had discovered in his letter box while putting her most recent (and most alarming) letter away. She was a serious-looking nine-year-old with a yellow ribbon in her light brown hair. Her mother, Mr. Fox’s sister, Clare, held an open raincoat around them both. All this was thirty years ago but already her hair was streaked with gray. The Finn cleared the plates, which was the signal for Mr. Fox and Anthony to leave. There was quite a crowd on the Boardwalk, near the West Pier, watching the first ferry from America steaming across the narrow sound. Or was “steaming” the word? It was probably powered by some new type of engine. Immigration officers stood idly by, with their clipboards closed against the remnants of the fog (for England had brought fog). Mr. Fox was surprised to see Harrison at the end of the pier, wearing a windbreaker and carrying a paper bag that was greasy, as if it contained food. Mr. Fox had never seen Harrison in the day, or outside, before; in fact, he had never seen his legs. Harrison was wearing striped pants, and before Mr. Fox could speak to him, he sidled away like a crab into the crowd. There was a jolt as the ferry struck the pier. Mr. Fox stepped back just as Americans started up the ramp like an invading army. In the front were teenagers, talking among themselves as if no one else could hear; older people, almost as loud, followed behind them. They seemed no worse than the Americans who came to Brighton every summer, only not as well dressed.

  “Woof, woof!”

  Anthony was yipping over his shoulder, and Mr. Fox turned and saw a little girl with light brown hair and a familiar yellow ribbon. “Emily?” he said, recognizing his niece from the picture. Or so he thought. “Uncle Anthony?” The voice came from behind him again. He turned and saw a lady in a faded Burberry. The fog was blowing away and behind her he could see, for the first time that day, the drab American shore.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” the woman said. At first Mr. Fox thought she was his sister, Clare, just as she had been thirty years before, when she had brought her daughter to Brighton to meet him. But of course Clare had been dead for twenty years; and the woman was Emily, who had then been almost ten, and was now almost forty; and the girl was her own child (the niece who had been growing up inexorably) who was almost ten. Children, it seemed, were almost always almost something.

  “Uncle Anthony?” The child was holding out her arms. Mr. Fox was startled, thinking she was about to hug him; then he saw what she wanted and handed her the dog. “You can pet him,” he said. “His name is Anthony too.”

  “Really?”

  “Since no one ever calls us both at the same time, it creates no confusion,” said Mr. Fox.

  “Can he walk?”

  “Certainly he can walk. He just doesn’t often choose to.”

  A whistle blew and the ferry left with its load of Britons for America. Mr. Fox saw Harrison at the bow, holding his greasy bag with one hand and the rail with the other, looking a little sick, or perhaps apprehensive. Then he took his niece and great niece for a stroll along the Boardwalk. The girl, Clare—she was named after her grandmother—walked ahead with Anthony, while Mr. Fox and his niece, Emily, followed behind. The other Americans had all drifted into the city looking for restaurants, except for the male teenagers, who were crowding into the amusement parlors along the Esplanade, which had opened for the day.

  “If the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, and so forth,” said Emily, mysteriously, when Mr. Fox asked if she’d had a nice crossing. Her brown hair was streaked with gray. He recognized the coat now; it had been her mother’s, his sister’s, Clare’s. He was trying to think of where to take them for lunch. The Finn at the Pig & Thistle served a pretty fair shepherd’s pie, but he didn’t want them to see where he lived. They were content, however, with fish and chips on the Boardwalk; certainly Anthony seemed pleased to have chips fed to him, one by one, by the little girl named for the sister Mr. Fox had met only twice: once when she had been a student at Cambridge (or was it Oxford? he got them confused) about to marry an American; and once when she had returned with her daughter for a visit.

  “Her father, your grandfather, was an Air Raid Warden,” Mr. Fox told Emily. “He was killed in action, as it were, when a house collapsed during a rescue; and when his wife (well, she wasn’t exactly his wife) died giving birth to twins a week later, they were each taken in by one of those whose life he had saved. It was a boarding house, all single people, so there was no way to keep the two together, you see; the children, I mean. Oh dear, I’m afraid I’m talking all in a heap.”

  “That’s okay,” said Emily.

  “At any rate, when Mr. Singh died and his Inn was sold, my room was reserved for me, in accordance with his will, in perpetuity, which means as long as I remain in it. But if I were to move, you see, I would lose my patrimony entire.”

  “I see,” said Emily. “And where is this place you go for tea?”

  * * *

  And so they spent the afternoon, and a rainy and an English afternoon it was, in the cozy tearoom with the faded purple drapes at the west (formerly east) end of Moncton Street where Mrs. Oldenshield kept Mr. Fox’s complete set of Trollope on a high shelf, so he wouldn’t have to carry them back and forth in all kinds of weather. While Clare shared her cake with Anthony, and then let him doze on her lap, Mr. Fox took down the handsome leather-bound volumes, one by one, and showed them to his niece and great-niece.

  “They are, I believe, the first complete edition,” he said. “Chapman and Hall.”

  “And were they your father’s?” asked Emily. “My grandfather’s?”

  “Oh no!” said Mr. Fox. “They belonged to Mr. Singh. His grandmother was English and her own great uncle had been, I believe, in the postal service in Ireland with the author, for whom I was, if I am not mistaken, named.” He showed Emily the place in The Eustace Diamonds where he would have been reading that very afternoon, “were it not,” he said, “for this rather surprisingly delightful family occasion.”

  “Mother, is he blushing,” said Clare. It was a statement and not a question.

  It was almost six when Emily looked at her watch—a man’s watch, Mr. Fox noted—and said, “We had better get back to the pier, or we’ll miss the ferry.” The rain had diminished to a misty drizzle as they hurried along the Boardwalk. “I must apologize for our English weather,” said Mr. Fox, but his niece stopped him with a hand on his sleeve. “Don’t brag,” she said, smiling. She saw Mr. Fox looking at her big steel watch and explained that it had been found among her mother’s things; she had always assumed it had been her grandfather’s. Indeed, it had several dials, and across the face it said: “Civil Defense, Brighton.” Across the bay, through the drizzle as through a lace curtain, they could see the sun shining on the sand and parked cars.

  “Do you still live in, you know . . .” Mr. Fox hardly knew how to say the name of the place without sounding vulgar, but his niece came to his rescue.

  “Babylon? Only for another month. We’re moving to Deer Park as soon as my divorce is final.”

  “I’m so glad,” said Mr. Fox. “Deer Park sounds much nicer for the child.”

  “Can I buy Anthony a goodbye present?” Clare asked. Mr. Fox gave her some English money (even though the shops were all taking American) and she bought a paper of chips and fed them to the dog one by one. Mr. Fox knew Anthony would be flatulent for days, but it seemed hardly the sort of thing one mentioned. The ferry had pulled in and the tourists who had visited America for the day were streaming off, loaded with cheap gifts. Mr. Fox looked for Harrison, but if he was among them, he missed him. The whistle blew two warning toots. “It was kind of you to come,” he said.

  Emily smiled. “No big deal,” she said. “It was mostly your doing anyway. I could never have made it all the way to England if England hadn’t come here first. I don’t fly.”

  “Nor do I.” Mr. Fox held out his hand but Emily gave him a hug, and then a kiss, and insisted that Clare give him both as well. When that was over, she pulled off the watch (it was fitted with an expandable band)
and slipped it over his thin, sticklike wrist. “It has a compass built in,” she said. “I’m sure it was your father’s. And Mother always . . .”

  The final boarding whistle swallowed her last words. “You can be certain I’ll take good care of it,” Mr. Fox called out. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Mother, is he crying,” said Clare. It was a statement and not a question.

  “Let’s you and me watch our steps,” said Emily.

  “Woof,” said Anthony, and mother and daughter ran down (for the pier was high, and the boat was low) the gangplank. Mr. Fox waved until the ferry had backed out and turned, and everyone on board had gone inside, out of the rain, for it had started to rain in earnest.

  That night after dinner he was disappointed to find the bar unattended. “Anyone seen Harrison?” he asked. He had been looking forward to showing him the watch.

  “I can get you a drink as well as him,” said the Finn. She carried her broom with her and leaned it against the bar. She poured a whiskey and said, “Just indicate if you need another.” She thought indicate meant ask. The King was on the telly, getting into a long car with the President. Armed men stood all around them. Mr. Fox went to bed.

  * * *

  The next morning, Mr. Fox got up before Anthony. The family visit had been pleasant; indeed, wonderful; but he felt a need to get back to normal. While taking his constitutional, he watched the first ferry come in, hoping (somewhat to his surprise) that he might see Harrison in it; but no such luck. There were no English, and few Americans. The fog rolled in and out, like the same page on a book being turned over and over. At tea, Mr. Fox found Lizzie confessing (just as he had known she someday must) that the jewels had been in her possession all along. Now that they were truly gone, everyone seemed relieved, even the Eustace family lawyer. It seemed a better world without the diamonds.