The Angels of Our Better Beasts

by Jerome Stueart

  The Gryphon looked into Lha’s soul. He could feel it—hot, searing, judging eyes.

  “No,” he said, finally.

  The Gryphon blinked. “Another lie you’ve been told. That you would get any Wisdom at all.”

  “Please, save the city and the people of the Holy City. They protected you.”

  “They tricked me. They tricked you.” The Gryphon’s face came down to his own. “You tricked me.”

  “I didn’t trick you—”

  “Your father used you as a baby. He distracted me with chit chat while you crawled on my gold. Your clothes snagged a coin. I could have killed you—he knew that. But he had eight other sons. You were expendable. But I can’t read the hearts of babies, and if I did, they would all be the same.” He looked away. “None of your people are worth saving. As far as I’m concerned, you were all in on the plot.”

  The Hundred Bells pealed again. They both looked to the crest of morning above the cave’s open crevice. Lha said, “Please save the city! We’ll be better people.”

  “Will all of you?” The Gryphon pushed his head against the boy, backing him up. “Will everyone be better? Can you vouch for the hearts of every one of your tricky, deceitful holy people?”

  Lha stumbled off the pile of gold. “I’ll make them.” He faltered. “I’m king.”

  “How will you promise that they will be perfectly good?”

  Lha’s back slapped against the cave wall. The Gryphon held him there with his head and a paw, gazing through one slowly brightening eye.

  “I can try.”

  “Whom can you vouch for?”

  “Me. I can vouch for me.”

  “You?”

  “I won’t lie. I won’t be bad. Ever. I’ll be a good king.” He began to cry.

  The Gryphon shouted, “You’ll never ever make a mistake. Ever?”

  “Never! I promise to be good. I’ll be good. I’ll be good.” The boy folded like a piece of paper standing against the wall, curled over the Gryphon’s paw, and cried deep heaves and tears that wouldn’t stop now.

  The Gryphon watched him. Listening. Assessing. The boy shook. His fingers held tightly onto the Gryphon’s feathered paw.

  “You might one day be a good king, but you’ve had a very bad first night. I’m a benevolent creature, but I’ve had a very long sleep—nine years too long.” He moved his face close to the boy, whispering, “I, too, have been frequently deceived by the hearts of men. I know that these tears are about betrayal, not merely grief. I, too, have been used like this. I’ll take your trade. I’ll protect your city and your people as long as you never make a mistake ever again.”

  He breathed through the holes on his beak, a mist over the boy’s wet face—a thick, musky smell, like spices and death.

  King Lha’s head became foggy. He could not stand. His legs gave way, and he fell on the gold.

  “But you’ll pardon me for hedging my bet. Sleep now, King Lha. The innocent are rarely wise, and the wise are rarely innocent. But maybe you made the wisest choice. Maybe the Wisdom did come to you. I, at least, will save the city. But age brings both wisdom and corruption. If I left you awake, you’d betray me. But if you are years asleep, you’ll remain pure. I would call this a just punishment—but tonight, child of a deceitful father, a deceitful people—” he paused, stretching his wings, preparing for flight, for battle, “it will feel like peace.”

  Bear With Me

  Evelyn leaned her suitcase against a camper shell covered in snow. She felt the Yukon burn her cheeks with cold, felt her nose hairs freeze into pins. She savoured what she called “the moment before she met Bear face-to-face,” where she was prepared to overlook any minor flaws—lack of flossing, hammertoes, belching. She’d lost ten pounds, had her hair cut, took skiing lessons. She felt amazing and prepared herself not to care if he should back away in fear or hold up the sign of the cross to protect himself—or worse, if he should show the subtle facial signs of disappointment.

  The big moment would have happened at the airport, but he’d asked someone else to pick her up. She adjusted for his lack of sensitivity, hoping it was an unavoidable emergency—some salmon at the Fish Ladder needing directions to the sea, perhaps.

  His small house had red shingle siding and a blue roof. Had she written this real estate ad, she would have emphasized “comfortable and cozy,” evoked fireplace, friends, wine, and photos on the fridge. Very attractive. She flexed her gloved fingers twice and knocked.

  The door opened slow and creaky, like it did in every horror movie she’d seen. Muddy boots sat against the wall below a blue parka. A set of Christmas lights draped over a kitchen window in the next room, giving the purple walls a lavender glow.

  “Come on in. I’m changing,” came his familiar voice. Thank God.

  Here she was, like women who had come a hundred years ago, lugging their tons of supplies across a snowy pass into a gold-rush town. She hauled her luggage, with no help from the boyfriend, and walked into a potentially heartbreaking house. Damn, I’m adventurous. But, with both of them in their thirties, she couldn’t afford to be frightened. She’d flown 3,000 miles already; what was one last lug?

  Two rooms away, something lumbered into the light of a living room lamp. It was a large brown bear walking on his hind legs. She backed into the door as it closed. She remembered advice she’d read about meeting this kind of bear. Back away slowly, speaking strongly to the bear. Appear larger with coat and backpack and arms raised. Never run. Instead, she dropped her luggage. They stood two rooms apart, the ghostly lavender kitchen between them.

  Its mouth moved and Bear’s voice came out. “You might be startled,” it said spreading its arms and claws pleadingly.

  She felt a scream falling like sediment into her gut. She could see no lines in the costume; saw the jaw hinge and unhinge. Saliva pearled between his teeth, and she thought she smelled dense fur. No skin between the edge of his eyes and the edge of the mask. Just his eyes, unblinking, wild and pitiful, wider now as he tried to explain himself.

  “God,” she whispered.

  It said, “It’s okay. Don’t be frightened. I’m not always like this.” It spoke slowly. It made no moves, not even to back up. Its tone was serious but casual, as if delivering news that the man she’d come to meet was, unfortunately, dead. “I didn’t know how to tell you, Ev.”

  Her hand found a very heavy vinyl-backed chair and she scraped it between them, ready if the beast should lunge, to protect herself with its metal legs. But the voice said the bear wasn’t going to attack.

  “How was your flight?” it asked, casually.

  It was interested in her flight. She was monitoring her pulse.

  “Bear?”

  “Not a costume. Real fur. Real me. You might be thinking about the home movies I sent, and those were me, but they were me during the day. Night is a whole different creature.”

  Bear winced at his own words. “If you sit down, we can talk. You can sit in the kitchen, and I’ll—” He looked to the couch behind him. “I’ll sit here. And I’ll explain everything.”

  He fell into the large, comfy couch. The cushions flattened under his weight; they were clearly worn out. He crossed his legs, as if the normalcy of the gesture might reassure her that she was just chatting in a friend’s living room.

  She sat down, surprised at herself. She wondered what happened to her boyfriend. She felt like crying for the man she thought was here. She stared at him. This creature is nothing to me, she thought.

  But he looked very lost. He stared at the ceiling for a moment before beginning. “Okay. It happened like this. I wasn’t always a bear. I was human like you. But I—I changed when I was eleven.” He sighed. “Not something I did to myself, or some mutant ability that came on at puberty. No. I made a mistake. I looked in the window of a neighbour woman’s house, and she was having—well, she was
in a very compromising—she was having sex with one of the sackers from our grocery store.” He looked horribly uncomfortable telling this story, even for a bear. “Red blanket on the carpet. I remember every detail. Burned right into my brain. I was eleven, and I hadn’t seen anything like—well, I had seen some things . . . pictures, maybe. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What matters is she saw me. Now, naturally, she got pissed. And well, I’d heard she was a witch, but no one really believed that.” He swallowed. “No one thought she had any powers or anything. But when she looked at me. I felt so badly. I mean, there she was, naked. Her face so shocked, so horrified seeing me standing there, some person staring at her in—her shame.” He seemed to pause, and then said abruptly, “She changed me.” He ran his paw across his chest, as if he were trying to wipe something off.

  He looked away from her, across the living room. The knock-off cuckoo clock in the corner ticked.

  He turned back to her, breathed out. “There’s no pressure, Ev. We can have your ticket changed. I just wanted to have the chance to defend—to present myself in person.” He leaned forward, tucking his enormous claws in his lap. “I hope you remember all the good things.” He smiled, but it just showed his teeth. “We have a lot in common, Ev. We like the same music—U2, old Beatles, Coldplay; eight out of each others’ top ten movies; we have similar plans for the future. I have a good job at the Fish Ladder.” He looked around the room. “I’m not always going to live here. I showed you the house I’m thinking about. You said it was a good buy. These are the things to think about. They’re what we’ve built on. They are more our relationship than this small revelation.”

  The lamplight highlighted a head of dark brown fur. She had expected some difference in the man she met online and the real thing—the same you might expect to find when you meet an actor for the first time and they’re dressed in everyday clothes, out shopping for melons.

  He said, “Are you going to say anything?”

  She looked at the kitchen floor. It was spotless. He cleaned well.

  “I’ve had about two minutes.”

  “Right,” he said gruffly. “Understandable. Let’s sleep on it.”

  He stood up suddenly. She jumped.

  “I should,” she said, “stay in a hotel.”

  “I have a guest bedroom. I won’t hurt you. Please, I don’t want to lose you in one night.”

  She looked him square in his small black eyes, looking for signs of common humanity. “I deserved to know the truth.”

  The bear looked at the floor. “You think I’m hideous.”

  “I think you look like a bear.”

  “I’m not a bear inside—only on the outside. I don’t attack people or eat anyone.”

  “How do I know you aren’t lying?”

  “I’m telling you I’m not lying.”

  “But you lied about this.”

  “I omitted.” He looked down, knowing it was a lousy excuse. The walls around him were a trendy orange and yellow, the couch royal blue—dynamic hues; almost comic book colours. And here, a comic book bear stood embarrassed and regretful next to the floor lamp.

  “I still deserved to know before now. It’s been more than a year.”

  He didn’t answer. He waited as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “I put fresh sheets on the bed,” he said finally.

  She picked up her suitcase. Heavier. “A hotel will be no trouble,” she said.

  He looked agitated. “I promise. I’ll be normal in the morning. Different face.”

  She sniffed back a nervous breakdown. She’d have to call a cab—she’d be alone in a foreign country. She closed her eyes. “Say this to me. Say: ‘Evelyn, it’s going to be okay.’”

  She heard him inhale, and then they were on the phone again. She’d lost her chequebook; her mother had a lump on her breast; she was lonely and making cookies for the office again, because no one else baked and she wanted cookies so badly. In that voice, she heard 430 nights of excitement, patience, frustration, all that she had shared on email and, in moments of desperation, on the phone. This time, as every time, she saw his face, his lips, his eyes as they formed the words, “Evelyn, it’s going to be okay.” She felt herself relax in the presence of hyperbole.

  She kept her eyes squinted, said, “Thank you,” and moved toward the bedroom. She heard him walk back into the other bedroom.

  Draped over the doorway of the guest room were his thinning He-Man sheets, showing muscled warriors and an evil Skeletor in blue. She could see how he might identify with being a superhero: one part of him normal but powerless, and the other powerful, usually with less clothing, clutching rescued women. Secret identities: your enemies never imagine your vulnerability; your girlfriend never sees your power.

  She opened her suitcase on a high bed of three mattresses. He’d placed irises in a clear bowl in her room. Five of them opened like a hand. Her favourite.

  He called out from the other bedroom, “I really do love you, Evelyn.”

  She didn’t know how to answer.

  She soon climbed into bed and lay there as the night sounds turned to snorting and subdued growling in the other room. On the ceiling above her were glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars in vaguely correct constellations. He snored like an alarm smothered with a pillow—a steady, soft vibration. She wondered if it shook the bed, and whether she could get used to the sound.

  >?

  In the morning, she saw him pass into the kitchen, and he was a man again, as testified—the same man from the pictures he’d sent, only slightly taller than she was with a thick, red crew cut and pink cheeks.

  He poured himself some orange juice, smiling when she walked out of the bedroom. “Did you have a good sleep?”

  “I did. I slept long.”

  “You hibernated. Jetlag and lack of sunlight. It happens.”

  “You were a bear last night,” she said, taking the orange juice from the fridge.

  “Yes. You remembered.”

  She poured herself a glass. “I’m trying not to forget.”

  “Is it so bad? Is it a terrible handicap?” he asked. “Would you like some eggs?”

  She leaned against the counter. She wore her favourite robe over a thin nightgown. Under the covers, she never got cold. The heater kicked in often during the night, a dull roar in the background of her dreams of bears. “I want honesty in our relationship.”

  “Everyone has secrets.”

  “Yes, I’ll take eggs,” she said.

  >?

  He didn’t deserve a second chance, but she really couldn’t maintain a state of furious for two weeks. They walked through neighbourhoods with flannel-shirted snowmen like real estate agents representing houses with colourful siding—blues, mauves, greens; very few whites. In a place where the ground was white nine months of the year, she guessed no one wanted a house that disappeared. They went to an art gallery. She lingered at soapstone carvings of bears, touching their smooth surfaces with her fingers. She ran her finger down a bear’s polished stomach, felt the glassy stone curve under her fingertip. Cold even in the warm shop.

  They toured Whitehorse while it was light, shopping, sightseeing, crunching snow with the rest of the crowds. Wherever he went, he was greeted by friends with expectant smiles and glances in her direction. “Oh, so this is Evelyn!” And they shook her hand, smiling like they knew more than they were saying.

  “I’ve become a saint,” she said.

  “They’re just being friendly.”

  “What does ‘I’m so glad you’re with him’ mean to you?” she asked.

  He ran off ahead of her to a giant paddlewheeler frozen in a surprise winter. He called back to her. “It means you’re lucky,” he laughed.

  They stopped and read the historical markers commemorating pioneers. She’d been doing her own research on women in the Klondike. When wom
en came up in the early days, they traded their homes, countries, lifestyles, peoples, all for adventure, and maybe a husband. She beamed with her connections to these women; she wanted him to see her as risky and hardy. She looked at his face, thinking she might find traces of the bear from the night before, but they had been completely erased by some boy’s face. She liked his skin—perhaps more now than before—where it creased when he smiled, where his face smoothed to his ears, the contour of his nose. She watched his lips when he talked, his human, searching green eyes. His cheeks looked pink and vulnerable, like an underbelly.

  They walked across the bridge over the Yukon River, stopping to admire the crevice between the ice where water flowed. “In summer it’s wide, but as it freezes it slowly closes over until there’s just a trickle going through. Just like the light here. In January, we only get four hours of sunlight.”

  “So you can only look human for four hours,” she said, leaning against the bridge railing. “Wouldn’t someplace else let you have more of a balance? Like the equator?”

  He smiled. “Yeah, like a bear’s body would be comfortable there.”

  “Okay, Texas then.” She was thinking practically.

  “Here, I can go out at night and everyone knows me. Everyone has a little vice, a little quirk, but we get to be ourselves and no one cares. So I’m the walking bear at night, and everyone just waves and says hi. Where else could I get that kind of acceptance?”

  Sea gulls congregated at the bend in the river, laughing at them both. Children tobogganed down the banks and onto the hard river, which otherwise would have swallowed them whole.

  “So, here’s a hard question,” she said. “If everyone’s so keen on you being a bear in the dark, why haven’t you found someone . . . ?”

  “More local?” He seemed to be looking off for the answer. “I’ve—I’ve got standards, too, you know? Just ’cause a woman can take the fur and the teeth doesn’t mean she’s a soul mate.”

  >?

  He would not let her see him change. He went into his bedroom, slid the sheet of stars, moons, and suns across the doorway. She thought she might be able to hear the change, but she heard nothing but him stripping away his human clothes and putting on his larger bear clothes. He called out from the bedroom, “I tried one year going to Rendezvous parties as a trapper. I dressed in raccoon and rabbit fur, but they really clashed with mine. So, I go very sophisticated now.” He came out of the room a decidedly ritzy bear, with dark maroon pleated pants and a matching vest; a gold watch chain stretched over his belly like a rope bridge. “I know. I look like a children’s book. But it’s better than the alternative.”