The Angels of Our Better Beasts

by Jerome Stueart

  She complimented him. He blossomed with pride.

  As for her outfit, she’d picked up a sexy, dark red velvety dress with a red feather that exposed her luscious shoulders. She was peeling up the long, black gloves when she came out of her room. The bear eyed her up and down.

  “Is it tight?” he asked.

  She raised her eyebrow. “Not a good first comment. I think you should start over with, ‘Yes, you look wonderful tonight.’”

  He frowned, scrunching his muzzle. Even in all that fur, she could see that he lingered unfavourably on her tastefully exposed chest. “I’m just saying that you’re going to be moving around a lot tonight, and I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

  “You have failed this test,” she said, half-smiling. “I look gorgeous. I am going to find three men who will tell me that this evening.”

  “The men here are not the kind you want to be flirting with,” he said as she put on her coat.

  “Because you’ve done extensive flirting with them?”

  He didn’t laugh. “People use Rendezvous as an excuse to go out and drink to excess and fondle women, and the women here seem to like that.”

  “Bear, these are your people. If you want—”

  “My people? What do you mean by that?”

  “We can stay at home. I didn’t mean to cause a ruckus.”

  He had his paws on his hips, his all-black eyes thinking and thinking. He was right about one thing—he looked like a page from Aesop’s Fables. “I’m just looking out for you.”

  She decided she wanted to leave, not argue. “I appreciate that, sir.”

  He buttoned the top button on her black coat, effectively sealing her in up to her neck. “You look wonderful tonight,” he added, grinning, showing those teeth.

  “Thank you, Mr. Clapton.” Did he mean now? Buttoned up to her neck? He walked her out the door. They did not go in his car, but walked the four blocks to Lizard’s Lounge. He was too big for the car now, and would have busted the seats, blown the tires. He got heavy as a bear. She hoped that by the time they reached the bar he would be less protective.

  >?

  The night started anew as they entered the room, as if they were making their way for the first time into other people’s stories. It was Rendezvous, as Bear had described, a week when everyone re-enacted the winter gatherings of trappers. Some were in costume—long dresses, men wearing red vests—while others were in regular clothes. She could tell she’d blown several rhythms. A chorus of approval came in a wave from the crowd. Evelyn had never been the centre of so much attention. It was reality tv, where everyone endured thirteen weeks of selection by our lonely hero, until finally, on this night, he brought her to the crowd and revealed his love. Her debut. Great.

  The band slammed music into her temples, and she felt suddenly thrown from the very silent world of winter into the rowdy, warm bar. They passed through the crowd to a small booth. Evelyn took off her coat, adjusted her dress. For a moment, she felt naked. Bear looked at her as if she were, and he glanced about the room as if someone might notice her shoulders. She wished she’d brought a shawl.

  Greg, the man who’d picked her up at the airport, and his wife April found them. April grabbed her by the arms and said she looked smashing. April, however, was not in costume; she had short, messy blonde hair and wore a crinkled, light blue cami under a crème top. She was an ad for the Buckle—how Texan, Evelyn thought, smiling. They joined Bear and Evelyn, set their coats on the booth seats, and ordered drinks. April, diligent in getting to know Evelyn, asked where they’d met. When she heard that Bear had not put up a picture of his more burly side, she leaned back, reached over, and thumped him in the chest. “Bastard!”

  She turned to Evelyn. “You have to thump him when he’s bad.”

  They chatted while music played. Evelyn stirred her Caesar—a V8 with a kick. It wasn’t so different than the States. Except it was a well-attended costume party in February with no fashion police. Everyone knew everyone else. Ordinary people having a good time. Evelyn relaxed.

  Across the table, Bear cleared his throat, scooted carefully out of the booth, and stood beside her, offering his paw. She tried to focus on his eyes alone, but she couldn’t help watching everyone watch them as she stood up to dance.

  She followed him to a linoleum dance floor, awash in gold light. For the slow song, he took one of her hands and gingerly placed it around his back, then took her other and held it, trying not to scrape it. His pads were soft. Here on the dance floor, he was considerate. He smiled and she looked in his small, dark, inhuman eyes. He asked with those eyes if she was warming up to him. She looked at his wet, black nose. She wasn’t sure.

  They both warmed to the music and the lights. She felt it pour over her and her shoulders loosened. He shut his eyes, grooved to a bass guitar solo. Flakes of green and pink and gold floated across his Victorian suit, lighting up his watch chain as if he had the sun hooked inside his pocket. She swayed back and forth and put her arms in the air. They rolled the negative space between them back and forth, kneading it with their bodies. He opened his eyes. Perhaps the pink light shone on her cleavage, mesmerizing him. She closed her eyes and pulsated toward him. Then she felt his soft paws on her chest, and when she opened her eyes, it was to wink and smile at him, to suggest that they do some of this in private. But his eyes were suddenly everywhere else, panicky, turning his head, watching who might be watching her. He was not groping her but covering her.

  He yanked her close, covered her body with his. She thought he was growling and angry, but he was trembling. Through the rest of the lively rhythm, he held her still against the music. She knew he had his eyes closed now. Did they look in love? Couples whirred around them, and he held her as she tried to break away.

  “Bear, I want to dance,” she said quietly. “Let go, just a little.”

  He looked down at her and tried to say something, but she couldn’t hear it. The song ended in a blast of drums echoing all over the room. With the last boom, he walked off the dance floor, leaving her to walk herself off. She tried to smile at everyone. She wanted to assure them that they needn’t worry—Bear’s feelings were being protected, their expectations would all be met.

  Immediately Greg thumped him on the chest. Apparently this was the appropriate and usual spot. They pulled back into another corner while Evelyn sat down with April.

  “What happened?” April asked.

  “I don’t know,” Evelyn said. “You know him, too. What did you see?”

  “He was, like, diving for your boobs. You had your eyes closed, but he was hungry, slobbery, and going right down for them. Not like he was a pervert. He’s a man and he saw a nice rack, and this is Bear and he doesn’t get out much. He spends a lot of time with the fish in the river. Which is kinda ironic, if you think about it. A bear spending time with fish, but not to eat them. And so he’s maybe a little un-practiced when it comes to being subtle.”

  But he was shaking, covering her. Didn’t April see his eyes moving all over the place?

  “He wanted to see if anyone caught him,” April said. “I mean, I saw Greg, and he was looking at your boobs, too, and he didn’t need a dance floor.”

  Evelyn felt exposed. She pulled her bodice up.

  “No, girl, it’s not you,” April said. “Men can be beasts, but we like them like that. And if you can’t show some hooters on the dance floor, where are you going to show them? I mean, they only last for a little while, and when they’re gone, they can’t pull a homeless man to his feet.”

  She watched Greg explain something to Bear in wide, sweeping gestures. She could still feel his trembling body in the hollow of her elbows, where she’d held him. How vulnerable he made himself. He could have brought her up in summer and she wouldn’t have known a thing; instead he brought her up in winter, exposing himself on purpose. Winter and summer, like two d
ifferent places up here. He’d told her that sunlight pulled everyone outside; they shed their coats and then, bam! They went biking, canoeing, hiking, swimming. Tourists flocked the streets and the sun never, ever set. Bear looked human for nearly three solid months.

  She imagined what it might be like to live here. If not for the women coming up during the gold rush, this place would never have become more than tents. Women settled the miners and gold-rushers down. Evelyn imagined turning her notice in to the real estate agency, telling people that she was going to be a pioneer in the Klondike; she felt the romance of those words. She felt again the tremble of his body.

  A lanky man in a red vest with a black garter on his arm came to their table, introducing himself as Terry. April knew him.

  He turned to Evelyn. “You look like a girl who hasn’t danced enough.”

  She tried to get Bear’s attention, but he was still with Greg. She smiled at Terry, standing up, feeling the pleasant weight of his gaze on her shoulders. Bear was capable of cutting in.

  He walked her out to the floor. They took separate grooves and she tried to remember the last time she went dancing. She’d gotten to be such a homebody in the last five years. She spent most of her time with her cat, Sioux, and a rented movie—conditions that propelled her into online dating. She missed going out with friends. She felt like she had inherited good friends from Bear, but they were ones he’d cultivated. While she had turned introverted in a city of hundreds of thousands, he’d been a social animal in a small town. Certainly, he made a great host. They’d cross-country skied, dined out, visited museums, watched children throw axes, adults chuck chainsaws, cheered on mushing dogs—all part of this social carnival.

  Terry looked to his left and waved to Bear, who was now sitting at the table. Bear didn’t wave back; he just stared at them. He leaned forward on the edge of his seat, as if he might get up on the dance floor and maul someone.

  Terry grabbed her hands and pulled her into a jitterbug. At their table, Bear stood up to a formidable height. He looked across the expanse of the dance floor. He didn’t walk out or demand to cut in; he pulled out his pocket watch casually, like a cartoon bear, and flipped open the casing. It sparked gold. He closed it shut against his chest and placed it back in his pocket. Other couples danced in front of him and still he watched Evelyn.

  It’s just a dance, she thought.

  When she came back to the table, Bear looked away, at his drink. He slurped it through a straw, quickly, noisily, all that vodka going down in one big gulp.

  She sat down. “I’m pooped,” she said to the table.

  Terry followed her to the table, joked with Bear, who grinned with an armada of teeth.

  She thought he might say something to Terry. He was obviously feeling possessive, but he just smouldered in polite conversation. She expected him to attack. She expected him to do so many different things with that fur. To be an animal. Instead he seemed pressed into a smaller box. Being a bear did not expand things for him, she thought to herself; it contracted them.

  Someone got on stage and announced the entertainment for the evening: Sourdough Sams—eight men in a contest that would make them the soul of the historical trapper. They entertained every night at different bars doing different contests—drinking, eating, singing, dancing. Tonight’s was a striptease.

  Evelyn and April woo-hoo’d together above the shouts of the crowd. Eight men stripped down to red long johns to “I’m Too Sexy” and then together, like a full-Monty review, down to thongs.

  It was so much more than what she was sure Bear could stand. She patted a place next to her, and he obliged. She may have pounded on the table and whistled, but she kept a hand firmly on Bear’s thigh. No mixed messages here, she thought. But she wasn’t going to shy away from it, either. He stripped the remaining hot wings of meat with fastidious teeth. He did not take her hand or even acknowledge that it was there. He seemed distracted and bored. Every other man in the place looked to be enjoying the spectacle and rooting these men on—they must have been coworkers and friends.

  “Do you know any of them?” she asked Bear. She wanted to know who to root for.

  “I don’t recognize them in their underwear,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he was being sanctimonious or homophobic. She decided a safe bet would be to root for all of them. When it was over, and the men had swung their last, she put on her coat and told April she was going outside for a breath of fresh air. April said she would join her, but when Evelyn got outside, it was Bear behind her.

  “You ready to go?” he asked.

  She looked at him. “Now there’s the 25,000-dollar question.”

  “I don’t want to fight.”

  “Me neither. I just want to have a good time.”

  The cold settled in under her collar, through the threads of her gloves. It came up under her coat to her legs, travelling upwards, leaving a trail of goose bumps.

  “Bear, what’s with you tonight?” she asked. “Are you embarrassed to be seen with me?”

  “No,” he rolled his eyes.

  “Then what was all that in there?”

  He put on his coat. He didn’t know what she was talking about. He wasn’t much of a dancer in the first place, and naked men weren’t his thing. Good save, she thought. Besides, the bar was getting too hot for him. He had all that fur, after all.

  April came to the door. “Off to get cozy in front of a fire?”

  Evelyn smiled and gave her a hug. She didn’t think they would make it to the cozy part this week. “We’re going to go see if the Northern Lights are out.”

  “Oh those,” she said, waving them away with her hand. “Good luck. I can never find them when I want them. Hey, if you do find them, whistle at them. They say the lights will come down and kidnap you.”

  “Have you tried it?” Evelyn asked.

  “Yeah.” But she offered nothing else.

  >?

  In his emails, he had moved to sex first. She’d tease him along the way, give subtle hints, but he always took the first dive, so to speak. They got explicit; they could overheat a hard drive. Bear had a pretty good vocabulary for sex. She liked that. Oh, she knew he was conservative, but his stories to her were very, very effective. She remembered, though, that he wasn’t as good on the phone—a little more embarrassed talking dirty out loud.

  She watched this face smile, how the black gums thinned, the pale teeth glistened. She watched the eyes, wet along the rims, slivers of white near the corners. The way the fur moved in tiny waves according to the muscles in his face. He didn’t look as frightening, or as foreign, as he had the first night. Still, she couldn’t connect the two parts of him; it was as if separate men were tag-team dating her. She had to work harder with the bear than she did the man. She imagined those two conferred on what they thought about her—about love, about passion. Did he even know what he wanted?

  They took another route to his house, through a darkened residential area, bordered on one side by steep clay cliffs. He put his arm around her. He tried to be chatty, as if she were upset. Sometimes he would rub his hairy paw against her neck. The city to their left was quiet; no one was out. The streetlights stood majestic in fog. On the way, she shivered, on purpose.

  “Cold?” he asked.

  “A little,” she said.

  He took off his coat and put it around her. It was a light trench coat. Not really any help.

  She made sure he felt her shiver more as they turned a corner. He asked her again if she were cold and then took off his vest. After all, he said, it was a wool blend. Now he was bear-chested in pleated pants.

  “You’re probably overheating anyway,” she said.

  He smiled. “I can take it.”

  “It must be twenty below out here,” she said, walking slower.

  He thought about it. “At least. But fur is a great insulator.” They
passed a park with a rock wall frosted by two inches of snow. Evergreens and spruce.

  “At least you have the pants,” she said. “You need those out here.”

  He scoffed. “I don’t need them.”

  “Course you do, Bear. You don’t have perfect insulation.”

  He stopped and looked at her. “You don’t know much about bears, do you?” He unzipped his pants without looking around, meeting her eyes with a spark of defiance. She smiled at him and she thought he was finally catching on. He whipped off his pants and threw them over the rock wall of the park behind him.

  “Tada!” he said.

  She thought he was smiling.

  “Satisfied, you little pervert?”

  She laughed. “You were too sexy for that vest, and those pants.” She took a gloved hand and ran it down his stomach. He had on Snoopy boxer shorts. But she didn’t make fun. He was right about one thing: he was putting out heat like a furnace. Her hand was warm on his chest.

  “And I’m not satisfied yet, Mr. Boxer Shorts.”

  She slipped a hand down his shorts, pulled the elastic wide, slipped them down over his legs. “Now you’re a naked bear.” She tossed those on the wall as well, but he suddenly reached to grab them back.

  Behind her, she heard a rush of panting and scuffling, and suddenly two yellow labs passed her, jumped up on Bear, licking and playing. For any other man, this might have been a slightly embarrassing moment, a playful timeout; for Bear it was anything but. He tried to push them down; he reached for the rest of his clothes, yanking them and a pile of snow off the wall. He looked at her, desperate to get away from the dogs. He argued with them, as if they too would speak English. They barked at him. He pulled on his pants. They were soaked in snow. He then strapped on his vest. She took off his coat, knowing that he was coming for it. She watched him stride away from the dogs, moving toward her, talking to them like a master: Sit and No and Lay Down. There was no humour in his voice as he buttoned up his vest, as he fit his arms into the sleeves of the coat. If he’d had gloves, she was sure he would make a point of putting them on over his claws. In minutes he had transformed from a bear back into a children’s illustration.