“I’m not a man,” Sherri replies. She has a way pitching up the last word, so that all her statements sound like questions.
They stop at a filling station so that Sherri can use the bathroom. Jake and Eduardo watch her tilt-sliding past the pumps. “Always looks like she’s in a hurry, like she’s got some bent no one else knows about,” Eduardo confides to Jake. “What’s it mean, anyway? Schizophrenia?”
“I think it means there’s like two of her in one body, two personalities.”
Eduardo snorts. “That body could oblige two people easy. If there’s two of her, I like ’em both.”
“Me too,” Jake says, jutting out his chin and squinting his eyes so that he looks a little like Eduardo.
Jake and Eduardo shake their heads and grin at each other right up until Sherri returns. Then Eduardo says, “Tell you what, big girl. We’re really close now. I think it’s safe to get some lunch.”
Sherri wrinkles her nose and nods eagerly.
Eduardo pulls the car out onto the road, parks, and gets out to open the trunk and remove Fred’s wheelchair. Getting Fred into it is a lot more difficult than it was getting him out, but they work together, including Fred, who is happy to be a part of the group.
Jake points out the Pizza Palace down the street. The zoo, Eduardo says, is so close now you can smell the elephant shit in the air. Sherri laughs her blaring, cacophonous laughter, tossing her head way back so that she looks as if she’s going to catch a grape or a piece of popcorn in her mouth. Fred laughs too. Elephant shit. This guy is something. He is glad he was assigned to his unit. It just goes to show you. You can’t judge a book by its cover.
Fred looks up and down the battlefield. The shops he sees feature signs that aren’t in English. They have come far in a short time, into some foreign country apparently. There are parked cars everywhere with missing parts. Lots of garbage. Rats, probably. A lot of people milling around so that you can’t tell who’s the enemy.
As they are walking toward the Pizza Palace, Eduardo says to Sherri, “What’s your sister’s name again?”
“Lizzie.”
“Funny, someone called me last night with an L name. Liz, Linda, Lorna. My brother couldn’t remember. Said she’d call back.”
“Lizzie don’t know your number.”
“Whoever it was, I’ll tell her I’m already spoken for, already got me a good woman. Two of them!” He chuckles and takes Sherri’s hand.
Jake is pushing his grandfather, keeping his eye on his Aunt’s shuffle and Eduardo’s free and easy elastic saunter. He tries to incorporate a bounce and some shoulder movement into his own gait, but it’s difficult with the wheelchair.
Fred is keeping his eye on the unit leader too, but he is simultaneously trying to make himself familiar with the surroundings. He doesn’t think he will have much trouble. The battlefield looks something like the one in Passaic, where he grew up.
Just outside the Pizza Palace, Eduardo says, “I need some smokes before we go in there. Let’s see.”
Jake says, “You think there’s a bathroom inside? I got to go to pe … I mean, to take a piss.”
“Check it out, man,” Eduardo replies, his eyes still skimming the street.
Jake puts the brake on the wheelchair and runs in with his thighs pressed together. Eduardo says to Sherri, “There’s a place across the street looks like it’ll have smokes. You coming with me?” Sherri cocks her head toward her father. “Your old man ain’t going nowhere. Hurry before the light changes,” Eduardo urges. The light turns orange as they run off, Sherri crying out over her shoulder, “We’re taking you to see the polar bears soon, Daddy.”
So, they are breaking up now, each going out to scout in a different direction. That’s smart. The only thing that Fred doesn’t understand is why the leader has taken the woman along with him. Then he gets to thinking that maybe the woman is a spy. Maybe that’s why the leader cuffed her hand to his.
Fred uses his good hand to release the brake on his chair. It feels good to be sweating, good to be out on the battlefield again. And it feels good, too, to know that in spite of his handicap, they still need him to fight. He won’t let them down. Polar bears. That has to be some kind of a code; he has to keep it in his head. Polar bears, polar bears.
Wheeling himself down along the sidewalk, he is encouraged by the speed he is able to attain with his one good arm. The people he has come to liberate know that he is an American and are getting out of his way so that he can get along with his business. Polar bears. He can’t let himself forget it. But he starts thinking about the old neighborhood, Passaic, remembers that people stayed out of his way there, too. He was a big man with a booming voice and a hard, fast fist back then. Pole. North Pole. Fishing Pole.
It’s going! In his effort to remember, he wheels faster yet. Pole something. Polecat. Pole-star. Polaroid. He is sweating profusely now. What will happen if he can’t remember the code when he’s asked for it? What will the unit leader say if he finds out?
He turns into a narrow alley between two shops, but his wheel catches on a concrete protrusion, some kind of mine-marker set up by the enemy, he thinks as he goes down. His head hits, and he can’t tell whether it’s shrapnel or merely the ground. That’s the way it always goes; at first, you can never tell. Sometimes it takes until you see the blood flowing or notice the missing limb. He tries to move, tries to locate the fox-hole. Polar. Polar night.
Polar bears: he finds the code in the darkness that is settling in around him. An image floats up lazily and connects itself to it. Big, white, loose animals. Black noses. He can hear the wheel of his chair spinning, slowly now. It is getting darker, and he hopes the enemy will fail to spot him. But then he senses something moist between his legs and feels himself going under, succumbing. He cries out against it, fights against it, wills a reversal; this is not how he wants to die.
All at once he sees a beam of light off in the distance shooting through the dark that has entrenched him. It gets brighter and brighter, until he can hardly stand it. Blazing light. He would like to move his good hand up to his face to shield his eyes, but it is pinned beneath his body, his fist against his ribs. In the jungles in the Philippines it was hot and moist, and the insects and snakes were as great a threat as the enemy. But he was trained to cope with all that. Here it is different. He has never been so bitterly cold in all his life. There is no part of him that isn’t quaking.
He squints his eyes and tries to make out some distinguishing features in the landscape. And then he sees the bear, twisting its long, powerful neck to scan the horizon.
Fred contracts his muscles and prepares himself for confrontation. He can feel something hard beneath him, beneath his ribs, his weapon—a gun or a knife. But the bear must not notice him, for he drops down clumsily and begins to move toward an ice hummock some fifteen yards away. Still sniffing, he slides down it and sets off for the black lead that he has singled out. There is a crack in the ice there, and using his mighty paw as a hatchet, he hacks at it until he breaks through. His power is awe-inspiring. Weapon or no weapon, Fred realizes that he will have no chance against such a magnificent creature.
The bear is patient. The only time he moves is to scratch, now and then, at the surface of the surrounding ice, to gain the curiosity of his prey. His wait is Fred’s wait, and watching him, Fred remembers the brightest secrets of his manhood. He knows how it feels to be that alert. He was that way himself once, back in the days before the war ended, before he settled down to fight a different kind of war, an endless battle that required skills unrelated to the ones he had grown up with. Still, he fought a good fight; no one can say that he didn’t.
The bear is concentrating on its prey just as unyieldingly as Fred is concentrating on the bear. And the prey, a seal most likely, is concentrating on a fish that he has seen swim by. Fred realizes that they all a chain, a network of concentration and courage. He dares Ellen and his mother to show their ghostly faces to him now that he is so conne
cted. He dares them to come up from the dark depths into this cold country and try to break the chain that links his heart to the heart of things no woman will ever understand. He dares his healthy daughter and her chatty husband to appear now with their words and words, with their peace signs and their doves and their squeamish responses to what is real, what is truly profound in this world. There are no words to describe this link.
The bear stiffens suddenly, slips his left paw into the hole, pulls out the seal with a deadly grip, and devours it. When he is finished, he rolls his great body on the ice, lifting his four bloodied legs into the air, growling, proclaiming his victory, articulating the thing that he and Fred share, the thing for which there is no word. Fred’s love for the bear is so fierce that he can no longer even feel the pain and the cold. If he is going to surrender to anyone, it will be to him.
Fred closes his eyes on the tears that have frozen there.
When he opens them, he finds himself lying in the shadow of a concrete building, his arm pinned under his body. His head seems to be welded to the pavement below him. “I will never forget,” he mumbles. And he might have said more too—for the words, the important ones, all seem to be available for once—but he hears a host of voices, and then he sees the feet rushing toward him.
He is being mauled, fondled, manipulated, but he no longer cares. He is satisfied now to give himself over to the enemy. As he blinks up at them, he notices that not all of them are in uniform. Both his daughters are there, and his grandson and son-in-law too. The unit leader is nowhere in sight.
They are all talking at once, all exclaiming—useless, senseless words. Their faces are dripping with gravity and concern. He sees tears rolling down someone’s cheek, but he can’t determine whose it is. Someone cries, “What have you done to yourself?”
Fred moves his mouth to answer. He finds his tongue and the words right there on the tip of it. He smiles and lets his audience wait. The words are rooted; he defies them to try to vanish. For the sake of these people who have gathered around him, he will say them, though they will never understand that the words are only peripheral to the encounter itself. “I saw the bear,” he says clearly. “I am the bear.”
But then he feels himself quaking, feels his lips pulling back from his teeth, feels the damn tears welling up again as if in contempt of his bliss.
PETE
Years ago, when he was about to begin his third semester at the State University, Pete went up to the Philosophy Department hoping that someone there might talk him into majoring in the subject. He was, even then, an ambitious young man, and he suspected that philosophers ran the world from the shadowy corners in which he imagined they lurked. He walked into the main office and cleared his throat, but the secretary, who was typing with her back to him, gave no indication that she had heard him enter. Since he was excessively polite, he stood behind her awkwardly, waiting to be taken note of and staring at the two blondish braids that dangled over the back of her chair. They were long but scrawny (he preferred thick hair himself) and, with the stray hairs jutting out at every turn, scraggly as well. It was people like her, he mused, who gave the Philosophy Department its spurious reputation. Again he cleared his throat, but she continued to type.
He was just turning to leave, when, with her fingers still clicking out symbols on the keys, she surprised him by asking what he wanted. He told her, and she informed him that none of the professors would be in until the first day of classes. He thanked her and left without ever seeing her face. And somewhere between her desk and the elevator, he decided to major in English.
That summer, his next-door neighbors, two men in their late twenties, invited him to a party. He was still living with his parents then, and as the men had never spoken to him before, he felt reasonably certain that they had invited him only because they hoped to keep his parents, whom they could not have known would be away for the weekend, from complaining about any noise. His neighborhood, which was on the outskirts of the village wherein the college was located, was a new development of contemporary and traditional-style houses on two acre lots. The properties were owned, for the most part, by business men and women who, like his parents, worked across the river. The two men were an aberration there, and though none of the neighbors had ever confronted them openly, there was much speculation as to the nature of their relationship and how they made their money. He said that he would try to come, but he had no intention of going.
Still, the night of the party, he put his English text aside and moved to the window to witness the arrival of the cars—or, more specifically, the vans and beat-up Volkswagens. He watched the people who emerged from them with the same detached curiosity with which he watched everything. They were wearing t-shirts, beads, head-bands, flowers, and all the other emblems of the “movement.” He was against the war and all for peace, but he was not for all the peripheral demands that the movement embodied. As far as the war issue was concerned, he was convinced that it had to be addressed from the inside out, and in this manner he saw himself as a nonconformist. Of course they saw themselves as nonconformists too. But then, how was it that they all looked so much alike?
Other than what they looked like and what they stood for, however, he didn’t really know much about them. He had been an English major for only a short time, but already he had decided that he would earn his living writing. It occurred to him that he might improve his skill by observing his fellow men at a closer range, perhaps even mingling with them. Still, he was reticent by nature and could not imagine going down and joining the revelers who reveled, he knew, in a manner which was illegal and, in his mind, abusive.
A purple bus pulled into the driveway and he watched attentively as the musicians struggled to haul their instruments and other equipment out of it. He saw one of his neighbors come out from the house to greet them, embracing each one in turn, while the other stood at the door waving his fingers. Pete looked at his English text. He had been reading Chaucer. A test had been scheduled for the next day in his summer-session class. What would Chaucer do? he wondered.
He got up and looked at himself in the mirror. He was wearing jeans and a pin-striped, button-down shirt. He thought he looked like a young investment banker. He went downstairs, and to prepare himself for the thing that he was still only considering doing, he drank a bottle of beer. Then he put a small notebook and a pen into his pocket and left the house.
With his hands in his pockets, he crossed the driveway that separated the two yards, passing just in front of the purple bus. The band had started up by then, playing what was commonly referred to as acid rock. From his place on the edge of the lawn, he could see the dancers through the opened windows of the house. There were also some dancers outside the house, near the front door. Since he could not envision meandering through them to gain access to the door, he decided he might as well return to Chaucer. But as he was about to turn away, he noticed the long, blonde, scraggly braids of one of the outdoor dancers.
He knew that he had seen those braids before but could not recall the circumstances. Already he could see that his methodical mind would be less than willing to concentrate on Chaucer until he had satisfied his curiosity.
She danced seductively, moving to the music in such a way that when her hips swayed one way, her braids swayed the other. She was wearing a ratty t-shirt and a long, flowing skirt. Her feet were bare, and as he edged around to have a better look at her face, he noticed that she was also braless. She appeared to be partnerless as well.
He would have expected a woman who danced as she did to be incredibly attractive, but, in fact, her face was unexceptional. Her chin was on the weak side. Her bottom lip was a bit too full in contrast to its partner, and her upper lip curved slightly, revealing an ellipse of white enamel. She was smiling and dancing with her eyes closed, and he immediately classified her as one of those Laughing Girls, the sort who cannot stand to be anywhere other than in the middle of things, the sort whose savoir faire—rather than thei
r looks—attract people to them.
The music stopped and she lifted her face to the moon, as though, he thought, it had been her partner. When she lowered her face again, her gaze fell on Pete. Her eyes were a revelation. They were large, glassy, direct, light-colored, nearly translucent in the moonlight—a contradiction to an otherwise forgettable face.
Embarrassed to have been caught staring and thinking that now he must introduce himself to her, he took a step in her direction. By now he had remembered where he had seen her before, and he began working on a sentence which would include mention of the Philosophy Department. But before he could get close enough to verbalize it, her gaze drifted, alighting on something beyond him. She laughed, clapped, and waved, in Laughing-Girl fashion. A male voice from the driveway returned her greeting. She ran toward it, falling into the arms of a tall, long-haired, bearded man. They swayed together for a moment, but gently, and Pete concluded that they were no more than friends. When they released each other, she walked the man to the front door of the house and then returned to the group of dancers, smiling and sweeping her fingertips familiarly over the arms and shoulders of those she had to pass to gain the spot which she had chosen for herself.
Feeling foolish, Pete began to move toward the driveway but stopped when he noticed several latecomers gathered there passing around what he guessed to be a joint. He turned to look at the house, but the crowd there confirmed that entering would be difficult and awkward. Turning aside, he pretended to contemplate the moon, but what he was actually contemplating was his misfortune in being where he was. He still had his hands in his pockets and could feel the wire spring that held his little note-pad together. Had there been a place to sit unnoticed, he might have pulled it out and scratched out a paragraph describing his discomfort, and, perhaps, the woman with the braids as well. His friend Max, who had died in Vietnam, had always loved the Laughing Girls, the ones who weren’t afraid to get right up close and look you in the eye. Max would have been charmed by this one’s flowing skirt and dirty feet and the heavy, green beads that hung down between her small breasts revealing her bralessness.
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