Bears Discover Fire

by Terry Bisson

  When I called Janet later in the week from a lawyer’s office—they never watch their phone bills—she said, “Do you know the movie Bright Lights Big City?”

  “Michael J. Fox has moved to Owensboro,” I said, astonished in spite of myself.

  “Not him, the other one, the author. I forget his name.”

  “McInerney,” I said. “Jay McInerney. Are you sure?” I didn’t want to say it because it sounded so snobbish, but Jay McInerney didn’t exactly seem Owensboro caliber.

  “Of course I’m sure. He looks just like Michael J. Fox. I saw him walking down at that little park by the river.

  You know, the one where Norman Mailer hangs out.”

  “Norman Mailer. I didn’t even know he lived in Owensboro,” I said.

  “Why not?” Janet said. “A lot of famous writers make Owensboro their home.”

  Make Owensboro Their Home. That was the first time I’d heard it said like that. It seemed to make it official.

  Janet’s call made me think, and for the first time since I broke up with him, I called Alan. At least he knew who Jay McInerney was, although he had never read the book. “The other Janet said she saw McInerney and Mailer down there at the park,” I said. “Does that mean the famous writers are starting to meet one another and hang out together?”

  “You always want to jump to conclusions,” Alan said. “They might have been in the same park at totally different times of the day. Even when they do meet, they don’t talk. The other day at the K Mart, Joe Billy Survant saw E. L. Doctorow and John Irving both in Housewares, and they sort of nodded, but that was all.”

  John Irving? But I let it go. “Housewares,” I said instead. “Sounds like folks are really settling in.”

  “We’re taking your mother to dinner at the Executive Inn for her fifty-first birthday Friday night,” Alan said.

  “I’ve been invited for a weekend in the Hamptons,” I said. “Well, almost the Hamptons.”

  “Oh, I understand,” he said. Alan likes to imagine he understands me. “But if you change your mind I’ll pick you up at the airport in Evansville.”

  Evansville, Indiana, is thirty miles from Owensboro. It used to seem like a big city to me, but after eighteen months in New York, it seemed pathetic and insignificant: all trees from the air, and hardly any traffic. The one-story terminal looks like a shopping-center bank branch. You climb down out of the plane on a ladder.

  There was Alan in his sensible-with-a-flair Olds Cutlass Supreme. I felt the usual mixture of warmth and dismay on seeing him. I guess you might call it warm dismay.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, gesturing toward a bearlike figure at the USAir ticket counter.

  Alan whispered, “That’s Thomas M. Disch. Science fiction. But quality stuff.”

  “Science fiction?” But the name was familiar, at least sort of. Although Disch isn’t exactly famous, he seemed more the Owensboro type than McInerney. “He’s moving to Owensboro, too?”

  “How should I know? He may have just been here in Evansville for the speedboat races. Anyway, he’s leaving. Let’s talk about you.”

  We drove back home on the Kentucky side of the river, through Henderson.

  That whole weekend in Owensboro, I only saw three famous writers, not counting Disch, who is not really famous and who was in Evansville, not Owensboro, anyway. Tom Pynchon was at the take-out counter at the Moonlight, buying barbecued mutton. He bought three liters of Diet Coke, so it looked like he might be having a party, but on the way home from the Executive Inn we drove past his house on Littlewood Drive and it was dark.

  For dinner, we had steak and salad. Mother was a hoot. Alan insisted on paying as usual. We were home by ten, and by ten-thirty Mother was asleep in front of the TV. I got two cans of Falls City out of the refrigerator and sneaked her Buick out of the garage. I picked up the other Janet, just like in the old days, by scratching on her screen. “The Two Janets,” she whispered melodramatically. She said the cops were rough on DWI (Driving While under the Influence) these days, but I wasn’t worried. This was still the South; we were still girls. We cruised down Griffith, out Frederica, down Fourth, down by the river. There was hardly any traffic.

  “Has Alan asked you to marry him again?” I asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, if he does, I think you should.”

  “You mean you wish I would.”

  The streets were still and dark and empty.

  “Sure isn’t New York,” I sighed.

  “Well, nobody can say you haven’t given it a shot,” the other Janet said.

  At midnight we went to the all-night Convenience Mart at Eighteenth and Triplett for two more cans of beer.

  John Updike was looking through the magazines (even though the little sign says not to). At 12:12 A.M. Joyce Carol Oates came in for a pack of cigarettes, and surprising us both, they left together.

  THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT

  “They’re made out of meat.”

  “Meat?”

  “Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

  “Meat?”

  “There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

  “That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”

  “They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

  “So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”

  “They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”

  “That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

  “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”

  “Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”

  “Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take long. Do you have any idea what’s the life span of meat?”

  “Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”

  “Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them.

  They’re meat all the way through.”

  “No brain?”

  “Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “So… what does the thinking?”

  “You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

  “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

  “Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”

  “Omigod. You’re serious, then. They’re made out of meat.”

  “Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they’ve been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”

  “Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?”

  “First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.”

  “We’re supposed to talk to meat.”

  “That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.’ That sort of thing.”

  “They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”

  “Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.”

  “I thought you just told me they used radio.”

  “They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds.
You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”

  “Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”

  “Officially or unofficially?”

  “Both.”

  “Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”

  “I was hoping you would say that.”

  “It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”

  “I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say? ‘Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”

  “Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”

  “So we just pretend there’s no one home in the Universe.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat?

  And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You’re sure they won’t remember?”

  “They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them.”

  “A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”

  “And we marked the entire sector unoccupied.”

  “Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?”

  “Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen-core cluster intelligence in a class-nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.”

  “They always come around.”

  “And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone…”

  OVER FLAT MOUNTAIN

  They didn’t used to call Louisville the Mile High City. I know because I was raised there, in the old West End, when the Falls of the Ohio were just dry limestone flats bypassed by a canal, and the river was slow and muddy, and the summer nights were warm.

  Not anymore, though.

  It was chilly for August when I rolled into Louisville from Indianapolis, heading south and east for Charlotte. The icy mist was rising off the falls where they plunge into the gorge. It was too much trouble to dig a flannel shirt out of the back so I bought a sweatshirt in the truck-stop annex, figuring I would give it to Janet or one of the girls later—they wear them like nightgowns—and rolled on out of there without a second piece of pie.

  The shirt said “Louisville—Mile High City of the South.”

  I bought a CD, 50 Truckin’ Classics, forty-nine of which I already had. I have a library of eleven hundred CDs in my cab. Imagine how much space that would have taken in the old days when they were as big as cookies.

  I don’t generally pick up hitchhikers but I must have felt sorry for this kid. I was an hour south and east of Louisville, just under the cloud shadow, when I saw him standing in the rain by the CRAB ORCHARD COG WAY 40M/64K sign, wearing a black garbage bag for a raincoat, and I figured, what the hell. He looked more than a little wet. It rains six days out of five south of Louisville since the Uplift.

  When we Flat Toppers run, we run. I just barely pulled over and was back in low-two before he was up the ladder and through the inside airlock lens, peeling off his garbage bag like a landlobster molting. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He had greasy blond hair tied back with a rubber band under a Delco cap, and under his garbage bag a wind-breaker over a T-shirt. Glad to see he had a coat at least. Boots had “hand-me-down” written all over them.

  Carried his things in a K Mart plastic bag.

  He combed the rain off the bill of his cap with one finger and perched on the edge of the seat until I swept the CDs off the seat into my own hat and dumped them into the glove compartment.

  “Nice gun,” he said. I had a Brazilian 9 mm in the glove compartment. I closed it.

  “Wet out there,” he said.

  I nodded and popped Ricky Skaggs into the player. I hadn’t picked him up for conversation. I picked him up because I’d done some hitchhiking myself at his age. Sixteen going on twenty-one.

  “Appreciate your stopping,” he said.

  “Nice rig,” he said.

  I was pulling a two-piece articulated, with a Kobo-Jonni. The KJ is an eight-liter steel diesel with that mighty ring that engines used to have before they went to plastic. A lot of guys fall all over the new plastic mills cause they don’t need oil, but I like oil. I had built the KJ three times, and was just through breaking in the third set of sleeves. Plastic, you just throw away.

  The kid told me his name but I forgot it. “They call me CD,” I said. I popped out Ricky and popped in the Hag to show him why.

  He had those narrow eyes and sallow skin, like he’d never seen the sun, and if he was from south and east of Louisville he probably hadn’t. And I could tell by his accent he was. Listen, I knew this kid. He was me thirty years ago. You narrow up your shoulders and narrow up your eyes, and since everything in the world is new to you, try to look and act like nothing is.

  “I’m going up to Hazard,” he said.

  I had figured that from his being by the cogway sign.

  “My pa works up there at the robot train,” he said.

  “Guess you’re going on over Flat Mountain,” he said.

  Anybody could tell that from my airlocks. He said it as if it was the most natural thing in the world, but it wasn’t.

  Not many trucks go over Flat Mountain. Most just go up the cogway to Hazard and offload for the robot train, and come right back down.

  “Well, there it is,” he said.

  The bottom part of Flat Mountain is the only part most folks ever see. Since it’s almost always raining under the cloud shadow, you can almost never see it from more than ten miles away. We were rounding the old Winchester bypass just east of where Lexington used to be, and from there it looks like a wall of logs and trash and rock, running almost straight up into the clouds that are always there at 11,500.

  I turned off onto the Crab Orchard feeder road, which follows the front twenty miles south and west, then turns in at a ghost town, Berea, where the wall eases off to a little less than 45 degrees. There were about six trucks ahead of me at the cogway, none of them Flat Toppers. I got in line next to a stream choked with old cars and house pieces. It didn’t have a name. Lots of these new rivers don’t have names.

  While we were in line for the cogway I called Janet and the girls from my cab phone and the kid got out. Maybe he was embarrassed by all the family stuff. I watched him walking up and down under the long board shed trying all the candy bar machines. I moved the truck up ten feet at a time and other trucks pulled in behind me. Gravy Pugh came by in his yellow slicker to clip my ticket. “Going up top?” he asked. “Watch out, CD, lobsters got Sanders yesterday.”

  This is his standard joke. I don’t lobster anymore and he knows it.

  “Snapped his pecker off,” he said, and clipped another corner off my violet Crab Orchard Cogway pass.

  The kid climbed back into the truck just as I was flagged to the approach grade. He was shivering. He had left his garbage bag in the truck and it rains about as hard under the board shed as outside of it. When I was his age I had hitchhiked a thousand miles, but this was out west where it never rained in those days. I let the flagman wait while I leaned up over the seat and fished a dry flannel shirt out from under the tools and spare parts. The kid pulled off his T-shirt and wrapped my flannel shirt around him. He could have fit in it twice.

 
; “I hope your pa’s expecting you,” I said. “You know, you can’t go around outside up at Hazard.”

  “I been up there,” was all he said.

  The guy behind me was honking but Gravy didn’t let him around. The cogway never stops, and there is a certain trick to magging on. The ramp is concrete but it’s cracked and crazy tilted, and there’s only one stretch where you can make enough speed for a hitch. If you miss, you have to turn down the cutoff and get back in line. I always make it, but I’ve been doing this run for twelve years.

  “Piece of candy?” The kid held out a Collie Bar but since it looked like his entire supper I turned him down. It was getting dark. Magged on, I let the big old KJ idle. With the truck tipped almost straight up, it’s better to have the pumps running to keep the air out of the lines.

  It’s a long ride up the western front. The Crab Orchard Cogway is slow and noisy, fourteen miles of squeaking, rattling chain. It’s powered by steam generated from the coal and trash that rolled off the lower slopes when the mountain uplifted, helped by the weight of the trucks coming down. Even in the dark I could see them through the rain twenty yards away. I know most of the drivers, even the up-and-backs, or yoyos as we Flat Toppers call them.

  The mountainside looked junky in the headlights. The lower slopes, from 7,200 to the clouds at 11,500 are overgrown with weeds and weird new ferns and what’s left of the trees—plus whatever else rolled down when the land rolled up.

  Some say they see giant volunteer tomatoes back in the weeds but I never see them.

  The first hundred trips or so, it’s a scary ride. The kid tried to act cool but I knew exactly how he felt. Your truck is tipped back at 45 degrees, you’re wondering if the mag and the safety under it will hold, and even if it does, what about that clattery old chain? Then every once in a while the chain hauls up short—maybe a truck had trouble unhooking at the Hazard end, or maybe the world is coming apart—and the boards under your tires creak and the leaf springs sway, and the wind howls across the splinters of the trees, because we’re still low enough on Flat Mountain for there to be wind, and you realize you’re just hanging there like a wet pair of jeans on a line.