The Heavy Bear

by Tim Bowling

  “I read other stuff now. The essays for this class. There’s some really good ones. I mean . . .” Chelsea bit her bottom lip. “I like some much better than others. The one about Dumpster diving. That’s really great. How he talks about it like it’s serious, like doing it can be . . . like there’s more to it than just being grossed out.”

  Had the girl blushed? It was hard to tell under the glaring institutional fluorescents. Certainly her manner was engaged. The essay she referred to was “On Dumpster Diving” by Lars Eighner, an odd piece by a sort of intellectual street person, which explains how to go about eating food out of Dumpsters. Despite my morning’s experience with the toys, I had forgotten all about Eighner’s essay. After all, it wasn’t on the syllabus until November. And this day had turned out to be its own syllabus, its own full degree – I sensed I’d be paying off these student loans forever. Even so, I tried to remember the essay. There was a list in it of all the things the author had found in Dumpsters besides edible food – books, dead pets, birth control devices. He might just as well have mentioned transparent horses and magician banks. He didn’t. But he did comment that there was good material to be had in the Dumpsters near university campuses. That much I remembered. The young, with their penchant for dramatic mood swings and changes of plans, often wasted perfectly sound goods.

  “Yes. Students seem to enjoy that essay.” Any more hollow and my voice could have housed a family of woodpeckers.

  But the girl suddenly exclaimed, “You’re cancelling the class!”

  I followed her gaze to the letters behind me. CLASS CANCE. I didn’t know what disturbed me more: her obvious disappointment, or the letters CANCE, which I naturally – or perhaps unnaturally – concluded as CANCER. No, not that I was a class cancer, poisonous to students, or that I was somehow turning against my own bourgeois status as a university instructor. What struck me then must have been the ominous silence around the missing R, a silence that made me search for Keaton in the doorway. He had died, too soon, a victim of lung cancer at the age of seventy. He hadn’t even known that he’d had the disease. His young wife and his doctors had kept the information from him. But why? Was the great clown really such a child that he could not face the darkness inside? Perhaps he had faced it enough by then, and it would have been cruel to make him face his end just as the work of his most creative period was being remembered and celebrated. Let him watch his beloved World Series on TV and play with his toy train set.

  CANCER CANCELLED.

  “I’m not feeling too well,” I explained, and the sweat on my brow was heavy and cold as morning dew, except it didn’t feel like morning.

  “You don’t look so good,” Chelsea said.

  I smiled weakly, despite myself. “I should have stood in bed today.”

  Delmore grunted appreciatively. “I always liked Yogi Berra. You know, me and your little white-faced pal have that in common, too. We’re both nuts for baseball.”

  Ignoring him again, I apologized to the girl’s perplexed expression and searched desperately for a change of subject. My eyes landed on the toys.

  “You should take echinacea,” Chelsea said. “I swear by the stuff. As soon as I feel something coming on, I take a pill. And green tea with ginger. That’s good, too.” Her voice, genuinely sympathetic, almost broke me. Any sign of compassion from a stranger, especially a young stranger, tends to make me weep for all the lost potential of the planet. But I rallied.

  “I got those toys from a street person. He probably found them in a Dumpster. And the bank . . . there’s a chance it’s valuable.”

  “Really?” She took it in her large hands. “It’s heavy.”

  Yes. The heavy bank that goes with me. I tried to control my shivering. Maybe I was sick; maybe I had picked up some strange germ off the flank of the grimy horse. “It could be worth thousands. If it’s not a replica.”

  She whistled and placed the bank down gently. “Have you looked it up on the Net?”

  I almost answered, “Yes. With a big man named Sleep.” Instead, I just nodded. “But it’s hard to tell for sure. I need to take it to an antiques dealer.”

  “And you say you bought it off some homeless dude?”

  I could tell from her slightly suspicious tone where she was headed, and I was pleased. A sense of justice in the young is the only hope we have.

  “For ten bucks. But if it’s a real antique, I’ll try to find him. I’ll give him what it’s worth. If I can find him.”

  “Well, half.” Her tone softened. “Half is fair. How much could it be worth?”

  “A bank like this,” I said quietly, “has sold for seven thousand dollars.”

  “Holy shit!” She jumped back, again as if the film had been cut, and then immediately covered her mouth. “Sorry about that. But . . . wow . . . that’s a lot of cash.” She whipped out her phone so quickly that I thought she might shoot me with it and run off with the toy. A very special kind of bank robbery. For all I knew, phones could shoot bullets now. Surely some American company had patented and manufactured that gem of an idea. Why not? I wouldn’t put anything past this culture except the past.

  “Past the past. Nice one, genius.” Delmore winked at me, then returned to casting perfect little statues of salt from his eyes.

  “Hey. You really don’t look good. How are you feeling, Professor?”

  Chelsea’s voice was as soft as the fontanelle of my firstborn, so soft that I let the “Professor” pass. I lacked a PhD, and could not profess to profess, which was just as well. I stood always before the young only as a mister.

  “I’m fine. That is, I’ll survive.”

  “There’s an antiques dealer just north of here. We should go.” This time, I was certain the girl blushed. “I mean, you should go. You should drive over there and find out. Aren’t you dying to know?”

  Today I was dying from knowing, but I wasn’t about to go into that. And, in truth, I was curious. Then my lack of transportation deflated me. “I don’t have a car,” I explained, which, in North America, is often akin to saying, “I don’t have a life.”

  The cheerleader almost hit me with a metaphorical pompom. “I do! I can drive you!”

  Delmore laid a heavy paw on my shoulder. His voice had more glee in it now. “She’s like this student I once had. A kid named Lou. He ended up forming some rock and roll band. The Velvet something or other. Underworld, I think. Ever hear of them?”

  “Underground,” I almost said aloud.

  Delmore heard the word anyway. “Ah, I get it. Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground. Yeah, Lou was a clever kid. Of course, he would have picked up the Dostoevsky from me. I was always talking about Raskolnikov. Sometimes, when I couldn’t face lecturing, I’d just read to the class. Probably read a lot of Dostoevsky.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Chelsea added. “I mean, if you’re cool with it.”

  What about the class, I thought. If I was healthy enough to visit an antiques dealer, I was healthy enough to teach. Besides, it was the twenty-first century. A university instructor didn’t go around fraternizing with students. Apart from being obviously unprofessional conduct, such behaviour was usually a sign of massive insecurity. Yet I wasn’t a real professional instructor, and I understood myself well enough to know that carpe diem in this case posed no harm to the young woman. I would spontaneously self-combust before I ever acted irresponsibly towards a student. So, against my better judgment, and because the day was already so strange, I accepted her offer.

  “Yes!” Chelsea slipped her phone back into her cardigan. “This is great. I’m parked a few blocks away.” She hesitated. “Are you okay to walk?”

  It wasn’t possible to insult me, so I simply smiled and said I was. Chelsea raced back up to her desk and pulled on what turned out to be a kind of army duffle coat. She was back and through the door in a matter of seconds. Nervously, I turned and shakily added the LLED and TODAY to the board. Gathering up the magician and the horse a few seconds later, I left the campus
with a student who wasn’t even my student yet.

  AT FIRST, I simply could not believe her lemon-yellow Pinto, forty years old but in remarkable condition. I hadn’t seen one since the original Trudeau lived at 24 Sussex. A memory about the car immediately dolphined to the surface of my mind – they often exploded if you put them in reverse. Or was that the Gremlin? Some funny little vehicle from the seventies used to blow up in reverse. I gaped at the Pinto’s hyperbolic burst of lemony ridiculousness. Chelsea, who was no doubt used to the effect her car had on others, sighed like Herman Melville looking over his last royalty statement.

  “My granddad gave it to me. He bought it for my grandma, but she died not long after and never drove it. Then he couldn’t sell it because it was a present to her. So it sat in his garage. Finally, he gave it to me. Because I’m just like her, he said. Sorry about the mess.”

  The front and back seats appeared strewn with guts. I had to move some clothing with discreet delicacy before I could sit down. Chelsea hastened to help, taking the clothes and tossing them in the back with the rest of her wardrobe.

  “It’s mostly uniforms from work,” she said, and gunned the engine so suddenly that my heart did a Keaton pratfall. Then she squealed the tires as she pulled out into traffic. I tried to relax into the slightly sour smell of polyester fabric, but the angle of the bucket seat in relation to the curve of the windshield was so unfamiliar – yet strangely familiar, too – that I seemed to be strapped into a rocket hurtling away from the earth. But Delmore was quite content. He had curled up in the crumpled uniforms and had started to snore in rhythm to the Pinto’s engine. The ghost of Keaton, meanwhile, grew excited by the speed and clambered onto the roof. I couldn’t see him, of course, but he was in his element, standing up there, windblown, holding his porkpie hat tight to his head as he waited to duck neatly under overpasses and telephone wires.

  I didn’t even need Keaton to remind me of Keaton. The drive was pure Sherlock Jr., all high speed and near misses at intersections – with one striking exception: it wasn’t silent. Chelsea conducted an almost non-stop commentary on other drivers, punctuated three times with a loud, “Come on, jerk!” followed by a sheepish, “Sorry, Professor,” and a rapid-fire explanation of how the dude (it was always a dude) either cut her off, wouldn’t get over to let her in, drove too slowly or ran lights (which she also did, to my dismay, but the hypocrisy was unremarked upon). Eventually, I had to shut my eyes and trust to the Fates. After all, as Jordan Baker points out to Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, “it takes two to make an accident.” And, when I thought about it, I saw that there was a kind of independent flapper quality to Chelsea, a daring and a promise of excitement. But she clearly wasn’t rich, spoiled or bored – and my instincts told me that she wasn’t dishonest. No, she wasn’t a flapper, so perhaps she was more like one of Keaton’s leading ladies? Absolutely not. While Keaton’s onscreen co-stars, such as Kathryn McGuire in Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator, and, most famously, Marion Mack in The General, occasionally exhibited flashes of spunk, they were mostly props, functionaries of mild prettiness conventionally present to serve the male plot lines. My classroom experience had certainly taught me that, despite the feminist movement, there were still plenty of young women around willing to be co-stars in title only. But Chelsea clearly wasn’t one of them; she lowered her athletic shoulders and drove straight into the world.

  Somehow or other, we survived the journey. Perhaps we had even driven along a bridge under construction that conveniently collapsed just as we reached the end of it. I was too rattled to know. I had already decided that this out-of-character outing was a mistake that I’d bring to a conclusion at the first opportunity.

  “Here we are,” Chelsea announced, and jerked the Pinto to a stop. Gently as an autumn leaf, the ghost of Keaton tumbled down the moon-wide windshield, landed on the street, stood, brushed off his baggy trousers and waited for us. Not at all gently, Delmore shoved my seat forward, grumbling, “The ego isn’t always at the wheel; sometimes it’s in the passenger seat,” as he forced his bulk past me. Still trembling, I managed to reach the sidewalk, the toys once again like ballast in my hands.

  We were definitely not in an upscale part of the city, but somewhere north and west of the downtown, which I rarely ventured out of, regarding any part of Edmonton that wasn’t within a few minutes of downtown in the same way that the characters in Huxley’s Brave New World regard the savage zone. We stood smack dab in the middle of North America’s main contribution to civilization: a four-lane highway next to a little strip mall. This mall consisted of two dingy fast-food franchises, an even dingier dry cleaners, a couple of empty shops with For Lease signs in the windows, a supremely sad pet store with a pair of lugubrious rodents – perhaps guinea pigs – dozing on sawdust behind grimy plate glass and, just beside that, a decidedly unpromising-looking shop called, believe it or not, Better Times Antiques. For a long ten seconds, we stood there, breathing in the diesel and fried fat fumes. I wondered whether one of the guinea pigs would move first, but they just lay there like a losing boxer’s gloves.

  “Here we are,” I mumbled.

  Chelsea laughed. It was a powerful, rolling kind of laugh, and I waited for the pins to crash and for her to boom out “Strike!” Instead, she did what the young are so good at, what I used to be so good at: she headed for Better Times.

  “I strive to be fed,” Delmore grumbled. “You know, ‘the scrimmage of appetite everywhere,’ and all that.”

  “‘Provide, provide,’” I said, and watched him rumble off on all fours towards a big blue Dumpster, one of the hundred million of his kind.

  By the time I entered the little shop, Chelsea was already talking with the tiny, bespectacled, elderly man behind the counter. He was nodding like one of those syrup-filled, long-necked novelty birds so popular decades ago, and I wondered if Chelsea had met him before. They resembled conspirators. Perhaps the girl had led me here to her unassuming accomplice, who probably held a very modern weapon under his grey vest. Seven thousand dollars was seven thousand dollars. Then it struck me all at once: what the hell was I doing? No one knew where I was; I didn’t even know. I had gone off with a student, a young woman still in her teens, to get an old toy I’d bought off a street person appraised. Why? I was a respectable man, a teacher, almost fifty years old. What the hell did I think I was doing? I knew what was illusory, what was real. Delmore, the ghost of Keaton, my own memories and terrifying darkness: if I had stepped out of my familiar body, I hadn’t lost control of the medium in which I performed. The gross world of heavy bears, fast-food franchises, work and death remained all too real, even as I longed for magic. While I stood there, uncertain, the contents of the shop helped to settle my nerves.

  It wasn’t a large space, but it was absolutely crammed with the survivors of changing fashion. High shelved like a university library, Better Times, conveniently enough, seemed to specialize in toys. Right away, my eye took in a huge green pogo stick, one of those punching-bag dolls with sand in the base (this one was Bozo the Clown), a couple of hula hoops, some Peanuts figures and what might have been an original Monopoly game. Small lamps with tasselled lampshades, a walnut filing cabinet with at least thirty tiny drawers, some Lionel trains (Buster will glom on to those, I thought) and a Disney poster from when Disney and everything else at least appeared innocent. And then my eyes faltered in the dim light, which seemed no stronger than what stars give off in puddles. It occurred to me then, with mild excitement, that there might be something related to the silver age of cinema in the shop, perhaps a Photoplay magazine or Erich von Stroheim’s monocle; I wasn’t hopeful enough to imagine that serendipity would grant me some Keaton memento.

  Suddenly, Chelsea was at my side, whispering. “It’s like Ollivander’s wand shop.” She paused for my reaction. When I didn’t have the appropriate one, she added, “From Harry Potter. The owner’s just like what I always imagined Ollivander would be like.”

  Well, I didn’t know wha
t she meant exactly, but I got the gist of it. Despite the musty smell and the cramped quarters and the unusual absence of music (which I had just noticed) – or possibly because of these – magic was in the air.

  “He seems like a good guy,” Chelsea went on in a hushed voice. “I think he’ll give you the straight dope.”

  The straight dope? Had she found that expression in the glovebox of the Pinto? I didn’t have time to mull over the girl’s diction, though. Eagerly, she gestured me towards the counter, past a head-high iron birdcage that looked strong enough to trap a woodcutter’s child.

  The air around the owner of the shop smelled of snuff and roasted chestnuts. The man himself seemed as indistinct as a grey and wispy column of smoke, except for a pair of prominent front teeth, which, ridiculously, made me think of George Washington, who, as legend has it, had worn a set of wooden choppers. The owner appraised me carefully – his head to one side, his pencil end tapping his front teeth – and must have found me wanting as an antique. I almost expected him to say, “He’s original, but not in very good condition.” Instead, his eyes lit on the bank I clutched to my chest, and noticeably widened.

  “Ahhh, what have we here?”

  His long, thin-fingered hands, more veins than flesh, reached out with a little boy’s greed. I gave him the bank, and the three of us closed around it like Astor, Greenstreet and Bogart around the dingus in The Maltese Falcon. For a few crazy seconds, I even wondered if the bank was solid gold under the paint. Nervously, I fingered my gat, until I realized I was only scratching my stomach.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Mr. Ollivander murmured, in a voice that should have had a Hungarian or Romanian accent, but sounded unmagically Ontarian. “J. & E. Stevens Company. Of Connecticut.”

  Unless I was hearing things, and of course I was, he had pronounced the middle C. I had never heard anyone do that before. I looked at Chelsea to see if she had registered this verbal oddity, but she had her elbows on the counter, her jaw cupped in her hands, and was gazing raptly into Ollivander’s face, which hovered like a waxy moon over the magician.