The Heavy Bear

by Tim Bowling

  I looked around at the cages and tanks. There were at least a dozen, and all were grimy. Some sort of a large lizard – perhaps a Komodo dragon – blinked up at me with its bulbous, Peter Lorre eyes. The sandpaper of its skin seemed to cast sparks against being. I could relate, too much so. I had already gathered a comic ghost, some toys, a poet-bear and a young student; I wasn’t eager to add to my entourage.

  The owner of the shop must have had shoulders but I couldn’t see them. The huge Metallica T-shirt hung below his face the way a bedsheet hangs off a kid-ghost at Halloween. Or used to. Kids didn’t go in for bedsheet ghosts anymore. Or hoboes. The sack at the end of a stick, the plastic cigar, the open road! I gave myself a mental jolt. Stay in the present, old boy, come on. I considered the owner’s face. It was as old as mine, framed by long, stringy, more grey-than-black hair and poisonous. The nose was long with cavernous, permanently flared nostrils, and the skin of the broad face was pouchy. A receding hairline and small, squinting eyes completed the picture: he might have stepped straight out of the pages of Bleak House, if not for the heavy metal T-shirt.

  When he noticed me staring at him, he said, “Hey,” and the word came across the thick air of soiled cedar chips and cat pee like a soft, sinister “Boo.” But I didn’t jump. For some strange reason, the depressing shop comforted me. Despite the filth and gloom of the place, the presence of other species, even these poor specimens, always lifted my spirits. I remembered my Whitman:

  I think I could turn and live with animals; they are so placid and self-contain’d;

  I stand and look at them long and long.

  They do not sweat and whine about their condition;

  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins:

  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God:

  Not one is dissatisfied – not one is demented with the mania of owning things;

  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;

  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

  It’s a bizarre, twenty-first-century form of comfort, but you hear it from time to time: the earth and its life existed before us, and it will survive us. Even when you don’t hear someone articulate the thought, you can feel it.

  I felt it now. The listless white mouse motionless on the tread wheel; the songbird cage as songless as the prairies; the grey Persian with dulled amber eyes; whatever flecks of colour flickered behind the aquarium glass; the sleeping Rottweiler puppies; the guinea pigs, hamsters and gerbils, of which there might have been hundreds; the old fan belt of some kind of snake; Chelsea’s little monkey: somehow they all spoke forcibly of an existence so far above and beyond us that I could almost pity the shop owner more than its prisoners. Almost. For the fact remained: the owner deserved to be in a cage. Of course, he probably already was. Who could live day by day, conducting such a trade in such a place and not be imprisoned? To take in your lucre-filthied grasp the scruffs of such sadness . . .

  Chelsea’s little monkey? My double take stretched itself to a triple as I saw the spunky girl chatter to a caged primate who, to keep the Dickens theme going, played Tiny Tim to the shop’s lugubrious Victorian London. His fur, mostly dark brown, was somewhere between caramel and cream around his pink-white face; he had a long tail curled like jumper cables, and more darkness to his eyes than Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo and the Gish sisters combined. He? Perhaps not. Sexing a primate wasn’t something I’d googled lately. But the monkey wasn’t much bigger than the Persian cat, and he/she/it was the liveliest creature in the shop by a long stretch. I stepped deeper into the stink and gloom for a closer look. The owner’s eyes followed.

  As I came up to the cage, I saw my own face on the monkey. But my image vanished quickly. The monkey’s personality was simply too vibrant. His eyes flashed, he chattered, he scratched his chin, head, armpits; he might have been describing the private life of the shop owner in some exotic human language – Armenian or the almost-extinct Yiddish. Chelsea, who had bent over and placed her face close to the bars, seemed to understand every word. She laughed and mimicked the sounds he made. She even took the monkey’s hand in her own, a gesture that only increased the torrential flow of his speech. At one point, he turned to me, and I swear he smiled and asked after my wife and kids. He was the very embodiment, despite being two feet tall and a primate, of hail-fellow-well-met social skill. Immediately I gave him the appropriate name: Greg Arious. The second I thought of it, he chirped with delight. It was almost spooky. But since I was already spooked, and had been for weeks, what did it matter?

  “Just look at him,” Chelsea said, straightening up. “Isn’t he great? It’s like he knows me. The metal dude back there says he comes from South America. Can you imagine? South America. And now he’s in Edmonton. In this shit place.”

  I wasn’t sure whether she meant that Edmonton was a shit place or whether she simply referred to the pet shop. The former was a definite possibility. One of the main charms of Edmonton is its lack of charm, or at least the perception from outside that it is an ugly, cold, depressing, unsexy city.

  “How much is he?” Chelsea waved her arm at the shop owner as if she was calling for the bill. I noticed that her mascara was streaked and her eyes were red. She must have been crying. Why? Had the sorry state of the animals affected her so deeply? Perhaps – probably – she had other things in her life to be upset about. After all, she worked several minimum wage jobs, and her mother sounded like a concern. Suddenly, I hoped that Greg Arious, whose new name sounded weirdly like that of an Olympic champion diver from the past, could communicate with her. Maybe this spunky teenager needed a friend.

  Like an out-of-shape roadie, the owner dragged the heavy amp of his decades over to us. “Capu . . . capu . . .” he gasped, and I thought he was desperate for a caffeine fix when he finally blurted out the whole word. “Capuchin.”

  Of course he was looking straight at me, as if I understood. It’s one curious thing about being an almost fifty-year-old man: people often grant you a degree of wisdom and authority that you don’t possess, especially people close to your own age and older. With the young, there’s more of a mix. Mostly they give you the authority but only sometimes the wisdom. Angus Metalhead, however, wasn’t young; even his T-shirt was older than Chelsea.

  “A capuchin monkey,” he explained. “From the jungles of South America.”

  I looked at Greg again, but I couldn’t picture him in a jungle, even though I could picture Buster Keaton’s ghost in the post-millennial jungle. No doubt my fantastic daydreaming couldn’t include real animals. Toy horses, talking bears – yes. But real animals have a magic entirely outside of us, no matter how close we try to get to them. One of the strangest films of Keaton’s triumphant era, in fact, explores this human-animal relationship. Go West, made in 1925, is basically a love story of the boy-meets-girl kind, except that the boy is a drifter named Friendless and the girl is a cow named Brown Eyes. Perhaps the fullest expression of a meaningful relationship in Keaton’s entire oeuvre involves a man and a cow, a rather rueful commentary on his marriage. Perhaps this isn’t even strange. Given what people are, or can be, given the sheer delight on Chelsea’s face as she continued to engage with the capuchin monkey from the jungles of South America, perhaps we should all join a 4-H club eHarmony site.

  “The only one in Edmonton. Maybe in Alberta.”

  I came back to the reality of the metalhead’s sales pitch.

  “Really tame, too. He’ll just perch on your shoulder and stay there. He doesn’t try to jump off or nothin’. You can take him anywhere.”

  “Where did you get him?” I asked, because all I could think to do was to play along until Chelsea had completed her Roddy McDowall moment.

  The shop owner squinted so hard that his eyes were mere coin slots. His greasy grey-black hair swung over his face. I might have been looking through vines at our distant ancestors. “A buddy of mine had him. But he wanted somethin’
easier to sneak into bars and restaurants. I think he ended up getting a ferret instead.”

  Because that actually sounded sensible to me, I began to worry. Now I could hear, in the near distance behind me, the lizard’s eyes blinking, each click like the snapping of a photo. Keaton’s cow was named Brown Eyes, but my lizard needed a less comforting moniker. Despair? Terror? Maybe just Angst would cover it.

  “I paid a lot for him,” the metalhead went on. “So I gotta ask a good price for him.”

  I had obviously missed something. “How much?”

  “Two thousand.”

  Chelsea turned away from the cage with a whole-body sigh that I understood well, since that was how I’d been turning away from my life for months. “Come on, that can’t be your best price. I’ll bet you’ve had him a long time.”

  Was two thousand dollars too much for a capuchin monkey? It would certainly buy a lot of concert tickets on the Iron Maiden Reunion Tour, if indeed Iron Maiden had ever broken their union. But then, I could outfit a whole zoo with exotic monkeys if I sold my magician bank to the guy next door for twenty grand. Suddenly a bizarre image of my wife asking, “So, how was your day?” floated before me, except she was wearing a British judge’s powdery wig and long robes, and what I heard was, “So, how was your life?” And on my lips was the terrible answer, “A failure. A selfish failure. I never lived up to it.”

  The tired machinery of the pet shop groaned and squeaked. I stood on that assembly line of denuded nature, assembling nothing, while Chelsea bartered over the price of Greg and while the ghost of Keaton – the successful, young, yet spirit-penetrating Keaton – stood beside the cage blinking his great bovine eyes. I wanted desperately to advance the plot. But, in the end, as so often happens, the plot advanced me.

  “Fifteen hundred. I can’t do lower than that.”

  “Well . . .” Chelsea looked at me, and the look was complicit. “Maybe. But I’ll have to hold him first. I mean, I can’t drop fifteen hundred bucks on a monkey if I haven’t even held him.”

  I was still trying to decipher Chelsea’s complicit look when the owner unlocked the cage and, to a delighted chorus of shrieks from the released primate, walked over to us with the monkey, like a pirate’s parrot, on his sloped shoulder.

  “He’s a little ramped up,” Metalhead explained. “I haven’t had him out in a while.”

  I could feel Chelsea’s spirit arch and hiss like a cornered tomcat, but she held her tongue. It was easy enough to read her thoughts, though. You asshole, you probably haven’t had him out since you bought him. I was beginning to understand the full import of her complicit look, and panic, like gorge, rose in my throat. “You . . . you can’t . . .” I mouthed, but, just as in the middle of the night, the words didn’t emerge.

  The little monkey now capered about on Chelsea’s shoulder. Then he leapt across the base of her neck to her other shoulder, and back again, while she laughed and tilted her head forward and said, “That tickles.”

  “He likes you,” Metalhead remarked, exactly as if he had said to me, “You really ought to buy this chick the monkey.” But he had no idea what was going on. Too many years of too many decibels had dulled his instincts, or maybe he’d never possessed any in the first place.

  Chelsea, meanwhile, seemed to know that Providence was on her side. Even before the phone rang on the owner’s desk, even before he sludged away to answer it, she waited for the phone to ring and for him to sludge away. The whole scene was playing out before her, and I was gaping at it, just as the projectionist in Sherlock Jr. gaped at the film he wanted to enter. Except, I didn’t want to enter Chelsea’s little production. She was filming the world through the lens of youth; an excitement and clarity of purpose burned in her gaze. My old Bell & Howell was middle-aged and required bifocals.

  “Let’s go! Come on! He’s not looking!” She held her arm out, like an usher at a wedding, to escort me to my place in the criminal’s petty underworld. And Greg Arious – amber-eyed and afire with primitive approbation, hurling a transcending cry across the species of “Live! Live!” – danced madly along between her elbow and shoulder blade. He knew the score.

  “No.” My eyes darted towards the owner’s desk. Metalhead appeared to be leaning, à la Jack Benny, on the empty air. Somewhere in those greasy grey strands of hair was housed a cellphone. He stood leaning on it, the dictionary definition of oblivious. If I hadn’t been so convinced he was the sort of small businessman to keep a weapon behind the counter, I’d have felt sorry for him. Instead, I was terrified.

  “Come on, Professor. Hurry!” Chelsea, big-boned, large-eyed, Pinto-driving Chelsea, advanced towards the door. Any second now, Metalhead would notice, he’d reach behind the counter, he’d see the older mastermind, the seasoned criminal who had let his apprentice accomplice leave first, he’d raise the gun and pull the trigger . . .

  I scrambled out of the shop, my heart a bloodied monkey trying to beat itself to death against bars that would never open. Ahead of me, beating just as violently, swung Chelsea’s green purse. I ran as if through a jungle towards the sea, the monkey’s ecstatic shrieks urging me on, waves of salt pouring off the sea-green cask at Chelsea’s hip. Somewhere out of the corner of my blurred vision, I saw Keaton’s ghost. Though still, he seemed as rapt and excited as the monkey, no doubt because, at last, here was a slapstick scene he could appreciate: a gag with risk and action, probably a manic chase and the actors performing all their own stunts. I could hear his five senses whirring at jumped-up speed as, gasping, I clambered into the passenger seat of the car, banging my knee hard in the process. Chelsea reversed the Pinto with a squeal the instant my bum hit the vinyl. The world outside the windshield careened. Greg Arious shrieked and bounced up and down on Chelsea’s right shoulder, as if trying to tear her coat sleeve off. Not surprisingly, the speed and the racket woke Delmore.

  “What fresh hell is this?”he grumbled.

  But I couldn’t respond.

  MY HEAD WAS turned back to the pet shop as Chelsea pulled out of the strip mall and onto the highway, alarmingly close to the front of a big rig with Tim Hortons and a giant brown doughnut painted on its side. The blast of the truck’s horn seemed to pour straight out of the mouth of Metalhead, who by now had burst from the shop. I couldn’t see a gun in his hand, but he was waving one arm. The other, still stuck to the side of his head, probably held the cellphone. Probably he had already called the police. Probably the sirens would start up any second and the ghost of Keaton would have exactly the kind of chase scene he loved. I cringed to think of the ending. Because, in Cops, a short that Keaton made in 1922, famous for the monumental chase scene in which Buster is pursued on foot through the city streets by an entire police force of running flatfoots, the final shot is of a tombstone. How many comic shorts from that era end with the death of the hero? Oh very funny, Buster – an innocent man hounded by the authorities and eventually executed. Ha ha ha. Existential comedy was all fine and dandy – and I had always appreciated Keaton’s darkness – but that was a movie. This hurtling, monkey-motivated, lemon-yellow Pinto was no prop!

  I found my voice, but I appeared to find it in the middle of a helium-filled balloon.

  “Chelsea, this is crazy. You have to go back.”

  She turned briefly, and the expression on her face hit me like a wall of flame. She was the leading lady tied to the railroad tracks, except her eyes did not flash with fear; they invited the train’s deadly advance. I had never seen excitement like it. Euphoria? She had crossed over to the primate side of the self; she was deep in the South American jungle, Bonnie to the monkey’s Clyde.

  “‘Mistah Kurtz – He dead.’ ‘The horror! The horror!’” came a grumble from behind us.

  My neck almost snapped off as I wrenched around to Delmore. The great shaggy ursine head with the penetrating, clarifying, direct-to-the-point intelligence of a brilliant poet was slashed by a hastily carved jack-o’-lantern grin. “‘Take a walk on the wild side.’” He hummed. “
‘Doo do doo do doo do doo doo.’”

  Well, I thought, of course you can enjoy this, your bloody hour of strutting and fretting on the goddamned stage is over. You don’t have kids to raise. Hell, you never had kids. Your life was just your life. Just yours.

  Somehow Delmore’s sigh fell louder than the monkey’s shrieks, rolling like the surf against my spirit. “Quite right. I never did.”

  I had expected anger, argument, some sort of intellectual attack on the emotional irrelevance of generation. But why? I had read Delmore Schwartz’s poems, and his biography and letters. I knew how deeply he had considered the conveyance of blood and cells from one human to another. I felt like a shit. But, even so, a terrified shit. Chelsea’s driving, which had been reckless before, was downright suicidal now. She cut in and out of traffic as if in rhythm to the erratic tune of Greg Arious’s shrieks. Jesus! Did the damned monkey ever have a contemplative moment?

  The skyscraper skyline hove into view, the ordinary crags and peaks of commerce. Somewhere up in that modern sky, Charles Sleep was sending Alberta oil to the Chinese infrastructure. And that was considered sane and reasonable, the act of a responsible global worker of the new millennium. As for being an unwitting accomplice to the theft of a capuchin monkey by a teenaged cheerleader-linebacker with all the chutzpah of developing self? I didn’t know what that was, except foolish. We had rescued a primate from a cage only to be put behind bars ourselves. Foolish? Insane.