The Heavy Bear

by Tim Bowling

  “I was never much good in a crisis,” he said. “And you know how I fared with women.” He sighed, but inside the sound was the obvious desire to be faring with crises and women all over again. “I can’t even really feel the sun, you know. And the trash I eat, I can’t taste. Being dead is a lot like what you’d expect. We’re right to dread it.” I could see exactly one half-foot rectangle of black eye and brown fur and snout in the rearview mirror, but I heard Delmore’s whole life in his voice. “You don’t know how lucky you are. Whatever you decide to do, it’ll be according to your nature. And I wouldn’t be here, frankly, if you were an asshole.”

  The comment was of some comfort, though what I really wanted was concrete, practical advice.

  “You wouldn’t listen to me in the library, so why should I waste my breath now?”

  I could hardly argue with this point. I hadn’t listened, and my failure was tragic.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Too late, I realized I’d spoken aloud. Then I realized that Delmore had no doubt intended me to do so.

  Chelsea’s watery gaze blinked at me briefly as I took my eyes off the road. “Why? You haven’t done anything. None of this is your fault. I drove you to the antiques store, I stole him . . .” Her voice broke again. “It was me who didn’t warn you.”

  How could I even begin to explain to this woman just beginning adulthood what my day had started out like? I could hardly even explain it to myself. The cold, creeping dread of fifty that puts ashes on your tongue and in your hands – how much it needed life, the surprise and promise of it, to usher in the gratitude and humility that could be the only jewels of age, if there were any jewels. The search, at least, must be made. Chelsea’s guilt and pain against what I woke to each morning . . . how could I warn her? I couldn’t, no more than I could warn my own children, or should. Such life was in the living. And the death of such life, too. I assumed the authority that was mine, all that I had earned through the accumulation of the decades.

  “Listen, now. What’s happened is over. It wasn’t your fault. You’re a good person, Chelsea. You care. You need to learn how important that is. Not everyone cares the way you do.” I reached my hand out and lightly touched the monkey’s broken skull. “Imagine if you hadn’t come into his life. Think of what you gave him. Gave him back.” I could hardly keep going; the tears came heavily in the back of my eyes. “He died for you because of it. And that’s a good thing. He was full of life when he did it. You gave him back everything that he was. He wouldn’t have had it without you.” I might have been speaking for myself; I didn’t know whether she could understand. She was so young, and the grief was dew-fresh. I wasn’t arrogant enough – not now – to believe my words could lift a lifetime of self-blame. But I had to speak them, just as I’d had to hold her; there wasn’t anything else to do. “You can’t blame yourself for everything that happens.”

  I had been driving with minimal attention, keeping to the streets and avenues I knew, obeying the lights. When I finally focused, I could hardly believe my eyes. The Pinto had come to a stop on Whyte Avenue, in the heart of Old Strathcona, the character district of the city, which had, a century before, in fact been a separate city entirely from Edmonton. A rail crossing bar with flashing red lights had descended, stopping traffic in both directions as a bright red diesel engine dragged the nineteenth century across the rapid speed and vision of the twenty-first. The train was barely moving – the tracks extended only a block north of the avenue – and the switching happened infrequently, even less often than a decade before. But Keaton’s ghost took full advantage of the opportunity. Just as in Sherlock Jr., he sprinted along the top of the boxcars, one hand clutching his porkpie hat to his head, his tiny figure moving with remarkable grace as he leaped and kept on going, the past that pursued him, or the mid-life that he hadn’t even smashed into yet, far behind and losing ground fast. The same force that had been in the monkey’s caring touch on Chelsea’s face and in his shriek as he threw himself into her defence radiated from Keaton’s young body, as if the powder on his face had formed a kind of phosphorescence around him.

  What could I do? What could anyone do? He was out there trying, out there transcending those tears he had shed on the MGM sets, just as Delmore’s poems and stories were out there trying, trying for whoever could hear them. Maybe most people never would, even the caring, loving people who would respond in kind, even this young woman beside me, who might never watch another Keaton film or read a Delmore Schwartz poem in her life, whatever her life might become. She had already invoked the spirit of their art, and what was their art for if it wasn’t for the permanent honouring of what already resided in her being, and in mine? Keaton ran and jumped and always escaped, even as he rode the railway handcart into the salt depths with the chasmic miles behind him; even as his suffering, mortal self proclaimed, “It’s all too late” to the world that bestowed attention and adulation on him in the year before he died. And as his old age passed my infancy once more, the wake of salt settling on my lips to be tasted now, in another place, with wholly another need and existence in my heart, something stood up inside me and raced along the boxcars, too. As the flashing bar slowly began to lift, nothing was decided. The nothing in which we all have to endure.

  I didn’t need to hear Delmore’s weary sigh, if weary it was. I didn’t need the translation of a dead poet’s philosophy to tell me about the thinness of the ice. Art, too, was human and fallible. Its consolations depended on many factors – mostly the horrible weight of time and the randomness of experience – and, as a result, it often failed. Even so, it had to be created even to have a chance at success. Keaton had to run, he had to ride blindfolded on a motorcycle to escape the villains, before he cracked his neck on the tracks and woke a decade later to the concussive effects of the world’s vast indifference. The film had to play, and the millions, in darkness and tension and hope, had to stay in their seats until all the seats were tipped up again and made into tombstones. Here lies the fate of the world. And the young bow their heads before it.

  I drove across the tracks, and they were not only in Edmonton, Alberta, in 2012. To my left, the nineteenth century groaned as it moved back, a snake gorged on blood and dust and soot returning to its burrow. But the tracks – of Hollywood in 1924, White Rock in 1964, Edmonton in 1916, Toronto in that last year of the earth’s innocence of the atomic bomb – extended into the sky, their deep black silvering as they reached, becoming the frames of a silent film in which the unborn actors would perform everything again. The consolation of art – because it is real – is cold and it hurts, and it drives us back to the essential hungers and the little decencies of life.

  When the Pinto reached 109th Street, I turned and drove north towards the river. Halfway there, I quickly angle-parked outside the Upper Crust restaurant. Beside me, Chelsea had gone unnervingly still. Only her hands moved, stroking the dead monkey’s fur. Her stillness seemed almost religious, and I was loath to disturb it. But I didn’t want to leave her by herself, not without some explanation. She was in no state to sit in a restaurant, nor was I, frankly, so my options were simple enough. Very quietly, I said I was getting some food and would be back soon. I asked if she’d like a coffee, and she responded with an almost imperceptible nod.

  Outside, I stretched painfully, my side and chest aching, my knee stiff and numb. Sweat soaked my shirt at the back and under the arms. Oh, but the air and the light – together they satisfied one of the essential hungers. I thought then of Greg Arious, of just how much escaping that dark, stale pet shop must have meant to him. Regretfully, I wished we had never wasted a moment in that food court, in all the false light and greasy air. If I’d known the little monkey’s fate, I’d have set him free in the river valley to fend off the bewildered coyotes.

  I spent ten minutes – no more – in the restaurant. But when I emerged, the Pinto was gone. It was as if a yellow slab had been removed from the Pyramid of Cheops.

  “I’ll Cheops you in the neck
, you idiot.” Delmore, more bearish than ever, his bulk down on all fours, glared up at me from where the car had been. “You’re not the sharpest image in the anthology, are you?”

  “How . . . what?”

  “You left the keys in the ignition, chum. She didn’t wait more than ten seconds. I had to scramble like hell to get out.”

  Now it was my turn to glare. “What did you get out for? Why didn’t you stop her?”

  “If you haven’t figured this out by now, let me be clear. I’m dead. I’m a projection. Do you think anybody else in this burg is stumbling around talking to a Jewish bear? I can’t get in the way. Not of the big stuff. A minor diversion here or there, maybe . . . You think I wouldn’t have kept the monkey alive for her if I could have? The little lady’s a peach. First-class spunk. And you’re a grade A ass. A real mentsch, sure, but not too bright.”

  I gazed to the north. The great black span of the High Level Bridge wasn’t visible, yet I could imagine the Pinto racing illegally across, going the wrong way, like a bold character on some tricky level of a video game. But this was no game. I knew what Chelsea intended, and all the blood in my body froze. Nothing reached my brain. I couldn’t think.

  Delmore snarled and reared up on his hind legs. Halfway there, he half-transformed – again. His figure slackened, though it remained bulky, and I could see the human intelligence in the ursine features. If the change kept on, he’d be as white-faced as Keaton’s ghost, standing there in a stained brown suit and worn loafers, middle-aged and failing. He was all power and control when he spoke. “Get a cab, will ya? Be resourceful. She’s going after the crazy guy. Do I have to paint you a picture?”

  A cab. Of course. But I didn’t have a phone. Wildly, hopelessly, I looked around for a booth.

  Delmore surged forward and gave me a shove. “That’s a main road, isn’t it? I know this ain’t Manhattan, but I’m sure you can hail a cab. Or at least a goddamned sled with dogs. Hurry up. I’m right behind you.”

  It didn’t take long. A few minutes later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of a yellow cab, telling the smooth, jet-black-haired young driver to head downtown, fast.

  “What address, please, sir?”

  “What? Oh. Uh, just downtown.”

  Once he’d cut a sharp right before the bridge and started down a steep hill to the valley floor, I began to collect my bearings.

  “Good thing she drove off on us,” Delmore grunted. “You’re a terrible driver. You’d have got us all killed. The two of you would have been enjoying my company. Permanently.”

  “Oh, lay off, will you. I feel bad enough as it is.”

  To my surprise, Delmore didn’t bother to respond.

  At this point, the driver’s neck appeared to flush with concern. I could hardly blame him. He kept glancing at me without turning his head, until I felt that I was pulling his eyeballs on strings. I tried to explain.

  “I’m looking for someone in another car. It’s very important. The car’s easy to spot. It’s a Pinto. Bright yellow.”

  “A Pinto?” Now he did turn, as lost as if I had said a DeSoto.

  Briefly, hastily, poorly, I tried to describe the car. “Very vivid yellow,” I ended. “You can’t miss it. Brighter than your cab. Like the sun.”

  We were ascending the hill on the other side of the river now, a half-mile from Jasper Avenue. Tall apartment buildings closed around us; the daylight dimmed. The driver’s aquiline nose twitched. I knew he was trying to assess the danger I posed, but I couldn’t reassure him, because I didn’t know what danger lay ahead. Besides, I was too busy scanning the streets at each intersection, desperate to see a flash of yellow, the coffee cooling and unsipped in my hands.

  “Just head east along Jasper,” I urged. “Then turn north on 100th towards Churchill Square.”

  I noticed little over the next several minutes, except how dismally lacking in colour the traffic was. Grey, grey, black, grey, dark green, dark blue, grey, black. That such a prismatic world should be so drab in its routine motion!

  Perhaps the police would find her first. Or even Metalhead and his motley crue out to avenge the theft. Anyone. Anyone else. Please. Please. I must have begun to murmur aloud, for the driver’s glances became even more frequent and he ran his tongue over his lips. Outside, along the crowded Jasper sidewalk, Keaton’s ghost kept pace, walking fast, then sprinting, then disappearing and reappearing at the next intersection. My heart beat faster, counting the seconds the way the meter did, adding them up inexorably towards some fare I doubted I’d ever be able to pay.

  After ten minutes of cruising – something I hadn’t done since I was a teenager – and once we’d come to a stop at yet another red light, the driver cleared his throat and, with remarkable discretion, asked, “Sir, are you certain you wish to continue looking?”

  My head-turn must have been rapid, or my eyes wild, for he quickly added, “It is fine if you wish it. But the fare . . .”

  Christ! The fact that I had to pay for this ride had completely slipped my mind, just as had my thirst and hunger. The two coffees cooled in my hands like Olympic torches after all the medals had been given out; I still hadn’t even taken a sip of mine. The brown paper bag on my lap, containing two sandwiches and two muffins, sickened me when I looked down on it and noticed its resemblance to the monkey’s corpse. All of a sudden, everything crashed in on me, the whole perplexing weight of the long, unpredictable day. I had to lower my coffee-cup-filled hands to my thighs out of weakness.

  Calmly and discreetly, the driver pulled over to the curb and waited. He stopped the meter. “Can you perhaps look some other time?”

  I didn’t even know what money I had in my wallet. Perhaps I’d have to use a credit card. The same credit card I’d been willing to use to buy a charming monkey that wound up getting killed by some homeless guy who’d sold me a grotesquely valuable mechanical bank. Only then did I remember the Pinto’s locked treasure. Thirty thousand dollars. Gone. I hadn’t even given it a thought. Stupid, stupid.

  “Be kind,” Delmore whispered. “You’re a mentsch, remember. It’s not the worst fate. Your friend, there, he never thought much about money either.”

  I stared through the windshield to see Keaton squatting before a newspaper box, trying to open it without putting in a coin. And succeeding, too, as I had done a hundred times as a boy, in the Vancouver rain, waiting at bus stops. So long ago now. I never took the papers. Theft wasn’t the point. It was finding a challenge for the moment’s boredom; it was putting the mind keenly to the abyss. Keaton’s ghost didn’t take a paper either. Why should he? The headlines and the stories weren’t really any different than they’d been on his last visit to Edmonton in 1916–money, death, death, money. Suddenly I could see Chelsea slumped against an alley wall, a knife thrust under her ribs.

  “Drive on,” I said hoarsely. “Please. Once more around.”

  The driver’s last bit of fear evaporated. He smiled sadly, and did not start the meter. I might have rejoiced at the simple human gesture, under different circumstances. But imagination had made me desperate once again. I saw the little girl behind Chelsea’s eyes as she stood before an abandoned house in a small town with her mother’s name and tried to call up her father’s image. My skin prickled. I mouthed her name, and I refused to see the passing city as a grave over which my whole life cried. I looked harder at the world than I’d ever looked. The cab slid along the streets like a tear that would not be broken.

  The moments passed in a curious silence. My desperation was great, my heart pounded heavily, my imagination raced with scenes of violence that I arrived just seconds too late to prevent; yet the interior of the cab remained hushed. I allowed the driver to complete one more circuit – past the library and Churchill Square, down 102nd Avenue west towards the MacEwan campus, then back around to the east along Jasper. No yellow Pinto appeared – no Pinto of any colour. No Gremlin, no Pacer, no little seventies vehicle born out of the energy crisis before the current energy c
risis. There wasn’t even a single yellow vehicle on the streets other than the cab we circled the downtown in. Keaton, however, kept the faith. The old comedian who’d once bragged that he worked more than Doris Day now raced the late-summer afternoon, sweat pouring down his immobile face and smearing the white powder, his baggy trousers seeming baggier with each block. Had we kept on, I believe he’d have been ground into the dust from which we all come.

  The driver never showed any impatience or concern. Somehow satisfied that I was not a lunatic, he drove with tremendous care; I noticed that he even slowed at intersections to afford me a more incisive look down the crossroads. And the meter remained off.

  I took a trembling sip of lukewarm coffee to recharge my voice. Then I asked him to stop the car.

  He pulled deftly to the curb, not far from where I’d first encountered the homeless killer, and blinked his long-lashed brown eyes at me.

  “I am sorry that we could not find this Pinto,” he said.

  I nodded and forced a slight smile. “We tried. Thanks for your help.” My voice had little strength in it now, but I made a conscious effort to rally. “What do I owe you?” Behind the question was the knowledge that I couldn’t pay, not with something as cold as money, for the instinctive discretion he had shown.

  “You will forgive me, sir.” The coffee-brown of his eyes reached me with more warmth than the lukewarm coffee against my palms. “I am young, but I have done this job for some time, many years, here and other places. I have met many people.”

  My eyes lowered to the brown paper bag on my lap. Strangely, I could smell Chelsea’s perfume faintly on the air, hear the rhythmic snapping of her gum. I half-expected the paper bag to transform back into the fierce monkey that would return her safely to the world. I wished it, just as intensely as she’d once wished for a letter from a wizarding school to lift her out of her fatherless life and her mother’s dreary and heartbreaking routine of heartbreak. The magic of the world is rarely dispensed predictably or in large amounts, and I knew that I’d already had my letter. The day had come stamped, and if the ripping open of it meant more death and loss in the end, it did not quite dispel the magic. After all, what is more magical than change?