Bear and His Daughter

by Robert Stone

  Checking on the mountain, Blessington felt a rush of despair. The lower slopes of the jungle were turning dark green. The line dividing sun-bright vegetation from deep-shaded green was withdrawing toward the peak. And the mountain looked no closet He felt as though they were losing distance, being carried out faster than they could paddle. Marie’s relentless screeches went on and on. Perhaps they were actually growing closer; Blessington thought, perhaps an evening tide was carrying them out.

  “Poor kid,” Gillian said. “Poor little baby.”

  “Don’t listen,” he said.

  Gillian kept coughing, sputtering. He stopped asking her if she was all right.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really cold now. I thought the water was warm at first.”

  “We’re almost there,” he said.

  Gillian stopped swimming and looked up at Gros Piton. Turning over again to swim, she got a mouthful of water.

  “Like … hell,” she said.

  “Keep going, Gillian.”

  It seemed to him, as he rowed the sodden vessel of his body and mind, that the sky was darkening. The sun’s mark withdrew higher on the slopes. Marie kept screaming. They heard splashes far off where the boat was now. Marie and Honoré were clinging to it.

  “Liam,” Gillian said, “you can’t save me.”

  “You’ll save yourself,” he said. “You’ll just go on.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Don’t be a bloody stupid bitch.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I really don’t.”

  He stopped rowing himself then, although he was loath to. Every interruption of their forward motion put them more at the mercy of the current. According to the cruise book it was only a five-knot current but it felt much stronger. Probably reinforced by a tide.

  Gillian was struggling, coughing in fits. She held her head up, greedy for air her mouth open like a baby bird’s in hope of nourishment. Blessington swam nearer her. The sense of their time ticking away, of distance lost to the current, enraged him.

  “You’ve got to turn over on your back,” he said gently. “Just ease onto your back and rest there. Then arch your back. Let your head lie backward so your forehead’s in the water.”

  Trying to do as he told her she began to thrash in a tangle of her own arms and legs. She swallowed water gasped. Then she laughed again.

  “Don’t,” he whispered.

  “Liam? Can I rest on you?”

  He stopped swimming toward her.

  “You mustn’t. You mustn’t touch me. We mustn’t touch each other. We might…”

  “Please,” she said.

  “No. Get on your back. Turn over slowly.”

  Something broke the water near them. He thought it was the fin of a blacktip shark. A troublesome shark but not among the most dangerous. Of course, it could have been anything. Gillian still had the Rasta bracelet around her wrist.

  “This is the thing, Liam. I think I got a cramp. I’m so dizzy.”

  “On your back, love. You must. It’s the only way.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m too cold. I’m too dizzy.”

  “Come on,” he said. He started swimming again. Away from her.

  “I’m so dizzy. I could go right out.”

  In mounting panic, he reversed direction and swam back toward her.

  “Oh, shit,” she said. “Liam?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m fading out, Liam. I’ll let it take me.”

  “Get on your back,” he screamed at her. “You can easily swim. If you have to swim all night.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said. Then she began to laugh again. She raised the hand that had the Rasta bracelet and splashed a sign of the cross.

  “Nam,” she said. “Nam myoho renge kyo. Son of a bitch.” Laughing. What she tried to say next was washed out of her mouth by a wave.

  “I can just go out,” she said. “I’m so dizzy.”

  Then she began to struggle and laugh and cry.

  “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow,” she sang, laughing. “Praise him, all creatures here below.”

  “Gillian,” he said. “For God’s sake.” Maybe I can take her in, he thought. But that was madness and he kept his distance.

  She was laughing and shouting at the top of her voice.

  “Praise him above, you heavenly host! Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”

  Laughing, thrashing, she went under; her face straining, wide-eyed. Blessington tried to look away but it was too late. He was afraid to go after her.

  He lost his own balance then. His physical discipline collapsed and he began to wallow and thrash as she had.

  “Help!” he yelled piteously. He was answered by a splash and Marie’s screams. Perhaps now he only imagined them.

  Eventually he got himself under control. When the entire mountain had subsided into dark green, he felt the pull of the current release him. The breakers were beginning to carry him closer to the sand, toward the last spit of sandy beach remaining on the island. The entire northern horizon was subsumed in the mountain overhead, Gros Piton.

  He had one final mad moment. Fifty yards offshore, a riptide was running; it seized him and carried him behind the tip of the island. He had just enough strength and coherence of mind to swim across it. The sun was setting as he waded out, among sea grape and manchineel. When he turned he could see against the setting sun the bare poles of the Sans Regret, settled on the larger reef to the south of the island. It seemed to him also that he could make out a struggling human figure, dark against the light hull. But the dark came down quickly. He thought he detected a flash of green. Sometimes he thought he could still hear Marie screaming.

  All night, as he rattled through the thick brush looking for a road to follow from concealment, Gillian’s last hymn echoed in his mind’s ear. He could see her dying face against the black fields of sugarcane through which he trudged.

  Once he heard what he was certain was the trumpeting of an elephant. It made him believe, in his growing delirium, that he was in Africa—Africa, where he had never been. He hummed the hymn. Then he remembered he had read somewhere that the resort maintained an elephant in the bush. But he did not want to meet it, so he decided to stay where he was and wait for morning. All night he talked to Gillian, joked and sang hymns with her. He saved her again and again and they were together.

  In the morning, when the sun rose fresh and full of promise, he set out for the Irish bar in Soufrière. He thought that they might overstand him there.

  AQUARIUS OBSCURED

  IN THE HOUSE on Noe Street, Big Gene was crooning into the telephone.

  “Geerat, Geeroot. Neexat, Nixoot.”

  He hung up and patted a tattoo atop the receiver, sounding the cymbal beat by forcing air through his molars.

  “That’s how the Dutch people talk,” he told Alison. “Keroot. Badoot. Krackeroot.”

  “Who was it?”

  He lay back on the corduroy cushions and vigorously scratched himself. A smile spread across his face and he wiggled with pleasure, his eyelids fluttering.

  “Some no-nut fool. Easy tool. Uncool.”

  He lay still with his mouth open, waiting for rhyming characterizations to emerge.

  “Was it for me?”

  When he looked at her, his eyes were filled with tears. He shook his head sadly to indicate that her questions were obviated by his sublime indifference.

  Alison cursed him.

  “Don’t answer the fucking phone if you don’t want to talk,” she said. “It might be something important.”

  Big Gene remained supine.

  “I don’t know where you get off,” he said absently. “See you reverting to typical boojwa. Reverting to type. Lost your fire.”

  His junkie mumble infuriated Alison. She snorted with exasperation.

  “For Christ’s sake!”

  “You bring me down so bad,” Gene said softly. “I don’t need you. I got control, you know wha
t I mean?”

  “It’s ridiculous,” she told him. “Talking to you is a complete waste of time.”

  As she went into the next room she heard him moan, a lugubrious, falsetto coo incongruent with his bulk but utterly expressive of the man he had become. His needles had punctured him.

  In the bedroom, lo was awake; her large brown eyes gazed fearfully through crib bars at the sunlit window.

  “Hello, sweetie,” Alison said.

  Io turned solemnly toward her mother and yawned.

  A person here, Alison thought, lifting her over the bars, the bean blossomed. Walks and conversation. The end of our Madonna-and-child number. A feather of panic fluttered in her throat.

  “Io,” she told her daughter; “we have got to get our shit together here.”

  The scene was crumbling. Strong men had folded like stage flats, legality and common sense were fled. Cerebration flickered.

  Why me, she demanded of herself, walking Io to the potty. Why do I have to be the only one with any smarts?

  On the potty, Io delivered. Alison wiped her and flushed the toilet. By training Alison was an astronomer, but she had never practiced.

  Io could dress herself except for the shoes. When Alison tied them, it was apparent to her that they would shortly be too small.

  “What’ll we do?” she asked Io with a playful but genuinely frightened whine.

  “See the fishies,” Io said.

  “See the fishies?” Alison stroked her chin, burlesquing a thoughtful demeanor rubbing noses with Io to make her smile. “Good Lord.”

  Io drew back and nodded soberly.

  “See the fishies.”

  At that moment, Alison recalled the fragment of an undersea dream. Something in the dream had been particularly agreeable and its recall afforded her a happy little throb.

  “Well that’s what we’ll do,” she told Io. “We’ll go to the aquarium. A capital idea.”

  “Yes,” Io said.

  Just outside Io’s room, on the littered remnant of a sun-deck, lived a vicious and unhygienic Doberman, who had been named Buck after a dog Big Gene claimed to have once owned in Aruba. Alison opened the sliding glass door to admit it, and watched nervously as it nuzzled Io.

  “Buck,” Io said without enthusiasm.

  Alison seized the dog by its collar and thrust it out the bedroom door before her.

  In the living room, Big Gene was rising from the cushions, a cetaceous surfacing.

  “Buck, my main man,” he sang. “Bucky bonaroo.”

  “How about staying with him today?” Alison said. “I want to take Io to the aquarium.”

  “Not I,” Gene declared. “Noo.”

  “Why the hell not?” Alison asked savagely.

  “Cannot be.”

  “Shit! I can’t leave him alone here, he’ll wreck the place. How can I take him to the goddamn aquarium?”

  Gene shrugged sleepily.

  “Ain’t this the night you get paid?” he asked after a moment.

  “Yeah,” Alison said.

  In fact, Alison had been paid the night before, her employer having thrown some eighty dollars’ worth of half-dollars full into her face. There had been a difference of opinion regarding Alison’s performance as a danseuse, and she had spoken sharply with Mert the Manager. Mert had replied in an incredibly brutal and hostile manner had fired her insulted her breasts and left her to peel coins from the soiled floor until the profile of Jack Kennedy was welded to her mind’s eye. She had not mentioned the incident to Gene; the half-dollars were concealed under the rubber sheet beneath Io’s mattress.

  “Good,” Gene said. “Because I got to see the man then.”

  He was looking down at Io, and Alison watched him for signs of resentment or contempt but she saw only sadness, sickness in his face. Io paid him no attention at all.

  It was startling the way he had mellowed out behind smack. Witnessing it, she had almost forgiven him the punches, and she had noticed for the first time that he had rather a kind heart. But he stole and was feckless; his presence embarrassed her.

  “How’m I going to take a dog to the aquarium, for Christ’s sake?”

  The prospect of having Buck along irritated Alison sorely. In her irritation, she decided that the thing might be more gracefully endured with the white-cross jobbers. The white-cross jobbers were synthetics manufactured by a mad chemist in Hayward. Big Gene called them IT-390 to distinguish them from IT-290, which they had turned out, upon consumption, not to be.

  She took a handful from the saki jar in which they were stored and downed them with tap water.

  “All right, Buck,” she called, pronouncing the animal’s name with distaste, “goddamn it.” She put his leash on, sent Io ahead to the car and pulled the reluctant dog out behind her.

  With Io strapped in the passenger seat and Buck cringing under the dashboard, Alison ran Lombard Street in the outside lane, accelerating on the curves like a racing driver. She drove hard to stay ahead of the drug’s rush. When she pulled up in the aquarium’s parking lot, her mouth had gone dry and the little Sanctus bells of adjusted alertness had begun to tinkle. She hurried them under wind-rattled eucalyptus and up the massive steps that led to the building’s Corinthian portico.

  “Now where are we going to put this goddamn dog?” she asked Io. When she blinked, her eyeballs clicked. I’ve done it, she thought. I’ve swallowed it again. Vandalism.

  After a moment’s confused hesitation, she led Buck to one side of the entrance and secured his chain round a brass hydrant fixture with a carefully worked running clove hitch. The task brought to her recollection a freakish afternoon when she had tied Buck in front of a bar on El Camino. For the protection of passersby, she had fashioned a sign from the cardboard backing of a foolscap tablet and written on it with a green felt-tipped pen— DO NOT TRY TO PET THIS DOG. Her last memory of the day was watching the sign blow away across the street and past the pumps of an Exxon station.

  Buck’s vindictive howls pursued them to the oxidized-copper doors of the main entrance.

  It was early morning and the aquarium was uncrowded. Liquefactious sounds ran up and down the smooth walls, child voices ricocheted from the ceiling. Holding Io by the hand, Alison wandered through the interior twilight, past tanks of sea horses, scorpion fish, African tilapia. Pausing before an endlessly gyrating school of salmon, she saw that some of the fish were eyeless, the sockets empty and perfectly cleaned. The blind fish swam with the rest, staying in line, turning with the school.

  Io appeared not to notice them.

  In the next hall, Alison halted her daughter before each tank, reading from the lighted presentation the name of the animal contained, its habitat and Latin name. The child regarded all with gravity.

  At the end of the east wing was a room brighter than the rest; it was the room in which porpoises lived in tanks that were open to the sky. As Alison entered it, she experienced a curiously pleasant sensation.

  “Look,” she said to Io. “Dolphins.”

  “Dolphins?”

  They walked up to the glass of the largest tank; its lower area was fouled with small handprints. Within, a solitary blue-gray beast was rounding furiously, describing gorgeous curves with figure eights, skimming the walls at half an inch’s distance. Alison’s mouth opened in awe.

  “An Atlantic Dolphin,” she told Io in a soft, reverential voice. “From the Atlantic Ocean. On the other side of America. Where Providence is.”

  “And Grandpa,” Io said.

  “And Grandpa is in Providence too.”

  For the space of several seconds, the dream feeling returned to her with an intensity that took her breath away. There had been some loving presence in it and a discovery.

  She stared into the tank until the light that filtered through the churning water began to suggest the numinous. Io, perceiving that her mother was not about to move on, retraced her steps toward the halls through which they had come, and commenced seeing the fish over again. Whene
ver an aquarium-goer smiled at her she looked away in terror.

  Alison stood transfixed, trying to force recall. It had been something special, something important. But silly—as with dreams. She found herself laughing and then, in the next moment, numb with loss as the dream’s sense faded. Her heart was racing with the drug.

  God, she thought, it’s all just flashes and fits. We’re just out here in this shit.

  With sudden horror she realized at once that there had been another part of the dream and that it involved the fact that she and Io were just out there and that this was not a dream from which one awakened. Because one was, after all.

  She turned anxiously to look for Io and saw the child several galleries back, standing in front of the tank where the blind fish were.

  The dream had been about getting out of it, trying to come in and make it stop. In the end, when it was most terrible, she had been mercifully carried into a presence before which things had been resolved. The memory of that resolution made her want to weep.

  Her eye fell on the animal in the tank. She followed its flights and charges with fascination.

  There had been some sort of communication, with or without words.

  A trained scientist, Alison loved logic above all else; it was her only important pleasure. If the part about one being out there was true—and it was—what then about the resolution? It seemed to her; as she watched the porpoise, that even dreamed things must have their origin in a kind of truth, that no level of the mind was capable of utterly unfounded construction. Even hallucinations—phenomena with which Alison had become drearily familiar—needed their origins in the empirically verifiable—a cast of light, a sound on the wind. Somehow, she thought, somewhere in the universe, the resolving presence must exist.

  Her thoughts raced, and she licked her lips to cool the sere dryness cracking them. Her heart gave a desperate leap.

  “Was it you?” she asked the porpoise.

  “Yes,” she heard him say. “Yes, it was.”

  Alison burst into tears. When she had finished sobbing, she took a Kleenex from her bag, wiped her eyes and leaned against the cool marble beside the tank.

  Prepsychosis. Disorders of thought. Failure to abstract.