Bear and His Daughter

by Robert Stone

  “Wine-dark!” he exclaimed to the bartender.

  The bartender, a foxy-faced young man, had a short, military-style haircut but his manner was slack in the extreme.

  “Say again, señor?”

  “Wine-dark,” Smart repeated, gesturing toward the lake.

  The young bartender seemed virtually floored by the assault of sudden illumination.

  “Wine-dark? The lake? You see it as like ‘wine-dark’?”

  “Not really an original conceit,” Smart explained. “Actually…”

  “Wine-fucking-dark.” He gave a little half-dazzled toss of his narrow head. “Whoa.” They had been alone at the bar but shortly a cocktail waitress with reddish-blond bangs arrived to collect an order.

  “Señor here,” the bartender told her; “sees the lake as ‘wine-dark.’”

  “Cool,” the young woman said. She looked at Smart not unkindly.

  “Make you feel like another belt, señor?” asked the barkeep.

  “Sure,” said Smart.

  The barman poured Smart the mean measure prescribed by the house. Smart reminded him to make it a double.

  “Then it’ll be Scotch-dark, right?” the youth asked.

  “And then it’ll be just dark,” said the waitress. She put her order on a tray and sailed off to deliver it.

  A few minutes into his third double Scotch, Smart asked the young man, “Think there are any salmon left in the lake?”

  At first the bartender seemed unclear as to what such creatures might be. Then he said, “Hey, sure. All you want.” He studied Smart for a moment. “Salmon? That what you like?”

  “Yes,” Smart said. “Salmon are what I like. Salmon are what I go for.”

  “No shit?” asked the man.

  For the past year; Smart had been trying to reconstruct a poem he had written about witnessing the salmon migration in the Tanana River in central Alaska thirty years before. It had been two-thirty or three on an early summer morning. The sun had been low on the horizon, and on the distant tundra a herd of bison were grazing the bitter subarctic bush. The fish working their way upstream had been plainly visible through the clear water. They were survivors, veterans of the Pacific, two hundred miles from the sea now, returned to die in the place they were spawned. Above them gulls, eagles, ospreys wheeled in numbers such as Smart had never encountered. It seemed to him that he had never witnessed a sight so moving and noble as the last progress of these salmon. So he had written a poem and left it somewhere and never seen it again:

  Like elephants, swaying

  Straining with the effort of each undulation,

  They labor home…

  “Check the dining room,” the bartender said. “You never can tell. Me, I don’t go for fish.” He lowered his voice. “If I did, man, I wouldn’t have it here. But the steak, hey, that’s another story. The steak is straight from Kansas City, you know what I’m saying?”

  “The river is forever swift and young,” Smart remembered he had written, “forever renewed, beyond history.”

  He looked out into the darkness, as though he might find the rest of the words there.

  But these, elephant-eyed

  Under the skirl and whirl and screech of gulls

  And swoop of eagles,

  Are creatures of time’s wheel.

  “I bet they got trout,” the bartender said. “They always do. But I can’t like give you trout out here. You gotta go to the dining room. You see where the maitre d’ is standing?”

  Smart, disoriented for a moment, looked toward a man in a dinner jacket far across the room. Now it all had to be paid for, he thought, every worthwhile moment, every line, good, bad, mediocre. And of all the poems, why had he to lose that one?

  “Under the pale ultra-planetary sky of the white night,” it had gone on, more or less:

  I feel for them such love

  And, for their cold struggle, such admiration

  In my overheated heart.

  Smart rose from his stool, dizzy with the Scotch and the altitude.

  “You OK, señor?” asked the bartender.

  He fixed the youth with a glittering eye, tossed a few singles on the bar and strolled out to the casino. On the way, he passed the young cocktail waitress.

  “You got nice eyes,” she told him.

  He felt so pleased he could only smile. A man had to keep settling for less. Patronizing compliments. You became a few scattered lines of your own poem.

  What wisdom could be bound in a fish eye?

  It must be an illusion.

  For how could fish, these fish, under their long-lost ale-colored sky,

  In the strange light, coming home, coming back after all these years,

  Have something in their cold old eyes I need

  Or think I need?

  A magical experience it had been, that night, all poetry and light!

  The casino had an Old West theme, with wagon-wheel chandeliers and fake Navajo rugs and buffalo skulls and elkhorn racks fixed to the log walls. It was a quiet weekday night on the lake and the action was slow. Half a dozen blackjack games were under way, dealt by fair young women with cavalier curls and sleeve garters. Three roulette wheels stood motionless beneath transparent plastic covers. At the craps table, two silent men, a pit boss and a stick man, stood side by side like mourners. Smart, who had carried his drink from the bar leaned against a polished pine stanchion to watch them.

  The house uniform was country-and-western. The pit boss was a pale, yellowing man in a two-tone beige and tan jacket and a bolo tie with a turquoise ornament. The stick man wore a red bandanna knotted below his Adam’s apple. He was bald and red-faced. There were shiny scars on the taut skin over his cheekbones. Smart decided to play.

  He was midway through a six-college tour of the mountain states, his first reading series in three years. For each reading, Smart was being paid two thousand dollars. He hitched up his chino trousers and advanced to the table.

  “Right,” he declared. “A wager here.”

  The men turned serpent gazes on him.

  “Did you want to play, friend?” the stick man asked.

  “Please,” said Smart. “Five-dollar chips.”

  “Friend will play,” sang the stick man in a grifter’s croon. He pushed the big red dice toward Smart. Smart spread ten chips along the Pass line, took up the dice, shook them and rolled.

  “Come-out roll,” the stick man intoned. The voice conveyed to Smart the romance of his own youth—carnivals, the society of car thieves and hustlers, the street.

  “A seven-ah,” the man declared, for Smart had rolled four and tray. He pushed Smart’s winnings along the green baize. Smart rolled again. The dice read double fives.

  “Ten the point,” declared the stick man. “Ten the hard way.”

  On the very next roll Smart threw another ten. The stick man paid out his chips. Smart left his winnings in place and rolled eleven.

  “An ee-leven,” the stick man called. Smart gave the man a humorous glance, as though his good fortune were somehow being appreciated. The man’s dead eyes offered neither help nor hope and not a grain of congratulation.

  A pretty girl in a leotard, a different girl this time and not the one who admired his eyes, asked Smart if he would like a drink. She was olive-skinned but pale, with an unhappy smile. Drugs, he suspected.

  “Oh,” said the poet, “double Scotch, I think.”

  And about halfway through the next anemic double Scotch, a drink for which Smart could conceive scant respect, things started to go wrong. Looking at the table, he found he could not calculate the amount of money represented by the chips there. The stick man had changed some of his five-dollar chips to twenty-fives, yellow chips with metal centers. Uncertainly he drew back some of the chips and let some ride. He rolled boxcars, then a seven, and lost.

  For a moment he hesitated. Sensing the house men’s impatience, entirely to please them, he spread the rest of his cash along the Pass line. Then he rolled an
d won again. Adrenaline made his heart swell but the exhilaration cast a queer shadow. Other players arrived, nasal tourists, men in baseball caps, owlish women, betting against him. He became more and more confused. There was some kind of quarrel. The pit boss called for Security. There was such violence, such hatred in the boss’s voice that Smart was briefly terrified. A woman laughed.

  Suddenly he was being lifted off his feet. An enormous Chicano security guard in a tan uniform had gripped his arm. Smart was a large man but the guard was larger.

  “Just a second,” Smart said. “Just a minute.” He had no choice but to move in the direction the guard impelled him. Otherwise, Smart felt, he would fall and be at the mercy of the whirling angry room. Looking up at the man holding him, Smart could focus on his face. It was brown and handsome, without expression.

  “That’s hard on the arm,” he said, trying to laugh it off, sputtering too wetly. And then he saw that there was a second guard, a young woman with straight blond hair who was saying, “Are you not all right, sir? Because if you’re not all right, sir; we’ll have to put you in custody of the police and they can see you get whatever attention you might require, if you feel you require attention. That would just be a matter of your own protection, if you required custody. Do you think you require custody, sir? For your own protection?”

  “All right,” Smart said.

  Then they were on the steps of the casino, at the edge of the parking lot beside the highway. The big Mexican stood by while the blond woman guard recited.

  “Now sir; the hotel and lounge and casino and the restaurant and the grounds are private property and you may not enter them without permission and you do not have that permission now. And you are barred from those places at any time. And you are very close—this close, sir—to violating our laws and you will go to jail if we have to engage you personally again. So are you hearing me, sir?”

  As Smart made his way toward his car; he turned and saw her, half in the shadow of her giant companion, talking into a hand radio.

  “My daughter;” he told the two guards, “is a park ranger. I’m on my way to see her.”

  The big Mexican guard advanced on him.

  “How’s that? How’s that, buddy? You got a problem?”

  “No, no,” Smart implored. “No problem whatsoever.”

  He breathed with difficulty. A few years before he had suffered a breakdown and been involved in an accident. Now his arm was completely numb where the guard had grabbed it. Its throbbing kept time with the beating in his chest.

  He climbed into his car and waited for the pair of them to go back inside. The worst of it, he thought, was their rage at him. As though everyone had been waiting for him to make the slightest wrong move. He started his engine, shifted into gear and, without turning on his headlights, guided the car to the part of the parking lot that was farthest from the highway. Beside the lot, beyond a log fence, began the stand of fir trees that marked the edge of woods that bordered the lake. Turning off the ignition was the last thing he remembered.

  He dreamed of being in trouble—trouble in boot camp, trouble at sea, trouble among the stacked books on college library shelves. He was forever doing things wrong. Wronging students, brother poets, women. The world was rotten with anger.

  Once he half awakened to a kind of clarity. He was still trying to remember the poem about salmon. Never published. Lost.

  And what they’ve seen!

  The shimmer of the equatorial moon against still glass overhead

  And leapt, breathless, headlong, a hair ahead of the needle jaws

  Out into the breathing world under the blank blessing of the Southern Cross

  Out under Cygnus, Hydra, Hercules,

  Now close-hauled home.

  It was red dawn when he came properly awake. He opened the car door and climbed out stiffly, shivering in the morning’s cold. He had to pop the trunk and pull out his old seabag from among the empty suitcases he kept there and rummage through it for a sweater warm enough. As he was pulling the sweater over his head, a few details of the previous night came back to him. He sat sideways in the driver’s seat with the car door open, feet on the ground, head in his hands. Then he looked up warily, wondering if he was still being stalked. But all that had happened concerned him less than the words of his lost poem.

  It seemed a shame, he thought, to be denied the lake. He’ could feel its huge cold blue presence across the dark green zone beside the parking lot. There was no one in sight. Thirsty and sore, Smart climbed over the log fence into the gloom of the big trees. He found a trail at once and followed it. Only a few yards off the hotel lot the sense of deep forest closed around him. And the trail was so unlittered, it might have been backcountry. The hotel was not the sort whose guests took walks in the woods.

  The trail led him to a granite ledge over the lake. In spite of the neatness of the trail, the lakeside was an untidy place, with spent Coors cans and pull-rings and a few crushed empty cigarette packs. Smart saw that a paved road led to the lake from the casino’s drive. Above the mists over the still water; an osprey circled like some omen in a shaman’s dream. The sun over the Washoes lit the white feathers beneath its wings.

  He stood and watched the bird soar for a moment, then closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

  Then he began to scramble down the granite ledge that led to the water. The lake was so still that there were barely wavelets against the rocky shore. In his morning thirst, Smart lay belly-down on the cold jagged stone and stretched out to drink. Pine needles floated in the shallows around him. He supposed it was inadvisable to drink the lake water but he was not in a mood to worry. It tasted sweet in his dry throat. Were there still landlocked salmon? There had been when he was a boy.

  Their hulking gray bodies

  Crisscrossed and creased with scars

  Of hook and teeth, harpoon, gaff and winch and bullet—

  They’ve survived the wolf shark’s circling, the bitch seal’s guile to feed her pups,

  From the prison-yard frenzy in the ascending stifle of the net

  These broke free.

  Getting to his feet, he wiped his mouth with his woolen sleeve and looked about him like an outlaw. Anyone spotting him there, burly and furtive in the early morning light, might have been reminded of a bear prowling at the edge of human habitation. In a stiff-legged lope, favoring his sore back, he hurried to his car. For a while he sat in indecision, hands on the wheel, breathing hard. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was after six. No longer too early to call his daughter, who lived within the State Natural Monument area, five hundred miles to the east and north. He drove for several miles along the road that circled the lake until he found a strip mall with a pay phone. From it, he called his daughter Rowan, named for the rowan tree. In the very first ring of her phone he could sense the desolation and terrible magic of the place she lived, the trailer under the stars, the fields of lava.

  “Hi,” said a man’s voice when Rowan’s line was answered. The casual response had a drawling near-insolence, somewhat mitigated by the softness of the speaker’s voice. Smart recognized his daughter’s friend and fellow ranger John Hears the Sun Come Up. John was a Shoshone from the reservation adjoining the monument who had gone east to college, at Beloit, and come home to work for the Park Service.

  “John? Will Smart. What’s new, brother?”

  “A little here, a little there,” said John Hears the Sun Come Up. “We been expecting you, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I was surprised you were coming. Rowan, she says she always knew. Anyway, we got your phone message.”

  “Is it all right?”

  There was a hesitation, and Smart was surprised and a little offended by it.

  “Sure. She’s real excited. Yeah,” John said in his unhurried manner. “Real excited. I hope you have got some poems to read us.”

  “I would never come empty-handed,” Smart said. “Tonight all right? I should be able to cover
five hundred miles.”

  “Out here you should be able to cover a thousand. Just be careful.”

  “Oh, I will be,” Smart said. “I’m sober again.”

  By lying, he had sought to reassure John. But he had also been trying to find out if Rowan, who shared his difficulty with alcohol and drugs, was on or off the wagon.

  John seemed to understand.

  “That’s real good,” he said. “Rowan’s been sober a lot. But now she got a raw deal from the service. She got transferred to law enforcement and she’s real pissed off.”

  “Law enforcement!” Smart exclaimed. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I know it,” said John, “especially considering her. But, you know, they’re short-handed. They’re putting everybody in law enforcement. Biologists and historians. Men and women both. So she’s pissed off. It’s not for her.”

  “Right,” Smart said. He supposed all this must mean she was drinking again. Possibly doing the crank brought over from the Pacific coast or made in the desert by bikers. “The public’s getting out of line, I guess.”

  “Oh,” John said, “the public’s apeshit. So the state’s bringing in Rowan.”

  “That’s escalation all right,” Smart said. “When does she start enforcing?”

  “She starts patrol tomorrow. This is her last day at the Temple.”

  The Temple was a small cavern in which red and blue stalactites and stalagmites in fantastic shapes lined a volcanic tunnel that led to a platform of black lava that somehow resembled a table of sacrifice. Everyone from the Shoshone to the mountain men and early Mormons had regarded it with a certain dread. Standing as it did amid the three-square-mile tortured moonscape of black cinder lava, the tunnel, in its sacerdotal spookiness, seemed close to artificial. It was the centerpiece of the park and Rowan always concluded her ranger-guided walks there.