Bear and His Daughter

by Robert Stone

  “I’ll be damned,” said the poet Smart. “Well, tell her I’m on my way, would you, John?”

  “Sure will.”

  Not long after starting his drive, he felt cheated of everything the morning might have provided. A little interior clarity and light. Hope.

  He had taken the first drink in Flagstaff, his second stop, a margarita before dinner when they had all gone out for the famous, fabulous Mexican food—he and the professors and the attractive woman librarian who had attended what they had been pleased to fatuously call his “craft lecture.” He had taken the drink because he could see that the librarian was attracted to him, ready in fact to sleep with him that night if he should make the move. But he was afraid of not performing, of impotence.

  He put the big lake behind him and took the interstate eastward, through Reno and into the desert. Trucks roared past him, the highway weariness oppressed. Brown peaks lurked on the edge of vision, a sad wind blew across the creosote plain. Smart tried to remember his poem. There was a part he could not recall, about predatoriness, the fish living in the sea as men do on land. At Winnemucca, he left the interstate and drove north.

  Four hundred miles away, during her lunch break, Ranger Rowan Smart drove her khaki-colored state golf cart from the Temple to the trailer she shared with John Hears the Sun Come Up. John was at home doing a wash in the machine. Their trailer had no dryer; they used a clothesline, half concealed like the trailer itself behind a stand of lodgepole pines less than a mile from the monument headquarters. Rangers were paid minimum wage.

  “Your father’s coming tonight,” John said when he heard Rowan come into the trailer. “He telephoned.”

  “I knew it was today,” Rowan said. She was fair freckled and blond, with a long plain pretty face. She had bright blue wizard’s eyes as striking as her father’s and her face was flushed. “Why didn’t you call me at the Temple?”

  “Figured you’d be home.”

  She went into the sleeping compartment and began to change her clothes. She was taking off the gray work slacks she wore at the Temple and replacing them with her military gray-striped breeches and the expensive English riding boots she had bought herself years before in Alexandria, Virginia.

  “What you want for lunch?” John asked. “I went to Yamoto’s. I got some pretty good tomatoes.”

  “No lunch,” she said. She went to the mirror on the bathroom door in the sleeping room and inspected herself in the uniform of Smokey hat and ranger shirt and boots and trooper’s breeches.

  “You didn’t eat breakfast. You on a fast or something?”

  “I’m on a fast,” she said. “I require a vision.”

  “I think you’re doing crank, Rowan.”

  “What I need,” she said, “is a drink.” She came to the door of the sleeping compartment and they looked at each other. “Martinis, right? Look, John, I need you to go up to the state store and get us gin and vermouth. I need it for him.”

  “I’m working the gate this afternoon. I already got wine. I got steaks in case you want to make him dinner. Anyway,” John said, “he says he’s sober.”

  “Wrong,” said Rowan. “Because if he were sober he wouldn’t stop here. He’d give me a miss.” She went back into the compartment and took another look at herself in the mirror. “Just like in the old days. Back to college. If he thought I could get him pot or coke, I’d see him. But if he was being Professor Straight and Narrow it was like hello goodbye Rowan, my dear. All right,” she said, “wine’ll do. I hope it’s good, because he knows his wine.”

  “It’s Georges Deboeuf red, the large size.”

  “That’ll do,” she said. She opened an aluminum drawer and took an envelope out and dipped her forefinger inside the flap and licked it.

  “Let him be,” John told her. “The past is past. I don’t think he always remembers what happens on his trips.”

  “How can he not remember?” she asked.

  “They’re gonna get you, Ro,” John said. “Peterson is gonna spring a random drug test on your ass. Anyone who knows you can tell when you’re on crank. You figure to do it on mounted patrol?”

  “No,” Rowan said, chastened. “Never happen again.”

  Once, loaded, not on enforcement but on what they called at the monument “riding fence,” she had ridden a cow pony half to death in a burst of romantic enthusiasm.

  When she came out of the bedroom, John Hears the Sun Come Up looked at her in her boots and striped breeches.

  “Put those on for him?”

  “Who?” she asked. She was without any ability to conceal her intentions or schemes. “Who? Peterson?”

  “Not Peterson,” John said. “You know who.”

  “Yeah, I did,” she said after a moment. “I did, so what? He likes them. He likes me to wear them.”

  “Well,” John said, “you’re thirty-one years old.”

  “Aw, shit,” Rowan said sweetly, “you remembered.”

  By afternoon, Smart had gone far northward, though he was still among the dry lakes, salt flats and badlands. Soon he began to see aspen groves and chamisa and smell the sage. Presently there were red rocks and buffalo grass, pinon and juniper. He began to think of Rowan. She was his wildflower outlaw, Girl of the Golden West. She had been born in Mendocino to a radical actually on the lam, a child of the old days. During the Patty Hearst affair the FBI had hassled him about the whereabouts of Rowan’s mother. But at that time he had not known where either of them were. He had been with his wife in Boston and his other legitimate children, whose day-to-day adventures were his life then.

  The FBI had been interested in him too, back then. His work had been so popular in the Soviet Union in those days. As a young man he had worked as a lumberman in forests not far to the west of his present road; Soviet publishing houses had always loved his poems about saws whipping back and sweat freezing in your hair, the crust of a frozen marsh collapsing underfoot, the absurdities of religion. And of course, in that era, the anti-Vietnam War poems. He was one of the American poets to whom the Soviet Writers’ Union paid royalties, and he had often gone over there, and to Eastern Europe, to read. He had had many Russian women.

  At last Smart crossed the first clear-running river, and he pulled off the road to go and stand beside it and listen to its tumbling run and smell the sage. Salmon?

  With Moby-Dick himself, they shared the Japan Ground

  And now under the sky of the Tanana, two thousand miles from there, two hundred from the salt, in this clear baptismal water, they’re home

  To claim their lay, like the Nantucket whalers, their fishers’ portion.

  They make me feel like cheering.

  Hearing the roar of a truck somewhere back along the two-lane road, bearish Smart, weeping for his lost poem, hurried in embarrassment back to his car.

  Back up at park headquarters, across a small parking lot from the rail to the Temple, Rowan found the county sheriff, Max Peterson, waiting beside the glass counter of the bookshop. Phyllis Stowe, the sales clerk, had been minding the store. She and Peterson had been gossiping. They both stopped talking to watch Rowan as she came in.

  “Here’s my new police person,” Peterson said to Phyllis with a wink. In his right hand he was holding a gun belt with a holstered pistol on it. He wore a big .357 in a silver-decorated Mexican holster on his own belt. “She look tough enough to you?”

  “She’s mighty tough,” Phyllis said, and seemed not to be joking.

  “Come on, tiger,” Sheriff Peterson said to Ranger Smart. He motioned her toward a small office off the headquarters lobby that said PRIVATE on the door. When they were both inside he closed the door. He was a huge man, six five, with massive shoulders and a bald shaven head to which he affected to apply wax. He had fierce curling mustaches which he waxed as well.

  “Here you go,” he said. He took the pistol from the belt he was holding and handed it to her barrel toward the ceiling. “You gotta sign for it. And for the bullets.”

&n
bsp; Rowan took the pistol, swung it toward the closed window and sighted down the barrel, gripping it with both hands.

  “Oh, wow,” she said. “A .357! Heavy shit. Who can I shoot?”

  “I can see,” Peterson said, “where we got a lot of review ahead of us. I mean like a massive reorientation procedure has to accompany this assignment for you.”

  “Nonsense,” Rowan said. “Absolutely not.” She set about inserting the cartridges in the revolver’s chambers. “I’ve done this before, Max, remember? I was an enforcement ranger for seven months in ‘94.” She pointed the weapon double-handed toward the window again, pivoting so that it could cover the arc of the visible park outside. Peterson gently took the weapon back, handed her the belt and watched her buckle it on.

  “First off, Rowan,” Peterson said, “this here weapon is not a .357 Magnum.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Sorry about that. This here is a Colt Lawman. American-designed revolver parts made in Spain or somewheres. Double action. Four-inch barrel.”

  “OK,” she said.

  “Now, Colt does a .357-caliber version of this and they do a .45-caliber but what you have, what you will have here, is a plain old .38-caliber version. Six shots. Firing .38 slugs. With double action, you don’t have to squeeze the trigger hard to cock it. You use your thumb.”

  “Well good for little me. But I can’t stop a damn bear with this, can I? I can’t stop a crack-crazed gangsta. So what good is it?”

  “Very accurate weapon.” Peterson watched her sign the form for the revolver “You OK, Rowan? Everything all right?”

  She gave him a quick affectionate glance with her striking blue eyes. He was at a disadvantage with Rowan Smart because, although he was a married Mormon and a bishop of the stake, he had been to bed with her.

  “I mean, you attending your program? Everything like that?”

  “What are you, Max, my parole officer? My confessor? My political commissar?”

  “I hear your old man was a major Communist,” he said. “That’s what they say in town. Some ranchers say.”

  “Damn right,” she said. “Mom was the same. Mom’s buried in the Kremlin wall. I’m gonna be buried there too.”

  “The fact is, Rowan,” Peterson sighed, “I’m worried about you. I wouldn’t have put you on enforcement but it’s not up to me.”

  “There you go,” she said. “I don’t work for you either.”

  Peterson flushed. “Now that’s where you’re wrong, sweetheart. Every law enforcement officer in this county works for me. And you, pal, you work under my direct personal supervision. You’ll be subject to regular testing. I catch you stoned and armed, I swear I’ll put you in the penitentiary.”

  “I’m clean, Max.”

  “Things are perverse,” he said. “I got little Mormon farm boys giving each other hand signs like they’re Crips and Bloods. I’m up against it. I’m trying to protect the public. Do I have to protect them from you? Were you clean when you like to rode that quarter horse to death up by Sutler’s Bar? I heard about that.”

  She frowned deeply, childishly.

  “I told you, man, I’m clean.”

  Peterson fidgeted.

  “You’re the only officer we got around here with a Ph.D. That’s supposed to mean you’re smarter than the other guys. So don’t go all dumb on me.”

  “I don’t have a Ph.D.,” she said. “I never finished my dissertation.”

  “Goddamn it, Rowan,” Peterson said, “I don’t give a good blip what you got. I need some law and order. I need this park not to be a hangout and I need you to help me. You know I like you,” he told her. “I’m an easy guy to get on with. I just want you to be responsible.”

  “You are an easy guy, Max,” she said. “When I first met you I thought you were one of the twelve Nephites who walk the earth.”

  He flushed further at her invocation of the Mormon tradition and then laughed. He had been to college and taken a sociology degree at a state university down in Utah and done a few years as a social worker in prison. He was a member of the Mutual Improvement Society and a scoutmaster.

  “Just don’t blow it, baby.”

  “Don’t worry, Max.”

  As she started out, her .38 buckled on, Peterson closed the door she had opened. She looked at him puzzled.

  “I don’t know how to put this, Rowan. I mean, I don’t want to embarrass you. You gonna wear those boots and britches on patrol? With your weapon?”

  “I got mounted patrol tomorrow,” she said. “Why not?”

  He paused and then spoke slowly.

  “I don’t know how to put this.”

  “That’s what you just said. What don’t you know how to put, Max?”

  “For … psychological reasons,” he said, looking at the floor, “I don’t think female law enforcement officers should wear provocative clothing. And I think you look good enough to … I think you look real nice in that rig. And with your gun belt, you know … you’re kind of provocative.”

  “You mean I’m a leather trip, Max? Sort of S-and-M like.”

  “I mean I know how bad guys think. How men think. Makes me wonder what you got in your own mind. So there it is. I don’t like you getting yourself up like that.”

  “It’s standard service uniform.”

  “Oblige me, Rowan.”

  “Male bullshit,” she said.

  “Jeez, you called it. Not me.”

  “All right, all right,” she said. “I’ll see you around.”

  There was a stretch of road, a time of afternoon when he could see the great peaks to the west shining. As the sun declined toward them, they seemed to remove themselves from sight. As he drove, a sudden storm came out of the east. The pinon-dappled hills were higher now and fingers of lightning struck the taller trees and set them ablaze, blackening the trunks and the ground around them. But in a few minutes the storm was gone, except for the smell of ozone and pine smoke, and there was hardly any rain.

  The road ascended by degrees, among ponderosa pine. A highway marker declared him to be entering Shoshone County, whose state university, still a hundred miles away, would be the site of his reading. The road approach to Shoshone County, which appeared to constitute a modest rise, was proclaimed by its marker to stand at seven thousand feet above sea level.

  He swung round a turn and encountered an orange MEN WORKING sign. Just beyond it stood a young flagman, about college age. He had on a Day-Glo vest over a poncho and a yellow hard hat from which his long blond hair protruded.

  “Five minutes,” the boy said when Smart rolled his window down a crack. He kept staring at Smart, holding up a red hand-sign that said STOP, shielding his eyes from the restored sunlight.

  “Are you William Smart?” he asked the poet finally.

  “Bless you, son,” said Smart. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “They had your picture in the cafeteria yesterday.” The young man kept on gawking stupidly. “I read your poem. We had to read one in class last year.”

  “Good for you. Which one?”

  “Umm,” said the young man. “Not sure.”

  “You don’t remember it?”

  “It went like … it had like fields in it. Like roads in it?”

  “Right,” Smart said. “I have a few like that.” He was quite ready to see the funny side. “How appropriate, since we’re on a road at this very moment. And there are fields out there.” He cleared his throat to keep his temper. “Do you go to Shoshone?”

  “They had your picture in the cafeteria yesterday,” the youth said.

  “Think it’s still there?” Smart asked.

  “Huh?” A distant siren had sounded. The youth reversed his sign so that it read SLOW. He seemed to be pondering an answer as Smart rolled up his window and drove on, passing workmen along the shoulders, their rollers and asphalt trucks.

  A poem with fucking roads in it, Smart thought, cackling. A field in it! Of course they were little morons at Shoshone State, he re
flected. But pretty kids, grandchildren of Mormon ranchers and Basques and Cornish miners. The cafeteria sold pasties. It was adorned with his picture that week because he was on his way to read there.

  He turned the radio on and found himself within range of the college transmitter. There was a nice flute piece by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. When it was finished the announce^ who had apparently struggled in speech course to overcome some palatal impediment, declared, “Together we can make cystic fibrosis history.” Smart turned it off.

  But one couldn’t blame the kids. The faculty were incompetent and corrupt. Enraged ex-nuns, paroled terrorists of the left and right, senile former state legislators. But to whom, he wondered, did he owe his own inclusion in the sacred syllabus? So that the very yokels at the crossroads were provided the exultation of forgetting his field and road poems.

  And what, Smart wondered, would they do with their lives up there once they’d duly read and forgotten? Manage Kmarts? Incinerate nuclear waste? Clerk for the Fish and Game? Ranching was for millionaires now, the mines and forests were objects of speculation. But how beautiful it had once been, he thought, the morning light, the trout rising at dusk. It was his land, he had worked it, his people had gone west with handcarts on the Oregon Trail, though they had settled farther along, closer to the ocean. In his day, a lumberman, a miner; worked his heart out, proud of his body’s strength, hating his bosses, loving his fellow workers, swearing by the union. The boys ten years older than Smart had gone into the war against Hitler. Smart had joined up, signed on with the navy when the judge required it, after he and his friends had been caught stealing Forest Service equipment. The alternative was the State School for Boys, an institution so dreaded and fearsome that only the meanest and craziest got themselves sent back. No Shoshone State to go to then, where regional poetry was learned and forgotten.

  Passing an alder grove with his windows down, he was startled to catch for a moment the robotic bleating of a backhoe. The sound made him pull off the road.