Bear and His Daughter

by Robert Stone

  “Are you kidding? He’s an old doper from the great age of dope. He could do half a kilo while other people were doing a gram.”

  John looked at the trailer deck for a moment, his fingers interlaced.

  “I’m not comfortable,” he said, “when you been drinking and doing drugs. You know that, don’t you? When we’re intimate and you been drinking…”

  Rowan picked up the guitar and began to sing: “When we’re intimate, and I’ve been drinking, I get to thinking…”

  “Oh shut up,” John said. “Don’t be so smart.”

  “Smart’s my name, baby. Smart’s my nature.”

  “Maybe you’ve forgotten,” John said, “you’ve got in real trouble on that crank. I’ve seen you crazier than all get-out.”

  Rowan nodded. “You can never tell how strong it is or what’s in it,” she agreed, and strummed a few chords. “I guess that’s because it’s made by the Hell’s Angels and not the Red Cross.”

  John picked up the afternoon paper and leafed through it.

  “I don’t know, kid. I ain’t gonna have a good time tonight. I should go see my mother.” He put the paper aside and stood up. His younger brother was making trouble for the old lady, hanging with a gang. John’s mother had a drinking problem of her own. “Anyway, I want to buy a lottery ticket in town.”

  “Oh God,” Rowan said, sounding truly frightened, “he’s coming! I think I see his car.”

  Her friend looked stoically straight ahead.

  “You gotta forget, Rowan. You have to realize what drunks are like. He won’t remember you that way. If he does … it’s not good.”

  “What do I care what citizens and pilgrims think?” she demanded of him. “You yourself told me you thought it was all right.”

  “Some Indian people think it’s all right. If it’s what the spirit world wants.”

  “Well, I happen to think it is.”

  “Well, I happen to think it isn’t,” John Hears the Sun Come Up said. “I think that crank will take your life someday.”

  “Jesus,” Rowan said, “it’s him.”

  “I ought to stay,” he said. “But only if you let me.” When he looked at her she was licking the crystal from her fingertips.

  “I hope God helps you. You should ask him.”

  “I’ll ask him to stay too.”

  “Rowan…”

  She put her hands over her ears, still staring out at the road.

  “I’m not hearing you.”

  “Yes you are,” he said. “You are.”

  Smart parked beside their cars at the end of the dirt road that led to the trailer. Hers was a Volvo from the mid-eighties. John’s was a Dodge pickup, suggesting commercials from vanished Super Bowl Sundays, the Spirit of America. They had the Park Service cart parked there too.

  There were sprouts and carrots still growing in their garden. The carrots, he remembered, sometimes came round as medallions, from the shallow layer of soil above the igneous rock, flattened out against it.

  He walked up to the trailer and knocked on the door. He had promised John Hears the Sun Come Up a new poem. Maybe he would magically remember the salmon poem. He might remember it word for word, he thought. Suddenly he found himself wondering what exactly he had been feeling that night beside the Tanana. Whatever it was, that was the subject of the poem. If he could bring that back, the words might follow.

  Rowan stood in the doorway looking down at him. When he’d last seen her she had been flabby with drink but now her face was lean and tanned, although of course she was older now and there were wrinkles radiating from the corners of her eyes. She was in her uniform, slim and sleek. Her face was red and her blue eyes looked a little unsound. Along with mounting excitement in his chest he felt a quickening of caution.

  Their kiss was brief and distant and they avoided each other’s eyes. John stood and shook hands with Smart. Then they sat in the center compartment of the trailer. Smart, as guest of honor, took the small gray sofa. Rowan and John sat in plastic armchairs. The rest of the space was occupied by cases full of Rowan’s books. There were more books in an adjoining stage closet. She had even jammed a tiny desk into the space. Looking around the small room, he saw a couple of yellow pads with what looked like verse in his daughter’s handwriting.

  “Writing poetry?”

  She laughed self-consciously without answering.

  “I’ll have to read it,” he said, “or get you to read it to me.”

  “She’s a good poet,” John said. He was drinking Sprite, staying with the program. Smart and his daughter drank the red wine. “Not as good as you,” he said to Smart, “but pretty good.”

  “John’s a connoisseur of poetry,” Rowan said. “He’s real diplomatic too.”

  “I know she’s a good poet,” Smart said. “She always has been. Since she was a little girl.”

  “We see the world through the same eyes,” Rowan said. “That’s literally true. Our eyes are the same. I mean look at them.”

  Both the men in the room found somewhere else to look.

  “Do you remember any of my poems?” Rowan asked her father. “Do you remember the ones I used to send you from California? Maybe you never got them.”

  Smart had a recollection of his daughter sending him poems she had written. He had inscribed a book of his poems to her and she had made a folder of her poems and sent them to him. Then later in college, she had published some poems in university literary magazines and sent them to him. He had never, as far as he could remember, responded.

  “I do remember some of them,” he said.

  “Do you remember the one I wrote about the wind in the desert?”

  “The one where you held the wind in your hands?”

  Rowan put her glass down and raised both hands to her face.

  “Oh God! You remembered it!”

  It was the one single poem of hers he remembered. She had written it after her mother had moved her to the women’s collective in New Mexico. It was about ending up with nothing, with no one.

  “Sure I remember it,” Smart said, draining his glass. “I think I used it.”

  “Oh God,” Rowan said. “I’m glad you did.”

  “How about playing for me?” Smart said. “Still got your pawnshop guitar?”

  “Hey, I thought you’d never ask.”

  She played him an old Scottishy song he liked about the Rose and the Linsey-O and then a song she had written, from one of her poems. But he seemed not to notice it was her poem.

  “Hey, what about that steak?” John said. “We gonna eat or what?”

  “Sure,” Rowan said without enthusiasm. Her eyes were fixed on her father. “I’ll do it.”

  “No, no,” Smart declared. He struggled up from the sofa and poured another juice glass of wine for Rowan and himself. “I’m cooking. I see mushrooms and your homegrown jalapeños. I’m the steakmaster.

  “You know,” he told them as he blundered about the kitchen, “I got thrown out of one of the casinos down on the lake. For being drunk, I guess.”

  “‘Cause you look like a rodeo clown,” Rowan said. She plunked a chord on the guitar and put it aside. “That’s why.”

  John gave her a disapproving look.

  “They seemed so goddamn angry,” Smart said. “Like they hated me.”

  “Probably did,” she said. She got up and went to the trailer lavatory. While she was in it John came up to Smart, one eye on the door. His voice was naturally so soft that it was always hard for Smart to hear him, and he was keeping it low.

  “She’s doing crank, Will. She’s been doing it all day and I thought I better tell you.”

  “She seems in good spirits.”

  “That can change real fast. And she won’t sleep and she won’t shut up. So I hope you’re ready.”

  “Actually,” Smart said, “I’m really not.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have come.”

  “You mean because I’m drinking?”

  “You know
what I mean,” John said. He had been speaking with his eyes closed, as some Northwest Indians do when they are moved to show respect. “I love hearing your poetry, Will. But I’m not gonna stay and protect either of you. Not with the two of you like this.”

  With John’s eyes closed to him, Smart drank the glass of wine down. His third.

  “Your poetry’s all you have,” John Hears the Sun Come Up told Smart. This time he looked him in the eye. His own eyes looked flat, utterly unfeeling. “It’s your soul, a good soul.”

  “Thanks,” said Smart, touched.

  “But you shouldn’t go near her. Not now.”

  He went out without waiting for a reply.

  When Rowan came out of the lavatory, they listened to his pickup roar to a start. He gunned the motor; braked hard backing out and took off explosively toward the highway.

  “I’m glad he went.” Her face was brighter. She looked around for where she had left her wine glass. “He’s jealous.”

  “Jealous.”

  “Yes, he should be … I’d be if I was him.”

  “Will he come back?”

  She gave Smart a dark crazy smile and shook her head. “Not tonight.”

  He watched her stand up and put a tape in her Sharp 4 recorder. It was Vivaldi, L’Estro Armonico. He saw that she was wearing a gun belt with a holstered pistol. The little space she stood in was piled from deck to overhead with books: The Golden Age of American Anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan on the Iroquois longhouse, George Caitlin prints. There was also shelf after shelf on religion: the Gnostic Gospels, the works of Hans Jonas, kabbala, witchcraft, Wicca.

  “Look at all your books, kid. You’re still beguiled by magic.”

  “My books?” She laughed. Instead of sitting down, she stood beside his chair while the Vivaldi played. “You know when I was in high school the local cops flagged all the library books on witchcraft? They pulled me in. They thought my boyfriend was castrating cattle. Or I was. They told me I had to spy on the witches’ coven in the high school or they’d send me to juvenile jail.”

  “Were you a witch?”

  “I was a little bookworm. Writing my poetry. There wasn’t even a coven.” She laughed again. “You know, I tried to start one but I got bored.”

  Now he laughed and put a hand on her hip and patted it.

  “You like the way I look, Will?”

  “You look very … constabulary. I mean, what with the gun.”

  “They put me on enforcement. Can you imagine? I know more about the Temple, about the Paiute and Shoshone traditions, than any white-eyes in the state. So I’m supposed to chase over hill and dale after some dummy poaching ‘lope. A bitch, right?” She licked her lips and offered him a soiled envelope. There was a crystalline powder at the bottom of it. “Want some? It’s the famous ice. Crystal meth.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Go ahead,” she said, moving closer to him, pouting slightly. “Because you know we’ll get crocked and you’ll go to sleep on me and how often do I get to see you?”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He dipped his finger into the stuff so there was a small mound on his fingertip and licked it off.

  “Easy,” she said, “this is strong. You’ll get shot out of a cannon.”

  “Right,” said Smart. The drug seemed to kick in almost immediately. “I guess I can tell you this,” he said. “I guess you’re a pal.”

  “You can tell me everything, Will.”

  His heart raced.

  “You know, I came unstuck on my last reading tour. I have to get my act together.”

  “How did you come unstuck?”

  “I found myself in an office full of my poems. A professor’s office. He had every volume I ever published. So I filled my briefcase with them, all my books, and I swung the case against his window. His office was in this ghastly brick tower.” It seemed to Smart that he was speaking faster and faster. “I was trying to break the window, see. I wanted to break his window with my books.”

  “Were you drunk?”

  “Of course I was drunk.”

  “Did you want to jump?”

  “Yes, I suppose. But I could only shatter the inner layers of the window. I got his office full of glass and blood. It was after the harassment thing back east. And that was the end of my reading.”

  He stood up, dizzy again. The altitude, the drug. He poured himself another glass of plonk.

  “But you oughtn’t to die. You have work to do.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I think you’re a great poet. Even my mother does.”

  “Does she?”

  “She sure does. And all her friends.”

  Rowan’s mother still lived on the commune in Mendocino. It was the place where, among flowers and flutes and midwifery, Rowan had been born. Rowan had spent a lot of her childhood there and Smart had seen very little of her.

  “I had a poem for you, Rowan. I’ve been trying to remember it since I got west.” He took another sip of wine to slow the rush of his heart.

  “Oh, you have to,” she said. “Take a little more crystal.”

  “You minx!” he said. “You’ve poisoned me.”

  “I’m not a minx. Or a mink or a weasel,” Rowan said. “I want my poem.”

  “Once I spent years trying to remember a poem,” Smart told her. “Twenty years maybe.” He had seen the low range of mountains on the horizon through the little kitchen window and it was as though he were looking for his other lost poem out there. “It was a poem I wrote about a plane loaded with American salesmen breaking up over Mount Fuji. They’d won a selling contest, a free trip to the Orient. So they ended up falling down on Mount Fuji with their wives and their wallets and their Kodaks. Buddhist monks gathered up their bodies. I thought that was so amazing. But I lost the poem I wrote and I never could bring the sucker back.”

  “Sure,” Rowan said. “Your Fall of Capitalism poem. I don’t want that one. I want the one you wrote for me.”

  “God,” Smart said, “if I sit down I’ll never be able to stand up. How can you take that stuff?”

  “Please,” she said, “try and remember. It’s important to me.”

  “Rowan,” Smart said, “why don’t I cook for us? We’re letting good beef go to waste.”

  “How can you be hungry?” she demanded. “I don’t want to eat.”

  “Well,” he said, “maybe I’m not. But we should eat or we’ll get plastered.”

  As though she were spiting him, Rowan finished the wine in her glass and poured more for both of them.

  “I’ll make you remember,” she said. “I’ll make you remember me. Then you’ll remember my poem.”

  She went up to him then and took his hand and kissed it. He put it against her flushed cheek and brushed her straight blond hair.

  “My fanciulla del west,” he said. He looked away from her at the sad greasewood landscape outside. “My cowgirl. My Rowan tree.”

  When he sat down breathless on the sofa she nestled beside him.

  “I was in Alaska, Rowan. Must have been twenty-five years ago. You were little. I saw these salmon going up the Tanana to spawn. I thought it was so moving.”

  “I can see you standing there. Like a big bear.”

  He began to cry. “Sorry, kid. I’m coming apart again, I guess.”

  She put her arm under his and put his hand on her thigh and stroked it for a moment.

  “Don’t you see,” she asked, “how our eyes are just the same?”

  “Yeah. Well, see me standing there. In that white night.” With his hand still on her thigh, he leaned his head against the back edge of the sofa and looked at the fake wood panels on the trailer ceiling and tried to recite the poem:

  Like elephants, swaying

  Straining with the labor of each undulation,

  They labor home.

  The river is forever swift and young,

  Forever renewed, beyond history…

 
He worked to catch his breath and had another swallow of wine.

  But these, elephant-eyed

  Under the skirl and whirl and screech of gulls

  And swoop of eagles,

  Are creatures of time’s wheel.

  Under the pale ultra-planetary sky of the white night

  I feel for them such love

  And, for their cold struggle, such admiration

  In my overheated heart.

  “I can’t, baby,” he said finally. “Anyway, I don’t think it’s very good.”

  “Such love,” she repeated.

  “I don’t know what it was about,” he said. “I admired these fish. Being finished, coming home. They had done what they were meant to do. Whereas I never had.” He closed his eyes and put a hand on his chest, under which his heart was racing. “Or maybe it was just about the moment. I don’t know.”

  “Such love,” she said.

  “When whatever happened between you and me, Rowan … What shouldn’t have, what I shouldn’t have let happen. I was on that tour. I had come apart.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “And I wanted some comfort and love. I wanted it so much.” He was weeping. He wiped his nose, bearlike.

  “And do you now?”

  “Yes I do.”

  She stood in front of him and took his hands and folded them behind her back. He withdrew them quickly. Rowan tensed and pursed her lips. Her anger frightened him.

  “The poem is about us,” she said. When he tried to speak, she interrupted him. “Yes it is, it’s about us.”

  He realized that she was trying to kiss him on the mouth.

  “This is just drugs,” Smart said. He stood up, trying to escape. It was like a dream, suggesting something that had happened once before in another world. “John will be back. What will he think of you?”

  She laughed and pushed herself against him, standing on tiptoes in her boots, pressing her face into his.

  “John will not be back, Will. John is a Wind River Shoshone and his attitude is from that culture and believe me it’s peculiar to that culture. Besides, he’s a passive-aggressive.”

  Smart collapsed back on the miniature sofa. She kept trying to kiss him, fondling him, at his belt, his clothes.

  “Rowan,” he said, “my sweet. I’m lonely. I wanted to see you.”