Bear and His Daughter

by Robert Stone

  “But you don’t want me.”

  “Oh yes,” Smart said, “I want you. I want all the things we didn’t have. I do. But I can’t make them happen, can I?”

  “But you don’t want me,” she said.

  “Listen,” he said, “you were just a pretty girl.”

  “Then we shouldn’t have done it before, should we?” Rowan said. She fixed him with the mirror of his eyes. “Then you never should have done it and I never should have gone for it. But I did. You’re the only one I want. Ever since then. All my life maybe.”

  “I was drunk,” Smart pleaded. “I was on drugs. I was certifiable. I took some comfort. I was desperate.”

  “Then,” she said, “what about me?”

  “We fucked up, baby. It happens.”

  She turned on him with such violence that he jumped. She was a big girl, strong as he had been, only an inch or so shorter than his six two. She resembled him so much.

  “You like me like this. I know you do. I’ve been waiting for you all day.”

  “God,” he said. “You’re still a child, aren’t you?”

  He put out his hands and took her by hers and sat her down beside him.

  “This is how it was, baby. I hardly knew you. It was as though you weren’t my daughter.” It was hard to face her grieving, crazy eyes. “You were the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen.” He laughed, against his will. “You were so adoring. I couldn’t help it.” He tried to embrace her but she avoided his embrace.

  “I’m the only one of your children,” she said, “who has your eyes. We’re the same.”

  “Just a beautiful young girl,” Smart was saying. And after a fashion he remembered or thought he remembered how it might have happened. As beautiful a young girl as he had ever seen. So young and gorgeous and besotted with him. What a fool he must have been, a weak, self-indulgent drunk. In those days, when he had let it happen, when he had done it, he had thought he could do no wrong. He had actually complained to friends of being made too much of. God knew what they had secretly thought of that, of him. As if no bills would ever be charged to his account.

  The drug was driving the rhythms of his heart and brain to a pitch he could not manage.

  “Your poem,” Rowan said, “it’s about me. It’s about you coming back to me. Us both coming back where we belong. Which is together. Always,” she said. “Always because we have the same flesh, we have the same mind, the same eyes.”

  Smart caught his breath. “You’ve taken that drug,” he said.

  “We see the same things at the same time. I know your poems as well as you do.”

  He got to his feet and tried to shake off the tremors that assailed him.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Smart said. “I’ve got through many a night on many a drug. I’ll sing to you like I used to. Sometimes, anyway. We can read poems to each other. Then it’ll be morning, see. We’ll hear the birds. The sun’ll be up. The drug will be over. We’ll have survived.”

  Without looking at him, she walked into the darkness at the sleeping end of the trailer. Finding himself alone, he went back to the kitchen and drank more wine. He had made a mistake, another one. Another old bill presented. No end to it. He curled up on the sofa with the light on. There was only darkness and silence at the far end of the trailer where his daughter lay.

  After a while, he began passing out, lapsing into a shallow sleep from which the methedrine kept waking him. In each space of sleep, a pool of uneasy dreams awaited him. From each he kept rising against his will, finding himself thirsty and breathless in the harshly lit trailer. Once he dreamed of the salmon. In the dream it seemed to him that he could remember it all, verse by verse, in Rowan’s voice:

  Fighting their way on up the Tanana

  Two hundred miles now from the sea

  And when I try to see their eyes,

  What I see, under the flow,

  Are old elephants’ eyes

  Appearing wise but still

  No wiser than Creation.

  Her warm cheek was against his temple and she was reciting:

  All their long years they saw the predators fail,

  All the same time their own predations fed them.

  What a life, the life of the roving sea!

  Where fish live, the poet said,

  As men do on land.

  Her voice was so sweet and he loved her so much. He was himself accounted a good reader. Then it occurred to him that he had never rendered those lines for her. It was a part of the poem he had forgotten. Before he could open his eyes to inquire, the bullet struck his brains out.

  She did not holster the weapon but held it hot against her left hand. After the noise, the deaf-and-dumb horror the vitriol of her grief welled up to every part of her where it could curl and pool. Even through the wine and the drug she felt it burn. For nearly an hour until the crystal energy failed, she pressed her wine- and speed-stained maw against his red mouth, trying to breathe life back into the mess she had made of him.

  “Sorry, Daddy,” she said. “Sorry, Bear.”

  She had not been able to get him through the night. Nor he her.

  Rage. But she had not wanted him dead, not at all. Only to have something. Something, anything, between childhood and death.

  All night long she sat facing the ugliness she had worked. His pants were undone. Dreadful. Had she done that? Maybe, pursuing the salt of her own generation. Trying to get home. She must be in some confusion, she thought, about which coupling had created her.

  Both, she thought. She was Rowan, the creature of both those lyings-down. Under the mountains, on sweet grass, among the musky ash and laurel. Name it and claim it. She could no longer remember the moment of killing. So he forgot he fucked me, she thought. And I forgot I shot him. Sorry about that, Bear.

  She had destroyed his eyes. She must not do it twice. She owed him that.

  There seemed some necessity to wait for dawn, out of love or respect or fear of the dark. When she could no longer drink, she kept plastering her face with crystal. That way her mind might become entombed in it, like one of those captives of the plains they candied with honey and earth and roasted, and there remained hardly a man but only a bear-shaped thing, eyeless, mouthless, blazing away, blackening like pottery, burning alive in a glazed silence. Crystal could do it.

  When she went out of the trailer; the sky was growing light. Somewhere out on the flats she heard the cough of a coyote. And overhead Venus was at its western elongation. Phosphorus, Lucifer, the Morning Star.

  On her way to the Temple, she holstered the revolver she had cradled all night long. She carried the wine bottle in her left hand; the envelope of crystal was in her uniform breast pocket. At the door of the Temple she paused to look at the pure early morning. Moment by moment, it was beautiful. Things could only be beautiful that way.

  She let herself into the Temple and walked past the columns, licking the last of the speed from the envelope, washing it down with wine. It made her impatient to be gone. When she came to the stone of sacrifice she stood beside it. She had brought the Caddoans, the Pawnee maidens, clear across the plains from Nebraska to die on it. All in her imagination, and that of the pilgrim children to whom she told the story. But real Pawnee maidens had died under the Morning Star, as she would. For a while she thought of lying down on the stone and doing it and being found that way.

  But I’m only the dead poet’s speed freak bastard daughter; she thought. She went into the little utility room beside the cavern entrance and pulled free the yellow felt marker that was held fast to the door by a piece of string. There was a public bathroom next door and she went in and relieved herself so that things would be as clean as they could be. Then she washed her hands and dropped the wine and her empty envelope of speed into the trash can along with the paper towel.

  She sat down beside the trash can with the revolver beside her on the tile floor and felt along her chest for her heartbeat. She was EMS-qualified. If she stretched her
arms up and leaned her head back, it would part her ribs a little, which might make it easier. When she was satisfied she had found her heart, she held the cloth of her uniform shirt taut and marked a cross over it with the marker.

  Let them anatomize Rowan, she thought. Not on the stone of sacrifice, thanks, just up against the shithouse wall. But she wouldn’t hurt his eyes again, not blind the bear again.

  Sitting propped up against the cold wall, she leaned her head back and raised her left arm in the air as far as it would stretch, fingers extended. She put the barrel of the Lawman against the X on her chest and said her own name and her father’s and pulled the trigger.

  Max Peterson came out around six-thirty, alone, as soon as John Hears the Sun Come Up called him. John had called him at home instead of through the dispatcher. Together they walked over the grounds, from the trailer to the Temple.

  “I don’t suppose you killed them, did you, John?”

  “Nope,” John said.

  They were standing in the ladies’ room where dead Rowan sat, her father’s eyes preserved in blank surprise, slowly losing their luster. Peterson punched the swinging hinge of the covered trash can, where they had found the envelope.

  “That fucking pervert Communist son of a bitch. It was his fault. He fucking killed her. That’s the way it really went.” “Fuck” was a word Peterson rarely used.

  “It was the speed,” John said. “It always made her crazy. She was a little crazy anyway.”

  “He probably brought it.”

  “No, she had it.”

  “Well, what the hell did you let her have it for?”

  “If I’d’ve found it,” John said, “I’d have got rid of it. She had it at work. Then I couldn’t take it off her; short of tying her up.”

  “You should have tried.”

  “Maybe,” John said.

  They walked back to the trailer and stood over Smart’s body and Peterson looked down at what was left of him.

  “Goddamn him, the filthy bastard,” Peterson said.

  “Well,” John said, “she loved him.”

  Peterson stared at John Hears the Sun Come Up as though he had taken leave of his senses.

  “He was her father, for Christ’s sake. The scumbag.”

  “He wasn’t a bad guy,” John said. “He was a good poet.”

  “What the hell is your problem?” Peterson shouted. “Every goddamn thing I say you gotta contradict it? The fucking man was her father, John. The relationship was perverted. Who the hell cares about good poet or such shit?”

  “He wrote a poem about salmon I liked,” John said.

  Peterson sighed. “You’re a crazy Indian son of a bitch, John. I’m truly impatient with you.” He looked around the trailer a last time. “Jeez, she had every kind of queer satanic book. He bring her up that way?”

  “I don’t know,” John said. “I guess.” There was no point in making Peterson angrier.

  Peterson went out to his car to call the dispatcher’s office. Presently the park people would be coining out and the photographers and twelve kinds of cop and probably the press and even television.

  Smart’s poem about the salmon had been folded away in Rowan’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology, and a few pages beyond it was another poem, about a bunch of American tourists falling out of the sky on a Japanese mountain. John Hears the Sun Come Up particularly liked the one about the salmon. It made him able to see very clearly the fish and the buffalo and the place Smart was writing about. It reminded him a little of Robert Frost, his favorite white poet.

  He went outside and watched the dawn swell over the low mountains to the east. He thought he would sell the trailer but keep her books. It was not that he needed them for her memory—he could take care of that—but they were good books and interesting. As for the rest, there was no point in keeping any of it. People disappeared. There, in the country of the Ghost Dance, people disappeared and their songs with them. They became ghosts and their songs ghost songs. Teenagers in the Indian high school got drunk and died, disappeared forever knowing hardly anything to sustain them in the ghost world.

  The powder the crystal, was death; as soon as he had seen it shining on her finger glistening with that death glow it had, under her nose, bringing the heart’s blood to her cheeks, he had known the two of them would die. Smart the poet would go to the place he had seen the salmon; people passing through might find his ghost there and hear his songs.

  “Will?” he asked the silence. “Mr. Smart?” He had Smart’s manuscript in front of him. He read the first line of Smart’s salmon song.

  “Like elephants, swaying.”

  He might try singing it one day. Singing it in the Shoshone-Paiute language. No word for elephant, just say “elephant.”

  “Rowan?”

  Her, she would be out in the greasewood with the thousand poems she knew, her songs and all the stories she made up. Well set up out there in the ghost world. People alone would hear her songs and be afraid. Her eyes would, like her father’s, look out from lost blue places. High lakes at certain times of afternoon, the evening sky, the cornflower; the shad violet. Easy to bring her ghost back—burn a little sweet grass, fix her guitar maybe and play it, she would come. Her and her father; called Smart, all their songs, two poets.