The Bear Went Over the Mountain
Page 2
Half Jam
Sounds too Nordic. But I feel I’m close. Let me just … a slight modification …
With the tip of his shiny claw, he covered up the f in Half.
That’s a name that will mean something to people.
There was a pen in the briefcase, and a few blank sheets of paper. With great concentration, he laboriously wrote a new title page:
DESTINY AND DESIRE
BY
HAL JAM
Arthur Bramhall returned home that night and went across the field with a flashlight to retrieve his manuscript from beneath its tree. At first he thought he had the wrong tree. He ran from tree to tree, yanking back branches and shining his flashlight on the ground.
“No,” he cried, “no, no.”
He stared through the trees at the cold, pitiless moon rising through the branches, the moon of thieves and crossroads. He fell on his knees and beat his fists on the ground. Then he got up and ran through the fields screaming, “It’s gone! It’s gone!” He shook his fist at the trees and shouted, “Why? Why did you do this to me again?” When he came to his senses, he sought the help of Vinal Pinette, the old lumberjack who lived nearby. Vinal Pinette came and investigated the scene under the tree.
“Bear.”
“What?”
“A bear’s got ’er.”
“A bear’s got my briefcase?”
The old lumberjack pointed to faint indentations in the ground. “Tracks are right there.”
“Well, let’s follow him!”
“A bear travels fast when he wants to. Could be in the next county by now.”
Arthur Bramhall fell back against the trunk of the tree. He’d already spent what little resilience he had. Years of depression and uncertainty had plundered him, and now a bear had finished him. “My life is over.”
“Had valuables in that suitcase?”
“My novel.” Bramhall stared at Vinal Pinette. Much as he liked the old man, he knew Pinette couldn’t grasp the significance of what had been lost.
“We kin go after him,” said Pinette, “but I don’t think it’ll amount to much. They al’uz say—if the bear sees you, you won’t see the bear.”
“Yes,” said Bramhall woodenly, not wishing to cause any more inconvenience to his neighbor. He stumbled back through the field, his brain mixing up that killer cocktail he knew so well, the one that was going to result in him feeling like a corroded anchor at the bottom of the sea.
“It’s a marvelous book,” said Chum Boykins of the Boykins Literary Agency, “but of course I don’t have to tell you that.”
The bear nodded, and Chum Boykins smiled, tapping his finger on the face of the manuscript. “What I like best is how fresh it is. At the same time, it has a haunting familiarity, of something we’ve never fully appreciated.”
The bear nodded again, modestly. His pants were no longer on backward, and his confidence was growing. Outside the office windows was the buzz of the great hive of humanity; its frenzied activity was difficult to fathom, but he soothed himself with candy bars, several of which were in his pockets right now.
“I’ve got an editor in mind,” said Boykins. “Do you know Elliot Gadson at Cavendish Press? I think he’s our man. He’s got the clout, he’s the right age, and this is the kind of book he loves. I’m going to call him and get the wheels in motion.”
Boykins pressed his intercom. “Margaret, get Elliot Gadson for me, would you, please?” He turned back to the bear. “Elliot knows I only call him when I’ve got something special. Do you want coffee?”
“Sugar,” growled the bear, carefully pronouncing the most important word in his limited vocabulary.
“Margaret, bring us a coffee, would you, please, lots of sugar. Thanks.” Boykins smiled at the bear. “Anybody ever tell you how much you resemble Hemingway?”
“Who?”
“Yes, who indeed. I think you just might be the one to make people forget him.”
“Pie,” said the bear to the waiter at the French restaurant to which Boykins had taken him.
“Nothing else?” asked Boykins.
“Cake ice cream.”
“It’s nice to see someone who’s not obsessed about their weight.”
“Winter,” said the bear, patting his stomach.
“Yes, it was a difficult winter.” Boykins’s eyes were dark, their gaze intense. His gestures were precise. He leaned forward, supporting his chin with thumb and forefinger. “Have you got anybody representing you on the West Coast? A Hollywood agent? Because the cinematic possibilities for your book are very strong. I can just see that huge solstice bonfire on the big screen.”
Boykins moved the vase on the table a few inches to the right. Yes, he said to himself, that’s better. Boykins had spent his childhood performing numberless compulsive rituals; in the middle of the night his parents would find him standing bolt upright in his room, the coils of compulsion holding him paralyzed.
“In fact, the whole book reads like a movie, which I’m sure isn’t news to you. It’s a brilliant piece of crossover work.” He smoothed the edge of the tablecloth down, several times. As a child, Boykins had no time for sport, no time for girls, no time for anything but smoothing his pillow hundreds of times, then standing on one leg in the bedroom, arms raised for hours in supplication to the faceless power that ruled him. “I’ve started working with a wonderful young woman at Creative Management. I’m sure you’d get along with her very well.”
The bear wanted to be careful about those he got involved with. “She like pie?”
“Pie?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” laughed Boykins, “I’m sure she likes it. Whether she eats much of it, I can’t say.” Boykins crunched a piece of celery in his strong jaws and chewed it thirty-seven times. While standing bolt upright in his college dormitory the night before graduation, and clicking his fingers thirty-seven times, he’d wondered how he could ever fit into the normal world with such an affliction. “I can tell you this, Zou Zou Sharr is one of the smartest women in Hollywood. And she’s beautiful, for whatever that’s worth. She knows the important directors, she knows the stars, and she’s a tough negotiator. And just so you know it,” smiled Boykins, “so am I.” Brutal negotiations were nothing to a man who’d spent his youth and young manhood standing on one leg. Who could back him down? In spite of his savage negotiating, publishers liked him. When they took on a writer represented by Boykins, they knew Boykins would edit text, design jackets, write ad copy, invent publicity gimmicks, drum up the sales force, call reviewers, court the media, and woo bookstores. His quiet insanity drove him to seek control over everything and it paid off in sales. “I don’t like to use the word trendy, Hal, but I think your book definitely touches a contemporary nerve.”
The bear sniffed, enjoying the weave of perfumes and colognes in the air, which made him feel as if he were in a field of flowers. He sipped some wine. His only previous experience of alcohol was a bottle of cooking sherry he’d downed while rampaging in the kitchen of that rural Maine restaurant; its effect had been blurred by the great number of pies that’d accompanied its ingestion. Now the effect was more noticeable and his sensitivity to the fragrant air increased. His nose, which for years had led his instincts, led him now, without deliberation, without preliminary weighing of what was at stake. He slid out of his chair and down onto the floor of the restaurant, where he rolled around with his paws in the air as a bear will do when he finds a field of flowers that fills him with happiness.
Boykins went rigid in his chair. His client was making an ass of himself. On the other hand, to roll off your chair and writhe ecstatically on the floor in the middle of lunch showed remarkable freedom from constraint. Boykins, bolt upright in body and soul, saw in Hal Jam the image of what he’d never been, a happy child at play in the dream of life. Boykins stared in fascination.
The headwaiter was not fascinated. He charged over, outraged at this breach of etiquette in his elegant domain.
“Monsieur, please, not during lunch!”
Bears don’t like their good times interrupted by impertinent weasels. The bear’s paw shot out. The head-waiter had spent a lifetime dodging through swinging doors. He ducked and the blow sailed past the tip of his mustache.
Boykins dropped to one knee beside his client, first making sure that his knee landed precisely in the center of one of the carpet’s rectangular patterns. “Hal, I think you’re drunk.”
The bear froze, aware of many pairs of eyes on him.
I’m getting a feeling here, he said to himself. Possible blunder?
He quickly flopped onto his stomach, pushed himself upright, and took his seat with as much dignity as he could muster, which was considerable, owing to a life of undisputed primacy in the forest.
The headwaiter had a similar authority in the room he ruled, and was equally skilled in the restoration of dignity, aided by Boykins quickly slipping him a twenty.
Boykins lifted the wine bottle. “I’ve seen too many writers ruin themselves on this stuff, Hal. And you don’t need it. You’re the real thing already.”
The voice of Boykins blended with the other human voices in the room, becoming the sound of bees. “Bees honey,” said the bear, his elbow sliding forward on the table.
He’s fried to the eyebrows, thought Boykins.
“Honey life,” said the bear, fighting to create easy conversation, but he could feel people’s glances and their superior smiles. They spoke their thoughts effortlessly, while his moved ponderously. His agent was looking at him anxiously, with no idea of what he was trying to say about honey. And he himself didn’t know. I’m floundering, he said to himself. Panic shot through him, and his eyes darted back and forth.
“Well,” said Boykins, trying to return to the orderly procession of business matters, “how do you feel about publicity?”
The question broke apart into pieces and the bear couldn’t fit the pieces together. His long tongue ran nervously over his snout. A woman who’d just joined a party of Tempo Oil executives at an adjacent table noticed the bear and kept her eyes fastened on him as the voices of her male colleagues broke dully around her. Now, there, she thought as the bear’s red velvet tongue slipped over his nose again, is a man.
“The sales force will insist on a tour,” said Boykins, “if we get the kind of money I’ll be going after.”
The bear had lost the thread to which he’d managed to cling from Maine to Manhattan. The buzz of the restaurant was an unbearable judgment on his animality. He slapped his paws over his ears.
“I understand, Hal, you don’t want to hear about it yet. You’ve just written a novel and it’s precious to you. But these days the author is as much the product as the book.”
The racing stream of human speech glistened as it curved around obstacles and glided on, relentless in its gradient, while he panted in animal stupidity.
And then his nose twitched, the olfactory bulb at its root a thousand times more sensitive than that of a human. He straightened and moved his head around to isolate the natural scent he’d found within the synthetic veil of perfumes. There it was, moist, cool. “Salmon.”
“Yes, they do it skewered with tomatoes, mushrooms, and green peppers.”
“Raw,” said the bear with a resurgence of primal authority.
“Raw?”
“Raw female. Lots of eggs. In my teeth.” The bear tapped at his incisors.
My god, thought Boykins, he is another Hemingway.
Arthur Bramhall stared at the blank sheet of paper in his typewriter. He had no words, no thoughts, no inspiration. This time the forces of nature had broken him. He rested his head on the space bar. “I should have used a computer. Everything would be on floppy disk. But I was afraid of all the power failures in the boondocks. I said, if a typewriter was good enough for Hemingway, it’s good enough for me. What a tragic conceit.”
He lifted his head. Beside him on the desk was a mug from the University of Maine, with its emblem—a black bear—painted on the side. He picked it up and put it away in a drawer. Then he stared out the window of his office toward the tree under which he’d left his briefcase. He strained to see beyond it, into the woods, hoping for the sight of a real black bear lumbering by with a briefcase, but the only sight was Vinal Pinette strolling down the lane. Bramhall got up from his desk as the old lumberjack entered the cabin. “Why did he take it, Vinal?” asked Bramhall. “What use would a bear have for a briefcase?”
“Bears are funny creatures,” said Vinal Pinette. “I had one steal a shirt of mine off the clothes-line. Gave it an awful thrashing and then throwed it aside. Something about that shirt he didn’t like, I suppose, and he got worked up about it.”
“I feel as if I’m dying,” Bramhall admitted, hoping that by some miracle Pinette would have words of wisdom for him, gleaned from long years of country living. He had put a character like Pinette in Destiny and Desire, an old backwoods philosopher who entered at crucial moments like this and saved the day with his hard-won natural wisdom.
“I used to feel just the same,” said Pinette. “Felt that way every year in spring when the timber company airplane sprayed us with DDT. It knocked the spots right out of me. The timber folks said it was the very best stuff in the world, and I don’t doubt it was, I just didn’t seem to take to it.” Then, looking into Bramhall’s sagging countenance, Pinette said, “But what I always say is if you ain’t got a noseful of porcupine quills, you’re doing okay.”
Bramhall put his face in his hands. “How can I go back to the University of Maine and face my colleagues?”
“They pay good wages up to the college, do they?” Like most country people, Vinal Pinette took a great interest in wages earned in exotic places.
“I don’t want their wages. I want freedom.”
“Arf McArdle used to talk about freedom too. Had a wife, eleven kids, and a mother-in-law who was as tough as a steel-toed boot. One day the mother-in-law sent him to the store for some soap, and nobody ever saw him again. Something about that request for soap set Arf on course for parts unknown.”
Bramhall gazed out the window again, toward huge fleecy clouds moving slowly overhead. “I thought my book was really good. But maybe I was deluded. Maybe it was only fit for a bear.”
“Bears ain’t fussy, it’s true.” After dispensing this profound piece of country wisdom Vinal Pinette turned his cap around in his fingers, and Bramhall’s gaze drifted toward the window. The clouds looked like bears in a chorus line, in top hats and tails, kicking up their heels.
Staring at these exuberant forms, he felt the desperate desire that had driven him all these months—to be freed from drudgery and to have a literary destiny. Longing for it twisted his guts, and then, perhaps because of his lifelong habit of depression, he let go—let go of desire, let go of his imagined destiny, let Destiny and Desire slip through his fingers like the string of a kite, let it fly away. He could almost see it, a golden cord whipping up into the air, out of reach. He slumped in his chair, and the golden cord went sailing, into the clouds. And he felt strangely relaxed in his ruin.
The bear entered the Port Authority building off Times Square in Manhattan. He was going back to Maine on the next Greyhound bus. The panic he’d suffered at the restaurant was only the beginning; if he attempted to stay in the human world, the buzz would cause him to crack; he’d expose himself as a bear and be put in a zoo. He carried his empty briefcase, to help him pass as a human being.
“Lemme carry that for you, sir,” said a criminal in a jogging suit, to which was attached a plastic tag that said Baggage Assistant.
“No,” said the bear, and cradled th
e empty briefcase more tightly under his arm.
“Somebody could take it from you,” insisted the bogus Baggage Assistant, but the bear kept walking, past lines of down-at-the-heels travelers waiting to board buses to other places in which to be down-at-the-heels. The bear didn’t know these travelers were in worse shape than he was. He didn’t know they would have given anything to have an agent. He didn’t know that everybody in America wanted an agent. He didn’t know he was throwing away the opportunity that every true American dreams of, to be a celebrity. This was because he was a bear.
Three fun-loving skinheads who needed money saw the bear’s portly, good-natured figure coming toward them and decided he’d be easy prey. They surrounded him, acting as if they knew him. “Hey, Jack, where you going with that briefcase?”
Their leader wore a Nazi helmet and had renamed himself Heimlich in honor of the man who ran the SS, not knowing he’d confused the Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims and Heinrich Himmler.
“I’m not Jack,” said the bear.
“Give me that briefcase,” snapped Heimlich. “That’s an order! Achtung!”
The bear stared away down the long corridor of the building, a distant look in his eyes. He didn’t want to attract attention to himself, but he needn’t have worried, as everyone in the Authority building was busy looking the other way.
“Give it,” repeated Heimlich, pointing at the briefcase.
“Why?” asked the bear, thinking there was a problem of communication.
“We’re the Obermensch. We take what we want.” Heimlich liked to sprinkle German words into what he said. One of these days he’d take a Living Fucking Language course and astonish everyone with his German. “Now give me your wallet and that briefcase.”
“No,” said the stubborn bear.
The skinheads grabbed the bear by the arms, and Heimlich reached for the briefcase. The bear, feeling his only link to humanity being taken from him, gave a backhanded swipe that dislocated Heimlich’s jaw and removed a sizable portion of his nose. Then he twirled Heimlich upside down, grabbed his ankles, and swung him. Heimlich’s helmeted head became a blurred streak of steel striking each of the other skinheads in the face with a whong-whong-whong sound. Heimlich’s head rattled inside the helmet, soundly concussing itself. From this point forward he would hear his treasured recording of “Deutschland über Alles” through a nice case of tinnitus.