The Bear Went Over the Mountain

by William Kotzwinkle

  They approached their colleague, and Settlemire called, “Bramhall, how are you?”

  Bramhall eyed them in silence. Peculiar ideas were sprocketing along in his brain with a speed a mad inventor would envy. By some wonderful alchemy which he was hard-pressed to understand, his perception at this moment included the presence of a groundhog whose tunnel was near where Settlemire and Wheelock were walking. Bramhall felt the groundhog’s uneasiness, even seemed to feel its thoughts—caution, suspicion—you never know who might shove a rat terrier down your hole.

  Settlemire came up to Bramhall and extended his hand. “Good to see you, old man. One hears that you might be unwell.”

  “A bear stole my book.”

  Settlemire cast a quick glance toward Wheelock, of the sort attendants at mental institutions give each other when a new messiah is admitted to their floor. “A bear stole your book. Incredible. One didn’t know bears did such things.”

  Bramhall caught the cynicism, but was not offended. His attention was on his subterranean acquaintance, the groundhog who was nervously enlarging his bolt-hole, that all-important escape hatch a prudent rodent must attend to. Just a precaution, said the shadowy voice in Bramhall’s head, touch-up work mainly, mustn’t be taken unprepared when the hostile snout comes calling.

  Wheelock said, “We’ve all been concerned for you, Arthur.”

  Bramhall’s nose twitched. The smell that was coming from Wheelock was ambition, a sweet greasy smell, as if Wheelock were roasting a pig in his shirt.

  “The department was wondering if you’ve had trouble with your mail,” said Settlemire.

  “I don’t open mail anymore.”

  “Ah.” Wheelock was noting Bramhall’s filthy pants. And he seems to be sprouting hair on his forehead. Glandular disturbance?

  “Look here, Arthur, I brought along a copy of my Qualified Qualifiers in Frost. It’s only a beginning but it points the way. Plenty of room for more research there.”

  Bramhall sniffed Settlemire’s academic self-satisfaction, the smell of dead flies baking on an attic windowsill.

  “One assumes you’re finished copying best-sellers. All right, it didn’t work out. A bear stole it, whatever, anything you like. We don’t need an explanation. The point is, all is not lost.”

  “Maybe Arthur doesn’t feel up to university work,” said Wheelock hopefully. “We mustn’t push him.”

  Bramhall turned away, into the sweet hay smell of the barn. Its stout timbers, its sun-dried boards, its age, steadied him against these emissaries from his former life.

  “Arthur,” said Wheelock gently, “should we call a doctor?”

  Bramhall lowered himself onto an old hay bale in one of the horse stalls and shook his head no. He envied the groundhog its bolt-hole, that secret place in which to vanish when unwelcome visitors disturb your tranquil meditation.

  “I’m going to leave my book here on the hay,” said Settlemire. Bramhall nodded again, aware that his silence was signaling the end of his life as a U Maine professor.

  “We’re going now, Arthur. We’ll tell everyone you said hello. And give Qualified Qualifiers a glance. It might be just what you need.”

  The two professors left the barn and walked back across the field. “I’d say he’s suffering a depression,” said Settlemire. “Like Hamlet, you know. A world ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.’ ”

  “I think, perhaps, something a little more serious,” suggested Wheelock, his glance falling on a whitened bone in the grass, of some creature whose days of roaming had ended, precisely here.

  Back in the barn, Bramhall remained on his bale of hay, gazing at the smooth poles that formed the walls of the horse stall. There were patterns on one of the poles, left by some insect that’d burrowed along under the bark. He traced the patterns, with the sense of reading the work of an alien calligrapher, whose life story was here. The script, though impenetrable, weighed more strongly with him than Settlemire’s Qualified Qualifiers.

  The rumble of a car sounded on the wagon road that led to the barn. Looking out the door, he saw the fur-bearing woman at the wheel. She drove to the barn, parked, and got out. The groundhog popped its head out of its hole and let out a long humanlike whistle. The fur-bearing woman turned toward it and smiled, then looked back toward Bramhall. “I love groundhogs. They’re the only ones who ever whistle at me.”

  She approached the barn slowly. She’d heard that Arthur had begun living closer to the land, and this rumor had renewed her interest in him. She was wearing a heavy flannel shirt and jeans and carried a bunch of dried flowers. Entering the barn, she said, “I was picking herbs for winter and thought I’d bring you some.” She’d woven dried flowers into her hair, and her voice was as sweet as the golden apples waiting to fall from the trees of the nearby orchard. As she sat down on the hay, her jeans pulled up slightly, revealing her hairy calves. Bramhall found them irresistibly attractive.

  He lay in the hayloft of his barn with the fur-bearing woman beside him. Now that her flannel shirt was off he saw that she had fur under her arms too. She used no deodorant and an exciting odor enveloped him as she lifted her arms to unpin her hair.

  Having expected cautious foreplay from the shy and timid professor, the fur-bearing woman was astounded when Bramhall spun her roughly around and bent her over.

  “Arthur … my goodness …” Her personal space was being invaded too quickly. In fact, it’d just been filled up completely.

  The little barn birds dived and twittered, feeling their nests of mud and sticks being shaken in the rafters. Oh, these clumsy humans, they’re so heavy, and a nest is a delicate thing.

  A growl rattled in Bramhall’s throat. He bit the fur-bearing woman on the shoulder and felt an odd sensation at the tip of his coccyx, as if a tail were vigorously twitching there. Then he experienced the kind of orgasm the hero of his book had enjoyed, one that seemed to tap a huge reservoir of pleasure from deep inside the earth.

  The fur-bearing woman’s toes curled around the dry stalks of hay. When the tide of her own ecstasy subsided she looked back over her shoulder and saw Bramhall gazing at her. “You’re a force of nature,” she murmured, running her hand over his surprisingly burly chest.

  The little birds swooped in and out of the barn, chattering to each other. Their nests were safe now but it’d been touch and go while the humans were humping.

  “A bear stole my novel.” Bramhall muttered his mantra up at the high ceiling of the barn.

  “What do you mean?”

  Bramhall did not immediately respond, as words no longer came easily to him. But finally a fragment surfaced from his life as a literature professor. “Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. Stage direction, act three, scene three.” He stood, and without bothering to put on his pants and shirt walked to the barn door. “Exit, pursued by a bear,” he said, and headed toward the woods.

  “Arthur!” The fur-bearing woman, though a daughter of nature, was not prepared to wander the woods naked, especially in the cold. She hurriedly put on her clothes. “Wait for me!” By the time she reached the edge of the trees, Bramhall had vanished. The fur-bearing woman looked for a path but there was none. She felt as if she’d just been initiated into a frightening mystery of the forest. He’d said something about a bear stealing his novel, but what could that mean? Was he saying that his book had been channeled by a bear spirit? Did that account for his wild sexual performance? What secret power did this man possess? And what weekend seminar had given it to him?

  The bear strolled through Greenwich Village in the bracing autumn air. A lovely night for a two-legged walk, he said to himself. Getting along like a real human being. Baseball hat, clip-on tie, comfortable shoes. What more could a bear ask for?

  He was starting to enjoy crowds of people, with all their perfumed smells. His book had been purchased by Universal Studios for a million and a half dollars and Elliot Gadson had taken him to his own tailor, where several new suits had been made, one of which the bear
wore this evening, a gray tweed which fit him perfectly. The tailor had expressed strong objections to the clip-on tie, but there are some points on which one can’t compromise, reflected the bear to himself.

  He entered Washington Square Park. The chess players were at their tables, and he paused to watch.

  No one knows I’m a bear. Standing here, paws in my pockets. Just another hairy guy in the park. He walked on, with a lighthearted step. A young woman went by on roller blades, arms swinging briskly. I should get a pair of those, he thought to himself, a contemporary bear on the move.

  Engrossed in watching the roller blader, he did not see the dog exercise area until it was too late. Dogs were chasing sticks and chasing each other and attempting various forms of intercourse. A male beagle came around a tree on the run, ears back, body low and almost flying. As he did so, he got wind of the bear. He skidded to a stop, stared for a moment, then threw his head back and let out the ancestral howl. It cut through the yapping and growling of the other dogs. It was the sound of the hunt. The other dogs took up the cry and raced to the fence, throwing themselves against it as they howled and barked, hackles up, teeth flashing.

  The bear quickly changed course, pulling his baseball cap down over his head and trying to blend, but after a few anxious steps he reverted to bear-walking on all fours.

  “Smoke, smoke,” said a voice above him.

  He forced himself to come upright, beside a man with matted hair and a ring in his ear.

  “Grass, hash, crack,” said the Jamaican entrepreneur, falling into step beside him. “What you fancy, mon?”

  “Potato chips,” said the bear with a nervous look back toward the dogs.

  The entrepreneur frowned. He did not have time to waste. He worked hard each day the American way, to buy big cars and little phones. “I got California sensamilla, mon.”

  “Do you have pretzels?”

  The entrepreneur’s eyes flashed angrily. Image was important in the park and he could not afford to be joked around. He jabbed a finger into the bear’s chest. “Hey, don’t be jiving me, mon, or I stick you in the guts.”

  The bear’s eyes darted fearfully in the direction of the howling dogs and he moved away hurriedly, out of the park. Dogs had the power to unmask him, to turn him into a raging, desperate animal forced to make a stand in public, where he’d quickly be arrested and taken away to the zoo. I let my guard down, he said to himself. I got cocky. Remember what Bettina said, you’re not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi.

  He continued through the Village, toward Gadson’s loft in SoHo. He’d visited it once before and the smells of its restaurants and shops formed a map in his brain, which he was following now, from Greek food to Italian food to Chinese food. At the entrance to Gadson’s loft building, he smelled the Clinique face scrub which Gadson used. He rang the bell and then climbed the stairs, toward a cloud of perfumes and colognes and the sound of voices.

  “Hal, so glad you could make it.” Gadson met him at the door and showed him through a corridor hung with turn-of-the-century posters of gay nightspots—Little Bucks, the Artistic Club, the Black Rabbit of Bleecker Street where the French Fairy had put on his remarkable floor show. There was a blown-up page from The New York Herald of 1892 describing activities at a Greenwich Village nightclub called the Slide where “Orgies Beyond Description” took place. The bear studied the posters, struck by the men in their evening attire, with canes and capes. He’d have to talk to Elliot about getting a cape.

  Gadson was leading him into the main room of the loft, whose entry was decorated with tall ferns in slender vases. Converted gas lamps illuminated the walls, and the furniture was Victorian. The guests were mostly from the literary world, and had already heard rumors about Hal Jam’s forthcoming book and the sale to Universal. “He does look like Hemingway,” said more than one person, though some said it was just a superficial impression, not a true likeness.

  Bettina appeared like the queen of the bumblebees, her gold and black dress clinging to her buzzing little figure, and her eyes bulging with the feverish fires that ruled her. Her path through the room was erratic, for she wanted to be everywhere at once. A tortilla chip attached itself to her flying scarf as she pivoted past the buffet table, and Chum Boykins removed it with a compulsive nip of his fingers.

  Bettina waved to Eunice Cotton and joined her in a corner of the room. Angels in Bed had now sold a million copies, and Eunice was everlastingly grateful for Bettina’s genius. Bettina had toured her heavily in Bible Belt country, and sales had soared, because Bettina had included a cute young male stripper on the tour. She’d had the stripper wear a short white tunic and gaze with impartial love at the ladies while Eunice read from Bed. During the book-signing session afterward, the muscular angel was especially attentive to Eunice, fussing over her, whispering to her, all of it stage-managed by Bettina, to give the impression of what angels actually did for people. Turnouts for the readings had been high, and the angel was now making promotional visits on his own to shopping malls. Gadson had signed him up to write his autobiography, tentatively titled Tarnished Wings.

  “Hal Jam is here,” said Bettina to Eunice excitedly. “I was afraid he wouldn’t come.”

  “That man is a saint,” said the angel writer.

  “Can we go quite that far?” asked Bettina.

  “He’s above it all, Bettina. You told me yourself he doesn’t care about publicity.”

  Bettina had to admit this was true, to her great puzzlement. She’d known writers who were indifferent to politics and even to sex, but she’d never met one who was indifferent to publicity.

  Eunice tilted her head back slightly and closed her eyes. “It happens the minute Hal Jam appears. I’m hearing my angel.”

  “What’s he saying?” asked Bettina with real interest. She desperately wished she had an angel but she knew she’d never qualify. She felt like the remains of a broken travel agency, had sent too many people off on trips peddling books. Her eyes swiveled to the door. “That’s Zou Zou Sharr walking in. Do you know her? She’s a killer Hollywood agent.”

  “I used to do my hair that shade of red,” said Eunice. “I used to do a lot of people’s hair that shade.”

  Bettina zipped across the room and slipped her arm through the bear’s. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. If he likes your work it could help enormously.”

  She introduced him to Kenneth Penrod, professor of English at Columbia and the author of The Decline of Literature. Penrod found the bear unusually taciturn and liked it. Penrod waited, wineglass in hand, as the bear struggled to express what was on his mind, glancing in the direction of Washington Square Park with haunted eyes. Finally the bear said, very slowly, “I’ve heard the howling of the dogs.”

  The depth of feeling in the bear’s voice was not the idle stuff Penrod generally heard at functions like this. “I know exactly what you mean,” answered Penrod. “Our literary values are being totally corrupted by men like Ramsbotham over there.” He pointed to the other prominent critic in the room, Samuel Ramsbotham of NYU, whose book The Literary Revolution had been outselling Penrod’s two to one. “Dogs? You’re absolutely right. They’re howling at our door.”

  The bear’s gaze shot toward the door of the loft, and the ridge of muscle at his neck swelled. “I hate dogs.”

  “There’s always one or two who show up, usually with an entourage of sycophants.” Penrod cast another disdainful glance toward Ramsbotham.

  The bear’s neck muscles quivered. “I’ll tear them apart.”

  “I hope you do.” Penrod was impressed. This man Jam lived his beliefs. So rare. So very, very rare. “I’m eager to read your novel, of course. I’ve heard a great deal about it already from Bettina and Elliot.”

  The bear nodded, but his eyes kept returning to the door, and then to the window. His indifference to talking about his own book further impressed Penrod. He’s not consumed by ambition, reflected the critic. He’s concerned, as I am, ab
out the crisis in literature. “I think you might get something out of my Decline,” said Penrod. “I’ll have the publisher send you a copy. It’s pioneer work, of course, but there are some points with which you’ll be in sympathy.”

  “How are you two getting on?” asked Bettina, returning in a whirlwind and spilling champagne into Penrod’s vest pocket, where it gave a good soaking to his heirloom pocket watch.

  “Oh god, Ken, I’m sorry,” said Bettina, trying to soak up the spilled champagne with her scarf.

  “Quite all right, Bettina,” said Penrod. “You’ve been spilling things on me for years. I look upon it as something of a ritual.”

  The bear went to the window of the loft, looking anxiously in the direction of Washington Square, through which he could never walk again. “Dogs,” he said to himself.

  “What about them?” asked Gadson, coming up alongside him.

  The bear struggled to say more, but couldn’t express the nuances of a hostility that was ancient. “Talking is hard.”

  “I know,” said Gadson. “I was three years old before I spoke a single word. I had the words in my head, but I was making sure of my listeners.” They moved at the edge of the crowd, along a library wall that was lined with Gadson’s collection of first editions. “Books were always my best friends. As I’m sure they were yours. You were raised in a rural area, and I don’t suppose you saw many people.”

  “I saw a man through a window.”

  Gadson was at a loss. “And did you get to know him?”

  “I hung around,” replied the bear, trying to express his memory of the time, because human beings did that, they talked about things that’d happened to them. The past is unimportant to a bear, but he wanted to become human, so he attempted to describe it. “He had something I wanted.”

  Gadson wondered: Was Jam’s peculiar shyness simply a matter of him not being able to come out of the closet? He drew Jam to the end of the room, near a painted screen that framed the doorway, the screen depicting two Japanese sailors and another man, in shadow, along a waterfront.