by Rafi Zabor
Yup. There was that, all right.
And even before the vocal denouement, there was the fact that the bearcub had already begun to evoke from him the one good quality he would still admit to, call it by its proper name: devotion.
Jones got up and walked away from the memory.
In the shower, he prayed for cool clear water to come down and rinse those nagging stains from his soul, but when he turned the shower off the world was still breathing slow and steady on the back of his neck in its usual overbearing show of constancy and presence and weight. Oh give me a break, Jones asked it. I outran you for awhile, for a few years even. Give me another couple of minutes now.
Whom the gods would destroy they first deprive of his magic bear.
In fact, what time was it? Soon he would have to begin the trudge to work.
Jones towelled himself down but fresh sweat beaded on his brow: it would drip down and bfind him later, he knew. What point was there to any effort, any motion, any feeble twitch of will? Jones felt the complex geometry of his depression advancing upon him, the invisible cage that kept him patrolling his bit of air under what hidden orders? He blinked at himself in the mirror and his face looked back at him, unimpressive and not very healthy-looking in the glass. One face too many in the world, he thought. One face he'd just as soon not see. Did He who made the fly make thee?
He had to get going or he'd be late for work at the bar and Johnny Coyle would give him one of his all-day special hard times. He had to get a move on.
The Bear Comes Home 77
But came to himself again slouched on the sofa so redolent of Bear today, the same unread book open on his lap. And Jones remembered his way-back bearcub sitting on the living-room floor while a record was playing, his shoulders rounded with what almost seemed human concentration as if, Jones had thought at the time, the thing was shaping itself to music. Even before he'd had any real inkling what intelligence was resident there, Jones could almost feel the cub drawing music into itself, the rounded furball form immobile or rocking intently in front of the speakers, its eyes out of focus or fixed on some random spot on the floor while Coltrane burned his way to God on a minor blues or Ornette raised his saxophone and centuries of cognitive imprisonment fell to the dust without especial drama. Jones used to test his new animule's tastes with different records. It seemed to like Bach and Bird a lot—there'd be that oddball stillness in him, he'd get that fanny elsewhere look in his eyes—but put some Mantovani on the box and the thing would bumble off to the bedroom on all fours. Switch back to Mozart or Sonny Rollins he'd be back on the carpet in front of the stereo, looking at the backs of his paws in a spill of sunlight from the windows as he listened, or would swat placidly at the golden dustmotes and watch them spin in the day's declining beam.
Cuter than a dog and maybe even a Httle smarter, Jones had thought at the time, and isn't it odd how exactly he seems to understand what I say to him? Although sometimes, true, and usually perversely, he does not. But what am I gonna do with him when he gets bigger? You can't keep a full-grown bear in a New York apartment. I'll have to have him put down with a needle at the vet's or contribute him to the zoo. Jones hated to admit it: in the isolation of his life at the time, the bearcub had become his closest friend. He talked to it, he confided, he told it everything. Some absurdity of symbiosis had evolved between them; it felt all right but thought all wrong. At night, noting the particular stupidity of this descent, Jones would have long, onesided conversations with the cub, and sometimes it would seem to nod yes to some salient point, or tacitly express some nuance of sympathy with a comprehending paw atop his knee.
I know I'm a fuckup, Jones would tell it, but is there anything good left in me? The cub would pat him consolingly. This was idiotic. Then, if he'd say. Come on, you understand me really, the thing would drool out the side of its mouth and start gnawing on the toe of his slipper.
He used to put the cub on a leash and take him out on walks around the neighborhood, and he'd met a lot of good-looking women that way. Is that what I think it is? You're kidding me! Really? They'd come up to the apartment for coffee or a beer, but all it had ever led to was them playing with the
78 Rafi Zabor
Bear for hours and hours, hugging him to their supernatural slender waists or those taut-nippled East Village bosoms poking T-shirts and tube tops, letting the cute li'l thing paw them wherever it wanted, enjoying its big sloppy random-looking kisses and even getting a laugh out of its shocking-pink erections.
If they'd only known.
For fack's sake, if he had only known.
Finally there came the day. A man if anything overstocked with halfway talents, Jones had always noodled on an instrument or two, and one week he impacked his old metal clarinet and played it persistently for an afternoon or two at the growing bear. He played some Sousa, a sort-of blues, almost-klezmer, an impression of belly-dance music, all the little bits of this-and-that he knew. Maybe I can get you to dance, he told it. I'm playing pretty well, ain't I? even with the occasional squeaks and squawks? The reed's a bitch to control sometimes. Maybe that's what we can do with ourselves when we grow up. I'll play, you'll dance, we'll make some bread and retire upstate like a pair of merchant princes. What do you say to that? I know it sounds hke a joke, but how would it be as a real-hfe prospect? Think I can get you to play along? Because, man, I'm sick of waiting tables. I tell you, bear, I'm an artist at heart. Always was. Jones played another snatch of tune on the clarinet and ended the phrasing on an interrogatory upnote. What do you think? What do you think really?
The bearcub rose onto its hind legs, waddled up to Jones, snatched the instrument out of his hands and said, "I think that if I have to hear you torture this poor thing another five minutes I'll go out of my fucking mind."
Jones had gasped and nearly fallen down. "Ack," he said.
"You mean you never guessed?" the Bear asked him, coolly examining the reed of the clarinet.
"There were clues," Jones just managed to say through a constricted throat. It was the strangest conversation he had ever had, and he didn't know what tone to adopt. Civilized outrage clearly wasn't working. He shuffled his deck of roles and voices and found no card he could play. "Clues," he repeated in a voice he barely recognized as his own.
"Yeah," said the Bear. "I laid a few out for you but you seemed kind of, uh, slow on the uptake."
"Kind oiwhat}" said Jones, aghast at the insult, the offense, the affront to his—
"I know it's a big conceptual leap and all but I thought you were a httle, how should I put it, thick, and I was going to let you pass. I mean, maybe you weren't up to it."
The Bear Comes Home 79
"Oh thank you very much."
"But the clarinet was the last straw," the Bear told him. "You had to be stopped. And here we jolly well are," he paraphrased one of Jones' Lord Buckley records, doing the voice, ^'ahnh we."
"W-what are you?" Jones had protested absurdly, his hands fluttering at the end of his ridiculous arms. "Some kind of expert on the clarinet?"
"Expert might be too strong a word," said the Bear. He moistened the end of his snout, then played the opening bars of the clarinet part of the K.581 Mozart quintet through the first arpeggio, with the rhythm nicely pointed up and his breath well controlled but some inconsistencies in tone production across the range of the instrument: Mozart was not as simple as he seemed. From the arpeggio's end he segued into Charlie Parker's "Au Privave" and improvised two not-bad choruses before lowering the clarinet from his distended black-and-purple lips. "When you go out to wait tables I only pull the couch apart and rip the carpet for realistic effect. Most of the time I read books or practice horn. I'd rather have a sax, you know. Probably an alto would suit me best, but without trying one it's hard to say."
"You've been practicing while I was out," Jones managed to say coherently and in his own voice.
"What did I just tell you."
"I think I need a drink," Jones said.
/> "Sit down and I'll make you one. There's just enough Scotch left for a stiff one. The usual half an ice cube and a soda back? The whiskey's already watered. I take some now and then and make up the difference from the tap. You never seem to notice. Not much of a palate, apparendy. You sure you want a drink? You don't have a very strong constitution and the stuffs not good for you."
Not much more than a pup, Jones had thought to say but kept silent, and already so fucking uppity.
"Look," said the Bear when he came back with the drink, exactly as if he'd read Jones' mind, "if I didn't like you I wouldn't be talking to you in the first place. I'm nervous about it myself. Overcompensating. I'm not as assured as I seem. It's a big jump for me too. A break with family tradition. I mean, it's obvious you're a fucking mess in the practical sense, but you've got a good heart, and that's what I respond to."
"You M^ me?"
"What's not to like? You're one of the human race's few true gentlemen."
"I am?"
"Trust me. For generations back my folks have known every kind of human cruelty. You're not one of Them. You're a good man. You wouldn't hurt a fly."
"I'm a good man," Jones repeated in a sort of wonder.
8o Rafi Zabor
"Drink up and get used to it. You are now The Man Who Owns a Talking Bear."
"Own? How could I own you?"
"Proves my point," the Bear told him, "but your Ufe's defined anyway. So tell me, what do we do next?"
Jones awoke years later on the sofa, looking at the unread words in his lap. What book is this? Why do I smell you so powerfully today? I've sat on this sofa before. Are you still out there somewhere? Is it possible you're still alive? Is it possible you're trying to tell me something?
Jesus McChristmas, he realized, I'm late for work.
Jones murdered another clam, added it to the paper plate that held the five he had already opened and handed the half-dozen littlenecks through the sidewalk window to the big brownskinned man outside, traffic bright and noisy behind him, blue exhaust smoke rising and a game of hoop starting up in the court on the other side of the Avenue.
"You got another little cup of hot sauce for me?" the customer asked him.
"Here you go." Jones passed it out into the daylight and took the man's money. Then he wiped his hands dry on his apron, ate another few cold shrimp with cocktail sauce he had mixed up heavy on the horseradish and took a swig of beer fi-om a paper cup. Sometimes it amazed him that he could stand there all day and down a simply unbelievable amount of seafood: shrimp, clams, oysters, the occasional filet of sole more or less meuniere: it all went down the hatch without even beginning to overstuff him. How did he manage to eat so much? Just because he didn't follow it with a carbohydrate chaser? He wasn't about to eat the fries here, not with that month-old tub of oil in the fryer. The management didn't seem to mind how much fish he ate, but that was mostly Coyle's good nature. It wasn't the worst job he'd ever had. Not by a long shot, no.
"Ah, excuse me, Jonesy," Johnny Coyle's voice said fi-om just behind his right ear, "but if you're not too busy eating shrimp and jerking off could you possibly go down to the basement and bring me up another couple cases of Miller's?"
Coyle was a retired longshoreman with a habitual Fm-just-another-dumb-fiicking-Irishman riff going most of the time, mid-forties, curly hair and moustache going grey but still in fighting trim. He made the job livable and got between Jones and the mafioso who owned the joint whenever that short squat reeking heap of psychotic violence put in an appearance, usually fresh from beating some poor son of a bitch half to death with a tire iron. Coyle was supposed to be the only guy alive who could keep this heavy,
The Bear Comes Home 8i
sweating, widespread monster at bay, used to ride with him on the bad months to make sure he didn't kill someone out of season. With Jones, Johnny Coyle was sociable and easy, and quite a sensitive guy, in his way. "Sure," said Jones. "I think I can get you a couple of cases cheap."
"Since you seem to be drinking it all," Coyle persisted.
"It's the Champagne of Bottled Beers," Jones informed him.
"If you'd be so fucking kind. When you have the time. If you'll forgive me for asking."
"All right all right all right."
Jones checked out his short-order emplacement—the tubs of clams on ice, the spread of cooked cocktail shrimp on a pizza tray, and on his right the deep fryer and the grill—to see that everything was in order. The Bear had long ago told him that there was no facet of your essential self that the world will not find out and one day travesty. No. Check that. There is no travesty of your essential nature to which life will not eventually subject you, was how the Bear had put it, and from this vantage point it seemed that the Bear, although of course his experience of Ufe had prejudiced him in this regard, in fact was right. Jones' job at Filet of Soul on Sixth Avenue in the Village had put stigmata on his hands and placed a crown of paper on his head that read Soup Burg in blue-and-red letters across his brow. The stigmata were easy to explain: when he opened clams all day, the heels of the shells wore a hole in the palm of the hand that held the clams against the pressure of the knife. Later this hole callused over, but a small red eye remained in its center. Jones was ambidextrous and had grown a callus on each hand fi*om which a livid eye looked back at him, like everything else, accusatively. To complete the sketch, the runoff fi-om the tubs of clams and ice had soaked through his white canvas deck shoes to leave a mottiing of rash on the tops of his feet. Not quite a spikemark, but under the circumstances it would do. The Soup Burg hat was a leftover from another restaurant that the owner wanted him to wear at all times. Better, perhaps, if less truthful, than Filet of Soul, but after a full day's work Soup Burg was about what he felt like he had left for brains.
But the imagery had not come entirely without compensations: on Jones' second day, the runoff from the clam tubs had made its way through the basement and whatever stonework intervened beneath to interfere with a portion of the city's basic power grid, and the whole string of subway lines that ran beneath the boards of Filet of Soul blew out at the rim of the evening rush and crammed the streets with stranded civilians for a couple of hours. Jones had punched New York City's lights out! He felt that he had struck a blow for freedom and in some sense made contact with the Bear.
Jones usually worked the nightshift, serving up clams and shrimp for the
82 Rafi Zabor
street trade and working the grill for people in the high-backed booths in Filet of Soul's dark interior—he had to wait the tables too, and work a full-scale kitchen in back if anyone ordered steak or mussels—but today he was doing the dayUght stretch, lunchtime through evening, get off after he'd buddied his relief pitcher, the Dominican guy, whatsisname, Esposito, Vergil, through the worst of the dinner rush. Most nights, by the time Jones closed down the grill and finished mopping out the bar, there'd be first Ught in the sk^ and nothing out there but yesterday's papers navigating the updrafts and a few last vampires scuttling home along the gutters through the early blue.
Tonight, though, there'd be some time to live through after work. And Sybil Bailey had called to say she'd be dropping by around seven or eight or so. They were no longer seeing each other—in fact it had been awhile since he'd Uteraily seen her at all—but she had the final layout of the album's cover art and she wanted him to see it. He had almost forgotten about the album. With the Bear gone, what really was the point of putting it out?
"Jonesy," came Johnny Coyle's voice again. "That beer. Anytime you're ready. And say hello to Spooker for me if he doesn't bite your balls off first."
"You mind if I bring him down some hamburger? I mean, you never know."
"Sure. Take him one for me."
He was all right, was Johnny Coyle.
Jones took two flat round patties from the cooler and lifted the basement kev from its hook, and even though he knew he had his apron on he patted himself to check for sure. If you walked down the basement st
airs without an apron on, the dog would tear your throat out before you knew what had hit you—there's no training like xMafia training Hke no training I know. The hamburgers were insurance, just to be sure.
"Spooker, sweetie," Jones sang out from the top of the steps when he had shut the basement door behind him. The fights were always on down there, a few bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, unplaned plank walls nailed up rough, a freezer vault, and he could see a few hardened dog turds on the cement floor at the bottom of the stairs, but the Doberman hadn't made his entrance yet. "Yo, Spooker.'" A quick tapping of uncut toenails on the concrete and there he was, a reddish-brown overstuffed chunk of walking meat, mouth open, looking up and wagging his stump of a tail for all he was worth. The animal was obdously half demented with its life down there. The boss didn't want him socializing with anyone, though Johnny Coyle was able to sneak him out for a walk on the end of a heavy leash a couple of times a month. On rainy days usually or late at night, when there weren't too many people out there.
The Bear Comes Home 83
"Look what I got for you, baby," Jones announced, then tossed Spooker down half a burger. The dog scarfed up the meat in an instant and looked up at Jones with renewed enthusiasm and an expansive doggy smile, tongue lolling out the side of it. Brain of a puppy and an overpacked body programmed for attack. Hiya, Spooks.
Jones nerved himself up for the descent.
For all he knew, every restaurant in Manhattan packed a brainwashed chump Hke Spooker in its basement. For all he knew the whole city was underwritten by a layer of buried animals living under lightbulbs and crapping on poured concrete floors. It was part of a hierarchical, metaphysical scheme of things Jones had been working out for himself over the last couple of months, a sort of outsized mental fresco: the dreaming public walked the upstairs maze in daylight while like the image of their own buried, denied or damaged selves a layer of animals lived trapped and incommunicate beneath. One level lower, just above the sewage, ran the subway full of worker drones and stupefied consumers, and in the co-opped heights above it all the rich reclined in golden condos against a sky of Fra Angelico blue. But watchit, ladies and gennamen: when the Big Day dawns, the first might get to be last, the last might just jockey into first position, you never know, and in any case everything's gonna get jumbled in all kinds of unpredictable ways and the animals will be set free and they will render justice.