The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  But probably not today. No, probably not today.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Jones hunkered down and offered another piece of hamburger, which Spooker gulped down quick as worlds vanishing into the maw of K^li. Then the dog thrust his strong insistent head into Jones' hands for a little human contact, a quick fix of love, and Jones rubbed him behind the ears. Jones had to admit to the absent Bear that the travesty level was running pretty high this year.

  "How you doing, dumbbell," he asked Spooker, working his hands behind the animal's ears, the dog pushing against his fingers to say harder, harder, more. Jones kneaded his way down the Doberman's spine. "Just another poor working stiff with the wrong instructions," he said. "Ain't you."

  Spooker looked up at him with crazed adoration and nodded yes.

  "Come down here without my apron on I sometimes wonder, would you go for the throat or take the low road and rip my balls off?"

  Spooker wanted more friction behind his right ear and down his neck.

  "Of course one day your programming is gonna snap and you'll go for me anyway. The apron might protect the family jewels, though. Which I might as well have hocked with the silver for all the use Fm getting out of them these days."

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  Spooker was getting very very happy. He'd found a buddy. Look at that stump of tail go. Jones worked the other side of his neck.

  "So have another burger on me."

  Spooker looked up at him with sudden serious focus.

  Oh shit, thought Jones. "Uh, how about I give it to you in the freezer?"

  Jones stood up and survived the transition. Brandishing his last half of hamburger, he walked to the freezer vault, turned on the light switch, pulled open the heavy door and tossed the piece of meat inside. Spooker ran into the freezer, pivoted on the concrete, looked happily at his old good buddy Jones without even bending to the meat and stood his ears at their ultimate degree of attention. Jones slammed the freezer shut on him, and while counting to twenty examined the double-X oak girderwork of the vault-strong door. In the middle of my life, dark wood. Look at how that thing is made. And they say craftsmanship is dead. Bet you the door they slammed shut on the Bear wasn't this well put together. Eighteen, nineteen.

  When Jones yanked the freezer open, Spooker still hadn't eaten the burger, and looked at Jones with his eyes wide and the skin pulled tight atop his skull, from which Jones could almost see waves of manic energy radiating outward. Jones didn't know which Spooker liked best, the cold in the freezer room or the thrill of imprisonment and release. Spooker's untrimmed feet did a quick little up-and-down tap dance on the concrete. Spooker's neural circuits were overloading and he had hit the wheel of bliss: bright sparks scattered with the friction, and the dog was on the verge of seeing its God.

  This is dreadful, he thought. Wonder if they've made something like this out of the Bear's brain by now.

  "You cool?" asked Jones. He slammed the door shut again, went to the wall for his two cases of Miller's and stacked them at the foot of the stairs.

  When he opened the freezer room again he beheld what appeared to be a dog in bliss. If Spooker could have turned his body inside out to express his gratitude he would have done so in a flash. "Out," Jones told him, and noted that the meat had been eaten. "Much as I enjoy dicking around in the underworld with you, it's time for us both to go back to work."

  Jones gave the Doberman a few farewell thumps on the ribcage and asked it again not to kill him next time he came down. As he hefted the cases of beer up the steps one at at time, he wondered how many hours it would be until Sybil showed up and did he really want to see her.

  Jones had long known that he lacked the knack for avoiding romantic disaster, but it came as a shock to him how fatally he was still in love with Sybil Bailey. It didn't take long to make the rediscovery. The day's last light behind

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  her obscured the details of her beauty as she came out of Sixth Avenue into the relative gloom of Filet of Soul, but once she had settled the warm generosity of her form on one of the tall uncomfortable barstools, Jones, canted on the edge of the one beside her toward the rear of the bar, felt his cresting soul plummet into the depths like the sinker tied to his whole life's sum of hook and Hne. Sybil removed her dun possibly Armani jacket and laid it across the bar and he was lost completely.

  Could he believe the warmth of smile she turned upon him? Believe the "Jones, it's so good to see you again" that accompanied it? And what about the deHberate beat during which she held his upper arm, and the half-moment during which she pressed her lips, first softly and then with a last ironic push, to his own in greeting? The tenderness of her Hps' first pressure devastated him, he had experienced none for so long. Could he trust the sense the gesture seemed to make? Truth was, he was such a fool for love it hardly mattered.

  "Good to see you too," he managed to say. Peripherally he noticed Coyle's goggling appreciation of Sybil from the business side of the bar and watched his social stock soaring here at the close of the trading day. "Is it still cognac?" Jones asked Sybil with, he thought, a certain degree of smoothness and cool, and followed with, "I'm afraid Remy Martin's the best the joint can offer."

  Johnny Coyle poured her an ample measure and waited to be introduced. The obligatory speeches gave Jones a moment in which to collect the remnants of himself. Was it possible that Sybil was willing to give him another tumble? In the early days of their, call it that, love, there had been so little trouble and so much hmmmm. It had been remarkable.

  Had what he felt for Sybil been only a heartfelt tribute to her body's warm amplitude or the depth of welcome it had once accorded him, Jones could have called his feeHngs by a simpler name. It had been a long time, actually it had been forever, since a woman of such beauty and intelligence had directed her tenderness and passion upon him. It was the woman suggested behind the clear grey eyes into which Jones had fallen so deeply, for Jones at least, that had made the kind of lovemaking they had done possible. Sexually they had sometimes reached unprecedented heights together, if speech could be trusted on the subject. Certainly it had been fine. What had puzzled him, even amid the interglow of their mixed auroras, had been the inexplicably high regard in which she seemed to hold him, as if there were some substantial trace left behind in him of the man he might have been.

  It had taken awhile for normal life and its routine denials to intervene, and her eyes to clear of the last veils of romantic haze. Do something, be

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  something, she then entreated him, with what had seemed an uncharacteristic hysteria of emphasis, a command flung against the annihilating weight of experience as he had known it theretofore. Make something of yourself in the world and I'll stay with you, she had said, expressing an inexplicable commitment to him but also an explicit intolerance of nonentity and failure, Jones' longtime traditional domain. In this culture a man expresses his masculinity by hunting and gathering money. Only do it, Jones, and I could be yours for a long time, who knows, maybe for life, think about it. . . . Don't you know anything about adaptation? Oh why are men such fixbrained idiots all of you?

  Beats me, Jones had told her. Beats me every time.

  Sybil's proposal had inspired him, of course, but he had not known what to do about it. In this worldly regard Jones had never quite known what to do. To such entreaties Jones could only respond as he had to the material demands of the world in general all his life, that is, like a man who had just been thwocked between the eyes by a tennis ball, served hard. The ball was in his court, apparently, but it was not a game Jones knew how to play. Standing there on the asphalt, he had all the practical smarts of a jacklighted deer. That stare. Oh look. The pretty Ughts. Whammo.

  "WTiat could you possibly want with me? What do you see in me?" Jones had asked her honestly.

  "Don't be an idiot," she had rephed with a throatiness he had not thought her voice possessed, and then she had gathered him to her. He loved the
feel of her body, less skeletal than those currently in fashion; womanly, rounded, and blushed by a softness that was a sign of mercy in this world. He remembered their first kiss, which, like their current inconsequential conversation, had taken place in a transit between barstools. She had come off her stool and walked into him with her mouth open, and Oh Jesus he had said around his tongue at the energy vibrating with fine intensit}^ between their lips, even as she sucked his tongue almost off its root.

  Not long after the Bear's disappearance and Jones' obvious inabihty to return the volley or dodge the Buick, Sybil was gone. Jones had not been entirely surprised, although in the immediate afterquakes of the Bear's arrest Sybil's departure had registered with nearly negHgible intensit}' on the Jone-sian Richter, a bit of routine dustfall amid the larger shaking of the foundations of his hfe. In the interim, however, his doubled loneliness had beaten against him with a fury whose edge was sharpened by the removal of everything Sybil's contentious love had seemed to promise. VTio did he miss more? On an essential level the Bear, but that was at least partly in response to all the time invested and experience involved, while Sybil was the image of every fulfillment he had ever felt his life deny him. The accusation of her

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  absence was definitive in your basic, garden-variety mene mene tekel upharsin kind of way.

  "Well actually," Jones told Sybil now, "not a hell of a lot. You?"

  "I've been busy," Sybil said.

  "I bet you have."

  "Work. Paperwork. Office hours." Sybil sighed routinely. "Another failed love affair."

  "You fall in love with another Gary Grant?"

  "Please don't be merciless," she asked him, as if that were a possibility, and the grey irises of her large eyes seemed momentarily to kaleidoscope and retract.

  "You didn't."

  "I did." Her eyes recomposed themselves into their original clarity and she rearranged her weight on the barstool as if to readjust her center of gravity.

  "And he was a shit," Jones pressed on, "like all the last times."

  Sybil nodded a slightly melodramatic yes.

  "You know," Jones mused aloud, "it's funny. I mean, to me you're the very image of someone who's got normal life worked out."

  "I mostiy am."

  "But there are some unresolved areas in there behind those intelligent eyes, huh."

  "A few," Sybil allowed, and took refuge in a sip of brandy. "Look, Jones, it's pretty cold out there, and a feeling heart is hard to find."

  "Well, tiiere's me."

  "There's you." She extended an arm as straight as a girder and laid the hand at the end of it atop Jones' shoulder.

  The Bear was right, Jones decided. People were funny. "And you'd Hke a taste of refuge," Jones suggested.

  "You know," she said, "that wouldn't be such a bad idea."

  This was pretty good, thought Jones, but he remained on his guard. There was an odd clumsiness to Sybil, and sometimes, just when intimacy seemed to have been achieved, she could say the most unguarded, wounding things and not even notice. "Okay," he said. "But I love you a lot and I'm very vulnerable to you. So try to go easy on me."

  She nodded yes, then they both breathed out.

  "You want a little something to eat?" he asked.

  "I wouldn't say no to an oyster."

  "They're highly aphrodisiac. Want to spHt a couple dozen?" He felt his face break open in an easy grin.

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  "Absolutely," Sybil said.

  I'm in, he told himself, amazed. Politely, medectophobically, he crossed his legs, "//o//? Vergil," he called out. The short dark Dominican, installed up front between the griddle, the clam tubs and the street window, raised his head in reply. Domini canes-, the hounds of God. Spooker. Very funny. "A string of pearls if you please," Jones announced. "Twelve of them."

  ''Sisenor,'^ Vergil called back, and bent about his business.

  "The senor must be in your honor," Jones told Sybil. "Usually he just calls me mariconr

  "How charming."

  "He calls everyone mariconP

  "Does he call Johnny Coyle maricony She nodded her chin at the bartender, who was pouring a short row of boilermakers for three dockworker types who had just come in.

  "He does not."

  "Well."

  Vergil showed up with the fresh dozen, which he had thoughtfully arrayed on a white porcelain plate rather than the statutory paper item. He had come up on the customer side of the bar, and as he laid down the pair of napkins and oyster forks, placed the bottle of hot sauce and withdrew, his glance slid over Sybil with insulting directness and an accompanying grin.

  Jones and Sybil made faces at each other in acknowledgment of this vulgarity, then squeezed lemon wedges and each gulped down an oyster. Jones found himself looking at the butt of his cigarette pack on the bar. LSMFT. Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. Loose Sweaters Mean Flabby Tits. Not her.

  "Not bad," Sybil said.

  "The place don't look hke much on the outside," said Jones, uncomfortably aware that he was putting in a subliminal plea for himself, "but the shellfish here is cherce."

  Sybil ingested a second one. "Did you notice the ring Vergil was wearing?"

  "The which?" asked Jones, adding a single drop of hot sauce to his next intended.

  "The ring."

  "I don't notice such things. Too bad the champagne here's so bad. A glass of decent fizz would go down nicely just now."

  "It's the one I gave you," Sybil persisted. "The silver one with the blood opal set in it."

  ''What?" gasped Jones around an inefficient swallow.

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  "Vergil is wearing the ring I gave you. Are you two guys going steady or something?"

  "I knrw I misplaced it here," Jones exclaimed, his volume drawing a quick sideglance from Coyle, who was accepting a shot of bar Scotch from the dockworker types. "I knew I took it off down in the basement, put it aside when I had to carry a bunch of cases up, then lost track of it. I asked Vergil if he'd seen it and he said no."

  "I think he might have been lying to you. Take a look."

  "I will."

  Once off the stool, Jones hiked up his jeans with what might have been a movie-cowboy reflex and moseyed up to the grill emplacement and the square of diminishing twilight beyond it, where colored lights were coming on all over the avenue.

  "Nice oysters," he told Vergil. "Plump ones. This month has an R in it and the moon's just past the full. Are you all set for the night? I'm about ready to leave, but if there's anything you need . . . Hey, look at that ring," he said innocently, and reached out to grasp VergiTs wrist. "I had one just like it."

  What Sybil saw down the length of the bar lifted her from her stool: Jones lashing out to seize the little Latino guy's hand, the Latino pulling violently back, Jones tightening his grip and hanging on, then the knife coming up.

  It was the big ten-inch chef's knife, and when Jones saw Vergil pass it twice across his belly, quickly but as if weaving a spell, he let go of the Dominican's wrist and arched his body away from the blade, banging into the side wall of the short-order box. Then something odd happened to Jones' perception. Things slowed down. He stared at the knife like a sparrow caught in a cobra's eye: the thing had hypnotized him. The knife meant something but it was like looking at anything basic in your life. In the end you couldn't read it, you couldn't tell what it was saying.

  Jones tried edging out of the emplacement in order to find a bit of open floor but the knife followed him, and before he knew what he had done he had grabbed VergiTs knife hand and was pushing the smaller man back onto the grill. VergiTs eyes and mouth went wide when he felt the heat behind him, and his knife hand grew more lethal and insistent. Jones understood that if he let go now he was going to find out what it was like to be gutted by a ten-inch chef's knife. The stillness receded, the racket of time resumed, and fear hit him again. Holy shit! How did I get into this?

  It was at abou
t this time that he heard Johnny Coyle's voice say, "Hold it. Nobody fucking move."

  Jones was relieved to see that both he and Vergil had obeyed Coyle for the

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  instant, but their bodies remained tensed, their eyes alert, jockeying for an opening, the Dominican's knife hand probing for a weakness in Jones' center of gravity or his stance.

  "Two things," Coyle told them. "I got one hand on the thirty-eight revolver here, and the other one's under the bar on the button for the basement door. I don't know which one of you the fucking dog is gonna go for first when I buzz it open, but I do know, Vergil, that even if you stab me in the fucking belly I'm gonna shoot you in the leg and stick your head in the French fiyer until it's fucking done. You understand me? Put the knife down. You've got five and I do it."

  Jones could see all the moment's wonderful potential: the knife stuck in his gut or Coyle's, Vergil's head bubbling in the fryer's ancient oil while a bleeding Coyle held it down with his last strength, and Spooker, whose image filmically interflicked with the Bear's in Jones' very busy mind, rushing upstairs to tear his balls off—look Spooks, no apron!—or rip the tonsils out of one of those three dockworker types who had stepped away from the bar in a frieze of shock or savvy. Maybe, the moment was so wonderfully pregnant with possibility, the dog would go for Sybil—where was she? Jones could feel her presence in the room but she escaped his sight. This was when the Bear ought to stroll in the front door saying casually Hi, how you been, man? Lord knows the Bear had bailed Jones out of even more perforated boats than this one. But of course the Bear wasn't there. Though wait a minute, this was the real thing: suddenly he knew for a certainty that this knife business has something to do with, was directly connected to, the Bear. Huh! Trouble was, he didn't exactly have the time in which to piece out how and why.