The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  The Bear put on his trenchcoat and pulled up on the collar, then jammed the big brown fedora on his head. It would be his first time outside in daylight since the jailbreak, which he didn't remember very well. He'd been down to the river a couple of times around four a.m. to see if any of his brother monsters were up and felt like talking, but there had been nothing out there besides water, enveloping dark and rippling smears of colored light. It was spring in New York City but the nights were still chilly. Too cold to work the horn comfortably in any case. A little warmer and he might have done a Sonny Rollins and for want of a bridge walk out on the pilings and play for the fishes.

  The Bear opened his saxophone case just to be sure his axe was actually inside it. The horn looked fine. Jones had taken it to Maury, who had worked on it for three days, replacing pads and the occasional cracked mother-of-pearl disk, fixing bent valves and rockers, replacing the springs and lubing its old Ugaments and Hmbs. Then Maury had hand-buffed what remained of the horn's original finish, tossed in some packets of the Bear's usual extra-heavy reeds, and given him a couple of new French mouthpieces to try out on spec. The horn looked almost new laid out in its nest of worn red plush. On the phone, Maury had advised him to get a new molded polycarbon case but the Bear wouldn't hear of it: he loved the old black rectangular beat-up luggage. Then Maury, although one might have thought he'd find such work infra dig, had repaired one of the hinges and braced a disintegrating corner with a piece of steel plate. The case was cool. Maury was an artist. The Bear admired the bronze complexity of his axe, quite a piece of plumbing really, checked his reed supply and fluttered through the sheet music, then shut the case and locked it.

  No excuses left. It was really time to go.

  The last time he'd done a gig he'd been arrested, but he hoped to do better this time. The image of Friedmann gushing arterial blood in mid-aria on a Vienna stage flashed irresistibly through his mind, but the Bear couldn't figure out what Friedmann's face would have looked like in its twenties.

  And then, of course, there was Lee Morgan, who'd been shot to death in

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  the middle of a set at Slug's Saloon. Morgan's death had meant the end of Slug's, and the Bear had learned just a few days before, in the middle of a phoner with Lester Bowie, that his own bust had shut the Tin Palace down. The place was gone, Bowie told him, a shuttered box on the Bowery. As far as the world in general knew, the Tin Palace had never been.

  Time to get a move on, Bear. Curtain up, light the lights, cut a record. Only question, how to do it when, at the present moment, you couldn't play for shit? He'd practiced enough to know that he was fucked in every essential musical regard. He had worked a few strategies out to cover this Httle difficulty but he wondered, even doubted if these strategies would work.

  Why is life so provisional, can you tell me that? Why are you never properly supplied?

  On leaving the apartment, he made sure the door had locked behind him. He turned the knob a few times and it held. So there was no way back.

  "One thing," said Jones while they were heading uptown in the van. "When we get to the Power Station, let's not have a repetition of what happened at the rehearsal studio."

  "What was so wrong with that?" asked the Bear.

  Jones looked sideways at him from the driver's seat before returning his attention to the milling traffic headed north on Sixth—a lot of cabs out there, bright yellow carapaces competing with each other for a good spot in the swarm, accompanied by a major-league blowing of horns. Fifth chords and thirds clashed with each other without, however, producing developmental consequences of much interest, and there was no universal system of tuning. Ives might have done something with it, thought the Bear, but the given day did not.

  "What was wrong with the rehearsal^'' Jones asked him incredulously. "You mean aside from it being just short of World War III and there was no blood on the floor when you left?"

  Well, even the Bear had to admit, although of course not audibly, that the rehearsal had been a little strange. Sigbjorn Krieger had booked two consecutive evenings at S.I.R. in the West Forties and the Bear had said cool on condition that Krieger didn't show. Of course Krieger, famous for his ambitions toward total artistic control of the recording process, had shown up, and of course Jones, still angUng for a gig with the parent company Megaton International, had lacked the necessary two olives to keep him out of the rehearsal room. The Bear had hardly met the band, had hardly had the chance to say hello to Billy Hart again, a lot of warmth there, and to meet Charlie Haden for the first time—a pink-cheeked Clark Kent-looking guy the Bear regarded as the greatest living bassplayer on the planet. And he'd

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  hardly had a chance to meet the young pianist Billy had angled onto the gig despite Krieger's objections and the Bear's doubts: Rahim Bobby Hatwell, this kid in his twenties Billy said the Bear just had to hear to beHeve. Well, the Bear felt he owed Billy a lot and he had given in. And Steve Kuhn had turned out to be out of town that week. The Bear would have given a lot to play with Steve Kuhn.

  Krieger showed up as the Bear was eyeing Hatwell hello and the small athletic-looking piano-playing cat was wondering if you were supposed to shake hands with a bear or what, and if so how. "Hallo, everybody," Krieger had called from the rehearsal studio's doorway while shucking a massive shearling overcoat into the hands of an attendant, and the Bear had shot an angry sidelong look at Jones, who shrugged in response and muttered something about how the guy owned the damn company, after all.

  Back in spacetime present, Jones stomped on the brakes and barely managed not to crush the rear end of a Chevy fall of Chasids. The Bear could see their sidelocks wobble. It was heavy traffic. It was daytime in New York. It was the world as given. "Naw," he said, "it wasn't all that bad, not really."

  "In the sense that Krieger didn't cancel your deal on the spot I'd have to agree with you," Jones told him. "Otherwise, are you kidding me?"

  "I thought it went pretty well," said the Bear, "musically speaking."

  "You hardly played."

  "It was enough," said the Bear.

  "You're out of your mind," was Jones' opinion.

  "Nyah nyah," said the Bear.

  While they sat in silence for a few heavily trafficked blocks the Bear wondered if he'd done the right thing at the rehearsal after all. His tactics had been based on the intuition that his music was doornail dead and the only way he was going to get a decent record made was to do it so fast he'd hardly have the chance to know he was doing it at all. That, and instead of getting into the intricate harmonic architecture that had absorbed his real attention lately, he would have to imitate himself, make believe, basically, he was the musician he'd been before his imprisonment: more simply impassioned, better possessed by naive and suppositious yearning for freedom and release. He'd have to forget, as experience had taught him, how complex and unsatisfactory even a small degree of freedom could be, once achieved. Have to dodge his nagging sense of the ambiguity of all experience and pretend to burning unicity again. Appetite he might have, but passion, not these days, no, not really. He was still living under the aspect of annihilation, in the spaces between the atoms. The world as given tasted primarily of ash. Iris? That was another story, not yet told.

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  What he had to do in order to make the date was dodge his ego or throw a whammy on himself so he wouldn't be looking when the music got made, disguise his right paw from his left so one of them wouldn't know what the other was up to.

  He had walked into the rehearsal at S.I.R. with all these problems prominently in mind, had said hello to Billy Hart, met Haden for the first time, and had a looksee at the Hatwell kid. He'd passed out four of the five tunes he wanted to do on the date, rushed everyone through the heads, blew a couple of trial choruses, let Hatwell get a few licks in—Billy was right, he was gonna be fine—heard the music starting to build, and then, coolly certain that if he let it build any further t
here'd be nothing left in him for the recording session, he'd stuck his paw in the air and called it an afternoon. Everyone said Huh? and that's when Sigbjorn Krieger, expecting to watch the music brew and jell and move in the direction of the perfect record he wished to make, objected. The Bear made it known, through Jones, that he didn't want Krieger in the room. Krieger likewise made it known, through his own intermediary, that he was personally involved in every phase of every record he produced, and his sole concession to the Bear's demand for privacy had been arriving at the rehearsal a half hour late.

  They might have had a fullblown battle on the spot, but Haden had somehow got between them and had started telling Krieger about how he had to change his hotel room again—something about the damp, or a draft— and how he wanted the producer to talk to the management for him. This enabled the Bear to get into his hat and coat and pack his alto before Victory-Bear Warrior, which was how the Bear roughly translated the producer's name, knew what was going on. When Krieger did figure out that his altoist was leaving he threw an intellectually restrained and cold-blooded tantrum at the Bear and told him to rehearse the date or else.

  "You want to cancel?" the Bear had asked him, but cheated the moment, baring his teeth more than he needed to, strictly speaking, and bristled his neckfur in waves. "Fine."

  Krieger stared at him and the Bear put a gentle but still bearish paw on the man's shoulder. "Fine?" Krieger asked him, his voice wobbling critically.

  "Yeah," the Bear told him. "On an essential level I don't need to make a record, so if you'd like me to leave, I will, no problem." Then he let his voice modulate to something more reasonable: it was like performing an aria. "But I do want to make this particular record, and I'm doing it the only way I know how. Granted I'm a bit unusual. Eccentric even. A bear of mystery, sometimes even to myself. At the moment it's fine with me if the rhythm section wants to loosen up and get to know the material I've written for them.

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  but purely for the sake of my ability to make the record, hello I must be going, dig?"

  The Bear thought it was a pretty speech and hoped it had confused Krieger. Anyhow it was all he had. As the Bear swept out of the studio all footstep and trenchcoat and untamed force of nature—anyhow that was the impression he was anxious to create—Jones had stayed behind to wheedle peace at the producer, and Charlie Haden had followed him out into the corridor, a mischievous grin on his boyish middle-aged map.

  "Oh man," Haden told him in the tremulous tenor the Bear had read was a result of childhood polio of the throat, "I don't know if there's going to be a recording date this week, but it was worth a million bucks just to see you talk to Sigbjorn, man." Haden doubled over laughing.

  "Glad you hked it."

  "I loved it. Are you sure you're okay for the date, assuming it happens?"

  "CharHe, you think I made a mistake?"

  "It's possible. You sure you don't want to play some more today?"

  "I'm saving it."

  "Well, you must know what you need to do."

  "That's the general idea," said the Bear.

  "But are you sure?" Haden asked him.

  "No. Unfortunately I'm not."

  "Has it occurred to you," Jones asked the Bear, as he pushed the intercom button of the Power Station a second time and still no one answered, "that you might have loused things up enough with Krieger that he cancelled the date?"

  "Someone would have called. You know," said the Bear, "they should never have changed the name of this neighborhood."

  Jones pushed the intercom button again. "See?" he said. "Nobody's answering. It's all over. Fuck."

  "I mean. Hell's Kitchen was such a cool name," the Bear continued. "But realtors interfered and the city knuckled under." The Bear sniffed the air, in which some tang of the waterfront remained. "I'd rename New York City Hell's Kitchen if I could."

  "Still no answer," said Jones, and actually wrung his hands. "When you fuck things up you fuck 'em good."

  "Hell's Brick Shithouse," mused the Bear. "Nah, even I think that's a Httle strong."

  "What are we gonna do now?" Jones asked the air.

  "Hell's Pay Toilet."

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  "Bear, puh-leeze." Jones pushed the button again and wiped sweat from his forehead despite the breezy cool of the day.

  "Did you know this actually was a power station once?" the Bear persisted. Jones was so easy to annoy. "Some relay in the city's early electrical system. Nice to know it's not just another ego-of-the-music-business name like the Hit Factory. Have a Httle faith, Jones. Someone's home."

  "I don't think so. I really hate you sometimes."

  "I know," said the Bear.

  "Kiioo zzit?" an electric voice rasped through the small square speaker-grid set in the concrete doorframe.

  "Animal crackers," said the Bear, leaning into the microphone aperture.

  "Well, someone^s here anyway," said Jones when the buzzer unlatched the door and he pushed it open. "If we're not making a record maybe we can get up a game of poker. Maybe I'll get lucky and lose you to an engineer."

  "That's very frinny," said the Bear, and laughed. "That's really very funny, Jones."

  "He said something nice to me!" Jones announced to a heavyset guy in a black T-shirt, old jeans and a Monster Cable cap who was sitting at a table sorting gold-tipped lengths of insulated wire. "You were a witness. He said something nice!"

  "We're the Bear," the Bear told the guy in the cap.

  "I guessed. You're in Studio A, through there." He indicated a way down the piney-woods corridor past the equipment cases and the lounge. "Door on the right's the control room, the left's the studio proper."

  "Thanks," said the Bear. "Nice cables you got there. Expensive stuff?"

  "So you really are a bear," the guy said, looking up, the cables bundled in his hands. "I thought maybe it was a nickname, but no, huh."

  "One morning," the Bear started telling him, and put his alto case on the table, the better to converse, "I woke from a night of uneasy dreams to discover that I had been transformed into an enormous—"

  "Yo, Gregor!" Jones was calling from the control-room doorway. "We got some musicians here! Looks like we're actually gonna make a record!"

  "I knew this was gonna be a shitty day," the Bear told the guy at the desk.

  "There's no avoiding it."

  "Later."

  "Later."

  As the Bear shoved his way through die control-room doorway, he took in the scene as if scouting the place for danger. None was visible. A thin, alert-looking guy in a plaid shirt and a neat haircut and beard was working a slider on a control panel that looked like it could pilot the Starship Enterprise, and

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  the sound of Charlie Haden playing his bass came through the enormous speakers set into the wall above the picture window that opened on the playing space. The Bear stooped to look through this window—it was set a couple of steps lower than the control panel—into the studio and saw CharUe Haden's back bent over his instrument—a French bass, the Bear understood, from the late eighteenth century. He saw Billy's drumset in an annex past Haden on the other side of the big piney-woods asymmetrically octagonal room—there was so much rawcut wood the Bear could smell it clearly enough to know it wasn't all pine: he distinguished at least two distinct other saps but could not name them with all that polyurethane in the way, besides which he was a city bear and did not know the names of enough trees. He looked out there for Billy, but the drummer was nowhere to be seen.

  "I'm James," said the engineer, looking up from the control board. "I'm getting some levels."

  "Hi," said the Bear. "So am I." He felt sufficiently in place now to hear what Haden was doing. The bassist cycled his way down a series of triple stops, the root in perfect tune and the higher notes slid infinitesimally sharp to lend his chording a questing tone. When Haden reached the bottom of the cycle he cut loose one of his core-of-the-earth ton
es from the bottom of the bass and bent it with some powerful fingerwork so that the note arched up into beauty and pretty much devastated the Bear's by now wholly attentive heart. The Bear couldn't quite believe he was really going to get to play with this guy.

  "Hey man," Haden's voice came at him from the speakers. The Bear opened his eyes to see Haden smiling at him from behind the glass. "Killed anyone yet today?"

  "It's early," said the Bear.

  "What?"

  "Hold on, I'll open a mike for you," said James from his emplacement.

  "Nah," said the Bear, pulled open the heavy control-room door and ambled into the studio proper. Haden was laying his bass gently down on its side, cushioning it on a rectangle of carpet. The bassist looked up at him and smiled.

  The Bear had seen a lot of people walk up to him over the years, but none of them had done it quite like Charlie Haden. Usually, especially on the first few tries, there was something freaked-out about them, whether it was covered by irony or bravado or not, but Haden, as at the rehearsal the other day, walked up to him more simply than any other human ever had, a social smile softening his features and a look of interest in his eyes. Haden put his hand out and the Bear took it firmly in his paw.

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  "It's really great to see you, man," Haden said in his wavering tenor.

  "I ain't..." the Bear began to say, his usual riff, but then dropped it. "It's good to be seen. I mean it's good to see you too. Both. Whatever." Haden was one of the few people he had met who had the power to disarm him more or less completely.

  The prelims done, Haden allowed a devilish grin to break out and play across his features. "I've played with a lot of animals, man, but this really is a first."