The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "We could?"

  "Sure," said the Bear, wondering why this should sound so important to her. I mean, what's the difference?

  "Then of course I'll come."

  "What?"

  "I thought you'd never ask."

  sutttmct* should have been icumen in, but spring was slow letting go of the year and the nights were still cool, so for this weekend, when the house would be full of people—his new band, no less—the Bear was out back spHt-ting logs and cutting lengths of lesser firewood from some fallen branches he'd pulled down the slope behind the house. From where he worked at the sawhorse, he could see Iris inside the kitchen through the luna moth window,

  270 Rafi Zabor

  her face flushed and harried and happy, as she worked at preparing a mess o' vittles for the coming horde. The Bear waved at her, and she smiled in return and wiped perspiration from her forehead. The Bear grinned back and returned to his work. He was cutting two-foot lengths from a long branch of ash with a bowsaw, working the iron band of blade back and forth through the white meat of wood, trying to let the teeth and not his arm do the cutting, as Siege had shown him the week before. He had cut about ten lengths so far, and a not unpleasant sweat, that of honest labor, had broken out beneath his fur. It was a beautiful day and he felt like whistling while he worked. It took him a moment to pick out a tune: "Well, You Needn't."

  In a sense, whistling was a greater technical accomplishment than learning to play the horn—not much lip to purse at the front of his mouth—but he had managed it finally, and "Well, You Needn't," which he loved anyway, was one of the handful of things he could whistle in tune. Should the band have the number in its working book? He'd see later.

  A section of freshcut log fell to the ground at the right-paw end of the sawhorse, and he advanced the branch from the left and began to cut again, whistling. This would be the first time anyone but Siege would be coming to the house, and the prospect pleased him, even made him improbably happy. It saddened him that she didn't want other people to see her living with him. He knew it was a stretch, he knew some people would see them as unnatural, her as scandalous. He knew, but it hurt all the same. Why was she still so brittle?

  "Vice is nourished by secrecy," the Bear had told her.

  "Well," said Iris, flashing red and thrusting her hands, what cute Httle hips, into the front pockets of her jeans, "we're certainly doing that."

  What? thought the Bear, just able to keep his jaw from falling open. Is that what she considers it? Vice? He considered their passionate conjugations nothing short of absolute love expressed with staggering, inconceivable beauty, even acknowledging the nagging sense that its most transcendent values were being discounted at the margins. He was sure—he was hoping he was sure—that despite all their due and inevitable settling into a mundane life they still managed to achieve something alchemical and transforming in the conjugation of their absurdly dissimilar bodies and souls. She thinks it's

  vice:

  Iris was uninhibited in bed, but she could be such a strange Httle girl sometimes. At least she comes up the mountain with me these days, though she gets winded pretty quick, hates to break a sweat, and all we do is loll in a clearing awhile before going back home. Won't make love outdoors, which would be really nice, but, face it, you're a pretty strange lovemate and she puts up with you indoors. Good Lord she does.

  The Bear Conies Home 271

  Another section of log fell to earth, its cut end showing nearly white. His arms felt good, the muscles pumping, blood running warm and strong through his veins. He checked the luna moth window again but her face was gone. Then it was back again. Probably scrubbing vegetables at the sink. He had told her that the easiest thing was roast a leg of lamb or a big bird and boil some potatoes, but she had insisted on a large, labor-intensive pot of chicken and seven-vegetable couscous—bought three organic chickens and a lot of ditto vegetables and spices—and even that was something of a stretch for her: now that she was out of the city and away from the stress of her professional life, she seemed to want to subsist on carrot juice, alfalfa sprouts and, if she was feeling particularly ravenous, a few leaves of salad with olive oil and lemon dressing. She usually consented to eat a bit of dinner with him, just to be nice, and he appreciated it, he did.

  He had also tried to get her back into painting, so she would have something to do with herself during the day while he was practicing or roaming hill and dale, and although she'd brought her supplies up from Gotham and had even set up her easel in an upstairs bedroom that got the southern Hght she did no work of that kind. What she did in the afternoons was dress casually, drive the Volvo into town, buy a few newspapers and sit in some food emporium or other and "have a coffee." She was getting to meet people that way, mosdy a bunch of guys running a line of talk on her; she had found out, for instance, which of the local merchants spiced their lives and incomes with a bit of coke deaUng and which were making pom films and running a line of hookers out of a bungalow colony near Shandaken. All this information kept her Hghdy amused, and the Bear could see that she liked the niche she'd found—in town but not of it, a cool mild observer of local Ufe and crime. She had that in her which made men tell all. "What do you think it is?" he had asked her once.

  "Perhaps they think I judge nothing and smile on everything equally," Iris said.

  "A Garance act. But what are you doing really?"

  Iris blew out a line of blue smoke, looked up at him and seemed to shrug. "Who knows. They certainly don't."

  Women sat down to talk with her too. Potters, performance artists, wild ladies who'd at last found true love at forty, others in first blush and full fever. Children were drawn to her: two-year-olds toddled across the floor to her table and looked up at her expecting something wondrous or just wanting to babble. The Bear grilled her on the subject of this universal attractiveness she had, but Iris professed not to know that she was so plainly luminous that all kinds of people could see it and were drawn to the light. If the Bear harped on this quahty of hers, Iris would roll her eyes and ask him to give it a rest.

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  What?

  Someone uphill was whistling back, the last two nee-dn notes of the Monk tune's A section. There it was again: nee-dn. The Bear spun his head left, right, didn't see a soul. Silence mostly: a slight breeze through the branches: one leaf detached itself, tumbling down in a series of ticks and crashes until it found the earth and settled, rocking on its spine. An odd move for springtime. Omen?

  Nee-dn. There it was again.

  Look higher. Son of a bitch: there.

  A grey wagtail catbird was observing him from a branch about thirty feet distant uphill. It dabbed its tail twice, raised its head, then sang out again: nee-dn. A compactly formed, glove-grey bird with white markings at the throat and a swatch of brown in its tailfeathers. It sang out again— nee-dn — and looked straight at him with particular intent.

  Look at that! He wanted to call for Iris to come check this out, but thought that maybe the bird would split if he raised his voice, and in any case Iris had disappeared from the oblong luna window. The Bear was into the local birdlife—he had adopted a family of swallows nesting under the eaves, sweet birds with charcoal-grey morning-coats, fox-colored weskits and a nest of striving, squeaking openbeaked birdlings whom he protected, when mom & pop were out circling high eating flies and midges, from a local pair of marauding bluejays, the carmibal bastards: the Bear would stand on the steps below the nest and wave his arms at the raiders and occasionally toss a stone at them—"I see you've finally found a family," Iris said of the swallows—and he was courting a pair of sweet but fairly stupid mourning doves who took forever nerving themselves up for a descent to his offering of brown rice and milletseed—but this Monk-attempting bird was something new. He had heard a catbird in the neighborhood, this catbird probably, mewing, imitating other birdcalls and even the electronic warble of the telephone, but this was the first time he had seen it, or heard any win
ged creature this side the angels attempting a composition by Thelonious Monk.

  Which was clearly what the bird was doing: it bobbed its tail twice, gave out with another nee-dn, then pointed its head at the Bear and blew him a confused, catbird equivalent of the two-bar phrase leading up to the two-note tag it already had down. The Bear got the message: the bird wanted the Bear to teach it the time. Too fiicking much!

  The Bear laid the saw aside and whistled:

  w^

  m

  The Bear Comes Home 273 The bird was still poised forward, so he added die two-note nee-dn:

  I

  i 7^r i -

  ^

  The bird canted its head to one side, then righted it, an obvious request for a repetto. The Bear administered it. This was a trip and a half, he thought.

  The catbird muddled its way through the opening bars, mixing a fragmentary cardinal imitation into the middle, but ended on a triumphant fortissimo Nee-dnW

  "Not exactly," said the Bear, "but I know you can do this. Trust me." He whistied the tune again.

  The catbird got closer to the notes this time and seemed to gain the beginnings of a grasp on the architecture of the piece, but it botched the needn't and got pissed off at itself sufficient to rub its beak, both sides, against the branch on which it stood. Then it directed a series of raspberries left and right.

  "You can do it," the Bear told the bird. "I've been there." He whistled the first two bars again, leaving off the nee-dnX trusting that the bird would imderstand he was getting down to the brass tack of details, and that the part he already knew would still be there when he learned the leadup.

  The catbird sang the opening twice, getting it wrong both times, stared furiously at the Bear, rubbed its beak on the branch again, whistled irritated discontent in all directions and flew off through the trees.

  "Dilettante," the Bear called after it, and picked up his saw again. Wonderful the smell of freshcut wood. Sorry to burn you in the stove. There must be some prayer I can say to ease the transition but I don't know what it is. The Bear laughed, thinking about the catbird. Iris should have seen it. You know, he told the bird in his mind, it'd be cool if you learned the tune, flapped back out there and taught it to the rest of the tribe: whole flocks of catbirds out there on the branches, working on their Monk charts, forest primeval ringing with minor sixths and getting into the intricacies. Heh. All it takes, bird, is a certain quantum of application. It starts with love, but that's only the beginning. You've got to work against the drift of nature. You've got to breast the current, take a flyer, a chance. Nee-dn. Well. What do you know.

  The Bear bent to the labor of the wood and cut more sections that would fit the stove, looked left to the pile of oak and cedar he had split eariier with the axe and felt good about the day's work. Split wood and you will find me there. Well, he thought, that's true. While he mused on this, two familiar notes accosted him from a tree.

  274 Rafi Zabor

  "xVee-dn't," sang the bird.

  Way to go! thought the Bear. You're backl You're wiUingl Let's work!

  It took him about twenty minutes, but he got the catbird through the A section once, even including, w ell almost, the three sUght variations of the principal phrase. The contrasting tag that ended the A section remained beyond the catbird's grasp. The main point was, the bird had hassled its way through. The bird hadn't quit.

  "Brai'o!" said the Bear, and applauded. "We did it! Let's hear it for all kinds of life-forms. But I hate to tell you this, the tune has a bridge."

  The Bear didn't have a chance to obsen^ the bird's reaction to the news, because Iris had pulled open the sliding door at the side of the house to call to him, "I think they're here," and the catbird flapped off through leaf and branch and dappled light.

  "You should have seen this, hon," he told Iris. "I called you but vou weren't—there was a bird and it wanted to learn—"

  "I think they're here'' she said insistently. "I also think they're lost."

  The Bear watched Iris leaning out of the glass doorway on one foot, balancing herself with a hght hand on the frame, this small illimitable luminosity of a woman. God, he thought, please presene this. Don't let us lose it. Is that too much to ask? Probably it is but help us am^ay, all right? "Coming," he said, laid the saw aside and asked, "They're lost? If they're really lost they'll phone. VVTiat should I do?"

  Iris took him by the paw and led him to the front of the house. They stood inside the porch together, looking downslope through the bulging old screens and the treetrunks to the road. The Bear put his arm around her shoulder but she stepped out from under its span.

  "I don't see amthing," he said.

  "I think they might pass by again." Having eluded his embrace. Iris took up his paw again.

  Can't we walk into eternit}* this way? thought the Bear. Can't we get old together and show up at the last roundup hand in paw like this? Isn't this etemit}^ already? I feel that it is.

  "There," Iris said, and he saw the car go by left to right, a big gold-brown station wagon with a mound of stuff tied to the roof rack under an army-green tarp. .n anxious brown face was looking out the shotgun-seat window as the wagon passed. "That must be them."

  "I think you're right," said the Bear, but by then the car had gone again. "WTiat do we do, light a signal fire?"

  "They'll come by again," Iris told him. "You could show yourself on the stairs and wave."

  i

  The Bear Comes Home 275

  "Good idea," said the Bear, and counted it a victory, since she had been asking him for weeks not to show himself out front. He cranged the screen door open and manifested himself to the world.

  "HATWELL!" he bellowed when the station wagon showed itself again, coming past from right to left this time, and the gesture achieved a result: the car juddered to a halt, wobbled front to back on its springs, and gave an answering call on its horn, a D-major third.

  Gesturing large—stage acting rather than film—the Bear pointed laboriously to the entrance of the drive, and the car made a series of slow, saurian adjustments before aligning itself to the reality of the situation and beginning its ascent up the gravel.

  "The band," the Bear said semiproudly to Iris and reached out a paw to her, but was dismayed to find her retreating backward through the screen door onto the porch. "Hey," he said.

  Iris waved her hands in front of her face in a gesture of self-erasure and was gone.

  "Shit," said the Bear, and looked back down. There was a lot of blue smoke coming out the back of that station wagon as he watched it crunch its way up the pebbles. It was burning oil. There were three guys in the front seat, just visible through the reflected trees. The brakes sang the car to a stop.

  The Bear heard the engine switch off, and he watched the car die: two coughs, three wiggles, one belch and a last blue-grey fart out the rear end before its motion ceased. The driver's door cranked open on a broken iron tongue and Rahim Bobby Hatwell stepped out of the vehicle and righted himself on the gravel. "Hey," Hatwell said, and smoothed his jeans down.

  "That's quite a car," said the Bear from the top of the steps.

  "The Lead Sled," Hatwell named it. "Heaviest thing to come out of Detroit since Motown and Elvin Jones. We can tour the whole country in this car, carry the guys and the instruments, crisscross America ten times over. It is the Car That Will Not Die."

  "The record company's getting us a bus," the Bear told him.

  "You're shittin' me," Hatwell said, although he was already looking up at the trees and breathing in extravagant lungfuls of country air. "Tour support. I've heard about it but I never expected to live to see the day. Lawd Lawd Lawd."

  "Well," said the Bear, "you should have started playing animal acts years ago."

  "You're forgetting my glory days with Zippy the Chimp."

  "WTiy aren't the other guys coming out?"

  "Probly cause they don't know how to deal with you and still look cool.

  276 Rafi Zab
or

  Trouble is they don't look cool in the first place so they're in kind of a bind." Hatwell bent at the waist and directed a taunting voice into the front seat of the car, where two forms sat veiled by reflected trees, clouds, sky. "Hey you silly chickenshit musician types, come out the car for a pluck. Meet our horn-player, get face to face with the Boss. Come and meet the Man."

  "I am not," the Bear said wearily, "a man."

  "That's their problem," Hatwell said, cackling happily, but as he spoke the car's right-hand door opened and two people climbed out of it, first a long-limbed stringy guy about six foot two, very black, with a round elegant head and a loose, graceful way of moving; he wore an oversized red T-shirt, baggy black chinos and white canvas deck-shoes. He was followed, more gradually, by a medium-brown guy with wide square shoulders, a geometrically squared-off fade haircut and a manner that seemed modest and penitent considering the solidity of his build: he composed his hands in front of his navel and deferentially inclined his head; his forehead was high and untroubled, his face wide at the cheekbones and his chin long; he wore a white shirt and a vaguely African vest over faded jeans and Birkenstocks. Like Hatwell, these two were in their middle twenties. The angular guy was an inch or two shorter than the lean guy, but Bobby Hatwell, who was five foot seven at most, did not seem small bet\^een them: the strength of his presence. The Bear had taken Hatwell's word on these guys, and whoever else they were, they were his rhythm section for the summer tour and they had better work out. If they didn't, it would be tough luck in a dozen cities and eight thousand miles of road. The Bear trusted Hatwell. Didn't he?

  "Hi, guys," the Bear said hopefully.

  Got some waves back, and a couple of noncommittal Heys, and the tall black guy broke out the beginnings of a wide bright grin, but shut it down quick.