The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  He heard her think it, in her own distinct voice: I want them.

  What? He almost sat bolt upright in bed.

  I must have them, her unmistakable voice pronounced.

  He looked at her. Her face was composed for sleep but she seemed to be concentrating on something.

  I want who} I must have what}

  The Bear's innards convulsed in what even he knew to be phantasmal jealousy. Who did she mean? The rhythm section? Jones? The entire male population within range? This is idiotic. She's already told me that getting into it with me has turned her on to the world in general, but let's not take it to extremes.

  Hallucination of jealousy to one side, it was not so unfamiliar a sensation: he didn't understand her in every subtle aspect, did he. What went on in that cool subtle mind of hers really?

  Maybe, big news, he didn't understand her very well at all.

  Who was she?

  Come right down to it and put his infatuation to one side, did he have a clue?

  poi*

  It:

  IVC

  Many is the caravanserai that must he departed before the man may come home.

  -Rumi

  lu^

  Ihc Bear happened to be standing with his arm around Iris at their bedroom window when the powder-blue bus pulled into the drive and ground its way up the greystone gravel to the front of the house. The driver handled the bus neatly—hardly even tore up the gravel; Iris would only have to rake it once to get it flat—which boded well for general safety in the weeks ahead, thought the Bear. He heard the engine noise cease, then the hydraulic doors sigh open.

  "I suppose I ought to go out there," he said. At the rear of the bus a last blue figment of exhaust swam up into the summer air.

  "You'll have to go eventually." Iris tiptoed up to give him a wifely peck on his jowl, but he could hear the tension of his departure in her voice. As the tour had drawn near, some disquiet or other had risen in her but she wouldn't talk about it. Was she worried he'd get busted again? Shouldn't be. They'd talked that one through—as far as he was willing to share his thoughts on the matter—and had decided between them that the threat was ephemeral and the security setup adequate. What was upsetting her then? He'd tried to broach the subject a few times—over dinner, while taking a stroll uphill behind the house, and intercurled in postcoital warmth abed—but in each instance she had widened her bright eyes and shaken her head no.

  "It'll only be a few weeks, kid," he told her now.

  "I know."

  "And I'll be all right out there." Actually the Bear had determined for himself that in the event of a bust he would not let himself be taken, even if it meant getting killed instead. Even, perhaps, if it meant killing someone else in order to get away. He wasn't going inside again, he was settled on that. If he died, he died, efinita la commedia.

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  "The driver's getting out," Iris said.

  So he was. A beefy number with a long dirty-blond ponytail and jMafia shades masking his eyes had stepped off the bus into the hush and dazzle of the global-warming summer beneath the trees. He wore pressed black trousers and a clean white shirt with epaulettes, but he looked like a reformed biker and had a certain lawless vibe. Well, maybe that's good too, thought the Bear. We could use muscle if weirdness turns up.

  "Come out there with me?" the Bear asked his favorite girl.

  "If you don't mind, I'll wait here," she said politely.

  The Bear's things waited for him in orderly formation in the screened-in shade of the porch: his sax case; a briefcase full of sheet music, road money, books, videos, and an anxious profusion of extra mouthpieces and reeds. A small matte-black suitcase and a garment bag completed the family grouping. The Bear hefted the assemblage in one go, stepped out into the country sun and started down the stairs to the bus. Prodigal son seeks readmission, accepts rubber nose and pointy hat.

  I know I'm supposed to go out there and knock 'em dead across America, but I still feel more like a question mark than an exclamation point. WTiat kind of statement can I make out of that? Puzzle the fuck out of the country and hustle back home with the cash? Must be what I live for. Iris.

  "Hi," he said on his way down the steps.

  "You must be the Bear." The driver looked up at him but made no move either to retreat before the approach of monstrosity or to help him with his gear.

  "I try to get a break now and then but basically that's it."

  "Tommy Talmo."

  "Hiya."

  Although introduced, the driver was still impassive and unmoving, so the Bear deposited his things at the base of the stepwell and took a little stroll around the veehickle. It had its lines but it was a pretty stubby bus, a light blue two-thirds-of-a-Greyhound with channelled aluminum side panels and a rounded rear end topped by a streamhned airconditioning vent. It was in pretty good nick, and the heavy-treaded tires looked solid enough—he gave one an exploratory kick and hurt his foot on it—and overall the bus possessed a certain retro charm. The speedlined aluminum streaks on its side reminded him of the bus that had deposited Gary Grant at Prairie Crossing so that Hitchcock's cropduster could shoot at him with its machine gun. The air-conditioning unit, unlike Hitchcock's as he remembered it, didn't eliminate the rear window, and no airplanes were in view; even so, his lesser, anxious self had begun to view the bus as the Capsule of Death. I really must learn to

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  deal more gracefully with change. Look: it's a perfectly good bus and I like the band and we're headed west. WTiere was the trouble in that?

  Phantoms of heat rose in waves from the engine box at the rear, making optical waves in the air.

  Jones had let the Bear know that it was through his specific influence—he was still beavering away at self-aggrandizement despite the summer heat, it seemed—that the company had agreed to pick him up in faraway upstate New York. "I spoke up for you. Otherwise," Jones had told him on the phone, "you'd have to come down to the city and meet the bus here."

  "I don't live in the Arctic," the Bear told him. "It's a two-hour drive."

  "And two hours back," said Jones, an ambient recording of office sounds behind him, for all the Bear could tell.

  "Oh my God," groaned the Bear. "I've imposed work on another living being. Call off the tour."

  Jones' voice had leapt to sudden contralto: "You're not serious, are you?"

  The Bear completed his circumambulation of the bus and again came face to face with the driver, insofar as the man's heavy black sunglasses permitted such an encounter.

  "Hey," said the Bear.

  "Hey."

  Not much of a social exchange. The Bear picked most of his things up and carried them on board. The driver gathered the remainder and followed him up the ridged black rubber steps.

  On the inside, things were economically disposed about the space, although for the moment some of the lesser fixtures and hideaways were inscrutable to the Bear. There was a smell of disinfectant. Synthetic panels and varnished pine, not too badly worn, achieved a certain balance throughout. Drawing on his experience of the movies, the Bear decided the bus looked like an airliner gone woodsy; he wished the powder blue of the exterior had been continued within. Behind the driver's plush eminence commanding the foreview were highbacked black leather pivot chairs, one either side of the aisle, and past them a pair of booths left and right; it looked as if their woodsy Formica tables could be lifted away and the space between the benches freed up for the meanderings of long-legged bait; a shelf nearby supported a TVA^CR combo; small speakers inset here and there indicated the presence of stereo.

  The Bear walked his bags through this first third of the bus into the narrow middle section, where he noted, right, the inset sink, lowboy fridge, coffee machine and microwave oven in passing; he guessed the two flush pine doors, left concealed a toilet and, he hoped and as negotiated for, some

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  bear-adequate form of shower. The sleepi
ng bunks and storage bays were in the rear.

  "Does the bus really sleep four?" the Bear asked Tommy Talmo. Turning, he laid a paw on one of the upper bunks. "I see there are four bunks, but they look kind of narrow to me."

  "Sleeps four Lhasa apso-lutely," Tommy Talmo told him. "T Lobsang Rampa," he added.

  The Bear could only blink at this. "They still look narrow," he said.

  "Yeah but there're only a couple of road nights on the itinerary and we'll be in pretty^ good motels most of the time."

  "/won't be," the Bear reminded him. "I sleep here."

  "Oh, yeah. Right. We'll work something out."

  "Like what?"

  Tommy Talmo shrugged. "Something," he said.

  The Bear looked Tommy Talmo up and down, sleepy eyes now that the shades were off him, near-Duane Allman moustache, the ponytail, a big frame on him and that gut bellying the shirt over his beltline. The Bear understood that Talmo was part owner of the tour-bus company. In any event he was acting pretty cool about meeting up with his first talking bear; then too he had the half-snoozed, unflappable look of the lightly stoned. l^Tiich, if true, was an issue. Because of his own shaky situation vis-a-vis the law, the Bear had stipulated an absolute ban on controlled substances on the bus for the duration.

  "Look, I do this all the time—"

  "Tour with bears?"

  "—and we always work something out," Talmo said. "You ready to go? We have to get in and out of the cit^ before rush hour. Your stufFs on board. W^e ready?" False toothy grin the Bear didn't especially like.

  "I have something to do inside the house." He and Iris had said several goodbyes already but he hadn't heard the cadence he had hoped for in their parting, a solid harmonic resolution that indicated further development ahead, recapitulation, maybe another movement—a set of variations perhaps, or a fugue. He liked fugues.

  "Let's do it," Talmo said, and walked back up the aisle.

  It was a hot day but even so it was good to be outdoors again, beneath what had become his home trees. He didn't want to leave them, no. As he reached the steps he looked back to find Talmo preparing to piss against a tree. This wouldn't do, but you had to grant the man a sense of atavistic nuance all the same.

  The Bear turned on his heel and walked up to the man, bristling, and

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  looked him in the face. Talmo bHnked. "You know what a bear does to you when you try that on his territory?" His voice, speaking of atavism, was shaking with suppressed fury, and for a moment he really did want to kill the guy.

  "No. WTiat?"

  A storm of hormones and power surges was working its way through the Bear. "Usually you die quick," he said simply.

  "No shit?" Talmo put it back in his pants and zipped up. "C'n I use the can in the house?"

  "No. You can use the facilities on the bus and make sure they work so I can use them later."

  "Okay," Talmo said.

  The Bear stood there. I know it's petty and I should let it ride, he told his nerv^ous system. On the other paw I could pound him into the ground like a fencepost and see how that affects my position in the industry. That would be one way out of it. He had a moment's discourse with himself: Do I kill him or do the tour?

  He knew it all along: he'd do the tour. "See you in a minute," he said, and made sure that Talmo was headed back to the bus before he turned toward the house again.

  To save time he took the steps on all fours, but stood up on his hindlegs when he reached the top and walked upright across the porch. "Honey?" he called—although he knew Iris didn't like him calling her honey: she didn't like the analogy—and poised on one foot, he inclined his upper body through the living room doorway "Hon?"

  No response. Then the Bear must go to Iris. He found her sitting on the big bed's edge, her hands composed upon her lap.

  "One more big sloppy kiss," he said from the doorway. "Is that too much for a roving bear to ask?"

  In view of her recent general attempt at self-composure, he had expected the politesse of a formal farewell at best, but what his lighthearted question from the doorway provoked from Iris was a terribly ardent look in which sex was not very prominent, from which she launched herself to fling her arms about his chest as powerfully as she could manage. She thrust her face into the depths.

  "Hey," said the Bear, returning the hug but finding her gesture surprisingly operatic, "it's only a few weeks, and I'll come back to you rich as a merchant prince and his two kid brothers." Iris pulled back far enough for him to see her face: so intense: what was going on in there? "You worried about a bust? It's not gonna happen."

  "It's not that." Her crystalline features seemed rounded and transformed

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  by depths of feeling the Bear hadn't expected to rise to the surface of the waves today.

  "Wow, you love me," he said, amazed.

  "Of course I do," she said, and shook her small head clear. "Have a great tour. Bear. Goodbye." The words, spoken in her usual lilting tone, didn't seem to go with the convulsiveness of her hug, but that kind of fragmentation was typical of her sometimes.

  "What is it really?" he asked.

  She shook her head rapidly no, seemed to suppress the big emotion and change the subject to something factual that enabled her to recompose: "I have to ask you: are you planning to have other women out there?"

  "Is that what's bothering you? The idea has no appeal to me. I am completely satisfied in you—satisfied? I'm in bliss—besides which I am the most faithful furcovered soul in the God-wide, breathing world. What can you possibly be thinking?"

  Iris hugged him with that strange intensity again, then they kissed, and Iris hauled herself up onto him and embraced him around his hips with her legs. The Bear thought: a quick trembly one standing up? but felt no, that's not what's called for. It'd seem sordid. The moment was about emotion even if he didn't understand what the referent was.

  "You should go," she said, and relaxed her legs around him but did not descend to the solidity of the floorboards.

  "I know," he said. "Okay. I'll miss you terribly, but I'm gone."

  She let go of him, dropped and stood back.

  "Walk to the bus with me?"

  "I'll stay here."

  "That's it, then." She nodded yes. He paused at the bedroom door. "Do you have enough house money?"

  Iris nodded again.

  "Remember to feed the doves," he reminded her. The timid pair he'd started feeding in late spring were showing up with their offspring—incompletely fledged, white stalks sticking out of their partly completed heads and backs—so there were five regulars now, and a second pair had begun scouting the area, occasionally coming down on shrieking wings for a peck.

  "I said I would," Iris said. "I'll feed them. Don't you trust me?"

  "Another pair has started showing up sometimes. Probably they'll become regulars," he said. "I love the doves."

  "I know you do. I'll look after them."

  "And the swallows."

  "My eye is on the swallow," she said.

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  The Bear nodded. "I have to leave sometime. This is it."

  And he managed it.

  The stairs, a last inhalation of home woods, his patch of earth and sky.

  Inside the bus the airconditioning was kicking in, the doors whirred hydraulically shut, the muted engine wound higher. Tommy Talmo punched the machinen^ into gear and let out the clutch. The Bear saw Iris in the bedroom window as the bus began to move, her hand raised in farewell from the only house in the world that had ever been his own. Is this really my Hfe? Is it possible I can come back to this?

  The bus pulled onto the asphalt, took a hard right downhill, and before the Bear knew it the house was out of sight.

  The Bear waited until Tommy Talmo was finished swaying through the cun^es of the countryside, then used the stability of the Thruway to dispose his things about the bus, his few clothes and such in the back and his b
riefcase handy where he sat. As to that, he tried the banquettes, then settled on one of the highback swivel chairs. It accommodated him pretty well. He had also noted that the toilet was wide enough to do the same and that yes, gra-tias Deo, the shower would do.

  Now he felt the wrench of leaving her. They'd been together almost continuously for the past months, apart for perhaps three hours the longest stretch. It was completely different from anything he'd known, and he'd begun to get used to it.

  Iris. It was still incredible.

  The bus whooshed its way down the Thruway to the city, almost as smooth as Ufe had been over the past months, from the gathering muscles of spring and the long slow lope of summer: smooth as the practiced motion of their bodies had become, smooth as the ease of talk between them and their mixed lives, only . . . only it was hard not to feel that the deepest resonances had been stripped from the harmony of their discourse, and as if from the poem of their sexual motion the subtlest sinews of their coordination had been taken out of action so that, so that what exactly? It was as if, perhaps, their most precious treasure had been taken from them atom by atom without their notice and only the mere effect of its glows and glitters had immaterially remained . . . well, something like that. It had been as if they hadn't been paying sufficient attention to the value of what passed between them, or had settled for something less without knowing how.

  Their quality of life, as long as you weren't paying strict, or perhaps overscrupulous attention—who knew?—had seemed extraordinarily fine: the ease of conversation in the morning, at table, in passing, whatever, and the

  3i6 Rafi Zabor

  practiced wonders of the bed. WTiat had ever been as good as this? Probably he was some overfinick}" fuckhead to trouble himself over the imperfections of such sumptuous congress. Did he have a problem with continuous sweetness? If so, then whylJiefuck? That's what he wanted to know.

  WTiatever the judgment, his sexual life with Iris left him in a different relation with hfe in general, more deeply implicated in its workings, more in touch with its flow and, who knows, its teleology too. He was deeper in. He was in it. It was living him. So?