The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "That's the end of the tour."

  "The club there's brand-new, a real palace they tell me, and the front money alone will be enough to get you clear. That's where you record if you feel ready, and there's an option on a second week if the nice folks keep coming out to see you."

  "It's weeks away, if I live that long, and what I'm looking at here is not inspiring."

  "You'll live that long and the inspiration's up to you. You still do irritation great."

  "Thanks."

  "And you miss me, don't you. Fess up."

  It was true. The Bear felt an illogical, out-of-sequence rush of his old affection for Jones. Was it because he was locked up with four lunatics for six weeks—well, three lunatics and a bassplayer, which came to pretty much the same thing—or was something more fundamental working? The Bear pawed his way through the fog of his current irritation re Nancy's Cabbage and would have sworn that some of the old unqualified camaraderie was coming back into play. It didn't make a lot of sense but it was welcome anyway. Why

  P

  The Bear Comes Home 339

  do things happen when they do? "Jones," he said, "I'm pissed off about the nightclub but it's good to hear your voice."

  ''Vestilagiubba^'&r

  "What?" The Bear repositioned the awkward headset at his ear. They should design these things more considerately for ursine use.

  "I said, I wish I could be out there with you."

  "You do?"

  "Course I do. You kidding? Listen, they'll send me out if you're ready to record in Colorado. Keep in mind Boulder'd be a low-pressure recording situation. Not up to snuff for full release, it goes out to radio stations and other promotional purposes, keep the pot boiling for Shoes^ for which there's a good buzz in the industry."

  "You've been looking out for me," said the Bear. "Doing toil and trouble."

  "Front and back, like always. How you feeling really?"

  "Strange," the Bear confessed. "It's a wrench leaving Iris, and I'm out here with Groucho, Chico, Harpo and the ghost of Jesse James."

  "Talmo's a trip, ain't he? He tell you how he got into the music biz?"

  "The world is a foreign country."

  "What else is new. Wish I could be there with you, B."

  "Wish you could too."

  "Sounds like old times, don't it?"

  "Ain't it strange? How're things at home?"

  "Actually," said Jones, lowering his voice confidentially, "hfe at home has begun to improve. It's like maybe I'm not on trial anymore. She's beginning to appreciate me for the find I am."

  "She knocked up?"

  "That's the good part. Far as I know she's not. It might be true love at last."

  "I always loved that old sweet song," said the Bear. "No, really: best wishes."

  "Want to call me after the gig? I'll stay up."

  "Get some sleep, or something even better," said the Bear. "I'll call you tomorrow." After a ceremonial exchange of goodbyes and best wishes he switched the headset off—Rondo would applaud him—and stuck it in the holster hanging from the backrest of the driver's seat.

  Was it too late to call Iris? It might be. She'd begun going to bed nine, nine-thirty. Country Hfe. He'd give her a honk tomorrow.

  Time to shuffle into place, stand there and see what happens.

  He banged back into the club and found Hatwell standing just inside the door. "Let's go up there," the Bear suggested, "and smite the sledded Polacks on the ice."

  340 Rafi Zabor

  "Just what I was thinking," Hatwell said, and thrust his hand quickly into his jacket pocket, but not before the Bear noticed the small white pill the pianist was trying to hide. Hatwell knew he had seen it, he knew Hatwell knew, Hatwell knew he knew . . . and the Bear decided to let it ride. Hatwell cleared his throat. "All the same, I'd watch what you say about Polacks in here. Me and the guys already feel a distinct chill in the air, you know what I'm sa}ing?" He worked a finger between his shirtcollar and his neck.

  "I'm good in a barfight," said the Bear.

  "I'm sure, but it's not the way to start a tour unless you're Mingus. Funny you should bring it up though. See that guy at the bar with the bandage on the side of his head? Don't look right at him, dummy."

  "I see him." A hulking young guy in working clothes draining a beerglass: a white crosspatch bandage covered the rear-right quadrant of his head: his lank black hair had been shaved around the perimeter of the wound: he didn't look terrifically bright.

  "Well," Hatwell told the Bear, "he gave me a Hey good buddy and asked me to have a beer with him. After a sip or two I asked him about the bandage and he told me about how he was shooting pool the other side of town last night and got into a fight with like a dozen black guys and one of them hit him on the head with a poolcue and then they threw him out into the street and he had to crawl home. So tonight he's getting together with about twenty colleagues and they're goin' over there and beat the shit out of the black guys. One of his old buddies is bringing a blowtorch and the rest are packing chains. He asked me if I wanted to go along."

  "Xo shit."

  "I wondered if he was being ecumenical or if it might be a sneak^ way of getting me beat up, fike maybe they could warm up on me in an alley on the way over."

  '"What'd you tell him?"

  "I said there was a chance his buddies might get me confused with the bad guys when the shit hit the fan. He said I could wear a hat so they could tell me apart. Did I want a John Deere or a Pittsburgh Steelers. I told him Chicago Bears and it was an interesting proposition and it'd make a change but if he didn't mind I'd pass."

  "I think you made the right decision," said the Bear.

  "bu think?"

  "I can't spare you."

  "Bear, this is the weirdest club I've seen since I did the tour with Mr. Tim, John Carradine and the monkey. Not," said Hatwell hastily, "that I'm making any comparisons between you and Zip."

  The Bear Comes Home 341

  "I could wear a hat," said the Bear, "so you could tell me apart."

  "Please don't make me laugh. The guy's looking over and I think he can smell we're talking about him."

  "Rahim," said the Bear, "just tell me about the pill."

  "Okay. I owe it to you." Hatwell dropped into a vaguely penitent slouch for a moment but didn't like it and straightened up. "It's a Percocet."

  "I don't know anything about drugs."

  "A painkiller."

  "Are you in pain?"

  "I'm alive, ain't I. Look, I had a small, manageable habit going and I tried to get clean before we started out but my timing came up a week short. I'm tapering off with Percocet. I'm not carrying anything heavier, I'm not high, I'm not fucked up, and in a week I won't even need Percocet—for which, by the way, I have a completely legal prescription. You won't see any shakes or diarrhea or any sweaty Hollywood bullshit, although I do have a small involuntary tremor in my legs, and on the way out of town I won't tell you I have to stop off at that jewelry store a minute where they were fixing my watch, I'll just be a minute and don't come with me. That won't happen. I'm fine for the music, and beyond that, if you don't mind, it's not your business. A small habit, you understand? I've slipped once or twice, but it's under control."

  "I've heard that song before," said the Bear. "It's such sad old shit."

  "Yeah well I have a feeling for tradition."

  "It's a mistake, Rahim."

  "Well it's mine to make, isn't it." For a moment a curtain rose and the Bear could see Rahim Bobby Hatwell as someone fundamentally stymied by the terms of life as he himself was. Then the curtain dropped. "Anyhow I'm using Percocets to taper and Lomotil for my bowels, otherwise I might have to get up in the middle of a piano solo and go to the can. Is that enough information? Are we cool? Is it okay?"

  The Bear gave Hatwell an assessing look. Hatwell looked as if he might be about to blow smoke out his ears and fire from his nose, so nothing seemed unusual or out of order. "If it has to be," the Bear said.
r />   "It has to be."

  "I worry about you sometimes."

  "Thanks, Ma."

  "Right. So let's go up there and, um . . ." The Bear checked the house and his voice trailed off.

  "Sled the fucking Polacks on their ass."

  But the house had been augmented, the Bear realized when he came onstage and looked out at it for real. The radio strategy, or word of mouth, or

  342 Rafi Zabor

  some other song, had done its work, and there were new people who looked as if they'd come from somewhere else. Only one couple had been brave enough to occupy one of the four front-row tables: students, he supposed. The male half looked like a twelve-year-old with intense eyes, a dark goatee and a cigarette he was smoking to death; his blond girlfriend was so pale and her features as yet so unaccented by character that she seemed incompletely formed. The Bear would have taken them for sixteen, tops, but either they were old enough to drink those beers or they had fake ID. The beard wasn't fake, though. The Bear would have to recalibrate his human-age scale for the tour. They looked like children.

  He heard the band settle into place behind him, complaining softly about this and that, and he felt the usual flutter of anxiety, then thought: No, we're good, we know how to do this; and he stamped off the tempo for "Straight No Chaser" medium up.

  He felt it going wrong from the beginning but was sure the band would get it together on the repetition of the head. After that he thought they'd pull together after a few choruses of improvisation. After that he told himself he had to get used to playing with his back to the band, when circularit}^ in his living room had been so easy, and accustom himself to facing a not particularly impressive house on a quotidian night in the known world. The band— they'd have to get used to it too. Bobby would stop laying in the wrong chord at the right moment, Linton would get his cymbal sound integrated with the drums and more nearly on the dime, and as for himself, he'd remember how to play before long. Garrett was the only one among them displaying anything like his usual competence, but although his steady walking quarter notes were all in a row and in tune, they were essentially indistinguishable from each other—One could be Three or even Two or Four—senseless, robotic, indiscriminate. Soon, though, one of them would pull it together and the rest would fall in line.

  But once the Bear finished eight undistinguished unswinging choruses and Bobby Harwell began his o\ti solo by stumbling over his own fingers, the night's real aspect rose definite and clear from these clouds of supposition. Unless they could do something about it soon, the night at Nancy's Cabbage was going to be an avatar of Every Musician's Nightmare.

  After Harwell's embarrassment Garrett wisely declined a solo, and when the Bear initiated an exchange of fours with his drummer, Linton dropped his left stick first time out and dropped a beat finding another one, so that no one came in together on the way back in. The Bear sustained the fours through three choruses, fistening to both of them lose count, went back to the head and got the tune done the best he could.

  The Bear Comes Home 343

  Then he made the mistake of caUing "Reincarnation of a Lovebird," a beautiful, difficult tune that cried out for long, reflective solos, and just wanting to get out of there they finished it in five minutes flat. The Ted Beastly Quartet had full leisure in which to contemplate the mystery of four entirely competent, frequently inspired musicians passing what, seemed like hour after interminable hour unable to play anything but notes. Their senses of time never meshed, not on the subtle, breathing level necessary to living music, and everything they played was reduced to mechanical gestures of tone production of no inherent meaning. The sounds went separate ways into the air or lay there on the floor like disused and misbegotten objects. None of them understood, given their known degree of talent, how this dispiriting thing could be, but evidently it was. It had not happened to any of them for a long long time.

  "Someone chop my fingers off," Harwell said behind him.

  "Too much work," Bostic said.

  "It can't go on forever," said the Bear over his shoulder.

  "Oh yes it can."

  The Bear called "Skylark," one of his favorite ballads, and some cold-hearted and murderous hunter shot it on the wing, but only wounded it so that it lay there flapping on the ground for the duration. Each time he came to the tune's bridge, the Bear played it as written, with only the lightest embellishment, so as not to spoil such a lovely thing completely.

  The house was pretty much silent when it was over. At least they respected the dead.

  Maybe, thought the Bear, a little uptempo energy will cure us. He called "Oleo" and heard the rhythm section lose itself in the stalls and disjunctions of the head, and when that was done he tore into the "I Got Rhythm" changes as if volume and attempted passion might be enough; but the insistence of the rapid tempo seemed like a whip lashing them to no purpose, time a maniacal insistence to produce energy and heat and light no matter what. Who decreed this? The rhythm at the heart of jazz had always seemed to instance the inexhaustibiHty of life itself, a ground for hope, a reason to go on living, an emblem on the prow of grace, but at the moment the whole of American music seemed to him, and perhaps to the rest of the band, a ship on which a blind god beat the drum and men worked themselves to death at the oars on a doombound, pointless journey. Others were under orders to listen and find pleasure in the spectacle. The world turned, laden with pain and weariness, and even in peacetime the population ate shit, which it was musicians' job to dish out in steaming heaps. Is this a great country or what?

  344 Rafi Zabor

  Such, at least, were the Bear's impressions of this version of "Oleo."

  The Bear tried another ballad, but its wings were broken too. After that he managed a limping, semisentient blues, and watched it die on a dirt road a hot mile short of home. Vultures descended Hke slow applause, necks bent, beaks hooked beneath unblinking eyes, and wings clapped the night to a pause with at least another set to play.

  On this first set, of all the tunes in the band's provisional book, only "M Squad," Count Basic's shuffle blues written back in 1960 for a TV cop show starring Lee Marvin, used now as an out-theme, worked at all. The Bear took three solos to stretch it out and close the set. If you can't play a Count Basic shuffle blues you were dead, most likely.

  "Thank you thank you thank you," he announced into the microphone, hearing his voice split and shriek on the Martian PA. "That's Rahim Bobby Hat\^ell on piano, Garrett Church bass, Linton Bostic at the drums, and on alto Lieutenant Frank Ballinger, yours truly." WTien no one laughed he added, "That's okay, I'm used to telling jokes no one gets."

  "We don't get it either," Bostic said from behind his drumset.

  "We'll take a short break," the Bear announced, "for suicide and surgery and we'll be back to torment you in twent^ minutes."

  While the band beelined for the bar he strolled into the audience compulsively apologizing to the folks at the tables. "Just our first set," he told them. "We oughta do better in a little while."

  "That's okay," the college-looking kid with the goatee trying to look adult and world-worn—if he only knew—said, looking up, one hand tangled in his beard and the other in his vague though lovely girlfriend's froth of hair. "That's about what we expected to hear ft-om a talking bear and his band. Who really played on the record?"

  "Perfect," said the Bear—the kid was polite, and seemed to mean no harm—and he walked to the bar feeling shot neatly through the middle.

  The rhythm section was sucking down draft beers and not looking at each other.

  "Don't say a thing," Hatwell told him.

  "We'll be fine the next set," said the Bear.

  "Didn't he ask you not to say a thing?" asked Bostic.

  "Garrett, let's hear from you."

  "Well," Garrett said, but declined to elaborate.

  "They keep the money," Rondo reminded them, "in banks."

  "Listen, guys," the Bear began.

  "Don't say. A fucking. Th
ing," Hatwell warned him.

  The Bear deferred, and they drank some so-called beers.

  The Bear Comes Home 345

  "We'll straighten out," the Bear insisted on the way to the stage for the second set, but halfway through he felt obliged to call "M Squad" again.

  If you couldn't play a Count Basie shuffle blues what could you do?

  You bussed back to the motel, where Rondo had confirmed the reservations. The band went inside and you got to sleep in the parking lot up against some decorative shrubbery and two willows that screened a view of the highway and a mall that had died in midconstruction. You popped open the roof hatches for ventilation but you didn't sleep. You looked down at the horn in your paws, tried it out—^you could play, almost—and thought about it all. You told yourself, in a rational tone of inner voice, that if it went on like this you would either . . .

  Couldn't sleep, didn't want to play horn, so figured out how to turn on the video and push in the first cassette of Les Enfants du Paradis, watched truth in the form of Arletty regard itself in a mirror, turning in the fake depths of her well, then thought Nah, and punched up Buster Keaton, watched him run down that hill pursued by a world of bouncing boulders. The Bear had long thought it the funniest thing ever put on film and he watched it a few times through, getting more technical-headed with each viewing, until he heard a knock on the door of the bus.

  "Who the fuck is that?" the Bear bellowed, scared himself and hoping he'd scared whoever it was. Then, ''Who?'' when he couldn't make out the voice.

  "Garrett," Garrett said louder this time, and "How you doing?" once he'd come inside. "I couldn't sleep either. What're you up to?"

  "Sitting here watching TV and wondering what it would cost to cancel the tour and pay you guys off."

  "Aw, don't do that."

  "I keep vacillating."

  "Then you need vacilline," said Garrett. "Who's that, Keaton?"

  "Yeah, end oiSeven Chances. Ever seen it? No? You're kidding."

  The Bear summarized the plot for Garrett and wound the tape back to Keaton waking up in church with a few hundred women who want to marry him for his money. Then they watched the chase through to the end of the picture, laughing and stomping.