The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  The other funny thing: driven by his own imperatives and without reference to the music's current neoclassical moment, the Bear had drifted more than a few degrees from his roughly free jazz habits to reinvestigate the details of the harmonic tradition. It shocked him how much he was a bear of his time.

  But you know? We might play some interesting music by the time we finish the tour in Colorado. God, I wish Iris could be here to see it.

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  the Blue Note in Boulder Colorado was the coolest-looking, not to mention the most luxuriously outfitted, club they played that tour by a long shot. The Bear sat at the bar, wearing his full nightclub rig of jumpsuit and raincoat, his hat on the bartop, sipping a Myers' rum and orange juice and enjoying the prospect in advance. It was a bam of a place: from his end seat on the bar's rounded wooden comer—American oak—he could look through a big square archway into the club's main room: high walls of nearly midnight blue, around which ran a fine line of royal-blue neon about ten feet up, enclosing rows of clean tables, ^ith dark 'iolet tablecloths believe it or not and orderly chairs; and although from his seat he couldn't see all the way front to the stage, the Bear knew that the band's instruments stood under modulated spotlights, preparaton' to a final sound check, and the band was chatting up a bunch of prett}' waitresses—the Bear had felt his own presence spook the lasses, so he had retired to the bar until the crew was ready for a last runthrough. The place had everything: good acoustics, onstage monitors that gave you an honest image back, and not just one acute weird pothead techie soundguy but an actual crew that adjusted microphones, stands, dials, shdes and whirHes as if it mattered. Good Lord, this gig might be more than the usual struggle against the force of circumstance.

  WTiich was especially welcome, in ^iew of the record or quasi-record they would make their last two nights here.

  The Bear sipped his drink. He had never been treated this well in a club, and the band had clocked in to tell him that Boulder had the finest-looking women they had seen since Paris, Alilan, Stockholm, Urbino, Rome, yeah maybe am-where. . . . Anyhow it was the right cap to a tour that had gone pretty well after its unforgettably bad beginning. Even the Dcnvn Beat inter-iew had gone well, although the issue wasn't out yet. The Bear got in a few words edgewise, the band had had their fun with the guy, and the Polaroids from the photo shoot promised an interesting cover: the Bear's back and shoulders massive under the raincoat and the guys looking pleased with themselves into the camera in front of a textured grey backdrop. Yeah, it had gone well, and Hatwell and Bostic hadn't given the interviewer too hard a time, considering.

  Although, thought the Bear, the genuinely odd and interesting thing was how quickly and Wthout fanfare the band's social act had changed once the

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  Bear loosened up and from St. Paul onward joined the general sense of fun. Everything got quieter—Hatwell less cutting and acidulous, Linton accordingly more laid back, and even Garrett began to enjoy something Hke free speech and equal time—and the Bear had blinked at it, amazed, because it seemed a subtle and instantaneous response to his own inward unconfessed change of state, a balancing act gracefully, perhaps perfectly achieved, as if the guys in the band were enlightened representatives of some higher agency, and had clowned around and made a lot of noise until he got the message and rolled away the stone.

  It was pretty unlikely, but that's how it looked. Elevated unspoken stuff going on behind the scenery. When people talked about the subtle interaction between musicians they didn't know the half of it.

  If only he could get a little interaction out of Iris. She was still relentlessly fine on the phone, and if the Bear could have afforded to worry about it he would have worried a lot. Finally he decided, since he couldn't do anything about it, that the best he could manage was pretend it wasn't happening, and if it was not just a quirk of hers but bad news, he would deal with it when he got home. Which was pretty soon. Of course it worried him.

  At least he was having all those good, seems-like-the-old-days conversations with Jones. Speaking of whom . . .

  The Bear watched Jones, must be fresh from the airport because he was carrying a suitcase and a garment bag, walk right past him and thrust his face through the archway as if he might just find the Bear in the next room. The Bear grinned as Jones halted with a characteristic wobble beneath the arch.

  "Hello, sailor," the Bear called, laughing.

  "Bear!" said Jones.

  It really was great to see the old boy.

  Jones dropped his bags, the Bear got off his barstool, and they managed a series of big imbalanced hugs and backslaps.

  "Together again after all these years," said the Bear. "Back from the dead."

  "We're friends again?" Jones asked him.

  "Seems that way, doesn't it. You look terrific. You look all different."

  "Yeah," said Jones. "It's possible I do."

  "Come to the bar and have a drink with me."

  "Come with me if you wanna go to Kan-sas City."

  "Been there, done that," said the Bear.

  They hunkered onto adjacent barstools.

  "Yeah," said Jones, "Kansas City. What was so important about Kansas City that you wouldn't tell me about it on the phone last week?"

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  "I wouldn't? Funny, it doesn't seem important now. I went out to visit Charlie Parker's grave, and even though the guys in the band were ragging me all the way through the cemetery—ooh, spooky, ooh look, a UFO shaped like an alto—I was hit by all these powerful vcmotions, and I felt sure, sure that I was, um, you know."

  "You were gonna encounter his spirit."

  "Like that," the Bear admitted. "But when I found the actual grave, all those big emotions vanished, all that sense of being greeted—zip."

  "And this is what you wouldn't tell me on the phone?" Jones asked him.

  "That night," said the Bear, "I had a dream in which I had a long talk with John Coltrane. We sat in two armchairs and I think I asked him all my deepest questions about, um, being out here and trying to do something real with the music."

  "What did he tell you?"

  "I can't remember. By the time I was aware of the dream the talk was almost over."

  "Tough luck."

  "The only specific thing I do remember," the Bear went on, lowering his voice, "is that he looked at his watch and said, 'Oh, I have to go. Why don't you come over to the house and have dinner with us, and then we're going to this lit-de club in Brooklyn'—I knew he meant the old Club la Marchal—'nobody knows we'll be there and you could sit in with us, you could play.' And I blurted out that I was just this Htde cub from the sixties and I used to come see you on a leash and there's no way I could ever ... et cetera. And he said—I remember the sound of his voice and it was his—^he laughed and said, 'Aw, never mind all that stuff Just come along with us, have some dinner, and play' And I woke up."

  "So whaddayou think?" Jones asked the Bear. "You think it was a real encounter?"

  "No idea," the Bear told him.

  "Oh?" Jones remarked suspiciously.

  "Maybe it has to do with me making some kind of a shift. I don't know." The Bear shrugged. "It's a mystery to me. I've had a very active dreamlife out here, but I don't know what it signifies, if anything. Could just be subjective stuff. Dreams is tricky, Jones."

  "What's that you're drinking?" Jones nodded at the Bear's glass.

  "Rum and orange. Have one. Sally?" A tall dazzle of redhead appeared before them and answered yes. Sally was not wearing very much and the Bear still couldn't figure how anyone could get a body to grow into all those shapes and fit them together so well. "One for my buddy and one more for the road."

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  "Okay, Frank," Sally said, and turned to the ranks of bottles.

  "Where did she come from?"

  "Take a stroll around town. Must be the mountain air. Place is loaded with Tibetan monks too."

  Sally set two
drinks in front of them, smiled and said Hi to Jones in such a way that he nearly fell backward off his bars tool.

  "Jesus," said Jones. "What're the monks like?"

  "Orange robes, nice smiles," said the Bear, and took a sip of his drink. "You know? Now that you're here we oughta rent a van and get up into the mountains in the afternoons. The bus isn't built for it, and it's too conspicuous."

  "I think I can put a car on the company and tool the two of us around."

  "Yeah, what's up with the music biz? How's Shoes doing? We making a record here or what?"

  ^^Shoes is doing fine and we can record two nights here and it's either another record or a radio show. How good's the band?"

  "You can hear them in a minute." The Bear leaned to look past Jones into the main room but didn't see signs of anything happening yet. "Only place I've ever seen that wants to do a second sound check because the first one didn't come out perfect."

  "Your wide experience," said Jones. "How you like touring?"

  "I haven't been arrested yet and we're sounding better. Jones, I don't think I've ever seen you this relaxed and cool. You don't mind my asking, is this the result of Sybil loosening up on you or did you get a stock option?"

  "It's the result of realizing that a tense, crummy, frightened life shot through with occasional visions and lately some pretty amazing sex wasn't... um, probably I shouldn't be talking about the sex."

  "Nah, I hke it."

  "I don't know. Bear. Things started working out. Sybil did reconcile herself to the idea that being with me wasn't the worst thing that had ever happened to her, but I think I changed first. I saw that I was in something like a state of grace and always had been. So I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb."

  "Ah ha," said the Bear. He squinied up his eye at his old buddy, looking for signs of the Higher Fatuity as Jones had practiced it, but didn't find any. The old boy seemed surprisingly well settled in himself. The Bear raised his glass of rum and juice in salute and hoped it would last.

  "Why're you looking at me like that?" Jones asked him. "A flower just pop out of the top of my head or something?"

  "I'm just enjoying you."

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  "That makes a change. We were driUing on opposite sides of the mountain for awhile. How you doing otherwise?"

  "I'm music stupid. The music's working out but I don't know nothing about nothing else. Occupational hazard. I took a swim in the Mississippi River and thought about chords. I sat on the grassbank and forgot that the Mississippi was being taken over by zebra mussels flushed from European tankers and that they were using up all the oxygen in the river and everything else was ding."

  "Miat would you have done, eat 'em all with pasta?"

  "I forgot the river was flooding people out of their homes further south—"

  "You were gonna drink it?"

  "—and forests were going up like matchsticks in the drought, habitat was still shrinking, the sun was burning hotter—"

  "Think you could blow it out?"

  "—and the sk^'d gone bad."

  "That's a lot to remember."

  "I know," said the Bear, and sighed. He wanted to ask Jones if he knew what was going on with Iris, but he hesitated, then disgressed. "Some nights now when the music opens up I go into isionary states, Httle ecstasies and flutters, and I'm happy to forget eventhing else. Mien I'm in those states eventhing isn't so much forgotten as subsumed. But how real is that? I wish I knew."

  "Having a second cubhood?"

  "It's been awhile," the Bear agreed. "It's nice, but it doesn't mean what it used to. I mean, hfe is more . . . um."

  "Life is definitely more um," said Jones. "Is there something you want to ask me?"

  "Actually ..." the Bear began, but then he heard the rh^thm section starting up in the other room, an arpeggio on the piano, a rap on the snare drum, then Hatwell and Bostic starting to make animal noises into their microphones. The call of the wild.

  "HowVe they been?" Jones asked the Bear as they dismounted from their barstools. "You get along? How're they placing?"

  "They're geniuses," said the Bear. "And a pleasure to live with."

  "Don't you find Bobby Hatwell just a Httle intense?"

  "The man's a puss}xat. Wait'll you hear us play."

  "Um," said Jones, holding the Bear back a moment with a pull on the sleeve of his raincoat.

  "Um?"

  "See if you can guess who might be coming out for the recording nights."

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  "The Great Dane?"

  "No, Krieger said he'd never work with you again and he's keeping to it. James'll be out day after tomorrow to hook up with a local studio and a mobile unit and get every^ing set."

  "We ought to be able to give them something worth taping," said the Bear. "The band's great, and I don't want to sound pretentious but I think I might finally be coming into my . . . my real, maybe . . . but, you know, I could choke when I know the tape recorder's on. We'll see."

  "You're still ftinny," Jones told him.

  "Thanks. So who's coming out?"

  Jones looked at.him oddly. "Bear, you're shitting me. You really can't guess?"

  il»is sat in the bus, her hands composed upon her lap, and waited for the Bear to get the news of her arrival and come out of the club to see her. Since the Blue Note fronted on some kind of pedestrian mall or walking-street. Tommy Talmo had pulled the tour bus into a service alley behind the building: dark night, utility^ ports blowing exhaust above hulking dumpsters. The Bear wasn't supposed to know she was here, but she was sure that Jones had told him. The Colorado night was cool even though it was summer in the mountains. Tommy Talmo had switched the motor off and, clumsily, elaborately polite, opened two small square hatches in the roof before he left. Iris had asked him to please lock the door. She didn't know how long she would have to wait. A powerful force knotted her small bony graceless hands together atop her thighs, and she had the familiar sensation of being about to break apart and fly off in bits and pieces. She had grown stronger and more peaceful in her domestic months with the Bear, but now that she was daring to make this journey . . .

  Iris heard a heavy key turn and the door sigh open. The bus dipped to take his weight, and then the Bear burst upward into visibility, his head turning every whichway in search of her: he was, thought Iris, like an irruption of primal chaos, and she was both happy to see him and scared half to death.

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  How odd that he hadn't seen her. She was right there in front of him, in the chair, although it was true she had switched off the overhead hght, as soon as she had found the button.

  "Bear?" she said, and the degree of emotion in her voice sounded inappropriate even to her. After all this was supposed to be a meeting of old friends.

  The Bear made a noise of discovery and welcome, and even though he halted for a moment before advancing upon her arms outstretched. Iris could feel the swarming shape of his affection and all his heart's warmth coming at her like a huge wave. It threatened to overtop her, and she had to keep intact every scrap of courage that had brought her this far. She must keep her will intact regardless, and her consciousness organized. She had vows to carry out, commandments to bear witness to and obey. "Here I am," she said, and stood.

  "Ba-by," the Bear bellowed all too predictably and took her in his arms. He enveloped her for a moment, then tilted back to have a look. "It's beyond belief incredible to see you here. Let me take you up into the mountains tomorrow. You gonna ride back East on the bus with us after we're done? You know we're recording tonight? It's our last night and we got so much great stuff on tape already we don't know what to do with it. You've got to hear us play. We're unbelievable. We've had incredible luck. You look more beautiful than ever, you're straight off a nonstop out of heaven. How was the flight? I love you so much my heart's about to burst. The music is getting incredible. How do you expect me to be able to hug you if you get back down in that chair?
Iris for Christ's sweet sake say something already."

  It was pretty much what Iris had expected. "Take a seat," she said, and indicated the matching chair across the aisle.

  The Bear lapsed backward into black leather—Iris had a brief preposterous sensation of seeing herself in a mirror as the Bear—which sighed its protest and widened a split in its left side but settled beneath him at last. "Jones told me you were coming out but he wouldn't say a word about why."

  "I don't beheve you," she said.

  "Pardon?"

  "I don't believe that Jones is capable of keeping his mouth that completely shut."

  "We're going down to Santa Fe to get your daughters," the Bear admitted.

  "Did he say why?"

  "I don't need a why. You want to get your daughters and you want my help is enough. I'd do anything for you, you know that."

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  "Are you sure?"

  "Santa Fe," the Bear ruminated. "That's in Arizona, right? The saint of faith in the arid zone. Perfect."

  "Santa Fe is in New Mexico," Iris said.

  "That's like a couple of hours' drive from here. Haifa day? I know. Rondo told me. When do we go? Tomorrow? Want to go tonight? I'm supposed to make a record but fuck it, who cares, baby I'm so proud of you. Let's get you your daughters back. We'll all go back home together on the bus. What are you looking so worried about? Something wrong down there? If that son of a bitch Herb is treating them wrong I'll pound him to a pulp. I'll grind him up like coffee beans and scatter the grounds all over Arizona. I'm with you, I'm here."

  "I would be awfully glad of your help and support. Bear," Iris told him.