On Bear Mountain

by Deborah Smith

  Daddy’s five tenants were clustered nearby. A ratty bunch. I tried to ignore them. Arthur clutched my hand harder. He stared at the casket perched on rails and the artfully hidden hole beneath it. His beautiful face, so much like Mama’s, compressed suddenly. His soft blue eyes narrowed until they squinted shut. I recognized the signs.

  I raised on tiptoe and whispered in his ear. “What are you, sweetie?”

  “A gopher,” he whispered back, his voice breaking. This meant he wanted to go underground with Daddy, or to at least confirm that underground was a safe world. My throat aching, I told him not to worry, that Daddy wasn’t living underground. He squinted harder.

  As soon as the minister finished his short sermon, a long-haired boy in the crowd lifted a corroded yellow trumpet to his lips and played a mournful refrain of Taps. Then an obese woman in a pink coat burst into a tearful, off-key rendition of Elvis’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” A tiny black man cocooned in several sweaters and faded overalls waved a four-foot-tall cross made of sticks wound with colorful electrical wire. Another man played “Amazing Grace” on a flute, the sound so haunting I thought my heart would bleed through my skin. A teenage boy sang a morbid Alanis Morrisette song in a high voice. A man in a yellowed white tuxedo with a gold cummerbund loudly recited a short, awkward poem.

  It was a circus of creative mourning, a glorious and appalling spectacle, a celebration of the whimsies that had defined my father’s life. The minister, John Tiber, and the other Tiber relatives stared with their mouths open. Mr. John began to scowl. The others traded disapproving looks. I was torn between embarrassment and pride. I was the Uber-Powell of Bear Creek, the landlord, my brother’s keeper, the owner of the Iron Bear.

  No. I never felt I owned the Bear. I didn’t inherit it.

  It inherited me.

  • • •

  “One, two, three, up,” Quentin ordered, as he and a three-man crew sent by an antiques broker attempted to hoist a six-hundred-pound slab of imported marble out the loft doors of the aging Brooklyn textile mill. He’d acquired the old mill when a salvage deal fell through, then converted the bottom floors into apartments, which he rented out. He used the entire top story for his own living quarters and business. There were days when he cursed that decision.

  The marble was wrapped in a spiderweb of cables attached to the arm of a massive winch Quentin had installed on the building’s outside wall. If they simply let the slab go, it would swing wildly out the doors and snap the cable.

  “Another few inches. Dese prisa,” he urged. The broker’s hispanic crew, sweating, surged forward. Quentin fitted one shoulder under the slab and braced himself. Here he was not the heir to Richard Riconni’s legacy and fortune. Here he was not a finely dressed businessman aiding his mother’s cause. Here he became elemental — a creature of iron, flesh, and blood wrapped in dirty denim and his own sense of order.

  One of the men suddenly slipped and fell, and Quentin sagged, struggling to hold up that end of the marble alone. Its blunt edge pressed on the hapless man’s chest. “Socorro! Cuidado!” the victim yelled, and began squirming.

  Quentin went down on one knee, every muscle straining. In the background, retired Army Master Sergeant Harry Bodine Johnson, otherwise known as Popeye for his thick forearms and garrulous temper, bellowed, “You sons of bitches, lift that motherfucker or I’ll let it swing.” He thrust the control stick on the winch’s motor, tightening the cable by dangerous inches. Standing beside him, Hammer barked wildly.

  Quentin thought his back would break. He could feel the strain grinding into his knee joints, his shoulders, his neck. Have to change a static load into a dynamic load, and I need leverage. He tried to ignore the shiver in his weakening legs. “Let it go, Captain, that’s an order!” Popeye thundered, having never really forgotten that he’d trained a raw, homesick recruit named Riconni in boot camp.

  But Quentin finally shoved one foot forward, found the fulcrum of bone, muscle, and determination he wanted, and inched the slab upward just enough. With an explosion of breath, he and the remaining two men eased the marble out the doorway. It swayed gently in thin air.

  Quentin sat down next to the man who’d fallen. They were both drenched in sweat. “Muchas gracias,” the man said breathlessly.

  “De nada.” He wiped his forehead and got up, then helped the other man up. The man was shaking. Quentin did not display so much as a quiver. The crew gazed at him in awe. “Damn, boss,” the translator among them said. “You act like that happens every day.”

  “Anything a man can live through couldn’t be too bad.” Quentin fitted a cigar in his mouth, then shrugged exhausted muscles in his shoulders.

  But after the crew left with the slab safely atop their flatbed, he stretched out on the loft’s thick wooden floor in a rare, empty space not occupied by inventory that included elaborate mantels, Grecian pediments, stacks of wrought-iron fencing, and crates of handpainted tiles. Hammer lay down next to him and snuffled his face. Quentin shook him gently by his shaggy yellow ruff. “It’s a good day when nothing falls down. That’s the point, isn’t it?” Popeye came over and sat down on a crate, rubbing arthritic knees. Quentin shut his eyes and smiled thinly. “I’m getting old, Sarge.”

  “You’re making yourself old, son, that’s for damn sure.” Popeye spoke in a slow Kentucky drawl that seemed soothing even when he was shouting obscenities. “You’re gettin’ bored and restless since your daddy’s work made you rich. What you tryin’ to prove, that you’re not his flesh and blood and you don’t need his money?”

  Quentin curled his hands behind his head and gazed at a ceiling crisscrossed with massive beams. The roof of the mill had a brutal simplicity that he loved. “I don’t need any of it,” he said.

  It’s only right for a son to inherit the benefits of his father’s success, his mother insisted, and vowed the money was his. She talked as if he were part of his father’s work, another piece she would manage dutifully. They never discussed her disappointments about his life, only her pride. But he knew she still wanted that MIT architect, that golden child for whom she had sacrificed, that boy who had worshipped Richard Riconni as much as she. And that boy was gone.

  “Money isn’t important as long as you’ve got a roof over your head and enough to guarantee it will always be there,” he said to Popeye.

  The old soldier snorted. “That something you read in one of your books? Shit.”

  Quentin eyed him narrowly. The old man had never been easy to like. In the barracks one night during boot camp he’d snatched a book of Freud’s writings off Quentin’s cot. “You sick in the head, boy?” he’d thundered. “That why you’re readin’ about head doctors? You a goddamn pussy-hating fag, boy?”

  Quentin had replied loudly, red-faced and angry, standing at attention. “Freud writes about big dicks, Sergeant! You’d know that if you read the book first!”

  “You callin’ me a dick, you Yankee wop?”

  “Yes, Sergeant!”

  For that smart remark he’d spent several weeks of boot camp in a virtual hell of extra duties and excruciating punishments. He’d never complained, never asked for mercy, and the impressed sergeant had said to him one day, Son, you’re the loneliest, toughest motherfucker on the planet, next to me. And Quentin had nodded.

  Twenty-two years later, Popeye grunted with the same crude devotion he’d demonstrated then. “You’re a frugal SOB now, huh?”

  “I know what I need to live.”

  “You know what you need to die. I coulda swung that marble outside. Yeah, so the cable might have popped and dumped it on their damned truck. So what? You got business insurance. You could buy those boys a new truck. You can’t buy a new set of bones, though.”

  Quentin sat up wearily, flexing his back and arms. “Beware the golden chains that bind. Your spirit moves freely in righteous solitude, alone. That’s something I read in a book of poetry, Sarge. It means be careful what you love. And who. Every person and thing you care about is a
weight you agree to carry. You can’t put it down once you pick it up.”

  “You’re gonna get yourself flattened, thinking that way.”

  Quentin smiled, got up, and said nothing. He’d stayed in the Army for sixteen years, and had been on the short list for a promotion to major when he left after the Gulf War. Army life made it easy not to think, or to feel. He’d earned a basic engineering degree while in the service, had been stationed all over the world, had served as a peacekeeper in several crises, and had led men in battle. But after the mine incident in the Gulf War he’d known he didn’t want to die yet, at least not that far from home.

  Now his life was about taking other people’s memories apart, not his own. Depending on the point of view, he was either a glorified junk dealer or an antiques expert. He tore apart mansions, mills, factories — any building in which the parts were worth more than their sum. Then he supplied a network of brokers with everything from handmade eighteenth-century bricks to Tiffany transoms.

  He went to his office, a corner area defined by rows of file cabinets, office equipment, and a battered desk sporting a state-of-the-art computer, and began to check his e-mail. Most of his orders came in that way, meaning that he rarely saw customers in person. His business had become a carefully efficient and isolated process, like the rest of his life. He preferred it that way.

  Next to the office, a double set of heavily carved Moroccan doors led to Quentin’s living quarters. He’d turned one end of the huge loft into his own apartment, a handsomely simple place outfitted with salvage items he’d decided to keep. An eighteenth-century plaster molding graced the wall above his bed. A weathered, worm-eaten, yet strangely beautiful mahogany archway framed the kitchen window. He’d covered the cracked and worn base of a stone fountain with a thick piece of plate glass to form a dining table. His tenants swore he had an artist’s eye.

  And he always denied it.

  But his father had appreciated castoffs, too, and Quentin never forgot that. “Those pieces bring something to you,” Papa had said. “What they know, what they remember, the glory they used to have. They can talk, if you listen.”

  Quentin’s tenants sometimes wandered up to admire and sketch items in the loft’s enormous inventory. Most of them were young, and most were pursuing ragtag careers as artists or musicians. The irony of that never escaped him — that he had somehow managed to draw that kind of people to him. Only Popeye knew that when they couldn’t pay their rent or needed help with their bills, they came to Quentin, and he took care of them.

  Popeye followed him to the office with military determination, plucking a stub of chewed cigar from his shirt pocket then flinging it out the open loft doors before shutting them against the cold March air. He’d been born in the backroom of a Kentucky whorehouse. He’d joined the army right after World War II, when he was only sixteen. He’d never married, never had children. When he showed up to visit Quentin after his retirement, he looked like a lost soul. Quentin hired him as an assistant and gave him a small apartment downstairs.

  Popeye pointed at him. “If you don’t want to be weighed down, how do you explain the pack of kids you rent places to, and how do you explain a pair of no-accounts like us?” He pointed to himself, then to Hammer.

  “You earn your keep,” Quentin said, and never looked up from the computer screen.

  “You’re gonna end up like me.”

  “I hope so, Sarge.” Quentin flicked a darkly amused look at him. “You’re the biggest dick in the neighborhood.”

  He dodged the sergeant’s stream of profanity, as the phone rang. Quentin lifted a hand for silence when he heard Alfonse Esposito’s troubled voice. “Your mother’s in the hospital,” he said.

  • • •

  She was napping in a private room by the time he arrived at the Manhattan hospital. She’d fainted while meeting with a financial planner. Alfonse stood up from a chair beside her bed when Quentin walked in. Alfonse’s dark hair was almost pure white, now, adding a cosmopolitan air of elegance to his rugged features and olive skin. He was a precinct commander and would be retiring from the police department in a year. His eyes were stern but worried.

  “She’s a trooper,” Alfonse whispered. Quentin gazed down at his mother, her skin chalky, her eyes shut, and covered one of her hands with his atop the bedcovers. He resisted an urge to test her pulse. “She wanted to leave straight from the emergency room,” Alfonse went on. “I told her I’d handcuff her to a bed. They want to run a few tests.” He lowered his voice even more. “Her blood pressure’s above normal. Doctor says it’s probably been that way awhile. I suspect she’s been hiding the fact from us.”

  “Absolutely,” she murmured, and opened her eyes. She squinted. “Someone please hand me my glasses.” Alfonse took a pair of slender metal frames from the nightstand. She slid them into place, and Quentin felt relieved. She looked wan and tired, but more like herself. He’d never gotten used to her contact lenses. “I’m fine. I think I hyperventilated over a discussion of mutual funds.”

  “I thought the money would keep you busy,” Quentin said. “I thought you wanted to stay busy, now that everything else is settled. Would you like for me to hire a business manager to take care of it for you?”

  “I won’t let some stranger manage our family’s future.” She said that simply, without insult, but she meant it. She’d made it clear that if he wouldn’t accept a share of his father’s legacy, either financially, spiritually, or creatively, then he shouldn’t be involved in the money. “You still don’t respect what the money represents,” she went on quietly. “You don’t respect your father’s memory.”

  Quentin walked to the room’s window and stood with his back to her, letting her words settle in his gut. He’d never told her about his father’s adultery, and he never would. Nor had he ever confessed his last conversation with Papa, and the guilt he still felt. “I respect you,” he answered finally, “and I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life worrying about every penny from the sculptures. If that’s the case, then I’d rather take all the money and throw it in the East River.”

  “I have nothing else to live for,” she said suddenly, her voice raw. Immediately she looked regretful for the outburst, and frowned. “I don’t expect you to understand. Alfonse, would you please let me talk to Quentin, alone?”

  “Of course,” Alfonse said, but he shut the door hard as he left the room.

  Quentin turned and looked down at his mother pensively, then pulled a chair closer and sat beside her bed. “Will you really talk to me? Is it that hard to be open about what’s bothering you?”

  Angele fidgeted with the bedcovers, a nervous movement so unlike her that concern curled through Quentin’s chest. She clutched the material hard, became very still, as if aggravated with herself, and stared at the ceiling. “All right. I’m miserable. For years I had a mission in life. Now I have nothing to do. I don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning.”

  “You’ve got a multimillion-dollar estate to manage. You have plenty to care about.”

  “That’s only money.”

  “You’ve achieved what you wanted. Papa’s name is established. People won’t forget him. Retire, now. Marry Alfonse.”

  Her gaze jerked to him. “Alfonse?”

  “You don’t think I know about you two? I’ve known for years.”

  “He’s only a friend.”

  Quentin considered this in rueful silence. He had spotted Mother at a corner deli having breakfast with Alfonse too many times to assume they merely met there. “You don’t have to hide your romance. I don’t disapprove.”

  “I will always be married to your father.”

  “He’s been dead for over twenty years. He’d want you to be with Alfonse.”

  “I am with Alfonse. We’re dear friends.”

  “Alfonse is crazy about you. You insult him by treating him like a second-class choice. Just now, didn’t you see the look on his face? How does it sound to him when you say yo
u have nothing to live for?”

  “I’m being lectured about romance by a forty-year-old bachelor who has no family life.” She knotted the covers again, exhaled deeply, and trembled. “What have I accomplished? All this success will never bring your father back, never make me feel I’ve done the one perfect thing his spirit demands, never restore whatever it was that stole your ability to care about him — to care about anyone in anything but a detached way.”

  “I have what I need. Let’s talk about your problems, not mine.”

  “Oh, no. When I woke up after fainting I felt as if I had been in a dream, talking to your father. Quentin’s following the same path as me, he said. Stop him. If you don’t find some measure of real happiness you might end up, you might . . .” She stopped, pressed her fingers to her eyes, and composed herself. When she lowered her hands she was in control of herself again. “Enough of this. Let me be clear. I don’t know what you’re searching for, but I want you to make some decisions about your future. All of the millions from the auction are yours — now or later, whether you wish it were so, or not. I would like to believe that the Riconni name and all it represents — including the money — will be passed along to new generations.”

  “You want me to marry someone just to start breeding?”

  She stared at him. “I want you to find a woman who is worthy of you. I want you to marry her and love her the way your father loved me. I want you to have children. I want grandchildren.”

  Quentin hid a coil of anger. He’d promised himself as a young man he’d never be his father, and that included never having a child to betray, or who would betray him. “If it were that simple,” he said, “I’d marry Carla.”

  Angele huffed. “Pardon me for being blunt — I will never say this in front of Alfonse, because he is well aware of his daughter’s weaknesses, and they torment him — but, Quentin, Carla is temperamental and frivolous. She’s fiddled her intelligence and her youth away on shallow husbands and on you. If she didn’t dote on her daughters I have no doubt she’d have thrown herself off a bridge over your lack of commitment, by now. She comes to you for money and advice, and you let her, and she lives in the fantasy that someday you’ll marry her and turn into a good stepfather for her girls.”