There was a card from Wallace in the mailbox. He and Elizabeth were doing fine and having a wonderful time. Not a word about Wallace Jr., but the boy didn’t seem to mind. Like most kids his age, he doesn’t really enjoy going places with his parents.
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON the Home called my office (Burley Belt Drought & Hail) and left word that Mother was gone. I was on the road. I work Saturdays. It’s the only day a lot of part-time farmers are home. My heart literally missed a beat when I called in and got the message, but only a beat. I had long been prepared. “It’s a blessing,” I said when I got the nurse on the phone.
“You don’t understand,” the nurse said. “Not passed away, gone. Ran away, gone. Your mother has escaped.” Mother had gone through the door at the end of the corridor when no one was looking, wedging the door with her comb and taking a bedspread which belonged to the Home. What about her tobacco? I asked. It was gone. That was a sure sign she was planning to stay away. I was in Franklin, and it took me less than an hour to get to the Home on I-65. The nurse told me that Mother had been acting more and more confused lately. Of course they are going to say that. We looked around the grounds, which is only a half acre with no trees between the interstate and a soybean field. Then they had me leave a message at the sheriff’s office. I would have to keep paying for her care until she was officially listed as Missing, which would be Monday.
It was dark by the time I got back to the house, and Wallace Jr. was fixing supper. This just involves opening a few cans, already selected and grouped together with a rubber band. I told him his grandmother had gone, and he nodded, saying, “She told us she would be.” I called Florida and left a message. There was nothing more to be done. I sat down and tried to watch TV, but there was nothing on. Then, I looked out the back door, and saw the firelight twinkling through the trees across the northbound lane of I-65, and realized I just might know where to find her.
IT WAS DEFINITELY getting colder, so I got my jacket. I told the boy to wait by the phone in case the sheriff called, but when I looked back, halfway across the field, there he was behind me. He didn’t have a jacket. I let him catch up. He was carrying his .22 and I made him leave it leaning against our fence. It was harder climbing the government fence in the dark, at my age, than it had been in the daylight. I am sixty-one. The highway was busy with cars heading south and trucks heading north.
Crossing the shoulder, I got my pants cuffs wet on the long grass, already wet with dew. It is actually bluegrass.
The first few feet into the trees it was pitch-black and the boy grabbed my hand. Then it got lighter. At first I thought it was the moon, but it was the high beams shining like moonlight into the treetops, allowing Wallace Jr. and me to pick our way through the brush. We soon found the path and its familiar bear smell.
I was wary of approaching the bears at night. If we stayed on the path we might run into one in the dark, but if we went through the bushes we might be seen as intruders. I wondered if maybe we shouldn’t have brought the gun.
We stayed on the path. The light seemed to drip down from the canopy of the woods like rain. The going was easy, especially if we didn’t try to look at the path but let our feet find their own way.
Then through the trees I saw their fire.
THE FIRE WAS mostly of sycamore and beech branches, the kind that puts out very little heat or light and lots of smoke. The bears hadn’t learned the ins and outs of wood yet. They did okay at tending it, though. A large cinnamon-brown northern-looking bear was poking the fire with a stick, adding a branch now and then from a pile at his side. The others sat around in a loose circle on the logs. Most were smaller black or honey bears, one was a mother with cubs. Some were eating berries from a hubcap. Not eating, but just watching the fire, my mother sat among them with the bedspread from the Home around her shoulders.
If the bears noticed us, they didn’t let on. Mother patted a spot right next to her on the log and I sat down. A bear moved over to let Wallace Jr. sit on her other side.
The bear smell is rank but not unpleasant, once you get used to it. It’s not like a barn smell, but wilder. I leaned over to whisper something to Mother and she shook her head. It would be rude to whisper around these creatures that don’t possess the power of speech, she let me know without speaking. Wallace Jr. was silent too. Mother shared the bedspread with us and we sat for what seemed hours, looking into the fire.
The big bear tended the fire, breaking up the dry branches by holding one end and stepping on them, like people do. He was good at keeping it going at the same level. Another bear poked the fire from time to time but the others left it alone. It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire, and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything? Every once in a while, a smaller bear walked into the circle of firelight with an armload of wood and dropped it onto the pile. Median wood has a silvery cast, like driftwood.
Wallace Jr. isn’t fidgety like a lot of kids. I found it pleasant to sit and stare into the fire. I took a little piece of Mother’s Red Man, though I don’t generally chew. It was no different from visiting her at the Home, only more interesting, because of the bears. There were about eight or ten of them. Inside the fire itself, things weren’t so dull, either: little dramas were being played out as fiery chambers were created and then destroyed in a crashing of sparks. My imagination ran wild. I looked around the circle at the bears and wondered what they saw. Some had their eyes closed. Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting alone in front of its own fire.
The hubcap came around and we all took some newberries. I don’t know about Mother, but I just pretended to eat mine. Wallace Jr. made a face and spit his out. When he went to sleep, I wrapped the bedspread around all three of us. It was getting colder and we were not provided, like the bears, with fur. I was ready to go home, but not Mother. She pointed up toward the canopy of trees, where a light was spreading, and then pointed to herself. Did she think it was angels approaching from on high? It was only the high beams of some southbound truck, but she seemed mighty pleased. Holding her hand, I felt it grow colder and colder in mine.
WALLACE JR. WOKE me up by tapping on my knee. It was past dawn, and his grandmother had died sitting on the log between us. The fire was banked up and the bears were gone and someone was crashing straight through the woods, ignoring the path. It was Wallace. Two state troopers were right behind him. He was wearing a white shirt, and I realized it was Sunday morning. Underneath his sadness on learning of Mother’s death, he looked peeved.
The troopers were sniffing the air and nodding. The bear smell was still strong. Wallace and I wrapped Mother in the bedspread and started with her body back out to the highway. The troopers stayed behind and scattered the bears’ fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do. They were like bears themselves, each one solitary in his own uniform.
There was Wallace’s Olds 98 on the median, with its radial tires looking squashed on the grass. In front of it there was a police car with a trooper standing beside it, and behind it a funeral home hearse, also an Olds 98.
“First report we’ve had of them bothering old folks,” the trooper said to Wallace. “That’s not hardly what happened at all,” I said, but nobody asked me to explain. They have their own procedures. Two men in suits got out of the hearse and opened the rear door. That to me was the point at which Mother departed this life. After we put her in, I put my arms around the boy. He was shivering even though it wasn’t that cold. Sometimes death will do that, especially at dawn, with the police around and the grass wet, even when it comes as a friend.
We stood for a minute watching the cars and trucks pass. “It’s a blessing,” Wallace said. It’s surprising how much traffic there is at 6:22 A.M.
THAT AFTERNOON, I went back to the median and cut a little firewood to replace what the troopers had flung away. I could see the fire through the trees t
hat night.
I went back two nights later, after the funeral. The fire was going and it was the same bunch of bears, as far as I could tell. I sat around with them awhile but it seemed to make them nervous, so I went home. I had taken a handful of newberries from the hubcap, and on Sunday I went with the boy and arranged them on Mother’s grave. I tried again, but it’s no use, you can’t eat them.
Unless you’re a bear.
JOHN KESSEL
A Clean Escape
John Kessel’s reputation as a writer of sophisticated, literary fantasy and science fiction is predicated on a handful of stories that frequently invade the territory of classic writers and use the lessons in their literature as sounding boards for contemporary values and social mores. The mock essay “Herman Melville: Space Opera Virtuoso” and the Nebula Award–winning riff on Moby Dick, “Another Orphan,” both chart incongruous intersections of the period of Melville and modern times. “The Big Dream” tells of a private detective, on the trail of Raymond Chandler, slowly evolving into a character in a typical Chandler crime story. “The Pure Product” and “Every Angel Is Terrifying” both extend ideas in the southern gothic fiction of Flannery O’Connor. H. G. Wells is himself a character in the Wellsian tale “Buffalo.” These stories, and Kessel’s alternate-history tales “Some Like It Cold,” “The Franchise,” and “Uncle John and the Saviour,” have been collected in his short-fiction compilations Meetings in Infinity and The Pure Product. The creative playfulness implicit in the “what-if” speculations of these stories extends to Kessel’s work as a novelist. Good News from Outer Space sketches a satirical portrait of a dysfunctional America on the eve of the twenty-first century, obsessed with alien invasion and millennial irrationality. Corrupting Dr. Nice is a screwball time-travel story involving a father-daughter team of flimflam artists who traverse timelines and alternate histories in search of victims. Kessel has also written the novel Freedom Beach in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly.
“I’ve been thinking about devils. I mean if there are devils in the world, if there are people in the world who represent evil, is it our duty to exterminate them?”
JOHN CHEEVER,
“The Five-Forty-Eight”
AS SHE SAT in her office, waiting—for exactly what she did not know—Dr. Evans hoped that it wasn’t going to be another bad day. She needed a cigarette and a drink. She swiveled the chair around to face the closed venetian blinds beside her desk, leaned back and laced her hands behind her head. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The air wafting down from the ventilator in the ceiling smelled of machine oil. It was cold. Her face felt it, but the bulky sweater kept the rest of her warm. Her hair felt greasy. Several minutes passed in which she thought of nothing. There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” she said absently.
Havelmann entered. He had the large body of an athlete gone slightly soft, thick, gray hair and a lined face. At first glance he didn’t look sixty. His well-tailored blue suit badly needed pressing.
“Doctor?”
Evans stared at him for a moment. She would kill him. She looked down at the desk, rubbed her forehead with her hand. “Sit down,” she said.
She took the pack of cigarettes from the desk drawer. “Would you care to smoke?”
The old man took one. She watched him carefully. His brown eyes were rimmed with red; they looked apologetic.
“I smoke too much,” he said. “But I can’t quit.”
She gave him a light. “More people around here are quitting every day.”
Havelmann exhaled smoothly. “What can I do for you?”
What can I do for you, sir.
“First, I want to play a little game.” Evans took a handkerchief out of a pocket. She moved a brass paperweight, a small model of the Lincoln Memorial, to the center of the desk blotter. “I want you to watch what I’m doing, now.”
Havelmann smiled. “Don’t tell me—you’re going to make it disappear, right?”
She tried to ignore him. She covered the paperweight with the handkerchief. “What’s under this handkerchief?”
“Can we put a little bet on it?”
“Not this time.”
“A paperweight.”
“That’s wonderful.” Evans leaned back with finality. “Now I want you to answer a few questions.”
The old man looked around the office curiously: at the closed blinds, at the computer terminal and keyboard against the wall, at the pad of switches in the corner of the desk. His eyes came to rest on the mirror opposite the window. “That’s a two-way mirror.”
Evans sighed. “No kidding.”
“Are you recording this?”
“Does it matter to you?”
“I’d like to know. Common courtesy.”
“Yes, we’re being videotaped. Now answer the questions.”
Havelmann seemed to shrink in the face of her hostility. “Sure.”
“How do you like it here?”
“It’s O.K. A little boring. A man couldn’t even catch a disease here, from the looks of it, if you know what I mean. I don’t mean any offense, doctor. I haven’t been here long enough to get the feel of the place.”
Evans rocked slowly back and forth. “How do you know I’m a doctor?”
“Aren’t you a doctor? I thought you were. This is a hospital, isn’t it? So I figured when they sent me in to see you you must be a doctor.”
“I am a doctor. My name is Evans.”
“Pleased to meet you, Dr. Evans.”
She would kill him. “How long have you been here?”
The man tugged on his earlobe. “I must have just got here today. I don’t think it was too long ago. A couple of hours. I’ve been talking to the nurses at their station.”
What she wouldn’t give for three fingers of Jack Daniels. She looked at him over the steeple of her fingers. “Such talkative nurses.”
“I’m sure they’re doing their jobs.”
“I’m sure. Tell me what you were doing before you came to this . . . hospital.”
“You mean right before?”
“Yes.”
“I was working.”
“Where do you work?”
“I’ve got my own company—ITG Computer Systems. We design programs for a lot of people. We’re close to getting a big contract with Ma Bell. We swing that and I can retire by the time I’m forty—if Uncle Sam will take his hand out of my pocket long enough for me to count my change.”
Evans made a note on her pad. “Do you have a family?”
Havelmann looked at her steadily. His gaze was that of an earnest young college student, incongruous on a man of his age. He stared at her as if he could not imagine why she would ask him these abrupt questions. She detested his weakness; it raised in her a fury that pushed her to the edge of insanity. It was already a bad day, and it would get worse.
“I don’t understand what you’re after,” Havelmann said, with considerable dignity. “But just so your record shows the facts: I’ve got a wife, Helen, and two kids. Ronnie’s nine and Susan’s five. We have a nice big house and a Lincoln and a Porsche. I follow the Braves and I don’t eat quiche. What else would you like to know?”
“Lots of things. Eventually I’ll find them out.” Evans’ voice was cold. “Is there anything you’d like to ask me? How you came to be here? How long you’re going to have to stay? Who you are?”
His voice went similarly cold. “I know who I am.”
“Who are you, then?”
“My name is Robert Havelmann.”
“That’s right,” Doctor Evans said calmly. “What year is it?”
Havelmann watched her warily, as if he were about to be tricked. “What are you talking about? It’s 1984.”
“What time of year?”
“Spring.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-five.”
“What do I have under this handkerchief?”
Havelmann looked at the handkerchief on
the desk as if noticing it for the first time. His shoulders tightened and he looked suspiciously at Evans.
“How should I know?”
HE WAS BACK again that afternoon, just as rumpled, just as innocent. How could a person get old and still be innocent? She could not remember things ever being that easy. “Sit down,” she said.
“Thanks. What can I do for you, doctor?”
“I want to follow up on the argument we had this morning.”
Havelmann smiled. “Argument? This morning?”
“Don’t you remember talking to me this morning?”
“I never saw you before.”
Evans watched him coolly. The old man shifted in his chair.
“How do you know I’m a doctor?”
“Aren’t you a doctor? They told me I should go in to see Dr. Evans in room 10.”
“I see. If you weren’t here this morning, where were you?”
Havelmann hesitated.
“Let’s see—I was at work. I remember telling Helen—the wife—that I’d try to get home early. She’s always ragging me because I stay late. The company’s pretty busy right now: big contract in the works. Susan’s in the school play, and we have to be there by eight. And I want to get home soon enough before then to do some yardwork. It looked like a good day for it.”
Evans made a note: “What season is it?”
Havelmann fidgeted like a child, looked at the window, where the blinds were still closed.
“Spring,” he said. “Sunny, warm—very nice weather. The redbuds are just starting to come out.”
Without a word Evans got out of her chair and went to the window. She opened the blinds, revealing a barren field swept with drifts of snow. Dead grass whipped in the strong wind and the sky roiled with clouds.
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