“Yeah,” called the crowd, caustic and mostly young. He grinned at them and they back at him. The Santa Claus ho’s came from the man being mashed by the elephant outside, and Kwan’s squint was well-rooted by now, not much more distressed than a standard sun-squint but limiting the amount that the eyes took in.
“You do?” Turning a bit toward the knot of whites, he dawdled, as if such a personal stunt was humiliating to perform in front of a bunch of Negroes, who were quick to sense this, however. Several pressed in, looking at all those blue bruises.
“Which arm?” he asked.
“Left!” they shouted. And plenty of whites were panting as well, until his contempt grew so delicious to him he couldn’t bear it and wheeled around to the blacks again.
“How about both arms?”
People broke into smiles and nodded. He leaned from the stage, stroking the longest hatpins. “You may expect I sterilize these things. No, as a matter of fact, just the opposite.” He dropped them and rolled them under his shoe. “The trouble is, a platform like this is never awfully dirty; not the real vicious germs. How about it? Put some on for me, would you? Give me some germs.”
Ha! They were startled. Those who didn’t freeze up were excited. “You want to get poorly, huh? Over here, babe!”
Musical Tons mixed his colors and took from the young and the old, leaning out to give everybody a chance to contribute the smudge off their hands. The women acted as if they were touching a snake, and one fellow had a real brainstorm and licked the pin when it came to him.
“Good. Let’s get the worst of it. Give me some more.”
He picked a white volunteer to help push the needles through. “You’re not much use, are you? Is he, folks?” It was hard going with the first one, particularly on the far side of his arm. The point was dulled so that nothing important inside would be cut. Once the pain started, though, his zest went away; he was deadpan. It seemed like distasteful labor to him rather than pain. Kwan felt twinges penetrating his limbs too.
Anguished figures around the room were painted with blood, but he might have been digging a sewer hole. When he had hatpins sticking through both his arms, “How’s this?” he said. “Enough, or do you want ’em through my legs too?”
“Up your old ass, man. Let’s see the whole thing!”
He smiled toothily like a dog. “Everywhere? Okay, but your job’s the filth. I want all you have. Armpits, that’s right, you got the idea.”
The racial divisions were gone. It was between those who froze and those who warmed. The pins that were already in obstructed his muscles when he was pushing the new pins through and he looked like a man from Mars equipped for space signals. “How about it?” He pointed to marks on the side of his neck. “Sometimes if I have a big crowd I’ll put one through here. Are you people big?”
“Yeah, big. Big as butter,” they yelled, with the grins of a gangster movie emptying.
He laughed. “No, you’re not. You’re too small.” He drew out the pins and rubbed the blood drops at each exit point into one of his hands like a powder.
• • •
Kwan loafed in a bingo parlor for an hour—a collection of souls who were more his own age. The sun got low. The whistle-pitched roar from the beach subsided. Instead there were drumming parties and bonfires, shouting, and stone-throwing. A girl belly danced. Gangs of kids with handkerchiefs around their heads were swinging clubs. The beach was like a checkerboard, with whites in certain parts and blacks in other parts. Kwan watched the pitching machines pitch baseballs and watched the Scorpion, the Steeplechase. The lights strung over all of the rides went on, and a boy ran along the boardwalk setting the wastebaskets afire. Kwan steamed in his bathhouse again. He sat in a bar, played bingo another half-hour, then saw the jail pen cleared. As this was underneath the boardwalk, an amphitheater was formed around it by the ramps going up. A large crowd gathered, and, since the prisoners came out singly to the paddy wagon, the process was a long one, each fellow making his moment in the limelight just as dramatic as he could. For some it was the last steps of a death march, for some the last steps to the stake. They stalked like concentration camp victims. They wept dementedly and stumbled, protesting, with glances at the sky. Soon afterward the riot that had been brewing finally broke out. It wasn’t anything to see, just cobra-mongoose-jumping and strangled yells, figures running dimly and hammering down with their sticks. First the Italians were outnumbered, and then the blacks. New blacks came, more Italians, and then again new blacks, who were sweeping the bench when the cops sirened in.
Kwan wandered through a side alley to get a last feel of the sand. He took his shoes off for the fifth time that day. He couldn’t decide whether to go straight home or stop downtown along the way.
He noticed a colored woman who was sitting against a post in the darkness near him. “Hey you,” she said. He was cautious—he had started to leave—but turned and edged toward her, kicking ice cream cups and paper plates.
“I’m Chinese,” he said.
“I know you’re Chinese. Nobody’s mad at you. Nobody’s going to beat you up.” She laughed. The feet on the boardwalk sounded over them.
Lying down, he put his hands behind his head and clasped the post. She fixed a piece of cardboard in the position of a lean-to. Although she was only a youngster, she had a face with glamorous, rich lines, a nose that flared out when she smiled, and very pretty creases in her forehead with which she could pretend surprise.
“I’m Crystal.”
He was impatient now. In his old boardinghouse a Cuban girl had tapped along the rows of single rooms each night, being quick and businesslike.
But she insisted. “Say it.”
“Clystal.”
“Crystal!” she giggled. “No, Crystal. Say it.”
“Clystal.” He clutched the pole and watched her tongue.
“Crystal. You trying?”
“I hold on,” Kwan said.
“Yes, you hold on as hard as you can. First say it, though.”
“Clystal.”
“Crystal!” she shrieked in giggles, making him wait.
The Beaver House
THE OMPOMPANOOSUC SKIRLED through a sequence of close-hedged passages with blowdowns everywhere and huge rock heaps in the channel that the water pounded into and next to which the horses had to slide and hop and skid, as Charley’s party continued pushing upriver. When the pitch of the ridges permitted it, they stayed above these difficulties, and Cecil lagged behind with the dog pack in case anybody was following. Periodically also the river spread out on its best behavior with a spear-point glitter, a fish-scale glisten, wriggles by the frantic millions glistering in the sunlight—its high-key rattling sibilance louder than a rustle but softer than a roar.
The dogs howled at night, and Cecil’s elderly gray shepherd Kaiser got bite marks on his muzzle from unrealistic sexual aspirations. Nevertheless, he’d spring into a pool, spring out, jump in again with a splash, facing the other way around, and playfully chew on underwater sticks, when Coffee was palling with him.
“Are we going all the way to China?” Sutton joked, riding in his tireless fat-man’s slouch, and ever more contented to be where he was.
Charley silently knitted up the miles like yarn; old men so often looked like old women anyhow. Though daily they were in the mountains, when they forded tributary rivers or creeks they could catch a glimpse of a grander topography behind these preliminary peaks which had such an extra dimension that Cecil remembered the story of Jack and the beanstalk—mountains which carried the shock of the first grizzly tracks he’d seen, with the indentations of the claws extending out beyond the outline of the toes as a black bear’s would never have; mountains large the way a shaggy-throated Western raven was bigger than an Eastern crow.
In the forestland, they’d started encountering black bear tracks, but whenever the country opened into grassy parks and rockslide areas where the sun hit hard again, the bear marks had been left by grizzlies. �
��Wherever you can’t climb a tree,” as Charley explained it, because if they could catch them the grizzlies ate the blacks, but a grizzly couldn’t climb trees like a black.
Though Sally hadn’t the best nose in the pack, more than any of the rest of them she now understood that bears were what most interested Cecil, and focused upon puzzling out bear signs for him. One fine day she turned up a set of prints with each hind paw as big as both of Cecil’s boots, each forepaw the size of his two hands, and claw tips that registered like five dimples in the dirt a finger’s length in front of the toes as a kind of last word and a shock even to look at. The bear had strolled about, scuffing its sandy feet across bare rocks but then walking in wet places as if for the pleasure of feeling soft mud on its toes.
They’d camped early because Charley wished once more to get rid of his nagging premonition that somebody—white outlaws or a Sikink raiding band—was trailing him. With Sutton he rode back a few miles to lie in wait beside the path while Margaret worked at housekeeping repairs and Cecil lingered over the bear’s progress, wondering if he couldn’t insert himself into its mentality—whether besides following its tracks he wasn’t able to pause at the same places and peer in the same directions toward which the bear had pointed its ingenious nose.
At first the creature’s meanderings seemed rather muzzy as he painstakingly followed it around. Then the chronology of where she’d gone and what she’d munched on seemed not muzzy at all, but personal. He almost forgot she was a grizzly; she was a fellow citizen of the valley of the Ompompanoosuc, enjoying its complexities like him, and he tasted several of the plants that she had sampled or feasted upon and smelled the traces of herself she’d left. He was startled when, after a mile or two, her tracks abruptly swung across a short red beach, straight into a deep stream just where it entered the river, and vanished into a purling current which was only ankle deep before it shelved into the thicker water. The current was still chipping away at her last print as if she were right beyond there, under the black surface.
Cecil explored this tributary, with its tea-dark water and red beaches, for another mile, until her tracks reemerged in a marshy patch—she’d probably traveled on the other side—where the dogs sent up an explosion of birds, and frogs plopped desperately for cover. Two beavers which had been dragging a birch bough out of the woods rocked back on their heels, clattering their teeth, as the dogs raced at them. Then they tumbled into the nearest of their stick-hauling canals, which was so full of water the dogs didn’t dare to try to grab them.
All the trees at the spot were beaver-bit. White chips lay all over, and unfinished business—stumps with topknot twirls of sappy wood, tree trunks that had split in falling, and loose branches—everywhere. Beavers, deer, and bear that were nocturnal back east were out and busy in broad daylight in this new country. A marten, too, hung spellbound in plain sight, watching Cecil from a spruce. There was lots of beaver feed, aspens and birches so dense that he was wiping spider webs off his face. He stumbled, the dogs tangling his feet—how silly it was to have so many of them with him, scrapping and tussling with each other.
The bear had nipped off fireweed shoots and nibbled biscuit-root, parsley, and cow parsnip; had consumed several frogs, to judge from the prints and scraps left in the mud, and parts of half a dozen rotting fish and clusters of salamanders that had been eating the fish. But when he noticed that these tracks appeared smaller than the earlier ones, it occurred to Cecil that this might be a second bear. He was suddenly glad all the dogs were along, and if they were nonplussed a bit by the bear’s activities, they were bolstered by him, their magic man, as he liked to describe his position among them when he felt smug.
Red-rock side hills rose prettily three hundred feet in the sunshine to ledges that supported junipers and pines. The little canyon had no end as yet. Modest waterfalls twined down and you could see a game trail descending from higher terrain. The floor widened into slough-grass meadows, as Cecil dawdled past beaver dams and ponds at a deliberate pace, the water gradually dwindling till he could observe the opposite beach so clearly he saw tracks emerge from, reenter and reappear at the edge of black water there.
He sat down awhile to soak his feet, rest his butt, and check his rifle. The gray shepherd had not been enjoying himself even at this easy pace, and Cecil was reminded of a dog in Maine whose master had brought it into a bar one night, intending to get drunk and pick a fight with some of the other loggers, and you could see that the dog knew very well that in about half an hour its master would be on the floor, that it would have to jump into the fight and try to save him, and would feel the spiked boots in the room, the fists and axe handles on its ribs. He realized that Kaiser, who a hundred miles out of Horse Swim had already regretted leaving his German master, was gearing up regardless to face the charge of a bear in order to save Cecil if he had to.
Smoky was also fearful, but Smoky was afraid of his own inner deterioration even when there were no bears nearby. Roy’s hound Yallerbitch, like Sally, was hardly bothering to trail the scent, it was so strong—perhaps was trying to ignore it—and the two huskies, as tall on their feet as Cecil’s hips, clung close to him, as did the goat. The goat had grown a veritable mane up to the top of its head from all of its adventures and, devil-may-care, was scratching its hip with the tip of one horn. But why had he brought the goat?
Tracks had materialized from another direction. Again he was puzzled, because although he wasn’t seeing two sets together, his impression was that they weren’t the tracks of a single bear. He knew that adults didn’t travel together, yet the difference in size wasn’t so disparate that it could be a sow with her yearling cub. The tracks were alarmingly large—but with his gun and his dogs, what had he come for except to trail bears?
He was sneaking slowly along like a deer hunter, but pulled up short at a ring of sparkling drops of water fifteen feet wide on the bank, where the bear must have climbed out after a swim and shaken herself. Thereupon—realizing he’d just been staring at other tracks—he remembered that since this was June it was the courtship season, a brief, uncharacteristically sociable period for bears. Twice in Maine he’d crept up close to mating black bears to watch them play and paw and nuzzle one another, and belatedly he recognized that the wayward footprints crisscrossing the creek had not been made by a lone animal foraging but by two creatures courting. That was why it had been so simple to see what they had been eating: they hadn’t finished anything.
Of course he wanted to drop back for at least a mile. There were never cubs near mating bears, and cubs were what he was after. What was he doing? What foolishness, to track this bear of bears so carelessly; and with the dogs, a surreptitious withdrawal was now impossible. He was in a brushy stretch, no trees to climb. The hound and the duck dog were ahead, Coffee, Smoky, and the huskies behind them, and the goat and shepherd next to him. The creek had been dammed into a two-acre pond in front of him on his left side, and he could see the impressive dome of a beaver house across a diffuse swirl of currents; also a smaller one. On his right side, he had a few dozen yards of meadow grass to operate in, then dense alder bushes that would provide better cover for a bear than for him, and finally the steep side hill with occasional trees spaced about on ledges above that he could never reach if he was being chased. A game trail descending from unknown territory seemed only to add to the sinister possibilities of whatever awaited him.
He heard his dogs already breaking sticks, scrimmaging with a mystery beast around a bend in the path, and hoped that maybe it was just another beaver. Moving sideways, he held his rifle against his chest, but stopped dead when he caught a reflection in a clear puddle ahead of him which seemed to be that of a grizzly sitting dog fashion in the brush with a head like a stump, plain brown and stationary as though neutral, head-on to him, not facing the yelps of the pack. In contrast, the commotion in the alders grew to an uproar as a second grizzly, as purple-colored as a plum, plunged around a boulder in pursuit of Sally and the huskies. Bi
ts of flowers were stuck to her lips from the vegetation she’d been feeding on, but the enormousness of her front legs at such close range astounded Cecil. Under the bulk of her hump, they were undiminished from her shoulders all the way down to her paws—paws that promptly veered toward him, as lithe as a cat’s. But she paused and waved the right one as if a dog had bitten it, half upright on her haunches and fulminating as if her privacy had been outraged, as well as the sanctity of her foot.
He didn’t fire, because he thought he’d be killed for sure if he did; and despite all of her violent manifestations, her elbows as thick as a ship’s timbers, she had a prissy and fastidious air that delayed her slightly. Sniffing for information, she was uncertain where to rush or who to charge. He couldn’t guess whether she had met a human being before, but in spite of her air of fussing, there was a pell-mell daring about her, a freedom such as he’d not seen in many animals. The dogs had run straight to him for protection, had then scattered when they sensed how frail a reed he was, but now were circling tightly—Moose on three legs—in order not to abandon him, while the shepherd, his hackles up, his muzzle high, although his hind legs were cringing, backed into Cecil’s knees, preparing to die defending him, just as he would have died for the German grocer in Horse Swim in front of a holdup man, or if a drunk had owned him, under the hobnailed boots of bullies in a bar.
The male bear broke from a standstill into a lope, bigger, calmer, bluffer than the female but scarcely looking at Cecil—looking at the goat instead, which was still hanging next to him. Cecil fired a shot into the sky, not because his friends would ever hear him, but to try doing something to save himself, and yet afraid of wounding either bear.
That loud report decided the female. She bounded at Cecil like a round-backed cat going for a mouse. He was so scared he dropped his rifle and snatched at it wrong-side-to. He would have been a goner if she hadn’t been blocked for a moment because the male, intent upon the goat, collided with her. Cecil sprinted out of the way, but the billy did the one thing he had learned to do when chased by the dogs. Instead of running as quick as he could, he stopped so as not to be mistaken for an antelope or deer and swung his little horns around. The bear didn’t even pause to swat him, simply lifted him in his mouth, puncturing the ribs on both sides of his backbone, and carried him horizontally and alive like that toward the same thicket of brush, till with a last twist he died.
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