The Bear Went Over the Mountain

by William Kotzwinkle

  Eunice stared at the burly young writer to whom she’d just been introduced. He resembled Daddy Anvil in his shape and unsuspected strength (Anvil could outrun government agents through a pitch-black swamp with barrels of booze strapped to his back). And there was something else about this man, something—well, angelic was the word. His eyes were cast shyly toward the floor, and he seemed unable to speak to her. Since her angelic revelation, Eunice had remained aloof from men, claiming that frosted-haired angels were woman’s natural partners, but there was an otherworldly force coming off Hal Jam, as if he were comtemplating the invisible. He was, in fact, contemplating the smell coming from all the iron-pumping maidens in the gym. Strong stuff, he noted to himself. Makes a bear edgy.

  Eunice took a sidelong glance at herself in the workout mirror. She’d been in the pool, which changed her pilgrimlike hairdo into a sleek cap that showed off the Cotton cheekbones and full lips, and Gadson was thinking to himself that maybe she was some kind of split personality, for the sensual woman in front of him was definitely not the prudish author of Angels in Bed, who wrote that the spiritual intentions of the winged beings should be realized through chastely imagined pillow fantasies. The imaginary angel would lie beside the reader through the night, in a feathery embrace that was thrillingly un-consummated.

  “Elliot’s the best editor there is,” said Eunice to the bear when Gadson had mounted a stair climber to nowhere. “He discovered me when I didn’t know jackshit about writing.”

  The bear shuffled uneasily from foot to foot. All around the room breasts bounced and thighs trembled, as if huge lady bears were trundling toward him on a forest path.

  All these females could be mine, he said to himself. All I need to do is tear the place apart and hammer the piss out of the other males.

  Might that be the wrong kind of exercise?

  Possibly. Best to withdraw before I go wrong.

  “Well, good-bye,” he said, and turned toward the door.

  Eunice Cotton hadn’t chased a man since her last hairdressers’ convention, and then she’d been plastered. Now she was the servant of an angel. At least she thought she was; sometimes she thought she was just crazy. Sometimes the voice of hairdressing inside her would say, Eunice, you’re rowing with only one oar in the water.

  “Isn’t it a beautiful day? Fall is really here.” She caught up to him on the sidewalk outside the health club. “Do you mind if I walk with you a ways?” Why, thought Eunice, I’m positively goin’ after this fat man.

  · · ·

  The head of a polished marble cherub was between them on the coffee table. It was one of hundreds of angels Eunice had in her apartment. Her collection ranged from fine antique European paintings to angels sculpted out of logs with a chain saw. A cheap wax angel with a wick in its head could move her as deeply as an angel painted by a Renaissance master. Sometimes her mood was lofty, and sometimes it was sentimental, and when it was sentimental you couldn’t beat a plastic angel from Hong Kong. She’d set that little sucker right alongside her word processor and its sappy smile would get the inspiration flowing out of her, about how a woman can get plugged into angels and stay plugged in, no matter what kind of crap is going on in her life.

  The bear was being cautious. His biological clock was already screwed up from rutting a female out of season. He’d been waking in the middle of the night and scratching on the walls.

  Eunice sat back in her chair, between two tables, each of which held angel lamps, the winged creatures cast in bronze and supporting white shades, in which other angels floated, their bodies glowing softly. There was a life-size angel in one corner of the living room, painted in Easter-egg pastels and wearing one of Eunice’s hats down over one eye. In the opposite corner was a Baroque masterpiece by Franz Schwanthaler, the figure’s exquisitely carved wing tip sporting one of Eunice’s umbrellas. The fireplace andirons were angels, and the oval mirror over the fireplace was held in the outspread arms of a gilt angel. A round marble-topped café table in the window had for its pedestal a muscular, scantily clad angel Elliot Gadson was particularly fond of. Angels supported other pieces of furniture throughout the apartment, smiling vacantly, like beautiful young men on tranquilizers. The bedposts were four angels, their bare feet seeming to float in the air. It was from the presence of these four handsome figures that Eunice had conceived her Angels in Bed. There were little magnetic angels in the kitchen, attached to the refrigerator, and others, shaped like jolly bowls, held utensils. In the bathroom a brass angel on the wall dispensed toilet paper. Another supported the soap dish in the shower, his aloof expression possibly meant to assure the bather that her naked form, glistening with bath gel, would not cause the angel to fall from grace. The bear was puzzled by all the angels surrounding him. He didn’t know about angels, and thought he might have missed something about human beings, that maybe they came with wings they kept folded neatly out of sight most of the time.

  Eunice put Rachmaninoff’s Vespers on her disc player. She might be uneducated swamp trash, but she knew heavenly music when she heard it.

  Human voices in potent musical combinations were new to the bear, and his ears rotated toward the sound. This was the inscrutable human essence, and it struck him hard. Humans were so complex, so mysterious, so rich in expression. What could a bear offer to compare with this?

  Eunice saw him plugging in on a very high level. If she needed any further affirmation about his character, this was it. She was certain he heard angels too.

  The bear closed his eyes as the sound enveloped him with its grandeur. Female voices rose, male voices descended, male and female blending in a weave of feeling that dwarfed his own crude emotion, his grunts and snorts of pleasure or discomfort.

  “What are you thinking about, Hal?”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her, then looked out her window toward the park and the buildings beyond it, on Fifth Avenue. The towers of light the human world had built seemed to be staring at him with innumerable eyes, like a sky full of owls. When feeling insecure, attack, said the ancient voice of his animal soul. He clenched and unclenched his paws. Tear the place apart. You may not be as smart as humans but you’re stronger than any of them.

  “I’ve been feeling tapped out myself lately,” said Eunice, sitting down across from him. “I’ve done four angel books and I’ll be goddamned if I can think of an angle for a new one. Everything a writer does is a sputtering candle, isn’t it?” she asked, and as she said the words, recognized them as having come not from her, but from the angel within her. Hal Jam had called it forth. She just knew he had a bunch of high-level angels following him around.

  The bear went to the window, his movements agitated. He’d stood on mountaintops and looked at vast tracts of silent wilderness, and felt his place in it. But what was his place in this city? All he had was an appetite, the simple, gobbling hunger of a brute.

  The music soared where he couldn’t follow. He felt like a mouse in a beehive. Mice like honey too, and sneak into a hive, not knowing the peril that awaits them. They’re stung to death in the entranceway, attacked by the concentrated force of the bees. He was in the great human hive, listening to the hum from its countless rooms, where the human mystery was celebrated, and the human sting was held in readiness, to paralyze the intruder. His dark eyes lit up with anxiety, and he spun away from the window.

  “Hal—”

  He saw a tree and yanked it up by the roots, as bears will do when they get upset. The tree was an antique iron clothes tree shaped like an angel, and its roots were shallow but it still made an effective weapon. He swung it around, shattering the disc player with its music and the life-size plaster angel beside it. A second swing tangled him in the window curtains, which increased his panic. He raced around the room like a deranged Bedouin, trailing the curtains.

  Eunice immediately grasped the situation. Her researches into angels had given her a shocking piece of news: demons were far more numerous than angels, as they could reprod
uce themselves sexually. The Theatrum Diabolorum of Martin Luther’s time put the number of demons at 10,000 billion. How many more of the little sleazeballs were around now! And one of them had Hal Jam by the scruff of the neck. Having opened himself to the higher vibration, Jam had made it easy for the lower forces to enter. This good man was a prize for the archfiend Ahriman and his legions.

  “Ahriman, cut the crap!” Eunice grabbed the end of the dangling curtain and yanked. The bear drew up short, caught by the throat, paws flapping at the air.

  “I won’t have trashy devils in my house,” yelled Eunice. “You hear?”

  The bear heard the dangerous female sound and reminded himself that male bears who ignore that warning can wind up minus a large patch of fur and skin. So he did what male bears do in such circumstances: he pretended he was looking the other way. Doing this while wrapped in a curtain was new for him, but he had to adapt. He picked up an angel paperweight and examined it with a show of interest.

  “Out from this man, proud devil! In the name of Saint Michael, leave him in peace!”

  The bear continued to pretend he always wore curtains while examining paperweights.

  “Back into your pit, Ahriman, you tomcattin’ piece of filth!” Eunice was pleased to see Jam calming down, and it made her see how necessary it was for people to call upon the angels during temper tantrums, depressions, dark moods, in fact during all the instances of uncertainty and craziness that were invitations to Ahriman and his fiends. She reached for her notebook and pen.

  “Well, good-bye,” said the bear, taking off the curtain. Things had calmed down, and nobody’d sent for the zookeeper. He’d been upset about something but it was over now. He walked toward the door.

  The shock is unspeakable, wrote Eunice, when your husband suddenly turns violent. Is this the man I married? Could this be him, tearing down the curtains?

  The bear walked to the elevator and pressed the button. He did not reflect on the terror that’d gripped him only minutes before and the atrocious behavior he’d displayed. It’d happened but it wasn’t happening now. That’s all that matters to a bear.

  You can forget about psychology, because it won’t work. Because it isn’t your husband. In fact, it’s a devil. Eunice had her new book—Angels in Your Arguments.

  “It’s brilliant,” said Gadson. He was seated in Eunice’s living room, with Eunice beside him on the couch. They’d just read through the first two chapters of Angels in Your Arguments, with Rachmaninoff’s Vespers playing in the background. “How did you ever think of it?”

  “Hal Jam gave me the idea. Do you really like it?”

  “I love it. We need a book like this, Eunice. I’ve ruined so many relationships with stupid, senseless bickering. An angel in the midst of all that would have been such a help.” Gadson’s eyes went to the Baroque angel in the corner, its pouting lips and naked arms and torso heartbreakingly reminiscent of a Cuban busboy who’d shared life with him recently. They’d quarreled bitterly over a soapy sponge, Gadson preferring to wash dishes with lots of hot water and very little soap. To think that I asked him to leave, that beautiful creature, over a sponge. “Yes, an angel is what we need, Eunice. That neutral third party we can turn to. You say Hal gave you the idea?”

  “He’s an angel in disguise,” said Eunice. “His simplicity? His innocence?”

  “Very unusual,” admitted Gadson.

  “But then you read his book—and I’ve read it now, every word of it—” Eunice pointed to the manuscript of Destiny and Desire on the coffee table. “—and you see that behind his innocence is a very old soul.” She breathed a sigh for all the old souls like herself and Hal who had returned to earth during this troubled period. “We’ve become quite close.”

  “How close?”

  “We have a deep spiritual bond.”

  “Come on, Eunice, this is your Aunt Elliot you’re talking to. Are you sleeping with him?”

  “We’re beyond that.”

  “Nobody’s beyond that.”

  “We have lunch together. We walk in the park.” She gestured toward the fall foliage outside the window. “We hardly even speak. Somehow it’s not necessary.”

  “He’s tight-lipped all right,” said Gadson. “But silence is not you, Eunice.”

  “He calms me. And I think I’ve helped him too. You know that Ahriman tries to possess him?”

  “Ahriman?”

  “The prince of evil.” Eunice laid a hand on a statue of Saint Michael, mass-produced in Korea. “I called in the archangel to kick Ahriman’s butt.”

  Gadson nodded thoughtfully. When he was with Eunice, he let his rational mind take a rest.

  Eunice leaned toward him, the statue of Saint Michael in her hands. “You’ve heard Hal talk about traps and snares?”

  “I’ve always found it odd.”

  “Traps and snares of the devil, Elliot. Hal knows he’s being stalked by Ahriman.”

  “How chilling,” said Elliot sympathetically, and looked around at the winged shadows on the walls. He thought of Eunice as a woman who’d sunk backward through several hundred years of evolution, and out had fluttered angels. They were medieval mental artifacts, he supposed, still frolicking around in the buried layers of the mind, still capable of influencing behavior, and that’s why people bought her books.

  “Ahriman is after everyone, Elliot.”

  “He’ll never get us, darling.” Gadson put his arm around his author and squeezed her shoulder. Then he pointed to the new manuscript. “You realize, of course, that Angels in Your Arguments leads directly to Angels in Court?”

  Eunice clapped her hands. “Elliot, you’re a genius!”

  “When suing our neighbor, our employer, our spouse, our government, or a perfect stranger, the well-prepared litigant should always have an angel on the case.”

  “Since my last book, the fact that Frost used the word like as a simile .54 times per page is common knowledge.” Dr. Alfred Settlemire of the University of Maine was riding in the automobile of his colleague from the English department, Bernard Wheelock. They were on a road that ran between large tracts of timberland, from which pulp trucks nosed out occasionally, loaded with spruce logs. “But,” continued Settlemire as he stroked his goatee, “it isn’t commonly known that he used as if .07 times per page. That’s the substance of my new study on him. One needn’t tell you the significance of this.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said Wheelock enthusiastically, as he was junior man in the department, and Settlemire’s study of as ifs was already under contract with a major university press. It was inconceivable to Wheelock that anyone gave a fuck about the number of times Frost used as if, but he knew he had much to learn about success.

  “Temporal simultaneity, you see,” continued Settlemire. “Crucial to grasping Frost. Which is where those .07 as ifs per page come in. Does one make oneself clear?”

  “Absolutely.” What Wheelock was most clear on was that cutbacks in the English department were anticipated now that government funding had fallen off. Settlemire, with his six-foot swaggering frame, his handsome head, and his as ifs, was a permanent fixture in the department. Wheelock’s own position was shaky. But if Bramhall were out of the picture …

  “How I wish Frost were still alive,” said Settlemire. “I’d love to present him with my as ifs.”

  “I’m sure he would appreciate them.”

  “One feels connected to his spirit anyway,” said Settlemire. “Diligence, perhaps that’s the secret. Pouncing on the as ifs.”

  “I envy you that,” said Wheelock, who had yet to pounce on anything.

  “Your work is still gestating,” said Settlemire kindly.

  “I think this is Bramhall’s road.”

  They took the winding unpaved road for several miles, to Bramhall’s lane. “I wonder,” said Wheelock, “if what we’ve heard about his health is true.”

  “Any man who sets out to make a deliberate copy of a best-seller is flirting with ethical fragmen
tation.” Settlemire smiled a superior smile, but said no more, and Wheelock felt a peculiar mixture of apprehension and hope. The head of the English department had sent them out to reconnoiter the situation. Bramhall had been ignoring all department correspondence, and his sabbatical was over. Rumors were flying around about a mental breakdown. The head of the department had to know. The question in Wheelock’s head was this: If Bramhall goes, will I replace him? Much as Wheelock had always liked Bramhall, he was hoping to find him dead or out of his mind.

  They parked in front of Bramhall’s cabin and got out. Settlemire knocked loudly on the door. The knock went unanswered. “Perhaps the fields?” Settlemire led the way, through the apple orchard, along a wagon path. “He’s wasted his sabbatical, that much I can tell you. When I took my last sabbatical I worked, Wheelock. I counted likes. It was a grueling task, but one knew it was essential to any sort of understanding of Frost. Nowadays, of course, the computer does the counting. That’s how Pettingzoo wrote his Numbers of Nowhere in Wallace Stevens. One’s point is this, however—one must work. Not make a blatant copy of Don’t, Mr. Drummond.” Settlemire winged a stone into the woods with a smooth, graceful snap. “Modern American literature is Bramhall’s field. He could have been counting likes in any number of authors. I’ve broken the ground. The way is clear. A new branch of critical thought has been opened. He could have had his place in that movement. But no. He chose otherwise.”

  Wheelock pointed toward the barn door. Bramhall had just appeared in it, glancing furtively outward. Wheelock’s heart leapt. He’s paranoid. Oh, perfect, perfect …