The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  The wide brick schoolhouse showed up on the left, the golf course opened out on the right. "Take the sharp left before the bridge," the Bear advised. "X^'e'll avoid Woodstock and come out on the main road just before Shady. The house is in Shady. There, there, no, before the bridge, there."

  Iris took the turn too quickly and without braking. Once the van regained its balance, they passed alongside the millstream where it widened to the right of the road. The Bear watched it fanning downslope through a series of slaterock shelves, black water swollen with the last of the snowmelt going white at the rips but essentially unperturbed over the shallow falls. The road passed beside a bridge that led off right to town and they began a shallow climb away from the creek past worn wooden houses set amid trees left and right.

  "There's a right we take soon," said the Bear, and Iris steered the van smoothly onto it when it came.

  It seemed a simple bypass at first, but after awhile the road began curling uphill past houses that showed and others hidden up long drives. Most were basic, foursquare wooden constructions, but one showed antebellum columns astride the white dignity of its door, and farther on, a classic log cabin neighbored some architect's angled glass-and-panel wank. The thickening forest was in early leaf; afternoon sunlight dappled down to warble here and there on the ground. A soft wind sent messages through treetops, and a multitude of leaves flickered punctuation into their body of discourse.

  "Is Stanlynn's house like any of these?" Iris asked him.

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  "Not exactly. The thing about the whole area is that it's zoned into state forest parkland so that roadbuilding is restricted and houses have to be close to the roads. That's the only reason the region has survived more or less intact. We get off this twistv-turny zigzag stuff soon."

  "I can handle it," Iris said. Soon they were tipping downhill on straighter two-lane blacktop. They recrossed the stream—^wide and slow here, rippling over shallow ranks of small grey stones—on an aluminum bridge with a sturdy wooden surface, and a quarter mile on they rejoined the region's main artery. Route 212, past a playground and the steamed exhaust fans of a woodsy-looking launderette. They turned left on 212 after letting a convoy of Saabs and Cherokees blow past.

  "It's not far now," said the Bear, and found his heart beating harder than he would have expected. Well, why not? It'll be home for awhile. Better than being lashed to a wheel of fire which my eyes do scald with tears. Better, most ways, than being back in the infernal city while awaiting the next harsh turn of the wheel of law. But I'll be alone here. Iris seems eager to get away from me and who can blame her. I hope Jones comes up to visit now and then. He said he would, but then he's got his own frail agenda these days, and hopeful fish to fiy.

  But what was stirring the Bear up for the most part, he understood, was the sense of a page being turned, of a distinct new chapter opening in the book of his life. Who can tell where it's taking me? Especially considering the proven unreliability of its author. The boy would seem to have some problems. Count no bear happy till he's dead. What a terrific gig. So glad I made this deal.

  "Take the sharp right uphill here," he said in a bit of a hurry. He'd almost missed the turnoff.

  Iris downshifted as the van met the upslope. "Did you see the names of those restaurants back there?" she asked, nodding back toward the road they'd left.

  The Bear had noticed a cluster of buildings lapsided in reds and browns, their shingled roofs grey-white. There'd been a parking lot too, and some signs. "The names? Can't say I did."

  "One was the Bear Cafe, the other was the Little Bear."

  "You're kidding me."

  "And I think the logo for the Little Bear was a bit demeaning."

  "Iris. Say it ain't so."

  "On the sign, the Little Bear was standing upright, holding a bowl in his paws, and he looked a little drunk to me. Something about the way the tip of his tongue stuck out the front of his mouth."

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  "No, please."

  "That's what I saw."

  "Sweet Jesus, where have I come to? Fresh travesty. New farce. One more twist of the plastic knife. Won't it ever stop?"

  "I don't know," Iris told him, "but we're coming to a T intersection. What do I do now?"

  The Bear was holding his head in his paws, trying on the mask of tragedy and finding out it still didn't fit. He was getting a headache anyway. That counted for something. "The house is just there," he said distractedly, not looking.

  "Where?"

  The Bear looked up and pointed to the semicircular driveway across the T junction. He indicated the house with a claw. "Yonda is the castle of my fodda," he said.

  The Bear saw the house behind its three-deep barrier of evenly spaced, thick-trunked evergreens. Their branches didn't even start till ten or fifteen feet up. From where the van had halted at the T, the Bear could make out new growth tipping the ends of the branches with a luminescent inch or two of brighter green. The earth beneath them was carpeted with yearsworth of fallen needles and broken bits of cone. Stanlynn's house—curiously tall, fronted with dark brown shingles, ornamented with white windowframes, then topped with an off-white circumflex of roof onto which brown needles of pine had strewn themselves—stood behind the guardian trees, a short ell coming out of its left side at the rear. It was an awkward-looking place, but it would have to do. He could see Stanlynn's small gold 4WD Subaru wagon parked on the drive in front of the house, hitched to a midsize white-and-orange U-Haul. She's leaving. This shit's for real. A troubled brow of dark grey cloud, bulging with the threat of rain, was rising to overtop the mountain that rose behind the house, but the rest of the sky was clear, and the sun was still awake in it, even perhaps slightly overeager to show off its post-equinoctial abundance of ideas.

  Iris punched the van into first, crossed the two-lane blacktop of the Glasco Turnpike and adjusted right for the leftward branch of the house's gravel drive. The Bear felt the change of traction as the van engaged the gravel, heard the tires crunch and grip, and sensed the sudden hush of pine-tree shade.

  "Give it a honk?" the Bear suggested, but Stanlynn had already appeared at the top of the tall wooden stairs, in the doorway of the windowed-in front porch. She was holding the screen door back with one hand and waving hello with the other. Her big dog. Buster, shouldered alongside her and then

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  remained faithfully in place, ears alert and tail upraised. Hi Bus, thought the Bear, and waved back through the windshield, leaning down as the car pulled up the drive and Stanlynn and Buster ascended his limited rectangle of view. Hi Stanny. Stanlynn showed nice white teeth in a smile of welcome. "You've never met her, right?" the Bear asked Iris sideways.

  "Never," she said, steered the van alongside the Subaru and its trailer and braked to a stop. She gunned the motor once—a bad habit, in the Bear's opinion—before switching the ignition off.

  The Bear listened for a wind in the firs or spruces or whatever—he was a city bear, and knew the names of so few trees—but all he could hear was the absence of the van's own engine and the windrush of the world going past. Then he smelled the living pines, needles lying beneath them, and the rich brown earth. I can live with this, he thought.

  They got out of the van and Buster rushed down the steep wooden stairs, upcurved furry tail waving high to meet his big ol' buddy bear. Bus was a roughly arctic-looking fella with blue-grey eyes and long matted fur in shades of grey and streaks of white. The only thing the Bear had against Stanlynn was that she'd had Buster neutered. Of course Buster'd been trouble when young, and that was before she'd had a chance to meet the Bear and talk with him about such things, and actually Buster didn't seem to mind it much, but still ... the Bear felt a shuddering chill at the thought of it. "Hey Bus hey Bus hey Bus," he said as the dog wagged and tumbled down the stairs at him.

  "Hey Bear hey Bear hey Bear," Buster said back, even if Stanny and Iris couldn't explicitly understand his speech. W
ell, Iris maybe. "Hey Bear hey Bear we're movin' out out out," Buster told him.

  "Hey Bus I'm comin' here I'm moving in in in," said the Bear, and thumped himself on the chest to indicate the exact degree of welcome he would like from the joint's previous animal tenant. Buster raised up and plonked his forefeet on the Bear's big pectorals; the Bear bent his face down, touched noses with Buster and let the dog lick his face a couple of times hello.

  "Are we still on speaking terms?" Stanlynn asked from the top of the stairs. "Or are you only here to see my dog?"

  "Hey, Big Strapping Girl," the Bear called up to her, figuring that would have been her American Indian name, if she'd been an American Indian. She knew lots of them, though, had grown up among Indians out West and had always wanted to introduce him to Chief Oren Lyons, who lived somewhere nearby. Maybe someday, he'd told her, and let it go at that. Stanlynn also knew an Indian named Jazzy Wee-Wah, but he was Cheyenne and lived out

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  West. The Bear thought that Jazzy Wee-Wah was the coolest name he'd ever heard, this side of Vakhtang Gourgastan. He nodded at the car and van in the drive. "I see you're all set."

  "Scon's I can get you all set up," she said, and started to step down from porch level. "This is Iris I assume?"

  "Hello," Iris said. She was standing beside him.

  "Oh yeah, I'm sorry," said the Bear, and took in, by a series of rapid oscillations, this study in female contrasts, Iris all crystalline delicacy and dazzle, Stanlynn a large-sized earthly radiance with curly hair and the apple cheeks of outdoor health. "I should have introduced . . . You mind getting down for a minute. Bus?"

  "Course not," said the dog, and dropped back onto all fours with a thump on the boards at the base of the stairs.

  Stanlynn was wearing a Western shirt and jeans and the Bear hugged her when she reached him and had nudged Buster aside with a knee. "Well, welcome home. Bear," she said, once she had leisure to pull away.

  "You think so?" he asked.

  "For awhile anyway. Iris?" Stanlynn said, turning to her. "Where has he been hiding j/ow?"

  "Not under a blanket," the Bear grumbled, "I can tell you that."

  "Tough luck." Stanlynn grinned at him.

  "Perhaps I've been hiding myself," Iris said. "I might actually be capable of that on my own."

  "Well I'm all ready to go," said Stanlynn, and the Bear noticed her wher-ever-it-was-from Western accent for the first time that day, "so let me show you what there is."

  "Just hke that?" asked the Bear. "So fast?"

  "Just like that. C'mon upstairs."

  "C'mon upstairs," the Bear relayed the message to Iris.

  "Oh thanks," Iris said.

  It was a strange house, awkwardly divided. The living room, which they entered once they had crossed the windowed porch—"You can take the glass out when it gets warmer and put the screens up," Stanlynn told him—^was bifurcated by a bulky greystone chimney rising from the center of the floor, a black iron woodstove set in its mouth. In effect, there was a cutoff living room on one side of the stovepiece and a dining room behind it. Neither was very large. "I left it a little better than semifurnished," Stanlynn said. "I was going to rent it for twice the price to the summer trade, but you're welcome to it now."

  "You left the piano," the Bear said in some wonder. A not-bad Mason &

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  Hamlin upright stood against one of the Hving room walls. Julius had sanded layers of old paint off it and oiled the original fruitwood, which had a lovely grain.

  "For awhile anyhow. You can play it long as you don't claw up the keys. Julius may want it in the city after awhile, and then again I might want it out in Oregon, but you're welcome to it for now."

  "Paradise," said the Bear.

  "Wait and see," Stanlynn advised him. "There's enough bedding, and there's things to sit on. There's about a quarter cord of firewood left—oak, but sometimes I get ash tailings from a baseball-bat factory a whole lot cheaper. You might need to buy some more before summer sets in and the nights warm up, though there's some deadfall you could cut up out back, and I need to show you about the gas tanks and the plumbing. It's not perfect," she told Iris in sum, "but you could get to like it here."

  "I live in the city," Iris said. "I'm going back tonight."

  "Oh."

  The ensuing pause accommodated the three—make that four of them: Buster was back inside, looking up at the Bear to see if anything fun and interesting was up—and might have made room for a half-dozen more.

  "Llamas?" the Bear asked Stanlynn finally.

  "Well I bought three breeding pair, the house is in the foothills of a bunch of mountains bigger than these guys here, I can sleep ten between the house and the outbuildings once I finish the barn, and I've worked out some trekking routes for next year."

  "So it's not the jazz life anymore."

  "Not hardly. Bear. Can I get you something?" she asked Iris, who, looking as delicately radiant as usual, was gazing around in most of the available directions.

  "The ladies' room," Iris inquired. "As it were."

  "WTiere'd you find herV Stanlynn asked the Bear once Iris had taken the indicated route.

  "Years ago," he said, "and I'm not sure who found whom, much less why."

  "How's the house look to you?"

  "Fine," he said without looking. "You know, if it weren't for Julius I might not be playing. Not only did he show me a lot of things on the horn, he was ... an example? Certainly a friend. I know you two broke up, but have you seen him since the leg operation? I spoke with him on the phone and he sounded pretty good, considering."

  Stanlynn nodded. "Losing his leg may have gotten his attention. Maybe he'll treat his diabetes with more respect. Maybe he's decided to live."

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  "Here's hoping," the Bear said.

  "But in any case I'm out of here," she said firmly. "So it's a thousand five hundred a month for the joint. D'you have two months' worth up front?"

  "Yes," gasped the Bear.

  "You're getting it cheap," Stanlynn told him, "especially considering it's mostly furnished. I can get three, even four grand a month for the summer if I want. You've got it for six months clear at this rate, then we can work out whether you want to stay or do I want to put it on the market for sale. It's cheap at a grand five, or don't you believe me?"

  "Of course I believe you." He and Jones had been paying two-sixty a month for their dump in the city. He could feel the princely twenty grand he'd been paid for the record date turning pauper in his paws. What am I doing here? What a world this is. How ready it is for you no matter what you've managed to do lately. The acuity of its aim. The bites it takes out of you. The repeated pounds of flesh.

  A pattering of rain graced the roof above them, or threatened it. "The weather in the mountains," Stanlynn said, looking up.

  "It was a dark and stormy night," the Bear told her.

  "Not yet it isn't."

  "Listen," said the Bear, "you've got to tell me about the names of those restaurants back down there at the bottom of the hill."

  Iris was back among them. "Was that rain I heard?" she asked.

  "I never knew," said the Bear, "even though I've been here a dozen times."

  "That's not possible," Iris told him.

  "You don't get it. They kept it from me. Julius, Stanlynn, Jones."

  The facts, as revealed by Stanlynn before she left, were that not only were the two clustered restaurants down the hill named the Bear Cafe and the Little Bear, but the road junction at whose elbow they were gathered was a town that went by the name of Bearsville.

  "I hate it," said the Bear. "They kept it from me and now I live just up the hill. The hell of it is, it's probably not the last straw. No, there'll be more to come. Haystacks, most likely. Farce follows me wherever I go, like shit on a shoe."

  "Do you know what a self-fiilfilling prophecy is?" Iris asked him.

  "Of course I do. Like everj^ing
else on earth it's a trick done with mirrors. It's Bearsville."

  Rain was sheeting down through the trees and thrumming on the roof, and Iris and the Bear were eating the odd but satisfying Chinese food the Little Bear cooked up downhill. Iris had picked the food up in the van, and the

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  white cartons stood about the table with the tops of their heads unfolded open. Iris performed surgery on her plate with chopsticks while the Bear rummaged around in his vegetables with a fork.

  It was getting darker out, and outside the rectangular window set above the long cherrywood dining table a shelf of slaterock gathered gloom beneath it amid leafrneal, ferns bowed to the repeated authority of the rain, and treetrunks ran black. "Bearsville," said the Bear. "I had no idea."

  "Maybe it's a good omen," Iris said.

  "Phrpphhrrphhr," the Bear remarked.

  Stanlynn had pulled her Subaru and its trailer out of the drive—like the Sim, heading west—and then the Bear had unloaded the van in the drizzle while Iris wandered through the upstairs of the house, opening closets and drawers and straightening picture frames. Well, I guess I should be going. Iris had said when he was done with the heavy lifting. The Bear rejoined. Hey, I thought we could Hght up a Kazbeck, lay back and watch a couple of Vladek Sheybal movies. He had pointed hopefully at the black Sony television and VCR that Stanlynn considerately had left behind, but that was not the ticket.

  Actually, I could use a bit of food before I drive, was what Iris said.

  And although the name bothered him, the Bear said he wondered if the Little Bear delivered.

  "What do you think of the food?" he asked her now.

  "It's different. Do you think the rain will stop?"

  "It always has," said the Bear. "Maybe you should stay the night."

  "I don't think so."

  "The larger upstairs bedroom looked pretty nice."

  "To you perhaps. Sleep in it if you like."