The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  Maybe all that bothered him was that they weren't talking. Or, they were talking, but not about amthing of consequence. They talked about the daily round—an exotic subject to the Bear, whose relationship with everyday life had always been tenuous at best, and so he delighted in it— about their food, the wine, their books or the weather; and since what the Bear had most deeply to say to Iris generally summed itself up as some variant of I love you I love you I love you, the cheerful trivia of their daily prose possessed a strange elegance for him: how graceful to only allude to the overwhelming fact of what had them in its paws. Only gradually did he notice that they weren't saying very much, and that the territory^ of their real intimacy^ had been ceded almost exclusively to a coalition of silence and the pleasures of the bed, which sometimes they transferred to tables or the hnng-room floor for the sake of a variety they had not needed earlier.

  But maybe this was the normal what-the-fuck motion of hfe. Miat did he know about the normal motion of ami^ng? This was life, wasn't it? Hadn't he always wanted one?

  Tommy Talmo got into an argument with the toUbooth guy at Harriman about the length of the bus, the number of wheels and how much money was owed, but they got it setded short of fisticuffs and the bus plummeted south toward the grey-brown fug of exhalations that overhung the beating, panting city.

  The rhythm section had foregathered at Linton Bostic's place on the Upper West Side, which they had judged most convenient to the highway system, besides which Linton said he wasn't gonna haul his drumset halfway 'cross town when they could pick him up at home and Garrett could get his bass there by car service down from the edge of Harlem so there.

  It was only an hour later than it was supposed to be when the band muscled itself onboard in a bluster of black luggage. Bostic was first on deck. He did a quick survey. "Old bus. Did the last refit 'bout two years back," he said. "Starting to run down but I seen worse. Whassup, B?"

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  "I don't know yet," said the Bear, seated in the black leather swingchair just inside the door. "I was hoping you guys could tell me."

  "Road virgin," Bostic laughed.

  "Not entirely."

  "Got to check the rest of this water hazard out," Bostic said. He dumped one of his bags under a wingtable and took strides toward the back of the bus. The Bear heard Bostic's drumcases sliding into the luggage bay beneath him, and he looked out the window to see Tommy Talmo's bent back beneath the upturned edge of aluminum door, the bottom of his shirt bulging. Garrett stood behind Talmo holding his bass in a large white molded hard case; he was saing something to Talmo's back.

  Rahim Bobby Hatwell climbed on board and looked around.

  "What do you think," the Bear asked him.

  "Free chicken and beer," Hatwell said. "Though I'll tell you, we still have time to rent a trailer and hitch the Sled on behind so we'll have a ride when this piece of shit breaks down. Where'd you find the driver, ape house at the zoo? You seen the list of towns we're going to? You ever see a tour booked like this? You sure you wanta do this thing? How long did it take you to develop an embouchure? How'd you get that much articulation in your paws? WTiat's your favorite Monk tune? Did Trane or Sonny win on 'Tenor Madness' or was it a draw? You doped out the unified field theory? What is this thing called love?" Hatwell coughed into his right hand. "How you doin'? You look kind of tense."

  The Bear shrugged.

  Hatwell rocked on his heels and came briefly up onto his toes. "Don't go batshit on us, Bear. That's my job and I'll fight you for it if I have to. Oo-bop sh-bam da Fledei-TnaiisT Hatwell raised his voice to a shout: "Hear ye, motherfuckers. I'm filling the fridge with frozen Jamaican meat patties. Anybody takes one he dies."

  "Yeah, eventually," Bostic said as he came out of the rear of the bus. "I guessed right and you guessed wrong," he told Hatwell, smiling happily. "Storage space upstairs is for shit and you're stuck with your bulky soft-sided they-came-to-Cordura crap and I'm slick with Samsonite."

  The pianist and the drummer got into a highly technical luggage discussion, much of it turning on the advantage of being able to pack your shit in halves that folded flat. The Bear didn't track all the detail. He did know that the band was to wear suits, however loosely defined, onstage; initially he was supposed to wear a suit himself. Iris had had a tailor she had met in town come up to the house to fit him out with a set of double-breasted items in grey pinstripe and summerweight blue serge, but once she'd seen the cloth

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  laid out on him and the paperwork patterns set forth she'd looked aghast. You'll look like a medieval fortress, she said. Actually, more Hke a brick . . . you know. That had been the end of it, and the tailor went home with a hundred for his trouble. Then Iris had gone to a Big & Tall shop in one of the malls across the river and come back with the best raincoat he'd ever owned—a hip modified charcoal trench that actually looked sleek on him despite the usual ornate flap-and-belt aspect of the thing—and two jumpsuits—one dull gold, the other black, both showing a lot of zippers. He was big, though not tall for his breadth, and she'd had to do some alterations. The Bear learned a new word when she was working on the seams around his crotch.

  Which side do you dress on? she'd asked him.

  WTiich side do I what?

  After a few repetitions of this exchange she'd rolled her eyes and finally asked him, WTiere do you put it?

  Oh, left, he told her, laughing and feeling prett}^ cool, not making the obvious lewd joke about where he really liked to put it, and he let her move it and pin the seam.

  The clothes looked fine, and the week before departure Iris had gone back to the Big & Tall store and bought him the same trenchcoat in tan and two new hats, wide-brim things, one black one brown, with countrypohtan silver-studded hatbands, that looked better on him than any hats he had ever owTied. Iris knew him, and had infallibly fine taste.

  It was true he'd gained some weight in the past months—a consequence, he w as sure, more of life with Iris than the amoimt of food he w as scarfing down: a sign that his space in the world had expanded since spring. More room had been made for him to live in it. It was her.

  He looked out the window. Garrett was shaking his head no to Tommy Talmo and keeping a grip on his bass case, and back by the storefronts a youngish couple were staring up at the Bear. The Bear made a toothy grin and nodded hello. The couple nodded back on a reflex basis, then looked at each other for a reality^ check. I'm not your problem, thought the Bear. I'm my problem. What also occurred to the Bear: it's a grey stone world out there, different from upstate. How did I ever live here for so many years? Such a limitation of scents: so few of them, and those few^ without much interest. For another there's no shading in the colors, jumble in place of detail and almost no nuance.

  The couple weren't going away. He waved again.

  "I know the unit," Hatwell was saying, and the Bear returned his attention onboard. "Screen's small but the rez is good." He had switched the teleision on and was waiting, more or less in the pose of xristotle contemplating the

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  bust of Homer in the Rembrandt painting, for the picture to appear. "I brought some videos," he said.

  "Good."

  The picture beamed on beneath Hatvvell's hand: one of those sick afternoon talk shows full of dysfunctional families, sexually rampant or omnidirectionally abused, UFO-abducted, women who live with talking bears, that kind of thing. "Cool, it's Rolonda," Hatwell said.

  The Bear looked at the screen, where a bunch of people were yelling at each other and the network was beeping much of it out; Hatwell was laughing at it in a good-natured way.

  "Could you turn that off?" the Bear asked him.

  "WTiat for? We ain't going nowhere for a few minutes."

  "It's too much of a learning experience."

  "W^e're just starting out," Hatwell told him. "This is nothing. \^ait a hundred miles and we'll be ready to kill each other."


  "I see."

  Hatwell turned the T^ off with a minor ironic flourish. "What the fuck is keeping Church?"

  "I think it's about where to store his bass," said the Bear.

  "WTiy did I even ask?" said Hatwell. "I'll handle this." He adjusted his invisible gunbelt and stomped down outside.

  Bostic dropped his long form into the pivot chair across from the Bear. "Instead of doing the tour," he said, "let's hide out."

  "Makes sense," the Bear told him.

  "When drummers rule the world," Bostic began to say, but fell into a silence with his mouth partly open, and after awhile the Bear stopped waiting for him to finish.

  A flash of light caught his eye: the couple outside had pulled an instant camera from a pocket or a purse; the guy had it now, and raised it to his eye. You won't get much of a picture through the windowglass, he could have told them. You'll mostly get the glare of your own regard, and is there not a lesson for us all in this?

  The flashbulb went off notwithstanding.

  Bobby Hatwell had involved himself in a highly gestural threeway with Tommy Talmo and Garrett Church.

  Another flash, and when the Bear's eyes cleared Garrett was bending to pull a bundled softcase from the belly of the bus. VVTiile Harwell unfolded it and held it up to receive the instrument, Garrett cranked his hardcase open and uncovered his bass. Look at the beauty of the wood, thought the Bear, the craft, the patience, the love that went into its making.

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  "We gonna be here forever," Bostic told the air.

  But in fact they were not. The hardcase was shd empty into the luggage bay, the padded, softcased bass went to bed in one of the bunks at the rear of the bus, everyone climbed aboard, and the engine ground back to life.

  When the bus lurched into motion, the Bear had a sense of being launched, but into what? The world streamed past in a clutter of commerce and stacked residential prospect. The bus swung toward the river, its air and light.

  "Yo, Rondo!"

  The rhythm section had taken to calling the driver Rondo Hatton because, they told him, he was taking them Round Manhattan, but actually, as Hatwell whispered to the Bear, because they thought his jaw sufficiently prognathous and his nose enough of a slab for him to resemble the grotesque actor who had once played the Creeper, among other roles, in movies of the thirties and forties. The Bear didn't see the resemblance, but what the hell.

  "Rondo, pass us the itinerary. You got it, right?"

  A folder was duly handed back as the bus, declining a plunge into the Hudson, orange flame under afternoon sun, hooked right onto the highway and pointed its nose north.

  "Looka this." Linton Bostic had commandeered the itinerary folder and was flipping through its sheets. "Amazing. We get to miss every major town out there. What idiot put this tour together?"

  "This one," said the Bear. Although Jones had done the actual bookings.

  "Monongahela stead of Pittsburgh? Waukesha stead of Milwaukee and we don't even touch Chicago? I imderstand the coupla college towns, but the rest of it don't make sense."

  "How about the last time I played a gig they shot at me and I spent a winter in the slammer? I'm being cautious. This is the only way I can do it. We've worked it out in detail," he said as the bus brought the arches and girders of the George Washington Bridge nearer through granulations of haze. He had his band's attention, everyone angHng toward him in varying acuities of interest, Linton the most eager, Garrett the most laid-back.

  "Speech," Bobby Hatwell suggested.

  ^^Sensible Shoes is coming out more or less as we speak," the Bear began.

  "Yeah I saw some ads in the paper," Bostic said.

  "And Megaton's supposed to do a bunch of pubhcity nationwide," the Bear continued.

  "I always said," Hatwell put in, "that if more furbearing higher mammals played jazz we'd see some respect around here."

  "So," the Bear persisted, beginning to get a fix on what this tour was

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  going to be like day-to-day, "every area we're playing they put out specific publicity for the album—"

  "But we're billed as the Ted Beastly Quartet," Garrett said.

  "—and the day before each gig," the Bear pressed on, "Jones calls the local jazz radio station and tips them that the Ted Beastly Quartet is us and we are them. There's also supposed to be some kind of clue in the ads but I don't know what it is. So the idea is—"

  "We get what the idea is," Hatwell said, "but these places we're playing, I don't think they're on the big huge side, so I don't see how we're gonna earn our keep. This fabulous bus," he said dryly, "all those Comfort Inns, those nice checks we got in the mail last week, the per diems you're supposed to give us along the way ..."

  "Yeah, those were nice checks," said Bostic. "We don't make that kind of money in New York much."

  "I've got some cash for per diems with me," said the Bear, "and the rest of it's supposed to come out of the nightclub money—"

  "You don't get it. Bear," Hatwell said.

  "No, see," the Bear tried to tell him, "what isn't completely covered by the nightclub fees—and in each case, on top of a flat rate we're getting a percentage of the bar—"

  "As counted by who exactly?" Bostic wanted to know.

  "Yo," came a voice from the driver's seat, "I can do that."

  "Rondo!"

  "Ron-^o!"

  "Cause if I don't do it," Rondo-Talmo's voice said wearily, "I can see where this whole thing's goin'."

  "Into the shitcan," Bostic said.

  "T. Lobsang Rampa," Rondo said.

  "Tee what?"

  The Bear got the orchestra to pause with a broad gesture of paw. "What is it I'm not getting," he asked.

  Hatwell leaned toward him. "Where does the rest of the money come from," he asked the Bear with the air of one speaking to a dim, resistant child, "if the nightclub receipts don't cover it?"

  "From the revenues of the record," the Bear said, extending both paws, claws held inoffensive, leathery palms up.

  The three members of the rhythm section looked at each other, then back at him. Tommy Talmo Rondo Hatton began to whistle "Dixie."

  "WTiat," said the Bear.

  "The money comes from the revenues of the record," Hatwell ground on.

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  "which there aren't any yet because it hasn't come out, and before there are any they get to deduct your advance and what they paid Billy, Charlie and me, also various other operational costs they'll make up as they go along, also the salaries and per diems the three of us are puUing down on the tour, also the nickel-down-for-every-sparrow-the-bus-hits-during-the-tour charge ..."

  "The fried-chicken charge," Bostic said.

  "The chord-change tax," this from Hatwell.

  "The thirty-two-bar-chorus toll."

  "We don't play too many of those," the Bear said hopefully.

  "Speeding tickets."

  "Uptempo fines."

  "Modulation fees."

  "Blues deductions."

  "Lyricism surcharges."

  "Mode loads."

  "Clinker penalties."

  "Uhh . . . wait a minute," said Bostic. "I'm working on one . . . shit."

  "You getting a flat salary on the tour?" Something Garrett wanted to know.

  "Not exactly," said the Bear. "See, what I get—"

  "You been turned over to Creative Accounting," Bostic told him. "What you get is fucked."

  "We gotta protect this guy," Rahim Bobby Hatwell announced. "We got to take this boy in hand."

  "We coming in kind of late," Bostic said. "How we supposa do it?"

  "STEAL!" Talmo Hatton shouted aloft. "They left us an opening wit' this percentage-of-the-bar bullshit. Put me on the bar and give me room to operate, this could be the winningest tour you ever seen. A little move on the register when no one's lookin' and hey fuckin presto. Put me on the door and the club only gets to see the littlest bitty pie
ce of the action." The bus began weaving from lane to lane, cutting off innocent commuters in sedans. Rondo seemed to be unbuttoning the front of his shirt. "Theft! I knew I was gonna come in handy."

  "But Jones told me everything was cool," the Bear told Hatwell as the bus swung onto the approach ramp to the G.W. Bridge.

  "And who does Jones work for?" Bostic asked him.

  "Maybe," Hatwell said, "we should change the subject."

  "Yeah," said Bostic, pivoting toward the Bear. "Read any good books lately?"

  "Lookit this little asshole," Talmo Rondo shouted amid a sigh of airbrakes.

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  "I oughta crush his fackin' car for him. Somebody get me a beer outa the fridge."

  The bus swayed its way along a high stone wall and an overhang of trees, then ascended a seasick curv^e leading to the bridge.

  The Bear washed his face with a dry right paw. "Is this what's really happening? Is this the straight shit on the deal?"

  "We changed the subject," Bostic reminded him. "And we gonna look out for you. We gonna cover your ass."

  "Garrett?" the Bear asked the bassist, looking for a lifeline, a straight line, a hint of objective hope.

  "So far this is exactly like every tour I've ever been on," Garrett said. "It's a mess and you're in trouble. Tradition supports you. Don't fight it." He got up from his seat. "Rondo, where's the stereo?"

  "Right-hand cabinet over the microwave. Who's gonna get me that beer? There some people I know in Detroit could set us up to do a bank. We got a day off after Ann Arbor. We could do us a bank, get our money squared away and set our minds at rest."

  "A bank?" the Bear asked weakly.

  "How the fuck you think I bought into the music business, got me a piece of the bus comp'ny, production outfit and the little jingle studio which let me tell you may look Hke shit but is one fucking moneymaker? See, Tony 'n' Don are my old good buddies but I still had to come up with a share legitimate if I wanted into the partnership. Only fair."