The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "Naw, that's okay. Too spicy for me. Just take the beer."

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  "Peckerwood motherfucker must think I'm for real about the bank job," Hatwell told the Bear sotto voce as he rose. "Probly thinks he's for real about the bank job. Meanwhile it's payday." He went back to the fridge for his tallboy can of beer. "Rondo," he called from there.

  "What."

  "This is Rainier Ale. Green Death."

  "Yeah I got a trucker friend brings me loads black market from the Northwest special."

  "Rondo. It's Green Death."

  "Fuckin' A."

  "Why would anyone want to bring this shit in?"

  "Man," said Rondo, "if you got to ask, you'll never know."

  The Bear looked down at his feet for a minute, wiggled his toeclaws on the indoor-outdoor carpeting. The band had only been on the road an hour or so and already there were all these competing subjectivities thickening the air. You were supposed to do this for weeks and get inspired on schedule every night. Piece of cake. Tea for two. Milk run. Love Theme from Terminator 2.

  On the other paw, some piece of him envied his rhythm section their youth—less their sense that there was plenty of time to fool around in than their living in a world without real consequences—but maybe that wasn't youth. Maybe, because all time does is heap illusion on you till you stumble and go under, maybe that's the way it really is. If so, he had been that young once, and hoped to be that young again.

  "Hey you guys," called Hatwell from the fridge, "I'm turning off the radio. We're getting out of range of New York and the static is getting to me."

  "Kill it," Bostic said, and the sound was gone. "Uh," Bostic said aloft, "maybe we could watch the box a little? Now?" The Bear detected something uncharacteristic in his tone.

  "Yeah," said Hatwell a bit overemphatically, coming back with the tallboy can of Death, Green. "Let's watch a video."

  "I brought a two-cassette version of The Children of Paradise^'' the Bear offered.

  "Naw, got something here," Bostic said, rummaging around in a bag at his feet.

  "I smell a setup," said the Bear, sniffing the air.

  "Setup? Setup? What's a setup?" Hatwell asked him.

  "We don't need no steenking setups," Linton said. "Whynchoo come over here and sit with us?" He patted the benchseat beside him while Hatwell fiddled with the video player.

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  "Okay," said the Bear, got up, went over there, sat down. "What is it."

  Garrett put a bookmark in Musil but didn't shut it. Hatwell addressed himself to the buttons on the video set. Bostic laid his hands demurely in his lap.

  "It's three against one," the Bear told them, "but I can take you. One at a time or all together."

  "Here we go," Hatwell said. "An art film. A bit of esoterica."

  The fifteen-inch screen flared into life, first as a field of video snow accompanied by white noise, then as bluescreen with the number three on it, and finally as an oldish black-and-white movie image from the fifties, the middle of a movie, Donald O'Connor wearing an army uniform in a barn, leaning on the side of a stall and having a conversation with Francis the Talking Mule.

  "This must've been hard to find," the Bear told Hatwell.

  "Not really, with my connections."

  "But Francis," Donald O'Connor was saying in evident panic, "you can't expect me to tell the general thatV^

  "See," Hatwell said professorially, left hand cupping right elbow, index finger accenting points in the air, "I always thought that Mr. Ed was the commercial bullshit version and Francis the Talking Mule was the real deal. But," he told the Bear, "I wanted to check it with you. Because, although I don't want to imply that you necessarily feel a solidarity with other talking animals—that would be insulting, that would be animaUst of me—still, I thought you might have a means of knowing something pertinent and not widely known. ..." Hatwell almost blew his professor act but covered the laugh with a cough cycle and a quick hand to his mouth. Once he recovered himself, the hand, now holding a conjectural pipe, indicated his readiness to hear the Bear's reply.

  The Bear was trying to make up his mind whether to tell them this was a bunch of juvenile bullshit or if he should come up with something that would pass the Humor Test and join up.

  Bostic, seated at the Bear's immediate left, also trying to look serious, said, "If you can't think of anything to say just stamp on the floor. We'll keep count."

  Garrett shut his book on his bookmark. "Linton and Rahim," he explained to the Bear, "are relentless practitioners of Musicians' Humor. Sometimes, the operative word is relentless."

  "Hey%."

  "And sometimes," Garrett allowed, "it's the other way around."

  Hatwell was waiting, Bostic fingertapping paradiddles on the stonewashed

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  denim of his knees and humming the four-note bassHne of "Hambone, Ham-bone, Have You Heard."

  On the screen, behind Donald O'Connor's back, a sergeant had walked into the barn without Donald O'Connor noticing his entrance. The Bear watched Donald O'Connor complaining to Francis the Talking Mule some more. Then he watched Donald O'Connor waiting for Francis the Talking Mule to talk back. "Come on, Francis," Donald O'Connor said. "Tell me." The movie paused a long beat for the theater audience to laugh. Then the sergeant laid a heavy hand on Donald O'Connor's shoulder, and Donald O'Connor did a large-sized double take with a last flip at the end, making it a triple.

  "I always felt," said Hatwell, "that Francis was, like, Duke EUington to Mr. Ed's Stan Kenton. But what do I know? Donald O'Connor is an obvious Jones figure but he can also dance, and this is confusing. So I came to you. With this dilemma."

  "Well actually," said the Bear, "despite your lack of inside information you've hit the nail more or less on the head, Bob. Because, as it happens, when I was a lot younger, when I was about your age, I knew both Mr. Ed and Francis the Talking Mule, although Francis was advanced in years by then. I think I can call them both dear personal friends and wonderful talking animals both of whom influenced me deeply. And in fact, although I was a mere cub at the time, they were kind and generous enough to let me jam with them."

  "Uh huh."

  "And fundamentally you're right. Ed would frequently pull up lame at the critical juncture. Sometimes count off a tune with his forehoof, One, Two, Three, and not infrequently Francis the Talking Mule or even I would have to tell him, 'One more, Ed. Come on, Ed, you can do it.'"

  "A time problem," ventured Bostic.

  "A labored conception generally," said the Bear. "An inability to cut loose, although Francis wouldn't let anyone say a bad word about him. Another thing about Ed. When he ate too much fermented oats you'd see the real horse start to come out."

  "An asshole?" Hatwell wondered.

  "Anger, and despite all his success insatiable envy. In a word, your typical mean chewer. Whereas Francis, oh man, what can I say? He was a Charlie Parker among mules, a Diz among pack animals, a Prez among beasts of burden. And his girlfriend, Clare? You want to talk about singers? You want to talk about Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace? You want a vow-of-poverty I-talk-to-the-birdies two-step with the Renaissance as a follow-through? Words fail me. Francis lives."

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  The Bear had scored: the laughter and applause that obliterated the end of the Bear's riff included even Garrett, although Rondo seemed unaffected: the bus cruised in a straight line through the world. Maybe the Bear should have worked crime into the speech so everyone would have felt equally involved in the categories he had proposed. But that was the way of improvised solos: they were provisional, in the best sense of the term. It was true, he loved jazz and the stuff it was made of. Besides, working Rondo in might have risked a crash.

  Meanwhile, Bostic was climbing out of his benchseat and clambering atop the wingtable. Once up, he shifted his right foot to the other table so that he bestrode the aisle, the Colossus of Roads. "AAAHHHHH!" Bostic
said, and banged his head into the ceiling panels. "AAAHHHHH!"

  "Are you guys always like this?" the Bear asked Hatwell across the aisle. The pianist was folding his laptop computer away so that if everything collapsed under Bostic he would still be able to play in the Digital Ofay League.

  "Touring with you kind of stimulates us a little," Hatwell said. "Things get Out There a httle quicker than usual. But basically, yeah, this is us."

  Bostic banged his head into the ceiling harder. "AAAHHHHH!" he said again. "I can't stand it! We finished all the humor and we're still in Pennsylvania!"

  "Actually, " Garrett told him, tilting his head up to catch his eye, "we haven't crossed the river yet. I hate to tell you this but we're still in New Jersey."

  "AAAHHHHH!" the drummer cried, and resumed smashing his head on the roof.

  The Bear wondered if Bostic would beat the roof of the bus apart and let the air in, but everyone settled down after awhile, and quieter miles resumed. The Bear and Linton traded fours, Garrett reopened his book, Rahim Bobby his laptop. Bostic had opened an issue oiModem Drummer. "Looks like Lud-wig got a good new hi-hat pedal here," he told the Bear.

  "Great," the Bear replied, and twiddled his thumbclaws.

  "I wish I had it now, on this tour."

  "Uh huh."

  "They didn't price it high the way the foreign companies do, and it looks pretty good."

  "Oh."

  "Here's the picture of it. Pretty slick, huh."

  "Yep."

  "Got two parallel springs but they didn't overbuild it just for show."

  "I see."

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  "The way it is," Harwell told the Bear, leaning across the aisle, "after a week or two of this, none of us is gonna be able to stand each other. The way to road, you have to find a distraction, something that passes the time for you, otherwise you'll die or go out of your mind with boredom. Pussy's good, but there's also drugs and alcohol. I'm a pussy man myself, but between engagements I do computer games and sometimes take a stimulant to close the gap. We need our pastimes and compensations. What's yours?"

  "I don't know yet." The Bear felt the road rising, and outside the bus the trees were thinning out. "Is this the river?"

  "It's Dodge City out there. Bear, a whole country fall of haw-haw cowboys and their gals, and you're gonna have to figure something out. I'm gonna intentionally walk this batter. When you figure out what it is, let me know."

  i

  ypassiBig Pittsburgh—probably a mistake, the Bear realized as the bus hit the bypass and swung away from the city amid its rivers under gathering clouds near the end of day—the bus travelled in one side and out the other of a brief fierce squall of rain in hill country and at length descended into a car-culture strip of gas stations, convenience stores, Blink-a-Lubes and the usual round of Macs and Kings until they reached a central, tilted town of clapboard houses under sulphurous lamplight. Behind the houses rose the onion tops of Slavic basilicas and a looming herd of extinct industrial immensities lit here and there by a few last productive fires.

  "Interesting," said Hatwell, looking out the window. "Let's fly Jones down and buy him a ride in a blast furnace for booking this shit."

  "It's not his fault," said the Bear.

  The bus blundered twice down narrow streets past clapboard tenement and warehouse sets, then found a long straight street with a tall green neon sign angling out from a building about three blocks distant. When they reached it they saw a tattering JAZZ NIGHT sign in one window and a hastier placard in the other for the Ted BEASTLY Quartett.

  "What I want to know," said Bostic, looking out—no one had made a

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  move to leave the bus although the engine had been off for a long minute— "is what the fuck kind of name for a club is Nancy's Cabbage."

  "Betcha dey got beer," Rondo said, sighed the doors open and struggled off the driver's seat and down the steps. They watched him push his way through the bar's double doors. Then they looked up and down the street. There was no one out there. There was really no one out there.

  "Are we insured?" Garrett asked.

  "In case of death," said Linton, "we get to go to hebbin."

  "I'm the bandleader," said the Bear, "so I'll go in first."

  "See, honor among bears," Hatwell said.

  "I read the rulebook once," the Bear told him. He put his rust-colored countrypolitan hat on and stepped down to the street, then across the sidewalk and through the doors into the barroom darkness of Nancy's Cabbage.

  Not a promising prospect, thought the Bear once inside, but then Rondo, arrayed backwards across a stretch of bar, raised a mug of beer into the air. "Hey join me, Bear," he called. "Cause I'm comin' apart."

  Nancy's Cabbage was a long dark bar with a bandstand in the dimness at the rear. Forms in workshirts and baseball caps huddled over dregs of beer along the bar and in one or two sunken booths toward the back of the room. A bass-heavy blur was playing at uneven speed on a jukebox whose Hghts were dying. The Bear heard the band come in behind him.

  "I've seen this somewhere before," he heard Linton say.

  "The ad campaign for Snafu, the new men's fragrance," Hatwell said, too loud. "Situation Normal, All Fucked Up."

  The Bear watched pale faces turn their way along the bar but nothing happened so after awhile he and the band came the rest of the way in.

  "Line 'em up," Rondo told the bartender, and in short order a row of foaming mugs began to appear atop the oak, or whatever. "The beer's pretty bad so let's have a lot of 'em."

  Rondo was right. The beer tasted of iron pipe and the Bear had three of them while Rondo walked around the room looking for a conversation and Bobby Hatwell tested out the upright piano at the bandstand in the back. The bartender was back there with him, watching as Hatwell plinked around, just in case he did something to the piano like put a spear through it or try to cook it up in a pot. The Bear tried not to hear what the piano sounded like, nor to count the notes that sounded like bedsprings or did not sound at all. He kept his hat on snug and his raincoat collar up, but nothing had budged the dead energy in the room.

  Hatwell was back. "John," he indicated the bartender thumbwise, "says they get a lot of organ trios."

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  "I don't see no Hammond B-3 back there," said the Bear.

  "No. Organ trios: stomach, hver, spleen and all you can drink. They use sampling keyboards," he explained to the Bear. "Welcome to modern times."

  "Doesn't look it. You play Hammond, work the pedals and all?"

  "Oh, man."

  "We oughta try it sometime."

  "Well, tonight all you get's the sample and for bass you're stuck with Garrett here."

  "So kind of you to mention me," Garrett said. "Another beer please."

  "Thanks for letting me get a word in edgewise. Church," Hatwell said, then turned to the Bear. "Though I'll tell you, playing the house piano would be great mental exercise." He paused to swallow down half a beer and make a face. "I'd have to remember which keys don't work and how to get around them in all the different keys we play tunes in. Four-dimensional chess with earlaps. The piano didn't sound like shit I might even try it. This is beer? Jesus. Rondo, how much Green Death you got on board?"

  "Four cases down the bay."

  "Rondo, remind me to thank your mother for fucking you up right. So Bear, I'm playing electric and Garrett's got his amp, but if you were expecting a usable PA for the horn forget it. You'll have to play to the room."

  "Linton'll have to play soft," said the Bear.

  "Ha," said Linton. "Ha ha ha. Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha haah."

  Hatwell leaned across the bar and wagged John closer with his index finger. "The Klan got a branch office in town?" he inquired. "Or you just use a website."

  While the band set up, the Bear decided not to watch Hatwell kick his amplifier one more time. He recovered Rondo from two iron men and a longneck Bud in a booth, went back to the
bus and tried to raise Jones on the cellphone. "Don't you know how to use that thing?" Rondo asked him finally.

  "The on switch. Where is."

  "Jesus H." Rondo hit the switch for him and left.

  The Bear was grateful Rondo gave him credit for knowing how to dial, but it took him awhile to figure out he had to hit the send button after.

  Sybil gave him a nice, surprised hello and said she'd get him.

  When Jones came on, the Bear heard ice cubes in a glass but Jones sounded fairly straight. "We figured you could use Nancy's Cabbage as a nice safe easy way to get up to speed," Jones told him. "You should pull some people down through the NPR station in Pittsburgh, where they're giving you extensive mention after sundown—I checked, they promised—and the other

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  venues are all gonna be much more to your liking I swear. Remember, you're the one putting the constraints on where we book you—nothing too big, nothing too wide open, the usual shall we call it your guarded attitude."

  "Shall we call it my rational disinclination to get busted again?"

  "We're accommodating you the best we can, but you have to deal with the accommodations."

  "Sure," said the Bear, "but why at Nancy's Cabbage?"

  "Mostly because the conjunction of Nancy's Cabbage and Monongahela was pretty much irresistible on a nomenclatural basis, is that a word? Besides which there wasn't anything lower-pressure out there within a one-day drive for a startup."

  "Monongahela? Is that where we are?"

  "You didn't look?"

  "In a general way." The Bear meant he had looked at the tour itinerary several times and his eyes had gone out of focus. He was looking more seriously now, flipping through the pages on the clipboard. "Jones, did you really do this? We're playing Rockford, as in Jim, Illinois, and Parma, as in Charterhouse, Ohio?"

  "I couldn't resist. We've got upfront guarantees at every venue and you'll exceed all of them. Think college towns. Ann Arbor and Madison are gonna be good financially four nights each, and very safe. You know how much you're gonna make five days in Boulder Colorado alone?"