The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  They stopped once for burgers and Iris declined to join in, obeying an obscure but potent urge to purify herself for the ordeal ahead, although she did step outside to take the air. What surprised her was how completely she had failed to notice the landscape's transition from green and granite to a red land she had never seen. The air was hot and dry and clear and the sense of place dramatic, and, she felt compelled to say, sacred.

  "Ma'am," came Rondo's voice behind her. "We're ready to go again."

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  Fifty or a hundred of these red, Hghtswept miles passed, slants of sandstone tilting out of the earth beneath crumbling hills, and then, after what she was told was a series of wrong turns that Rondo had undertaken in an attempt to approach Santa Fe from the most propitious angle, the bus pulled crunching onto a roadside curve of scenic overlook. They were just outside of town, and as they all descended from the bus Iris felt her tense little heart punching at her breastbone. All the forces that had ever attended her hfe were drawn up like armies and the outcome was uncertain—all that Krishna and Arjuna crap that frightened her and she didn't like to believe in.

  She was the last to join the grouping at the outlook's edge, and almost had to elbow her way between Jones and the Bear to get a peek at the prospect. So this was where Herb had taken her daughters. It was new land to her entirely: the corrugated earth so red and the sky above it bereft of lighter harmonics rendered a flat cyanic blue in which long clouds lay, their undersides tinted brick-red by light reflected from the earth beneath. The hot dry air helped to clear her mind. What an unambiguous place this is, she thought. And how susceptible I am to the sense of place. Suspect it.

  "Holy ground for sure for sure," Rondo said of it.

  Past a stretch of flat country Iris saw a complex rectilinear grid of steel fences where sodium lamps an evil grade of yellow gleamed over low buildings even though the sun would still be up another couple of hours.

  "See that's the prison there," Rondo continued. "Bear, shame you and me can't go down there and bust some good ol' boys loose. I proUy got a couple friends in there. We can't, huh? Ma'am, you sure we don't need no more help?"

  Iris shook her head.

  "How much time you do?" the Bear asked Rondo.

  "Oh," Rondo said, "me and time we go way back."

  Iris tried to focus on the business in hand. Past the prison, to the left south and east. Iris could see the car-culture sprawl and ingathering verticals of a city that must be Santa Fe. There. It was there.

  Jones had the map outspread in his hands and rustled it importantly before him.

  The Bear put an arm about her shoulders and she accepted it, then took a half-step forward to the map.

  "Now we have a decision to make," Jones was saying. He pointed below them to a dusty-looking stretch of land into which some houses had been spilled like dice. "Jim Wilson's house is down there—you remember Jim, don't you Iris? I made a few calls and found him—amazing what you can do with a phone billed to the company—and we're invited to rest up, spend the

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  night at his place and go get your daughters tomorrow, great dinner and good wine if we come. Either that or we go right into Santa Fe and do it now. If we do it now we should get out of town right away, no stops."

  "\ e're doing it now," Iris said.

  The two men and the Bear looked at each other and nodded. Oh thanks for permission, Iris thought.

  "Okay," said Jones. "If the information Rondo got in Boulder is correct—"

  "It is," Rondo said.

  "—then your ex-husband's house is in a rich folks' canyonland just outside towTi on the northeast." Jones pointed off to the left of the city, then down at the map, but Iris couldn't quite make the connection between the tw o planes of reference. "You sure you don't want to reconnoiter, lay up a night and make our move tomorrow?"

  "I'd like to go and get my children now," she said, "and drive back to Colorado right away."

  "Then it's done," said the Bear. "Let's take another breath of this good air and get on with it."

  Jones tapped the map and pointed beyond Santa Fe to where mountains rose jagged out of the earth, their underslopes shading blue to purple in the day's dechning beam. "See those Hghts at the bottom of the mountains there?" Jones said. "Los Alamos. U-235. The Bomb. Radiation City."

  Rondo gave a low whistle. "The serpent's glowing eggs," he said. "Very dangerous if you steal them."

  The Bear did a classic double-take, then said, "Right on, Rondo. Right on."

  "Miat?" Iris was momentarily confused by the appearance of this inappropriate subtext, then reahzed: of course: this whole spectacular landscape is poisoned and my daughters are caught in it.

  Jones began folding the map, getting the conformations wTong. "Santa Fe's all right—fucking thing—but I understand the cancer rate in Los Alamos is—fucking thing."

  Rondo took the map from him and folded it so the cit' street map came out on top.

  "I've never even seen a picture of Herb," said the Bear, aside.

  "I prefer not to keep them around," Iris told him.

  "Wliat's he hke?"

  "Sephardic."

  "That doesn't make a picture for me."

  "He's a ver)^ handsome man," Iris said.

  An abashed-looking Bear blinked at her. "Better-looking than me?"

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  Iris was grateful for Jones' bony shoulders to collapse on shaking with laughter.

  "What's so funny?" the Bear wanted to know.

  Iris looked up at him and laughed more convulsively—but wasn't this beginning to border on hysteria?

  "You're . . . different," she managed to say.

  "Different how?"

  "Bless you, Bear," she said, getting control. "I needed that."

  "Yeah, so what's the cancer rate in Santa Fe?" Rondo was asking Jones.

  "Boys," Iris said finally. "Do you see that?"

  Off west toward Albuquerque a fanshaped cloak of dark grey cloud was spreading swiftly toward them across the sky, shadowing the land beneath and raising its horns toward the sun, which ran down shafts of fire that pierced the fabric here and there.

  "Jesus," said Jones.

  "Man I love the fucking West," was Rondo's impression.

  "Storm," the Bear said intelligently.

  "Whatever," Iris, surrounded by loonies, said. "I'd like to be on my way out of here before it hits."

  But the weather system had scattered, mere scraps of grey in the sky, by the time they found their way out of central Santa Fe and an unobstructed sun was going down behind them. After halting on an upslope while Rondo consulted his notes, the dayHght darkening down fi-om gold to orange, the bus hauled a hairpin left into a road forking its way out of a sage and mesquite canyon up onto one of its ridges. The low white adobe houses that emerged as they neared the top offered the road a modest prospect but seemed to stretch to the rear over large areas, dark antiqued beams poking out from under pueblo roofs: what ethnicity would look like if the ethnics had cash. Cactus, more mesquite, dark green silver leaves on twisty trees, impeccable gravel walks and exposed rough rock fell away from the houses in landscaped gradients to afford the folks who lived there ordered and gratifying views of the world, such as they had earned it, on all sides.

  "Big money," said the Bear, bending to peer ahead through the windshield. "Probably worth a few hundred thousand each."

  "Nearer a million," said Iris. "This is just where I'd expect to find Herb. Do you see any numbers on the gateposts, Ron?"

  "I'm lookin', sweetie-pie. That it over there?"

  "Let's look." -

  Rondo pulled the bus up on the right in front of a house still being built

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  across from what might be Herb's hacienda, a wider spread to it than most other places on the road.

  Iris saw the stubby black Porsche sniffing the Range Rover's rear end in the driveway and knew that this was it.
He's still rich and powerful. Get on with it. God help me.

  Rondo confirmed the number.

  "Want me to come with you?" the Bear asked her.

  "No," she said, "let me try it first," and in a sort of dreamstate Iris descended, crossed the road, stepped along the white sand curving walkway through low dry greenery, turned the facetted knob, pushed open the heavy wooden door and walked inside. Left, past a barrier of entrance shelves, two steps forward, turn right and there Herb was in the middle of his living room, spinning to the sound of the opening door and seeing her, a rocks glass in his hand, arms spread wide and his face wondering what the fuck? and once the gears engaged and he recognized her he still didn't get it.

  Iris did a quick scan, detected no sign of her daughters and looked at her ex-husband again.

  Herb looked shockingly bad. His frizzwired hair had gone half grey but that was only the normal work of time. His staring eyes looked fried—evidence his brain must be—and his features were still in place but looked shot to hell. The air around him was full of alcohol and drugs, of which last shrinks have their pick of course, as she'd had once. His skin, although sunbrowned, wasn't doing well, and in his burst face Iris could read the trails and creases he had ridden from the intellectual and chemical bravado of his youth to this degree of wealth and collapse and what might be near-psychosis. Or was she reading too much into a few burst blood vessels and the luggage beneath his eyes.

  "What the fuck?" he managed to say finally.

  His voice: he was rotted out inside. Was it possible that, even without the Bear's revivifying input, she had done better with her life than he? It seemed obvious that she had, but old habit and accustomed shame made it hard for her to assimilate the idea all at once. He had been such a powerful figure looming over her past, just like the other men to whose usually inexistent mercy the circumstances of life and her own helplessness had confided her. You're better off with talking bears, though of course they have their problems too. For a moment Iris watched this former superpower staggering before her, and she felt an involuntary smile tug at her fips. Revenge.

  But she must keep her attention fixed on the present moment and all the things there were to do in it.

  "What the fuck are you doing here?" Herb asked her, his first complete sentence.

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  "I've come to get my daughters," she said, and was pleased to hear her voice sound entirely normal. "You're fried," she added. "You're a wreck."

  "I'm at home on Sunday evening," he said, slurring some of it. "Tomorrow in the office I'll look like an apoth, a poth. I'll look unassailable."

  Iris looked him up and down. "That's no longer possible," she said.

  "Excuse me?" said a female voice, but it wasn't one of her daughters. A form stood itself into view from a sofa set at the windows at the far end of the long white room, and the girl walked toward her. Where were Tracy and Amy? This little piece, a fringe benefit no doubt of the New Age end of Herb's practice, couldn't have been more than a few years their senior. Certainly her physique—no waist, flaring hips, large self-lofting breasts—would not survive its teens. Even by her twenties she would succumb to gravity or fill out or deflate. In the meantime she was just the sort of troubled, hyper-sexual young thing a rich deteriorating shrink might still be able to get ahold of in a place Hke Santa Fe. The girl walked steadily but too slowly—grass or tranks at least, Iris thought, noting the dreamy eyes—high-breasted beneath a cutoff T-shirt that lifted as she stepped, a curtain threatening to rise on what Iris had no doubt was Herb's favorite show. The girl looked at Iris with still innocent youthful insolence. Iris was surprised Herb could satisfy her, but maybe expertise could pass for vigor with one so young. But—Iris warned herself—^wasn't this speciously, transparently self-defensive? not to mention some idiotic form of outworn jealousy. Reject it.

  "Mom?"

  Tracy—thank God she was home: Iris had asked them not to go out all weekend, but they had whined about it, and you never knew—appeared in an archway to Iris' left and stared at her with only seeming calm in her dark eyes. Tracy's face was longer and more serious than when Iris had last seen it at Herb's mother's apartment in Chicago. A corridor behind her led to a bedroom in which some rock record or other was playing. Amy wandered out of this room up the corridor and stood partly behind Tracy, her blond head down but her eyes looking toward her mother, and Iris knew what she had to do.

  "You really came," Tracy said, and Iris could hear that her elder daughter had had no faith in her arrival. Perhaps no faith in her at all. It hurt but perhaps over the years she had earned no better. My two daughters, dark and light. Tracy was beginning to become beautiful. That Mediterranean coloring, the xMoorish modelling of her eyes beneath their arches. Aim was still cute, with a pale saddle of freckles across her nez retrousse; Iris smiled just to see her. My heart might burst. Can I get away with this?

  "Are you packed?" Iris asked, but Herb was on the move and she had to keep an eye on him.

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  "What the fuck are you talking about?" he said, and blundered toward a rank of shelves on the lidng room's right-hand wall. There was a fireplace and a mantelpiece, left. His hand found a squat round piece of Indian pottery, earth-bro\Ti triangulated with gridded slants of black, then rejected it for something larger but less well made—even in near-deUrium he retained his sense of property. Once he had grasped this second pot by its Up he stepped forward and swTing it at her head, missing widely, and then, either by a continuance of his motion or deHberately, flung it into the opposite wall, where it shattered over the mantel and knocked over two kachinas and some photographs. Tracy ducked away from the flying pieces and Herb came toward Iris.

  "That's it," said the Bear at the first sound of breakage, out of the bus and covering the ground to the house on all fours at speed. He was upright once through the open door and inside the house, however. It looked bad, he thought, but he thought he could manage this.

  They must have exchanged positions, thought the Bear, because Iris was farther inside the house than the man was, and the man, in a black short-sleeved polo shirt and loose khaki slacks, was advancing upon her with his arms outstretched, a whiskey glass raised in one hand. Off left under an arch-w ay stood two adolescent girls presumably Iris' daughters, one dark the other hghter, and there was another girl, probably a friend of theirs, who had fallen backward onto a sofa beneath a sweep of windows at the far end of the room. Amazing tits, he thought.

  There had better be enough space between the man and Iris to forestall any iolence until he got there, because if the man hit Iris the Bear w^ould likely kill him and that would lead to comphcations. The Bear knew it was fatuous and cheesy, but as he made his approach he couldn't help thinking of it as a Jim Rockford moment. The man w as raising the w^hiskey glass higher to threaten Iris.

  The Bear hit the guy—Herb—between the shoulderblades with the flat of his forepaw, not hard enough to knock him down—didn't want him falling into Iris—but sufficient to stagger him and command his attention, and when the handsome ravaged face spun toward him and its eyes went wide and jaw fell open—the Bear was bristling atop the jumpsuit collar and baring most of his teeth—the Bear spoke: "You'd probably deal with this better if you were a Jungian. But it's already too late now^ to make the change."

  Herb didn't deal with it well. His face reddened abruptly enough for the Bear to worry about the possibility of a heart attack.

  "Sit down," the Bear advised Herb, and prodded him down onto the loveseat. "We'll be out of here in fifteen minutes. You want another drink?

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  cause I think you spilled that one. In fact, show me where you keep the Hquor and I'll join you."

  "Fftffif," Herb said.

  "You don't want to say that," the Bear confided. "Iris? Jones and Rondo can help you carry that stuff. I'll just sit here with your ex." He patted Herb on the knee. "Nice to meetcha. What? In fact yes I am," he as
sured the man. "Real as real can be. That girl's underage. Amazing body. She much fun? Don't you fucking move."

  Of course the girls had not packed everything their mother had asked them to, and it took twenty minutes, Jones and Rondo shuttling in and out of the house with their arms loaded. Iris in the girls' bedroom most of the time, puUing things out from under the bed, insisting to Tracy that if she couldn't find it she would buy her a new one in New York. When everything had been loaded into the underbays of the bus—Rondo made a last appearance, grinning, with all the house's telephones in his arms—Iris came out looking admirably calm and addressed herself to the girl in the cutoff T-shirt.

  "I don't think you want to stay here now," Iris told the girl in her normal conversational tone.

  "He can be a lot of fan sometimes," the girl maintained.

  "Not for the next day or two, I think," Iris said. "Has he ever beaten you?"

  "I'll get my things," the girl said hurriedly.

  "Can we drop you somewhere? Home, I mean your parents' place?"

  "Sweet Jesus not there it's worse," she said. "I have friends. Could you drop me downtown?" The Bear watched the girl as she jammed things into a backpack, put on a torn denim jacket and told Iris that she was ready. She didn't seem to remark the Bear's existence at all.

  "It's been a blast," the Bear told Herb in parting. They'd had a couple of whiskeys together, straight. "But don't try to find us. Nobody'll believe you about me and you'll hate the countercharge of statutory. You're not in shape for this. You're fucked."

  "By the way," Iris said. "Your mother's on my side."