The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "No point taking his car," said Jones.

  "Then it's settled," Hatwell said. "We're not taking his car."

  Long pause, a furtive exchange of looks, then all five burst out laughing. The Bear was the first to say it: "Let's take his fucking car."

  Hatwell lapsed laughing onto Linton Bostic on the sofa. Garrett hooted.

  Bostic summed it up. "Okay let's take his girlfriend's fucking car."

  "You seen his girlfriend?" Hatwell asked. "Cause maybe we could take her, instead."

  "Actually," said Jones, "we could raise two grand on his sweater."

  The Bear stomped wheezing laughing around the room. "Car," he said. "Car. Car. Car."

  "Hey," said Bostic, "Bear learned a word."

  Who could tell, the Bear thought while gasping, maybe this would be a good night after all.

  They took his girlfriend's car. Jones had signed the paper, in Ueu of a pawprint from the Bear. X^e girlfriend, a nice one, alternated anger and anxiety but let it happen. Levine told her she could have the Mercedes if the deal didn't play. The house had filled, and down in the parking lot at the base of that long stairway a white-hot pivoting searchUght lanced and circled at the sky. "He can hire a fucking searchUght but he don't have dime one for us?" was Hatwell's reasonable remark. Hatwell bit a fingernail. It was almost time to play.

  The Bear wandered out in front of the stage for a moment to glad-hand a portion of the house, pardy to say obHgatory hellos but also because he had security concerns in mind. He didn't see Salman Rushdie. There was a back door accessible from the stage and it had been left unlocked for him, but that had not been enough at the Tin Palace, and this particular escape hatch gave onto an exposed metal stair slanting to street level down a bare brick wall with no cover and no future to the gambit if the law was waiting at the bottom. The Bear expressed some of his misgivings at the first stageside table he approached.

  "You see these good old boys here?" Rondo grinned up at him.

  "I see them," said the Bear, looking down at five other big strange white guys—swollen T-shirts, black leather, guts, bad skin, tattoos, sloppy distracted grins, straggly beards, long ponytails and lawless almost certainly demented eyes. "Hi. Hah. Yall. A fragmentary greeting I'm afraid but the fact is I'm glad to see you. Yall."

  "Anything happens," Rondo told him, "they run loose like you wouldn't beUeve and the world better duck and cover."

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  "Rondo," the Bear said, "I thank you from the available bottom of my heart but don't start anything just for the fan of it, okay?"

  "Do my best to keep the guys in line," Rondo said. "This's Dooky, that's Pap, this here's Clancy, Case, and Bugle-Ass. Y'oughta take the time to get to know them individjly."

  "Maybe after the first set you could all come back to the greenroom," the Bear suggested.

  "The fuck's this 'Rondo'?" one of the faces at the table asked as the Bear headed over to say hello to Tim. Rondo was answering; if they were old movie buffs there could be trouble. The Bear could feel the house watching him, faces pivoting his way as he moved from table to table, nodding and sociable as he could manage.

  "Hey Bear," Tim's famihar voice asked him when he was still looking out at the house and raising his saxophone aloft—pure social weakness—to wave some species of generalized hello: lot of tables out there in the relative dark, and a smattering of applause even though he hadn't played a note yet. "I don't see any cops in here. Bear, in case you were wondering. And I oughta know," Tim said.

  "Hey thanks man," said the Bear, and nodded to acknowledge the information. "Is this xMrs. Tim here? Hi." Still somewhat distracted and looking around, definitely impohte; the Bear attempted a correction, and labored to focus his eyes on the woman.

  "Miranda," she offered up, and took his paw with less than the usual trepidation, a wdde grin beneath lofted red-dyed hair.

  "O brave new world," the Bear felt obliged to say, still turning a wary eye upon the house. "Nice to meetcha. Creatures in it."

  "Really, Bear," Tim told him, "the law ain't here."

  "The law is always here," said the Bear, "even when it can't be seen."

  "Tim has told me so much about you," Mrs. Tim said, perhaps conventionally, and tugged lightly on his paw.

  The Bear finally looked down at her and hked what he saw: behind the woman's face widening and flattening into middle age he detected an indiscriminate Hght, more pleasing than the attempts at makeup or the aura of hair that framed the display suggested. "Look after him," he told Miranda, feeling a sudden tenderness for both of them, making their efforts at identity in the midst of such immensity. "He needs looking after." As did all sentient beings, he thought, his heart swelling with unthought love for every creature his eye might propose to consideration that night. WTiat's happening? he wondered. I know it's true but what's working in me? What is going on?

  "I will look after him," Miranda said.

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  "I know," said the Bear, and it seemed for a moment that he could see Tim and Miranda as God might have thought them up; how precious and impossible not to love, how undiminished and untravestied while deployed in time. WTiat could he do for them? The Bear was unable to think of anything adequate.

  VVTiat is up with me tonight? he wondered. If I get too floaty I won't have enough concentration to play.

  Levine came up behind the Bear and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Stanley Crouch just bought a magnum of our best champagne for his table. God bless the MacArthur Foundation and the markup on booze in general. We're making money."

  "You mean you want the car back?"

  "Only if I pull in the two grand clean above what I have to pay the kitchen staff. I'm ready to introduce the band. You ready to play?"

  "One never knows, do one." The Bear looked at the brick and ocher masonry walls, the stonework trim, and reminded himself: material world: you play music in it: your role here: you signed on again, remember: but why?

  "I'll just say a few words to welcome the audience." One more shoulder-pat and Levine made for the stage, where he tapped the chrome and webwork microphone, cleared his throat and bestowed upon the house his best attempt at a relaxed, hospitable grin. "If I could have your attention for a minute ... just a minute please ... hello ello .. . thank you ... ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Bridge."

  A dutiful round of applause, quick fade, the sound of drinks, provisional hush of patience.

  "And welcome to the Bear too. Didn't mean to leave anyone out.'* ' iyj

  The Bear dropped into a chair next to Tim and listened as Levine began i surprisingly long speech about how he had always dreamed about opening sr jazz club in New York, if at all possible in just this particular, quite extraordinary location, and as the Bear heard a certain tearfulness beginning to cre^ in the man's voice he cast his eyes around the room to scan his almost fiilly comped public. That might be Stanley Crouch over there pouring out champagne—nice suit for a man his size, wonder if his tailor could make me one like that; orange label on his champagne bottle; the Bear felt a sudden purely phantom thirst—for his large round table of eight; but the man the Bear wanted to find was that creep Badiyi so he could brace him between sets all bristling fur and flashing teeth to ask him about the small matter, the rather too small matter of those royalty checks, hm? Instead his eyes encountered, at a small table set against a masonry wall, the Shakespeare-looking guy who

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  had interviewed him at the Power Station—he was sitting with an attractive Middle Eastern-looking woman, who seemed, to the Bear's lipreading eyes and directional ears, repeatedly to be calling him Winkies. Note to Iris: people are funny.

  Levine, poised at the microphone in the spotlight at the edge of the stage, had begun talking about how important animals had always been to him, especially in childhood, when . . . the horse he'd always wanted . . . the birds he had wanted to befriend . . . White Fang . . . The Jungle Book . . . Akela . . . Baloo . . .r />
  What was it with people? the Bear wondered. I get so tired of being everybody's sentimental inkblot.

  Bagheera . . . Kaa . . . Levine said he had always seen himself as, well, how should he put it, a sort of Mowgli-figure . . . empathy with his childhood dog . . . the raccoons that used to raid the trashcans at his parents' country place those long summer nights . . . and don't we know New York's a jungle? So ... in a certain sense . . . the bridge above our heads . . . and the appearance of the Bear in it... as cars rush over us . . . signifies . . .

  The Bear had had enough of this—Jones had taken a run at this near-metaphor on the ride down from the mountains, but as far as the Bear was concerned it was twice-idiotic hooey, signifying a double dose of nothing. It was time to cut the talk, time to strut your hour upon the stage and hope it swings despite the odds.

  The Bear rumbled up from his seat, rehooked the alto to his neckstrap, nodded farewell to Tim and Mrs. Tim, and walked up to the stage playing a bit of intro to what was supposed to be "Doxy" but might actually prove to be a blues: he'd think about it. Turning heads, startled looks, one glass breaking, and a smattering of applause as Levine stepped back looking confused from the mike and indicated with a flawed sweep of arm the advancing Bear. After a momentary dissociative blur, he found himself fully onstage, nodding into the lights as he played, acknowledging the applause with inclinations of his trunk and hearing the band attain its instruments behind him—tink of piano, ting of cymbal, thrum of bass—as he played a couple of blues licks in F up into the arches and thought it might work out.

  It only then occurred to him that walking onstage playing was another Sonny Rollins reference, something Sonny sometimes Hked to do—considering the venue, it was no more than good form, due tribute—but he thought that opening with Rollins' "Doxy," as he had planned to do, might overegg the custard, and he cued the band with a couple of passing references to "M Squad," the Count Basic shuffle blues they'd had fun with on the tour, but noodled and divagated his way through some further asides before settling on

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  a tempo and pulling the band in with a downward sweep of his horn. Four bars into the head the house unloosed a round of applause—they know "M Squad?" it'd surprise me—and he looked up past the spothghts' mix of white and blue and red into the balconies, which seemed well freighted with listening humans. The house might be comped, but at least it was fall. He finished the repeat of the head and heard the guys prepare the way for his solo: a climbing Tynerish cadence, a cymbal flurry with a press roll behind it, and a friendly nod to the subdominant from Garrett. Okay, thought the Bear. What should I play for these nice people?

  In any event, he thought after a couple of choruses, this is an interesting way to stumble into the music. What he had done, pretty much, was keep Sonny Rollins in mind: gradually, teasingly, he'd been evolving the beginnings of a new melody from the fundamentals of the tune, underlining the process with a blatant, half-comic tracing of each cadence and chord change—first, um, this chord, then that, and at the end of every twelve bars it all comes down like this —in a way the audience might find familiar if they'd heard his recording of "When a Man Loves a Woman." What he usually liked, when his head was working along these lines, was to build up, by means of overstated basics and interstitial runs, a long and ruminative architecture which he could later tear to pieces for catharsis; but as he put the solo through these somewhat accustomed paces, he had occasion to wonder how much this really had to do with Sonny Rollins, because maybe it really came down from Monk.

  Rahim Bobby Harwell seemed to think it did; in any case, he salted the way ahead with an exploratory alternation of major and minor sixths, and when the Bear acknowledged them the band dropped into a meditation on "Misterioso," the almost unrecognizable abstract Monk had built out of the barest fundamentals of a blues, and they might even have taken it out of tempo to explore the implications—Garrett and Hatwell climbing those laddering sixths, the Bear continuing to augment the nearly contrapuntal bass component of the line to draw out its aspects one at a time, so that the four of them were slowly being led by the tune's abstraction into a kind of stalled, Cubist consideration of its workings. Monk's corners all so brilliant—had not the Bear pressed onward into the next chorus, and the next, with a willful plurality of new ideas in order to jettison the already known, or at least the sufficiently obvious. The band fought him at first—kids, he thought, and we can work this stuff out some other time—but after awhile they seemed to accept his terms and give way before his insistent push ahead. They set up a httle modified shuffle groove to see if he might enjoy the ride, and after two more choruses it seemed as if he did. Garrett's time broadened to accommo-

  44- Rafi Z abor

  date the larger melodic ambit the Bear kept proposing and reproposing; Linton \idened the shuffle into a lope and set c}Tnbal ornamentations shimmering in the gaps: and Bobby Harwell began to leave uncharacteristically long spaces between his chords—the Bear looked over his right shoulder to check and yes, to spare himself Harwell was holding his hands down on the keys rather than using the pedal to sustain their resonance: a partly practical consideration given the state of his legs, but it also imited the Bear to occupy the lengthening gaps with whatever the freedom of the moment might suggest.

  These were three ven' smart musicians. The band was sounding good. -nd how much room they give me. As a matter of fact I do feel a bit expansive.

  He felt his body find its ease, his lungs expanding on the inbreath, tone enriching itself on the out. He doubletimed the next four bars, did a littie accent-sntching turnaround, thank you Bird, into the release, and felt cell after cell in the large dark shape of himself begin to come alight. Ox^gen. Inspiration. I Hke it. He took the saxophone from his snout for a two-bar lag and laughed aloud as his heart began to open—lots of room in there, and something more knowing than emotion. Yes. he thought, as he had sometimes on the tour but never at the beginning of the first set, this is what the music s for. AMiat I feel right now is worth a fife, even one as preposterous as my oMi. Certainly worth all the sweat and study. In the cit- of himself, lights went on m the apartments, people settied down to dinner or got up to dance, block parties started up in the sidestreets, and the simplest facts of fife were celebrated: memon* was accorded a specific rh}-thmic nod and the basic functions of the brain inspired spontaneous group g^Tations here and there. The basic stuff of night and day embraced and the undecided sk' filled nth a rich blend of color The Bear took a stroU along the boulevards and liked the look of eventhine he saw, the way people were, the things they loved and the way they loved them. One more significant step onward and he saw the labmnth of streets begin to assemble itself into that ideal geometn* of hght in which identity- was spelled out whole beyond the passing chords of space and time— a radical shift m the angle of ^iew but not yet. he noticed, an essential change of substance. The process so far was only impHcation not ascent, and what he felt now was deep pleasure in being who he was, where he was, and if that necessarily included all the gain and loss that had brought him to this point, he had a few objections but was ready to say yes. The Bear felt an anticipator)- flutter in his heart, the familiar trembling of the veil at its entrance, but suppressed the uree toward ecstasy, or laid it aside for the moment in the interest of the continuing particulars of this satisfactor}- fittie solo on a Count

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  Basic shuffle blues as played on a worn Martin alto in a club called the Bridge.

  So that, standing on recognizable earth, the Bear played a long arching trill in alternating seconds and thirds through the better part of a chorus— lungs still good, he thought—leaned back into the rhythm section to play one more long-breathed chorus that casually summarized the preceding architecture and stepped aside to let the guys have a go. What surprised him was that Hatw^ell kept his outing short, Garrett decHned a solo, and the Bear traded three choruses of fairly elegant fours with Linton befor
e taking "M Squad" out. But you know—he told himself, still riding on the warmth and illuminations of the performance—these are familiar, well-worn pleasures: they only add up to just more Me. However cozy the sensation, it's within known limits, and less than ultimate. It's still within the prison walls. Looking down into the mostiy bungled immensity of himself he felt the coarseness of the puppet on him, the cheap fur, the glassy inexpressive eyes, the corruption of its known coordinates, its unsuitabiHty as essential statement, and he decided that any amplification of the mostly comical dingus could not satisfy him or anyone finally. But did you really expect to bust out of here completely? It would be nice, and I'll put in the obligatory essential request, in triphcate if need be, but it's not the kind of thing you can expect to happen really, is it, in the persistent narrowness of the given world.

  "Thank you thank you thank you," he said into the ovation anyway. "I'm Lieutenant Frank Ballinger and I wish Sonny Rollins was here tonight too. We all know he should be opening this club, but he turns down more gigs than the rest of us get offered and his price was high for the house, so welcome to the real world and we will do the best we can. Rahim Bobby Hatwell only slightly crippled at the piano, Garrett Church wisdom itself on bass, Linton Bostic hitting things with sticks until he thinks up something more sophisticated, and I am exactly what I appear to be. My friend Tim assures me there's no danger of arrest tonight and Rondo looks particularly ready to resume his dialogue with the law should occasion arise. Jones is watching the receipts, I've already won a car and you could be next. Keep your coat-check tickets and thank you thank you thank you. We hope you're not sitting up too close or back too far and we'd like to play you a tune from the score of Gigi Sonny should have played back then but somehow missed out on: 'Say a Prayer for Me Tonight.'"

  He had almost said Iris instead of Gigi.

  The Bear nodded the band into the pirouetting little waltz before the applause had quite died away. Such a pretty tune. The way he'd found it. Iris had a video of Gigi up at the house and the Bear used to watch it some nights.