Bear and His Daughter (21 page)

Enraged now, she could detect the mocking hypocrisy in his false, mellow tones:

Surrender to the Notion
Of the Motion of the Ocean.

As soon as she received the words, they occupied every fraction of her inner space, reverberating moronically, over and over. She put her hands over her ears.

“Horseshit!” she cried. “What kind of cheapo routine is that?”

The voice, she suspected suddenly, might not be that of a porpoise. It might be the man in the turtleneck.

But where? Hovering at the mouth of a celestial black hole, secure within the adjoining dimension? A few miles off Sausalito at periscope depth? Or—more monstrous—ingeniously reduced in size and concealed within the dolphin?

“Help,” Alison called softly.

At the risk of permanent damage, she desperately engaged her linear perception. Someone might have to know.

“I’m caught up in this plot,” she reported. “Either porpoises are trying to reach me with this fascist message or there’s some kind of super-Nazi submarine offshore.”

Exhausted, she rummaged through her knit bag for a cigarette, found one and lit it. A momentary warp, she assured herself, inhaling deeply. A trifling skull pop, perhaps an air bubble. She smoked and trembled, avoiding the sight of the tank.

In the next moment, she became aware that the tall young man she had seen earlier had made a circuit of the hall and was standing beside her.

“Fish are groovy,” the young man said.

“Wait a minute,” Alison demanded. “Just wait a minute here. Was that…?”

The young man displayed a woodchuck smile.

“You were really tripping on those fish, right? Are you stoned?”

He carried a camera case on a strap round his shoulder and a black cape slung over one arm.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alison said. She was suddenly consumed with loathing.

“No? ‘Cause you look really spaced out.”

“Well, I’m not,” Alison said firmly. She saw Io advancing from the bench.

The young man stood by as Io clutched her mother’s floor-length skirt.

“I want to go outside now,” Io said.

His pink smile expanded and he descended quickly to his haunches to address Io at her own level.

“Hiya, baby. My name’s Andy.”

Io had a look at Andy and attempted flight. Alison was holding one of her hands; Andy made her fast by the other.

“I been taking pictures,” he told hen “Pictures of the fishies.” He pursued Io to a point behind Alison’s knees. Alison pulled on Io’s free hand and found herself staring down into the camera case.

“You like the fishies?” Andy insisted. “You think they’re groovy?”

There were two Nikon lenses side by side in the case. Alison let Io’s hand go, thrust her own into the case and plucked out a lens. While Andy was asking Io if she was shy, Alison dropped the lens into her knit bag. As Andy started up, she seized the second lens and pressed it hard against her skirt.

Back on his feet, Andy was slightly breathless.

“You wanna go smoke some dope?” he asked Alison. “I’m goin’ over to the art museum and sneak some shots over there. You wanna come?”

“Actually,” Alison told him, “I have a luncheon engagement.”

Andy blinked. “Far out.”

“Far out?” Alison asked. “I’ll tell you something far out, Andy. There is a lot of really repulsive shit in this aquarium, Andy. There are some very low-level animals here and they’re very frightening and unreal. But there isn’t one thing in this place that is as repulsive and unreal as you are, Andy.”

She heard the laughter echo and realized that it was her own. She clenched her teeth to stop it.

“You should have a tank of your own, Andy.”

As she led Io toward the door; she cupped the hand that held the second lens against her hip, like a mannequin. At the end of the hall, she glanced back and saw Andy looking into the dolphin’s tank. The smile on his face was dreadful.

“I like the fish,” Io said as they descended the pompous stone steps outside the entrance. “I like the lights in the fish places.”

Recognizing them, Buck rushed forward on his chain, his tongue dripping. Alison untied him as quickly and calmly as she could.

“We’ll come back, sweetie,” she said. “We’ll come back lots of times.”

“Tomorrow?” the child asked.

In the parking lot, Alison looked over her shoulder. The steps were empty; there were no alarums or pursuits.

When they were in the car, she felt cold. Columns of fog were moving in from the bay. She sat motionless for a while, blew her nose and wrapped a spare sweater that was lying on the seat around Io’s shoulders.

“Mama’s deluded,” she explained.

I
T WAS AN
old Mafia lodge on the north shore of the lake that went back to the 1940s. During the years of its construction casino managements had not yet discovered the necessity of isolating their patrons from time and daylight, so the main bar had a huge picture window fronting on the lambent water and the towering sierra beyond it. The sun had already disappeared behind the mountains and the lake was purple with dusk. Smart, the bearded poet, stood with a double Scotch and water in his hand, his stool turned to the window.

“Wine-dark!” he exclaimed to the bartender.

The bartender, a foxy-faced young man, had a short, military-style haircut but his manner was slack in the extreme.

“Say again, señor?”

“Wine-dark,” Smart repeated, gesturing toward the lake.

The young bartender seemed virtually floored by the assault of sudden illumination.

“Wine-dark? The lake? You see it as like ‘wine-dark’?”

“Not really an original conceit,” Smart explained. “Actually…”

“Wine-fucking-dark.” He gave a little half-dazzled toss of his narrow head. “Whoa.” They had been alone at the bar but shortly a cocktail waitress with reddish-blond bangs arrived to collect an order.

“Señor here,” the bartender told her; “sees the lake as ‘wine-dark.’”

“Cool,” the young woman said. She looked at Smart not unkindly.

“Make you feel like another belt, señor?” asked the barkeep.

“Sure,” said Smart.

The barman poured Smart the mean measure prescribed by the house. Smart reminded him to make it a double.

“Then it’ll be Scotch-dark, right?” the youth asked.

“And then it’ll be just dark,” said the waitress. She put her order on a tray and sailed off to deliver it.

A few minutes into his third double Scotch, Smart asked the young man, “Think there are any salmon left in the lake?”

At first the bartender seemed unclear as to what such creatures might be. Then he said, “Hey, sure. All you want.” He studied Smart for a moment. “Salmon? That what you like?”

“Yes,” Smart said. “Salmon are what I like. Salmon are what I go for.”

“No shit?” asked the man.

For the past year; Smart had been trying to reconstruct a poem he had written about witnessing the salmon migration in the Tanana River in central Alaska thirty years before. It had been two-thirty or three on an early summer morning. The sun had been low on the horizon, and on the distant tundra a herd of bison were grazing the bitter subarctic bush. The fish working their way upstream had been plainly visible through the clear water. They were survivors, veterans of the Pacific, two hundred miles from the sea now, returned to die in the place they were spawned. Above them gulls, eagles, ospreys wheeled in numbers such as Smart had never encountered. It seemed to him that he had never witnessed a sight so moving and noble as the last progress of these salmon. So he had written a poem and left it somewhere and never seen it again:

Like elephants, swaying
Straining with the effort of each undulation,
They labor home…

“Check the dining room,” the bartender said. “You never can tell. Me, I don’t go for fish.” He lowered his voice. “If I did, man, I wouldn’t have it here. But the steak, hey, that’s another story. The steak is straight from Kansas City, you know what I’m saying?”

“The river is forever swift and young,” Smart remembered he had written, “forever renewed, beyond history.”

He looked out into the darkness, as though he might find the rest of the words there.

But these, elephant-eyed
Under the skirl and whirl and screech of gulls
And swoop of eagles,
Are creatures of time’s wheel.

“I bet they got trout,” the bartender said. “They always do. But I can’t like give you trout out here. You gotta go to the dining room. You see where the maitre d’ is standing?”

Smart, disoriented for a moment, looked toward a man in a dinner jacket far across the room. Now it all had to be paid for, he thought, every worthwhile moment, every line, good, bad, mediocre. And of all the poems, why had he to lose that one?

“Under the pale ultra-planetary sky of the white night,” it had gone on, more or less:

I feel for them such love
And, for their cold struggle, such admiration
In my overheated heart.

Smart rose from his stool, dizzy with the Scotch and the altitude.

“You OK, señor?” asked the bartender.

He fixed the youth with a glittering eye, tossed a few singles on the bar and strolled out to the casino. On the way, he passed the young cocktail waitress.

“You got nice eyes,” she told him.

He felt so pleased he could only smile. A man had to keep settling for less. Patronizing compliments. You became a few scattered lines of your own poem.

What wisdom could be bound in a fish eye?
It must be an illusion.
For how could fish, these fish, under their long-lost ale-colored sky,
In the strange light, coming home, coming back after all these years,
Have something in their cold old eyes I need
Or think I need?

A magical experience it had been, that night, all poetry and light!

The casino had an Old West theme, with wagon-wheel chandeliers and fake Navajo rugs and buffalo skulls and elkhorn racks fixed to the log walls. It was a quiet weekday night on the lake and the action was slow. Half a dozen blackjack games were under way, dealt by fair young women with cavalier curls and sleeve garters. Three roulette wheels stood motionless beneath transparent plastic covers. At the craps table, two silent men, a pit boss and a stick man, stood side by side like mourners. Smart, who had carried his drink from the bar leaned against a polished pine stanchion to watch them.

The house uniform was country-and-western. The pit boss was a pale, yellowing man in a two-tone beige and tan jacket and a bolo tie with a turquoise ornament. The stick man wore a red bandanna knotted below his Adam’s apple. He was bald and red-faced. There were shiny scars on the taut skin over his cheekbones. Smart decided to play.

He was midway through a six-college tour of the mountain states, his first reading series in three years. For each reading, Smart was being paid two thousand dollars. He hitched up his chino trousers and advanced to the table.

“Right,” he declared. “A wager here.”

The men turned serpent gazes on him.

“Did you want to play, friend?” the stick man asked.

“Please,” said Smart. “Five-dollar chips.”

“Friend will play,” sang the stick man in a grifter’s croon. He pushed the big red dice toward Smart. Smart spread ten chips along the Pass line, took up the dice, shook them and rolled.

“Come-out roll,” the stick man intoned. The voice conveyed to Smart the romance of his own youth—carnivals, the society of car thieves and hustlers, the street.

“A seven-ah,” the man declared, for Smart had rolled four and tray. He pushed Smart’s winnings along the green baize. Smart rolled again. The dice read double fives.

“Ten the point,” declared the stick man. “Ten the hard way.”

On the very next roll Smart threw another ten. The stick man paid out his chips. Smart left his winnings in place and rolled eleven.

“An ee-leven,” the stick man called. Smart gave the man a humorous glance, as though his good fortune were somehow being appreciated. The man’s dead eyes offered neither help nor hope and not a grain of congratulation.

A pretty girl in a leotard, a different girl this time and not the one who admired his eyes, asked Smart if he would like a drink. She was olive-skinned but pale, with an unhappy smile. Drugs, he suspected.

“Oh,” said the poet, “double Scotch, I think.”

And about halfway through the next anemic double Scotch, a drink for which Smart could conceive scant respect, things started to go wrong. Looking at the table, he found he could not calculate the amount of money represented by the chips there. The stick man had changed some of his five-dollar chips to twenty-fives, yellow chips with metal centers. Uncertainly he drew back some of the chips and let some ride. He rolled boxcars, then a seven, and lost.