Bear and His Daughter (7 page)

“I don’t want to see the fucking volcano,” Fletch said.

“I bet you go,” Marge told him.

Fencer and Willie Wings got out and walked toward them. Fencer was wearing his white duck pirate pants and his Pima Indian necklace with a Maltese cross soldered to the chain. He wore his yellow hair like General Custer.

Willie Wings shuffled along beside him carrying a parrot in a cage. Breathless from the morning’s methedrine, he was addressing the bird. His face and the bald crown of his head were red and sweaty.

“Look at Fletch, Godfrey,” Willie Wings enjoined the parrot. “You see Fletch over there?”

Fletch turned away and lowered the brim of his cap over his eyes. He felt colder at that moment than he had ever felt in Mexico.

“It’s a good day,” Fencer declared, striking a posture before them. “Here we are and Willie Wings has his parrot.”

“Can you say ‘Fletch’?” Willie Wings asked the parrot. “Say ‘Come see the volcano, Fletch.’”

“Willie’s been tryin’ to train Godfrey to sit on his shoulder” Fencer said, “but it don’t never work. So he just carries him around.”

Willie Wings scratched at his denims with a free hand and shook the cage.

“Godfrey’s literary, that’s what his trouble is. I’m not saying he’s verbal but he’s literary. He’s like Fletch.”

Willie’s clear gaze swept the scene. Fletch remained under his hat.

“Godfrey and Fletch and Mrs. Fletch are all literary and that’s a handicap.” Willie turned from them, marched away ten steps, wheeled and approached talking.

“Which isn’t to say I don’t have my own literary side except I haven’t got the technical training in Paris and Bucharest of higher poetics before the crowned heads of Europe which is what Godfrey and Fletch and Marge think they have over me.”

He stopped and smiled on his parrot with broken teeth.

“Oh you doll, Godfrey! You pseudo-intellectual.”

“We got beer in the car,” Fencer said. “Let’s haVe a beer, Willie Wings.”

Willie set the parrot down and went to the car to wrestle the beer from the trunk.

“Willie had another bad scene with that Chinaman grocer” Fencer said as they watched him. “Pretty soon oP Hong won’t sell us no more beer.”

Marge shook her head.

“I thought you took his crystal, Fencer,” she said. “He’s really too much now and then.”

Fencer looked sad.

“Willie gave up crystal. He handed me what he had and made me swear I’d only give him what he really needed. But he got some more somewhere and he’s shooting it again. I think maybe he got it from Sinister Pancho Pillow.”

“His mind is running off its reel,” Fletch said. “He’s going to end up in a speed museum.”

“I got a deep personal esteem for Willie Wings,” Fencer told them. “My friends don’t appreciate that. He’s an avatar.”

Fletch said nothing.

“Well he’s certainly a very good driver,” Marge said.

“He’s a lot more than that,” Fencer said. “Aw, just look at him with animals.”

Fletch savored the imaginary cold under his hat brim. He considered Willie Wings’s relationship to animals and Fencer’s relationship to Willie Wings.

“Remember Willie’s dog?” Fencer asked. His eyes sparkled with humorous affection. “Remember Ol’ Crush?”

Marge laughed, joining in the mood of nostalgia. “Oh, God,” she cried, “Ol’ Crush.”

Fletch recalled the days when Willie’s mind had been clearer and he had been a dealer in the Haight. He had maintained a German shepherd named Old Crush, although according to Willie it was an Alsatian and had been trained to kill in French. Willie, in those days, had been more political and would have no traffic with German killer dogs; Old Crush had been raised by anti-fascists, and attacked at the command “Mort
aux vaches.
”

When a deal was consummated Willie Wings and the customer would turn on together, and when everyone was suitably high Willie would introduce Old Crush from an adjoining room.

“Don’t betray the slightest sign of fear,” Willie would advise his guests, “or he’ll tear you to pieces.”

Willie Wings set the case of beer down on the patio and stood before them panting.

“I hear you had more trouble with Mr. Hong,” Marge inquired.

Willie rolled his eyes. “Don’t think Orientals can’t sense dharma strength,” he said. “When Hong sold me that beer, we lived out the Eon of the Void together, and he fought me every step of the way.” He picked up the caged parrot and shook it. “Didn’t he, Godfrey?”

“Hong is afraid of you,” Marge explained, “because he thinks you’re crazy. He’s afraid of Fencer, too.”

“That reminds me,” Willie Wings said. “Let’s go see the volcano. Let’s take Fletch.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Fencer said. “Let’s go, Fletch.”

The rain broke suddenly, Fletch sat silently, listened to it for a while, and lifted his hat.

“Well,” he said, sitting up, “I do want to go up there and see it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Willie Wings sang. “There are fire flowers up there, Fletch. Along the rim. Black rock and fire flowers.”

“But … I don’t think I want to go today.”

Willie Wings stared at Fletch in horror.

“I don’t like it, Fencer,” he said. “I didn’t like it before and I don’t like it now.” He looked at Marge and Fletch in turn. “Why not? I don’t understand. What is this, some kind of literary mood? Some kind of balky bolting? Some kind of not doing what the guys have come to do?”

“This would be the best time to go,” Fencer said.

“It isn’t that I don’t want to see the thing,” Fletch explained, “because I certainly do…”

He made what seemed to him an intense effort to conclude his statement but found himself unable to do so.

“Well, good,” Fencer said. “Let’s go, hoss. Let’s have a joint and go.”

Fencer had the joints under his belt. He produced them with astounding grace and speed; they shot from hand to hand like flaming arrows. Fletch took his tokes one after another, feeling that it was somehow against his will. It occurred to him that he did not have to go with Fencer and Willie Wings to the volcano but that he was very high.

“That’s all I want,” he said after a while.

“Too much,” Willie Wings cried.

They all had another joint and washed the grass sediment down with cold beer.

“I lust after that mountain,” Fencer said. “I’ve got to get up there.”

The rain stopped. Within seconds the wet leaves of the vanilla trees beside the patio were drying.

“Marge,” Fletch said, “do you want to go?”

“No,” she said.

Fencer and Willie Wings watched her.

“Why not?”

“I’ll stay down here with the kids. I have to.”

She leaned against the wall. A small lizard ran between her sandaled feet.

Fletch stood up and looked at the ocean.

“If I had said I was going,” Marge told him, “and Fencer and Willie Wings had come to take me, I would go.”

“Right,” Fletch said.

“Man,” Fencer said, “we’ve got to get up there. We’ve got to leave now while it’s light.”

“Right,” Fletch said. He picked up the thermos of Coke and alcohol and walked to the car. He felt curiously cold in the sunlight.

The inside of Fencer’s car was stifling. Fletch sat down between a tire and some empty gasoline cans. The car smelled of gasoline and the steaming rotten upholstery.

Fencer and Willie got in. As the car pulled away, Fletch watched his wife go inside and close the door.

“When we get up there, Fletch,” Fencer said, “you’ll see it’s a great place for a poet. Then I won’t have to describe it for you anymore.”

“When Fletch sees it,” Willie Wings said, “he can describe it for us. Because being a poet he can describe things better than we can.”

He turned around to face Fletch.

“Fletch has had too many things described to him. It’s time he had something of his own to describe.”

Fletch looked out the window at the rows of banana trees.

“Who is he talking about, Fencer? Is he really talking about me?”

“You know that better than I do, Fletch,” Fencer said. “Sounds like he is.”

They drove along the coast highway between the plantations and the beach. Just outside the village, where the police post was, the Indians were lined along the road in their Sunday suits, holding palm fronds and flags. Five men in silver-studded vests stood behind the crowd with instruments at the ready—two trumpeters, a tuba player; a drummer and a cymbalist. People in the crowd held lengths of a banner reading
BIENVENIDOS PADRE URRIETA!

Fencer and Willie Wings saluted the crowd as they drove by. Fencer salaamed and Willie Wings, his fingers joined to suggest the Trinity, dispensed papal benedictions.

“
Diablo,
” someone shouted.

Fletch crouched down beside the tire in a position from which he could see only the crests of palm trees and the sky.

After a while they turned inland, following the straight plantation roads through armies of coconut palm. At the turn where the road curved upward into the sierra, they started a covey of vultures from the jungle. The birds flapped about the car windows in alarm.

“Hong won’t sell me tarot cards,” Willie Wings said. “He told me no, absolutely refused to sell me them, won’t have me near them.”

“He probably doesn’t have tarot cards,” Fletch said. “He’s a grocer.”

“I know what Hong has,” Willie said heatedly. “I know every thing about him.” Willie was popping pills; he turned to Fencer in a fury. “Listen, Fences how can he be a poet? He don’t live the conscious life. He lives unawares.”

“You reckon there’s truth in that?” Fencer asked.

“No,” Fletch said. “I live the conscious life.”

Fencer smiled at him in the rear-view mirror.

“You hear that, Fencer?” Willie Wings shouted. “You hear what he said?”

Fletch stared at the moist flushed surface of Willie’s head and felt a thrill of fear.

“Everyone has a potential level of consciousness,” Fencer said kindly. “There’s a vein of deep perception in all beings. The thing is to bring it out.”

“Fletch’s perception is dead,” Willie Wings declared. He began to assemble a joint of his own. “Like a dead nerve in a tooth.”

They were leaving the low ground. Palms gave way to occasional live oak, Spanish cedar and euphorbia; vines covered the road. They ascended a green spiral, and at the turns Fletch could see the bay below.

He said nothing, but when Willie Wings presented the next joint he accepted it. His perception, he reminded himself, was not dead but throbbed within his lax and ill-used body, a secret agent. Crouched low in the back seat, he stared dully toward the mass of the sierra and tried to consider the action.

They were taking him up to the volcano. When the moment came, he promised himself, he would act appropriately.

The smell of thick-fleshed green things was suffocating. The wind that resisted their climb was heavy and sweet.

“I was once the only white bellhop in Chattanooga,” Willie Wings told them when the joint had been consumed. “Years and years ago at the start of my career. I worked in an eight-story hotel. You see me, right? Youthful in those days, with glossy black hair that indicated my Cherokee blood. Braided uniform, kind of like the staff drape at the Hotel Dixie on Forty-two Street when the bus depot was up there. Only it’s an eight-story hotel in Chattanooga—take it off the stationery.

“Now I couldn’t begin to lay on you the parts of the human heart I witnessed there. Forget the microcosm—it was more than that. Eight stories high.

“You
know,
don’t you, that I saw lots of shit to appeal to the prurient interest? I saw every variety of sexuality known to the Eastern masters. Dig it! In each and every room was a viewee thing—sometimes it was a little hole, sometimes it was more complicated, because this was in the great age of hotels.”

Fletch listened with growing panic. While Willie Wings paused to do a speed item, he raised his thermos and drank. He tried to do so in absolute silence, and huddled even lower in the seat so that he would not be seen. Willie caught him all the same.

“Fencer!” Willie cried, so loudly that the bird beside him set up a squawk in anxious imitation. “Look at Fletch with that lush! Look at him suck on it.”

Fencer smiled tolerantly. “Fletch is just relaxing.”

“Don’t get so juiced I can’t tell you, Fletch—I’m talking about Chattanooga! I’m talking about that eight-story hotel!” He raised his clenched hand as though he were wrestling with angels.

“Every notion that could be acted upon with the human body was acted upon under my eyes, baby. My nights were rich—they were cloying. But—listen to this, Fletch—of all those fleshy games I saw played, the most spectacular beyond any shadow of a doubt was played by one man! One solitary, ordinary-looking citizen in a room by himself! I have never again seen anything like it.”

Willie Wings paused to catch his breath. He rubbed his hands together.