Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! (9 page)

“Look! I’m really sorry! We just … we can’t drive out at night, Marv. There’s parts washed out, there’s a lot of off-roading and stuff. In the morning we’ll go. You’ll be okay, you gotta believe me.” And then he reaches under and pats my shoulder like I’m his little Papillon. “Be brave, Marv. Don’t worry, you’re gunna be fine. Just hang in there, tiger.”

I grab his loathsome, condescending sleeve. “Not fine! Worried! Just jack up this car and I will nurse my
own
god damn wounds and drive
myself
the fuck home! This is a Range Rover! It’s
guaranteed!
”

“Marv, please!” suggests ever-helpful Edna. “Use your anger tools! You could hurt yourself even worse if you get all worked up!”

“Hurt
myself?
You just shot me!”

“I said I was sorry! Honestly, Marv … you’ve got to hold on a little longer, Pumpkin. Please … for me?”

“First you shoot me … and now you want to see my
anger tools?”

And then Frank chuckles. Frank Baumer chuckles. At me. He thinks I’m funny. I consider cutting off one of his fingers. I have a knife. I can still hurt people. He says to me: “Marv, you’re talking crazy. Don’t try crazy stuff. You’re in no shape to drive.”

And then … then he reaches across my chest into my right breast pocket … and pulls out the gleaming fob that holds my Range Rover’s ignition keys and door/alarm remote. Just like that. Like he knows which pocket I keep them in. Like he’s been watching me. I grab for the keys, for his arm, his coat, anything, but my hands are just like big bunches of bananas hanging off my sleeves. And he says: “Just hunker down and hang in there, Marv. Help is on the way. You’re gonna live. You’re gonna be fine.” And he gets up to walk away, the keys still dangling from his limp, worthless wrist.

“Gimme that! Get back here with that! Those are
mine
! Don’t you leave!” He walks over to Edna, and they stand there looking at me from a distance. “Edna! Do
not
leave! Bitch, you had better not leave! Get over here right now and jack up this car!”

“Get a
grip
, Marv! Honestly we’re doing the best we can. Why do you have to get all grumpy at a time like this?” Edna sobs pointedly, but she doesn’t comply. Why doesn’t she
comply?

“Baumer! You are so fired if you don’t get back over here right now and get busy with that jack!”

Edna stands up with a meaty, phlegmatic sigh. Now I don’t see them, I just hear their heavy footsteps crunching back into the forest, Edna’s sobs and labored breathing fade out like a steam train rolling away from the station without me.

“Frank! Edna! I need water! I need medicine! Rescue me god-dammit! I’m sorry! I’m bleeding! I didn’t mean what I said! I’ve been under a lot of stress! Come back here and let’s just start over. Please! Edna! Did you hear that? Marv Pushkin is saying please, you know I never say please but I’m saying it. I’m asking nicely for fuck’s sake, so will you get the fuck back here, I love you already! Baby! Sugar bumps! I love you, Edna! I’m going to die! If you leave, I’ll die! I’ll do it, I swear! Edna!”

Silence. Severe silence. It’s never this quiet. I’m totally alone. And I’m crying. Like a woman, like a fag, I’m crying.

Note to self: Kill, kill, kill my darling Edna.

9

But wasn’t that the whole point? Isn’t that why I brought her along? To get her off my balance sheets, wash her out of my collar, pluck her like the nostril-hair she is?

Certainly not! Oh no, officer, such an unspeakable act never crossed my mind. Kill my own wife? My loveypants, my cream and sugar, my honeydew melon, my ice cream headache? Oh no.

Rather, I thought I’d delegate. Alaska is wild and dangerous — as we’ve seen — and there’s no shortage of mortal threats to which to delegate the wife-disposal chores with which modern advertising executives are so overburdened. People die out here constantly, especially weak, foolish, incompetent, ugly people like Edna. They drown in poorly-marked bodies of water with no lifeguards presiding. They fall off cliffs, into ravines. They are devoured by bears, or trampled by moose, or skeletonized by ticks. And when all else fails, there are always the tragic hunting accidents. In fact, just before we left I bought Edna a brown fur coat with a matching fur hat from Saks. From a distance she made a fine grizzly … but the stupid bitch refuses to wear it.

“It makes me look fat,” she said.

“Baby,” I enthused, “that coat makes you look fabulous. Being
fat
makes you look fat.”

And oh, she cried about that one. She’s a prize weeper, Edna is, a real lawn-sprinkler when she wants to be. No sense of humor, and no sense of taste, or of tact, and absolutely zero sense of when to shut up. Excellent sense of whining, though. One of the great whiners of our times.

Mister Bear, you got the wrong guy. You’re supposed to be eating Edna, not me. I, not you or Edna, am supposed to be boffing my secret fuck in the woods behind Camp Image Team. But Edna has this incredible talent for fucking me up.

I recall we were enjoying a very late breakfast back at Camp Image Team, Frink and Halsey had finally coaxed enough heat out of Frink’s anemic Coleman stove to sort of mildly cook some bacon and eggs. Just to accomplish that had taken them hours, while the rest of us stalked around like hungry snakes, smoking cigarettes and drinking cold, gritty coffee and cleaning rifles and suiting up for some serious killage. I hadn’t had nearly enough sleep, for the same reason that Marcia from Product Dialogue was still asleep in her one-bimbo pup tent — because between the hours of 3 and 3:45 A.M. I had traded Edna’s toilet-flushing snore for Marcia’s pork-holstering fanny in that same single-bimbo housing unit. So I could hardly complain, really, about the loss of sleep. But the absence of breakfast had me murderous.

Edna had risen earliest of all, and there she sat on the self-inflating couch, picking fussily with her plastic fork at the runny eggs on her styrofoam plate, taking issue with Halsey’s cooking and the little black bits of flaked-off frying pan, being impossible to please, being difficult, being Edna. Much to my dismay she wore not the brown fur coat but one of those bright orange don’t-shoot-me-I’m-not-a-bear hunting vests, over a dumpy blue down ski jacket. Edna doesn’t even
try
to look her best.

But I was prepared to accessorize her with a special cologne: Ranger Steve’s Sure-Draw Bear Bait, Yukon Formula. The efficacy of Ranger Steve’s secret recipe is sworn to on his website by a throng of experienced bear hunters, including celebrity outdoor hunting guide Rock Majestic. (I wasn’t able to find a bear bait endorsed by Ted Nugent.) Supposedly Ranger Steve’s bear bait is carefully pH balanced to smell exactly like both a honey-dipped pig on fire and a barn full of bears in heat. Supposedly bears swarm to it like flies to shit. Supposedly you just spray it on some jelly donuts, leave them lying out in a spot that’s easy to shoot at, the bears show up looking for the party, you blow away the bears. Ad infinitum. With this stuff one could bag a six-pack of bears in an afternoon, if one could just work out how to lash them to Baumer’s Toyota. (No bear marks on my Rover, please.)

I loosened the top of the plastic squirt bottle so the juice would spill more easily — it stank badly of bacon fat and cold tuna — and then I considered the choreography. Come from the left? From the right? Throw it at her from here, or sneak up from behind? The thing is, it had to look right because everyone was watching. It had to look accidental. And I’m a direct-approach guy, so I decided I’d just sit down beside her and … whoops! Clumsy me! Yeah. Perfect.

I took my plate of half-cooked food in my right hand and the bottle of bear bait in my left, walked over to the bouncy, boneless, unpredictably flaccid self-inflating couch where Edna sat, and plopped down suddenly, right up friendly next to my darling wife. And … whoops! Clumsy me!

Only my darling stupid wife chose that very stupid instant to jump up, leaving the couch jiggling like a hot water bottle, causing me to lose slightly more of my balance than I had planned to lose, spilling the Ranger Steve’s not on my darling stupid cunt wife but on the spot where she had just sat, and then causing me to roll sideways over into that very same puddle of stinking Sure-Draw bear slime.

“Marv! Don’t sneak up on me like that! Look what you did!”

“It’s nothing, baby, everything’s fine. Come sit down over here and talk to me.”

“What is that you just spilled all over the couch? It
smells
.”

“It’s just hot sauce, baby. Try some, it’s good on bacon.”

“What are you doing? Look, you’re ruining your clothes! Didn’t you just buy those pants?”

“Oh, c’mon, give me a hug.”

“MARV! Are you
drunk
! You smell like dead fish!”

“It’s just nature, baby. Nature smells crazy sometimes.”

So it goes. Take a gorgeous, majestic, nature-type setting. Add a lovely morning, coffee and a good breakfast. Then apply one fresh Edna, and observe her power to convert it all to crap. Suddenly, everything was going wrong, wrong, wrong. She told me to get cleaned up, and I told her to shut her trap, and she told me not to speak to her that way in front of people, and I told her to seriously shut her trap or experience later regret, and I tried to peel my sticky self up off the self-inflating couch but it stuck to my ass like toilet paper. But wait, there’s more: I stepped on a styrofoam plate of lukewarm breakfast that Edna — on purpose? or through her usual incompetence? what’s the difference? — left lying on the ground by my foot. And I slipped, fell back on the couch, and got Ranger Steve’s on my shirt collar and the back of my neck and all over my camel hair hunting jacket and even in my hair. While all around us like dumb chickens the members of Image Team stared, unblinking, not laughing only because they wouldn’t fucking dare.

“Edna, get over here and sit down right now.”

“Marv, I think you’re having an
episode!
I’m not getting near you
or
that mess! Go clean off, or roll in the mud or something.”

And it was just then that Marcia from Product Dialogue popped her morning-coiffed, moisturizer-faced, doe-eyed head out of her pup tent to say good morning to the world. Myself and Ranger Steve were the first men she beheld when she opened her senses to the morning. And like the eloquent spokesperson for Image Team that she is, she emitted the following brilliant line of product dialogue:

“Eeeeeeeew! Marv, did something make a poo on you?”

And that set them all off. It was really funny. Baumer held his nose and fanned the air around his face with his hand. “Eeeeeeeew!” Frink pointed his egg-caked spatula at me. “Eeeeeeew!” Halsey and Smith and all the others, pointing and pinching their noses and waving at the air like they were trapped in a closet with God’s Own Fart. “Eeeeeew!” Oh yes, I was really funny. Had it been Edna covered in stinking slime, I suppose I would have laughed as well. But I was not the audience, I was the joke.

I told them to shut up, and they didn’t. I told them that was enough and it wasn’t. I told them they were all fired and they didn’t care. So I assigned them all the task of going and fucking themselves with fishing rods. And I climbed in my Rover, put on that Damn Yankees CD and just drove away.

I was leaving, too. I was headed home to my luxury condominium in Seattle. Those clucking chickens could fend for themselves. Without me, they were bear bait on a stick. As far as I could tell, not one of them had brought a gun big enough to kill a bear with, not the big bears that were certain to convene on them when they smelled magic bear hot sauce all over the self-inflating couch. Frink and Baumer were used to shooting ducks and fish. I doubt any of the others had ever hunted a damn thing, and they had all done zero bear research. Baumer was toting a pistol, for Christ’s sake. The Alaskan old timers on AlaskanOldTimers.net recommend that if you carry a pistol for protection from bears, you should file the front sight off the barrel, so it doesn’t rip your sphincter when the bear shoves it up your ass. Pistols are only good for killing people.

And now, as I sit here pondering this new injury and this latest insult, now I wonder … and now I know. Baumer.
Frankie.
Frank Baumer never had an original idea in his life. He’s always stealing mine. Now he’s stolen this one. He’s not summoning any HELP for me, oh no. He’s not going to tell the others that he found me here, and he’s not going to summon Search & Rescue. He and Edna will leave me out here to die. Baumer, my oedipal lackey, wants me dead so he can set about worming his way into my position at Wilson & Saunders, moving into
my
luxury condominium with
my
ugly wife, and commuting from there to the Merch building in
my
Rover!

Baumer, you really want Edna? Why didn’t you just text me? I’m done with Edna. I’d say you can keep Edna except that for certain complex tax and financial reasons, I really do need her to actually die. But for the weekend, sure, why not? What’s a little Edna between co-workers. If you get off humping a splintery knothole like Edna, I say climb on in there.