The Bear Went Over the Mountain (2 page)

While his manuscript was being stolen by a bear, Arthur Bramhall was having coffee with a fur-bearing woman. They were in a diner on Main Street in the small town to which they went each week to do their food shopping. “I finished my book,” he said to her, and she said, “Well, that’s exciting.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” he said, attempting to maintain his urbanity though he was secretly bubbling with happiness. If his book succeeded, he’d never have to return from his sabbatical. He’d never have to see the English department again, nor be tempted to eat greasy pizza in the student union building, where his English students sat around reading comic books featuring space Amazons clad in aluminum foil.

“I’m sure it’s going to be a success,” said the fur-bearing woman kindly, although she’d written him off her serious-relationship list. He had a sturdy build and a pleasing head of wavy brown hair; his brown eyes were gentle, and he had a nice smile, but her sort of man had to smell of pine sap and woodsmoke and the great outdoors, as she did. Arthur Bramhall
could never be trained up to any sort of satisfactory level. For one thing, he ironed his jeans.

“It’s nice running into you,” he said. While it was true that he ironed his jeans, he was a decent human being with much natural affection for other people. But because he was shy and introverted, he’d never found a lasting relationship with a woman, and in his loneliness he tended toward moods in which he stared out of his window like a goldfish. Right now he was in the manic phase of his cycle. “What’ve you been doing with yourself?” he asked with genuine interest.

“Oh, I’m still doing my wellness work,” said the fur-bearing woman with a dubious grasp on English but a firm hold on economics. For fifty-five dollars she gave her clients what she called an energy massage. Bramhall had paid her fifty-five dollars only to discover that her hands never touched his body, only swept the air above it with a dyed-purple chicken feather. He pretended to feel much better after this because he liked to encourage others in their work. Now he listened to the fur-bearing woman’s latest insights into energy fields, auras, magnetized water, and tried to find her attractive, despite the smell of kerosene. He tried to think of her as resembling the heroine of his book, but the sensually stimulating properties of kerosene worked better on paper than over coffee at the local diner. She said, “You know that the earth is coming into a feminine cycle, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know that.”

“Yes, the feminine force is getting stronger every day. I’m organizing a moon goddess festival to celebrate it.”

Bramhall nodded. The fur-bearing woman loved festivals. On nights when he was only mildly depressed he could help himself get out of it by thinking how wonderful it was that he wasn’t at a moon goddess festival.

The fur-bearing woman took his hand in hers. “Close your eyes,” she said, “and concentrate on success through Jupiter, the planet of good fortune.” The fur-bearing woman was a decent human being too, who sincerely believed she helped others with her purple chicken feather.

Bramhall closed his eyes, and thought again of his briefcase, under the tree. He thought of it the way a Bushman thinks of his carved fetish wrapped in bat skin.

“I see very good things happening with your book,” said the fur-bearing woman. “I see someone taking it.”

Bramhall felt an effervescent thrill in his abdomen, as if he’d swallowed the Antacid of Happiness. With his eyes closed, he realized she had an understanding voice, and he felt her good will toward him. She was a fruitcake, but so were the other fur-bearing women of Maine. The winters were too long for them, and it drove them into peculiar activities. He hoped his little novel might comfort them. Its hero was a renegade archaeologist looking for fossils in Maine; he too had been humbled by nature
and had learned to respect it, and to respect women, for they were the crown of nature. Bramhall thought that the fur-bearing women who read it could believe, for a little while, that the hero had come to
their
run-down farm to respectfully poke around in their fossils.

The bare overhead bulbs of the diner were reflected in the quartz crystal the fur-bearing woman was wearing on a chain around her neck, and it seemed to reflect her isolation as well. He suspected she was as lonely as he. He imagined himself taking her home, running her a hot bath, and leaving a shaving brush and razor conspicuously on the edge of the tub. “I think you might like my book,” he said shyly.

She nodded in agreement. “I have the very strong feeling that there’s an angel watching out for your book right now.”

The bear waited at the edge of town until nightfall. As the town was in rural Maine, there was only one clothing store, but the bear wasn’t fussy. He forced a back window and went in. Going through back windows usually led to shoveling down the sweets, but he forced himself to put thoughts of food aside as he prowled the darkened aisles of the store. A display mannequin caused him to draw back cautiously, but his nose quickly ascertained that the human-looking figure was made of wood. He approached the dummy and carefully studied the items of clothing it wore. Then he went and collected those same items in the store, choosing a suit of the kind lumberjacks wear to funerals. He worked himself into a shirt without too much trouble, but fastening the buttons was difficult. He got a few of them through the little holes and called it good enough. After several tries he got himself into the pants. They were on backward, as he hadn’t entirely grasped the nature of the garment. “Not a bad fit at all,” he remarked as he gazed at his shadowy reflection in the mirror at the back of the store. He slipped into the suit jacket and
returned to the store dummy for a quick comparison. The painted eyes of the dummy seemed critical. “A tie, of course,” said the bear, and found one with hula dancers on it. His taste was deplorable but he was only a bear. Studying the knot at the dummy’s throat, he fashioned his own. “That looks good,” he said, though the knot was unusual. He added a baseball cap and shoes, went to the cash register and emptied it, then climbed back out the window. As he hit the pavement, he shook the sleeves of his coat and balanced himself in the upright position. “It’s remarkable what a suit can do for a bear,” he said.

He walked slowly and clumsily, his shoes unlaced. The briefcase handle was in his teeth and this drew the attention of several passersby. They said nothing, but the bear noticed their superior smiles. What could it be? he wondered. He caught a glimpse of himself in a window and stopped. “Something wrong there,” he said to himself as he studied his reflection. Baseball cap is on straight, and the suit looks fine. His small, gleaming eyes stared back at him. Briefcase in the mouth!

Sheepishly, he transferred it to his paw. The old habits are going to die hard, he said to himself as he walked on.

Later, seated in the back row of the diner on Main Street, he opened the briefcase again and examined the title page of the manuscript.

DESTINY AND DESIRE
BY
A
RTHUR
B
RAMHALL

Title’s fine, thought the bear to himself, but I don’t see myself as Arthur Bramhall. No, that name wants changing. Something snappier. It’ll come to me.

On the table before him was coffee, toast, and two little pyramids of jam and half-and-half containers. He ran his gaze over the containers thoughtfully.

Jam

Perfect name, you can’t do better than Jam. Now for a first name.

Again his eyes ran over the labels on the containers.

Half-and-Half Jam

Very distinguished.

Or is it too ethnic?

With his paw, he blocked out some of the lettering on the half-and-half container.

Half Jam

Sounds too Nordic. But I feel I’m close. Let me just … a slight modification …

With the tip of his shiny claw, he covered up the
f
in
Half
.

That’s a name that will mean something to people.

There was a pen in the briefcase, and a few blank
sheets of paper. With great concentration, he laboriously wrote a new title page:

DESTINY AND DESIRE
BY
H
AL
J
AM

Arthur Bramhall returned home that night and went across the field with a flashlight to retrieve his manuscript from beneath its tree. At first he thought he had the wrong tree. He ran from tree to tree, yanking back branches and shining his flashlight on the ground.

“No,” he cried, “no, no.”

He stared through the trees at the cold, pitiless moon rising through the branches, the moon of thieves and crossroads. He fell on his knees and beat his fists on the ground. Then he got up and ran through the fields screaming, “It’s gone! It’s gone!” He shook his fist at the trees and shouted, “Why? Why did you do this to me again?” When he came to his senses, he sought the help of Vinal Pinette, the old lumberjack who lived nearby. Vinal Pinette came and investigated the scene under the tree.

“Bear.”

“What?”

“A bear’s got ’er.”

“A bear’s got my briefcase?”

The old lumberjack pointed to faint indentations in the ground. “Tracks are right there.”

“Well, let’s follow him!”

“A bear travels fast when he wants to. Could be in the next county by now.”

Arthur Bramhall fell back against the trunk of the tree. He’d already spent what little resilience he had. Years of depression and uncertainty had plundered him, and now a bear had finished him. “My life is over.”

“Had valuables in that suitcase?”

“My novel.” Bramhall stared at Vinal Pinette. Much as he liked the old man, he knew Pinette couldn’t grasp the significance of what had been lost.

“We kin go after him,” said Pinette, “but I don’t think it’ll amount to much. They al’uz say—if the bear sees you, you won’t see the bear.”

“Yes,” said Bramhall woodenly, not wishing to cause any more inconvenience to his neighbor. He stumbled back through the field, his brain mixing up that killer cocktail he knew so well, the one that was going to result in him feeling like a corroded anchor at the bottom of the sea.

“It’s a marvelous book,” said Chum Boykins of the Boykins Literary Agency, “but of course I don’t have to tell you that.”