The Bear Went Over the Mountain (4 page)

“Lemme carry that for you, sir,” said a criminal in a jogging suit, to which was attached a plastic tag that said Baggage Assistant.

“No,” said the bear, and cradled the empty briefcase more tightly under his arm.

“Somebody could take it from you,” insisted the bogus Baggage Assistant, but the bear kept walking, past lines of down-at-the-heels travelers waiting to board buses to other places in which to be down-at-the-heels. The bear didn’t know these travelers were in worse shape than he was. He didn’t know they would have given anything to have an agent. He didn’t know that everybody in America
wanted an agent. He didn’t know he was throwing away the opportunity that every true American dreams of, to be a celebrity. This was because he was a bear.

Three fun-loving skinheads who needed money saw the bear’s portly, good-natured figure coming toward them and decided he’d be easy prey. They surrounded him, acting as if they knew him. “Hey, Jack, where you going with that briefcase?”

Their leader wore a Nazi helmet and had renamed himself Heimlich in honor of the man who ran the SS, not knowing he’d confused the Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims and Heinrich Himmler.

“I’m not Jack,” said the bear.

“Give me that briefcase,” snapped Heimlich. “That’s an order!
Achtung!
”

The bear stared away down the long corridor of the building, a distant look in his eyes. He didn’t want to attract attention to himself, but he needn’t have worried, as everyone in the Authority building was busy looking the other way.

“Give it,” repeated Heimlich, pointing at the briefcase.

“Why?” asked the bear, thinking there was a problem of communication.

“We’re the
Obermensch
. We take what we want.” Heimlich liked to sprinkle German words into what he
said. One of these days he’d take a Living Fucking Language course and astonish everyone with his German. “Now give me your wallet and that briefcase.”

“No,” said the stubborn bear.

The skinheads grabbed the bear by the arms, and Heimlich reached for the briefcase. The bear, feeling his only link to humanity being taken from him, gave a backhanded swipe that dislocated Heimlich’s jaw and removed a sizable portion of his nose. Then he twirled Heimlich upside down, grabbed his ankles, and swung him. Heimlich’s helmeted head became a blurred streak of steel striking each of the other skinheads in the face with a
whong-whong-whong
sound. Heimlich’s head rattled inside the helmet, soundly concussing itself. From this point forward he would hear his treasured recording of “Deutschland über Alles” through a nice case of tinnitus.

The other skinheads had their arms up, trying to shield themselves from the blur of metal. Its impact twisted them around, breaking ribs and elbows, and a large automatic weapon bounced along the floor of the bus station. An elderly woman picked it up.

As Heimlich desperately tried to fit his nose back on, the bear looked anxiously about, afraid the crowd would attack him for such a bestial act. He started to hurry away, but now that the danger was past, the
crowd applauded, crying, “Way to go” and “Nice piece of work.”

And, with the automatic in her shopping bag, the elderly woman got on a bus to visit her aggravating son-in-law in New Jersey.

Arthur Bramhall followed Vinal Pinette into the entranceway of a small farmhouse. Wood was stacked neatly in the yard, and a pail of fresh water was beside the door. “What you need,” said Pinette, “is more sociability. Fred’ll cheer you up.” He knocked on the door. “Fred, you there?”

“Come on in,” said a voice from inside.

Pinette and Bramhall entered. A burly man in work pants and shirt sat by the stove. “Art,” said Pinette, “this is Fred Severance. Fred, this is Art Bramhall, from up the college. I thought you and me could cheer him up.”

Bramhall saw that his host was depressed, could feel it, could almost smell it.

“She left me, Vinal.” Severance shook his head sadly, then remembered his duties as host. “You boys want some tea?”

The wood stove held pots and pans dented and blackened by a lifetime’s use. Severance’s face was reflected in the gleaming chrome of the stove, his head elongated in the metal, as if a zucchini squash were growing in his brain. Well-used harnesses hung on the
wall, along with antique snowshoes. The only contemporary note was a framed color photograph of a young woman.

“That’s her,” said Severance, noting the direction of Bramhall’s gaze. His voice was low, solemn. “World Federation of Wrastlers come to town for their annual show, and off she went.”

“Cleola went off with a wrastler, did she?” inquired Pinette.

“Yes, she did. And I blame myself.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” said Pinette.

Severance’s gaze returned to the photo of his beloved. It was a studio photograph, of the kind taken at high school graduation. “I shouldn’t of let her go, Vinal. Not to wrastling. ’Cause now she’s out on the road with a tattooed midget.”

“Her family was always fond of travel,” admitted Pinette. Then, delicately, he changed the subject. “Show Art that contraption under the stove.”

Severance rolled out a crudely carved length of wood, whose center was about the size and shape of a pair of bowling balls. “Beavers did that. And rolled it for miles.”

Bramhall stared at the astonishing sculpture, whose mechanical utility could not be denied. It had the presence of a totem; it riveted his gaze, as if he’d met it somewhere before—his dreams of the last few nights had been
terribly strange and colorful, involving all sorts of animals both real and monstrous.

Beavers, he thought to himself, they chiseled this with their teeth. But he felt how much more there was to the object than simply the tools with which the little sculptors had created it. There was an emanation coming from it, of soulful gnawing in the moonlight, while the forest was still and men were asleep. Then the beavers worked, and Bramhall, with a strange floating sensation, felt himself go to them, felt himself crouching beside them on the wooded hill above their pond, the hill down which they would roll their prize. Their eyes flashed at him, signaling a pact he could seal with them, if he desired.

With a jolt of fear, he felt himself snap back from the vision. His body twitched in the chair, as if he’d just rebounded from a long elastic swing through the forest.

“Not too many people know beavers invented the wheel,” said Pinette to Bramhall. “And
that’s
the kind of story—” He slapped his knee for emphasis. “—you want to tell when you get to writing your new book.”

The bear pushed his shopping cart through the supermarket. The sky-scrapers of Manhattan had astounded him, and now the endless amounts of honey that man had available to him had humbled him to the ground. The intelligence, the inventiveness, the time and courage it took to lay in this much honey was the final proof that man wore the crown of creation. “Bears are just along for the ride,” he said to himself as he filled his cart with honey—honey in jars, honey in plastic bottles, honey in plastic tubs.

A rainbow of colors dazzled him, and he peered more closely at the bright glass jars. Can this be? he asked himself. Excitedly, he selected an assortment of jams and jellies. When I think of the hours it would take me to pick this many blueberries … And there was no competition from crows, no foxes to chase away. He ignored the quiet voice within him that said that this superabundance came with a price other than the one fixed to the lid of the jars. By the time he reached the checkout counter, he had every jam jar in the store. Mounded above them were packages of cookies,
cakes, pies, and doughnuts, and his respect for humanity’s accomplishments was boundless.

The supermarket had narrow aisles and stock crammed everywhere. The checkout lines were long and customers smoldered with impatience. But the bear didn’t mind, as it would have taken him months to gather in the forest what he’d just gathered here in a single hour. He pushed his cart in behind an elderly female. She’s old, she’s wise, I’ll copy her. Be a golden opportunity.

“This goddamn fucking place,” said the elderly female.

The bear nodded and made a mental note.

The old woman pointed a gnarled finger toward the girl working behind the checkout counter. “She’s half-asleep. She don’t care. We can wait here all day for the little slut.” The old woman rammed her cart against the end of the checkout counter, rattling the magazine stand. “Come on, speed it up!”

The checkout woman gave the old lady a flickering glance of contempt and continued with her slow and dreamlike tallying of merchandise. The bear found her performance mesmerizing, the way she’d take hold of something, slide it along, make a bell ring, then slide it further along, to where another young woman bagged it. The movements of both women were so smooth, their manner so poised, like a particularly graceful shorebird whose antics he appreciated in salmon fishing season. The
thought of this bird took him suddenly backward, to memories of his territory. Who was commanding it now? What incursions would be made into his favorite fishing spots? What other bear was even now sniffing its way into those fields he’d staked as his own? A stab of jealousy ran through him, for the unfettered step of that rival whom he could sense across hundreds of miles, a rival alone at the edge of that special field, sniffing, sniffing. Used to be one big tough sonofabitch controlled this patch. Gone. Must be dead. So then it’s mine.

“Get with the program, girlie,” growled the old lady, banging her cart against the counter again.

The bear angled his own cart so that he was able to bang it against the counter too, like a real human being, and in doing this he silenced the battling voices inside him.

The old lady turned toward him with a conspiratorial glance. “We oughta set fire to the place, that’d get them moving. They’ve only checked one goddamn item in the last minute and a half.” The old lady pointed to a watch that was pinned to her coat along with a card bearing her name and address. “Don’t think I haven’t timed them.”

The bear continued banging his cart back and forth against the checkout counter. I’m a model of deportment here.

The checkout woman totaled the old lady’s order. “That’ll be twenty dollars and fifty-two cents.”

“Up your ass,” replied the old lady. She paid, was handed her parcels, and left the store, muttering to herself.

The bear emptied his cart onto the conveyor belt. When his items had been packaged and handed to him by the bagger, he said, “Up your ass,” and walked toward the door. He was learning more every day.

“What you want,” said Pinette, “is a story that will touch people in the heart.” They climbed into Pinette’s truck and he steered them through the twilight, along the dirt road that connected the houses in the remote settlement. “I hate to see a man’s suitcase stolen by a bear,” continued Pinette. “Nor a child neither.”

“A child?”

“Mavis Puffer, one time, was out covering her garden against the frost. She looks up and sees a figure by the fence, which could only be her old man coming home. It’s dark, and Mavis never had sharp eyes. She hands her baby over the fence, says, ‘Take him inside, he’s cold.’ Only it wasn’t her old man, it was a bear.” Pinette took off his cap and scratched his head, the story apparently concluded.