The Bear Went Over the Mountain (5 page)

“And what happened to the child?”

“Bear et it, likely.”

They rode in silence for several miles, Bramhall returning his gaze to the forest. He saw the glimmer of a pond through the trees, saw burnished twilight on the hillside above it,
and a longing filled him, to be there, to see the beavers roll their wheel, but more important, to have them look at him, their eyes glinting, signaling.

“I believe your story is up ahead, at Armand LeBlond’s place,” said Pinette, and pulled his truck into the LeBlond driveway. The door to the farmhouse opened and a woman stepped out. “Armand’s mother-in-law, Ada Sleeper,” said Pinette meaningfully as he and Bramhall climbed from the truck, Bramhall mindful of a nearby fence, which was humming with electricity.

“How you keeping, Ada?” asked Pinette.

“Just fine, Vinal.” Following this reply, a strange sound emanated from Ada Sleeper’s throat, like the cackling of a hen. And then her voice became normal again. “Armand’s in the south meadow. He’ll be back soon.”

“And Janetta?”

“In the barn,” said Ada, the hen-cackle sounding in her throat once more. “Janetta!”

A young woman came out from the barn. Behind her Bramhall saw lighted stalls and the forms of cows.

“Company, Janetta,” announced Ada with cackle.

Janetta LeBlond came across the yard, smiling tentatively at the two men. Introductions were made, and Pinette engaged her in conversation, during which he several times sent knowing nods toward Bramhall, whose significance Bramhall failed to understand. Then Armand
LeBlond came across the field, and Pinette and Bramhall went to meet him. “How’re you, mah friend?” asked LeBlond in a buoyant Maine-French accent.

“I brung this feller to see you, Armand. He’s a writer looking for a story.”

LeBlond drew out a pouch of tobacco and paper and rolled himself a cigarette whose ragged ends ignited in a sputtering rush of flame. He glanced at Bramhall. “You talk to Mudder-in-Law, you hear how she sound like chicken?”

“I did notice, yes,” said Bramhall.

“Well, Janetta used to sound like chicken too. It run in dat family.” LeBlond puffed on his homemade cigarette thoughtfully. “Very queer damn business. But den one night, Janetta had too much to drink and she c’lapse into mah fence.” He pointed to it, and the fence seemed to hum slightly louder, making a chord, as if proud of the part it had played.

“She musta spent too much time hanging there,” explained Pinette, “because it took the cackle right out of ’er.”

“Den de old woman want to t’row herself against dat fence too, get rid of cackle same way. But I tell her, dere’s no one like you wid chickens, Mudder-in-Law.” As LeBlond said this, Bramhall noticed that several chickens were devotedly following Ada, clucking up against her
ankles. LeBlond turned to Bramhall. “I give you dozen eggs, you tell me. Best damn eggs you ever eat, I bet.”

The three men stood quietly then, as the last light of the day was lost over the fields. Later, in the truck, with a bowl of eggs on the seat between himself and Bramhall, Pinette said, “A remarkable true story, Art, which I believe has all the trimmings.”

Bramhall picked up one of the eggs and cradled it softly in his palm. Then he put its cool surface against his slightly fevered forehead. It had a soothing effect.

“Porkapine going,” said Pinette, nodding ahead of them, where the ambling creature was caught in the headlights of the slowing vehicle. Its eyes gleamed, and Bramhall got out of the truck while it was still moving. He followed the porcupine across the road, which caused it to raise its quills defensively. It waddled off into the foliage, and he listened to it going slowly away into the darkness of its own concerns.

“Porkapines are comical rigs, all right,” said Pinette, coming up beside him in the road.

Bramhall was sniffing the porcupine, its odor somewhat human, like a heavily perspiring person in a raunchy undershirt.

“What’s up, Art? You smell something?”

“You don’t smell it?”

“Can’t say I do.”

The porcupine had gone far enough into the underbrush for the sound of its movements to go undetected, but its odor was leaving a vivid picture of it in the night air. Bramhall turned his head around, suddenly aware that he was smelling a night rich with scents of every kind. But the moment he tried to analyze the sensation, something slammed shut, with the sound of a filing cabinet, a door, a window whose sash has snapped, and that snap was his return from whatever perfumed cloud he’d been traveling on, and his heightened sense of smell was gone.

Elliot Gadson was reading the final proofs of an autobiography written by acquitted society scion Barton Balfour III, who’d been accused of having disposed of his wife by serving her up to guests in a light Madeira mushroom sauce. Balfour’s prose style left much to be desired, but the main thing was that the
heart
was there.

“Mr. Hal Jam to see you, Mr. Gadson.” A young editorial assistant stood at the door, the bear beside her.

“Ah, Hal, come in, come in. I’m delighted to meet you.” Gadson came around to the front of his desk, holding out his hand. “I loved your book. It was completely real to me. I felt I’d known the people in it all my life.”

The bear was sniffing the office: coffee, cologne, paper, glue. He liked the life-size cardboard replica of Barton Balfour III with a knife and fork in his hands; it showed a proper esteem for eating.

“I can’t remember the last time I read such an absorbing work,” continued Gadson, feeling his way carefully, as Jam had the air of a messenger boy who’d been sniffing aerosol cans. “Noticing our other titles? As you can
see, we have a diversified list. A star biography or two, the latest from the Bel Air Diet Doctor …”

Gadson was not warming to his new author, for Jam was guarded. God, I hope he’s not homophobic, thought Gadson, whose wall carried a poster of Cary Grant in
Bringing Up Baby
, at the moment when he’d put on a woman’s nightgown and cried,
“I just went gay all of a sudden.”

The bear was not homophobic, as bears have a tolerant sexual attitude. Occasionally young male bears who fail to find a female will hump each other, and no one makes a fuss about it.

“I’d like you to meet Bettina Quint, our publicity director,” said Gadson, and dialed another office. “Hal Jam is with me now, Bettina.”

The bear had turned to look out the window, over the bustling city. “Mine,” he said, making his territorial claim. Of course, to firm it up he’d have to shit along the perimeter. All in good time. Hearing a sound at the door, he turned back around, and had the impression that a confused hummingbird had just entered the room.

Bettina Quint was tiny and moved with great speed. A rapid shift of trajectory, upon spying Hal Jam, caused her to strike a stack of books and send them flying. “Oh shit,” she said, and started picking them up.

“Please, leave them,” said Gadson with a patient air.

“This is my second collision of the afternoon. The
first one was much more colorful.” Bettina attempted to adjust her flyaway bun of streaked-blond hair. An emerald scarf encircled her twenty-two-inch waist; her constant hurrying flight burned calories in a steady flame. She rushed to her new writer and shot out her hand. “Your book is going to be a blockbuster.”

Bettina spoke as a hummingbird might, in high-pitched peeps of great excitement. The bear sniffed her discreetly, taking in the aroma of her perfume, makeup, deodorant, hand and face cream, and the faint residue of the soap she’d showered with. Her resemblance to a hummingbird pleased him, for hummingbirds were close to bees in their habits.

Bettina had already made her own assessment of the new young writer the Muses had sent off the assembly line. From her reading of a three-paragraph synopsis of Jam’s book she’d concluded that he was the find of the year—a writer who could move a woman to tears of compassion for herself. She regretted not having had time to read the book—it seemed like fun—but that was a luxury she couldn’t afford just yet. The interviewers she’d be wooing wouldn’t have time to read the book either; they’d be working from her publicity release. Something so drab as the book itself wasn’t much use to anyone.

“I’m like the Shadow, Hal. I cloud men’s minds. I’ve got a big budget for
Destiny and Desire
, and that means I’m going to impose you on the national consciousness.” Bettina
moved as she spoke, sitting, standing, sitting again, this time on a papier-mâché fishing frog from Java which Gadson kept at the edge of his desk. “I’m not talking a brief moment of exposure here and there, I’m talking major saturation. I’m sorry, Elliot, was this a precious memento?”

“Ignore it, darling.”

“To saturate we have to tour long and hard, Hal. We have to give the public a feeling of intimacy with you.” Bettina paced to the window and back, then to Gadson’s couch, ideas seeming to propel her as they surfaced. Her hands were continually gesturing, and the bear watched her dizzily, his nose working back and forth. She smells sincere, he said to himself.

“We’ll make the Hemingway comparison, I hope you don’t mind. Sportsman, adventurer, larger than life, the man of action who can also tell a love story. You have a wonderful physical presence, I can feel it with you just standing there, can’t you, Elliot, a sort of raw vitality? Forgive me, Hal, I have to treat my authors as objects. You have charisma, and I want to capitalize on it. We’ll play up your love of the outdoors but I’d like to put an environmental slant on it, the sacredness of nature, how you respect it. If you’ve shot any endangered species play that down—in fact I wouldn’t mention it at all.
I
don’t mind if you killed any cute little animals, but some people might.”

“I kill when I have to.”

“Certainly, perfect, kill when you have to.” Bettina spun toward Gadson, as if he were a waiting flower, and shot toward him. “Hal’s voice is amazing. When audio rights are sold, he should be the one reading it, he’s perfect.” She darted back toward the bear, her high-pitched voice chirping on about all that she had in mind for him. The bear rose from his chair and stepped over to the door frame, where he vigorously rubbed his back against it. A suggestible brute, he was seeing fields of flowers again, with hummingbirds darting over them. He went down on the floor and rolled around on his back.

Gadson was on the phone immediately to Boykins. “Your client is in my office, rolling on the floor.” Gadson looked at Bettina. “Chum says he does this kind of thing, but that it passes.”

Bettina stared at the bear in horrified fascination. His feet were pedaling at the air as he manipulated his spine, twisting first one way and then the other, with a vaguely obscene look in his eyes. Would
Good Morning America
appreciate a guest who might go down on all fours? She looked at Gadson. “Can we tour with this?”

“Not to Dalton’s in the mall, we can’t.”

Bettina looked back at the deliriously squirming novelist. “What if we called it performance art?”

“Performance epilepsy is more like it,” said Gadson.

Bettina’s gaze remained fixed on Hal Jam. Uncontrollable velocity sometimes sent her tumbling to the
floor herself, and though her recovery was always swift it was nonetheless embarrassing. The interesting thing about Hal Jam was that he was making it pay off for him. Far from looking embarrassed, he seemed incredibly self-confident and vital. “I can work with it,” she said decisively.

“His book is so solemn,” said Gadson. “It’s hard to square it with what I’m looking at now. I don’t say I mind him rolling around on the floor, but I do think it’ll be hard for you to package it.”

The bear was about scratched out, however. The faces of the two people in the room came back into focus and he realized his perspective could only be that of one who was on the floor making a spectacle of himself again. A sheepish grin crossed his face, and he sat upright.

“Feeling better?” asked Gadson with concern.

The bear was looking at Bettina. Little birds had always seemed so intelligent to him, their dainty ways of food gathering so different from his own rough methods; and this hummingbird woman was so intensely focused, her eyes glittered with such interest in him—he sensed she was to be his teacher. He stretched out a paw toward her.

“Yes, dear, I’m here.” Bettina was used to needy writers.

“I confess I’m touched,” said Gadson. It was obvious that Jam’s gruff exterior hid a sensitive nature, vulnerable
as a child’s. He whispered to Bettina, “A touch of autism, valiantly overcome? Is there an angle there for you?”

Bettina gazed at Jam thoughtfully as he climbed up off the floor, his ungainly form seeming to balance itself with difficulty. Yet once his feet were set, he exuded that same tremendous presence. “Christ, what a combination. Strong but wounded. Women are going to love him. I’ll need to know a lot about your life, Hal. Because somewhere in all of it are the charming little bits that make great publicity.”

“Well, good-bye,” said the bear, who could only take so much human company at a time. Central Park was calling to him; he needed the gnarly emanations of trees to settle his mind, which the city greatly agitated. He turned toward the door, and Bettina rocketed off after him. Her sleeve caught on the outstretched cardboard arm of Barton Balfour III, and the display dummy toppled over, his hand running down her back and catching in the bright scarf that circled her tiny waist. “Oh god, he’s following me. Elliot!”