The Bear Comes Home Read online

  Ecce the Last Romantic, he thought, put down the horn, and looked at the breakfast mess on the table. Jones had put a cigarette out in the hardened yel-

  The Bear Comes Home 31

  low of an tgg, and the Bear had spilled the dregs of his own last coffee. This is supposed to inspire me? This is supposed to provide a basis for Art? The fire, the inspiration, the whatever-it-was that had filled him just a few nights before at the Tin Palace lay dormant or damaged somewhere in the workings of his chest. He tried to play "Giant Steps," but although he could make the changes in tempo it sounded listless, empty, not even nearly right. Funny how it works and then the next minute doesn't. He put his alto down, went to the sink and washed the dishes clean.

  When Jones came back, banging the door almost off its hinges, he seemed excited, red in the face and nearly out of breath.

  "What's up, doc?" the Bear asked him, and halted in the middle of a chorus of "Brilliant Corners." "I know you ain't been jogging. You land a job at Lutece?"

  "Not exactly." Jones held an opened newspaper in front of him. "You made the Voice.^^

  The Bear squinted his eyes and just made out the headline. ''Ecological-Jazz Fusion:" he read.

  "Oh yeah."

  "Oh no."

  Jones brandished the paper and began to read aloud. " 'Amid the drastic imbalances inflicted upon the natural world by human avarice and stupidity the great enveloping silence of the natural kingdom has begun to unfold itself into sound,'" he said.

  "No shit?"

  "No shit. 'No single alto solo at this point can raise a voice sufficient to the wounds of the butchered planet—'"

  "No?" asked the Bear.

  "Apparently not," said Jones. "And what do you think it means that you made 'analogical reference to Albert Ayler, Lee Konitz, Albert Schweitzer and Chu Berry'?"

  "Beats the shit out of me," said the Bear.

  "Here, take the paper." Jones handed it to him.

  Smoothing it down on the breakfast table, the Bear wrinkled up the top of his head and scratched himself midway between the ears. "Did you catch this?"

  "Which."

  "About how if the human race has any hope left it will enter through the portal of the extrahuman?"

  "It's looked like that for a few years now."

  32 Rafi Zabor

  "'By extrahuman,'" the Bear quoted, indexing the air with an upraised claw, "'I mean to include not only bear-solo and whale-song but the less articulate utterance of the mineral world, vegetation's language on the stave of the seasons, pools of water aiming their hearts at the moon.' Did I play that? I forget."

  "What I said before," said Jones. "Things will have their revenge,"

  "I ain't," said the Bear, "a thing."

  "Sure you are," said Jones. "We all are. It's a thingy world. The sun shines down equally on the good and the bad, the just and the unjust."

  "Also," the Bear read on, "I seem to be 'the first enunciation of a new age of possibilities not only animal but human, the unlocking of a bizarre and singular door in the mansion of the future, and possibly the best altoist to show up in New York since Zoot Finster.' How's that grab you?"

  "Sounds like our man drinks a lot of coffee. Does he say anything in there about me?"

  The Bear retired to a far corner of the living room with the newspaper, and after awhile his laughter grew softer and more contented. "I mean it's got nothing to do with me," he announced finally, "but it's made my day. Glory be."

  "You still want to work the street today?" Jones asked him.

  "Can it wait till tomorrow?"

  "We got two days to pay the phone bill before they shut us off and I can get some credit at the grocer's."

  "Do I seem like a first enunciation to you?"

  "First time I saw you I said to myself. . . there's a bizarre and singular . . . uh . . ."

  "Door." the Bear prompted.

  "Exactly," Jones concluded. "So what should I get for dinner."

  "Hinges," said the Bear.

  The next day they were out on a midtown streetcorner at lunch time. Their police permit was posted, a decent crowd of workers and wanderers had gathered and the Bear was flat on his back, moaning and crooning and waving inarticulate paws at the sky. He wasn't sure he'd be able to complete the routine. Time and the city were pounding him to a powder, and something weaker was fighting for life in his heart. Faces looked down at him in a ring and laughed, showing teeth and tongues. There's so fittle of me left, thought the Bear, why not take it all? The Bear felt himself beginning to slip away. "Harooo," he said, and waved blurry paws. "Haroooo."

  Jones knew that Harooo was not in the script, and when it was time for

  The Bear Comes Home 33

  him to walk over, look triumphant and plant his foot on the Bear's panting chest, he looked down to see if everything was all right. "Haroo?" the Bear asked him, and looked with unforgettable clarity into his eyes. Jones felt his entire life rise up to accuse him, and he stepped away from the Bear in confusion.

  They cleared nineteen-fifty on the first show. Picking himself up and dusting off his jacket, the Bear wondered idly if anyone in the audience had read the piece about him in the Voice.

  Looking out at the Bear, who stood waiting on the pavement in the middle of a ring of shoppers, Jones felt Hke tearing himself to pieces rather than go on. He should never have let the Bear talk him into taking the act out on the street again. It was torture for them both. For Chrissakes the Bear was a musician, and if he was afraid of standing there in the human world as what he really was, it was Jones' job to help him, give him strength. I'm the only one who knows him, Jones told himself. I raised him from a cub, I gave him records and an education. When he turned out to be special I protected him, but I should have been able to give him more than that. If I'd been a better human being ... If I'd been man enough to stop the money I had from running through my fingers, we wouldn't have to do this. We'd be living in the Bahamas, plucking our food off the trees and making it with beautiful women of all races. . . . On big occasions the Bear would slap a fish out of the waves for dinner. If I were a better man I could have given him a life. If I'd been able to hang on to the family cash I could have given him a hideaway, but good Lord look at us now.

  A three-deep crowd had gathered in a ring around the Bear, and it was time to begin. Well, thought Jones, making a living is a bitch even in the best conditions. You get eaten alive, a little at a time. He tipped back his straw boater, cued up his harmonica and began to play "Columbia the Gem of the Ocean" in C major. The Bear saluted in sprightly fashion, then began tap-dancing in a circle, a desperate, toothy grin on his face as he passed before the faces of the crowd. He pulled a small American flag from the breast of his plaid jacket and waved it aloft. There was a small, merely ritual ripple of applause.

  And there they were: Jones with the beginnings of tears in his eyes, inhaling and exhaling into a small chromium harmonica as if the device had been surgically attached to his face, the Bear dancing in a circle with a terrible grin on his face and the crowd just beginning to loosen up and enjoy itself, just starting to clap its hands to the music. Above the tops of the slab-and-crystal buildings the sky was a clear and brilliant blue. It was another working day in the fallen world.

  34 Rafi Zabor

  Jones put down his Hohner and switched on the Sony. The Bear did an effectively fanny belly dance, followed by an adept disco parody (paws pedaling the air), and then, while Jones put on a Shore Patrol armband and got out the white sailor hat, the Bear did his strutting, avuncular Viennese bit to waltzes byjohann Strauss. When Jones tossed him the sailor hat and the tape segued to "Anchors Aweigh," they looked at each other across the pavement for a moment as if across a chasm, an identical pain piercing their hearts, before going on. The Bear was the drunken sailor, Jones the SP barraging him with questions as to his unit, ship and status. The Bear's groaning, monosyllabic answers were perfectly timed, his impersonation of human drunkenness uncannily exact for a
beast. The crowd loved it, the men and women laughing and wiping at their mouths, and the bit was beginning to find its rhythm, but when Jones popped the Bear over the head with the foam-rubber billy and the Bear groaned and took his second roll in the gutter the show went suddenly slack and the hilarity ceased. It was Jones. The billy dropped to his side and his shoulders slumped. "C'mon, Bear," he said, "let's go home."

  Lying there on the pavement looking up, the Bear blinked twice and let his mouth fall open, surprised. "Suits me," he said finally. "I feel like homemade shit."

  "We can't do this anymore," said Jones. He pulled off his armband and walked away.

  At first the crowd thought this was a brilliant new wrinkle in the performance, some combination of signals, ventriloquism and pathos, and although they were uneasy they applauded. But when the Bear started helping Jones pack up, switching off the cassette machine with weary casualness and putting it with his sailor hat in the valise, uncertainty set in, as if the crowd were seeing a piece of modern theater no one had written an essay about yet.

  "You go get the cab," said the Bear, "and I'll collect the money. Alms for oblivion,'^ he announced to the crowd. As he went around the circle, hat in hand, collecting dollars, matchbooks and a smattering of fear, the Bear could feel the skin of his life tearing almost audibly open, a membrane that had kept him from what? It was either new life or fatal illness from here on out. Anyhow that bit of prophylaxis was gone. "Only fifty cents?" he said to an olive-skinned lady with hollow cheeks and tweezed, Dietrich eyebrows. "For a first enunciation, a bizarre and singular door?" He saw her mouth drop open, her eyes register pain. "Sorry," he mumbled, and moved on down the line. "Sorry. I didn't mean . . ."

  "Cab's here," he heard Jones call him.

  "Hope it's a Checker," said the Bear. He looked back and it was. Nice roomy backseat.

  The Bear Comes Home 35

  The Bear pocketed the money and made his way to the big old satisfying taxi. Jones was already inside. As people parted like the awestruck waters of antiquity left and right, the Bear realized that it was time for his last pubhc gesture as a street entertainer, but the necessary poetry wouldn't come. What could he say? O you people, change your lives? Somehow it lacked the neces-S2iry punch.

  He reached the taxi door and turned. They were still there: good. But as he waited for the buildup of rhetoric that would enable him to call down the fire of heaven on a nation of vacated grinning fools, he recalled the woman he had just wounded with a passing remark and realized that like her all of them were innocent, whatever he had suffered under their eyes. The crowd was no target, merely human, merely a little uneasy due to a momentary. Bearish breaching of the laws of nature, and the only thing he wanted was to restore to them their fragile, baseless sense of peace. I'm just not ruthless enough, he told himself. It'll be the end of me yet.

  "Our revels now are ended," he told his pubhc gently, "and our little life is rounded with a sleep." He bowed deeply, hand on heart. "You're all in deep shit," he muttered under his breath. "Good luck."

  The applause began as he straightened, and continued as he backed into the taxi. "That's New York for you," he remarked to Jones as he pulled the door closed. "If they think it's art they clap their hands, and if they think it might be real they turn pale and hope it goes away. You realize we cleared fifty bucks plus?" He smiled and waved to the crowd as the cab pulled away.

  "What came over us?" Jones asked him.

  "Gee I dunno," said the Bear. "You wanna try it again and find out?"

  "Nope."

  "What it was," the Bear said sagely, "was the law that says. Whatever the reality of a situation is, that's what has to come out in the end. There's no going back. I mean, that was a genuine change of state."

  "Shucks," said Jones. "You don't have to explain absolutely everything to me. I can keep up with the basic stuff okay."

  "Hey, where downtown?" asked the cabbie.

  "Stay on Second," Jones told him, "and I'll tell you when we get there."

  "Great costume you got there," the cabbie said, looking back.

  "Thanks," said the Bear. "I'm beginning to develop a fondness for it myself." He reached forward to pull the Plexiglas partition shut. "So that's it," he said to Jones. "When we get back to the apartment I'm gonna call Lester Bowie and tell him that the guest shot with the Art Ensemble is on, if it's still okay with them, but I don't know what happens after that, how we make a living or what."

  36 Rafi Zabor

  "You know," Jones said, settling back in the seat, "with that article in the Voice behind us we could probably manage to book you a little tour."

  "A tour?" said the Bear.

  "You said yourself there was no going back. Why not go straight ahead?"

  The Bear ran a paw across his face as if to wash it. "Jones, I dunno. My family has a long tradition of silence. Twenty generations of talking bear and I'm the first to so much as open my mouth to a human being."

  "That's because I'm such a sweet guy," Jones told him.

  "I'm not sure I can go any farther than that," said the Bear.

  "You've done that already. You want to cross the next line," Jones cleared his throat, "I'll be with you."

  "I know," said the Bear. "But a tour ..."

  "Think about it. You've got the time."

  The Bear looked out at New York City rocking past the taxi window. A stone jail with humans bunched at the major intersections. Ten million dazed and mortal beings hypnotized by love, work, hate, family and the past. What were the odds—the Bear asked himself, trying to be realistic—in all that multiplicity, on gaining sufficient purchase on real freedom? Looking out at this sampHng of the millions is just the thing to convince me that I have no meaning and no chance. What could it possibly matter if one more or less creature toots on a horn?

  They were passing Fourteenth Street, where drugged-out husks shambled past the storefronts like ghosts in coats. Living in the world means becoming part of that.

  On the other paw^, he thought, the right, the brave thing is to grasp your personal grain of truth and take your stand no matter what. God help me, he thought, I'm the genuine article, I'm a sap. He turned to Jones. "Guest shots?" he said. "A tour? I'm ready if you are."

  The Bear looked down at his paws. Oh no, he thought, realizing what he had to do. I was never good at dramatic gestures. "Do I have to do this?" he asked aloud.

  "What," said Jones.

  "The ring."

  "Maybe you should wait till we get to the apartment."

  "I think it's time for it to go."

  "Just remember it was never my idea, okay?"

  "I know. You wanted to stay with the collar," said the Bear. "It was my sardonic bullshit take on things when I was a kid. It should have gone some time ago. It's going now."

  "I think you'll want some towels," warned Jones.

  The Bear Conies Home 37

  But the Bear had already inserted his index claws and begun to pull the ring in his nose apart.

  "Steady, steady," Jones advised him, but the first bright droplets of arterial blood began to spatter the Bear's chest.

  "Get my jacket off," the Bear managed to say.

  "Wait a minute ..."

  "Bunch it, bunch it, pull it off."

  "Shit, you've done it now," said Jones when he saw how much blood the Bear was losing.

  "What the fiickr^ the cab driver said, taking notice, and then a squeal of tires and blare of horns as he swerved his taxi to the curbside.

  Jones got the Bear's plaid jacket into position beneath the Bear's bleeding nose and thrust a chunk of the day's fat take at the cabbie. "Two blocks south, then take a left. I got the nosebleed covered here, and this money is for you."

  The driver blew out air. Which about summed it up, thought Jones, looking forward to the fall of eventide, when all this would be over and something unforeseen would begin at last.

  Iiv« weeks later, they were halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge and the Bear was tired
of hiding in the back of the van Jones had rented for the day. He clambered forward into the shotgun seat and rolled his window down.

  "Bear," said Jones, while changing lanes, "please don't make a spectacle of yourself."

  "Me?" the Bear asked him, then stuck his head out the window into the breeze and did his St. Bernard impression for two fair-haired kids down there in a passing Oldsmobile. "Woof," he said. "Woof woof woof," then let his tongue loll out the side of his mouth full length and drooled into the wind.

  The kids waved and pointed at him and pounded at their parents, but the folks weren't having any.

  "Spectacle, shmectacle," said the Bear, and pulled his head inside. "Nobody gives a shit. But what a day. Ain't it a brilliant day in the harbor? Sun with thy shiny rays! Water with thy gleamy gleams! Harp of steel stretched above the deep! O Sonny! O Rollins!"

  38 Rafi Zabor

  "Oh shut up."

  "We really ought to get out more often. You never take me anywhere."

  "We're getting out now."

  They made their landfall in Brooklyn, passing between the Eagle Warehouse and the Watchtower—Read God's Word the Holy Bible Daily.

  "Jones," said the Bear, "what do you know about this band really?"

  "They're the best we can do under the circumstances."

  "Circumstances," said the Bear, "will be the end of me yet."

  "Look," Jones told him. "It's summer. Everyone who can is touring Europe and Japan. Even aside from all the security considerations and the kind of money we can afford to pay, there's this general sense of Huh, a bear? And it's partly your fault, for being so careful to point out to everyone that there's a danger of you getting busted and the whole band with you. I wish you'd let me handle the phone calls."