Bear and His Daughter (10 page)

“Yes,” Pancho said. “I was…” His hand fluttered in the air.

“You were too modest to ask,” Fletch suggested.

Everyone laughed together.

“Well, actually, Pancho,” Fletch said, pronouncing his auditor’s name with difficulty, “they didn’t say anything.”

Pancho and La Beatriz hooted.

“Oh, come on, man,” they said, in melodious unison.

Pancho Pillow’s Odd Buddy turned to Fletch for the first time. Fletch saw that the two sides of his face did not match.

“They didn’t tell you that one time me and Pancho drove from Belize to Jalapa with them in the trunk?”

Pancho intervened. “It was in a good cause,” he assured Fletch.

Fletch drank his rum. He was content.

“I love Mexico,” he told them. “You can take some fantastic rides here.”

“What a poet!” Pancho Pillow exclaimed.

“Lord Byron,” La Beatriz said.

The boy with the
Corazón!
machine approached and Pancho’s Odd Buddy watched him eagerly, ogling the metal handles. He was reaching in his pocket for change when Pancho leaned forward to restrain him.

“Don’t, Idaho,” he said.

“What the hell,” his Odd Buddy said protestingly.

“For me, Idaho,” Pancho pleaded. “I don’t want to watch.”

The boy looked at them in disgust and went outside.

“You’re in your element here, Fletch,” Pancho said. “Not everyone is. Myself, I’m at home throughout the Spanish-speaking world.”

Fletch nodded. “I am in my element here,” he agreed. “That’s true.”

“I was born in Tunis,” Pancho confided. “Hispano!” He breathed deeply and beat twice on his chest. “Superficially French in culture and outlook—a man of the world and a great traveler. But in the soul I’m Hispano, that’s where it’s at.”

“Everyone should have a souly country,” Fletch said.

“I admire simplicity of heart,” Pancho said. “I despise hypocrisy and deceit, so I have no use for politics.”

He looked at Fletch in admiration.

“I myself am poetical. My view of life, my way of looking at the world, is poetical. If I wasn’t a businessman, that would be my groove.” Pancho seemed to grow emotional.

“Listen to me, Fletch, we can use some poetry in our lives. Let’s really get together—nothing superficial. I have a story to tell—the story of Pancho Pillow—it’ll wipe you out, man. No bullshit. Let’s have lunch, Fletch. Just you and Marge and me and Beatriz and Idaho. We’ll have a picnic. We’ll go up to the volcano.”

The lights went out. There was silence for a fraction of a second, and in that splinter of time Fletch had covered the distance between Pancho and the open doorway. He was not quite in the street when the chorus of groans broke. La Beatriz screamed.

“Adiós, you fuckin’ monsters,” Fletch shouted indignantly.

“Fletch!” Pancho Pillow cried. “For Christ’s sake!” His voice was sheer desperation.

Monsters, Fletch thought. Flying men. The street down which he ran was packed with drunken invisible soldiers. Men walked about striking matches and falling down in the road. The military police approached with their flashlights; Fletch huddled in the doorway of the cinema to let them pass. As he ran across the square, they turned their lights on him and shouted.

Fletch laughed. Never in his life had he so appreciated modern technology. Fine, he thought, bring the jungle to the folks.

At the market café, they had lighted hurricane lamps. A few trucks were parked outside, and the first in line was an International Harvester pickup truck loaded with chickens. A man in a Stetson was inspecting the carburetor. He was very drunk and singing to himself.

Fletch approached and asked him, with elaborate courtesy, for a ride to the coast. The man turned to him and crooned the refrain of his song, to illustrate the futility of all ambition. Fletch offered to hold his flashlight and offered twice the reasonable price for a ride, so when the truck started through the dark streets he was safely aboard. As they passed the square, Fletch could see Pancho Pillow’s Lincoln cruising like a baffled predator.

“Fuck ‘em all,” Fletch told the driver.

“Fuck,” the driver agreed. He was so drunk it seemed impossible to think of him driving down the mountains. A little girl in braids was nestled in the space behind the seat, asleep. When the wind and the noise of the engine permitted, Fletch could hear the chickens in the back of the truck.

The man in the Stetson drove much too fast and his clutch seemed to be slipping badly. Halfway down to the coast, as they sped past banana trees, he began to sing again.

“You warned me over and over,” he sang,

You kept warning me about the woman
That she wasn’t a good woman for me
You gave me so many warnings
So many warnings
That I thought you had gone loco
But the warning you should have given me
Was the one you didn’t give me
That you were a thieving betrayer
Just as bad as her
So now it’s me that’s gone loco
And I got a warning for you!

At times, Fletch sang with him. It was still dark when they reached the coast road, but the moon was very bright and Fletch could see the breakers beyond the beach.

He got out, paid the driver and walked along the beach toward his house, guided by the dark mass of the bay headlands. He was still walking when the sun came up over the volcano and woke the birds and lit the sea to pink and pale green beyond imagining. Now and then he passed men sleeping on the sand.

His house, when he came to it, was silent, although he could hear Doña Laura awake next door. Willie Wings was sprawled on the hammock before the doorway, quite awake and watching him blankly. The parrot lay prone and stiff in its cage, covered with a second skin of white dust. The morning flies had started to gather on it.

Fletch went past Willie Wings and inside. His children were asleep on their cot in the kitchen, but he heard faint voices from the bedroom. He got down on his hands and knees and crept silently over the tiles toward the bamboo curtain that divided the house.

Lifting the curtain slightly, he saw Marge and Fencer together on the mattress, naked. Marge’s long tanned body entwined Fencer’s like a constricting serpent. Fencer was clutching her around the thighs as though he were afraid she would fall. Their faces were together.

“I wish he hadn’t bolted,” Fencer was saying.

It occurred to Fletch that he could not be certain that Fencer had not heard him come in.

“You know, like he just bolted. It looked for a while like we were really going to get something going together. I thought, by God, it’s gonna work, we’ll go up there and turn on and we’ll groove and we’ll break down the verbal barrier. But he bolted.”

“Well, my God,” Marge said, “it was pretty stupid of Willie Wings to shoot at him. For Christ’s sake, he’s so paranoid
anyway.
”

“Willie’s a fanatic,” Fencer said. He ran his hands over Marge’s backside. “I’m kind of a fanatic too.”

She took his long hair in her hands and pulled it round his neck and kissed him.

“You super-romantic shithead,” she said.

Fletch lay still on the tiles trying to hold his breath and watched them do it. When his ribs began to hurt, he turned over and slid across the cool floor to the doorway. It took him nearly five minutes to crawl out—a masterpiece of silence.

When he was outside, he picked up one of the weights he had bought to keep himself in condition and lay down with it. Lying on his back, he held the weight at arm’s length for quite a long time. Sweat welled from his body. Then he lowered the weight and looked at the sky.

“Willie Wings,” he said to Willie Wings, “I went up that mountain, right? You were there, you saw me do it, right?”

“Yeah,” Willie said. “Not all the way. But you went up the mountain.”

“Right,” Fletch said. “I went up.” He leaned his head back to look at Willie. “I went up. And you should have been there to see me come
down,
man. Because
that
was really something else.”

Willie Wings watched him for a little while.

“Fletch, babe,” he said. “I had you wrong, brother. You really are a poet.”

O
NE GRAY
November day, Elliot went to Boston for the afternoon. The wet streets seemed cold and lonely. He sensed a broken promise in the city’s elegance and verve. Old hopes tormented him like phantom limbs, but he did not drink. He had joined Alcoholics Anonymous fifteen months before.

Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret. His wife went to Mass and cooked a turkey. Sober, Elliot walked in the woods.

In January, blizzards swept down from the Arctic until the weather became too cold for snow. The Shawmut Valley grew quiet and crystalline. In the white silences, Elliot could hear the boards of his house contract and feel a shrinking in his bones. Each dusk, starveling deer came out of the wooded swamp behind the house to graze his orchard for whatever raccoons had uncovered and left behind. At night he lay beside his sleeping wife listening to the baying of dog packs running them down in the deep moon-shadowed snow.

Day in, day out, he was sober. At times it was almost stimulating. But he could not shake off the sensations he had felt in Boston. In his mind’s eye he could see dead leaves rattling along brick gutters and savor that day’s desperation. The brief outing had undermined him.

Sober, however, he remained, until the day a man named Blankenship came into his office at the state hospital for counseling. Blankenship had red hair, a brutal face and a sneaking manner. He was a sponger and petty thief whom Elliot had seen a number of times before.

“I been having this dream,” Blankenship announced loudly. His voice was not pleasant. His skin was unwholesome. Every time he got arrested the court sent him to the psychiatrists and the psychiatrists, who spoke little English, sent him to Elliot.

Blankenship had joined the army after his first burglary but had never served east of the Rhine. After a few months in Wiesbaden, he had been discharged for reasons of unsuitability, but he told everyone he was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He went about in a tiger suit. Elliot had had enough of him.

“Dreams are boring,” Elliot told him.

Blankenship was outraged. “Whaddaya mean?” he demanded.

During counseling sessions Elliot usually moved his chair into the middle of the room in order to seem accessible to his clients. Now he stayed securely behind his desk. He did not care to seem accessible to Blankenship, “What I said, Mr. Blankenship. Other people’s dreams are boring. Didn’t you ever hear that?”

“Boring?” Blankenship frowned. He seemed unable to imagine a meaning for the word.

Elliot picked up a pencil and set its point quivering on his desktop blotter. He gazed into his client’s slack-jawed face. The Blankenship family made their way through life as strolling litigants, and young Blankenship’s specialty was slipping on ice cubes. Hauled off the pavement, he would hassle the doctors in Emergency for pain pills and hurry to a law clinic. The Blankenships had threatened suit against half the property owners in the southern part of the state. What they could not extort at law they stole. But even the Blankenship family had abandoned Blankenship. His last visit to the hospital had been subsequent to an arrest for lifting a case of hot-dog rolls from Woolworth’s. He lived in a Goodwill depository bin in Wyndham.

“Now I suppose you want to tell me your dream. Is that right, Mr. Blankenship?”

Blankenship looked left and right like a dog surrendering eye contact. “Don’t you want to hear it?” he asked humbly.

Elliot was unmoved. “Tell me something, Blankenship. Was your dream about Vietnam?”

At the mention of the word “Vietnam,” Blankenship customarily broke into a broad smile. Now he looked guilty and guarded. He shrugged. “Ya.”

“How come you have dreams about that place, Blankenship? You were never there.”

“Whaddaya mean?” Blankenship began to say, but Elliot cut him off.

“You were never there, my man. You never saw the goddamn place. You have no business dreaming about it! You better cut it out!”

He had raised his voice to the extent that the secretary outside his open door paused at her computer.

“Lemme alone,” Blankenship said fearfully. “Some doctor you are.”

“It’s all right,” Elliot assured him. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Everybody’s on my case,” Blankenship said. His moods were volatile. He began to weep.

Elliot watched the tears roll down Blankenship’s chapped, pitted cheeks. He cleared his throat. “Look, fella…” he began. He felt at a loss. He felt like telling Blankenship that things were tough all over.

Blankenship sniffed and telescoped his neck and after a moment looked at Elliot. His look was disconcertingly trustful; he was used to being counseled.

“Really, you know, it’s ridiculous for you to tell me your problems have to do with Nam. You were never over there. It was me over there, Blankenship. Not you.”

Blankenship leaned forward and put his forehead on his knees.