The Bear Went Over the Mountain (25 page)

“The little details, Bramhall. They could be important.” Magoon’s nose wrinkled. “And strong cologne. I think a good daub of that wouldn’t hurt either.”

Bramhall lowered his head sideways, sniffing. “I know, I smell like an animal.”

“Perhaps
several
good daubs of strong cologne. Better yet, splash it all over yourself.”

“All right,” said Bramhall with the chastised look of a bad dog.

“I don’t want to tell you what to do. But we need to
present you in the most favorable light we can. When you pass the jury box, I want them to see an upstanding member of the community. Someone with whom they feel they have something in common.”

“I’ve gotten very shy of people.”

“Shy is fine, it can be an endearing quality. But you look
hunted
. All the time you’ve been sitting here, you’ve been glancing back over your shoulder.”

“I
feel
hunted.”

“You’re in my office. No one’s threatening you. If they do, I’ll have them arrested.” Magoon looked back down at his notes and gave himself over to reflection. He had a shot at winning this case because Bramhall was telling the truth.

Magoon swiveled toward the window while imagining his approach to the jury.
My client has been robbed of his most valuable possession. He’s been driven nearly insane by the loss
.

He looked back at Bramhall’s tormented face. The suffering look could help, as long as his suit fit.

“The court has compelled us to answer,” said Warwick.

“Hal won’t agree to it,” said Gadson.

“He has no choice.”

“He’s such a private person. Perhaps if you filled out the interrogatories yourself and just handed them to him for signature—”

“Are you asking a lawyer of my stature to fabricate facts for a client?”

“Well, how about if Bettina fabricates the facts? She’s already made up all kinds of stories about him. She could just finish the job.”

“There you are, Hal,” said Bettina. “All you have to do is sign them.”

The bear looked at the interrogatories suspiciously.

Bettina laid her hand gently on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Hal. It looks very official, but it’s just another kind of publicity. These are only little details about your life that people will enjoy reading.”

The bear sniffed the interrogatories. They were laden with Bettina’s perfume,
which reassured him. He read them over, moving his paw along very slowly under each line. They described a real person, with a place and date of birth, and a lot of other swell things. He began to feel very good about the interrogatories. In fact, he was proud of them. They were
his
interrogatories. “Mine,” he said, and signed.

It was springtime when the bear’s case came up before the superior court in Maine. He and his lawyer, John Warwick, checked into the only lodging available in town—a dilapidated bed-and-breakfast on Main Street. The front porch held a semicircle of rickety rocking chairs, in which they now sat. To one side of them was the volunteer firehouse and on the other a live-bait shop. Murmuring somewhere in back was the river which had given the town its feeble reason to exist.

“Well, it’s certainly a change,” said Warwick as a wreath of black flies circled his head.

The bear sniffed the air. A spring rain cloud was overhead, ready to drench the surrounding forest. Its hovering presence troubled him, for it was a distiller of many familiar scents, gathered from the forest’s floor. The songs of the birds were colored by the moist, heavy air, and he resented their anticipation of the storm; they celebrated what he could not, for he no longer walked in the rain. He had an umbrella now, for emergencies.

“I always say I’ll rent a place in the country for the summer. But I never do.” Warwick’s
voice had a melancholy tone, of a busy man used to denying himself what he longed for. “Something always comes up. That’s the way, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said the bear, wondering why his beloved forest wasn’t his anymore. Then he remembered and said aloud, “I’m a person.”

Warwick glanced at him. Jam certainly said some odd things. Warwick had a large and thoroughgoing staff, and he knew by now that Jam had bought his title. Warwick’s staff had also summarized for him all the major plagiary cases of the past fifty years. They’d built a dossier on the plaintiff, Arthur Bramhall, which went back to the day of his birth. But they’d been unable to find anything at all on the life of their own client, Hal Jam. Warwick was disturbed by Jam’s lack of cooperation, and even more deeply disturbed by the fact that the man had no past. In this life, everyone has a past, unless he has deliberately destroyed all traces of it.

The bear rocked in his chair, nose sifting and sorting the elements of springtime in his home territory. The moist air brought the smell of wild animals going their solitary ways—a deer nibbling new buds, a fox stalking on tiptoe, a porcupine slowly climbing a tree. His blood stirred with the old magic, and his rocker began to creak more rapidly. I could slip away. In a minute I’d be gone. This mess I’m in would hang behind me like an empty spider’s web, to which no one ever returns. The valleys,
the meadows, honey in the comb would be mine again. I’d stamp the earth, I’d shake the mountain with my roar.

He sprang from the rocker, his primal self waking from its hibernation in the plush velvet cave of man. He filled his lungs with the impending storm and shook his head with short, sharp snaps to clear it of the last silky, sticky threads of detestable indulgence.

A dented airport taxi pulled in beside the bed-and-breakfast. “Hal, I’m so relieved to see you,” said Chum Boykins, hurrying up the porch steps, suitcase in hand. “I got away as soon as I could. Here, I brought us a New York City cheesecake, as an aid to concentration.”

The bear’s spirit faltered, the smell of the cheesecake obliterating other smells as he lowered his nose toward its moist, sweet, fascinating surface.

Boykins turned to Warwick. “How do things look?”

“Fine,” said Warwick, his confident veneer what one would expect from a man who could put on a good face while 200,000 barrels of oil were being spilled into prime fishing waters.

Boykins sat down, his fevered gaze falling on two empty rockers beside him. He made a few corrective touches to their positioning. “Bettina said she can put a positive spin on the lawsuit story, that it’s just more publicity for Hal, but I don’t like it at all. Any hint of plagiary is deadly. Reputations can be spoiled overnight.” Boykins made a further adjustment on one of the empty rockers,
making it nice and straight for Mickey Mouse, should the rodent drop by. As the day of the lawsuit had drawn near, his doctor had had to switch him from Prozac to Zoloft. He shifted his gaze toward the dark wooded hills that ringed the town. “I guess all this uncharted wilderness must really inspire the hell out of you, Hal. But how you turned such a godforsaken place into such an inspiring story is amazing, really. Because there’s nothing here. You look at it, and what is it? Trees, hills, a skunk, a two-by-nothing town. Is the next book going to take place around here too?”

“I haven’t found it yet,” said the bear, mouth stuffed with cheesecake.

“My instinct says go with what worked last time.”

“Maybe I’ll never find it.”

“Don’t say that, Hal. Book number two is already shaping itself inside you.” Boykins cared deeply about his author’s future. Agents came and went, compulsive agents came and went several times, but there was only one Hal Jam. And Boykins felt there was disaster ahead for him.

“Why am I bothering with it, Vinal?” It was night, and Bramhall was seated with Pinette in front of the old lumberjack’s kitchen stove. The kitchen was lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and moths were fluttering against the window screen, trying to reach the light that had lured them from the fields. “Why am I fighting this battle?”

“To find out what happened to your suitcase. My guess is, this feller Jam musta shot the bear while the bear was lugging the suitcase around. Jam reads the book, says well it ain’t much use to the bear any longer, then takes off with it.” Pinette poked at the fire in his kitchen stove. “The question in my mind is, did he boil the bear down? Because you hate to see lovely grease like that go to waste.”

Bramhall turned to the window. A huge luna moth had flown against the screen, its pale green wings working furiously.

“By god,” said Pinette, “that’s a big feller. You don’t see him too often.”

Bramhall stared at the great moth and felt a fragile emotion flit through him. He’d turned his back on the forest, but it had not
forgotten him; this green-cloaked messenger of the night had sought him out, to remind him of those enchanted regions he’d explored both awake and in his dreams. The eyes of the moth were glittering; its huge antennae waved, and its wings moved so quickly they created a mesmerizing luminosity. Bramhall abruptly rose and went into Pinette’s living room. The bulky, misshapen cushions of its couch and armchairs were sunk in shadows, and Bramhall stood there in the gloom until the enchantment passed, and he felt as dull and misshapen as the furniture.

After supper at the local diner, the bear, his lawyer, and his agent strolled along Main Street. Boykins gazed downward as he walked, to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk.

“Look for a briefcase,” said the bear.

“Why, did you lose one?”

“Somebody might have,” said the bear.

John Warwick had been listening in silence to the conversation of the two men as they walked. Jam had tremendous presence, but what he said made little sense. What the hell kind of defendant would he be?

Boykins continued counting the cracks.

What’s going on here? the bear asked himself as he sniffed Arthur Bramhall’s scent across the courtroom. He turned to his lawyer and said, “He’s a bear.”