The Bear Went Over the Mountain (9 page)

The man raised his stick enthusiastically, then tossed it and the sack in back of the truck and climbed in. A sweet smell of soda emanated from his clothes. Pinette said, “Gus, this here’s Art Bramhall. Him and me are writing a book together.”

“Gus Gummersong,” said the man, shaking Bramhall’s hand.

Pinette steered the truck off the pavement onto a dirt road and followed it for several hundred feet, to a tiny shack. The yard surrounding it was piled with firewood, tires, scraps of iron, and a mound of soda and beer cans.

“By god, ain’t this weather nice?” said
Gummersong, pointing with a grizzled chin toward the dead-calm afternoon sky. “Makes a man glad he ain’t in jail.”

Bramhall followed him into the smallest living space he’d ever seen. A tiny stove was at its center, with a narrow cot beside it. A pail of water with a dipper was on a stool, and a pair of pants hung from a nail on the wall. It was like being in a monk’s cell—or an animal’s den—and Bramhall felt strangely comfortable, more than he’d ever been in any of his own residences. “I like your place,” he said.

“It keeps the flies off,” said Gummersong modestly. His missing teeth gave him the look of a medieval fool. He moved the pail off the stool for Bramhall. Then he sat down on the cot and Pinette sat beside him.

The smell of the surrounding fields drifted in through the tiny window. “So tell me ’bout this here book you’re writing,” said Gummersong.

“Our first idea,” said Pinette, “was to write about bears.”

Gummersong reached beneath his cot, brought out a gallon jug in the crook of one thick finger. “Bear grease. Best place for a whoreson bear. In a jug.” He unscrewed the lid and put the mouth of the jug under Bramhall’s nose. The odor was overwhelmingly rank. “That’s one bear we don’t have to worry about.”

Pinette took the jug and poured some of the grease on his finger and rubbed it into his boot. “The very best substance there is for turning water. Try ’er, Art.”

Bramhall dipped a finger in the thick grease and rubbed it into his own boots, over the toes and into the seams. The smell filled the shack now and was somehow familiar to him, as if he’d known it for years.

Gummersong put the lid back on the bear grease bottle and held it up to a shaft of sunlight that came through his tiny window. Then he turned to Bramhall. “Here, you take ’er.”

“I couldn’t do that,” said Bramhall, reluctant to reduce the few possessions of this hermit.

“You take ’er,” chimed in Pinette. “There’s all kinds of uses for bear grease.”

Bramhall accepted the bear grease, cradling the jug in his lap. “Thank you, Gus.”

“Don’t mention it. Jug was taking up valuable space.”

“As I was saying,” said Pinette, “we’re gathering stories for our book.”

“Any money in the job?” Gummersong leaned forward keenly.

“Down the road,” said Pinette.

Gummersong reached for the stick with which he speared empty cans and bottles. “It’s al’uz down the road, ain’t it.”

“What I’m thinking,” resumed Pinette, “is that we should write us a love story.”

“In that case,” said Gummersong, “you come to more or less an expert.”

Pinette’s bushy eyebrows went up and down several times expectantly, and he glanced at Bramhall to be sure he was paying attention.

“The love of my life,” said Gummersong, “was a woman who bred guard dogs.” He sighed and cradled his stick dejectedly. “She were easy on the eyes for a woman her age, and she set out a good feed for a man. But after awhile I noticed she took a few drops of something in her tea each night. I asked her what ’twas and she says arsenic. Claimed it settled her nerves, which it very well may have done, I never tried it meself.”

“You told me,” said Pinette, “it lent an air of tranquillity to the evenings.”

“Well, it did,” said Gummersong. “But she carried it too far. Started taking drops all day long and stiffened up at the dinner table one night. Knife in one hand, fork in the other. Couldn’t move a muscle for over an hour. I told her the arsenic was having an adverse effect on her, and that she’d have to give it up. She knew better’n me, of course.”

“Strong-willed,” nodded Pinette.

“She had to be, in her line of work,” said Gummersong. “Them guard dogs was mean sons-of-bitches.
Anyway, she said she had a nice income, and who was a damn fool man to tell her what to put in her tea?” Gummersong tapped the end of his stick thoughtfully on the rough board floor of the shack before resuming. “Well, a week later I found her facedown in the dog pen, and her nerves was more’n settled, she was croaked.”

“Then Gus made his big mistake,” said Pinette. “Any one of us mighta done the same.”

“I lit out,” said Gus, “and never asked myself what them dogs were gonna do when they got hungry. Course they et her.”

“A hungry dog ain’t particular,” said Pinette.

“But they wasn’t used to arsenic in their feed, and they keeled over dead themselves.”

“When Gus come back here, the police wasn’t far behind him.”

“Said I’d poisoned her.”

“Got into the papers and all,” said Pinette admiringly. “ ’Tain’t every day a woman gets et by her dogs, with her boyfriend implicated.”

“It took all the money I had to get clear of that case,” said Gus. “Had to sell the farm. Even so, my reputation was tarnished.”

“Well, you didn’t have much of a reputation to begin with.”

“True enough,” said Gummersong. “Well, sir, when
all was said and done and the judge was bribed, I come out of it with barely the shirt on my back. I thrashed about for awhile, till I found my present line of work.” Gummersong raised his stick again. “And I ain’t never been happier. Got that whoreson farm off my back, and I spend my days the way I wants to.”

“And he owes it all to that arsenic-eating woman,” said Pinette as he got up to leave. “That’s the part I think our readers will go for.”

Gummersong accompanied them into the dooryard. “Don’t be afeared to rub that grease in,” he said to Bramhall.

“Thanks, I will,” said Bramhall, swinging the jug by the handle. The thick yellowish liquid made a heavy sound. Though his literary life had been ruined by a bear, he lowered the jug with a sort of courtesy toward its contents. And a sort of acknowledgment came from it, that perhaps something was owed to him for his having been ruined by a bear and that the matter was being taken into hand.

Elliot Gadson and the bear stepped into the large, mirrored exercise room of Gadson’s health club. The bear was in gym trunks and a T-shirt, as was Gadson, who’d suggested that his portly writer would benefit from working out. Gadson was himself in very good shape, having been a champion diver in his days at Yale. Currently he was being trained on the club’s Nautilus equipment by Bart Manjuck, a powerfully muscled young man who awaited them now. Manjuck was eating a Bel Air Protein Wafer sold by the club and wore the club’s own T-shirt, the sleeves of which were stretched tight around his biceps. His hand rested lightly on the tip of an upright metal bar on which was threaded a thousand pounds of circular iron weights.

“Bart,” said Gadson, “this is my guest, Hal Jam.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Manjuck. “Ready for a little sweat?” He was gauging what kind of shape Mr. Gadson’s friend was in. Grossly overweight, observed Manjuck. No muscle tone at all. And he’s got a bad slouch. Looks like it takes all his strength just to stay
upright. “I think we should start you out with a nice light program. Not too much weight, we don’t want any strain.”

“Fine by me,” said the bear. No strain was just what he liked.

All around the room men and women were grunting and panting as they rowed and lifted and pedaled and climbed stairs that didn’t go anywhere. Soon he’d be climbing stairs that didn’t go anywhere either and then he’d be a full-fledged human. He was pleased to see how many females there were in the club. Maybe he could have them up for honey sometime. But when the eyes of the trim, pumping females fell on the porky-looking guy, they barely acknowledged his presence. They were building power bodies to go with their power jobs, and men who didn’t keep themselves in condition were pathetic.

“Why don’t you just step this way, Hal?” said Bart Manjuck. “I’ve got a curling machine free and we can put you on it with around fifty pounds resistance. That shouldn’t stress you too much.”

“Great,” said the bear obligingly. As he followed Manjuck, he stubbed his toe on the pile of weights, so he picked up the weights to move them out of the way. “Okay?” he asked, holding the thousand-pound stack questioningly in the air. Bart Manjuck’s head came forward like an astonished camel’s. The trim women paused in their pumping and watched the porky guy pick up a
second thousand-pound pile of weights in his other hand. Considerately, he took them to the corner of the room, where he set them gently down.

A petite middle-aged woman rose from her Nautilus machine and strode swiftly toward them. “You must introduce me, Elliot,” she said in the throaty Southern accent that’d been heard on all the morning network shows that week. “Eunice Cotton,” she said, extending her hand to Jam. “You’re some power lifter.”

“Well, of course, it wasn’t a lift, strictly speaking,” said Bart Manjuck, bouncing up and down on his Nikes and flexing his pectoral muscles.

Gadson said, “This is Hal Jam, Eunice. I sent you the manuscript of his book.”

“
This
is Hal Jam? But I
loved
your book,” she said. Though she hadn’t actually read the manuscript, it had been on her desk for several days, awaiting a jacket quote from her, and she’d been getting a feeling for it each time she set her coffee cup on it.

Eunice’s own books were about angels. Her latest,
Angels in Bed
, was written simply and beautifully for all the world, as was her last best-seller,
Angels in Business
. Her writing had the slow, easy flow of the bayou in it, and an alchemical inventiveness inherited from a father who’d spent his life turning cornmeal, water, and sugar into bootleg bourbon. Eunice had left the Louisiana swamps to become a hairdresser in New Orleans—a tarty-looking girl
with nice high breasts and a ready laugh. One day, while breathing the fumes of a particularly strong hair spray, she had a vision of a strong, handsome, sexually pure male with frosted curls who said he was her guardian angel and that he was going to make her a star. Working in the evenings, she cranked out a two-hundred-page text on angels, written in the chatty style of a hairdresser talking to a client in curlers. Her word processor corrected her spelling and grammar, more or less, and she handed out copies of the spiral-bound manuscript at the American Booksellers convention in New Orleans. Elliot Gadson received the manuscript directly from Eunice, glanced at it, expecting something quaint or just plain crazy, and immediately saw the potential in Eunice’s angels. He took Eunice aside to see if she was of reasonably sound mind and discovered that she was an authentic American yakker, a born distiller of dreams like her daddy, Anvil Cotton. She used too much corn and sugar in her mix, but it made for memorable moonshine, and made a fortune for Cavendish Press. Eunice moved to New York City, bought a seven-room apartment in the Dakota, and became a popular figure on talk shows. She shed her tarty look, assumed a pilgrimlike hairdo, dressed in dowdy clothes, and talked with Geraldo and Oprah, but underneath the dowdiness a sexy hairdresser was hidden; when she gave her throaty laugh or made some salty comment, the audience loved it.

Eunice stared at the burly young writer to whom she’d just been introduced. He resembled Daddy Anvil in his shape and unsuspected strength (Anvil could outrun government agents through a pitch-black swamp with barrels of booze strapped to his back). And there was something else about this man, something—well, angelic was the word. His eyes were cast shyly toward the floor, and he seemed unable to speak to her. Since her angelic revelation, Eunice had remained aloof from men, claiming that frosted-haired angels were woman’s natural partners, but there was an otherworldly force coming off Hal Jam, as if he were comtemplating the invisible. He was, in fact, contemplating the smell coming from all the iron-pumping maidens in the gym. Strong stuff, he noted to himself. Makes a bear edgy.

Eunice took a sidelong glance at herself in the workout mirror. She’d been in the pool, which changed her pilgrimlike hairdo into a sleek cap that showed off the Cotton cheekbones and full lips, and Gadson was thinking to himself that maybe she was some kind of split personality, for the sensual woman in front of him was definitely not the prudish author of
Angels in Bed
, who wrote that the spiritual intentions of the winged beings should be realized through chastely imagined pillow fantasies. The imaginary angel would lie beside the reader through the night, in a feathery embrace that was thrillingly un-consummated.

“Elliot’s the best editor there is,” said Eunice to the bear when Gadson had mounted a stair climber to nowhere. “He discovered me when I didn’t know jackshit about writing.”

The bear shuffled uneasily from foot to foot. All around the room breasts bounced and thighs trembled, as if huge lady bears were trundling toward him on a forest path.