I had no business in that corner of
Snooky's Newsstand pawing through its raunchiest
offerings. So when another late-night customer sidled
in, nervousness and guilt made me drop the magazine in
my hands, incriminating centerfold up. That the new guy
stood four inches taller than I and stank of the
contents of a fast-food dumpster did nothing to ease my
nerves. And it really didn't help when my first
clear look revealed that he was no homeless bum in a
ratty fur coat, but one of the gene-tweaked black bears
that our Bureau of Wildlife Labor Management had
franchised to do menial jobs after our last sweeping
deportation of illegal immigrants.
Take a deep breath, I advised myself.
I did. It worked. (What do bears know about the morality
of erotica, anyway?) I knelt, closed the covers on my
girlie book, and reshelved it. It glistened there like a
recruitment poster for Old Nick's pitchfork brigades, as
did the sleazy titles around it, all of them addictive
goads to sin.
"Pardon me," I whispered, but only an eavesdropping
gossipmonger could have heard me.
The bear grunted.
I should have turned and left. My wife and children
awaited me at home, but this secret bondage to my animal
side, and to the knee-weakening adrenalin surges
attending my every trip into Atlanta, had
short-circuited my logic centers and my soul. Sinning, I
trembled. Trembling, I burned. Burning, I exuded a
glow—God forgive me—akin to the renegade Lucifer's.
Besides, that smelly bear had begun to crowd me. With
his stiff-wristed paws he pulled Big Girls Bimonthly
down, braced it on his forearms, and, with his
prehensile lips, opened it to the centerfold. He
squinted. Even genetically jiggered bears don't see too
well, and unless their augmenters have given them color
receptors, their vision consists of light and dark
dapples, a shadowy paste. Anyway, this shaggy guy didn't
see what I saw, and maybe his poor eyesight caused him
to bump me.
Words that should never pass a minister's lips passed
mine—"Out of my space, ursey!"—but I belonged in
Snooky's about as much as any Top 40 number belongs in
the Cokesbury hymnal, so I didn't regret blurting them
out.
The bear ignored me. He clawed half the centerfold out
of the girlie book and stuffed half of that half into
his mouth. His breath reeked of spoiled lettuce, spoiled
grease, spoiled chicken skin. Heedless of his feelings,
I pinched my nose. He didn't care. He tongued the slick
photo out of his mouth and returned it, crumpled and
saliva-coated, to the magazine.
"Hey, ursey," Snooky said from the register. "You'd
better buy that now, or I'll have to call a cop."
The bear shuffled over to Snooky carrying the girlie
book and dropped it with a splat on the counter. He
dragged a heretofore-invisible fanny pack around to his
belly, fumbled its Velcro tabs apart, and dropped the
pack on the magazine. He made a gulping noise and a
self-effacing "Eh, eh, eh, eh," indicating that
Snooky should take out the cost of his purchase.
Snooky did. "Have a blessed evening," he said, handing
over the fanny pack and the magazine. (His hypocrisy on
behalf of commercial gain rivaled mine as an ordained
Testifier and a girlie-book ogler.)
The bear, when he turned around, fixed me with an
appraising stare. He could see me just fine, whether in
crisp black and white or muddy color. The stare didn't
seem disapproving so much as calculating, but I still
felt as if an invisible hand had reached in and squeezed
one of my gut coils. Staring among omnivores and
meat-eaters frequently means a pending attack. But even
though urseys risk termination by agents of the Bureau
of Wildlife Labor Management for "crimes" as rinky-dink
as peeing on a potted shrub or jaywalking, this guy's
manner suggested that he had few self-image issues and
no fear of authority. After taking my measure for what
seemed a minute (but may have been only seconds), he
shuffled out into the muggy night.
"Well," said Snooky, "looks like bears have discovered
cheesecake."
"Smut, you mean."
"Call it what you like. It keeps me in beans and grits."
Snooky shook his head. "I just never thought a dumb
beast would stoop so low."
· · · · ·
I drove my pig-waste-powered Chevy home the fifty-eight
miles to Hebron, in the foothills of the north Georgia
mountains, and found Sandi waiting up in our living
room. A colicky Simon fidgeted in her arms. Tabitha
snoozed on a pallet with her tiny butt up in the air and
a filament of drool staining her pillow.
The digital clock on the TV set blinked 1:37. Although I
had phoned two hours earlier to report that a crisis at
Peachtree Court Pastoral Counseling Institute (PC2I)
would delay me longer than I had figured, Sandi shoved
Simon into my arms and sprayed me with eye-bullets.
"You promised this wouldn't happen again."
"And you knew when you married me that my work would
require sacrifices on both our parts."
"Oh, Tommy Kyle."
"What?" I answered stonily.
"Your 'sacrifices' get you out of the house when I could
use your help. They sap your time and strength for
ministering to this family."
"Which is why I've got to depend on you so much,
Sandi." I shifted Simon to my other arm and touched his
angry-looking forehead with a fingertip. Tabitha
murmured on her cushion but didn't wake up.
Believe me, I thanked God that I was a Full-Gospel
Testifier rather than a Roman Catholic. My denomination
spared me the recurrent shame of confessing my lies and
addictions to a priest, and nothing but my
conscience—which had a glitch in it—required me to
confess them to Sandi. I had a ministry in the city all
right, but not a twice-weekly job as a counselor
to troubled married couples. No, I evangelized the
short-short-and-tee-shirt-clad waitresses in all
Atlanta's Upper Deck restaurants. (I really
slaved when they needed lovelorn advice or a wardrobe
adjustment.) Sandi had the number of the chain's central
office, but she assumed it belonged to the Pastoral
Counseling Institute and never phoned it anyway,
primarily because I had told her that interrupting me
could derail a potential counseling breakthrough.
Despite the late hour, Sandi and I talked. (A husband
who comes home late had better talk.) From this
powwow, I learned that Sandi's foul mood stemmed in part
from the arrival in Hebron that afternoon of an ursey
construction crew.
Her brother Angus, a vet who'd lost an arm in our
ongoing foreign war, had also just lost his job as a
drywall finisher to a member of this hairy bunch: a
burnt-cinnamon Tremarctos ornatus, or spectacled
bear, from the Birmingham Zoo. This development stank
because Angus would soon start "self-medicating"—Sandi's
delusive euphemism for moonshine bingeing.
"Spectacled bears don't even hail from this country," I
said, trying to reassure her. "Spectacled bears are
native to the Andes. By law, an American man
can't lose his job to an undocumented alien bear."
"Listen to me," Sandi said. "This bear hails from
the Birmingham Zoo."
"So?"
"He was born in Alabama. He's a citizen, like the urseys
born and raised here in Georgia. And just like them,
Tommy Kyle, he's undeportable. Even better, if you're
his boss, he'll work for June-bug grubs."
I gave Simon back to Sandi, who rocked him, and thought
about this news. After a slew of mass deportations
(Hispanics, Asians, Arabs), the wholesale genetic
tweaking of Ursus americanus (American black
bear), and the approval of a bill abolishing labor
organizations (Universal Disunioning Act), almost all
menial work in the US had fallen to unpaid or poorly
compensated native animals.
Black bears got special treatment under the Disunioning
Act owing to a clause championed by President
Shallowford. He loved the creatures. When he was a young
man, a female bear in the Tennessee hills had wrapped
her body around his for three straight winter nights,
sparing him death by hypothermia. The president's
opponent in our last election, Senator Bright, tried to
score points by noting that Shallowford had wandered
away during a fraternity keg party, at the advanced age
of thirty-two—but the American people rejected this
attack and returned Shallowford to the White House. One
week after his third inaugural address, a joint session
of Congress exiled Senator Bright to the barrens of the
Arctic National Petroleum Dig.
Today, black bears—but not polar bears or
grizzlies—constitute an overwhelming majority of
construction workers, truck drivers, sanitation
laborers, domestics, hotel and motel employees,
rock-show roadies, and carnival roustabouts. Although
not many can read, they have voting rights in
presidential elections and use touch-screen monitors
with scent dispensers geared to the elephant and donkey
symbols of the two major parties to make their choices.
They exercise this franchise in percentages that put us,
their human superiors, to shame.
"Well?" Sandi said, summoning me back to the present.
"An ursey can't legally steal an honest-to-God human
citizen's job," I told her. "Angus has to fight."
"That's just it, Tommy Kyle. You and I both know he
won't."
Exasperated, I said, "A person has to take some
responsibility."
"Like you do around here?" Which was a really cheap shot
and a deflection of the issue at hand.
Simon wriggled in Sandi's arms. Tabitha stuck her pink
legs out, rolled over onto her back, opened her
indigo-blue eyes, and wailed. I should have soothed her
with kisses and baby talk, but I couldn't. I simply
couldn't. I belonged nowhere near her. For that matter,
I belonged nowhere near Sandi, or Simon, or the
intransigent problems of my one-armed brother-in-law.
"You soulless phony," Sandi said.
"Don't," I said, pointing at her. "It's these damned
black bears that have no souls. They're taking over the
country. They're ruining it."
And shedding my coat and unknotting my tie, I reeled
off-balance down the hall to my study.
· · · · ·
Unmolested, bears can live thirty to forty years. When
they pass on, their bodies decay and, I suppose,
dematerialize. But they don't go to Heaven or Hell,
because they have no souls. Their spirits—the instincts
and the primal smarts that make them bears—cease to
exist. If God had wanted it otherwise, He would have
ensouled a bear in Eden, or up on Brasstown Bald, when
he blew life into Adam's lungs and baby ego. He would
have made black bears and human beings coequal spiritual
twins. But He didn't. Bears die forever and probably
deserve to.
If not, the Bible lies about our dominion over them, and
President Shallowford has erred in urging our
legislators to preserve even the shortened hunting
seasons meant to thin their growing ranks. You can't
hunt bears in the city or in any other populated area,
of course, nor can you shoot a bear wearing a scarlet
neckerchief—but you can shoot a grown naked bear
in the woods in the fall, and many people do, for the
meat, for rugs, or for trophy heads. Clearly, the
president's sentimentality about bears runs no deeper
than it should—in emphatic refutation of those who
accuse him of shielding his pals against any
comeuppance, warranted or not.
But why do I digress this way?
Well, on Sunday morning, Angus Showalter, my
brother-in-law, came to church—the First Full-Gospel
Testifying Church of Hebron—bringing along the
burnt-cinnamon bear that had taken his job.
The bear sported its red immunity bandanna—out of
season—like a tie, most likely in honor of its aberrant
churchgoing experience. (I would have bet that Angus
had knotted that inept tie.) Conspicuous beige markings
encircled the bear's eyes, giving him an
absentminded-professor look.
On the top step outside the sanctuary, I said, "I'm
sorry, Angus—we don't allow urseys in here, even if
they've got prosthetic opposable thumbs."
"You don't?"
"It doesn't do them any good. They don't have the
necessary spiritual equipment to benefit from either
God's word or the Church's sacraments."
Angus glanced at the ursey standing patiently at his
elbow. "It might do me some good, Tommy Kyle. I
told Specs"—nodding at the bear—"that if he came this
morning, I'd forgive him for snaking my job."
"He can't come in, Angus. This is a house of
prayer, not a stinking zoo."
Angus's brow furrowed. "Preacher Whitlock over to the
Baptists blesses animals. Puts his hands on
heifers' heads and horses' flanks and outright blesses
'em. Birddogs and housecats, too. And I've heard you
stand up at Christmastime and sing 'The Friendly Beasts'
as loud as loud can be."
"This isn't Christmas, Angus, and blessing an animal
isn't the same as trying to save its soul." Congregants
had begun to back up at the foot of the steps. The
Manley family—Bill, Mamie, and their three girls—gawped
at us from the end of the sidewalk, awkwardly frozen in
their Sunday-go-to-meeting shoes.
"Oh." Angus had finger-combed his hair and put on a
clean wrinkled shirt. "I guess we'll try elsewheres." He
and Specs trotted down the steps, the ursey swaying on
all fours and shaking his massive head.
I learned later that no other church had let them in,
either. (The clergy in Georgia still have some
sense.) So they had perched on a picnic table outside
the open windows of an African Methodist Episcopal
church on Frye's Mill Road to listen to the singing and
the hallelujah shouting …
· · · · ·
I love my wife. I love my children. But Satan and our
fun-worshipping society—deviltry and greed in evil
cahoots—have conspired to drag me sinward, and that
summer I often stumbled toward it.
For several months after our marriage, I surfed erotica
on our home computer, always late at night or early in
the a.m. while Sandi slept. She has more techno-savvy
than I do, though, and finally caught me just by
attending to her business as an online commodities
broker. I admitted to nothing more twisted than
conducting research on reprehensible internet filth—so I
could better combat it for God's faithful. And if
I had appeared to sneak about this task, I'd done so
only out of respect to Sandi's sensibilities as an
upright Testifier woman.
"Don't do it anymore," she said.
"Sneak?"
"Research. It's contaminated our machine, Tommy Kyle.
Besides, if you can't just imagine the boring
outer limits of pornography, well, you have serious
shortcomings as an imaginer."
This remark bowled me over. It implied that Sandi, once
my cherry sweetheart and now my lawful bedmate, could
envision stuff that I had to see firsthand if I
hoped to file it in my mental data banks. Even worse,
Sandi thought such imaginings not so much disgusting as
boring, whereas I, when Satan led me to indulge them,
always did so with a heady psychological rush and
thrilling tides of guilt. Her remark gave me even more
evidence that men and women are wholly distinct species,
with out-of-synch transmitters and receivers.
Anyway, I obeyed her. I stopped visiting
triple-X sites. I fetched my shoebox collections of
erotica out of their hole under the bedroom floor and
put them in a metal storage unit outside town. And I
laid plans for a ministry at the Upper Deck eateries by
creating phony paper and electronic trails to the
Peachtree Court Pastoral Counseling Institute. Sometimes
I couldn't tell if the Archangel Gabriel or a lizard
monster in my id was prompting my behavior.
Sandi didn't catch on to these moves (or didn't
tell me if she had), and Tabitha and Simon appeared in
our lives, one after the other, as if Sandi and I not
only loved each other but also understood each other's
deepest longings and fears. Of course, to remove myself
from this lie, I started driving to Atlanta two nights a
week as a traveling marriage counselor for PC2I—yet
another complicated lie.
· · · · ·
On the Tuesday after Angus's attempt to bring Specs to
church, I paid my cover and entered Rapscallion's
Lounge, on a revitalized stretch of Cheshire Bridge
Road. This gentleman's club is known for the beauty,
class, and high-energy dancing of its mostly au naturel
exotics, but I couldn't sign off on these claims without
a look-see of my own. Besides, I'd done just about all I
could at the Upper Deck eateries (none of which serves a
decent hero sandwich, anyway), and some of the girls
plying their trade at Rapscallion's could stand to
hear—again—the testimony of a convicted believer.
Well, because of the darkness and the crazy placement of
the booths and tables, I stumbled going down into the
pit. I stumbled again paying more heed to my hostess's
sequined posterior than to the mazy aisles, but at last
I settled in, ordered a nonalcoholic beer, and did my
duty estimating the level of sinfulness of the pole
huggers performing on stage. (If you ask me, their
serpentine moves pretty clearly showed their
allegiance.) I estimated for a long time.
A waitress wearing little more than a thong and mascara
slid me another O'Doul's and a dish of beer nuts.
Belatedly—and I wasn't even tipsy—I laid my palm over my
wedding ring. The waitress said, "Relax, Teddy Bear.
Seventy-five percent of the dudes who come in here have
wives and kids. 'S no big deal."
"It's Tommy Kyle, not Teddy Bear."
"Sure. How long have you and the missus been hitched?"
Techno-disco-country-western-calypso-hip-hop made it
tricky to hear.
"Seven years."
"Ah, it's itch-time. Kids?"
"A couple. They're both under four."
"Right. You had to get out of the house—to reassert your
sense of self." I didn't reply to that. She said, "May I
sit down?"
"Is that allowed?"
"Actually, it isn't." She sat down anyway.
I uncovered my wedding ring and sipped my "beer."
"But I don't care what bubba don't allow, gonna quiz my
client anyhow." She patted my wrist. "My name's Minerva,
Tommy Kyle." (I had blurted out my real name,
preempting any chance of foisting an alias on her—a bad
beginning.) "Relax," she said again. "Just call me Min.
How often do you stay home and help Missus T.K. take
care of the cubs?"
"Almost never."
"Why's that? Are you allergic to dirty diapers? Or to
sticky little paw prints on your face?"
"No, I—" My voice failed me.
Min said, "Relax," her favorite command. "Look over
there." She nodded at a booth cattycorner to my table,
beyond the stage. My chin bobbled. A black bear in a red
neckerchief sprawled in that booth staring my way and
sniffing the liquor-, sweat-, and makeup-scented air for
tattletale pheromones. Then, registering my notice of
him, the bear glanced aside and raised a radiant
blue cell phone to one of his erect Mickey Mouse ears.
Never mind that almost all ursey utterances—whimpers,
moans, grunts—depend on face-to-face meetings for their
decipherment. This bear reminded me of the buttinski at
Snooky's Newsstand last Thursday night. In fact, you can
forget the canard that all black bears look alike: I
definitely knew this guy. "… He's probably a
daddy too," Min was telling me.
I started. "What?"
"Male bears play virtually no role in raising their
cubs," she said. "It's not that they have no paternal
feelings. It's just that sows with offspring need a
certain amount of territory to feed the kids in. Papa
Bear instinctively knows better than to trespass on that
territory. Evolution in its wisdom—"
"How can you credit wisdom to a supposedly blind force
like evolution?" I said. "Grant it to God, to Whom it
belongs."
Min cocked a kohl-lined eye. "Okay, T.K., you got it.
God—in His wisdom—designed Papa Bear to
hightail it after the consummations he so devoutly
wishes and to stay out of Mama Bear's, and Little Baby
Bears', space until Mama can wean the little suckers to
get by on their own. If Papa hung around, he'd just muck
everything up. So he's an absentee daddy by"—Min paused
to read my mood—"intelligent design." Then she winked
and rubbed a smut of mascara out of her eye.
I put my elbows on the table. "How do you know all this
ursey-oriented gobble-gook, anyway?"
"Like half the girls here, I work at Rapscallion's to
pay my way through college: We've got girls going to
GSU, Tech, Emory, Oglethorpe, Moorhouse, Agnes Scott,
you name it. It's a cliché, I guess, but clichés take
root in realities, T.K., which is more than I can say
for a lot of God talk I hear." Min added that she was
majoring in social work and minoring in ursine studies
because one day she hoped to score a job as a caseworker
with DABBS, the Department of Augmented Black Bear
Services. "Anyway," she said, "running out on the missus
and kids is a very bear-y thing to do. Come to DABBS
some time, and I'll see what I can do to get you a
little more intelligently designed for Homo sapiens
fatherhood."
She rose, finger-saluted, and sashayed away. Three
pole-hugging ladies writhed in imperfect unison in the
purple fog, but the bear I had first seen at Snooky's,
well, that mysterious galoot had vanished. I squinted
through the haze to find him. Had he left on his own
just now, or had a bouncer somehow managed to toss him
out?
Question-plagued, I made my own way to the door.
· · · · ·
Despite the hour, I couldn't bring myself to drive back
to Hebron. I ambled past several lewd-talking men in the
parking lot and walked down Cheshire Bridge Road past a
darkened studio where amateurs, for a nominal fee, could
take photos of either lingerie-flaunting young women or
chained urseys. On another day I would return with a
cohort of the faithful to picket the place.
But that must have been my fake beers talking, for the
police or outraged citizens had already shut it down. It
was Snooky's that needed picketing, or Rapscallion's, or
the storage unit housing my shoebox porn.
I kept walking. Crap-mobiles, rickshaws, and sail-bikes
huffed and clattered by like the crippled ghosts of
fancier vehicles. Coyotes howled on the decrepit
interstates. Maybe I had a death wish: I angled off the
sidewalk and down a cracked embankment to an underpass
pocked with shadows and littered with glass. A gang
member could shank or sodomize me. A renegade ursey
could lay me out with one blow and plunge his snout into
the steaming pudding of my bowels. I didn't care. Either
God would watch over me or He wouldn't, and, shamefully,
I deserved Him not to.
A trio of figures in silhouette occupied the far end of
the underpass. Near them, a small black oil drum
flickered with the fire they'd built in it—not for
warmth, given the season and the suffocating humidity,
but for light. I half expected one or all of them to
recite "Double, double, toil and trouble" or "When
shall we three meet again?"—but, as I approached,
they merely shifted from foot to foot. Eventually, the
two smaller bears dropped to all fours and scampered up
the embankment to the top of the overpass itself. There
they clung like good-sized patches of lichen. I kept
walking and halted only about twelve feet from their
upright mama bear, who, swaying suspiciously,
high-sniffed my unwelcome presence.
"Evening, ma'am." My courteous-cowboy imitation.
Mama Bear gulped and uttered several variable-length
moans. (If Min had come along, she could have
interpreted.) She wore no bandanna. A patch on her chest
showed gray-white skin rather than fur. Above us, the
eyes of her cubs glittered warily.
"Huh, huh, huh, huh!" grunted Mama Bear. To me,
it sounded like "Beat it!" or "Get lost!"
I would have, too, except that I made her face into
something human and took offense at the "stink-eye" she
was giving me. Nobody—no mortal being—told the Rev.
Tommy Kyle Kidwell what to do. Besides, the sow looked
old and bedraggled, and I couldn't run out on her, even
to ease her motherly dread.
I rummaged in my pocket. That afternoon, Sandi had given
me a small plastic bag of dried apricots. I waved it in
front of the sow. Then I pulled out an apricot and
pitched it to her. She swatted it into the oil-drum fire
but sniffed her paw and then slow-licked it to identify
the smell. She moaned and gestured. I poured the
apricots into my hand, set the bag on the underpass
floor, scattered apricots atop it, and backed up. The
sow dropped down, ate two or three of the fruits, and,
gulping and grunting, summoned her cubs. The cubs
tumbled to her, wrestling demonically. Mama sorted them
out and made sure they each got more than a taste.
I thought, Unto the least of these, and hiked
back to Rapscallion's without further incident.
· · · · ·
At first my daily schedule fretted, and then peeved, and
finally infuriated Sandi. I sympathized, but a
Testifying minister's priorities flow from the
headwaters of God to his parishioners, his family, the
unchurched, society at large, and, last, the self, and
not the other way. Sometimes I erred in ordering these
priorities, but almost always owing to satanic attack
instead of malice aforethought.
Even so, Sandi had reason to grouse: "Fridays and
Saturdays, you write your weekly sermons. Sundays, you
preach. Mondays, you visit members and teach your
rotating Bible classes. Tuesdays, you do Deep Prayer,
post-seminary study, and pastoral counseling in Atlanta,
which you also have on Thursday nights. Wednesdays, you
go from shop to shop making yourself visible here in
Hebron—as a Testifier to the faith, of course, not as an
ad for Tommy Kyle Kidwell personally. Thursdays—well,
enough. I only see you for a hectic hour every
morning and whatever minutes before bedtime you get home
on Institute nights."
So as I walked to the parsonage door, I braced for
attack. The porch light burned accusingly, and the
living-room curtains glowed, I thought, with the pent-up
wattage of Sandi's indignation. Well, I deserved it: Why
couldn't I shake Old Nick's grip on my libido?
But when I stepped into the house, Sandi hugged me. She
put a glass of iced tea into my hand. By this time, I
had seen her brother Angus sitting on the sofa wearing a
thick white bandage on half his face, sort of like that
loony Dutch painter who sliced his own ear off, except
Angus's bandage was bigger and uglier.
He had his hand—his only hand—on top of his head, as if
to keep the pressure inside it from blowing his skull
into fragments. Sometimes he liked to say that if anyone
knew the sound of "one hand clapping," it was he, Angus
Showalter, but tonight, or this morning, he looked
clueless and hangdog—no match for a knock-knock joke,
much less a Zen Buddhist stumper.
"I had to stand him bail," Sandi said. "After they took
him to the clinic, I mean. I couldn't let them put him
in a stinking cell with Duane Fuqua, the wife beater,
and Willie Brownlee, the weed-eater thief."
She told her story in fits and pieces, bits and starts.
Since Sunday, Angus's even-temperedness about losing his
job to a bear had disintegrated. Around quitting time
that evening at a construction site outside Hebron,
Angus approached Specs as the ursey left a brand-new
starter house with several other workers. He challenged
the ursey to fistfight him.
"A fistfight to the death," Angus put in from the sofa.
Specs had seemed confused. When Angus swung at him, he
blocked the blow, roared, and stepped aside. Angus
called him a coward and pursued him around the yard: an
obstacle course of supplies, equipment, and tools.
Because he couldn't land a punch, though, his
frustration mounted.
"I always have to fight with 'one hand tied
behind my back,'" Angus broke in. "Try it some time,
Tommy Kyle."
Sandi explained that Angus finally picked up a
sledgehammer and, reaching out with it, slammed Specs in
the right upper thigh.
"A sledgehammer?" I said in amazement.
"There's nothing in the rules of free-for-all
fistfighting that sez you can't have something useful
in your fist," Angus replied.
I had never realized that free-for-all activities came
furnished with rulebooks, but I kept my mouth shut.
Sandi hurried to say that Specs had struck back with a
paw swipe to Angus's face—hence the bandage—but hadn't
dropped down and mauled her brother to death, probably
because of the V-chip that Wildlife Labor Management had
planted in his hippocampus.
Meanwhile, called by Angus's old boss, who now had five
or six bears working for him, Police Officer Wrangham
arrived and put Angus under arrest. The crew chief had
decided to press charges as a warning to other
disgruntled employees who planned to scapegoat his
urseys. Wrangham stopped at the health clinic to have
Angus's wounds bandaged and telephoned Sandi to tell her
to meet them at the jail.
The bail procedure was expedited owing to Angus's wounds
and his kinship to the late Autry Showalter, a mayor who
had raised money for the Police Benevolent Fund by
auctioning speeding-ticket passes and get-out-of-jail
chits at the halftimes of Hebron High School football
games and at every junior-senior prom. Anyway, as a
result of this dispensation, Angus now occupied the sofa
in our parsonage rather than a jail cell. And probably
would until our next local court session.
I didn't mind. Angus's presence had distracted Sandi
from my absence. And she was prepared to stay up all
night with him to insure that the bear's sudden wallop
to his head didn't lead to a coma. She would count his
pulse, monitor his eye movements, and periodically wake
him to forestall catalepsy or paralysis.
"And it might keep me from having a repeating-loop dream
of the same stupid Three Stooges sketch," Angus added
helpfully.
I had no objection. I felt kindly toward Angus. He had
spared me another guilt-stacking midnight heart-to-heart
with his sister.
I rustled up some apricots in the kitchen and popped
them with a glass of milk and a Restoril. Then I slept
until 9:17 A.M.,
almost like a hibernating bear.
· · · · ·
On Thursday evening, back in Atlanta, I checked in with
my unknowing abettors at PC2I. The institute
now had a paunchy black bear serving as a security
guard. To my surprise, I spent twenty minutes counseling
a pair of newlyweds suffering from birth-control fears
and a total ignorance of the ovulatory cycle. They also
shared the bizarre conviction that the security guard
wanted to violate the bride. I helped them understand a
hunch of my own: that the bear's attention to her
signaled infatuation, not lust, and that if she and her
hubby prayed together before their next intercourse,
whatever resulted from it would occur with God's
blessing.
After this strange session, I cruised the city, biding
my time. The announcer on Crossroads Radio reported that
the decapitated heads of seven urseys had shown up that
afternoon on the eighteenth hole of Augusta National
Golf Course, home of the Masters. Also, in Yellowstone
National Park, President Shallowford had addressed an
audience of augmented Ursi americani, promising
immediate deportation of grizzlies and Kodiaks to
set-aside habitats in Canada. The Canadians were
cooperating, mostly to keep the US Congress from
declaring their nation off-limits to American tourism.
Meanwhile, black bears on the four-lane medians in
Alberta had united in a protest, complete with smoky
pine torches, demanding secession from Alberta and
annexation to the brand-new union of bears in Wyoming …
Finally, my methane mobile cruised into a neighborhood
where a mixed menu of women in seven-inch heels and
thirteen-inch skirts minced along a dim street flaunting
their carcasses. An old blood-borne hum droned in my
ears, and my heart leapt. Other cars patrolled the same
street, slowing and hiccupping forward again when the
women signaled their drivers: harlots on parade, Babylon
sisters for sale. Where were the cops? Where were the
vigilant people of Neighborhood Watch?
An especially tall woman in bearskin boots and a
wide-brimmed black leather hat loomed on my Chevy's
right. The padded sheath around my steering wheel had
grown really damp. In my rearview mirror I counted seven
beads of sweat on my upper lip. I needed to talk to this
gal. I needed to ask her if parading jauntily here would
in any way ready her to saunter the sidewalks of the
City of God. I would pay her for this info. The godly
ends of a godly researcher justify almost any outlay.
And so I eased alongside the woman and powered down the
passenger window.
She saw me. She approached. She removed her hat and
leaned down to stick her head into the car. Her neck
cords and sunken eyes gave me pause—was she an
honest-to-God woman?—but her crooked smile had an odd
girlish sweetness, and so, as Min had kept urging me at
Rapscallion's, I relaxed.
Too soon!
The car behind me—a refitted taxi of uncertain make and
year—plowed into me with a loud bang! crash! tinkle! My
seat belt kept me from flying into the windshield, but
its wrenching grab bruised me from chest to hip. The
tall harlot vanished, but the taxi, after backing up
several feet, flashed its biting halogen headlamps two
or three times, as if threatening to run into me again.
A prophetic voice in my reptile brain said, "Better get
your holy butt out of here, Tommy Kyle."
More lights flashed around me, but the taxi's headlamps
switched off. I looked back over my shoulder. The driver
wore a small felt cap of some sort and a loose
light-colored cotton vest. On the passenger side,
though, sat a hairy figure with a long muzzle and a dark
bandanna. Surely, he couldn't see me any better than I
could see him, but the mere suggestion of his identity
led me to put my car into gear and hit the methane
pedal. The Chevy drove, granted, but items both metal
and plastic fell from its rear as I wrestled it out of
that Pit of Dissipation.
· · · · ·
This abrupt end to my researches could have allowed me
to get home even before Sandi expected me. But I had the
car checked out at an all-night service center and drove
back to the Counseling Institute to make sure that its
new security guard hadn't tailed me on my unsuccessful
junket. No, the guard was positively a different
bear. But having this reassurance disturbed rather
than calmed me, and I took a side trip to my storage
unit outside Hebron to retrieve my three banished
shoeboxes and to soothe my nerves by their repossession.
So I again got back to the parsonage after midnight.
When I crossed its threshold, an ax swept down.
Sandi hit me with hard evidence of my ungodly obsession
and deceits: an issue of the in-house newsletter of the
Upper Deck restaurants showing me partying with several
waitresses; a copy of Big Girl Bimonthly with my
fingerprints all over it; digital photos of me
estimating levels of sinfulness at Rapscallion's Lounge;
and video of my abbreviated trip, that very evening, to
Alley Cat Row.
The bear responsible for these articles of my
impeachment sat on the sofa, where Angus had sat two
nights ago. He didn't make eye contact. He didn't even
add a blame-laying snort. His presence so deeply shocked
me that I never even thought to ask him to produce his
private investigator's license. I had never considered
the possibility that a bear could enter that profession.
I had never considered the possibility of Sandi's asking
a PI—and certainly not an ursey PI—to put me under
surveillance.
"Never say 'research' to me again," Sandi said. "You've
lied and lied, Tommy Kyle. You have a serious problem
and need serious help. So do I, but first I choose to
take Tabitha and Simon out of this den of lies and leave
you here to mull your sickness. Eventually, I'll get
back to you, or my attorney will, to end this
humiliating fiasco of a marriage. Good-bye."
· · · · ·
Not long after our divorce, the First Full-Gospel
Testifying Church of Hebron fired me. I now live in a
rented doublewide in East Hebron and support myself
doing talk therapy with my walk-in clientele.
Ironically, I moved in with the bear who exposed my
secret life. He conducts his PI business out of the
other half of the doublewide and styles himself Silent
Sam Ellijay.
Angus Showalter rooms with me, on my side, and fetches
my kids from Sandi's on my visitation weekends. Specs
and a young honey bear room with Detective Ellijay. I
gave the bears my shoebox collections to prevent Tabitha
and Simon from coming upon them over here and warping
their outlooks on male-female relationships and the
viability of modern marriage. Sometimes, the urseys paw
through the boxes maniacally, placing a postcard or two
in their mouths to distill the perfume from the scented
pasteboard. Their take on smut totally bewilders me.
It's a weird arrangement, I know. A year ago, I could
not have imagined sharing a mobile home with three
bears, augmented or otherwise. As for Angus, he harbors
more bitterness toward Specs and Detective Ellijay than
toward me, although who knows why? Every day, he takes
one-armed target practice with an old 30.06 rifle, a
Showalter family heirloom. Hunting season's coming up
again, he says, and licenses are readily available from
the Bureau of Wildlife Labor Management.
The End—for Terry Bisson |
