Now You See It: A Toby Peters Mystery (9 page)

Blackstone got in the car with his brother and they drove off. Phil and I did the same. We didn’t talk. There was nothing to say except good night when he took me back to my car parked behind the Bluedorn Apartments.

I got back to Heliotrope and parked half a block down from Mrs. Plaut’s at a little after two. There was one more surprise waiting for me before I got to bed.

        
Announce that you are about to demonstrate a magic detector. Take a quarter. Place it on table. Turn your back. Tell the person to pick up the coin with either hand. Have them hold the hand to their forehead for about fifteen seconds while you concentrate. Tell the person to put the coin back on the table. Turn and have them place their hands on the table. Look into the person’s eyes and then point to the hand that held the coin. Tell them you can repeat the trick and do so a few times. Solution: Before looking into the person’s eyes, look at their hands. The whiter hand will be the one that held the coin. Being held to the person’s forehead causes the blood to drain enough from the hand to make it whiter than the other. Be sure to glance at the hands the instant you turn around. Take as long as you like looking into the other person’s eyes. You already know which hand held the coin
.

—
From the
Blackstone, The Magic Detective
radio show

I
GOT UP THE PORCH STAIRS,
through the door, and past Mrs. Plaut’s door. No problem. I got to my room. Still no problem. I turned on the light. Problem.

I saw it on the small table near the open window. Dash, the orange cat who sometimes permitted me to share the room with him, was sitting on it. The black cardboard covered composition book lay next to the salt and pepper shakers. A sheet of cardboard stood propped between the shakers. On the cardboard was written,
Please read before morning. Breakfast at eight.
It was signed, Irene Plaut.

“No way out of it,” I told Dash, who licked his left front paw.

I undressed down to my underwear, felt the stubble on my chin, filled a bowl with milk for Dash, and poured myself a big helping of Wheaties and milk.

Then I sat to eat, read, and wonder about the latest addition to Mrs. Plaut’s family history.

W
OOLEY AND
T
HE
B
EAR

        Brother Wooley was not one to shrink from his duty or a battle with fists or bottles or anything that was helpless. Wooley toward the end of the days the good lord had given him on this orb of woes and frequent joy did shrink a bit but that was because of lumbago.

            Be that as it may my brother Wooley who was as skinny as a dandelion stem was at the London Zoo. In truth Wooley had yellow hair and looked much like a dandelion if one applied one’s imagination. This may account for why my aunt Evangeline called Wooley “the wilted flower of the family.” Aunt Evangeline was a tsk-tsker. To Aunt Evangeline everything was a shame or a sin or both. Aunt Evangeline simply called me “Poor Irene.” Then she would shake her head and tsk-tsk. Aunt Evangeline was loath to explain. Aunt Evangeline would not say. This concerned me for many a year but a distant cousin named Sarah Free-homver from Sandusky Ohio did later tell me that Aunt Evangeline had met her but once and said to her upon taking her hand, “I’m so sorry.” Sarah Freemhover was not at all sure what Aunt Evangeline was sorry about and she never did explain.

            Wooley had a greasy order of fish and chips wrapped in newspaper that he ate as he ambulated around the zoo. He ate the fish and chips not the newspaper. Do not misunderstand. Wooley was thin and bemused but he was not a simpleton.

            He stopped before a cage behind whose bars sat a very large brown bear. People passed pausing only to glance upon the poor creature. It was a hot summer day. The bear just sat. When no one was about Wooley said, “Like some fish and chips?”

            The bear looked at Wooley and Wooley threw him the wrapped-up newspaper containing one reasonably sized piece of cod and some fried potatoes. The bear picked up the newspaper and said “Thank you.”

            “You’re welcome,” said Wooley and walked away so the bear could eat with some privacy. It was only after he had walked approximately forty paces and was looking at nervous wolf that Wooley realized that the bear had spoken.

            Wooley turned and went back to the bear’s cage. The creature had finished the fish and chips and the newspaper it had been wrapped in was nowhere in sight which led Wooley to the immediate conclusion that this talking bear had eaten the newspaper as Wooley had not done.

            “You spoke,” said Wooley.

            Three people in addition to my second eldest brother were now standing in front of the cage. The three people were a man and a woman and their small daughter. It might have been their granddaughter. Wooley was not concentrating on them. They were concentrating upon him after he had addressed the bear.

            The bear looked at Wooley and licked its paw.

            Wooley looked at the three other people before the cage and said “He talked. I gave him fish and chips and he talked. He said ‘thank you.’”

            “Polite bear,” said the man ushering wife and daughter or granddaughter away. The child may in fact have been a niece or a neighbor’s child or even a foundling they had taken in but that is no matter.

            When they were gone Wooley again addressed the bear. “You can talk?”

            The bear looked at the roof of his cage.

            Wooley urged the bear to talk again, even promised him more fish and chips. Wooley believed the bear was considering the offer. Wooley pleaded.

            “If you don’t talk I’ll spend my life thinking I am a lunatic.”

            The bear didn’t answer.

            Wooley believes he raised his voice to the creature. So intent was he that he would not have noticed the three men in blue zoo uniforms running toward him. He turned only because the bear said, “Look out,” and looked toward the men in blue zoo uniforms who now took hold of Wooley’s arms.

            “Did you hear that?” Wooley asked the men, one of whom smelled of something vile, perhaps a Dromedary, which I understand is one of the most vile smelling of God’s creatures.

            “Heard what?” asked the man with bad breath.

            “The bear spoke,” said Wooley. “He told me you were coming.”

            “And here we are” said the man with bad breath. “Let’s go to the office and discuss this curious phenomenon.”

            Wooley was taken to the office of the keeper of the London zoo who was fat and sassy and grumpy. Wooley was a man of great conviction and determination and given to the truth that our mother had told us would keep us in good stead with the Lord and with our fellow man because once you started lying it was close to impossible to remember all of your lies.

            Only a part of an hour earlier Wooley had been thinking of getting to a job interview. Wooley was an accomplished mandolin player. He could play the banjo too and was known in the family and beyond for his fast moving version of Waiting For The Robert E. Lee alternating between instruments.

            “The bear spoke to me,” said Wooley.

            “She spoke to you,” said the zookeeper.

            “Yes,” said Wooley.

            “No, I mean the bear is female,” said the zoo director.

            “She spoke to me,” Wooley repeated reaching up to adjust his hat, which had been jostled by the three men in blue zoo uniforms.

            “She did not speak,” said the zoo director turning red.

            Wooley said nothing. Stubborn ignorance cannot be overcome by the word of even the most truthful of men.

            “The bear has been with us for two years and has never spoken,” the zoo director said trying to appear calm in the face of honest certainty.

            “There was the little lad about two months back who said the bear said Thank you.”

            “Yes,” said Wooley. “That is what the bear said to me.”

            “The little boy also said that one of the elephants threw a clump of dung at him” said the zoo director who glared at his employee. “You may either leave now and never return to the zoo or we will call the authorities and have you taken to the hospital.”

            “I am not ill.”

            “You are deluded, sir. Perhaps you have been drinking.”

            Well Wooley had successfully imbibed a wide swath of spirits over the course of his adulthood and perhaps even a bit before that but that morning he was sober and had drunk nothing but very ill-tasting English coffee.

            Wooley chose to go to the hospital rather than be banished from the zoo though as it turned out the zookeeper had not given him a choice at all because he still ordered that Wooley was not to enter the zoo again.

            Wooley passed three weeks in the hospital proving to the doctors and nurses and alienists that he was of sound mind if fragile body except for his insistence that he had heard the bear speak. They allowed him to leave. The job with the dance band no longer existed. Wooley could have come home but he got a job waiting tables at a restaurant called the Chicago Bar & Grill.

            When he was not working Wooley would attempt to get back in the zoo and talk to the bear. He climbed fences, crawled under bushes, took to wearing disguises including that of a Zooave and a pregnant woman, but it was all to no avail. He would always get within approach to the bear cage and be apprehended by one of the guards who had been assigned on a rotating basis to watch for him.

            Twice his eyes met those of the bear but the creature did not speak. One time the bear had a paw over his eyes as if trying to keep out the sight of Wooley being caught.

            Wooley was never the same. The same as what you may ask. The same as he had been before being spoken to by a bear.

            Eventually my brother Ezra and my cousin Matthew went to England at the expense of the London zoo to escort a recalcitrant Wooley back to the shores of our great land.

            Wooley moved to Denver, obtained employment at a restaurant, saved his money, and bought a very old bear from a traveling carnival. He shared a one-room house with the bear and ended his days attempting to teach the bear to speak. He failed but he did learn to love the bear who had come to him with the name Bruno but which he changed to Ernest.

            Love comes to us in strange and mysterious ways. Amen.

The night was filled with dreams of talking bears, bears in tuxedoes performing magic tricks, bears sawing other bears in skirts in half to an audience of bears applauding almost silently with their padded paws. Bears wearing turbans with green stones. And there I was onstage, the only human—if indeed human I be—waiting my turn in a line of bears to be sawed in half, evaporated, decapitated, eviscerated, levitated or, if they figured out I wasn’t a bear, masticated.

“Your first time?” asked the bear in front of me in line offstage.

“Yes,” I said.

“Just don’t let them shoot you,” the bear said. “Blackstone the Bear can shoot straight. Killed more bears last year than all the hunters west of the Mississippi. Bear that in mind.”

The other bears laughed, and then I was in bed sleeping. The three bears came up to me. Papa Bear leaned over and I felt a dry tongue on my face. I opened my eyes. Dash was looking down at me with his round green eyes. The sun was coming through the window. My Beech-Nut Gum wall clock said it was almost seven-thirty.

I rolled over, got to my knees, stiff, sore, and wounded, stood and said to Dash, “So far so good.”

Then I rolled up the thin mattress on the floor, put it in the corner, dressed quickly, pants not terribly in need of pressing, fresh white shirt, and rewarded Dash with a bowl of corn flakes and milk.

At seven-thirty, the door to my room flew open. I was ready. Mrs. Plaut, broom in hand, looked down at where I would normally be lying on my back, eyes closed.

“Good morning,” I said cheerfully.

She turned her eyes to where I sat at the small table near the window.

“You are fully awake,” she said with a hint of suspicion.

“That I am,” I said.

“Have you been carousing all night instead of reading my pages?”

“I have not been carousing,” I said. “I’ve been getting shot, but I read your pages. Fascinating.”

She adjusted her glasses.

“Wooley is an interesting character,” I said.

“Breakfast in twenty-two minutes,” she said. She seemed maybe a little disgruntled at not having her ritual morning moment of terrorizing me into wakefulness. Then she stopped and faced me again, supporting herself with the broom, which was only a little narrower than she was.

“Wooley was not interesting,” she said. “He spent his life in family exile in Americus, Georgia, serving as assistant to a half-mad pharmacist named Spaulding.”

“But the bear, England?” I said.

“Wooley never was in England,” she said.

“You made it up?”

“Invention is the parent of truth,” she said.

“Who said that?”

“I just did,” said Mrs. Plaut.

I looked at Dash. He turned his head away and leaped onto the window ledge and leapt to the tree. Stiff, sore, and shoulder aching, I had neither the agility nor opportunity for such an escape.