The Bear Went Over the Mountain (16 page)

Interview!

Where?

Somewhere.

Somewhere, somewhere, somewhere.

With somebody.

Who?

Don’t tell me, wait, I know it.

His tongue ran over his snout as it came to him. Gumball!

He came up out of the park onto Central Park West,
and knew he had everything under control as soon as he saw the subway entrance.

He was fond of subway entrances because of their cavelike appearance. He rarely passed a subway entrance without descending into it. Then, once he was down below, the echoing tunnels made him feel at home. On one of these descents he’d discovered gumballs, which were dispensed from round glass globes attached to posts on the subway platform. Had his cave in the forest had a gumball dispensing machine he might never have felt the desire to leave. But again, it had been up to mankind, with its superior mental powers, to make this great stride forward.

He descended now, into the subway, through the turnstile, and onto the platform. Sure enough, there was a gumball machine.

I’m doing beautifully here, he said to himself as he approached the machine.

He inserted a quarter in its slot, turned the crank, and out rolled a large red gumball. He took it in his paw and gazed at it.

Interview.

With a gumball.

He waited, and while subway trains came and went and the gumball sat unmoving in his paw, he wondered if perhaps there was something he’d missed.

He popped the gumball into his mouth.

The vivid red dye which coated the gumball melted
onto his tongue, and the carcinogens within flowed over his taste buds, absolutely first-rate.

He chewed happily, feeling that, after all, the mission had turned out well. He was interviewing a gumball. Publicity was easy. He wondered why the little birdlike female at his publisher’s was so worried about it all the time.

A subway train rattled into the station. He got on it. It was the first time he’d been on a train, but today was a day for breaking new ground.

He sat down and the car started. He stared at the subway tunnel walls rushing past; he chewed his gumball thoughtfully.

He rode along through a great many stops, until he grew hungry. Time to get off, he said to himself, stood, and waited for the train to enter the next station. He surfaced in a neighborhood he’d never seen before. He walked along, sniffing the air, but before he’d gotten a complete sampling, a dominant male in a shiny red suit with big shoulders stopped him. The dominant male had two females with him, in short skirts. “Hey, brothah,” said the dominant male, “you like to subagitate with the sisters of mercy here?”

The females smiled at him, and one of them angled her body toward the bear so her hip stuck out, and said, “You wan’ some of my cat meat, honey?”

The bear
was
hungry, and he was grateful to her for
offering to share her cat meat, but it was not a favorite food of his. “No thank you,” he said. “Good-bye.”

“He’s not here!” screamed Bettina into her cellular phone as she paced wildly on the sidewalk in front of NBC. “I hired your company to pick up my writer and bring him here and he’s not here!”

“My driver dere,” said Manfaluti Kheyboom, the owner of Lightning Limo. “He was front of boolding.”

“Well, where is he now?”

“Driving.”

“Without my writer?”

“Your writer not appear.”

“What do you mean, he not appear? He left the building.”

“My driver ask. Nobody know nutting.”

“Well, nutting is what you’re going to get paid.”

“My driver lost t’ree hours.”

“And I lost my
writer!
”

“Not my fault, lady. Fault your writer.”

“Fault your mother!” said Bettina, and ended the call with a violent jab of her finger on the cellular disconnect button. Manfaluti Kheyboom shook his head sadly and thought to himself, you come to America, you struggle to learn language, you hire good driver, and all you get is misunderstandink.

·  ·  ·

The bear didn’t know he was in Harlem, but he knew it was different from his own neighborhood. There was music floating from the windows, and the people seemed in less of a hurry than in other parts of town. They congregated on street corners, while people in his neighborhood just rushed along the sidewalk and didn’t even look at each other. He felt himself relaxing and decided he would move here.

He was in his gray tweed suit and baseball hat, with his elastic tie, and he wished he had a shiny red suit like the one worn by the dominant male.

He walked on, sniffing his way through the smells that came from the restaurants. Watching him were two heavily armed children. They were brothers and the bigger kids called them the Tinys—Tiny One and Tiny Two. Tiny One had an IQ of 200, and had been able to read a newspaper since he was in diapers. His ambition was to be a criminal and drive a white Lincoln with gold-leaf chrome.

Tiny Two had discovered the principle of base-10 arthmetic while goofing with the beads on his playpen. He’d worked his way through complicated mathematical procedures before he could speak, and now calculated sums in his head with astonishing speed. His ambition was to control sixty blocks of Harlem selling caviar crack,
from which he’d make a thousand dollars a day. Tiny One and Tiny Two knew they were the smartest people in Harlem, but older gang members still kicked their asses a lot. So they were on the lookout for opportunities to impress the older members. And this big buster who’d just walked into the neighborhood might be that opportunity. He was big, and he looked bad. “Probably trying to cut himself a piece of territory,” said Tiny One.

“We be the ones doing the cutting,” said Tiny Two, touching the concealed barrel of his submachine gun.

The bear was strolling happily along, doing his latest imitation of a human being. He was copying the walking style of the dominant male in the red suit, a rhythmic swaying of trunk and pelvis, and footsteps that rocked along the ground, as if testing it for solidity.

“Dude walking like a pimp,” said Tiny One.

“He dressed awful square fo’ a pimp.”

The bear noticed some unusual hand gestures young people in this part of town made to each other when they met on the street, and he copied these too.

“Goddamn, he signing!” cried Tiny One. If anyone who wasn’t a member of the ruling gang made hand signs, they had to die. “Putting the neighborhood down bad! Disrespecting the sign! I’m gonna pop the mothahfuckah!”

“We ain’t in close enuf. Keep yo’ cool.”

Tiny One and Tiny Two moved along quickly. “I’m
gonna spray that big buster’s ass
good
for signing like that,” said Tiny One. Somewhere in his smart little self, he knew he was lost in a house of mirrors, but as he was only eight all he could think to do was grow bigger in the mirror.

“Yeah, he gonna sign fo’ the last time today,” said Tiny Two, who had a similarly vague awareness about himself. Sometimes his lightning math calculations arrived with thoughts about his future that frightened him, but they came and went too fast.

The Tinys drew closer to the bear. He’d stopped to listen to three males singing on a street corner. They sang the most beautiful music he’d ever heard. Their voices were locked in harmony, and his ears rotated with the loveliness of it. It sounded like this:

“Shooo-doop-en shooo-beee-doooo …”

Their close vocal harmony created a sound the bear felt he could touch with his paw.

“Fuckah be signing
again
,” said Tiny Two.

“We got to get around the other side, or we liable to shoot the King Tones in the ass.”

“Be great to take him down right ’longside the King Tones though.”

“Yeah, they ’preciate a dramatic touch like that while they singing.”

The King Tones were known individually as King Cobra, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Imperial Decree. Imperial Decree had been ingesting a new brand of paint thinner,
which gave his throat a coating he liked for singing. He had the deepest human voice the bear had ever heard, and the sweetest, like a heavy golden syrup pouring into the air from his throat. But Imperial Decree’s eyes had begun to revolve in his head from the effects of paint thinner, and his knees were buckling.

“You okay, Imp?” asked King Cobra, the leader of the group.

“Be fine …” said the crumpled singer. “Jus’ need to take a moment here …” Imperial Decree pressed his cheek against the pavement, as his head seemed to be rotating at an increasing rate of speed. “Got to … 
stabilize
…”

“You sing from down there?”

“Sing anywhere.”

“Okay, le’s take it from the top again.”

Tiny Two and Tiny One had realigned themselves so they had the proper trajectory on the Big Buster. “Now,” said Tiny Two, “le’s get down for the ’hood,” and reached inside his shirt for his weapon.

“Shooo-doooop-en shooooo be-doooooo …”

The harmony floated out again, but the bear noted that a portion of it was missing. The singer with the deep voice was moving his lips but no music was coming out, only soft sputtering sounds.

“Shit, he out of it totally now,” said King Cobra. “Vinyl resins fuck him up bad.”

The bear opened his mouth, and suddenly a deep musical growl was coming out, for bears are tuneful beasts at heart. His tremendous barrel tone filled the air. The King Tones looked at him in surprise and resumed their singing, their eyes saying,
take it
.

The bear took it, floating happily in the song, becoming part of the dimension of harmony. His musical growl fit the pulsing bass line, and he poured all of his heart into it, his mighty diaphragm expanding and his breath resonating in his huge chest and stomach cavity.

Dude got a voice like the horn on the Staten Island ferry
, observed King Cobra.

“We cain’t kill him while he’s singing,” said Tiny One, pressing down the barrel of Tiny Two’s gun. “The King Tones might think we disrespecting them.”

“We wait till they’s done,” said Tiny Two.

The bear swayed to the tune as he sang, his eyes slitted in concentration, his voice rumbling along at the bottom of the vocal register. Kaiser Wilhelm sang in a strong falsetto, like a hawk on the wind, the sound piercingly sweet and sad, a sound the bear knew well and to which he blended his own thunderous rumbling. When the last note was reached, the leader threw his arm around the bear’s shoulder and said, “Brothah, you sing yo’ ass off.”

Brother
, thought the bear excitedly. His imitation
of a human must have been perfect. What a break-through!

“Okay,” said Tiny Two, “song’s over, we kin pop him now.”

As Two and One drew their guns, King Cobra looked their way. “What the fuck you think you doing?”

“That big buster was signin’,” said Tiny Two. “He was disrespectin’ the ’hood.”

“Get the fuck outa here fo’ I kick yo’ fucking ass,” said King Cobra, who was himself only five feet three but commanded great respect in the neighborhood for his musical abilities. “This be ouh soul brothah.” He tightened his grip around the bear’s shoulder. “Man got a sound like he got, I don’ give a fuck what he signs. You understand me?”

“Yessir,” said the two Tinys as they put away their weapons.

“Go beat yo’ tiny baloney ’stead of messing around where you ain’t wanted.”

The two Tinys slunk back, and King Cobra said to the bear, “Crazy little mothahfuckahs got nothing better to do than shoot peoples up. They don’t know they’s a time and place fo’ everythang. Now—let’s do us a little rap.”

The diminutive leader of the King Tones could rhyme eighty thousand words in single, double, and triple rhyme. The pulsing rhythm of his rap got the bear hopping
up and down excitedly, his arms pistoning back and forth as he sang a drumlike bass-grunt accompaniment. Imperial Decree rolled onto his back and stared at the sky, the whites of his eyes the color of turpentine. He snapped his fingers weakly to the music. “Sound good,” he said. “Sound
real
good.”

After the tune was finished, King Cobra said to the bear, “It’s time we got some food into the brother down there, to cut the effect of what he been ingesting. You up for a little bite to eat?”

“Subagitate with cat meat,” said the bear, his left arm still pistoning to the beat.

King Cobra bent over Imperial Decree. “You able to rise and walk, Imp?”

“Think … I bes’ stay put,” said Imperial Decree, his bass voice resonating near the curb and his eyes pointing in different directions.

“Shit,” said King Cobra, “bus liable to run over his ass, we leave him here.”

The bear reached down and picked Imperial Decree up with one hand and laid him gently over his shoulder.

“Much … oblige,” said Imperial Decree, hanging head-down.

“You got to give up paint thinner, my man, fo’ it kill you,” said King Cobra.

“Amen,” moaned Imperial Decree.

Trailing behind the King Tones and the bear were
Tiny One and Tiny Two, hands on their concealed weapons. If the Big Buster caused any problems for the King Tones, they’d ventilate his ass.

“We got us a great restaurant up ahead, name of Ralph’s,” said King Cobra to the bear. “Every Tuesday afternoon Ralph got a seventy-five-cent special.”

The bear nodded, his nose twitching with the smell that was coming from the restaurant fan. He was feeling very good about the way this day was going. He’d interviewed a gumball, and now he’d made friends, one of whom was hanging over his shoulder.

They entered the small restaurant, which was crowded with people from the neighborhood. It had a few tables with plastic flowers on them; a counter with several wobbly stools faced the window. The bear sniffed the air and liked what he smelled. He removed his new friend from his shoulder and propped him up by the window.

King Cobra read from a blackboard on which the seventy-five-cent Tuesday special was advertised. “Fried chicken, french fries, salad, and two slices of bread. Best deal in town.” He leaned toward the bear and said quietly, “Ralph bankrupting himself with the seventy-five-cent special. But he got to see folks eating.”

The bear nodded. He understood. When you saw people eating, generally they weren’t eating you.