The Bear Went Over the Mountain (24 page)

He stretched out on his living room rug, on top of an electronic massage mat which directed small motorized rollers and fingers into various parts of his back, scratching where
he couldn’t reach. Laying his paws together on his stomach as the rollers ran up his spine, he thought about how he used to have to do this sort of thing himself against a tree trunk—how crude, how primitive. His tongue slipped slowly outward at the corner of his mouth and hung there ecstatically.

His ecstasy was interrupted by the door buzzer. With a sigh, he switched off the scratcher and went toward the door. Building security sent no one up without announcing them, so the bear assumed the man who greeted him on the other side of the door was from the maintenance crew. “Do you need to fix something?” asked the bear.

“Are you Hal Jam?”

“Sure.”

The man extended a folded sheet of paper. “I’m serving you with this.”

“Thank you,” said the bear. He liked being served. He gave the man a ten-dollar tip.

The man looked at the ten-dollar bill regretfully. “Sorry, I can’t take it.” The man walked back toward the elevator and the bear retired into his apartment. Elliot Gadson had told him he was probably going to win something called the National Book Award. Was this it? He unfolded the paper the man had given him. The words were nice and big, the way he liked them. He read slowly:

Was this the National Book Award? The bear turned the paper in his paws as if changing the angle would help him understand it better. Then he sniffed it. There was only the flat scent of paper and the pungent imprint of the thumb of the man who’d brought it; it smelled like pastrami; much as the bear liked this smell, he somehow sensed it wasn’t relevant. And slowly, very slowly, he began to grasp the significance of the piece of paper.

He stared at the summons as if teeth of steel were buried under its surface. He could fight a pack of hungry wild dogs but how could he fight a piece of paper? The trap had sprung and had him in its jaws.

He threw the summons to the floor. “I’ll pretend it never came,” he said aloud, but even as he said it he knew that this wouldn’t work.

The summons lay almost smugly, as if it knew it held him in a grip from which he couldn’t escape. He stared at the white, rectangular shape. He could pounce on it, rip it to shreds, and swallow the pieces, but its sinister power would be undiminished.

He sank heavily into his beanbag chair and reached for his honey jar. He opened it, drained it desperately, wanting oblivion, wanting to float away on a sea of sweetness. He wiped his mouth with the back of his paw.

The dreadful summons lay near his toe. He touched it lightly, expecting it to hiss or possibly even speak, to say,
“You will be caged tomorrow.”

He laid his heel on it and dragged it toward his chair. Recklessly, the way he tore into hives for honey, he grabbed the summons and shook it, hoping the words would fly off the paper like bees. But no bright winged little bombers attacked him. The hive of words was indifferent to his attack.

The bear read the summons again slowly, moving his paw along under the words. He read the entire summons over several times:

He let out a roar of delight and threw the summons in the air.

“A person! They called me a person!” He retrieved the paper from the floor and read it aloud:
“Hal Jam, a person.”
No mistake about it.

He carried the summons over to his desk and laid it carefully down. This was the most important document he’d ever received. “A
person
 … not a bear. I’ve done it. I’m a person. It’s official.”

He danced around on the carpet, paws in the air. “I’m finally a member of the human race!”

“Come in, my lord, come in.” Elliot Gadson was waiting in a conference room at Cavendish Press, along with a lawyer from Tempo Oil, who showed the sort of deference toward title that Bagget and Smallwood had predicted in their ad. The bear entered with a light step, since he was not only a Lord of the Manor but more important, a person. He took a seat at the head of the table. The lawyer, observing his self-possession, put it down not just to his aristocratic lineage but to the innocence of a writer having nothing to fear from a crank with a nuisance suit. Gadson, who had a flair for dramatic formality, was delighted to be able to make the sort of introduction now required. “Hal Jam, twenty-fifth Lord of Overlook.”

“John Warwick,” said Tempo Oil’s senior attorney.
Warwick’s face expressed experience gained in matters of great complexity, involving billions of oily dollars. He knew how to take stock of a man quickly and he was pleased with Jam’s appearance. His air of robust strength, confidence, and good health would play well in court. “I’m sorry we have to bother you at all with this business, but it shouldn’t take long for us to put things right. I thought your book was a real page-turner, and so did my wife.”

The bear nodded his thanks, that of a judicially certified person.

“You’re important to us, Hal.” Warwick gestured toward Gadson, who made a small, appropriate sound in response. “It’s no secret we’re in business to make money,” continued Warwick. “And it’s also no secret that you’ve made a lot of it for us. We’re here to protect you and ourselves. Now—” He opened his briefcase and placed some papers on the desk. “We’ve received interrogatories you’ll need to answer. They’ve been sent to us by the lawyer representing the individual who’s brought the suit against you.” Warwick handed the papers to Jam. “It’s just straightforward stuff. Place and date of birth, and so on.”

The bear stared down at the questions. He’d been born in a hollow tree trunk. His previous address was a cave. He looked back up at Warwick. “No.” He handed the interrogatories back.

“I know they’re trivial questions, Hal, and they’re certainly a waste of your time and ours. But that’s what this whole suit is, you see. It’s meant to be troublesome and costly so that we’ll capitulate and settle. But we aren’t going to do that.”

“It’s not that I’m not a person,” explained the bear. “I’m definitely a person.”

Gadson intervened, feeling the point was a delicate one and that he was more sensitive to it than others might be. “Hal is very careful about his background. We’ve had a close professional relationship, and yet he never once mentioned that he was an English lord. I raise this point to show how private a person he really is. Most people in this day and age couldn’t wait to trot out their pedigree, if they had one. But Hal, to his great credit, feels it’s inappropriate that he should have to speak of his background. Am I correct in this, Hal?”

“I’m a person. It says so right here.” The bear waved the summons at Warwick.

Warwick was used to fighting environmentalists and had been looking at this Jam action as a welcome change—nobody’d spilled oil on anyone’s duck. But Jam was … well … strange. Warwick was aware that English aristocrats could be that way. He cleared his throat and tried again: “What it says on that summons, Hal, is that somebody claiming to be you is suing you for claiming to be him. It’s a bogus claim, since you’re an established
author, and a lord, and he’s an opportunist, or—and this is a real possibility in this kind of case—he’s deluded. Either way, we need your response to these interrogatories. We need to establish your bona fides.” Warwick smiled the patient smile he used when a Tempo Oil tanker was sinking in offshore waters. “I understand that you feel it unnecessary to talk about your illustrious family. And I’m also aware that you’ve cultivated a mystique of mystery to help sell your book. We’re not going to disturb that mystique. In fact, we’re going to preserve and enhance it. But what we’re preserving first and foremost is your money. And ours.” He slid the interrogatories along the edge of the conference table toward Jam.

The bear pushed them back. “No.”

“But why, Hal? I mean, my lord? What objection do you have to telling us when and where you were born? We’re not going to publish it.”

Again Gadson intervened. “Hal’s life is his writer’s capital. He doesn’t wish to draw from it unnecessarily.”

“He’ll be drawing from his capital big-time if we lose this case.”

“He’s refused to answer our interrogatories,” said Eaton Magoon. “I’ve no idea why. He has Tempo Oil attorneys representing him, so I assume they’re up to something dirty. I’m going to make a motion to compel.” Magoon had the reputation of being a shrewd old-fashioned country lawyer, with plenty of horse sense. “By the way, Bramhall, have you got another suit of clothes? That one doesn’t fit you.”

“It used to fit.”

“When, in high school? The sleeves are nearly up to your elbows. The waistband is split.”

An impatient growl escaped Bramhall’s lips, for it cost him a great deal to be here at all. Shadows from the cave still disturbed his perception. Objects in Magoon’s office that should have been familiar—a clock, a picture frame, a file folder—appeared sinister, pieces of a grand delusion he must now rejoin. Only the breeze coming in at the window seemed companionable. His feet felt horribly cramped in the shoes he wore; he longed to walk barefoot over the pine-needled floor of a forest lit
by the soft moon of dreams. These memories clung to him, discreetly agitating their case, while Magoon explained the other case, the real one, and what they needed to do to win it. “I suggest you buy a suit that fits you. A man whose jacket rides up to the elbow and whose pants are split does not make a good impression on a jury.”

Again, Bramhall snarled a reply. He was irascible, the way bears are in springtime, and it worried him, because he felt capable of seriously injuring someone, anyone, who got in his way. His emotions were hardly recognizable to him. At some moments he felt like an authority, a king. And this would be followed just as quickly by a feeling of numbing stupidity, in which his thoughts wouldn’t move at all. Other times he felt like his old self, a lonely university professor, socially inept but hardworking and clever, clever enough to have written a best-seller. And then a bear’s blind rage would surface.

Magoon saw the confusion in his client’s eyes and leaned forward in a kindly manner, his fingers inter-twined. “I’m beginning to think we have a case. It’s possible they didn’t answer our interrogatories because there’s something in the man’s past that’s shady. I don’t dare count on that, but I can hope for it. And I hope for something else, Bramhall. May I continue to speak frankly?”

Bramhall shrugged his assent. Magoon said, “I hope that you can, between now and the trial, learn to speak more clearly.”

Bramhall groaned. “I’ve developed … an impediment.”

“Speech impediments can sometimes win a jury’s sympathy.” Magoon rocked back in his chair and laid his intertwined fingers on his paunch. “But you sound as if you’re tearing your way through a hunk of raw meat. I don’t think a jury will find it a sympathetic sound.”

“I know,” growled Bramhall. “It’s terrible.”

“A speech therapist might be able to help you.”

“I used to speak perfectly well.”

“And your suit used to fit.” Magoon turned toward the window and gazed out thoughtfully toward the fading logo of the Feed and Seed store. “Maybe I should tell the court you received a throat injury playing football. Or while rescuing a drowning child. Yes, that’s better.” He turned back to Bramhall. “The rescue ropes twisted, and caught you in the larynx.”

“My voice changed while I was sleeping in a cave.”

“Again—not the sort of thing a jury would find sympathetic. But just for my own enlightenment, why were you sleeping in a cave?”

“I was demoralized. I wanted to live like an animal.”

“And?”

“I felt … drawn to a cave. I spent most of the winter there.”

“You spent the Maine winter in a cave?” Magoon stared hard into Bramhall’s eyes, trying to judge his client’s mental condition. Bramhall’s gaze was tortured but Magoon could discern no true signs of lunacy. “You need a haircut, a shave, and a new suit. Will you take care of those things?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Bramhall ran a hand over the thick stubble that covered his face. “I have to shave three times a day now.” He ran a hand over his forehead. “And I’ve gotten hairy. The mind … can affect the body.”

“I suggest a depilatory cream.”

“Whatever you say.”