Girl and Bear Continued

It was her father who had taken her to see the bear, a year after her mother had disappeared, leaving only a sliver of packing paper that read, “Gone back.” It was a stone-white morning, before the birds began to stir, when she woke and saw her father sitting in the corner, watching her with his red rimmed eyes. “You look like your mother,” was the first words he spoke. Then, “Come. Let’s see the bear.” The girl sat up without speaking and studied the room--the stove dark, the larder empty, the fiddle strings torn from their pegs. “Alright,” she answered, in the flat tone she shared with her father.


The girl pulled on her boots, though they were stiff and crimped her toes. She shivered to the creek and scrubbed her face with water that burned like snow. She hurried back to the cabin, though it was as cold as the outdoors, and took the wooden comb with the missing teeth and quietly brushed her tired hair, just as her mother had done, then strung it back from her face without a mirror to fix it. It was October, and the days had been warm, but the cabin was tucked in the thin canyon above Wagner creek where it remained covered in shadows long into the afternoon. Her winter coat was too small for traveling so she opened the trunk, without asking, lifted her mother’s heavy coat, and wrapped herself inside like an Indian girl.


Outside her father prepared the mule with leather satchels on the haunches, a folded army blanket for a saddle, and a braided strap for pulling. The girl came and stood by his side without speaking. When all was fixed, he set her on the blanket, just below the neck, and placed the knotted mane in her hands. He paused and took in her mother’s jacket, then lifted the dark oily strap, and led the quiet beast along Wagner creek, toward the highway. The girl knew not to speak, but after awhile her ache could no longer stay quiet, “I’m hungry,” she said, and then stiffened, uncertain if her father would turn angry. But he was too tired for anger and with weary eyes he said, “I know, dear. I know.”


Down the road they traveled, their thoughts soothed by the mule’s heavy feet. They came out from the trees and walked the dirt road between orchards. Halfway to town, father spied a patch of blackberries at the edge of a pasture. “Wait here,” he instructed, then carefully climbed the stone wall and walked between a handful of sleepy cows with smoking nostrils, until he reached a tumbleweed of vines. She waited while the mule nipped at the roadside clover, her stomach crying for food. To keep warm she rubbed her legs against the animal’s bristly belly and buried her fingers deep within the mane.


Her father returned just as the sun began to glow behind the Siskiyous. He opened his hands and gently offered a palm’s worth of red and purple speckled berries. “They’re past season, but it’s something. At least until we get to town.” She lifted them carefully into her own hand, and as the mule began to walk, she placed the berries one at a time into her mouth. Some were bitter, others washed out, but the last one was perfectly sweet and she rolled it with her tongue until it fell open.

Rondo Unleashes a World of Hurt on His So Called "Buddies"

Rondo’s tallywacker was still smarts from the nip of the pekingese. He gingered himself into the broken circle of homeless men, allowing the queerness of their predicament to grow unchecked. It was Coco who first tried to broker the distance, offering up the Hamms he’d been nursing, but Rondo wasn’t having any of it. He backhanded Coco at the elbow and the luke warm libation took flight.

“Jesus, Coco!” he punctured the silence. “Jesus H. Coco. I don't even know where to begin.” Rondo paced aside the truck stop dumpster like a dog gone mad until he finally ascended the crate box, beside the fire barrel, and commenced to dole out the expected come uppings.

“Buddies?! Buddies for life? Isn’t that what you said Wolfgang? Well, where the hell are my buddies now? Where are they Shep? Wang-she? Calypso? I am so sorely—I see that smile Shep and I've got half a mind to shank you right now!" Rondo waited for the buddies to collect their composure.

"As I said, I am sorely disappointed. God gives a male one secret pleasure. One solitary digit of comfort. Though the whole body betray the man, the Lord provides one faithful Ebenezer, a staff of pride that might be raised in times of joy and times of sorrow. An honest man might expect that when he proffers a commitment of fellowship, swears an allegiance of friendship, treaties—in good faith I remind you—with men akin to his own situation, congregates his affections and entrusts them to his companions under a promise of 'buddyhood'—that man might expect his brothers in arms, his spiritual intimates, to vault all obstacles. Most particularly when that man is in perilous danger of losing the holy sepulchre of his own existence, his spiritual gift, his visible sign of the Father’s heralded love.

But no! The faithful soul who trusts in the treaty of buddyhood is a tragic figure indeed. That's what you've reduced me to my buddies. A dime store tragedy. The man who stands before you is bereft of all faith in a beneficent deity, a man hallowed empty by the cowardice of a people he once claimed as kin.

Shep! For Godssake Shep, you sheepdip! Can’t you set your Norwegian snuff aside for a hare’s whisker? Is it too much trouble to lend an ear to a fellow soul cast upon the capriciousness of human friendship? And you, Wolfgang! I’m ashamed to say, I dappled my eyes a time or two when you spoke of the blitzkrieg of remorse that raked your childhood. My heart reached out to you my Germanic friend. But now I count it a point of shame. No more Wolfgang. No more shall you feel the comfort of Rondo's loyal heart.

Sure, I was in need of coin--like any man in my situation. The nightclubs no longer desirous of the pluck and strum of an Alabama banjo. And sure, I was grateful Wang-she, when you told me of the potential to earn a few dollars at the Sweet Dreams Rest Home holiday festival. So I went, and I played my gift like the lil' drummer boy before the baby God incarnate. I caressed them to tap and sway to Alabamy Bound, and When That Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam', and Alabama Jubilee, and then finished her off with Old Folks at Home (in Alabama).

Then, as you all are well aware, the bitty with the white snowflake pekingese stood and let that cattail of a dog run and take hold of my John Thomas with a vengefulness that I've only seen in my darkest visions of Hades. The dog hung their, mind you, while the bitty, and the nurses, and my so called 'buddies' stood agog." Rondo went silent and looked down at his bruised jewels.

"We thought you'd handle him yourself Rondo," Chauncey mumbled.

"What did you say Chauncey? Did you say handle! Handle! Goddamn you Chauncey, to Satan's lair. In case you haven't noticed Chauncey, I'm a professional.--course you got no idea what that means, so I'll enlighten you: When you're playing Old Folks at Home (in Alabama) and your comin' round home to the final lick, you don't stop to wrastle a pekingese. You finish whatchya started! Why? Because that's what the public expects. Because that's what a P-R-O fessional does. But that's not what a buddy does Chauncey. Hell no. A B-U-uddy, upon seeing his companion distressed, lends a hand, reaches out and removes the offending mutt. Displaces it from his friend's Yankee noodle. What other meaning could you possible interpret from our Saviour's admonition to 'Love thy neighbor?'

I guess that was too much to expect. I played my tune. I turned the corner toward Alabamy. I finished what I started and let the pekingese dig is damnable fangs into my manhood, and swing his furry headed body in a most hateful tempo. There I stood. Playing my last licks. With a pain that only Christ Our Lord can contemplate."

Rondo stepped down from the blue plastic crate. "Well it's over. Yes sir, it's over. I am no longer anyone's buddy. I return to my selfhood from which I'm quite familiar, thank you. I enter the citadel of my own soul, no less lonely then when I first journeyed forth from the womb--hope in mankind being my only loss." Rondo picked up his canteen and took a long swallow of his own urine mixed with Grey Goose vodka. He gave the buddy circle a final look, "I guess what I'm trying to say is: Screw you guys."

He turned, lifted his banjo case, then ran, into a dark field of forget-me-nots.

The Girl and the Bear

There was a girl in a cabin who would lie on the floor and think of the bear. She would lie under the wool blanket on the red fir planks with her mother’s quilt and a flat brown pillow and she would think of the bear, on the ground, in the lamp-lit park, shackled to a tree. The girl lay on the floor because she had no bed, and she lay in the dark because there was no light, no electricity, no matches to strike. Dark and still, her father asleep, she lay thinking and feeling and remembering the bear, all alone, beneath the moon.