The Bear Went Over the Mountain Read Free Page B

and writhe ecstatically on the floor in the middle of lunch showed remarkable freedom from constraint. Boykins, bolt upright in body and soul, saw in Hal Jam the image of what he’d never been, a happy child at play in the dream of life. Boykins stared in fascination.
    The headwaiter was not fascinated. He charged over, outraged at this breach of etiquette in his elegant domain.
    The bear twisted back and forth, using the accepted bear maneuver of raising arms and legs to get momentum into the twist and thus scratch more thoroughly and more deeply. His eyes were half-slitted with ecstasy. The face of the headwaiter was indistinct, but the waiter’s mustache, and his whining voice, had the semblance of a weasel.
    “Monsieur, please, not during lunch!”
    Bears don’t like their good times interrupted by impertinent weasels. The bear’s paw shot out. The head-waiter had spent a lifetime dodging through swinging doors. He ducked and the blow sailed past the tip of his mustache.
    Boykins dropped to one knee beside his client, first making sure that his knee landed precisely in the center ofone of the carpet’s rectangular patterns. “Hal, I think you’re drunk.”
    The bear froze, aware of many pairs of eyes on him.
    I’m getting a feeling here, he said to himself. Possible blunder?
    He quickly flopped onto his stomach, pushed himself upright, and took his seat with as much dignity as he could muster, which was considerable, owing to a life of undisputed primacy in the forest.
    The headwaiter had a similar authority in the room he ruled, and was equally skilled in the restoration of dignity, aided by Boykins quickly slipping him a twenty.
    Boykins lifted the wine bottle. “I’ve seen too many writers ruin themselves on this stuff, Hal. And you don’t need it. You’re the real thing already.”
    The voice of Boykins blended with the other human voices in the room, becoming the sound of bees. “Bees honey,” said the bear, his elbow sliding forward on the table.
    He’s fried to the eyebrows, thought Boykins.
    “Honey life,” said the bear, fighting to create easy conversation, but he could feel people’s glances and their superior smiles. They spoke their thoughts effortlessly, while his moved ponderously. His agent was looking at him anxiously, with no idea of what he was trying to say about honey. And he himself didn’t know. I’m floundering,he said to himself. Panic shot through him, and his eyes darted back and forth.
    “Well,” said Boykins, trying to return to the orderly procession of business matters, “how do you feel about publicity?”
    The question broke apart into pieces and the bear couldn’t fit the pieces together. His long tongue ran nervously over his snout. A woman who’d just joined a party of Tempo Oil executives at an adjacent table noticed the bear and kept her eyes fastened on him as the voices of her male colleagues broke dully around her. Now, there, she thought as the bear’s red velvet tongue slipped over his nose again, is a man.
    “The sales force will insist on a tour,” said Boykins, “if we get the kind of money I’ll be going after.”
    The bear had lost the thread to which he’d managed to cling from Maine to Manhattan. The buzz of the restaurant was an unbearable judgment on his animality. He slapped his paws over his ears.
    “I understand, Hal, you don’t want to hear about it yet. You’ve just written a novel and it’s precious to you. But these days the author is as much the product as the book.”
    The racing stream of human speech glistened as it curved around obstacles and glided on, relentless in its gradient, while he panted in animal stupidity.
    And then his nose twitched, the olfactory bulb at itsroot a thousand times more sensitive than that of a human. He straightened and moved his head around to isolate the natural scent he’d found within the synthetic veil of perfumes. There it was, moist, cool. “Salmon.”
    “Yes, they do it skewered with