So I went away. I hitchhiked to Niagara Falls. I reached Niagara and stood looking in. I was entranced by the crash of the water. Water can be very healing. I went on the Maid of the Mists, the old one, since burned, and through the Cave of the Winds, and the rest of it. And then I went on up to Ontario and picked up a job in an amusement park. This was most of all what I recalled on the plane, with the head of the American-Persian child on my lap, the North Atlantic leading its black life beneath us as the four propellers were fanning us homeward.
It was Ontario, then, though I don’t remember which part of the province. The park was a fairground, too, and Hanson, the guy in charge, slept me in the stables. There the rats jumped back and forth over my legs at night, and fed on oats, and the watering of the horses began at daybreak, in the blue light that occurs at the end of darkness in the high latitudes. The Negroes came to the horses at this blue time of the night, when the damp was heavy.
I worked with Smolak. I almost had forgotten this animal, Smolak, an old brown bear whose trainer (also Smolak; he had been named for him) had beat it with the rest of the troupe and left him on Hanson’s hands. There was no need of a trainer. Smolak was too old and his master had dusted him off. This ditched old creature was almost green with time and down to his last teeth, like the pits of dates. For this shabby animal Hanson had thought up a use. He had been trained to ride a bike, but now he was too old. Now he could feed from a dish with a rabbit; after which, in a cap and bib, he drank from a baby bottle while he stood on his hind legs. But there was one more thing, and this was where I came in. There was a month yet to the end of the season, and every day of this month Smolak and I rode on a roller coaster together before large crowds. This poor broken ruined creature and I, alone, took the high rides twice a day. And while we climbed and dipped and swooped and swerved and rose again higher than the Ferris wheels and fell, we held on to each other. By a common bond of despair we embraced, cheek to cheek, as all support seemed to leave us and we started down the perpendicular drop. I was pressed into his long-suffering, age-worn, tragic, and discolored coat as he grunted and cried to me. At times the animal would wet himself. But he was apparently aware I was his friend and he did not claw me. I took a pistol with blanks in case of an assault; it never was needed. I said to Hanson, as I recall, “We’re two of a kind. Smolak was cast off and I am an Ishmael, too.” As I lay in the stable, I would think about Dick’s death and about my father. But most of the time I lived not with horses but with Smolak, and this poor creature and I were very close. So before pigs ever came on my horizon, I received a deep impression from a bear. So if corporeal things are an image of the spiritual and visible objects are renderings of invisible ones, and if Smolak and I were outcasts together, two humorists before the crowd, but brothers in our souls-I enbeared by him, and he probably humanized by me-I didn’t come to the pigs as a tabula rasa. It only stands to reason. Something deep already was inscribed on me. In the end, I wonder if Dahfu would have found this out for himself.
Once more. Whatever gains I ever made were always due to love and nothing else. And as Smolak (mossy like a forest elm) and I rode together, and as he cried out at the top, beginning the bottomless rush over those skimpy yellow supports, and up once mute against eternity’s blue (oh, the stuff that has been done within this envelope of color, this subtle bag of life-giving gases!) while the Canadian hicks were rejoicing underneath with red faces, all the nubble-fingered rubes, we hugged each other, the bear and I, with something greater than terror and flew in those gilded cars. I shut my eyes in his wretched, time-abused fur. He held me in his arms and gave me comfort. And the great thing is that he didn’t blame me. He had seen too much of life, and somewhere in his huge head he had worked it out that for creatures there is nothing that ever runs unmingled.
Lily will have to sit up with me if it takes all night, I was thinking, while I tell her all about this.
As for this kid resting against me, bound for Nevada with nothing but a Persian vocabulary — why, he was still trailing his cloud of glory. God knows, I dragged mine on as long as I could till it got dingy, mere tatters of gray fog. However, I always knew what it was.
“Well, look at you two,” said the hostess, meaning that the kid also was awake. Two smoothly gray eyes moved at me, greatly expanded into the whites — new to life altogether. They had that new luster. With it they had ancient power, too. You could never convince me that this was for the first time.
“We are going to land for a while,” said the young woman.
“The hell you say. Have we crept up on New York so soon? I told my wife to meet me in the afternoon.”
“No, it’s Newfoundland, for fuel,” she said. “It’s getting on toward daylight. You can see that, can’t you?”
“Oh, I’m dying to breathe some of this cold stuff we’ve been flying through,” I said. “After so many months in the Torrid Zone. You get what I mean?”
“I guess you’ll have an opportunity,” said the girl.
“Well, let me have a blanket for this child. I’ll give him a breath of fresh air, too.”
We started to slope and to go in, at which time there was a piercing red from the side of the sun into the clouds near the sea’s surface. It was only a flash, and next gray light returned, and cliffs in an ice armor met with the green movement of the water, and we entered the lower air, which lay white and dry under the gray of the sky.
“I’m going to take a walk. Will you come with me?” I said to the kid. He answered me in Persian. “Well, it’s okay,” I said. I held out the blanket, and he stood on the seat and entered it. Wrapping him, I took him in my arms. The stewardess was going in to that invisible first-class passenger with coffee.
“All set? Why, where’s your coat?” she asked me.
“That lion is all the baggage that I have,” I said. “But that’s all right. I’m country bred. I’m rugged.”
So we were let out, this kid and I, and I carried him down from the ship and over the frozen ground of almost eternal winter, drawing breaths so deep they shook me, pure happiness, while the cold smote me from all sides through the stiff Italian corduroy with its broad wales, and the hairs on my beard turned spiky as the moisture of my breath froze instantly. Slipping, I ran over the ice in those same suede shoes. The socks were rotting within and crumbled, as I had never got around to changing them. I told the kid, “Inhale. Your face is too white from your orphan’s troubles. Breathe in this air, kid, and get a little color.” I held him close to my chest. He didn’t seem to be afraid that I would fall with him. While to me he was like medicine applied, and the air, too; it also was a remedy. Plus the happiness that I expected at Idlewild from meeting Lily. And the lion? He was in it, too. Laps and laps I galloped around the shining and riveted body of the plane, behind the fuel trucks. Dark faces were looking from within. The great beautiful propellers were still, all four of them. I guess I felt it was my turn now to move, and so went running — leaping, leaping, pounding, and tingling over the pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, and was raised in Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago, received his Bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1937, and did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin. He worked for a short time on the WPA Writers Project, and served in the Merchant Marine during World War II.
Saul Bellow has contributed fiction to Partisan Review, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, Esquire, and the literary quarterlies. His criticism has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Horizon, Encounter, The New Republic, The New Leader, and elsewhere. He has taught at Bard College, Princeton University, and the University of Minnesota, and is at present a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.