The bear smell is rank but not unpleasant, once you get used to it. It’s not like a barn smell, but wilder. I leaned over to whisper something to Mother and she shook her head. It would be rude to whisper around these creatures that don’t possess the power of speech, she let me know without speaking. Wallace Jr. was silent too. Mother shared the bedspread with us and we sat for what seemed hours, looking into the fire.
The big bear tended the fire, breaking up the dry branches by holding one end and stepping on them, like people do. He was good at keeping it going at the same level. Another bear poked the fire from time to time but the others left it alone. It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire, and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything? Every once in a while, a smaller bear walked into the circle of firelight with an armload of wood and dropped it onto the pile. Median wood has a silvery cast, like driftwood.
Wallace Jr. isn’t fidgety like a lot of kids. I found it pleasant to sit and stare into the fire. I took a little piece of Mother’s Red Man, though I don’t generally chew. It was no different from visiting her at the Home, only more interesting, because of the bears. There were about eight or ten of them. Inside the fire itself, things weren’t so dull, either: little dramas were being played out as fiery chambers were created and then destroyed in a crashing of sparks. My imagination ran wild. I looked around the circle at the bears and wondered what they saw. Some had their eyes closed. Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting alone in front of its own fire.
The hubcap came around and we all took some newberries. I don’t know about Mother, but I just pretended to eat mine. Wallace Jr. made a face and spit his out. When he went to sleep, I wrapped the bedspread around all three of us. It was getting colder and we were not provided, like the bears, with fur. I was ready to go home, but not Mother. She pointed up toward the canopy of trees, where a light was spreading, and then pointed to herself. Did she think it was angels approaching from on high? It was only the high beams of some southbound truck, but she seemed mighty pleased. Holding her hand, I felt it grow colder and colder in mine.
WALLACE JR. WOKE me up by tapping on my knee. It was past dawn, and his grandmother had died sitting on the log between us. The fire was banked up and the bears were gone and someone was crashing straight through the woods, ignoring the path. It was Wallace. Two state troopers were right behind him. He was wearing a white shirt, and I realized it was Sunday morning. Underneath his sadness on learning of Mother’s death, he looked peeved.
The troopers were sniffing the air and nodding. The bear smell was still strong. Wallace and I wrapped Mother in the bedspread and started with her body back out to the highway. The troopers stayed behind and scattered the bears’ fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do. They were like bears themselves, each one solitary in his own uniform.
There was Wallace’s Olds 98 on the median, with its radial tires looking squashed on the grass. In front of it there was a police car with a trooper standing beside it, and behind it a funeral home hearse, also an Olds 98.
“First report we’ve had of them bothering old folks,” the trooper said to Wallace. “That’s not hardly what happened at all,” I said, but nobody asked me to explain. They have their own procedures. Two men in suits got out of the hearse and opened the rear door. That to me was the point at which Mother departed this life. After we put her in, I put my arms around the boy. He was shivering even though it wasn’t that cold. Sometimes death will do that, especially at dawn, with the police around and the grass wet, even when it comes as a friend.
We stood for a minute watching the cars and trucks pass. “It’s a blessing,” Wallace said. It’s surprising how much traffic there is at 6:22 A.M.
THAT AFTERNOON, I went back to the median and cut a little firewood to replace what the troopers had flung away. I could see the fire through the trees that night.
I went back two nights later, after the funeral. The fire was going and it was the same bunch of bears, as far as I could tell. I sat around with them awhile but it seemed to make them nervous, so I went home. I had taken a handful of newberries from the hubcap, and on Sunday I went with the boy and arranged them on Mother’s grave. I tried again, but it’s no use, you can’t eat them.
Unless you’re a bear.
JOHN KESSEL
A Clean Escape
John Kessel’s reputation as a writer of sophisticated, literary fantasy and science fiction is predicated on a handful of stories that frequently invade the territory of classic writers and use the lessons in their literature as sounding boards for contemporary values and social mores. The mock essay “Herman Melville: Space Opera Virtuoso” and the Nebula Award–winning riff on Moby Dick, “Another Orphan,” both chart incongruous intersections of the period of Melville and modern times. “The Big Dream” tells of a private detective, on the trail of Raymond Chandler, slowly evolving into a character in a typical Chandler crime story. “The Pure Product” and “Every Angel Is Terrifying” both extend ideas in the southern gothic fiction of Flannery O’Connor. H. G. Wells is himself a character in the Wellsian tale “Buffalo.” These stories, and Kessel’s alternate-history tales “Some Like It Cold,” “The Franchise,” and “Uncle John and the Saviour,” have been collected in his short-fiction compilations Meetings in Infinity and The Pure Product. The creative playfulness implicit in the “what-if” speculations of these stories extends to Kessel’s work as a novelist. Good News from Outer Space sketches a satirical portrait of a dysfunctional America on the eve of the twenty-first century, obsessed with alien invasion and millennial irrationality. Corrupting Dr. Nice is a screwball time-travel story involving a father-daughter team of flimflam artists who traverse timelines and alternate histories in search of victims. Kessel has also written the novel Freedom Beach in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly.
“I’ve been thinking about devils. I mean if there are devils in the world, if there are people in the world who represent evil, is it our duty to exterminate them?”
JOHN CHEEVER,
“The Five-Forty-Eight”
AS SHE SAT in her office, waiting—for exactly what she did not know—Dr. Evans hoped that it wasn’t going to be another bad day. She needed a cigarette and a drink. She swiveled the chair around to face the closed venetian blinds beside her desk, leaned back and laced her hands behind her head. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The air wafting down from the ventilator in the ceiling smelled of machine oil. It was cold. Her face felt it, but the bulky sweater kept the rest of her warm. Her hair felt greasy. Several minutes passed in which she thought of nothing. There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” she said absently.
Havelmann entered. He had the large body of an athlete gone slightly soft, thick, gray hair and a lined face. At first glance he didn’t look sixty. His well-tailored blue suit badly needed pressing.
“Doctor?”
Evans stared at him for a moment. She would kill him. She looked down at the desk, rubbed her forehead with her hand. “Sit down,” she said.
She took the pack of cigarettes from the desk drawer. “Would you care to smoke?”