“Heard what?” asked the man with bad breath.
“The bear spoke,” said Wooley. “He told me you were coming.”
“And here we are” said the man with bad breath. “Let’s go to the office and discuss this curious phenomenon.”
Wooley was taken to the office of the keeper of the London zoo who was fat and sassy and grumpy. Wooley was a man of great conviction and determination and given to the truth that our mother had told us would keep us in good stead with the Lord and with our fellow man because once you started lying it was close to impossible to remember all of your lies.
Only a part of an hour earlier Wooley had been thinking of getting to a job interview. Wooley was an accomplished mandolin player. He could play the banjo too and was known in the family and beyond for his fast moving version of Waiting For The Robert E. Lee alternating between instruments.
“The bear spoke to me,” said Wooley.
“She spoke to you,” said the zookeeper.
“Yes,” said Wooley.
“No, I mean the bear is female,” said the zoo director.
“She spoke to me,” Wooley repeated reaching up to adjust his hat, which had been jostled by the three men in blue zoo uniforms.
“She did not speak,” said the zoo director turning red.
Wooley said nothing. Stubborn ignorance cannot be overcome by the word of even the most truthful of men.
“The bear has been with us for two years and has never spoken,” the zoo director said trying to appear calm in the face of honest certainty.
“There was the little lad about two months back who said the bear said Thank you.”
“Yes,” said Wooley. “That is what the bear said to me.”
“The little boy also said that one of the elephants threw a clump of dung at him” said the zoo director who glared at his employee. “You may either leave now and never return to the zoo or we will call the authorities and have you taken to the hospital.”
“I am not ill.”
“You are deluded, sir. Perhaps you have been drinking.”
Well Wooley had successfully imbibed a wide swath of spirits over the course of his adulthood and perhaps even a bit before that but that morning he was sober and had drunk nothing but very ill-tasting English coffee.
Wooley chose to go to the hospital rather than be banished from the zoo though as it turned out the zookeeper had not given him a choice at all because he still ordered that Wooley was not to enter the zoo again.
Wooley passed three weeks in the hospital proving to the doctors and nurses and alienists that he was of sound mind if fragile body except for his insistence that he had heard the bear speak. They allowed him to leave. The job with the dance band no longer existed. Wooley could have come home but he got a job waiting tables at a restaurant called the Chicago Bar amp; Grill.
When he was not working Wooley would attempt to get back in the zoo and talk to the bear. He climbed fences, crawled under bushes, took to wearing disguises including that of a Zooave and a pregnant woman, but it was all to no avail. He would always get within approach to the bear cage and be apprehended by one of the guards who had been assigned on a rotating basis to watch for him.
Twice his eyes met those of the bear but the creature did not speak. One time the bear had a paw over his eyes as if trying to keep out the sight of Wooley being caught.
Wooley was never the same. The same as what you may ask. The same as he had been before being spoken to by a bear.
Eventually my brother Ezra and my cousin Matthew went to England at the expense of the London zoo to escort a recalcitrant Wooley back to the shores of our great land.
Wooley moved to Denver, obtained employment at a restaurant, saved his money, and bought a very old bear from a traveling carnival. He shared a one-room house with the bear and ended his days attempting to teach the bear to speak. He failed but he did learn to love the bear who had come to him with the name Bruno but which he changed to Ernest.
Love comes to us in strange and mysterious ways. Amen.
The night was filled with dreams of talking bears, bears in tuxedoes performing magic tricks, bears sawing other bears in skirts in half to an audience of bears applauding almost silently with their padded paws. Bears wearing turbans with green stones. And there I was onstage, the only human-if indeed human I be-waiting my turn in a line of bears to be sawed in half, evaporated, decapitated, eviscerated, levitated or, if they figured out I wasn’t a bear, masticated.
“Your first time?” asked the bear in front of me in line offstage.
“Yes,” I said.
“Just don’t let them shoot you,” the bear said. “Blackstone the Bear can shoot straight. Killed more bears last year than all the hunters west of the Mississippi. Bear that in mind.”
The other bears laughed, and then I was in bed sleeping. The three bears came up to me. Papa Bear leaned over and I felt a dry tongue on my face. I opened my eyes. Dash was looking down at me with his round green eyes. The sun was coming through the window. My Beech-Nut Gum wall clock said it was almost seven-thirty.
I rolled over, got to my knees, stiff, sore, and wounded, stood and said to Dash, “So far so good.”
Then I rolled up the thin mattress on the floor, put it in the corner, dressed quickly, pants not terribly in need of pressing, fresh white shirt, and rewarded Dash with a bowl of corn flakes and milk.
At seven-thirty, the door to my room flew open. I was ready. Mrs. Plaut, broom in hand, looked down at where I would normally be lying on my back, eyes closed.
“Good morning,” I said cheerfully.
She turned her eyes to where I sat at the small table near the window.
“You are fully awake,” she said with a hint of suspicion.
“That I am,” I said.
“Have you been carousing all night instead of reading my pages?”
“I have not been carousing,” I said. “I’ve been getting shot, but I read your pages. Fascinating.”
She adjusted her glasses.
“Wooley is an interesting character,” I said.
“Breakfast in twenty-two minutes,” she said. She seemed maybe a little disgruntled at not having her ritual morning moment of terrorizing me into wakefulness. Then she stopped and faced me again, supporting herself with the broom, which was only a little narrower than she was.
“Wooley was not interesting,” she said. “He spent his life in family exile in Americus, Georgia, serving as assistant to a half-mad pharmacist named Spaulding.”
“But the bear, England?” I said.
“Wooley never was in England,” she said.
“You made it up?”
“Invention is the parent of truth,” she said.
“Who said that?”
“I just did,” said Mrs. Plaut.
I looked at Dash. He turned his head away and leaped onto the window ledge and leapt to the tree. Stiff, sore, and shoulder aching, I had neither the agility nor opportunity for such an escape.
“So none of the business about Wooley and the bear is true?”
“Not a lick,” she said.
“What about all the other stories about your family?”
“All true,” she said with indignation. “Every last word. What do you take me for Mr. Peelers?”
“But Wooley?”
“I felt the tome needed spicing up,” she said. “My imagination is futile.”
“Fertile,” I corrected.
“Breakfast this a.m. is Treet omelets accompanied by margarine-fried diced carrots gently mixed in,” she said. “There will also be an announcement of consequence.”
And she was gone.
That gave me time to shave, rub some Kreml in my hair, change the Band-Aid covering the pellet hole in my shoulder, wince a few times, wash, avoid my battered image in the mirror, and knock at Gunther’s door.
“Enter Toby,” he said.
“You know my knock,” I said, opening the door.
“I know that it is nearly eight and that Mrs. Plaut does not knock,” he said.