Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

“Hello, sweetie,” Alison said.

Io turned solemnly toward her mother and yawned.

A person here, Alison thought, lifting her over the bars, the bean blossomed. Walks and conversation. The end of our Madonna-and-child number. A feather of panic fluttered in her throat.

“Io,” she told her daughter; “we have got to get our shit together here.”

The scene was crumbling. Strong men had folded like stage flats, legality and common sense were fled. Cerebration flickered.

Why me, she demanded of herself, walking Io to the potty. Why do I have to be the only one with any smarts?

On the potty, Io delivered. Alison wiped her and flushed the toilet. By training Alison was an astronomer, but she had never practiced.

Io could dress herself except for the shoes. When Alison tied them, it was apparent to her that they would shortly be too small.

“What’ll we do?” she asked Io with a playful but genuinely frightened whine.

“See the fishies,” Io said.

“See the fishies?” Alison stroked her chin, burlesquing a thoughtful demeanor rubbing noses with Io to make her smile. “Good Lord.”

Io drew back and nodded soberly.

“See the fishies.”

At that moment, Alison recalled the fragment of an undersea dream. Something in the dream had been particularly agreeable and its recall afforded her a happy little throb.

“Well that’s what we’ll do,” she told Io. “We’ll go to the aquarium. A capital idea.”

“Yes,” Io said.

Just outside Io’s room, on the littered remnant of a sun-deck, lived a vicious and unhygienic Doberman, who had been named Buck after a dog Big Gene claimed to have once owned in Aruba. Alison opened the sliding glass door to admit it, and watched nervously as it nuzzled Io.

“Buck,” Io said without enthusiasm.

Alison seized the dog by its collar and thrust it out the bedroom door before her.

In the living room, Big Gene was rising from the cushions, a cetaceous surfacing.

“Buck, my main man,” he sang. “Bucky bonaroo.”

“How about staying with him today?” Alison said. “I want to take Io to the aquarium.”

“Not I,” Gene declared. “Noo.”

“Why the hell not?” Alison asked savagely.

“Cannot be.”

“Shit! I can’t leave him alone here, he’ll wreck the place. How can I take him to the goddamn aquarium?”

Gene shrugged sleepily.

“Ain’t this the night you get paid?” he asked after a moment.

“Yeah,” Alison said.

In fact, Alison had been paid the night before, her employer having thrown some eighty dollars’ worth of half-dollars full into her face. There had been a difference of opinion regarding Alison’s performance as a danseuse, and she had spoken sharply with Mert the Manager. Mert had replied in an incredibly brutal and hostile manner had fired her insulted her breasts and left her to peel coins from the soiled floor until the profile of Jack Kennedy was welded to her mind’s eye. She had not mentioned the incident to Gene; the half-dollars were concealed under the rubber sheet beneath Io’s mattress.

“Good,” Gene said. “Because I got to see the man then.”

He was looking down at Io, and Alison watched him for signs of resentment or contempt but she saw only sadness, sickness in his face. Io paid him no attention at all.

It was startling the way he had mellowed out behind smack. Witnessing it, she had almost forgiven him the punches, and she had noticed for the first time that he had rather a kind heart. But he stole and was feckless; his presence embarrassed her.

“How’m I going to take a dog to the aquarium, for Christ’s sake?”

The prospect of having Buck along irritated Alison sorely. In her irritation, she decided that the thing might be more gracefully endured with the white-cross jobbers. The white-cross jobbers were synthetics manufactured by a mad chemist in Hayward. Big Gene called them IT-390 to distinguish them from IT-290, which they had turned out, upon consumption, not to be.

She took a handful from the saki jar in which they were stored and downed them with tap water.

“All right, Buck, ” she called, pronouncing the animal’s name with distaste, “goddamn it.” She put his leash on, sent Io ahead to the car and pulled the reluctant dog out behind her.

With Io strapped in the passenger seat and Buck cringing under the dashboard, Alison ran Lombard Street in the outside lane, accelerating on the curves like a racing driver. She drove hard to stay ahead of the drug’s rush. When she pulled up in the aquarium’s parking lot, her mouth had gone dry and the little Sanctus bells of adjusted alertness had begun to tinkle. She hurried them under wind-rattled eucalyptus and up the massive steps that led to the building’s Corinthian portico.

“Now where are we going to put this goddamn dog?” she asked Io. When she blinked, her eyeballs clicked. I’ve done it, she thought. I’ve swallowed it again. Vandalism.

After a moment’s confused hesitation, she led Buck to one side of the entrance and secured his chain round a brass hydrant fixture with a carefully worked running clove hitch. The task brought to her recollection a freakish afternoon when she had tied Buck in front of a bar on El Camino. For the protection of passersby, she had fashioned a sign from the cardboard backing of a foolscap tablet and written on it with a green felt-tipped pen— DO NOT TRY TO PET THIS DOG. Her last memory of the day was watching the sign blow away across the street and past the pumps of an Exxon station.

Buck’s vindictive howls pursued them to the oxidized-copper doors of the main entrance.

It was early morning and the aquarium was uncrowded. Liquefactious sounds ran up and down the smooth walls, child voices ricocheted from the ceiling. Holding Io by the hand, Alison wandered through the interior twilight, past tanks of sea horses, scorpion fish, African tilapia. Pausing before an endlessly gyrating school of salmon, she saw that some of the fish were eyeless, the sockets empty and perfectly cleaned. The blind fish swam with the rest, staying in line, turning with the school.

Io appeared not to notice them.

In the next hall, Alison halted her daughter before each tank, reading from the lighted presentation the name of the animal contained, its habitat and Latin name. The child regarded all with gravity.

At the end of the east wing was a room brighter than the rest; it was the room in which porpoises lived in tanks that were open to the sky. As Alison entered it, she experienced a curiously pleasant sensation.

“Look,” she said to Io. “Dolphins.”

“Dolphins?”

They walked up to the glass of the largest tank; its lower area was fouled with small handprints. Within, a solitary blue-gray beast was rounding furiously, describing gorgeous curves with figure eights, skimming the walls at half an inch’s distance. Alison’s mouth opened in awe.

“An Atlantic Dolphin,” she told Io in a soft, reverential voice. “From the Atlantic Ocean. On the other side of America. Where Providence is.”

“And Grandpa,” Io said.

“And Grandpa is in Providence too.”

For the space of several seconds, the dream feeling returned to her with an intensity that took her breath away. There had been some loving presence in it and a discovery.

She stared into the tank until the light that filtered through the churning water began to suggest the numinous. Io, perceiving that her mother was not about to move on, retraced her steps toward the halls through which they had come, and commenced seeing the fish over again. Whenever an aquarium-goer smiled at her she looked away in terror.

Alison stood transfixed, trying to force recall. It had been something special, something important. But silly — as with dreams. She found herself laughing and then, in the next moment, numb with loss as the dream’s sense faded. Her heart was racing with the drug.