Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

The drug was driving the rhythms of his heart and brain to a pitch he could not manage.

“Your poem,” Rowan said, “it’s about me. It’s about you coming back to me. Us both coming back where we belong. Which is together. Always,” she said. “Always because we have the same flesh, we have the same mind, the same eyes.”

Smart caught his breath. “You’ve taken that drug,” he said.

“We see the same things at the same time. I know your poems as well as you do.”

He got to his feet and tried to shake off the tremors that assailed him.

“I’ll tell you what,” Smart said. “I’ve got through many a night on many a drug. I’ll sing to you like I used to. Sometimes, anyway. We can read poems to each other. Then it’ll be morning, see. We’ll hear the birds. The sun’ll be up. The drug will be over. We’ll have survived.”

Without looking at him, she walked into the darkness at the sleeping end of the trailer. Finding himself alone, he went back to the kitchen and drank more wine. He had made a mistake, another one. Another old bill presented. No end to it. He curled up on the sofa with the light on. There was only darkness and silence at the far end of the trailer where his daughter lay.

After a while, he began passing out, lapsing into a shallow sleep from which the methedrine kept waking him. In each space of sleep, a pool of uneasy dreams awaited him. From each he kept rising against his will, finding himself thirsty and breathless in the harshly lit trailer. Once he dreamed of the salmon. In the dream it seemed to him that he could remember it all, verse by verse, in Rowan’s voice:

Fighting their way on up the Tanana

Two hundred miles now from the sea

And when I try to see their eyes,

What I see, under the flow,

Are old elephants’ eyes

Appearing wise but still

No wiser than Creation.

Her warm cheek was against his temple and she was reciting:

All their long years they saw the predators fail,

All the same time their own predations fed them.

What a life, the life of the roving sea!

Where fish live, the poet said,

As men do on land.

Her voice was so sweet and he loved her so much. He was himself accounted a good reader. Then it occurred to him that he had never rendered those lines for her. It was a part of the poem he had forgotten. Before he could open his eyes to inquire, the bullet struck his brains out.

She did not holster the weapon but held it hot against her left hand. After the noise, the deaf-and-dumb horror the vitriol of her grief welled up to every part of her where it could curl and pool. Even through the wine and the drug she felt it burn. For nearly an hour until the crystal energy failed, she pressed her wine- and speed-stained maw against his red mouth, trying to breathe life back into the mess she had made of him.

“Sorry, Daddy,” she said. “Sorry, Bear.”

She had not been able to get him through the night. Nor he her.

Rage. But she had not wanted him dead, not at all. Only to have something. Something, anything, between childhood and death.

All night long she sat facing the ugliness she had worked. His pants were undone. Dreadful. Had she done that? Maybe, pursuing the salt of her own generation. Trying to get home. She must be in some confusion, she thought, about which coupling had created her.

Both, she thought. She was Rowan, the creature of both those lyings-down. Under the mountains, on sweet grass, among the musky ash and laurel. Name it and claim it. She could no longer remember the moment of killing. So he forgot he fucked me, she thought. And I forgot I shot him. Sorry about that, Bear.

She had destroyed his eyes. She must not do it twice. She owed him that.

There seemed some necessity to wait for dawn, out of love or respect or fear of the dark. When she could no longer drink, she kept plastering her face with crystal. That way her mind might become entombed in it, like one of those captives of the plains they candied with honey and earth and roasted, and there remained hardly a man but only a bear-shaped thing, eyeless, mouthless, blazing away, blackening like pottery, burning alive in a glazed silence. Crystal could do it.

When she went out of the trailer; the sky was growing light. Somewhere out on the flats she heard the cough of a coyote. And overhead Venus was at its western elongation. Phosphorus, Lucifer, the Morning Star.

On her way to the Temple, she holstered the revolver she had cradled all night long. She carried the wine bottle in her left hand; the envelope of crystal was in her uniform breast pocket. At the door of the Temple she paused to look at the pure early morning. Moment by moment, it was beautiful. Things could only be beautiful that way.

She let herself into the Temple and walked past the columns, licking the last of the speed from the envelope, washing it down with wine. It made her impatient to be gone. When she came to the stone of sacrifice she stood beside it. She had brought the Caddoans, the Pawnee maidens, clear across the plains from Nebraska to die on it. All in her imagination, and that of the pilgrim children to whom she told the story. But real Pawnee maidens had died under the Morning Star, as she would. For a while she thought of lying down on the stone and doing it and being found that way.

But I’m only the dead poet’s speed freak bastard daughter; she thought. She went into the little utility room beside the cavern entrance and pulled free the yellow felt marker that was held fast to the door by a piece of string. There was a public bathroom next door and she went in and relieved herself so that things would be as clean as they could be. Then she washed her hands and dropped the wine and her empty envelope of speed into the trash can along with the paper towel.

She sat down beside the trash can with the revolver beside her on the tile floor and felt along her chest for her heartbeat. She was EMS-qualified. If she stretched her arms up and leaned her head back, it would part her ribs a little, which might make it easier. When she was satisfied she had found her heart, she held the cloth of her uniform shirt taut and marked a cross over it with the marker.

Let them anatomize Rowan, she thought. Not on the stone of sacrifice, thanks, just up against the shithouse wall. But she wouldn’t hurt his eyes again, not blind the bear again.

Sitting propped up against the cold wall, she leaned her head back and raised her left arm in the air as far as it would stretch, fingers extended. She put the barrel of the Lawman against the X on her chest and said her own name and her father’s and pulled the trigger.

Max Peterson came out around six-thirty, alone, as soon as John Hears the Sun Come Up called him. John had called him at home instead of through the dispatcher. Together they walked over the grounds, from the trailer to the Temple.

“I don’t suppose you killed them, did you, John?”

“Nope,” John said.

They were standing in the ladies’ room where dead Rowan sat, her father’s eyes preserved in blank surprise, slowly losing their luster. Peterson punched the swinging hinge of the covered trash can, where they had found the envelope.

“That fucking pervert Communist son of a bitch. It was his fault. He fucking killed her. That’s the way it really went.” “Fuck” was a word Peterson rarely used.

“It was the speed,” John said. “It always made her crazy. She was a little crazy anyway.”

“He probably brought it.”

“No, she had it.”

“Well, what the hell did you let her have it for?”

“If I’d’ve found it,” John said, “I’d have got rid of it. She had it at work. Then I couldn’t take it off her; short of tying her up.”