Luckily, Mrs. Ramsey went to get the ice cream and, when she returned, opened up the topic of my stay with them. I was overjoyed when she turned to me, saying, “Hey, kiddo, you’ve been with us awhile now. Hasn’t he, Sammy?”
“He sure has,” he growled, mushing up his ice cream with a spoon.
“You getting along, you heathens? Staying up late whispering? You know I hear you.”
“He’s the one whispering. In his sleep. A complete freak.”
Mrs. Ramsey: “Sammy, hush it.”
“What do I say?” I shouted. Too loudly, I think.
Sammy spooned some of his cream, slurped it down, and became an astonishing mimic-mask of my face: “
Please stay, oh stay, stay!”
The ice cream coiled like a cold snake in my intestine. I decided it would be best to laugh but I lost control and became a chattering hyena.
Sammy snickered: “What’s up with you, duckbrain?”
Mrs. Ramsey stared at me with sharp interest, then gave out a bemused little laugh. “Oh my Lord, he’s drunk.”
My glass was found and in it she smelled her old friends, gin and vermouth; Sammy launched into his own fit of hysterics; I was taken to the sink and given a short speech and a tablespoon of black pepper to coat my wretched tongue and now here I am. “Grounded” for a week.
It’s no great punishment—this duckbrain rarely ventures out—but it was a fall from grace, and worst, worst of all, was the look in her eyes: the thick thunder of doubt. Not at my behavior but at her
own, for even considering taking this feral thing into her life. Oh, Mrs. Ramsey, reconsider. You do not understand how far I’ve come.
I must stop writing. Obviously I am still drunk.
Morning. Slight hangover; not everything grows young along with me. Sammy, oddly enough, seems wary of me and, perhaps, impressed that I found the gin. No, I won’t let you know its hiding place. Let me scribble out a little history before this headache does me in.
“We’ve gotta go, old man,” Hughie told me one evening over beers. “I mean one last time.”
Years had passed, and both of us were changed—older, younger, respectively. We sat in a bar near my friend’s bachelor apartment, blowing the foam from our steam ales; it was where we often met, in those years before we grew apart, but that evening Hughie had a purpose. He pulled out the newspaper, and though by then he was a man, there was something boyishly anguished in Hughie’s face when he showed me an item on the third page. “We’ve gotta go,” he said, blinking and wincing at memory. It was a former Hughie, a young and strawberry-nosed Hughie, who informed me they were tearing down our Woodward’s Gardens.
The place had been closed for years. Professor Martin had sailed his last ascension long before, lifting into the air in his weightless metal droplet to the awe of those last children, tossing his last paper roses into the last leaping crowd as some stillunknown misfortune popped the dimpled fabric of his ship and sent him, a fluttering scrap of glitter, to his crumpled death on the
ground. No other balloonist took his place. Nor did any new monkeys replace those in the Family House who, after years of heckling the proud Victorians with their heathen commedia dell’arte, were found one morning on the floor of their cage wrapped in each other’s dead embrace. Woodward himself died in the late eighties and it was only the furious infighting of his daughters that kept the place open for a few last acrobats and flame-eaters, last visitors to the dromedary whose hump had gone tonsorially bald. So this was the last event, an auctioning of every piece of plaster, and what they called “the removal of the animals.”
I knew what this meant: it was my last chance to see him before he was led away, old Splitnose Jim, the imagined savior of my such-as-it-was boyhood.
We arrived just in time to see the coyote cowering in the threecornered amphitheater. Men lined the stands, suffering the soft streamers of rain, and Hughie and I took our seats and watched as a young man holding a dog’s muzzle approached the lean and mud-streaked animal. “The removal of the animals” was mostly a rodeo, of sorts; we had all come to see our favorite wild animals roped, corralled, and penned for their new homes. To our surprise, the coyote made no move; it just stood there as the man inched closer. Every moment we thought it would hear the pack howling in its blood, but it never did. It shivered in the rain and sniffed a stone. It bent its head to be muzzled and was led off through the stands, licking its new owner’s hand. We were not pleased. Next came the lioness, which had been sold at auction to a Chinese highbinder (whom you would call a “mobster,” Sammy, and admire as a hero). The lioness and the Oriental entered the ring together, as if in some odd Roman ritual, and I was surprised to see both the poor girl’s lazy walk and the object that the highbinder produced from his suit pocket: a pistol. He brought it to the animal’s soft, squinting face and fired only once before she fell in thumping misery to the dirt. He did the same with the jaguar and
hyena, the latter giving just a little chase and gargled song before submitting in a heap against the wall. Hughie and I sat steel cold with shock.
“Oh my God it’s a slaughter.”
“Hughie …”
“They’re just killing them one by one.”
“Maybe just the wild ones,” I said, watching the tall Chinese man ordering the hyena dragged out by its legs, its spotted hide covered now in dust. “Maybe to keep us out of danger.” But another minute proved me wrong; they had brought out Splitnose Jim.
I did not want my bear to be that slow or old. I did not want to see him roll his feet across the wooden planks as he entered from the grate; I did not want to see him sway with sniffing, senile pleasure at the meal set out before him—enough carrots and soup meat for a den of bears—or see into his mouth as he stared out at us and yawned, showing how his old man’s teeth had worn down almost to the gums. I did not want to see him blinking as the sun came out, licking at the air until he decided to lean back against a fake stone and enjoy the warmth. His keeper had thrown a piece of rope into the pen and Jim kept glancing over at it while he tried to doze, finally deciding it was worth investigating, but I did not want to see the way he swatted at the knotted hemp, curious, until submitting to some long-bred playful urge, sitting on his rump and batting it back and forth as if this were any day of his life. I could not tell what kind of pity to feel for Splitnose Jim; he, at least, did not know if he was young or old. He was merely a paw with a rope. Liver was set out in a silver bowl but he ignored it. The sun arrived again and brightened his fur. Moments later, the German stepped out with the gun.
The crowd began to scream. Hughie and I were pounding the air with our voices, trying to stop him, but the rest of the men shouted advice: “Get him closer!” “Move the liver!” “Shoot for
the head, the head!” “Get his legs!” This did nothing to Jim, who was used to crowds of all kinds, but the German got nervous. He was a butcher from North Beach and planned to sell Jim’s meat to specialty restaurants at a hefty profit. With his beard and chapped hands, he would have looked more at home in a back room with a bloodstained mop than beneath five tiers of half-drunk onlookers. He stood wide-legged in the arena and glared out at us with his gun by his side.
“Be quiet, you! I know all about it!” he shouted to the mob in a thick accent. “I don’t need no advice! I shim him right in the butt of the seat!”
And this was what he did, just as Jim dropped. his dainty tongue into the liver bowl. The butcher cocked his gun, shaking nervously, and after a fast exhalation of air, fired off a shot that hit Jim somewhere in his haunches. The old boy gave a long, rough bellow, turning around and around, coughing and grunting. Blood smeared the planks in a flourish. The German watched, startled, while the crowd shouted gaily to the bear the way people do to poor women standing on the ledges of high buildings, urging something to happen, something terrible, anything to happen. Jim noticed the crowd now, and barked at us like a seal; some men laughed. Then, picking up his rope in his jaws, my old friend made off towards the entrance to his cave and slipped inside. Across the stage, he had left a long rubrication in blood.
Now the crowd went crazy with advice. The bear was gone, hibernating from death; the German stood frozen except for a nervous lip-twitch; the hour of battle was passing and the audience would have none of it. “Scare him out!” they shouted, or “Let him sleep!” or “He’s dead, go get him!” One man yelled out, “Sing ‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers’!” which made the crowd spew laughter, since this was what audiences commonly shouted to dull minstrel performers. But no one moved in the pit below us.
Years later, when talking over this memory in a tent somewhere
in Nebraska, Hughie bald and gray-templed and myself boyishly blond, we agreed that the image that stayed with us was not of Jim roaring out of his cave a minute later, terrifying the poor gunhappy German and staggering blindly around the perimeter of the stage. It was not my bear shitting the floor as a new hail of bullets pelted him, or how he fell in a whining, terrified mound. It was not the ten minutes or so we spent watching his gore trickle across the wood, damming up in a clump of leaves before soaking them and running on towards the wall, that stinking eternity it took for Jim to bleed to death. We best remembered the stage before his reentrance, empty except for a hunter and a shining flourish of blood. A scene from a children’s opera. How the sun spotlighted the very sawdust point where Jim would make his curtain call. How we all shouted for him. The straw, the beer, the hopeful wait for the star. The thrill when his shadow hit the floor where he would die.
We left while Jim lay on the floor in the pile of his own blood and shit; I could not bear to watch. I only heard the German shouting and shouting, and the crowd applauding, and I imagine they must have dragged my old Jim out of the bear pit where the creature had performed for twenty years. I’m sure he died in confusion; I’m sure he could remember nothing of his youth in Yellowstone or wherever he was born, or his life on the streets with a ring in his nose. I’m sure he did not know he had grown old or that nobody loved him anymore. He died in plain confusion, perhaps thinking that all this would go away if he performed his old tricks for the audience, balancing a peanut on his nose or roaring to the sky, but he was surely tired; or perhaps he thought that when he opened his weary eyes, he might be in a forest full of trees and creeks of salmon, buzzing bees, and roaming bears. For I am sure he had not seen another bear for thirty years or more.
Hughie was married in January of 1898 and went to war three months later. It was a sweet and informal ceremony at the bride’s parents’ home in the Fillmore; the time was half past three. Hughie and I wore frock coats, striped cashmere trousers, patent leather boots, and tan kid gloves—as well as top hats, of course; I can hear you snickering, Sammy—and in his buttonhole he wore an enormous sprig of stephanotis in the accidental shape of Prussia, which, like that dead nation, threatened to invade the rest of his coat. The bride was a plump-cheeked beauty with the strained eyes of a devoted reader; the daughter of a newspaper editor, the young woman, like those strange creatures who exist only at the salt point where freshwater meets the ocean, dressed and walked like a society girl but nudged and guffawed like a seamstress. She wore a white dress and a bonnet, not a veil, because soon after the ceremony the couple departed in a coach bound for a destination known only to me. I went ahead to handle the luggage and pay the porters, and when Hughie and his new wife arrived, they seemed in awe of themselves as if they had done something never before accomplished. The coachman said that the wedding guests had thrown slippers and one had landed inside: good luck. A left shoe, the bride informed me, was even better. The coachman produced the item: left indeed. There were kisses, solemn promises, and with an exhalation of steam, my youth departed.
Why did he marry? I don’t know; for love, I suppose, or something like it. Young men do marry, after all. But there was something hard won about Hughie’s marriage, almost as if he were closing his eyes and diving backwards from his life. Something sad, you see? I can’t describe it. All I can give you is a small moment I remember, one of many from the blizzard of days, a night of no importance at the time.
I was drunk and angry. It had begun earlier in the evening, when I came home from a miserable day at Bancroft’s—walked home, in fact, to save on money—to find a piano recital in full
flower within my parlor, all ladies in taffeta and stiff aigretted hats and a corps of girls in lace berthas. Some confident child was at her instrument, tearing Mozart all to shreds, and I watched her whitegold curls wriggling in the electric light before I realized this was my Mina. Happy, beloved, ignorant of life: my Mina. I felt a presence beside me; it was an ugly woman in heavy brocade. She looked over my thin clerk’s clothes, then said, “Here, man, get some more cake for the girls,” and stepped away. I did not know her at all, but I knew the tone: it was that of a woman used to talking to servants such as me. I was twenty-five.
I fled to Hughie’s. He was a lawyer by then and owned a building so ridiculously small and fairy-tale that I referred to it as “the Pumpkin.” The streets were dark, as was his house, so I rapped lightly on the door. No answer. As his best friend, I had a copy of the key, so I let myself in. I thought maybe I’d help myself to his sherry and a snack. “Hughie?” I called, and there was no response.
Then I saw light glimmering from the library—the light of a fireplace, wavering like water in the hallway—and I wondered if he was simply asleep. And so I stormed down the hall and into the room. I was so selfish a young man it never occurred to me that Hughie might not be alone.