Setting Free the Bears Page 3

  Wanga and I lay in the ferns, peeking for Siggy and fat Karlotta.

  'Where are you travelling now?' she asked.

  'To the Arctic Circle,' I said.

  'Oh!' she said. 'I'd love to come. I mean, if you were traveling alone, I'd ask to come with you.'

  'And I'd let you,' I said. But when I nuzzled the down on her arm, she sat up and looked again for Siggy and Karlotta.

  We heard Siggy trumpeting at the rhino; for a while I couldn't see him, but I knew Siggy's poetry voice. He bellowed somewhere along the rhino's field, and we could hear Karlotta tittering. When we saw them, they were arm in arm behind the hippohouse and coming for the gate of the Tiroler Garten.

  From the wild eyes of Karlotta, it was easy to see that she would be one of us - marked for life; to remember always having seen the oryx.

  'Let's hide from them,' I said, and I tugged Wanga down in the ferns.

  But her eyes were startled and she lay on her back, hugging herself, 'Karlotta!' she called.

  'You! Boy!' Karlotta shouted. 'Are you hurting her?'

  'We're talking,' said Wanga, 'but we're over here.'

  And they came along the fence line to us; Siggy slapped through the deep ferns, one hand up under Karlotta's sweater and cupped round her lumpy side.

  'Well, Graff,' said Siggy, 'my Karlotta was properly impressed with the oryx.'

  'Who could fail to be?' I said.

  'What?' asked Wanga. 'With what?'

  'Not for you, dear,' Karlotta said. 'You're a dear boy, you,' she told me. 'That was nothing for Wanga to see.'

  'It's for the world to see!' said Siggy.

  'Stuff you,' Karlotta said, and she went tugging him off to another fern path.

  When we were all lying down, we couldn't see each other. Close to the ground was an air trap, and the rich scent of some animal's dung settled over us.

  'I believe that's rhino stuff!' Siggy called.

  'Or hippo,' I said.

  'Something large and prolific,' said Siggy.

  'Hippos never leave the water,' Karlotta said.

  'Oh, they must!' said Siggy. 'It's hard to imagine ...'

  And Wanga curled in the crook of my arm, knees up tight and a cool hand on my chest. We could hear the stirrings of Siggy and Karlotta; twice Siggy hooted like a wild bird.

  Well, as the notebook wisely imparts:

  Time passes, praise God.

  And then we were hearing Karlotta. 'You're not so funny all the time,' she was saying. And when I looked, I saw Siggy's upstretched arm - waving above the ferns a mighty pair of black lace bloomers.

  'You're just too much of a stuffing clown,' said Karlotta, and I saw her bare, thick foot thrash upwards through the ferns. 'You can't ever be serious, you frotter!' she said. 'Oh, there's something definitely wrong with you.'

  Then Siggy sat up and grinned toward our fern patch; he wore the thigh-wide bloomers for a hat. Karlotta swatted him with a clod of weeds, and Siggy danced over to us.

  When Karlotta stalked after him, she swung at her side a black lace bra with a pink bow - one cup loaded with sod. It dangled from her wrist like a battler's sling.

  'Here comes the giant-killer,' said Siggy.

  Karlotta's breasts sagged to her movable paunch. When her sweater rode up, I caught a peek of dark nipple-bit.

  Then Wanga was out of my arms and running down the fence line to the gate; she ran in a buffeted way, like a leaf blown along by varying gusts - through the gate and back into the zoo.

  'Hey!' I said. 'Hey, Wanga!'

  'Mine! Mine, Graff,' said Siggy. 'I'll get her.' He flipped the bloomers to Karlotta and was off running himself.

  'No!' I yelled. 'Siggy, I'll go!' But Karlotta had moved alongside me; when I tried to stand, she threw her hip into me and knocked me down in the ferns.

  'Oh, let him be the clown,' she said, and she knelt beside me. 'Dear boy,' said Karlotta. 'You've some morality about you. You're not a bit like him.' And when I tried to sit up, she smothered my face in her bloomers and held me down. Then she peeked under the glorious panties and kissed me with her peach-sweet lips. 'Hush, hush,' she said, and she pressed me into the damp ground.

  We rolled in the hidden and airless, dung-smelling patch; the sounds of the zoo merged and were lost in the lashing of ferns, and the rhino shook the ground.

  And when we heard the birds again, their voices were raucous and demanding. The great cats were snarling for meat and revolution.

  'Feeding time,' said Karlotta. 'And I've not yet seen the hippo.'

  So I tried walking, and she followed me, steering me into the hippohouse, a great vat sunk in the middle of a greenhouse, with a rail around the water so the children wouldn't fall in. At first, there was nothing but murk in the vat.

  'Oh, he'll be coming up now, any time,' said Karlotta. She scratched herself and showed me a leer. 'My left boob's itchy,' she whispered. 'There's a truckload of ground in my bra.' She squirmed and goosed me where I stood, and I watched the bilious pool with the fruit floating in it - and big, bobbing thatches of celery. Suddenly there were bubbles.

  First we saw nostrils - two gaping holes, quite bottomless - and then came the thick-lidded eyes. Its head kept rising and rising, and its long pink mouth kept opening and opening; I saw the stump of an impossible epiglottis; I smelled from its dank, empty mouth a whole windowbox of rotted geraniums. The children threw food to it, and it rested its chin on the pool curb; the children threw peanuts, marsh-mallows and caramel corn - they threw paper bags and souvenirs of the zoo, an old man's newspaper and a tiny pink sneaker. When the hippo had enough, he just rolled his head off the curb and made the pool a sea. He sprayed us and sank in his vat.

  'He'll be up again now,' said Karlotta. 'God, he could swallow me whole!'

  On the back of Karlotta's sturdy leg was the imprint of a fern - an accurate fossil on her dark, flexing calf. I slipped away from the vat rim unnoticed, and left Karlotta in the hippohouse.

  Drawing the Line

  'I DON'T KNOW how you could have done it,' said Siggy. 'You've such bad taste.'

  'Where did Wanga go?' I said.

  'I lost her somewhere, Graff. I was just trying to get away from that fatty there.'

  'We went to the hippohouse,' I said. 'In a few hours it's going to be dark.'

  'Thank yourself for that, Graff. Honestly, I don't know how you could have! There's a point, you know, where a fellow should stop and think.'

  'If we left now,' I said, 'we'd be in the country before dark.'

  'Karlotta!' said Siggy. 'I just can't imagine! Rich as mud, was it? I should think you'd feel contaminated.'

  'You're a crude oaf!' I said. 'Wearing her bloomers for a hat, dancing around like a jester.'

  'But I draw the line somewhere, Graff. Oh yes.' And he began to fiddle with the motorcycle.

  'Well, how frotting grand of you that is!' I said. 'It might interest you to know that it wasn't so bad. Not at all bad!'

  'I've no doubt of that, Graff,' he said. 'Skill is more common than beauty.' Well, stuffed and officious, that line reappears in his jottings: Finesse is no substitute for love.

  And at the zoo gate he was ignoring me, rising up on the kick starter and throwing down all his weight.

  'You're a doctrinaire forker, Siggy,' I said.

  But the engine caught and he throttled it up and down, nodding his head to the music. I swung up behind him, and we buckled on our crash helmets. Then on with my World War One pilot's goggles, to tint my world yellow - to pinch and addle my mind.

  'Siggy?' I said. But he didn't hear.

  He turned us out of the Platz at the Hietzinger Zoo, while behind us the lions were roaring for freedom and food, and Karlotta, I could easily imagine, was in the process, both awkward and admiring, of feeding herself to the hippo.

  Night Riders

  FOR SEVERAL TOWNS now, we hadn't seen a Gasthaus lighted. There were farms with one tiny light still burning, most likely an attic light left burning always - a beac
on to say: There's someone still up, if you've any plans to sneak about. There'd be a dog too, who really was awake.

  But the towns were all dark, and we roared through them, seeing no one; just once, we saw a man peeing in a fountain. We caught him suddenly in our headlight and in the clamor of our engine, and he dived to the ground, still fumbling himself, as if we'd been so many megatons dropped out of the night. That was in a place called Krumnussbaum; just before Blindenmarkt, Siggy stopped. He killed the engine and headlight, and the quiet of the woods sealed up the road.

  'Did you see that man back there?' he said. 'Have you looked at these towns? It must have been like this during the blackout.' And we thought about that a minute, while the woods went cautiously about their night noises again, and things came out to watch.

  When he turned on the headlight, the trees seemed to leap back out of the road; centuries of night-watchers scurried back in hiding - ferrets and owls, and the ghosts of Charlemagne's lookouts.

  'Once,' said Siggy, 'I found a very old helmet in the woods. It had a spike and visor on it.' And his voice hushed the night noises; we heard the river for the first time.

  'Is that ahead of us?' I said.

  So he worked the kick starter and got us moving slowly. We crossed the Ybbs just out of Blindenmarkt, and Siggy swung the bike sideways on the bridge. Just out of the headlight's beam the river was a black, rumpled sheet in the wind, but the spot where the light struck seemed waterless; the river was shallow and clear, and we saw the pebbles on the bottom as if there'd been no water to cover them.

  A logger's road ran beside the river, and snow was still in the cool woods; patches of it were yellowed in our headlight and laced with dark needles from the firs. There were smudges of bright chalk-colors on the trees marked for lumber, and the road wound with the river.

  When the river made a bend away from us, the bank widened; we jounced off the center crown and slithered over the wet grass to a flat place on the bank. There were frogs and mice in the grass.

  I listened for dogs. If there'd been a farm very near, we'd surely have heard a dog. But instead there was only the river and the wind creaking the bridge out on the main road, the wind brushing through the tight forest - like silent city men creeping through coat closets; not the noises soldiers would make, with their iron parts clanking between the trees.

  The Ybbs had a muted rattle and a thousand separate trickles. We unloaded the motorcycle in whispers, not missing a word of the night. When we laid the groundcloth down, we had to pinch the mice out from under it. We were still in sight of the bridge on the main road, but in all the time we stayed awake, there was nothing passing by. The bridge line across the sky made the only geometry above the riverbed; the only other shapes were the jagged ripples in the water and the black, uneven tree line against the brighter night. There were rock pools near the bridge pilings, and the waterlap tossed its phosphorescence to the moon.

  Siggy was sitting up in his bag.

  'What do you see?' I said.

  'Giraffes, ducking under the bridge.'

  'That would be nice,' I said.

  'How nice!' said Siggy. 'And the oryx! Can't you see him wading across the river, dipping those fantastic balls?'

  'Freeze them off,' I said.

  'No!' said Siggy. 'Nothing could damage that oryx!'

  Living Off the Land

  THERE WAS A boulder under the bridge, and it made a tiny waterfall to clean our trout in; we let the water spill into their slit, flapping bellies, sluice about their lovely ribs and fill them up to their high, springy breastbones. You could clamp up their belly slits and pinch on the bulge; the water came out of their gills, first pink and then clear.

  We took twelve trout between us and plunked down their innards on the bouldertop. Then we sat by the motorcycle and watched the crows swoop under the bridge, diving for the fish guts until the rock was picked bare. When the sun came off the water and hung level with the bridge, we thought we'd find a farm and make our deal for breakfast.

  The road was soft and we slipped off the high crown into the ruts; Siggy drove slowly and we both leaned back to catch all the air smells, of pine pitch in the woods, and of clover and sweet hay beyond. The woods were thinning, fields swelled behind and beside them; the river was white-capped, running deeper and faster, and nudging a fine froth out to the cutaway banks.

  Then the road climbed a little and the river ran down and away from us; we could see a village now - a squat church with an onion-shaped spire, and some solid buildings close together in a one-street town. But before the village was a farm, and Siggy turned in.

  The driveway was a slough of mud, as plastic as dough, and our rear wheel sunk to the drive chain; we wallowed, caught in a sponge. There was a goat on the bank of the driveway and we aimed at it, posting on the foot pedals. The goat bolted when we made the bank; we thrummed past a pigpen, the little pigs springing like cats, and the big pigs running like fat ladies in spike heels. The mudcleats whacked themselves clean of the driveway slop; the mud-splatter pelted behind us. The bolting goat had roused the farmer and his wife.

  A most jovial Herr Gippel and his Frau Freina looked quite eager to make the exchange - coffee and potatoes for half our trout, and the coffee was black-bean roast.

  Frau Freina tried to say, with her pale, winking eyes: Oh, come see how pretty my kitchen is! She had a proud, motherly, grouse-like swell to her breast.

  And this Gippel appeared an expert in feeding.

  'You're a fine fish eater,' Siggy told him.

  'Oh, we eat a lot of trout,' he said. He'd pinch them up at the tails and coax the meat off neat. He kept a tidy stack of skeletons to one side of his plate.

  'But so many trout!' Freina said.

  'And we're just starting out at this business,' said Siggy. 'Living off the land, Graff! Back to the simple laws of nature.'

  'Oh now,' Gippel said, 'you would have to go and remind me of laws.'

  'And we've had such a lovely meal,' Frau Freina said.

  'But the question of laws came up, dear,' said Gippel. 'And it was twelve trout they had between them.'

  'Oh, I know,' Freina said. 'But we wouldn't have had the same breakfast if there'd been just ten.'

  'Just five apiece,' said Gippel. 'What you're allowed, of course. But my Freina's right. It wouldn't have been the same breakfast at all.'

  'I think this is terrible,' Freina said, and she went out on the porch.

  'Herr Siggy,' Gippel said, 'I just wish you hadn't brought it up.'

  'What did I bring up?' said Siggy.

  'Laws!' said Gippel. 'You went and reminded me.' And Freina came back in the screen door and gave Siggy a green piece of paper, face down.

  'What's that?' I said.

  'It's our fine!' said Siggy.

  'Oh!' Gippel cried. 'What manner of man am I?'

  'Who in hell are you?' said Siggy.

  'The fish-and-game warden,' Gippel said.

  'This is just terrible,' said Freina, and she went out again.

  'It's nice,' said Siggy. 'I always say it's nice to make a friend of the local gamekeeper.'

  'Oh, that's something to be thankful for,' said Gippel. 'That's why it's only fifty schillings.'

  'Fifty schillings?' I said.

  'It was the least I could do,' said Gippel, who moved to the screen door himself now. 'If you'll excuse me a moment,' he said. 'I'm just so ashamed.' And he went very sadly out on the porch.

  'The frotting thief!' I said. 'How close is the bike parked?'

  'Well, Graff,' said Siggy. 'It's parked about a foot from where Gippel's sitting, giving comfort to his gentle wife.'

  'Fifty schillings, Sig!' I said.

  But Siggy took the right note from his duckjacket. 'You go give them this comfort, Graff,' he said. 'I'll be just a minute inside.'

  So I went to cheer up the kindly people; we all sat on the porch and watched the witless goat squaring off with the motorcycle trying to get up the nerve for the initial ram.r />
  Then Siggy came out, quite choked up himself, and that was enough to set off poor Freina again. 'Oh, they're sure lovely boys!' she wept.

  'Oh, sweet, sweet,' said Gippel. 'The laws are just vile!' he roared. 'Allowances should be made for boys like these.'

  But Siggy said, 'Now, now' - with a forearm bolstering up his belly. 'It was such a feed we had, it was worth fifty schillings.' And that did surprise all of us - brought Freina back to her senses and her alert, pale, winking eyes. Poor Gippel was agog, with nothing more to say.

  So they watched us climb on the motorcycle. We stood off the goat and were careful this time to avoid the driveway. The pigs began their insane running.

  'It's amazing,' I said to Siggy, 'the deals one can make for breakfast.' But I felt something hard against his belly, under the duckjacket. 'What have you got there?' I said.

  'Frau Freina Gippel's frying-pan,' said Siggy, 'and one flint, one bottle-opener, one corkscrew and a saltshaker.'

  Well, we were pinched by the fence rows when we came near the road, and we were forced into the driveway for a moment. But this time we had the speed behind us and we slurred out on the road. We could see Gippel waving both his arms like a madman; Frau Freina was swelling her breast and waving, kissing her fingers goodbye to us. The tires skidded us into the ruts, and again beat themselves clean of the driveway. The old mud flung madly after us; thot, thot, thot it went on the downhill road.

  'There are certain investments required,' said Siggy, 'if one is to live off the land.' And the frying-pan was still warm under his jacket.

  Where the Walruses Are

  AS THE NOTEBOOK has it:

  There are certain investments required.

  And so. It was lunchtime when we rode into Ulmerfeld and bought two bottles of beer. We were nearly out of the village when Siggy saw the windowbox hung to a second-story window of a Gasthaus.

  'Radishes!' said Siggy. 'I saw their little greens peeking over!'