On Bear Mountain

“Any salvage and demolition expert can knock a building into pieces,” he said slowly, pinning me with his gaze. “But I’m the only man in the business who can take one apart.”

  “You believe your father’s work is all hype and no substance. You talk about his sculptures as if they’re pieces of metal engineered to fool people looking for some deeper meaning. All right. If they’re so simple, then creating one ought to be easy for you.”

  “No. No. That’s my answer.”

  Silence stretched between us. He was quiet, emphatic, and uncompromising. I believed he’d return to New York and realize the futility of his own plan. Then that would be that. “Goodbye,” I said.

  He walked to me, reached out, and cupped a hand against my hair. When he drew it back, the tiniest white butterfly perched on his fingertip. His troubled gaze held mine. “They’ll bring you the news as soon as I know it.”

  And then, after being a part of my life for three weeks and six days, thirteen hours and twenty-seven minutes, and changing my life forever, Quentin left me.

  • • •

  “Where’d Brother Bear go?” Arthur asked frantically, just as I knew he would. “He didn’t die, did he? You’re sure he didn’t die?” I saw the terror in his eyes. We stood atop a granite overhang that protruded like a hat brim from a ridge above Bear Creek. We’d played under the blue shadows of the tallest trees a thousand times when we were children. The granite ridge was one of the most beautiful spots on the farm.

  I’d brought him there to lie to him, something I’d sworn I’d never do again.

  “He’s gone to his home to work on the idea for your Bear. He’ll be back, but working on a Bear takes a lot of thought. I can’t say exactly when we’ll see him again.”

  Arthur paced, wringing his hands. “He’s got to build a friend for Mama Bear. He has to. He just has to.”

  “Sweetie, here’s what we’ll do. Every day we’ll come over here, and we’ll set a pebble on this rock to mark the day. As long as we keep counting the days, we’ll be getting closer and closer to the day when he comes back.” The rock cairns of ancient lands had probably started this way, built on sorrow and hope.

  Arthur stared at me urgently. “As long as we have rocks, we have days?” I nodded. He bounded off the overhang, scratched in its crumbling fringe for a few seconds, then held out a handful of small rocks. “How many is that?”

  I counted out seven and told him to throw the rest back. “That’s enough for the first week.” He put six in the pockets of his shorts, very carefully brushed leaf mold from a flat spot on our granite stage, and laid the seventh pebble there with solemn ceremony. “I’m counting on you, Brother Bear,” he whispered. “I know you’ll come back.”

  I wished I believed it, too.

  A big brown UPS truck lumbered into the farmyard the next afternoon. The driver unloaded several large boxes. As he drove away I stood there staring at the return address of the silver shop in Atlanta. “This can’t be right,” I told Liza and Fannie Ledbetter, who had wandered over in curiosity. I opened the boxes and found my entire silver collection inside. Finally I discovered a handwritten note from the shop owner, my genteel and sympathetic counselor in the fineries of a southern lady’s survival. Sometimes, it is quite appropriate to accept a gift from a gentleman. Your friend is, indeed, a gentleman.

  “Quentin did this for you,” Liza said in soft awe. “Oh, Ursula.”

  “He’s a fine man,” Fannie Ledbetter agreed.

  I carried the boxes inside, sat down among all that cold, beautiful silver, and cried.

  PART

  THREE

  CHAPTER 17

  I can put the idea of her out of the way, here at home. Her voice, her eyes, her body, her thoughts. How she felt around me, and how she made me feel, Quentin told himself after he returned to New York. He’d always been able to divvy up his everyday life, concentrate on specific tasks, and let troubling circumstances fade into the back of his mind. This had worked every time he wanted to forget a woman.

  It didn’t work, this time.

  New York and its boroughs suddenly looked different to Quentin, made of the wrong kind of mountains, not quite real, anymore, a place full of rented spaces and tiny rooftop gardens, of public property and little privacy. No forest kingdoms, there. Not one single Riconni in the history of the family in America had owned land, to Quentin’s knowledge. He kept thinking of Ursula and of Bear Creek, then shoving the thoughts away.

  “All right, Joe, tell me what the problem is. I knew on the phone you didn’t like this plan.” He and Joe Araiza sat in the worn wooden booth of a sports bar in midtown Manhattan, where Joe managed a prestigious sculpture gallery.

  His father’s former student, now middle-aged and stocky, brushed a hand over his fading, sandy hair before grimly downing a shot of Scotch. He slapped the glass on the table and leveled a hard look at Quentin. “I don’t like what you’ve asked me to do. I want to know what you’re trying to accomplish with this crazy idea about faking your father’s work — ”

  “I want a companion piece for Bare Wisdom. Not a copy, but a similar sculpture. You find me a sculptor who can do the job. You make the connections. It’s that simple.”

  “I need to know why you want it.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Is this for Angele?”

  “Indirectly. I don’t want her to know until I’m ready.”

  Joe spread his hands in dismay. “Ready? Ready to foist off a copy of your father’s masterpiece on her? You want to convince her Bare Wisdom still exists?”

  “No. It’s not about lying to her. It’s not about faking a copy. I told you.” The accusations gnawed at Quentin and brought a harsh glare to his eyes. Had his reputation become so cold-blooded that even Joe Araiza thought him capable of deception?

  Joe glanced at the look on his face and leaned back. “All right. I shouldn’t have put it that way.” He exhaled and rubbed his receding hairline, then slumped forward with his elbows on the table. “Quentin, what I’m getting at is this: You don’t know what you’re asking for.”

  “I want a skilled artisan to do a contract job. That’s all.”

  “Your father was an artist. You can imitate his work, but you can’t recreate the magic.”

  “Just interview the best people and pick one. Hire him and send me the bill.”

  Joe sighed. “All right. But do you know this will be a massive job for any fool willing to try it?”

  “I don’t believe that. The structure’s already determined, the basic design’s in place. It’s just a matter of working with the metal and improvising on the concept.”

  “You understand what you want, obviously. Or you think you do. Why don’t you build the sculpture yourself?”

  “I have a business to run. Sarge doesn’t have the kind of personality you leave in charge of your front office. When he has to deal with a broker, you get the feeling he doesn’t know whether to salute or yell Drop and give me twenty push-ups.”

  Joe mused over this excuse while frowning at him. Then he sighed. “Your father once told me that he spent months working on the bear sculpture — and he tore it apart at least a half-dozen times in the process. Plus we only have a few old photographs and sketches to work from. It’ll take time to find the right person. You don’t realize how daunting your father’s reputation is. Or how much blood, sweat, and tears he put into every piece.”

  “I remember the blood.”

  “God, I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry.”

  A fractured mood silenced them both. Quentin sat back, took a sip from his own shot glass brimming with Scotch, and studied the tiny pool of amber liquid. Liza Deerwoman had confided to him that she believed in water-gazing to communicate with the dead. She said she’d spoken to Tom Powell that way, and that he wanted Quentin to build the second sculpture.

  Quentin found himself staring deeper into the glass. What would you say to me now, Papa? Go back to Bear Creek and give it all a try? Love a w
oman as much as you loved Mother? Or give up, the way you did? Do I have to follow your footsteps all the way to the grave?

  “Quentin? Are you all right?”

  He set the glass down and laughed sharply. “Hire a sculptor for me, Joe. If I get the result I want, you’ll be glad you went through this.”

  “Tell me something. You’ve never given a damn about your father’s work. Why now?”

  Quentin smiled thinly. “I still don’t give a damn.”

  • • •

  A week passed, and then another. He began to concede that it could be months before a sculpture was designed and finished. He picked up the phone to call Ursula, then stopped. Slow news was no news. It would only make matters worse. He lay in his bed at night remembering how they’d been together on the floor of the old bookstore.

  Give it up. Ursula was right. You’ll ruin Arthur. Stay out of their lives. Forget her. He slept badly, took too many risks for his own safety at salvage sites, and sat brooding at his office desk on too many hot, smog-choked summer evenings. You could do it. Build the sculpture for her. For Arthur. For yourself.

  But he didn’t know a damned thing about the pattern of his father’s thoughts, how he had planned and started a sculpture, which of his random visions transformed cold metals into provocative life. What kind of alchemy did a man need, to perform that godlike result? I can’t go that deep for Papa. Can’t stand to look that long into his heart.

  He dug inside a storage box, searching for a few of the metal toys, as if they might hold some clue to the mechanisms of his father’s ideas. Instead he came up with something his mother had packed long ago: a handful of smooth, gunmetal-gray ball bearings, like dark steel pearls. Papa had bored the finest small holes through each one, and linked them with heavy cord. They had served as his rosary.

  For one of the few times in his life he was stymied by a situation he could not reduce to the scattered sum of its parts. That kind of void was his nightmare, and a reason, for example, that he avoided taking airplanes, though no one in the world knew that. He didn’t like so much thin air around him.

  Brooding over a decision, he visited mountainous junkyards, barges floating heavy under demolished cars, salvage yards stinking of human garbage. He sorted through the trash of the industrial universe, trying to see shapes and forms the way he imagined his father doing, to hear his father’s voice offering guidance among the creaking steel and sad decay. He carried the rosary in his pocket, touching it often.

  It didn’t help.

  “What happened to you down there in Georgia?” Popeye demanded. “Somebody knocked the shit out of your attitude.”

  “Leave me alone,” he said quietly, as he lifted a wrought-iron garden gate and slid it into a shipping crate that had to go out the next day. Popeye stared at him. There was a soft threat in his tone, a deadly emptiness that had always been concealed before. The old sergeant was filled with affectionate concern. “Cap’n, get drunk, get a woman, pay her to fuck your brains out. That’ll solve most of your problems.”

  Quentin mulled the advice more than the old man ever expected. But he knew of only one dependable antidote to every uneasy thought. He called Carla.

  • • •

  Carla glowed with pleasure, teasing and joking, touching his hand often as they ate a catered dinner of lobster and steak in his dining area beneath a turn-of-the-century gas chandelier he’d restored. His rare invitation had all the earmarks of a new beginning, another intimate phase in their relationship. She fully expected to spend the night. He fully expected to let her.

  She talked all through dinner about her daughters, how they were doing so well in private elementary school, how she’d begun taking them to the ballet and the opera — they wouldn’t grow up with no culture, no, they weren’t stuck in Brooklyn. “They keep asking me when their Uncle Quentin will come to visit again.”

  “How about this weekend? I’ll take them to the zoo.”

  Carla stared at him. He’d never taken her daughters on an outing before. “Are you . . . all right? What’s happened to you?”

  “You don’t want me to take them to the zoo?”

  “No, I’m thrilled. It’s just . . . odd. You’ve never wanted them to like you.”

  “That was for their own good. Maybe I’m trying to change.”

  “Quentin?” Smiling, incredulous, she got up, came around to his side of the table, and sat on his lap. “That southern buying trip really gave you a new perspective. I like it.”

  A dull thread wound through him, but he nodded and held her around the waist as she planted small kisses across his face. “I’m going to put on a special outfit I brought,” she whispered. “You wait out here until I call you.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  She kissed him lightly on the mouth, hopped up, and disappeared into his bedroom. He sat staring into space. Take her to bed and get it over with. This could be a good life. If you don’t want to be alone anymore, you’ve got Carla. Simple.

  He heard a crash, and a shriek. He strode into his bedroom. It was a wide, airy space fronted by huge brick-rimmed windows, always uncovered, even at night. He found Carla standing before one of them, where a tall brass floor lamp reflected her fury in the glass. She clutched a handful of photographs. One of his dresser drawers lay on the floor. “Who is she?” she demanded, thrusting out a picture of me kneeling beside Hammer with my arm around him.

  “Why are you looking through my dresser?”

  “Because I knew you were hiding something from me.”

  He held out his hand. She backed away. Her black hair fell over her face as she tossed her head. Her eyes glittered. “There had to be some reason you’re acting so strange. This is it.” She shook the photographs. “You took a dozen pictures of this woman. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not casual. You’ve never taken that many pictures of any woman before. Including me.”

  “This makes no sense. I invite you here, I offer to spend time with your girls, and you assume I’m seeing another woman?”

  “Yes! It makes perfect sense! You’re using me to avoid her. Goddamn you. Goddamn you, Quentin. I knew this was too good to be true.” She sank down on the window’s wide sill. Her shoulders slumped. He sat down beside her, took the photographs, and laid them aside. “I don’t have a life with her,” he said quietly.

  “You already do.”

  “No. You and I have a life. We’ve had a long past. Maybe we have a long future. I’m trying to make some decisions. I’m forty years old.”

  Tears slid down her beautiful face. She wiped them away with a rough swipe of her hand. “Forty years old and forced to consider the fact that one day you’ll be a lonely old man like Popeye. Getting desperate. Settling for a comfortable situation with me.”

  “I’m telling you the truth when I say what you see in those pictures isn’t my future. It won’t work. I’m not capable of making it work.” He paused. “Here’s the only fact I can guarantee: I care about you.”

  She uttered a hard, sharp groan and looked heavenward. “Mother Mary, he cares about me. Isn’t that the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard? He doesn’t love me, he doesn’t keep a dozen homey pictures of me in his dresser, but he might be willing to marry me someday because I’m so freakin’ familiar to him.”

  He stood and walked to another window, shoving his hands into his trouser pockets, staring bleakly at a landscape of aging industrial buildings being converted to apartments and lofts, like this one. The world he remembered was fading away. His mother, growing old, still hadn’t forgiven him, though she didn’t suspect his real crime. Carla, finally dropping the veneer of hope he’d subconsciously encouraged all these years, would find someone else, probably the banker she still dated. This time, her marriage would be permanent.

  She dried her eyes and walked over to him. They looked out on the night, together. “I want you to love me,” she said. “I want you to believe you can’t wake up happy every morning without me here. I want yo
u to tell me your life won’t be complete unless you and I have a baby together. I want you to say no one else can make you feel the way I do.”

  After a moment, he put one arm around her shoulders, then pulled her to him for a deep hug. She cried into the crook of his neck, then pushed herself away. “See you around,” she whispered. He walked her to the elevator, but she waved him off when he tried to escort her downstairs to her car. “I’m on my own,” she said. “Finally.”

  • • •

  Two more weeks passed. Popeye grunted as he tossed Quentin a wrinkled manila envelope folded tightly around a pliable block of contents. “I found this under your travel-sack of dogfood in the back of the Explorer. You missed it when you were unpackin’. You been careless, lately. It’s not like you.”

  “I have no idea what that is.” Sitting at his desk, Quentin pulled out his knife, flicked the blade open, and slit a piece of twine tied around the packet. When he opened it, the loan shark’s five thousand dollars cascaded out, along with a folded sheet of Powell Press stationery.

  Yours, Ursula.

  Popeye read the note over his shoulder before Quentin could lay it aside. The sergeant eyed him with abrupt understanding. “I don’t know what you did to the lady, Captain, but damn. She’s bribing you to come back.”

  • • •

  “Alfonse says you and Carla had a very serious disagreement,” his mother reported. Quentin made a vague sound of no-comment while he hung the jacket of his suit on a chairback and sat down to face her. He’d taken her to Sunday brunch and now shared a small, lace-draped table in her brownstone’s parlor. She always invited him to Sunday tea, as if enough tea and gentility might erase the past. “Alfonse could make a second career as a snitch,” he said.

  “Is it true about Carla?”

  “Now, wait a minute. I want to tell you something. Alfonse snitches for me, too. So I know you haven’t been back to the doctor for a checkup, the way you promised.”

  “I take my blood pressure medication. I feel fine. No more whining.”