Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Chapter Eleven

Along with my copy of the signed agreement to publish from Yale University Press came a note from the editor, J. Digby Wolfram, giving me editorial and production schedules and suggesting how, as he put it, it would accrue to our mutual advantages if I could get to New Haven as soon as possible.

J. Digby. It was redolent of English, of Beau Geste, and Pimm's Cups. And "accrue to our mutual advantages'? Made me feel as though I were entering an entirely new dimension where scholars vetted works they considered worthwhile, where words such as collegial were used at faculty meetings and tea was served in china cups.

I showed the note to the departmental chair, thinking only to get the academic equivalent of a hall pass--some time off--but Janet McHenry, Herself, as we called her, went me even better. "Seems to me there's some discretionary money in the departmental travel fund," she said. "The department ought to be able to get you part of the way there. And I will see that this venture is posted on our web site."

Such are the shifting tides of academic life. The "part way" was a business-class round trip from LAX to JFK, leaving me to pay only for train fare between New York and New Haven.

One week later, my classes covered by no less than Daniel Binford, I took the red eye to New York, trained up to Yale, and arrived at the University Press offices on a brisk Saturday afternoon. Wolfram proved to be a small-boned, athletically trim man with prematurely gray hair and a nose that seemed to have come from a Roman coin. By my estimate, Wolfram could wear size thirty-eight suits right off the rack--provided he ever wore suits. He greeted me in tennis togs that day and the next. His concession to formality the following Monday, when the Press offices were in full function, was to wear Cambridge gray flannels, Everything else--shoes, sox, shirt, and jacket were intended for life on the tennis court.

There was something disconcerting about the way Wolfram spoke as he outlined his plan of attack for me. "There's the Taft Hotel not too far from here," he said. We'll get you set up, then you can take the manuscript with you, look over some of my suggestions and--" he peered about a scrupulously neat office until he spotted what he was after, a small laptop computer. "I could get you a Mac if you fancy it."

"First of all," I launched forth, "what am I going to need a computer for? And secondly, I'm no expert on these things, but isn't yours an Australian accent?"

Wolfram brightened. "Do you think so? That's wonderful." He lowered his voice to conspiratorial level. "Actually, I'm a Brit, but it does one better here to be thought of as Aussie. Makes one seem more cutting edge. Being thought of as a cohort of Les Murray carries a better cachet than that traitorous Blair."

I'd been given something here, but I wasn't sure what or how to respond to it.

"Well," he said at length. And I reintroduced the question of why I would need any computer.

"Things are complex in scholarly publishing," a thesis he set forth to explain for several moments, then stood abruptly. "This won't do." He led me out into the Yale campus, setting a brisk pace past the School of Art, beyond the School of Architecture, and alongside the British-American Museum, where he paused for a moment as though the building had some purpose or memory for him. He paused again in front of the J.Press store, looked critically at my jacket, then at the two jackets being featured in the window. "You might want to leave your measurements with them," he said. "You could do with something more--"

"--more--?"

"--substantial." Wolfram was off again, taking us around the corner, where I saw the facade and canopy of the Taft Hotel. But that was not our immediate destination.

Crossing the street, Wolfram led us to Christie's, a decidedly working-class tavern. It was not like any of the establishments I'd seen in West LA or Santa Monica, where students were encouraged. This was a place for serious drinkers and sports fans. A number of signs on the wall set the tone. Students should be seen but not heard except during hockey games. Yet another one warned: Acting out by students will not be tolerated in this establishment.

For a time I was worried that our appearance, Wolfram's tennis gear in particular, would cause some acrimony if not outright grief. In that apprehensive frame of mind, I steered myself for the worst, but it soon became apparent that Wolfram was an individual who could manage in any setting. A number of the regulars greeted him with one or two staves of dialogue, clearly part of an in-progress conversation.

"So how's the slice coming, Wolfie?"

"That's backspin, mate. Slice is golf."

"Whatever. Gold. Tennis. Same silliness, different togs."

Two particularly quarrelsome drinkers, railroad employees to judge by their striped denims. appeared to be debating which of the two would approach Wolfram, then deciding to do so together. "We were wondering," the shorter of the two asked, "if you think Marxism is dead, now that Communism has had it."

"Not bloody likely," Wolfram pronounced. "News of its death has been greatly exaggerated."

"See," the other replied, taking a swipe at his companion's engineer's cap. "I told you."

Wolfram grew into his secretive mode. "Americans," he said. "So quick totake sides. They think all Brits who don't err suits have gone to the London School of Economics and become radiclized."

"Where did you go to school?"

"LSE," he said, placing drink orders for u. "But the thing is, you see, I was radicalized before that."

I waited until our drinks came before I returned to the unanswered question. "Why am I going to need a computer?"

Over the course of the next hour or so, while fending off my questions about his questions relating to my manuscript, Wolfran set about a methodical course of gtting me drunk and garrulous. He steered me through the treacherous landscape of Canadian beers and ales, all of a much higher alcoholic content than their American counterpart, matching me bottle for bottle, the distinction being that his bottles were Cock & Bull ginger beer, alcohol content 0. We ran the gamut of William Butler Yeats' alleged fascist tendencies, the new epistemology, gender as metaphor, and why existentialism had become a rallying cry for the Fundamentalists of the American Far Right.

At one point, Wolfram had to place himself between me and the man with the engineer's cap to prevent that worthy--as drunk or drunker than I--from throwing a punch at me. Some time later, while gnawing on a large platter of Buffalo chicken wings, we were discussing D.H. Lawrence with another group of Christie's regulars, me taking Lawrence's side against those who argued that Lawrence had missed several vital points in his Classic Studies in American Literature.

Seeing Wolfram in a conference with two of the Christie's bartenders who seemed to be pointing at me, I became aware that it was time for us to leave. My relief at this being our immediate agenda was enormous because I was growing sleepier by the minute.

Wolfram made a to-do about settling me in at the Taft Hotel. I knew it was rude of me, perhaps even unforgivably so, but with the briefest of apologies, I tumbled into the large, springy double bed, reaching with some immediacy for the outer edges of the mattress on either side of me when the room began to spin.

"Not to worry," Wolfram assured. "You just doze off for a bit. I'll leave the laptop, the manuscript, and my notes and see myself out."

"Why am I going to need a computer?" I said, but before he had time to respond, I also felt the need to say "The room. The room."

"It will settle down," Wolfram said. "All in good time."

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Chapter Ten

Browsing through a neighborhood weekly in Fall River, Massachusetts, Rae had found a remarkable rental for us. Although we'd only intended to stay in the area for a few weeks to watch the autumn colors, the four-room furnished flat near La Fayette Park was so snug and comfortable that we decided to brave ourselves on into the winter months.

The rooms were on the second floor of an old building that creaked in the wind, sounding like an old person climbing a flight of stairs. The rooms smelled of apple cider, the closets and bureau drawers whispered secrets of hidden lilac sachets, and the enormous bathroom had tiled floors and a large enameled bathtub mounted on articulated claws.

Rae had more experience with snow than me. Being close to snow country and having a tidy nest egg at the time, we were feeling expansive and romantic as well. My expansiveness was enhanced by a few modest successes with stories--another nice note from Robley Wilson and an acceptance from Clint McCown at the Beloit Fiction Review. Rae was expansive about the prospects of visiting some of the Revolutionary War sites she'd read about as a youngster.

She'd been out shopping for dinner things and I, arriving at a natural break in my work, thought to get some necessary maintenance out of the way. When Rae returned with the groceries, cheeks reddened from the wind as though they'd been slapped, her eyes dancing with the pleasure of being out in the first stages of snow, I had the entire kitchen table covered with my paraphernalia.

"What is that?" she asked.

"The guns." I had a .38 and an ugly-looking .375 magnum in component pieces. Rae's 9mm had already been cleaned, oiled, and wrapped in chamois, ready for storage. The machine-like pungency of gun oil permeated the kitchen. "I thought I'd clean them and get them out of the way before we got on to cooking."

"I can see that. What I'm asking about are those--" She hitched her head toward three boxes the approximate size of boxes of large wooden matches.

"Just what it says on the label. Ammunition."

"Bullets, you mean?"

"Rae,what's this about?" I reached for a box and shook it. "Shells. All right, bullets."

"Three boxes of bullets."

"Exactly." I saw a collision coming, but I had no sense of how or where to apply the brakes.

"How long have you had those three boxes of bullets? How long have you been carrying them around?"

I thought I was beginning to see an opening. "No need for concern. I bought them in Virginia. Didn't have to show any ID, and the name I signed was different from anything we've used."

Rae shook her head. "And you think that makes them all right?"

"They can't be traced."

"Screw their being traceable." She swept the boxes off the table with a vicious arc of her hand.

"Will you tell me what this is about?"

"What this is about is, you want bullets in your life, Howard Camden, you've got no room for me. I don't want bullets in my life. Bullets have a way of getting into guns, which have a way of being discharged. They have a way of tearing holes in people and things. There are a lot of people in my life I'm not happy with or disappointed in, but I don't want holes in them."

I felt holes being augured through me from the way she stared, hands on hips, her chest rising and falling in controlled phases. Even as she bent on her haunches to retrieve the boxes of bullets, her eyes remained fixed on me. Stuffing the boxes in her coat pocket, she cinched her belt tightly about her waist. "I know you see irony in things, Howard, and that's one of the things that draws me to you. See alll the irony you want in this, but don't you go laughing at me, not now, not about this." She started toward the door. "You can laugh all you want later, but not about this. You hear me, Howard?"

"Where are you going?" I asked her.

"I don't know," she said. "Somewhere practical to get rid of these."

I stood. "You'd better take me with you."

When she nodded, I could see the tension quit her, but the repugnance for the things in her pocket remained. "Get your coat then," she said, "and be sure you take a scarf."

We stayed on in Fall River throughout the worst of the snow season, making frequent trips into Vermont and
New Hampshire taking turns , learning how to drive in the snow and how to put on snow chains. In a cheap-but-outrageously-expensive motel near Stowe, I asked Rae if she would consent to marry me and she shoved me into a snow bank. I got a good deal of my own work done during that time, and Rae developed a passionate interest in Thomas Jefferson and Dolly Madison. We did not speak about the bullet incident for some considerable time and when we did, I was not in any way disposed to laugh.

Thinking about those months in New England, reliving in my mind the apartment in Fall River, and recounting the incident with the bullets is some bittersweet comfort to me. I describe those times now to ease myself through a difficult transition. Here I am at the same kind of emotional odds with myself as I was when a part of my life had ended and I stumbled into another.

The difference is that this time I am not alone by choice.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Chapter Nine

The letter informing me of the acceptance of my book for publication could not have come at a more opportune time. My name had been before the department tenure committee for about a month. According to some discreet leaks from friends and sympathetic associates involved in the rating process, the word went something like this: You've compiled some interesting credits, Camden. Interesting--but not significant.

Subtext: UCLA is a research institute. Our graduates are placed in major universities throughout the world. They contribute an aura of books, papers, and interpretations, all of which push the appreciation and understanding of literature to new plateaus. They are significant. You are interesting.

Dan Binford, whom I considered neither friend nor sympathetic associate, seemed to take particular pleasure in asking me to coffee in order to tell me in his southern Missouri drawl that I was not only some distance from breaking new scholarly ground, I was in fact--his metaphor--plowing up acreage that had already been harrowed. Never one to keep his metaphors in control, Binford extended a patronizing pat on the arm before leaning in for the kill. "Your work is like Santa Monica Beach on a Monday morning, Howard. All those scavengers with the ear phones ad metal detectors are combing the sand, looking for lost pocket change, an occasional cheap wrist watch and, if they're lucky, a Swiss Army pocket knife." My publications and theories were, according to him, the scholarly equivalent of loose coins found between the cushions of a sofa.

Binford went on to assure me that he was pushing for my contract to be renewed at full course load for another year, this on the basis of my good evaluations from students. "After all, their opinions should count for something." But the implication was clear. Publish something substantial during the year or start looking for a job somewhere else.

This ultimatum was ratified by my wife, Sylvia. Although her subjects were art and art history and she was at Santa Monica College, she too, it seemed, knew someone on the tenure committee." "The thing I'm concerned about," Sylvia said, "is all that time and effort we invested toward your Ph.D."

Translate that to mean, Where would I go if UCLA didn't rehire me? Translate that to mean joining the army of academic gypsies on part-time contract to three or four different schools in the L.A. Basin, spending as much time commuting from one
campus to another as in the classroom. Translate that to mean being so low on the totem pole that at least half my classes would be Freshman Comp.

Translate Sylvia's concern about the time and effort going into my Ph.D. as reflecting her awareness of being tenured at Santa Monica and not having the slightest intention of leaving the L.A. Basin, much less the state, in order to be with me if I had to take something out of California.

It might as well have been a notation on my curriculum vitae: Interesting but not significant credits. In the Biblical sense, I'd been held in the balance and found wanting. Mene, mene, tekel upharshin. Existentially, it was Close, but no cigar.

Then the letter from J. Digby Wolfram came, changing everything.

The letter would have been delivered sooner, but one of the departmental secretaries thought it was nothing more than the kinds of inducements we get from publishers with maddening regularity, urging us to consider new text books. If in the line of the blind--as H.G. Wells put it--the one-eyed man is king, it must also follow that in the land of academia, departmental secretaries know things first. Jennifer was nothing but cordial and solicitous toward me, asking with regularity if I needed typing, photocopying, or even help with my filing. Asking secretaries to fetch coffee was a political taboo as well as a departmental no-no, but this self same Jennifer could not bear to let me have a visitor in my office for more than fifteen minutes before asking if she could bring us coffee. And so when I tell you that Jennifer knew, she was current on my status in the department, you must not suppose she had any other than the most kindly of agendas when she delayed bringing me Wolfram's letter.

Jennifer was sparing me an advertisement. Why else would Yale University Press be writing to me? She told me this in an excited rush when I arrived for my office hours one Thursday afternoon and was told Wolfram had called from New Haven, wondering why--why the bloody hell? were his exact words--I hadn't responded to his letter.

I could scarcely contain my enthusiasm nine months earlier wen Wolfram, responding to my query, invited me to send along the entire manuscript of The Widening Gyre: Text and Textuality in Nineteenth Century American Fiction. The intervening time was a personal torment. Outside of Sylvia, it would have been bad form for me to tell anyone, even as a casual aside. Everyone in the department wants to be published by Yale or Princeton. Only Cambridge or Oxford would have ranked higher. Indiana is also an occasion for champagne and before Ronald Wilson Reagan began dismantling the University of California, even our own press had a cachet of respectability. But you didn't say--didn't even think--you had a book at Yale until you got back what I got from Wolfram: an agreement to publish.

My fingers shook as I read the document, and you will think me an incredible bombast when I tell you how, with my mind's ears, I heard the aria from Lakmi, sung by the princess and her maid. But nevertheless, there I was, the shaking fool, complete with audiohallucination.

The Widening Gyre: Text and Textuality in Nineteenth Century American Fiction brought me two direct results: an offer of publication by a respected university press and a unanimous vote of tenure in the most prestigious English Department of the University of California system. There were two tangential results. I was hit==no, hit doesn't do the matter justice--I was blindsided by the same force that had validated me and what I now like to think of in metaphor as the onion of my marriage to Sylvia was peeled away to the point where noting recognizable was left.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Chapter Eight

The first time I met Rae, an insidious process was set loose to work within me. Because of the frustration and excitement attending the meeting, I was too distracted to sense the subtleties at play. But on my second encounter with her, the process began to reveal itself, reminding me of a worm who had found its way into the midst of a crisp, tart apple, sated itself, and was now boring its way out in search of another target of opportunity.

I was in Springfield, Illinois, Land of Lincoln, a person whose sentiments and writings I admired. But I was not there to research him or ponder, as he did, the better angels of anyone's nature. My destination had to do with some extraordinary municipal laws that severely inhibited the sporting instincts of traveling salespersons and bored locals. Accordingly, games of chance were driven into what my former academic colleagues would call the priate sector, which is to say in this instance, a converted loft apartment over a warehouse fronting the Sangamon River.

Sitting with a select group of traveling salespersons and bored locals about a commodious circular table, covered in green felt, I estimated them and my chances of success. With the hole card left to be dealt, one of the players had aces; Harry could have been working on a flush. Although I had sevens showing, the true strength of my chances was the snub-nose .38, taped to the inside of my lower left calf. There was a thousand dollars in the pot., most of it in chips, but about two hundred in cash from players who thought well enough of their respective hand not to buy another stack of chips, not just yet. There was easily another ten thousand dollars symbolized by piles of chips before each player.

A dapper-looking young man, tieless in a striped shirt and J. Press or Brooks Brothers jacket, was the banker. He was called Thumper by many at the table. By my estimate, Thumper was marshaling fifteen or sixteen thousand dollars in cash. His apartment, his booze, his lavish display of sandwich food and snacks. I felt an affinity for him. This activity was clearly Thumper's way of supporting his habit, a series of adventurous landscapes and still lives, stacked against the brick walls and on one or two easels over toward a skylight that opened to the north. I saw at least one Motherwell and a number of John Registers in the display. Thumper was looking at at least a two-thousand-dollar night, minimum, which could buy a lot of paints and canvases. I was looking at close to twenty after my expenses.

The player with the aces had pared up with some fours. His two pair was the winner and he was raking in his pot when I decided to make my move, be out of there and on Highway 66, heading northeast to Bloomington by midnight. But a crisp knock sounded at the door and the single word "pizza" was shouted, sending my scheme irreparably aft a-gley.

At the knock, Thumper looked up, surprised. "Who would call out for pizza with all this?"

When the door opened, we saw three of them, two men, one rather tall, the other square and stubby, with a Pancho Villa moustache. And of course there was Rae. I recognized her immediately, which proved to be my undoing.

They deployed with practiced skill, but before any of them could bark out orders, I groaned and placed my hands in front of me
on the table.

"Okay, listen up," the mustache said. "Hands onna table. Forehead touches the green. Any funny stuff earns you frequent flier points to a place you don' wanna go, 'cause you don' get back."

From a vantage point where he could watch Thumper, Big Guy covered the table with his gun and directed Moustache and Rae, who moved among us, relieving us of wallets, credit cards, the better watches, and the cash from those of us who used money clips.

I drew Rae, or rather she drew me as a--what would you call it?--friskee. She patted me down, quickly finding my breastfold and money clip. You may wonder, dis she find the snub-nose taped to my calf? She did. She even went to the point of giving it a little push into my leg, just to let me know she'd found it. But she said nothing about it to her cohorts. It struck me then (and it does to this day) as an incredible risk for her to take. That awareness yanked me directly into my vision of the worm and the apple, all the more so when Rae's attention was drawn to one of the stacks of paintings. "Hey," she called to Thumper, "you got a Motherwell here. Cool."

Thumper merely groaned.

From that point until our intruders cleared out and made their get-away, I was in a fugue state in which my senses recorded details about Rae. She wore blue-and-white Nikes, a pair of khaki culottes, and an L.L. Bean insulated vest. She also wore a string of pearls and her nails, although cut short, had a fresh coat of dark maroon polish. The thing I found most remarkable was the tortoise-shell barrette holding her shiny dark hair in place. And was I imagining a light purple eye liner?

When Rae and her cohorts left a few minutes later, my thoughts were not of the twenty-odd thousand dollars that might have been mine but rather of the awareness of the extraordinary odds at play here. What were the chances of being robbed by the same person in two different cities when I had just committed or was contemplating a robbery of my own? What were the chances I'd see her again? A woman had robbed me twice at gun point and here I was, reflecting on the color of her nail polish and the ease of her stride as she moved about the table, stuffing currency into the pockets of her vest.

(Later, when Rae and I, dressed in nothing but terry-cloth robes, sat on the balcony of our room at the Westin Peachtree in Atlanta, sipping Florida grapefruit juice, I` asked her why she hadn't alerted her cohorts to my concealed snub-nose.

"All the time we were doing the room? I kept trying to place you," she said. "When I found the gun, the penny dropped. You were the dude in Cedar Rapids who was so outraged when we clipped you?"

"And?"

Rae smiled. "I was just curious enough to see what would happen next.")

That conversation was almost a year in coming. What happened to me next in Springfield was the inevitable result of Thumper and some of the regulars being convinced by my early response to the break-in that I'd given the game over to our three intruders in payment of some outstanding debt.

You can see my quandary there. Explain that it was all a mistake; I'd planned to rob them? In what followed, I learned a painful thing or two about the relative values of actions and words. "If I'd given you over," I argued against their suspicions, "why would they leave me behind`? Why wouldn't I have just left with them?" I spread my hands as though I'd just turned over a full house. "Why would I still be here?"

"Let's put it this way," the player named Harry said. "You're here and they aren't."

My net loss for that job: two cracked teeth, one of them loosened. Severe bruised about the lower jaw, a broken nose, and a ringing in my right ear for nearly a week. Which says nothing of the two thousand dollars I carried in cash.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Chapter Seven


I wrote earlier of how Rae arrived in Covington, Kentucky, at the age of fifteen with a stake of twelve hundred fifty dollars, given her by a man who promised her five hundred more. The man was Lyle Burris, the third in a series of stepfathers. From everything Rae has told me about Burris, it is clear that he was the most influential. He also, according to Rae, was the only one of the stepfathers whom Rae's mother left. All the others bailed out on her, leaving her variously pregnant, in debt, and in one notably tense situation Rae's mother had been left as forfeit to a loanshark.

From the stories Rae told me and the two photographs she had of her mother, Estella Perkens was a remarkably attractive woman, her hair radiant with the dark rufous gloss of a raven's wing, her profile--especially her chin--and her deep-set eyes and prominent brow line seemingly etched in minute detail. Not a notably tall woman, Estella had the ability to appear proud and alert even after a day of work that would have put most women to rout.

"Mother had a clear, alabaster skin," Rae once told me, "which was miraculous considering some of the things we had to eat when things were bad and some of the things she liked to eat when things were good."

Although not as overtly striking as her mother, Rae inherited some of Estella's looks and physical presence. In one notable way, both were quite alike: Men as a matter of course would want to touch them. An old Chinese curse wishes you to live in interesting times. Because of their very presence, Rae and Estella live in volatile times.

Some of the most volatile of these times began for Estella when Sonny Perkens lit out on her after running up bills of over four thousand dollars in The Chicken Shack, a failed venture where residents of Harlan County, Kentucky, could get fried chicken (dark meat or white), which if unhealthy because of being cooked in transfats was legal, get quart-sized Mason jars filled with a pellucid liquid testing out at one hundred eighty proof, place bets on horse races and basketball games, get their sexual preferences (dark meat or white) attended to, all of which activities were not legal.

Estella sold as many of her household furnishings as she could, loaded Rae and four-year-old Jason into a Chevrolet Imperial that had been bought for sixty dollars--thirty of it down, thirty to come, with the implicit promise of a date with Jimmie Macomb of Harlan Chevrolet, new and used cars, as a consideration to cover tax, license fees, and carrying charges--and left town just ahead of the creditors.

In Lexington, Estella met Lyle Burris by accident in a supermarket. After spending nearly all her available cash a a down payment on a small apartment for herself, Rae, and Jason, Estella had obligated herself to dates with the landlord until the balance of the first and last month's rent could be secured. With only enough cash for a large box of powdered milk, a sack of corn meal mix, and a few vegetables for a soup, Estella had just shoplifted a rump roast when she met Lyle.

The chemistry between them was immediate as the chemistry between Rae and me when I sat next to her on that flight from Tri-Cities to Atlanta. In addition to having immediate qualities Estella found lacking in the landlord, Lyle had a house big enough that there were rooms in it he hadn't used, and he had money from working two jobs.

Lyle wa a tall man with stoop shoulders, dark hair that parted in the middle of a large, bony head, and long, spatulate hands. He was the sort of man who put catsup on his eggs--which at first disgusted Rae--and was always offering you what he considered choice portions from his own plate.

Unlike some of the men Rae had seen in her mother's life, Lyle Burris grew nicer and funnier the more he drank, sometimes coming into Rae and Jason's room to rearrange the bedside lamps for maximum advantage as he performed shadow plays, using his dexterous hands to cast a variety of whimsical forms on the wall, animating them further with his high-pitchd nasal twang.

Sometimes after Burris was moderately drunk, Rae would hear him in the nxt room, laughing or using his special voices, and at first she thought he was putting on a shadow play for Estella, but when Rae asked her mother if Lyle was indeed putting on shadow plays for her, Estella released an exasperated sigh. "You're old enough to know better than that." Giving this some additional thought, Estella told her, "You're old enough to be wanting some of your own pretty soon, but don't you go complicating things for me, you hear?"

When Rae nodded, Estella pressed the point. "You know what I mean already, don't you?"

"You don't want me teasing Lyle until he gets acting silly."

Rae remembers how Estella drew her in for a hug, kissed the top of her head, and gave her a quarter. "That's exactly right honey. I don't want you to tease Lyle. I surely, surely don't."

After a year of living with Burris, Estella had his number pretty well. He liked his Wild Turkey or George Dickel, but could hold it tolerably well, was more likely to become maudlin and sentimental rather than violet or destructive when drunk, and rarely lost more than fifty dollars at a poker game.

If there were any quirks to Burris's behavior that were likely to irritate Estella, they were his tendency to take household appliances apart with the intention of fixing them (and seldom doing so) and an irrepressible appetite for flea markets and garage sales, from which he was always bringing home bizarre-looking lamps--for one birthday present, Rae was given a reading lamp with a stuffed owl as a base--and plaster-of-paris lawn decorations in the form of birds and animals. It was true that Lyle had an eye for women, but Estella kept him well worn.

Neither Rae nor Jason were surprised on the day Lyle brought home a large corrugated cardboard box, redolent of the smell of barbecued chicken parts, roasted corn, and rib slabs from Jake's in the black section of town and, as they picnicked on the trestle table in the back yard, amid statues of penguins, flamingoes, water fowl, and geese, Lyle rapped the side of a Hires root beer bottle with his fork. "Attention, everyone. I have an announcement to make." Although Rae was barely thirteen at the time, she was not surprised to note that Estella had managed to cast her eyes downward, then blush.

"Your mother and I," Lyle said with a sweep of his arm that seemed to include all of them, "have decided to make this a real family."

"Does that mean momma is going to have another baby?" Jason asked.

"Eat your ribs, son," Estella suggested.

As things turned out, Jason's guess was accurate, not only about Willis, who was born seven months after Estella and Lyle married, but in his future surmises about Andrew and Katie, the half-brother and -sister Estella would subsequently bear in two future marriages.

Estella and Lyle were married in that menagerie of a back yard, to which Lyle had added a pair of rose trellises, a large concrete bird bath, and a fountain with the figure of a Botticelli Venus that occasionally squirted water several feet beyond its base. The ceremony was performed by a preacher who moonlighted for the same multi-level cosmetics and personal toiletries vendor as Lyle, and Rae remembers there being close to fifty persons present to drink a spiked Kool-Ade punch, eat barbecue from Jake's, and careen about the yard, bumping into one another, pretending to dance with plaster and terra-cotta birds, and bursting into spontaneous a cappella renditions of "Stand by Your Man."

After a year and a half of marriage to Estella, Lyle knocked respectfully at Rae's door. (She had her own room by then.) When she bade him enter, he stumbled drunkenly, and made for the edge of her bed. "I can't take it no more," he told her.

Rae, who had with great calculation lost her virginity to a man of about Lyle's age some six months earlier, remained silent, estimating the amount of time she could remain at home.

"I'm like the Wizard of Oz, Rae. Not a bad man, just weak is all." He watched her for a response, "I've had impure thoughts all my life, but they never once got me in trouble." Tears began streaming down his face as he regarded her. "You probably know all there is to know about men by now, anyway."

Rae knew enough not to say anything.

"Do you have any money saved?"

For the first time since he'd entered, Rae nodded. "I've been saving."

"That's good, Honey. That's real good." Burris fumbled in his pocket for a wad of bills, They were mostly fifties and hundreds. "There's fifteen, maybe sixteen hundred here. You got to take this and go now. I'll send you another five hundred, more if I can, to General Delivery in Cincinnati. But you got to be the one to go. I thought it all out. If I went, it would effect four people. If you go--"

Rae reached to pat his hand. "It's okay. I was going to go pretty soon, anyway."

"The thing that makes it hard--" Shaking his head in frustration, Burris began to redden. "I didn't mean to have it sound like that. The thing that makes this difficult is you're like my own flesh and blood."

It had been close to three on a blustery gray afternoon when Burris had lumbered into her room. Rae sat with him, holding his hand until the shadows lengthened and evening darkness came on.

"I got two bits of advice for you," Burris said when they both heard Estella return home from grocery shopping. "Whatever happens, you keep up with your reading. They say Emma Bovary, she got into all that trouble because she believed what she read." He shook his shaggy head. "She got into trouble because she didn't read enough."

Rae stood, drawing him to his feet. "There's momma back," she said.

"Leave her a nice note, you understand? Whenever you leave someplace for good, you leave a nice note behind you."

Rae nodded.

"Your Daddy Lyle isn't a bad man, Audrey Rae. Don't you be remembering him like this."

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Chapter Six

I can judge the degree of Rae's irritation with me by the closeness of her aim when she throws things in my direction. Whatever she throws, be it a copy of Middlemarch or an overripe beet, there is little chance in her aim; she never hits me unless she intends to.

One morning when we were living in a mobile home in Brookings, Oregon, for a few weeks, Rae returned from an early walk, picked up an annotated paperback edition of Middlemarch, and caught me midshoulder as I sat in the kitchenette, hunched over my laptop. Dreariness and overcast swirled outside, but that had little to do with Rae's mood.

Brookings is a metastasized retirement village, plunked on top of an otherwise cheery and boosterish town on the Oregon coast, just over the California border. We were there investigating a potential target of opportunity in Medford, catching the Henry IV cycle at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, and giving me a chance to finish a requested revision of a story.

Being hit by the book was not a complete surprise; Rae had been on edge starting after dinner the night before, when the provocation for her dark humors had slipped free like the genie escaping the bottle.

"You think that's going to make everything neat and tidy? Get this straight, Howard. There isn't any neat and tidy. They're finding planets out there that they hadn't known about before. There's professors and ex-husbands and cops out there, not even thinking about colliding with us, but accidents waiting to happen all the same."

I stood, rubbed my back once for effect, then went to the propane stove to pour myself more coffee. "It's not such a big thing. People do it to formalize relationship."

Rae shook her head, first at my rubbing my back, then at the offer of coffee. "You think being married, I'm less likely to walk on you or you're less likely to want to chippie around with someone? Get a better metaphor, Howard. Did that stop you when you were married before?"

"Different circumstances altogether," I said.

Rae rolled her eyes upward. "Right," she said. "How silly of me."

My suggestions that we be married were as much of a surprise to me as they were annoyances to Rae. The notion of marriage to her seemed to have a life of its own, spurting forth like the catsup from a bottle in a truck stop restaurant.

When Sylvia and I sat in the office of an earnest MFCC in the University of California Counseling Services and effectively dissolved our partnership, I felt a great ease of spirit and an awareness that marriage was not so much a good thing or a bad thing as much as it was an experience I no longer needed to relate to. There was no one waiting on the sidelines, either for Sylvia or me, no oppressive sense of having submerged myself in a relationship. Then along came Rae. With her, my senses of comfort and completeness hit levels I'd left previously unimagined.

"Do you have any idea how many times I was married, Howard?"

"Four, isn't it?"

Now she came over and took a sip of my coffee. "I wish," she said. "I dearly wish it was only four." She seemed to consider this for a long, sad moment, then perched on my lap. "You remember that time when we'd been together about a month and I told you--" she took my chin in her hand, and shook it.

I nodded.

Her fingers tightened on my chin. "What? What did I tell you?"

"You said we'd be together longer than I could possibly imagine."

"So it was settled." She shook my head with finality. "It is settled."

The circulation in my legs was beginning to take a beating. Sensing this, Rae stood, cupped my face. "You've got to stop asking me to marry you, hear? Marriage is not what's going to make us last--not with our records. I've done being married. You not done well with it." She kissed my lips. "You've got a story to revise. I've got this book, which doesn't get any easier to read thanks to George Eliot's view of the world. Being thrown by me doesn't make it much better. We should go to Medford soon, take another look. Then maybe go, see if we can get tickets for A Winter's Tale. We have enough on our plate without you saying we ought to marry up."

Two days later, we were having cappuccinos in a small coffee shop across from a mobile home building in which a small one-teller branch of a bank has temporary offices while its permanent home in a small shopping center next door was being readied.

"This is an opportunity we are not likely to see again in our lifetime, Howard," Rae said. "An honest-to-god bank."

Later that night, while we sat in the Ashland replica of The Globe Theater,(because the main theater, where A Winter's Tale is being mounted has been sold out) watching a stirring rendition of King Henry IV, part two, six jiffy bags containing close to thirty thousand in cash, mailed from two locations in Medford and one in nearby Talent, and one in Ashland were on their way to us at three of our various MailBoxes USA franchises in Washington, Nevada, and California.

Just at the point in the play where Falstaff beseeches Henry to remember their early roistering and carouses and Henry responds, "Old man, I know thee not," Rae clutched my arm, her eyes brimming with tears. Caught in the web of her feelings and the aching sense of loss projected by Falstaff at Hal's rebuff, my eyes began to mist. "We should get married, Rae."

"Goddamn you, Howard," she said, her voice hanging in the humid summer night, and she was up, shuffling her way in front of people seated in our row, making her way to the aisle before I could stop her.

During the intermission I searched for her while ransacking my psyche for a reason for asking, however reflexively, the question I was enjoined from asking. When the lights flickered as an announcement that the next scene was about to begin, I returned to our seats, but Rae was not there.

My attempts at losing myself in the play grew progressively more futile. As the drama of one man's successful ambitions unfolded on stage, I felt alone and wretched without Rae. A nagging sense of melancholy stole over me, as persistent as the muggy Oregon night. When the play was over, armed with two hot chocolates from the refreshment stand, I headed to the street adjoining the Festival facility where our car was parked , trying to convince myself Rae would be leaning against the rear fender smoking a cigarette, which meant she still hadn't discharged the combustion beyond her explosion or, better yet, curled up asleep on the back seat, which meant she had.

Dream on, Howard Michael Camden. When I reached the car, there was no trace of her. No note under the driver's side windshield, no message on the steering wheel or driver's seat. Sitting there in the semidarkness of the parked car, my focus was drawn to the hum and flutter of bugs and millers circling about the nearby street lamp. I remained there for some time, trying to draw sense and wisdom from the bugs as they pursued their wild orbit.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Chapter Five

I first met Rae when I'd been living on the road, entirely away from the academic life for about eight months, my spendable savings all but exhausted, the proceeds from my last job dwindling toward the thousand-dollar level, the place where I more or less drew the line. Even back then, working alone and not having the benefit of Rae's extraordinary methodology, I had good instincts about not taking jobs out of desperation. Cutting back on expenses to the point of moving into furnished room off East Garfield in Davenport, Iowa, I boiled water from my portable hotplate for instant oatmeal breakfasts and Top Rammen noodle dinners. Lunch was my main meal of the day, eaten at leisure in some convenient fast-food restaurant discovered in the course of my research.

I was drawn to a small check-cashing service that also sold money orders. Located in a run-down maze of older apartments, thrift shops, and liquor stores just off the Mississippi on Front Street, the object of my interest was new enough in the neighborhood to be still relying on crude signs in the window and one sidewalk display, a small sandwich sign that may have been a relic of an earlier location. Lingering in a small short-order shack over one of the best bowls of chili I'd ever eaten, I continued to watch the check-cashing service. Two cups of coffee and an enormous slab of cherry pie later, my plans were completed. After a brief stop at an Army-Navy store for some essentials, I cleared my things out of the rooming house, changed clothes in the back of an old Subaru published some weeks earlier in Dubuque, then went to work.

By ten that night, I was in Bernie's, a San-Francisco-style bar and grill in Cedar Rapids, flushed with the success of being about twenty-five hundred dollars richer. Treating myself to the giant t-bone steak speial, I sat at the bar, drank local beer, paid middling attention to a Bucks-Bulls game on TV while going through the mail I'd had forwarded to the Cedar Rapids MailBoxes USA franchise: a few literary magazines, an attempted resolution of a problem I'd had with a Midas Muffler shop in Mesa, Arizona, a few notices of stories being rejected, one letter of acceptance from The Pikestaff Forum, and one small envelope that had neary escaped my notice.

In celebration of the acceptance from Pikestaff, I switched from beer to cognac. Bernie's only carried Hennessey, not my favorite, but the options of peppermint schnapps, Hiram Walker's peach brandy, or B & B from a bottle with a white, sugary crust inside the neck left me no choice. The small envelope was from the North American Review, and need I tell you how it added to my already expansive regard for life? Because I move about with such frequency, I generally don't ask for my rejected manuscripts to be returned, relying instead on a number ten envelope for whatever reply was thought appropriate. Small envelope such as the one I held generally meant a note from an editor with a definite acceptance (although on occasion I've been fooled by ones that were only reminders of an about-to-expire subscription).

Robley Wilson had given me a few "close-but-no-cigar" responses on earlier submissions and once in Chicago, where he was reading from his own work, I'd actually met and talked to him. Slitting the envelope with my steak knife, I read his crabbed, scholarly penmanship. "Not quite there, Camden, but getting damned close. have a feeling we'll be doing business soon." RW

I motioned the bartender for another Hennessay at just about the time the commotion began toward the front entrance. Two men wearing turtlenecks much like the one I'd worn earlier in the day had come in and appeared to be shouting something. In response, a number of persons rose from their stools, leaning against the bar, arms extended as though involved in some kind of push-up contest. My first response was amusement at the thought that his was some local tradition, perhaps even one native to Bernie's Bar & Grill. But then the reality of what was happening came to me and my response was anything but amusement. Much of my newly-come-by twenty-five hundred dollars was in my pocket.

A voice behind me said, "You heard the man, Sport. Off the stool. Feet back. Both hands on the bar."

Turning, I saw Rae. The knit watch cap she wore was the same darkness as her ebony hair, giving the overall impression of a compact fullness. Indeed, newspaper reports of the incident the next day described her as having an Afro hair-do.

My knowledge of guns then was even more limited than it is now. I can distinguish the 9 mm semiautomatic, the .38 Smith and Wesson, the Glock, the modern Colt .45 and the Luger-type. I knew the gun Rae carried was not a .38. (She later told me it was a 9 mm.) At the time, she showed it to me with an off-handed wave. "Better get with the program, Sport," she said, hitching her head toward her two cohorts. "They neither one mind denting skulls."

A sudden anger rose to combustion point somewhere in my thorax. "You can't rob me."

"Why is that, Sport?" she said.

"Goddamn it," I said. "You just can't."

Even then, angry as I was, her smile and the slight lift of her brows got to me. "Cause," she said sotto voce, "you just robbed it yourself and should be allowed to keep it?" She smiled again, then called down the bar to one of her cohorts. "Hey, Junior? We got a guy down here, I think he's looking for professional courtesy."