Ordinary Bear, page 7
When she arrived at work an hour later and saw the assignment board, all her fears about punishment were confirmed. With resolve, she passed the morning collecting fecal samples in an unpleasant blur of fur and shit and paperwork. For the first time she could remember, she didn’t need to leave for lunch. The rain had stopped so she grabbed her sandwich and set out to eat outside in the zoo.
Though the elephants were her favorite animals, they weren’t out that day. Lissa sat on a wet park bench in front of their empty enclosure, eating her tuna and mustard on a hard roll. When she stood and brushed the crumbs from her lap, a handful of juncos alighted on the ground to peck at them. Why would a bird with the power of flight choose to spend its days at a zoo, she wondered? Maybe just to taunt the caged animals with its own freedom. Maybe as a show of solidarity—chins up, comrades, your free brothers and sisters are working on a liberation plan.
As she walked back to the medical building, Lissa saw a crowd gathered around the marine mammal habitat for the seal and sea lion show. To avoid it, she cut through the polar bear exhibit, empty except for a single person. He stood alone in front of the plexiglass, staring into the habitat, and to her surprise she recognized him immediately.
The giant.
She would get to thank him after all. But as she got closer, she had second thoughts. He stood quietly, staring in at Tasul and Conrad, the playful resident bears, with a look of such contempt that it frightened her. Who could hate the bears?
He’d saved her daughter’s life. She wanted to return the favor, wanted to pay him back for what he had done. But what did she actually know about him? Did she really want to invite some kind of relationship with a filthy, homeless giant who had shown no hesitation to become violent? Second-guessing herself, she studied him from afar. He wore the same dark clothes, dirty from the street, leaning on his cane as he stared into the enclosure. The bears ignored him completely despite the intensity of his glare, swimming in their pool, rolling around on the rocks, flipping over the truck tire given to them as a toy.
She watched until the end of her lunch break. During that time, he did not move even once. As far as she could tell, he did not blink. He did not seem even to breathe.
When she left, his expression still had not changed.
Maybe it was best not to thank him. Maybe it was best just to keep her distance entirely. She walked back to work without saying anything at all, leaving him to glare at the bears in peace.
The rest of her day passed as a blur of blood samples and teeth cleanings. Her mood had been diminishing steadily since lunch, and though she wanted to blame the giant and his dour aura, she knew it was her own cowardice about talking to him that rankled her.
Though she’d intended to work late, when the zoo closed at six she all but sprinted across the grounds to catch the bus home. Worried she would not find a seat, she took a shortcut she knew behind the condor exhibit to beat the crowd gathering at the bus stop. She had the sitter and did not need to be back at any given time, but the worry had become muscle memory, repeated each day as she faced the prospect of being late to gather Olive from after-school care. Late parents accrued additional fees—fees she could not afford. Forty-five bucks for fifteen minutes, enough to make her wonder whether the fines were meant to discourage tardiness or raise revenue.
When the bus pulled up, she filed aboard with the others and got the last empty row to herself. The doors closed and the bus lurched forward. Then it stopped immediately. The doors opened again with a hiss to let one more passenger aboard. The bus dipped as he boarded. He filled the aisle, ducking to keep his head from hitting the curved metal ceiling. As he made his way toward the back, clutching his cane, lurching with a painful-looking limp, he saw the empty spot beside her and groaned himself into it without making eye contact or acknowledging her at all.
Lissa did not necessarily believe in signs. Still, it seemed she’d been given a second chance to thank him. She would not miss another opportunity.
But before she could say anything—before she could even say hello—he crossed his arms around his cane, slumped in the seat, and closed his eyes.
Why was he even on her bus? Did he not know the camp had been rousted? Maybe he would step off at her stop only to be surprised to find the sidewalks cleared, the tent city gone. She decided he’d probably set up a new campsite nearby, on the same bus line; he didn’t look like he could walk very far. She tried to muster the courage to speak to him as the bus made its way through the park toward Route 26. Why was it so difficult? This man had saved Olive’s life. Maybe hers too. His size, his scars, his living situation—none of that mattered.
Say something.
Overcoming her nerves, she took a deep breath and turned to him to speak.
At that exact moment he began to snore. His chest filled with air, his expanding body threatening to push her against the bus window. Each breath arrived as a long, deep rumble, thunder rolling in over the horizon; each breath left as a quack, a ridiculous, comical flutter of lips loud enough to scare birds into flight.
She put her hand to her mouth to prevent her laughter and studied the man with curiosity. Up close he was even bigger than she’d thought, with ears the size of her hands, a broad chin, shoulders like the headboard of Olive’s bed. He smelled like sweat and car exhaust and rain. She studied his scars, thick parallel lines that raked one entire side of his face, including the eye, raised above the skin and shining and red enough to look new. The eye itself was white. Milky.
It was also open, staring at her. She sat back against the window, startled.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare.”
“You were looking at my scars.”
Lissa nodded.
“It’s hard to see anything else.”
“No . . .” Lissa trailed off; to finish would be to lie. “Can I ask about them? How . . . how you got them?”
He returned her stare for a long moment.
“No,” he said, and closed his eyes once more.
Having missed her opportunity a second time, Lissa decided she would not say anything else. She felt rebuked—either he did not recognize her or he did not want to talk, or both, and she would honor his wish. At least for the duration of the trip.
But as the bus approached her neighborhood, she panicked anew. To get up from her seat, she would have to wake him. She cleared her throat like a cat with a hairball as her stop neared but her efforts yielded no response. The man sat perfectly still.
“Excuse me?”
She tapped him on the arm. He did not rouse, asleep and oblivious to her escalating panic.
Lissa put a hand on his arm. She’d always been aware of her own legs—not ashamed, exactly, but aware of them, of their thickness, the meatiness of her thighs and calves. In sixth grade a misguided gym teacher with a shoeshine-brush flattop and formaldehyde breath had bestowed her with a lifetime of mild self-consciousness by referring to her as “Thunder Thighs,” a nickname that her high school boyfriend—Olive’s father—latched on to in a way she would have held against him if it weren’t buried deep on a long list of emotional transgressions. But at their thickest, her legs were thinner than the man’s arm. She squeezed it gently.
Nothing.
She shook it as politely as she could. Still no response.
As the bus braked at her stop, Lissa knew she would have to take the only recourse still available to her—she would have to climb over the man’s prodigious lap. Complicating matters, he’d jammed his long legs against the seat back in front of him to fit in the tight seat, with the cane between them. They arched high off the ground, a potentially insurmountable obstacle between her and the aisle.
She looked up, saw the driver watching impatiently, and got to her feet. Facing the back of the bus and holding the overhead rail for support, she pivoted, lifted one leg as high as she could, and stepped carefully over him. But even when she stretched her toes, on pointe like a ballerina, she could not reach the floor on the other side of his legs. Now all the eyes of the other passengers were upon her, the driver watching in her rearview mirror with train-wreck curiosity. Lissa was an unqualified gymnast hung up on the Olympics vault, and the judges awaited her next move.
Still holding the rail with one hand, she grabbed her work bag from her seat with the other and tried to pass it between herself and the man and into the aisle. But its weight threw her off-balance, and for a long moment she teetered and swayed, knowing she would fall. She contemplated retreat. But there was no going back. Instead she went all in, pushing off with her inside leg and leaping over the man’s lap onto her other foot.
For a few perilous seconds, her fate—like her body—could go either way. Then, to her relief, her foot touched the aisle floor.
But now she found herself with two new problems: the first being that she was straddling the giant, holding the overhead rail as a bus full of people watched; the second being that he was now wide awake and staring at her, his own face just inches from hers.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s my stop.”
“Mine too. Remember?”
Lissa nodded, embarrassed.
“May I?” he asked.
She nodded again. Putting his hands on either side of her waist—they nearly encircled her like a belt—he lifted her without any hint of effort and set her down gently in the aisle. Some of the other passengers applauded.
Grabbing her bag, an embarrassed Lissa hurried down the aisle. Once outside, she waited for him on the sidewalk. She saw him wince and try to hide it as he stepped off the stairs into the rain. He brushed past her without stopping.
“Hey,” she said, following him toward her building. “Hey!”
He approached the door to the lobby, opened it, and stepped inside. She followed him in.
“This is my building,” she said.
“Mine too.”
“You live in my building?”
“Yes.”
“Since when?”
He pushed the button for her floor. “Since I got back to Portland.”
“But you were sleeping in that homeless camp. You had a tent there. I watched that camp for weeks. I called the cops on it. I called TriMet. I studied that camp. You were there almost the entire time it was.”
The doors opened on her floor and they exited together. Despite his limp and broken gait, he walked quickly with long, pained strides, and Lissa hurried to keep pace. Then he astonished her again by stopping in front of her apartment.
“This is my apartment.”
“Congratulations.” His voice heavy with annoyance, he turned and opened the door across the hall.
“You live across the hall from me?”
“Is there something you want?” His manner brusque, impatient, she saw in his eyes that he just wanted to be left alone.
But she could not let it go.
“I thought you were homeless,” she said. “You lived in a homeless camp.”
He looked at her and she felt the ferocity of his gaze, recognized the pain in his eyes.
“Just tell me this,” she said. “Why would you sleep in a homeless camp if you’re not homeless?”
The man ducked his head to fit through the doorway and turned, awkwardly, to face her. Taking a deep breath, he shut his eyes and rolled his head around until his neck cracked. With a long, slow sound, he released his breath again.
He opened his eyes.
He shut the door.
12
THE ASSHOLE LIVING IN CAPTIVITY
Farley walked all the next morning. Whether the miles he had been forcing upon himself over the past weeks were making his injuries better or worse, he could not tell, but with each day he felt stronger on his feet, more comfortable with the realignment of muscle, tendon, and bone, more confident in the tectonic shift that had devastated his body. Still it hurt—the pain a song he sang himself, with each verse adding more voices, a richer instrumentation, a faster backbeat—but now, at least, he recognized the melody.
He’d been walking without really paying attention, but that afternoon, to his surprise, he found himself back on the hill at Washington Park and made his way once more toward the zoo. At the gate, he paid and bought himself lunch—burritos instead of hot dogs, a side salad that felt like it had been taken from one of the animal exhibits—and took his seat in front of the bears. All afternoon he glared into their enclosure until he heard the announcement over the loudspeakers that the zoo would be closing soon.
When he got to his feet to leave, it took some effort, his body slow to respond, on the verge of betrayal. But it did not fold beneath him, and one tentative step at a time he made his way toward the exit.
As he passed the Steller Cove exhibit in the Pacific Shores habitat, a sea lion approached the glass and stared at him with cartoonish saucer eyes. It followed him as he walked, drifting effortlessly without any visible sign of effort or propulsion. Farley stopped and stood close to the glass. The animal approached, floating face-to-face with him, big eyes bright and focused, expression interested, just inches away. Farley cocked his head. The sea lion mimicked him. When he raised a big hand, it did the same, lifting a flipper. He shuffled two steps to the left; it followed. A massive animal—nearly ten feet long and almost two thousand pounds, fat on salmon and pollock—it moved free of the friction and effort that haunted each of Farley’s own moves, as if the glass between them were not the wall of a tank but a mirror, the animal on the other side a reflection of another version of Farley himself, a glimpse into another dimension, another possibility. Bubbles escaped its mouth, which curled into what looked like a smile.
“What are you laughing at me for? You’re the asshole living in captivity.”
“Am I?” it asked.
The sea lion hadn’t actually spoken, of course. But that didn’t mean it was wrong.
“Is that what you do here every day? Talk to the animals?”
This time the words took a woman’s voice. Farley turned to find the woman from his building standing behind him. She wore a raincoat and carried a backpack and looked at him with what might be curiosity but might also be concern.
“Mostly I just listen. Occasionally I ask follow-up questions. What do you do here every day?”
“I work here.”
He squinted at her for a beat, considering possibilities. “Lion tamer?”
“More like ‘crap wrangler.’ I’m a vet tech.”
Farley nodded but said nothing else, leaving the three of them in a silence that began as awkward, became uncomfortable, and then threatened to turn outright painful. The woman rocked on the heels of her Nikes. Farley stood still and let the fiery pain of his muscles engulf him until his soul felt charred. The sea lion floated, waiting to see what would happen next.
“Can I give you a ride home?” she asked finally.
Farley nodded at the sea lion. “You talking to me or him?”
“You.”
“You have a car?”
“No, but I know where we can catch a bus.”
“What about him?”
“Can he cover his own fare?”
Farley looked at the sea lion and shrugged. For a moment its expression looked like disappointment, but then it turned to boredom, and with a flick of its tail the animal swam quickly away.
The woman set off in what Farley believed to be the wrong direction. He followed. The effort turned over the engine of pain that ran his body these days and it sprung to life with a roar.
“I know you work here,” he said, turning a grunt into words. “But isn’t the exit the other way?”
“I want to show you something.”
They walked through the Great Northwest exhibit, threading through the crowd past the bobcat, cougar, and mountain goat exhibits. She stopped in front of the California condor cage and Farley squinted to read the plaque.
This critically endangered species
has a wingspan of nearly ten feet
and can weigh more
than twenty-five pounds.
Four or five of the big birds stood around their cage, brooding, severe, and black as soot, with pink-and-yellow heads and gray legs. Their feathers formed a sort of frill around their necks.
“They remind me of my great-aunt Margie,” the woman said. “She was big and ugly and mean, and always wore this ridiculous feather boa that she thought made her look glamorous. Also, I think she ate carrion—at least that’s what dinner at her house tasted like the one year she hosted Thanksgiving.”
“Is this what you wanted to show me?”
“No.”
With a conspiratorial grin, she walked around the side of the cage and disappeared behind it beneath an employees only sign. He waited. After a few seconds she reappeared.
“You coming?”
He followed her around the back where the exhibit butted up against a tall metal fence all but buried by brush and the trees of the wooded area behind it. He saw a gate in the fence padlocked shut, with a barely legible no exit sign zip-tied to it, faded and weather-beaten from the sun and rain. She opened the padlock, slipped it from the hasp, and opened the gate.
“The lock is broken. Has been for years. See?”
She clicked it open and closed a few times to demonstrate.
“After you,” she said.
Farley stepped through the gate onto an uneven, unused path. She followed him through and closed the gate behind her. The rough path paralleled the fence for a hundred yards and then ended. They emerged from the trees behind a half-dozen dumpsters at the edge of the zoo parking lot near the bus stop.
“Sometimes I like to come and go this way to avoid the crush of the crowds at the main exit,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone I showed you this, but you can sneak into the zoo without paying for a ticket this way.”
