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In the other corner, the handler talked to the bear and stroked its head. John formulated a plan. Years ago, on a children’s TV show, he’d seen a man climb into a gorilla suit that had a single zippered seam running around the waist. If John could get his hand on the seam of the bear suit or, better yet, unzip it, he could expose this act for what it was.
“I’m gonna go for the zipper,” he told Will.
“What?”
“Zipper,” John shouted, as the bear came toward them, its head back and its snout pointing to John like a gun. “Now!” John cried, and the boys pounced, Will going for the hips, John tackling the shoulder. They knocked the creature off its feet and fell on top, but the bear quickly rolled onto its side, it’s legs splayed defensively against the canvas. Will embraced a thigh and John clung to the animal’s back, his face buried in the stinking fur at the nape of the animal’s neck. Looked at close, John saw that the hair of the coat wasn’t just black, but an explosion of shades of black and dark brown.
For several seconds, the grapplers held their places, the bear solidly anchored, the boys awkwardly hanging on. Time was running out. As the crowd screamed, John reached with his right arm around the bear’s side and slowly walked his fingers through the tough hide, feeling for a zipper. Nothing. The bear lay still, as if taking measure of John’s move. The grunts stopped. John pressed, his arm extended and exposed. If only he could get to the zipper. Suddenly, the creature bucked. John bounced back and a furry right foreleg came down with a vicious karate chop on John’s probing forearm. He screamed. The bear shook free and scudded away. John lay on his back, hugging his arm to his stomach. The pain came in waves. He couldn’t stand to look down, so he stared straight up into the bright lamp attached to the top of the tent. Will’s face appeared above him. “You OK?” Will asked.
John forced himself to look. His right forearm had a bulge about four inches below the elbow and then made a slight dogleg to the left. “I think it’s broken,” he said.
The crowd had fallen silent. “Hang in there,” Will told him.
The barker appeared above John, the thin face in a scowl under the cowboy hat. “I told you no funny business,” he snarled. He knelt and pulled away John’s good arm. For a few seconds, he studied the situation, then carefully placed the good arm back. He stood and walked away without saying anything.
With Will looking anxiously down at him, John tried to say, “Sumbubbabitch,” but for some reason he couldn’t form the word. So he closed his eyes. He lost track of time and may have fainted. After a while, he saw a bright-red throbbing light broken by spidery veins on the inside of his eyelids. Will lifted John’s head and took off his helmet. When John opened his eyes, the throbbing red light covered one side of the tent wall. “Easy now,” Will said, putting his arms under John’s shoulders, lifting him.
Two cops stood behind Will. “We’ll get you to the hospital, son,” one of them assured. The barker’s cruel face peeked over the cop’s shoulder.
Still clutching his arm to his stomach, John walked in a cluster of helpmates down an aisle and then outside. The air felt frigid. John realized he was washed in sweat. The cluster swept him to a police car, its red light spinning. The cops helped him into the backseat and closed the door. A silent crowd stood around. As the police car pulled out, John saw Will’s anxious face fall away from the window, and John had a panicky need to have his friend beside him. He wanted to scream out, to stop the car, but he was beyond that now. The car eased forward. The flashing red light streaked across a gaudy landscape of game booths, food stands, and clumps of gawking West Virginians, and John knew he was entering a place he had only heard about, but now he could never leave. He hugged his throbbing arm.
It’s late by the time Lincoln finishes the story. Amy’s head lies heavily on his chest, and he absently combs her soft hair with his fingers. He feels relieved—emptied, but unburdened.
“Did that really happen?” Amy asks without looking up. Lincoln can hear the toll of the all-nighter in her voice.
“More or less.”
“What kind of an answer is that?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever find out if the bear was real?”
“My father tried to check. They insisted it was a real bear.”
In the unit next door, an ice fisherman is watching American Idol with the volume too high. Amy falls quiet. Lincoln thinks that perhaps she has dropped asleep at last. But suddenly she lifts her head and scolds, “That didn’t ruin your childhood, John.”
No, it didn’t. But when he thinks back before the bear, he remembers—he thinks he remembers—how he used to operate with a kind of natural grace. Patterns unfolded, doors swung open. His path was clear—or, more to the point, he didn’t have to think about the path. It was just there, beckoning. Afterward, he faced uncertainty, missed chances, bad luck, and bad decisions. For all his talent and privileges, he was somehow unprepared for a world where you had to make hard choices, dig deep down to find what was really moving you. The bear introduced him to that. It was as if the creature were telling him that he didn’t really know, didn’t really get it. Sumbubbabitch.
No, Lincoln thinks, the wrestling match didn’t ruin his childhood. But it ended it.
22
FOR THE NEXT two days, Lincoln and Amy work furiously on the book, punctuating their efforts with interludes in bed. She spends the days and nights in room 14, only returning to 11 to shower and change. The collaborative editing goes remarkably smoothly. Once, defending a scene he’d added, Lincoln says the action will make the book more commercial, more likely to “grab readers,” and over time “grabby” becomes code to express the sensibility he’s trying to impose. Even Amy uses the word without rancor. At the same time, Amy robustly defends the literary merit of some of the material that Lincoln has deleted—language and ideas that she insists would make the book appealing to “thinking readers,” as she puts it. They end up retrieving sentences, paragraphs, even several sections from the computer file containing her original manuscript. Jokingly, they talk about joining the yin and the yang, the “thinky” and the “grabby.” Secretly Lincoln suspects there’s actually something to the notion.
As for the real-life sex, they assure each other that this is just a passing occasion—curious circumstances have brought them together, and there’s nothing beyond the diversion and pleasure. Lunker sex, they call it, honoring the location, and they acknowledge that it must end when they leave for Chicago. There’s not even much discussion of the matter, the dictates—jobs, ages, outlooks—are so obvious. One afternoon, as they lie in bed in a becalmed after-moment, Amy admits that she feels too young to link up with a divorced man trailing an ex-wife. Stung by her candor, Lincoln reminds himself of Amy’s naïveté, the slightly annoying sense he’s had from the start that she’s an intern at life. With equal candor, he tells her that what he needs now, after the disastrous end to his marriage, is a mature woman, someone who’s been through several serious relationships and knows herself and her emotions. The strong bond Amy and Lincoln have built in two days of intense editing helps them accept each other’s confessions with grace.
In keeping with their continuing policy of discretion, they try to hide their relationship from the curious proprietor of the motel, though inevitably, the maneuver fails. “I ran into Mrs. Lunker outside, and I had to tell her that I was your girlfriend,” Amy admits on Saturday morning.
“Why’d you do that?” Branding the relationship makes Lincoln feel uneasy, as if unnamed it could disappear into the past.
“What else could I say? My bed has been untouched for three days. She asked where I’ve been sleeping, and I didn’t want her to think I was a slut.”
“Hmmm.” Why didn’t Amy think to muss the sheets? Why didn’t he think to suggest it? After a moment Lincoln says, “You know, that’s not really her name.”
“You call her that.”
“Not to her face. I just named her that because of the motel. I think her real name is Geiselbrecht, or something.”
