THE BEAR IN THE BACK

 I usually look back when they get in the cab. Just a quick glance is usually enough, with some steel in the eye from time to time –at least enough for the romance. It is a natural human urge, like the urge to speak. Not so much to see, as to be face to face. Even the blind do this. What we aren’t born with, we learn growing up among those others of our species: a groomed self defense. The face is where deception comes from, danger. Get face to face, just in case …

Just in case what? Just in case anything. Just in case the constant terrible anything of the news. Just in case the con­stant nightly, real anything of a driver’s ten hour shift.  Ask, the next time you are in a cab, to match the most frightening moments of his week, or hers, with yours. If the driver will talk, and is honest, and you are, yours will be marched to the short end of the line, and you will be glad. Anyway, I usually look back. That ride I didn’t. And after the door slammed shut, no face appeared in the rear view mirror for any other kind of a look.

 “Kirkham and La Playa,” he said. The end of the western world. The end of the universe: fog swept, sun forsaken and god forgot. A comfort only to lovers and dreamers who have not yet under­stood. The houses look like they’ve come from an East Coast mid-winter boardwalk, and they smell worse. Gray and remorseless, steeped in mildew and seaweed winds. For a good part of the year Kirkham and La Playa is not even California. But the fare was long and the night was getting short. I punched the meter and dropped into drive.

 I had picked him up at Sutter and Leavenworth, downhill and dark from the elegant shoulder of Nob Hill, and the last way-station before the slow whirlpool of the Tenderloin began to spin its way towards oblivion. I turned the nose of the aging six-cylinder out Sutter towards Van Ness and settled into it, slouched and leaning against the door, left arm cocked at the wrist and holding the wheel, right arm thrown back on the seat. Give me an edge to see him, I thought, under a street lamp, or stopped at a red. But I knew he was there all right, in the rasp of his breath.

“Don’t go up to Pine,” he said. “Grab Eddy.”  Normally I am glad to take whatever way the fare says; your money, your map. But I hadn’t seen even the edge of his head yet, and his voice seemed to come from somewhere not yet there. I wanted to have a look before there would be nobody’s help but mine.

 Pine is the normal ride from downtown out to the Park. It rises and falls steadily west, timing its lights, then to an easy sweep onto Lincoln and westering on to the beach. Eddy would do nearly the same, but without timed lights, and passing through some of the darkest blocks of the city. I compromised and took Turk instead. Turk starts out squat and perpendicu­lar to Van Ness, bolted to its course by the enormous square of Opera Plaza, igniting at Gough in a blaze of light, and disappearing like a shot towards space into the darkness of the Western Addition.

 “Eddy, not Turk I said,”  he said. I raised myself slightly from my slouch. There was still nothing to be seen of his eyes in the black, back-lit back. If the shot out Turk was through some rela­tively friendly darkness towards a fat earth moon, Eddy’s passage was cold and deep, darksiding one of Jupiter’s meanest. There were cross streets out there only the real crazy cabbies ever heard when called. But I did what he said; what the hell. Every door I’d ever leaned on, opened; every mountain going up had a mountain going down.

Nothing now but the sound of the car engine, the dry over-warm heat, and the faint smell of new brake shoes burning-in: very small company when wanting a crowd. We passed by Eddy and Laguna, the block where bad rock was sold and kids stood around with fistfuls of cash and the confidence of Uzis. I craned my neck again to try to find him in the mirror. Even a reflection or a moving shadow would make me feel easier. I had heard nothing from him for blocks, as if he had disappeared. Opening the door for a dead man out at the ocean would screw up my evening bad; I didn’t even have my gate-and-gas yet, and the shift was coming up hard on half gone.

“This is Laguna, isn’t it?” he said. “Yup,” I said, flicking my eyes across the dark expanses of the apartments, worrying at the tail of exhaust coming from the darkened, primer mottled Cougar.”I faced up to reality yesterday,” he said. The low gasping growl raced up the back of my head. My eyes shifted to the mirror to see the enormous dark bulk of his head beginning to appear, surfacing from the lower right of the frame.

Then it was filled with him, pulling himself up and forward, in the center, his arms stretched wide and gripping the far corners of the seat, his head dropped and hanging from the middle of the long branch of his arms, swaying like a single, enormous over-ripe fruit about to drop.

“I faced reality, and it come on me like a bear.” His deep grief of a voice gave way to the sound of the car again, the engine, the tires on the asphalt, the whir of the fan from the heater. Then, as if from the floorboards, or the tires rumbling steadily over a ridged road, a low, dark, distant moan escaped him, as if another creature, caught inside him, enchanted, were testing this moment of his weakness to escape. It rose and then fell back. And then the car again. And then, again, the dark, shaggy, enormous, threatening throat. “It got a hold of me, it got a really hold of me and it stank,” he said. I could feel his arms tightening on the backrest, as though they were being turnbuckled back through his chest, and the seat beginning to bow backwards, straining, forcing me forward towards the wheel.

 His head began to shake slowly from side to side, testing the weight of what was pressing against it, from the inside, measuring its diminishment, or its growth. His arms continued to haul back between the far edges of the seat, and then his head to lift. Lights flashed white against the line of his scalp. He opened his mouth so the voice pressing it could make its way out. “It stank so bad, so very, very bad.” We were passing Broderick now, leaving the darkest streets behind. He threw himself backwards and his weight settled the car down and back onto its rear springs. His hair and the crescent of scalp disappeared from the mirror.

 A pain that came so often it no longer felt like company began to knock at the upper corner of my left eye. I knew from long experience it would come on in invited or not. Before the night was over it would stretch from the eye back across the temple, through the thicket of hair and spread into a drying ache near the top of my head. More than once I had pulled over to look in the mirror for a trace of blood, or some subcutaneous scar. Always nothing.

The dispatch radio did not break the silence. I wanted to reach over and roll the volume knob, make sure I had not left it turned down from some previous low voiced passenger. A white lace apron whirled suddenly into the headlights. Left! Pull! Then gone, only a cloth, not a woman, leaping away on fog stockinged legs, up and to the right, leaving my heart to settle and the wheel to center itself alone. I shifted slightly in the seat, out of one frame of fear and back to another.

I had flipped a quick left and then a right to get back onto Turk. Eddy wouldn’t get us all the way to Masonic where we would make our turns for the Park. With the clear lift of Turk ahead, and my fare quiet in the back I decided to hold on clear out to Stanyan. The fewer turns the better I thought. Maybe he’s sleeping. The tired old engine had cozied down to a wheezing crawl. Number 323, avoid this one the next time, I thought. Even his breathing had faded quiet and I began to drift. Just passed through four hours of the shift and my back was already beginning to ache, a long dull welt up the left side of the spine and an occasional needle prodding the kidney. Did I have to drive tomorrow? How much to go to cover the rent?

As we passed the solemn, dark presence of the University on the Hill, the car began to pitch slowly back and forth, side to side, as if caught in a cross wind high over the Bay, or as if some weight were being shifted, silently, suddenly and repeatedly somewhere along the frame; as if a couple, new to each other were entangled, wrapped in love’s python, oblivious to all but its tightening coils. Out of the previous silence came a whimpering, and then a gurgling, the sharp slap of breath against the still air of the cab. Then a grunting, in two voices, as though two bikers were lifting the remains of a Harley off a crushed set of hips of a third. I had to look. My life depended on the next two moments. But I could not turn my face.  As if frozen in a dream, trying hard to make yourself believe it is a dream, not not one; that it will be over; that you will not fall. Or die. Or be found where you are hiding. A terrible, snorting, strug­gling heat filled the car. The windows fogged up complete­ly. And still I could not look. I leaned forward, as if everything were normal, reaching to turn on the defroster, fingers groping at the darkened levers. You are just the driver, I said to my­self. Let him live as he will. Then, suddenly, the struggle was over. We crested the hill and began the long descent to the sea. The long pain had anchored itself firmly in my eye and was beginning to trace it slow burning crawl across the naked furrows of my brow into the forest of hair.

The silence held for a block or two. The sensation of death had escaped from under my arms and begun to crawl in curlicues around them, leaving a goose-bump trail. “Oh Christ!” he said, in a voice that seemed to be wrenched from a torn out mouth. “And it got its claws well into my back, do you see, and it begun to pull. Oh Christ it stank, and it pulled me into it, pulled me, my face, right into it, into its rancid, fat, stinking belly, and the hairs were sticking into my face, and into my eyes, and into my nose and into my mouth, and oh Jesus oh Jesus get this real get this real get this real away from me I was screaming out but the sound was going no where but into that big bear’s belly, and it was diggin’ its claws into my back and beginning to pull me apart like to I was a little bitty bit of a clam or a rolled up arma­dilla, and those hooks were doin’ worse’n any drugger ever give me, I…”

He lurched up out of the seat again, so fast that the cab leapt forward, and grabbed the back of the seat.

 “…and then it dropped its snout by my head, and commenced to pushin’ at it, an’ my neck an’ shoulder, till it open its mouth, and oh Jesus Jesus that breath was like the breath of the devil I knew I could see now that he was pushin’ onto my face there was a little light comin’ in and I could see those teeth, and I could see, did you ever see the linin’ of a big dog’s mouth mister?”  he asked me, “up close, up real close, like dark, wet leather, like soft an’ plastic, like dirty wet rags to sop up the blood after the teeth’ve done they work.”  He was staring straight ahead now, straight out over the headlights pouring into the endless blackness of Lincoln Avenue as it rushed us towards the sea, patches of fog drifting out of the trees to the right, tearing apart on us as we kept up out westerly rush. At Nineteenth Avenue, where the lights grew bright for a block I looked up at the mirror, and there was his face, filling the odd piece of glass with his forehead and eyes.

 His eyes were terrible, cloven by an intense scar tissue ridge running between then, the butt end of a wedge that had driven his pupils wider apart than would let anyone properly see. And the gray whiteness of his forehead, from his hairline to the great protruding eyebrows was carved into counties and claims by dry trickles of blood: a bramble works etched on his skin. A livid furrow ran northeast out of one of his eyes. I couldn’t be sure which because of the mirror.

 “Oh that was a bear,” he said, “oh that was a real bear. Life.”  We rode for a while. The fog thickened, began to turn cloak and wing, but almost as if afraid, as if witches had signaled it off, it swift thinned to wisps of gray white night and left us the road. The dispatcher, or the radio, had gone coffee for the night. I was alone. And the man. “And we got to tame it. Ain’t we?” he said

We rolled into the wide, happy, sweeping left turn from Lincoln going west to Sunset headed south. “Ain’t we? Turn right here,” he said, “at Kirkham.”  The cab had gotten oppressive and dank, filled with a smell and a presence, as it did with a smoker, but worse. Smoke is a dead smell; this was warm and alive: hair and blood, folds of flesh that had never been washed. I lowered my hand to the window knob. It didn’t give. The smell was growing heavier, in layers, up from under the seat and the floor; turning rank, like a drain with a bad stand of grease. His thick hair was burred and standing on end, haloed by backlights. The deep creases and drying blood on his face slowly lit and fell to dark over and over as we rolled under lights to the shore. La Playa: end of the line. Across the high wind swept dune the Great Highway, then the wall, then the water, the mighty Pacific, the far distant land where the sun went down, the land of the dead for generations who once used to lived here.

“We got to tame it is all. I get out here.” He dropped a crumpled, damp twenty onto the seat beside me, and shouldered the door, heavily, almost falling, than catching himself, he turned back to me. Its just the same. “You do drugs? No, but you been loved. And then, of a sudden, it’s over an’ you don’t know why. Or one day you seen so clear, a man crying in the car behind you, trying to drive himself down some highway away from his misery, or an old woman with her shopping cart filled with her life, standing at a corner, not knowing which way to go. You see it. You feel those teeth in your throat that you can not cry out. That’s true. Life is bigger’n you, an once it comes on to you you can not get it off.” I had turned to look at him now, trying to find him face to full face. But his matted, shaggy hair covered the side of his face nearest me, and in the window of the open door, his reflected features were dissolved in the cars parked along the sidewalk. Only one eye was sharp and clear in the eroded reflection; hazel brown, like mine, but sunk in a dark nest of bruises and hair,the remnants of nights that had been broken in pieces, and the reflections of windows and cars and street lights in the window. The reflected eye was looking straight at me, unblinking, as though deciding something, as if my throat, naked in the darkness, were a fountain he could seek surcease from. Then, in one of those brain times defying all measure­ment, I knew him. An eye, a ridge of bone, a nose, an appearance of jaw I recognized. From somewhere, sometime, some human person I had once known. As though a friend from thirty years before in the guise of new flesh, as though a dream come badly real, as though an ancestor appearing though you in the evening mirror, or your own face in another sex, another race, in a photo, on a sidewalk, in a city you will never see again. I tried to speak and grew confused. Speech to this great, hulking, fetid man seemed silly, or simply dangerous. Even if I knew him. I counseled myself, let him go. If this is real, you will meet him again. If life is as he says.

He began to shake again, from his massive shoulders to his head. He tried to lift himself up and out onto the street. “Some people they say,” he said, “walk the world and never meet up with it.” His hand was on the top of the door frame. “An’ they say in the next one it doesn’t have such terrible claws.”

He heaved and stumbled, then righted himself to lumber, at a gait and pace unimaginable for a man so big, around the corner of the shoddy old apartments, and disappear. I watched him go, then slid the car into gear. The door half closed on its own. I stopped and stretched back and across the seat to reach and tug it shut. Scattered across the back seat were tufts of thick, sharp black hair, and darker, glistening streaks. Probably blood. I’d have to stop by the garage and tip the gas man to clean it up; get a slice of pizza and call it dinner.

 It was a long ride back to Geary and Hyde. Enough to ride me away from some other man’s life I thought. Enough to turn on some music and try to lose the headache that had peaked and settled into the throb that usually kept me company until I could find my way to sleep; enough to try to flex the pain out of my back, enough to meet the top of the shift and begin the downward count to home. But tonight I couldn’t go to work on them. The car was still rocking slowly back and forth. The springs were whimper­ing like sounds in an insomniac night, and a sub-audible moan I could sense, not through my ears but my bones, was rising under the thrum of the tires on the dark asphalt. Even with the window run down till I shivered with cold the car still stank. Rancid flesh, unwashed hair, clothes stained with sweat, trousers with urine. In the mirror I kept constantly checking for the bozos of the night but in the reflections of the windows, in the patterns of light from the on coming cars was an eye that would not leave me, a mirror of a soul, sunk in bruises and life.

“The Bear in the Back”

from Tales of the Ixat

Will Kirkland

This is from some writing years ago, published in Tamaqua, Fall 1992 and only just now shared here.