Southern Legitimacy Statement: Yep, even though I was born in Cincinnati, I’ve spent all but three days of my life in the South, those being Kentucky, Florida (gasp), Georgia and Alabama. A friend asked me what type of tree I wanted to be hung from, after reading the attached story.
The Bared Bear
Marian was pedaling a stationary bike, traveling, she half-supposed, home to Louisville from Tusktown. By the odometer she’d ridden a mile and a half, and since there weren’t any eighteen-wheelers lane-hogging in Chuck’s Fitness and Spa and since Chuck’s overhead air-conditioning was blasting her face, she closed her eyes and pumped, remembering a guy she’d dated when she worked at The Courier Journal.
. . . a walrus moustache as wide as his face, a waiter who wanted oh so badly to write the Great American Novel. Weekly, just like Parade magazine ran ads for Collectible Commemorative Chinaware, he wrote Scalding Scathing Satires. How patiently she’d read each, knowing he punched them on an outdated computer between serving nouveau cuisine at some swank Louisville restaurant and swilling Schlitz beer at some drab Louisville dive. As to their affair, he was Concorde-jetting while she was hang-gliding. About the time she spotted the runway’s end, he wound up flying off on his own, departing for graduate school in Florida to work on a Master’s degree in English. He mailed a very literary note (spewed from a nearly inkless printer) about angst and commitment—with a P.S. asking her to “post” (he’d really typed that word) a book she’d borrowed to Gainesville. Though the note arrived long past Derby Day, she drank a mint julep to his memory and forgot the book. Now, four years later, she still kept an eye out for his Great American Novel in Barnes & Noble. Who could ever tell?
She sighed.
“You’re working up a real sweat, girlfriend. Where ya traveling to?”
Startled by the grating voice, Marian lurched. The woman who’d spoken was barely pedaling a nearby bike, though her face glowed as red as a pickled communist beet. The woman grinned and blew a thick black curl off thick black glasses, both blacks counter-pointing her red.
“Nowhere in particular, I suppose.”
“Now that’s a bad sign, girlfriend, a bad sign.”
Marian had seen this woman here in Chuck’s before, heard her arguing with some jock over Bear Browning and Adolph Krupp. The Krupp name Marian knew from Kentucky: he was New South University’s basketball coach through the early seventies, the Baron of Basketball. And Bear Browning, he was Bear Browning. Marian always thought intense people fun, so she asked: “What were you and jock-boy arguing about the other night?”
“That close-minded fool. Let me tell you . . .”
When the beet-red, communist-red woman with her scratchy voice and thick black glasses began a harangue about Adolph Krupp and Bear Browning, how the two had carried on a closet homosexual affair at New South University when they both coached there, how that was the real reason the Bear left for Old South U in Alabama, because of a lover’s tiff, Marian pedaled nonchalantly and bit her cheek to think: Comrade! In exactly which dank cellar do you and your friends meet? Can I bring Coca-Cola and toss peanuts?
“. . . The point is, I don’t have any proof.” The woman punched her glasses onto the bridge of her nose, then lunged angrily at her bike’s pedals.
Marian suppressed a laugh by lunging into her own pedals. “Why don’t you hire the private detective three doors down? That’s his specialty, uncovering affairs, so people can get divorces. In fact, he even went to New South U.”
The woman stopped pedaling. Her knuckles whitened on the handlebars. She chuffed at the troublesome black curl before turning foggy glasses toward Marian: “Girlfriend, that’s a dang good idea.” Wheezing tepid air toward a male grunting at bench press, she pedaled again, bouncing on the seat.
“Proof, proof, proof.”
“Proof, proof, proof,” Marian joined in, laughing.
The woman was certifiable. This was Tusktown: to intimate that Bear Browning repressed the passing game was dangerous enough, but to announce that he repressed being gay bordered on slow suicide, as in the Board of Trustees uncrating four spanking new John Deere tractors on the library green, hitching one to each leg and arm, then cranking all four while blonde cheerleaders performed splits and the male student body collectively expectorated a grocer’s case of Red Man chewing tobacco.
As the woman kept huffing “proof, proof, proof,” Marian smiled at the thought of the private investigator’s bullet face lengthening, his blue eyes dilating at this woman’s ludicrous suggestion. His name was Wallace Webb and he seemed nice enough. He’d started coming in here a couple of weeks back. She liked his looks: sandy thinning hair; a studious hooked nose; a puppy-dog way of tilting his head when he grinned—always widely. No moustache, thank heaven. And those intense blue eyes! Next best to the resurrection of Elvis. She’d be doing him a favor by sending this customer down, even this loony one, because in yesterday’s heat he’d complained that he needed new clients to pay for a broken air conditioner, joking that Alabama’s divorce rate wasn’t keeping pace with his budget, most of which he spent on science-fiction movies and books.
“Proof, proof, proof,” the woman again huffed.
Marian glanced over: Wallace honey, if it’s science fiction you want, I’m sending you a methane-breather from Planet 12. She wondered how he’d react. Probably use science fiction to draw some moral, just like last night when he asked if she’d ever seen The Blob while he spotted her bench presses. Assuming her grunt meant Yes instead of Pay Attention To These Weights Before They Crack My Skull, he’d blithely continued: “Sometimes I think we’re all like those people in that movie, trapped in a theater, panicking, hoping to escape the bugaboo blob.” She’d locked her elbows to balance 80 pounds over her nose and stare at his chin, round and cute. Then came his moral: “I mean, look at us, grunting various gasses, hoping we’ll escape the blob of graverot and attain eternal youth.” With lines like that, he couldn’t possibly be writing the Great American Novel.
She pulled to the present with a huff. On cue, an anorexic teenager who needed to munch twenty pounds of chocolate chip cookies got on another stationary bike. The crazy woman’s “proof, proof, proof,” had eroded into “poof, poof, poof.” They all pedaled frantically to escape the blob.
“Phew,” the crazy woman finally sighed. An alien in a spacesuit, she turned steamed lenses toward Marian to leak methane: “Thanks again for the advice, girlfriend. I’ll talk with that detective fella tomorrow.”
As she spoke, a couple of ex-footballers banged their way through the front door, bristling oiled muscles under studied rag-tag sweats, no doubt hoping to pick up coeds or young secretaries working out before supper.
“Damned jocks,” the woman grunted as she got off the bike. “Every one of them should choke on steroids and have their penises drop.”
Marian said she wouldn’t argue that, and the teenage girl giggled. The woman wiped her red face with a huge brown beach towel: “If you ever hear anything through the grapevine about—”
“I’ll let you know.” Marian spoke sharply, not wanting a repeat about the Bear and the Baron being ex-lovers when jocks might overhear.
“’Night, girlfriend.” The woman grinned in a beaver way to waddle toward the women’s shower, dragging her brown towel like a beaver’s tail. Marian smiled vaguely at the anorexic teenager and kept pedaling. Marian hated that stupid catchword, “girlfriend.” It implied some quilt-making, moralizing sisterhood she’d never join.
There was a clunk: the brown towel caught in the women’s room door and the crazy woman peeped back. Marian considered running to warn the detective, but then told herself he was just one more damned walking Alabama penis. Just as quickly, she re-decided. After all, he seemed human enough, with only a modicum of sniffs at her perfume and gawps at her legs. And those blue eyes, that sandy receding hair. A dome away from home. Heaven knows she needs a stately pleasure dome-home, seeing as she’d had only four dates in the two years and seven months she’d lived in Tusktown. She wasn’t much on car mechanics or jocks, and the guys at the newspaper strayed too close to both, especially the boyos in Sports, who thought that not only the city, but the entire green-and-blue globe revolved around Old South football.
Minutes later, Marian caught herself spinning the wheels on her bike so hard that perspiration droplets flew. The teenager grinned. Sisters in sweat. The jocks had stationed themselves at a free-weight bench and were parading their grunts before a dozen women assembling for aerobics. Marian couldn’t imagine why men thought weightlifting sexy: all that body odor. One woman, Marian recognized from the Spanish Department. A secretary for graduate school. Her tights glowed menstrual crimson and virgin white. Then it dawned on Marian: the loony woman, she was a big lesbian-feminist professor. Really lesbian, not chicly-politically so, because Marian had spotted her cuddling at Tusktown’s one and only lesbian bar where she and a new reporter named Rita had gone to irk the sports staff. So why, Marian wondered, would the loony woman care even if the impossible were true and Browning had been homosexual? Why get her plump red body and coal black hair uptight? Of course, Marian realized on staring at the bike’s quivering speedometer and feeling her quivering knees—of course: politically correct politics.
Clank!
The jocks were really packing on the weight, nearly three hundred pounds. In a hurry to impress, the dumbos hadn’t warmed up. Steroids, hormones, or misshaped brain cells, take your choice. Marian was about to give the bike a shot at 90 m.p.h. when she heard a bursting exhalation. The arms of the jock on the bench had crumpled. His spotter was struggling to lift the bar off his pal’s chest as his legs kicked. Another guy rushed to help and the two toppled as the weights shifted to the jock’s neck. Marian ran over, along with half the spa.
The loony woman emerged from the showers and stared. A smile crossed her face, and she held her hands inside her brown towel as if it were a muff. Tripping over a barbell, she kept grinning, then bumped out the door.
The jock was turning blue, even though the weights were off. Chuck, the spa’s owner, directed the aerobics teacher to phone 911; then he cleared everyone to start CPR.
Marian looked for the crazy woman, but didn’t see her. Marian told herself that the woman hadn’t understood the situation, that her fogged glasses left her stone blind, and that was why she turned on the Cheshire grin. Still, Marian confirmed her resolve to find Wallace the detective tomorrow, just in case this woman was battier than the usual loony PC. Say PC as in Prick-em, Castrate-em.
