The Bear Went Over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle Read Free Book Online

Boykins. He looked down at his feet and saw his new shoes were full of water and his pants were wet up to the knees. Am I making a bad impression here? he wondered, removing the last bits from his mouth. “Fish,” he said by way of explanation.
    “Bettina,” said Boykins, helping her out of the pond, “are you all right? I’m so sorry.”
    “Not your fault, Chum. Publicists are used to wading in shit.”
    The sailor-suited little boy angrily threw his radio control into the pond.
    “I’ll pay for it,” said Boykins. “How much?”
    “A thousand dollars,” said the child, whose father was a bond trader.
    Boykins held out two fifties. Nanny took the moneyquickly and slipped it in her purse. Profitable incidents like this came a nanny’s way all too rarely.
    Boykins, pretending to look into the pond, genuflected.
    “All bones,” said the bear, thinking his agent was trying to spy out a fish for himself.
    Boykins rose to his feet and stared at his client. Jam seemed indifferent to having just eaten a child’s toy. The child was being led away in tears and Jam was calmly picking his teeth. He knows something about life I don’t know, said Boykins to himself, and I’m going to learn it.
    Bettina fell into step on the other side of Jam, her three-hundred-dollar French shoes squishing water. Apart from that, her get-acquainted period with her new author was no worse than usual. A public figure who destroyed children’s toys
could
be an interesting publicity sell, with the right angle. “Did you do it because you think children have been exploited by the toy industry?”
    “Bad fishing,” said the bear. He was, as Bettina’d hoped, an environmentalist.
    Bettina reflected on his reply.
Hal Jam, renowned sportsman, sums up society’s problem this way: Bad fishing
.
    A sound bite with potential.

 
    “She’s all that’s left of the old Spooner place,” said Vinal Pinette, laying his hand against a dilapidated henhouse. “Titus Spooner was the greatest hand for inventing stuff I ever saw. The problem was he invented things which had no earthly use. Put your shoulder against it with me—”
    Bramhall pushed with Pinette. “Harder,” said Pinette, “she’s froze up.”
    Bramhall was adrift in Pinette’s literary suggestions, wherever they might take him. Lately they all seemed connected to hens. He pushed harder, felt the henhouse give, and a creaking sound came from somewhere below its floor.
    “That’s it,” said Pinette. “Get your back into it.”
    They strained and the structure began to slowly rotate, bending the grass beneath it. They turned it several degrees against the horizon before stopping, out of breath. “It used to be you could turn it with one finger,” said Pinette.
    “But why would anyone want to turn it?”
    “For rotating hens in their nests. Titus felt a hen should face each direction once aday.” Pinette peered through the broken window of the henhouse. “The mechanics were first-rate, but the basic idea was weak because it don’t matter which jeezly way a hen faces. Everything Titus come up with had that sort of flaw in ’er. Titus’s old woman used to give him hell about wasting time on inventions, said it were going to ruin them.” Pinette brought his head back out of the window. “And now the whole damn shooting match has rotated off the face of the earth, Titus and his old woman included.”
    Pinette peered at his friend, trying to see if he was getting his point across. “Don’t that sound like a better book than the one you lost? We’ll write it up together, you and me, and put the son-of-a-whore in a cast-iron safe.” Pinette pushed against the henhouse again, and this time it gave more easily, moving several degrees on its rusted track. “I don’t say Titus’s rotating chicken house were the Seventh Wonder of the World, but the look in them hens’ eyes when they started spinning was notable.”
    Bramhall stood in silence with Pinette then, paying his