Setting Free the Bears - Page 38

Siggy had the raingear out of the rucksack, the plastic bags to cover his boots, the rubber bands to wrap the bags tight to his calves, and the saddle soap. The duckjacket took a candle gloss and looked like a thing melted over him. 'Don't worry,' he whispered. 'You draw them off, and I'll be back for you.'

'They're down in the lobby, Sig. They'll hear you.'

'Then get them up here. I'll be back, Graff - a day, two nights, at the most. You've got the pack and all the money I don't need for gas.'

'Sig,' I said.

But he opened the window and swung out on the ledge. He put on the goggles and helmet - a parachutist tightening his flyaway parts. Then he stepped his boots into the bags; they ballooned; he looked like a man with his feet in glass pots.

'Siggy?'

'Graff,' he said, 'we're in need of details! After all, Graff, we didn't really have much of a look at the place - what with your sporting with that hippo of a girl, and with the offense we took to it right away - now did we?'

And I thought: What? How your mind can leap - to something the spanning of is beyond me.

He jumped.

And I thought: What a show! You could have climbed down the vines.

He made a splotz sound in the garden-muck.

I heard the mayor's voice again. 'Herr Graff! Is he making up his mind?'

'Oh, I think he'll talk,' I called, and I went out in the hall. 'Come up now!' I yelled, and I could hear them thudding the stairs.

I could hear the damp-chilled motorcycle too; it made short and enginelike sucks - caught and faltered once, like a bull-voiced man who started a shout, but gagged in mid-holler. Those rounding the stairwell, they heard it all too; we faced each other with the safe length of the hall between us.

Then I ran back to my room and the window; I could hear the stairs being swung down upon to the lobby. The mayor, though, came alongside me; his eager face spasmed from cheek to ear.

Siggy had caught it and held it; thick balls of gray were lobbed from the tailpipes, as weightless and wispy as dust kittens. They seemed like flimsy wads of hair, so tangled that we'd later find them in the garden, strung from the forsythia like mangled pieces of wigs.

Siggy smoothed the engine in one throttling, up and down - and lined up with the gateway, still narrowed by the strewn milkcart.

So it was before the policemen were off the castle stoop - and before the shoving milkman, the pink-washed man and Auntie Tratt had all shouted themselves out the castle door - that Siggy sped through the gap, posting on the foot pedals. The hunched, waxy duckjacket gleamed like a beetle's back. And even through the rain, I could hear him hit three of his gears.

Oh, a lover of ill weather and of the overall, precarious condition! This was - why yes, the trial marathon to Vienna - Siggy's reconnaissance mission to the Hietzinger Zoo.

The Real and Unreasonable World

SO I READ the note more than once, and Gallen saw the light under my door. I saw her foot shadows, creepy and soft.

'Gallen?' I said. 'I'm unlocked' - because no one had fixed the knob that the policeman had sprung.

And I expected her in nightgown, unblushing black lace, and sleekly unfrilled.

But she had her apron on; she jingled into my room, hands stuck in the flowery pocket for coins.

'I know,' I said. 'You want to sleep with me.'

'Stop it,' she said. 'I can't stay a second.'

'It'll take hours,' I told her.

'Oh, Graff,' she said. 'They're talking about you.'

'Do they like me?'

'You helped him get away,' she said. 'No one knows what to do.'

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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