Setting Free the Bears

'What's in it for you, Keff?' I said, and watched him knot his eyebrows; tennis-ball-sized, they welted out from his head.

'Aw, smarty,' he said. 'Please, I do mean it good for you.' But then he looked at me - a faint menace in his eyes. 'Your nice girl's waiting now, and you're going to go if I have to lug you, smarty.'

'You don't have to,' I said, and packed what there was. Notebook, sleeping bags, helmets - in the rucksack or tied on top. There was nothing worth saving the duckjacket for, and I gave Siggy's pipes to Keff. Then I gave him back The ABZ of Love.

'Aw, smarty,' he said.

'It wasn't your fault, Keff,' I said, and actually gave a squeeze to the bit of his arm I could get my hand around.

Then Keff caught me under my shoulders and lowered me by the armpits, half down the castle wall - so I wouldn't have so far to drop, and plop so loud in the garden when I landed. For a moment, I thought he wasn't going to let me go. He held me straight down and a little away from the wall; I couldn't even hear him breathing. Hanging, I said up to him, 'Keff, it's too bad you never knew Todor Slivnica. Because I'll bet you could have taken him.'

Then I looked straight up above me and saw him giving down his puzzled little O-shaped grin, above his three, thick chins.

'OK, smarty,' said Keff, and he dropped me. I fell softly in the garden and broke straightaway for the forsythia. In the grove, still in the courtyard, I peered out the gate and all around me. Waiting for an absolutely empty landscape, and not a sound on the cobblestones.

But before I made my break for the road, I threw a look back to my previous window and saw Keff pressed against the grate - the enormity of his shadow blotting out whole shrubs and garden plots below. His shadow, segmented by bars, loomed so much bigger than Siggy's had, and although the great Keff had turned so gentle to me, his caged shadow struck me as even more violent and determined than what Siggy once had cast.

And the Gallen I was headed for now seemed altogether different-promising, too, than the girl of the first evening, when I'd lightly held her; whom I'd left standing in the spray of the falls while I hurried to my Siggy's room to inquire why he aped caged animals at the window grate.

So I jogged up the dark orchard road with his clutter in my skull, doing my fighting best to keep the slightest plan from raking the slightest root in my stung head.

While Siggy, unresisting, was being carried farther and farther away from the scene of his schemes - while, I imagined, O. Schrutt's watch had not yet begun, and the Famous Asiatic Black Bear, taking his brief rest when he could get it, slept as stonily as Siggy.

But I cut the imagining there. I broke out of my jog and ran full-out on my bathtub-tired legs, digging for Gallen, with no more in my head than the most immediate of plots. Only the essentials.

Would she be there - where Keff said? Would the bike start? And since she'd had the lessons to make her be our driver, where would I put my hands when I held her as she drove us away?

The Feel of the Night

I HAD TO be careful where I put my hands. This girl was skittish of them, and a nervous driver anyway. Gallen had been well enough taught the mechanics of it - the gearing and leaning - but she had this caution about her that was carried a little too far. She startled easy, at stuff in the road that wasn't there.

'Well, Keff didn't teach me at night,' she said - the helmet so funny, high up on her head, and her braid whipping side to side, as she kept looking for things off the road. About to leap out at us I guess.

So I didn't want to add to her nervousness any, and I was moderate about my hands; I stayed around her waist - except when we were coasting, when I'd let them rest, just lightly, on her hips. She wore her brown leather ladies' jacket, with an old belt Keff gave her to sash it shut. Around her waist, I let my hands go under the jacket and flattened my palms against her warm blouse. But they were the tightest tummy muscles I'd ever felt, so I didn't move against her any.

I once said, in her helmet's ear hole, 'Gallen, you drive very well.'

But she startled at that too. Turning her head around, she said, 'What?' And almost dumped us.

When we slowed for the little towns, I could talk more easily. I said, 'It's getting late. We could find a campsite.' But she was convinced we should ride through the night and get out of the Waidhofen vicinity - well up in the mountains to the southeast. So if they did care enough to look very hard for us, we'd be hard to find.

But I don't think she wanted to sleep out that night with me. In fact, I wondered if she'd make a travel plan that would have us never sleeping in the dark. For as long as we were together, I foresaw, we'd be nervously driving every night, throughout the night; even if we liked a place well enough to stay awhile, we'd still go off and drive in circles - until the dawn.

But then she surprised me. She s

topped in the biggest town we'd come to so far, still before midnight. Mariazell it was - big and touristy. The whole place was a sort of summerized ski lodge, and the loudest club still open had a young, dancing crowd of smart dressers - rock-and-roll music mashing down the flowers in the window-boxes.

My Gallen kept us idling a while, out in front of the place; she just stared in the open windows and looked over all the couples, smoking on the outside steps. They looked us up and down, as well.

It was then I realized that Gallen von St Leonhard hadn't been out of Waidhofen, ever; this was city life to her, and awesome. Attractive to her.

It was killing, really, though unnerving, that there was such a world lust, even in her.

And when we were out on the road again, I dared to let my fingers dig at her tummy; just a little kneading, you might say. I thought her muscles weren't quite so tensed. I kissed her, awkwardly, through her helmet's ear hole, and she let some of her weight rest against me.

Out of town, she pulled the bike into a flashy lay-over on a corner and scared me so much that she had me digging into her tummy harder, which she felt of course, and knew she'd had the edge on me for a moment. I felt her belly chuckle.

But still she wouldn't stop. We drove straightaway south now, and every coming town was darker. She even developed a feel for speed. And the whole night was wondrously eventless, as if we had stepped out of the gale of this world, as Siggy's old Chetnik hero would have claimed - out in limbo - and were moving nowhere.