Setting Free the Bears

Two bushes away, I c

rossed between, after the next holler - the next peep of double-man to straighten up and blunder on.

Then they were one bush away; I looked over a squat shrub and could have touched the two heads with my hand if the shrub hadn't stabbed me when I reached.

'Siggy!' I said.

In the courtyard, on the stoop to the castle door, I heard the tumbled man yelling. 'Get the dogs on him! Why aren't the dogs here?'

And now we ran in the same bush row; I followed the wet-streaked, flexed bottom, the long toes bent back and dragged behind the churning milkman, who was staggering more head-down, more slowly now. I could catch them.

Then the milkman was three-headed; he couldn't run, he swayed - his shoulders coming back - and his knees quit.

'Oh, dear God,' he moaned. And we were all in a pile in the black garden-muck, the milkman groveling under Siggy, skittering his hips out sideways and thrashing his arms. I had Siggy's head, but he wouldn't come loose. I got under his chin and tried to work open his mouth, but he ground his jaw into my hands until my knuckles were cracking. Then I biffed him in the ears and kneeled on his spine; but he held. And the milkman began some chanting wail, his hands digging back into Siggy's hair.

'Sig, let up,' I said. 'Let him go!' But he clenched his teeth still, and kept the man from turning his hips.

So I broke a switch of forsythia off a bush, and lashed it across Siggy's rear, and he writhed sideways; but I could still catch him, and did. At the third fanny lash he rolled free of the milkman and sat his smarting rump in the cool, kind mud.

He put his hands under himself and slopped the mud over his hips as if he were dressing himself in it; his mouth made a little puckered O. I held out the pouf to him, and he made whistling noises.

'The police are coming, Sig,' I said.

And the milkman inched away from us; he scooped up a great splot of mud to the mauve welt on his neck. He made the whistling sounds too.

Siggy wrapped himself in the pouf. I caught him under his arms and pushed him up in front of me - out of the bushes and along the castle wall. Siggy began to march; he took great strides that jogged his head up and down. His feet left spread and terrible toe marks in the ooze. 'There's a mound of mud in my ass, Graff,' he said; he jiggled.

There was a mound of sorts in the lobby too. Auntie Tratt, sponging, held the fat, dizzy man in a chair. She tried to clean the mud off his lederhosen; my Gallen held the water pail to dip the sponge.

'Well,' the man said, 'I heard someone coming and I was turning around to see.' And Siggy came up the stoop with the pouf draped over one shoulder and down between his legs.

The dizzy man rocked in his chair; he made an odd, fishy gurgle. He hammered his fists in his lap, where his ascot lay puddled like a napkin over his bright knees; his lower lip was as purple and fat as a beet.

'Frau Tratt,' said Siggy. 'It's raining up a flood, fit to burst the dam. The end of the earth!' And he paraded by her.

The pouf flared out as he swung on the banister, taking the stairs on upward - rhythmically, with flourish, and two at a time.

Massing the Forces of Justice

NOW AND THEN a clod of mud appeared in the air above the forsythia, a long spitter of debris trailing behind it. It was always flung nearly straight up, and followed by unreasonable stamping sounds and violent shakings of the bushes. The milkman was composing himself in the garden.

The poor horse was only making his lot worse. He'd managed to turn himself, still on his side, so that he now lay perpendicular to the hitchmast, and under it; he'd twisted himself so tightly in his breeching that he hadn't room to move any more. A lump the size of a tennis ball swelled on the ridge of his eyebrow and closed one eye. The other eye blinked into the rain, and the horse lay back and wheezed - his tail switching.

'Is it still raining, Graff?' said Siggy.

'Harder now.'

'But it's not an electrical storm, is it?'

'No,' I said, 'not any more.'

'Well,' he said, 'it's not a good idea to have a bath during an electrical storm.'

'You're safe,' I said.

'It's an enormous bathtub, Graff. I can see how you managed it.'

'The milkman's still in the bushes,' I said.