Free The Bear Went Over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle Page B

said. Though she hadn’t actually read the manuscript, it had been on her desk for several days, awaiting a jacket quote from her, and she’d been getting a feeling for it each time she set her coffee cup on it.
    Eunice’s own books were about angels. Her latest,
Angels in Bed
, was written simply and beautifully for all the world, as was her last best-seller,
Angels in Business
. Her writing had the slow, easy flow of the bayou in it, and an alchemical inventiveness inherited from a father who’d spent his life turning cornmeal, water, and sugar into bootleg bourbon. Eunice had left the Louisiana swamps to become a hairdresser in New Orleans—a tarty-looking girlwith nice high breasts and a ready laugh. One day, while breathing the fumes of a particularly strong hair spray, she had a vision of a strong, handsome, sexually pure male with frosted curls who said he was her guardian angel and that he was going to make her a star. Working in the evenings, she cranked out a two-hundred-page text on angels, written in the chatty style of a hairdresser talking to a client in curlers. Her word processor corrected her spelling and grammar, more or less, and she handed out copies of the spiral-bound manuscript at the American Booksellers convention in New Orleans. Elliot Gadson received the manuscript directly from Eunice, glanced at it, expecting something quaint or just plain crazy, and immediately saw the potential in Eunice’s angels. He took Eunice aside to see if she was of reasonably sound mind and discovered that she was an authentic American yakker, a born distiller of dreams like her daddy, Anvil Cotton. She used too much corn and sugar in her mix, but it made for memorable moonshine, and made a fortune for Cavendish Press. Eunice moved to New York City, bought a seven-room apartment in the Dakota, and became a popular figure on talk shows. She shed her tarty look, assumed a pilgrimlike hairdo, dressed in dowdy clothes, and talked with Geraldo and Oprah, but underneath the dowdiness a sexy hairdresser was hidden; when she gave her throaty laugh or made some salty comment, the audience loved it.
    Eunice stared at the burly young writer to whom she’d just been introduced. He resembled Daddy Anvil in his shape and unsuspected strength (Anvil could outrun government agents through a pitch-black swamp with barrels of booze strapped to his back). And there was something else about this man, something—well, angelic was the word. His eyes were cast shyly toward the floor, and he seemed unable to speak to her. Since her angelic revelation, Eunice had remained aloof from men, claiming that frosted-haired angels were woman’s natural partners, but there was an otherworldly force coming off Hal Jam, as if he were comtemplating the invisible. He was, in fact, contemplating the smell coming from all the iron-pumping maidens in the gym. Strong stuff, he noted to himself. Makes a bear edgy.
    Eunice took a sidelong glance at herself in the workout mirror. She’d been in the pool, which changed her pilgrimlike hairdo into a sleek cap that showed off the Cotton cheekbones and full lips, and Gadson was thinking to himself that maybe she was some kind of split personality, for the sensual woman in front of him was definitely not the prudish author of
Angels in Bed
, who wrote that the spiritual intentions of the winged beings should be realized through chastely imagined pillow fantasies. The imaginary angel would lie beside the reader through the night, in a feathery embrace that was thrillingly un-consummated.
    “Elliot’s the best editor there is,” said Eunice to the bear when Gadson had mounted a stair climber to nowhere. “He discovered me when I didn’t know jackshit about writing.”
    The bear shuffled uneasily from foot to foot. All around the room breasts bounced and thighs trembled, as if huge lady bears were trundling toward him on a forest path.
    All these females could be mine, he said to himself. All I need to do is