Henderson the Rain King (28 page)

but expanding water, the heart of the water. Other passengers were reading. Personally, I can't see that. How can you sit in a plane and be so indifferent? Of course, they weren't coming from mid-Africa like me; they weren't discontinuous with civilization. They arose from Paris and London into the skies with their books. But I, Henderson, with my glowering face, with corduroy and Bersagliere feathers--the helmet was inside the wicker basket with the cub, as I figured he needed a familiar object to calm him on this novel, exciting trip--I couldn't get enough of the water, and of these upside-down sierras of the clouds. Like courts of eternal heaven. (Only they aren't eternal, that's the whole thing; they are seen once and never seen again, being figures and not abiding realities; Dahfu will never be seen again, and presently I will never be seen again; but every one is given the components to see: the water, the sun, the air, the earth.) The stewardess offered me a magazine to calm me down, seeing how overwrought I was. She was aware that I had the lion cub Dahfu in the baggage compartment, as I had ordered chops and milk for him, and there was a certain inconvenience about my going back and forth constantly and prowling around the rear of the plane. She was an understanding girl, and finally I told her what it was all about, that the lion cub was important to me, and that I was bringing him home to my wife and children. "It's a souvenir of a very dear friend," I said. It was also an enigmatic form of that friend, I might have tried to explain to this girl. She was from Rockford, Illinois. Every twenty years or so the earth renews itself in young maidens. You know what I mean? Her cheeks had the perfect form that belongs to the young; her hair was kinky gold. Her teeth were white and posted on every approach. She was all sweet corn and milk. Blessings on her hips. Blessings on her thighs. Blessings on her soft little fingers which were somewhat covered by the cuffs of her uniform. Blessings on that rough gold. A wonderful little thing; her attitude was that of a pal or playmate, as is common with Midwestern young women. I said, "You make me think of my wife. I haven't seen her in months." "Oh? How many months?" she said. That I couldn't tell her, for I didn't know the date. "Is it about September?" I asked. Astonished, she said, "Honestly, don't you know? It'll be Thanksgiving next week." "So late! I missed out on enrollment. I'll have to wait until next semester. You see, I got sick in Africa and had a delirium and lost count of time. When you go in deep you run that risk, you know that, don't you, kid?" She was amused that I called her kid. "Do you go to school?" "Instead of coming to ourselves," I said, "we grow all kinds of deformities and enormities. At least something can be done for those. You know? While we wait for the day?" "Which day, Mr. Henderson?" she said, laughing at me. "Haven't you ever heard the song?" I said. "Listen, and I'll sing you a little of it." We were back at the rear of the plane where I was feeding the animal Dahfu. I sang, "And who shall abide the day of His coming (the day of His coming)? And who shall stand when He appeareth (when He appeareth)?" "That is Handel?" she said. "That's from Rockford College." "Correct," I said. "You are a sensible young woman. Now I have a son, Edward, whose wits were swamped by all that cool jazz � I slept through my youth," I went on as I was feeding the lion his cooked meat. "I slept and slept like our first-class passenger." Note: I must explain that we were on one of those stratocruisers with a regular stateroom, and I had noticed the stewardess going in there with steak and champagne. The fellow never came out. She told me he was a famous diplomat. "I guess he just has to sleep, it's costing so much," I commented. "If he has insomnia it'll be a terrible let-down to a man in his position. You know why I'm impatient to see my wife, miss? I'm eager to know how it will be now that the sleep is burst. And the children, too. I love them very much--I think." "Why do you say think?" "Yes, I think. We'll have to see. You know we're a very funny family for picking up companions. My son Edward had a chimpanzee who was dressed in a cowboy suit. Then in California he and I nearly took a little seal into our lives. Then my daughter brought home a baby. Of course we had to take it away from her. I hope she will consider this lion as a replacement. I hope I can persuade her." "There's a little kid on the plane," said the stewardess. "He'd probably adore the lion cub. He looks pretty sad." And I said, "Who is it?" "Well, his parents were Americans. There's a letter around his neck that tells the story. The kid doesn't speak English at all. Only Persian." "Go on," I said to her. "The father worked for oil people in Persia. The kid was raised by Persian servants. Now he's an orphan and going to live with grandparents in Carson City, Nevada. At Idlewild I'm supposed to turn him over to somebody." "Poor little bastard," I said. "Why don't you bring him, and we'll show him the lion." So she fetched the boy. He was very white and wore short pants with strap garters and a little dark green sweater. He was a black-haired boy, like my own. This kid went to my heart. You know how it is when your heart drops. Like a fall-bruised apple in the cold morning of autumn. "Come here, little boy," I said, and reached for the child's hand. "It's a bad business," I told the stewardess, "to ship a little kid around the world alone." I took the cub Dahfu and gave it to him. "I don't think he knows what it is--he probably imagines it's a kitty." "But he likes it." As a matter of fact the animal did lighten the boy's melancholy, and so we let them play. And when we went back to our seats I kept him with me and tried to show him pictures in the magazine. I gave him his dinner, and at night he fell asleep in my lap, and I had to ask the girl to keep her eye on the lion for me--I couldn't move now. She said he was asleep, too. And during this leg of the flight, my memory did me a great favor. Yes, I was granted certain recollections and they have made a sizable difference to me. And after all, it's not all to the bad to have had a long life. Something of benefit can be found in the past. First I was thinking, Take potatoes. They actually belong to the deadly nightshade family. Next I thought, Actually, pigs don't have a monopoly on grunting, either. This reflection made me remember that after my brother Dick's death I went away from home, being already a big boy of about sixteen, with a mustache, a college freshman. The reason why I left was that I couldn't bear to see the old man mourn. We have a beautiful house, a regular work of art. The foundations are of stone and three feet thick; the ceilings are eighteen feet. The windows are twelve, and start at the floor, so that the light fills everything through that kind of marred old-fashioned glass. There's a peace that even I haven't been able to destroy, in those old rooms. Only one thing is wrong: the joint isn't modern. It's not like the rest of life at all, and therefore it's misleading. And as far as I was concerned, Dick could have had it. But the old man, gushing white beard from all his face, he made me feel our family line had ended with Dick up in the Adirondacks, when he shot at the pen and plugged the Greek's coffee urn. Dick also was a curly-headed man with broad shoulders, like the rest of us. He was drowned in the wild mountains, and now my dad looked at me and despaired. An old man, disappointed, of failing strength, may try to reinvigorate himself by means of anger. Now I understand it. But I couldn't see it at sixteen, when we had a falling out. I was working that summer wrecking old cars, cutting them up for junk with the torch. I was lord and master of the wrecked cars, at a place about three miles from home. It did me good to work in this wrecking yard. That summer I did nothing but dismantle cars. I was grease and rust all over and scalded and dazzled with the cutting torch, and I made mountains of fenders and axles and car innards. On the day of Dick's funeral, I went to work, too. And in the evening, when I washed myself in the back of the house under the garden hose, I was gasping as the chill water rushed over my head, and the old man came out on the back porch, in the dark green of the vines. By the side was a neglected orchard which later I cut down. The water blurted over me. It was cold as outer space. Fiercely, the old man started to yell at me. The hose bubbled on my head while inside I was hotter than the cutting torch that I took to all those old death cars from the highway. My father in his grief swore at me. I knew he meant it because he put aside his customary elegance of words. He cursed, I guess, because I didn't comfort him. So I went away. I hitchhiked to Niagara Falls. I reached Niagara and stood looking in. I was entranced by the crash of the water. Water can be very healing. I went on the _Maid of the Mists,__ the old one, since burned, and through the Cave of the Winds, and the rest of it. And then I went on up to Ontario and picked up a job in an amusement park. This was most of all what I recalled on the plane, with the head of the American-Persian child on my lap, the North Atlantic leading its black life beneath us as the four propellers were fanning us homeward. It was Ontario, then, though I don't remember which part of the province. The park was a fairground, too, and Hanson, the guy in charge, slept me in the stables. There the rats jumped back and forth over my legs at night, and fed on oats, and the watering of the horses began at daybreak, in the blue light that occurs at the end of darkness in the high latitudes. The Negroes came to the horses at this blue time of the night, when the damp was heavy. I worked with Smolak. I almost had forgotten this animal, Smolak, an old brown bear whose trainer (also Smolak; he had been named for him) had beat it with the rest of the troupe and left him on Hanson's hands. There was no need of a trainer. Smolak was too old and his master had dusted him off. This ditched old creature was almost green with time and down to his last teeth, like the pits of dates. For this shabby animal Hanson had thought up a use. He had been trained to ride a bike, but now he was too old. Now he could feed from a dish with a rabbit; after which, in a cap and bib, he drank from a baby bottle while he stood on his hind legs. But there was one more thing, and this was where I came in. There was a month yet to the end of the season, and every day of this month Smolak and I rode on a roller coaster together before large crowds. This poor broken ruined creature and I, alone, took the high rides twice a day. And while we climbed and dipped and swooped and swerved and rose again higher than the Ferris wheels and fell, we held on to each other. By a common bond of despair we embraced, cheek to cheek, as all support seemed to leave us and we started down the perpendicular drop. I was pressed into his long-suffering, age-worn, tragic, and discolored coat as he grunted and cried to me. At times the animal would wet himself. But he was apparently aware I was his friend and he did not claw me. I took a pistol with blanks in case of an assault; it never was needed. I said to Hanson, as I recall, "We're two of a kind. Smolak was cast off and I am an Ishmael, too." As I lay in the stable, I would think about Dick's death and about my father. But most of the time I lived not with horses but with Smolak, and this poor creature and I were very close. So before pigs ever came on my horizon, I received a deep impression from a bear. So if corporeal things are an image of the spiritual and visible objects are renderings of invisible ones, and if Smolak and I were outcasts together, two humorists before the crowd, but brothers in our souls--I enbeared by him, and he probably humanized by me--I didn't come to the pigs as a tabula rasa. It only stands to reason. Something deep already was inscribed on me. In the end, I wonder if Dahfu would have found this out for himself. Once more. Whatever gains I ever made were always due to love and nothing else. And as Smolak (mossy like a forest elm) and I rode together, and as he cried out at the top, beginning the bottomless rush over those skimpy yellow supports, and up once mute against eternity's blue (oh, the stuff that has been done within this envelope of color, this subtle bag of life-giving gases!) while the Canadian hicks were rejoicing underneath with red faces, all the nubble-fingered rubes, we hugged each other, the bear and I, with something greater than terror and flew in those gilded cars. I shut my eyes in his wretched, time-abused fur. He held me in his arms and gave me comfort. And the great thing is that he didn't blame me. He had seen too much of life, and somewhere in his huge head he had worked it out that for creatures there is nothing that ever runs unmingled. Lily will have to sit up with me if it takes all night, I was thinking, while I tell her all about this. As for this kid resting against me, bound for Nevada with nothing but a Persian vocabulary--why, he was still trailing his cloud of glory. God knows, I dragged mine on as long as I could till it got dingy, mere tatters of gray fog. However, I always knew what it was. "Well, look at you two," said the hostess, meaning that the kid also was awake. Two smoothly gray eyes moved at me, greatly expanded into the whites--new to life altogether. They had that new luster. With it they had ancient power, too. You could never convince me that _this was for the first time.__ "We are going to land for a while," said the young woman. "The hell you say. Have we crept up on New York so soon? I told my wife to meet me in the afternoon." "No, it's Newfoundland, for fuel," she said. "It's getting on toward daylight. You can see that, can't you?" "Oh, I'm dying to breathe some of this cold stuff we've been flying through," I said. "After so many months in the Torrid Zone. You get what I mean?" "I guess you'll have an opportunity," said the girl. "Well, let me have a blanket for this child. I'll give him a breath of fresh air, too." We started to slope and to go in, at which time there was a piercing red from the side of the sun into the clouds near the sea's surface. It was only a flash, and next gray light returned, and cliffs in an ice armor met with the green movement of the water, and we entered the lower air, which lay white and dry under the gray of the sky. "I'm going to take a walk. Will you come with me?" I said to the kid. He answered me in Persian. "Well, it's okay," I said. I held out the blanket, and he stood on the seat and entered it. Wrapping him, I took him in my arms. The stewardess was going in to that invisible first-class passenger with coffee. "All set? Why,
where's your coat?" she asked me. "That lion is all the baggage that I have," I said. "But that's all right. I'm country bred. I'm rugged." So we were let out, this kid and I, and I carried him down from the ship and over the frozen ground of almost eternal winter, drawing breaths so deep they shook me, pure happiness, while the cold smote me from all sides through the stiff Italian corduroy with its broad wales, and the hairs on my beard turned spiky as the moisture of my breath froze instantly. Slipping, I ran over the ice in those same suede shoes. The socks were rotting within and crumbled, as I had never got around to changing them. I told the kid, "Inhale. Your face is too white from your orphan's troubles. Breathe in this air, kid, and get a little color." I held him close to my chest. He didn't seem to be afraid that I would fall with him. While to me he was like medicine applied, and the air, too; it also was a remedy. Plus the happiness that I expected at Idlewild from meeting Lily. And the lion? He was in it, too. Laps and laps I galloped around the shining and riveted body of the plane, behind the fuel trucks. Dark faces were looking from within. The great beautiful propellers were still, all four of them. I guess I felt it was my turn now to move, and so went running--leaping, leaping, pounding, and tingling over the pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence.