Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (44 page)

Trolling along, pushed hard against the shore by the wind, we get a strike. Then another, bigger. Kobo has it hooked. As the thick rod bends and nods toward our catch, Kobo hurries to me, getting the rod into my hands, wanting me to feel the thrill of it. Down and reel, pull back hard, bend down and reel, pull back hard again: my rhythm comes and goes, and we’re all laughing. At last we see it. Ali jumps around after a net. Kobo leans out and strikes with his homemade gaff. We land a Nile perch of about sixty pounds. Ali begins to whoop and so do I.

That night the fish feeds both camp and village. It is received with great awe and surprise, as if this hasn’t happened hundreds of times before. After we finish off the beer, we try sleeping again, and the wind remains fierce and hot all night.

The next morning we pack up to leave, even Jim Robertson, because there’s simply nothing left to eat or drink. I ask him what the Molo fishermen will do. Oh, they’ll stay on, he assures me, they always stay on, they’ll do something.

And it occurs to me that the Molo regard our kind as a benevolent part of nature nowadays: when we arrive we’re like a lucky catch, bringing bottled drinks, tins, and perhaps a little money. One wonders if our intrusions are costing the Molo their skills as masters of the lake, as croc killers; if they no longer bother to row themselves across the lake to South Island where the great Nile perch are feeding, and if the arrival of sportsmen and travelers hasn’t made them less efficient out here. As we depart this morning the sun is already blistering hot and the Molo are already taking the shade of their huts; none of them are at the shore with their nets or out on the lake.

Our Land Rover climbs the steep track leading away from the lake. Teleki’s volcano comes into view. We can see the serpentine sheen of the water below us.

They always stay on, they’ll do something, yes, I’m thinking, they’ll wait for others like us. It’s primitive up here, sure, but to every man, Molo or American, tribesman or tourist, the end of it is in sight.

I’m waiting around in the little airport at Port Harcourt wondering why in hell I have a tennis racquet with me.

The evening plane has been cancelled and there’s not a single hotel room back in town, so I’ve decided to sleep here beside my gear until morning. Tomorrow’s planes are all booked, so I’ve also decided to do what one does in African airports: take the first available flight going anywhere. Escaping one’s present circumstances is an ongoing adventure on the continent.

A young man approaches, grinning. He’s an Ibo, speaking with the breathless English by which his tribe is often recognized in the West, and he asks if I happen to know Jennifer Capriati. I smile back and say, well, no, but I’ve seen her playing tennis on television. He has a letter for her, he says, and can I wait while he goes home to fetch it? I can only answer yes, sure, my pleasure.

After he hurries off, I stroll around the airport, trying to get a little exercise while keeping an eye on my gear. I pause in an open doorway where the odors of the Niger delta are strong: rotted wood, brackish swampwater, and a kind of putrid gardenia. Crickets swarm everywhere, hurling themselves against the lighted windows, and out at the baggage carts a group of locals are cooking up a supply of the insects in an empty tin can held over a small fire of straw and twigs. Pages of the
London Observer, Der Stern, Newsweek
and
Punch
lie around for my entertainment. I take short naps, buy coffee from a vendor who pushes a brass urn fitted with homemade wheels, nod and smile at a weary mother surrounded by her four sleeping children, and take more strolls among the hundred or so passengers stranded for the night.

A greying British gentleman invites me to play gin rummy. He works for a big wildlife fund and he’s eager to discuss diminishing herds, endangered species, game reserves and the millions of pounds his outfit has raised to save the animals. He wears a tie — in spite of the humid night — and says he lives in Hampstead. He shows me some brochures. Not much money exchanges hands at cards.

But after a while I’m exhausted with his prattle, even when he talks intelligently about the leopard, my favorite of the animals. I’ve heard most of it, of course, and I have a prejudice for these wildlife sorts — for one thing, because they’re often successful and pious about raising money for the creatures of the continent. Famine in Ethiopia, starvation in Mozambique, disasters everywhere, but save the little lion cubs, pray for the noble elephant, help the snake, monkey, and rodent. It’s not that I dislike animals, I want to explain, but please.

As it gets toward morning, I make my excuses. The urinals are broken and the toilets are now overflowing. In another half hour I sit beside the sleeping mother and entertain two of her children with coin tricks, allowing them to keep the money when they correctly guess where I’ve hidden it.

At sunrise a plane lands. Everyone stirs. Packages and luggage are moved across the terminal, then set down again. We soon learn there are no available seats.

Then the Ibo correspondent returns. His letter is actually a thick packet covered with Nigerian postage, but he’s an even more arresting sight: his clothes soaked with perspiration, his eyes wide, his breath coming in uneven bursts.

He lives twelve miles from the airport, he explains. He tries to smile, but he’s still breathless. After seeing me he dashed home to fetch the letter. And am I, perhaps, he wonders, a tennis coach? In any case, can I find a proper address for this?

The letter, it turns out, is a long proposal of marriage. Tell me honestly, he asks, do you think Jennifer Capriati would consent to marry a poor man who can only offer his complete love?

I tell him that I just don’t know.

He talks about how women athletes practice long hours, how they always want to please their fathers, how their managers exploit them, and how lonely they often are. They are superstars, yes, he argues, but they sacrifice what is most tender in themselves. And can’t find good men. Look at Chris Evert, he says, who has been through so many heartbreaks and a divorce. As he goes on, I keep thinking about all the miles he walked, jogged, and ran during these last hours. When the coffee vendor returns, I buy us both a coffee — bitter as dark metal.

By nine o’clock I have a ticket to Lagos and a transfer to London. By the time I move my gear into the crowded departure lounge and before we say goodbye, my Ibo acquaintance has talked about studying in America, working in a brewery, the Biafran war, his family, and his poster of Jennifer. He covets my tennis racquet, but although it has been mostly a nuisance during most of my African visit I don’t offer it to him.

In the departure lounge I’m denied a boarding pass and instructed that I’ll have to wait for an afternoon flight.

The Brit who works for the wildlife foundation is gone, but the mother and her weary children are still there.

The people, I say to myself, the desperate people, the people, the people.

Robin Hemley

 

ROBIN HEMLEY
is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction. His stories and essays have appeared in
The New York Times
,
New York Magazine
,
Chicago Tribune
,
Southern Review
,
Conjunctions
,
Boulevard
,
Prairie Schooner
,
Creative Nonfiction
,
Fourth Genre
,
Ploughshares
,
Shenandoah
, and many other literary magazines; and in anthologies including
Sudden Fiction
,
Continued
, and
New Sudden Fiction
. His work has won first place in the Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from the
Chicago Tribune
, the George Garrett Award for Fiction,
Story
magazine’s Humor Award, the Governor’s Award for Nonfiction from the State of Washington, the Independent Press Book Award for Nonfiction,
ForeWord
magazine’s Award for Nonfiction, the Walter Rumsey Marvin Award from the Ohioana Library Association, and two Pushcart Prizes. He is director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and writes a column for
The Believer
magazine on defunct literary journals. He recently finished a new short story collection and is working on a new novel and a work of nonfiction titled
Do Over
.

 

 

Your silence will not protect you.

— Audre Lourde

 

“Everything’s mixed up in those boxes, the past and the present,” my mother tells me. “Those movers made a mess of everything.” I’m visiting her at the Leopold late on a Monday night after reading to my kids and being read to by my eldest, Olivia, who at six is rightfully proud of her newfound reading ability. My mother and I have been readers for many years, but in some ways, she finds reading more difficult than does Olivia. At eighty-two, my mother’s eyesight has deteriorated. Glaucoma. Severe optic nerve damage to her left eye. Macular degeneration. Tomorrow, I’m taking her to the doctor for a second laser operation to “relieve the pressure.” We have been told by the doctor that the surgery won’t actually improve her eyesight, but, with luck, will stop it from deteriorating any more. After that there’s another operation she’ll probably undergo, eighty miles south in Seattle. Another operation that won’t actually make her see any better.

“I always had such good eyesight,” she tells me. And then, “I wish there was something that could improve my eyesight.” And then, “When are we going to go shopping for that new computer?”

“Well, let’s make sure you can see the screen first,” I say, which sounds cruel, but she has complained to me tonight that she wasn’t able to see any of the words on her screen, though I think this has less to do with her eyesight than the glasses she’s wearing. Unnaturally thick and foggy. My mother looks foggy, too, almost drunk, disheveled in her dirty sweater, though she doesn’t drink. It’s probably the medicine she’s been taking for her many conditions. My mother owns at least half a dozen glasses, and I know I should have sorted through them all by now (we tried once) but so many things have gone wrong in the last five months since my mother moved to Bellingham that sorting through her glasses is a side issue. I get up from the couch in the cramped living room of her apartment, step over the coffee table — careful not to tip over the cup of peppermint tea I’m drinking out of a beer stein, careful not to bump into my mother — and cross to the bedroom crammed with wardrobe boxes and too much furniture, though much less than what she’s used to. On her dresser there are parts of various eyeglasses: maimed glasses, the corpses of eyeglasses, a dark orphaned lens here, a frame there, an empty case, and one case with a pair that’s whole. This is the one I grab and take out to my mother who is waiting patiently, always patient these days, or perhaps so unnerved and exhausted that it passes for patience. She takes the case from me and takes off the old glasses, places them beside her beer mug of licorice tea, and puts on the new pair.

She rubs an eye, says, “This seems to be helping. Maybe these are my reading glasses.” I should know, of course. I should have had them color-coded by now, but I haven’t yet.

She bends down to the photo from the newsletter on the coffee table, and says, “Yes, that’s William Carlos Williams.”

A little earlier she told me about the photo. “It’s in one of those boxes,” she told me. “I saw it the other day. I thought I’d told you about it before,” but she hadn’t, this photo of her with William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, and other famous writers. So I spent fifteen minutes rifling through her boxes of bills and old papers mixed up on the kitchen counter (a Cascade Gas Company bill, final payment requested for service at the apartment she moved into in December, when we still thought she could live on her own; a letter from the superintendent of public schools of New York City, dated 1959, addressed to my grandmother, a teacher at the time, telling her how many sick days she was allowed), looking for the photo, until she explained that it was actually part of a newsletter from the artists’ colony, Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Armed with that crucial bit of information, I found it.

The photo is captioned “Class picture, 1950.”

Can you pick me out? she says.

 

From left, top: William Osborne, Theodore Roethke, Robel Paris, Harvey Shapiro, Elaine Gottlieb, Beryl Levy, Cid Corman, Simmons Persons, Gladys Farnel, Hans Sahl, Clifford Wright, Richard Eberhart. From left, bottom: Ben Weber, Nicholas Callas, Jessamyn West, Eugenie Gershoy, William Carlos Williams, Flossie Williams, Mitsu Yashima, Charles Schucker, Elizabeth Ames, John Dillon Husband.

 

Not many of these people are smiling. Eugenie Gershoy, seated next to Jessamyn West, has a little smirk, and Mitsu Yashima, seated next to Flossie Williams, smiles broadly, and also Cid Corman in the back row, whom I met in 1975, when I was a high school exchange student in Japan. My mother visited me in Osaka and we traveled by train to Kyoto, to Cid Corman’s ice cream parlor where I ate a hamburger, had an ice cream cone and listened to a poetry reading while my mother and Cid reminisced.

“Don’t I look prim?” my mother says, and she does. Or maybe it’s something else. Scared? Intimidated? Shocked? My mother was 34 then — This was a year or so before she met my father. My sister, Nola, was three, and my mother was an up-and-coming young writer, one novel published in 1947. John Crowe Ransom liked her work, publishing several of her stories in the
Kenyon Review
. I wasn’t born until 1958.