A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (29 page)

Sorenson sips his coffee. “The Bible boys, did they get you yet?” He grins. It’s a great grin and it makes me grin while I nod.

“They did.”

“You started writing about the mammalian orders.”

“The primates.”

“Men are more closely related to tree sloths than are squirrels.”

“Not in some newspapers,” I say. We’re about to laugh. “I lost the column. I’m going to do a piece on this panda and then free-lance for a while. I’m going to plan C.” It feels good to level with someone. “The bad part is I had one hundred and seventy-five papers; I was syndicated. We bought a house.”

“You’ve done some wonderful stuff, besides the newspaper deal,” Sorenson says. “You can write anything you want.”

A Hawaiian kid comes in, dressed like we used to dress in graduate school, a long-sleeved white oxford-cloth shirt, khakis, white tennis shoes. “Mr. Sakakida is here,” he tells Sorenson.

“Ah,” Sorenson says dramatically. “Mr. Sakakida. You’re on, Lewis. Good luck. Just go with Johnny.”

The campus is as green as one of Rousseau’s paintings and quiet as a dream. The young people we pass all carry books and whisper together. Johnny doesn’t know who Sakakida is, except that he is the person Sorenson has been talking to on the phone for two months. Johnny calls him “the panda man.” As we walk along it bothers me that I can identify so few of the trees, they all seem like ancient, outsize houseplants, grand and succulent, fit for dinosaurs. On a dirt path we cross through a shallow ravine, and in the thick shade we come up behind a huge pagoda.

“You can find the lab, right?” Johnny asks. He’s stopped. He points off to his right. “It’s just up there.” He starts to move off. “Go around. The panda man should be out there.”

There is a huge plum Mercedes with tinted windows parked on the gravel drive in front of the pagoda. As I start up the steps of the building, the passenger door of the Mercedes swings open and a tall oriental man in a gray suit steps out. He’s wearing gold wire-rim sunglasses and he’s smiling like mad.

“Dr. Wesley,” he says with satisfaction.

“Mr. Sakakida?” I say and we shake hands and he bows. He waves at something in the shadows down the lane.

“We are very happy about this,” he says. He’s Japanese, his accent is clear. “We are glad an expert such as yourself is helping. We hope everything is fine. We are happy to help the people of Hawaii and the people of the United States of America.” He bows again and goes back and steps into his car and closes the door and I watch it roll silently off through the trees.

I didn’t even ask him a question. Before I can move, a new white Ford van appears and stops before me. Now I realize I can smell the cedar incense floating out of the pagoda. The driver of the van is all business. He’s a large Hawaiian in a faded yellow Primo T-shirt. He wings open the van’s rear doors and wants me to examine the contents.

In a slatted wooden crate there is a giant panda.

“Well,” the guy says. “Are you taking delivery here?”

The bear isn’t moving, and I crawl in the van. As soon as I do, I feel my pulse in my cheekbones; my face is swelling shut. She’s alive—though I can tell by the overpowering smell and the matted hair that she’s been in this box too long. There’s hair everywhere.

“No,” I say, and I can hear my allergies shutting my head down. “Drive me up the hill.”

On the way back to the lab, my nose begins to run, voluminously. My face has begun to itch. My eyes are slits and I am breathing through my mouth. Allergies. That’s okay by me; this is a giant panda. I feel the first excitement, but I can tell by my rasping breath that I am going to need a shot.

When we arrive at the lab, Sorenson and Johnny are ready. They’ve got the large cage prepared and all the equipment is clean and laid out. Sorenson takes the clipboard from my driver and then hands it to me. “You’ve got to sign,” he says. “It’ll be all right.”

I sign the sheet and the driver leaves in the van.

“Heavens,” Sorenson says to me. “Look at your face. Johnny, call Dr. Morris.”

But when Sorenson sees the bear for the first time, he smiles. It may be dying, but it is something to see. His panda. Even my enthusiam is rekindled and when he asks me if I had any trouble, I simply say, “I met your Mr. Sakakida.”

“But you’re okay?” Sorenson says.

“I’m okay.”

We sneak the panda in through his loading area on a gurney and start the procedures. She’s shedding hair like an old doll. We take a pulse and draw blood and Sorenson and the kid start to clean her up. Old Sorenson can’t get close enough. He’s right in there, another phenomenon.

Ten minutes later, Dr. Morris arrives. He’s a well-dressed Hawaiian with a beautiful black leather medical bag. He asks about my allergies, pries open my eyes to check my pupils, takes my blood pressure, and gives me two shots, a small one in the arm and a large one in the hip. By this time, Sorenson has finished the first set of procedures and shows Dr. Morris his prize, making the doctor promise not to tell anyone about the bear.

IT’S DARK
. I remember to call Katie. She’s not in the room and I leave a message at the desk. There is still a lot to do tonight. We weigh the panda and Sorenson checks her nose, teeth, skin tone. He won’t have the blood results until tomorrow, so I shake Sorenson’s hand. We’ve all scrubbed and the panda is sleeping in her new cage.

“In a year, she’ll have her own quad in the zoo.”

“If she makes it through the night.”

“Thanks, Lewis,” he says. “I appreciate this.”

“Who’s Sakakida?” I ask.

“An importer.”

“What’s his real name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.” I stand up. “But you’ve got your bear.” My rash now is a sharp itch. “And now I’m going to drive back to the hotel, and you will call me tomorrow so we can all go to a sumptuous dinner, your treat.”

Sorenson comes to me at the door and takes my hand. “Lewis, she’s going to thrive.” He’s high on having this animal here and his happiness makes me smile too. “You know it, Lewis. She’s going to thrive.”

I love his enthusiasm. I love old Sorenson really. He’s been the author of so much of the good that’s happened to me. As I drive back to the hotel, the world seems full of possibility again. All the lights are on in Waikiki, ten thousand hotel windows, and the streets swarm with parties of two, four, and six, polished and sunburned and looking for dinner.

At the Royal Hawaiian, I get out on the circular drive and give the keys to the attendant, who eyes me strangely. My face is still a little swollen and I smell like bear. I smell a lot like bear. It doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s wonderful. The hotel seems the very edifice of romance, glittering in the night, and I can hear drums. It’s seven
P.M.
local time.

There is a phone message. The note reads: Dearest Lewis—I’ve gone with Mikki over to Kaneohe to see her parents. They leave tomorrow morning. Be back at ten or eleven.
The coast is clear
—wait and see. Love, K.

I thank the concierge and hand him back Katie’s messages. I step back to the center of the lobby to read my note again. It’s okay. It feels like a little present. I’m tired. I fold it into my pocket.

Going upstairs is a mistake. One person in a hotel room at this point in my life is a mistake. Especially with the drums: pum-pum-pum. But I quickly shower and powder up my rash, which is slightly bigger and real angry. I dress in a pair of light khakis with my sandals and Hawaiian shirt. But I can’t go out the door with that shirt on. It’s too nutty. My head is almost back to normal. There are some splotches of red, but the swelling has subsided. But this shirt. So I throw a blue blazer over it and look pretty good—like the ne’er-do-well son of the local gentry.

In the elevator, I’m thinking of a riddle Ricky asked me last week: Why did the young pencil call “Yoo hoo”? Answer: Because his mommy was in the forest. It suddenly makes perfect sense to me. His mommy was in the forest. I need a drink. I’ll have a civilized cocktail and Katie will come back.

From the lobby, when I open the door, the drums blast me, sucking up all the air. Boom. Boom-boom. Boom. Boom-boom. Boom. Two big drums like that in the torchlight. There are, I notice immediately, no little drums. No tambourines. No maracas. Two big drums. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. It makes you duck, this noise. I walk to the cabana in step, boom—boom—boom—boom, leaning against the percussion, in fact, and grab on to the bar. I can feel the drums in my chest against the wood.

Behind me under the torchlight on the lawn, the island dance show is full swing. Six big guys in leafy skirts are stomping up and down and juggling torches. It’s a big show, everything’s big. There are no small guys. Then the women come out and they’re big too. The bartender, another guy in a Hawaiian shirt and a pencil behind his ear, is at my elbow and I order a mai tai. The women are doing something I can only describe as the hula and their hips are swinging in astounding figure eights. Their movement is mesmerizing. It is something one should call a feat. I stare at the woman nearest me and all I can do is wonder at the axle of her pelvis, how it could bear such radical and smooth leverage.

The little bar patio is only half full, so I take my drink over to one of the perimeter tables and sip the rum. There is a purple blossom in my drink as well, which I eat. I watch as the women vibrate double-time for a couple of minutes and then promenade off. Everyone applauds, even the people across the lawn inside the luau room. Next to me two young women in sleeveless summer dresses are drinking large red drinks, and on their table is a line of six little drink umbrellas and a little bouquet of wet orchids. Two lawyers from Houston is my guess. “Is that something, or what?” one of the women says to me. I smile and nod. The torchlight flares unevenly and I think I need more torches in my life. More torches and more ocean and more beaches. I can feel the pressures in my head shifting. The cocktail waitress in her green sarong slips by and I order another mai tai.

IT WAS
Ryan McBride’s idea to have the graduation party at Black Rock Beach on the Great Salt Lake. It was a weird idea, because in those days the Great Salt Lake was different than it is today. In the old days it was a strange and superlative place. It was the saltiest body of water on earth. It was saltier than the Dead Sea and it was six times saltier than the ocean. It was famous for salt. The mineral content was so high that bathers bobbed like corks on the surface and there were several famous postcards that showed five or six people sitting in the water as if on easy chairs. Through several years the Great Salt Lake, which was hundreds of square miles, was as salty as water can get. In twelfth-grade chemistry, before things got bad, we had studied the way salt would precipitate up an anchor rope, climbing like frost two or three feet above the surface of the water.

The lake itself sat in the broad desolate alkali desert dish twenty miles west of Salt Lake. There were few amenities, just an access road which left tourists on the half-mile-wide beach among the swarming brine flies. At Black Rock Beach there was a magnificent wooden pier which stood like a ruin high and dry, hundreds of yards from the then receding waters of the great salty lake. From time to time, some misguided soul would set up his hot dog stand near the pier and lose money all summer long.

Years before, of course, in the thirties and forties, the water had been high and there had been a famous resort on the water: Saltair, where trainloads of citizens could spend the day riding rides, bobbing in the water, and then dancing until after midnight. It had been abandoned and burned down before I was born. But when we graduated from high school the shores of the Great Salt Lake were the most forbidding place I’d ever seen on this planet. It was a vast, treeless, forlorn place smelling of brine, and even as my classmates began to park their shiny cars on that shore and climb out in their graduation clothes, bright and new and calling to each other in the twilight, it could have doubled for a tragic Martian landscape peopled by teenagers from Earth.

Cheryl Lockwood had written in my yearbook, under her picture in the Ski Club: “ . . . And what are you going to do about it? Love and
expectations,
Cheryl.” Something major was going to happen, I could tell, and I took her aside at the yearbook-signing party the night before graduation, placing my hand way up under her arm and marching her outside the gym and all the way to the thirty-yard line on the football field where, I’ll say, I kissed her, but in fact I started to talk to her, saying only, “Meet me at the party tomorrow, and come alone.” Whereupon she kissed me and then we twisted closer and kissed again like two doomed lovers under the five-story backside of our high school looming above us, the clock’s ponderous lighted face tragic and remote and, as always, six hours ahead.

Graduation day was graduation day, of course, elevated and strange, perceived primarily in the stomach, I remember. At lunch, which I ate alone in our empty kitchen in a house that was already seeming someone else’s, my mother sat down with me for just a minute and said, “Oh my, the last sad meal at home for the Porcupine.” (Union’s symbol was the Porcupine.) “And tuna fish at that. Graduation is such sweet sorrow, Lewis,” she went on, “but I want you to know that even after you graduate and you begin to wrestle with life’s big problems . . .” She was grinning in her omniscient way.

“Mom, I’m eating here, okay? Could we maybe talk later?”

She was having a wonderful time, but I was sweating that maybe she knew somehow that I’d been dreaming about the way Cheryl Lockwood had felt against my chest and planning the way things were going to go tonight late at the Great Salt Lake. After years of living in dank and cloudy ambiguity, I was going to find something out tonight with Cheryl. Promises had been made. We were going to
do it.
And here I was with my mother. I held my sandwich to my face like a veil.

“Lewis, Lewis,” she said. “You’re on your way and tomorrow you’ll be out in the real world.” She stood and came around the table, casually checking my forehead for fever. “But I’ll still be your mama.” She laughed softly. “Remember that,” she said and went off to other errands.