The Dick Gibson Show (21 page)

“‘Only when there were no more seditionists save himself did Korogachi declare that he disbelieved the emperor’s story about the wingless bird. He let it be known that he thought the bird was a hoax, a desperate fabrication of the emperor’s counselors—for example, he presented proof that the bird had been with the cunning Ryusho Mali long before the emperor had ever laid eyes on it—and that when he and Shobuta met on the field of combat, man-to-man, no crippled— ha ha—bird would have any bearing on the outcome. He intimated that the real miracle was the so-called “character change” of the emperor, and declared that he had no more faith in Shobuta the Jealous than he’d had in Shobuta the Tender. “If you want my honest opinion,” Korogachi was wont to say, “that mother should be known as Shobuta the Showboat!”

“‘When Shobuta the Jealous heard what the shogun had been saying about him, he was so furious that he insisted on setting out at once for their confrontation, and he ordered that the bird be brought from the temple where it had been kept for safekeeping and religious observance ever since the day of its fabulous flight. “We shall just take the wondrous bird with us this time, since Mister Korogachi proclaims not to believe in its powers! Perhaps it will show again what it can do. Who knows but what it may fly in his face and peck out Mister Korogachi’s eyes?”

“‘In this wise, feeling himself invincible, and now singing martial airs to the bird where once he had sung lullabies and poems and love songs, Shobuta set off with his army, the bird waddling along beside him.

“‘I shall not dwell much longer on this history. Shobuta’s forces were met by an enormous army. The holocaust raged for three days and three nights. The noise of battle was fantastic; the clank of armor intermingled with the screams of the dying and the bangs and booms of the gunpowder, which had only recently been invented. The racket was simply terrific.

“‘As you know, in nature there is a law of compensation. When a leg is injured or lost, an arm grows stronger. He who has not the sense of sight is frequently preternaturally blessed with the sense of touch or smell. In the bird world it is the same. For some reason, winglessness may be compensated for by a particular acuity of hearing. Historians speculate that Shobuta the Tender had a lovely voice, one particularly well suited to accommodate the soft nuances of gentle love songs. We scientists think it may have been particularly amenable to the sensitive hearing of the miraculous bird. The martial, fervent stridencies of patriotic petition were something else, as were the harsh noises of that awful battle. They were more than the sensitive auditory threshold of the bird could accommodate. It went mad. There is no other word for it. It dashed its poor head to pieces on the shield of a just-fallen soldier. Perhaps, in its confusion, it had identified the shield with the noise of the battle and sought to stop the sound by breaking its ears upon it. Or perhaps both the historians and the scientists are wrong. Perhaps we have all along paid too much attention to its winglessness and not enough to its voicelessness. Perhaps voicelessness is a choice—the choice of silence. Perhaps winglessness is one. Perhaps there are birds who reject the air and choose the earth. Perhaps even extinction is a choice of sorts.

“‘When Shobuta the Tender saw what had happened, his poor heart cracked. Suddenly he remembered those gentle days when he had been closeted with the bird in his apartments. Laying down his sword, he took the bird up in his arms. “Come,” he whispered, his voice broken, “once more I shall be your wings,” and he began to croon the bird’s favorite song. No longer conscious of where he was, he drifted through the field of death among the fallen bodies of his foes and followers. It was such a touching sight that Korogachi, seeing it, began himself to weep. Blinded by his tears, and following now only the sound of the emperor’s voice, he did not notice one of the emperor’s warriors creeping up behind him. It was Earaki, a deaf samurai who, since he had not heard the sound of battle, could not now hear that it had ceased. Seizing the opportunity of what he saw only as the momentary lapse of the leader of the enemy, he struck from behind and felled the shogun Korogachi for his emperor. Once again the bird had saved Japan.’

“It was a while before either Collins or I could speak.

“‘You’re here for the bird,’ I said.

“‘We are losing the war. Only a miracle—’ His voice trailed off.

“I nodded. His story had unsergeanted me, dissolved the chevrons from my arms. Silence
is
golden, I thought, and kept quiet, as grateful to the Japanese as I had been to the general. I looked from one to the other. Collins’s eyes shone. ‘He knows where it
is,’
he said suddenly.

“‘Sir?’ I said. I knew enough to be fearful.

“‘
He knows where it is.
Don’t you
see?
They’ve already got it. Or maybe they haven’t, but they’re close. Anyway, it’s still on the island. That’s why he told us—so we can get word to the troops not to shoot. Can you think what it would mean if we could capture that bird?’ The Japanese smiled. ‘You see?’ Collins said, pointing at our prisoner and talking fast. ‘He wants us to try. They
haven’t
got it. They haven’t got it because he’s the expert; he knows its ways and its lairs. The bastard is challenging us to try. He’s teasing us to try. That’s what he was doing in the museum—studying it. Then he was going after it. but that’s when we showed up. Right? Am I right, you?’

“‘All correct,’ the scientist said. He was still smiling.

“‘All correct.’ Collins laughed. ‘You
bet
all correct. He couldn’t tell the British because there were too many of them, but there are only two of us. So he wants us to try. We bring him along so he can find it for us, then the Japs grab it back. That’s it—that’s what it’s all about.’

“‘But that would only make sense if there were a million Japs around to guarantee that he could get it back,’ I said.

“‘All correct, Sergeant,’ Collins said.

“‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘it’s a trap.’

“‘A beauty,’ Collins said. He turned to the Japanese. ‘We have a jeep. How long till we get to the area?’

“‘About nine hours,’ the scientist said. ‘I’m judging by the time it took the patrol to bring me here after I was captured.’

“Collins had risen and was moving toward the door, the Japanese right behind him. ‘But there’ll be all those
Japs!’
I said.

“Collins turned to me. ‘They can’t shoot for fear they’ll madden the bird. We’ll stay out of their way. You’ll see. Even if they get the dodo first they can’t shoot because of the noise. He won’t let them. That’s our chance.’

“Collins got on the jeep radio and told the story to the British. He asked them to hold their fire, to give us twenty-four hours to try to find the dodo. He wanted Sansoni—that was the scientist’s name—to give him the position where we’d be so he could tell the British. The Jap refused. When Collins drew his gun the man just grinned. ‘It’s better, Lieutenant, that they
don’t
know,’ he said. ‘They’d be drawn to the area. Something could go wrong.’ Collins nodded, and put the gun back. I had been cast adrift among brave men. It is always the case with squires.

“Though I’m not a good driver, Collins made me drive the jeep and Sansoni gave directions. To avoid the British we stayed off the main roads, and after a while we even avoided the secondary roads and were cutting across plantations and through fields. We left Port Lewis in the afternoon, and it was already dark, about ten-thirty or eleven o’clock, before we saw our first Japanese. They were under orders not to shoot, of course, but they signaled us to stop. Collins drew his gun again and pointed it at Sansoni’s head. The soldiers recognized the scientist, and when he spoke to them calmly in Japanese they giggled. ‘I’ve explained the situation to them,’ he told us. ‘They’ll inform the others on the walkie-talkie—that is an interesting English orientalization, “walkie-talkie,” don’t you think—that we’re coming. We won’t be interfered with.’

“‘Excellent,’ Collins said.

“‘Bully,’ I said. ‘Why were they giggling?’

“‘Oh well,’ Sansoni said patiently, ‘they expect that you two stand to lose our little contest.’

“It was fantastic. Every few minutes now we passed great clusters of Japanese troops. When our headlights picked them up they would simply turn and smile and wave us on. Soon we were in a forest, squeezing the jeep between the trees. Here and there we could see soldiers crawling along on their hands and knees. Collins was very excited. ‘It’s true,’ he said hoarsely, ‘they
haven’t
found it yet.’ By now it was almost impossible to drive. The crawling soldiers took up so much of the space between the trees that there was no longer any clearance.

“I honked the horn to make them move. ‘
Don’t do that again,’
Sansoni said fiercely. ‘We’re almost there. Do you want to madden it? Lieutenant, please do something about this man of yours.’

“‘He’s right, Sergeant. Calm down.’

“‘Further,’ Sansoni said, ‘just a little further.’ We drove another half-mile or so. ‘Now,’ Sansoni said.

“‘Lieutenant?’

“‘Do what he says. Sergeant. Stop here.’

“The three of us got out. We had passed all the Japanese soldiers and were alone in the forest. We walked through the woods for a while, and finally came to a bowl-shaped clearing, perhaps two hundred feet across. Though it was very dark—there was no moon—and I’d never seen the place before, there was something familiar about it. Then I realized that it was the landscape of many of the pictures in the museum. Collins was having the same thoughts. ‘The glass case,’ he said. ‘The environment they built for the reconstructed dodo. That was like this place.’

“‘Shh,’ Sansoni said. ‘Now it is necessary that we do not talk.’

“The grass was strange, leathery, and there was a fierce smell to the ground. It was an odor neither ripe nor rotten, life nor death. It was as if we smelled the molecules themselves, things outside time and form. I turned to see if there were any Japanese behind us, and when I looked back again I had lost the Jap. I moved toward the lieutenant to tell him, but he shushed me before I could speak and pointed to Sansoni. He was down on his hands and knees in the dark. Collins and I both halted. Then Sansoni suddenly began to croon strange songs in a high soft voice. I knew they were Shobuta’s thirteenth-century carols.

“‘Lieutenant,’ I whispered.

“‘What is it?’ The lieutenant was whispering also.

“‘He’s seen the dodo.’

“‘We know that.’

“‘He’s an ornithologist.’

“‘We know that.’

“‘Even if he only saw it through field glasses—’

“‘What?’

“‘ … he’d have made …
observations.’

“‘Yes. What of it?’

“‘He knows its lairs, its habits.’

“‘Yes, we know that.’

“‘He can do its signals.’ I shuddered.

“‘Will you be quiet?’

“‘He’ll find it.’

“The lieutenant shook me off, moved toward Sansoni, and as I watched, went down on his hands and knees. In the dark I lost them both. I was not alone, though; the Japanese had caught up with us and I could hear their creaking movement all around me. I sank down on
my
hands and knees. There we were, Americans and Japanese, crawling around in that queer grass, soundless as Indians. We could have been cats and birds observing some petty detail of a mechanical neutrality, a breach in nature like a child’s ‘time-out’ in a murderous game.

“A match flared suddenly in the darkness, its light rolling across the face of the Japanese who had been on the plane with me, the one who’d helped me with my seat. He grinned and blew out the match. Someone laughed. It sounded like Sansoni.

“‘Lieutenant?’ Perhaps they’ve already killed him, I thought. I stopped crawling and waited till I could no longer hear the soldiers. I leaned against a tree, but the bark was thorny and I moved back into the leathery grass. I rooted about in it and suddenly came on something soft. I laid my head down and closed my eyes, and something warm and feathery brushed my face. I didn’t have to see it to know it was the dodo bird; I’d invaded its nest. I felt the bird’s body stiffen and move backward. No, stay, I thought, I’m no hog. Then I grabbed its legs and pulled it to me for a hostage.

“In the dark, directionless, I traveled with the bird for hours. Several times we passed Japanese, but the bird was hidden under my shirt, next to my skin. As I crawled by the soldiers I made the exploratory pats of one searching for something under a bed. Over the old rough ground we went, a trade route of the extinct. I thought of dinosaurs and mammoths and the saber-toothed tiger, and here was I, Dick Gibson, with that other loser, the dodo.
Back,
I thought, cursing it,
back to history, you.
And felt its shape against my skin, its useless, resisting wing that whipped at me percussive as a terrorized heart. It scratched me, it pissed on me, and shit on me. I gagged, and my vomit covered the bird’s stench and saved me from the Japanese. When the sun comes up, I’ll be killed, I thought.

“Then I heard Sansoni’s voice. He was perhaps a hundred yards off, but I could hear him talking to Collins—or to me, perhaps, if Collins was already dead. ‘It’s useless in the dark,’ he was saying. ‘Most likely it’s asleep. We’ll have to wait and look for its nest in the morning. I’ll tell them.’ He spoke briefly in Japanese, and I heard the men laugh. For all I knew, he had told them to kill us. I froze where I was, and forgetting that the bird was mute, I reached inside my shirt and grabbed its beak. This only made it thrash the more. I think it bit me. Quietly as I could I removed the bird and set it down on the ground. ‘Go,’ I whispered to it, and shoved it away. I heard the soldiers taking off their packs, and after a while their heavy breathing as they slept.