The Bookman's Tale Read online

  The Bookman’s Tale

  Berry Fleming

  New York

  To

  S.H.B.,

  for help unmeasurable,

  and unmeasured.

  New-minted glint-gleam-shine

  up off your thumb

  in a rising spin,

  not coin-disk or ball but both

  at once

  and quickly both a rise and fall

  to the back of hand—

  a win or a lose,

  or a neither and both.

  —Old Song.

  The Bookman’s Tale

  If he changed his eye focus the tall window in front of his chair became a mirror, and without moving his head he could see the planes landing and taking off, crossing at a downward slant or an upward, and also see the passengers at the ticket desk behind him, black and white, patient and fretful, a barefoot boy with a dog on a leash.

  Could see out there a corner of “SAN JUAN DE PINOS” set in white shells on a turf bank beyond the shoulders of travelers arriving, walking up the path between the beds of hot-country flowers, the patches of halfhearted grass nursed by revolving sprinklers, between two giant palms with spikey gently bowed trunks and feather-duster tops sliced off by the waiting-room ceiling; and at the same time see the passengers behind him standing dry in the spraying water, walking through the pair of wet palm-trunks, stabbed through their chests now and then by the white arrow of a plane slanted up or down—the out-there stirred into the behind-him, mixing ahead-of with back-of, tomorrow’s reverberations with yesterday’s drums and yesterday’s dancers stomping the bare ground. And yesterday’s, “You seek, and you find, but what you find is not what you were seeking,” from somebody on the boat, he had already forgotten his name.

  The mirrored clock above the ticket counter confused him but his wrist watch (with its gold overlay of wife-daughter-death) showed a clear 11:44, told him again he had a long wait, brought back the hotel clerk and “Yes sir, there’s a non-stop flight to Miami at 13:37,” and, “No sir” (with a clerk’s smile at the impropriety of his question), “I am not familiar with Mrs. Tyner’s name before she married, perhaps our Social Director—but she doesn’t come on until noon.”

  Brought back yesterday’s Frank Hardly swinging down the deck like a monkey, one hand-hold to the next: “We’re doing twenty knots.”

  “A freighter? Impossible!”

  “Ten straight on, ten up and down and sideways.”

  And yesterday’s then-nameless young woman handing him the afternoon Islander with, “Ready, Mr. Edward Ray of the Sunwise Press?” as if flashing a light in his face out of her obscurity, and seeing himself listed in a corner of the page among “Arrivals & Departures.”

  And yesterday’s wait beside the black road for the bus, forty miles from town, the sun already in the treetops, waiting in the weeds, watching the empty road. Conscious of the others off nearer town in a bright-colored group by themselves, but not looking at them, dangling other thoughts before his mind as you hoped to quiet an apprehensive child—the hours on board the ship, the days, the hour in some port wandering the simmering streets with the others while the ladies did the shops for odds and ends to ornament the Christmas party, making little moves of his knees and shoulders as if to free them from the motion of the ship which they still carried. Waiting, watching the empty road, not alarmed but certainly not comfortable.

  Not looking at them but conscious of them there in a corner of his eye if he looked across into the jungle-woods, in a corner of his mind if he looked away up the road, ten or twelve of them, in pinks and greens—a hatband, a belt, a kerchief—five or six men, the rest women and children, moving about on and off the road watching for the bus, watching him, turning away quickly if he glanced that way, talking among themselves in a fast weathered sort of Island-English he could hardly understand, all as black as the road on which he was sorry to think he had ridden hours from town to see “The Castillo.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t miss the Castle, sir, the Castillo de San Marcos,” from the hotel clerk when he mentioned his free afternoon (not mentioning his free evening too—avoiding the thought of it—and his free tomorrow morning, if “Miss Claudia” returned by lunchtime as the voice on her phone said they expected her to). “Only an hour by car, sir, perhaps a little more.”

  And when he said he didn’t have a car, just came ashore, said, “On the Lindvagen, yes. Captain Lundquist, yes we know the Captain. Well, you might rent a car. Or take a taxi from the stand out there. The bus goes by the Castle, but I wouldn’t recommend the bus, Mr.” (glancing at the register) “Mr. Ray.”

  But, stranger to the Island, not young but still young enough for the idea of a native bus ride to appeal to him over the everyday solitude of a taxi, he took the bus. Seats to spare at first but before it left the city standing room only. Passengers in the aisle swaying from the straps, glancing at him, glancing away and back again as if magnetized by his difference, his pale face, cotton jacket, good Panama hat the only ones aboard. He gave up his seat in a goodwill gesture to a large woman nursing a baby, found a greasy strap and wished he had hired a taxi.

  Off at last at a weathered arrow aimed down a path through the woods: “CASTILLO—75yds.” Nobody on the path, nobody at the caretaker’s lodge—a padlock on the door—and nobody in the courtyard of the Castle until a family of three emerged from under the beautiful egg-shaped arch of coquina stone supporting the stairway, frowned at him without speaking and disappeared toward the only car in the parking area. Windy on the parapet, with a blinding view of the harbor and a far-off ferryboat with blunted ambidextrous ends, white in the sunlight as if to match the white sea birds, the white oyster shell he sailed out into space; alone up there with the restless birds—and wishing he were alone down here, instead of about to be joined by the two men approaching on the road.

  “Look like you waiting for the bus, Mr. White,” from one of them, halting a few feet away.

  He said, “Oh, hello. Yes, I am. I’ve been over to see the Castle, the Castillo. Quite a place, quite a view. Now to get back to town” (conscious of the tightness coming through his scatter of words and telling himself to ease up, easy does it—nothing premonitory, except possibly the “Mr. White”).

  No response from the men, no speech; response of a sort in the level-eyed looking at him from where they stood, the younger one a little behind, both with broad-brimmed straw hats browned by the sun and heat to the color of toast, the color standing out against the black woods. “He seems to be running late today, the Holidays, I suppose,” just to break the awkwardness of the three of them standing silent in an all but deserted road, his words sinking into the silence like the oyster shell he had sailed out from the parapet. “Does he often run late like this?” sailing out another shell.

  Into another silence, the man in front moving a step closer and pushing up the hat brim with the back of his middle fingers. He stopped with his feet apart and said in a tone of explaining what shouldn’t have had to be explained, “Mr. White, the bus runs for poor people.”

  It surprised him—not the fact (after his ride from town) but hearing it stated—and yet the sense of it joined so neatly with the tightness in his chest that it seemed to be only an extension of it in a different medium, extension of the empty road, the cluster of stares from the group, some distance off but as if brought close by their eyes, each pair of eyes aimed at him like blowguns, meeting his own as he looked away searching for how best to reply. And able to find only a noncommittal but delaying, “There’s usually plenty of room, isn’t there?” glancing from one to the other, looking for a sign they admitted there was something they agreed on—and not finding it.

  Which the younger man seemed to ta
ke as his cue. “Taxi, mister. That’s where you belong to be. How the taxiboy feed his children, you riding the bus? Pale folks ride the taxi.”

  Bringing a forlorn grin to Ray’s hot face and a stammer that he wished he could find one, glancing about as if one might appear and seeing two men who might have been twins leaving the group and walking toward him. “Is there a phone round here where I can call a taxi?”

  “Telephone!” from the first man with a sort of laugh and a mumble that he couldn’t understand, then, “All we know, Mr. White, is the bus run for poor folks and white folks don’t belong to be on the bus—”

  “Here he come!” in a shout from a woman in the group. “Come on, Jabish! Johnny-boy!” all the men turning to look and one of them grumbling, “That ain’t no bus,” and another, “That thing coming from town. That woman!” (the four in front of him like four charred posts of a fence enclosing him, four black uprights blocking a somewhere path, a somewhere river—that he might have dreamed), a woman in a green bandana striding in to brace them, full skirts swaying.

  How serious was all this? He couldn’t believe they would actively oppose his taking the bus, refuse to let him aboard; and yet they might. Ashamed of the flush he could feel in his face, the tightness in the top of his chest, of the signals to himself (and probably to them) that he was out of his depth. And knew it. He was trespassing, poaching, overdrawing his account, all without precedent in his business experience; how to handle it. Resistance? Unthinkable; one against many, stranger against native—he was like a tourist with no local currency. Help from the bus driver? (when eventually he arrived). Public employee, he would have some authority as to who rode his bus, how they behaved. And take the side of a city-dressed stranger? Of “Mr. White”! He would sit there with his fist on the lever for closing the door, or looking off down the road, or studying the center of his horizontal steering wheel; he would take—or leave—a passenger as these passengers decided.

  What to do, then? Were there any choices, any alternatives to turning away, walking back down the overgrown path to the Castle, disappointing these people who seemed to expect him to protest, resist, seemed to be tightening themselves into a mood to counter anything he did. Except walk away.

  And if he walked away, what then? Was there a later bus? And if so, when? And wouldn’t Mr. White be just as much an outcast? Hitching a ride in a car or truck was hardly worth the thought; the car that was passing—had passed (in the wrong direction)—was the only vehicle to come by in the half hour he had stood there. When he said, as if summing it up for himself, half mumbling, “I need to get back to town,” one of the men grunted a sort of laughing, “Some folks walk the road, mister,” setting off quick assents from two or three—

  As a squeal of rubber told him the car had stopped, pulled his eyes toward it, a blue MG with the top back, in reverse now and halting with a jerk in front of him: “Get in,” from the woman in a cotton jacket and white shorts, sliding to the center and flipping the door open with her free hand.

  Sorry to have to shake his head but shaking it. “Thank you very much, I’m going the other way—”

  “Get in!”

  They didn’t understand and he pointed toward the town. “I’m going—”

  “Get in!” from the man, adding two short revs of the motor for underscoring it, and he sank into the rumpled linen covering the leather seats, the driver zooming away with an MG “zoom” mellifluous to his burning ears, and he was saved—young people, or young to his fifty-eight, pale hair in tangles from the wind, dressed for tennis (or cricket, strange bats in the folds of the top), the woman with a canvas shoe at each side of the stick shift. He said (after catching his breath—trying to hide his having lost it), “Deus ex machina,” which clearly meant nothing to either of them but reminded him of the rest of it and he added, “Apollo appears from above with Helen,” which pleased the woman.

  And pleased himself for remembering it, helping to loosen the tensions still lingering from his roadside defeat—brought back for a moment as they halted at a crossroad to let the bus go by then turned off through a forest of bamboo toward the harbor. The man said something about “certain elements” liking to “keep them edgy. Somebody should have told you,” as if understanding he was a visitor, leading him on to explaining a little about the freighter and seven days down from Tampa, no time for much of it even if he had been inclined to talk, the man braking with a sliding scratch on the gravel at the foot of wooden steps up to a porch across the front of a cubical house on head-high stilts, windows all open, sashes hinged at the top.

  “Give me ten minutes to change and I’ll run you in,” gathering up racquets, cricket bats, towels, a folded newspaper in a rubber band, Ray protesting he would call the hotel for a taxi if he could borrow their phone: “There’s a taxi stand at the door,” the woman adding with a little laugh, “Yes, ‘Twenty-two taxis facing west.’”

  “No trouble,” from the man. “I’m taking a plane in an hour. I’ll drop you off. Princess Ann?”

  “Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

  And the woman—Ray’s daughter’s age—seated him on the porch with a bottle of welcome Scotch and some ice cubes in a bowl, pointed hospitably at binoculars hanging from the back of a chair and vanished on rubber soles; leaving him facing a sun-streaked view of the bay and, as his eyes grew quiet, of a far-off vessel headed out that he took to be the Lindvagen though he realized he might not know her from such a distance, and from the side—only knew her from within (as you may know someone so intimately you forget how she would appear to a stranger), the passengers now down to five, the Captain now shorthanded (possibly promoting the steward until he reached New Orleans again), the door to a cabin in splinters and needing to be replaced—

  The ship then changing course to show an ideogram on the smokestack that became a hammer-and-sickle through the glasses as if to warn him against making flash assumptions; such as assuming tomorrow’s Claudia would be the one he knew—not a word between them for half a lifetime.

  And none expected for the other half. Then four inches in the Times:

  WALTER MOTLOW, IN AFGANISTAN

  Veteran newsman … helicopter … gunfire in the Chagai Hills … Mr. Motlow, according to sources at the left-wing daily … to investigate charges of chemical weapons.…

  He is survived by his wife, the former Claudia Baird of Austin, Texas, and two married daughters.…

  (no children when last he saw her, now grown up and married—and no doubt divorced, in the modern sequence), memories crowding into his head, the trivial with the unforgetable: “They mowed the wheat below us yesterday, what a glorious smell!” (writing from North Carolina one October—Mot reporting on the union organizers in the textile mills for the New Republic); overhearing, before he knew her name, knew only the back of her shoulders over the edge of a sofa, stiff black hair bunched out an inch above a soft white collar, “You’re going to the mountains by bus!” from some man sitting beside her, unthinkable as a way of getting there.

  “Oh yes. My husband needs the car.”

  “God, you mustn’t do that. If you wait until Tuesday I’ll take you, I have to be in Asheville on Tuesday.”

  She silent only a second or two, then, “Tuesday? Tuesday’s fine. Thank you very much,” jealousy rising in him like a blush though he didn’t even know her name, had only come close enough to notice that the laces in her brown shoes were tied with the bows falling front to back (months later showing her how to reverse the tying and send them right and left—having faced the same problem himself and taking it as a sign of compatability). Remembering, later, trying to deny the sense of completeness he felt in her presence, in the very awareness of her existence even when she was not present, refusing to hold with such sentimentality as that she could reinforce his faith in himself, his hopes for himself, could “stop the whirlwind, balk the elements”; and yet unable to deny his feeling of their affinity, the “fit” of their piano-violin difference�
�telling her so once in of all places a New York taxicab, she looking at her hands. Or at her “hand,” at how she should play it?—

  Shocked by the sudden weight in his lap, still on edge from the roadside minutes; it took him an instant, not to see the cat but to adjust to the indiscriminate friendliness of another blue-eyed Siamese taking welcome for granted—after nearly a week of the freighter’s gray-spotted Kristine and her serpent hiss for one and all except the first mate who fed her, following him, not close like a dog but springing along behind, rail to cleat to stanchion to pink Florida lumber lashed head-high between the forward bulwarks and offering a broad sundeck for Mrs. Sarah-Wesley Ackworth and Cousin in bikinis until they caught on this was world-class heat and not to be trifled with.

  Appearing beside him one velvet morning, taking welcome for granted like the Siamese—one of them (Sarah-Wesley, he thought, not yet at home with names)—he with arms on the hot rail watching the birds like white kites on strings about to dive out of control, gazing at the black cable tailing out behind them trolling for their speed and progress. At the churned-up wake as it settled back to quiet; like anguish quieting with time and distance—the truck without a driver rolling toward them off a slope in the sunshine, gaining speed, rolling unbelievably into the other lane, the coming car swinging out to avoid it, striking them from the front as the van struck from the side, her side, changing his life in an instant, wife broken and in a week mercifully dead, he on crutches for half a year, on crutches of a sort to this day. And seeking a miracle cure next week in San Juan de Pinos (his Pilgrimage to Lourdes)—

  “Penny for your thoughts, Eddie,” eyes steadily on his face as if not so much to see him as to see if he saw her, bringing back the young clubwomen at home and their cookbook the Press had been publishing for them; and the “few words” they asked of him for an Introduction. “I was thinking of the ‘few words’ I once wrote for a young ladies’ cookbook. They didn’t like them.”