Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  One Sunday, not long ago, I was beaching my canoe after making the run from Healdsburg to Monte Rio, when I encountered a longhair type. He was sitting on a rock, smoking marijuana, and studying me in the offhand way that pot smokers do. As I gathered my gear together, he asked me how the river was, and I told him that it was slow but fine, and then he invited me for some smoke with him, holding the joint out to me and wincing to show it was good. I declined the offer but told him thanks anyway. He then asked me if I lived around here, and I told him, yeah, not too far. When I answered him, I looked him square in the face, and while we were locked there briefly, eye to eye, I saw his expression change and his eyes change glaze and grow disturbed looking. He had recognized me, or, more correctly, Ram I. When I turned back to him after putting my new canoe in order, he still had that slack-jawed expression—shock and recognition—and then I let a slow smile creep over my face and nodded, a barely perceptible nod of assent, before reaching down for my binocular case. When I looked up again, I saw him in his cut-off jeans, disappearing through the bushes.

  I thought about it for a moment, watching the bushes and hearing him stumble and curse. It is not my intention to play the role of menacing monster, and I felt bad that I had, even though there wasn’t much truly malevolent in it. And yet I don’t deny that it did give me some sense of satisfaction to know that I could if I wanted to, if I needed to. And this is what I told myself on the drive back home: I would do what I had to do, and anything I could do to protect my privacy and quiet, just so long as it was legal.

  Another Sunday, I was doing yard work when two men walked to the foot of my driveway and called out my name. I was trimming branches from a dead oak felled for winter firewood and was holding a running McCullough 24. “Yes,” I said.

  “Ram Le Doir?” they asked. It was then I noticed the notebooks, the recorder, and the cameras. I whistled sharply for Rattler, my pit bull. He exploded from underneath the deck and claimed a position between me and the media. Rattler was trembling like a tuning fork and giving out a low growl that sounded like an idling Ferrari. The two men said they were journalists from People Magazine and wondered whether they might ask me some questions. In reply, I held the saw out from me with both hands like a samurai and gunned it twice before goosing it up to a whining plane that drowned out their shouts and the barks of my dog.

  Knowing for a fact what one particular human, Ram I, is capable of is a fearsome thing, an intimidating quantity to be reckoned with and respected. I am using this fear to underwrite the insurance policy on my isolation. I must act and play the part of the madman in order for this formula to work effectively. This is what I tell myself I am doing. I really don’t think myself capable of another act of violence. But then again, I might be wrong.

  I have become a watcher of birds during these past six months that I’ve been on the river. The Russian River is the summering ground for osprey, and there are occasionally golden eagles, barn, and great-horned, and spotted owls; red-tailed, Swainson’s, and sparrow hawks, and swallow-tailed snow-white kites, the great hunters of the savannahs who can hover in one spot, shimmering like the holy ghost, all of them living in the woods close to my home. These are all raptors, birds of prey; the particular family which most interests me. And what most interests me about them is not the deadliness of their force, the certitude of their killing ability, but their manner of flight: it absolutely enraptures me.

  On weekends during mid-summer, I rose at six as there was a mated pair of red-tailed hawks who patrolled the area during that hour. I would take a pot of coffee onto the deck and sit there drinking it while the morning mist burned off, awaiting their appearance. I believe that they became aware of my presence after a while; they’d look down in what seemed my direction and give one of those shrieks that shatter the silence like breaking crystal as though it were an opening fissure, some crack in the heavens beyond them. I would sit there for the better part of the morning, tracing their orbits with my 30X Leica, gasping in marvel when they caught a thermal and followed its spiral up to 1,500 feet without even a wingbeat before suddenly leveling off to glide at 50 mph toward the distant horizon, where I’d quickly lose them.

  The birds are teaching me patience, not a long suit of the former tenant. It’s not at all unusual for me to spend thirty minutes looking at a bare patch of sky, awaiting the appearance of a raptor.

  One evening in late August, I was sitting on the deck, cup of coffee in hand, and the radio was playing Tommy Dorsey’s ‘Marie’ when I saw my first osprey. The sun had set a half hour before and a diaphanous salmon band crowned the rim of Mt. Armstrong when she came into view, gliding parallel to me 100 feet away as she made her effortless-seeming way back downriver toward Jenner: solitary, proud, graceful, and unfettered. I recalled a moment on a crystalline December morning before my time when Ram I, in Canadian exile, stood at the summit of Mt. Seymour, watching the city of Vancouver as it awakened through the mist and drizzle, shaking off its sticky-eyed sleep and stretching its limbs in all its holy and machine-humming glory. I believe it was his desire to consume the city and all that went with it, its parks, neighborhoods, office buildings, museums, gas stations, donut shops, inlets, bays, and bridges—all at once, to be omnipresent and experience the town, entirely and simultaneously. And I remembered that he failed.

  The solitary floating osprey somehow awakened the memory of that day. I was thinking that if it were me, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in it and of it. The difference between us is that, like the osprey, I’d have wanted to be above it.

  In the early fall, I began setting out meat in the hope that I might attract a bird that I could befriend. Rattler kept the varmints away and that eliminated any possibility of their making off with the scraps that I placed nightly on a tin dish nailed to the deck railing. One night, unable to sleep, I passed through the living room on my way to the bathroom, when I sensed a presence outside the sliding glass door. I stopped and turned slowly to discover a barn owl clutching the railing while ripping into a shard of round steak. Carefully and quietly, I slid the door open and regarded him as he gorged himself. But when I took a step closer to him, he rose and flapped his wings in a threatening attitude before ascending to the north, his broad blond underbody contrasting against the black night like a roving beacon as I stood with arms upraised in defense from the fright he gave me. Later, I thought of the student pot smoker and the people from People and felt chastened.

  I do not go out in the evenings, except to an occasional movie. There’s an old Quonset hut theater in Monte Rio that I go to. Inside, it smells like the tube station at Piccadilly Circus, a sticky-sweet close smell, redolent of electric current. They show double bills of old movies, and if I’m in the mood, I’ll make the ten-mile drive to see Bogie or Walt Disney or whatever else they might have going. It doesn’t really matter, so long as there’s action or laughs; I don’t feel capable of sitting through foreign films or romantic movies. One night, I walked out fifteen minutes into “To Have and Have Not” with my hands trembling and sweaty. I remembered Vera lighting her cigarettes like Bacall did, and I could feel the hut shrinking. A disturbing burn from my nether parts rose up and flushed my face, leaving me dizzy. I smoked in my car with the windows down and attempted to hypnotize myself with the glowing end of the cigarette, but I couldn’t concentrate on my trance. All I could see was Vera lighting two smokes and passing one to the former tenant while exhaling through her nostrils. I missed work the next day. The phenobarbitals made me sleep right through the alarm.

  I got my official release from Fremont Neuropsychiatric on July 1st. I had been before the examining board three times in the past nine months, twice in the past two. I answered their questions regarding a variety of subjects, most of them about attitudes and feelings, but some of them even political. Apparently, I gave the right answers, as they termed me both sane and cured and assigned me a permanent counselor from the state Department of Rehabilitation, who would assist me in choosing my new caree
r and placing me in a job.

  I didn’t much care for Mr. Heine, the counselor to whom I was assigned, and it took some restraint on my part to avoid losing my temper. He was a smug mustached guy in his mid-thirties, who dressed like one of those old disco kings, with his shirt open to the fourth button, displaying a concave chest adorned with gold chains of various widths. He wore skin-tight designer jeans and his boots were so shiny you could comb your hair in the reflection and get a straight part with it. I don’t think he was too fond of me either, and on Monday mornings, when he was invariably hung over, he sometimes tried to provoke me, referring to my previous occupation in a snide way or making disparaging remarks about the amorality of filmdom. I didn’t bite, just sat there and took it. He was my last control and I wanted out and wasn’t going to blow it by socking this discophile even though I thought he deserved it. He used to refer to me as Mister Le Doir or, when he wanted to summon up the power of the state that he as a petty officer represented, “our client.” His name during these, then weekly, chats was always “we.”

  After reviewing my tests and evaluations and record of temporary employment at Vacu Doc, the carpet-cleaning job I held for six months while living at Redwood House, he advised me that he was recommending me for electronic assembly. He said that it was the field of the future and that with proper training and application I could move up the ladder at Astrodyne, the company where he could place me. It wouldn’t be much to start, he said, not like the media or the movies, but within four years, I could be making fifty-five thousand a year as a troubleshooter, and I’d maybe even get some travel. I told him sure, sounds good to me. But if he would have suggested that I become an accountant or an arc welder or a beekeeper, I would have just as readily done that. My only requirements were regular hours, steady pay, modest benefits, quiet, and an aversion to working with the public. “Mr. Le Doir,” he said, holding out a fish hand for me to shake, “we have ourselves a deal.” Heine and Voc Rehab helped me find the house on the river and when I left Fremont that still July morning, I took the bus back to Santa Rosa and then completed the journey in a taxi to my yellow house on the bluff. The bus ride was uneventful, but when we pulled into Vallejo, I saw two small Mexican children playing alongside a building with an animal in a cage and when I looked at their nasty little faces taunting the living thing inside the metal box I got angry and was thinking of yelling at them but thought better of it and hypnotized myself instead. As the bus pitched through the hills of the coast range, the rocking motion was like that of a small boat on a mild sea, lulling me into a deep sleep from which I awakened only when the driver nudged me to say that this was the end of the line.

  I didn’t have to report to work until the 5th, a Tuesday, and so I spent the intervening four days arranging my few things, cleaning the house, and buying things like towels, plates, pots, etc. using up half of the $1,000 home-starter stipend they’d allotted me along with a six-year-old Datsun, a half-truckload of Goodwill furniture, and two months of rent. I spent another couple hundred on a stereo I found at the flea market and, as per Heine’s suggestion, put the rest aside for a rainy day. I arranged my living quarters, policed my environment, and put my affairs in order.

  On the 4th of July, I stayed home and read a book about a green-skinned child who showed up one day in a small English village. It was meant to be allegorical, I think. The sounds of shrieking rockets, small explosives, a gunshot or two, 4-wheel drives scattering gravel, barking dogs, and an occasional scream reverberated from somewhere up the canyon. After a while, I turned on the radio and it was Elvis Costello singing about “the damage that we do, and never know; the words that we don’t say that scares me so.” I flipped the dial to swing jazz and got ‘Moonglow.’ I sat on the deck with tea and cookies, listening to the dreamy music while the local citizenry celebrated our nation’s birthday with machines and explosions. I felt good. I was home again.

  I enjoy my work. There’s a certitude to electronics that appeals to me. I know if I solder a wire from one terminal to another and trace the circuit from one end of the board to the other, a certain unvarying effect will be produced when current is applied. It’s the ineluctability of this electronic logic which I most appreciate; a matrix of order I am trying to assimilate and superimpose over the random pattern of existence and rationale which the previous tenant operated by. You might say his circuitry was suspect, his wiring not up to code, his connections not cleanly soldered. His tendency to overload, break down, and short circuit was an annoying trend which ultimately led to the machine’s destruction. It is my intention to rewire this apparatus properly and make this machine a functional unit that will hum with the cool efficiency and utter simplicity of a turbine.

  I was born from the shock that erased another. This new being is simple; careless, in the most literal sense of that term. And yet, at unguarded moments, I sense the spectral shadow of the other—those vestigial sensations that are the drying mucilage of separation. I had an acute sense of this during the recent grape harvest, the autumn air heavy with an overwhelming aroma of rot. The smell pierced my skin and percolated down to the core of my being. It reminded me of the smell of my own skin and brains after the shock treatments. The growers think it’s going to be a good year for chardonnay.

  It became my custom, during the fall, to take long nocturnal walks through the streets of my neighborhood. The name of this area is Ice Box Canyon, which is an apt description of the region that I inhabit irrespective of physical geography.

  For years I had driven everywhere I went, even if it was just a block or two, attended by the deception that the shortest distance between two points wasn’t a straight line, but how quick it took you to cover the ground. Now, I have lost sight of points altogether, and if life is, as the shopworn adage goes, a race captured by the swiftest, then I am out of luck, for I have gone so far as to remove myself from the competitors.

  There is no destination I seek, no achievement I pursue save the sanctity of order and the purity of quiet. I prefer to observe from the stands, or, more precisely, from the streets of my neighborhood, where I meander aimlessly and without malice or intent, past small cottages and cabins, their living rooms flickering opalescent from televisions that will sometimes shout to me as I pass. “How long has it been since you were able to say, ‘I feel grrreat about my body! Well, at Grecian Um Wellness Spas Incorporated,’ etc.”

  I’m at a loss to explain why I went to that bar the other night, because I don’t drink anymore and because it’s technically a parole violation. I had worked overtime that day and wasn’t thrilled by the idea of cooking another solo meal, so I decided to drive to Guerneville, searching for something to catch my eye. Neon blue script announced “Alexis”—“Fine food and beverages.”

  The restaurant itself was cozy with a huge stone fireplace and wrought iron chandeliers festooned with tiny votive candles. I ate a red snapper and after coffee the waitress asked me if I’d been in the bar and, after replying in the negative, she told me that I should check it out as it was hot.

  It was decorated in the owner’s favorite style, Memphis high-tech, she said, and since all I could think she meant by that was some kind of toned-down, hipped-up Elvis, it got the better of my curiosity and I did as she said and checked it out.

  The walls were eggshell white, the tables were green glass on marble pedestals, and the chairs were huge chrome tube-like sculptures with Chinese red cushions affixed to their frames at angles that forced you to recline. I felt like I was about to be served a drink in a futuristic doctor’s office. I didn’t notice her until she addressed me.

  “Do you mind if I join you?”

  She was already sitting down. “No.”

  “Isn’t this place fantastic?” she demanded enthusiastically, taking it in with her eyes like a child at an amusement park and coming back to me smiling.

  I looked around. “I guess it is.”

  “I’m Marla. I’m up for the weekend.”

  “I’m
Ram. I’m down for the count.”

  She laughed heartily, throwing back her head, fingers to her sternum, while I looked down her throat.

  “Oh, that’s great, just great. And what do you do, Ram down for the count?”

  “Not much. If you mean work, I’m an electronics assembler.”

  “That must be fascinating!” she replied too quickly. I could tell she was bullshitting by the tone, just trying to keep the conversation going, and I should have excused myself right then, but I didn’t.

  “I’m in real estate—commercial leasing, corporate stuff.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “It’s slow now so I came here to rest. I’m from The City.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know The City?”

  “A little. I used to know someone who lived there.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yeah, among others.”

  “I bet you have lots of women chasing you.” Her eyes were dark and dancing in the muddled light, and they were lined with kohl that made them even more coal-like. The candle on the table made two little red points on the irises. She was grinning.

  I laughed. “Not really, not at all in fact.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she teased, squeezing my knee with one hand, the fingertips on the other one tickling the rim of her drink.

  “It’s true. At one time,” I said, hesitating. “At one time, I guess you could have maybe said that. A long time ago, ages ago, really.”

  “Um, I see.” She squeezed her lips together and nodded. The fingertips slid down to the stem. She slid them around the cup of the glass like it was a snifter and tipped it back slowly. “And now you’re into change,” she finally said.

  “Yeah, that’s it, change.” She looked at me, her coal eyes moist as her lips, uncertain for a moment. She blinked and then looked up right at me, opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, and then drew near, whispering conspiratorially. “I’m into costumes. Like this one.”