by Ron Carlson
He’d fall in step behind some junior in tight white Levi’s, her rear bobbing like a searchlight, and he’d lean to me and say, “What is this feeling? The biological urge toward procreation of the species?” Then he’d elbow me and answer the question: “Nah.”
His great and lasting fame derived, however, from planning the graduation party on Black Rock Beach and from his thesis: “Eleven,” which postulated that there were eleven different kinds of erections. I can remember these things with a clarity that quiets me.
Katie has put her book on her lap and her head against my arm. It is sweetly warm here now, sunny with the kind of sleep that closes your eyes from the bottom up. The plane rides the white shell of air over the ocean, splitting silence into broomstraws, and I interlace my fingers carefully so as not to disturb my wife Katie. If you think I don’t love her, you’re not catching on. I close my eyes in the bright rushing world. I move my lips. So, what is this, more than it should be? I don’t know. The truth: I’m praying.
The next: it doesn’t last long. I move my lips carefully around the few important things I have to say and then use the bundle of my ten fingers to adjust the knob in my trousers. The walrus has a genuine bone in its penis that ranges in length between ten and twenty inches. The bone is an evolutionary device that is a great help in cold water. Eskimos save these bones, called “ooziks,” for good luck. A sperm whale’s penis, when erect, is nearly fifteen feet in length. The grizzly bear, more closely related to man, has erections that average four inches and require greater willing or unwilling cooperation from a mate. My watch tells me I’ve had this tumescence half an hour and at our speed that’s three hundred and fifteen miles, a boner that could go from Denver—if I can hang on ten more minutes—to Santa Fe. It’s the kind of erection Ryan used to call number three, the kind you get about ten in the morning in third period, a wonderful extension that makes you slide down in your seat and stretch your legs. It’s related to number one, the one you wake up with, stiff as a clothespin. Number two was what? It was also a morning deal, the one that comes up between class, pointed down, trapped in your shorts pointing at five o’clock. Number two was the one you used your chemistry book to straighten out. What were the others? Eleven. We laughed our heads off, but we all knew he was right. There are eleven, minimum.
I remember the larky randiness of those days and my decision finally to push the point with a girl named Cheryl Lockwood at the graduation party. I wasn’t really out of the mainstream in high school, most of our class were virgins, but I’d had a couple of relationships that had just dried up and blown away and I couldn’t figure it out. I was a little worried, I remember, about being unqualified for the real world of men and women. Who doesn’t? My parents, of course, could read my mind, but I could not read theirs. I lived in a kind of dread that my father would take me aside one evening or my mother would try to open the topic. As it was, we lived an uneasy truce. If we were watching television at night together and there was a kissing scene, I would always leave the room, glass of water, homework, something. I was out of there.
Cheryl Lockwood was a cutie. I wasn’t going with Cheryl, a smart-looking girl with short brown hair and a nice bosom, but she was my chemistry partner, and whenever we talked, we flirted. Her favorite phrase was “What you going to do, huh? Huh?” It was all smile-smile stuff, but the undercurrent was there. The way we flirted was that I would tell her she had to put on some weight and she would moan about it, oh, no, no, like that, and then we’d light the Bunsen burner and melt something down. When I think of her I still smell sulfur.
My decision to make serious moves on her was a result of our being sent to the principal’s office together for staining Mr. Welch’s hands. Our teacher, Mr. Welch, of course, deserved it, because he understood chemistry and wasn’t that willing or able to let the rest of us in on the secret. He was a terrible teacher. We did learn that sodium nitrate stains human skin, however, and we spread a thin layer on our counter just before asking him over to explain something about liquid sulfur. The next day his palms were gray and he sent me and then Cheryl (because she laughed) to the office.
On the way down there I was a little high, you know, from being kicked out of class and the halls were empty and there was Cheryl in step with me and we were kind of bumping together and I said, “There is something so sexy about empty hallways, don’t you think?” I put my arm around her shoulder and she put her arm around my waist and squeezed, saying, “Absolutely. What are you going to do about it?” And I said, “I’m going to get you alone at the graduation party and have my way with you.” She squeezed me tighter and said, “Good. I hope you enjoy it as much as I plan to.” We met with Mr. Gonzalez, the principal, and he tried to be mad about what we had done to Mr. Welsh, but he had a little trouble.
And that was that. Cheryl and I didn’t flirt for the last two weeks of school. I didn’t try anything because I didn’t want to break the spell. We had made some kind of deal that day in the hallway and we both knew it.
We land in Honolulu. I’m on the wrong side of the plane to see Waikiki, but I look down and see the water change, the seven layers of turquoise. When the wheels touch down, the plane bumps once in a soft, unreal way, and instead of thinking we’re really here, I think: This seems unreal. And nothing that will happen for hours will dissuade me.
Our cab driver, for instance, is the same guy who took us to the airport in Phoenix. I lean back sleepily in the car and feel the strange air, moist and full of orchids and exhaust, and I see the back of his head. He must be working two shifts. He lets us off in the circular drive of the Royal Hawaiian and here the air wants to wake us, sweet with salt, in the dappled shady imbroglio of trees. I give the driver a big tip. He’s going to need it to get back to Arizona by dawn. Here it is full afternoon, sunny but broken, and Katie stops me amid our suitcases on the steps of the hotel and kisses me. Just a little kiss. What am I going to do, make more of it than it is? No, some woman kisses you on an island.
When we register, there are two messages—one from Sorenson at the university, the other from Katie’s friend from Tokyo, Mikki. While Katie makes the arrangement for our rental car, I step back from the majestic registration counter, smooth as marble and big as a boat. The wide Persian runners down the lobby’s arcade are four inches thick. Down at the end through the glass atrium, I can see the lawn and a cluster of umbrellas around the bar, and further—through the palms—just a wedge of the fake blue sea. Katie takes my arm and says, “Let’s go up and make our calls.”
I smile as the boy bumps our old luggage into the elevator because I am thinking of Harry in my suitcase. He could be in there right now. You take your children everywhere.
I call Sorenson and he says to forget the zoo, to come directly to the university. He says to come now and gives me directions. In the tropical heat, I can feel my rash. Kate and I are in the room, fourth floor, and she has opened the shutters onto the beach and I can see a thousand bodies at their ease. The large catamaran nods in the sand in front of the hotel, its large green-and-white sail seems the flag of health. I ask a few questions, but Sorenson says, “We’ll talk. I’ll fill you in when you get up here.” I can smell something wrong.
Katie has heard me on the phone. There is no need for us to talk. I’ll be back later. “Are you okay?” I ask. “You’re going to see Mikki?”
“I’ll call her, meet her for a drink this afternoon.”
It should be now that I bring it out—I lost my job—tell her. I can’t do it. I’d end up defending something. I’ve still got six months’ pay, residuals. She’d rail against the forces that have got me fired. I’d say something generous about the situation. I don’t have it to be generous. Something crawled out of the sea two hundred million years ago, took a breath, and liked it. That guy has lost me my job.
I take a deep breath and then another, trying not to sigh, and take Katie’s hand. “Let’s kiss in front of the window,” I say. “Be part of this place.” When she
comes to me in the sunlight, we kiss like two people in a movie, and I realize her arms are the reason I have a neck, an evolutionary device.
Then when I open my suitcase to grab a new shirt and find my powder, Harry’s not in there. But the boys have left me a souvenir. I find the rental videocassette case and open it. The Land of the Lost. Harry’s done a little packing for me. There’s going to be a late fee on this classic.
At Sorenson’s lab there’s a little confusion. I take my bag and notes in our rental Toyota up the hill to the university and find his block building hidden among the million-year-old trees behind a little cemetery.
“The bear isn’t here,” he tells me.
“You moved it.”
“No. It hasn’t exactly arrived.” Sorenson was one of my professors at Stanford and now, like everyone else, he’s not getting any older. He’s still got all his hair; he isn’t any heavier; and he’s still wearing the same wire-rims. It confuses me that I’m the same age as all these old guys. As always when things are working out, he seems unconcerned, peaceful. I think he was in physics before zoology, and he found out how fast the universe is expanding. It cooled him out about all the small stuff.
“Where is the panda, Phil?” I say. “Should we go see it?”
“There’s a guy coming.” He smiles. “He wants to meet Zoo Lewis.”
I feel the plane ride humming in my sinuses. I sit on one of the metal stools. “There’s a guy coming?”
“Right.”
“Phil. Whose panda is this?”
Sorenson smiles and pours us each a cup of thick laboratory coffee. I’m glad to be here even if he’s being mysterious. He got me my first assistant editorship right after I left veterinary school. He was the second one I called from the hospital after the allergy attack, and like my parents, he wasn’t surprised.
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 t
oo. “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.