Old Songs in a New Cafe

by Robert James Waller

  I lie back on my pillow. My parents are asleep, but the little brown radio beside my bed, the one with only two dials and tan cloth covering over the speaker, glows in the darkness. “Welcome to ‘Your Saturday Night Dance Party,’ “the smooth baritone from New Orleans says. The music is live, and I know, absolutely, there are handsome men and beautiful women. They are eating and drinking, and dancing on a southern rooftop, a big hotel, their hair only slightly ruffled by a soft wind from the gulf.

  Over the music and following the geese I hear a Rock Island freight train. In the bottomlands south of me, the wizard is laughing and does a backward flip, unable to contain himself The Road is busy tonight—music from New Orleans, geese across the moon, trains across the trestle. The wizard loves the Road and is teaching me to love it, as both an illusion and a reality.

  I fade in and out of sleep, wandering along the edge of things, open to the possibilities. The music changes and images come. People dressed in wind-whipped black, carrying daggers with carved handles and drinking tea in front of flapping tents, waiting for the call to prayer. Camels moving silk and frankincense at a steady pace over blowing sand, pushing hard toward Medina. Near morning, my mother pulls the covers over me and turns off the little radio, while I travel, far from her.

  There was only one good road leading out of Rockford, Iowa, back then. The rest were gravel, loose and dusty in the summer, treacherous in the winter. But one good road is enough. I knew that’s all it took. I could travel east on it, go south on Highway 14, swing east again and catch one of the big highways leading down to New Orleans, or, for that matter, to Paris or Persia or twilight places in the Amazon Basin.

  These were not fantasies without the possibility of fulfillment. I never believed that for a moment. They were plans, you see, plans that could be converted into small-town sidewalks that turned into streets that turned into highways and the highways into old steamers or airplanes or caravans headed toward market towns. The steady two-beat of a New Orleans drummer could become the complex syncopations of wrinkled hands on tightly stretched goatskin in high desert arroyos, and the Rock Island freight could some day be transformed into a long, chuffing train across Siberia. The images are the beginning; you must have the images first. Then comes the Road.

  So I lean over a 4 A.M. hotel balcony in my forty third year and watch Bombay work its way toward morning. Thirty-four hours in front of this, I had shut the front door of my house in Cedar Falls, slapped my vest pocket to make sure the tickets and passport were there, and picked up my suitcase. Car to the airport, commuter plane to Chicago, jet to New York, and there in the darkness was Air India 106, loading. Then London by daylight, and into the night again—Europe, Istanbul, Persia, the Gulf of Oman. India, unknown, and fearsome in that ignorance, out there somewhere.

  On the balcony, I drink a Kingfisher beer as light approaches, watching Arab dhows run up their sails into the first wind of morning where the Portuguese once harbored, watching the street people cook their breakfast on charcoal burners, thinking of a little brown radio humming, geese flying, and a wizard promising me that my world would not always be so circumscribed as it was then.

  I wander the streets of India. Touts offer sightseeing, drugs of any kind, and women, or young boys if a woman is not to my liking. I swim in a pool at dawn, listening to a flute somewhere, and fall in transient love with Indian women in green silk, gold upon their bodies. For seventeen nights I eat at a table next to that of Sir David Lean and his wife. He’s here scouting locations for A Passage to India. We do not speak. My midwestern reticence and respect for privacy prevent me from asking about his dreams as a young boy. I know he thought of deserts and jungles and dark winds from Java, though.

  And Arabia came along. On Themari Street in Riyadh, the old ways endure. There is gold, and women with covered faces and men with covered intentions. There are calls to prayer and desert winds, and I wander through the markets at night looking for presents to take home. The bracelet will do, and the necklace. The scarf also. I flag down a taxi in the middle of a broad avenue. The driver is a Bedouin who remembers the sound of hooves and the taste of blowing sand. Far to the west, Canadas are beating their way south over the rooftops of northern Iowa.

  Then Munich and Dubai and Hong Kong and Paris and on and on. 1 ride a coastal boat south of Puerto Vallarta to a fishing village. Staying there for a week without light or pure water, I listen to an African drummer tell me how the drums can talk, if you have the skill. I believe him and sit nearby while he plays to the darkness, on a hill 167 stone steps above the village. In the morning a man from San Francisco sings his night-dreams and invites others to do the same, while another man murmurs incantations to the beat of a smaller drum.

  In the river towns of Belgium, winter lies hard and brittle upon me. Moving across the cold marble floors of a Flemish cathedral, I listen to the sound of my boot heels and wonder if the bishops in their crypts of stone are listening also. Was this the place? There’s something here I can’t touch, some ancient sense of having stood in these shadows before, and watched. Watched the lady in silver, small hurried steps as she came streaming down a secondary aisle past the confessionals and toward me. The image is there for a moment only. It wavers, dissolves, as early light comes through high and painted windows and colors orange a suffering Jesus, hanging, crucified.

  St. Maarten is expensive, but the beaches are good. You can make up the cost at the casinos if you know blackjack and the cards are running your way. I am suspicious, though, about playing against the government. Governments think of gambling as taxes; they have unfavorable rules and close the casino while I’m in the middle of a streak. The hell with ‘em. I put my winnings in a metal box at the hotel and catch the morning flight out of there. I’ll try Macao next.

  I ride long-tailed boats through the backwaters of Bangkok, hang off foggy cliffs in Acadia with my cameras, and follow snowy egrets through the swamps of south Georgia. In Big Sur, I read my poetry by firelight. There are professional poets with long hair in wide-brimmed hats, and pretty young women who love the idea of poets more than the words. The high plains drums are still there in New Mexico, if you listen, and old dogs lie in the streets of La Push, where violent January waves hammer the coast of northwestern Washington. A fusty woman, from Omaha twenty years back, combs the Oregon beaches and dreams of secret cargos only she will find. I spend an hour talking with her about that.

  Now there is more than one good road out of Rockford, Iowa, though still only one to the east. The same one. I visit there and talk with my mother. She remembers the old brown radio, the one with two dials and a tan cloth covering over the little speaker. She remembers the late-night sound of geese overhead. But she never quite has understood the wizard or the Road or why the man she raised loves it so.

  “India?” she says. “How many times will this make?” “Three,” I say. “There is more out there, and I’m fifty now. It’s time for India again.”

  At some point, it gets down to “lasts.” It’s getting there now. I wear clothes for a long time. I wonder if my leather jacket, worn but tough, is the last one I’ll buy. And my boots, good ones, Red Wings, are the same. The man at the shoe shop says they’re going to outlive me. And my old hat? And the guitars? They’ll go on forever. Maybe this is the last of the India voyages. Maybe.

  I go down into the bottomlands to talk with the wizard of my summers. His ways are slanting ways, as mine have become and turn ever more so. He looks at the river purling by and listens to my questions. I ask again about the geese and the Road and the music, and what it all means. Where does it go from here? What about the “lasts”:?

  He is a fey companion, uneasy with too much directness, and begins to move away from me through meadow grass, chanting as he goes, his voice fading:

  The High-Desert Master gave me a child

  In return for some footprints

  I found in the sand.

  And I carried him here

  Through fall an
d through winter

  Past old riders turning their ponies for summer,

  Past slavers who cried for their right to the boy,

  Past dancers who moved through the streets of Castile,

  Past arms reaching out from windows and doorways,

  Past women in black who were crying and offered

  Their only true daughters for a sigh and a drachma,

  Past those who would counsel prudence and claimed

  The dancers had gone and no more would follow,

  Past old harbor seals who lay in the sunlight

  And remembered the coming of Christ and before.

  I carried him here to sweet meadows bending

  And fought off the bandits who tried for his soul.

  I gave him his love of sails leaving cover

  And the sound of old flutes on the first wind of morning,

  While I showed him the maps

  Scribbled in chalk,

  Washing away on the walls of September.

  But women in green, with gold on their bodies,

  Ah, they were the ones who took him away,

  And gladly I gave him

  Asking only one promise:

  You must teach him to dance

  In the twilight of Eden,

  In the moments remaining,

  Before it has gone.

  For he is the last one

  And

  “Never again,” cried the High-Desert Master.

  “Never and never and never again.”

  Looking upward, he begins to sing, sweeping his small arm in widening arcs. I follow the point of his finger. Geese are moving south across a dagger-like slice of moon, their ancient sextants working in sober eyes, taking them along time and space, toward the ponds of Texas.

  I drive my truck out of Rockford, down the one good road to the east, On the tape deck, Kitaro plays of blowing sand and loaded camels pushing hard toward red-walled cities in the deserts of Rajasthan. Goatskin drums underneath the melody. Switching over to celestial reckoning, I jam my boot harder on the accelerator, drifting somewhere between illusion and reality, refusing to succumb, thinking of magic…. and believing in it.

  Southern Flight

  Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport,

  the frogs do not die in sporty but in earnest

  —BION

  ______________________________________

  I am twenty birds back on the left side of the skein, looking over my shoulder at Malachi. He has taken many pellets in his eastern wing and cannot pull it high enough for a full stroke. My right leg is dragging as we hammer our way south in the late afternoon. Two pieces of shot are embedded there, and they will cause me great difficulty when we land.

  We stayed too long in the north. All of us knew that. But the summer ran late and warm; we became fat, floated on amiable water, and delayed the leaving. Lobu had argued for days that it was time to go. But we whined or laughed at him and refused to rise when he urged us.

  A cold night rain fell and turned to sleet by morning. We did not see four men take their places in long marsh grass when the sun was still far down the curve of Earth. At dawn, they began shooting while we were sleepy on the water.

  Lobu sounded the lifting cry and was in the air at the first hint of camouflaged movement in the grass. I saw him begin to rise even before his warning slid across the pond. And I remember marveling at the great power of his young body, his wings taking him first along the water, then into a long curving roll as he fought for height and distance. I wondered if I had looked that splendid in my second year.

  Others picked up the cry, and I knew this was more than Lobu’s way of getting us moving. Amalo, one of the youngest geese, looked at me for a moment in panic and indecision. I signaled him instantly, reaffirming what he feared, and we began our takeoff, struggling desperately for speed, for another day, for another moment.

  I called upon myself for the strength that once was there, I called upon myself for all that I had ever been. To my left, I could see a hunter swinging his dark barrel in a practiced even way, following the wife of Jonaku through early light.

  Coming off the water she exploded in a cloud of blood and feathers as the full load hit her. Jonaku trembled when he went over her floating body only two feet below him. The hunters were firing shell after shell from pump guns, and I could see pellets digging into the water ahead of me.

  East we all were moving, perpendicular to the guns, straight into a curious mixture of freezing rain and rising sun. Birds were tumbling downward, some giving cries, others falling only in silence. The guns kept firing as I reached climbing speed. Malachi had drawn almost even with me, coming up on my left as we passed directly in front of the muzzles.

  Rolling upward to the right. Apricot flame. A surge of it. Buffeting cone of mountain thunder. At the same moment I felt the impact on my leg, Malachi shuddered and began to fall, but caught himself and stayed low behind a stand of tall grass where the guns could not find him,

  Sixty yards out. Almost safe. Coming around to follow Lobu, I could see a cumbrous man sloshing through the water, a spaniel beside him. He was shouting a wild cry of exultation and waving his gun above his head; I did not understand his words.

  Birds were struggling, others lay still. Sori paddled in small, tight circles, flopping randomly, a piece of shot in her brain, while the dog swam toward her. Zach-ary, the old one, was injured, but tried one more time to follow us. As he flailed wildly near the edge of the pond, a man in camouflage shot him again, and he died there on northern water.

  I banked into a strong wind from the western lands and fell into place. Other birds were doing the same, Water streamed from our feathers and flashed in the light of Mother sun, while Lobu took us southward.

  There are two great rivers in the middle of this land. We are flying sixty miles east of the one that flows from the Montana highlands, three hundred miles north of the Missouri lakes. Ahead on the point, Lobu is pushing us hard. He is angry with us for lingering so long at the pond of morning, and we know he is right to be angry. Seven birds were killed by the hunters.

  Light snow is falling. The color of the sky matches Lobu’s mood. Our cadence has been steady for the last seven hours, and we listen to the Words. Heard they are, but not spoken. The sound unfolds from the meter of our wings. There is a slight unevenness in our stroking, and it is from this that the Words arise.

  Like a great pulsing sigh they come, sweeping back along the lines in which we fly. “Alooooom” is the sound. “Alooooom—We are One.” It is our creed and our comfort.

  The Words wash over me, and wondering about Malachi, I turn once more to look at him. I am startled to see blood coming from his left eye. I had not noticed the blood before, and I remember again that only his body saved me from the full load of shot. His good eye glitters with pain and desperation as he stares straight ahead, giving full energy to his flight.

  Lobu is curving us around a tall structure with a round, dish-shaped plate at the top and over wires connected to it. We do not know the name of this thing, though we have seen many of them before.

  Below, thin sheets of ice begin to form on shallow patches of water. The snow is falling with more intensity now, and each of us knows that we must keep moving. A blizzard would take many of us.

  Ten yards across from me, in the western line, Shanta is also watching Malachi. They are old lovers. She feels an enduring warmth for him and tries to send some of her strength over the empty sky between them.

  When I had younger wings, the long southern flight was exhilarating. There were many places to come down and rest at evening. Now the water has disappeared. From this height, we can see traces of primitive contours where once the marshes could be found.

  They are gone now. To other things they are gone. To houses and planted fields and roads. And there is little left for us.

  Much of the remaining water is surrounded by guns, preserved only for the killing, not for the good. It is said th
e hunters fight with their money and their time to save the marshlands, and, though we try, we find it difficult to be grateful. We do not understand the killing; we can only fly before it.

  The young ones ask about the killing. “Why?” they ask. We have no answers, for there seem to be none. Once there were reasons, the very old ones say, but those reasons disappeared long before the marshes died.

  “But,” the young ones press us, “if not for the meat, then why? And why have they taken the marshes if they want our flesh? It makes no sense!”

  In those moments, we would turn to Zachary. He had lifted in terror from many ponds, had fought for the safety of altitude through a thousand magenta dawns with buckshot lacing the red face of Mother sun, had seen the waters smeared with blood and lifeless birds floating on silent mornings, had counted in his years the disappearance of the places for living. Finally he would speak, but only after the young ones could not be quieted with generalities and platitudes.

  “I have no way of understanding the thoughts of humans. I can only repeat what has come down to me through the elders. The origins of what I will tell you are shrouded by the failure of memories and the embellishment of time. I know only that the words were given by one of many forms who rested on a long sandbar in summer firelight and spoke in a tongue that knew no boundaries. When the elders asked the same questions that you now ask about the ways of humans, they were cautioned to listen, to remember. And the traveler spoke thusly”:

  Ancient dreams, there are,

  Unresolved.

  And lingering impulses

  From the days of rocks and fire,

  Just after the great ice had gone.

  A reluctance to come before

  Themselves and ask,

  “Who are we, and what is our place

  Among all things?”

  An avoidance, there is,

  Of eternal questions,

  Difficult and submerged.

  Questions yielding not to

  Force but only to