Green Shadows, White Whale Page 3

  My director stood there in boots and riding pants and a silk shirt open at the neck to reveal an ascot tie. His eyes bulged like eggs to see me here. His chimpanzee mouth fell down a few inches, and the air came out of his lungs in an alcohol-tinged rush.

  “I’ll be damned!” he cried. “It’s you!”

  “Me,” I admitted meekly.

  “You’re late! You okay? What delayed you?”

  I waved behind me, up the road.

  “Ireland,” I said.

  “Christ, that explains it. Welcome!”

  He pulled me in. The door slammed.

  “You need a drink?”

  “Ah, God,” I said. Then hearing my newly acquired brogue, I spoke meticulously.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  As John, his wife Ricki, and I sat down to dinner, I gazed long and hard at the wee dead birds on a warm plate, their heads awry, their beady eyes half shut, and said:

  “Can I make a suggestion?”

  “Make it, kid.”

  “It’s about the Parsee Fedallah who runs as a character through the whole book. He ruins Moby Dick.”

  “Fedallah? That one? Well?”

  “Do you mind if right now, over our wine, we give all the best lines and acts to Ahab? And throw Fedallah overboard?”

  My director lifted his glass. “He’s thrown!”

  The weather outside was beginning to clear, the grass was lush and green in the dark beyond the French windows, and I was blushing warmly all over to think I was really here, doing this work, beholding my hero, imagining an incredible future as screen-writer for a genius.

  Somewhere along in the dinner the subject of Spain came up, almost casually, or perhaps John brought it up himself.

  I saw Ricki stiffen and pause in her eating, and then continue picking at her food as John went on about Hemingway and the bullfights and Franco and traveling to and from Madrid and Barcelona.

  “We were there just a month ago,” said John. “You really ought to go there sometime, kid,” he said. “Beautiful country. Wonderful people, it’s been a bad twenty years, but they’re getting back on their feet. Anyway, we had a little event there, didn’t we, Ricki? A small thing got out of hand.”

  Ricki started to rise, her plate in her hand, and the knife fell clattering to the table.

  “Why don’t you tell us about it, dear,” said John.

  “No, I—” said Ricki.

  “Tell us what happened at the border,” said John.

  His words were so heavy that, weighted, Ricki sat back down and after a pause to regain her breath, held for a long moment, let it out, “We were driving back up from Barcelona and there was this Spaniard wanted to get into France without papers and John wanted us to smuggle him across the border in our car under a rug in the back seat and John said it was okay and the Spaniard said please and I said my God, if they found out, the border guards, if they caught us we’d be held, put in jail maybe, and you know what Spanish jails are like, in there for days or weeks or forever, so I said no, no way, and the Spaniard pleaded and John said it was a matter of honor, we had to do it, we had to help this poor man and I said I was sorry but I wouldn’t endanger the children. What if I was in jail and the kids would be in the hands of others too many hours and days and who would explain to them and John insisted and there was a big row—”

  “Very simply,” said John, “you were a coward.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” said Ricki, looking up from her food.

  “You were yellow,” said John, “pure yellow, and we had to leave the poor son of a bitch behind because my wife didn’t have enough guts to let us get him across.”

  “How do we know he wasn’t a criminal, John,” said Ricki. “Some sort of political fugitive, and then we would have been in jail forever—”

  “Just yellow is all.” John lit a cigarillo and leaned forward to stare at his wife at the far end, miles away down the table. “I really hate to think I am married to a woman with no guts, who wears a yellow stripe down her back. Wouldn’t you hate to be married to that kind of woman, kid?”

  I sat back in my chair, my mouth full of food I could not chew nor swallow.

  I looked at my genius employer and then at his wife then back to John and then back to Ricki.

  Her head was bent.

  “Yellow,” said John, a final time, and blew smoke.

  As I looked down at the dead bird on my plate, I recalled a scene that now seemed so long ago.

  In August, I had wandered, stunned, into a bookstore in Beverly Hills looking for a small, comfortable-sized copy of Moby Dick. The copy I had at home was too large to travel. I needed something compact. I shared with the proprietor my excitement about writing the screenplay and traveling overseas.

  Even as I spoke, astonished, a woman in the far corner of the shop turned and said, very clearly:

  “Don’t go on that journey.”

  It was Elijah, at the foot of the Pequod’s gangplank, warning Queequeg and Ishmael not to follow Ahab off ’round the world: it was a dread mission and a lost cause from which no man might return.

  “Don’t go,” said the strange woman again.

  I recovered and said, “Who are you?”

  “A former friend of the director’s and the former wife of one of his screenwriters. I know them both. God, I wish I didn’t. They’re both monsters, but your director’s the worst. He’ll eat you and spit out your bones. So—”

  She stared at me.

  “—whatever you do, don’t go.”

  Ricki’s eyes were shut, but tears were leaking out of the lashes and running down to the tip of her nose where they fell, one by one, onto her plate.

  My God, I thought, this is my first day in Ireland, my first day at work for my hero.

  Chapter 6

  The next day after lunch, we circled Courtown House, the old mansion where my director stayed. There was a large meadow and a forest beyond and another meadow and forest beyond that.

  In the middle of the meadow we met a rather large black bull.

  “Huh!” cried John, and whipped off his coat.

  He charged the bull, shouting:

  “Ha, Toro! Toro, ha!”

  One minute from now, I thought, one of us will be dead. Me?

  “John!” I cried quietly, if such is possible, “please, put on your coat!”

  “Huh, Toro!” my director yelled. “Ho!”

  The bull stared at us, motionless.

  John shrugged his coat back on.

  I ran ahead of him to toss Fedallah overboard, assemble the crew, bid Elijah to warn Ishmael not to go, then launch the Pequod to sail off and around the world.

  So it went, day on day, week on week, as I killed the Whale each night, but to see him reborn each dawn, while I was lost in Dublin, where the weather struck from its bleak quarters in the sea and came searching with sheets of rain and gusts of cold and still more sheets of rain.

  I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and found it dry.

  Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it’s just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

  Then, late each afternoon, I taxied out amidst Kilcock’s gray stone with green beards on it, a rock town, and the rain falling down for weeks as I worked on a script that was to be shot in the hot sun of the Canary Isles sometime next year. The pages of the script were full of hot suns and burning days as I typed in Dublin or Kilcock, with the weather a beast at the windows.

  On the thirty-first night, a knock at the door of my hotel room revealed Mike, shuffling.

  “There you are!” he exclaimed. “I been thinking on what you said. You to find the Irish, me to help. I got me a car! So would you get the hell out to find some wild life in our land? And forget this damn rain on the double?”

  “Double!” I said gladly.


  And we blew along the road to Kilcock in a dark that rocked us like a boat on a black flood until, sweating rain, faces pearled, we struck through the pub doors and it was warm as a sheepfold because there were the townsmen pressed in a great compost heap at the bar and Heeber Finn yelling jokes and foaming up drinks.

  “Heeber!” cried Mike. “We’re here for that wild night!”

  “A wild night it is!”

  Whereupon Heeber whipped off his apron, shrugged his meat-cleaver shoulders into a tweed coat, jumped up in the air and slid down inside his raincoat, slung on his beardy cap, and thrust us at the door.

  “Nail everything down till I get back!” he advised his crew. “I’m taking these gents to the damnedest evening ever! Little do they know what waits for them beyond!”

  He opened the door. The wind threw half a ton of ice water on him. Taking this as a spur to rhetoric, Heeber added in a roar, “Out with you! On!”

  “Do you think we should?” I wondered.

  “What do you mean?” cried Mike. “Would you freeze in your room? Rewrite the dead Whale?”

  “Well …,” I said, and slung on my cap.

  Then, like Ahab, I thought on my bed, a damp box with its pale cool winding sheets and the window dripping next to it like a conscience all night through. I groaned. I opened the door of Mike’s car, took my legs apart to get in, and in no time we shot down the town like a ball in a bowling alley.

  Finn at the wheel talked fierce, half hilarity, half sobering King Lear.

  “A wild night? Ahead! You’d never guess, would you, to walk through Ireland, so much could go on under the skin?”

  “I knew there must be an outlet somewhere,” I yelled.

  The speedometer was up to one hundred kilometers. Stone walls raced by on the right, stone walls raced by on the left. It was raining the entire dark sky down on the entire dark land.

  “Outlet indeed!” said Finn. “If the Church only knew, or maybe it figures: The poor buggers! and lets us be!”

  “Where?”

  “There!” cried Finn.

  The speedometer read 110. My stomach was stone like the stone walls rushing left and right. Up over a hill, down into a valley. “Can’t we go a bit faster?” I asked, hoping for the opposite.

  “Done!” said Finn, and made it 120.

  “That will do it nicely,” I said, in a faint voice, wondering what lay ahead. Behind all the slate-stone weeping walls of Ireland, what happened? Somewhere in this drizzling land were there hearth-fleshed peach-fuzz Renoir women bright as lamps you could hold your hands out to and warm your palms? Beneath the rain-drenched sod, the flinty rock, at the numbed core of living, was there one small seed of fire which, fanned, might break volcanoes free and boil the rains to steam? Was there then somewhere a Baghdad harem, nests awriggle and aslither with silk and tassel, the absolute perfect tint of women unadorned? We passed a church. No. We passed a convent. No. We passed a village slouched under its old-men’s thatch. No. Yet …

  I glanced over at Heeber Finn. We could have switched off the lights and driven by the steady piercing beams of his forward-directed eyes snatching at the dark, flicking away the rain.

  Wife, I thought to myself, children, forgive me for what I do this night, terrible as it may be, for this is Ireland in the rain of an ungodly time and way out in Galway, where the dead must go to die.

  The brakes were hit. We slid a good ninety feet; my nose mashed on the windshield. Heeber Finn was out of the car.

  “We’re here!” He sounded like a man drowned deep in rain.

  I saw a hole in the wall, a tiny gate flung wide.

  Mike and I followed at a plunge. I saw other cars in the dark and many bikes. But not a light. Oh, it must be wild to be this secret, I thought. I yanked my cap tight, as rain crawled down my neck.

  Through the hole in the wall we stumbled, Heeber clenching our elbows. “Here!” he husked. “Hold on. Swig on this to keep your blood high!”

  I felt a flask knock my fingers. I poured its contents into my boilers to let the steam up my flues.

  “It’s a lovely rain,” I said.

  “The man’s mad.” Finn drank after Mike, a shadow among shadows.

  I squinted about. I had an impression of midnight sea upon which men like little boats passed on the murmurous tides, heads down, muttering, in twos and threes.

  Good God, what’s it all mean? I asked myself, incredibly curious now.

  “Wait!” whispered Heeber. “This is it!”

  What did I expect? Perhaps some scene like those old movies where innocent sailing ships suddenly flap down their cabin walls and guns appear like magic to fire on the foe. Or a farmhouse falls apart like a cereal box, Long Tom rears up to blast a projectile five hundred miles to crack Paris. So here, I thought, will these stones spill away, that house open wide, rosy lights flash on, so that from a monstrous cannon ten dozen pink women, not dwarf Irish but willowy French, will be shot out and down into the waving arms of this grateful multitude?

  The lights came on.

  I blinked.

  For there was the entire unholy thing, laid out for me in the drizzle.

  The lights flickered. The men quickened.

  A mechanical rabbit popped out of a little box at the far end of the stony yard and ran.

  Eight dogs, let free from gates, yelping, ran after in a great circle. There was not one yell or a murmur from the crowd of men. Their heads turned slowly, watching. The rain rained down on the half-lit scene. The rain fell on tweed caps and thin cloth coats. The rain dripped off thick eyebrows and sharp noses. The rain hammered hunched shoulders. The rabbit ran. The dogs loped. The rabbit popped into its electric kennel. The dogs collided, yiping. The lights went out.

  In the dark I turned to stare at Heeber Finn, stunned.

  “Now!” he shouted. “Place your bets!”

  We were back in Kilcock, speeding, at ten o’clock.

  The rain was still raining, like an ocean smashing the road with titanic fists, as we drew up in a great tidal spray before the pub.

  “Well, now!” said Heeber Finn, looking not at us but at the windshield wiper palpitating before us. “Well!”

  Mike and I had bet on five races and had lost, between us, two or three pounds.

  “I won,” Finn said, “and some of it I put down in your names, both of you. That last race, I swear to God, won for all of us. Let me pay!”

  “It’s all right, Heeber,” I said, my numb lips moving.

  Finn pressed two shillings into my hand. I didn’t fight him. “That’s better!” he said. “Now, one last drink on me!”

  Mike drove me back to Dublin.

  Wringing out his cap in the hotel lobby he looked at me and said, “It was a wild Irish night for sure!”

  “A wild night,” I said.

  I hated to go up to my room. So I sat for another hour in the reading lounge of the damp hotel and took the traveler’s privilege, a glass and a bottle provided by the dazed hall porter. I sat alone listening to the rain and the rain on the cold hotel roof, thinking of Ahab’s coffin-bed waiting for me up there under the drumbeat weather. I thought of the only warm thing in the hotel, in the town, in all the land of Eire this night, the script in my typewriter with its sun of the South Pacific, its hot winds blowing the Pequod toward its doom, but along the way fiery sands and its women with dark charcoal-burning eyes.

  And I thought of the darkness beyond the city, the lights flashing, the electric rabbit running, the dogs yiping, the rabbit gone, the lights out, and the rain flailing the dank shoulders and soaked caps and ice-watering the noses and seeping through the sheep-smelling tweeds.

  Going upstairs, I glanced out a streaming window. There, on the street, riding by under a lamp, was a man on a bike. He was terribly drunk. The bike weaved back and forth across the bricks, as the man vomited. He did not stop the bike to do this. He kept pumping unsteadily, blearily, as he threw up. I watched him go off in the dark rain.

  Then I
groped up to find and die in my room.

  Chapter 7

  On Grafton Street just halfway between The Four Provinces pub and the cinema stood the best, or so John said, Gentleman Riders to Hound emporium in all Dublin, if not Ireland, and perhaps one half of Bond Street in London.

  It was Tyson’s, and to speak the name was to see the front windows with their hacking coats and foulards and pale yellow silk shirts and velvet hunting caps and twill pants and shining boots. If you stood there long enough you could hear the horses fribbling their lips and snorting their laughter and twitching their skin to jerk the flies off, and you could hear the hounds whining and barking and running in happy circles (dogs are always happy and thus their smiles, unless they are miserable because their master crossed his eyes at them); but as I say, if you stood there long enough waiting for someone to hand you the reins, the owner of the shop, seeing you as one of the blindfolded hypnotics wandered out of Huston’s Barn, might come out and lead-kindly-light your way into the smell of leather and boot cream and wool; and buckle on your new trenchcoat for you and fit on a tweed cap abristle for a thousand rains within the month and measure your pigfoot and wonder how in hell to shove it into a boot and all the while around you Anglo-Irish gents being similarly whisper-murmured at by lilting tongues; and the weather turned bad outside within thirty seconds after you set foot within, that you linger and buy more than your intent.

  Where was I? Oh, yes. I stood out in front of Tyson’s on three separate nights.

  Looking at the wax model, as tall as Huston and as strideful and arrogant in all his Kilcock Hunt finery, I thought: How long before I dress like that?

  “How do I look, John?” I cried, three days later.

  I spun about on the front steps of Courtown House smelling of wool, boot leather, and silk.

  John stared at my tweed cap and twill pants.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” he gasped.

  Chapter 8

  “You know anything about hypnotism, kid?”

  “Some,” I said.

  “Ever been hypnotized?”

  “Once,” I said.

  We were sitting by the fire after midnight with a bottle of Scotch now half empty between us. I hated Scotch, but since John relished it, I drank.