Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  “Hello, Carlo. Paulie, Marie,” Ram said, scanning the table. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” said Ram to the woman sitting next to Carlo. “I’m Ram Le Doir.”

  “You don’t remember me. We met a long time ago at Ava’s. I’m Cassandra Smith.”

  “My pleasure,” said Ram, before pulling Fozetta aside to speak to him privately.

  “This isn’t cool, Carlo.”

  “What? You said to come up anytime.”

  “When I’m here by myself. And I thought you’d be coming alone.”

  “Hey man, relax. You know Paulie and Marie. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  Ram said nothing for a moment, waiting for his anger to pass. He smiled and took Carlo’s hand. “It’s alright, man. But if you guys are gonna party, I’d prefer you do it in the guest cabin. I don’t do that shit anymore and you know that.”

  “I’m sorry. We didn’t think you were getting back till tomorrow. We came up for a gig last night. We opened for Mose Allison and hung out with him afterward. I apologize,” he said.

  The six made small talk for half an hour before Fozetta and friends cleared the table and repaired to the cottage, leaving Ram and Beaufort alone on the deck, the jabbering from the cottage rising periodically as Ram and Beaufort drank tea on the deck under a sky smeared with a whitewash of Milky Way.

  “How was your trip?”

  “Don’t know yet. Problematic is the best answer I guess.”

  “And how’s Vera, Ram?”

  “She’s fine. Busy. Dizzy. Working. Looping.”

  Beaufort sensed Ram’s desire for silence. A minute passed, then the sound of wings.

  “Red tail hawks,” said Ram gesturing toward the nearby redwood tree. “They’ve been here since Vera and I bought the place; a mated pair, probably out hunting.”

  Beaufort nodded. “This is a beautiful place. I imagine you get a lot of work done here.”

  “Sometimes, Carl. Some work I can do here—journalism, plenty of that. But I don’t think I’ve written a line of poetry here since I bought this sucker, and that was one of the main reasons I did.”

  They sat under the stars for another hour, then Ram excused himself to go to bed. “See you in the morning. I’m exhausted. Keep the stereo down if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course, Don Le Doir. I think I’ll go in and read a while.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “A thing called The Closing of the American Mind.”

  “I guess I might be partly responsible for that phenomenon,” Ram laughed.

  Beaufort chuckled but didn’t respond. “See you in the morning,” he called as Ram went inside.

  He shed his clothes in a heap and crawled into bed, dropping into sleep, awakening to the partying whenever the volume increased. When he awoke the next morning, he stayed in bed making notes until he was sure that everybody other than Beaufort was gone. Then he got up and made Eggs Benedict for the two of them.

  Ram and Carl were at the Brookdale Lodge, a rustic cedar resort where Bing Crosby and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra once played to ballrooms crowded with dancers during the thirties, the kind of place where Ram’s mom used to go with her girlfriends when she was a young woman, although that was in the Adirondacks a continent away. A dais stood at center stage with microphones atop it. Lights and video cameras were aimed at it, awaiting the appearance of Barry Bailey who’d soon be addressing the throng.

  Ram asked Beaufort to drive him to the Brookdale, making notes and composing questions in the passenger seat while Beaufort drove. After the gathering, Ram would continue with Bailey and his party to another gathering while Ram interviewed him along the way. The interview in LA and the lunch with Bailey had been cancelled. Bailey had avoided Ram in LA the day that Ram went to meet him at his campaign headquarters, and this would be Ram’s only chance to get him on the record for the story he’d shortly be filing. He had maybe a dozen questions—about the race for Senate, about Bailey’s gubernatorial reign, and about a possible run for the presidency, as Heiman and Golden State wanted. Ram was feeling glum about it. Beaufort picked it up as they drove.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. I’m beginning to wonder what all this fuss is for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My editors want me to write this story and have it end with Barry Bailey becoming President in 1992. You think that’s possible?”

  Beaufort laughed. “I don’t know. I’d say it’s remote at best. But you’re the journalist here. You’re the expert, not me.”

  “Yeah.”

  Beaufort laughed and Ram looked at him quizzically, then Beaufort spoke. “I was remembering that time I went with you when you went to pick up a check from Emile Donner for something you were working on for him and that developer guy he was affiliated with, and some other guy came up to me and said, ‘Hey, are you a reporter too?’” Beaufort laughed, shaking his head. “I told him, ‘no, I’m a poet,’ and the guy says, ‘Golly! A real poet!’ It was too good for words.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. So I guess you’ll have to report it the best you can. Your editors and your public expect you to.”

  “I guess.”

  Barry Bailey took the stage, walking to the dais in the dark-blue double-breasted suit that was his uniform during this particular campaign, the same suit Ram had seen him wearing at the three Southern California campaign stops that Ram had already attended, delivering the same stem-winder Ram had personally witnessed and heard on video tape at least a half-dozen times by then, changing only the place names and names of the politicians and celebrities who were present in the particular region Bailey found himself in, telling the crowd what a forceful senator he would be, how he would challenge the Right, how he would make liberal a respected term again instead of an epithet, how he would un-muffle the message that had been muted for too long among Democrats, how he would energize the party and again make it the party of the common man, as though he understood what the common man was, which Ram and everybody close to Barry knew that he didn’t.

  When the speech was over, Bailey mingled with the crowd for fifteen minutes or so, pressing the flesh and offering greetings. Then he and his entourage disappeared into a backroom with a group of older high-roller types and didn’t re-emerge until it was dusk. Only a few stragglers were left.

  “Come on, Mr. Le Doir, you’re on,” said a woman press aide.

  They walked to the car, a nondescript late-model, four-door sedan. Ram was escorted to a back door. The woman got in ahead of him, leaving Ram by the window. Barry Bailey followed another press aide and got in from the other side. Ram asked his questions, unable to see Barry Bailey’s reactions, barely able to see his notepad with the questions on it, and receiving answers that were standard phrases replete with mantras that sounded soothing and sincere, and the non-sequiturs that didn’t make sense to Ram but perhaps did to Barry Bailey and his band of believers, not once getting a straight answer to any of his questions, not once able to look into Bailey’s eyes except once, when the headlights of a car passing in the opposite direction illuminated them. Even then they illuminated nothing, only a stony guardedness and glimmer of fear not unlike that of a child. When Ram got back to The Arbor around midnight, the woman press aide driving him home in cordial silence, Beaufort was sitting in the living room reading his book. He looked up. “How was it?”

  “Absolutely worthless. Like interviewing an oyster.”

  …He looked back into the computer with the completed text flickering back at him, trying to find a space between paragraphs where he could insert the required thousand words on the Presidential scenario, wondering how to begin it, wondering, too, if he could make it convincing, wondering whether it was possible and wondering if it mattered. Wadded pages of paper overflowed the waste basket beneath Ram’s desk, surrounding his feet like fallen leaves, the sea of white contrasting with the green screen of the computer and the blinking red light of the message machine. Ra
m got up, poured himself a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, and walked out on the deck overlooking Humbug Creek. He heard a car come up the driveway, walked around the side of the house, and mounted the steps to see who it was. When he got there, he found Allan Singer, the previous owner of The Arbor.

  “I was in the neighborhood. I thought I’d look in and see how you’re doing,” Singer said. “Am I coming at a bad time?”

  “No, it’s fine,” Ram lied.

  “I miss this old place sometimes,” Singer said, getting out of his Suburban and coming over to Ram. “How are you?” he said extending his hand.

  Ram shook his hand. Singer was about Ram’s age, a couple of years older maybe, and he’d been a rock-and-roller in San Francisco during the seventies when the business was booming. Then, when it wasn’t, he went into real estate. Singer’s band produced a few albums and got fat advances from the label. His band mates spent their money on cocaine and Ferraris. Allan invested his money in property. He was a quiet man and sometimes would stop by unannounced, and he and Ram would talk about music or journalism, which Singer had studied in college before he became a rock star and then a realtor.

  “You working on anything?”

  “I’m doing a couple stories that are giving me migraines.”

  “Sorry to hear that. You want a joint?”

  “Nah. It’ll only confuse me more.”

  “What are the stories?”

  “One’s a profile of Barry Bailey, the other one’s about my family, a sort of personal history thing. I’m having the devil’s own time with both. I get close, but then, the closer I get, the further they seem to get away from me.”

  “I used to have the same problem with songs, usually the bridges. I’d have the verses nailed down but couldn’t get the fucking bridges. Used to drive me crazy, cost me a marriage when I went nuts during our second album. Hang in there, you’ll figure it out.”

  “I hope so, I’m on deadline.”

  “I won’t keep you. Maybe the spirit of old Joe will come to your aid. He did to me when I was building the addition to this house. I told you about Joe right, the guy who built this place in the thirties?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Ram.

  “Well, that is really a story, maybe one you should write.”

  Singer told Ram the story. The original owner of The Arbor was a Swiss emigré named Josef Stocker, who had come to America from Berlin, where he worked as a journalist until Hitler was poised to take power. Stocker was Jewish, so he abandoned his job and boarded the midnight train for Paris with only his suitcase and an overcoat lined with cash, his trousers heavy with a handful of diamonds he’d extracted from the jewelry he’d inherited from his grandmother and sewn into the inside lining. “When Joe got to America, he headed west, becoming a pipefitter in San Francisco, saving his money until he’d put enough away to buy the property and build The Arbor. He retired and lived alone until his death in 1972. He never practiced his former trade here, but he wrote one book that he left in the house, which I held on to. It’s in German, and I don’t understand German. It’s a history of his family, and they were a big deal—in Berne, I think. I’ll bring it by the next time I’m up this way, if you’d like to see it.”

  Ram thought about the offer for a long time before answering, not replying directly to the question, but asking one himself.

  “What can you tell me about the chapel up there and the name on the porch—Chalet Annetta?”

  “Another time, when you’re not so stressed.”

  “No, I’d like to hear it now,” Rams said softly.

  “Okay, here it is,” sighed Singer, “it’s a sad story. When Joseph went back to Switzerland after the Second World War, he was about fifty or so. He was at his family’s estate and there was a big party held in his honor, a welcome home sort of thing. At the party, he meets this beautiful young woman, maybe twenty-five years younger than him, a war widow, I think. They courted, and Josef fell in love with her and proposed. She accepted. Her name was Annetta. When Joe got back here, he built the house, the chalet, and named it for her. She was very religious, so he built a chapel for her too. But she never came,” said Singer, looking away. “They never saw one another again and Joe died here with only his dogs to keep him company. But his spirit is really strong around this place, and when we were building the downstairs addition, we’d get to a place where we couldn’t figure something out, whether it was the stairs or the rafters or the angles of the walls or whatever, and I’d get this feeling that would guide me. If I tried to override it with my logic, it got even stronger. But every time I went with the feeling, the problem would get solved. It would work itself out, almost by magic. Maybe you should do the same thing with your stories, Ram. Invite Joe to guide your hand. Maybe that might do the trick.”

  “Maybe,” Ram whispered. He wasn’t thinking of stories anymore. He was thinking of Josef Stocker, and the story that was his and Annetta’s, and afterward, when Singer left, the cedar logs seem to exude them, exhaled Annetta’s unknown resistance and Josef’s heartbreak. The air inside The Arbor, inside Chalet Annetta, became suffocating, refulgent with remorse, overpowering with dumbfounded loss, sour with its after-burn, so choking with it all that Ram had to save his work to diskettes and finish it on a laptop at a beachside motel. He scrapped the family history story, writing a St. Patrick’s Day story about Yick instead. He inserted a businesslike thousand words on Barry Bailey becoming President, not one fucking word of which he actually believed.

  When he was at the motel, Ram called Phil Le Gris and told him of the trouble he was having with the story about his family. It was Phil who suggested he scrap the idea and write about Yick, which Ram did, faxing a draft to Les Beak, who loved it, calling it a masterpiece. “It’s very fine, Le Doir. You’ve delivered something noteworthy. We’ll run it Sunday after next.” Ram was pleased Beak was pleased, but it gnawed at him that he hadn’t succeeded at what he’d set out to do.

  When he finished the substitute piece on Yick and the green pigs on St. Patty’s Day, Ram went to see a comedy starring Bette Midler, which inspired him to formulate the missing piece for the Barry Bailey profile. He went back to the motel, expelled the thousand words, then checked out and drove back to The Arbor. He had come to a decision about where he was going, about his work and where it had led him, and felt he needed to talk to The Peach and Oso, AKA Wesley Llewellyn.

  Ram called the New Directions office in San Francisco, asking for George Rogers. The receptionist said they didn’t have a George Rogers but she patched Ram through to Sam Williams, a senior editor whom she thought might be helpful.

  “Mr. Le Doir, it’s an honor. I read all your stuff in Golden State and George spoke very highly of you.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “He’s no longer with us, we let him go. The last I heard he was back east.”

  “With Marcia?”

  “No, they divorced.”

  Ram paused, registering the bad news.

  “Is he with another house?”

  “I don’t think so. He wasn’t in too good shape I’m afraid. The last I heard, he was down in the Florida Keys working on a fishing boat.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Well, do you have a phone number? A forwarding address?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. But I can pass your message along to Marcia. I’m in touch with her.”

  “Can I call her?”

  “I’m sorry. She insists that I don’t give out her number to any of George’s old friends. She was very hurt by what happened, very bitter, and she doesn’t want to be reminded.”

  “This sounds pretty dreadful.”

  “I’m afraid it was, is. Shall I pass on your message?”

  “Yes. Please give her my number, and ask her to call me, and thank you, thank you for letting me know.”

  He put the phone down, walked out on the deck and smoked a cigarette, wond
ering what it was that pushed Peach over the edge, remembering his cool professionalism, the warmth of his friendship, his elaborate yarn spinning, the bond that Ram sensed between Peach and Marcia that seemed much stronger than his with Vera, and the envy he felt over it. When he came back in, he poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and called Wesley’s house in Indiana.

  …Ram sat at a back corner near one of the porthole windows, the afternoon light falling on the composition book opened in front of him, a handful of struck-through lines staring back at him. He was not able to think in that fashion any longer, much less write in it; the weave of allusion and image, the sense of metaphor and measure had left him. Only meter seem to function and serve a purpose anymore, and only when it was applied to expository argument or analysis. The world of poetics had fled Ram some time ago, or he it more accurately. Now his hand could only produce characters and their situations, and not really produce them, only describe them.

  He was living in Sagrada now in a rented condo, summoned there by publishers to write a coffee table book on the city. The editors insisted Ram live in Sagrada while he was researching and writing the book, and though Ram was loath to do so, not wanting to leave The Arbor, he gave in when the publishers wagged a large advance at him. His whoredom was complete now; and he didn’t care anymore. Nothing seemed to matter. He’d just filed the Barry Bailey story by fax when he finally reached Esmé, Wesley’s wife. Ram had an idea for a story he wanted to co-author with Wesley, and Ram said he’d finance a trip for them to Cuernavaca to write the Day of the Dead story they’d long discussed over many a liquid afternoons on the Llewellyns’s front porch. Ram’s tone was enthusiastic when Esmé picked up the receiver, and he asked for Wesley. When a long moment passed, Ram knew the answer before she said it.