How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  Still, I seemed to have no choice but to walk him away from the trees, east back down Shoshone. I turned south on Nez Perce so we could get back to Arapaho. There were cherries in bloom behind a green house on our right, and Lucky whined when we walked past them, quickened his pace so we’d get by faster. He barked out loud at three pear trees planted in a row in front of a house across the street. When we got back to Arapaho, our street, and started toward our houses, he whined and barked and was shaking when I handed him over to Maria. I walked into my front yard and looked at the two plum trees I had planted there then, regular plums, not flowering ornamentals. They had been blooming and had been a mass of color for nearly a week. The grass around them was thick with fallen petals.

  Ellen got to my place around seven. I shook out her umbrella while she hung her coat in the hall closet. It had been raining again for nearly an hour, though now it was letting up. “What a night,” she said.

  She had rain misted on her chin and lips, and the water caught the light when she smiled.

  “Your chin is red,” I said, touching her.

  “Cold,” she said.

  I got her a towel and watched her dry off and wondered again why our relationship hadn’t gone anywhere. We were just friends, now — we’d tried dating, but it hadn’t worked, and she was one of the few people who managed to stay in my life as a friend after something like that. I wanted the dinner to be nice for her.

  “Baked Danish ham,” I said. It was glazed and beautiful. I let it keep cooking on low heat in the oven while we sat down to eat the salads.

  Ellen took hold of my hands. “They’re all red,” she said. “Have you been working outside?”

  “No,” I said. But I remembered poking around in the tree with the broom that morning, knocking rainwater on my hands. Ellen’s chin was still red. I got up and looked at the broomstick in the laundry closet. It was covered with a dusty film like my shoes had been. I could rub it off with one finger.

  “You’ll have to put some lotion on your hands,” she said.

  Maybe more than that, I thought. I sat back down and told her about the rain, that maybe there was something in it. We were quiet for a time. Ellen touched her chin.

  “What’s that noise?” she asked.

  “The dog next door? You remember Lucky —”

  “No.The high-pitched whine. Did you have an alarm system put in here?”

  Ellen could hear high-pitched sounds I could never hear, like the whine of alarm systems in department stores. The clerks said a few people, especially children with their good ears, sometimes commented on the sound. Ellen wasn’t the only one. A year ago, she’d insisted on having her desk at the paper moved farther away from the water fountain because it emitted a high-pitched whine no one else could hear but which bothered her.

  “No alarm,” I said.

  “What’s on?” she asked, looking around the kitchen.

  “I left the oven on low heat,” I said. I got up and turned it off.

  “I still hear it,” she said. “It’s faint. Could it be from outside?”

  She got up and looked out the kitchen window.

  “Come outside with me,” I said. “I wonder if you’ll hear this sound under the plum tree.”

  I found us both hats to wear, and we kept our hands in our pockets. The sky was just dripping now. Occasional raindrops hit our hats when we walked outside, that’s all. We walked back under the plum, getting our shoes wet. Lucky was whining on the Barretos’ back steps, and he ran toward us when he saw us walk out, pawed at the fence. I reached over and petted him.

  “The sound is louder here,” she said. “Much worse. Can’t you hear it?”

  I shook my head. “But this dog’s been going crazy since last night,” I said. “Barking and whining at this tree.”

  “It’s no wonder,” she said. “The sound would drive me crazy. It fluctuates a little, but it’s pretty constant.”

  “So what’s up there?”

  She was looking at the tree. “No one spot emits the sound,” she said. “It’s as if the whole tree is resonating.”

  I had her walk out in my front yard.

  “Your plum trees are doing it, too,” she said.

  I tried putting on music to drown out the sound, but that didn’t work. I could tell the sound still bothered Ellen, so we abandoned dinner at my place and drove to a little Vietnamese restaurant in a shopping mall a mile from my house — with asphalt parking lots between us and most trees. Ellen couldn’t hear a whine inside the restaurant. But she called me later from her apartment to tell me she could hear dogs barking down the street near Liberty Park, which had apricots and cherries and plums in flower.

  I walked back outside, not under the plum trees where rain-water might drip on me, but near them, and tried to hear their resonations. I couldn’t. But I could hear Lucky trying to bark, though he was mostly hoarse now. There were dogs barking down the street past the Andersons’ and some big dog with a deep voice barking two or three streets south.

  That night, I lay in bed and listened to dogs barking all over the city.

  In the morning, all the petals had fallen from my fruit trees. By night, when I got home from work, the leaves had started to fall. Ellen called to say that she had gone for a walk in the park at noon and that the fruit trees were resonating there, too, and dying. The leaves were falling off them.

  I changed clothes, and Edwardo and I wore hats and gloves and took Lucky out for a walk. The dog didn’t want to run, just walk. His paws seemed to hurt him, and I tried to steer him away from the puddles of water. He seemed exhausted, though calmer. And maybe with reason, I thought. The sound might have lessened. All the fruit trees down Arapaho and back up Shoshone had lost their petals and were losing their leaves.

  Maria kept Lucky in her house, and he lost whole patches of fur. The boys tried to brush him at first, but his skin was tender and it hurt him, so they just let him shed. Maria swept up after him. After a few days, though, he didn’t seem to mind being outside again. The sound was over, by then. We were right about the rain, that it had caused the rashes on our skin, and Lucky’s shedding, and more. The rashes, at least, soon cleared up. All the news in the papers and on TV was about the new compounds in the rain, a result of many things — loosened regulations on emissions from cars; dust blown in from the National Toxic Dumping Grounds in the west desert; pollution from the Geneva steel mill in the next valley over; and possibly the resumption of poison-gas testing at Dugway Proving Grounds, though the media could never fully confirm the rumors of that connection. The compounds killed seventy-four thousand trees in Salt Lake in a matter of weeks, including most of the fruit trees. They stood without leaves all around us and made it look as though a new winter were coming, not spring.

  “And I heard it,” Ellen said to me when we went walking in the park past all the dead trees, crunching dry leaves under our feet in late April. “I heard the sound the trees made when they died.”

  And the dogs had heard it.

  You think you understand the world. You think things work in certain ways, that they do only certain things. Then the trees make noise when we kill them with toxic compounds. It was the chemical reaction, the news said. The sound was a result of the chemical reaction going on inside the trees, the reaction that killed them.

  I chopped down the plum trees in my yard and in the Barretos’, had them hauled away. Maria and I didn’t burn the wood, like some people did. We didn’t want to risk breathing in whatever might have been in the smoke.

  I washed my car every day after I knew what was happening, but the paint still faded in places. The whole neighborhood got out hoses, and we sprayed down our houses, but we were too late there, too. Most of the houses ended up with yellow spots all over them, and we had to repaint later in the summer, after the rain stopped.

  And I didn’t plant fruit trees back in the front yard. I planted junipers, a hardy desert tree that had stood up under the new rain, at least for now. New
antipollution regulations had stopped the problem, we were told. It would be safe to plant fruit trees again. It wouldn’t happen again in Utah. But I wondered. So I stopped trying to grow fruit myself, decided to buy it instead from the country, where I hoped it would be cleaner away from the city, where I hoped the world still worked like it had when I was a boy, and the trees didn’t cry out before dying.

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  THE SOUND OF THE RIVER

  It was the physical presence of the Sahara surrounding Niamey, the heat and the dust and the sand of it, that never let anyone in the city forget that Niamey had no water of its own. By the end of my third week there, getting water for drinking, cleaning, and bathing had become an obsession with me, an obsession shared by everyone else. It got so that just before dusk I would stand on the balcony of my third-floor hotel room and watch the road south of town for the dust of the water trucks lumbering up from the coast. Watching from the third floor gave me an advantage. At the first glimpse of dust, I would pull on a shirt and hurry out to Sekondi Usala, a water seller whose friendship I tried to cultivate — and I’d get there before most of the other people.

  I preferred buying my water from Sekondi Usala. He seemed honest, and once he had even sold me a liter of first-grade drinking water before the sun had set — but only once. “You Americans suffer more in our heat,” he’d told me when he’d handed me the water, and he hadn’t charged extra for the evaporation when he’d measured it out.

  So it happened that on the Friday of my third week in Niamey I caught an early glimpse of the dust of the water trucks south of town and arrived at Sekondi Usala’s door before the sun had fully set. I carried two empty three-liter plastic water bottles with me. I wanted to be sure to get water for a weekend bath.

  “Go away,” the gatekeeper told me in French. “We will not sell water until ten.”

  “So I will wait here in line,” I said. I was going to take a bath that night. I hadn’t been able to get enough water midweek to take a bath, and I’d tried washing with beer I’d saved from a lunch at the Canadian embassy.

  “You will not wait here,” the gatekeeper said. “Sekondi Usala will not have it.”

  “I am his American friend,” I said. “He will let me wait.”

  “Indeed, he will not have it. Sekondi said to me: ‘Tell my American friend to wait in the museum. All people not from Niger go to the museum, but he does not go. Tell him to wait there until we sell the water.’ And so I have told you.”

  The gatekeeper would not look at me or talk to me after that. He brushed flies away from his eyes and watched his feet.

  So I walked away slowly, back up the street. It was not a good idea to anger one of the major water sellers of Niamey, one who was evidently a Nigerophile proud of his country’s past and the museum that preserved some of it.

  I leaned against the wall of a house two houses down from Sekondi Usala’s. The gatekeeper did not look at me. I looked at my watch: 7:30.Two and a half hours till I could buy any water. Other people were standing up and down the street in the lengthening shadows, waiting. None of us in line, of course. Sekondi Usala wouldn’t have that.

  I looked back at the gatekeeper. He was looking at me, then. “The museum will entertain you until we sell water,” he called to me.

  Damn, I thought. He would not give up. There was nothing to be done except go to the museum, then return and show Sekondi the receipt for my entrance fee and tell him that I had seen this or that interesting thing from his country’s past and hope that he’d sell me enough water to keep me from washing in beer.

  The museum was two blocks away. I left my empty plastic bottles at the front desk and was careful to keep the receipt for my entrance. The museum had opened only an hour before I arrived. I read in the mimeographed guide I was handed that the directors could afford little electricity, so they opened the doors to the public only in the evenings when the exhibits could be viewed in the waning light of day and air conditioning could theoretically be dispensed with in most of the building. I walked, sweating, among the exhibits on the first floor, watching shadows gradually cover the stuffed specimens of animals, birds, and fish that had once inhabited the Niger river valley; the neolithic spear points discovered near Arlit; and the geometric designs painted on wood shields made from trees gone extinct twenty years before.

  I walked upstairs to the second floor, the archives, and tried the water fountain at the top of the stairs, but of course it didn’t work. Across from the fountain were a series of glass cases exhibiting Dutch engravings made from sketches drawn by the English explorer Mungo Park for his 1797 book Travels into the Interior of Africa. I looked in the first case. The engraving I saw was old, yellowed, crumbling at the edges, carefully folded out from the book it was bound in. I could see it dimly in the fading light.

  And I had seen it before.

  The engraving showed the Niger River and, though stylized, pictured a land more lush than anyone living now in Niger could remember. I remembered seeing that exact engraving as a boy, printed on the jacket of a record I had loved and forgotten, a record of music by a group from Niger. It gave me a strange feeling to see something as a man that had meant so much to me as a boy and, for a time, while standing looking at the engraving, it seemed as if the boy and the man were different people who had once been introduced. I wondered what the boy had really been like and why the music had held him so long, moved him so much.

  And if, subconsciously, that music had compelled him into a line of work that eventually brought him to stand in a museum in Niamey, the city from which the music had come — even after he had forgotten the music.

  I wanted to hear that music again. I wanted to listen to it in Niamey itself and see what the man would make of it, what he would find in it. So I went looking for the director of the archives, Franç;ois Brissot, an old Frenchman whose family had stayed in Niamey through decades of postcolonial political turmoil and eventual ecological disaster, and brought him back to the engraving in the glass case. He stooped down over the top of it and peered into the growing shadows.

  “On a record jacket?” he asked me again, in French.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I owned a copy of that record when I was a boy. The group was —”

  “Hamane Oumarou.”

  “You remember them, too.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Old enough to have owned records. I had two of theirs.”

  “Well.” He straightened up. “There were only six. You did well. We have the Hamane Oumarou papers and what production tapes of the group’s were saved from the fire. Follow me, and I will show you.”

  He talked as we walked down a hall lined with file cabinets. He told me the studio in Paris that recorded Hamane Oumarou had burned, and that the group had rerecorded their music, this time digitally, but disbanded afterward when Hamane Oumarou left his group and returned home from Paris.

  Brissot stopped in front of a closed door. “The music is in this room,” he said. “I’m afraid there will be a nominal charge to you if we turn on the light.”

  “I’ll pay it,” I said.

  He opened the door, turned on the light, and motioned me ahead of him into a room filled with the music of Niger: anthropological recordings duplicated in Paris and sent down to the Niamey archives, the papers and compositions of eight native composers, and what was left of the work of Hamane Oumarou — one cardboard file box labeled “Correspondence” and another labeled “Recordings, Show Bills, and Contracts.” Brissot took five compact discs out of the front of the Recordings box and handed them to me. None had the Mungo Park engraving on its jacket.

  “I owned records,” I said.

  “But we did not collect them, unfortunately,” he told me. “We were given these after the fire and the rerecording.”

  I was afraid I would have to listen to each of the CDs to find my music, and I wasn’t sure I would know it then, it had been so long. I had hoped to find my record with the help
of the jacket art. But as I looked through the CDs, I recognized one of the jackets, a photo of Bilma from a distance, the spires of its mosques rising up over the walls of the city. “This was on the jacket of the second Hamane Oumarou record I owned,” I said.

  “Then they probably used the same art on the CD jackets that they had on the records,” the director said. “But there were six records. Yes — look here.”

  He pointed to a list of the recordings of Hamane Oumarou: six records, five of them rerecorded digitally and put out on CDs. The one that had not been rerecorded was the first record, Niger!, and I remembered that title. It was the name of the record I had owned that had had the Mungo Park engraving on the jacket.

  “Why was this one not rerecorded?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” the director said. “But would you like to listen to these other CDs?”

  I told him that I would, and he left me sitting next to a stereo, earphones on, listening to the CDs in order. It turned out that I had owned the first and second recordings of Hamane Oumarou — the CD with the photo of Bilma on it had been the second, and I remembered the music. Some of it was strangely compelling. Hamane Oumarou himself would sing out a line of a chant about a Hausa king or perhaps a virgin lost in the desert just before her wedding and the other five members of the group would repeat the line with slight variations. The music would grow in intensity and power; drums and the native instruments would be added one by one; and some of the songs would end in a moving crescendo that said “Africa” to me, even now, as I sat in a museum in a city of Africa.

  It was what the music had said to me as a boy.

  But only some of the music on that second recording could say “Africa.” Most of it said New Orleans or Paris — jazz, in other words. Hamane Oumarou had turned the remarkable music of Niger into what, in the end, seemed unremarkable jazz. And the succeeding recordings confirmed me in my feelings. There was less and less of the musical magic and wonder, movement, romance and the exotic, that Hamane and his group had originally brought with them out of Africa, less and less of the magic that had drawn me to some of the music of that second recording and to all of the music of the first — music I wanted to hear again.