Whirligig

by Paul Fleischman

  They passed through Preston, then Issaquah. The old man next to Brent was still sleeping. In twenty-four hours they hadn’t exchanged ten words. He observed two women in front of him exclaiming over wallet photos and marveled at how naturally some people spun lines of connection, turning a world of strangers into family. He opened his own wallet, took out Lea’s picture, and studied it in solitude. He found her entrancing. She looked Hawaiian, her skin the color of cinnamon, smooth as sanded wood, her forehead high, her hair long and straight. Her eyes were faintly Asian. He probed the photo for new information and now saw that she’d drawn her hair, shiny and black as obsidian, to the side with a clip. Her dress was white. Or was it only a blouse? He examined the pattern embroidered on the bodice. She wore a gold necklace, fine as spider’s silk, but he couldn’t see what hung from it. He scrutinized her smile from close range, almost felt her breath on his face. Strange to think she was now smiling at her killer. Yet she wasn’t—her head was turned at an angle. He stared into her cheerful brown eyes, knowing she would never look back at him but always off to the side. This was a relief. Her direct gaze would have vaporized him with accusation.

  He turned the photo over and read her full name, Lea Rosalia Santos Zamora, written in her mother’s curlicued script. She’d given him the picture as a model for the whirligigs, along with a disposable camera. Strangely, she wanted photos of them but didn’t want to know their locations. The idea of coming upon one, she’d told him, rusted or vandalized or fallen over, lifeless like her daughter, was too forbidding. She preferred to see them in her mind, where they could spin forever, safe from all harm.

  Suburbs appeared out the window. Then the bus nosed its way through a long tunnel and emerged into downtown Seattle. The streets were hilly. Brent glimpsed Puget Sound. He wanted a longer view, but the bus turned, following its usual labyrinthine path to the station. He glanced at his United States map. Interstate 90 ended here, the same road that led all the way back to Chicago, that passed a few miles from his house. He felt himself a departing sailor, leaving the sight of land behind. The bus found the station. The brakes sighed. He grabbed his pack and climbed down.

  His voice sounded odd in his ears when he asked for directions to the water. He tightened down his sleeping bag, struggled into his pack, and set off, staggering like a grizzly walking upright. It was early in July and sunny. He sampled the air, amazed at how light it felt, so different from the weighted, humid heat he was used to. He followed bustling Stewart Street, viewing the cars and pedestrians curiously. How like the afterlife it all was: a populous city, reached only after a long journey toward the setting sun, here all along but never seen until now. Was Lea here somewhere? Walking on, he jerked at the sight of a face vaguely resembling hers, then arrived at tourist-thronged Pike Place Market. He passed up the chance for a squidburger, bought two hot dogs instead, and watched a juggler while he ate. The crowds bothered him. It felt more like Chicago than the pristine Pacific Northwest he’d heard of. He left, following signs to Waterfront Park. This turned out to be piers and amusements. He looked over the water. A line of blue mountains floated above the clouds in the distance. That was the Washington he wanted. Lea’s mother hadn’t specified where in the four states he should put the whirligigs. He bought a map and some groceries, walked back to the station, and took the next bus north.

  He got off in Mount Vernon and pored over his map. He broke his promise to his parents not to hitchhike, found a ride with a fisherman heading west, then walked three miles to a state park on the water only to find that the campground was full. He hadn’t realized it was Fourth of July weekend. Seeing that he’d walked, the ranger suggested he try asking if he could share a site. Slowly, Brent meandered through the campground. Every site was a separate country, baseball blaring from a radio in one while the next was occupied by a couple playing duets on soprano recorders. It struck him that every family was a universe, with its own peculiar natural laws. Free of his own family, he imagined himself part of each one he passed, trying on identities like a quick-change artist. He neared the end of the campground. He paused, stealthily eyeing a bearded man unloading his tent from a bicycle. He was tall, fit, looked to be in his thirties, had a thoughtful, sunburned face. The man noticed him, stopped, and turned. Brent felt like a stray dog begging scraps.

  “I was wondering…” His voice was rusted from disuse. He cleared his throat. “If you’d mind…”

  “If you picked out a corner for yourself? Be my guest.”

  “I’ll pay half the fee,” Brent added quickly.

  “No need. Glad to have the company.”

  The site was on the water and more private than most. Brent was pleased. He took off his pack, pried off his sneakers, waded in up to his calves, and washed his face in Puget Sound.

  It was too late to begin on the whirligig. He pulled out his tent, an open tube of plastic meant to hang from a rope strung between two trees. He’d been sent to a camp for a week a few times, but not lately, and had never camped out on his own. He stood with his rope, unable to find flat ground furnished with properly spaced trees. He hoped the cyclist wasn’t watching him and saw the man’s dome tent suddenly spring up like a magician’s illusion. Brent scanned the sky. It didn’t look like rain. He put the tent back and unrolled his sleeping bag.

  “And what brings you here?” the cyclist asked over dinner.

  They’d collaborated on the fire. Brent stirred his pan of beef and barley soup. “Just seeing the country,” he answered offhandedly. “What about you?”

  “Riding south from Canada. Heading down the coast to San Francisco. Seeing the country, like yourself. Studying the strange customs of the natives. No offense meant.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Prince George, British Columbia. Halfway up toward the Yukon.”

  The name raised visions of the far north in Brent’s mind. He’d never met a Canadian before and felt like an explorer who’s just heard tell of an unknown continent.

  “Ever play Go?” the man asked. “The game.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Like to learn?”

  After dinner the cyclist produced a folding board and two tiny boxes of stones, black and white. “It’s from China originally, like most things. I’m still learning myself. Brought a book about it, to study on the trip.” He gave Brent the white stones, shaped like flying saucers, polished and identical. “Supposed to be excellent training for generals. Some say it won the Vietnam War for the North. Wheaties for the brain.”

  He explained the rules and they began a practice game. The object was to secure territory, arranging groups of stones into living communities that couldn’t be extinguished by your opponent. Brent felt he was practicing constructing his new life. Out of nowhere, the word karass came to mind, from the Vonnegut book he’d read in English, a term for a disparate group of people linked together without their knowledge. Your family and friends weren’t part of your karass. You couldn’t choose its members, and might never know who was in it or what its purpose was. Brent felt certain that Lea was a member of his. Was the cyclist part of it too?

  Sunset flared orange on the water. Firecrackers began going off.

  “Ah, yes,” said the man. “Noisemaking devices to dispel evil spirits on this important day.”

  Brent couldn’t reveal why he shared the same distanced perspective. This second time around, he saw everything from the outside. Much that he’d taken for granted before now struck him as curious: handshaking, the Pledge of Allegiance, neckties on men, sports teams named for animals …

  The sky shifted to shades from the spectrum’s outer edges, then went black. The cyclist lit a tiny gas lamp that hissed and glowed like a shard from a star. By its light they played another hour, then retired. Brent climbed into his sleeping bag. Radios, firecrackers, voices subsided, replaced by the chirring of crickets, a breeze’s passage through the trees, the waves’ steady respiration. The nonhuman world was emerging, a world he�
�d rarely noticed, another hidden city. Was Lea now a citizen here? He wondered if the creature he heard creeping over dry leaves could be her. He imagined her fully fluent here, able to hear and comprehend what he couldn’t, her sense of smell greatly magnified, this bit of shoreline known to her as it never would be to him. He looked up at the stars, glinting silently, a movie without a soundtrack. Or was he simply deaf to their music? He realized he knew no constellations. Likewise the names of trees, flowers, rocks, birds, insects, fish. He was a foreigner here. He wished he knew some names.

  When he awoke, the cyclist was just leaving. It was cold. Brent’s bag was damp with dew. Huddling within, waiting for the sun to top the trees and warm the world, he understood why people had worshiped it. Two hours later he’d taken a shower, breakfasted on French bread and cheese, skimmed three chapters of the whirligig book, and picked the simplest project offered—an angel whose spinning arms played a harp.

  He studied the diagrams apprehensively. Neither he nor his father was the Popular Mechanics type. There were practically no tools in his house; those he’d brought with him had all been bought new. It had been four years since he’d taken woodshop, where he’d spent weeks on a simple hinged-top box. Maybe he’d changed in that time. He felt Lea and Mrs. Zamora watching him, and hoped that he had.

  He walked to his pack. He’d brought four pieces of plywood, one foot by two feet, marine grade, half an inch thick. He drew one out, sat at the table, and sketched the angel’s outline on it, then erased it all. Freehand drawing was not his forte either. It took half an hour to get it right. He tightened the wood down to the table with a clamp, started in with his D-shaped coping saw, and promptly broke the thin blade. He inserted the only spare he’d brought, feeling like a soldier down to his last bullet. He worked gingerly. The blade survived. The file that followed the same path not only smoothed the wood’s edge but snapped off a sizable chunk of the angel’s wing. He slammed the file onto the table. He hated wood. He took a break, frightened by his anger in the face of this setback. There was no channel-changer here. He picked up the whirligig book and stared at the previous owner’s patient, precise script. He almost felt the man was with him, telling him to settle down and conquer the project calmly, step by step.

  He sat down. He decided to do without the wing. The figure could simply be a harp player. The harp was full-sized, the sort you’d find in an orchestra. Lea had played in an orchestra. He wondered what her instrument was. He sawed off the rest of the wing, sanded the wood, then went to his pack and dug out his five tubes of acrylic paint. In the trash can he found a styrofoam cup, which he filled with water for cleaning his brushes. From the same source he retrieved a paper plate to use as a palette. He painted one side of the figure, let it dry a bit, then leaned it on a stone and painted the other, making her hair black rather than the yellow prescribed by the book. Down one side he printed Lea’s name with a black permanent marker, then used it and his tape measure to draw the harp strings. He considered his work. It wasn’t perfect, especially the outline of the face. It looked nothing like her picture. He repainted the mouth, but only made matters worse. The two sides should have been identical, but weren’t. It was the best he could do. He stopped and ate lunch.

  All afternoon was spent on Lea’s propeller-shaped arms. He’d begun referring to the whirligig by her name and almost felt he was reassembling her broken body, reviving her. Each arm required much whittling and sanding. Suddenly he was halted by the strangeness of his task. He saw it as his parents had. “Why am I doing this?” he said aloud. The whole enterprise seemed taken from a dream, incomprehensible in the light of day.

  He returned to work. What he knew without question was that it felt good to be busy toiling in atonement, to direct his feelings outward through his arms and knife, as if draining an abscess. Now and then his eyes crossed Puget Sound to the Olympic range and settled on the peak the cyclist had told him was Mount Olympus. The home of the Greek gods, Brent mused. Hadn’t Hercules likewise performed his labors to cleanse himself of a crime? From Miss Lifton’s class, in his previous life, the story returned to him while he worked, of the Greek hero slaying his wife and children in a fit of insanity, his asking an oracle how he could atone, her telling him to seek out a certain king and perform for him twelve labors. His tasks had been just as bizarre as Brent’s and likewise had called for long journeys.

  Brent worked until late. He cut his hand three different times and suspected that part of him wasn’t content with the labors he’d been assigned and longed to mete out more punishment. He laid out the whirligig’s various parts and set them shining with a thick coat of varnish. Lea’s eyes glistened as if she’d awakened. Finally, he put down his tools, built a fire, and warmed another can of soup.

  He returned to work early the next morning. Bent over his book like a biblical scholar, mumbling, rereading, receiving sudden insights, he carefully mounted the arms on the figure. The placement was tricky. He tried to figure out why one arm didn’t spin and adjusted it endlessly. Next he agonized over the figure’s pivot point, marked the spot, drilled the hole, and hoped for the best. He pounded some tubing into the hole. He slipped this over a piece of dowel. The figure turned smoothly from side to side. He glued the dowel into a chunk of two-by-four he found along the shore. He tingled. He realized he was finished. He blew upon it. The arms pinwheeled, seeming to strum the harp strings. He could hardly believe it actually worked. He blew fifty more times for confirmation.

  He now wondered where to set it up. Was it illegal to mount it on state land? Then again, the park belonged to the public. Better here than in someone’s front yard. He’d have to hope the harpist so charmed the rangers that they wouldn’t remove it. How to mount it was a further problem. He hadn’t brought ten-foot poles in his pack. He paced the site, deliberating. Then he spied a tree limb, roughly horizontal, open to the wind from the west and high enough to keep his work out of reach. He climbed out and nailed down the driftwood mount. Then he returned for the whirligig.

  Back on the ground, he stared up at it. The harp player was just over a foot tall and seemed much smaller from a distance. Brent awaited a breeze until his neck ached. When it came, the figure felt it first. It swung on the dowel like a weathervane. The arms lifted, then trembled. Then spun. He felt the breeze. The arms gained speed. His smile widened. The phrase “the breath of life” traveled through his mind. He watched, mesmerized. Then he ran for the camera.

  Miami, Florida

  Still dark outside. No traffic. Just me. This is how I like it. Muy tranquilo.

  I never saw a street-sweeper machine in my life until I came from Puerto Rico. The first week here, it woke me up. I was eleven. I thought it was a monster. Then I looked out the window and saw it pass. I saw the man inside. I wondered what he thinks about, driving all night in the dark, alone. And now I’m driving a street-sweeper. Maybe the same one. And now I know what the driver thinks. Watching the curb. Watching parked cars. Looking down at the gutter broom. Thinking when to use the sprayer. Thinking about other times in my life. Enjoying the peaceful night.

  Peace is a very hard thing to find. The Pope is always asking for peace. He tells all the countries to stop their wars. Every year he tells them, but more wars always come. Always people disagree and fight.

  I think about why this is while I drive. I think about the shearwater bird.

  It’s March. Still cool at night. Like Puerto Rico, in the mountains, where I lived. The air was cool there. Life was more calm. For a while, anyway. Then my father had to sell our farm to a power company. Lots of families had to. They covered our farm with water to make a lake, to make electricity. Many people there were angry. My family left the mountains, where we’d always lived.

  We moved to San Juan, on the coast. San Juan is a very big city. There were five children in my family. People laughed at how we talked. Boys fought me. Some people laughed at my father’s straw hat. Many times I heard my father and mother argue. Other people argued agai
nst the government. Some wanted Puerto Rico to join the United States. Others wanted it to be its own country. Others wanted it to be something else. All were fighting against each other. One day a bomb went off near our house. I ran to see. Then I wish I didn’t. I saw a man lying down in his own blood. One month later we flew in a plane to Miami.

  No one in my family spoke English. In the mountains there was only Spanish. In school here I listened to the teacher but I didn’t understand anything. I would look a long time at her ring and her necklace and her shoes and at other students and out the window. That’s all I did that first year. The next year I went to junior high. There was lots to look at in woodworking class. But my teacher got mad when I didn’t look at him. He asked me a question one time. I didn’t know what he said, so I didn’t say anything back. His face got red. He ran up to my chair. Then he grabbed my hair and lifted me up and yelled some words right in my face. I hated that teacher. He didn’t know Spanish. When he let me go I swore at him in Spanish. Then I ran out of the room and went home.

  Next week, they made me take a test. Then they said I could move to a different school. I was glad. Then I went there. It was a school for retarded children. That’s where they put kids who didn’t know English. I told my father I wouldn’t go. He said school in America makes your life better. We had lots of arguments. I pretended to go, but instead I would walk around or go to the park to watch the tennis players. When I was fourteen, I got a job in a restaurant when I was supposed to be in school. I brought home the money and gave it to my father. I knew he needed it, for the rent. He took it. I quit pretending to go to school after that.