Landscape: Memory

by Matthew Stadler

  26 JULY 1915

  Flora took us punting on the pond. She'd cajoled a canoe from Mr. Squashtoe and brought a long thin staff. She sat in the back to punt, rather than standing as the Venetians do, and she pushed and poked us round the pond a half dozen times. Then I punted and then Duncan, the passengers lounging about on pillows in the middle of the boat, eating fresh fruits and sipping lemonade.

  Rippling waves tickled up my ankles, shuddering cold in the brisk evening breeze. I'd dropped my feet into the water, sitting on a drift log, watching Duncan paint ice-blue fish scales up the flank of his boat.

  27 JULY 1915

  Duncan's prow is a perfect spiral spear. Thick at one end and tapering off to a point at the other. He's painted it pearl gray.

  We burned a bonfire on the beach, starting late after dinner, the cold sky black and clear. We burned driftwood down by the lagoon, upwind of Duncan's boat. The wood crackled and spit, burning bright as torches and high into the night. Even the wreck, a good fifty feet distant, glowed all orange and warm, reflecting the flames.

  Grover, Tyrone and Falillia came, having seen the flames from across the water. They brought corn for roasting and marsh-mallows too. Flora took a photo and we all held stock-still for the long seconds she felt were needed to expose a plate by firelight.

  28 JULY 1915

  Duncan got me going in the afternoon, laying me out all lovely in the grass by the pond, naked and wet and my muscles all tired and tingling from swimming fast laps. He had me stretched out full, me reaching out above me and stretching my toes to their farthest possible points, all that feeling rushing from end to end and about to burst out of my middle and come when he stood away and let me lie there, almost bursting, looking at me and waiting. I said nothing, just stayed all stretched out, my heart still racing, catching my breath and the sunlight dappling through oak branches and over my brown skin. Then he lay down again by me and started over, very slow and soft, just touching and then his mouth over me again, and the blood just aching in me until I was dizzy and almost dying and up he got again, just standing over and watching me. It went on and on till I was so tired and dizzy I thought I'd passed out there in the grass, blind to the day and my body just raw and tingling, drawing deep breaths inside me. His mouth came over me then and I could feel the full length of me in him and my warm push against the back of his throat, and him working me all up and down. The whole afternoon came rushing through my spine, bursting out my middle and into his throat, like that white flash, that intensity, that infinity of presence.

  I was completely gone. I lay there breathing, and sank into the wet green grass. Duncan's arm lay near my mouth and I felt that feeling in my throat. It felt so lovely, the groan and growl of that unconscious song rattling inside me each time I exhaled, buzzing the soft underside of his arm where my lips lay against him. It was nothing more than a sound.

  29 JULY 1915

  We four went up in the hills picking berries. Father made us wear sun hats and we dipped them in water whenever we could find water. Blackberries warm up hot like hot syrup sitting in the sun. They hang heavy on their stickered vines, and so soft they burst if you touch them too hard. You've got to unch them off with gentle fingers placed flush against their collars, right around the stem. Best of all, unch them off into your mouth. Hot bursting berry juice, boom! across your tongue.

  The Seals are in first place, Grover says. But there's still a month and a half left in the season.

  30 JULY 1915

  Duncan worked on the rudder today, sawing it with the jigsaw so it looks like a tailfin. I painted it, following his instructions, all silver gray and black, very detailed, so it looks scaly like a fish and matches the design he's made up the sides.

  Flora's sewing the sail from a white canvas tent Father junked because it tore. Duncan asked if she could cut it kind of fancy, making it look like an enormous dorsal fin.

  We played Capture the Flag at dusk on the beach at Bolinas.

  31 JULY 1915

  Mother sent a note reminding us to go to Berkeley, among other things. Matriculation exams are in two weeks. Flora's excused because Mr. Morton put her on approval from Lowell. Classes in three weeks.

  Flora and I climbed the middle canyon with her camera and set up on its north ridge. She took a series of shots across the whole panorama so we can post them up all in a row and see it "just like it is" here. I'm glad her photos don't have colors.

  After, we had the loveliest time gossiping, just like we used to at school, but now about the various kids in Bolinas. She feels Falillia is far too intelligent for Tyrone, whose only appeal is physical. I asked innocently if she found Grover attractive, and she just laughed at the very idea, adding, however, that his body would be beautiful like Tyrone's and very soon.

  Duncan says the boat is ready.

  1 AUGUST 1915

  Flora brought the camera down for the launch. It was after lunch and a swim and Father came too. What with setting the camera and attaching all the boat's various parts, it was quite late into the afternoon before we actually put it in the water and christened it with a Coca-Cola. Duncan simply poured the beverage over the prow, not wanting to foul the lagoon with broken glass.

  When assembled, the boat is a beautiful silver fish. Its front slopes up to a fine proud snout, thick fish lips pouting in an aristocratic frown. The spiraled spear attaches right in the center of the prow and helps explain the ship's name, Narwhal which Duncan had painted in sky-blue script across the back.

  We climbed aboard and got a good shove off from Father, wading in up to his thighs and pushing away. Flora stood on shore and fixed her second plate in place, ready for an action shot.

  We drifted out toward the middle and Duncan hoisted the sail. The rope pulled clean and easy through its pulleys and held on tight where Duncan wrapped it round the irons. The wind came in, filling the sail, and we were off, gliding across the choppy water, not even a drop leaking in. Duncan worked the rudder. I lay back on the smooth wooden gunwale and looked up past the taut white sail, up into the blue sky, watching the tip of the mast bend back slightly with the pull of the rope.

  We sailed up and down the lagoon, Duncan tacking skillfully to recover ground against the wind, till the sun had sunk almost to the shore and Father and Flora were long gone, the camera packed in its heavy case and hauled back up the hill. We were swift and clean across that lovely clear water, racing on toward Bolinas, then making slow strategic progress back up the lagoon. It was all so pretty a sail. Just wind and water and Duncan and me, and Winky and Blinky the dog, which I remember from when I was little.

  * * *

  Duncan let the sail down slack, the breeze blowing lightly now and warm, blowing over the hot inland hills. We lay low, back into the boat, watching the warm orange sun wash over clouds and shore and lagoon, turning the thin mast bronze and casting a long, pinpoint shadow across the water. It's another memory whose place I want to find, a moment I hope nestles in with all that matters to me, not slipping away. Duncan and I lying low in the evening, the soft wind washing over all of it and us, warm and close and touching, together in the same boat.

  Returning to the Fair

  _______________________________________________

  12 AUGUST 1915

  We came by boat, returning down the Marin coast and in at the Golden Gate. The sky was crisp blue, lightly marbled with thin wisps all combed out and curly, and the air was bright and clean. It wasn't Duncan's boat, alas. The Narwhal stayed in Bolinas, where it could succeed at navigating the small hazards and hardships so sheltered a place might pose. The open sea was a wholly different level of danger, one more fit for U-boats and dreadnoughts than little silver skiffs.

  We rode a journeyman's steamer, all busy with ropes and hoists and hot oily motors spitting steam. A slight, graying engineer rambled roughly about the deck swearing a salty stream, jamming in wedges, wrenching pipes and yanking levers as if that was the activity by which the boat was propelled. Duncan a
nd I were both dressed neatly, clean white shirts, collars and bow ties, our soft worn caps and twill shorts too. Flora stayed in Bolinas, due back in a week (or two, she said).

  I watched the rough brown headlands, imagining them as Dover, and cultivated a nervous fear of U-boats and hidden mines. In a split second, I tried to convince myself, the rippling blue water could tear open in foam and flame blasting clear up to the wild heavens, ripping the steel plates from off our hull and sending us down in pieces to the mucky mysterious floor of the deep dark sea. I sat still on my satchel, gazing out over the gunwales, conjuring up this possible terror. Duncan was no help, chattering away about the Fair and Flora's motorcar, to which she'd given us the key.

  "We'll drive to Hollywood," he proposed. "Your mother must know someone in movies."

  I stayed mum, preferring my fantasies to his just then. I thought of Dunkirk, how the bombs came from nowhere, sailing invisible through the beautiful blue sky. Point Bonita jutted out into the sea just a half mile down the rocky, tumbling coast, one last weak push of land west before the sea came rushing in through the Golden Gate, flooding in to fill the wide flat bay. We sat on our luggage, out on the open deck, the wet salty breeze blowing over us.

  A third passenger rode with us, sitting stiffly on her heavy leather portmanteau, trying to arrange her legs in a suitably feminine fashion and failing. She finally planted her feet firmly and let her elbows rest on her knees, as though taking a dump into her lovely brown luggage. A stiff straw hat was pinned fast to her neat gray hair. It featured paper flowers and a desperate stuffed canary, poised to leap off into the gloom. Its slight, feathered shoulders were back, wings lifting. Its chipped lacquer beak was wide open, waiting, I imagined, for its own queer song to emerge.

  But other sounds came in from "out there," as Father calls it, interrupting my reverie.

  "Are you involved with the cinema?" our companion asked, filling the long silence I'd let follow Duncan's whimsy. We'd come clear of Point Bonita and turned in. Rough shoulders of land plunged down suddenly on either side of the narrow channel. The choppy water was busy with boats and blue and beautiful. It ran right in, opening up on the sheltered bay. Alcatraz, a squat white rock of an island, cracking through the blue, sat smack in the middle, straight ahead now, as we pulled in past Land's End.

  "We're college boys," I answered. "We'll be freshmen this year."

  "If we're unsuccessful in Hollywood," Duncan added.

  "You wish to be actors?" The eyeless canary dipped and bobbed inquisitively with each inquiring nod of this woman's head.

  "Duncan," I gestured toward him, "wishes to be. I would like to direct."

  "Hollywood is so full of deceptions," our companion mused, "or so I am led to believe."

  The scene was suddenly busy, the air filled with noise. Boats crowded in close, ferrying about in all directions. Horns blasted and bells rang. There were fishermen and ferry boats and long, low, open-decked barges, loading and unloading. Far in front, proudly pushing east, two armored gray dreadnoughts cut across our view, black smoke rolling from their stacks, long and sharp as sabers, and solid and swift. The Presidio appeared, rising green and rugged away to our right. The boom of cannons could be heard marking the hour and puffs of smoke seen drifting from the trees. Whole columns of drab brown soldiers marched in military formation right across the crest of one field. Battalions of men on horses rode alongside. The Fair opened up below, rising like a fantastic dream of the Orient, all golden, pink, red, orange and blue. The domes looked more unimaginably grand than ever they'd seemed from land. Thin pillars and minarets, the Tower of Jewels, like liquid silver, washed in the sun— from the Presidio clear across to the marina, they rose, sparkling in the brisk salty air.

  Our steamer rattled along, running parallel to the Fair. The oom-pah pounding of various brass bands sounded across the open waters, mixing with the hungry cry of sea birds and our boat horn. Its blasting announced our return to the city.

  * * *

  The business of landing and the confusion of the docks had me in a dizzy spin. Bleats and blats and warnings and boys grabbing bags, jitneys roaring past. I hadn't been in a motorcar in almost two months, nor seen this many people at all, total, during our time in Bolinas.

  Duncan seemed charged up, waving down this or that boy to see us through, buying hot Italian sausage and negotiating our steamer fare all at once (even getting sausage for our captain). I was numb from overstimulation, and could only stare dumbly at the spitting links, lying dead and bursting on a dirty black grill over coals. Duncan flagged a jitney down.

  The mud-splattered jitney pulled away as I was still falling into the backseat, pulling the back door closed behind me. Duncan had already climbed in with our bags and I landed in his lap and nearly lost my hat. We tore through traffic, skidding about the crowded streets, blasting death calls on Gideon's horn and paying little mind to the unfortunate pedestrians dumb enough to walk these same streets. The buildings seemed so incredibly tall, rising up on either side of Post like sheer canyon walls.

  We sped out of downtown on Bush, rolling over the long hills west to our house. The inhuman speed and noise of the motorcar rattled through me. It worked inside me so I wanted to either sleep or throw up, the two seeming equally viable and, somehow, quite similar. It was like that when I was a child.

  (Vomiting Coke syrup, my little wet mouth sleepy with yawns. I've a dog in my bed, someone else's dog, and a funny rash all up and down my pale skin. I've never been up so late. What am I, five at the oldest? More likely four.)

  * * *

  Mother and Mr. Taqdir were home, still stocking the cupboards and folding linen. We'd sent word by mail, insisting they make no fuss and certainly not feel they had to meet us at the docks.

  Mother had had her hair cut, scandalously short, barely reaching the bottom of her neck and bouncing with a slight bob. If that was not enough, Mr. Taqdir's thick mustache was gone, recently, it seemed, for a pale ghost of it sat all bluish with shaven beard just below his nose. I slumped in through the familiar door and collapsed on the divan.

  "Lovey, pumpkin," Mother cried, smushing her face into mine. "You're a perfect wreck." I did feel a perfect wreck, rumpled and rattled by the confusion of the city, wanting more than anything just to go to sleep. Mr. Taqdir was squeezing Duncan lustily in the doorway, lifting him up off his feet like a bear mauling its prey.

  "You're so thin," Mother said to me, though I wasn't thin at all.

  "I'm fit," I explained.

  "And so brown and handsome," she kept on, squeezing me more. "Your hair is a fright." She ran her fingers through my thick dark hair, all wild and wonderful. "We'll have it cut."

  "No we won't, thank you very much." I loved my hair like this. I wanted only to wash it and, if it got much longer, tie it back in a ponytail.

  "You must be starving for some nourishment." She was persistent, abandoning one motherly desire and picking up another. And I was starving.

  "I am. Something warm and delightful, soup or bread. Let's not eat out." I nuzzled into her, smelling all the familiar smells—her lavender-and-soft-cotton-dress smell, the house all sweet wood and tinged with smoke and spices, nutmeg and coriander and pepper.

  13 AUGUST 1915

  From the whole summer's mail, just one letter from Maury.

  Dear Robert,

  What sorts of birds should one expect with spring here? I find myself wondering about the reality this place once was. I don't recognize it as land really. A few frightened starlings have arrived in the trenches, looking, I guess, for what scraps of bread or seed we might have left scattered.

  Perhaps the war's a wound that will heal with the weather and the seasons. A golden thatch of wheat grows thick across the lip of a mine crater. The gray lifeless earth stretches away all around it, ripped by scars and crossed by dead wire and bones. Sheep and cattle who've made it through a year of war wander the middle ground, putting their noses to the dead or wounded. They stand in their beaut
iful animal stupidity and graze on the few tufts of grass that have sprung up. The winter was much more beautiful, and the smell was not so rich and terrible.

  Cut the leg off an old friend of yours. Chapman, I believe. Mortar had ripped his calf silly. One of ours, it was. He sends his hello.

  I had a lovely long bath this morning and we met Mother after breakfast, to shop for our college wardrobes. We've decided Hollywood isn't really an option.

  Mother drove, which was a blessing. She drives slower than a horse. Usually it makes me crazy, but today it was bliss, turning the car into an oversized pram, rolling gently along the busy roads in no great hurry. She had a simple garland in her hair, about which a bee kept buzzing. Duncan and I squeezed in up front with her, me in the middle and Duncan suggesting routes.

  Mother paid him no mind and kept rumbling along her roundabout, taking whatever road looked widest and getting us to Market Street soon enough.

  We parked down by Stockton, in the midst of the busiest jumble. Trolleys clanged past four abreast. Horses and carts and cars and bicyclists wiggled in amongst the mayhem. It seemed some disaster had struck, some terrible trembling from deep in the earth and this was the ensuing panic.

  Ladies bustled into traffic, navigating boldly through the various conveyances, stopping to converse on thin islands of safety between lanes of traffic. One raised her little gloved hand and a jitney jammed its breaks and skidded to a stop nearby. Other cars swerved out behind into the trolley paths. I hesitated before following Duncan into the street.

  I wanted to take my clothes off. They all felt so terribly heavy and constricting. I hadn't worn them in some time. Certainly my feet had grown. Coffee seemed like a good idea.

  "Things don't seem quite right today,'' I suggested meekly, hoping Mother or Duncan might set the chaos back into order.