Shame and Wonder

by David Searcy

  Copyright © 2016 by David Searcy

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following essays have been previously published: “Hudson River School” in Granta; “El Camino Dolorosa,” “Mad Science,” and “Still Life Painting” in The Paris Review.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Searcy, David.

  [Essays. Selections]

  Shame and wonder: essays / David Searcy.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-8129-9394-3

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9395-0

  I. Title.

  PS3569.E176A6 2016

  814'.54—dc23

  2014046233

  eBook ISBN 9780812993950

  randomhousebooks.com

  All photographs copyright © David Searcy

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for eBook

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover illustration: Brian Levy

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Hudson River School

  El Camino Doloroso

  Mad Science

  A Futuristic Writing Desk

  Sexy Girls Near Dallas

  Didelphis Nuncius

  The Depth of Baseball Sadness

  Santa in Anatolia

  How to Color the Grass

  Science Fictions #1

  Science Fictions #2 (for C.W.)

  Science Fictions #3

  Nameless

  On Watching the Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan Documentary About Lewis and Clark on PBS

  Love in Space

  An Enchanted Tree Near Fredericksburg

  Cereal Prizes

  Paper Airplane Fundamentals

  Three Cartoons

  Always Shall Have Been

  Still-Life Painting

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I’m in the dental hygienist’s chair and she’s a new one, although very much the same bright, cheery presence as the last, which works for me. The unencumbered heart is best, I think, in matters such as these. She seems about the age of my daughters, which I mention, and we talk. She’s from West Texas, where her father is a rancher. I’m a writer. Well, her sister is a writer. Really. Children’s books. How about that. It’s a nice day. You can see downtown from here. We’re on the eighth floor. I’ve been coming here for years, and I have always liked the view. I think there may be something classically romantic (if that’s not a contradiction) about the view and my condition as I view it. Like those grand romantic nineteenth-century landscapes so majestic you don’t see at first the tiny human figure there, oblivious and engaged in tiny purposes of his own right at the edge of where the whole world seems to fall away toward heaven. This is just like that except it’s Dallas, Texas, with no place to fall away to and I’m only here for a cleaning.

  When I’m able to speak again, it is to lie about my flossing habits and ask about her childhood on the ranch—I spent some time on a ranch myself when I was young, pretending to help with shearing sheep and hunting the wild dogs that would prey on them. It’s coyotes in West Texas, though, she says. And so develops out of all this bright and cheery and obligatory chitchat in the eighth-floor dentist’s office such a strange, opaque, and mysterious tale, it startles me and makes me ask if she’d mind if I spoke with her father about the events.

  It seems there occurred, a number of years ago on her father’s ranch, an alarming rise in coyote depredations among his flock. The lambs, especially, suffered terribly. He believed it was the work of a single animal but his efforts to hunt it down were unsuccessful. For two seasons he tried all the usual snares and calls but nothing worked. The animal was too cunning. And the lambs continued to die. One day he hit upon a new idea—and here’s the part I’d like to know a little more about and why I’d like to give him a call, find out where the idea came from, whether he made the tape recording for this purpose or already had it; how it felt to do what he did, if it seemed desperate or dishonorable or too risky in some indefinable way—but anyway, one morning he took a tape recording of his infant daughter’s cries (not those of Lila, my hygienist, but another daughter’s cries) out into the tall grass or the bush, the range, whatever you call it out there where the coyotes wait to take away your lambs, and played the recording as he watched with his rifle ready. And it worked. The coyote came, he shot it dead, the depredations stopped and that was that. She writes her father’s name and number on the appointment card and says she’s sure he wouldn’t mind at all if I gave him a call and that she’ll see me in six months.

  Six months later I’ve not called him. Though I’ve thought about it often enough. I’ve even gone online to look up Sterling City, Texas—which is the nearest town to the ranch—and used that Google Maps capability that is still, to me, so ghostly, where you’re able to descend from heavenly cartographic altitudes right down into the street-level world to pass among the living. I’ll pass west on Fourth Street—Highway 87—through the middle of town, which isn’t much, proceeding in those spooky-smeary increments of fifty yards or so. You don’t just jerk along between the discrete locations like you’d think. They’ve introduced a bit of theater here, I guess. So when you click from one point to another along the virtual yellow stripe—from here in front of this boarded-up feed store, say, to where that little white-haired lady waits to cross the street on up the block—it all goes blurry, sweeps away to the rear like smoke in a wind before things rematerialize around the next coordinate where you find you’ve overshot the white-haired lady, have to spin that magic compass thing to turn around and get a closer look. She seems uncertain. She looks past you down the highway to the west, where the town itself blurs away into mesquite and scrub and rolling empty distances. On down the road I pause and spin the compass thing again, but I can’t see her. I suppose she got across. I have no reason to believe the ranch is out this way at all. I get a sense of how it looks, though. And it all looks like it’s pretty much the same. This sort of scrubby empty country. Line of hills off in the distance. I keep thinking I might spot some sheep or something—maybe a coyote even. Everything’s so open. But the resolution isn’t very good. Those smudges out there could be anything. A mile or two outside of town the virtual yellow stripe splits off to the left down Highway 158. I drift that way for a while until the sameness seems to settle in completely. Then I stop and look around. I can’t tell which is the way to go and for a second I’m like Cary Grant in North by Northwest, stuck out here in my business suit in the middle of nowhere, absolutely lost.

  I think the view across the city on a nice day from the eighth-floor examination room is better than a fish tank. Although possibly to similar effect. So, here I’m back again and haven’t called her father. Lila, I say, I’m afraid I haven’t called your father. And perhaps she’s disappointed, having told him I might do so. I apologize, explaining how terrifically tangled up I’ve managed to get in my current project but I really had the time and should have called. There’s something here that makes me hesitate.

  Back home I open my little kit and throw the floss away, replace my orange toothbrush with a green one. Later on I’m paused on Highway 87 at the edge of Sterling City once again for no particular reason, gazing past the brown brick church and the service station out to where it fades to open country. It’s a nice day here, as well. The blue sky hazes into white near the horizon. It’s late morning, I would guess. My
girlfriend, Nancy, a painter who pays close attention to the way things look and lived in California where they know what coyotes look like, says she saw one near my house once. Right out here in these densely ordinary 1950s neighborhoods one foggy night, quite late. It stood in the grass beneath the power lines that run beside the tollway. She had come across the Northaven bridge and there it was, just standing there long-legged in the grass, in the foggy pale pink tollway light. She stopped and rolled her window down for a better look. And for a moment it looked back, then loped away.

  A number of years ago on Forest Lane, not half a mile from here in heavy afternoon traffic, I encountered a giant snapping turtle attempting to cross the road. And it had almost made it somehow, crossing all six lanes but found itself unable to mount the curb. I parked my car to block the traffic, got behind it trying to keep away from the bloody but still dangerous-looking beak—it might have been injured by a car or just from bashing against the curb—but, anyway, this thing was as big around as a trash-can lid and weighed about fifty pounds, so it was all I could do to hoist it over the curb and get it headed toward a narrow grassy corridor that ran behind some houses. There was no place in the area I could think of that might call to such a creature. No place anywhere nearby for it to have come from. But next morning it was gone. I’ve seen raccoons at night dart in and out of storm sewers on my street. And once, alerted by the yelps and exclamations of my neighbor who was fighting to control her dog, a toad the size of a mixing bowl right out there in the gentle summer evening beneath the streetlamp. I encouraged it—one sort of stomps and lunges—out of the street into another neighbor’s yard. Then we retreated—she with her wild-eyed dog and I with my thoughts. That toad was even bigger than the giant African bullfrogs I had seen at the Dallas Zoo. It had no business here. Nor anywhere we care about, where limits are imposed and children sleep and dream unburdened by outrageous possibilities. In the morning though, of course, it too was gone. Where in the world do these things come from? Is the city like a net? Does our imagination—urban, gridlike—drag behind us deeper than we know? And these are just the ones we see. Or are they simply passing through. Unsure of us. Our world perhaps a little ghostly to them, streets and houses hardly here at all, a blur like smoke across an older landscape.

  I can’t find the appointment card with Lila’s father’s name and number on it. Which, I imagine, lets me off the hook for a while. But then, a day or two later, there it is, tucked into my wallet. “Lila King, RDH” on the front, and on the back, across a gauzy reproduction of three vaguely Postimpressionistic apples, “Courtney King” and two phone numbers, cell and home. So I call him. What the hell.

  He’s on the highway in his pickup truck—a good old honest pickup truck, I’ll bet. And he remembers being told that I might call. I can’t quite tell, at first, how this is going to go. I like his voice. That broad and easy, pure West Texas way of speaking that I’ve come to think is somehow fundamental, undistorted, like the structure of a crystal that’s had adequate room to form. If I attempt to imitate it—try to demonstrate and let myself get into that West Texas sort of talk, which is the way all Texans probably ought to talk and maybe did before the cities pinched our noses and our vowels—I find it hard to stop. I find I want to be the one who speaks like that, regards the world that way. Whatever way that is. He seems okay with this. Amused a little, maybe. We’ll just drive on down the highway—is it 87, I will wonder later—and he’ll tell me how it happened, how the whole thing really happened over a long period of time, a generation, in fact, between his tape-recording of his infant daughter’s cries and rediscovering them and taking them out there with him to higher ground—a “mountain,” as he calls it—maybe sixty miles away where he would spend the night and “come down from on top” at the crack of dawn. That’s how he says it. He decided he would “come down from on top.”

  I’m checking my notes and they don’t tell me why it was sixty miles—I’ll have to ask him later. Maybe they lived away from the ranch then, or the coyote had been spotted somewhere else, but anyway this draws the process out somehow. Reveals, it seems to me, more clearly something about the strangeness of it. Traveling such a distance with that tape recording, taking it so far away. The boom box—or, who knows, I guess it could have been an older reel-to-reel; I’ll have to ask about that, too—but I imagine it beside him in the pickup truck that evening, and this daughter, this same one, Joellen, seventeen now, out on a date that night, I think he said. I think he said the way it happened, she was waiting for her date and he had come across this tape a little earlier and his wife said, “Why not use it? Why not use that tape and see if it comes to that?” As if, somehow, their daughter waiting there so beautifully, I’m sure, and maybe vulnerably as well, brought this to mind. This possibility. And he’s heading away that evening, taking all that with him there on the seat beside him (I shouldn’t give my imagination so much room, I know. Details are bound to shift.), but there beside him, surely, something to consider as pertaining to the squalling, fragile origins of things. Not to discuss to himself or anything like that but there beside him nonetheless. A hunter’s mind, a rancher’s mind, you’d think, would have to have a certain peripheral vision, as it were—and maybe that is what you hear in those long, slow, inflected vowels between the consonants like wind between the fence posts, that provisional sense of things not quite in view. Okay, too much. But still—how many lambs had died? He said two “crops.” Two years—two crops. All lost, I guess. I hate to think how many fleecy, squalling lambs two crops might be. My uncle Jack, who oversaw that ranch near Glen Rose where I spent time in my teens, ascribed to sheep a strangely maladaptive fatalism whereby, merely nipped by the predator, barely marked, not really harmed at all, they’d drift into a kind of shock or resignation, fail to eat, and finally die. My uncle Jack was more a hunter and outdoorsman, not a rancher. So who knows. Another thing I need to ask about. But I remember one time having to kill a lamb or kid we found near death—a little mark where he’d been bitten on his hind leg. That was all. It makes the wild dog or the coyote or the wolf a kind of metaphor to sheep. It’s the approach that counts. The fact of it. The terrible apparition.

  In “The Mioritza,” the ancient Romanian ballad, a shepherd is told, one night by one of his sheep whose name is Mioritza, that his brothers plan to kill him in the morning and divide his flock between them. Yet the shepherd doesn’t flee. He’s like the lamb who knows from the touch of death that death is inescapable. So he says to Mioritza—and there seem to be a number of versions, shorter and longer; sometimes, I’ve been told, the poem, depending on who’s singing, may go on and on all night—but fundamentally what he says is: do not tell of my death, but rather tell how I have gone away and married a queen, the Bride of the World; that at my wedding stars descended; that my crown was borne by the sun and the moon; great mountains were my priests, the trees my witnesses, and all to the songs of a thousand birds and the burning of the countless stars, my torches. And thereafter, Mioritza tells this story again and again as she goes wandering over the countryside, across the rivers and mountains to encompass and define, as some suggest, the form and spirit of Romania—and I think this is the part that can go on and on all night.

  So Lila’s father spends the night up there on the mountain with the tape-recorded cries and, in the morning, “at the crack of dawn,” comes down and sets it up. He turns it on low and lets it play for about three minutes, and this is what interests me the most. How was the light? Was it one of those hazy dawns with redness spreading all along the edge of things but not yet casting shadows so it’s hard to pick out movement in the distance? Did it take him back to mornings when they’d hear the baby squalling, have to get up in the chill and attend to her, never dreaming this would happen—that those cries might drift away like this, uncomforted across the empty landscape? That’s the worst thing that could happen. And yet here he is. He turns it up a notch. And then, not thirty seconds later out of the lifting gloom, the coy
ote making for him at a dead run. Does he comprehend the risk? What if he misses? There’s no end to it then. The lambs will die. The cries go on and on. But at a hundred yards he drops him. Pow. One shot from a .280 Remington with a seven-power scope. The world continues and he pays Joellen the two hundred dollars he promised. She and the next year’s lambs grow up. And there you have it. Here again. It was an old one, he says. A smart one. You could tell by the old snare scars. But not very big—maybe thirty-five pounds—which he thought odd. He has the skull and the hide at home.

  I hate to floss. It seems sort of prissy—like a manicure or something. But I know I really should. My girlfriend flosses all the time. I can’t see Lila’s father flossing, though. A toothpick, sure. But flossing? I don’t know. How we attend ourselves seems touchy, somehow, out here in the open. Out on the range, the scrub, the prairie or whatever, where a sharp peripheral eye is so important. One’s attention should be outwardly directed. I remember on Nantucket once we visited the seventeenth-century Jethro Coffin House. The oldest house on the island, I believe. It’s near the center of town but up a little rise surrounded by trees, so it’s not hard to imagine the isolation back when it was new. It’s one of those massive-chimneyed, tiny-windowed postmedieval houses so protective, so much more concerned with warmth than light, you sense a certain built-in trepidation. There’s a clear, mown yard around it and a chain across the open door with a sign announcing times for tours. It’s like the houses children draw. It’s like the first house in the world. An upstairs bedroom with a cradle by a window breaks your heart. A reluctant window in the heavy white-painted planking of the wall above the ancient hooded cradle with a corner of its little quilt turned back. The bed next to it is completely made, its antique quilt pulled up, a single pillow placed on top. We know they’re gone, these people, centuries ago. It’s just that cradle’s little quilt turned back, receptive still as if to make us think the child is here somewhere, that maybe there’s a chance she’s not quite lost, that someone yet might bring her, stand there by the window in the evening for a moment holding all that’s close and dear while gazing out upon what must have seemed, in 1680-something in the New World, such a terrifying gulf. And for a moment simply standing there, the child presented to it. What has this to do with flossing, you may ask. Well something, surely.