Bones of The Moon Page 5

  Pepsi chose two things I didn't remember at all – a white «Sky King» cowboy hat and a rubber Popeye doll. It intrigued me to know why _those_ two things, but when I asked he shrugged. He wanted to know who Popeye was; he liked the sailor's funny arms.

  «He's a guy in cartoons. He eats spinach.»

  «What's a cartoon?»

  What kid didn't know about cartoons?

  On the other hand, what kid was named Pepsi?

  I asked Mr. Tracy if I could take one of the toys. For some reason, of all the things there, I most wanted to have the small baseball glove I'd used daily one summer when I was six and very much the tomboy. To my surprise, the big dog said a very firm «No.»

  Outside the hangar the sun had just gone down and the sky was the color of peaches and plums. The wolf and the camel sat waiting for us with two leather knapsacks at their enormous feet. The air smelled of dust and dying heat. The only sounds were those we made.

  Pepsi slid on his cowboy hat and carefully adjusted it. We picked up the heavy sacks and started walking north. I _think_.

  One night not long after I had this dream, a six-foot nine-inch jerk named DeFazio came down full force on top of Danny in a game and turned his knee into mush. I wasn't there but they told me that, true to form, Danny immediately forgave DeFazio for maiming him.

  What followed was the Italian version of a hospital emergency room – _Pronto Soccorso_ – where the only pronto thing was complete confusion about what to do about my poor husband's leg.

  No one called me, so the first I knew of the disaster was Danny hobbling through our apartment door on a pair of aluminum crutches, his knee taped and bundled . . . and ruined.

  I didn't know whether to yell or cry, but I kept my mouth shut because I was afraid either reaction would make Danny feel even worse.

  We went through the next fewr days very carefully, each of us trying to be as kind as possible to the other and not letting them see how very scared we were. I had felt all along that the greatness of the last few months couldn't go on forever of course, but who is ever prepared for disaster? Life is full of villains and villainous moments, but who wants to think about that? Anyway, what kind of life is it when you are afraid of every knock on the door or every letter in the mailbox?

  Danny pretended to take it in his stride, but his worry about what we were going to do next was palpable: his wife was pregnant and his successful career as an athlete was completely _finito_. Life had hit him right in the head with the ball and even sane, calm Danny hadn't a clue about what to do next.

  His team paid for the two necessary operations, but then it was, «Here's your last check, pal. See you around.» Their quick, albeit understandable indifference made me livid and made a lot of the days that followed pretty damned dark.

  Luckily, by then the season was almost over and we had been planning to visit America anyway. But sitting down one night over the kitchen table, we reviewed everything and decided we would be better off moving back there for good.

  We packed everything in a week and said good-bye to a life both of us had grown to like very much. If I had been by myself I would have been in bad shape, but I had Danny James and our baby and I was sorry things had gone wrong, but big deal!

  Danny was tremendously cheered by the fact that after making exactly two overseas calls, he landed a job. It was a lovely thing with the New York Parks and Recreational Department, organizing programs like summer basketball clinics for ghetto kids.

  «_Two_ phone calls! Danny, if I made two phone calls, one of them would be a wrong number! How on earth did you do it?»

  He took a coin out of his pocket and «disappeared» it for me. «It just happens you're married to a very nice magician, honeybun.»

  With the help of my parents, we found our apartment in «The Axe Boy Arms,» as I began calling it after our illustrious downstairs neighbor made his debut. It was on 90th Street near Third Avenue and was a good, sunny place with room enough for both for us as well as the baby when it arrived.

  Danny was able to walk normally again by the time we'd moved back and had completely settled into the apartment. But in that time something big had changed in my man. Perhaps it was realizing he too was human – complete with breakable bones, twistable knees, etcetera. He was quieter during those first days back in America and sometimes it was obvious he was brooding, which wasn't like Danny at all. That's not to say he became mean or philosophical or . . . weird. Just a little quieter and more . . . self-contained. Whenever I was able to make him smile or laugh about something, it was one of the day's victories.

  The good thing was he liked his job from the start and looked forward to going to work every morning.

  We began spending weekends with my parents at their house on the Long Island shore. As expected, they loved Danny from the moment they met and the four of us spent good days together, feeling comfortable and eating summer fruit and doing little else besides sitting in the sun and being glad we were all together.

  One of the many discoveries I made that summer was realizing I would never again swim in the sea with my father. He was seventy that year and afraid for his heart; a recent operation had left him tired and frightened.

  Every year when I was a girl, we spent the entire month of July at my parents' house on the Island. It seemed all we ever did then was swim in the ocean. We had inner tubes, water wings, rafts; a flotilla of things to keep us buoyed up after we'd grown exhausted from doing it with our own limbs.

  In my memory, all that remained of those lemony-bright days at the shore were picnic baskets full of beach food – cold fried chicken, lukewarm ginger ale, «Hostess Snowballs» – and my father's hair plastered down to his head, gleaming, as he swam alongside me in the surf. It was as if he owned the ocean.

  My father and I took a lot of walks both when I was a girl and the summer we returned from Europe. My memories of the good old days made him smile and shake his head slowly; the kind of smile you get when you're thinking back to something particularly foolish you did a long time ago. Particularly foolish, but you're glad you did it anyway.

  One day he surprised me by touching my stomach gently and familiarly. «Soon you'll be swimming with your own, eh?»

  I smiled and hugged him very hard. He reminded me of Danny in that neither of them showed their emotions much. We kissed when we said hello and good-bye, but that was about it. Sometimes I thought my growing-up had made him shy and uneasy around me. He could touch and kiss and jiggle me on his knee when I was small, but once I grew breasts and started talking to boys on the telephone, I became someone to love and continue to support – but at a distance.

  But his operation, and both Danny's disaster and my pregnancy, had brought us closer together. The operation because he had been faced with his own mortality and how everything could disappear in a second; Danny's crushed knee and the coming child because . . . well, maybe because of the same thing. Everything _can_ disappear in a second, particularly happiness and structure, but the more you're able to face it square-on, or the more you might even be able to add to the earth that will remain after you've gone, the better. Besides. it would be my father's first grandchild, and I secretly prayed he would live long enough to walk by the sea with this child. Maybe not swim, which was Pop at his best, but at least poke at a few horseshoe crabs together.

  Miraculously, Danny and I had landed safely again. I was unused to recoveries like that and it took almost all summer for me to get accustomed to the fact that we were going to be all right after all.

  3

  Rondua returned. Pepsi and I rode across uninterrupted plains, seated comfortably on the heads of the animals. There were salmon-colored pyramids in the distance which contrasted sharply with the still-black volcanic ground we passed over.

  Felina the Wolf told us the story of her ancestors; of how they rose from the sea as red fish and gave their scales back once they had reached land. It turned out that all of the animals in Rondua had metamorphosed from one sp
ecies to another when they came here. Clever Pepsi asked if we would have to change too, now that we were here. Mr. Tracy, his velvety hat glued to his bobbing head, said we already had.

  Martio the Camel often acted as tour guide, pointing out blue pterodactyls that flew in the distance one morning, telling us to watch closely, another day as the sun began to split in half to mark the end of another Ronduan month.

  Many of those early dreams were long, panoramic views of the countryside. There was conversation, but I often lost track of what was being said because I was more interested in what I was seeing. Also, I later realized I paid more attention to the countryside because I already knew many of the stories. Like jokes we hear and then forget until someone begins telling them again, I could have interrupted the animals many times and told my son what came next: how the mountains had learned to run, why only rabbits were allowed pencils, when the birds had decided to become all one color. This knowledge notwithstanding. I still hadn't a _clue_ of why we were in Rondua.

  Our first summer back in America moved by with a genial smile on its face and despite New York's torturing heat and humidity, we got used to the pace and once-familiar way of life. It was nice to be able to go to the newest movies that were once again in a language we didn't have to battle to understand. There were bookstores and museum exhibits, and once a week my mother and I would sneak off for lunch at one of those expensive restaurants where all the waiters and waitresses were beautiful, but the food tasted the same whether it was supposed to be Turkish or Cantonese.

  To my embarrassment, I grew bigger and bigger. I once asked Danny if it were possible to give birth to the Graf Zeppelin. He said it was more likely to be a fourteen-pound Hershey bar.

  Sometimes, but only sometimes, I thought about the boy in my dreams and wondered if we would have a son. Then what would I do? Name him Pepsi James? No. We discussed names for the child and decided on «Walker» for a boy, «Mae» for a girl. Both of us liked old-fashioned names.

  I bought five books on how to bring up a child and so many baby clothes that Danny thought I secretly knew I was due to give birth to triplets, but hadn't told him yet.

  On the night of the birth, we watched television until about eleven and then went to bed. A few hours later I woke up, wet and uncomfortable. My water had broken, but both of us were calm and ready as we gathered my bags and headed for the hospital.

  The doctor was nice, the labor horrible . . . and the baby came out wailing, red and looking like some kind of live ripe fruit. Mae James. They cleaned her up and put her in my arms for a little while. I was in that euphoria you feel just after a baby is born; right before the pain and exhaustion return in tidal waves. On first glance, she looked pretty tough and spry. Danny appeared out of nowhere and stood on the other side of the room, shy and beaming like a lightbulb.

  «Come over here, Pop, and see your daughter.»

  He started over, his long arms already stretching out for her. Suddenly I felt this tremendous «whoosh» of fatigue washing over me and I blacked out.

  Danny later told me he looked at me at the last moment and luckily guessed I was a breath away from dropping our brand-new child on the floor. He lunged and caught her at the last second.

  I woke up in Rondua, my head on Pepsi's lap.

  «Mommy, you slept so _long_!»

  In the dream I _knew_ I had just given birth, but I was dressed as before and my body felt fine and fit. I was ready to move on once again. I sat up and looked toward the mountains of Coin and Brick which, it we were lucky, we would be crossing in a few days. Beyond that, I didn't know where we were going. None of the animals were willing to talk about it.

  Martio and Felina stood a few feet away, a giant camel and wolf calmly waiting for the sign from us to go. They were so large they blocked out a great deal of the sky from where I was sitting.

  «All right, Cullen is awake. Now we can head for the mountains.» Mr. Tracy sat nearby, his soft eyes set on the faraway cliffs.

  «Is it because of Mae, Mr. Tracy? Are we going over there because of the baby?»

  «Cullen, you have three questions that you can ask. You've already asked two, and the answers weren't important. They weren't necessary. Your third question may be very helpful to Pepsi later, so be careful.»

  He waited tor my reply, knowing I wouldn't waste this third, _my_ third question on something like this. It seemed like a question that would be answered in time once we got there, we'd know. I would have to think long and carefully before asking the third.

  «Our shortest way is across the plains, but that's also the most dangerous. What should we do?»

  The question was addressed to me, and three animals and a little boy waited for my answer.

  I looked out across them and could barely make out, flat miles away, the dim but ominous shapes of the Forgotten Machines. Inventions from an age when anything mechanical was considered both positive and magical, they had once easily turned stone into steel; green plants into medicine, cloth, brown fuel. Abandoned later because of failed dreams or newer and better combinations, they had been left to stop and die. But they hadn't. Machines don't die . . . they wait. Like so many other things in Rondua, they had simply appeared there one day.

  Trying to look courageous, I threw back my shoulders and said strongly, «We've got to go past them. Come on.» I had no idea what I was talking about, but I sensed this was the response they wanted. I walked to Felina and climbed her _paw_ and leg up to her sleek, angled head. I loved that head already, and her yellow wolf eyes both sharp and kind.

  When I was growing up, there were three giant cement lions in front of our town library. All of us kids would climb up and over them and never come down until we were either exhausted or their stone coldness had passed into us. I remember loving those lions both for their solidness and size. They were as dependable and permanent as our parents. When I grew older I missed them and my feelings for them.

  The Ronduan animals were as large as those lions. But here giant animals spoke and moved and when you climbed on to their backs, their body heat was tropical, often intense. But I felt no fear of them. From the beginning, they were as trustworthy and familiar as the library lions so many years before.

  To give us all courage as we moved toward the plains, I began to sing the song of the wooden mice who went to war. I don't know why I remembered it, I didn't even know where it came from, but I certainly knew every word of the song. The others joined in (Pepsi humming after he had listened a while), and we moved a little less apprehensively toward the machines.

  «There she is! She's coming round!»

  For the first time since the dreams of Rondua began, I woke without really wanting to. I was afraid of what was about to happen to us over there, but also excited and curious. After the gorgeousness and hubbub of this new phase of the Yasmuda dream, waking to my white hospital room – even the new wonder of little Mae – was even at that fortunate time a bit of a letdown.

  And then there was so much pain! Mae had decided to enter the world feet-first. Consequently, with all the pushing and pulling and turning they did before she actually made the scene, a good part of my lower innards was a disaster area.

  Some time later, the doctor said he had had to put fifty stitches in me just to repair the damage. For days afterward I walked around bowlegged and slow and _very_ carefully, reminding myself of those pictures of astronauts on the moon, walking through weightlessness. Except that those guys got to bounce from here to there in big cartoony leaps. Whenever I stepped wrongly, every pain bell in my system went off with a jangle.

  Needless to say I wasn't at my best, but Danny treated me marvelously. He brought flowers and candy and a pair of green velvet bedroom slippers so ugly that they made me cry for love of him.

  In between all this, I would hobble slowly down the hall to see the baby. I'd hobble back to my room a few minutes later, astounded that she was still there. She actually existed and was ours!

  A cloud over all of
this nice sky was remembering one night in bed that the last time I had been in a hospital was when I had had the abortion. I looked at the black ceiling above me and said a prayer for everyone – Mae, Danny, the dead child, myself, my parents. Saying the prayer didn't make me feel any better, but the words alone were soothing company and they helped me to sleep. I remember dreaming that night of magicians with giant hands making babies appear and disappear like the coins in Danny's tricks.

  I didn't dream of Rondua again until a few days after Mae and I went home. That's where it all began.

  It began. Yes, _it_ began on one of those mornings when everyone you pass on the street seems to be wearing nice cologne.

  October is a temperamental month in New York. It can be as courtly as Fred Astaire or as surly and mean as a summons server. It was on its best behavior the first week we were back, but then it turned. I spent hour after quiet hour by the window in a rocking chair, feeding Mae, watching the first hard rains fall.

  You can lose yourself watching rain as easily as you can watching a fire. Both are deliberate yet whimsical, completely engrossing in no time at all.

  After Danny left for work, I would cart Mae and a white blanket over to the window in the living room, plop us down in the chair with the blanket over both of us, and settle in for my daily ration of rain watching. She would slurp her breakfast while I watched the silvery-blue, wet windows lighten as the day came to earth. The rain swept and blew back and forth angrily, but I liked it and felt protected by it.

  One morning the clouds cracked open and the sun slipped through like a big yellow egg yolk. It decided to stay around for a while too. By that time I had fallen into such a state of sitting and gazing that the gleam and bright snap of vellow everywhere made me sit right straight up – as if someone had clapped their hands behind my head.