Dancing in Dreamtime (9 page)

“Do you raise the chickens yourself?”

“With my own little hands.” She lifted both meaty fists from the steering wheel by way of illustration.

“I've never met a chicken grower before.”

“And I never met an accountant. So we're even.”

“I suppose somebody has to raise them,” Jason observed.

“They don't just wander into the supermarket from the woods.” With her hands once again on the wheel, she turned those piratical eyes on him. “Before you get through traveling, you're going to meet a lot of things you never bumped into before.”

On a wharf in Cincinnati, Doris Wilkins gave him a crushing bear hug and introduced him to a barge captain who was bound for Pittsburgh with a load of coal. “Give this guy a lift,” she told the captain. “He's going around the world.”

Driving away, the chicken truck left a swirl of white feathers in its wake. Jason watched the spiraling fluff a long while after the truck had disappeared.

The captain could answer none of his questions about sailing, but he was an expert at stamp collecting. All the way up the Ohio River, while Jason gazed out the window counting smokestacks and dumps and huddles of trees along the banks, the captain talked about first-day covers, plate blocks, cachets, mint-sheets. Hauling album after album down from a shelf and spreading them across Jason's knees, the captain showed him stamps triangular and hexagonal, stamps depicting butterflies and biplanes and dead dictators, stamps in a rainbow of shades.

“This one here,” the captain said, fingering a thick album, “has got an uncanceled stamp in it from every country in the UN except Upper Volta. You wouldn't be going through Upper Volta, would you?”

“I just might,” said Jason, writing the name of the place in his notebook. “If I do, I'll be sure to send you some stamps.”

“It's right in there between Mali and Dahomey.” The captain began drawing excitedly with his finger on the steamy pilothouse windows. “Sierra Leone's down here, see, then Liberia and the Ivory Coast, then Ghana, Togo. You can't miss it.” Saying the names, he seemed about to lapse into song. “If I could go to just
five countries I've got stamps from, I'd die happy. I've never in my life been any place where if you pissed on the ground it wouldn't run into this river.”

“The beautiful river,” Jason murmured.

“To you, maybe. What I see is a thousand-mile sewer. An oily highway.”

“That's what Ohio means in Iroquois. Beautiful river.”

The captain grunted. “You read a lot, don't you?”

“Life would be awfully pale without books.”

“I know what you mean,” said the captain vaguely. “Tell me, how'd you get started in this traveling business?”

Not used to answering personal questions, Jason was slow to respond. In Buddha, people thought of him as a two-legged calculator, without concern for anything but numbers. “When I was nine years old,” he said at last, “the librarian gave me a book about world religions. In it, I discovered that a famous Indian holy man had been named Buddha about a thousand years before anyone ever heard of America or Indiana, let alone our little town. And right then I realized how big a place the world is.”

“You ought to collect stamps,” said the captain.

“I tasseled corn in the summer and saved up enough money to buy an atlas. And I started planning this trip.”

“So if you'd come from a place called Jonesville or Gnawbone you might never have stirred from home?”

“Quite possibly.”

Rain had turned the barge loads of coal as slick and lethal-looking as obsidian. Studying the captain's stamps, each one opening like a tiny window onto jungles and snowy mountains, Jason already felt a long way from home.

“Aren't you afraid of getting lost?” the captain asked.

“I have a keen sense of smell,” Jason said. Realizing this might not explain why he felt confident of finding his way, he added, “And I've studied nature's signs on the weekends.”

“Nature's signs?” the captain muttered.

Jason would not be daunted. He knew what he knew. Spiders build their webs in line with the wind. In deserts at sundown flocks of pigeons will lead you to a waterhole. Termite hills in Australia are topped by sharp ridges that point unerringly north and south. A dark patch in the clouds above an ice-covered sea betrays open water. From walking in the Hoosier National Forest and from reading the journals of great explorers, Jason had learned such things and a thousand things more. Over his brownbag lunch, every working day for twenty-six years, he had studied
National Geographic
and
Natural History
and
Smithsonian
, so he knew how various parts of the world should look. He would be certain of recognizing a place when he came to it.

In Pittsburgh, Jason thanked the captain and continued eastward. Wishing to give his new boots a test, he refused all rides. He stopped shaving and his beard came in pale yellow, the color of old sheets. Every few hours, crossing Pennsylvania by the National Road, he consulted the map to see how far he still had to go to reach Philadelphia. The map, which he had picked up free at a gas station, was devoted to the Eastern United States. Being so ambitious in scope, it lacked details. For example, it made no mention of the Allegheny Mountains, over which he had been laboring for three days, and it neglected all rivers smaller than the Susquehanna. The atlas was too bulky to pack, but fortunately Jason had committed most of it to memory.

A rainstorm drove him to shelter on the porch of a farmhouse near Gettysburg. The only person home was a teenage girl who wore an actual bonnet. She reminded him of a girl he had secretly adored in high school. While brewing him a pot of sassafras tea, this bonneted girl told how her pony had died from eating green apples. “Just swole up and keeled over,” she said. Ever since that death, she had been looking for another pony just as small, as shaggy, and the same rusty color. A person could find such ponies on the Shetland Islands, or so she heard tell.

“If you pass by that way,” she said to Jason, “and if you'd pick me out a mare that's less than ten hands high, with bushy mane and forelock down over her eyes, the color of this corduroy,” giving him a scrap of cloth, “my daddy would pay for it and I'd put you in my prayers from now till eternity.”

Jason wrote all the details in his notebook and tucked the piece of cloth in his pocket. As he was leaving, the girl handed him a corn bread muffin. He carried away with him the smell of her hair, like newly cut pine boards.

Before he reached Philadelphia, where he stood on Penn's Landing beside the Delaware listening to a brass band play salsa tunes, three more people had charged him with missions. In addition to the chickens in Japan, postage stamps in Upper Volta, and pony in the Shetlands, there was a grave to be located in Belgium, a prison warden to interrogate in Mongolia, and a debt to collect in Malaysia. Jason was beginning to feel as though he had undertaken this journey on behalf of a multitude.

When the brass band crashed to its finale, the conductor, a dark-skinned man in a shirt emblazoned with parrots, noticed him listening with rapt attention.

“If you think that was good,” said the conductor, swaggering up to Jason, “you should hear the stuff we play on the ship.”

The ship turned out to be the
Mexico
from Venezuela, a sailing schooner with three masts, bound on a training cruise to Europe. The musicians had been packed along to shorten the days with their playing. Jason arrived there with the band after an interlude in a seaman's bar, where he drank only apple juice.

“Not even a little beer, the man is so incorruptible!” the band leader proclaimed, introducing him to the first mate. “He will go with us to Portugal, no? A moral influence!”

The mate had no objections. Jason unrolled his sleeping bag on the deck, between two coils of rope.

Aside from the conductor and first mate, no one on board spoke English. Jason managed quite well with gestures. His hands wove pictures in the air, and his face, once he relaxed a bit, had a mime's expressiveness. Drawn by his sympathetic way of listening, the men approached him one by one, cooks and trombone-players and cabin boys, each one telling his life story in patient Spanish. Occasionally Jason would understand one of their questions well enough to record it in his notebook. Much of the time he simply nodded, absorbing their griefs and desires.

“You have kind ears,” the conductor crooned. “I can tell by the way you listen to our music.”

They docked in New York, to replenish their supply of remedies for seasickness. Jason was glad of the stopover. He wanted to see the Empire State Building, because the limestone for
constructing it had been quarried just down the road from his home in Indiana. Half a dozen sailors insisted on going with him, to protect him from thugs. They wore white, dazzling in the sunshine, and Jason dressed in his usual green. The ascent in the elevator made him dizzy. From the top of the Empire State Building he looked down at the lesser skyscrapers, the maze of streets, the hurry of people, and thought of the quarries near Buddha. It seemed a strange thing, to dig so much limestone out of the earth, drag it halfway across the country, and stack it so high in the air. The sailors dared one another to throw coins from the roof. Jason cautioned them against it, for he had read that a penny dropped from such a height could pierce right through a person's skull. The sailors understood his gestures, if not his words, and held onto their coins.

On a street near the docks a barefooted woman asked Jason to help find her baby. The sailors joined in the search, peering through gratings in the sidewalk, turning over heaps of rags in doorways, but they could discover no baby, and at length the woman went sniffling away. Even lacking several teeth and smelling of cough medicine, she made Jason's heart ache.

After three panhandlers had shuffled up to him begging money and a wino had asked him for advice about delirium, the sailors perceived that Jason was a man who drew other people's needs to him as a magnet draws the inner spirits of iron. Once this was clear, they formed a barricade around him and let no one through. And so they arrived back at the ship, the sailors in white suits encircling him like a picket fence, green-clad Jason in the middle like a rare plant.

Sight of the Atlantic Ocean made even Lake Michigan seem humble by comparison. During the first night at sea, Jason lay
awake thinking about the spaces between stars. Matter was so thinly scattered through the universe, it was a wonder how any two atoms ever rubbed against one another. That all the stuff necessary for making his body had joined together within this immensity seemed to him wildly improbable. And yet here he was, flesh and bone, nauseous from the heaving of the sea. He sniffed avidly at a land-breeze, which carried the reek of an oil refinery and a hog farm. So long as he could smell the shore he was not utterly adrift in this emptiness. During the day he gained comfort from watching gulls and terns cruising in the ship's wake, but eventually these birds reached the border of their fishing territory and swooped back.

Whenever the sea was calm enough the band set up folding chairs on deck and played music, either feverish dance tunes or mournful ballads, depending on the mood of the conductor. The off-duty sailors hunkered down beside Jason and resumed their life stories. Every now and again he would scrawl a memorandum: “Greetings from Juan to Esmerelda in Istanbul,” it might be, or “Price garnets in Turkestan.” When the sailors arrived in bunches and were reluctant to speak of what pressed on their hearts, Jason entertained them by calculating the hour of moonrise and moon-set. At night he would estimate the time by the position of stars. Of course they had tables for predicting the movements of the moon and they had luminous watches for telling the time, yet they were fascinated by Jason's ability to compute such things in his head.

“What kind of sailors are you?” he scolded. “What if you were cast adrift, with nothing but your wits to guide you?”