High Island Blues (3 page)

He’d been on the plane though, with Rob and Oliver. He’d escaped in the end.

In the cab they hardly spoke. Oliver made a polite enquiry about Rob’s trip to the Middle East. Rob answered shortly then sat back in silence, not sulking exactly but not prepared to make small talk either. He was too tired. What he’d really like was to go on to the hotel bar, have a bit of a session with Oliver, cut through all that politeness and reserve. In the air-conditioned iciness of the hotel lobby he was about to suggest it, but two members of his tour group had been waiting for him. They accosted him immediately. Oliver gave him an amused wave and sauntered off.

They were a couple, in their early sixties. They looked rather dowdy and out of place. Tiredness and anxiety had made the woman shrill and complaining.

‘Where have you been then?’ she demanded. She grabbed hold of Rob’s arm, as if she were afraid he would run away and leave them again to the mercy of strangers. Suddenly embarrassed she let it go.

‘I explained at the airport. I’d arranged to meet some friends for dinner.’ He gave her his professional smile, though looking beyond her he watched Oliver disappear into a lift.

‘Well really. I don’t think that’s on, do you Russ? Personally accompanied by expert staff, that’s what the brochure says. I didn’t fancy America anyway though Russ was keen when he got his early retirement. You see all those things on television. Riots and murders. I don’t know how any of them sleep in their beds at night …’

She stopped abruptly. She had lost the point of her complaint. Her eyes were red and she looked exhausted. This would be a big trip for them. Perhaps they had never flown before. She’d probably not slept much in the week before leaving home.

‘Russ is the birdwatcher,’ she said. ‘I’m only here for the trip.’

‘We’ll have to make sure you enjoy it then,’ Rob said gently. ‘What’s the problem?’

The problem was the shower tap in their bathroom. They couldn’t get it to work.

‘You could have asked the hotel staff,’ Rob said.

‘I know, but I didn’t like to. I’d have felt such a fool.’ She was quite sheepish now, saw that she’d blown the thing out of all proportion, was prepared to laugh at herself.

He went with them to their room and showed them how to turn on the shower, watched their amazement at the power of the water jet.

‘It’s how the American’s like it,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ she said. ‘Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.’

‘I’ll see you at breakfast then,’ he said.

‘You
will
be at breakfast?’ Her anxiety returned.

‘Of course. Then the bus will take us to High Island.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘ that I lost my temper.’

‘That’s all right,’ he replied, smiling again. Some people thought West Country Wildlife Tours only kept him on because he could charm the old ladies.

‘It’s just that it means a lot to us, this trip. We’ve been waiting a long time for it,’ she finished.

Mick and Laurie Brownscombe lived very much like their neighbours. They had a large house set away from a wide road. There was a pool in the back garden and a garage with automatic doors and room enough for an Explorer and a little Toyota. None of this was considered excessive. Laurie might once have dropped out of school and made her living in ways she wouldn’t want her kids to know about but now she was a regular mom in a regular neighbourhood. On the surface at least.

‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ Mick said. He waited for Laurie to lock the house and set the alarm.

‘Sure,’ she said.

‘What about the kids?’

‘I’ve told you. The kids’ll be fine. It’s all arranged.’

She waited for him to get into the driver’s seat of the Explorer. Two women in shorts, wearing towelling sweat-bands, walked down the street, arms swinging. Mick was distracted for a moment. It still seemed strange that in Texas walking was a form of exercise, not a means of getting where you wanted to go. For that you used the car. Reluctantly he returned his attention to Laurie.

‘It seems kind of tacky,’ he said. ‘ They’re my friends.’

‘Look,’ she said. ‘You got to hustle.’ It was a joke between them, a catch-phrase, but he didn’t laugh.

‘Not my friends,’ he said.

‘All right,’ she said, losing patience with him. ‘I’ll do the hustling. OK?’

He shrugged. He knew there was no point in arguing.

‘Things aren’t easy right now,’ she said, ‘and you wouldn’t want to lose all this, would you?’ The sweep of her head took in the house, the car, the yard.

‘I guess not,’ he said, ‘but I’m not going to be popular.’

She grinned. ‘You think you’re popular now? You ended up with the girl didn’t you? They’re both as jealous as hell.’

‘You like that don’t you?’

She laughed again. ‘ Sure I like it. You watch. I’ll have them eating out of my hand.’

He looked at her helplessly but there didn’t seem to be anything else to say. He drove down the I10 past the glittering skyscrapers of Houston and through the flat land towards the coast.

Rob Earl stood at the front of the bus and spoke to the party. He used a microphone because he knew from experience that at least half of his audience would be hard of hearing. It was that sort of group. He’d led trips to High Island before, usually as part of a Texas package for keen birders, taking in the Big Bend and Laguna Atascosa at the same time. This was a new venture, a gentle introduction to the Upper Texas Coast based for ten days at High Island. There would be no long bus trips and no early starts unless the punters wanted to get up to make the most of the migration on the reserves.

The tour didn’t come cheap because the accommodation was good, and Mary Ann could charge just about what she liked in the spring. Birders came from all over the world to the peninsula, and there weren’t that many places to stay. The Gulfway Motel was booked from one year to the next. Besides, Oaklands was something special.

The party was much as he had expected considering the nature of the tour. There were a lot of retired people. Most came from the West Country where the independent travel agent for whom he worked was based. He recognized a few familiar faces, people who had travelled with him before. There were plenty of experienced birders, but few fanatics. He relaxed. This would be easy. They wouldn’t be hard to please.

‘High Island isn’t an island at all, of course. It’s a small town, close to the coast, raised slightly above the surrounding wetland. I believe it’s all of thirty-nine feet above sea level. Hardly a mountain, of course, but distinctive enough to be attractive to birds.’

There was an appreciative, slightly superior chuckle from his audience.

‘There are four main birdwatching areas on the Upper Texas Coast: Anahuac, a National Wildlife Refuge which has more than twenty-seven thousand acres of marsh, the Bolivar Flats, an area of saltmarsh and beach, and two Houston Audubon Society Sanctuaries in High Island itself – the famous Boy Scout and Smith Oaks woods. We’ll spend time at each depending on the weather. What we need are strong, turbulent head winds to meet the migrants as they fly north from the Yucatan peninsula. That should result in what we call a fall and the Americans call a fall out. If that happens it’ll be the most spectacular birding experience of your lives: thousands of tired migrants seeking shelter in the woodlands on the reserves. From a personal point of view I’ll be watching the weather forecasts very carefully. I first visited High Island twenty years ago and I’ve never experienced the ideal conditions for a classic fall. Then on Sunday there’s the Easter Bird Race or Birdathon which will benefit a number of environmental organizations. Oaklands has been asked to put up a team. I’ll be around for volunteers later in the week.’

He sensed that the passengers’ interest was wandering. They were tired and they wanted to see birds, not talk about them. He sat down. The group dozed.

The couple who had accosted Rob in the hotel the night before waved at him shyly to catch his attention. He walked up the swaying bus to sit beside them. After a night’s sleep they were apologetic and wanted to chat. They needed to be reassured that he bore no hard feelings for the outburst of the night before. Their name was May. Russell had worked for the South West Electricity Board since he had left school and he had taken early retirement with quite a decent redundancy pay-out soon after the company was privatized.

‘We couldn’t have afforded it otherwise,’ he said. ‘Not a trip like this.’

He seemed dazed by his own good fortune. He’d watched all the slide shows of other chaps’ travels. Never thought he’d actually see those American warblers for himself.

Connie had been a cook in a small private school. She retired with Russell so they could spend more time together. ‘The boys bought me ever such a nice bunch of flowers when I left,’ she said. ‘But there was nothing from the school. Not even a thank you.’

This was what it was like at the beginning of a trip. Everyone wanted to tell Rob something about themselves. Each traveller wanted to be special, not just another anonymous tourist. Usually these confidences irritated him – he was paid to show them birds not listen to their life stories – but today he was feeling mellow, even sentimental. He asked the Mays if they had children. That was where these conversations usually led. To proud descriptions of offspring, their work and qualifications, to photographs of adored grandchildren. But Russell and Connie only looked at each other and he sensed a tragedy, a terrible gap in their lives. No, they said. No children.

‘We’ve got friends in Houston,’ Russell said as if that were some compensation. ‘Old neighbours who moved out to work with British Gas. We thought we might hire a car, spend some time with them. Connie would like that. It would kill two birds with one stone you might say. A few ticks for me and some gossip for Con. That would be all right, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t put you out?’

‘Of course not.’ Rob was expansive. ‘It’s very relaxed where we’re staying. Just treat it like home.’

But he imagined that they lived in a tidy semi and thought that Oaklands wouldn’t be much like home.

The bus drove east down the I10 past the urban sprawl which had developed along the freeway: motels, second-hand car lots decked out with shimmering bunting, huge concrete churches with extravagant names. They had no sense of any country beyond until they crossed the San Jacinto River and looked out at the forest of oil refineries towards the coast. Then there was the Trinity River and views of open countryside: the wide expanses of water of Galveston Bay, rice fields and cattle, and in the distance a water tower, shining like an alien space craft. Ahead of them, along the flat, straight road, they could see almost into Louisiana and watched the huge, chrome-plated trucks appear out of the heat haze.

They turned off the 110 before Winnie so that they could drive past the National Wildlife Refuge at Anahuac. There marsh and swamp stretched to a horizon which was as straight and even as if it was the sea. They got out briefly to see herons, stilts and wading birds. Some would have liked to stay longer but Rob herded them back onto the bus. Mary Ann would be waiting for them. She would be expecting them for lunch. He would have liked to stay too – he loved the sense of space and the rich smell of the swamp – but he knew better than to take liberties with Mary Ann.

At the I24 they turned south towards the coast. Two turkey vultures soared above the road. Russell May took out his check-list and ticked off the species. There were more rice fields, more cows.

Despite Rob’s warning they had been expecting something more dramatic of High Island, perhaps a real hill rising out of the flat land. But as they approached the town all that broke the horizon was the steep, semi-circular bridge crossing the intra coastal canal. Beyond that they reached the town almost without noticing. They came to a field of nodding donkeys, part of the local oil industry, and then they were in High Island, which hadn’t seemed to be a hill at all, just trees floating above the marsh.

Oaklands was to the north of the town. The bus turned off the highway just after the bridge and drove down a road of single-storey houses without boundary fences, mostly clapboard, some in need of repair.

Rob, directing the driver, saw the detail as if for the first time, the wooden swinging seat outside one house, basket-ball posts and a kids’ climbing frame outside another. A dog chased out into the middle of the dusty road and barked at them. A woman flapped out in her slippers to call it back. She stopped to wave at the bus. High Island prided itself on being friendly to the birders.

They came to a gate, already open, and a cattle grid. A track led through huge magnolias with shiny leaves and oaks covered in lichen. The house was surrounded by trees so it seemed that if it let up guard for a moment the woodland would take it over again. Then they saw the house.

It was bigger and more ornate than any of them had expected, gloriously overdone, all turrets, and verandas and angled roofs. It was three-storeyed, L-shaped with a clock tower and pointed windows in the roof. On the inside of the L there was a magnificent wrought iron veranda and on the long side of the house a new wooden porch, with a view of a lawn which had been cleared from the woodland, and a pool.

‘It was built in 1897,’ Rob said, as proud as if he owned it himself. ‘At one time a railway line brought visitors right up to the door. It was very grand. Miss Cleary has brought it back to its former glory. When I first came here it was very different. Falling to pieces. You wouldn’t believe the change.’

But nobody was listening to him. They had had enough of travelling. They had climbed from the bus and were waiting in the heat to collect their luggage.

When Rob had stayed in Oaklands twenty years ago it had looked like the set of a second rate horror movie. The paint had been peeling and the whole place smelled of decay. It had been run as a boarding house by a widow who had a child to support. Salesmen stayed there and student teachers at the High School, and a couple of elderly long term residents who should have been in a nursing home but couldn’t afford to move.