Old Songs in a New Cafe (15 page)

“Satch.” He also liked to be called “Satch.” I think that flowed from his respect for Satchel Paige, the great baseball pitcher.
“Hey, Satch!” we’d yell at Perry Burgess. “Ready for the game?” He’d cock his head and grin.

Actually, he wasn’t much of a pitcher. Given Perry’s style, that was not the point. Under the lights of a country ball diamond,
he pitched wildly, wheeled and dealed with seventeen different motions. Threw the ball behind his back, between his legs,
the crowd roaring in approval Old men in the stands whacked each other on the back and croaked, “That Perry Burgess, he sure
is somethin’ isn’ he?”

On the mound, way out there in the dust with Satchel Paige riding his shoulder, Perry cocked his head and grinned at the applause,
careened into his windup, and delivered another dipsy-doodler in the general direction of home plate. From kiln stacker to
softball jester in three hours. Perry had range, that much was certain.

“Sure I remember Perry,” I said out loud to his brother, Albert Burgess. “I’d love to see him again.” “Well, he’s right over
there, sitting on a bench.” Albert motioned, and across the floor of an Iowa shopping mall came Perry Burgess. Small, old,
head cocked, grinning. I loomed over him, tall, taller than he’d ever been back there in the dusty days.

We shook hands. I grinned and told him about my feelings: “You were one of my heroes.” Grabbing the book I had already signed,
I wrote Perry’s name in it, along with something about the esteem I held for him back down the years. I wanted to talk more,
but there were books to be autographed, a stack of them. The holiday traffic was heavy. Christmas music over the sound system.
Perry and his brother drifted off, politely.

But I was warmed by seeing Perry again. Old feelings, good feelings. In my boyhood. Perry Burgess was one of the eagles and
made those days better in ways still undefinable. Maybe it had to do with style, with flaunting convention and getting away
with it. I don’t know; it doesn’t matter. The years run, but some of the old heroes are still out there, and I am comforted
by that.

A few months later, in the summer, I wandered through the ruins of the tile plant. Weeds and trees have taken back the spaces
where hard men worked the clay. There are spirits in that place. You’d have to be less than a quarter sentient not to feel
them, to hear the shouts and footsteps, hear the freight cars rolling down the spur.

I came to the kilns. Three of them, with doors open, round and domed and thirty feet in diameter. Hornet nests in the cracks,
dust blowing across the floors.

Sweating, August hot, I stood in one of the kilns for a moment, thinking of Perry. The image of an old man in a Marshalltown
shopping mall was gone. That’s not the way I see him. Nope. Not at all. This way: boots, cutoff jeans, no shirt, red bandanna
around his head, good muscles. “Hey, Satch! Ready for the game?” Head slightly cocked, grinning, on the street outside of
the beer joints, on the mound. That’s how I remember Perry.

The ol’ Dipsy-Doodler, out there under the lights, sliding into his windup, delivering. Darn right I remember him. He was
important to me. Still is. It was good running into Perry.

______________________________________

F
elis
concolor, middle-brown in the thin light of a winter afternoon, comes out of the scrub thirty feet ahead of me, three hundred
yards from the Pacific She crosses the old Park Service road in easy strides and, without hesitating, takes her one hundred
pounds into a soft curving leap over a patch of low brush on the other side, like a house cat arching into a cardboard box.

Instinctively then, I am into a crouch and turning to the woman behind me. “Did you see the lion?” I say quietly. “What?”
she answers, confused. “The mountain lion, the cougar, did you see it?”

For a moment she doesn’t believe me. I can tell. Another of my little stories, she thinks; the outdoor man teasing the indoor
woman again. From my shoulder comes the knapsack, and I dig frantically within it for a camera. “A what? Where?” the woman
asks again, earnestly. I tell her and begin to move slowly up the narrow and abandoned road, toward the place where the cat
has gone into the brush.

Only two miles behind, the van rests on a highway’s edge. Back there is air-conditioning and speed, concrete and the road
to cities. Here, the technological ground is different, tilted a bit in favor of the lion. And, in some curious way, I relish
that. She is at home, and I am the stranger. A kind of interspecies democracy has taken hold, and my place in the food chain
seems less secure than it did a few minutes ago.

Staring hard, my eyes watering from the energy of focus, I reach the brush and look into it. Nothing. Farther up the road
in quiet steps, I stop and look long into the grass and brambles. Nothing.

Disappointed and turning toward the woman, I catch the breath of her whisper on the wind of late afternoon: “It’s here. It’s
right here.” She looks back into the tangle, then at me, partly confused, partly afraid.

Carefully, I go back along the road, my boots silent on old dirt, until I stand beside the woman and look where she is looking.
And there is the face, a young one but old enough to be on her own, looking back at me from ten feet away—the eyes yellow-green,
white fur around the mouth and chin, whiskers silver-gray in the mottled light, ears pointing up.

For a moment, just a moment, the eyes of order Carnivora and order Primates come together. I look at her. She stares back,
unblinking. Then, perhaps catching a faint and lingering smell of the spear, she is gone, not even as a shadow, but rather
like the dream of one. No branch flickering, no crackling of brush, no sound at all.

In the ways only cats are given, she just swings her head, moves off, and leaves us standing there along a road, by a river,
near the sea. The one frame of film I remember to shoot as she goes eventually develops into a brown, out-of-focus blur. I
will throw it in the discard box. The memory of such things is always better than a photograph, anyhow.

The woman and I move on toward the sea, talking of lions and yellow-green eyes and the wondrous good fortune of seeing the
cat. Just the night before we had been driving along a mountain road, headlights sweeping thick forest on the curves, and
I had said, “There are only a few things I need to do yet in my life; one of them is to see a mountain lion in the wild.”
So we talk about that and other matters of chance.

As we walk toward the beach, I am silent about the fact that big cats have been known to follow humans, if only out of some
passing curiosity. Now and then, however, I glance backward along the path and into the trees. Truly, though, we have little
to fear. The number of attacks on humans by mountain lions statistically is low. But, as one biologist has pointed out, mountain
lions can’t count. Later, I tell an official from the Mountain Lion Coalition about our meeting with the cat, and she says,
“Do you realize how special that is?” I do. The probability of such an encounter is incredibly small. The big cats, nocturnal
and secretive, are twilight figures even to those who seek to study them.

Except for thirty or so Florida panthers, and their survival is tenuous, the eastern lands are pretty much empty of lions.
Killed as vermin or game or their habitat destroyed, they have gone. Though some believe that the cougars or pumas or mountain
lions or catamounts, all of them the same animal, are moving back into remote areas of New England, northern Minnesota, and
Michigan as forests regenerate and the deer population increases.

Aside from the perverse human tendency to destroy anything that offers the least bit of threat, the loss of range is the true
vandal of the cougar’s world. They are the ultimate individualists, loners except at mating time, and the consummate travelers,
requiring a space of forty to two hundred square miles for their hunting.

Their range, particularly in the Far West, unceasingly falls to the saw and the highway and the condominium. California alone
has lost 7.7 million acres of lion habitat since the 1800s, 4.5 million of those acres since 1945.

Moreover, as with all cats, the lions are uncooperative, even when humans are trying to help them. Estimates of the lion population
are disputed vigorously among various groups interested in the cougar’s preservation. The truth is that nobody knows for sure
how well or poorly the lions are faring, and the big cats aren’t talking.

Still, I had that moment. And I claim as much for it as any of the things I have seen. I have looked into the eyes of a starlight
traveler whose lands recede steadily now. So, like the wild spaces themselves, I also grow less in contemplating a world too
small and too selfish and too beset upon the trivial and transitory for the allowance of freedom, freedom that is colored
middle-brown in the light of a winter day and carefully must keep to ever-diminishing cover.

I sigh within myself at the losses we sustain, the cat and I, for each of us understands in our own fashion that range, free
range, is the way to the center of things. To take that from a traveler is to take all—from the traveler, from ourselves.
And freedom thus becomes not even like a shadow, but rather like the dream of one. Like a dream I once had out along the edge
of the great ice, a long time ago, before wisdom came and, along with other childish things, I put the spear aside.

______________________________________

A
utumn in 1949, night, and the geese are moving south. I hear them talking, toss the covers aside, and scramble to the foot
of my bed, looking out the window. Low they are, coming down the river valley and passing over town. On unsleeping wings they
ride, long necks extended, with sober eyes that see only time and far things and space… and me, I think.

They know I’m here, I’m sure of that. Ten-year-old boys have not yet succumbed to a world counseling consumption in place
of laughter and duty in place of wings. The geese understand. I clutch the bed covers to my face, responding to some curious
mixture of delight in their coming and sorrow at watching them pass.

Celestial reckoning. That’s how they go… by the stars. That’s how they find the ponds of Texas. Scientists study their ways,
dissecting and inducing. The answers will elude them. It’s magic, and no one can argue me otherwise, at age ten or four decades
later. Logic and data have their place, but not in the night, not out along the roads of wonder, where the music rises and
the Cana-das fly and a wizard waves them onward with long sweeps of his arm from tall grass in the river meadows.

I lie back on my pillow. My parents are asleep, but the little brown radio beside my bed, the one with only two dials and
tan cloth covering over the speaker, glows in the darkness. “Welcome to ‘Your Saturday Night Dance Party,’ “the smooth baritone
from New Orleans says. The music is live, and I know, absolutely, there are handsome men and beautiful women. They are eating
and drinking, and dancing on a southern rooftop, a big hotel, their hair only slightly ruffled by a soft wind from the gulf.

Over the music and following the geese I hear a Rock Island freight train. In the bottomlands south of me, the wizard is laughing
and does a backward flip, unable to contain himself The Road is busy tonight—music from New Orleans, geese across the moon,
trains across the trestle. The wizard loves the Road and is teaching me to love it, as both an illusion and a reality.

I fade in and out of sleep, wandering along the edge of things, open to the possibilities. The music changes and images come.
People dressed in wind-whipped black, carrying daggers with carved handles and drinking tea in front of flapping tents, waiting
for the call to prayer. Camels moving silk and frankincense at a steady pace over blowing sand, pushing hard toward Medina.
Near morning, my mother pulls the covers over me and turns off the little radio, while I travel, far from her.

There was only one good road leading out of Rockford, Iowa, back then. The rest were gravel, loose and dusty in the summer,
treacherous in the winter. But one good road is enough. I knew that’s all it took. I could travel east on it, go south on
Highway 14, swing east again and catch one of the big highways leading down to New Orleans, or, for that matter, to Paris
or Persia or twilight places in the Amazon Basin.

These were not fantasies without the possibility of fulfillment. I never believed that for a moment. They were plans, you
see, plans that could be converted into small-town sidewalks that turned into streets that turned into highways and the highways
into old steamers or airplanes or caravans headed toward market towns. The steady two-beat of a New Orleans drummer could
become the complex syncopations of wrinkled hands on tightly stretched goatskin in high desert arroyos, and the Rock Island
freight could some day be transformed into a long, chuffing train across Siberia. The images are the beginning; you must have
the images first. Then comes the Road.

So I lean over a 4
A.M
. hotel balcony in my forty third year and watch Bombay work its way toward morning. Thirty-four hours in front of this, I
had shut the front door of my house in Cedar Falls, slapped my vest pocket to make sure the tickets and passport were there,
and picked up my suitcase. Car to the airport, commuter plane to Chicago, jet to New York, and there in the darkness was Air
India 106, loading. Then London by daylight, and into the night again—Europe, Istanbul, Persia, the Gulf of Oman. India, unknown,
and fearsome in that ignorance, out there somewhere.

On the balcony, I drink a Kingfisher beer as light approaches, watching Arab dhows run up their sails into the first wind
of morning where the Portuguese once harbored, watching the street people cook their breakfast on charcoal burners, thinking
of a little brown radio humming, geese flying, and a wizard promising me that my world would not always be so circumscribed
as it was then.