Universe 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  The Abbe Pingre visited the Mascarenes in 1761. He saw the last of the Rodriguez solitaires, and collected what information he could about the dead Mauritius and Réunion members of the genus.

  After that, only memories of the Colónists, and some scientific debate as to where the Raphidae belonged in the great taxonomic scheme of things—some said pigeons, some said rails—were left. Even this nitpicking ended. The dodo was forgotten.

  When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland in 1865, most people thought he invented the dodo.

  · · · · ·

  The service station I called from in Memphis was busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Between bings and dings of the bell, I finally realized the call had gone through.

  The guy who answered was named Selvedge. I got nowhere with him. He mistook me for a real estate agent, then a lawyer. Now he was beginning to think I was some sort of a con man. I wasn’t doing too well, either. I hadn’t slept in two days. I must have sounded like a speed freak. My only progress was that I found that Ms. Annie Mae Gudger (childhood playmate of Jolyn Jimson) was now, and had been, the respected Ms. Annie Mae Radwin. This guy Selvedge must have been a secretary or toady or something.

  We were having a conversation comparable to that between a shrieking macaw and a pile of mammoth bones. Then there was another click on the line.

  “Young man?” said the other voice, an old woman’s voice, Southern, very refined but with a hint of the hills in it.

  “Yes? Hello! Hello!”

  “Young man, you say you talked to a Jolyn somebody? Do you mean Jolyn Smith?”

  “Hello! Yes! Ms. Radwin, Ms. Annie Mae Radwin who used to be Gudger? She lives in Austin now. Texas. She used to live near Water Valley, Mississippi. Austin’s where I’m from. I …”

  “Young man,” asked the voice again, “are you sure you haven’t been put up to this by my hateful sister Alma?”

  “Who? No, ma’am. I met a woman named Jolyn…”

  “I’d like to talk to you, young man,” said the voice. Then offhandedly, “Give him directions to get here, Selvedge.”

  Click.

  · · · · ·

  I cleaned out my mouth as best I could in the service station restroom, tried to shave with an old clogged Gillette disposable in my knapsack and succeeded in gapping up my jawline. I changed into a clean pair of jeans, the only other shirt I had with me, and combed my hair. I stood in front of the mirror.

  I still looked like the dog’s lunch.

  · · · · ·

  The house reminded me of Presley’s mansion, which was somewhere in the neighborhood. From a shack on the side of a Mississippi hill to this, in forty years. There are all sorts of ways of making it. I wondered what Annie Mae Gudger’s had been. Luck? Predation? Divine intervention? Hard work? Trover and replevin?

  Selvedge led me toward the sun room. I felt like Philip Marlowe going to meet a rich client. The house was filled with that furniture built sometime between the turn of the century and the 1950s—the ageless kind. It never looks great, it never looks ratty, and every chair is comfortable.

  I think I was expecting some formidable woman with sleeve blotters and a green eyeshade hunched over a roll-top desk with piles of paper whose acceptance or rejection meant life or death for thousands.

  Who I met was a charming lady in a green pantsuit. She was in her sixties, her hair still a straw wheat color. It didn’t look dyed. Her eyes were blue as my first-grade teacher’s had been. She was wiry and looked as if the word fat was not in her vocabulary.

  “Good morning, Mr. Lindberl.” She shook my hand. “Would you like some coffee? You look as if you could use it.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Please sit down.” She indicated a white wicker chair at a glass table. A serving tray with coffeepot, cups, tea bags, croissants, napkins, and plates lay on the tabletop.

  After I swallowed half a cup of coffee at a gulp, she said, “What you wanted to see me about must be important?”

  “Sorry about my manners,” I said. “I know I don’t look it, but I’m a biology assistant at the University of Texas. An ornithologist. Working on my master’s. I met Ms. Jolyn Jimson two days ago …”

  “How is Jolyn? I haven’t seen her in oh, Lord, it must be on to fifty years. The times gets away.”

  “She seemed to be fine. I only talked to her half an hour or so. That was …”

  “And you’ve come to see me about?…”

  “Uh. The … about some of the poultry your family used to raise, when they lived near Water Valley.”

  She looked at me a moment. Then she began to smile.

  “Oh, you mean the ugly chickens?” she said.

  I smiled. I almost laughed. I knew what Oedipus must have gone through.

  · · · · ·

  It is now 4:30 in the afternoon. I am sitting at the downtown Motel 6 in Memphis. I have to make a phone call and get some sleep and catch a plane.

  Annie Mae Gudger Radwin talked for four hours, answering my questions, setting me straight on family history, having Selvedge hold all her calls.

  The main problem was that Annie Mae ran off in 1928, the year before her father got his big break. She went to Yazoo City, and by degrees and stages worked her way northward to Memphis and her destiny as the widow of a rich mercantile broker.

  But I get ahead of myself.

  Grandfather Gudger used to be the overseer for Colónel Crisby on the main plantation near McComb, Mississippi. There was a long story behind that. Bear with me.

  Colónel Crisby himself was the scion of a seafaring family with interests in both the cedars of Lebanon (almost all cut down for masts for His Majesty’s and others’ navies) and Egyptian cotton. Also teas, spices, and any other salable commodity which came their way.

  When Colónel Crisby’s grandfather reached his majority in 1802, he waved good-bye to the Atlantic Ocean at Charleston, S.C. and stepped westward into the forest. When he stopped, he was in the middle of the Chickasaw Nation, where he opened a trading post and introduced slaves to the Indians.

  And he prospered, and begat Colónel Crisby’s father, who sent back to South Carolina for everything his father owned. Everything—slaves, wagons, horses, cattle, guinea fowl, peacocks, and dodos, which everybody thought of as atrociously ugly poultry of some kind, one of the seafaring uncles having bought them off a French merchant in 1721. (I surmised these were white dodos from Réunion, unless they had been from even earlier stock. The dodo of Mauritius was already extinct by then.)

  All this stuff was herded out west to the trading post in the midst of the Chickasaw Nation. (The tribes around there were of the confederation of the Dancing Rabbits.)

  And Colónel Crisby’s father prospered, and so did the guinea fowl and the dodos. Then Andrew Jackson came along and marched the Dancing Rabbits off up the Trail of Tears to the heaven of Oklahoma. And Colónel Crisby’s father begat Colónel Crisby, and put the trading post in the hands of others, and moved his plantation westward still to McComb.

  Everything prospered but Colónel Crisby’s father, who died. And the dodos, with occasional losses to the avengin’ weasel and the egg-sucking dog, reproduced themselves also.

  Then along came Granddaddy Gudger, a Simon Legree role model, who took care of the plantation while Colónel Crisby raised ten companies of men and marched off to fight the War of the Southern Independence.

  Colónel Crisby came back to the McComb plantation earlier than most, he having stopped much of the same volley of Minié balls that caught his commander, General Beauregard Hanlon, on a promontory bluff during the Siege of Vicksburg.

  He wasn’t dead, but death hung around the place like a gentlemanly bill collector for a month. The Colónel languished, went slap-dab crazy and freed all his slaves the week before he died (the war lasted another two years after that). Not having any slaves, he didn’t need an overseer.

  Then comes the Faulkner part of the tale, straight out of As I
Lay Dying, with the Gudger family returning to the area of Water Valley (before there was a Water Valley), moving through the demoralized and tattered displaced persons of the South, driving their dodos before them. For Colónel Crisby had given them to his former overseer for his faithful service. Also followed the story of the bloody murder of Granddaddy Gudger at the hands of the Freedman’s militia during the rising of the first Klan, and of the trials and tribulations of Daddy Gudger in the years between 1880 and 1910, when he was between the ages of four and thirty-four.

  · · · · ·

  Alma and Annie Mae were the second and fifth of Daddy Gudger’s brood, born three years apart. They seemed to have hated each other from the very first time Alma looked into little Annie Mae’s crib. They were kids by Daddy Gudger’s second wife (his desperation had killed the first) and their father was already on his sixth career. He had been a lumberman, a stump preacher, a plowman-for-hire (until his mules broke out in farcy buds and died of the glanders), a freight hauler (until his horses died of overwork and the hardware store repossessed the wagon), a politician’s roadie (until the politician lost the election). When Alma and Annie Mae were born, he was failing as a sharecropper. Somehow Gudger had made it through the Depression of 1898 as a boy, and was too poor after that to notice more about economics than the price of Beech-Nut tobacco at the store.

  Alma and Annie Mae fought, and it helped none at all that Alma, being the oldest daughter, was both her mother and father’s darling. Annie Mae’s life was the usual unwanted poor-white-trash-child’s hell. She vowed early to run away, and recognized her ambition at thirteen.

  All this I learned this morning. Jolyn (Smith) Jimson was Annie Mae’s only friend in those days—from a family even poorer than the Gudgers. But somehow there was food, and an occasional odd job. And the dodos.

  “My family hated those old birds,” said the cultured Annie Mae Radwin, née Gudger, in the solarium. “He always swore he was going to get rid of them someday, but just never seemed to get around to it. I think there was more to it than that. But they were so much trouble. We always had to keep them penned up at night, and go check for their eggs. They wandered off to lay them, and forgot where they were. Sometimes no new ones were born at all in a year.

  “And they got so ugly. Once a year. I mean, terrible-looking, like they were going to die. All their feathers fell off, and they looked like they had mange or something. Then the whole front of their beaks fell off, or worse, hung halfway on for a week or two. They looked like big old naked pigeons. After that they’d lose weight, down to twenty or thirty pounds, before their new feathers grew back.

  “We were always having to kill foxes that got after them in the turkey house. That’s what we called their roost, the turkey house. And we found their eggs all sucked out by cats and dogs. They were so stupid we had to drive them into their roost at night. I don’t think they could have found it standing ten feet from it.”

  She looked at me.

  “I think much as my father hated them, they meant something to him. As long as he hung on to them, he knew he was as good as Granddaddy Gudger. You may not know it, but there was a certain amount of family pride about Granddaddy Gudger. At least in my father’s eyes. His rapid fall in the world has a sort of grandeur to it. He’d gone from a relatively high position in the old order, and maintained some grace and stature after the Emancipation, and though he lost everything, he managed to keep those ugly old chickens the Colónel had given him as sort of a symbol.

  “And as long as he had them, too, my daddy thought himself as good as his father. He kept his dignity, even when he didn’t have anything else.”

  I asked what happened to them. She didn’t know, but told me who did and where I could find her.

  That’s why I’m going to make a phone call.

  · · · · ·

  “Hello. Dr. Courtney. Dr. Courtney? This is Paul. Memphis. Tennessee. It’s too long to go into. No, of course not, not yet. But I’ve got evidence. What? Okay, how do trochanters, coracoids, tarsometatarsi, and beak sheaths sound? From their henhouse, where else? Where would you keep your dodos, then?

  “Sorry. I haven’t slept in a couple of days. I need some help. Yes, yes. Money. Lots of money.

  “Cash. Three hundred dollars, maybe. Western Union, Memphis, Tennessee. Whichever one’s closest to the airport. Airport. I need the department to set up reservations to Mauritius for me.…

  “No. No. Not wild goose chase, wild dodo chase. Tame dodo chase. I know there aren’t any dodos on Mauritius! I know that. I could explain. I know it’ll mean a couple of grand … if … but …

  “Look, Dr. Courtney. Do you want your picture in Scientific American, or don’t you?”

  · · · · ·

  I am sitting in the airport cafe in Port Louis, Mauritius. It is now three days later, five days since that fateful morning my car wouldn’t start. God bless the Sears Diehard people. I have slept sitting up in a plane seat, on and off, different planes, different seats, for twenty-four hours, Kennedy to Paris, Paris to Cairo, Cairo to Madagascar. I felt like a brand-new man when I got here.

  Now I feel like an infinitely sadder and wiser brand-new man. I have just returned from the hateful sister Alma’s house in the exclusive section of Port Louis, where all the French and British officials used to live.

  Courtney will get his picture in Scientific American, me too, all right. There’ll be newspaper stories and talk shows for a few weeks for me, and I’m sure Annie Mae Gudger Radwin on one side of the world and Alma Chandler Gudger Molière on the other will come in for their share of the glory.

  I am putting away cup after cup of coffee. The plane back to Tananarive leaves in an hour. I plan to sleep all the way back to Cairo, to Paris, to New York, pick up my bag of bones, sleep back to Austin.

  Before me on the table is a packet of documents, clippings and photographs. I have come half the world for this. I gaze from the package, out the window across Port Louis to the bulk of Mt. Pieter Boothe, which overshadows the city and its famous racecourse.

  Perhaps I should do something symbolic. Cancel my flight. Climb the mountain and look down on man and all his handiworks. Take a pitcher of martinis with me. Sit in the bright semitropical sunlight (it’s early dry winter here). Drink the martinis slowly, toasting Snuffo, God of Extinction. Here’s one for the Great Auk. This is for the Carolina Parakeet. Mud in your eye, Passenger Pigeon. This one’s for the Heath Hen. Most importantly, here’s one each for the Mauritius dodo, the white dodo of Réunion, the Réunion solitaire, the Rodriguez solitaire. Here’s to the Raphidae, great Didine birds that you were.

  Maybe I’ll do something just as productive, like climbing Mt. Pieter Boothe and pissing into the wind.

  How symbolic. The story of the dodo ends where it began, on this very island. Life imitates cheap art. Like the Xerox of the Xerox of a bad novel. I never expected to find dodos still alive here (this is the one place they would have been noticed). I still can’t believe Alma Chandler Gudger Molière could have lived here twenty-five years and not know about the dodo, never set foot inside the Port Louis Museum, where they have skeletons and a stuffed replica the size of your little brother.

  After Annie Mae ran off, the Gudger family found itself prospering in a time the rest of the country was going to hell. It was 1929. Gudger delved into politics again, and backed a man who knew a man who worked for Theodore “Sure Two-Handed Sword of God” Bilbo, who had connections everywhere. Who introduced him to Huey “Kingfish” Long just after that gentleman lost the Louisiana governor’s election one of the times. Gudger stumped around Mississippi, getting up steam for Long’s Share the Wealth plan, even before it had a name.

  The upshot was that the Long machine in Louisiana knew a rabble-rouser when it saw one, and invited Gudger to move to the Sportsman’s Paradise, with his family, all expenses paid, and start working for the Kingfish at the unbelievable salary of $62.50 a week. Which prospect was like turning a hog loose under a pe
rsimmon tree, and before you could say Backwoods Messiah, the Gudger clan was on its way to the land of pelicans, graft, and Mardi Gras.

  Almost. But I’ll get to that.

  Daddy Gudger prospered all out of proportion with his abilities, but many men did that during the Depression. First a little, thence to more, he rose in bureaucratic (and political) circles of the state, dying rich and well-hated with his fingers in all the pies.

  Alma Chandler Gudger became a debutante (she says Robert Penn Warren put her in his book) and met and married Jean Carl Molière, only heir to rice, indigo, and sugar cane growers. They had a happy wedded life, moving first to the West Indies, later to Mauritius, where the family sugar cane holdings were one of the largest on the island. Jean Carl died in 1959. Alma was his only survivor.