Between Here and the Yellow Sea Read online

  BETWEEN HERE

  stories by nic Pizzolatto

  AND THE YELLOW SEA

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-913-5

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas

  Isle of Man

  IM2 4NR

  via United Kingdom

  Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672

  email: [email protected]

  Originally published by:

  MacAdam/Cage

  155 Sansome Street, Suite 550

  San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.macadamcage.com

  Copyright © 2006 by Nic Pizzolatto

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pizzolatto, Nic, 1975-

  Between here and the yellow sea / by Nic Pizzolatto.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-59692-168-4 (alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3616.I99B48 2006

  813′.6—dc22

  2006000688

  Book design by Dorothy Carico Smith.

  Several of these stories have appeared elsewhere, in some cases in a different form: “Ghost Birds” in The Atlantic Monthly, “Amy’s Watch” in Shenandoah, “1987, The Races” in The Missouri Review, “Between Here and the Yellow Sea” in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Guild of Thieves, Lost Women, and Sunrise Palms” in Quarterly West, “A Cryptograph” in Stories from the Blue Moon Café, Volume IV, and “Haunted Earth” in The Iowa Review.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Nath, my brother

  GHOST BIRDS

  AMY’S WATCH

  1987, THE RACES

  TWO SHORES

  BETWEEN HERE AND THE YELLOW SEA

  THE GUILD OF THIEVES, LOST WOMEN, AND SUNRISE PALMS

  A CRYPTOGRAPH

  HAUNTED EARTH

  NEPAL

  GHOST BIRDS

  THEN THE CITY ENTERS ANOTHER TORPID AND SIMMERING May. Parents grimace while pulling their kids through the Museum of Westward Expansion, and barges moan down the Mississippi. Something erupted at the Dowling Industrial factory and the gases are making our sunsets plum and plutonium orange.

  I work from eleven at night until six in the morning. The park is deserted, and I keep watch from a small window in a wall of steel 630 feet above the ground. Ninety acres of grass and trees on the east, bridges over the river and the lights of St. Louis to the west. I patrol under purple sky (you can’t see stars this month), and after surveying the grounds with my official U.S. Park Service binoculars, I squeeze out my window and drop off the top of the St. Louis arch.

  I use a Perigee II, a Velcro-closed, single parachute container made by Consolidated Rigging. It holds an ACE 240-square-foot canopy and my gear is black: helmet, knee and elbow pads, a black scarf over my nose and mouth, but my goggles are the blue glass of fourth-generation NVT night-vision. The arch is Pittsburgh steel, called “The Gateway to the West,” and when my leg hangs out the window and high winds break on my face I can stare down at the dark forest or turn to the far window where St. Louis smolders, and in that moment I feel I might be straddling the sleeping intersection of a country’s dreams. Gichin Funakoshi tells us that truth is contained in dreams.

  Wind explodes so hard and loud you might be disintegrating. Three seconds of free fall, about four more guiding the canopy down. Sometimes I revolve in descent, like water going down a drain.

  At the base of the arch, the Museum of Westward Expansion has the dimensions of a football field. In its lobby I keep a bag and ranger uniform, hustle in after a jump and emerge seconds later as Ethan Landry, park ranger. Those times, it always takes the quiet darkness to remind me that the park is closed, and I am alone.

  The old workers’ elevator jostles and squeals softly bearing me up.

  A radio plays music and I listen to breaks in static on the black call box. Hours crawl toward morning. Since I don’t drink anymore, I break the tedium by reading. Stuff like The Book of Five Rings. Hagakure: Way of the Samurai. The Tao Te Ching. I enjoyed the writings of Black Elk and some of Emerson’s essays, but the Eastern mind seems a lot clearer to me. Clarity, I think, is the chief thing. Find a road and walk it.

  Which as much as anything explains my jumps. The literal definition of BASE jumping is to parachute off a stationary object (building, antennae, span or earth), but for me it means narrowing your senses and joining the void. The great samurai Miyamoto Musashi says it is necessary to lose the self and become one with Mu, the emptiness at the heart of existence to which everything returns. Thus the warrior finds life in death. That’s tougher than it sounds, and I’ve really come close only once. Three years ago, kayaking on the Buffalo River in northern Arkansas, I overturned and kicked loose. I smacked into a rock and the kayak shot at me, broke my ankle, whipped around and knocked a molar out and vanished downstream. Pounded by waves, swallowing water, and nearly blind from pain, I clung to the rock, knowing if I got washed away, I was over. On the bank of the river I noticed a squirrel staring at me. It cocked its head, as if asking what I thought I was doing, then spiraled up a tree where I lost it in the branches. I remember a sense of calm then, stillness, and thinking, This is my death. Interesting.

  The moment was a glimpse of the true universe, a galactic procession that marched on without me. What Dogen calls “The Ten Thousand Things.” My ankle healed, but rafting lacked something after that, and I discovered skydiving, which led to BASE jumping. I started kayaking in the first place because one of the basics they tell you in rehab is that if you’re going to stay sober, you have to get physically active.

  But if none of that makes much sense, let’s just say that with the hours I keep, my chief relationship is with gravity, and we’re intimate every moonless night around three a.m.

  And we’re in May. The skies are hued amethyst and green and, like I said, I can see no stars. At night the woods lose their depth, take on a flatness and seem to stretch out in a single plain like the overgrown grazing fields on the farm where I grew up. The two spotlights at the bottom of the arch aren’t a problem—I fall between them. Though there’s no moon tonight, I’m a little wary of the illumination the strange sky creates, as BASE jumping is effectively illegal in the U.S. Many jumpers take falls in national parks, and park rangers are their traditional nemeses. The irony of my life is so obvious, I don’t even think it’s irony.

  Before I jump I check the park with my binoculars: clipped grass, patches of pine and broadleaf poplars, concrete walkways converging at the Old Courthouse to the east. A gleam—behind a tree, I spot a shining flash. I zoom in and see at least two people huddled in the shadows. I’m about to call it in on the radio, but then I see what was gleaming: glass lenses. One of them is looking up at the arch with binoculars. Three o’clock has brought something new tonight; I shed my rigging and become a park ranger.

  The elevator chugs me down and I creep between trees and crouch behind tall shrubs. I find three people—a girl and two boys, pretty young, and I remind myself to take it easy on them. At twenty-eight I can still remember the thrill of sneaking around at night. I had a girlfriend who loved exploring forbidden places. Our nerves humming along on whatever we copped, Mabel would lead me through dark spaces crammed with steam pipes and No Trespassing signs, staircases to rooftops that ended in a kiss. I hold off on my flashlight and move closer, because I can hear voices and want to know what they’re saying.

  A burly kid with
fat cheeks and glasses is speaking to a thinner boy in a ball cap and trench coat.

  The girl has been looking at the arch with binoculars. She lowers them and interrupts the boys, “I think I saw a ranger up there.”

  Then a human moan breaches the air. I look around and see outcroppings of shadow everywhere. Ahead of this grove, people fill the park, at least a dozen of them. A girl and boy are lying on their backs, the girl pointing to the sky. Another couple making out against a pine tree explain the moan I heard. I’ve stumbled upon some dream of youth and lust. For vague reasons this angers me—these young people intruding on my sacred and necessary moment.

  The flashlight ignites and my deepest voice comes with it. “What’s going on here? The park is closed.” Everybody bolts and I trap the three in my beam. Leaves rustle and the dull reverberations of footsteps run through the ground.

  The boy in the trench coat raises his hands, slowly lowers them, and steps forward. “Um, hi. We know the park is closed. We’re sorry. We’re on assignment for a class. We all go to Washington University.” Over his shoulder, the girl watches me.

  I’m still angry, and as the boy steps into my circle of power I ponder various angles of kokyu nage I could use to throw his body over the shrubbery. “You’re all trespassing.”

  “We’re in this class, Modern American Myth and Legend, um, we’re working on our final project…see…”

  Now the girl speaks up. “There’s this urban legend that on nights without a moon something flies down from the arch.” I can’t make out the shade of her eyes, but they’re pale. “Frank thinks it’s a guy with a parachute, but the descriptions sound like a ghost bird.”

  “What?”

  “Ghost birds. Native American thunder spirits. Gigantic, black with glowing eyes. People have seen them for centuries.”

  “Nothing flies off the arch.”

  Frank (I guess) interjects, “I personally know three people, who never met each other, and told me stories of seeing this thing fly off the arch. All three described something in all-black, with glowing red eyes. Another connection? There was no moon either night. I researched this. Six hundred feet is a totally plausible BASE jump. You can’t be watching all the time.”

  “Listen, kids. You are trespassing. This is illegal. You’re on government property.”

  “We’re sorry. Really. It was just—you know.”

  “We wanted to see if it was true.”

  “It’s not,” I say. “You need to leave the park.”

  They shuffle off, mumbling apologies. The girl turns her head and glances at me. Soft features gleam on her face—eyes, lips. Then the students vanish.

  I trudge back to my office with memories of my own college experience in mind. I was the first person in my family to attend a university, and I remember the students there, so like these kids—tan, smiling, walking through stone quadrangles holding hands, and they all had different haircuts than me, different clothes. I learned that I did not know how to talk, or dress, or even smile.

  I remember feeling like a fraud that first year, picturing conspiracies around me, but I had a roommate who bought pot in bulk and he showed me ways to relax and let the world go. My spine shivers a little when I remember those days, before I learned the necessity of control and found my path.

  As the elevator takes me up, my mind’s eye keeps replaying the girl’s parting glance. Miyamoto says the true bushi divorces himself from desire, but in tonight’s shadows her eyes tugged at something in my lungs that ran down to the place behind my abdomen where chi is stored, and I’m compelled to think of Mabel, so I spend the rest of my shift practicing guided meditation. In the lotus position, I close my eyes and focus on the Blue Triangle where I store the egoless self, trying not to remember Mabel’s laugh and the cleft at the base of her spine, the taste of her sweat or the purple bathwater that covered her on our last night together. Dead air from the call box hisses, and I block it out.

  Morning is a loud wash of white sun and I hear St. Louis waking up as I ride the tram down. Birds wake, barges wake, everything calling to everything else. A girl stands at the bottom of the arch in a sleeveless white blouse, wind wrapping brown hair around her face, and even before she brushes it away I know who she is.

  “The park doesn’t open until nine,” I say. She looks at me with faded green eyes and her brown hair is streaked by shades of orange. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” she says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  The wind keeps playing with her hair. “You’re the ghost bird, aren’t you? You know there’s a Web site about you?”

  The morning grows noisy, feels too bright. “What?” If I keep lying, what are my odds? She’s much smaller than me, and I consider a yonkyo nerve pinch to make her unconscious. But I’d still have a problem when she woke up. “What do you want?”

  “I’ll tell you in a second.” She looks around at the park and up at the arch. “Can we go talk somewhere?”

  A coffee shop that smells like butter and icing. She wears a lot of silver, and rope bracelets on one arm; dusky-hued freckles spot her nose and cheekbones. Her name is Erica Gleason, and she’s telling me the history of ghost birds, working toward an explanation for something she hasn’t said yet. “In our class one of the myths we studied was how throughout history, in every culture, an unexplained thing people see are black, ornithologic figures, enormous bird-things with glowing eyes. They’re called different things, but a lot of theory insists names are meaningless.”

  “Erica—”

  “I mean, angels, demons, monsters, whatever.”

  “Erica.” I lean over the table. “What do you want?”

  She deflates a little, and I’m instantly sorry I interrupted. She sips coffee and looks out the window. People bustle under traffic lights. Horns bleat, brakes squeal. I’m usually in bed right now, preparing to sleep through the day.

  She turns back to me. “I’m just saying, I was disappointed when I figured out it was only you.”

  “How did you know, by the way?”

  She bows her head and stirs her coffee. “I could tell by the way you acted…and I saw a guy dressed all in black looking at me with binoculars from a window in the arch.” Her eyes meet me with consolation. “I didn’t tell anybody.”

  “Right. So. What do you want?”

  “Okay. Here’s the thing.” She puts her spoon down. “I want you to teach me.”

  “Teach what?”

  “BASE jumping.”

  I try to tell her it doesn’t work like that. “You don’t just go out and BASE jump. It takes years to accumulate the knowledge needed to do your first jump. It’s a continual learning process. I still walk away sometimes.”

  “I’ve skydived before.”

  “How many times?”

  “Twice.”

  “Jeez.” I’m wrong to describe her hair as brown. It’s more like burnt wheat with copper and russet highlights. “This sport isn’t about proving anything. It’s very personal. People get killed. Very experienced people get seriously injured and killed. Why do you even want to do this?”

  “Why do you do it?” she asks, and the image of Mabel floating lifeless beneath lavender soap bubbles flashes across my mind.

  “You have to master skydiving first. Even after, there are other people who can teach you.”

  “Look, I didn’t say anything to anybody, okay? I didn’t turn you in or anything. I mean, then why are you talking to me about it? What are you waiting for?”

  She knows that by deliberating, I’ve already agreed. Silver jangles on her wrist; her lips are thin and faded; her collarbone spreads like a shadowy albatross above her chest and I’m thinking, Blue Triangle, Blue Triangle.

  At my apartment the answering machine blinks, showing several messages, which makes me uneasy because I don’t know who could be calling. After ten months in St. Louis, my acquaintances encompass a landlord, a mailman, and two park rangers who think I’m cra
zy for pulling the hours I do. In Hagakure, Tsunetomo writes that there is deep power in the solitary man.

  It’s my father’s voice on the machine: “Ethan, it’s your dad. I can’t find your mother, son, and I been trying to get hold of you. You need to bring the horses in.”

  The next message is from an hour later, his voice guttural and slow, twanging words out. “Ethan, it’s your dad. I can’t find your mother, son, and I been trying to get hold of you. You need to bring the horses in. It looks like rain.” Three other messages say roughly the same things, along with suggesting I gather up some potatoes and carrots so my mother can make vegetable soup. Our farm was sold some time ago, after my mother died.

  I call Green Grove and speak to the head nurse about these messages. She puts me on hold, comes back and explains that a temporary nurse was working my father’s floor yesterday, and that’s why he was able to make so many phone calls. She apologizes for the inconvenience. In my room, I lie upon a bamboo mat in the center of the floor and place a sleep mask over my eyes to block out sun filtered through the blinds. When I attempt to envision a beach where I can align my heartbeat with the breaking of waves, I instead see my father one particular morning, during my first summer home from college: at dawn my mother and I found him standing in a field of scrubgrass with only a blanket wrapping him, staring at the sun. Brightness engulfed him that morning. We thought he was kidding around at first, but in the intervening years I’ve wondered what, exactly, he was seeing.

  So the ocean in my mind becomes the sounds of warblers and wrens at dawn on my father’s farm, and then Erica starts lecturing me about eternal spirits disguised as birds while unbuttoning her white blouse. Unable to sleep, what I really want to do is jump off something.

  We enter an AFF course—accelerated free fall. It’s a seven-step program designed to teach skydiving basics; after that she has twenty jumps till she’s a novice jumpmaster. She has money for all this. Her father’s a litigator for Dowling Industrial. We start on a small single-engine Cessna whose air tastes like aluminum and petrol. Our bench rattles and dips; the engine sputters. Beyond the door is a roaring radiance. While we’re waiting to be flagged out, Erica eyes her static line and says, “Here we go. Geronimo.”