Welcome to the Watch RWISA Write Showcase Tour! The purpose of the blog is to highlight the work of nineteen outstanding authors. The RWISA (Rave Writers - Int'l Society of Authors) is an elite branch of the outstanding Rave Review Book Club, featuring the best of the best in writing.
It's my honor to introduce Ron Yates.
OUT
TO PASTURE
Musings of an
Erstwhile Asia Hand
by
Ron Yates, RRBC 2017 KCT Int'l Literary Award Grand Prize Winner
He watched the hawk
circling high in an infinite Southern California sky, far above the shaggy
brown hills that loomed behind acres of avocado and orange trees. Every so
often the hawk would dip as though preparing to dive on its unsuspecting prey,
but then it would pull up abruptly, unsatisfied with the approach to its
target, waiting perhaps for a better opportunity.
He knew this hawk.
He had seen it before. There were two patches of vermilion feathers on the
underside of its broad chestnut wings that reminded him of the red circles that
adorned the wingtips of the Japanese fighter planes he used to see in the
Pacific during World War II.
He closed his eyes,
allowing the warm sun to wash over him. The only sound other than the crisp dry
wind that blew up the long pass from La Jolla, was the dull whine of the
automatic pool cleaner as it made its programmed passages back and forth in the
pool next to the patio. For a moment he could feel himself being pulled back to
a time when the heavy coughs of old propeller-driven fighters ripped through
the dense,
fragrant tropical air like a dull knife through perfumed silk.
For a brief moment, he pictured himself
sitting at his old black Underwood, pounding out another story of some
long-forgotten battle in World War II, or Korea, or Vietnam that he had
covered. He could almost see the white typing paper rolled half-way out of the
typewriter and he could see his By-Line typed neatly just above the first
sentence of the story:
"By Cooper McGrath
Global News
Service."
He sighed and
shifted his body in the pool-side lounge chair, allowing his growing potbelly to slide
slowly to the other side of his frame. “Typewriters,”
he thought. “Nobody even knows what they
are today.”
Then he reached for
his binoculars so he could get a better view of the hawk.
"Look at old
Zero-sen up there. He's going in for the kill."
"Zero-sen?"
Ellen was still puttering around the patio, watering potted plants and trees.
"Yeah, the
hawk. That's what I call him.
Look at those red spots on his wings. He looks like one of those old Japanese
Zeros."
Ellen squinted up at
the sky and frowned. "You have a lively imagination, Cooper."
The hawk continued
to circle, but it was moving further away. Finally, it dipped below a small rise and disappeared.
When it reappeared,
it was carrying something in its talons. Cooper exhaled and at the same time
pounded his ample belly, the sound of which reverberated across the patio like
a hollow drum. Then he pulled himself upright in the recliner.
"I always did,
you know."
"Did
what?" Ellen asked, only half paying attention to what her brother was
saying.
"Have a lively
imagination."
"Oh,
that." She was on her knees pushing sticks of fertilizer into her potted
plants. "And as I recall, it always got you in trouble."
"Is it time for
lunch?" he asked, rising slowly to his feet. "God," he groaned.
"I'm stiff as a dead tree." He looked at his watch. It was already
one-thirty in the afternoon—way past his usual lunchtime and his stomach was growling.
"You don't get
enough exercise, Cooper. I keep telling you, you should enroll in that aerobics
class they're offering down at the clubhouse."
She stood looking at
him for a few moments, hands on hips, white, wide-brimmed gardening hat shading
her beige face from the hot sun. She loved her brother mightily, but it
saddened her to see him in such physical and mental decline. Why had the Global
News Service pushed him into retirement? He had given his life to that
ungrateful news agency.
As he stretched his
arms skyward Cooper's ever-expanding belly caused the bottom of his shirt to
pull out of his shorts at the midriff, revealing a roll of untanned flesh the
color of boiled pork. Finally,
she shook her head and made one of those disapproving clucking sounds with her
tongue.
"I'll call you
when lunch is ready. Why not take a few laps in the pool, or even better, call
the clubhouse about that senior’s aerobics class?"
Cooper mumbled some
acquiescent reply as Ellen walked into the house. She was right of course. But
at 70 he didn't feel any particular need to jog around a room with a bunch of
other ill-proportioned old farts in tights. Hell, he was retired. Why did he
have to do anything at all? Hadn't he worked his ass off all his life? Didn’t
he risk his life reporting stories nobody cared about? Didn't he deserve some
time off to do, well, to do nothing? Nothing at all? Hell yes, he did.
He sighed heavily,
and a bit guiltily. He always did when he remembered the half-finished
manuscript in his small office. It sat there day after day on the desk next to
his laptop computer—unfinished, unedited and unsold. Sometimes he half expected
it to finish itself, to somehow link up magically with his mind, download forty
years of journalistic experience and then turn it all into some kind of
marketable prose that a big time publisher would snap up without hesitation.
But it didn't work
that way. He knew that. Oh,
how he knew that. After years of meeting one deadline after another—thousands
and thousands of them—if there was one thing Cooper McGrath knew it was that
nothing got written until he sat down at his typewriter and began banging it
out. Then, about five years ago, toward the end of his career as a foreign correspondent, he had reluctantly
traded in his typewriter
for a computer. The laptop had been sent over to Singapore by his editors. He
would no longer roam the Asian continent as he had for most of his professional
life. Instead,
he would write a column every two weeks that focused on current events. And
that's what he had done for the past few years. His job, he was told, was to
insert his years of historical perspective into dispatches written by less
knowledgeable, more youthful correspondents.
Cooper knew what was
really going on, of course. He was being put out to pasture. Sure, the
discipline was the same. You still had to sit down in front of a blank screen and create something worth
reading. The difference was the burnout. He felt as burned out as an old war
correspondent could feel—like the old iron kettle in which he cooked up his
special chili. He had served up so many portions of his life that there just
wasn't anything left to spoon out anymore. It was 1990, and the kettle was empty—empty and caked
with rust.
Yet he knew he had
things to say, stories to tell, history to recount. He was, after all, an
eyewitness to some of the greatest history of the Twentieth Century. World War
II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, not to mention more than a score or so revolutions
and coups d'état. When he thought about it that way, he could feel the juices
stirring and bubbling in the bottom of the kettle, and he would get excited enough to walk
into his small office, turn on the laptop and type a few lines. But after a while, an inexplicable gust of arid
self-doubt would blow through his mind, and he would feel the passion receding. Then it
would be gone—as
extinct as that old black Underwood he used to pound on day after day in places
like Rangoon, Saigon, and
Hong Kong.
"Nobody gives a
damn," Cooper would say when Ellen asked him why he didn't finish his
memoirs. "It's all ancient history. Hell, I'm ancient history."
Ellen knew he was
feeling sorry for himself. But she couldn't bring herself to tell him that. Instead, she guilefully
nudged and tugged his ego gently back to its perch above the bleak valley of his self-doubt.
"You've seen so
much, and
you have such a gift for describing what you've seen," Ellen would say.
"You must
write it all down, to preserve it for others. That is your gift to the world.
It shouldn't be wasted."
Cooper knew Ellen
was right—if not for the sake of history then for the sake of his own mental
and physical health. He needed to be doing something. And he had to admit, when
he was writing,
he felt like he
was contributing again. It gave him a sense of power and purpose.
But after Toshiko's
death most of the power and purpose he still possessed deserted him. He
retreated emotionally and physically from the world. He gave up the grand old
house in Singapore where he and Toshiko
had spent the last ten years of their married life. He just couldn't bear
living in it anymore—not when everything in the place reminded him of Toshiko
and their life together.
For the first few
weeks after Toshiko had succumbed to the ravages of cancer, Cooper would sit on
the verandah of their house built during the British-raj, drinking one
vodka-tonic after another and wondering why Toshiko had to be the first to go.
He always figured he would be the first. After all, he was the physical wreck,
not Toshiko. She had taken care of herself. Her 5-foot 2-inch body was as lithe
and slim as it was the day he met her in 1946 in Osaka.
Cooper knew the
hours spent on his verandah were nothing more than a boozy ritual of self-pity.
But he didn't care. It was the only way he knew to deal with abandonment. And
that's what had happened. He had been abandoned; and cheated, and irreparably damaged. By dying, Toshiko had deserted him. These were
the emotions that had churned in Cooper's sozzled brain with ever-increasing
velocity until late afternoon when he was, as they say, “decks-awash and listing severely to starboard.” Then, with the sun
descending past the tops of the traveler palms and tamarind trees that
populated his front lawn, Cooper would stumble into the house and collapse on
the small bed in the guestroom. Even drunk he couldn't bring himself to sleep
in the bed he had shared with Toshiko.
The self-pity finally
wore off in a couple of months and so did the appeal of Singapore. After minimal coaxing from
Ellen, he left Asia and moved in with his only living relative. Ellen, his
little sister,
lived in the sunburnt craggy hills just north of Escondido. The house was one
of those rambling Spanish-style places with a red tile roof and bleached stucco
walls. It had been built by Ellen's husband just before his untimely death ten
years before.
Moving in with Ellen
wasn’t Cooper's idea, but he was thankful she had offered. One evening in
Singapore during a fierce tropical storm that had forced Cooper to retreat from
the Verandah, Ellen had called, and in the course of the conversation, she suggested he
come to California and help out with her thirty acres of avocado and orange
groves.
A month later, after
selling off five decades of Asian bric-a-brac, several rooms of teak, rosewood
and rattan furniture, half of his oriental carpets and various silk screens,
wall hangings and jade statuary, Cooper returned to the U.S. It was the first
time he had been back in almost 20 years. When he stepped off the plane in San
Diego, he couldn't help observing how sterile, how ordered, how incredibly
mind-numbing it all was.
"Where's the
texture?" he asked as Ellen drove him north toward Escondido.
"What?"
Ellen responded.
"You know, the
texture. The dirt.
The coarseness. The graininess that makes a place look lived in."
Ellen had dismissed
Cooper's outburst as a sign of jet lag or crankiness.
In fact, Cooper was
frustrated by how little the change in scenery had done for him. He had merely traded the verandah of his
house in Singapore for the poolside patio of Ellen's mountainside villa. There
was one huge difference, of course. There was no booze to be had anywhere in
Ellen's house. Just lots of lemonade and cases of those flavored ice tea drinks
that were so irritatingly trendy.
And so it had gone
for the past six months that he had lived with his sister in the hills north of
Escondido. He purged the booze from his system, but not the pain. He drank lots
of ice tea and lemonade and every so often the two of them took day trips to
places like the old missions at San Juan Capistrano or San Luis Rey, or the old stagecoach town of Temecula, or the posh resorts of La
Jolla.
If nothing else,
Cooper was getting to know his kid sister once again and Ellen was
rediscovering her brother. Nevertheless, sometimes she thought he would have
been better off staying in Singapore. But she was the only family Cooper had
left and it distressed her to know he was alone and suffering in Asia.
Cooper watched Ellen
as she reemerged from the house and moved across the patio with the water hose
trained on the hanging plants. He closed his eyes and imagined Toshiko standing
on the long wooden verandah of their Singapore house under slowly turning
teakwood paddle fans fussing with the bougainvillea and orchids. It was too
easy. All he had to do was will her into his consciousness and there she would
be, just as she had always been. That was the problem. As much as he had loved
Toshiko in life, he found himself consumed with an even stronger love for her
in death. Sometimes he thought it was
becoming his own personal cancer, and he had no doubt that it was killing him.
Cooper paced the
length of the patio, spent a moment or two pushing himself up by the toes, then
walked back to the lounge chair, eased himself onto its thick foam rubber
cushions and closed his pale blue eyes under freckled eyelids.
"That’s enough
exercise for today. I think I'll take a little nap."
Ellen looked over at
him and shook her head. His tanned legs with their crepey skin extended from
knee-length blue shorts and his meaty, liver-spotted hands rested on a
half-buttoned red, yellow and blue Hawaiian shirt that threatened to burst open
with each of his breaths.
"You really are
a lazy old bear, Mr. McGrath."
Cooper, muttered an
indistinct reply and watched Ellen as she pottered past him into the house. He
closed his eyes, yawned, and began drifting away to another time in a vanished
world where his personal cloistered refuge awaited.
“Tomorrow,” he mused. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll come in from the pasture.”
The End
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