It's that time of year where we celebrate amazing authors through the "Watch RWISA Write" Showcase Tour. Each day, I will share with you a different author who truly deserves your attention and support. Each author has written a new piece specifically to share with you, so enjoy! Today's author is:
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
