THE CHINESE BOY by Ann Stapleton

Scaff is passing through the drive-thru bank with his daughter when he first sees the Chinese boy, and the love that has stalked him silently all his life and until now has only come upon his dried footprints many years old (ah, Scaff was here) finally catches up with him. The boy’s face inside the little bank building comes up suddenly, blooms in the light and dies away, smooth and pearlescent, with that look of belonging somewhere else Scaff will never get to, in an element he cannot breathe. The shadows there are so heavy Scaff can barely see. The pressure in his chest is unbearable.
October closes around him, floats him, almost weightless now, along its shining edge, the light so beautiful as it recedes into winter that the trees are trying to hoard it, mine, in their own black hands. But it only breaks apart wherever they try to touch it. Brightness disintegrates, the one trick it always knows.
On this day, Scaff sighs into the cool air and sees his own breath disappearing ahead of him, he cannot stop it. O, wait for me, he wants to say, but to what? To whom? So through his front window he watches the sun go down, blood-faced and bucking in the evening’s arms, not now!, not yet!, until whatever it wanted so badly to finish is ended by the black hills beyond the town. All night long Scaff picks up the bits of what it said to him alone, though he only stares into the darkness, the stars collecting in his palm, a tiny mountain of light that shifts and cuts him as he tries to climb.
At dawn, Scaff is still in his chair with the rubber wheels, Scaff the difficult, the unlikable, the failed, watching the black birds mock his life, whatever corn all eaten now but one scant, yellow handful. The bentness of his wings is evident in how easily the birds put him behind them, hundreds at a time, lifting up lightly into the air as if they are glad to see the last of him, acute with love as he is. Burdened so late. A lapful of leaves. His hands do not know what to do with themselves. His yearning can assure him of nothing at all.
Behindhand friend to a zealot of loneliness, he bangs the bars of morning with the tin cup of his brooding. He is trying to bend the steel of circumstance with his small hands, but it will not bend. Everything from out of nowhere looking in the window, he rocks himself in the outgrown cage of his life, the same leaf falling just beyond his reach, over and over, like the smudged, red key to everything he needs.
Scaff’s daughter Tonya is the Elephant Girl of Littleton. Six and a half feet tall at least, and big as all grief, with rings of pale skin that bulge up and back along her arms as she lifts them up or hangs them down. Every day she climbs the red and orange circus stool, stickered with every A from school, though she is forty-six years old now, and does tricks for her father. A cup of tea. A bath. A trip through the town in the sunshine. Papa, look at the leaves. Look at the moon, so full. But her tricks are just the same old same old – he has seen them a thousand times – and Scaff only stares out the window, his crooked little shoulders saying enough.
Scaff at the age of eighty-three has recently begun to look back upon his life. Ah, Scaff! Who knew that everyone who can’t die young will arrive at this one day? His soul in jeopardy, he has begun to try to say to his daughter some few nice things. One pleasantry a day because it is the right thing to do, like a terrible green medicine, sour in his mouth: that soup was not bad; a hot bath can’t be beat. Scaff writes these on an erasable message board; since his stroke, he cannot speak. He pushes the board toward Tonya to say I have traveled through the world on business all these years, and yes, of course, I have brought you a present, you can open your eyes now. But Tonya does not profit from this as you might think, for she was trained with the hook of indifference, and over time the reward becomes the reward, whatever it is, and when Scaff scrawls his kind word, she only looks at him questioningly, as if he is not himself today, as if she should put her hand up to his forehead and match his temperature against hers. As if the stroke was a whirlwind through the very core of his personality and she is patiently stooping and lifting beams away with her trunk, trying to find him as he was, bitter and slight and familiar. Papa, I see your hook! Here it is.
Scaff’s blue house is poked into a hillside on a corner, the grass bending backward because it must, the little serviceberry tree leaning in to hold on as something rocks lightly in its branches. Before the stroke, Scaff was an agile-footed mountain goat flying up and down the sheer drop of the steps. But now there is now, and then has gone away for good. They do not have the money for a ramp, and at the angle of Scaff’s yard, it would be like the Terror Slope anyway, no telling where he would end up. So Tonya stands behind and holds the arms of the chair, and her enormous bulk, quivering and steady at once, balances everything, everything, like a red and blue ball with shining gold trimmings. And Scaff goes from the top of the steps to the bottom on the lightest of bump, bump, bumps, Tonya’s troubled breathing saying, It’s OK, Papa, I’ve got you, to the top of Scaff’s bald head.
Somewhere there is an Africa, but they do not know where, and so must believe this is home. Taken as infants in the black bag of the world, they have all but forgotten freedom. Out on the plains of some Serengeti, a little tickbird perches on an elephant’s back and the wind blows and symbiosis becomes almost the ordinary trick of happiness. An elephant will not tolerate a tickbird. But these two are so lonely; life asks what it asks. Sometimes love is only this dark perch of regret on a gray cloud of longing. But no matter, for it is nearly time for everything left alive, so full of thirst, so hungry for anything green, to commence its great migration somewhere else. It is nearly time now, as the twilight begins its slow unwinding over each and every one, stroking their faces so gently, a familiarity they hardly notice. See how the grass waves gold into the deepening evening, how love sometimes looks, so late on its way.
But Scaff and Tonya are in a little house on a little corner of a little town in the Midwest. With one foot taking up the whole front yard, Tonya does not even wonder anymore if there is a place where she would fit the scale, if somewhere there is a blue mountain so massive it could shade her happiness as she snorts in the grass beneath it, the wind’s hands warm against the small of her back. No, she is where she is, the jackals of paltriness slicing into her giant legs, the insufficiency of it all inescapable with its brilliant teeth, or so she has come to believe. But see how the bright grasses of the plain are beginning to stir, the horizon restless with so many beating hearts, all of them dreaming at once. Grass, in its bid to go along, cresting and cresting with so much hope, who could imagine it? Where does it come from? And still the light goes wandering off on its own as it always does; all the dreamers can do is follow it into the dusk. That is their mission, and they are always true.
Scaff’s neighborhood has been purchased by a grocery chain, his neighbors disappearing one by one in the night, popping up in bet-ter parts of town without him, their sleek new cars parked self-consciously along the curb. But Scaff said, “No!” and “The thieves!” His arm crooked around the serviceberry, something holding tightly to a limb overhead, he smacked his cane against the fence like this till the whole thing trembled, and now he and the Elephant Girl are almost alone here behind the mega store, peeking over it toward the cornfield and the river, keeping a solid eye on the drive-thru bank just across the street to the right, where the Chinese boy swims in his tank, down to the end and back, down to the end. Sometimes he moves his hands slowly over the glass as if he is feeling for a crack in its smoothness; a breach that could lead to an exit, a sky, a bubble of air. The light is like the beloved in jail; he puts his hand up to match the shape of his fingers to another’s, but there is only the hard, bright density of everything beyond his reach.
Every afternoon the sun sets again like a swollen fruit no one can eat, bitter and green-rimmed in the shadows’ cupped hands. The Chinese boy can see through everything, but only all the way into darkness. The light comes for him repeatedly, I am here, but he is forbidden to open the door of the bank. The key in his pocket burns his thigh. The cornfield waits, drumming its fingers, bits of light trampled and strewn. A crime scene where victim and perpetrator are one and the same, where the search dog just goes round and round in confusion.
Only Scaff the unconscious can see now, the sunset fierce in his keeping, singeing his small, empty fingers. A boy who gives his books to the river, one by one. A black-haired boy who watches the light on the water, how something gives up again and again at the top of the spillway, chained forever to its own descent. A cormorant’s neck makes a single black loop in the middle of the lake, but it is not enough to hold on to. Danger swoops in the chill air, does backflips, hangs upside down by its hard, yellow nails. The world swings toward and away. Scaff’s scalp prickles as he looks on. Someone should be notified, but what would he say? What would he request? The Chinese boy is lonely; he walks beside the river in desperation. He is the son I will never in a million years beget and do not deserve, come to weep me out of the world, and in the sadness of his face, in the grief of his wrists as they twist so lightly to accommodate nothing, all has been revealed. How can such things be explained? How can they be said aloud? Tonya brings a dish of hot peaches with brown sugar on top, his favorite, but he only grimaces and sets them aside, the juice making a tiny water hole, dim and undrinkable, in the green shallows of the bowl. Something shivers in the serviceberry, freezes as he turns to look.
The first snow flurries are enough to push the Chinese boy down on his knees, but he cannot think of anything to ask for. The river in blackness is pulling him down; the cornfield and sky in their brightness are stunning him, over and over, warm fingers stroking his eyelids shut. The drive-thru is dimming so much that he can barely discern its gray outline, his own thoughts like insects straight out of Africa, like six-inch flying ones that smack against his neck and shirt front in the middle of a long, long party. He cannot look at them or he will scream the guests away, never to return. Yes, sir. Would you like that in ones? He hears the birds diving above his head, feels their rigid claws graze his hair. Scaff, for his part, has things he needs to give away. Like the bright clouds over the field, they are crushing his life, they are so heavy, and he must hurry, hurry to divest himself.
The Chinese boy used to read books on his breaks. Scaff could see him at the window or cross-legged in the grass behind the drive-thru, each volume a buoy bearing him up in the blue day, long hands opened around a fragile way forward. But lately the boy walks over the road to the cornfield beside the river. A rectangle of green once, now a pale, pink-tinged gold, all tattered and flapping, like Scaff looking out the window. He sees a human figure drafted in darkness, a smear of light for a human face. The Chinese boy sits in a tire swing hung from the tallest tree, a sycamore enamored of the water, saying and saying with its days I will come to you, some night soon, expect me. Little scrolls of bark, smooth and blank, lie at his feet. He smokes a cigarette and watches the birds turning above the river, spelling Scaff loves you with their ardent black bodies, though he cannot read the words.
One day as the Chinese boy is closing up, Scaff, as he spies for love, sees this: a brown shadow breaking through the drive-thru chain as if it is made of paper, a lion bounding toward its living supper as it runs ahead, its small heart beating so heavily. Eyes find the boy in the sunlight and their brightness smashes against the window; darkness like water rushes over him, though he is dry inside. Across the road a man, a woman, and a small child try and try to climb up the riverbank to reach him, but are swept back down. A heaviness like stone strikes the glass where his face floats, then bounces away. The shadow prowls around and around the drive-thru, motions for the Chinese boy to come out, but he waits, perfectly still, until it finally goes. He takes off his sweatshirt and slowly wipes the river water from the glass, though it is dry, carries the jacket by one sleeve as if he is holding hands with something that can hurt him terribly. And Scaff, who has lived a long life with only a black cavern in his chest, filled with tiny bats everywhere all upside down, and a small, sulfurous trickle of water no one could drink from and live, that same Scaff, a little monkey pelting the sky with peanuts, guards the Chinese boy against the autumn afternoon as best he can. He is the only one to see. The boy hurries up the street and into the late sun, but it is the boy who sets, going down behind the hill, a small, dark streak disappearing from Scaff’s intent eyes. Something, only a trace or a half-thought, covers itself in the leaves.
Scaff’s daughter prepares for everything, Tonya the Elephant Queen with her little blue walkie-talkies. (You take one and I’ll take one. This button right here if you need me, Papa.) Tonya, the toast of the Serengeti, with her big button phone and her instantaneous tie-in to the EMS. (Just push this, Papa. I already gave them the name and address.) Scaff half listens, his eye on the drive-thru bank, his heart where, after all these years, it suddenly must go. A herd of elephants could not stop it. The golden afternoons pull his sparse hair, prick his thinned, ashen flesh like burrs.
Scaff is troubled. The Chinese boy never reads anymore. He walks in little circles at the edge of the cornfield, stares up at the autumn birds going over, pure belonging right in his face like that. Too big, too small, no wings, he flaps his arms once as if to lift off, but he is too heavy for the sky. Out of the darkness of the Chinese boy’s hair, Scaff’s heart comes shooting up in his throat. The world that just weeks ago had laid him aside, a finished tale, arises again beyond THE END to want something now, its fingers clutching his life as he tries to pull it away. The light on the field rakes his eyes. The Chinese boy puts both hands up and dances lightly with the sun-warmed glass, nothing holding him as close as it can.
Balanced on the trunk of his daughter, the Elephant Wonder, Scaff enters the drive-thru. He scribbles, “Let me,” on a piece of paper and puts her check in the pneumatic tube, hiding beneath it a peppermint from lunch, a gift for the Chinese boy, who looks up in confusion, only seeing Scaff’s daughter, Scaff is so small, slumped down in the seat.
The Chinese boy says, “Would you like that any special way, ma’am?” holding his breath, as if he is lying on the ground beneath her for a trick and he is relieved she isn’t stomping him to jelly while the crowd looks on. Tonya smiles in her beneficence, her fleshy face red and bland and kind. The mint comes back (shoop!) and Tonya thinks the bank is having a giveaway. She smiles and says thank you, offers it to Scaff, who just scowls and looks out the window. She pops it into her mouth, the taste like an old forgiveness, frozen hard.
The Chinese boy and the river, the cornfield and the birds dip crazily away from Scaff as his daughter turns the car uphill toward the house, a little blue Tibet above the mega store, the autumn light an intense, crystalline gold on dust-colored snakeroot racked to seed. Tonight is hot soup and television, everything on a tray with a cornucopia napkin. Tonight no man will sink his teeth into the soft folds of Tonya’s belly once again, though up on her stool washing dishes she has done every trick she knows. Her loneliness will find her later, coming through the dark at breathtaking speed. Ah, there you are, my sweet one. How are you? Did you think I could forget?
Tonya, with little Scaff walking beneath you past all lions, what is it like to take up so much of the horizon? You sit down on the edge of everything and the legs of the world smash beneath you, small splinters of good intention everywhere. You live in a house built for vervets, your clothes hung at an angle because there isn’t enough room for them front to back, the usual way, in the tiny closets. Men look at your thighs and picture their own faces on milk cartons all across the land: last seen on the outskirts of the Serengeti, holding one red rose. You think there must be someone in town named Lardass who looks exactly like you, you have been mistaken for her so many times as the cars go by, one after another, beeping their horns! Love looks at your kind, pink face, as big as a cake plate, and sighs with happiness. Beautiful! So beautiful. But Scaff is small; he cannot peak up over his own life to see it. A good father should carry his girl child to safety on his shoulders. The whole world knows. But you are just another mirror everywhere for Scaff to look into and see his own failures. You say “Papa” dozens of times a day, as if to invoke someone dear and devoted, conjured wrongly out of Dickens. And in his sharp monkey eyes you see you are a mistake to be repented of and nothing in this world can unmake you. With your own hand, each day you paint the bull’s-eye on your soft, warm belly, a rhino horn inexorable on its way. As if they will remember you, you look up at the stars, expecting someday even now. Distracted by their closeness, you do not try to move. There is nothing at all you cannot forgive.
The Chinese boy opens a box of paper clips the sun shines on, a tiny silver bridge cracking apart in his hands, a little figure falling, disappearing into dark water. He looks out the window of the drive-thru and sees his joy growing smaller and smaller, a black bird no one notices leaving the world, the fringe of a sore wing brushing the sun so far away. The cornfield calls his one true name; his head jerks hard in response, he feels such longing. Lie down with me, say the broken stalks. Right here, right here. Whatever you need.
Tonight when the Chinese boy is floating alone in his bed, ice will be trying to tell the river something, but the water will have its hands over its ears. A man, a woman, a little girl are huddled there, unable to reach up to the light, waiting and waiting in the green-brown water. It has been years, and still they are looking up with so much love. They hold out their hands to the Chinese boy, but he rolls over and closes his eyes, mistaking their voices for the cries of birds in his dreams.
Scaff, my old friend, at last I have found you, says love, putting its arms around him, kissing him MWAH! MWAH! on both cheeks like a European, ignoring his look of discomfort, pushing him up and down the hall all night while he tries to fall asleep. Please forgive my tardiness, a hazard of my profession, sometimes. Scaff looks out at the yellow lights of the drive-thru as if love is not standing there beside him, telling him, belatedly, everything it knows, and yet the stars in the background are wobbling and splintering, rocked with his longing. Everything he sent away, its hands empty, is crossing the bright plain now, hoping somehow to reach him. The lions are watching from the edge of his dream, the evening sun stroking their manes, licking their peppermint paws. They have eaten his old life down to the last knucklebone, a thimbleful of blood and dust and things he could not say. Eyes peer in at him from the serviceberry, but look down before he can read their expression.
Though she swears she will never, in bed at night, the Elephant Girl’s heart rushes to the window when the bad boy death throws his little rocks. She climbs down the swaying darkness right into his arms, smokes cigarettes and hurls the holes of light from the car, lies down on her back in the grass, a girl named Apnea with her elbows up over her head, her fingers in the yellow weeds, his hands all over, almost his. Tonya wakes up gasping for breath. Ba BOOM BOOM b bbb b ba BOOM! She slows her breathing as she has taught herself to do, in, out, you’re OK, you’re OK, her finger and thumb pushing deep in the dough of her wrist to feel her pulse kick and fade and then grow regular again, as death laughs and peels off without her one more time. All this happens in silence so that Papa will not wake, but he is up on his palms in the front window, having it out with the stars. What do you want of me? He begs for an answer, but they are silent. They only move closer when he looks away.
The late rains return and the cornfield floods. The Chinese boy looks down at the trees and the sky and his own puzzled face, pierced by the stubble there next to his shoes. A bird retreats with his heart, a dim, dried berry, his help me scrawled in mold unreadable. Tonya flips a grilled cheese sandwich over and back again, both sides done brown, and Scaff’s chair rolls inexorably toward the window’s light.
The hyenas show up in the daytime and the Chinese boy must wait on them, he cannot avoid it. The lion circles the drive-thru, its long tail lashing the air. Laughing in the sunlight, they are putting something into the pneumatic tube container. Scaff refocuses his binoculars. The darkness of their gift comes shooting in, an arrow of hate, straight toward the Chinese boy, who cannot move from its path. It finds him there as they flee into the afternoon. Asante sana. Thank you very much, he says, his hands so afraid to unlatch the little silver door.
Scaff writes on his erasable message board that there should be bullets for his gun. Tonya says, “Papa,” (in Swahili, “throb of a heart or pulse”) and goes on slicing carrots with her puffed out balloon fingers. She is singing a John Prine song to herself, and Scaff scowls, caught like a stunned bird – he never even saw the glass – in the hands of love. But who will blow into his mouth to keep him from going into shock? Who will open these fingers and fling him again toward the sky? He is an old man, wretched with sudden, perhaps final, feeling. He is sitting in a chair with rubber wheels, looking out over the river, where the Chinese boy is spinning slowly in the swing, the birds all around him like the notes to a love song he cannot hear.
He looks far into the river and cannot even glimpse his homeland anymore, the world formed of four faces nowhere now; there is only the darkness moving over him, why does it take so many years? Could his family find a hole to America? Could a river flow so far across the world that he might come upon them here on these deserted banks, his mother’s beautiful hand clutching a brown reed? He is the only one left, his whole body encased in glass like water he can see through but not break. His mother and his father. His baby sister. He used to see their faces, but now the water is only dark. He is the failure of the family, who goes on floating and floating forever after the others who had such a talent, all of them but him, such a talent for drowning. He wants to enter the river that has been calling to him for so long, can think of nothing else to try, but fears the world will only swim away as it always does. He sifts the water with his fingers, but there is no trace. The wind blows and his hand dries.
He had climbed up the hill, so far and fast, so proud and glad that he could do it, to free their kite, the pleased face of the dragon on it suddenly so confused as it said, Follow me home – And then the impossible waters had broken over the world and rushed down the narrow valley below him and taken them away forever. Left him behind, his hand severed from the kite string slipping upward out of the branches. For a moment, from high above in the sunlight, it could see their heads – and then not, the little sister, unable to struggle, afloat the longest, like a small hole of light moving away on what became of his love. The dragon tried to tell the clouds as he traveled on, but they were restless, always changing, and could not pay attention. The moon came and went.
And then the occluded days of the orphanage with its handless, armless caretaking. And then America and the little room the boy shared with his twin brother, the brazen idiot loneliness, wailing and clutching at his clothes when he came in, putting its hands in his pockets, greedy for whatever nothing it could find, biting his forearms if he tried to stroke its cheek.
He left his family to the river that day; he did not have the strength to search for the grace of their bodies as it wandered off, he did not have the courage to find them and look into their open eyes. And if his love climbed out somewhere downstream, the shoe of a baby sister, its mouth broken by mud, he looked beyond it to the red pines as he lived daily onward and did not stoop to pick it up, so that it followed him at a distance wherever he could not go.
The trees give up, set free, finally, the beautiful light, what choice do they have? Their branches let in the wind like any cage in its cruelty. The winter will come, though it is always so hard to believe. Scaff and his daughter enter the drive-thru, big Tonya, serene and massive in the lead, with little Scaff intense beside her, missing only the tiny bellman’s uniform with its golden braid, with its flat red cap. Scaff tries a follow-up to the peppermint. An inspirational message. His fingers fly over the scrap of paper: You must hold on tight. You must never give up. Please. It’s all he has time for as Tonya retrieves the container from the pneumatic tube to put her check inside. She looks over just at the wrong moment, sees him still writing, assumes the note is for her.
As she has done a thousand times, she reaches over and takes the paper from him to see what it is he wants. A styptic pencil, perhaps. A boiled egg for dinner. She blushes with surprise as she reads and the Mara grasses tremble ever so slightly as a hungry snake is thwarted somehow and turns back into its own coming. Is it possible? Can he have seen her sadness, after all? She turns her head away from him, chin trembling like the soft mud at the edge of the water in spring. The Chinese boy looks down to scatter the birds from his sight (they are so insistent now), then takes another customer.
“I – I will, Papa,” she says. “I mean, I won’t.” So simply, she takes the grail into her hands. Heart of an elephant, this woman. Scaff looks agitated, but less stern than usual, surprised himself. Distractedly, his eyes still fierce, he smiles a stern little monkey smile, meant somehow to be reassuring, and, wonder of wonders, it actually is. Hesitantly, shyly, almost, Scaff puts his pale monkey hand on the high gray boulder that is his only child and pats lightly, two times, then turns to fiddle with his seatbelt, already fastened correctly. Tonya looks out the windshield over the plains of the Serengeti, the wind blowing her giant ears back like lilies as she moves along. She must cross the Mara after the sun sets. This is all her life. “I promise,” she says, putting each foot down so carefully, walking on a road of crocodiles over the twilight.
Scaff is afraid for the boy, a one-man autumn, letting everything go. Scaff can see it in his posture, the way his books have molted into cigarettes, the lack of fight in him when the wind turns against the swing. Though he does not know it, there is only one thing holding him now. There is only Scaff in his little chair, balanced on Tonya’s broad back. In some Africa, the stars are everywhere, so close you can taste them on your lips, but she does not know there is a land of others just like her where the wind could explain to her how she could be free. Jambo, rafiki. Unatoka wapi? Hello, friend. Where are you from? This greeting starts toward her on its own sometimes, but is stopped in darkness somewhere along the way, who knows how, her loneliness swelling what contains it so that it cannot move forward or backward, like love, still alive, grown huge in a snake’s cold belly. She brushes crumbs from the tiny kitchen counter, hits her elbow on the low door frame as she clumps slowly off to bed. The escarpment is aflame with light. Oloololo.
Scaff is usually asleep by now, down in a little ball of flannel, his arms and legs a few bent twigs protruding. But tonight he is agitated. Tonight he is on fire with eighty-three years’ worth of human feeling, and he is sitting up straight under the strain of it, is sitting up as high as he can in his chair, staring out the front window at the yellow lights of the drive-thru, his wasted life a moto (a hot object) he tosses from hand to hand, but cannot hold. The serviceberry vibrates in the wind.
And then suddenly they are there, bad intentions swirling like bats from the cavern of how he never cared, swooping and diving now on the Chinese boy, who has his hands up to his face, the river in darkness, the bare trees full of black birds gone completely silent, as if they aren’t even there, then, as one, streaming all together out of the world. But Scaff catches their black tail feathers in his fingers, drags them back with both hands, no!, as he feels himself lifted from his chair. He tries to call out (hatari!), but he cannot speak. By habit, he starts to scribble on his message board, but Tonya the Elephant Girl is far up the stairs, and fast asleep.
Under the yellow lights, the Chinese boy is pushing a box into place. He is climbing up in clarity, the world ambling off through the darkness, moving away from him. Behind him the man, the woman, the little child are trying so hard to climb up the riverbank, they are begging the mud and the slimmest of grasses for help, but the Chinese boy will not turn to look at them and their knees slip down and the water closes over their grief.
Scaff screams without a sound, his message hurtling upward in urgency, only to stop halfway up the stairs and slide back down. His heart is bursting as he sees the necklace. The hyenas have brought a white necklace for a present and are putting it around the neck of the beautiful, far-off-eyed Chinese boy, proudly and carefully, as if he is their bride. They are using his own hands.
The lion puts its paws up on Scaff’s chest and holds him. He looks wildly around his little chair with the rubber wheels, looks for anything at all. And then he remembers. The African Queen has prepared him! He grabs the one blue walkie-talkie off the nightstand and jabs the button over and over. A little alarm goes off in front of him, and he can hear its counterpart upstairs like an owl answering from a nearby tree. Nisaidia! (Help!)
The Elephant Girl comes out of her sleep in a roar, her heart lurching and skidding. Papa! She stamps down the stairs of the tiny house, her feet so big they hang over each step and almost trip her, the little purple birds on her pajamas swollen and pulsating. Papa! She sees Scaff by the window, his face frozen in horror, both hands pointing toward the terrible dream he cannot stop the world from having. From the serviceberry a face in terror looks back into his.
The Elephant Girl follows his gaze, after all these years sees exactly what he sees, as he sees it. And then she goes roaring out into the night, she doesn’t stop to think, and an enraged elephant is a terrible sight to see, Scaff up on his hands on the arms of his chair, the whole golden plateau of the Masai Mara stretched out before him. He hangs from the moon by one finger, trying to see it all, whatever he once was moving off into the night on its own, so small and stiff-legged. Love looks on in pity, silent now that it has finally had its say.
She crosses the road and the field in seconds, a curtain of love sweeping across the darkness straight toward the Chinese boy who was so certain any more that he had no one at all. It is the great migration of herds across the vastness of the Serengeti plain, the zebras and wildebeests, gazelles and elephants, swarming over the grass with their very bodies toward something they cannot name but must do, toward their own survival and the way the water will taste on their lips when they finally come to it, to the way the wind will blow over their backs, and something – the singing of the grass, the angle of the sun, the hard taps of a tickbird over their neck bones – will mean they can live. It is their own darkness over the plain that will link the horizons together, light and light. Do you see how death, for a while, is crushed beneath so many hooves, so many gray and wrinkled pounds? So many hearts headed off in the same direction, how can it ever be? Even the stars do not know.
And then in only seconds, the lawn still quaking from the approach, she reaches them, trumpeting and swinging her trunk wildly every which way, her shadow over them enormous. And the brutal ones, stunned by the strangeness of her arrival, the moon obscured entirely by her bulk, let go of the Chinese boy just like that, and the circle of hyenas around him breaks apart and wheels away, their laughter blowing off like dust, leaving the cornfield whispering of the brown lion’s disappearance, the slinking away of the shadows. And then the Chinese boy himself, his whole body and all he thinks about and everything he hopes for, the way the whole world turns slowly around him as he sits in the swing, so lonely and so loved, though he does not know, careers into the darkness.
But Tonya is there to receive this time. She takes out of the blackness as it moves so quickly toward her the little striped candy of this one chance and puts it in her mouth. I will. I mean, I won’t. I promise, Papa. She catches the Chinese boy in her arms, as he starts to shoot through them, like a tunnel down to the bottom of the river, a little skier smacking straight into Kilimanjaro, sure to die. But the mountain is not made of stone and ice as some might think. And the skier hits hard against only a wide expanse of human flesh and the reverberation of an oddly beating heart and is saved. And Tonya the Elephant Girl goes up on her toes on her stool of blue and red with the golden trimmings and does the most wonderful trick imaginable, a trick she has been doing forever for Scaff, but which he has never noticed. The trick called holding up the world. And then she is balancing the Chinese boy on her trunk, light as a feather, light as a human breath. And she can see across the dark field, across the road, her Papa’s face like a monkey’s in the window of their house, and yes, he has seen the trick finally. He is clapping his hands in joy over it; he is swinging by his tail around the room. He is ringing and ringing the little bell of happiness.
And then Scaff sees the dilemma. She can hold the boy up, but she can’t take off the necklace. She could loosen the necklace, but the boy would hurtle alone into darkness. The trick does not encompass both acts. And so, as good as she is, his daughter, as much of a Colossus as his Tonya is proving herself to be under the yellow lights of the drive-thru, it is up to Scaff now. It is time, says love, after eighty-three years, now putting its hand on Scaff’s, so warm he jumps. And in his weeping and his fear and his feelings of devotion so intense that he cannot move, Scaff knows what to do, for Tonya is helping him. She has prepared him long ago, just for this night. Just push this button, they will be here in minutes, Papa. And Scaff’s crooked little good-for-nothing fingers, stiff from their withholding everything so long, so long, bear down on the button, and the cry for help goes out through the darkness and someone opens the container immediately and they come shooting right back through the night on the stream of light that is human love, through the tall black grass, never still in its yearning. The serviceberry stays motionless, a being holding its breath.
Scaff rolls out on the porch, tiny sallow-faced monkey in flannel, to point them where to go, and they see in yellow light an Elephant Woman raising a Chinese boy in her trunk above the river of hurt that has come flowing toward him on this night. Scaff has never seen anything so beautiful as this. His heart is fractured in a million pieces, the whole field glittering with grief, rustling where the lion moves off through the dried cornstalks, dragging his helpless life.
And then in seconds everything comes down, the boy and Tonya like some temporary installation as the circus moves on, and the boy funneled away to the hospital right up the road. And Tonya’s odd heart goes on beating, the circus drum now inside her chest somehow and the drummer drunk again on so much sadness, the leaves of Ohio saying his name against a window open since the day he left. She shuffles back across the road toward the house lit with Scaff’s tardy love, a dusty candle flickering in the cup of his need. She goes back to her own loneliness that no one can see like a vast, grass-filled plain with its herd of one, goes back dragging her stool that feels so heavy now. She steps into the cage and closes the door with her own trunk, as she has been taught to do.
When she comes through the door, she sees Scaff writing on his message board. Thank you. Thank you. Asante sana. As if she is a surgeon who has saved the most important person in the world to him. She is amazed, her heart calming down a little, and turns to look down into his face. Papa. And then, through the darkness, so sudden in its arrival, after forty-six short years, though the man’s heart is too small to contain it and the plain of loneliness too wide for the daughter to be found, despite the lions and the crocodiles so hungry, and the buzzards that follow like the first sadness wherever they go, still it comes for them. Still love comes, though no one can say how he got there and even after so much time they are not prepared, embarrassed as they are, looking down so intently at nothing. Though all they know to do is to have a cup of tea in silence and look out over the empty drive-thru. Though they cannot stay long like this, but wander off from the waterhole toward dawn, the same world before them.
And you may think that the Chinese boy would be so grateful he would become one of the family, tatu (three), and move right into the little house in the hill where such love has been waiting for him all along, like a set of beautiful clothes that fit perfectly, all laid out on the bed. And you may even picture them at the dinner table together: Scaff passing the wali (rice) and the kuku (chicken), Tonya the Elephant Girl bringing more water for the Chinese boy, who is smiling as he begins to tell them all he has read today and how it has moved him, as he tries one of the sweet, bitter stars (Nina njaa!) from the plateful set before him.
But this is life we are talking of, and what happens at the end of the migration is only a retracing, after all, is only a massive turning around to go back, and so the Chinese boy, though he is partly – yes, only partly – glad not to be dead, is mortified by the way in which he was saved, cannot agree to it though it is already over. He remembers being scooped up out of his tank, held forever where he could not breathe. He swims around that every day and cannot break out of the tiny current of it. The flesh on the woman’s arms engulfing him. The little man’s burning eyes. How their love shamed him in its strange clothing, with its hair all up on end so that the world wanted only to laugh.
And so one day soon after, he takes his books under his arm and rides away on the bus to the world that has not read the paper, gets off where it looks straight into his eyes and does not know him, to become, of all things, a writer. And here you would think he might immortalize his two friends who watched over him so well from their cramped perch above the mega store, though so often the light across the Mara burned their eyes. But for now, he is too ashamed to think of them. His hands are flown too far away from his heart to write the story. His life is the birds over his head, one darkness massing above him at evening, the scraps wafting in loneliness from a hundred different trees. The serviceberry adjusts and adjusts again to the slight weight in its arms.
And Tonya the Elephant Girl, who might have lain down and died that night, her oddly booming heart saying enough, a sacrifice to the yellow light, does not do it. She simply lumbers home again and climbs from the golden valley up the stairs too small for her feet, her toes gripping tightly, her heels on nothing but air. In a way, she does become rich for what she has done, as her Papa has thanked her and she has heard. And she does become famous, in a way. After the incident, the local paper carries this headline, repeated in slightly varying forms around the state: 400 Pound Woman Saves Boy. The editor led with the 400 pounds, he could not resist, and the saving part shrank down to a nubbin as a consequence. But she would change nothing about that night, nothing at all. She does not begrudge the stars a single thing, they themselves would tell you if they could.
What will happen now anyone can guess. The life that Scaff and Tonya have on the hill will continue to erode, a day here, a lifetime there, a clod of dirt hitting the sidewalk and bouncing away, until the death of one or the other of them staves the hillside in for good. The other will lumber or wheel along as best he can for a while and then follow. The house is already headed downhill. Perhaps the day it takes the Thrill Ride to the curb will be the day the Chinese boy takes up his pen and begins to write. Or perhaps he will only walk along the same water, watching the same birds as they go, not knowing, still, how he belonged to someone once, how tenderly the cornfield meant to hold him in its dying arms. Maybe he will go on waiting – it takes forever sometimes. The little tree can show him.
But perhaps an elephant, a wild elephant moving across a plateau of brightness, far out on the edge of what the boy can feel, and the tickbird riding lightly on its head, parting the whole sky so bravely with its small, brittle wings, will, just for a moment, just in one patch of light at sunset, enter the heart (for where else can they go?) of a Chinese boy turning in a swing, his feet writing nothing in the dust. A boy who was cherished, though he did not know, and will not be remembered forever. A boy impatient for the birds to tell him what they saw: love as it came slowly along the riverbank, shoes caked with mud, its arms full of light –
So that the woman comes to find him, arrives somehow with her long hair following after her like the wings of black birds flying homeward, negotiating his future with the wind along the river, paying the long ransom with her dark eyes and her calm hands, exchanging all she has, her life alone, for his. So that one night in spring he comes hesitantly across the sighing bridge of her body to safety, leaving the old days and who he was then, so delicately made and unsure, so hastily sketched in, behind the smooth bars of glass: the black curve of a cheekbone, hands unable to reach the light. And love, thinking he is safe now, finally, love, who makes mistakes sometimes, even after so much experience of humankind, goes hobbling away, goes hurrying onward into the cooling afternoon, he has so much to do, and he is so old now, as old as the world.
But the Chinese boy is still in danger – if Scaff were alive, it would be so easy to see. But he is dead, a little puff of hope for the end to be different from the rest, swirling down slowly for a while, then hitting the ground, dispersing again into the brilliant light of another life. The danger now is subtle, is small and unaccounted for, the way a man can look at his wife and see her unhappiness, an unhappiness he might turn to dust so easily between his first two fingers and his slender thumb, if he wished. But instead he looks past her, out the window, and yearns for the river’s body he has never held, that has never held him, and lets his wife go so quietly up the stairs she almost disappears into the twilit carpet. He feels her footsteps like his heartbeat going away, but he does not move. The serviceberry sighs so sadly.
And then the child is born to them, flies straight into their hours with his arms outstretched just as he is supposed to do, and everything changes and nothing does, and they are happy for a good part of each day and they are only sometimes alone. But the Chinese boy has no past at all, and though the woman looks for it all over the house and sometimes when he sleeps she sees it vanish in the window of his face, it is not to be found. He does not wish to speak of it, and after enough of that, she does not ask.
And so the boy, who has eyes like his mother’s, looks for it too, after a while, holds out his hands to be picked up by it, but never is, crawls on the floor, putting his tongue on everything he comes across, so close he can almost taste it, but never finding it. He says Dada! every afternoon when the Chinese boy arrives at the door, with such great joy, as if he has never seen him before, as if he could never have imagined anything so wonderful! But the Chinese boy is frightened of his son, of the way he calls the past into being in his small eyes, and though he lifts him up in happiness, there is always space between them, a separating light because the father has no before and so the son has no after. And things go on like this, sometimes for a lifetime, they can.
And then the baby catches a cold, no – the flu, no – they do not know what it is. A hundred thousand viruses out there, the young doctor says, and smiles and smiles in trying to be kind, like a hyena slowly and quietly tearing the legs off of language. It will either burn itself out, or – He does not finish and does not have to. The Chinese boy’s whole body shakes with sudden cold. His wife is perfectly still, like a beautiful statue crazing in every part, small cracks opening from within her, releasing the black birds that whirl and whirl around their heads. Take him home, they say. An instruction sheet. Nothing more to do now. Nothing more.
The Chinese boy holds the baby to his chest, as if his own heart has fled outside his body suddenly, like this. Crossing a small strip of green grass, suddenly the space of light between him and the child is absorbed into the darkness. Between them now is only energy, pure and black, that enters both beings freely as if there were no such thing in the world as a wall. Later in the night he lets his wife sleep a little while he keeps holding the boy, little hot coal of his life, of all their lives, the father’s arms curved perfectly to the small shape, his shoulders and wrists frozen in pain for he cannot dare to move.
“Dada, do you see them running?” the boy cries out. “Do you see them all?”
And the Chinese boy says, “Yes, I see. I see.”
And the birds keep trying to come into the room and the father shoos them off by closing his eyes so tightly. The baby is stiff-backed and burning hot, a smell of singed feathers in his father’s nose. And the wife reaches in with a cool sponge in her hand and her eyes catch her husband’s and they are the same person now in two incapable bodies. Nothing comes between them this time, their one heart hoarding the baby’s small shrieks, strangely like delight, like amazement: “Oloololo!” Ears in the serviceberry strain to hear.
He is standing deep in the river with a book, the one book of everything he ever did not understand, clasped hard against his chest and the sycamore yearning so far toward the one it loves that the whole world is almost pulled down with it, and the empty cornfield calling and calling his name. And then he looks up over the small head of all his hope and love and sees them again, after so many years, the behemoth woman and the fierce-eyed little monkey man who shamed him once with their love, what did they mean by it? Why was he saved? Their faces are so beautiful, he wants to laugh, to cry out. Why did he not see? What could they have meant but this? The birds fill the field before him, it is black with them suddenly, completely, and the dark waters as if they had his hands to use, finally, wash over the fever with their cold, cold grief. The baby relaxes against him, still alive! Alive! The white necklace, worn and cracked now, so tight around his neck, breaks apart and his small, regular breathing fills the world. The hyenas slink away into the cornstalks, into the tall grass bright with fear. The lion climbs the sycamore to sleep, still hungry. And he is trying to touch them, but they are fading, shimmering like the oldest light in the world, and blending into this day as it is, as it must be, and then they are gone, and he cries out NO!, for the pain is so terrible that he must bring them back. He must find them somehow. He commands and he pleads, calls out to the tree to help him, but the tree loves only the water and they do not return. While he is still holding his son, and with his wife’s hands so lightly on his back as if they are his own wings budding, the father, though he is standing still, starts running, runs and runs, far back through his own life as if he is following a white string, so far into an old, old light that kept trying to show him his life. His wife and son with him now, he runs until he comes to the little blue house on the hill, gone for years and yet still waiting there. And though there is no blue house to be found anymore – only a chain drugstore all orange and silver, though he does not know it – the Chinese man cannot stop. He runs up the stairs anyway, runs three at a time.
“I’m here! I’m here!” he screams. He bangs on the door with both hands. He looks in every window, sees in each one his own face weeping, and his own eyes, the eyes of his father looking up at him on the hillside, safe in the sunlight, so afraid and wild with love, and behind him the empty river, and in his hand the baby’s shoe.
In the top of the serviceberry tree, bulldozed years back on a bright blue day, is the dragon, so thin now and old he is almost clear, so tired and ready, finally, to become a part of the sky. Though he wishes for it, he has no way to tell the Chinese man how he remembers Scaff, his lonely face looking out into the light, his hands, so stiff and awkward in their mission, holding tightly to the string.

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Ann Stapleton is a freelance writer in Logan, Ohio. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.