Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“‘Excellent,’ Collins said.

“‘Bully,’ I said. ‘Why were they giggling?’

“‘Oh well,’ Sansoni said patiently, ‘they expect that you two stand to lose our little contest.’

“It was fantastic. Every few minutes now we passed great clusters of Japanese troops. When our headlights picked them up they would simply turn and smile and wave us on. Soon we were in a forest, squeezing the jeep between the trees. Here and there we could see soldiers crawling along on their hands and knees. Collins was very excited. ‘It’s true,’ he said hoarsely, ‘they haven’t found it yet.’ By now it was almost impossible to drive. The crawling soldiers took up so much of the space between the trees that there was no longer any clearance.

“I honked the horn to make them move. ‘ Don’t do that again,’ Sansoni said fiercely. ‘We’re almost there. Do you want to madden it? Lieutenant, please do something about this man of yours.’

“‘He’s right, Sergeant. Calm down.’

“‘Further,’ Sansoni said, ‘just a little further.’ We drove another half-mile or so. ‘Now,’ Sansoni said.

“‘Lieutenant?’

“‘Do what he says. Sergeant. Stop here.’

“The three of us got out. We had passed all the Japanese soldiers and were alone in the forest. We walked through the woods for a while, and finally came to a bowl-shaped clearing, perhaps two hundred feet across. Though it was very dark — there was no moon — and I’d never seen the place before, there was something familiar about it. Then I realized that it was the landscape of many of the pictures in the museum. Collins was having the same thoughts. ‘The glass case,’ he said. ‘The environment they built for the reconstructed dodo. That was like this place.’

“‘Shh,’ Sansoni said. ‘Now it is necessary that we do not talk.’

“The grass was strange, leathery, and there was a fierce smell to the ground. It was an odor neither ripe nor rotten, life nor death. It was as if we smelled the molecules themselves, things outside time and form. I turned to see if there were any Japanese behind us, and when I looked back again I had lost the Jap. I moved toward the lieutenant to tell him, but he shushed me before I could speak and pointed to Sansoni. He was down on his hands and knees in the dark. Collins and I both halted. Then Sansoni suddenly began to croon strange songs in a high soft voice. I knew they were Shobuta’s thirteenth-century carols.

“‘Lieutenant,’ I whispered.

“‘What is it?’ The lieutenant was whispering also.

“‘He’s seen the dodo.’

“‘We know that.’

“‘He’s an ornithologist.’

“‘We know that.’

“‘Even if he only saw it through field glasses—’

“‘What?’

“‘ … he’d have made … observations.’

“‘Yes. What of it?’

“‘He knows its lairs, its habits.’

“‘Yes, we know that.’

“‘He can do its signals.’ I shuddered.

“‘Will you be quiet?’

“‘He’ll find it.’

“The lieutenant shook me off, moved toward Sansoni, and as I watched, went down on his hands and knees. In the dark I lost them both. I was not alone, though; the Japanese had caught up with us and I could hear their creaking movement all around me. I sank down on my hands and knees. There we were, Americans and Japanese, crawling around in that queer grass, soundless as Indians. We could have been cats and birds observing some petty detail of a mechanical neutrality, a breach in nature like a child’s ‘time-out’ in a murderous game.

“A match flared suddenly in the darkness, its light rolling across the face of the Japanese who had been on the plane with me, the one who’d helped me with my seat. He grinned and blew out the match. Someone laughed. It sounded like Sansoni.

“‘Lieutenant?’ Perhaps they’ve already killed him, I thought. I stopped crawling and waited till I could no longer hear the soldiers. I leaned against a tree, but the bark was thorny and I moved back into the leathery grass. I rooted about in it and suddenly came on something soft. I laid my head down and closed my eyes, and something warm and feathery brushed my face. I didn’t have to see it to know it was the dodo bird; I’d invaded its nest. I felt the bird’s body stiffen and move backward. No, stay, I thought, I’m no hog. Then I grabbed its legs and pulled it to me for a hostage.

“In the dark, directionless, I traveled with the bird for hours. Several times we passed Japanese, but the bird was hidden under my shirt, next to my skin. As I crawled by the soldiers I made the exploratory pats of one searching for something under a bed. Over the old rough ground we went, a trade route of the extinct. I thought of dinosaurs and mammoths and the saber-toothed tiger, and here was I, Dick Gibson, with that other loser, the dodo. Back, I thought, cursing it, back to history, you. And felt its shape against my skin, its useless, resisting wing that whipped at me percussive as a terrorized heart. It scratched me, it pissed on me, and shit on me. I gagged, and my vomit covered the bird’s stench and saved me from the Japanese. When the sun comes up, I’ll be killed, I thought.

“Then I heard Sansoni’s voice. He was perhaps a hundred yards off, but I could hear him talking to Collins — or to me, perhaps, if Collins was already dead. ‘It’s useless in the dark,’ he was saying. ‘Most likely it’s asleep. We’ll have to wait and look for its nest in the morning. I’ll tell them.’ He spoke briefly in Japanese, and I heard the men laugh. For all I knew, he had told them to kill us. I froze where I was, and forgetting that the bird was mute, I reached inside my shirt and grabbed its beak. This only made it thrash the more. I think it bit me. Quietly as I could I removed the bird and set it down on the ground. ‘Go,’ I whispered to it, and shoved it away. I heard the soldiers taking off their packs, and after a while their heavy breathing as they slept.

“The bird wouldn’t leave me — don’t ask me why — so I sat with it in my lap and waited till morning, and all that night I could think of no plan.

“Just after dawn I heard the soldiers getting up and Sansoni organizing them, telling them what to look for. There was a heavy mist and I couldn’t see them very well. I examined my chest where the bird had bit me and thought of the dodo’s extinct germs working in my blood.

“Finally I stood up. The bird was in my arms. ‘The search is over,’ I shouted. ‘I have it. It’s mine.’

“A Japanese came out of the fog and smiled and called out to the others. I could hear the word go round the forest. They were about two hundred feet from me when Collins pushed through the vanguard. Though I had thought him dead, I was not surprised to see him. I was very detached about everything.

“‘You found it?’ he yelled.

“I held it up.

“‘They’ll take it. Run. Go on — get going.’

“‘They can’t shoot. You said so yourself.’

“‘ Run!’

“The Japanese were still coming toward me. They were only twenty-five yards away now.

“‘ They’re going to take the bird!’ Collins screamed.

“They were fifty feet off.

“‘Kill it,’ he yelled.

“‘What?’

“‘ Kill the damn thing. They mustn’t have it. Kill it!’

“‘ What good will that do?’

“‘That’s an order, Sergeant.’ Collins was pointing his pistol at me. ‘Kill it or I’ll kill you.’

“‘It bit me,’ I said lazily.

“‘ Kill it.’ The Japanese had stopped where they were. They were looking first at Collins, then at me. ‘Kill it, Goddamn you. Kill it!’