Green Shadows, White Whales

I felt a flask knock my fingers. I poured its contents into my boilers to let the steam up my flues.

“It’s a lovely rain,” I said.

“The man’s mad.” Finn drank after Mike, a shadow among shadows.

I squinted about. I had an impression of midnight sea upon which men like little boats passed on the murmurous tides, heads down, muttering, in twos and threes.

Good God, what’s it all mean? I asked myself, incredibly curious now.

“Wait!” whispered Heeber. “This is it!”

What did I expect? Perhaps some scene like those old movies where innocent sailing ships suddenly flap down their cabin walls and guns appear like magic to fire on the foe. Or a farmhouse falls apart like a cereal box, Long Tom rears up to blast a projectile five hundred miles to crack Paris. So here, I thought, will these stones spill away, that house open wide, rosy lights flash on, so that from a monstrous cannon ten dozen pink women, not dwarf Irish but willowy French, will be shot out and down into the waving arms of this grateful multitude?

The lights came on.

I blinked.

For there was the entire unholy thing, laid out for me in the drizzle.

The lights flickered. The men quickened.

A mechanical rabbit popped out of a little box at the far end of the stony yard and ran.

Eight dogs, let free from gates, yelping, ran after in a great circle. There was not one yell or a murmur from the crowd of men. Their heads turned slowly, watching. The rain rained down on the half-lit scene. The rain fell on tweed caps and thin cloth coats. The rain dripped off thick eyebrows and sharp noses. The rain hammered hunched shoulders. The rabbit ran. The dogs loped. The rabbit popped into its electric kennel. The dogs collided, yiping. The lights went out.

In the dark I turned to stare at Heeber Finn, stunned.

“Now!” he shouted. “Place your bets!”

We were back in Kilcock, speeding, at ten o’clock.

The rain was still raining, like an ocean smashing the road with titanic fists, as we drew up in a great tidal spray before the pub.

“Well, now!” said Heeber Finn, looking not at us but at the windshield wiper palpitating before us. “Well!”

Mike and I had bet on five races and had lost, between us, two or three pounds.

“I won,” Finn said, “and some of it I put down in your names, both of you. That last race, I swear to God, won for all of us. Let me pay!”

“It’s all right, Heeber,” I said, my numb lips moving.

Finn pressed two shillings into my hand. I didn’t fight him. “That’s better!” he said. “Now, one last drink on me!”

Mike drove me back to Dublin.

Wringing out his cap in the hotel lobby he looked at me and said, “It was a wild Irish night for sure!”

“A wild night,” I said.

I hated to go up to my room. So I sat for another hour in the reading lounge of the damp hotel and took the traveler’s privilege, a glass and a bottle provided by the dazed hall porter. I sat alone listening to the rain and the rain on the cold hotel roof, thinking of Ahab’s coffin-bed waiting for me up there under the drumbeat weather. I thought of the only warm thing in the hotel, in the town, in all the land of Eire this night, the script in my typewriter with its sun of the South Pacific, its hot winds blowing the Pequod toward its doom, but along the way fiery sands and its women with dark charcoal-burning eyes.

And I thought of the darkness beyond the city, the lights flashing, the electric rabbit running, the dogs yiping, the rabbit gone, the lights out, and the rain flailing the dank shoulders and soaked caps and ice-watering the noses and seeping through the sheep-smelling tweeds.

Going upstairs, I glanced out a streaming window. There, on the street, riding by under a lamp, was a man on a bike. He was terribly drunk. The bike weaved back and forth across the bricks, as the man vomited. He did not stop the bike to do this. He kept pumping unsteadily, blearily, as he threw up. I watched him go off in the dark rain.

Then I groped up to find and die in my room.

Chapter 7 (#ulink_a946ae65-41c9-5f5c-b192-041a508bc20f)

On Grafton Street just halfway between The Four Provinces pub and the cinema stood the best, or so John said, Gentleman Riders to Hound emporium in all Dublin, if not Ireland, and perhaps one half of Bond Street in London.

It was Tyson’s, and to speak the name was to see the front windows with their hacking coats and foulards and pale yellow silk shirts and velvet hunting caps and twill pants and shining boots. If you stood there long enough you could hear the horses fribbling their lips and snorting their laughter and twitching their skin to jerk the flies off, and you could hear the hounds whining and barking and running in happy circles (dogs are always happy and thus their smiles, unless they are miserable because their master crossed his eyes at them); but as I say, if you stood there long enough waiting for someone to hand you the reins, the owner of the shop, seeing you as one of the blindfolded hypnotics wandered out of Huston’s Barn, might come out and lead-kindly-light your way into the smell of leather and boot cream and wool; and buckle on your new trenchcoat for you and fit on a tweed cap abristle for a thousand rains within the month and measure your pigfoot and wonder how in hell to shove it into a boot and all the while around you Anglo-Irish gents being similarly whisper-murmured at by lilting tongues; and the weather turned bad outside within thirty seconds after you set foot within, that you linger and buy more than your intent.

Where was I? Oh, yes. I stood out in front of Tyson’s on three separate nights.

Looking at the wax model, as tall as Huston and as strideful and arrogant in all his Kilcock Hunt finery, I thought: How long before I dress like that?

“How do I look, John?” I cried, three days later.

I spun about on the front steps of Courtown House smelling of wool, boot leather, and silk.

John stared at my tweed cap and twill pants.

“I’ll be goddamned,” he gasped.

Chapter 8 (#ulink_533adc1d-a229-5b05-b86f-b73982eed0f8)

“You know anything about hypnotism, kid?”

“Some,” I said.

“Ever been hypnotized?”

“Once,” I said.

We were sitting by the fire after midnight with a bottle of Scotch now half empty between us. I hated Scotch, but since John relished it, I drank.

“Well, you haven’t been in the hands of a real pro,” said John, languidly, sipping at his drink.

“Which means you,” I said.

John nodded. “That’s it. I’m the best. You want to go under, son? I’ll put you there.”

“I had my teeth filled that one time, my dentist, a hypnodontist, he—”

“To hell with your teeth, H.G.” H.G. was for H.G. Wells, the author of Things to Come, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man. “It’s not what comes out in teeth, it’s what goes on in your head. Swallow your drink and give me your paw.”

I swallowed my drink and held out my hands. John grabbed them.