Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [163]
together, and as he cried out at the top, beginning the bottomless rush over those skimpy yellow supports, and up once mute against eternity's blue (oh, the stuff that has been done within this envelope of color, this subtle bag of life-giving gases!) while the Canadian hicks were rejoicing underneath with red faces, all the nubble-fingered rubes, we hugged each other, the bear and I, with something greater than terror and flew in those gilded cars. I shut my eyes in his wretched, time-abused fur. He held me in his arms and gave me comfort. And the great thing is that he didn't blame me. He had seen too much of life, and somewhere in his huge head he had worked it out that for creatures there is nothing that ever runs unmingled. Lily will have to sit up with me if it takes all night, I was thinking, while I tell her all about this. As for this kid resting against me, bound for Nevada with nothing but a Persian vocabulary--why, he was still trailing his cloud of glory. God knows, I dragged mine on as long as I could till it got dingy, mere tatters of gray fog. However, I always knew what it was. "Well, look at you two," said the hostess, meaning that the kid also was awake. Two smoothly gray eyes moved at me, greatly expanded into the whites--new to life altogether. They had that new luster. With it they had ancient power, too. You could never convince me that _this was for the first time.__ "We are going to land for a while," said the young woman. "The hell you say. Have we crept up on New York so soon? I told my wife to meet me in the afternoon." "No, it's Newfoundland, for fuel," she said. "It's getting on toward daylight. You can see that, can't you?" "Oh, I'm dying to breathe some of this cold stuff we've been flying through," I said. "After so many months in the Torrid Zone. You get what I mean?" "I guess you'll have an opportunity," said the girl. "Well, let me have a blanket for this child. I'll give him a breath of fresh air, too." We started to slope and to go in, at which time there was a piercing red from the side of the sun into the clouds near the sea's surface. It was only a flash, and next gray light returned, and cliffs in an ice armor met with the green movement of the water, and we entered the lower air, which lay white and dry under the gray of the sky. "I'm going to take a walk. Will you come with me?" I said to the kid. He answered me in Persian. "Well, it's okay," I said. I held out the blanket, and he stood on the seat and entered it. Wrapping him, I took him in my arms. The stewardess was going in to that invisible first-class passenger with coffee. "All set? Why, where's your coat?" she asked me. "That lion is all the baggage that I have," I said. "But that's all right. I'm country bred. I'm rugged." So we were let out, this kid and I, and I carried him down from the ship and over the frozen ground of almost eternal winter, drawing breaths so deep they shook me, pure happiness, while the cold smote me from all sides through the stiff Italian corduroy with its broad wales, and the hairs on my beard turned spiky as the moisture of my breath froze instantly. Slipping, I ran over the ice in those same suede shoes. The socks were rotting within and crumbled, as I had never got around to changing them. I told the kid, "Inhale. Your face is too white from your orphan's troubles. Breathe in this air, kid, and get a little color." I held him close to my chest. He didn't seem to be afraid that I would fall with him. While to me he was like medicine applied, and the air, too; it also was a remedy. Plus the happiness that I expected at Idlewild from meeting Lily. And the lion? He was in it, too. Laps and laps I galloped around the shining and riveted body of the plane, behind the fuel trucks. Dark faces were looking from within. The great beautiful propellers were still, all four of them. I guess I felt it was my turn now to move, and so went running--leaping, leaping, pounding, and tingling over the pure white lining of the gray Arctic silence.
The End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec,