Lisa Graley
Excerpt from “Larry and the Pelican”
When
a pelican followed Larry Grass home from Florida to Alum Creek, West Virginia,
he naturally took it as the sign of a calling—but from whom or for what, he did
not know.
"Why couldn't it have been a
girl?" his father kept saying and winking at the neighbors. "Or a
mermaid?"
And maybe there were times that summer when
Larry did imagine a girl—not a mermaid—but a girl with her pale, blue-veined
ankles bound tight with fishing wire beckoning to him for help. He'd go to
sleep while she floated farther and farther away, nearer to the horizon than to
the shore where he stood. But when he awoke, it was the bird that demanded his
attention.
On the way home from Orlando, his parents
had joked about it. At the rest stop outside of Macon, Georgia, and in the
parking lot of McDonald's near Fancy Gap, Virginia, they all saw a big bird
circling. His mother and father assumed it was a local hawk or buzzard sailing,
but they teased him, nonetheless, because they didn't know what else to say to
him. They told him his precious pelican was following him home—and wouldn't
that make him happy? Of course, even in the mountains, Larry knew it was the
pelican. He recognized, with some degree of amazement, the powerful rhythm of
her wings in flight. And it was a she.
The lifeguard had told him so.
When they hit I-77 and drove the stretch
from Beckley to Charleston, there were no more sightings of the big bird. And
at the Oakwood exit, when they finally pulled off the interstate, there was no
sign of her either. Larry was both pleased—and disappointed. If she flew so far
inland from the coast, she might not ever find her way home again.
Nevertheless, Larry couldn't help but feel slighted when she did not appear. On
the Orlando sands, he had felt singled out, as if handed a mission, and he had
performed his duties well. He wanted her to follow him home so the neighbors
could witness, so they would see him revealed in his glory.
That first night home, Larry slept deeply.
They'd driven straight through in one day so he'd have a day off before going
back to work at the garage. Next morning, they unpacked the car, drained all
the water out of their new ice chest, washed several loads of salty laundry and
hung their clothes on the lines—even though Larry was sure Ab Dunlap would be
peeking through his blinds at all the new underwear Larry's mother had ordered
them for the trip. There was no sign of Pearl—what Larry's mother had named the
bird because of her dull gray color. In the car, when she teased him, she had
chanted: "Pearl's chasin' Larry. Pearl's gonna catch him."
On the second morning his mother called him
from sleep: "Larry. Larry. Come quick. You'll never believe who's in your
swimming pool."
He knew. How could he not know?
"Guess we'll be going fishing later
this evening," his father said, pleased.
Larry slid into his boxers and scrambled to
the back door. Pearl was paddling slowly in his above-ground, three-foot pool.
She preened, brushed her golden beak against her long, gray, ruffled wing,
dunked her head in and brought up a bucketful of water. She tipped her head and
let the water slide down her slender neck and onto her back. She shook herself
gracefully. Larry knew this performance was for him.
On the beach, right up next to her, Larry
had an idea of her size, but here in his swimming pool, she loomed as large as
one of those prehistoric birds the mountains had not nested for a millennium or
more. Already a crowd had gathered.
Larry stepped out the door onto the
cinderblock steps, a wide smile spreading across his face.
"Get your pants on, Larry," his
mother called behind him. "This ain't Florida."
***
When twelve o'clock came, Larry scrubbed
the grease off his hands and walked to the library. Questioned by the fellows
at work, he had decided he needed to know more about pelicans. He walked in the
door and was greeted by Mrs. Kessler, the librarian, whom he'd not seen since
the tenth grade library tour six years ago—though he now remembered he had,
probably for a year or more after that, imagined rescuing her from certain
dragon fire and the slimy clutches of Jabba the Hut. She had changed little,
and Larry felt a wave of heat in his face when he saw her.
"I bet I know why you're here, Larry
Grass," she said, pointing to a stack of books on her desk. "I've
been reading up, too," she said. "I thought you might come by."
Larry shrugged. "Well, I don't know
how you found out so fast."
"Librarians always hear things,"
she said. "You can keep these for two weeks. I made you up a card and
everything."
He shrugged again. "Now that she's
here, I want to do my best to take care of her," he said.
"Naturally," Mrs. Kessler agreed.
***
It was several days before the first
reporter showed up. He was a local fellow who'd been called by one of the
neighbors. Larry told his story straight out—how they'd gone to the beach, done
the usual things—walked on the sand, watched the waves and shrimp boats, bobbed
on rafts in the ocean. Then one morning, picking up seashells, Larry had come
across the pelican. First he thought she was dead, the way she was twisted up
on shore, but she flipped herself over with one enormous wing, and Larry saw
the cause of her trouble. Gently he approached her and began loosening the
strands of fishing line wrapped around the bird's legs. It was painstaking
work, and he was at it hours in the blistering sun before the lifeguard came
along and put an umbrella over him and the bird. The lifeguard offered a hand,
but Larry said he was doing just fine alone.
Beachcombers paused along the way and
watched him. Some took photographs. The attention made Larry blush. He'd done
what any decent man would do—and yet, inside, he knew it was a special thing.
Sometimes when the tide of his thoughts ran this way, another voice countered:
"What else did you have to do anyway? You were bored stiff." He did
not tell the reporter this. But he couldn't help thinking it. He'd been at the
beach with his parents, for heaven's sakes. What else could he do, a man his age? Of course, they had encouraged him to
run off, to have a good time.
"Doing what?" he had asked them.
They shrugged their shoulders. If he didn't
know, they couldn't tell him. But there was plenty going on in the world, his
father said. Didn't he know it?
It was easy for his father to say, Larry
figured. He'd already made his way in the world, was already at where he was going. And here was he,
Larry, without a roadmap or signpost, without a clue of how he'd spend the next
of his fifty years, if he lived so long. One thing he was sure of—he wanted no
misstep. He would not in a moment of blind passion do something rash that would
limit his future choices. No, he must bide his time, see what it came to him to
do. What did his father know about it? It'd been easy for him. But for Larry,
it would be different.
The next week Larry saw himself in the
windows of the newspaper boxes in town—front page, above the fold—he was
cradling Pearl: "Birds of a Feather Flock Together." The AP bought
the story.
Some time later, the second reporter showed
up—from New York. Said she wanted to do a human interest piece on him and the
pelican for a magazine called CONNEXION. Would he mind if she followed him
around a few days? If she wanted, Larry said, but he couldn't take off work.
She brought with her a photographer, a greasy sort with crumbs in his beard.
Larry's father narrowed his eyes each time he saw the photographer, but his
face brightened when the reporter was around.
"First came the pelican," his
father said to the neighbors, "and then came the girl. Larry knows what
he's after and how he's gonna get it."
Madeline Bennett didn't ask Larry many
questions though she was always writing something in her tablet. That bothered
him. He didn't have a clue what she was going to say in her article. People
stared when she followed him into Earl's Diner, sat across from him, and
ordered only water—not ice water even—but lukewarm water from the tap. Larry
shrugged his shoulders at Earl, and Earl understood. At the end of the meal,
the photographer, who had also been silent, urged Larry to fetch the pelican to
Earl's for a photograph. Larry didn't want to be late for work, so he promised,
if Earl was in agreement, to bring her for dinner.
That evening, Larry and the pelican were
made to sit with a family just passing through—to "evoke" a community
feeling. Larry was uncomfortable though the children were appropriately amazed
at the pelican. The youngest kept reaching to touch the pelican's bucket. Each
time the photographer told him to sit still. He had finished a roll of film and
was reloading his camera when the pelican broke free from Larry's grasp and
perched on the edge of a table occupied by Larry's high school geometry
teacher. There, Pearl squirted a sudden stream of ooze reminding Larry of clean
motor oil. He looked at Earl, and Earl winced. The reporter hastily scribbled
something in her tablet, and Larry blushed. Of course, clouds were bound to
shadow his day in the sun. That went without saying. But in the end,
everyone—even his geometry teacher—was a good sport.
At home, adjustments were made. After the
first night in a local hotel, Madeline Bennett complained so much about her
lodgings that Larry felt obligated to invite her home with him. There wasn't a
spare room in their mobile home, but Larry offered her his bed and took the
couch. He wondered what she was up to in there—what she would discern from
looking at his Spider Man and Star Wars and Lone Ranger posters, his dinosaur
collection. He kept a sharp eye lest she should leave her tablet in sight. He
was itching to know what she'd written about him.
When his father got up in the mornings and saw Larry on the couch, he smiled knowingly, even winked, much to Larry's embarrassment, and said to him, "You made it back out here just in time for your mother to get up, eh?" Larry dodged him.
The reporter was with them four days and
three nights. At first, Larry's mother didn't know what to cook for her—and
even called up Mrs. Hensley to learn some of the new recipes making it around
the potluck dinner scene. But soon enough, after the Southwestern Tomato
Dumplings, the Bostonian Chicken Pot Pie, the Shepherd's De-Lucke's Bean Stew,
and the Crunchy Slaw, they understood that Madeline Bennett intended to skip
meals. Continually she sipped her lukewarm water, and occasionally nibbled on
something called Oriental Trail Mix.
"That's for the birds," Larry's
father told her. "Try it out on Pearl—or let Larry. A girl like you don't
need to jeopardize her pretty little fingers feeding some overgrown duck."
When her time was up, Madeline Bennet stood
one more time beside Larry's swimming pool and watched the pelican preen.
"Do you think the pelican's
lonely?" she asked him finally. "Without any—you know—other birds
around?"
The taxi idled in the driveway beside the
Williams's trailer.
"They's birds," Larry told her.
"Blue jays and mocking birds. Hawks and buzzards and crows. Robins and
cardinals. Goldfinches and bluebirds. Just not pelicans."
"That's what I mean," she said.
"Hang it," Larry said. "I
don't know if she's lonely. Ask her yourself."
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