Things Will Never Be the Same Read online

  * * *

  Alma and Annie Mae were the second and fifth of Daddy Gudger’s brood, born three years apart. They seemed to have hated each other from the very first time Alma looked into little Annie Mae’s crib. They were kids by Daddy Gudger’s second wife (his desperation had killed the first) and their father was already on his sixth career. He had been a lumberman, a stump preacher, a plowman-for-hire (until his mules broke out in farcy buds and died of the glanders), a freight hauler (until his horses died of overwork and the hardware store repossessed the wagon), a politician’s roadie (until the politician lost the election). When Alma and Annie Mae were born, he was failing as a sharecropper. Somehow Gudger had made it through the Depression of 1898 as a boy, and was too poor after that to notice more about economics than the price of Beech-Nut tobacco at the store.

  Alma and Annie Mae fought, and it helped none at all that Alma, being the oldest daughter, was both her mother and father’s darling. Annie Mae’s life was the usual unwanted poor-white-trash-child’s hell. She vowed early to run away, and recognized her ambition at thirteen.

  All this I learned this morning. Jolyn (Smith) Jimson was Annie Mae’s only friend in those days—from a family even poorer than the Gudgers. But somehow there was food, and an occasional odd job. And the dodos.

  “My family hated those old birds,” said the cultured Annie Mae Radwin, née Gudger, in the solarium. “He always swore he was going to get rid of them someday, but just never seemed to get around to it. I think there was more to it than that. But they were so much trouble. We always had to keep them penned up at night, and go check for their eggs. They wandered off to lay them, and forgot where they were. Sometimes no new ones were born at all in a year.

  “And they got so ugly. Once a year. I mean, terrible-looking, like they were going to die. All their feathers fell off, and they looked like they had mange or something. Then the whole front of their beaks fell off, or worse, hung halfway on for a week or two. They looked like big old naked pigeons. After that they’d lose weight, down to twenty or thirty pounds, before their new feathers grew back.

  “We were always having to kill foxes that got after them in the turkey house. That’s what we called their roost, the turkey house. And we found their eggs all sucked out by cats and dogs. They were so stupid we had to drive them into their roost at night. I don’t think they could have found it standing ten feet from it.”

  She looked at me.

  “I think much as my father hated them, they meant something to him. As long as he hung on to them, he knew he was as good as Granddaddy Gudger. You may not know it, but there was a certain amount of family pride about Granddaddy Gudger. At least in my father’s eyes. His rapid fall in the world has a sort of grandeur to it. He’d gone from a relatively high position in the old order, and maintained some grace and stature after the Emancipation, and though he lost everything, he managed to keep those ugly old chickens the colonel had given him as sort of a symbol.

  “And as long as he had them, too, my daddy thought himself as good as his father. He kept his dignity, even when he didn’t have anything else.”

  I asked what happened to them. She didn’t know, but told me who did and where I could find her.

  That’s why I’m going to make a phone call.

  * * *

  “Hello. Dr. Courtney. Dr. Courtney? This is Paul. Memphis. Tennessee. It’s too long to go into. No, of course not, not yet. But I’ve got evidence. What? Okay, how do trochanters, coracoids, tarsometatarsi, and beak sheaths sound? From their henhouse, where else? Where would you keep your dodos, then?

  “Sorry. I haven’t slept in a couple of days. I need some help. Yes, yes. Money. Lots of money.

  “Cash. Three hundred dollars, maybe. Western Union, Memphis, Tennessee. Whichever one’s closest to the airport. Airport. I need the department to set up reservations to Mauritius for me. . . .

  “No. No. Not wild goose chase, wild dodo chase. Tame dodo chase. I know there aren’t any dodos on Mauritius! I know that. I could explain. I know it’ll mean a couple of grand . . . if . . . but . . .

  “Look, Dr. Courtney. Do you want your picture in Scientific American, or don’t you?”

  * * *

  I am sitting in the airport cafe in Port Louis, Mauritius. It is now three days later, five days since that fateful morning my car wouldn’t start. God bless the Sears Diehard people. I have slept sitting up in a plane seat, on and off, different planes, different seats, for twenty-four hours, Kennedy to Paris, Paris to Cairo, Cairo to Madagascar. I felt like a brand-new man when I got here.

  Now I feel like an infinitely sadder and wiser brand-new man. I have just returned from the hateful sister Alma’s house in the exclusive section of Port Louis, where all the French and British officials used to live.

  Courtney will get his picture in Scientific American, me too, all right. There’ll be newspaper stories and talk shows for a few weeks for me, and I’m sure Annie Mae Gudger Radwin on one side of the world and Alma Chandler Gudger Molière on the other will come in for their share of the glory.

  I am putting away cup after cup of coffee. The plane back to Tananarive leaves in an hour. I plan to sleep all the way back to Cairo, to Paris, to New York, pick up my bag of bones, sleep back to Austin.

  Before me on the table is a packet of documents, clippings and photographs. I have come half the world for this. I gaze from the package, out the window across Port Louis to the bulk of Mt. Pieter Boothe, which overshadows the city and its famous racecourse.

  Perhaps I should do something symbolic. Cancel my flight. Climb the mountain and look down on man and all his handiworks. Take a pitcher of martinis with me. Sit in the bright semitropical sunlight (it’s early dry winter here). Drink the martinis slowly, toasting Snuffo, God of Extinction. Here’s one for the Great Auk. This is for the Carolina Parakeet. Mud in your eye, Passenger Pigeon. This one’s for the Heath Hen. Most importantly, here’s one each for the Mauritius dodo, the white dodo of Réunion, the Réunion solitaire, the Rodriguez solitaire. Here’s to the Raphidae, great Didine birds that you were.

  Maybe I’ll do something just as productive, like climbing Mt. Pieter Boothe and pissing into the wind.

  How symbolic. The story of the dodo ends where it began, on this very island. Life imitates cheap art. Like the Xerox of the Xerox of a bad novel. I never expected to find dodos still alive here (this is the one place they would have been noticed). I still can’t believe Alma Chandler Gudger Molière could have lived here twenty-five years and not know about the dodo, never set foot inside the Port Louis Museum, where they have skeletons and a stuffed replica the size of your little brother.

  After Annie Mae ran off, the Gudger family found itself prospering in a time the rest of the country was going to hell. It was 1929. Gudger delved into politics again, and backed a man who knew a man who worked for Theodore “Sure Two-Handed Sword of God” Bilbo, who had connections everywhere. Who introduced him to Huey “Kingfish” Long just after that gentleman lost the Louisiana governor’s election one of the times. Gudger stumped around Mississippi, getting up steam for Long’s Share the Wealth plan, even before it had a name.

  The upshot was that the Long machine in Louisiana knew a rabble-rouser when it saw one, and invited Gudger to move to the Sportsman’s Paradise, with his family, all expenses paid, and start working for the Kingfish at the unbelievable salary of $62.50 a week. Which prospect was like turning a hog loose under a persimmon tree, and before you could say Backwoods Messiah, the Gudger clan was on its way to the land of pelicans, graft, and Mardi Gras.

  Almost. But I’ll get to that.

  Daddy Gudger prospered all out of proportion with his abilities, but many men did that during the Depression. First a little, thence to more, he rose in bureaucratic (and political) circles of the state, dying rich and well-hated with his fingers in all the
pies.

  Alma Chandler Gudger became a debutante (she says Robert Penn Warren put her in his book) and met and married Jean Carl Molière, only heir to rice, indigo, and sugar cane growers. They had a happy wedded life, moving first to the West Indies, later to Mauritius, where the family sugar cane holdings were one of the largest on the island. Jean Carl died in 1959. Alma was his only survivor.

  So local family makes good. Poor sharecropping Mississippi people turn out to have a father dying with a smile on his face, and two daughters who between them own a large portion of the planet.

  I open the envelope before me. Ms. Alma Molière had listened politely to my story (the university had called ahead and arranged an introduction through the director of the Port Louis Museum, who knew Ms. Molière socially) and told me what she could remember. Then she sent a servant out to one of the storehouses (large as a duplex) and he and two others came back with boxes of clippings, scrapbooks and family photos.

  “I haven’t looked at any of this since we left St. Thomas,” she said. “Let’s go through it together.”

  Most of it was about the rise of Citizen Gudger.

  “There’s not many pictures of us before we came to Louisiana. We were so frightfully poor then, hardly anyone we knew had a camera. Oh, look. Here’s one of Annie Mae. I thought I threw all those out after Mamma died.”

  This is the photograph. It must have been taken about 1927. Annie Mae is wearing some unrecognizable piece of clothing that approximates a dress. She leans on a hoe, smiling a snaggle-toothed smile. She looks to be ten or eleven. Her eyes are half hidden by the shadow of the brim of a gapped straw hat she wears. The earth she is standing in barefoot has been newly turned. Behind her is one corner of the house, and the barn beyond has its upper hay-windows open. Out-of-focus people are at work there.

  A few feet behind her, a huge male dodo is pecking at something on the ground. The front two-thirds of it shows, back to the stupid wings and the edge of the upcurved tail feathers. One foot is in the photo, having just scratched at something, possibly an earthworm, in the new-plowed clods. Judging by its darkness, it is the grey, or Mauritius, dodo.

  The photograph is not very good, one of those 3 1/2 x 5 jobs box cameras used to take. Already I can see this one, and the blowup of the dodo, taking up a double-page spread in S.A. Alma told me around then they were down to six or seven of the ugly chickens, two whites, the rest grey-brown.

  Besides this photo, two clippings are in the package, one from the Bruce Banner-Times, the other from the Oxford newspaper; both are columns by the same woman dealing with “Doings in Water Valley.” Both mention the Gudger family moving from the area to seek its fortune in the swampy state to the west, and telling how they will be missed. Then there’s a yellowed clipping from the front page of the Oxford newspaper with a small story about the Gudger Farewell Party in Water Valley the Sunday before (dated October 19, 1929).

  There’s a handbill in the package, advertising the Gudger Family Farewell Party, Sunday Oct. 15, 1929 Come One Come All. (The people in Louisiana who sent expense money to move Daddy Gudger must have overestimated the costs by an exponential factor. I said as much.)

  “No,” Alma Molière said. “There was a lot, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. Daddy Gudger was like Thomas Wolfe and knew a shining golden opportunity when he saw one. Win, lose, or draw, he was never coming back there again. He would have thrown some kind of soirée whether there had been money for it or not. Besides, people were much more sociable then, you mustn’t forget.”

  I asked her how many people came.

  “Four or five hundred,” she said. “There’s some pictures here somewhere.” We searched awhile, then we found them.

  * * *

  Another thirty minutes to my flight. I’m not worried sitting here. I’m the only passenger, and the pilot is sitting at the table next to mine talking to an RAF man. Life is much slower and nicer on these colonial islands. You mustn’t forget.

  * * *

  I look at the other two photos in the package. One is of some men playing horseshoes and washer-toss, while kids, dogs, and women look on. It was evidently taken from the east end of the house looking west. Everyone must have had to walk the last mile to the old Gudger place. Other groups of people stand talking. Some men in shirtsleeves and suspenders stand with their heads thrown back, a snappy story, no doubt, just told. One girl looks directly at the camera from close up, shyly, her finger in her mouth. She’s about five. It looks like any snapshot of a family reunion which could have been taken anywhere, anytime. Only the clothing marks it as backwoods 1920s.

  * * *

  Courtney will get his money’s worth. I’ll write the article, make phone calls, plan the talk show tour to coincide with publication. Then I’ll get some rest. I’ll be a normal person again; get a degree, spend my time wading through jungles after animals which will be dead in another twenty years, anyway.

  Who cares? The whole thing will be just another media event, just this year’s Big Deal. It’ll be nice getting normal again. I can read books, see movies, wash my clothes at the laundromat, listen to Jonathan Richman on the stereo. I can study and become an authority on some minor matter or other.

  I can go to museums and see all the wonderful dead things there.

  * * *

  “That’s the memory picture,” said Alma. “They always took them at big things like this, back in those days. Everybody who was there would line up and pose for the camera. Only we couldn’t fit everybody in. So we had two made. This is the one with us in it.”

  The house is dwarfed by people. All sizes, shapes, dresses, and ages. Kids and dogs in front, women next, then men at the back. The only exceptions are the bearded patriarchs seated towards the front with the children—men whose eyes face the camera but whose heads are still ringing with something Nathan Bedford Forrest said to them one time on a smoke-filled field. This photograph is from another age. You can recognize Daddy and Mrs. Gudger if you’ve seen their photograph before. Alma pointed herself out to me.

  But the reason I took the photograph is in the foreground. Tables have been built out of sawhorses, with doors and boards nailed across them. They extend the entire width of the photograph. They are covered with food, more food than you can imagine.

  “We started cooking three days before. So did the neighbors. Everybody brought something,” said Alma.

  It’s like an entire Safeway had been cooked and set out to cool. Hams, quarters of beef, chickens by the tubful, quail in mounds, rabbit, butterbeans by the bushel, yams, Irish potatoes, an acre of corn, eggplant, peas, turnip greens, butter in five-pound molds, cornbread and biscuits, gallon cans of molasses, redeye gravy by the pot.

  And five huge birds—twice as big as turkeys, legs capped like for Thanksgiving, drumsticks the size of Schwarzenegger’s biceps, whole-roasted, lying on their backs on platters large as cocktail tables.

  The people in the crowd sure look hungry.

  “We ate for days,” said Alma.

  * * *

  I already have the title for the Scientific American article. It’s going to be called “The Dodo Is Still Dead.”

  AFTERWORD

  Though this is the one you’re probably reading first (if we go by chronology of publication here) this afterword is the one I’m writing last.

  This is the story I’m known for, if I’m known at all.

  It was reprinted ten times in the first year after publication, here and abroad. I got hard American dollars in the early 1980s out of the USSR, before glasnost, and it appeared over there in a real magazine, not an SF publication. It was in all three Year’s Best SFs extant over here at the time. And I will tell you a true thing:

  After I wrote it I didn’t know if I had a good story or an afterbirth.

  This was the hardest story to do of
all I had written up to that time.

  I had missed deadlines for Terry Carr’s Universe original anthology series before, after being in #4 and (with Utley “Custer’s Last Jump!”) in #6. It was coming up on #10 AND I WAS GOING TO BE IN THERE I swore.

  This story was written between March and May 2, 1979, a really long time for me, even though it was a novelette.

  The last line had come to me first, and the whole story had come out of the last line. I had access to the University of TX library system, and among other things they had Baron Hachisuka’s The Dodo and Kindred Birds which had been printed in an edition of about 1000, with tipped-in plates, one of those labors of love the science-world coughs up every so often. (They were also supposed to have Richard Owens’ book on the dodo from 1868—I had them turn the Biology Library upside-down twice, but they couldn’t find that.) Among other things, I had to go to the Latin American Library to get a copy of Leguat’s Travels (1620) which had been reprinted in a series of mostly-South American-travel writings in the late 1880s—about as far as you can get from the Indian Ocean island of Rodriguez. I found it: it had uncut pages and had never been checked out in the 95 years it had lain there. Now, it couldn’t leave the building. I convinced the librarian on the sacred honor of my soul to let me have it from 3 p.m. that afternoon until 8 the next morning. “It’s been there for 95 years.” I said. “Gimme.” I of course took it home and performed delicate surgery on the book and read it, the first human in Texas to do so.