A NATURAL HISTORY (a romantic tale)
Dan Korgan

Eager to repay his friend, Lambert, Arnold Lupinfield drove with caution down the busy four-lane highway. Cars rushed past him spitting inky clouds of smoke past his windshield. He honked his horn at those hasty drivers. The shopping malls with their green corrugated roofs and cement beige facades made him nervous in their sameness.

Arnold had met Lambert a few years before at the post office while waiting in line. They each held a shoebox wrapped in brown paper, and for that brief moment, felt obliged to share what they had in common. "I'm sending this bundle of recipes to Grandmother. She lives in Texas, well, and she keeps asking me to send them to her. I work at The Star Lounge on Broadway, and she has never been there," Lambert had said. In return, Arnold reported in a throaty nature that he was sending his Grandmother in Nebraska a few stones from the basin-and-range, mostly petrified wood and a few sandstone fossils of pine. As it turned out, Arnold had grown up on the east side of the highway and Lambert on the west. They attended different schools but might have had a few friends in common. When they learned this, Lambert thought maybe Arnold was one of the eastside punk-ass kids he would slug in the face and Arnold did wonder if he had ever poisoned this man's dog. Lambert recognized Arnold's almond-shaped and cold-blue eyes and Arnold recognized Lambert's bulldog stance. From one week to the next, Lambert and Arnold had bumped into one another this way. They found themselves in line together at the supermarket, standing in line together at the cinema, and sitting next to one another while waiting for a chair at the barbershop. Now, in their middle years, they were less inclined to promote these coincidences. They had this much in common, anyway. A little shy. A little embarrassed for their childhood misgivings.

As Arnold turned into the parking lot, a semi-truck blared its frightening horn and swerved big black tires around his station wagon that straddled the bus and far right lane. He sat for a few minutes to collect his nerves. Making sure he had landed in the right parking lot, he kept the motor running and waited patiently for one of the many neon signs in the firmament to blink simultaneously and reveal all the right letters -  T    OUNGE, S A      GE,  T    O   E, S     O NG ,  TAR L UN E and finally STAR LOUNGE. Arnold looked across the tarred surface of the lot, the black stitching that held the orange, purple, green cars together in an impossible quilt of steel. Lambert would be terribly busy with his job to feed all those people, but it had been six long weeks now; the last time he saw Lambert, after they had they had split a bottle of brandy, chewed on smoked cod and goat cheese, Arnold had asked to borrow a little cash even though he did not need it very much.

In the restaurant lobby, at the lamp lit desk, Arnold greeted the handsome man who wore a tuxedo.

"Lambert here?" Arnold politely asked.

"He is working, yes."

"Can you direct me?"

"Is this of grave importance?"

"Certainly is."

"Then I shall take you to exactly-where-he-is."

"Kind of you," said Arnold.

"Through the feeding area," the host snorted and straightened his black miniature bow tie.

Arnold was led down a narrow hallway past the bar's shelves of tulip-shaped glasses and long-necked bottles filled with expensive liquors, then up a short ramp a few strides to a stiff-hinged door and brightly lit kitchen. The host guided him to a walk-in cooler and pulled on the heavy steel handle. A rush of cold air confronted them. "In there," he said, and with his left paw gently closed the heavy door behind Arnold.

From hooks, ribs of cow hung from the ceiling, stainless steel trays held fish with their mouths stiff and open, green plastic buckets filled with potatoes and onions lined the shelves, along with large Tupperware labeled hollandaise, esplanade, marinara, demi-glaze. Arnold peeled open one of the unmarked tubs dipped his finger and enjoyed Lambert's famous lemon custard. Farther in he admired his colorful arrangement of tomatoes, kale, celery, carrots, and cauliflower sitting squarely in wooden crates. Folded in white cloth he found sprigs of herbs: cilantro, thyme, mint, oregano, rosemary, basil. Such variety, such abundance, reminded Arnold why Lambert could never probe his friends with reminders for things they borrowed.

Arnold found Lambert standing over a large tub pecking his pencil at his clipboard, counting something. Wearing an orange and green striped stocking cap and red chef coat, Arnold thought he looked like a tropical bird.

"It has nothing to do with the decline in the fish population, does it?" Arnold chuckled.

"Arnold!"

"Lambert."

"I've been meaning..."

"How's the family?" said Arnold with confidence.

"Quite healthy. My sister just left for Ecuador to plant trees and try out some guinea pig, and my parents are still traveling the Czech Republic. They keep sending me recipes-as if I did not already how to bake Kolaches and potato dumplings! How've you been?"

"Well, my students seem to be growing younger every year."

Lambert smiled, "I certainly hope this year they are as fanatic about natural history as you."

"I wish they were more enthusiastic."

"About banding Chicka-dees!?"

"And following fresh tracks of deer to the corn field and spring."

"Maybe it's your fascination with grouse. Everyone knows they have all been flushed out, Arnold."

"Just because you don't spend your free time hunting for their droppings and hoping to find one budding in a popple thicket?"

"I see you got past the host."

"A little snotty, if you ask me."

While Lambert lifted and weighed and calculated, he asked Arnold if he had seen any of the various snowbirds, the Oregon Junco or the White-crowned Sparrow, cold-loving migrants who consider the Oregon winters balmy, or any of the locals, the bald eagle, varied thrush, California quail, or the cormorants that fly under water? While Arnold's mind went to work on Lambert's queries, he followed him from one stack of shelves to another stack of shelves. They walked from one heavy handle to another one just like it, from one steel door to the same steel door, from one gray arctic room to the next until all Arnold could think about was birds, until his mind felt like a giant rising loaf of bread.

"Before I fell asleep last night, Grandfather told me he had finally counted to a billion, that he was 9,512 years old." Lambert looked a little embarrassed.

"That's somethin' else," said Arnold.

When Lambert said, "Grandfather", Arnold could only recall an image of his own Grandfather. Dear Grandmother, at her husband's funeral had propped herself up from her wheelchair and peered into his polyester stuffed coffin, kissed him, and stared for a long time before she began to laugh and cry. She dried her tears with a pink tissue and finally said, "He's wearing glasses. Why is he wearing glasses? Surely he won't be needing those in the kingdom of dirt." Although this rugged man built birdhouses for Sherman's for twenty-five years, just to be laid off by the profiteers, he was no piece of equipment, but he sure packed a beauty. On Saturdays, he would dress in his pinstriped suit and take his family for a drive around the soy fields. He tended his garden; grew tomatoes and watermelons and Chinese eggplant. Every once in a while, with batter under his fingernails and flour in his hair, he would step into the living room and blurt, "Has that Arnold learned about copulation, yet?" Then he would retreat to the kitchen and prepare for his family a plate of fried grits and okra. As a youngster, he collected fireflies in a jar, stirred them up into a paste, and painted Grandmother's face with wide green lines. In the shadows, they ran naked. She chased him; she found traction, cupped and squeezed his firm sack of nuts. Grandfather and his pack of friends.

Perhaps it was only coincidence, but an hour before, while Lambert picked at a plate of ceviche, he had spoken to his own grandmother over the phone who reminded him directly why Grandfather had had to bathe last, "Because he was the most filthy," she said. First in the tub, Lambert would scrub his cousin's scalp and chicken-thin legs. As he worked the washcloth from her chest to thighs, Lambert kept his growing embarrassment covered with bubbles. Then Ron-one and Ron-two, who had ditched their evening chores to ride on the-backs-of-pigs, would take their turn, haloop and oops, hah, and in and out of that giant puddle. When Grandmother sat in the muddy water, she lathered her body, sang show tunes, and venerated the odor of green apple conditioner. While Grandmother and cousins sat around the Formica kitchen table chewing strips of pickled tongue, they knew Grandfather's tub would smell of farm and shit. While he soaked his tired body, a thin coat of oil would form on the surface of the water. His skin was so saturated with chemicals that when he rubbed his leathery arms the barn animals could hear a thunder building from behind the bathroom door. No one believed his death was caused by smoking a pipe. If Grandmother could have known his fertilizers softened the eggshells of bald eagles, she would have had him bathe first and drawn two tubs of water instead of one.

Lambert looked up at Arnold who was staring at his friend Lambert, deep in thought.

"Some large containers, no?"

"You're telling me, Lambert."

"Nearly Skyscrapers."

"Look, there goes a Mercedes!"

"And a Cadillac!"

"Taxi, taxi," Lambert waved.

They chuckled shamelessly at their own wit. It crossed Arnold's mind that someday their friendship might begin to dwindle, and they might not be able to stop that from happening, that maybe they had so much in common they could not learn from one another, or that they might try and kill each other as happens in the lower orders of the animal kingdom, or perhaps they had so much in common they might be driven to the next village over, but what this biologist needs from a legendary chef would not require this.

Before Lambert exited the cooler, he hung his clipboard and chef coat on a hook, slung his pack over his shoulder. Arnold followed him out. They passed through the brightly lit kitchen and through the smoky lounge where two skaters watched a golf tournament on TV.

"Lamb, mind if I make myself a cheeseburger?" the host asked.

"Like I care," Lambert replied.

Under the green exit sign in The Star Lounge, Lambert reported, "It's silly, Arnold, that you have your students keep a journal."

"I have them document every species they can recognize. It may be important to us someday," said Arnold.

"And specimens?"

Arnold saw Lambert's chagrin.

"Twigs and leaves."

"You're wasting your time," said Lambert, "and theirs too."

Outside, Arnold felt Coho wind moving through the valley. Behind the restaurant, behind the shopping mall where the neon signs blink letters to form distinct readable words, they walked across the parking lot to the bank of the Willamette River. Across the narrowing bend, from the paper mill's jungle of shiny pipes, white columns of smoke swelled into the atmosphere. Sitting under a cypress, Lambert unwrapped a piece of smoked salmon from its plastic wrap, and while Arnold chewed on the fish, he recounted the history of the lilies: Camassia, Zigadenus, Trillium, Tofieldia, Fritillaria, Disporum. During the last Ice Age, thousands of years ago, glaciers to the north held a supple finger of ice protruding far enough south to dam the Missoula Lake. Every hundred years or so, when the glacier warmed, the roaring wall of water carrying a tangle of ice boulders and Columbia basalt (erratics that for many years would raise question as to their origin) would carve a path through the mountains, fertilizing the valley with a bedrock of minerals. Arnold lowered his eyes. Lying horizontal, his short body rubbing against pine needles and dirt, he reached inside his front pocket and clutched the money he could return to his friend, Lambert. Lambert took a deep breath, sat up and crossed his thin legs. Two cold-loving migrants, perched at the ragged edge, considered the Willamette River, rushing backwards. They fluttered up and climbed down and down again. Coo, caw, coo, coo, caw, coo, they soared across blades of towering sedge into the murky ravine.

© Dan Korgan 2004

Dan Korgan designs databases for a living. He suspects that eventually he will only be able to think inside a labyrinth of columns and rows.

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