The Fable of Bing Read online

  THE FABLE OF

  BING

  BY

  TIM SANDLIN

  OOTHOON PRESS

  GROVONT WYOMING

  NEW YORK

  LOS ANGELES

  ISBN 978-0-9893957-1-7

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Tim Sandlin. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  FOR CAROL

  also by Tim Sandlin

  Sex and Sunsets

  Western Swing

  Skipped Parts

  Sorrow Floats

  Social Blunders

  Honey Don't

  Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty

  Rowdy in Paris

  Lydia

  The Pyms: Unauthorized Tales of Jackson Hole

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  Thanks to the kind folks at the San Diego Wildlife Safari for their patience and help.

  And to Army Feth who went into Tijuana so I didn’t have to.

  And Julia Kardon for handling the technical end.

  And, forever and always, for Carol who makes it matter.

  THE FABLE OF BING

  CONTENTS

  September 1991

  FEBRUARY 2010

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 82

  September 1991

  History of the name: Bing Crosby sang “Blue Hawaii” in Waikiki Wedding in 1937 and fifty-four years later Dale Konigsberg danced with his wife in Zaire. They found the album of mixed movie tracks in their predecessor’s leavings, along with an aged RCA Victor stereophonic record player and a packet of three new needles. The abandoned treasures were stuffed in urine-stained crates in a closet off the boxing room where meerkats, zebras, and various primates lay caged and crated before their long journeys around the world.

  Dale pressed Mary’s flushed torso against his own, the palm of his left hand in that divot in her lower back that he knew so well. He stared into her bottomless blue eyes. “What shall we name the tyke?”

  Mary floated in Dale’s arms across the concrete slab floor. His dancing prowess had been the hook that snared Mary’s love, way back at the Tri Delt Spring Fling at UT. Before dancing, Dale had been nothing but a tall frat boy with a thick mustache and a receding hairline faking sophistication beyond his years in order to impress Mary and her cousins from Chattanooga. But, as the strains of a fairly decent Lionel Richie cover oozed over the student union ballroom, Dale strode across the hardwood floor and asked if he might have this dance, and that was all she wrote for Mary’s discretionary dating period.

  Together, Mary and Dale danced through grad school, marriage, internships at the Cincinnati Zoo, dream jobs in Zaire with the Wildlife Nature Conservancy, followed by pregnancy and the birth of Franklin, who at the moment was staring at a rusted crack in the corrugated tin ceiling above his hammock crib hung between two hoist stakes.

  Franklin’s name had been the closest the couple ever came to a bone of contention. Dale’s grandfather — Franklin — offered a Vanderbilt education to any family offspring named after himself. This blatant bribe rankled Mary’s sense of fair play.

  “You should name a child after a relative from respect, not cash flow.”

  “We can respect Grandpa Franklin and take his money,” Dale said. “It’s the American way.”

  They argued for three days until Dale led Mary into the lobby of the Kinsangani University Hospital and slow danced her to the sound of air conditioner hum while nurses snickered at the back gap in Mary’s gown and she forgot her anger.

  Now, five months further into the happily ever after part of the story, they were still dancing, and it was time to name another baby.

  Dale swayed his hips to the steel guitar waves, gliding and guiding Mary between the prep table and the storage cabinets, over to the crate that an overweight black man wearing a striped railroad engineer cap was nailing around a cage.

  “Our lady is within moments of being ready, Boss,” Oudry said. “The truck should arrive at this spot in fifteen minutes.” Oudry had a cauliflower ear and had been educated at Cambridge, England. The Yes, Bwana, No Bwana attitude was an affectation meant to needle Dale who considered himself racially advanced.

  “You call me Boss one more time and I’ll drop you in the soldier ant pit,” Dale said.

  “Yes, Boss.”

  Dale spun Mary out to the tips of his fingers where she froze, one arm poised over the orchid decorating her right ear, to peer down into the cage of a female bonobo — long black hair, pink lips, deep, dark eyes — nursing a hairless wisp of a baby. The female was named Betty, some sort of a stretched take-off on Betty Boop.

  Betty blinked thick eyelids and stretched a tongue elastic as a Gumby doll.

  “Betty knows she and I are sisters under the skin,” Mary said. “We should be sipping oolong tea and swapping delivery stories.”

  Bing Crosby finished his last Buh Buh Buh Blue and after a short, scratchy silence, Martha Raye broke into a ditty complaining about men in general and Hawaiian men in specific.

  Dale leaned into Mary for a look down at the bonobos. “She does resemble you a touch, except her lips are larger, proportionately.”

  Mary popped a right fist punch to his chest.

  Dale backtracked. “Hers flop in space where your little plums point directly at me.”

  Mary said, “I choose Bing.”

  “He’ll be
back in a few minutes. They let Martha Raye sing the comic relief between love songs.”

  “The name for the baby.” As if he knew Mary was speaking about him, the baby bonobo’s eyes came up, looking over his bald forehead and directly into Mary’s eyes. His head looked like a Bocce ball painted by a Tijuana velvet artist. He wreaked vulnerability.

  “We’ll call him Bing,” Mary said.

  “Not Bing Bing?”

  “One Bing is plenty. You wouldn’t like being called Dale Dale by drooly tots throwing peanuts at you. Let’s leave the poor child a semblance of dignity.”

  Dale stood beside Mary with his arm around her waist. He lived for the stance. It made him feel a part of her, more partners than any of the interesting positions they’d learned from the lovemaking book. “He doesn’t look a bit like Bing Crosby. Observe the ear holes.”

  The baby bonobo — Bing — clutched his mother with both tiny fists. He made a kitten-like mewl sound. As if in commiseration, Franklin began to fuss.

  “I don’t give a snap about ears. I love our little Bing. He’ll grow up to be a crooner.” Mary broke free of Dale’s arm and crossed over to baby Franklin. Franklin was a chubby, hairless version of his mother. Same pistachio shaped eyes. Same dimple. Even his nostrils flared in a Mary-esque button kind of way.

  He gurgled when Mary scooped him from the crib.

  Dale examined the bonobos while Oudry hammered on the front panel. All he had left was the lid and the paperwork and they’d be ready to ship.

  “Load her with bananas,” Dale said. “Those bureaucratic bumble brains in Kinshasa Airport are supposed to check her, but they never do.”

  “You always say that and I always do,” Oudry said. “Always have, always will, from the beginning of time. Perhaps you should give me credit for having a memory.”

  “I don’t recall saying the same thing — always.”

  “Thus you prove my point, Boss.”

  Baby Bing shifted under the warmth of his mother. Even without hair, he had the distinctive facial bones of the male bonobo. High forehead, regal nose, wide eyes. He could have passed for a senator from Wisconsin.

  Dale said, “His nose is more Bob Hope.”

  Mary dropped the strap of her sleeveless blouse and guided Franklin to a breast. Dale left off the bonobos to admire his wife nursing their child. If possible, Mary was even more wondrous than she’d been before giving birth. Her skin glowed. Her demeanor was that of the original Mother Mary had she been a ballerina. No matter how long he lived, Dale would never tire of the sight of his wife.

  Oudry, on the other hand, stared hard at the crate slats. He wasn’t used to this behavior in a white woman.

  “Come, come,” Mary said. “We can’t send out an animal named Bob. It would destroy our reputation.”

  “We have a reputation?” Dale cocked his head toward the double garage loading doors. “What’s with the racket in the compound? Sounds like a tiger attack.”

  “The natives must be celebrating a successful circumcision,” Oudry said.

  “Natives? As opposed to fat devil invaders like you and me?”

  Mary’s eyes came off her feeding baby. “That doesn’t have the ring of a celebration to me.”

  High-pitched wails bled through the walls, more in the lines of terror than ecstasy, although it was hard to pin down. Had this been west Tennessee, Dale would have recognized the tone. These Bantu had a way of mixing their extremes.

  “Oudry.” Dale took two steps toward the door. “I want you to go out there and discover the scoop, as it were. Find out who is winding up the compound and if it’s an uprising, throw them some red meat. I’ll finish Betty and Bing.”

  Oudry spoke through roofing nails between his teeth. “You do not follow procedure.”

  “I’ve been shipping wildlife since you were white, Oudry. Get out there.”

  Oudry mumbled complaints, setting his hammer and nails on the prep table. He squared the engineer’s cap on his head, pulling it low in hopes of hiding the cauliflower ear. His deportment as he glided through the double loading doors was nothing less than majestic.

  Mary said, “That smacked of racism.”

  Dale dug into a stack of files and folders strewn across the table as if by a stiff wind. “Oudry hates it when I treat him as ginger.”

  Mary translated. “Gingerly.”

  “He craves to be one of the good old boys. Like you and me.”

  She faked offense. “Since when did I turn into a good old boy?”

  “Since we’re the only true Americans within a hundred miles, except for the Peace Corps do-goodniks and they don’t count.” Dale slipped the bonobos’ invoice from its plastic sheath. “Always with the drums. If God wanted white girls on African drums she’d have given them big feet.”

  Mary said, “What?”

  “Those faux-black chicks all keep journals. Natives don’t keep journals.”

  “I don’t know which mortifies me most, you saying faux or chicks.”

  Dale popped the top off a Sharpie and wrote: WE NAMED THE BABY BING on the descriptive page, in the margin next to birth date and weight.

  Mary placed Franklin back in the crib hammock and tucked a rice sack under his little chin. The fluorescent lighting that Mary hated with so much passion gave Franklin a shimmering pink look. Or maybe it was the suffocating heat laced with diesel fumes. Most five month olds don’t sweat like cowboys, but Franklin seemed to be giving himself a bath.

  “You’re turning into a character out of Joseph Conrad. By next winter you’ll crown yourself King Dale of the Congo. What was that?”

  From outside, a noise popped, distinctly like small caliber gunfire followed by more shouts. Betty Bonobo stirred from her crouch and stood with the baby hanging off her neck. Franklin opened his eyes to stare out at his mother.

  Mary said, “Why, Dale. This feels just the way I always imagined a movie moment would feel.”

  “It’s the modern version of déjà vu,” Dale said. “In a crisis we react as if we’ve been transported into a movie because that’s the only level we can relate to. We’ve seen life and death many times, but never experienced it first hand.”

  “But, this isn’t a movie moment, is it?” Mary said, a little sadly.

  Dale pulled himself up to his best posture, the one he saved for facing situations. “No, my dear, it isn’t.”

  The doors banged open and Oudry strode in, fighting to maintain a standard of dignity he no longer felt. Only his breathing, or lack thereof, gave away a heightened sense of involvement.

  “What is the problem?” Dale said. “Speak up.”

  “Let him catch his breath,” Mary said.

  “He can breathe on his own time.”

  Oudry shut and locked the doors, then he turned back to the room. He was now collected. “Bad news, sir. Mobuto’s goons have lost self-control.”

  Another large object hit the wall. Mary said, “Be specific.”

  Oudry glanced from her to Dale. “Armed with government issue machetes, they are hacking up the staff. Cook, the gardener. Both interns. Not a living soul is being spared.”

  Dale stared at his precious Mary. “I hate it when they do that.”

  He hoped she might rush into his arms, but instead Mary stayed by Franklin. “I’ve rehearsed this a thousand times since we left the States. I always thought I would fall apart from fear.”

  Dale smiled. “Look at you now,”

  “Yes, look at me. It’s the oddest thing, how calm I’ve suddenly become.”

  “That’s because we are together.”

  Mary’s eyes slicked over and her voice quavered. “I only regret what we are doing to Franklin. He is innocent. He deserves a life.” She reached down to touch her son on his little chin. He laughed and grabbed her finger. Mary raised her eyes to her husband. “I would take it kindly if you could save him.”

  Dale walked a circle around the bonobo crate. He touched his mustache, which was as close to nerves as he
felt comfortable displaying. “The truck will arrive in ten minutes. Those UPS guards carry firepower enough to stop an army of machete wielding maniacs.”

  Oudry sniffed, as if smelling an offensive odor. “I estimate we do not have ten minutes to spare.”

  Dale strode to his charcoal gray file cabinet. He opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a huge mother of a pistol. One of the originals, perhaps carried by an Earp brother.

  “Where did you find that thing?” Mary asked.

  “It was stuffed in the crate, under the record player.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it?” Mary wasn’t certain she liked the idea of Dale hiding the gun’s existence from her. He’d never kept secrets, in the past.

  Dale shrugged. “I’m not certain how the mechanism works.”

  “Pardon me.” Oudry lifted the pistol from Dale’s hand and broke open the breech. “Did your firearm come with bullets, Boss?”

  Dale flinched at the Boss crack, but there didn’t seem time to go there. “Bullets?”

  “Firearm don’t fire with no bullets,” Oudry said, his Cambridge accent replaced by Swahili roots. The words came fast and mumbled, as if by a man with gravel between his teeth and gums.

  Mary stared at him, wondering if, while he was outside, Oudry had been replaced by his jungle twin. “Oudry, where is this accent coming from? You never talked native before.”

  “I was never on the edge of being chopped before.”

  Dale shut the file drawer with a bang. “My love, I fear we are screwed.”

  Mary didn’t approve of the word screwed used in that context. It beat the F-thing, barely. The F-thing would show a total breakdown of moral fiber. Still, she would have preferred We are in dire straits, or Our number is up — terms that fit her self-image as the civilized woman in an uncivilized land.

  “Dale, you save Franklin or I will go to my grave cursing your name. Your family’s name, starting with Grandfather Franklin and working down to those neckless cousins from Ohio who believe in intelligent design.”

  Dale’s attention traveled from the bonobo crate to the pistol in Oudry’s hands to his baby. He ended the scan of options by staring into Mary’s blue eyes. Her eyes were the oxygen in his lungs. The blood that beat through his heart. He could not bear the possibility of disappointing Mary.