The Bird Boys Read online

  Why is it you can’t just think the right stuff up in the first damn place, ’stead of having to stumble onto it? Jeez. Shirt’s soaked through to your waist.

  Phelan hailed a guy splayed in a lawn chair, eyelids at half-mast, jumble of empties behind him from the old over-the-shoulder toss. The tent read PHIL’S, but according to this fish-seller, he worked for Phil on the boat and was only here today as a favor because the usual guy, Terrence Dumbass, had shot himself in the knee with a nail gun. He was Ticker. Could give Phelan an end-of-the-day deal buster, sure enough.

  Phelan considered the six pounds of shrimp in his cooler, said, “Why not,” and bought one more. Ticker hoisted himself up, fumbled half the shrimp onto the ground, had to get down like a dog and gather them up, slosh some water from a bucket over them. The altitude changes compelled him to establish a firmer footing. Once his flip flops were planted, Ticker seized his brown ponytail and wrenched it two-handed, tightening up the rubber band and getting hair cooties on his soiled hands. Then he wrapped up Phelan’s shrimp in newspaper. His smile was so loose it almost fell off his face.

  Phelan aimed the conversation once, then again. Acted spellbound at a story the guy told until he raised an eyebrow and tweaked out a joint from the breast pocket of his Captain Beefheart t-shirt. When Phelan rumbled, “Now you’re talkin’,” Ticker indicated a lawn chair next to his that Phelan could use to take a load off. If he’d pull it over because Ticker was good where he was. Phelan parked himself. They high-fived and passed the joint.

  “So how’d you get the name Ticker?” Phelan asked him.

  “Boo-boo. Quang Tin. ’71.” The guy grinned crookedly and jerked up Captain Beefheart, flashing a ropey foot-long scar that meandered down his breastbone. And, partially peeking from the back of his jeans, a walnut pistol butt.

  Phelan recalculated his first impressions of Ticker. Made another, more careful sweep of Phil’s shrimp stand: table with coolers on and under it, a scale, box of newspapers and trash, the tumble of empty beer cans on a sandy dirt floor. Few more folded lawn chairs piled against the tent’s back wall. There, behind the green and white webbing and aluminum legs, a vertical shape like the stock of a shotgun.

  Phelan didn’t show anything. Finally he offered, “Dak To. ’67.”

  Ticker made a fist, stretched out toward Phelan, who formed his own fist, let Ticker tag it. “Funny. Couldn’t wait to ride that freedom bird home, right? Then ain’t nothing been like that since, like all your boys together. Thought maybe it’d be like that on the boat. Naw.” He waved away the boat.

  “You work on a boat?”

  Ticker’s eyes, on Phelan, glazed. He shook his head and they cleared. “These stateside boys—they just Jody.”

  Surprised, Phelan grunted. Hadn’t thought about that name in a dozen blue moons. But his brain chanted Ain’t no use in lookin back, Jody’s got your Cadillac. Ain’t no use in going home, Jody’s got your girl and gone.

  Ticker rambled through a couple anecdotes: his uncle’s landing at Pelelieu, its dark-green and blue lit up by twinkles from the machine guns. His own entry in-country, when a corporal riding ahead on a tank unloaded on a water buffalo in a field. For the fun of it. Thing wasn’t no more than a black, gentle old cow, and it sank down on its knees in the shallow water. Ticker did not go for that, no sir. No how, no way.

  “For sure,” Phelan said.

  Conversation bobbed along. Not even trying, Phelan collected a string of innuendos. He was about to let slip a name, Frank Sweeney, until he saw that his party partner’s pinkened eyes had gone soft and moist. The temperature had slacked off, and cars whizzed by melodiously. The sun was headed for the water.

  “Look at that, man, like a, you know, look at…look at the clouds. You know? I swear, ain’t it the…the end? Know what I mean?”

  Phelan did not. But he hung on.

  “Who wants fucking streets of gold—gimme sand. You know, all we’re doin, me and Phil and Ding-ding, is…we’re just makin it so more people’ll sit their foolish asses down and see all this.”

  The end of the day washed around them, and Phelan, prodded into contemplation, let it. He craned around to watch the gray underside of clouds enflame, above them blue sky. The scrubby trees tossing their branches had begun dimming to silhouettes. Birds bumped up their calling, insects chirred. Two men and a tall egret over a ways in a ditch maintained holy silence while the ball stained the horizon and slipped away.

  Took some maneuvering to regain the jokey camaraderie after the sun’s rite. Phelan managed to work in a mention of Frank Sweeney, friend of his really good on boats.

  Ticker blew out a mouthful of beer. “The cheese weasel?” He scraped together a straight face, then gravity imploded and he cracked up. Eventually, he locked in a middle-of-the-road expression. “Tall guy, mustache, movie hair?”

  Phelan remembered Cheryl saying her husband was good-looking, so he nodded.

  “Hey, look, man, stir around in the cooler, that one with the blue top, and fish you another beer. Don’t take the last one, OK?” Ticker sat back, chuckling under his breath, brushed a strand of escaped brown hair off his forehead. Waved away the offer of a cigarette from Phelan, produced another joint with the same flourish as the first one, and clamped his lips around it. Phelan tossed over his lighter.

  Cheese was a hand on one of the boats, same as Waffle and St. Peter and Ding-ding, same as Ticker, but Ticker was Numba One sailor. He knew his shit. The cheese weasel knew no shit, he was Numba One Jody. Guys only tolerated him because he busted his ass—Ticker would give the fucker that, he hustled—and on land The Cheese drew women like blue fin drew kitty-cats.

  Phelan’s nose tickled pleasantly. “Land? You mean when you get back here?”

  “Naw, man, land on the other end.” Ticker expelled a slow load of smoke and handed over the roach. Brought up a dirty pointer finger and shhh’d on it. “Man, they got squeezeboxes, you know, just like the Cajuns, horns, corcoronets, bongo drums.” He wiggled his fists in the air, shimmied his shoulders. “You know, rattles.” Not that bars or music happened much. Usually was load ’em up, move ’em out, rawhide.

  Phelan waited a bit, went for it. “How much reefer y’all floatin’?”

  Ticker’s eyes shifted one way then the other. He extended his neck and hauled Phelan into focus. Then rared back and brushing aside the t-shirt, drew the gun from his waist band. Pointed an old S&W semi-automatic toward Phelan’s nose.

  “Man, shut up. I never said nothing about reefer. What’s wrong with you?”

  Phelan’s hands, holding the beer can, had slammed into the air. He had the can gripped and poised to heave at Ticker, but he was going with patter first. “Sure, man, OK,” he said, “sorry, my mistake, no problem—” He stumbled on humbly until the semi-automatic was stuffed back into the jeans and Ticker himself was reinserted into the groove. After twenty more minutes of racheting the subject far, far away from boats, shrimp, or Frank Sweeney, he laid down two bucks for another six-pack to polish the evening and said sayonara.

  That word wasn’t Ticker’s idea of a proper sign-off. He blundered out of the lawn chair and, wobbling in his flip flops, muttered, “Hey, sorry about the piece, hoss. Just playin’. I wouldn’t pop a brother.” He hooked Phelan’s fingers with his fingers and pulled him into his chest. Phelan hadn’t seen many white soldiers dap like that, but he went along. Bumped Ticker’s shoulder.

  Walked away, his hair blowing crazy in the warm wind.

  XXVI

  WITH A BAD conscience, Delpha deserted the phone again in order to check out the last two homebuyers. She drove west on I-10 and gradually began to notice an unwillingness in the rumbling Dart. A gimp that felt unsteady on the freeway. She took an off ramp and drove, limp increasing, until she found a gas station with a line of cars waiting to pump gas. She skirted the line and pulled up to the bay. Delpha got out, flat-handed the car door shut, walked around it, and spotted the problem on the passenger side front. She stuck in the
trunk key and unlocked it, checking to see if the jack and tire iron were there. They were. A uniformed young man with a Cab Calloway complexion and a junior mustache approached her.

  His nametag read Wesley, and he was probably about eighteen, but he did not have a bandleader personality. He was sober, silent. As Delpha assessed this stranger, it briefly occurred to her that no one in her thirty-two years had ever called her a chatterbox, either. Then it occurred to her she was measuring herself against other people out here in the free world. How long had she been doing that—ever since she got out? Sure she had. But till she’d got a job and a place to live, she’d had no inclination to note what she’d been noticing, at least about herself. So now she had to? It jarred her.

  She stood there with her head bent like the gas station attendant’s. Both of them considering the sagging tire, which did all the talking, anyway. The young man loosened the lugs, jacked the car and spun them off, he had the tire lifted and up on his tub in no time. Delpha peered intently as he sprayed it with soapy water. When the bubbles began to blow, neither one of them remarked, There it is.

  Wesley pointed at the leak with an eyebrow.

  Delpha asked, “How much?”

  “Three dollar.”

  Nod of agreement. “Check the oil?”

  Raised thumb.

  She went into an office with candy bars, cigarettes and chew, Pennzoil cans. A rotating fan ruffled her hair, then relocated the office air, then blew on the fifty-ish white woman smoking on the stool behind the counter. The top of her long blond hair was cut in swoops lifting every few seconds, like she was flapping away. “What can I help you with, honey?” she said.

  “He’s fixing a flat for me.”

  Ka-ching. Delpha handed over three dollars and sat down in a folding chair. An outside bell clinked. She studied the assortment of calendars on the far wall: a naughty Mexican señorita, some preening cars, a locomotive snaking around a snowy mountain track, and a cartoon character, a giant-size, bottom-heavy yellow bird with orange legs. The message by the bird said Today is brought to you by the letter U for Unemployed.

  “He’s such a hoot,” the woman at the counter said.

  She couldn’t mean the yellow bird or even young Mr. Calloway repairing her tire. Delpha turned to look.

  A car had reached its turn at the pump. A brownish-faced man got out, middle-aged or older, rumpled hair and sunglasses, and stuck the nozzle into his tank, turned his back to watch the numbers roll. Had an arm up, shading his eyes from the sun. The passenger side window was hiked down, and a big kid in a baseball cap was smiling and waving.

  The woman behind the cash register waved back with her cigarette, saying, in a squeaky voice not meant to make it outside, “Hi, there, Hi there!” She brought her waving hand back to take a drag. “I swear, wouldn’t you like to live your life that way? All the time, happy as a clam.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Customers. I have never once seen him in a bad mood. Even with this gas crisis and all the waiting in a line just to fill up your tank.” She exhaled a smoke-stream and cranked up her waving.

  The door to the office opened, and the attendant came in and handed Delpha her keys. “Oil good,” he said. It seemed to her he looked at her curiously. She thanked the back of his shirt.

  She slid into her car, reversed, and drove slowly past the pump. Silent Wesley was high-fiving the cheerful kid on the passenger side. The kid kept throwing out his hand so that Wesley could high-five him a bunch of times. Damn if it didn’t look like Wesley was talking to him.

  This was the free world. There was no explaining it. Here she was, out in the town with My god streets going ever which way, stores, buses, and she was driving a car, not in a box wearing coarse white clothes. Like a kind of hard-edged dream that she could walk to her car without running up against some barrier. That nobody stopped her. That she wasn’t dragging tangles of wet sheets from an industrial-size washer or burning her fingers through a worn-out oven mitt on a tray of three-dozen rolls or holding a bedpan under a woman’s bony butt. Instead, out here in the world she was searching for a man who didn’t know he was lost. Teenagers pointed out ghosts, and tight-lipped people talked. Tall birds needed jobs. She felt relief at having one because for sense in the short-term, at least you could count on work.

  Delpha had two last Homebuyer names to scope out: Davies and Anderson. J.T. Davies lived in a powder blue box with white shutters, a bed of purple-pink hydrangeas, and a metal awning over the front door. She pushed the bell then stood back on the small concrete landing, one foot on the step below.

  No one answered.

  Phelan hadn’t got any answer, either. She rang again and waited.

  Rang, stood, rang again. Nothing. But there was a Chrysler in the driveway and damned if she was going to give up. She knocked, calling out “Mr. Davies?”

  A man cracked the door. J.T. Davies was white, stubble-faced, pouchy-eyed. Seventy if he was a day. Delpha fetched him a friendly smile and offered him the phone book Ma Bell had forgotten to leave him.

  He had to stick out an arm to grasp it. Pulled the book in. Quickly she asked if he was enjoying his new home.

  Davies craned around as though the house were a frame that had just set down around him. Too many flowers on the wallpaper. His sister had given him a deal, though.

  Delpha seized on “sister.” She asked casually if it was just him and his sister in their family, adding, “I got six brothers. Boy, was our house crowded.”

  In the lifeless tone that the head of a parole board would announce No release, Davies said, “We have a brother.” A knuckle brushed his chin as he frowned. He gave the impression of having reviewed some regrettable memory and judged it, but Delpha didn’t see his head move. J. T. Davies was not an easy man to talk to.

  He did, however, have a brother who was still alive and did not inspire happy feelings. They had a candidate here. This could be Rodney. Out, she decided. There could be a friend, and that friend could be out. Maybe the friend still had a job. OK then. She wouldn’t cross off Davies. Though he didn’t strike her as dangerous. He struck her as gloomy.

  Doubtfully, Delpha wished the man a nice day and drove back in the direction she’d come. She located the Anderson house—Phelan’s ‘Not Home’ note in the margin—only because its street number was stenciled on the curb. In between the stout trunks of loblollies, whose evergreen branches began high up, stood a lot-sized, haphazard forest of spruces and junipers, a few dogwood and redbud, a raggledy magnolia. A rug of rust-colored pine needles lay beneath the trees. She spied the end of a weathered gray ramp and walked it around to the door, which was, like the windows, cast in shadow. She knocked, then just in case, stepped back a good arm’s-length from the screen door.

  Which was lucky because it banged open.

  To a surprise.

  The teenager holding the door was the smiling passenger at the filling station. He was tall, tilted a little to one side, and appeared overjoyed to see her. He stood, unsteadily upright, like a skinny bear, feet wide apart, knees bent, hands drooping from his wrists. Behind him was a sparsely furnished living room: an upholstered couch and brown armchairs and footstool, a wheelchair next to a dinette table with two vinylseat chairs. On the dinette, a smallish black case with a trailing strap and a scattering of small, spiral-bound tablets.

  And birds. To the left of the door where she stood: two huge cages, across from the dinette. The first, floor to ceiling, held a three-ring circus of blue, yellow, and green parakeets and even smaller, stripey-black birds. Through it she could see another cage, not as large, with one grand gray bird weaving on a perch.

  Delpha swallowed her surprise—at seeing the same boy who’d been high-fiving Wesley and also at this boy looking wildly glad to see her.

  “How you doing, Mr. Anderson? My name is Delpha Wade, and I’m from the phone company. I’m bringing you this book they shoulda give you when they installed your phone.” She held up the new phone book, s
miling back, but her smile strained as she examined him.

  She’d placed him as young, but up close the fine lines around his eyes and across his forehead were much more pronounced. He wasn’t a teenager. The hair that fell on his forehead in boyish bangs, that had appeared fair, was mainly gray, laced with pale brown. His age might be forty, even closer to fifty. He looked like…a happy, withered child.

  “Raffie,” someone called from the back of the house. “Bring your bag back here, and get your towels.”

  The man grinned, showing small, widely-spaced teeth. “Bitch,” he said excitedly.

  Delpha startled. Then felt irritated because she’d let this unusual person’s high spirits disarm her.

  He turned and lunged past the table and a galley kitchen to the hall, dragging a canvas duffel bag by its strap. In a minute he came stumbling back, the bag fuller. He grabbed her hand, saying Bitch bitch and yanked her around, laughing.

  Delpha cast back through her experience but did not find a cue to guide her here. Moving slowly, she caught their joined hands, patted his, and gently extracted hers.

  An old man tanned to the shade of a football except for a white band of upper forehead skin, entered the room with some folded clothing. Seeing her, he dropped the clothes on the dinette table and strode across the living room to guide the other man away from Delpha. He inserted himself between them.

  “If you’re selling somethin’, we’re not buyin’ today,” he said, pleasantly, matter of factly. His gaze, though, slid around her, verifying she was the sole person at the door. He bent over to cough.

  “No, sir, I’m not a peddler,” Delpha said. “Bringing you your phone book. You Mr. Anderson?”

  “That’s me, and I got one. You’ll have to ’scuse us, but we’re packin’ to go to the beach.” He took hold of the doorknob.

  “Oh, sure. They musta made a mistake down the office. Sorry to bother you.”

  The door shut on Delpha’s sociable wave.

  …on the songs of birds. So many birds.