The Bird Boys Read online

  Delpha turned into the Pig Stand. When the tray arrived at her rolled-down window, she tipped the sweating waitress and carefully papered her lap with napkins. She ate a hamburger, drank a Coke from a bendy straw while consulting her written directions.

  Then she turtled the loud car around to the realtors’ offices. One owner refused on grounds of privacy. But the secretaries—if the bosses and agents were out with clients, which many were, they hardly let her finish her story. They passed over the Sold records like a pan of stale Rice Krispie bars.

  Around quarter to five, she came to the home office of Kirk Properties, situated in a remodeled garage attached to a neat yellow ranch house with a porch swing. Strip of fluorescent light illuminating a mustard carpet, gray file cabinets, rows of Kirk Properties calendars on both walls going back twenty years. Each calendar featuring a woman in handsome middle age, softening and thickening until there sat the proprietor herself, sixty-ish, a dome of hennaed hair and powder in the cracks of her face. She was in greeting mode, her hands lightly clasped in the air over her desk like a catalog model in white gloves.

  “Good afternoon, young lady. You and your husband in the market for a new home? I’m Nan Kirk, and I’d be pleased to help you find one.”

  Delpha said her name and politely asked if Mrs. Kirk kept a record of all the houses she’d sold in the past year.

  “Well, I do,”—the woman peered into her face—“but what would you need it for?”

  She was looking for a single man who was so mad at his family he’d moved and legally changed his name from theirs. She worked for Mr. Norville, the attorney of the man’s father. That gentleman was ninety-three and not well. He wanted to reconcile with his son.

  The hand model pose collapsed. Mrs. Kirk laced her hands against her bosom. “Well, family’s all we got for sure in this world. What did he change his name to?”

  A curl-tailed pug dog scrambled up into the woman’s lap, craned its neckless head, and confronted Delpha with goggle-eyes.

  “That’s the problem, Mrs. Kirk. The father doesn’t know.”

  “Now isn’t that sad? I only sold two houses to single men in the last year, and one of ‘em wasn’t but twenty-four years old. Doesn’t seem like his daddy would be ninety-three.” Mrs. Kirk bent down and pulled out a lower desk drawer.

  A side door flung open, causing Delpha to reel back, and a pigtailed teenager leaped through, singing, “Nana Nana Bo Bana, Banana Fana Fo—”

  “Aileen, you idjit, this lady and I’re talking here. Excuse yourself.”

  The girl’s short pigtails were the color of a peeled sweet potato. They were cinched high on her head like a pair of foxy ears, the back of her hair fallen down from them. She wheeled toward Delpha, revealing a freckled nose and a bold chin, and stopped short. Either she’d been fooling with a makeup pencil, or she had two genuine beauty marks, one black dot under each wide green eye.

  Mrs. Kirk had retrieved her Sold information and was gesturing toward Delpha’s legal pad. Delpha held it out. The older woman copied down names and addresses, reading each syllable aloud, and then passed back the pad.

  Delpha glanced over at the teenager. The girl had been gaping past Delpha, her forearm and an out-turned palm shielding her chest, but her arms dropped, and her eyelids fluttered, shutting away the beauty marks. She had gone motionless, her eyes fixed unwaveringly on Delpha, who asked, “Is she OK?”

  Mrs. Kirk swiveled toward the girl.

  “Oh Lord. She gets these…thoughts, ever once in a while. Aileen, go on back in the house and do your homework, honey.”

  “I’ll be on my way,” Delpha said to Mrs. Kirk. “Thank you very much for the information. Mr. Norville will be grateful.”

  “Huh uh. Huh uh now. You’re kinda a sight, lady. But to start off with, you’re fibbing ’bout Mr. Norville.” Aileen wafted over and grasped the side of Delpha’s hand. The girl was talking in Delpha’s direction rather than to her. She lowered her head again—the pigtails poked forward—and pressed the bone of Delpha’s little finger.

  “You saw the worst thing, didn’t you. I can tell because I did once, for just a little bitty bit. I saw a man that had this black rim around him. Like the opening to a cave you wouldn’t never, ever go in. Scared me to death. Hey, that thing’s way far back from you now. You should keep it back there.”

  The pug dog hit the floor and pranced desperately around the teenage girl’s bare ankles. “You just turned your head quick and saw it, right? That’s what happened to me. On a man at the racetrack when Pawpaw and me went.” Her head tilted. “Wait a minute. It came closer to you. Real close. You understand what I mean?”

  Delpha had chilled, standing on the worn carpet with calendars of years on years on her either side. “Maybe.”

  A flushed Mrs. Kirk shoved back her chair, saying, “’Scuse us. My granddaughter needs a drink of water.”

  “I don’t either.” The girl squeezed Delpha’s fingerbone and glanced at her face then, awake. “But listen, lady, that’s not all. You really…you know you got this—”

  “Aileen! Aileen, go on in the kitchen, honey. Now.”

  The girl huffed, dropped Delpha’s hand, and grabbed up the begging dog. “Any-way. Nana Nana Bo Bana doesn’t have what you came here looking for. That thing’s not at our house, thank you, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” She scooted through the side door rocking the pug in her arms.

  Mrs. Kirk was still standing behind her desk, which Delpha read as a sign she should leave. She couldn’t yet. “What’d she mean by all that?”

  “Just one minute here. What fib did you tell me, Miss…what was your name?”

  “Delpha Wade. I work for a private investigator, not a lawyer, and we’re looking for someone, just not how I explained it to you. That was the lie. Your granddaughter see either of those single men you sold to?”

  “I don’t know. She’s in and out the office. Listen, Aileen had some troubles in her little life ‘fore we stepped in and took her away. Sometimes she makes remarks we…we don’t understand what she means. That’s nothing I care to discuss with a stranger. Now is there anything more I can do for you today?”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Kirk. I apologize for lyin’ to your face.” Delpha stuck out her hand.

  “Well. Guess that’s part of your business.” Mrs. Kirk wrinkled her nose, but she shook hands, one businesswoman with another. When Delpha offered her a cramped smile, admitting, “Have to say that it is,” the woman dropped the unfriendly expression.

  Delpha’s smile became fuller. Not a grudge-holder by nature, Mrs. Kirk.

  “Truth is, I don’t mind so much Aileen runs in and out of here. What am I doing so important? We’ve raised her since she was seven. Turn around, she’ll be grown.” Mrs. Kirk straightened some papers. “Her granddad and I discourage the funny thoughts Aileen gets. Scares him. Me, too. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe her. She’s been right too many times.” Mrs. Kirk jutted her chin.

  Delpha took that in. “Not judging, believe me. Knew a girl once could read a worried person’s mind. But your Aileen’s in a bigger league. Thank you, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Kirk’s smile quavered with gratitude and dread.

  Aileen was not drinking a restorative glass of water. The rain had paused, and she was out in the oil-spotted driveway peering into the Dodge. “I like this car, lady,” she said. “Fast. Is it yours?”

  “No.”

  The red-haired girl’s gaze passed over her. “Not fibbing about that.”

  “No, I’m not. Answer me something, OK?”

  Aileen skittered away from the car window into the yard. Poked both sets of fingers into her tight jean pockets and looked off across the street to where an optimist neighbor was pinning wet sheets to a clothesline.

  “If I can. But only if I want to.”

  “Fair enough.” Delpha leaned against a fender. “That black thing you were talking about. Was it on the man or was it loose? Is that—can that black cave get on the insi
de of people?”

  “You did see it. I knew it!” Expressions tumbled over Aileen’s freckled face: satisfaction, vindication, a shudder. The girl’s gaze attached to Delpha. “Inside of a person? Man, I don’t know. Wasn’t in you.”

  She stood for a good minute, eyes unseeing, nose up, as if sniffing a patch of air that was a channel to the air of everywhere else.

  Delpha felt a mild jolt. Aileen reminded her of herself in the hospital, lying still, gazing through the windows to green treetops so as to leave behind pain and clatter.

  The teenager turned to Delpha. “The point is, duh lady, I wasn’t sposed to see it. It was an accident. Now you, seems like it showed itself to you.” The smooth brow furrowed as she stared, the emphasis of the double beauty marks startling. “But, look, there’s a…you know a little tiny girl’s following you?”

  Delpha didn’t move. Softly, “No, Aileen, I didn’t know that.”

  “Welp. Not now. But I swear she was there in Nana’s office. Wore a little blue smock.”

  “Who is she?”

  Aileen angled away as if to escape, and then irresistibly back again, so that she appeared to perform a rippling dance move. “I wouldn’t know if you don’t. Hey, you come again let me drive that car, OK? Friday I’m a get my learner’s permit.”

  She twirled away. “Bye.”

  VIII

  PHELAN HAD DECIDED that an hour or so spent on Louisiana birth records might not be a waste of time. Might provide a fallback in case the house search did not uncover Rodney. By finding baby boys born two years apart in the New Orleans area, 1898 and 1900; they could find the Bell brothers—Rodney’s real name, parents’ names, maybe an old address.

  Phelan hit up 4-1-1 to ask for the number of the Louisiana Vital Statistics Office. After hearing his request, Vital Statistics informed him he needed State Archives, which resided at the Secretary of State’s office. He duly connected with this office, was transferred, and held while Louisiana Archives in Baton Rouge searched out the proper clerk.

  A voice like a trellis twined with honeysuckle identified herself as Louisiana Archives and wished him a good morning so fragrantly that September 10, 1973, rainy or not, became a very good morning. Phelan gave her the name of his business, his location, and said what he wanted.

  The clerk interrupted his request: he wanted wha-at? All Orleans Parish births for 1898 and 1900? Couldn’t he just supply her a surname? He was afraid he couldn’t. Ga lee, he didn’t know this was gonna run him a arm and a leg?

  State office. Why wasn’t it free?

  “Oh, honey. This is Louisiana. Nothing’s free to Texas.”

  “All righty then. Tell me what I owe you. Who’d begrudge you a dime, Miss?”

  A laugh. “Watch out who you Miss-ing, Sugar-mouth. I got eight kids. Listen, gimme your number, I’m on have to call you back just to tell you how big a check to send us. Gotta count the pages.”

  When Mrs. Louisiana Honeysuckle called back with the amount, Phelan jotted the number and squinted at it. Not a fortune, but sure seemed steep. He grimaced and, equipped with a Louisiana-addressed envelope, trotted off to the bank to buy a money order so they wouldn’t have to wait for a check to clear. Shielded his head with newspaper on his run to the car, which took care of reading any unpleasant headlines about the White House today. Phelan slotted the envelope with the money order into a mailbox and skidded into the office just in time to catch the ringing phone.

  On the line was the manager of Bellas Hess, a rambling store that aimed to be your one-stop shopping. Except it didn’t sell liquor or food, so that threw a lot of its Beaumont, Texas customers into two or three-stop shopping.

  High-ticket items—TVs, stereos, cameras, car tape decks, handguns, shotguns—were walking out of the store. It was happening at night, of course, they’d find the stuff gone the next day. Only the manager and the assistant manager carried keys, Ralph Bauer, the manager, told Phelan. Yes, they kept the keys with them at all times. Headquarters was planning on adding more security, fancier cameras and monitors, but the manager had seen one of Phelan’s ads in the Enterprise, and he thought maybe they could fix the problem before the company went to that expense.

  “Be real good if the problem got fixed fast,” he said.

  Ralph wanted it fixed on his watch, get a backslap and a head-rub from the company. Phelan understood that.

  “Our current schedule’s pretty busy, Mr. Bauer.”

  “Aw, now.” The man pushed out a heavy breath. “I was hoping for quick.”

  “OK, I tell you what. We’re waiting on some records, so I could work you in right now.”

  Silence. Then, a happier tone. “Hold on, lemme go check on something—”

  Bellas Hess’s manager came back on the line to report that, all right, the job could be started this afternoon. He was at the store right now in case Phelan wanted to see the lay of the land, so to speak.

  Phelan’d been in Bellas Hess before. The land lay flat like every other big store he knew, a concrete plain broken up into corrals, each with a cash register and a minimum-wage captive. 1973’s hourly ran to $1.60, been stuck there five or six years.

  “Six p.m. is fine, Mr. Bauer,” Phelan told him. Now he’d have a while to dream up the plan. He hung up, lit a cigarette, and plotted out the next few days. Then closed his eyes.

  Two jobs going, and the first was, if not a piece of sponge cake, then simple—an earnest, stuffy old guy looking to be reunited with his slippery brother.

  And Delpha was back. She was back.

  Though he had almost lost her again on the very day she returned.

  An hour after Bell’s departure, the mail slot had clinked, and a couple of letters had dropped onto the floor. With a light step, he went and scooped up the two envelopes.

  One white and windowed, one an unbroken expanse of luscious French vanilla. When Delpha’s hand closed on them, Phelan had recalled that the mail was her job. He let go, then scanned the return addresses.

  Gulf States Utilities. Griffin and Kretchmer, Attorneys at Law.

  “Pay ’em both out of the account,” he said.

  “No sir. I’ll pay this one.” Meaning Griffin and Kretchmer. Which would be Miles’ bill.

  He looked at her. “You’re not calling me sir?”

  Without moving, Delpha seemed to resettle herself on her feet. “Didn’t mean to sir you. I just meant that I really meant this bill was mine. Mr. Blankenship worked for me. I owe him.”

  “I called him. This was a contract between me and Miles.”

  “Contract is lawyer and defendant. Ask a judge.”

  “Defend—you weren’t a defendant. You weren’t even arrested. He’s my friend, Delpha.”

  “He was my lawyer.”

  “My name on the envelope and—” Phelan covered her hand with his right one and slid the envelope away with the left. He tore it open and displayed the letter. “My name on the bill.”

  Uh oh, she rose to her full five foot six, her slender neck elongated and her chin curved down.

  “We both know his time went for me.”

  “And we both know you were working for Phelan Investigations when it happened. But listen, aren’t you…are you on the hook for a hospital bill, too?”

  Her face went blank. “Joe Ford sent the hospital’s Indigent Fund my parole papers. Now I get that he thought he was doing me a favor, and truth is he did. But he coulda asked.”

  She walked over to her desk, pulled open a drawer, and came back thumbing the pages of her miniature dictionary with the red plastic cover. Peering into it.

  “First time I didn’t have a lawyer because I was indigent. Wasn’t no law then said I had to have one. Fact, there was a law said I didn’t have any right to one. And you know what happened.”

  He nodded.

  “‘Indigent,’ that isn’t…the sign I wanna keep dragging around.”

  Phelan was beginning to feel like dog food.

  She flipped the tiny pages around to hi
m.

  “See there? ‘Indigent’ means ‘deficient in what is requisite.’ And ‘requisite,’ if you look that one up—and I did—it means ‘whatever is called for.’ Isn’t that some word? Requisite. Whatever’s necessary. So ‘indigent’ means whatever it takes, you don’t have it. People don’t like people that are indigent, Tom. They think they can catch it.”

  Phelan surrendered the vanilla envelope. Lips pressed, he glanced over at her determined face and downward, to where the miniature dictionary blurted its judgmental words. He was not seeing it that way at all. Phelan’s hand had fallen on her shoulder and, well, held it. A verification—on his part anyway—that on the day Deeterman came at her what was requisite was the blindest kind of will, and she had had that, and she was here now in one piece.

  But her shoulder had tightened, and he had let go.

  IX

  DELPHA DROVE AWAY from Kirk Properties. She turned into an abandoned parking lot and sat, thinking about Aileen, balancing what she didn’t understand against what she did: Aileen Kirk against Dolly Honeysett.

  Dolly was eighteen when she came in, like Delpha, and not full of rage as Delpha had been, but full of guilt. She had answered her mother’s screams for help by swinging a loaded kerosene heater at the back of her step-father’s neck. If he’d been making off with his wife’s purse or Pontiac, Dolly could have walked—by using deadly force to protect property. If she’d swung with less fright, if she’d just conked him, she’d have been sent home with her mother. But the man was only beating on his wife, not stealing from her, and in court the mother recanted. Why, she’d never urged her daughter to burn George with the heater, she was a loyal wife, you ask any of her neighbors. George, he’d a been sorry later, bless his heart, he always was sorry. She certainly didn’t mean for Dolly to set fire to him like she did…

  The Defense leapt howling onto his polished Florsheims and tried to sandbag her with her Grand Jury testimony, but the sobbing witness overran him like a hard rain overruns a ditch. The defendant sat stricken, her wide mouth downturned. Once the judge banished the sodden mother from the stand, the State of Texas went to town on Dolly.