The Bird Boys Read online

  Or that was the story.

  Aileen Kirk looked nothing like Dolly Honeysett. Inside prison, Dolly’s white, five foot one, pudgy body faded behind other inmates’. She occupied no fixed spot in the chow hall, only nomadic outposts on the peripheries. Her upper lip was long, her nose a small knob high above it. Her brown hair, rubber-banded into a rat-tail, started off the morning flattening a pair of prominent ears that soon fought their way to freedom. Who came in with Dolly Honeysett were three other women and the good fairy Glinda, and it was maybe six months before anyone put that together. Nobody wanted to, did they? Glinda, named by an early recipient of her magic, was a positive force in their unit of Gatesville, even if you couldn’t see her. Because you couldn’t see her. Glinda divined a need and delivered tokens to the poor in heart. These items were puny and a surprise and their juju all the stronger for that.

  A woman whose parole had been denied slumped back to her cell to find just inside the bars, a Baby Ruth resting on the smooth surface of her special favorite, a banana Moon Pie. A month later, one going up for a parole hearing and climbing the walls about it discovered three packs of Luckys. Wasn’t her brand, but the omen heartened her. Maybe a couple months after that, a laundry worker losing her looks and her grip picked up a squat pink bottle of Oil of Olay. A young one, twenty-three, worried about her ten-year-old son, explosive about her lack of telephone time, found stamps and three four-packs of envelopes. Write him letters? Well, maybe. If somebody would spell for her.

  These were items anyone could buy at the commissary or receive from a relative. Not like a lacy negligee or a ride in a Cadillac convertible or an honest embrace. Something like that, though. This was all during—Delpha had to concentrate here—1965 or ‘66, when they got used to hearing that name, Vietnam, on the radio. When one of the Beatles said the four of them were more popular than Jesus—didn’t that remark get some dedicated chow-hall discussion? The gifts went on through 1967, the year that started off with the spirit of dough-faced Jack Ruby whistling past the bars of Death Row.

  Conversations about Glinda, like conversations about lottery-winning, were pleasurable in themselves. The speculation, the secret glances, the proposing and dismissal of names. People started calling out to Glinda that they wanted some Fritos and bean dip, some Dragon’s Blood nail polish, an ice cold Grapette, then they got crazy and wanted parole and a Thunderbird car, a snuggle-date with Rock Hudson. Women cried out for everything impossible. After an upsurge of such craziness, Glinda did not come for a long time, and speculation grew that whoever she was had left Gatesville. Then she came again, and once that news had circulated, people seemed relieved, content to hush-hush her name.

  In summer, in the scorching middle of it—the coarse white uniforms weighed like wet concrete on their backs and thighs, and the news outside was that the pretty boxer Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali, could be headed for prison—the warden summoned Mary Buell, a black inmate, so that two Marines could notify her that her son had been killed in battle. Afterward, a chaplain ministered to her in her cell. A funeral could not be arranged until the body arrived, no certain time was given, and there was no consoling the shrieking mother.

  Had her son died in a car wreck or a forklift accident, her lack of consolation would have remained solely her business, and her shrieks the burden of her neighbors. But Ernest J. Johnson was the warden then, a veteran who’d been frozen, starved, and shot at a place called St. Vith, and when an African Methodist Episcopal pastor in Temple volunteered to hold an interim service, the warden arranged it. To Ernest Johnson one thing only divided men more surely than skin color, and that was Semper Fi. Two other inmates had sons in the Army, and a question meandered to the warden. Could the funeral service be opened to the unit?

  Friends of the bereaved took the right-side pews in the stifling chapel, and white inmates, including the two other servicemen’s mothers, filed into the left. One of those must have been a Catholic because she stayed on her knees the whole time, though there was no cushioned rail to kneel on. A Gatesville funeral home had donated fans, and these were passed out to all and gratefully used. Not until the pews had settled did the mother of the fallen Marine advance down the aisle in prison white, her face gleaming with tears and sweat. Mary Buell was supported by her two sisters, accompanied by the young soldier’s teenage sister and his small brother. From the first step onto the chapel linoleum, there were wails and weeping and folding and contorting, thrusting arms and beseeching the Lord.

  Looks passed among the inmates on the left side. Many of them had not seen black women freely carry on like this, it was a strange window they were seeing through. Ridicule rose up. Most swallowed it. One girl who sniggered took a swift elbow to the ribs. Though this greeting of death was different than what most of them were used to, they sweated in silence. A lot of women in there had sons. Didn’t matter if they were two-year-old babies. Or six years old or ten. The white inmates saw a mother beset with the mother of all fears, and it had come-to-be, and they feared it for themselves. A moan broke out from the chapel’s left side, mingling with those from the right. Then another.

  Delpha had been to one funeral: her mother’s. That was a tight-jawed affair. This was something else, but what? The black women and girl, the brotherless boy, made their way toward the altar as though barefoot on shattered glass, and Delpha distinguished two things: the suffering of grief and the expressing of grief. Both were real—she read that in Mary Buell’s murdered eyes, in the sisters’ clutching and entreating. The griefs were intertwined, as if Agony itself were crawling down the aisle, one bloody body with many arms and voices.

  Afterward, when Mary Buell was escorted to her cell, she found just outside the bars a jar of the flowers that grew haphazard around the prison garden: milkweed. A gallon glass jar, de-labeled and buffed to a crystal sparkle. Its tin lid was poked with holes, the jar filled with a green leafy stalk sprouting purplish-pink florets. Mary picked up the jar. Jostled, a Monarch butterfly arched gold-red wings and flitted to another floret. An inmate heard Mary murmur that her son was found. She lifted her voice. Her Clayton was not lost in a foreign land, he had waked up in the mansion of the Lord.

  To Mary from Glinda.

  That was how they caught her. An inmate near the garden had been struck by the sight of a girl with a yard of cheesecloth, creeping and pouncing, chasing and swiping like a lunatic. She didn’t know the girl’s name was Dolly Honeysett, she called her “the one with the Dumbo ears.”

  Soon enough, some girls cornered Dolly. Was she the one who gave people stuff? Was she Glinda?

  Dolly shook her head.

  Hit on the shoulder she said,

  No.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  Then yes.

  Why on earth?

  Dolly shrugged.

  Why did she do that?

  Backed up against a wall, she stammered maybe because it helped some.

  Some what?

  What did she mean, helped?

  Helped what?

  Well, because she had to do something to make up for misunderstanding her mother. For burning George’s head. Her prayers were dry. The only thing she could figure to do was give something to another person who needed it. Certain people, it was just large in their face what they needed. After she left her offerings, Dolly had found that, for about as long as a kitchen match would burn, she felt clear.

  There was no magic in this answer. Some people didn’t understand it. Other people did. But nobody talked about Glinda anymore, not like when she was a mystery. Whichever sad people received candy or Lipton tea bags or pink Suave shampoo mumbled thanks to Dolly, and that was that. Until—wasn’t too long after Otis Redding had plane-crashed, was it, Christmas, 1967—Dolly’s trial attorney with the polished Florsheims, his legal vanity torpedoed by Mrs. Honeysett’s image-burnishing perjury, assassinated the woman’s character in a parole hearing. He managed to spring the obedient girl who’d swung the gas heat
er.

  Goodbye, Glinda, goodbye.

  Both Dolly and Aileen stuck in her mind, Delpha understood, because they saw things others couldn’t, but Aileen craved the spotlight on herself while Dolly had shined it on others. Really, the girls were opposites.

  Like Delpha and Isaac.

  Back in the late spring Delpha had had a lover, a college boy mourning his dad. She’d unlock the Rosemont Hotel’s kitchen door around eleven and let in Isaac. Him almost twenty, astonishing her with his open nature; her thirty-two, a wary ex-con—not that she told him that. What fiery nights they’d spent up in her room. They had gone slow, touching slow, had lingered learning each other’s bodies. Other nights they were wild, pushing. Tall, a shade stooped, and crazy to learn, Isaac was in the flush of leaving boyhood. Delpha, lifting the floodgate prison had locked, had known that craziness, too. Until summer was almost at its end.

  Last week, Isaac had sent a shiny postcard of what looked like the biggest brick church she’d ever seen. Princeton University.

  Dear Delpha, You were right that I had to go back, the card said. And you were wrong, too. I don’t understand how that works, but I miss you. Isaac.

  She’d kissed the handwriting side and put away the card in the night table’s drawer.

  Delpha shook her head as a misty gust blew leaves across the vacant parking lot. Her hair brushing against her cheeks, she turned her mind away from Isaac, from Aileen, to the right now. See there—her blessed focal point: the line between treetop and sky. Then down, to a fan of broken brown glass on the cracked blacktop, the orange stars of sweetgum leaves. She breathed out. Placed her hands on the wheel.

  Tomorrow either she or Tom would finish off the realtors’ offices, then they’d have a list to work from—names of men who’d bought homes, and one of them just might be Xavier Bell’s missing brother Rodney. What if Rodney wasn’t on that list? Well, they’d try something else. Delpha sighed.

  What you always do. She put the car in gear.

  X

  BY SIX O’CLOCK Phelan was out on the Bellas Hess floor, selling cameras, tape decks, and televisions. He was boxed in behind a little corral of a counter with a nineteen-year-old named Ben. That night he’d sit in his dark car in a mostly-deserted parking lot at a judicious distance from the back door. That would be his post, in view of the loading dock. A store security guy would cover the locked front door. The manager had furnished them with a pair of walkie-talkies from Radio Shack.

  “How come you get to walk all over the store and Ralph doesn’t chew your butt?” Ben complained when Phelan had rambled back into the corral from reconnaissance. The teenager glared at him from Buddy Holly black plastic glasses, hands planted at his waist where his hips would have started if he’d had any. His black gabardines were staying up courtesy of a workhorse belt.

  “You’re so sharp with the merchandise he can’t spare you.”

  Ben’s sull reduced a little. “Well, I tried to teach you.”

  Phelan stared at the kid. Ben went over to the other side of the glass counter and polished.

  Ralph the manager had introduced him to the staff. The assistant manager Dean was a short, squat young man with thinning blond hair and a dog-like expression. Ralph had wanted to let him in on Phelan’s role, but Phelan had shaken his head no. There were girls and middle-aged women, both black and white, behind the counters, and an old man janitor for spills. A food area where two bored boys speared hotdogs off a heat-lamp griller, and handed over potato chips and Cokes. A loud, friendly pharmacist in the pill house with a pretty girl out front ringing up the white prescription sacks. Phelan’s guess was the stockroom, since they were the ones handling boxed goods, appliances, knowing the inventory, what was coming in. He’d have to make it back there. Meanwhile, Ben with the slicked-down hair was the only man on the floor proper. And it was easy to get him to talk about himself.

  He was the next Ansel Adams, he told Phelan, looking for the impress-o-meter to register. The name rang no gong with Phelan, but he nodded anyway. Ben told him about a trip to Big Bend and all the boulders and wildflowers, jackrabbits and scorpions and sunsets he’d taken pictures of. He’d got an A in his Nature Photography class at Lamar College, and his teacher said some of his shots were good enough to sell.

  “Ever take pictures of people? Action shots?”

  “Sure. And print ’em. Got my own darkroom.”

  Phelan filed that info away while Ben enthused about his series of the Southeast Texas State Fair. Tattooed carnies, couples Frenching, kids with cotton candy stuck in their hair, teenagers freaking on the Tilt-a-Whirl. He was so wound up that Phelan had to step up to a customer and badly advise him on what camera to buy.

  “No, no, this one’s better,” Ben cut in, demonstrating features until the customer backed off and pulled out his wallet.

  Apparently soothed by getting to speak his piece to his new fellow employee, Ben turned to Phelan afterward. At length and kindly, he repeated the specs for every camera set out around the case and in it.

  A sliver of Phelan’s brain attended, the rest of it mapping out the employee in each station. At break time, he made it a point to wander past them, have a casual exchange. Smoked a cigarette with the stockers in the back, two black guys in mechanic’s jumpsuits who had nothing to say until one of them noticed his missing finger. Then they worked up a brief conversation about one of them’s cousin, a machinist who’d cut off both his thumbs last month.

  Phelan winced.

  The other guy hooked his chin and said, “Got to git back to work.” His friend, shooting a glance at Phelan, ground out his cigarette on the stockroom floor.

  The pharmacist, Ted Something, phone cradled between ear and shoulder, set out sacks like a short-order cook. Hung up and jawed Phelan’s ear off with baseball predictions. No hope for old Yogi’s Mets, even with Seaver and Mays; might be rallying now, but they’d choke in the end. Reds would skin ’em alive. Hotshot Nolan Ryan’s arm wasn’t made for the long haul.

  “I don’t know. Man’s pitching a hundred miles an—” Phelan put in, but the pharmacist answered the phone again, scribbled, hung up, and started in on the player for his money, Pete Rose. Hank Aaron, well yeah, he was edging the Babe’s record, but he’d choke, too. Streak would putter out. Guy was thirty-nine years old, staring forty in the face. And over the winter—

  “Oh, c’mon, man, Aaron’s almost to 715 now. Hit Number 711 already,” Phelan said.

  “Almost only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades. Now, that Pete Rose,” the man planted a thumb in the air, “he’s my darlin.” Statistics spilled as he jiggled pills from jars into the little plastic canisters.

  Phelan continued his tour. He didn’t take pills, but if he did, he thought he’d get them somewhere else.

  The rugged lady in Sports was knowledgeable about handguns in the case, also shotguns racked on a wall and fishing tackle. Set her trousered leg on a lower shelf and recommended lures: baby wrigglers, husky plunkers, underwater minnows bristling with hooks. She hefted a double-barrel to her square shoulder like she needed to hold off Housewares with it.

  Housewares was Mabel, a fifty-five-ish saleswoman who wore her dyed, flat-black hair in a time-warp pompadour with sausage curls, platform shoes with a big painted toe sticking out the peephole, and a scalloped apron over her dress. Canteen girl from The Twilight Zone.

  “Nice to meet you, honey,” Mabel said, not shaking but patting the hand he held out to her. “Your wife likes baking, pick her up one of these Corning Wares with the blue flower decals. They’re on sale.”

  The two boys penned inside the snack bar not far from the store’s front door sleepily resisted conversation with anybody but each other. The chubby girl in makeup had her fingernails all painted different colors. Seemed to have a lot of visiting friends. Phelan bet she was throwing in freebies with the rung-up items, but that wasn’t what he was there for.

  After closing, he suffered Crandall, the security man, who was in lust with
the walkie-talkies.

  “Hey, Tom, your daddy ever sic a hound on you?”

  “Hey, Tom, you ever go out with a girl had hair on her nipples?”

  “Over and out, Crandall, less you see somebody at that door.”

  “Well, pardon my ass and 10-4 that.”

  “10-4 this, too. Don’t move an inch till I come get you. In person.”

  Phelan sat there till four-thirty a.m., slouched down in his car a few yards from the only light pole behind the store. All was calm, all was bright. He had plenty of time to feel all right about Delpha having not quit to find a less murderous job. He already knew how he’d have felt if she had done that.

  Only one alarm. A dark sedan, couldn’t place the model, had driven into the parking lot, done a loop, and exited. The driver wore a hat. Phelan had the feeling, from the slow speed of the loop, that his lone car was of interest, but that was only a feeling. Maybe the slowpoke was lost.

  XI

  HE CAME IN late. Delpha, cheered to hear that Phelan Investigations had booked a second job, leaned toward him as he sat bleary-eyed on the corner of her desk, describing Bellas Hess’s inhabitants, speculating on possible culprits. The manager had drafted a list of stolen goods, brand names, and models. By the way, had Delpha ever heard of Ansel Adams? Photographer of nature pictures.

  She shook her head. “I’ve got more realtors to see. With both us gone, Tom, nobody’s answering the phone.”

  “Can’t help it. Don’t suppose you found Rodney’s house yesterday?”

  Delpha’s eyes narrowed. “No. And you didn’t catch any thieves at Bellas Hess.”

  “That’s a negative.”

  They looked at each other. Delpha shouldered her purse and headed downstairs to the Dart.