Apologize, Apologize! (28 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

I
T WAS MY FIRST VISIT TO CASSOWARY SINCE THE TRIP TO IRELAND,
and I found the Falcon down at the stable checking out a new foal, born the night before. He seemed mildly surprised to see me, gave me an awkward hug, and then took a few steps in reverse, his back coming to rest against the stall door.

“You’re looking well, Collie. Nice shirt,” he said. “You can’t go wrong with a good white shirt. Where did you get it? Brown and Thomas?”

I nodded. “How did you know?”

“I have an unerring instinct for such things.”

I reached into my back pocket. “Here’s your money clip,” I said sheepishly. “I’m sorry about Pop.”

“That makes two of us,” he said, popping the clip into his jacket pocket. “So, how did you find the old country? Was it suitably challenging and charming?”

I laughed. “Yeah, you might say that.”

“I hope you don’t nurture any sort of sentimental desire to live there,” he said, looking faintly concerned.

“Oh no. No chance of that happening.”

“And you’re feeling better, are you?” he asked, averting his eyes.

“Yeah, I’m okay, Granddad.”

“I understand from Ingrid that you’ve taken up pigeon racing with Tom Flanagan,” the Falcon said, relaxing a little and folding his arms in front of his chest, his head cocked to one side.

“I’m just helping him out. It’s no big deal. He wants to enter some of his birds in one of the big races coming up.”

“You could do worse things with your time,” he said. “The racing pigeon is a remarkable creature.”

“You sound like Uncle Tom,” I said, unable to resist.

“Yes, well, oh, dear,” he said, momentarily set back. “Come and look at our newest addition to the family.” He opened the door to the stall and gestured for me to follow him inside.

“What’s his name?” I asked, reaching down to pet the baby horse, a deep sorrel color.

“Mr. Guppy,” the Falcon said, rubbing the mother’s forehead and offering her a carrot from inside his jacket pocket. “You must bring some of your pigeons to Cassowary. I’d like to see them,” he said.

“Sure. I’ll bring Bobby Sands sometime next week, if I can sneak him past Uncle Tom.”

“Bobby Sands? Of course, what else would he be called? Your mother would appreciate that, wouldn’t she? Poor Mr. Sands, I understand he loved birds. Oh well, maybe there are birds in heaven—there must be. It wouldn’t be heaven, would it, if there weren’t any birds?”

“That’s what Ma used to say about dogs,” I said.

“Really? Did she say that? I had no idea.” He reached into his pocket for another carrot. “Will you stay for dinner?” he asked me.

“Yes, thanks, I’d like that,” I said.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s hope that after three weeks in Ireland you haven’t begun eating your peas with a knife.”

I woke up early the next morning, the day before the pigeon race. Uncle Tom and I were scheduled to make the drive to Maine.

“Pop, have you seen Uncle Tom?” I stepped from the hallway into the open door leading to his bedroom—the same one he shared with Ma for so many years.

“Pop?”

“Good heavens, Collie, you woke me from a dead sleep. What time is it?” He was buried under a mountain of blankets even though it was warm.

“Seven o’clock. Uncle Tom’s not in his bedroom. I can’t find him in the house. I checked the loft and he’s not there, either—”

“Seven o’clock! What are you thinking? It’s the middle of the night.” He rubbed his eyes and patted his chest before lifting himself onto his elbows. “Wait a minute while I collect my thoughts.”

“Pop, come on, it’s important. . . .” I could see him deliberately stalling, relishing the chaos he knew would ensue from what he was about to say.

“Now I remember . . . I’m afraid I’ve some bad news for you. Swayze came calling after you’d gone to bed—”

“Oh no. No! No! Jesus.” The news blew me off my feet and into the nearest armchair. “You’ve got to be kidding. That’s just great. We’re supposed to leave for Maine today. . . .”

“Well, if history’s any teacher, your uncle Tom will be AWOL for the foreseeable future.”

“I don’t believe it.” I hopped back up onto my feet. “The race is tomorrow. What an idiot I am to get involved. I really thought this time would be different.” I was pacing. I didn’t know whether I was sad or angry or both. At the same time, I was trying to figure out why I was so upset when I should have been relieved. I’d been resisting the idea of the race since the beginning, and now I had a perfect out.

“Settle down, Collie. Why all the emotion? Where’s this coming from? Panic isn’t a becoming trait in a man.” Pop never missed an opening for a sermon. “What did you expect? You know your uncle Tom.” Transparently thrilled by Tom’s truancy, he pulled the pillows up around his head, making himself comfortable, settling into the disarray as if it were a featherbed. “What will you do now?”

“What do you mean, what will I do? What can I do? This was his stupid project. All I can do is hope that he shows up sometime today before it’s too late. . . . Does Swayze still live in Chilmark?”

“No, he’s in Edgartown with his sister and her husband. . . .”

“Okay. I’ll see if Uncle Tom is there . . . or maybe they know where the two of them are. Fuck . . .”

“Please, must you swear, Collie? I’ve told you since you were a boy, bad language makes a man ordinary.”

“I am ordinary, Pop.”

Swayze was passed out in the living room of his sister’s Edgartown cottage. She helped me roust him into temporary lucidity.

“Last time I saw your uncle Tom, he was headed to Victoria Park to feed the pigeons,” he said, his eyes like slits.

“When was that?” I asked him.

“I haven’t a clue,” Swayze answered, collapsing like a hollow suit.

I found him in a heap, familiar position, facedown on the ground, two pigeons perched on his shoulders and one nesting in the small of his back—Uncle Tom finally had become a living monument. They reluctantly lifted off as I approached.

“Uncle Tom . . .” I squeezed his arm. “Wake up. . . . Uncle Tom.”

He opened his eyes and mumbled something unintelligible. Bending down, I reached for his arms and tried hoisting him to his feet. He was a dead weight. I couldn’t carry him or drag him, either. Finally, I managed to revive him enough to get him vertical, my arms around his waist, his back against my abdomen, his feet positioned on top of my feet, as I tried to walk him to the car, struggling with my cane and my bum leg.

He lurched forward and I went over with him; he was sprawled out over the ground, face forward, me on top of him and struggling to get free. I pulled him back up on his feet, and this time we fell backward, him landing on top of me with a thud.

He weighed a ton; I could feel my lungs collapsing under the weight of him. For a moment, I thought about just staying there forever beneath him, crushed by the rock slide of Tom Flanagan, buried under an avalanche of booze and blarney.

I wriggled out from underneath him and grabbed his ankles, dragging him over to the car, where I coaxed some reluctant Good Samaritan into helping me lift him into the backseat.

“Pop! . . . Hey, Pop!” I called out from the kitchen, the midafternoon June breeze rippling in waves of sound through the open and unscreened window next to me. “Where are you? Can you give me a hand with Uncle Tom? I need your help.”

I followed Brendan and Kerry into the living room, where I saw Pop splayed in the shape of a cross, stretched out on his back on the pine floor—the dogs licking his face and covering him in a thin veneer of saliva.

“How’s about another kiss, Miriam, my love?” he said, grinning, making smacking sounds, wrapping his arms around Brendan.

Slowly I sagged into the closest chair. Wagging his tail, Kerry came over and put his wiry head in my lap. He smiled up at me. I looked down at him looking up at me.

“Pray for me, Kerry,” I said.

A few minutes later, I stood up and went outside, and after a ludicrous struggle, I managed to get Uncle Tom into the house and lined up alongside Pop on the floor. I went upstairs and got a couple of blankets, covered them up, and went back upstairs to get washed and dressed.

Uncle Tom was sitting up on the floor, had dragged himself up, his shoulders against the sofa, eyes closed and head leaning back, when I came back down to the living room.

“Thanks,” I said to him from just inside the doorway. “I didn’t want to do this. I don’t care about racing pigeons. You’re the one that talked me into it. I was just doing this for you. It was all you. You asked me. You wanted me. Even if you won’t admit it, you know you did. You needed my help. You wanted my help. So I gave in and spent weeks training the birds with you and taking care of them and listening to you talk about nothing but this big weekend, and this is how it ends? Now what am I supposed to do?”

“What’s all the fuss?” Pop said from his spot where he lay next to Tom, drawing himself up on his elbows and squinting elaborately in my direction.

“You’re hopeless, both of you, you’ll never change. You know, I look at you two and I wonder. What would it take to stop you from doing this? Jesus, why did I let myself think this time would be different? How could I be so stupid? What’s wrong with me?”

For probably the first time in their lives, both Pop and Uncle Tom were speechless, and in Pop’s eyes there was a look I took to be something almost like shame flickering briefly.

“Well,” Pop said finally, rubbing his hand over his face the way he always did when he was trying to pull himself together, “that stings.”

“Oh no, you’re not going to make me the villain in this,” I said, though I had already begun to feel the part.

“It’s one thing to tell a man off, Collie,” Pop said. “It’s another to strip him of all that he is and leave him with nothing. Are we nothing? Do our lapses make us nothing? All right . . .” He shrugged, an improbable dignity hovering over his head, and Uncle Tom’s, too, appearing like a muted rainbow. “Maybe it’s so.”

The whole time, Uncle Tom kept uncharacteristically silent—drunk or sober, he always had plenty to say—just sat there with his back resting against the legs of the sofa, his chin in his hand, his hand cupped around his cheek, his elbow on his chest, his eyes averted.

When Pop finished, Uncle Tom’s gaze finally met mine, and something passed between us—it didn’t last long, but it lasted long enough.

An hour or so later, I was on the road heading for Maine with Patsy and Bobby in a release cage in the backseat. Bingo sat perched on my shoulder, cooing the whole five hundred miles that it took to get to Rogue Bluffs.

By the time I got to the race site, I was pretty much at a loss to explain why I was there at all. I seemed to be under the influence of the earth’s magnetic field myself, following a prescribed route, keeping to this unyielding linear journey for reasons I didn’t understand and decided not to explore.

I tormented myself with thoughts about Bingo being torn apart by a hawk or a falcon. They’re so vulnerable, pigeons, when they’re on their own. Racing season must be for predators a kind of avian carnival; Patsy, Bobby, and Bingo were looking more and more like cotton candy and corn dogs.

I argued with myself right up until the moment of release, but in the end I let them go.

I held on to Bingo a second longer than I should have. I tossed him into the air above my head. I watched as he disappeared into a moving gray cloud that temporarily obliterated the sun, hundreds of birds surging forward as a single unit, driven by the same purpose but ultimately destined to make their own individual journey, separate and alone.

“You must be Harvard Barney,” said someone in a pair of overalls, sidling up alongside me, his baseball cap spattered in birdshit, both of us beneath the shifting sky of birds.

“Yeah, that’s me. How did you know?”

He laughed. “You got the look. How go the hieroglyphics?”

I suppressed the urge to lop off my head with my Swiss army knife. “Fine. Thanks for asking.”

“Good. Where’s Tom?”

“He was feeling a little under the weather.”

“Too bad. I hear he’s got quite a bird this year, a real contender, a little red fella. . . .”

I nodded in agreement, all the while staring skyward, the two of us focusing on the birds, not talking but looking, watching until you couldn’t see them anymore. It has a name, the moment when a pigeon disappears from sight—it’s called “vanishing bearings.”

Two weeks passed with no sign of little Bingo.

“It’s no use, he’s not coming home,” I said to Uncle Tom as I walked into the kitchen after checking the loft for the hundredth time over the course of the morning. Bobby and Patsy made it back to the loft the day of the release, placing fourth and fifth.

“What kind of talk is that?” Uncle Tom demanded. “You never know. Remember the story of Michael Collins. He walked home.”

“Uncle Tom, please, enough with the Michael Collins fable. Bingo’s fallen victim to the perils of the flight home, we’ve got to face it.”

“And why is that, exactly?” Uncle Tom stuck out his chin, a wedge between himself and my pessimism. “Because you say so? You’re never right about anything, Noodle. What makes you think you’re right about this all of a sudden? Anyway, he was my bird. I’m the one who’s suffering the loss. What about me? You’re always trying to steal my thunder. Why don’t you make yourself useful for a change, think of someone other than yourself and get out there and look for him?”

“Look for him? Where in the hell am I going to look for him between here and Maine?”

“You’re so smart, you tell me. You’ve got so many years of high-priced education stored up in your little pea brain that you can’t think anymore. If you were half as intelligent as a pigeon, you might be worth having around.”

“Jesus,” I said, slumping into the kitchen chair, burying my head in my hands.

“You can start by following all the major highways, for sure that’s what Bingo is doing. Let the mountains be your guide. Use your olfactory senses and open yourself up to the sun and the earth’s magnetic forces—in other words, aspire to a higher intellectual plane and try to think like a pigeon, if it doesn’t hurt your head too much.”