Blackbird (6 page)

Kat and I had been seeing each other every day since the District game, and I’d proudly introduced her to Johnny, the miserably envious Daz, and pretty much everybody else I knew. We rode the far places of the farm in Indian summer, past grazing Brangus and Charolais and sunning brood
mares watching us with patient eyes, under windmills that creaked like cellar doors in their tireless turning, through woods as high and silent as cathedrals, across pasturelands where the wind ran through the grass in waves that chased and overran and re-crossed each other until they lost themselves in the hills.

On a golden Saturday afternoon we let the horses graze as we lay back under the old willows by the Far Pond listening to the goggle-eyes take insects from the smooth surface with little smacking sounds. Pale peach and ivory coloured clouds piled on themselves to the highest reaches of the sky, and the gently sloping bluegreen fields stretched away endlessly into the long afternoon. The heartbroken call of a dove drifted across the water from the cottonwoods along the opposite shore, and swallows dipped, climbed and turned in the cooling air.

Without opening her eyes Kat said, ‘It’s really sweet being out here. How far are we from the house?’

‘About three and a half miles.’

‘Wow. How much of it is the farm?’

‘Everything you can see from here. A little over nine thousand acres.’

‘Must be a lot of work.’

‘Sometimes.’

Pointing to the cupped brown nests in the dry cattail stalks fringing the shallow end of the pond, she said, ‘Did blackbirds build those?’

‘Yeah, redwings,’ I said. ‘Soldier-birds, some people call them, because of those little stripes on their shoulders.’

‘We have them back home,’ Kat said. ‘At least I think they’re the same. But I’ve never seen them up close like this – they’re beautiful.’

‘They say some of the Indians thought they called people away from life, like “Time’s up”, off to the Happy Hunting Ground or something.’

‘Then we better not listen.’

Kat played classical guitar, and sometimes brought her Ibañez along on our rides. She’d make up songs about things that caught her attention along the way, like the one she called ‘What Colour Is Time?’, about the green hills around us and how long they’d been there, waiting and watching for other colours to come.

Another time she told me about having a nanny named Estrella from Guadalajara when she was a little girl, and asked me in perfect Spanish how I learned the language.

‘Mainly just hanging around with the hands – a lot of them are from Mexico,’ I said. ‘
Porque lo preguntas?
’

‘I’ve heard you and your family talking to them,’ she said. ‘
Es una lengua hermosa. Es un mundo hermoso aqui
.’

And she was right. I looked away across the fields and valleys, thinking about how beautiful it all was and wondering why I’d never seen it like this before.

She made a couple of tuning adjustments on the guitar, strummed and chorded randomly for a while, then found her key. ‘There’s about a thousand versions of this one,’ she said. ‘See if you’ve heard it like this – Estrella used to sing it to me sometimes, like a lullaby.’

Ay, ay, ay, ay
Canta y no llores
Porque cantando se alegran,
Cielito Lindo, los corazones
.

Este Cielito Lindo
Lindo Cielito que canto aqui
Viene de la huasteca cielito lindo
Solo por ti

Que tu estas dentro
Tierra de las aztecas
Cielito Lindo, que Dios nos hizo
Son esas tres huastecas
Cielito Lindo, un paraiso
.

She laid the guitar beside her on the grass and said, ‘Do you think that’s really true?’

‘That God made us? I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe just the good stuff.’

‘Do you hate black people? Or poor people?’

‘No, why would I?’

‘I thought I was supposed to be mad at the rich white people down here. I thought there was some kind of conspiracy or something, and everybody was in on it. It was like, here are the good guys and there are the bad guys over there, and you can tell the bad guys because they’re white and they have growly teeth.’

‘You’ve met a lot of people around here,’ I said. ‘What do you think now?’

She shook back her hair. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘All I can say, I haven’t met any bad guys yet.’

Now Max said, ‘Was that not your last ride with her?’

At first I couldn’t speak.

‘Jim, are you still there?’

‘Yeah, I’m here.’

‘Wasn’t that your last ride with Kat?’

Finally I said, ‘You know it was.’

‘And you’re telling me all that was then, and this is now?’

FIVE

I finally got around to Jonas an hour or so after I got back to what used to be home, the three-bedroom on Lanshire where I slept at night and where the emptiness was like an icicle through the heart. On the way, thinking maybe I needed a sugar and caffeine hit, I had stopped for a cappuccino at Starbucks, but ended up grinding my teeth and throwing it savagely at the ArkLaTex Realty sign in the front yard as I crossed the drive toward the door. Just the thing to show the neighbours what a stable guy I was. Then for my self-imposed act of contrition I walked humbly over and retrieved the cup, thinking, for no reason I recognised at the moment, of Father Joe – José Carbajal, senior pastor at Sacred Heart downtown – gone now but bright in memory.

Father Joe walking into the fellowship hall, finished with confessions for now and carrying another six-gallon bucket of pancake flour to the kitchen, setting it on the end of the counter and lighting a small cigar. It was a freezing Saturday morning toward the end of my first year in Traverton, and I was standing elbow to elbow with Jonas McCashion, flipping all-you-can-eat pancakes for the Kids’ Roundup Ranch in Bowie County.

‘I thought this place was smoke-free,’ said Jonas.

‘
Que es peor que la que
,’ the priest said, rolling up his sleeves, the cigar cocked at an obstinate angle in his teeth. ‘
Es de la reserva privada de Fidel
.’ He grabbed a spatula. ‘Let’s feed these
paganos hambre
.’

Jonas and I went back to our conversation about women, snow geese and incoherent Texas governors, already on our way to becoming good friends. I was what he called dis-mated, a circumstance he was unwilling to let stand. He introduced me to a former neighbour of his, a ceramic artist named Jana Stiles, and his instincts turned out to be dead-on.

Because without Jana I’d have had no story that could be whole. I still saw and smelled and felt the exact moment when it began for me: the CCR concert in Baton Rouge – our third date – midnight, cigarette lighters held high all around us in the dark, Fogerty and his latest line-up doing a long, sweet reprise of ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain?’ and Jana, deep inside the music, swaying against me, leaning over and taking the lobe of my ear lightly in her teeth, growling softly.

When I lost her it was for reasons I should have understood then but didn’t even now, a fact that joined forces with many others to make me wonder how the hell there could be enough room in the known universe to accommodate all the things I didn’t understand.

One thing I did get was that most of the women I’d loved had been John Fogerty fans, and I remembered him from about as far back as he went. When it came to dancing Rachel had been more country-western than anything else, but couldn’t get enough of Fogerty’s early stuff, like the Blue Velvets version of ‘Have You Ever Been Lonely?’.

In fact, that was what had been playing on the kitchen radio the first night I’d been the designated cook on one of Kat’s visits. That had given me full control of the operation, which meant steaks all around. It was the first time I’d been trusted with that many rib-eyes, but I brought it off without a hitch if you judged by all the compliments and the almost complete absence of leftovers.

When the table was clear, Dusty had said, ‘’Fraid y’all are going to have to hold the fort without Ray and me tonight. We’re goin’ boot-scootin’ at the Palomino with Liz and Doc.’

‘How nice,’ Gran Esther said. ‘You two have a good time – you’ve earned it.’

With Dusty and Rachel on their way, Kat and I were doing the dishes. ‘Where’s the Palomino?’ she asked, her hip warm against mine.

‘Greenville,’ I said, lowering my voice a little to keep Gran Esther from hearing. ‘It’s a couple of hours each way. They usually stay the night in town.’

Kat smiled, passed me another handful of knives, forks and spoons.

‘Here, let me help with that,’ said Gran, carrying a couple of stray saucers she’d found in the living room over to the sink.

‘No, ma’am,’ I said. ‘We’ll have this done in no time. How about some hot chocolate or something?’

‘Come to think of it, hot chocolate would be very nice, dear.’

Kat quickly dried her hands, saying, ‘Let me make that for you, Mrs Rhodes. Biscuit can show me where everything is.’

Gran said she was tired and decided to take the chocolate
to her room. ‘Goodnight to both of you,’ she said, ‘and God bless.’

What Gran called her room was actually a good-sized apartment at the far end of the house, and once she was in for the evening she never came back out. Kat watched as Gran closed the door behind her.

‘You’ve got a great family, Biscuit,’ Kat said.

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘Want a beer?’

‘You can do that?’

‘One or two on weekends as long as it’s just around here. Dusty thinks beer is good for your constitution.’

‘How does Rachel feel about it?’

‘She doesn’t drink. And she doesn’t say anything about anybody else’s drinking either. Calls that taking other people’s inventory.’

‘My Uncle Marty says things like that. He’s in AA.’

I just nodded.

‘Well, she seems like a pretty terrific lady to me.’

‘She is now.’

I opened two Lone Stars from the fridge and handed Kat one of them as we wandered over to the stereo.

Flipping through the tapes, Kat picked one up and said, ‘Judy Collins, great.’ She took a drink of Lone Star and looked around the room’s wide hardwood floors scattered with area rugs. ‘This room was made for dancing, Biscuit. Think Gran would mind?’

‘She takes out her hearing aid when she goes in at night,’ I said. ‘She’ll never know.’ I pushed the tape into the player, and we rolled back a couple of the rugs and lowered the lights. Kat slipped her penny loafers off, took my Lone Star and set both bottles on the counter, then came back and held her hand out to me as the music filled the room. I
buried my face in her hair, smelling her skin and her summery perfume, her soft breasts lightly pressing my chest and her hips moving smoothly against mine.

After a few more numbers she lifted her mouth to mine, kissing me deeply as we danced, her hands on my waist.

When we finally broke the kiss she said what I’d been trying to think of a way to bring up: ‘Show me your room?’

When I opened the door to my room and switched on the light Kat glanced around. ‘Hey, you’re not too messy for a guy, Biscuit – and your own bathroom! Wow!’ She walked over for a closer look at the framed picture on my dresser next to the cracked red coffee mug bristling with pencil stubs and dried-up ballpoint pens. ‘This must be Lee Ann in the middle,’ she said. ‘Who are the other two?’

‘My grandmother and Dr Kepler.’

‘Dr Kepler?’

‘She was a professor, a friend of ours,’ I said. ‘She didn’t have any family or anything, and she kind of adopted us.’

‘What happened to her family?’

‘Her parents and sisters died in a concentration camp in Poland,’ I said. ‘Now she’s dead too.’ I stood gazing at her image, feeling its familiar dark energy, like a permanent, warm, almost undetectable push against my skin, and wondering why I couldn’t stop saying things that made me sound even stupider than I actually was.

For a while Kat just stared at the picture in silence, something changing in her eyes. She swallowed hard, touched her fingers to the glass. ‘
Aleha ha-shalom
,’ she said softly. ‘
Baruch dayan emet
.’

I was about to ask what this meant when she pulled my mouth down to hers and kissed me again, her breath coming faster. She stepped back, looked at me for a while without saying anything, then walked over to the door, closed it and thumbed the lock.

Taking a deep breath, I unlocked and opened the front door of my house and stepped inside, bracing myself against what I knew I was going to see, which was nothing. Or maybe I should say everything, but all of it exactly as I’d left it this morning. Until Jana took the girls and moved to the big cedar A-frame behind her gallery off Border I hadn’t understood that inanimate things could die, that all those atoms could stop their quantum dance at once and something as full of energy and purpose as a house one day could become only a shell the next, a replica of life like the detailed husk a cicada leaves behind when it moults.

It wasn’t that I denied being mostly responsible for what had gone wrong between Jana and me, or that I didn’t understand what she was saying about the job. And for her it went beyond the fact that her brother had been killed in the desert, or that her cop uncle had been murdered by a couple of skinheads on the street in Houston. It really came down to her being through with the locker-room police culture that still hung around me like cigar smoke when I got home from work at night, the gun I put on my belt every morning – to her nothing but an ugly black killing tool – the constant anxiety, the midnight calls. She wanted no more bagpipes playing ‘Amazing Grace’ or white-gloved honour guards firing blanks at the sky as somebody with colourful medals and
high rank handed young widows or widowers in sunglasses their tightly folded American flags. And outweighing all the rest of it put together, the half-ounce of copper-jacketed lead in the form of two nine-millimetre bullets that wouldn’t have had to be cut out of my body if I’d had some other job.

Her solution was direct and uncomplicated: take the fifty-one-per-cent deal Rachel and Dusty had offered us on the Flying S in Rains County, move out there and run the place, and let them take off to find out what the rest of the world looks like – something they’d been dreaming of for the last fifteen years. But the terms didn’t really matter, because for Jana the question of where we’d be going was a non-essential detail; what she cared about was what we’d be leaving behind – a folded flag of her own.