The Man Who Loved Birds (2 page)

They played three games. The Voice stepped in from time to time and offered help and Little seemed not to object until they were into the third beer and the third game and some part of what the Voice was showing him clicked for Flavian and his body took over the job at hand. He had a vision of the cue stick as an extension of himself—he stopped thinking of the stick and the balls as objects, as nouns, and began seeing the whole picture, he and the stick and the balls and the table as a process outside of time, as one big verb. And then he ran three in a row and the Voice said, “Hot damn!” and Little said, “Beginner’s luck,” and when Flavian finally missed a shot he took as great a pleasure as he had ever known from seeing the newfound seriousness with which Little took up his stick.

Then they played neck and neck, ball for ball, and it came down to this, the white ball and the black ball on the grassy green field in the smoky cone of light and the Voice with his arms crossed over his taut white t-shirt and his full lower lip stuck out and no
longer offering help or even so much as a word of advice. Then Flavian muffed a gimme and left Little set up and Little, as close to a pro as came in these parts, sank the eight ball with a smooth quick stroke and a smack of his lips and it was over.

Flavian turned to the Voice. “Thanks, teacher.”

“Your favor to return.”

“I’d buy you a beer but I have to go,” Flavian said, uncomfortably aware that he was too late to make Compline.

“Suit yourself, Brother Tom.”

“How did you—” and then Flavian caught himself and turned to the door and then he was crossing the parking lot to the monastery minivan and wondering if he’d said or done something to give away that he was a monk, or maybe the Voice called everybody
brother
at the end of an evening of pool and beer? Flavian was in the driver’s seat and had the van started when the Voice appeared at the window.

“Hey, listen. You’re one of the brothers at the monastery, right?”

Flavian considered denying the fact—after all, the apostle Peter had denied Jesus himself—but in the end he resolved to play it straight. “How did you know?”

The Voice shrugged. “It’s in the walk.”

“The walk?” Flavian set aside this cryptic comment for later consideration. “Anyway, I was just stopping by . . .” His voice trailed off into the certainty that any excuse he gave was only going to dig his grave deeper, besides which he had none. Why had he “just stopped by”?

The Voice stuck a stuffed, oversized manila envelope through the window and dropped it in Flavian’s lap. “I put this together for the abbot but hadn’t found the chance to get it over to him. Much obliged for the favor,” he said and vanished.

“Hey!” Flavian turned off the van and jumped out but the Voice was nowhere to be seen. Flavian walked over and peered in the bar windows—the bartender was wiping down the bar top,
where Little’s broad beam was tossing down one last draft. Flavian looked up and down the street, around the corner of the building—nothing, no one.

Flavian sighed, climbed back into the minivan, tossed the manila envelope on the passenger seat, and put the van in gear. He rolled his window down—the night held the chill of winter and the cold clean air rushed over him but he could still smell beer and smoke, the sweet smell of possibility and of sin. He drove under a high bright full moon and as he moved under the early spring sky he spoke aloud the prayers of Compline, the day’s last office he’d long since missed. After seventeen years he was indifferent to the ritual—in this world of television and cars and planes, what was the point of all that hocus-pocus? But some childish part of him still took comfort in saying the
Salve Regina
.

Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope

To you we cry, poor banished children of Eve

To you we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy upon us,

and after this our exile

Show us the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, o precious,

o sweet Virgin Mary.

Flavian pulled into the monastery drive—all was dark. He unlocked the wide metal gate to the enclosure. It swung open with a screech that would wake the dead—how had that rusting hinge escaped his notice? All the same, he doubted anyone would wake. If anybody asked he would make a clean breast of everything he’d done. Maybe. He would deal with that tomorrow.

He extinguished the headlights and used the light of the
moon to pull the van into its parking spot. He studied the battered manila envelope, bequeathed by the Voice, riding shotgun. It had no address, no markings at all—it might have been salvaged from someone’s garbage. Flavian served as the abbot’s personal secretary and would be responsible for opening it in any case but he considered tossing it right here, right now. He’d had what for him passed as a wild and crazy evening. With luck it would be a long time before the demon seized him again and in any case opportunities were few and far between. He’d made no commitment to delivering the envelope. He was entirely within his rights, legal and moral, in pitching it in the can.

He considered this dilemma carefully. The stranger had bought him two beers and taught him a bit about shooting pool, and brief as the evening had been, it had held the bond of companionship. The Voice had asked a small enough favor in return. All the same, discretion required that Flavian open the envelope in the privacy of his own counsel to see what sort of business his teacher and unwitting partner in crime might have with, of all people, the abbot.

Flavian turned on the van’s dome light, undid the clasp on the envelope, and looked inside, to find it stuffed with cash.

When the talk came to cars or guns Johnny Faye went outside for a smoke and didn’t return until the conversation came back to a subject he knew something about—growing knock-your-socks-off marijuana, say, or breaking the law and getting away with it. He was relieved when his flashlight revealed that this particular backhoe had only a button for a starter. He jumped in the seat and got to his business.

The construction site was remote, adjacent to a stretch of woods that Johnny Faye’s mother owned where fully mature black walnuts grew straight to the sky, each worth several thousand dollars. More than once Johnny Faye had suspected that in choosing the location for his golf course subdivision the county attorney
had his eye on those walnuts, that some plan was afoot involving his mother’s land. The site favored the making of mischief exactly because it was so far from anybody who would be listening or looking in the bright light of a full moon night.

Blu-ue mo-on of Kentucky, keep on a-shinin’
 . . .

Johnny Faye tested the levers while he sang. He glanced at the moon in all its splendor, well above the dark line of woods to the south. He lowered the bucket until he felt, through the roaring, jaw-rattling machine, the bite of its steel lip against the earth.

He was nearly one with his moonshadow by the time he had the hole dug as big as he planned but the second half of the job would go faster. Filling in was always faster than taking out. By the time his shadow began to lengthen the hole was finished. He parked the backhoe to one side, then switched it off. The roar faded from his ears. He took a swig from a flask of bourbon he carried in his back pocket, then lit a joint and took a couple of hits slowly enough that by the time he was buzzed a nearby whippoorwill felt comfortable enough to raise its after-midnight voice.

He studied the golf cart, to be struck by a moment of panic—when he arrived he hadn’t thought to check to see if it required a key. But then he saw the key right in the ignition where the county attorney left it because this was his county and he thought himself immune to anybody wreaking mischief with anything that belonged to him.

Johnny Faye drove the cart down the little earthen ramp and into the hole, its little grave for a little while. He was pleased to see that even with only the full moon to light his work he’d dug the hole as big as it needed to be. Only a couple of inches of dirt would separate its bright orange pennant R
IDGEVIEW
P
OINTE
from daylight and discovery.

For the second time on that soft spring night he lit his joint, but as he was taking a hit he was struck by an avalanche of dirt
from the pile beside the golf cart’s grave. “
Jeee-
sus!” he cried. The falling dirt knocked him sideways into the cart frame and buried him to his knees.

Gently he leveraged himself sideways and crawled up the pile to the grave’s lip. A quick sign of the cross—“Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” he breathed and inspected the damage. His shirt was ripped down its side and his skin burned raw. He reached to pull his flask from his back pocket and felt the real damage—the stab of pain made him yelp. Gently he reached for his back pocket with his other hand. He unscrewed the top of the flask, gritted his teeth, splashed some whiskey on the bloody raw wound, and took a swig.

Now, though the ache in his side grew into a throbbing wracking diamond star of pain, he smoked while he worked—time was getting short, the last thing he needed was the contractor’s men deciding to get a little work done in the early dawn light and coming across him smoking pot astride one of their backhoes. He pushed dirt into the golf cart’s grave until the cart was covered.

By the time he finished smoothing out the dirt the woods were giving a horizon to the brightening light and he could see the lines on his hand when he smoked the last of the roach. The flame was a puny child of the rising sun but he had finished the job before dawn as he had figured he must do. A backhoe alone on the site where before there’d been a golf cart to keep it company and no trace of the latter and no one the wiser.

The sun broke free of the trees’ tangle of limbs and leaves. Johnny Faye took up his walking stick—before setting out on this expedition he’d considered leaving it at home, but it turned out to be a necessity, his third leg as he limped across the field and vanished into the brush as if he were a whitetail deer or the whippoorwill whose night of courtship he’d so rudely troubled.

The government agency that assigned Dr. Meena Chatterjee to this poor rural county had warned her that men were more reluctant than women to visit a doctor, the more so if the doctor was a
dark-skinned woman from a country they’d never heard of whose Bengali-accented English they found hard to understand. After two weeks of seeing women she received her first male patient—a farmer, she guessed, from his coarse, ruddy complexion—complaining of chest pains.

Dr. Chatterjee held out a clipboard and a medical history form and pointed him toward the second of her two examination rooms. “Please provide the basic information. I shall be with you in a moment.”

He raised his cane and waved aside her clipboard. “My mamma told me never to put down on paper nothing you don’t want nobody to read. And I’m in the habit of obeying my mamma. I just need you to take a look at my side.”

“The paperwork is not for you, Mr.—”

He took her hand and gave it a vigorous shake. “Johnny Faye. Pleased to meet you.”

She extracted her hand from his grip. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Faye. Now, if you would—”

“No Mister to it, nor Faye neither. Just Johnny Faye.”

“You must have a last name.”

“I got a belly button, if that’s what you mean.” He gave her a broad wink.

“Mr. Johnny Faye. Please restrict yourself to the subject at hand.”

He furrowed his brow in contrition. “I never made the acquaintance of my daddy. Which is just as well, according to my mamma.”

“Whom you are in the habit of obeying.”

“That’s right.”

“Surely your mother would tell you to complete this form.”

“I’m sure she’d never tell me to do no such thing. Besides, you aint my mamma, and if that aint the best news you’ll hear all day I want you to tell me better.”

“I have no intention of being anyone’s
mamma
, thank you,
the world has quite enough people without my contribution.” She waved him into the tiny hallway that led to the examination rooms. “Let me take a look and we’ll proceed from there.”

When she entered the examination room he was shirtless and standing. She pointed at the table. “If you would, please, take your seat, Mr.—Johnny Faye.”

“Thank you, ma’am, but I’m more comfortable on my feet. A man can run faster with his pants up than a woman can with hers down.”

She tightened her lips into a puckered line. “You will please keep personal comments to yourself.” Then she noticed his right side, where a yellow-blue bruise blossomed amid a broad scrape of clotted blood. “A nasty scrape. You have most likely cracked a rib. When did you injure yourself?”

“This morning, ma’am. Or last night, depending on how you look at it.”

She pressed the stethoscope to his chest. “Take a slow, deep breath, please.”

He breathed in. “I aint going to be taking any
fast
breaths, that’s for certain.”

She removed the stethoscope from his chest. “You have not punctured a lung. Most likely the rib is cracked, not broken.” She pressed her stethoscope to his back. “The ribs are encased in muscle, which expands and contracts the chest with each breath.” She pressed the stethoscope to his sides, then again to his chest. “When you breathe deeply, you’re moving that cracked rib, which is letting you know that it’s cracked. You should obtain an X-ray to be certain you have no jagged edges and unless you have had a tetanus booster recently you should renew that. You do not want a punctured lung and you do not want tetanus. Then you would have—” she paused, searching for an Americanism “—
real trouble
.”

“I been in
real trouble
most of my life. My mamma tells me it’s my natural state. Considering the alternatives I kind of come to
like it. Ever noticed how much trouble people go to, to get into a little real trouble? From my point of view I’m performing a community service. Which I would be happy to perform for you.”

She took up her pen and clipboard. “You will do me the courtesy of not taking me for a fool. Please tell me how this happened.”