Wild Things: Four Tales (4 page)

They, too, would develop their own secret languages and matings and lives.

I might never understand them fully as I could never fully comprehend my wife.

I began to take personal days off from work, and just wander the woods, or walk along the bike trail. I’d get lost for hours at a time in the deep forest that should not have been there – for there was a shopping mall two miles away, and a town on either side. Yet, a forest existed, and I could lose myself in it for half a day without seeing another human being.

There were arguments at home that escalated into shouting matches.

I became less tolerant of the boys’ behavior when they crossed a line. At work, I just didn’t deal with others much and spent most of my time pretending to be buried in projects that I knew I’d never finish. On my lunch break, I’d go out to the park and sit and listen to pigeons and yet more starlings, and watch as they flew and stole bits of food from near the trash cans and dive-bombed someone who sat too close to a hidden nest.

On a bitter day of bad reports at work, and a wife who didn’t even want me to come home, I walked along the bike path in the woods, and could not stand the voices of the birds anymore.

I wept in my wife’s arms that night, and told her I had some kind of madness in me. She cooed into my ear and told me she loved me and that it would pass, whatever it was, and if it didn’t, we’d get help.

“It’s all the loss,” she said. “You didn’t cry when we lost the baby. You didn’t cry when your mother died. That bird did it. It reminded you of loss. It got to you.”

The bird had changed me. The bird had never left me. I longed for the kingdom of birds rather than the kingdom of men. The voices of birds seemed, to me, to be more about life than the voices of mankind.

7

A call came in to work for me, but I didn’t pick up. I just let my voice mail get it, and it wasn’t until my wife text-messaged me on the cell phone that I picked up. “Emergency Room.” That was the whole message.

When I got there, she was trembling and pale. I held her, and she whispered, “William.”

Strangely, I noticed a man nearby who looked as if he had just done something terrible. He spoke to a nurse and mentioned “birds."

I suppose that was why I noticed him at all. Later, I learned that he had been the one driving the car.

8

During the six months after my son’s death, I began to listen only to the birds. I barely acknowledged Jeanette, and though I loved Rufus dearly, I could not bear to look at him for he reminded me too much of his little brother. I smoked my Gitanes in the open now, for my wife could not chide me during this time.

I spent long afternoons and evenings out on a lawn chair, beneath the sycamores and maples, my eyes skyward as I watched the dark flocks of starlings readying for winter. Their words comforted me, and took me elsewhere as they spoke of distant places of warmth and insects. Though I often thought of William’s warm fingers in my hand or his soft whisper at bedtime, the birds told me about life and death and loss and continuations and how the spring brought hope and summer brought plenty. I also heard about the deaths of birds, of sorrow, of a mate shot down by a thoughtless boy with a gun, of marriages and the ends of marriages, of wounds that never healed, and feuds between siblings that continued to the end of life.

Laid off from my job by October third – in a massive lay-off that left thousands without work – I came home to an empty house. By empty, I mean, bereft, without human voice. Jeanette and Rufus had left a couple of weeks earlier to stay at her sister’s in the next town over, but they would be back (so my wife promised) or things would change or something. I wasn’t clear on the details.

In the early morning, I went out in my boxers and sat on the back lawn. The earth had turned hard and cold, and the wind was strong. I listened for the birds, and leaned back, my arms crossed behind my head. Still sleepy, I began to doze when a voice brought me up from sleep.

What the voice had said, I am not sure. It seemed like my name or a name. The sound was nearly like a child’s voice. Perhaps I had been dreaming that it was my dead son’s voice.

I opened my eyes. There, on a slender leafless branch above me, a starling. Dark, and mottled with the yellow stars of adulthood, and – I was sure – it was Fledge himself. Watching me.

“Fledge?” I asked, but then laughed at my foolishness for asking a bird its name.

The bird cocked its head to the left and the right, and then hopped down to the ground. It fluttered over and hopped up on my chest. It began squawking and making a whistling sound that was a fairly good mimic of my own whistle.

Then, it hoped closer to my face.

Instead of a whistle, it spoke to me. “William,” said the bird.

As I lay there, stunned by this hallucination, the bird flew away.

9

Now, of course I thought I had lost my mind, but I had to know something I didn’t know before. Something I’d never really asked or followed-up on.

I went to visit the man whose car had hit and killed my little boy.

10

“Yes?”

The door opened, and the man, who I guessed was about fifty, opened the door to his apartment. He lived in a rough neighborhood near the city, but had not lived there at the time of the accident. He had lived, the day when my son stepped off the curb, in a nice house, larger than my family’s place, but the death of my son had changed him as much, if not more, than it had changed us. His own life had fallen apart. His wife and he had divorced. He had a grown daughter who blamed him, though it had been apparent that he had been driving the speed limit and had done what he could to avoid hitting my son and several children who had stepped into the street in heavy traffic. He had only hit my son, but four children’s lives had been spared, including my eldest, Rufus.

Yet, his life had spiraled downward.

I saw it in the apartment building, which was dark and filthy.

I saw it in his eyes, as well. “Oh,” he said, recognizing me. He didn’t ask the next question, but it hung there as if he had:
What do you want?

“You said something. I barely heard it. I guess I wasn’t listening.”

He opened the door a bit wider, but looked at me with a kind of anticipation as if I might swing a punch at him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am.”

“You said something about birds,” I said.

“Oh.” He looked over my shoulder as if expecting others to be with me. “The birds.”

“What was it about birds. I overheard it. We were standing there, at the hospital. But I just caught the tail end of it. I didn’t even know who you were at the time.”

“I can’t remember,” he said.

“It’s important. To me.” Without realizing it, I had begun sobbing, and I suppose my body heaved with each exhalation of grief.

He came out into the hallway, and put his arm around my shoulder. “Come in. I’ll get you some water.”

11

Inside the apartment, on a green, worn couch, I sipped from a glass. Vodka, not water. It tasted good.

He sat across from me. Behind him, the television was on, but the sound had been muted. “I don’t remember about birds. Look, I’m sorry. I have nightmares about what happened. I see his face.”

“Me, too.”

“I see all their faces. If I had only…if I had only stopped for the ice cream my wife wanted. If I had just taken the short cut instead of driving down Apple Valley Road.”

“I know. I think if I had just made him stay home from school. If I had just told Rufus not to play after school. ‘If only’ drives you nuts. I’m weary from it.”

“Yeah.”

“You said something about birds. At the Emergency Room. You were speaking to a nurse.”

“Oh,” he said. A shadow passed over his face. “Oh. The birds. I saw them. Blackbirds. I think that’s what the kids were doing. There was a bird in the street. I saw it, too. Just sitting there, and I thought it was going to get hit by somebody. I think that’s why the kids went in the street. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know.” He emptied his glass, and sighed. “Does it matter? I’m sorry. I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life.”

“It was an accident,” I said, and then rose, setting my glass on the glass table.

12

I waited for Rufus after school. When he saw me, he looked at me as if I were the enemy. He walked cautiously to the car, and leaned into the open window.

“Come on, I’ll drive you to Mom’s.”

“She’s gonna be mad.”

“She’ll be mad when she sees me. At least she won’t be mad at you.”

Driving him to his mother’s place – which really was his aunt’s large home where they were staying for a few weeks until everything somehow either worked out or didn’t – I said, “You doing okay?”

He said nothing.

“I want to ask about something.”

Again, no response from my boy.

“All right. Look. That day. That day. Was there a bird? Or a flock of birds?”

He looked at me, his eyes seeming to flash with anger. Then, back to the road ahead. Then, he blurted, “Don’t ever talk to me about that day again. I mean it. I never want to think about it.”

As I dropped him off at his aunt’s house, he slid out of his seat and had not yet swung the door shut. I said, “Just tell me. Why did you go in the street at all? There was traffic.”

“Ask William,” Rufus said, his face a mask of childhood fury, which was both pale and burning. “He’s the only one who knows. I was trying to stop him. I was trying to stop him. Nobody believes me -- I was trying to stop him!”

13

My wife called me on the cell phone ten minutes later and yelled at me for making Rufus upset. She said he had gone all fetal and wouldn’t talk to anybody and that if I showed up at his school again she didn’t know what she’d do, but she’d do something.

I barely heard her – the birds were talking outside, and I went out to them and tried to decipher what they were saying. Winter had not quite come ‘round the bend,but autumn had exploded briefly like a firecracker and stripped the trees bare.

On the twisted branches, the dark swarms of starlings began chanting.

I stood there, in awe of them, their beauty and their language and their flight.

They spoke of journeys to sunlit lands, and of love among them, and of the legends of their ancestors and of the anger and fury at the deaths of those they raised up from birth. I wandered back through the yard, into the woods, and followed them.

I, earthbound, watched as they danced tree to tree to sky to telephone wire to rooftop.

I began speaking in the tongues of birds and all else fell away, the whistles and warbles from my throat seemed perfectly natural. The starlings told their secrets to me.

I knew my son’s final moments. The starlings told me what they had seen, what my boy William had done. It was in their songs, their exaltations, their chattering squawks as they surrounded me, a cathedral of dark birds.

They shared with me the love I had taught him for even the smallest bird, the tiniest creature, in the road, to be rescued from the traffic of human monsters. I heard his footsteps on the street as he raced into traffic.

The birdsong grew deafening. I clutched my hands to my ears, for I could not take what they told of my little boy.

I pressed my fingers deep into the skin of my ears -- and deeper still to the wax -- to plug them up and keep the sound of the last moment’s of my boy’s life from entering my brain. The pressure was enormous as I pushed my fingers deeper still.

And yet, I heard his voice as he shrieked, and the thud of the car against him – they warbled each note of his last moments of life so that I might feel I was there with him. I begged them to stop, but the birds continued their praise of my little boy. They mimicked his cries and the wheezes of his lungs and throat until he breathed his last.

I felt as if I were there, with William, in the street, his head upon my lap, his eyes turned upward, his small body shivering.

As if I held his small body and looked up to God in the sky, but only saw the birds that had witnessed his death. The birds that had lured him into the street. The birds who had begun to drive me to madness with their terrible words and sounds.

Their voices, telling me of other secrets, of those who had died in the past, and the deaths to come.

The American

Quested's, a cafe in the Fire District, looked out on a triangle of park that was lined with sculptures and trees. It was a place known for slipping secret elixirs in the coffee as well as for providing a variety of absinthe and coriamandra and other liqueurs the dusky cafe dwellers enjoyed, but it was something more than the quality of drink that drew the young American man. He had enjoyed the Roman life of meeting strangers and treating those at cafes to stories of his travels throughout the world. He was not the only American at Quested’s, which was primarily a British hangout, but he was the only one worth remembering.

The barman brought him an espresso, tinged with lemon; the American stared at the small cup for a minute as if deciding whether or not to order something else instead.

“I tried to kill myself tonight,” he announced to the couples at a nearby table. He sipped his drink, and glanced out into the night, not caring if they listened. “I smoked every cigarette I could find. Drank everything. I swam in the filthy river and then went to a brothel where the whores were shapeless and ancient.”

“Now, that’s the way to do it,” one woman said. "Good for you. Bon voyage."

"Then you come to a dark little cafe like the rest of us," someone else said. "More coriamandra, good sir. This time, two shots. I feel lucky tonight."

The barman stood by, a small white towel on his arm. “We’re closing in a half hour.”

“Why’s that?” the tourist from Scotland asked.

“I have a life, that’s why,” the barman said.

“It’s a lovely night,” a man said, and then began singing, lightly, a beautiful Italian song in a reedy voice.

The leaves of the trees waved slightly, then, the breeze died.

The American began laughing.

“What’s the joke?” said the woman who had congratulated him on his last night on earth.