The Man Who Loved Birds (16 page)

“More interesting than most people’s stories around here. Maybe you could tell it to me sometime over dinner. We could drive up to the city—there’s no place around here to take a date.”

She paused and the moment grew too long. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I have good intentions, believe me.”

“Everyone is so kind,” she said finally. “In my experience these matters are arranged by the families, in consultation with stars and bank accounts. I hardly know what to say.”

“How about ‘yes’?” Vetch emptied his glass and took up the drink he’d brought for her. “Well. I think you might benefit—I think you might be doing yourself and the county a favor—look. Nobody who wasn’t born here knows this county like I do. Why not let me show you around? That might be more fun than dinner, and good for your practice.”

“You are very kind indeed to think of my needs.” She caught a glimpse of a familiar face and raised her hand in recognition. “You will not mind, I hope, if I take some time to respond—I am so busy with organizing my practice. A challenge I am happy to have.”

Maria Goretti approached them, a glass of wine in one hand and a drink in the other. The county attorney took her by the arm, lifting the drink from her hand. “You’re too late—our guest is fasting. Dr. Chatterjee, may I introduce Maria Goretti Shaklett, I think you guys know each other from the hospital? And now I think the time has come to badger the judge into kicking this thing off.” Vetch directed Maria Goretti toward a pair of friends from her high school days. He steered the doctor toward Rosalee Smith, standing near the door. “You won’t mind waiting here? I’ll give you the nod when your introduction comes. Rosalee, be a good hostess and keep our newcomer occupied.” He weaved through the crowd.

The county attorney and the judge mounted a stage fashioned from empty cases of beer and a slab of plywood. Harry Vetch took the microphone and greeted those present, thanking them for their past contributions. The room went dark, while they watched slides of the conversion of the old gas station into the office she now occupied. Then the lights came up. The county attorney introduced her—she mounted the stage, where in her nervousness she bowed, her hands coming together in a gesture from that other, older world. She busied them smoothing her skirt. Scattered applause and she stepped down. The county attorney made his pitch—he was eloquent on her behalf, extolling her sacrifice, urging generosity. Checkbooks were produced, checks written.

Outside the windows the darkness had thickened and the patter of the first drops of rain against the glass made it difficult to catch what Vetch was saying, but then someone fiddled with the amplifier and after a screech of feedback the volume improved. He was taking the opportunity to introduce his project—the new golf course subdivision.

From the shadows, a murmur from Rosalee Smith. “He sure sounds like he’s running for something.”

“Yes, I would say so.”

“Mamma, let’s
go
.” This from Matthew Mark, pulling at his mother’s hand.

“Just a minute longer, sugar. We have to wait for your daddy.”

Meena crouched to whisper in the boy’s ear. “Stand quietly and I promise I will tell you another story.” Matthew Mark opened his eyes wide and pinched his lips shut.

“For more than a year I’ve been involved in the planning of a major housing development,” Vetch was saying. “Ridgeview Pointe will be built around a golf course in the style that you may have seen in your travels to other, wealthier parts of the country. The building of the course and its houses will jump-start our economy, creating construction jobs that bring good salaries and good benefits. After Ridgeview Pointe is completed, its success will inspire
imitations. And it’ll have created permanent jobs for those who manage the golf course fairways and maintain the greens.

“And so I asked the project architect to create a few slides that will allow you to visualize the final project—to see rolling fairways and emerald greens where now you see only rocks and trees, to see houses where there are none, and to see how the unemployed of this county, now dependent on welfare, will have the opportunity to earn respect and decent wages in a pleasant work environment.” Vetch picked up the control unit for the projector. “Our first slide shows the property as it currently exists.” He clicked the button. Up flashed a slide of a horse’s hindquarters. Suppressed titters. Vetch clicked the button again. A second slide—the hindquarters of a mule. An open guffaw from someone in the crowd. “Mamma, lift me up!” Matthew Mark cried. “I want to see too!” The judge raised his hand to cover his mouth. A third slide—a pig’s haunches and curly tail.

“We have
got
to teach that man a lesson,” Vetch muttered to no one in particular and, courtesy of the microphone, to the room at large.

And then a bright flash lit the windows and a peal of thunder shook the walls and the screen went dark.

For a long while the monks scrabbled in the darkness—“Murder in the dark!” someone cried, and “Belly of the whale!” Finally someone found a flashlight, then a kerosene lantern, and before long they were sitting again, drawn closer together by the lantern’s small circle of light.

Johnny Faye took up the bottle. “Another round, boys, in honor of the storm.” He refilled their cups, then emptied the bottle with the last and most generous drink for Flavian. “Go on, Cyprian, finish up your story.”

“All right. Well. Old Mrs. Hawthorne came roaring in here, had to talk to her spiritual advisor—would somebody tell me who made up that title? Every time I hear it I think of Casper the
Ghost—on a matter of such importance that she could not wait, no, buildings must be moved so that she could speak to the abbot right here, right now, because, it turns out, she had wanted a diamond for her twenty-fifth anniversary and her husband gave her an emerald.”

The rain on the roof was making a fearful racket but still Flavian, since childhood always the one to ask why, needed an explanation. “Why on earth,” he asked, “would her husband give her an enema?”

A puzzled pause, then a roar of laughter louder than the rain on the roof. Johnny Faye doubled over, gasping, until he finally came up for air. Then he seized Flavian around the chest with one arm and pulled him up till he was half-standing and made a show of inspecting the back of his head. “Boy, you are really wet behind the ears.”

Flavian struggled free, stood, and edged toward the door. “I was just asking a question. A pretty logical one, if you ask me.”

Johnny Faye upended an empty milk crate, grabbed Flavian’s shoulder, and plunked him down. “Come on, sit. Here, take your drink. First rule. You can never have too much ice. Second rule. Drink water on the side, helps your liver out, keeps the hangover in your bed. Third rule. Stay away from that frou-frou shit—you know, strawberry frozen sunrise banana rum mush. Unless hangovers bring you closer to God. Support the local product. Stick with bourbon.”

Flavian had taken his seat well into the party, and the others were already far down the slope that leads to the valley of cheerful drunkenness and beyond to the dark wood of despond. The whiskey went quickly to his head, but where others grew loud and bright he grew introspective, a dufus grin on his face but with his soul’s lips sealed shut. Sitting with his brother monks, he realized he had never sat with his brother monks. He had always been an outsider, the watcher in the tree limbs looking down as the world passed by. He saw how the men told stories—the ritual that they
knew and practiced without it having been taught. The floor was a battleground and the storyteller’s job was to defend his territory. The storyteller worked his way through the story, interrupting himself now and then to offer comment, pausing for breath long enough to allow the others to interject smart remarks but never yielding the high ground, always returning to the story before the upstart could take the floor. And so the story built to its climax, but as the teller neared its end one of the members of his audience would be designated his successor—whoever had made the most biting aside or had brought out the most laughter with a jibe. And when the story reached its climax, amid shouts and signs the storyteller would be dethroned and the story would begin again, now with the upstart as the new king to be challenged in his turn.

And so the evening wore on and all their stories became one long continuing story: how Father Peter lost his turkeys became how Johnny Faye rode Hoover DeWitt’s dead body around town in an open jeep wearing a suit he’d eased out of the bank director’s bedroom closet because Hoover had never in his lifetime known what it was to wear a tie, became how Freeman Frank shot the Yankee reporter and got off with manslaughter with time off for good behavior. Then the tone turned darker, as Cyril told how a local policeman’s wife came to him time and again fleeing her violent husband and how she always went back to him for the sake of their child and Cyril had no idea what she did with the money he gave her so that she might take her child and leave.

And finally the storm wore itself out, the gods and goddesses retreated to the hills to lick their chops and the rain diminished from a fierce thrumming to a gentle pattering on the roof and they, all of them Cassian, Bede, Cyril, José, Aelred, Cyprian, Denis, and Johnny Faye, were slipping into the sweet nodding that is the fate of the cheerful drunk. A pause came that ought to have signaled the evening’s end, but Flavian was not tuned into that nuance of late-stage cow barn society and so he began a story of his own. “This was in the days before I became a monk.”

“
No! Never! You were born tonsured! Your mama never had to change your monkly diapers!
”

“I was driving—”

“
Go on. The boy is old enough to drive? Let me see the license.”

“Hush. You let him tell it
.”

“—I was driving, a big old black Chrysler New Yorker, I can feel the wheel under my hands—it was my father’s car and he let me have it for my last year of college. The back seat was big enough—”

“
for you and two sheep
”

“—big enough to sleep in and I set out across the country, just driving, trying to figure out where I was going, what I was going to do when I graduated because if I did nothing I’d be in Uncle Sam’s Army before I had my cap and gown returned to the professor I’d borrowed it from. And I was driving through the desert—the mountains, really, but it was New Mexico, no, Arizona, and there was no tree taller than a man and only those funny cactus that are taller than a man and look like they’re waving hello. Or good-bye.”

“Saguaros.”

“Thank you. And I’m cruising at seventy miles an hour—you can do that in the West, the road is straight and flat and comes to a point on the horizon—and on either side are cactus bigger than men and big purple mountains and not a tree in sight or memory when
Bam!
my windshield shatters. It must already have been replaced once because that old Chrysler would never have had safety glass, but this glass shattered but didn’t break, you know, just had that spider-webbing effect that makes it go all opaque and I couldn’t see a thing. And I slammed on the brakes—good thing nobody was behind me—and got out of the car in that hellish heat and sure enough there was a six-foot rattlesnake—”

“No! No way! Not possible!”

“—a six-foot rattlesnake that had managed to crawl from the windshield to the roof of the car and there it was. Dead, as in deceased.”

“Manna from heaven! Snake from the sky!”

“So I looked around—nothing—you tell me, but my best theory
is that a hawk or an eagle had caught it and either the snake had twisted free of its claws or maybe the bird meant to drop the snake as a way of killing it, you know, the bird saw the hard flat surface of the pavement as a target and let go, only I and my seventy-mile-an-hour windshield got in the way. And I looked at that dead snake and up at the clear hot blue sky with no sign of a bird, no sign of anything except the road shimmering in the heat, and I raised my hands to the sky and said: ‘I guess I’ll be a monk.’”

A long pause after this story and then fat Brother Bede rose and stood before Flavian and then he was down on one knee—he had to help himself down, placing one plump hand on Flavian’s head to steady himself until he was low enough to drop one knee to the cement floor, then following with the other knee, and then he was touching his forehead to the floor in a salaam. “O Flavian, seer and prophet!”

And then Flavian was helping Bede to his feet and Bede threw his arm around Flavian’s neck to haul up his bulk and then Johnny Faye had his arm around Bede’s neck and Cyril around Johnny Faye’s and on down the drunken line until they were all on their feet and dancing, slowly, gravely, to a shared but unheard beat, to their left and then their right in a circle, each with his arms over others’ shoulders and this is what they sang:

Pange lingua, gloriosi

Corporis mysterium
,

Sanguinisque pretiosi

Quem in mundi pretium

Fructus ventris generosi

Rex effudit Gentium
.

At one point the KC Hall had been designated a bomb shelter, and the government had stockpiled barrels of drinking water and battery-powered lamps guaranteed to last for the several years the townspeople would require before they could emerge to inspect
the radioactive ashes of their lives. Now Harry Vetch hauled the lanterns out but no one had checked the batteries in years and none worked. Then someone remembered that acts of God had preceded acts of man as the likely cause of such disruptions, and that tornado shelter supplies were stored in a different part of the basement, and before long everyone was carrying a candle. The KC Hall looked like the church at Easter midnight mass, with men’s and women’s faces lit from the candlelight cupped in their hands, the men trying to get their candles to stand upright in empty highball glasses and the women taking care to keep the dripping wax away from their dresses. Harry Vetch wandered through the crowd, apologizing for the storm and noting that the dead lanterns were one more indication, if any was needed, of the dire straits of the county infrastructure.