The Man Who Loved Birds (34 page)

“No, I have not heard the news about Martin Stead.”

“Another piece of evidence, as if we needed one, of how much more I know about this place than you. Shot himself. DOA in emergency this morning. Somebody turned him in for having pot on his farm and the feds served him with notice to take possession even before serving charges, which was probably the next step and probably would have happened today, as surely he anticipated. That farm had been in his family two hundred years. He had two sons. I guess he figured that if he was out of the way, he could save the farm for them.”

“As a matter of fact, that’s not at all clear,” Vetch said. “His death doesn’t change the fact of his breaking the law. They may yet encumber the property. That’s what I’d do.”

“There is that,” Maria Goretti said. She opened the door and stood, hand on the knob, waiting. “There is that. Call me if you want. I won’t be calling you.” She eased herself out, closing the door with a quiet click.

Vetch opened his desk drawer, pulled out the bottle of whiskey, poured himself a tumbler full, and left the bottle sitting on his desk. He sat long into the evening. At one point he rose from his chair and went to the door and locked it, then shut off his computer. Then he lay on his office floor, his knees curled to his chest. For a long while he lay there, consumed by all the predictable emotions and their attendant fantasies—the confrontation with the doctor, the bitter and contemptuous words. He wanted to weep and shout with pain. He lay silent. In the lambent light of reason the path was as obvious as if some great hand had pointed the way.

He stood and tossed the tumbler of whiskey out the French doors into the garden. He poured the rest of the bottle in the toilet and flushed, then turned back to the French doors to watch the last light of summer fading into night.

And so she was pregnant. With child. She could not be pregnant. She must not be pregnant.
I don’t report out a positive unless I’m sure and I haven’t been wrong yet
. There must be some mistake. There was no mistake. The test confirmed what she had already known. She would get an abortion. Someone from her medical retraining could provide a reference. Phoning someone and asking would be the greatest imaginable embarrassment but they all lived at some considerable distance and what did she care? No great problem. A weekend out of town. No one would notice. She would close the office on Saturday and with luck be back on Monday, though to be safe she had better close Tuesday as well and then the office was closed Wednesdays, a nice little vacation. She would get an abortion. She would not get an abortion. Shouldn’t she consult the father? Fuck the father. You see, she was learning American English, small town,
jungli
American English. “Fuck the father.” She spoke the words out loud. Such useful words, so satisfying on the tongue. “Fuck the father.” I beg your pardon, Doctor Chatterjee, but that is the problem. You
did
fuck the father. The father fucked you. You’re fucked, as the father might say, exactly so. What was she to do? She would lose her position, she would have to return to Bengal, pregnant. Disgrace on two continents, not so easily accomplished and she had accomplished it. No, in Calcutta worse than disgrace. She and the child would be without money, without
relatives. And the father. Who is the father? The obvious question that no one would ask and everyone would ask. Disgrace. How could she burden a child, her child, with such a fate? How could she take this child back to that world? She longed to go to Johnny Faye. She longed to fuck him, as a matter of fact, and her desire was a horror and a boundless need. She could not bear the child. The duplicity of words: She could not
bear
returning to Bengal, where disgrace lay in her barrenness. She could not
bear
the child here, where disgrace lay in her fertility. But she would bear the child. If she had to return to Bengal, if she had to undo all she had done, she would bear the child. She could never return to Bengal. A single mother, no, not single, still married, she had never divorced but simply walked away, and now a child
born out of wedlock
, who is the father? Inconceivable. Not to be conceived. But the child had been conceived—she had conceived it. Her. Him. With help, of course. Should she not tell the father? She would not tell the father. She would let Harry Vetch fuck her and see where that led. After seven months, with luck maybe more, first babies often took their time, the child would be born. By then Harry Vetch might be her husband, a marriage her grandparents might have arranged except that she had arranged it by herself as she had done so much, most everything by herself—except conceive this child. She would marry the county attorney and she would not tell anyone her secret, not even the child. And if the marriage ended in divorce, in this country that was of no great consequence and she would still possess the papers and their magic seals, she would be legal, she would be American. It made so much sense. No, a better plan: abortion, then marriage. No need to take risks. What if she never conceived again? With an attorney as her husband, so much the better. She did not need a child. Had she not made her way this far alone? She did not need anyone, except as a means to the end of the piece of paper that would allow her to make her way in this new world where she had come to be herself. She was a wanderer, a foreigner. She had no home but herself and her work.

She went to the statues at midday. He was not there. Suffocating heat. She might as well be in Bengal. The sun a hot white presence in a cloudless sky. No rain. Why had there been no rain? If there had been rain she would not have come to the statues, she would not have been fucked. When would it rain? The statues were no help. Jesus in agony, littered with pine needles and resin. She sat on the fallen pine and dangled her feet over the hollow that had once writhed with snakes. Nothing now but an empty hole. She was not barren. She had conceived. A miracle. She had conceived a miracle. Unto her a child. The Lord has taken away the disgrace I have endured among my people. All generations will call me blessed. Thanks be to the Loretines for teaching me the words. An abortion, easily enough accomplished, problem solved. Later, much later, perhaps another child by another father. A respectable father. A father worthy of a Brahmin. An attorney, perhaps the county attorney. Not now. I cannot bear the child. This, my child. She placed her hand on her womb. You, our child. I am so sorry. A few days’ holiday, a quick journey north, the problem solved, all problems solved. I cannot bear this child. Meena wept. I will not bear this child. I will not bear this child and I will marry Harry Vetch. It makes so much sense. I am so sorry.

Officer Smith stood before Harry Vetch, smoking a cigarette. The sun was a fist on their bare heads. At the far end of Ridgeview Pointe a lone backhoe roared and farted and puttered about. With each pass at the dry earth a cloud of red dust rose and drifted the length of the project to settle on their shoulders.

“Do you have any idea,” Vetch asked, “why I have asked you to meet me here?” He loosened his tie.

Smith took his cigarette between thumb and forefinger and sucked hard before exhaling a cloud of smoke. “No, sir.”

“Or why I asked you to wear your uniform on your day off.”

“No, sir.”

“Look about you. This is a public place—we have nothing to hide.” He waved the length of the development at the backhoe operator. “Go on, give him a wave, you know him, Dakin Thompson’s son.” The officer lifted his hand. “Now.” Vetch began to pace. “Let’s start with the obvious and say that I have asked you to come here because I am concerned about vandalism. I would like you to make your presence known out here from time to time, maybe even leave your patrol car parked here overnight. You got that? Secure the perimeters, that sort of thing. Good. I want you to exercise a little imagination. You know what imagination is?”

“Yes, sir, I guess so.”

“For our purposes imagination is the talent to perceive trouble
before it happens and then act to defuse it or, if that’s not possible, then to deflect it onto somebody else. Now, if I were to ask you what you think about the people who are growing marijuana in this county, what would you say?”

“Well, sir, I’d say they are breaking the law and that it is my responsibility to see that they are arrested and prosecuted.”

“That’s right, that’s good. But what if you arrest them and they’re prosecuted but their friends and family see that they go free? What would you say to that?”

“I’d do my best to arrest them again.”

“Thereby wasting the taxpayers’ money. Unless you count the spectacle of their coming before the court and you hauled in to testify and me losing the case as entertainment worth the public expense.”

Smith sucked again at his cigarette. Vetch pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his forehead but the sweat came as fast as he could wipe it away. His handkerchief was a smudge of orange. “Now, if I were to ask you if you smoke or have ever smoked marijuana, what would you say to that?”

“No, sir, I do not smoke marijuana.”

“And you have never smoked it.”

“Sir, I’m not sure where you’re going with these questions—”

“What if I asked if you had any idea as to the whereabouts of a considerable amount of marijuana that disappeared from the inventory of the crop taken from the farm of Martin Stead? What if I asked about the precise nature of your relationship with, to select a name at random, Benny Joe, the guy they call Little?”

Officer Smith’s expression changed from a squint against the sun to a sullen scowl. “I’d tell you I have to protect my sources. Sir.”

“I can well imagine that you do. Have to protect your sources. Don’t worry, it’s a rhetorical question. By that I mean I don’t want you to answer it. Don’t answer it.”

The officer took out sunglasses but before he could put them
on Vetch lifted them from his hand. “Not just yet. I have a few more questions.” He resumed his pacing. “Have you ever killed a man?”

“No, sir. Well. There was once when a guy had me cornered in a stairwell and he raised a Louisville Slugger over his head and I said, ‘Drop it or you’re a dead man,’ and I had my gun on him faster than he could swing and sure enough he dropped it.”

“But you would have killed him.”

“Yes, sir. It was him or me and I knew which one I wanted to come out of that building feet first.”

Harry Vetch halted in his pacing in front of the officer’s sweat-soaked chest. “What if it wasn’t you or him? I mean, what if the questions weren’t so clear-cut? Let me give you an example. What if somebody was threatening you and your home or maybe your community or even your country—that’s a good example. The president of your country calls you to war and you go, and after a few months you find yourself with a gun in your hand, firing across a field at some man who has never done you the slightest harm, that if you met him in the Miracle Inn you might buy him a beer and shoot a game of pool. Would you kill that man?”

“Yes, sir, I would.”

“And why would you kill him, when he’s done you no harm?”

“Because it was my duty. If I was a soldier and he’s the enemy and we’re at war.”

Vetch clapped him on the shoulder. “Now you’re talking. Long story short, Smith, we
are
at war, President Reagan has told us so. We’re fighting the war on drugs and you’re a front-line soldier in one of the hot spots, one of the main battlegrounds, and you’ve got a chance to make a difference for your kids.”

“She only has one boy, sir, and he’s a runt if I have to say so myself.”

“We are, as you know, one of the nation’s hotbeds of marijuana production. And you know who is the mastermind of that. You know who brought it into our lives, made it happen almost
singlehandedly. The same man who impersonated you—who used
your
good name—in stealing a truckload of air conditioners.”

Officer Smith was silent.

An especially big cloud of dust rose from the backhoe. The county attorney’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “If you should find yourself in a difficult situation—and you understand, I hope, the nature of the situation to which I refer—I want you to know that I will be behind you to the fullest extent. Beyond the fullest extent, if that becomes necessary. Do you understand?”

The officer nodded.

“I’d like to hear you say it aloud.”

“Yes, sir. I understand that in any difficult situations you are behind me up to and beyond the fullest extent of the law.”

“I want you to know that I understand that you are the first interface between the law and the criminal, and that I further understand that in the course of your duties you encounter situations that require on-the-spot reaction. If in the course of the pursuit of your duties circumstances should put you in a difficult position, I want you to know both that I trust your judgment in acting on the spot, and that I want you to use discretion in contacting the appropriate authorities. Let me be clear on this point. In any genuinely difficult situation, I want to be the first person whom you call. Even before the sheriff. He may be your boss but I am charged with protecting you from any parties who might question your judgment. And as I hope I have made clear, I do not question your judgment. So far as I am concerned, your judgment
is
the law.” The backhoe revved up for a last assault. Vetch raised his voice to a near shout. “What I am saying”—here Vetch drew in very close to the policeman and gave him a hard and direct look—“what I am saying is that you may be sure that I will not ask you for information that I do not need. I will not ask you—”

Dakin Thompson’s son killed the backhoe engine, which died with a rattle and cough. The roar tangled itself in the branches of
the forest before fading to silence. Vetch lowered his voice with each word until he was near a whisper.

“—for more information than you care to volunteer. Should you decide that illegal behavior that frustrates the channels of the law might require a more direct approach.”

“Yes, sir. I understand that. And I can be plenty direct if the situation calls for it.”