Gradle Bird

by J. C. Sasser

  “Right there,” Delvis said, pointing to where the petals were. “That’s where I seen the Tooth Fairy, right there at the bottom of the steps. You stay here,” he said. “I’ll go pick us some food.”

  Gradle sat down on a bright red pleather booth she didn’t recall being there the last time she was here. She removed the photographs from her bra, stared at Grandpa, and recalled her fight with him the night before. There he was, smiling that great big smile, and there was her mother smiling, too. She stared at her mother, her ponytail, her thick raven bangs chopped crooked and too short, her chiffon tank dress, her cat-eye glasses. Gradle went inside Delvis’s shack and retrieved the cracked hand mirror she used to spot Delvis’s tooth. She sat back down on the booth, stared into the mirror and wondered Where was Gradle Bird?

  She put the mirror down and surveyed Delvis’s junk-littered yard, and while she listened to his Coca-Cola whirligig spin in the breeze, she wondered if it was possible to find herself in Delvis’s odd and magical world.

  “Look at these rubies,” Delvis said, running up the porch steps and holding up two ripe tomatoes. He sat on the booth’s edge where the foam was coming out and bounced his knees, as if he was either giddy or gut-sick. “You like my booth? I got it yesterday from the dumpster. They’re givin’ the Dairy Queen up town a redo and I liked the color and the way it sits,” he said. He sliced up the tomatoes with his switchblade knife. “I’m a professional dumpster diver. I’m the best in the state. Maybe even in the entire Southeast region. Ain’t nobody can compete with me. I’m not braggin’, just the facts.” He fanned the tomato slices atop his forearm and presented them to her as if they were atop a serving tray.

  She picked out a slice and bit into it.

  “What sets me apart is I can fix anything that’s tore up. Give me anything, a broke TV, broke microwave, lawnmower, car, anything broke I can fix it. Once I get it workin’ right, I take it up to Rick’s Pawn Shop and negotiate price. Some of the stuff I like to keep myself, but stuff I don’t want I fix and sell.”

  “Did you make that?” she asked, pointing to his whirligig that now spun like mad in the wind.

  “Yeah. I got a patent on that one. So nobody can steal my design. That one is a mystery. Nobody can’t figure out how it works. Like hummingbird wings. Nobody knows how they work neither.”

  “How’d you learn to do all this stuff?” she asked.

  “I was borned into it,” he said.

  “Was your Daddy a professional dumpster diver?”

  “I ain’t never known my daddy or my mama. I was borned in the junkyard. They found me when I was a few days old. They had all kinds of people wantin’ to adopt me. All over the world. I was a miracle they kept tellin’ everybody, so it was natural people wanted me. Hilda Green finally got me. She’s this woman who liked to keep children. She had an egg carton full of us. She raised me ‘til I was in the third reader, and then she died. And I got it in my mind to go out on my own, and I did, and I been right here ever since.”

  “I never knew my daddy or mama either.” She picked another tomato slice from his arm. “Nobody cared you didn’t have anybody to look after you, make sure you went to school?”

  “No,” he said. Tomato juice ran down the side of his mouth. “They always said I was special. And besides, they didn’t have the type of class in school that could work with a brain like mine. I was too smart for all the classes. So they just let me be out here on my own. It’s the way I liked it and wanted it and couldn’t nobody force me to do nothin’ different ‘cause I could draw and shoot my Ruger pistol within two seconds, ninety-seven percent accurate on target each and every time.”

  A hiss of lightning struck the yard, and a loud crack of thunder rattled the NO TResPass-N and NO PichtER Tak-IN signs on the wall.

  “We gone get us a mean storm,” he said, looking out at the clouds. When his eyes came back, they set on the photographs sitting in Gradle’s lap. “Who’s them people?”

  She held the photographs up so Delvis could see. “That’s you,” she said. She showed Delvis the photograph of himself. “And that’s Grandpa and my mama.”

  Delvis took the photograph of Grandpa and her mother and put it close to his eyes. He turned his head slightly to the side and furrowed his brows. He put his fingers to his face and patted it, as if comparing Grandpa’s face to his own, and then he put his fingers to his ears and traced their gigantic Cs.

  He held up his great big hands and turned them over and back over and over again. His eyes honed in on Grandpa’s hands, and they stayed there, studying them through and through. Whatever he saw in the photograph rendered him speechless. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple a greased ball in his throat, and when he finally tore himself from the photograph and looked at Gradle, his blue eyes were calculating. He held the photograph to his eyes again. “He looks real familiar to me,” he said, and he handed her the picture.

  “He’s a real dick sometimes,” she said, comparing Grandpa’s image to Delvis. There was a resemblance. She must have noticed it before, but hadn’t paid it much mind until now, dismissing this familiarity to an imagination warped by her desperation and desire to be the apple of Grandpa’s eye. She didn’t know why she had run here. She didn’t know what drew her so much to Delvis. It was odd, a girl of her age befriending a crazy man in his sixties, much less spending the night with him. Maybe it was leftover guilt. Pity. Fascination. Heartache. Maybe it was a little of everything combined. But now, as she compared their smiles, she realized her attraction was simple. Delvis reminded her of Grandpa.

  “Look at you,” he said, pointing to Gradle’s mother in the photograph. “That’s a big fish you got.”

  “That’s not me,” she said. “That’s my mama.”

  Delvis scratched his head. “Sure looks like you.”

  She did look like her. She looked exactly like her, purposely like her, so much she was her. She removed her cat-eye glasses and stared at Delvis. “Do I look like her now?”

  “Yes, but without the glasses,” he said.

  She pulled her hair from her ponytail, felt the weight of it brush her shoulders, and pulled it around to one side. “What about now? Do I still look like her?”

  “Yes, but without the glasses and with your hair down,” he said.

  “Will you cut my hair?”

  Delvis’s knees bounced. “Why? You got pretty hair.”

  “I want you to cut it.”

  “I ain’t got no scissors. The pair I had rusted in the rain.”

  “Use your knife,” she said. She banded her hair back into a ponytail. “Cut right above here,” she said, pointing to the band.

  “I ain’t no professional at cuttin’ hair.”

  “You won’t hurt me.”

  He wrung his hands and picked at the foam busting out of the red Dairy Queen booth. “I ain’t got no practice at cuttin’ hair.”

  “Just cut right here, that’s it,” she said.

  Delvis fidgeted with his fluorescent orange shoestrings. He looked at her one good time like he was about to take action, but he started messing with his shoestrings again.

  “Do you need to suck on some tree bark?” she asked. “Get you over the hump?”

  “You know me, I will accept any and all challenges,” he said, drew in a deep breath, and let it blow. The shiny blade switched out of its handles with an aggressive click. He grabbed her hair and drew it taut, and with four saws of the knife, her long raven ponytail came loose in his hand.

  She felt an oppressive weight lift off her shoulders. She reached back and judged the length of her hair.

  “Cut it all off,” she said.

  Delvis re-banded her ponytail and draped it around his neck like a lady would a stole. He sawed and cut, releasing tufts of her hair into the storm, and with each saw, cut, and release, she felt lighter and lighter. Weightless.

  He blew the last bit of hair from his fingertips. “That’s ‘bout as close as I can get it without cuttin’ you,” he
said.

  She reached to her head and had nothing to grab. “What about now? Do I look like her?”

  “You look like you.” He folded the blade gently back in its frames.

  He walked to the edge of the porch and looked out at the rain. His heel nervously tapped against the sagging boards. It grew louder and louder as if he might explode. He spun around and stabbed her with his eyes. “Can I draw you?”

  “What for?”

  “‘Cause you’re pretty,” he said. “I like to draw pretty things. I’d like to draw you for keep sake.”

  She brought her knees into her chest, an effort to shield her sudden insecurity. She looked at the sagging porch floor and raked her fingers through her inch-long hair. “You think I’m pretty?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, bowing his head. “I didn’t mean to make you mad.” He wrung his hands and stared down at his fluorescent orange shoestrings. “I’m a plain person, Gradle. And I don’t know how to talk right sometimes.”

  “You’re not plain,” she said. “You can draw me if you want.”

  He rushed into the house and came out with a pad and a pencil and samples of what he had drawn before.

  “This here’s a unicorn,” he said. He sat on the edge of the booth. “I saw it back behind my house a little over a year ago. It stood in the woods long enough to let me draw him. No, I couldn’ta drawed that if I hadn’ta seen him. At the time, I didn’t have no picture camera, so I couldn’t take a picture, so I drawed him for proof. I submitted to the newspaper, but they was too scared to print it. Might cause widespread panic. I make replicas, two drawings of everything I draw for security reasons. In case one of ‘em gets lost or stolen I got a backup.”

  “Wow,” she said, marveling at the skill it took to draw something so imaginary and make it look so real.

  He took the picture away and switched it for another. It was a portrait of his dog, Rain. He had drawn a teardrop rolling down the side of Rain’s face, and in it was Delvis’s reflection. It looked so real; she touched the teardrop with her finger, expecting it to feel warm and wet. He showed her three more pictures, all of a woman in a dress. Each portrait progressed in skill and detail, as if the woman was something that required a lot of practice. She was thin and frail like the threads of spiderwebs, and although it was possible to see that at one time she possessed an incredible beauty, she was aged beyond her years, wasted away with what looked like grief. Gradle knew the look all too well. She had lived with it, memorized it without any effort. Just like Grandpa, the woman’s sadness was everywhere, in the hollows of her cheeks, in the creases of her eyes, and even in the smile on her face that seemed to struggle not to show teeth.

  “Who’s she?” Gradle looked closely and found Delvis’s reflection in the sadness of the woman’s right eye.

  “I don’t know. She wouldn’t ever tell me her name. I thought she didn’t like the picture I’d drawn of her, so I kept practicin’ at her portrait, hopin’ I’d see her again. But I only seen her once.”

  “Why’s she so sad?”

  “I reckon she was lonely.”

  Gradle studied the woman again, wondering if loneliness could eventually kill a person, if it would eventually kill her. “Where’d you learn to draw?”

  He leaned back into the booth and popped his knuckles. “Boys made fun of me at school. I was in the second reader. It was Thanksgivin’ and the teacher said, ‘ever-body draw a turkey’. I drawed a turkey for the teacher and the boys made fun of me. I will admit it was a little grizzly. So I sat up for six weeks trainin’ myself. And now I’ll give anybody a twenty-dollar reward if they make a mark, a letter, a dot, what have you, that I can’t make a picture out of. No sense braggin’, just the facts.” He clasped his hands in front of his belly. “God shows me what to draw. With his help,” he pointed to the sky, “there’s nothin’ I will fail at. But there’s one thing,” he said, pausing to allow his eyes to grow mean, “I will not, no matter how nice somebody asks me, I will not draw a picture of Jesus Christ. I refuse. ‘Cause in the Bible it says make no false images of me. Anything with Jesus Christ I won’t draw.”

  “You won’t go to hell for drawing me,” she said.

  “I promise you, Gradle. I’ll treat it with one hundred percent respect.”

  He laid his drawing pad on his lap and skinned the pencil’s tip with his knife.

  She dropped one leg from her chest and tucked her cheek against her upright knee. Her wrists hooked around her ankle, and the fingers that could reach cupped the undersides of her toes.

  His eyes caught her. He pinched down his view and magnified something within her she could feel but couldn’t see. He made a mark. His pencil let loose like something wild from a cage. She felt powerful and guilty, a little bit erased. Exposed, yet free.

  When he was done, he titled the portrait, POrTrAIT of GRaDle BiRd , and signed his code name in the lobe of her ear: D-5. He handed her the portrait and pointed out his reflection nested in one of the many diamonds that formed her iris. “That’s my trademark. I put me in everything I draw.” His eyes were assured, yet desperately sought her approval.

  She studied the drawing, and it made her eyes hurt. “That’s me.”

  “That’s you, Gradle Bird,” he said, hooked his thumbs together, and motioned his hands like flying wings.

  SONNY JOE WOKE on the wooden church pew with a brown-liquor hangover and a hard-on. He sat up, adjusted his groin, and picked the nuggets of sleep from his eyes before he took down what was left in the half-pint of Southern Comfort. He looked around the dark sanctuary for Ceif and found him in the pulpit, preaching from his Bible to an audience of one. He had listened to Ceif preach a hundred times, his sermons always following on the day after a long booze bender or an all-nighter steeped in nothing but no good. It didn’t matter how much sin they’d wallowed in the night before, no matter if they still stunk of it, Ceif kept his faith. And while Sonny Joe didn’t believe in angels, he always found his crippled friend preaching from the pulpit a bit angelic. But today was different. Ceif didn’t look like an angel. In fact, Sonny Joe found him a bit devilish. Ceif had danced with Gradle last night and still, even in the morning, it was eating him up inside.

  Ceif’s Bible hissed as he turned the pages. He bowed his head and prepared. “Love is patient. Love is kind. It is not jealous,” he said. He bore his dark eyes into Sonny Joe. “Love vaunteth not itself, it is not puffed up or arrogant. It does not act unbecomingly. It does not seek its own. It is not easily provoked. It thinketh no evil,” he said, aiming right at him as if his little mouth was a barrel and his words, bullets. “It rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. Love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things,”

  “I know, preacher boy,” Sonny Joe said. “You want to save my soul if it becomes the death of you.” His words were hollow and echoed off the sanctuary walls. “Maybe you ought to put an ad in the paper about your church out here so you can get a real flock, and be a real preacher, and preach to some people who’ll actually give a damn.”

  “You are my flock,” Ceif said, closing his Bible shut.

  “Why do you worship me so much?”

  “It ain’t worship.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I pity your soul.”

  A smile cut up the side of Sonny Joe’s mouth. He slid to the end of the church pew, got on his hands and knees, and crawled down the center aisle. He knelt at the altar and sprawled his arms down the warped wooden railing like the crucified Jesus himself, and stared up at Ceif, his eyes posed in the most willing and helpless position they could find.

  “Save me, motherfucker,” he said.

  Ceif hobbled down from the pulpit and laid his hands on Sonny Joe’s shoulders. “Father God,” he said, “we come to you right now in the name of your most Holy son, Jesus Christ, asking you to accept Sonny Joe.”

  Sonny Joe’s arm started to shake. The more Bible words Ceif let loose from his
mouth, the more Sonny Joe shook.

  “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved,” Ceif said, laying his hands atop Sonny Joe’s head.

  His entire body shook now, and he could hear the passion in Ceif’s voice rise, as if his physical reaction was fuel for Ceif’s heart. Sonny Joe stood up. His body convulsed. His eyes rolled back into his head.

  “Say it!” Ceif yelled.

  Sonny Joe writhed around on the floor like a serpent in hot ashes.

  “Accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Say it!”

  His body went still. He closed his eyes. The sanctuary was silent.

  Ceif nudged his ribs with his shoe. “Say it.”

  He opened his eyes and found Ceif standing over him. A halo of light lit up his crown and his dumb, innocent expression of suspense. He had turned back into a little angel.

  “I had you going, man,” he laughed. He backslapped Ceif’s thigh.

  “Dick-wad,” Ceif said.

  “I admire you. You’re a persistent little fucker. One day you might get lucky and catch me in a weak moment. But it ain’t today.” He sat up, proud he had put the hurt on Ceif, and punched him in the arm. “Come on man, let’s blow this joint.”

  Sonny Joe lit a cigarette and cranked the truck while Ceif slid in the passenger’s seat and punched the rain out of his hat. Sonny Joe slung mud all the way down the road with one thing on his mind—Gradle Bird.

  Ceif flipped the visor down and looked at himself the mirror. He finger-brushed his teeth and combed his hair to the side before gingerly placing his hat back on his head.

  “What you primping for?” Sonny Joe coughed in his hand, checking for bad breath.

  “Gradle Bird. I think she likes me,” Ceif said, and tipped his hat. “You might wanna spit down that cowlick you’re sporting.” He nodded at Sonny Joe’s head.