Gradle Bird

by J. C. Sasser

  “Back up mister,” the man shouted. “I will shoot you.”

  “Don’t shoot, Delvis!” Gradle yelled.

  “I can shoot on target with ninety-seven percent accuracy each and every time and can pull this trigger faster than the bullet can fly.”

  “Delvis! Don’t shoot!” Gradle yelled.

  “Drop the axe mister.”

  “Let Gradle go,” Leonard said.

  “I’m protectin’ her. There’s people out there wantin’ to steal her from me. I already organized a duel with one of ‘em this morning at the Piggly Wiggly for tomorrow in the A.M., A.M. means before midday. And you just might be one of ‘em. How do I know you ain’t one of ‘em?” Delvis asked.

  “Drop the axe, Grandpa,” Gradle said. The chains rattled on her wrists. “He’s my friend. He doesn’t mean to hurt me.”

  Leonard squeezed the axe’s handle tight, let out a roar, and charged Delvis. With the axe’s blunt end, he clipped the back of Delvis’s knees. The gun flew through air and Delvis hit the floor.

  Leonard spun around, hacked the axe against Gradle’s chains, and freed one of her arms. He hacked the other chain and freed her other hand.

  A pair of arms grabbed Leonard from behind and put him in a chokehold. “Come up here tryin’ to make my life a livin’ hell,” Delvis yelled in Leonard’s ear. “Do you know who you’re messin’ with? I’m a professional in the WWF.”

  Leonard felt the life in him dwindle as Delvis applied more pressure.

  “Did that Ceif boy send you up here? ‘Cause if he did I ain’t got no regrets giving you a swift kick to the nuts and puttin’ you in the figure four.”

  Leonard kicked to find his breath, but the man’s grip was superhuman strong.

  “Since you’re now good and frozen, I’m gonna read you the lady named Miranda and the rights that go along with her. You have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer any of my questions. Do you understand?”

  Leonard couldn’t speak. As he watched Gradle racing to free her legs, his vision turned black. The axe fell from his hand and landed with a thud on the floor.

  “Do you understand?” Delvis yelled in his ears again. “Are your ears broke? I said, do you understand?”

  The man’s words echoed and rang inside Leonard’s ears. He began to slip, to cross over into unconsciousness. He heard Gradle next to him, urging the man to let him go. Her words were fragile and sweet, like the song of birds. Leonard dug his heels in and used what life he had left to flip Delvis over his back.

  Blood rushed back in. Leonard coughed for air, and his vision blurred back into focus. He jumped on Delvis’s chest, pinned his arms with his knees, and punched his face. The man’s eye split and blood ran from the slit, bright and red. Leonard punched the man’s face again and again, mopping it with blood to the point he didn’t know what the man looked like anymore.

  “Stop!” Gradle yelled. Half of her body moved off of the bed. “He’s my friend!” She grabbed Leonard’s hair and yanked him back.

  Delvis’s hips popped and bucked Leonard forward. The man’s legs rose high in the air, wrapped around Leonard’s head, and yanked him onto his back. Delvis squeezed Leonard’s head between his thighs. Leonard’s eyes bulged, and his head felt as if it would explode.

  “Do you know who I am, mister? I’m The Masked Warrior from the WWF.” Delvis released the pressure, jumped up in the air, and came down on Leonard’s chest with his elbow.

  Leonard punched Delvis in the throat, grabbed him by the front of the shirt, and lifted him to his feet. Delvis socked Leonard in the nose. A flood of red warmth drained from Leonard’s nostrils. He blew blood from his nose, grabbed Delvis by both ears, and gave him a headbutt. Delvis wheeled back into the wall, and a mountain of junk came tumbling down upon him.

  Leonard grabbed the axe from the floor. He waded knee-deep through the junk, stood over the man, and waited for him to make a move. Delvis’s legs kicked. The head of a babydoll flew up in the air and rolled along the floor. Leonard cocked the axe over his shoulder, ready to bring it down.

  “He’s your son!” Annalee screamed.

  The wind of her voice blew Leonard back. His head banged against the wall. The axe slid through his grip and balanced on its head before tipping over and hitting the floor with a clap.

  Leonard shook his head, and through the strands of fallen hair, squinted at a sphere of light. The light burned bright, dazzled with a million facets. He narrowed his eyes and focused the light to the diamond of Annalee’s ring. Annalee stood in front of the man, protecting him with her misty light.

  Leonard walked to where Delvis lay and knelt at his side. He took off his undertank and wiped the blood from Delvis’s swollen face. His eyes pried opened and their pool blue penetrated Leonard with a shocking intimacy.

  “Who are you?” Delvis whispered with all the energy he had left.

  Leonard touched Delvis’s face in the place he knew would dimple if his son was to smile. “Smile,” Leonard said, tapping the side of his face.

  “My face is broke,” Delvis mumbled.

  “I’ll break it some more if you don’t smile.”

  “You don’t know me, Mister,” Delvis said, struggling to get the words out. “My name is D-5 Delvis Miles The Lone Singer,” he said and spat blood from his mouth. “And I will accept any and all challenges.” Delvis stared deep into Leonard’s eyes and smiled a half-dimpled smile.

  Leonard’s hand moved to Delvis’s ear, traced it, and moved on to his shoulder, down his bicep and wrists. He grabbed Delvis’s enormous hand, felt the callouses on his fingertips and palms, folded it into a fist, and brought it to his lips. He was his. There was no question Delvis was his.

  Leonard cupped Delvis’s armpits, drug him from the junk, and situated him against a wall where he remained slumped and motionless. Leonard took the axe, raised it in the air, and hacked at the chains around Gradle’s ankles. The chains split. Leonard dropped the axe and opened his arms for Gradle.

  Gradle kicked the chains off her feet and ran from the bed over to Delvis. She knelt by his side and cradled his bloody chin.

  “Why’d you have to hurt him so bad?” she asked.

  An emptiness overcame Leonard. His legs couldn’t hold his hurt anymore. They bent, and he collapsed on the floor where he rested his back against the bed rails. Gradle petted Delvis’s hair, and did her best to stop the trail of blood running from his split eye. Leonard’s jaw went slack, as he stared at Gradle and watched her love and nurse her captor, his son.

  “I’m sorry,” Delvis mumbled. He touched Gradle’s hand. “I didn’t mean to make you scared. I ain’t got the right words for it.” He licked blood from the corner of his mouth. “I told you I’m a plain person, Gradle. I don’t talk right sometimes,” he said, leaned to the side, and spat out red. “I chained you up so you wouldn’t never leave me. So nobody could never steal you away.”

  “It’s okay, Delvis. I understand,” Gradle said, holding him tight in her arms.

  Thunder cracked the sky, and as a hard rain pelted the tin roof, Leonard watched her hold Delvis and Delvis hold her. Where did all their beauty come from, he wondered?

  “I have something to give to you,” Gradle said. She crawled under the bed and retrieved a strap made of leather belts and red and white striped shoestrings. “I made this for you from the trash I found at the dump,” she said. “It’s a guitar strap.” She grabbed the guitar from a wooden chair sitting beside the bed. “It’ll help you carry your guitar around. Free your hands up for autographs when you become a real live country music star.” She helped Delvis to his feet and placed the guitar in his arms as she fitted the strap.

  She stepped back and looked him over, as if trying to memorize who she saw. When she was done, she leaned in. “I’ll be listening out for you on the radio waves,” she said and kissed Delvis’s cheek.

  “Come on Grandpa,” she said, taking his hands. “Let’s go home.”

  She looked around the roo
m, as if it was the last time she would see it. Her eyes scanned the stuffed animals tacked to the walls, the fake flowers sitting on sunless windowsills, the porcelain figurines lining the lip of the door jamb, the Popsicle stick cross keeping watch over Delvis’s bed.

  Leonard rose from his feet and stood eye to eye with Delvis. Delvis walked in closer and looked him up and down.

  “I know who you are,” Delvis said. “I know where I got my good fightin’ skills.”

  “I know who you are too,” Leonard said back.

  “But shhhhh,” Delvis said, putting his finger over his swollen lip. “Don’t tell nobody.”

  Delvis turned his attention back on Gradle. “I got somethin’ to give to you, too.” From the wall, Delvis untacked a hand-drawn portrait of Gradle. “I done drawn me a replica of this one, so I have one for keepsake,” he said, handing her the picture. “I ain’t never gonna forget you.” He gave Gradle a swift hug and walked them to the door.

  Leonard and Gradle stepped out of the shack onto the porch. Hard rain pounded the roof, and a roll of thunder vibrated in the distance.

  Delvis zipped his palm up the guitar’s neck and cleared his throat, and then his fingers picked the strings and produced a sound that was familiar, yet unlike any Leonard had ever heard.

  Leonard and Gradle walked down the steps, and while they walked toward the Chrysler through the rain, Delvis belted out from his porch a true original song.

  Gradle sat in the backseat and watched raindrops tremble off the ends of Grandpa’s hair as he drove the Chrysler down the muddy road. The wipers sucked back and forth, and if it weren’t for their sound and the seat separating her from Grandpa, their world would have been unbearably quiet and close. She smoothed her dress and stared at the portrait Delvis had drawn of her, the cut of her jaw, and the hundreds of diamonds in her eyes. She could see herself completely, and wondered if Grandpa ever would, too.

  A mosquito whined at her ear. She shooed it away, and when she looked up, she caught Grandpa staring back at her in the rearview mirror. His bloodshot and bruising eye held onto her like a hook, and she didn’t know how to look back at him—if he was her enemy or her hero.

  “What’re you looking at?” She looked away through the window into tobacco’s passing green.

  “You look different,” he said, reaching in his pocket, and stretching his arm and a closed fist into the backseat. He opened his fist, and on his calloused and bloody palm rested her gold-cross earring.

  She took it from his hand, and stared at this lost little piece of her, where the gold had turned green and where it had worn pale. She straightened the cross’s chain, ran her fingertip down it, and closed her fist around it, wondering if it was something she had outgrown.

  Her temple rested against the backseat window. She closed her eyes and wondered to what world he would bring her back and if their time apart had made him different, too.

  The ride put her to sleep. When her eyes opened again she found herself lying down in the Chrysler’s backseat. It was still and twilight. The Chrysler’s windows were rolled down, and the air smelled of moonflower and hot leather. She peeled her sweaty cheek from the seat, got out of the car, and faced the old Spivey house.

  She remembered the day they first came here and feeling the hope and possibility in its abandoned beauty, the belief that this place would be different. But now, as she stood before the house, she felt afraid to walk back inside a life from which she had already run.

  Leonard sat on the porch swing working his pliers, bending a coathanger into a bird. The Chrysler door slammed. He pushed his black-rimmed readers up his nose, looked out in the front yard, and saw Gradle walking his way. She climbed the porch steps and stood in front of the door for a long time, like she was scared to walk through it. She didn’t see him sitting on the swing. He bowed over his work, and cleared his throat to get her attention. He could feel her looking at him as he curved the wire to make the bird’s head.

  “Were you gonna leave me in the car all night?” she asked.

  Leonard switched his pliers for a pair of wirecutters and snipped three pieces of coathanger into equal lengths.

  “Cat got your tongue?” she asked, and he could feel her walk up on him.

  He bent a piece of wire into a coil and picked up another piece to do the same.

  “You know it’s not my birthday,” she said. “It was back in July.”

  He could feel the twilight get darker and the last of the moonflower blooming near his ear.

  Gradle picked a moonflower bud off the vine, cradled it in her palm, and watched it slowly open without any lifeline at all. “Why won’t you look at me?” she asked, staring into the flower. She closed her fist around it and threw it over the porch rail.

  Gradle turned to walk off, and his swift hand grabbed her wrist.

  “Sit down,” he said. He pulled her down beside him with a force that gave her no choice.

  He picked up the third piece of wire, bent it to a coil, and held it up for his eyes to inspect. “The night you were born, a little bird flew in my house,” he said, trimming the wire’s end and connecting the three coils to make the bird’s wings. “There’s an old wives’ tale about that.”

  “About little birds flying into people’s houses?” Gradle asked.

  “They say it’s a sign of death.”

  Gradle pulled her knees into her chest. The chiffon of her dress whispered to him and brought him back to that night she was born—July 10, 1976. It was late afternoon and he sat at the kitchen table, sweating over copper wire and conduit, trying to run electricity to a socket that had blown. A summer storm had blown in, and he opened all the windows in an effort to cool down the house.

  A knock came at his back door. He closed the blade of his pocketknife and walked down the hall. Her face was so sunken and lined, like somebody had taken a black inkpen and scribbled all over her, that at first he didn’t recognize the young woman slapping the glass.

  He turned the knob, and Veela rushed in. She smelled like a sour rag and had the jitters.

  “I can’t go to the hospital,” she said. She paced his hall, scratching at her needle-tracked arm. “I need your help.” She clawed into his bicep like a wild animal and looked at him with a pair of painful, half-mast eyes.

  She bent over, grabbed him around the waist, and moaned as something overcame her body. Her shoulder blades stuck out like shark fins, and he could see every vertebra in her back. She was so skinny, it wasn’t until she made it through the contraction that he realized she was pregnant.

  He brought her head into his chest, and when he did, it felt like a hammer hit his heart and busted it up into a million tiny pieces.

  “Can I go to my room?” Veela asked.

  Leonard led Veela to her old room and calmness seemed to set in as if the room she hadn’t seen in over four years provided her sanctuary. She sat down on her vanity stool, wound her old jewelry box, and stared at herself in the mirror while the plastic prima ballerina pirouetted to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” She grabbed the picture frame from the vanity and wiped off the dust that had muted the photograph of her and Leonard on the banks of the Ohooppee River. Her hand gripped her mouth, and her forehead pinched together in an effort to hold back something that desperately needed to come out. She took a deep breath, and tears tinted with mascara rolled down her cheeks. She bowed her head and placed her hand atop her belly. As another contraction crashed upon her body, she stared at the photograph, as if it was the only thing that could help her make it through.

  “Look how happy we were,” she said, as her body came back to her and the music died.

  She rose from the vanity’s stool, walked to her closet, and pulled out the green chiffon dress Leonard had designed and sewed for her. The wildflower corsage he had picked for her that day was still pinned above the dress’s heart, their petals desiccated but still bright. She held it to her body and stared in the mirror.

  “It’s a girl. Maybe one day sh
e’ll get to wear this,” she said. Leonard felt his breath go missing. “I’m gonna name her Gradle.”

  Leonard pulled himself back into the present and found that his eyes were lost inside the chiffon of Gradle’s dress. He brought his eyes back to his work, clipped off another piece of coathanger, and bent it in a triangle for the bird’s beak.

  “I was piddling around with some copper wire and conduit when your mama came knocking on my door. She was pregnant and in trouble.” He worked his pliers and attached the bird’s beak to its face. “Your mama had troubles.”

  “What kind of troubles?” Gradle asked, handing him the three coils he had hooked together for the bird’s wing.

  “Addiction,” he said. He attached the bird’s wing to its body. “While your mama was in labor I kept piddling with that wire. Stripped the conduit from it, and started shaping it into a bird. I don’t know why I picked a bird,” he said, looking up from his work to try and solve that puzzle. There really was no reason. It was just where his hands and fingers had led him. He shook his head and bowed it back down. “I thought I might make you a mobile out of it. Something your mama could hang over your crib.”

  A hawk moth whirred past his ear, hummed above the last of the moonflowers, and stuck its tongue inside. “Your mama named you Gradle,” he said. “I don’t know where she got that name from, but I always thought it unusual.” He shaped the wire into the bird’s breast, and clipped off pieces to make its legs. “She didn’t have a last name for you.”

  “Where’d Bird come from?” Gradle asked.

  Leonard cleared his throat and felt a quake starting up in his hands. “I named you Bird.”

  “I’ve always thought Bird was unusual.” She watched him make a hook on each of the bird’s legs.

  “It is,” he said, attaching each leg to the bird’s body. “I’ve had a bird fly into my house once before. When your grandma who you never met was pregnant with Veela. But it was daylight then. What was strange about the bird that appeared when you were born is that it appeared in the night. And this little bird wasn’t a night bird.”