“Mr. Spondoni, I asked you a question.”
Shrimp looked up from his dream, stared dumbly at Miss Lee. She had her cranky face on today, the sucking-lemons one that pursed her lips and put a furrow in her brow. Her dark eyes were fixed on his, faintly menacing. He realized, all of a sudden, that he didn’t give a shit what she thought, said, did, expected, or hoped for.
“Did you hear what I said, Mr. Spondoni?”
“No.”
“No?” Her eyebrow arched up, her face seemed shellacked, like something made in wood shop class. “It is your responsibility to listen in this classroom. Do you know what that means?”
“Yeah, this.” He raised his right hand and stuck his middle finger in the air, right under her nose.
She stared in amazement, which matched his own, for he couldn’t believe that it was his finger out there wriggling in the air. But then he knew, that’s how the trophy looked, with himself on the pedestal, giving the finger.
“Bend over, young man . . .” She dragged him from his seat and shoved him against her desk. Her other hand was reaching out for her paddle, which hung from a nearby hook.
Shrimp looked at it, saw his own work, the handle of the paddle smoothly carved, the face smooth as glass, meant for destruction. But Miss Lee did not really know how to use it. “Gimme your best shot,” he said over his shoulder, and then looked at Tootsie Zonka and winked.
He heard Miss Lee winding up, felt himself inside the cloud of her sweet, despised perfume. And then she drilled him, with a force so surprising the tears shot out of his eyes, for himself, for Dick Fontana, for Tootsie, for all of them. “You no-good lousy fucking bitch. Here!” His finger was in the air again before he knew it, the trophy figure shining on its pedestal.
The door of the classroom flew open, and standing there, eyes burning like something found in the coal-breaker, was principal Herbert T. Astle, the silver-haired sadist. “I’ll handle this, Miss Lee,” he said, crossing the room with quick strides.
Shrimp pulled back, eyes darting wildly. Herbert T. Asshole was the undisputed master of the paddle, with a technique far surpassing that of Short Circuit Smith. He ruled the school by means of it and a gold-toothed smile that gave him the look of a cat preparing to chew on a mouse’s head. “Bend over, Spondoni,” he said, and took the paddle from Miss Lee.
Shrimp felt himself freezing up, rage and courage gone in the presence of the supreme ruler. This was the guy who could send him to a reformatory, and that was not in Shrimp’s game-plan.
“He disrupted this class in the most obscene manner,” said Miss Lee, voice shaking with anger as she moved closer to the kill.
“He’ll think twice about it in future, I assure you of that.” Herbert T. Asshole shoved a hand in the middle of Shrimp’s back. “Hold it precisely there, Spondoni . . .”
“You hold it,” said a soft voice from the back of the room.
Herbert T. Asshole spun around, and then his eyes narrowed. “Sit down, Fontana.”
Dick remained standing, relaxed but seeming to be ready, the way he looked at the beginning of a game, when he was about to jump for the ball against an opposing center.
Herbert T. Asshole walked down the aisle toward him, slowly, his own voice soft now. “I can break you and your future, with one phone call.”
Fontana gazed at him, eyes expressionless, his body still seeming to be at ease, yet the tension was there, the thing that could suddenly spring up at you, tower over you, drive a basketball down your throat. He took a step toward Herbert T. Asshole, and the principal stepped backward, his voice getting suddenly higher. “I’ll suspend you for this—” He continued backing up, collided with Miss Lee’s desk; the paddle, still in his hand, struck her flower vase and sent it to the floor where it shattered, water and roses spilling out of it. Shrimp stepped aside as the water trickled past his shoe. He looked at Fontana, and Dick’s face was calmer than he’d ever seen it, as if this gold-toothed fiend jabbering at him was just a stranger on a street corner, past whom one simply walked. Dick walked, and Shrimp walked with him.
“You won’t get away with this!” Herbert T. Asshole ran after them toward the door. They stepped through, and the principal whirled around, back toward the class, where Tootsie Zonka was standing up, and Tony One-Punch, and Frankie Plunger. The whole class stood up and walked out of the room, in a quiet, solemn march.
* * *
Shrimp left the pillow factory, arms itching up to the elbow. It was a winter day, the air crisp and clear. He walked along the river to the corner store and bought a paper, turning immediately to the sports page. He found the write-up on the big college game, and saw Dick Fontana’s picture in a little square frame. “Go get ‘em, baby.” Shrimp folded the paper under his arm, and walked on.
A Man Who Knew His Birds
Meechum swung his binoculars up. The forest veil played its deception, but among the leaves the rust of a flickering tail went up and down. Meechum pressed a button on his recorder. “Hermit thrush,” he said softly.
“Tuck, tuck, tuck,” said the thrush.
It was routine work. After these few last observations, he’d be heading on, following the migration, south to Guatemala.
“Kit, kit,” said the wren.
“Queedle, queedle,” said the jay.
Meechum stalked ahead, mentally composing the pages of his textbook. In his imagination it was ornamented with creeping vines and tendrils, but in the museum edition it would, of course, be a straightforward work.
“Beep, beep,” said the woodcock.
“Smack, smack,” said the thrasher.
The forest gave way to an old field, flat except for some grass-grown rocks, piled by a farmer a half-century ago. Meechum moved along the edge of the meadow, threading a line between forest and field, recording, sorting, arranging, cataloging the sights and sounds.
At the meadow’s end, he stopped, cupped his hands around his mouth and gave a sharp staccato call. Calls were his specialty; he could lure birds along, playing on their instincts with perfect certainty of the outcome.
“Queedle, queedle,” answered the jay on cue a moment later, to confirm the theory of irreversible drives sealed by mechanical fates.
A breeze played over the meadow. Grass and flowers bent and swayed. Insects and birds fluttered along, but only one mind was at work, and it was Meechum’s. For only in man, went the text of his book, are the powers of intellect freed. Man alone, the paragraph concluded, has broken the bars of instinct.
A few illuminated vines and leaves wound around this, and its author stalked on, listening to the marvelous but mindless machine on all sides of him—queedling, tuck-tucking, smack-smacking. Meechum filed the bird-calls, with that easeful certainty of the expert, with a peculiar sort of thunking sensation in his brain, of material going where it was supposed to.
He walked along, noting the peculiarities of terrain, expecting and finding nests exactly where they should be. A pair of eggs was revealed in a nest deftly hidden, not in a tree but in a certain kind of ground cover Meechum knew well; finding the eggs there filled him with sadness almost, for the poor birds would always and everlastingly lay their eggs that way, and an intelligent investigator would always find them. The poor simple creatures were slaves to instincts that occasionally seemed pitiful. He disguised the ground nest again. No, he said to himself, there is no freedom here, free as we may think the birds are. And it is always the same—they are mechanical creations.
As for their fabulous singing, reflected Meechum, it too is instinctual and predictable down to the last note. The beauty of evensong is an ancient recording, the same now as it was ten thousand years ago—unchanging, caught in unrelenting sameness. A shame, in a way, but that is blind nature’s style. Man alone has been freed, and man alone rules.
And Meechum felt that man’s sentimental projections concerning birdsong would ultimately die, and be banished by a more accurate and scientific view of the matter. No, birdsong was not inspir
ed nor was it the poetry that emotional fools made of it. It was—code. And he, Meechum, was master of the code.
“Zwee, zwee, zwee,” said the blue warbler.
“Pee-wee? Pee-wee?” asked the flycatcher.
And then: “Who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you . . .”
Extraordinary, thought Meechum. He’s 1500 miles off the beam.
And then: “No-hope, no-hope. . .”
Meechum could not have been more stunned if he’d walked into a wall. A white-winged and an Inca dove, here?
Fifteen hundred miles off the beam?
He entered the brush, his excitement growing, the fading afternoon tingling with discovery as he switched on his tape recorder.
“Who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you . . .”
Marvelous! He went down on all fours and moved deeper into the brush. There was a faint rustling off to the side, as of a large animal circling, but what he sought was much smaller, much more delicate, would be holding to the ground, just ahead. Carefully, gently, he moved one branch aside, and then another.
The parted veil revealed—nothing at all.
He brought himself up closer, like an inchworm. He’d make identification in a moment more, of course, he could never fail on something like this.
“Howdy . . .”
The voice spun him around, crazily, as if the forest floor were a rug that’d been pulled out from underneath him. Meechum stared across the little clearing, in which he’d never ever heard a single human sound, and now, at a crucial time like this, on the brink of an extraordinary sighting—
“You lost?” A grizzled old local was coming toward him, hat on sideways, a demented grin on his face. Drunk, thought Meechum, an old drunk . . .
“Please,” said Meechum softly, “there’s a bird in there.” He pointed toward the bushes.
“Well, flush the bugger out!” The codger took off his cap, rushed at the bushes, and started beating on them.
“No!” Meechum grabbed him by the arm. The old yokel was light as a feather and Meechum easily pulled him back.
“You go at ‘er strong, don’cha . . .” The old drunk cackled and spat a stream of tobacco juice into the leaves where the rare doves were, or had been.
“Please,” said Meechum again, speaking slowly, as if to an idiot. “I’m doing field work. I’ve made an important sighting of a wind-drifted vagrant . . .”
The man squinted toward the leaves. “Pair of pigeons?”
Meechum’s heart sank. “Yes, are they yours?”
“Brought ‘em all the way from Mexico,” said the man, proudly straightening his hat.
“I see,” said Meechum, crestfallen, the moment gone, the day over. “The doves are pets.”
“I was out there workin’ . . .” The old man smelt faintly of fish. The ocean wasn’t far; he must be a fisherman. “. . . I seen them pigeons and heard ‘em talking ‘mongst themselves—”
“Yes,” said Meechum glumly, putting his microphone away for the day, “. . . and you brought them back with you.
“—goin’ who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you—”
Meechum’s hand stopped, with the microphone still in it. Automatically, he clicked it on again. “What did you say?”
“I said, who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you.” The old cod’s mouth wrinkled up mischievously, producing the most perfect dove call Meechum had ever heard.
“No-hope, no-hope,” continued the codger in the same expert tones, his toothless gums shaping the delicate sound. Then, seeing the confusion on Meechum’s face, he burst into laughter.
It took Meechum’s brain a second to catch up to the wild high-pitched laugh, but his file-system was whirling, the laughter familiar, incredibly so.
Fulmaris glacialis, observed Meechum, as the correct file-drawer opened in his mind, and then closed again a moment later with a thunking sensation, of material going where it was supposed to—laughter of the Arctic seabird, south to Newfoundland, also northern Eurasia— but produced by an old nut in the forest.
“Yessir,” said the codger, “I brung them pigeons here alright, and turned ‘em loose. Along with all the rest.” He looked at Meechum, slapped his thigh and started laughing again—weird, shifting, kaleidoscopic screeching. Meechum experienced a succession of thunks in his head, more drawers opening and closing as the old fisherman’s laughter ranged quickly through bird families from the eastern Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
Meechum heard brown boobys, painted storks, red jungle fowls, the great hummingbird of the Andes, and a mousebird of Africa; the forest seemed to fill with toucans, trogons, wood hoopoes, nightjars, honey guides, and common cuckoos. He heard, distinctly, parrots, parakeets, puffins, and a razor-billed auk. Meechum turned his recorder nervously, on, off, on again.
“Yessir, there are more birds in these parts than a feller might think,” cackled the old reprobate. “Well, they keeps the bugs away, right? Eh?” He cackled again, and poked Meechum good-naturedly in the ribs with his bony finger.
Meechum teetered, and pitched backward.
“What’s wrong?” asked the old loony, as Meechum sank down heavily on a moss-covered stump. “You feelin’ alright? You sure you ain’t lost?”
“No . . .” stammered Meechum, feeling as if he’d just bounced from breeding ground to breeding ground, halfway round the earth.
The old zany laughed again, then gave a low “hoooo, hooo, hoooo.” He looked at Meechum. “You know what that is?”
“Spruce grouse.”
“We call ‘em fool hens,” said the old man, and cackled again, as at the funniest joke in the world. A long series of calls came from him then, in rapid succession. Meechum followed each of them, his mind going though its regular cataloging, a lifetime’s training at work.
“Queer-a-chi-queer, queer-a-chi-queer . . .” The old man was dancing, shaking his pants legs, rattling off calls with mad glee. Meechum closed his eyes, saw the Dry Tortugas, then a soft Brazilian moon. He opened his eyes, saw the codger a few feet from him, toothless gums beating. A green warbler had landed in his hat.
Meechum pointed his microphone instinctively, but it was not the warbler who sang into it, but rather the old man, and the song was that of some fantastic mockingbird whose repertoire was music from a thousand forests, a million lakes, and the seven seas.
Meechum’s mind whirled, faster than any tape recorder, from call to call, his information bank lighting up madly as the old sailor cackled and cawed, twittered and cooed, clicked and whistled.
If he publishes, thought Meechum, I’m ruined.
This painful thought was quickly submerged, for Meechum found it impossible to think with such an awesome medley of bird-calls filling his brain. He wanted to rise and go, wanted to find the path to the road and drive away, but he was fastened to the stump, filing, cataloging, filing some more, as the old loony danced, arms akimbo, calling, calling, calling, in a Babel of bird-tongues, the warbler still sitting in his hat.
Meechum’s mouth hung open, his eyes glazing over. He was imprisoned, he was being called.
No call was left out, from jungle to mountaintop. How? his free mind would have cried, but it was no longer free. Meechum sat like a toadstool, like a tree-ear, listening.
“Titi-ri-titi-ri, titi-ri-titi-ri . . .”
The old man flapped his elbows, cocked his head, scuffled his feet. Meechum blinked mechanically, seeing a dejected hunched plover on the Arctic tundra, then a spasmodic running wagtail on Spanish ground—yet the only real bird present was the warbler in the old codger’s hat. The warbler looked at Meechum.
Its little black eyes filled with an expression Meechum had never seen before. The warbler turned, first this way, then that, to stare at him. His own brain was numbed, netted, imprisoned by song, and the warbler was saying, in illuminated thought framed round with vines and tendrils, Birds alone know the meaning of song.
Meechum closed his eyes. Texts and guides were fluttering in his head, page after page, the pages blu
rring like wings in flight. He saw an immense wheeling formation, heard its magnificent call, an immensity of wingbeats fluttering through his nerves.
He forced his eyes open, expecting to see an evening sky filled with birds, but there were only the pines, and a crazy old coot, hopping toward the brush, with a warbler in his hat. Twittering, cheeping, cawing, the old man disappeared, and a moment later the forest was still.
Meechum rose from his stump, and listened. There was a faint klee-klee-klee from afar.
“Merlin” he said softly into his microphone. “Labrador south to Nova Scotia.”
A faint whisper of wings came out of the pines and the shadow of the little Merlin-hawk glided silently by.
Letter to a Swan
Lake Zurich glistened, reflecting the first sun for many days. Spring was late and all Europe seemed unseasonably cold. DuJohn sat at the stern of the ferry, huddled in his jacket, staring down at a mottled swan on the water; as the ferry approached, the great bird raised its wings and flapped away, long legs cutting a narrow wake in the water, toward the shore. The ferry followed, turning landward to Küsnacht.
He joined Marie at the gangplank; they walked down to the dock and on into the little town. A two-lane highway had to be traversed, but beyond it were the hills, through which was woven a network of small streets. The houses were all marked with the craftsmanship of Old Europe, which spoke through the heavy wooden doors, the iron hinges, the careful work of the tiled roofs and eaves. Flowing down from the hills was a wide stream, descending between the houses over tiers of stone to the lake. Pedaling across a narrow bridge above the water was an elderly gentleman on a bicycle. DuJohn stopped him, asking him for directions to the cemetery, to the grave of Carl Jung. The man shook his head, and pedaled on.
“We can ask there,” said Marie, pointing to an old church and the cleric’s house beside it. But the bell went unanswered, echoing within an empty house.
They walked back to the stone bridge spanning the stream. He looked up it toward the next bridge, where two men stood gazing at the river. “We can ask them.”
Jewel of the Moon Page 8
