That’s Chester.
Uncle Al kicked the Magician out after he got a hold of some credit cards and crashed the third Volvo towards the end of high school. The Magician said it didn’t matter, he fucking hated horses anyway, hated their smell, hated their eyes, hated the way people talked about them like they were people. They weren’t fucking people; they were commodities like bonds or real estate. They were property and you were lying to yourself if you said you truly loved a horse. It’d be like loving your china cabinet or a fifteen percent increase in your stock portfolio. Like loving a toaster or a Toyota. Uncle Al loved horses so much, the Magician said, because he could always decide when to put a bullet between their eyes.
The Magician called every few weeks for cash and always found new ways to spend it. He got the snake tattoos from some Estonian girl in Scarborough, along with the hepatitis and whatever else was on the old needles she shared with her sister and their brother-in-law. The Magician picked up little tattered pieces from everyone and he clutched them until the stains were his too, until they all smelled the same. He collected all the spare parts he could find, even if they were busted
Carl and I pull the Magician up off the floor and he smiles at us. The teeth that are left are bright and white. He might have stolen more white strips from a pharmacy or grocery store. The staff say he has to go; this is a youth shelter, not a hospital ward. Carl waves them off. The Magician yawns and tells me he is tired. He is so tired and he makes his body go limp in our arms. Carl and I buckle under the load and then we are outside in the snow and I can barely see the car. The Magician is still wearing his cargo shorts and that Woodbine T-shirt, but he isn’t shivering. His skin is turning pink. He shakes awake in our arms, but doesn’t try to move his feet. We drag two parallel lines behind us in the snow. The air smells like McDonald’s fries and vinegar. The Magician mumbles in my ear that we should go watch a movie, go hide out in a theatre for a couple of hours. Only a couple hours until he can feel his feet again. His moustache is filling up with white flakes. He wants to know where we are going.
He asks Carl if he remembers watching Death Wish, if he remembers Charles Bronson holding that gun to a mugger’s head on the subway. He asks about that power, about the will it must take to kill a man. Easy enough to put a horse out of its misery if you have to—if you must. Easy enough to pull that trigger even if you aren’t Charles Bronson, even if your hands aren’t steady. My hands are getting cold, we’re all turning different shades of pink out here, but Carl can’t find the keys to the Chevy and the Magician wants to tell us more about horses. He wants to tell us about the best way to feed horses and about Charles Bronson III, the strongest of all creatures, the noblest of the beasts. He says he will ride again. Carl isn’t listening; he’s trying to find the keys somewhere in his jacket. The swirling snow bites at my ears and all I can see is the Magician moving his lips, trying to speak. Every word is swallowed by the wind, drowned out by a howl from somewhere down the highway. Somewhere cold. The Magician smells like McDonald’s and his eyes are pink around the edges. His lips keep making frosted words.
I can’t hear a thing he says.
In a Car in a River outside Peoria, Illinois
The funds from the church were deposited in her name. The assets he couldn’t hide in Cayman banks or Swiss accounts were placed in safety deposit boxes that only she could open. The countless dollars invested by friends, family and parishioners—all of it floating in offshore bank accounts or squandered on those women out in Reno, the ones who will lick the salty tears off your face for five hundred dollars an hour. The endless shrimp he swallowed as his belly grew wider and wider, the gold watches he lost in cabs and limos with rented drivers and tinted windows. Albert Kale wants to apologize for all of this. He wants to make amends, but at the moment he is still struggling to breathe as water filters through the windows of his ’87 Camaro, a gift from his wife on their twentieth anniversary. It was his favourite car in their whole garage.
Albert Kale still believes drowning is less painful than hanging from his belt in a jail cell, swinging like some meaty pendulum. Albert Kale believes they would find him with his feet pointing north in the morning like a compass, a reminder of greater constants, of things beyond our brief reckoning here. He believes drowning will be less painful than a prolonged trial, than all those weeks on the stand, than facing the crowds that once came to worship in the house he built for the Lord. Albert Kale isn’t sure if he still believes in God. He knows death in this car in this river won’t happen in front of an audience. It won’t leave a bright red arc behind.
The water in this car is cold and it is up to Albert’s neck now. He keeps his seatbelt on because this is still supposed to be an accident. His heart pills, his liver pills, his pills for a back broken by one of his horses down in Louisville—they float around him in the car like spent confetti. Albert Kale knows he could have swallowed those pills in large handfuls. He has done it before in hotel rooms and on private ranches. Albert Kale is familiar with his pharmaceuticals, but he has no need for them now. He wants his system to be clean when they dredge this river outside his hometown, the river where all the kids used to swim and pitch bottles at passing boats until some girl on water skis took a Heineken in the eye and the cops started patrolling the shore.
Albert Kale remembers his friend Jonah telling him it didn’t hurt to drown. He told him it was like drifting off to sleep, like suffocating in a dream, like falling forever. Albert Kale believed Jonah because they were nine years old and Jonah was from Austin and his Mom never went to church. Albert Kale believed him because Jonah claimed he had once fallen off a fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico, back when his Dad still lived with his Mom and they had two televisions in the house. As he drifted below the water, Jonah claimed, the fish followed him down from the surface. Their silvery shapes began to spell out his name as his chest filled with water. Jonah said it didn’t hurt, not until after. It was one of the Mexican labourers on the boat who pulled him out, who pushed the water out of his lungs and brought him back to life. Afterward, Jonah’s father told him all the splashing scared away anything worth catching.
Jonah called sometimes from halfway houses on the Louisiana coast. He called asking to speak to his old friend Albert Kale. He called because Albert’s ads were all over TV down there, pictures of his benevolent face radiating calm, collected understanding. Albert Kale understood. He understood why a man might hit his wife, why he might cheat on his taxes, steal from his neighbour, or even bury his own child in the backyard without a marker to signify the crime. Albert Kale understood the weak and weeping masses that poured into his holy church on the second and fourth Sundays after the welfare cheques came out. He understood them all.
The water begins to burble around Albert’s mouth and he considers undoing the seatbelt, but his hands are too cold. Jonah said they were still running the church’s ads alongside reports about Albert’s crimes, about the money that disappeared and all those people he promised salvation for a dollar ninety-five a day. Jonah called because all those sermons seemed to drip with the same words he told Albert—back when they were kids, back when Jonah couldn’t spell methamphetamine and didn’t like the taste of cold medicine. Albert hung up on him, but Jonah did not stop calling. He wanted Albert Kale to know about the two years in juvenile detention, about solitude and ping-pong and what it meant to be alone, surrounded by men with old teeth, new wounds and no fixed address.
Albert Kale wants to keep breathing, but the water continues to slip through the cracks of his Camaro. He wants to rethink his options, reapply whatever twisted logic forced him to plunge his vehicle into the water this cold November. He wants to emerge from this enlightened, but the pressure keeps the doors shut. The locks have shorted out and his arms are so tired. His wife will not forgive him for this. She will smile because that is what she does, but she won’t forgive him.
Albert Kale has no ID in his wallet. He can’t reach his back pocket to check, but
he knows it isn’t there. It’s on a nightstand somewhere with all his old receipts. Albert Kale wants someone to remember what his face looks like before it bloats beneath the water, before all the fluids in his body begin to turn to gas. His face won’t look like it does on the billboards scattered throughout the Midwest, the ones staggered up and down the back roads and the highways through dead and depleted towns. His face in these ads is clean-shaven. His chins are tucked beneath a bright white collar. It’s his eyes though that cause motorists to pause, that cause men and women in motels without bibles to dial the 1-800 number. They imagine those eyes staring at them like a beacon as they clutch the phone against their neck and listen to Prince after the dial tone, waiting for Albert Kale’s voice to tell them about the fish spelling out his name beneath the water, the ones who told him it didn’t hurt to drown or die.
It was like falling through a dream, he would tell them. Like being lifted up again.
Albert Kale knows Jonah has called this number. Even as the water covers his eyes and small air pockets begin to escape from his nose, he can only think about Jonah calling that number to hear Albert Kale tell his story about the fish and the drowning sensation. Except in Albert’s version, it’s his father who saves him. There is no Mexican labourer—no one thought that would sit well with the listeners. Jonah would call and find Albert Kale there, telling his story in that calm and collected voice, the same one Albert used in interviews with journalists and state’s attorneys and the old lady from 20/20.
Jonah would call asking for Albert, asking if it really was his father. Jonah remembered Albert’s father as a hard man, a man who kicked them out of the attic, who stole cigarettes from his neighbours’ cars and once rabbit punched a teenager in line at the liquor store. The police said it cracked two vertebrae, but no one ever identified the attacker. Jonah wanted to know who this father was and why there was no Mexican labourer on that boat. Jonah called and called until he spoke to Albert Kale himself. Jonah said he wanted to talk. He wanted to know why.
It does not feel like a dream. Albert Kale’s arms and legs begin to spasm and shake in the water as his body fights for air, for a surface he can’t reach. The roof of the car will not budge against his balding head. It is not like drifting off to sleep. There is no one here to grab him. Albert Kale is collapsing from the inside out. Maybe a passing driver will spot his bright red car floating in the river. Maybe no one will notice the bits of Jonah’s shirt still clinging to the undercarriage. Albert Kale knows there will be no one there to judge him after this car finally sinks. Jonah asked him for credit, as if his story about those fish in the Gulf wasn’t a lie, some old concoction from a child’s mind. Jonah just wanted all the things Albert Kale had, all the things now slipping through his fingers, all those things trapped inside this car.
Albert just wants this to look like an accident. He wants to tell Jonah—what’s left of Jonah on the bloody floor of that parking garage—this was all an accident. Each cell in Albert’s body screams for air as his lungs swallow up the brackish water. There are no fish left in this river. They all died back when Albert’s father worked at the mill, back before all of this began to crumble, before Jonah said this was a peaceful way to die. He always was a liar.
Cloud
Everything is covered in shit.
When the birds first arrived, everyone was taking pictures. Jimmy and I rode our bikes down the streets, pointing at houses covered in starlings. They looked like oil slicks spreading from roof to roof. The trees were filled with their chirping babies and the sky would occasionally go dark when they rose together in flight. News teams and professional photographers clogged up the downtown taking photos of the phenomenon. They split it straight across their tongues and spat it at the camera. They were all so proud of our new bird collection.
Phenomenon—they said it like we were special.
Everyone is gone now of course. Hudson is just the bird town now. We are a freak show—we would be listed in some tourist’s top ten destinations if it wasn’t for all the poop. Our cars are covered in white bird shit; it eats straight through the paint. Half the kids in town have something wrong with their lungs. We are choking on air filled with feathers and feces. Most of my brother’s friends carry around inhalers and wear surgical masks when they go outside. I tie a bandana around my face and wear a hat to keep their constant droppings out of my hair. Jimmy wears his Dad’s motorcycle helmet and has to keep Windexing the visor.
We are told by parks officials and some short fat man from the government this all will pass, but the birds don’t seem to agree. They gather in large patches in our front yards and observe us through the glass. They rattle our windows in the morning and sing songs to one another when we try to sleep. They almost never blink and all their eyes look like spilled change. They steal tinfoil and barrettes and old batteries from our garages. They eat our garbage and they do not look away. Sometimes they rise and fall like a tide through the air, blocking out the sun and swallowing the rain. You can hear their wings beat in unison. They have no rhythm though—just a buzzing noise like grinding teeth. No matter where you go, the birds are always watching.
“What you two want gas for?” Orlando says. He carries an umbrella over his head outside the gas station booth. It is already spotted with droppings. Orlando runs the station and owns two others down by the highway. He sometimes details Jimmy’s Mom’s car to keep the shit from ruining her paint job. The three of us stand around the pump and try to fill the gas can. Jimmy and I found it after school in a janitor’s closet. The cleaning staff kind of gave up when the birds arrived and a lot of people decided to pull out of town. No one will notice that it’s gone.
“We need it for the lawn mower. You know, to cut the grass,” Jimmy says.
“What grass? Birds been shitting all of it to death. Too much fertilizer.”
Orlando isn’t wrong. Most of the grass in town is already dead. Trees and plants are losing their leaves. My parents spend their weekends trapping the starlings in cages paid for by the government. They kill the birds by applying thoracic compression, according to my Dad. Basically, you squeeze them to death with your hands. You wear gloves and you wait until their hearts explode or their lungs collapse or whatever comes first, I guess. My parents are paid by the pound and are told to put the birds in plastic garbage bags. Every Monday two garbage trucks roll down the streets and collect whatever people could catch that week. All the bags are splattered with bird shit by the morning. The birds have begun to figure out the traps.
“Well, we can still ride on the mower, can’t we?” Jimmy says and hands Orlando five bucks. Orlando shakes his head and starts to dart back toward his booth. The glass walls are covered with pictures of Jimmy Buffett and ocean views. Jimmy says Orlando only wishes he was from Florida. He is too pale. He would burn up if the birds ever left and the sun came back again. Sometimes we catch him trying to play guitar at night. He sings from inside the booth at the top of his lungs. You can’t hear anything over the birds though, so he just looks like a mime.
We strap the gas can into the basket on the front of Jimmy’s bike. His Mom doesn’t know about our plan, but we stash a lot of our stuff at her place. My parents have taken over our garage with nets and cages and the stench of rotting feathers. Orlando tries to yell something after us about safety, but we are already gone, our legs pumping the pedals down the speckled streets. Small children watch us from the windows and above us the thrum of wings remains unending. We live permanently under a cloud and breathe filtered air. We are the only people outside and we would not have it any other way. We will not be cowed by all these fucking birds.
* * *
“This is not going to work. We need a longer hose or something. Maybe a bigger motor or like a water gun kind of thing. Air pressure? You’re supposed to be good at science, Tony.”
The birds only killed one man since they arrived. I mean, they’re slowly killing us all, I’m sure, but this was almost premeditated accordi
ng to Jimmy. This was a homicide.
“Look, I can go back to your place and take a look if you want, but I don’t know if a hose is going to do it. We might be better just trying an oxygen tank or something.”
“And where are going to get one of those?” Jimmy says.
We are in the woods behind Jimmy’s place. There are birds in the trees around us, but they keep scattering whenever we start up the mower. It was Jimmy’s idea to build this machine. Something like a flamethrower on wheels to clear out the sky. Something to burn up all these winged oil spots and put an end to the surgical masks and rain coats. I thought high school was going to be full of girls in skirts and spaghetti straps, but the birds kind of ruined all of that. Everyone is all bundled up. We don’t even trust the ceilings inside the school. You can hear the babies squealing for food up in the rafters and down in the empty drains. They invade every space and stuff holes full with wrapping paper and old plastic grocery bags.
“Try and start it up again. I will go back to the house and try to find some more hose.”
The trees around me are made of dead branches and slimy bark. Jimmy’s backyard is fenced off from the woods, but that doesn’t mean the birds don’t like to settle in his yard. They hop away from me as I try and skirt around the abandoned barbecue. This was where Jimmy’s dad trapped a bunch of them after the last of the news teams began to trickle out of town. Once the cameras realized the birds were here to stay, most of them lost interest. They could always check in with us again in a couple weeks and file a report about the air pollution. The birds would not dictate their schedule. They were free to leave. Jimmy says we should go too, but he’s not ready yet. There are still too many birds here in Hudson. There are too many beaks to feed.
All We Want Is Everything Page 4
