A Catalog of Birds

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A Catalog of Birds Page 19

by Laura Harrington


  Billy goes to bed without eating. Falls asleep instantly. Doesn’t wake until Flanagan complains to be fed, the sun already up, not a cloud in the sky, the wind testing the pines. Late for Asa’s. Late for Harlow’s. Late for everything.

  Everyone has an opinion about the crash whether they know Billy or not. He must have been drunk. Or asleep at the wheel. Or both, to have survived. He must be one tough son of a bitch. He should never have been driving. They should revoke his license. Lucky no one else was hurt. What was he doing out on County House Road at three o’clock in the morning? Did that bucket of bolts pass inspection? We need stricter laws, better enforcement.

  People were loud with these opinions, some of them even showed up as letters to the editor of the Geneva Star. The whispers were saved for the uneasy speculation that one of our own boys had deliberately run his car off the road. Some people may have connected it to Vietnam.

  Billy was found by Bob Munson, a county policeman, wandering dazed and bloody along the side of the road. The blood was from a superficial head wound, but there was a lot of it. Otherwise he was shaken and bruised, but not seriously hurt.

  The Ford was two hundred feet off the road, flipped on its roof.

  Munson brought Billy to the local hospital. They stitched up a two-inch gash over his left ear and marveled, like everyone else, that he had walked away from the crash.

  He asked them to wait until six before calling his father, no need to disturb his rest.

  They left Billy in an examination bay, the curtain pulled around him, where he promptly fell asleep.

  Driving Billy home, Jack doesn’t say much. He believes that his kids’ mistakes are punishment enough. And he knows not to jump to conclusions, to wait for Billy to tell him his side of the story.

  He makes oatmeal while Billy showers. Jack had been skeptical that he could go to work, but Billy is adamant.

  Coming into the kitchen Billy refuses to eat until Jack insists. Jack adds raisins and walnuts and brown sugar to the bowl. He pours coffee, puts sugar and cream within reach, makes himself a second piece of toast.

  “Nell took care of your jobs up at Asa’s this morning.”

  Billy picks up his spoon, sets it down again. Doctors his coffee, drinks.

  “Try to eat, son.”

  “My stomach . . . ”

  “It’ll get even worse if you don’t eat.”

  The circles under Billy’s eyes are so dark they look like bruises.

  The lake is a deep slash of blue. Through the open door, the smell of grass, pine, basswood. The jays and juncos are loud as they feed and sing in the sun. There’s nothing to say or too much to say; in either case it silences both of them.

  “I could have slept forever on that gurney,” Billy says and instantly regrets it for how strange it sounds.

  He sets down his coffee cup, picks up the spoon again, the oatmeal congealing in the bowl.

  “I’ll make you a sandwich.” Jack pulls bread, cheese, ham, and lettuce from the fridge.

  “Just the cheese, Dad.”

  “Okay.”

  “You got cheddar?”

  “I know how you like it.”

  “Nance’s?”

  “Like I said.”

  Billy pushes the morning paper aside. Kent State, Jackson State, SNCC demands: immediate withdrawal from Southeast Asia, release of all victims of political repression in the United States including the Black Panthers, the impeachment of President Nixon, and the end to war-related activities at universities.

  Good luck with that, he thinks.

  His head is throbbing; both shoulders ache and his knees seem to have taken a beating. He wishes he’d asked the doctor for painkillers. Not like anyone would write him another prescription after that fiasco.

  “Where were you headed?” Jack asks from the counter.

  “Nowhere.”

  Jack wraps the sandwich, packs a few of the ginger cookies Nell made the night before.

  “When you got back from the war, did you ever . . . ” Billy asks.

  “It won’t last.”

  “You never talked about it.”

  “You were too young.”

  “I’m not too young now.”

  “I never wanted to burden my children.”

  “Dad . . . ”

  “It took me ten years to come home from that war, leave it all behind me. Look at the pictures: I looked like a ghost. Just like you. That’s why it was so hard to see you both enlist.”

  Billy brings his dishes to the sink.

  Jack’s natural reticence is choking him.

  It’s clear that Billy is in pain as he climbs awkwardly into the passenger seat and reaches across to pull the heavy door closed. The wound over his ear is bleeding through the gauze bandage.

  Driving past the old army depot, Jack slows when he sees the herd of white deer appear out of the forest. They run past, flowing along the wire mesh fence, unearthly.

  “When we were kids we thought the neutron bombs they stored in the ground had turned all the deer white,” Billy said.

  “Reasonable theory.”

  “For a twelve-year-old. They always scared Nell, but she loved riding our bikes over here at dawn. When you see them step out from the trees, they look like ghosts.”

  “Kids like to be scared.”

  Jack rolls his window down. The air is sweet with the scent of lilacs and newly turned earth.

  “I’m sorry about the car, Dad.”

  “It’s a pity. All our work.”

  “Yeah. I liked that car.”

  “Honestly, I’m amazed we got her to run.”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that right now.”

  Billy looks up at the sky where a flock of sparrows wheels over the cornfields spooling past.

  “Was it an accident?” Jack asks.

  Another long pause.

  “I was going too fast, you know me, the wheel started to shimmy and then I hit a woodchuck, an opossum, I don’t know what the hell it was—and I lost control. My right hand is fucking useless. The wheel was just spinning through my fingers. That’s all I remember.”

  He takes a breath.

  “Twelve weeks of rehab and I can’t control a beat-up car. How am I ever . . . ? Shit.”

  Turning onto Exchange Street they pass an Army recruitment billboard: a soldier hanging from a parachute, drifting in a peaceful sky, and the most inane slogan ever devised: The Army Wants to Join You.

  Jack looks over at Billy as he turns his head away, wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

  “You sure you’re up to this? I could speak to Harlow . . . ”

  “Leave it alone, Dad.”

  Jack pulls into the station. Billy twists to open the door with his left hand, forgetting his lunch.

  Jack calls out to him, the sack in his hand. “Eat something, will you?”

  “You sound like Mom.”

  “I could come by later. Take you to Luke’s. Quick. Say 1 o’clock. Blue plate special is corned beef hash on Tuesday.”

  “You just made me lunch.”

  “Tomorrow then.”

  “Maybe.”

  Jack puts the truck in gear.

  “What’s the blue plate special on Wednesday?” Billy asks.

  “I have no idea. We always go on Tuesday.”

  “Looks like we’re gonna find out.”

  Billy walks around the truck to his father’s open window.

  “Talk to me.” He looks past his father, squinting in the sun.

  “About what?”

  “How you put yourself back together.”

  Jack flips the visor down.

  “You saved me.”

  “Come on . . . don’t rewrite histo
ry.”

  “When we finally brought you home from the hospital, I was the one to get up in the middle of the night, feed you, rock you to sleep.”

  “You did not.”

  “I was awake anyway. Drinking too much. Trying to numb the nightmares. Just like you.”

  “How long did the nightmares last?”

  “You want the truth?” Jack asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Years.”

  Jack wants to touch his son, lay a hand against his face. Knows better.

  “There’s nothing more peaceful than holding a sleeping infant. I held on to you for two solid years until you got too big and too busy. Even then, you’d fall asleep at night with your head on my chest. Marion kept telling me I was spoiling you and I’d better cut it out.”

  “I don’t remember any of that,” Billy says. And thinks of waking up on the hospital ship with the scent of his father in the bed beside him.

  “I’ve always wondered how many men came home from the war and held on to their kids like I did.”

  “Maybe I should become a babysitter.”

  “Or you could spend some time with Rosie and Nick and the boys.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll pick you up after work. About 6 o’clock.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Harlow looks up as Billy limps into the station.

  “Jesus! What happened to you? Oh, Christ, don’t tell me. The car.”

  Billy looks at Harlow, that all too familiar blank you can’t touch me stare.

  “Totaled,” Harlow says.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you walked away.”

  “More or less.”

  “Can you work? You need a day off?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “About what?”

  “Don’t fuck around with me, Billy.”

  Billy reaches for his coveralls. Harlow grabs the front of his shirt. “Do we understand each other?”

  Breaking away. “I don’t know, do we?”

  Harlow shoves him against the desk. Billy stumbles, winces.

  “You made it home, you stupid son of a bitch,” Harlow says.

  “I’m not asking . . . ”

  “I don’t feel sorry for you and you are done feeling sorry for yourself. You hear me?” Shaking him. “You hear me?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “That’s not how this works, you dumbass. Your job? You just hang on through the next weeks and months. And then you’ll be through it, and out the other side.”

  Billy can’t, or won’t, meet his gaze.

  “I know about the guilt phase, the pissed-off phase, the why-me phase, the pills and girls and alcohol phase. You can’t change what happened. You have to find a way to live with it. I know you don’t believe me. You don’t have to believe me. You just have to hang on.”

  Billy slips out of his grasp and disappears into his own element, like a fish, coldness coming off him in waves. Harlow tries to shake it off, his hands clenching into fists, imagines beating Billy bloody. As if that would pull him back.

  Jack turns on to North Main and then, instead of taking the right onto Castle and driving up the hill to the Ag Station, he turns onto Center Street and pulls over in front of Saint Joe’s. The big Catholic church is too sad and foreboding, so he heads west toward the college. He rarely drives through the campus of Hobart and William Smith. Not much reason to. It’s like walking into a parallel world.

  Today the quad overlooking the lake is host to another raucous demonstration. After the May Day firebombing of the ROTC office, he’s surprised Hobart hasn’t been shut down.

  Jack parks in front of the school’s chapel, an ornate wooden structure. This is the sanctuary Jack chooses when he wants a chance to think, free from the candles and the Stations of the Cross and the stink of death and incense in the Catholic church.

  Save my son are the words that rise up in him as he bows his head.

  No other words stir inside him as he sits in the plain wooden pew. Instead, there are images he can’t shake, the car flipped on its roof, the blood seeping through the bandage over Billy’s ear, the tremor in his son’s hands.

  The wan Protestant stillness does not bring him peace today. The tasteful abstract stained glass seems weak and watered down, without enough substance or fire to offer comfort or the complex embrace of faith.

  Emerging into the May morning he stands looking out over the lake. The elation he usually feels in the presence of this landscape is tempered by a feeling of dread. A line of sailboats slides out from behind the trees at the foot of the hill.

  A roar erupts from the demonstration behind him as the boats fan out on the lake. The students’ chants float over the campus:

  Hell, no! We won’t go!

  1, 2, 3, 4! We don’t want your fucking war!

  He turns back to the lake, lifts his face to the sun, to the sweet promise of the lengthening days, and finds himself praying, finally, with a full heart: Let the summer save him as it saves us all.

  He looks at his watch, realizes he’s missed a staff meeting; shrugs it off. All he wants is to get outside into the orchards with his trees, the buds bursting into flower.

  Turning to his battered pickup, he finds a young couple leaning against the fender, lost in a kiss. Their bodies’ yearning rushes through him. He feels envy, sharply aware he is not nineteen anymore.

  When he opens the driver’s-side door, the couple pull apart. They look dazed, a bit lost.

  “Sorry, man,” the boy offers.

  Jack smiles at them, lifts a hand.

  What a dream we had, to raise our children in peace.

  Billy doesn’t question why Anna shows up at 5 to pick him up; he’s too exhausted to resist Harlow’s machinations. He falls asleep with his head against the truck’s window.

  She wakes him when they arrive at her cottage and leads him directly to the outdoor shower. She undresses him, the hot water beating on them both. She bathes him, careful of the new bruises and lacerations. The wound over his ear begins to bleed again.

  In the cottage she serves him hot soup. Sits with him, insists that he eat. She ignores his anger, brings him to bed, lies beside him as sunset pours through the windows gilding the sheets and the floor. He startles and pulls away when she runs her fingers over his scars, tracing the path of the burns down his face and neck, shoulder and arm, the rough overlapping edges of newly healed flesh.

  When she opens the window the smell of mossy green water floats up to them along with the looping echoes of birdsong.

  Billy waits for mercy, like a cool hand, to wipe away his memory, and the darkness he carries inside. Prays for it. Anna makes him hope for things, for the clean wash of water, of redemption, the possibility of forgiveness. He feels hollow.

  He looks at the curve of her breast, wishes he could draw it. Closes his eyes.

  Nell ignores the closed sign and walks through the office into the service bay. A Malibu up on the lift casts a fat shadow. Harlow wipes his hands with a dirty rag. He shaved that morning, she notices. He has the most beautiful skin, tawny and smooth.

  The last time the four of them were together keeps coming back to her like an unfinished dream. It was freezing in Harlow’s runabout, the June night unseasonably cold, tasting of snow almost, a cold wind streaming down from Canada. Harlow’s last leave before shipping out to Vietnam, Billy on his way to Basic in less than twenty-four hours.

  She sat next to Harlow as he steered them south toward Dresden, both of them trying not to watch Billy and Megan in the bow of the boat, their hands all over each other. He’d finally asked her to sit on the seat opposite, facing him, blocking his view. Blushing, glad for the dark, relief mixed up with being so close to him, the embarrassment of the dis
play in front of them, her own hunger for touch, and knowing how soon both he and Billy would be gone.

  The air was dense and alive; it felt like rain was on the way, even though the sky was clear and crowded with stars. She turned to look over her shoulder. Megan laughing as Billy got his hands under her jacket and then her sweater. Nell focused on her right sneaker, a hole in the toe, the laces broken and knotted. Harlow turned to check the gas line, gave the can a kick to determine its fullness and remind Billy and Megan they weren’t alone.

  Nell watched Harlow’s hands, wanted to grab them, be grabbed. Closed her eyes. Only one step and she could be beside him. Nothing but air between them. She could kiss him. Nothing to stop her but shyness. She could touch his face, his neck, put her hand on his chest. Nothing to stop her; nothing but the terror of not being wanted.

  Megan’s laughter brought her back to herself, and, in that brimming moment, all that was not being said: fear, sadness, loss, every conflicting desire; stay, go, excitement, dread. She was too young to learn that nothing lasts; yet there it all was, slipping through their fingers.

  She crosses to him now, skirting the patches of oil on the floor. She puts both hands on his chest, pushes him against the tool-cluttered workbench; reaches for his shoulders. He does not react, his hands still at his sides, still holding the dirty rag.

  He watches her, waiting. She can hear him breathing.

  She moves away, meets his gaze.

  “You know how I feel about you,” she says.

  He grabs her belt, pulls her against him, his arms around her. All the air goes out of her. He puts one hand at the back of her neck, pulls her head against his chest. She wants to shake her head, no, no. He kisses the top of her head like she’s a little kid, while she stands there, wanting to take her clothes off and climb into the backseat of that car. It might be funny if it weren’t so humiliating.

  “Look, you’re gonna run through me like a knife through butter and I’m not sure I can take it,” he says.

  “What are you talking about?”

 

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