Whippoorwill

by Joseph Monninger

“He was sort of serious about it. He used to take off school to watch the space mission launches. Of course, if he had been serious about being an astronaut, he would have made it a point to stay in school when they had a mission launch, but he didn’t know that at the time.”

  “Jebby—”

  Someone knocked on the door. Dad raised his eyebrows, wondering. I held up my finger and went to the door and opened it just a little. Danny stood on the step with Wally beside him, his desire to come inside transparent. But I didn’t open the door all the way. Instead, I blocked the opening, reached a hand down to say hello to Wally, then shook my head and told him we were in the middle of dinner.

  “Oh,” he said, his face folding down, “sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. We’re just having a family dinner.”

  I didn’t even want to think about submarine sandwiches being a family dinner, but that’s the way it was. He nodded as if understanding and he backed off the porch. I felt terrible, but I forced myself not to give in and I closed the door.

  “You two okay?” Dad asked when I sat back down.

  “Sure.”

  “You didn’t want to invite him inside?”

  “No. Not right now.”

  He nodded. Then he grabbed some more chips and took a humongous bite of the sub.

  Before bed I went out to see Wally. Danny had put him on his pole. I figured his father would have some say about whether Wally came inside or not, and it wasn’t a bad night to be outside, anyway. I squatted down and rubbed Wally’s chest. I kept glancing behind me, half hoping Danny might appear, but I couldn’t see his car in the driveway. He was probably out cruising somewhere, maybe over at Holly’s for all I knew, and that line of thinking got me tangled up.

  I put my forehead against Wally’s forehead and neither of us moved for twenty seconds or so. The world smelled good. It smelled of rain and mud and trees taking leaf. I thought of what my dad had said at dinner, and about his idea of being a designer, and about the look on Danny’s face when I didn’t invite him inside, and it felt as though I had swallowed a hot coal and instead of going out it burned brighter with each breath. In Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Brutus’s wife, Portia, dies from eating coals, I knew, because we had read about it in ninth grade literature. When I read it, and when Mrs. Philipone explained it, I didn’t believe a word of it, but now I did. It made all the sense in the world.

  Later, from my bed, I heard Danny come out and let Wally off his pole. I rolled over and ducked down by the window and I watched him. Wally tried to jump up, but Danny corrected him and lowered his own posture so Wally could give and receive affection without misbehaving. Danny rubbed him a long time. Then he leaned forward and put his head against Wally’s shoulder and he was so still, so unmoving, that Wally actually sat and let him keep doing it. The sight of Danny finding some comfort in Wally made me choke up. I wanted to call to him and tell him I was sorry for not letting him inside at dinner, but once a thing was done, it was done.

  Finally Danny stood and led Wally on a short loop around the yard. Danny looked over at our house a couple of times, but he didn’t keep his eyes on it for long. He led Wally inside afterward and Wally trotted at his side, happy to go with him, happy to go anywhere.

  Fourteen

  ON THE TEACHER in-service day, Danny texted me first thing in the morning asking me to go for a ride, and I said yes, okay, because it was a pretty day and I had nothing else to do. Dad was out of the house early, still working on his job over by Hanover, and I left a note saying I was going for a ride, not sure when I would be back, but that I’d call.

  I checked my phone for texts from Holly, wondering if Danny had invited her, too. We had been a little brown with each other at school, talking, but not really. She had mentioned doing something with her brother on the in-service day, but I couldn’t remember what it was. We didn’t talk much about Danny.

  “Any destination in mind?” he asked that Wednesday morning when I climbed in. Wally sat in the back seat, happy and drooling. Holly wasn’t there, but it was possible he intended to go pick her up.

  “I’d like to go see my mom’s statue.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Bolston. It’s north of here. It’s a fishing village.”

  “How far?”

  “I don’t know. New Hampshire isn’t that big, but it’s probably pretty far.”

  “I’ve got a map in the glove compartment. Start navigating and I’ll get us going.”

  It was that easy. He didn’t mention Holly and neither did I. I was on my way to see my mom’s statue. That seemed incredible.

  Danny wore a pair of jeans and a red flannel shirt untucked over a blue T-shirt. He drove north according to a bubble compass on the dash. I unfolded the map and spread it on my lap, but it took me a while to find Bolston. It was way up on Route 3, the center spine of New Hampshire, up in the Pittsburg area.

  “I don’t even know if the statue is still there,” I said after we had a rough route planned out. “They might have taken it down by now.”

  “Your mom did it?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know much about it. It’s kind of like a family legend.”

  “I know about those.”

  “You never talk about your dad. Or about your mom.”

  “Not much to say about them.”

  “Anyway, we might be driving all that way for nothing.”

  “It’s only an hour or two and it gives us someplace to go.”

  “As long as you feel that way.”

  “We need to walk Wally soon. Not sure where he’s at on the bathroom continuum.”

  “Okay.”

  “Was your mom an artist?” he asked. “I mean, I know she taught art, but did she, like, do her own stuff?”

  “I guess so. They paid her for the statue we’re going to see. Something, anyway. It’s a fishing village.”

  “You mean like an Indian village?”

  “No. I don’t know exactly. That’s what they always said about it. I guess it’s a place where people go to fish. Something like that. The subject of the statue is fly-fishing. But I guess she used bicycle parts, and it got a little write-up in the newspaper.”

  “Cool.”

  “It’s her only professional piece.”

  “And you’ve never seen it?”

  “Nope, just pictures.”

  “Well, that’s good then. We can grab some sandwiches and we can try to find it. It will be like a treasure hunt.”

  We drove. Eventually the road numbers started making sense and I was able to direct him better. Danny played me a variety of blues, music that he admired, and he talked about why he valued it. I liked seeing him that way. He said the blues were sad, but hopeful, too, because as glum as the lyrics might be, as much as the songs were often about loss, the beauty of the rhythms spoke to the pleasure of transformation. Something like that.

  As he talked the day grew warmer and we wound down the windows, and Wally stuck his goofy head out the back, and it felt good, it all did. I didn’t mind the way I looked, and I liked how Danny treated me respectfully, and didn’t think because we had kissed that we were now in some torrid sex contract. I decided that I liked Danny, although I wasn’t sure if it was “like” with a capital L or small l. He was okay. And I also decided it didn’t matter, that I could let it go, just ride it along and see where it took me. That maybe we would be friends, and maybe we would be more, but I didn’t need to direct anything or try to shove it in any certain direction. It was a relief to come to that conclusion.

  For a long time we rode north and I held Wally’s head over my shoulder, like the world’s biggest, goofiest parrot, and it was pretty outside. The trees had turned green and the rivers ran full, and going north always felt like progress. I was heading to see my mother’s statue, if it still existed, and that felt good too. Danny had made that possible. I had to give him that.

  We walked Wally on the forty-fifth parallel, halfway from the equat
or to the North Pole. Danny spotted the sign along the highway, and it took us a moment to understand what it meant.

  “We’re halfway to the North Pole,” Danny said when we backed up and looked at the sign again. It was hard to comprehend. We pulled over to a dirt turnout. Obviously, people stopped and took pictures next to the sign.

  “And halfway to the equator.”

  “The world’s big,” Danny said.

  Wally surged to get out. We walked him along what would be a cornfield in a couple of months but right now was only a dirt meadow filled with last year’s stubble. Wally did his business and we walked over and stood against the latitude sign. Danny took pictures of me and Wally, and then handed me the phone and let me take pictures of him. Then we did some silly shots, both of us pointing to the sign and covering our mouths in surprise, joking around. He showed me the different shots on his phone, and we laughed, and I noticed that his phone seemed to be ringing a lot. He checked it each time it rang, but he never answered it.

  “Who’s trying to get through to you?” I asked when we got back in the car, wondering if maybe it was Holly.

  “I don’t know. I don’t recognize the number, but I’m going to turn it off anyway.”

  “You have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know. Do I?” he asked.

  It slowly dawned on me that he meant me, and I felt my face flush. I kept looking forward. I didn’t answer and he didn’t pursue it. But he also didn’t turn off his phone and he kept checking it as we drove, never answering it but always pulling it out of his pocket and glancing at the number.

  We hit Bolston a few minutes before noon. It was a tiny village off the main drag. One look around made me doubt the statue still existed. A sign directly over the town line said it was the PROUD HOME OF THE EASTERN BROOK TROUT. The Connecticut River ran through the town, and I realized this is what the article meant when it called it a fishing village. It was a destination for trout fishermen. Counting the number of signs about moose and deer, maybe it attracted hunters, too. The houses on either side of the main road appeared rundown and cheap. Some of them had been painted wild colors, as if old hippies lived there, and they had the usual whippoorwill yards, with beat-up cars and junked engines, broken hammocks and plastic Wiffle ball bats, leaning against trees. I couldn’t see any town center, or common, where a statue might be located.

  “I’m going to ask this guy about the statue,” Danny said, pointing to a guy on the left-hand side of the road. The guy had his head in the mouth of an old car, his body jackknifed in to reach something.

  “I don’t think it’s here anymore.”

  “You never know. Can’t hurt to ask.”

  “I’m beginning to think it was taken down.”

  “Hold on one second,” Danny said, and pulled the car over. “No reason to jump to conclusions.”

  He climbed out of the car and ran up to where the man was standing. They talked. I couldn’t hear what they said, but Danny looked back the way we came, made a motion with his hand to say which side of the road, then nodded and said thanks loud enough that I heard it.

  “We passed it,” he said, climbing back in. “We passed the statue. It’s right on the town line.”

  “It’s still there?” I asked, my heart beating hard.

  “I guess so. It’s on your side. It’s grown over is why we didn’t see it.”

  We drove back the way we came, and I saw it this time without trying. Vines had covered it, looping up and obscuring it, but I knew it was my mom’s work even before Danny stopped the car. It looked like my mom, strangely enough, although I didn’t even know myself what that meant. It had her essence, somehow, with all the movement and bicycle parts, and vines tying it to the bushes behind it. It stood about double my height on a metal I-beam sunk into the earth. The wind tried to make the statue move, and I realized it was meant to swing like a weathervane, turning with the breeze, and some of the gears down below—down where the fisherman’s belt was located—had been designed to turn. It was sort of a mobile, and sort of a weathervane, and I liked the way it looked, the way it stood, and I found myself smiling even as my eyes filled.

  “There you go,” Danny said. “What do you think of that?”

  “It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s kind of cool. We could cut away the vines and then it would move more.”

  “I can’t believe we found it.”

  “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I was starting to lose hope.”

  “You want to clean it off?”

  “Do you have any tools?”

  “We could buy some clippers or something. I have a knife with a saw blade.”

  “Let’s just use that. Maybe we can come up some other time and do a complete job on it. Now that I know it exists, I mean.”

  “Some people might like the vines. It makes it look pretty cool.”

  We tied Wally to the I-beam, and while he peed his brains out to mark his territory, we used Danny’s stupid Swiss Army knife saw blade to hack away at the vines. They were honeysuckle vines, we guessed, and no one had cut them in a long time. They came away fairly easily, though, and it didn’t take long to chop down the front vines. It reminded me of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, because every time we got another vine cut away, the statue tried to move more. I imagined plenty of people in Bolston probably didn’t comprehend the statue was supposed to move, if they knew about its existence at all. It felt good liberating the statue, and Danny was a champ, climbing up and nearly killing himself to get the tallest vines off. Slowly the statue began turning again, just a little, and one of the middle gears rotated too. Danny jumped down after he’d sawed the last vines free and he nearly landed on Wally. Wally skittered to one side, then he jumped up on Danny.

  “It needs some oil and stuff, but it was meant to turn with the wind,” Danny said, patting Wally.

  “It’s kind of pretty, isn’t it?”

  “It’s very pretty. All from old bike parts.”

  “Mom loved junk.”

  “I’m sorry about her. About how things went with her,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “It was a car accident? How long ago?”

  “A little more than three years ago.”

  “And an accident?”

  I shrugged. That had always been a question. The police said her car showed no sign of braking before it rammed into the bridge abutment out on Route 25. They said usually there would have been tire marks or some sign that she had realized what was about to happen, but they couldn’t detect anything in this instance. Still, they filed it as an accident, mostly so the insurance companies would cover the loss on the vehicle at least. My father said Mom had no life insurance, so he used the car repair money to cremate her.

  “Yes, an accident,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.”

  We didn’t talk much after that. We watched the statue turning slowly in the wind. Mostly it teetered back and forth, not sure which direction to go.

  It turns out, Wally could swim. Of course, nearly all creatures can swim, but Wally had enough Labrador retriever in him to make him crazy about water. I knew that much from looking up his breed characteristics online. As soon as we pulled into a small picnic area and let him off his leash, he flopped into the Connecticut River and took off. With the spring runoff, the water was pretty high, and I worried when he flattened out and really started swimming toward the center of the river. I figured he might keep going until the river emptied into the ocean somewhere. His ears dragged in the water. Then I remembered how strong he was, how determined he could be, and I smiled when I saw him bend in a big arc and come back toward us. He had spotted something in the water, a stick or a piece of debris, but it had drifted away before he could snag it, and so he came back.

  “That’s a boy,” Danny said, and broke off a big piece of wood from the underbrush and threw it into the river.


  Wally took off. It was impressive to see. He meant business this time, and he flew off the bank and landed with a huge splash. This is what he was born for, I realized, and I forgot what I had thought about his blood containing bloodhound or Great Dane. He was a Labrador retriever, at least his instinct was, and he deserved to live near water where he could swim. He was good on land, and strong, but seeing him swim was an entirely different matter. I wondered if his paws were webbed.

  “Man, he likes that,” Danny said, watching him and smiling. “You hungry?”

  “I am. I’ll grab the sandwiches. You keep throwing for him. It will be good to tire him out for the ride home.”

  “He’s going to smell up the car.”

  “That’s what owning a dog is all about.”

  “I notice he’s not getting in your car.”

  “Keep him exercising.”

  I set the sandwiches out on the picnic table. The table was in rough shape; the picnic area in general was in rough shape. Bolston looked like better times had passed it by, and I wondered about my mom spending her childhood up here, not far from Canada, a young girl in a fishing village. I knew her dad had worked in a mill, and some grandfather had been a logger, but beyond that it was all a mystery. In any event, people weren’t flocking to Bolston to picnic any longer, so the town had let the area run down, and the statue had taken on vines, and that was the way it was.

  We had two turkey sandwiches and a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips and two orange sodas.

  “That dog can swim,” Danny said, coming over and propping himself up on the tabletop once I had the sandwiches set out. “I mean, really.”

  “We can take him to some lakes down at home.”

  “We’re going to have to. That dog is intense.”

  “Eat,” I said.

  His phone buzzed and he checked it and put it back in his pocket.

  “What are you, like, a drug pusher?” I asked, taking a bite of my sandwich. It was good and fresh.

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “Somebody wants to talk to you.”