Blackbird

by Tom Wright

  Cielito Lindo, un paraiso.

  She laid the guitar beside her on the grass and said, ‘Do you think that’s really true?’

  ‘That God made us? I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe just the good stuff.’

  ‘Do you hate black people? Or poor people?’

  ‘No, why would I?’

  ‘I thought I was supposed to be mad at the rich white people down here. I thought there was some kind of conspiracy or something, and everybody was in on it. It was like, here are the good guys and there are the bad guys over there, and you can tell the bad guys because they’re white and they have growly teeth.’

  ‘You’ve met a lot of people around here,’ I said. ‘What do you think now?’

  She shook back her hair. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘All I can say, I haven’t met any bad guys yet.’

  Now Max said, ‘Was that not your last ride with her?’

  At first I couldn’t speak.

  ‘Jim, are you still there?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m here.’

  ‘Wasn’t that your last ride with Kat?’

  Finally I said, ‘You know it was.’

  ‘And you’re telling me all that was then, and this is now?’

  FIVE

  I finally got around to Jonas an hour or so after I got back to what used to be home, the three-bedroom on Lanshire where I slept at night and where the emptiness was like an icicle through the heart. On the way, thinking maybe I needed a sugar and caffeine hit, I had stopped for a cappuccino at Starbucks, but ended up grinding my teeth and throwing it savagely at the ArkLaTex Realty sign in the front yard as I crossed the drive toward the door. Just the thing to show the neighbours what a stable guy I was. Then for my self-imposed act of contrition I walked humbly over and retrieved the cup, thinking, for no reason I recognised at the moment, of Father Joe – José Carbajal, senior pastor at Sacred Heart downtown – gone now but bright in memory.

  Father Joe walking into the fellowship hall, finished with confessions for now and carrying another six-gallon bucket of pancake flour to the kitchen, setting it on the end of the counter and lighting a small cigar. It was a freezing Saturday morning toward the end of my first year in Traverton, and I was standing elbow to elbow with Jonas McCashion, flipping all-you-can-eat pancakes for the Kids’ Roundup Ranch in Bowie County.

  ‘I thought this place was smoke-free,’ said Jonas.

  ‘Que es peor que la que,’ the priest said, rolling up his sleeves, the cigar cocked at an obstinate angle in his teeth. ‘Es de la reserva privada de Fidel.’ He grabbed a spatula. ‘Let’s feed these paganos hambre.’

  Jonas and I went back to our conversation about women, snow geese and incoherent Texas governors, already on our way to becoming good friends. I was what he called dis-mated, a circumstance he was unwilling to let stand. He introduced me to a former neighbour of his, a ceramic artist named Jana Stiles, and his instincts turned out to be dead-on.

  Because without Jana I’d have had no story that could be whole. I still saw and smelled and felt the exact moment when it began for me: the CCR concert in Baton Rouge – our third date – midnight, cigarette lighters held high all around us in the dark, Fogerty and his latest line-up doing a long, sweet reprise of ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain?’ and Jana, deep inside the music, swaying against me, leaning over and taking the lobe of my ear lightly in her teeth, growling softly.

  When I lost her it was for reasons I should have understood then but didn’t even now, a fact that joined forces with many others to make me wonder how the hell there could be enough room in the known universe to accommodate all the things I didn’t understand.

  One thing I did get was that most of the women I’d loved had been John Fogerty fans, and I remembered him from about as far back as he went. When it came to dancing Rachel had been more country-western than anything else, but couldn’t get enough of Fogerty’s early stuff, like the Blue Velvets version of ‘Have You Ever Been Lonely?’.

  In fact, that was what had been playing on the kitchen radio the first night I’d been the designated cook on one of Kat’s visits. That had given me full control of the operation, which meant steaks all around. It was the first time I’d been trusted with that many rib-eyes, but I brought it off without a hitch if you judged by all the compliments and the almost complete absence of leftovers.

  When the table was clear, Dusty had said, ‘’Fraid y’all are going to have to hold the fort without Ray and me tonight. We’re goin’ boot-scootin’ at the Palomino with Liz and Doc.’

  ‘How nice,’ Gran Esther said. ‘You two have a good time – you’ve earned it.’

  With Dusty and Rachel on their way, Kat and I were doing the dishes. ‘Where’s the Palomino?’ she asked, her hip warm against mine.

  ‘Greenville,’ I said, lowering my voice a little to keep Gran Esther from hearing. ‘It’s a couple of hours each way. They usually stay the night in town.’

  Kat smiled, passed me another handful of knives, forks and spoons.

  ‘Here, let me help with that,’ said Gran, carrying a couple of stray saucers she’d found in the living room over to the sink.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ I said. ‘We’ll have this done in no time. How about some hot chocolate or something?’

  ‘Come to think of it, hot chocolate would be very nice, dear.’

  Kat quickly dried her hands, saying, ‘Let me make that for you, Mrs Rhodes. Biscuit can show me where everything is.’

  Gran said she was tired and decided to take the chocolate to her room. ‘Goodnight to both of you,’ she said, ‘and God bless.’

  What Gran called her room was actually a good-sized apartment at the far end of the house, and once she was in for the evening she never came back out. Kat watched as Gran closed the door behind her.

  ‘You’ve got a great family, Biscuit,’ Kat said.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘Want a beer?’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘One or two on weekends as long as it’s just around here. Dusty thinks beer is good for your constitution.’

  ‘How does Rachel feel about it?’

  ‘She doesn’t drink. And she doesn’t say anything about anybody else’s drinking either. Calls that taking other people’s inventory.’

  ‘My Uncle Marty says things like that. He’s in AA.’

  I just nodded.

  ‘Well, she seems like a pretty terrific lady to me.’

  ‘She is now.’

  I opened two Lone Stars from the fridge and handed Kat one of them as we wandered over to the stereo.

  Flipping through the tapes, Kat picked one up and said, ‘Judy Collins, great.’ She took a drink of Lone Star and looked around the room’s wide hardwood floors scattered with area rugs. ‘This room was made for dancing, Biscuit. Think Gran would mind?’

  ‘She takes out her hearing aid when she goes in at night,’ I said. ‘She’ll never know.’ I pushed the tape into the player, and we rolled back a couple of the rugs and lowered the lights. Kat slipped her penny loafers off, took my Lone Star and set both bottles on the counter, then came back and held her hand out to me as the music filled the room. I buried my face in her hair, smelling her skin and her summery perfume, her soft breasts lightly pressing my chest and her hips moving smoothly against mine.

  After a few more numbers she lifted her mouth to mine, kissing me deeply as we danced, her hands on my waist.

  When we finally broke the kiss she said what I’d been trying to think of a way to bring up: ‘Show me your room?’

  When I opened the door to my room and switched on the light Kat glanced around. ‘Hey, you’re not too messy for a guy, Biscuit – and your own bathroom! Wow!’ She walked over for a closer look at the framed picture on my dresser next to the cracked red coffee mug bristling with pencil stubs and dried-up ballpoint pens. ‘This must be Lee Ann in the middle,’ she said. ‘Who are the other two?’

  ‘My grandmother and Dr Kepler.’

  ‘Dr Kepler?’
/>   ‘She was a professor, a friend of ours,’ I said. ‘She didn’t have any family or anything, and she kind of adopted us.’

  ‘What happened to her family?’

  ‘Her parents and sisters died in a concentration camp in Poland,’ I said. ‘Now she’s dead too.’ I stood gazing at her image, feeling its familiar dark energy, like a permanent, warm, almost undetectable push against my skin, and wondering why I couldn’t stop saying things that made me sound even stupider than I actually was.

  For a while Kat just stared at the picture in silence, something changing in her eyes. She swallowed hard, touched her fingers to the glass. ‘Aleha ha-shalom,’ she said softly. ‘Baruch dayan emet.’

  I was about to ask what this meant when she pulled my mouth down to hers and kissed me again, her breath coming faster. She stepped back, looked at me for a while without saying anything, then walked over to the door, closed it and thumbed the lock.

  Taking a deep breath, I unlocked and opened the front door of my house and stepped inside, bracing myself against what I knew I was going to see, which was nothing. Or maybe I should say everything, but all of it exactly as I’d left it this morning. Until Jana took the girls and moved to the big cedar A-frame behind her gallery off Border I hadn’t understood that inanimate things could die, that all those atoms could stop their quantum dance at once and something as full of energy and purpose as a house one day could become only a shell the next, a replica of life like the detailed husk a cicada leaves behind when it moults.

  It wasn’t that I denied being mostly responsible for what had gone wrong between Jana and me, or that I didn’t understand what she was saying about the job. And for her it went beyond the fact that her brother had been killed in the desert, or that her cop uncle had been murdered by a couple of skinheads on the street in Houston. It really came down to her being through with the locker-room police culture that still hung around me like cigar smoke when I got home from work at night, the gun I put on my belt every morning – to her nothing but an ugly black killing tool – the constant anxiety, the midnight calls. She wanted no more bagpipes playing ‘Amazing Grace’ or white-gloved honour guards firing blanks at the sky as somebody with colourful medals and high rank handed young widows or widowers in sunglasses their tightly folded American flags. And outweighing all the rest of it put together, the half-ounce of copper-jacketed lead in the form of two nine-millimetre bullets that wouldn’t have had to be cut out of my body if I’d had some other job.

  Her solution was direct and uncomplicated: take the fifty-one-per-cent deal Rachel and Dusty had offered us on the Flying S in Rains County, move out there and run the place, and let them take off to find out what the rest of the world looks like – something they’d been dreaming of for the last fifteen years. But the terms didn’t really matter, because for Jana the question of where we’d be going was a non-essential detail; what she cared about was what we’d be leaving behind – a folded flag of her own.

  But nothing about Jana was simple. She’d been an accounting major but cared more about natural fibres than bottom lines. She had killer instincts at poker, but kids lost in stores ran to her on sight. She called herself a ‘pretty good potter’, the real-world meaning of which was that she was an at least moderately famous artist, a ceramicist exhibiting in galleries from one end of the country to the other.

  Maybe it was being an artist that made her so contradictory. But whatever gifts she had, she wanted to share. One of the most vivid memories I had of her went back to a Saturday morning years ago, our daughter Casey still in her yellow footie pyjamas, an icy rain falling steadily beyond the windows of the breakfast nook where she sat at the table with her colouring book, Jana standing beside her, watching in silence, her face soft and radiant with undisguised pride.

  My eyes stinging as the already-dead house somehow found a way to die a little more, I was suddenly filled with a pure, brilliant hatred of the echoing emptiness banging against my eardrums and sucking the oxygen from the air.

  Mutt, my personal cat, came pacing silently in from the hallway. He was mostly black, with two barely visible tan markings above his eyes that gave him a permanently surprised expression, and he stopped and stared at me now as if I were the last thing he’d expected to find in here. Jana had taken him along when she and the girls moved out, thinking he was more attached to them than to me, but he’d run away the first day. Then three days after that I’d found him sitting on the front doormat, licking a curled paw and ignoring me. He’d somehow made it almost six miles across town to come home, probably using up several of his spare lives on the way.

  As cats go, he wasn’t a bad roommate – no clawing the furniture, keeping me awake at night or spraying in the house – but he reminded me so much of Jana and the girls that I sometimes had to work at not resenting him for it. On the other hand, right now I was glad to have the company of another conscious being.

  ‘Ahoy,’ I said.

  He gave no sign that he heard me.

  The thought of other conscious beings brought to mind the only Dallas phone number I didn’t need to look up. I grabbed the phone and punched it in.

  ‘Dr Lee Ann Rowe’s office,’ said LaKeisha.

  ‘This still group night?’

  ‘That you, Lieutenant Bonham?’

  I said what I always did: ‘Call me Jim.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘It is, and she should be out any second. I’ll put you on hold. Enjoy the music.’

  The next thing I heard was a slow instrumental version of ‘Satisfaction’, strings and light brass, which I enjoyed as much as I could.

  Thinking about LA as I waited – as always trying to edit out the memories that underlined my own failures and selfishness, my inability to prevent what had happened to her – I argued myself around to the position that this call was justifiable, that I wasn’t going to kick up any dust from the past that she couldn’t deal with, that she was probably tougher than me anyway, and certainly no longer had any need for my protection. If she ever really had.

  Then, thinking some more about families, I looked up at the pictures on the wall: Jana in front of the fieldstone fireplace at the Flying S; Gram, my grandmother Miriam Hunnicutt Vickers, who’d raised LA and me after everyone else ahead of her on the depth chart had defaulted – a wise and beautiful woman, battered but never broken by a world that didn’t deserve her, looking sadly into the lens from among the tomato plants in her garden; and my own daughters, Casey and Jordan, on horseback, the November sun backlighting their hair against a background of red and gold leaves.

  But images of Deborah Gold’s dead flesh began shouldering their way back in, her half-shut eyes gazing emptily down at me through the icy rain, her viciously violated body already gone cold on its way to rejoining the soil.

  Then the soundtrack transitioned to ‘Circle of Life’, taking me smoothly back through time to an evening with the girls not long after the separation, the three of us sharing a tub of popcorn and watching a movie about cartoon animals having conversations and singing songs, Jordan saying, ‘That’s pretty dumb,’ not carping, just thinking out loud. ‘They’d be eating each other.’

  A huge sigh from her sister Casey. ‘It’s a metaphor, you dink.’

  ‘I think you mean fable, Miss Hairball.’

  All her life Casey had been what Jana called an ‘easy upchuck’, like a cat, throwing up for any reason, or no reason. When there was a purpose it was usually evil – to duck chores, an exam, or some adverse social situation – and it had earned her the nickname Hairball. She was a little sensitive about it. ‘Well, just up yours, Little Susie Einstein,’ she said, giving her hair a sulky toss.

  The soundtrack clicked off. ‘Speak, troop,’ LA’s telephone voice said. ‘Start by telling me you’re not relapsing.’ I imagined her leaning back in her desk chair, sporting one of her two main looks – denim and boots that would look spot-on in a boardroom, or a serious suit in toned-down colours that she could wear to a dogfi
ght without raising an eyebrow. Not much jewellery or makeup, probably no high heels – you don’t paint extra stripes on a tiger. Of course with her the concept of a hairstyle had never had any actual meaning because no matter what she or anybody else tried to do with it, she still ended up with the same dark, unconquerable mop that our grandmother had said always looked freshly dynamited.

  ‘Hi, girl,’ I said. ‘I’m fine, but I need your wisdom.’

  ‘Some things never change,’ she said. ‘How’s your appetite?’

  ‘Not too bad,’ I said. ‘But junk food has kinda lost its taste.’

  A brief pause. ‘How long since you’ve been fishing?’

  ‘I don’t know – quite a while.’

  ‘But you’ve still got the boat?’

  I said, ‘Yeah. And tackle. And a fishing licence. I just don’t go.’

  ‘What’s your weight?’

  ‘One-seventy-five.’

  ‘Still a light heavyweight. How well are you sleeping?’

  ‘No way to know,’ I said. ‘I’m always asleep at the time.’

  ‘Give.’

  ‘Okay, I’ve waked up too early a few times since the last time we talked.’

  ‘What are you calling a few?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Talked to Max about it?’

  ‘Yeah, some. He gave me a couple things to think about.’

  ‘But you haven’t talked to Jana and the girls about the farm.’ Not a question.

  ‘Would you believe it if I said I was working on it?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I’d believe you think you are.’

  ‘Maybe the problem’s not really knowing where I belong.’

  ‘I saw how you were when you were working the place that last year, troop. Nobody could belong there more than you. Except maybe Casey and Jordie.’

  I looked again at the pictures of the two of them on the wall. She was right; both were natural riders, as much at home on horseback and in the open country as birds in the air. If anybody belonged out there it was them.

  ‘Yeah, they’d be great with it,’ I said. ‘What worries me is how they’re handling the separation. I’m taking them out for lunch tomorrow, probably to the marina. I know it won’t fix anything, but I really need to spend some time with them.’