The Hummingbird House

by Donna Ball

  Cici pointed out, “Usually it’s beautification.”

  Derrick looked hopeful until Lindsay clarified, “Picking up trash.” And then both Paul and Derrick shuddered.

  “Animal shelter,” Bridget went on.

  “Maybe they’re looking for a dog groomer,” Paul muttered.

  “Recycling Center …”

  They both threw up their hands in protest and Paul said, “I seriously wouldn’t have a thing to wear!”

  “Senior Center, Parks Department …”

  “That might be fun,” Derrick said.

  “Picking up trash,” Cici said, and his face fell.

  Paul said, “Nothing in the fashion industry, I presume.”

  “Meals with Love, library.” Bridget returned the paper to Paul. “That’s it.”

  Paul looked at Derrick. Derrick looked at Paul. “Library,” they agreed.

  “We’ll start first thing in the morning,” Derrick said, looking relieved. “Twenty hours of shelving books, how hard can it be?”

  “I worked in the school library in high school,” Paul added, looking slightly less depressed than he had been a moment ago. “I practically memorized the Dewy Decimal System. And in a small town like this, the library can’t be very busy. There’s sure to be plenty of free time for us to plan the grand opening.”

  “And Internet,” added Derrick, almost cheerfully. “Don’t forget Internet access.”

  Bridget looked concerned. “I don’t think …”

  “Our library back home even had a coffee bar!” Paul reminded him, delighted.

  “I don’t think …” Lindsay put in, but Derrick interrupted.

  “Ladies, let us buy you lunch,” he invited expansively, extending his arms to Bridget and Lindsay.

  Paul offered his arm to Cici. “You don’t suppose they’ll make us wear those awful orange jumpsuits, do you?”

  Cici exchanged a resigned look with her two friends, then took Paul’s arm, patting it in reassurance. “I don’t think so,” she said, and smiled. “Now, where shall we eat?”

  ~*~

  The Winnebago was faster than walking, but just barely. In fact, the only advantage it had over putting shoe-rubber to the pavement was that the blisters on Josh’s feet had a chance to heal. That, of course, and the free food.

  Artie had an unreasonable fascination with meandering. He would take an unmarked byroad over a highway any day of the week. He couldn’t pass a Dairy Queen or a Waffle House without stopping—about which Josh couldn’t really complain because when the bill came, Artie cheerfully paid it, assuring his companion, “You can get it next time,” but of course next time never came—and there was not a flea market, Indian museum, snake farm, antique shop, country café, or county fair into which the wheels of the old Winnie didn’t seem to turn, like a compass swinging to magnetic north.

  Josh volunteered to share the driving in hopes of making better time, but being in the passenger seat only gave Artie a better view of the signs advertising obscure attractions and scenic highways. After a day or two, Josh found himself falling into an almost Zen-like state, something that had served him well in prison. There were things he couldn’t control. Fighting them was a waste of energy. He couldn’t reach Leda on the telephone. He couldn’t push the Winnebago’s speedometer over fifty. He couldn’t make Artie stay on the highway. All he could do was be patient. He had waited fourteen months. He could do this.

  At a yard sale outside of a little town called Victory, he found a pair of Reeboks that fit for two dollars, and three pairs of almost-new socks for fifty cents. He was long past thinking about the time when he would have gone barefoot before wearing someone else’s used socks, but every now and then it hit him: here he was, Josh Whitman, who had once lost a jacket at a high school football game that cost more than the average man’s dress suit, feeling like the luckiest guy in the world to have found a pair of sneakers at a yard sale that actually fit. And for a moment he was taken out of himself, wondering, as though from a very great distance, whose life he was living. And realizing in the same instant that it didn’t matter. The important thing was that he was living. Because he had things to do.

  “You remind me of another fella I knew once a while back,” Artie observed, watching Josh lace up the shoes. “Walked everywhere he went. When he wore holes in his shoes, he’d line them with newspaper. Said walking was the best way he knew how to get where he was going, because if a man couldn’t count on his on two legs, what could he count on in this world?”

  They had stopped at a KOA somewhere in Indiana; nice showers, big pool, and a community house that was serving not-horrible barbecue platters for $5.00 each. Josh had paid for his own meal out of his dwindling stash, and now they were back at the campsite, sitting around the campfire while Artie brewed his coffee and melted marshmallows for the long-awaited s’mores. Their next door neighbors had the radio on a little loud, and the family on the other side had a yappy little dog that only barked louder when its owner shouted “Shut up!” Life on the road.

  Josh glanced at him, tightening the laces. “Let me guess. Johnny Appleseed, right?”

  Artie chuckled. “Nope. Never had the pleasure. This fellow was a lawyer. I never had much use for them myself—lawyers, that is—but he made quite a reputation for himself. They called him Honest Abe, but just between you and me he was no more honest than any other lawyer I’ve ever met, if you know what I mean.”

  Josh rolled his eyes but said nothing. He was accustomed to Artie’s eccentricities by now, and had decided they were the cost of passage. And in some ways, he actually enjoyed them. The man was a nut, but he was entertaining.

  Josh flexed his feet inside the new shoes and then, cautiously, put weight on them. Padded inside athletic socks and surrounded by arch and ankle support, his battered feet felt as though they were encompassed by clouds. Unconsciously, he let out a sigh of pure pleasure.

  Artie retrieved a bubbling marshmallow from the fire, grinning as he slid it onto a square of chocolate between two graham crackers. “Be sure you put your feet in the right place, and then stand firm,” he said. “That’s what he used to say.”

  Josh looked at him across the fire. “Abraham Lincoln?”

  “Right.” Artie passed him the sandwich of graham crackers and marshmallow, and Josh took it, pulling his camp chair closer to the fire.

  Josh said, “So what are you, a history professor or something?”

  Artie let forth with his strange cackling laugh, leaning back so that his feet left the ground. “Heavens, no. Just a student of human nature. Just a student.”

  Josh bit into the cookie and Artie watched his face grow soft, eyes twinkling. “Good, huh?” He threaded another marshmallow onto the skewer and passed it to Josh. “The trick is to keep them coming. Where’d you go to college, Josh?”

  “Harvard.”

  “Ha!” There was a spark of amusement in his tone as he speared another marshmallow for himself. “You can always tell a Harvard man.”

  Josh watched the edges of the marshmallow he held over the fire grow golden, and he turned it expertly.

  “Ah, you’ve done this before, I see,” Artie observed.

  Josh shrugged. “I’ve been to camp. Computer camp, space camp, tennis camp, riding camp, you name it.”

  “Lucky kid.”

  “I guess.” He took two graham crackers and a square of chocolate from the paper plate on the ground between them, checked for ants, and then slipped it between the chocolate and graham crackers, squeezing gently until the hot marshmallow softened the chocolate.

  “So what did you study?”

  “At camp?”

  “College.”

  Josh licked a bit of dripping marshmallow from the edge of his sandwich. “Science and engineering. You know, computer stuff.”

  “Impressive.”

  “Not really.” He hesitated. “Turns out I wasn’t as good at it as I thought I’d be.”

  “Oh yeah?” Artie looked up
from spreading his melted marshmallow across a square of chocolate, using his skewer as a knife. “What are you good at then?”

  “Nothing.” Josh frowned. “Not everybody has to be good at something.”

  “Sure they do. It’s why we’re here, you know, to be good at something, and then let it shine. Why, like my old friend Ben Franklin used to say—you know he wrote that book, Poor Richard’s Almanac—he used to say, What’s a sundial in the shade? Of course …” He pursed his lips, thinking that over. “That might be why they invented clocks.”

  Josh felt a reluctant grin tug at his lips even as he gave a sharp, dismissive shake of his head. “What are you, some kind of nut or something?”

  “Or something,” agreed Artie amiably. “So what are you, Josh?”

  Josh gazed at the flames. “A mess,” he said.

  “Well, that much is obvious.”

  The marshmallow Josh held over the fire was turning black. He jerked it out but not soon enough; a blue flame licked its way up the side and he blew it out. He tried to remove the charred blob of melted sugar and cursed as he burned his fingers.

  “What I meant was,” Artie went on, ignoring him, “how did a Harvard man end up at a truck stop in Las Vegas without a penny to his name?”

  Josh scowled at his scalded fingers, plucking stiff pieces of charred marshmallow from the tips. “Lost it all at Black Jack.”

  “Is that right?”

  The mild way in which he spoke told Josh he was willing to believe the lie, but Josh didn’t have the energy to sustain it. “No,” he said. “That’s not right.”

  Josh found a napkin and wiped the burned candy off the skewer. Artie waited. He threw the napkin into the fire. “We were on our way to Vegas to get married.” He spoke slowly, and addressed the campfire. “My girlfriend and I. We got pulled over, the cops searched the car, I ended up serving time in Nevada. They let you out with what you had in your pockets when you went in, and I didn’t have much. What I did have got stolen at the first bar I stopped at to make a call.” He shrugged. “That’s how.”

  Artie gave a sudden sharp bark of laughter, his eyes glittering with delight in the firelight. Josh stared at him in disbelief. “You think that’s funny?”

  Artie raised a hand in self-defense. “No, no, no, of course not! Not a thing funny about it. It’s just that I love being right, and I knew I was right about you. The minute I saw you out-foxing those men at the truck stop I said to myself, Now there’s a young fellow who’s got what it takes. He’s going to make it just fine, that’s what I said to myself, you just wait and see, said I, because that young man has got what it takes. And how about that? I was right!”

  Josh’s frown deepened, and he started to push to his feet. “You’re certifiable, that’s what you are. “

  “Sit down, sit down.” Artie waved him back, eyes still dancing. “You don’t understand. Here, have some of this coffee. Goes with the s’mores like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Josh hesitated, and took the cup of coffee from Artie’s outstretched hand mostly because his only other choice was to go back inside the hot RV and stew in his own discontent. It was white ceramic with a couple of chips, and had the faded slogan “See Rock City” emblazoned on the side. It looked like an antique.

  He regarded Artie suspiciously. “What do you mean, I don’t understand?”

  “Why you fascinate me.” Artie settled back in his camp chair, cradling his own cup. “There aren’t too many young men who could go from tennis camp to Harvard to hard time in prison to landing flat broke on the side of a highway and still manage to get themselves from Las Vegas to Utah using nothing but their own two feet and the strength the good Lord gave them. That takes moxie, son. That takes character. Like I said, I’m a student of human nature, and that is one story I want to hear.”

  Josh muttered, “Yeah, well I’ll send you a copy of my memoir.”

  Artie let forth with another cackling laugh. “That’ll be one for my collection, yes it will. I hope you don’t intend to make it a work of fiction, though. I’ve always found the truth to be much more interesting.”

  Josh took a sip of the coffee. Artie was right, there was something about the campfire smoke that gave it a flavor like none he’d ever tasted, and it melded with the lingering sweetness of marshmallow and chocolate on the back of his tongue like the long deep notes of the bassoon melted into a symphony orchestra. “Whatever.”

  Artie laughed again. “Whatever? From a Harvard man? They were a lot more articulate back in my day. Why, if Mr. John Harvard—or John Adams, for that matter—could hear you say that he’d turn over in his grave. Now there was an interesting fellow,” he mused. “John Adams, not John Harvard, who I never had the pleasure of knowing …”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” said Josh impatiently, “will you let it go already with the eyewitness-to-history shtick? And Harvard, too, while you’re at it. That was a long time ago.”

  Artie just smiled. “Maybe for you.” And then he said, out of nowhere, “Your dad didn’t really kill your mother, now did he?”

  Josh looked long and deep into the coffee. “I never knew my real dad,” he said. “He died of cancer when I was two. There were always pictures of him and stuff around, like my mom wanted me to remember him, but I always felt a little bad that I couldn’t.”

  Artie said nothing, and the silence made Josh’s words sound empty and self-pitying. He cleared his throat, brows knitting briefly with embarrassment and impatience with himself. “Anyway, my stepdad … I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t around. He practically raised me. He was my father’s best friend, so he kind of naturally was around all the time, and he was the only person I ever called Dad. My mother said it was right after that—right after I started talking—that she knew it was okay to marry him.” This time his smile was a bit more genuine, if sad. “He was a good guy. He treated me right. Like I said, he wasn’t much of a baseball-in-the-park kind of guy, but that was okay because neither was I. Oh, we had our fights, just like anybody else, but we had some good family times, too. He made sure that whatever I needed, I had before I even thought to ask for it. He told me once it was a promise he’d made to my dad—my real one—when he married my mother, that neither one of us would ever want for anything he could provide. I never thought about that much until now, but that didn’t mean just a good school and clothes and tennis lessons and a house in the country. It meant going to soccer games when he didn’t even know anything about the game, and Disneyworld when he’d rather take my mother on a cruise. And sometimes it meant saying no.” He was silent for a moment. “Of course, you don’t appreciate things like that when you’re a kid. You think they’re your due, and I guess it’s part of a dad’s job to make you think that. At least while you’re little.

  “I was in my third year at Harvard and things weren’t going all that well. My folks wanted me to come home for Christmas, but I knew it was going to be a hassle, a lot of talk about straightening up and taking responsibility for my life, and I just didn’t want to hear it, you know. It wasn’t like I didn’t already know what a screw up I was. I made out like I was going to stay on campus and study, but I went to Aspen with a bunch of the guys instead.”

  He gazed down at his coffee cup again, absently tracing the curve of the handle with his finger. “Seems my folks thought it would be a good idea to drive down and surprise me for Christmas. It was snowing, some drunk came out of nowhere, and by the time they tracked me down my mom was in a coma and they said she would never wake up again.”

  Artie nodded. “Your dad was driving?”

  For a moment Josh appeared not to hear him, so absorbed was he in the design his finger was making on the handle of the cup. Then he gathered his thoughts with a visible effort, and he said, “Yeah. But it wasn’t his fault. I guess I always knew that. It just didn’t matter.”

  He seemed to recognize for the first time that the cup held coffee, and he took a sip. “I didn’t believe the doctors, of course
. I thought if I hoped hard enough and prayed hard enough … if I sat with her long enough, and talked to her long enough, and kept believing she’d come back to me … but she just lay there with her eyes open and her head all bandaged up, not even looking like herself. Like all the soul was gone out of her. I talked to her, I held her hand, I kept expecting her to blink and turn her head and smile at me, but she didn’t know I was there. And all the time I just kept getting madder and madder at my dad because he wouldn’t even try … he just sat in the waiting room staring at the wall looking all shrunken and haunted, just staring. He wouldn’t even come in the room. I guess … well, later I guess I heard that he’d already been there, doing exactly what I was doing, not leaving her side, for over a week while they were trying to find me. He knew. He already knew what lay at the end of the road.”

  Josh let a silence fall, and after a time, Artie spoke into it. “There’s a native tribe along the Amazon whose word for parent is hiabwi. It means ‘those who go before.’ Those who go before always see the end of the road first. That’s their job.”

  Josh said softly, “Yeah.” He was silent for a moment. Then he went on, “The doctors kept telling me we had to make a decision. They said there was no hope. They said she was gone already, that whatever was inside of her that made her my mom had died before they even got her to surgery. But people come back from comas all the time. Five, ten, twenty-five years later, they wake up and they’re fine. I just wanted to see her one more time, you know? To say some things … to tell her stuff. But my dad said it was time to let her go. He said it was what she wanted. He said he had papers. I said I would get a judge to stop him. He said I was dishonoring her memory. I said he was a murderer. The last thing I said to him was when I had him pinned up against the wall screaming in his face that he had murdered my mother. I walked out of that hospital, and I never even said good-bye. To either of them.”