The Hummingbird

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  The Professor swallowed noisily. “Someone might have informed us. Instead we witnessed this ongoing violence, stupefied, until one of the men in scrubs glanced over his shoulder, realized Deirdre’s presence and mine, and bellowed, ‘What the hell are they doing in here? Get them out.’ ”

  “Ouch.”

  “Indeed. Though the hallway was little better.”

  “You could still hear?”

  “Everything. Particularly their tone when they had succeeded. One might expect a note of triumph once Shinju’s heart beat again, whereas I discerned a clear disappointment. Someone asked how long she had been arrested, and when the answer of six minutes came back, someone else told a Dr. Bronsky it was time to have ‘the talk.’ ”

  “What in the world is ‘the talk’?”

  “You’re the medical professional. I assumed that you would know.”

  “I have no idea. It sounds like telling a kid about sex.”

  He waved me off. “I learned soon enough as a young man strode up to us, looking as earnest and bright as a new penny. I asked if he was the physician in charge. He allowed that he was a mere resident. Nonetheless, it was his duty to report that Shinju’s heart was failing. Compromised blood flow, diminished electrical self-­control, without doubt it would continue to arrest. They could restart her heart as many times as we wished, but each episode incurred brain damage, and brought no greater likelihood of recovery. ‘Plus,’ he felt compelled to add, ‘it is not a gentle intervention.’ ”

  I couldn’t help butting in. “At least they didn’t crack her chest and perform manual massage.”

  “They might have, given the opportunity. In fact Shinju’s heart arrested again as we were speaking. Alarm alarm, everyone rushes back in, and Deirdre and I listen while the whole process completes another iteration.”

  “Why didn’t someone move you away? You shouldn’t have had to endure—­”

  “Nurse Birch.” Barclay Reed frowned. “Need I remind you that we are discussing intensive care? In such units, the patient’s family does not exist.”

  “Someone in there sent Bronsky to talk to you.”

  “True. He returned as well, after another six-­minute success. He asked whether we wished for them to continue to respond, or would we rather let nature take its course. I must say, I found that expression artfully put. Nature in command, rather than the Grim Reaper.”

  “What did you decide?”

  “There was no decision. Why continue to torture her body, knowing my pearl would never recover? Deirdre cried that I was giving up, I must not love her, how could I, et cetera. They sat us in an adjacent waiting room that resembled the inside of a mausoleum. Some minutes later, Shinju’s heart stopped once more. Dr. Bronsky entered her room and read the time aloud to a nurse taking notes, 6:46 in the evening. Meanwhile I held Deirdre, who thrashed and flailed, screaming that I had killed her mother.” He turned his face away. “She was only thirteen.”

  “That certainly explains why you’ve insisted on hospice. And how you became a murderer in D’s eyes. But what about the kitchen photos? She called them evidence.”

  “A touchy subject.” The Professor glanced at me, as if to confirm that I was listening, and then away. He tucked the blanket snugly around himself. “I am at peace with my actions at the hospital. My guilt feelings, though copious, had other causes. Marrying Shinju removed her from a culture in which her notions about gender and power may have been accepted, appreciated, perhaps even admired. Under the weight of that culpability, I could not bear my wife staring down at me during meals. Nor, I might add, eat out of bowls she had made. When I removed the photographs, my daughter saw only additional betrayal. She asked to go away to preparatory school in New England. I granted her wish. Aside from briefly at holidays, she never truly returned.”

  “Your intake papers explicitly said you had no surviving family.”

  “Not because I was disowning Deirdre. She had disowned me. Regardless, the information I provided your intake nurse was indeed falsehood.”

  “It makes a difference,” I said. “Legally.”

  “Ah.” For a fraction of a second, his eyes met mine. “I apologize.”

  Who was I to sit in judgment? I who would be alive next month? “Accepted, Professor. Of course.”

  “What a day. First my daughter, then you. Two apologies in one afternoon. A tragedy.” He shook his head. “I must really be on my way out.”

  The Professor’s eyes were glistening, but I saw the slightest hint of a grin. He motioned to the reading chair. I sat, taking the black binder, but not opening it yet. “What about that letter?”

  “Yes, well.” He chose one of his remotes, turning on a television but muting the sound. “Blount was ambitious, with legitimate scholarly potential. But compare: He spent two semesters in Japan, whereas I lived in Kyoto for three years. He had read about Japanese culture, while I was married to a Japanese woman. He was twenty-­seven years old, but I had been publishing on the Pacific war for thirty-­six years. What findings could he possibly possess that I would stoop to stealing?”

  “So your last words to your daughter are words of deceit?”

  “I told Deirdre a tale to make it easier for her to forgive.” The Professor fixed me with his gaze. “What your husband would call a loving lie.”

  He had me, the old coot. Yet even as I stood there, admiring his calculating ways, the man deflated before my eyes. The battle of wits with Deirdre, the letter, the story of Shinju, all of it had required his last drop of stamina. Barclay Reed’s shoulders drooped, and his face went slack.

  “Professor,” I said. “Did you just surrender your sword?”

  He ran a tongue over dry lips. He needed a swab, but I waited till he finished what he had to say. Finally he lifted his head and gave a wan smile. “Shouri.”

  WE SAT IN SILENCE FOR HOURS. From time to time he would tweak his tuft of hair. When he dozed, I stretched my legs. I was exhausted too. Yet the day was not dull. It felt meditative. Respectful. For once, we were enough.

  Late in the afternoon I realized that he had been scratching his chin. I came to his side. “Would you like me to shave you today?”

  “Nurse Birch.” He swallowed audibly. “I am afraid I do not have the energy to leave this bed.”

  “You don’t need to. Just wait there.”

  By now I knew the man’s face. His cheekbones were not quite symmetrical. His chin was difficult to get completely smooth. The rest of it—­warm water, soft cream, the quiet scratch of the razor—­felt so familiar it was intimate.

  The Professor was quiet this time, no banter, simply allowing his senses to experience what it is to be shaved by someone, the close attention, the care not to cause hurt. I didn’t clutter the air with words, and I was careful not to spill one drop of water on his sheets. He stretched his jaw forward, making it easier to shave his neck.

  Afterward I used a fresh towel to wipe and dry his face. There was no way to do that without its becoming a caress, but neither of us objected.

  Barclay Reed lay there blinking at me. It was a companionable silence. I had been sitting on the bed, but now I straightened and collected the shaving things. Everything felt wonderfully tender.

  “Wasn’t I a handsome man?” he said at last.

  I snapped the towel in his direction. “You devil.”

  He ran a palm over his face. “Wasn’t I, though?”

  DRIVING DOWN THE ROAD TO OUR HOUSE, I spied Michael digging in the trash. There’s no other way to describe it, given how he jumped at the sight of me, slammed the lid on the garbage can, and hurried back by the screen door.

  “Sweetheart, how are you?” I called, getting out of the car.

  Michael shook his head as if to clear it. “Hey, Deb. How was your day?”

  “Everything OK?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Spl
endid.”

  Splendid? I had never heard him use that word before. Michael crossed his arms and grinned at me. It seemed almost as if he was acting.

  I could not help it. I started toward the trash can. “Looking for something?”

  “Nope.” Michael hurried to get there before I did. “Just bringing some stuff up from the basement. You know, cleaning around where I work out.”

  “Was there trash down there? I didn’t know that.”

  “Lots. Look.” He took the lid off. The top third of the can was filled with papers, his pages of drawings, the faces.

  I picked up a handful. “Why didn’t you put these in the recycling?”

  “Don’t know.” He shrugged his big shoulders. “I guess I didn’t want anyone to see them.”

  “Oh.”

  “But you’re right. About the recycling, I mean.” He snatched the pages from my hand, and tossed them in the bin behind the trash.

  He was behaving so oddly. “Michael, is there anything you want to share with me about those ­people?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You just seem so cagey right now. I want you to know that I am willing to listen to anything you want to say. Maybe I could help. Like with Gene.”

  His shoulders lowered. The exuberance vanished. “Or the thunderstorm night,” he muttered.

  “Exactly.”

  Michael started away across the backyard, then turned. “It’s hard for me.”

  “Perhaps if you just shared about one of the faces.”

  “You really don’t know.”

  “So tell me.” I followed him across the lawn, the sheets in my hand. “I recognize some of them now. The one with the squiggle next to him, the one in sunglasses. Yes, and here’s that dude with the mouse ears.”

  “Ha.” One great peal came out from Michael, but it was icy cold. “Mouse ears? Honestly, Deb, you have no clue.”

  “Then give me a clue. Who was he?”

  He shook his head. “Nobody. No one.”

  “Tell me, sweetheart.”

  “You want to know?” he shouted. “You want to know?”

  “Of course I do. And I want you to be free of it.”

  “Fuuuuck.” Michael breathed hard several times through his nose, like a rhino deliberating when to charge. Then he slapped the papers in my hand. “OK. All right. Request granted.”

  He fumed to the end of the lawn and back. He took another lap, glaring at me. I just stood there, arms crossed, waiting.

  Eventually he came to the back stoop, where he pointed for me to sit. I went there, pressed against the screen door while Michael paced in front of me. I realized I was about to have my first real taste of his war. Seven months after he came home, and this would be the first.

  “We were half a dozen miles southeast of Sadr City, heading to a planning session, not even on patrol. The nasties were using EFPs, a kind of homemade shell but instead of having a bullet shape after being fired, it goes flat. When it hits a Humvee, the hole is two feet wide.”

  Michael wiped his forehead, drying his hand on a pant leg. “They nailed us from the right, on the passenger side but low. I sat back row on the left. Somehow no one was killed, but everyone had injuries, cuts and scrapes. Count that as one time an armored Humvee did its damn job. Gene, though, he was riding shotgun. His lower right leg was torn clear off, boot and all. We all piled out, dizzy from the blast and temporarily deaf, but mad as hornets. There was no one to shoot back at. We attended to Gene right away. I knotted the tourniquet myself. Everyone else either set a perimeter or loaded up in the caravan’s other vehicles.”

  Michael glanced at me then, still pacing, his face pinched and pained.

  “You don’t have to—­”

  “Don’t stop me Deb, now that you’ve started it.”

  There are moments with every patient when you know, no matter how much you want to offer medical knowledge or personal comfort, that your task is to close your mouth. It’s not easy. Your ego asserts itself, your desire to help. But they need you to shut up.

  I squatted forward, closer. “I’m listening, sweetheart.”

  “I hate Iraq. The heat, the smell, the boredom. But the thing I hate most is the dogs. They’re everywhere, like pigeons in any U.S. city. Lurking, barking, sometimes you hear them fighting in an alley. Anyway, Gene’s loaded on the chopper and gone. Later a squad will come for the Humvee, drag it back to base for parts and demolition. Last thing before pulling out, I go back to make sure we aren’t leaving any gear behind. Ammo or whatever. The vehicle’s all bent doors and flat tires. Behind it there’s a dog though, some mutt of a street-­thing, lapping away at a puddle. But this is Iraq, Deb, the giant sandbox. There are no puddles. I take a step closer, and sure enough, he’s drinking Gene’s blood.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Just a dog, right? Doing its nasty doggy business. But I blasted that fucker, the impulse arrived and I obeyed it, no hesitation, no processing, just gave it the 30.06 at point-­blank range.”

  Michael took a huge inhale, but it came out in broken huffing. “The round just about cut the dog in two. Somehow, though, he didn’t die. Not right away. He yowled and tried to move. But his back was broken, along with a bunch of other stuff. His guts were out. I know I should have finished him. I didn’t, though. I left him there, writhing, because I knew. Any minute, another dog would be along to make supper out of him.”

  Michael stopped pacing. He stepped past me to open the back door. “That’s ‘the dude with mouse ears.’ You can see why he’d be with me forever. Just a dog, but my conscience will carry him around till I’m dead.”

  He shuffled into the house, moving like he was a hundred years old, pausing to speak through the screen. “Then again, Deb, when I left him to suffer like that, knowing he would get eaten any minute, I also learned a valuable lesson. Maybe the fundamental lesson of war.”

  I stared at the pages between my feet, those scribbled faces. “And what is that?”

  “There will always be another dog.”

  BROOKINGS AIRPORT LIES ONE MILE from the town center, north on highway 101. At an altitude of 459 feet above sea level, it offers two paved runways, each 2,900 feet long. The airport provides fuel ser­vice, military-­grade lighting, and a beacon from sundown to sunrise.

  Nineteen single-­engine planes stand parked in tie-­downs, plus four two-­engine aircraft and one helicopter. The FAA call name for the airport is BOK.

  For take-­off limitations, one runway has redwoods 125 feet tall, located 2,900 feet beyond the tarmac’s end, therefore requiring an elevation slope ratio of 19:1. The other has 15-­foot pines at a distance of 380 feet, for a lift ratio of 12:1. To the east lie the heavily treed mountains of the Siskiyou National Forest. To the west, the flat expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

  According to his manifest filed for that day in May 1992, “Donny Baker III and passenger” arrived at BOK at 8:10 A.M. Why did it take forty-­five minutes to travel three miles from the Kerr home? No record accounts for that interval.

  Piper Abbott had followed Donny’s truck. Thus she was equipped to report her observations and fill gaps in the narrative with interviews later that day.

  The truck parked beside a single-­engine plane, immaculate white with blue stripes down the sides. The wings spread above the cockpit, supported by struts down to the lower fuselage.

  “This is a Cessna,” Donny explained to his passenger, who had eased himself down from the truck with the assistance of his myrtlewood cane. “These others are Pipers,” Donny waved down the row of aircraft. “Which is fine if that’s what you learned on.”

  “Low wing,” Soga observed.

  “Exactly,” Donny said. “They land easy as pie, but airborne you can’t see jack below you. The Cessna’s overhead wings let you take in the view.”

  “Most excellent air
craft.”

  “This one’s a 182. No big deal in the world of 747s, but around here a 182 means something.”

  As Donny spoke, they circled the plane, Soga alternating between leaning on his walking stick and using it to point as though he were touring another bank.

  “See,” Donny continued, pausing to pick a speck of something off the fuselage, “everybody from here to the Atlantic learned on a 172, it’s the classic trainer. But when you get your own, if you can afford that one step up, and buy the 182, it says something. You’ve arrived.”

  The aircraft stood 29 feet long with a 36-­foot wingspan—­nearly identical to the E14 that Soga flew in 1942. It offered a top cruising speed of 145 miles per hour and, with a fuel tank in each wing, a range of 900 nautical miles. Donny’s habit was to refuel both tanks after every flight. That day, therefore, he could have comfortably flown to San Diego.

  Soga was nodding as he listened. “Most excellent,” he repeated.

  Donny hitched up his pants and took in the surrounding scene. Low morning light angled in over the trees, casting their shadows far down the tarmac. At that moment Piper Abbott photographed them—­an unremarkable picture, two men beside an airplane, significant only in context and the length of their shadows.

  Donny unlocked the passenger door. Soga stiffened, but Donny indicated a step on the strut that had a small traction strip. “Just put your foot there.”

  Soga extended the arm holding his cane, like a wing, and Donny supported his elbow. It was the first time the two men had touched. The Japanese guest stepped on the footplate, rose even with the door, and plopped backward into the seat. He laughed, settling the cane in beside his leg. One wonders: Did it feel like a sword? Or like the passage of time?

  “You are one plucky S.O.B., Soga,” Donny marveled. “I’ll give you that.”

  He secured the passenger door, circled the plane to release the tie-­downs, and climbed into the pilot seat. But instead of sitting back, Donny fidgeted. The door was pressing the holster into his side. He adjusted the seat back, shifted himself, wrestled with the strap inside his windbreaker. No luck—­the grip dug just below his ribs. He tried sliding the holster forward, but the pistol wound up pointed straight at his crotch.