Bird's-Eye View

by J. F. Freedman

  BIRD’S-EYE VIEW. Copyright © 2001 by Chesapeake Films, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, USA, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017, Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

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  The "Warner Books" name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2539-9

  First eBook Edition: August 2001

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  ALSO BY J. F. FREEDMAN

  Above the Law

  The Disappearance

  Key Witness

  House of Smoke

  The Obstacle Course

  Against the Wind

  For Markus Wilhelm

  “I have looked upon these brilliant creatures

  And now my heart is sore.

  All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight

  The first time on this shore,

  The bell-beat of their wings above my head . . .”

  W. B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole

  The bottle flies banging against the window screens wake me up. Not yet dawn and they’re already out there, lying in wait, drawn by the ripe human odors wafting out of the open windows. Big green flies, the kind that when they bite you, you feel the sting for days, the welts rise and itch like crazy and neither calamine lotion nor rubbing alcohol nor the direct application of urine from a virgin can soothe the pain.

  Although my windows are open, it already feels hot and muggy—in a couple of hours the heat will be of blast furnace intensity, particularly for the unfortunate souls, like me, who don’t have air-conditioning. It’s a bitch living around here without artificial cooling; those bereft of it suffer mightily from June until October. Air-conditioning in this region is like television—who doesn’t own a TV? The answer is, very poor folk; struggling students in tomblike dorm rooms; alternate life-stylers who eschew modern conveniences altogether; and a handful of fall-through-the-cracks people, like me.

  Along with the flies there is a swarm of mosquitoes, buzzing like a ripsaw. Cousins in kind, in intention. Vampires of the insect world, they want blood. They smell it, from the other side of the mesh. They have extremely keen senses of smell, these relentless little sons of bitches. Hundreds of eyes to see everywhere, and olfactory awareness way more evolved than ours. If the human sense of smell was as highly developed as that of these insects we could not stand to be near each other. We would have perished millennia ago.

  I inspect my screens two or three times a week religiously, to make sure there are no holes, not one solitary pinprick. They are resourceful fuckers, these denizens of the insect world, they’ve been around much longer than we have, and will be here, buzzing and biting, long after all trace of our species has vanished.

  The clock on my nightstand reads five o’clock straight up, the tail end of the wee small hours. First light is not yet on the horizon. Slipping out from under the thin cotton sheet, wet with a nighttime of sweat and other bodily fluids, I make my naked way through the house and out onto the back porch, taking care not to wake up my companion, who sleeps on her side, her back to me, snoring heavily, rhythmically. She has her own sets of unique bodily smells and effluence, some rather lovely, some distinctively funky. I checked them out last night with great pleasure, from a considerable number of positions, both hers and mine.

  It was our first time together sexually, this particular woman and me. Whether she and I will have other such nights, I don’t know; I doubt it. Commitments of any kind, especially mid- or long-term, aren’t in the picture for me these days. I’m recuperating—I need space, lots of it.

  If there is any marrow left in my bones this morning—there seems to be, since I am walking and breathing—it is because of the body’s extraordinary ability to regenerate itself. The French call a great fuck “a little death”; the difference between that and the real thing is that in the little death you go to heaven before you die, and you feel better afterward, as opposed to feeling nothing at all. At least I assume that’s the difference.

  But I digress. I do that a lot these days. I’m good at avoiding, too, and I’d be at the top of the list of championship procrastinators as well. I’m excellent at not staying on the topic, especially when the topic is me or about me, about what I’m doing or how I’m behaving. Actually, avoiding myself takes up most of my time. Not looking at why I am where I am, and how I got here.

  That’s not quite true—I’m an academic by vocation, I should be precise with terminology. I know how I got here, I just don’t like to think about what it is about me—environment, genetics, heredity, plain dumb luck, or some pathetic combination of those and other factors—that has made me such an expert about fucking up my life. My cock isn’t all that long, but I’ve been stepping on it with great regularity the last couple of years.

  I grab hold of it. Tilting up a screen panel, I lean over the porch railing and take a good long piss into the shallow, torpid water below, bracing myself against the edge post for support. The flies buzz over, but I shoo them away with my free hand. They hover and make angry noises. They are primitive creatures, they don’t like waiting on a meal. But I don’t want my body to be their meal, especially not the family jewels. I finish taking my leak, and go back inside.

  I live in a shotgun shack. Front room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, back porch. Less than six hundred square feet, total, not counting the porch. An old sharecropper’s shack that had been sitting empty and abandoned for decades.

  Sharecropping is a defunct way of life now, at least in this region. The practice still exists in some of your deep South shit-kicker states, where people are still living in the nineteenth century, not only philosophically but physically, but not in modern, enlightened societies such as mine.

  My people were not sharecroppers—far from it. We were landowners and water people for almost three hundred years, from well before the Revolutionary War. An old, solid Maryland family. My mother and all my grandmothers going back forever were card-carrying members of the DAR. There are both Union and Confederate generals scattered throughout the family tree. My forebears owned slaves until the Civil War and they had sharecroppers after that, up until the late 1950s, when my father stopped the practice. He felt it was morally repugnant for people to live in a serflike situation. We had seven sharecropping families working our land when he decided not to do it anymore, and he deeded over forty acres to each family. Some of them still farm their sections to this day, and speak of my father with great reverence.

  During this time, the first part of the century, my people were comfortably well off, and pretty much cut off from the larger world—theirs was an insular life. The Chesapeake Bay area away from the big cities, like Baltimore and Annapolis, was a rural, sparsely populated region. Even people with money, like my parents a
nd their forebears, didn’t travel much, didn’t see much or know much of the world. Which suited them just fine.

  That life-style began changing at the end of World War II, and the pace accelerated in the 1970s. The population boomed all over southern Maryland and northern Virginia. The new people moving into the outlying areas needed places to live, work, shop. Suburban sprawl was inevitable, unstoppable. The Maryland counties of Prince Georges, Calvert, Charles, and St. Mary’s all underwent tremendous growth, which hasn’t abated for fifty years.

  This surge in population, however, didn’t extend as far south as our county, King James, which is the southernmost county in the state on the Bay’s west bank. It’s too far away from Washington and Baltimore for people to commute. There’s only one road, a four-lane highway connecting the county to the rest of the state. And the area’s not suitable for casual recreation—much of the land is heavily wooded or semiswampy, the roads are narrow and scarce, the beach areas are not as hospitable as those north of here, or on the Eastern Shore, or the ocean. Our census is lower than it was a generation ago—for every new face that moves here, more than one departs for a life that’s more promising—socially, culturally, financially. The young people, especially.

  Those who have moved down here in the recent past have generally been older people who want a quiet place for their retirement. A sizable amount of the property that’s been carved up for these ten-, fifty-, and hundred-acre parcels used to be in my family—we owned the best land in the county for having access to the waterways that feed into the Potomac River and the Bay. My father, the late Horace Tullis, who was a mover and shaker in local businesses and politics, started selling off bits and pieces of the farm during the 1970s and 1980s. The money was too good to say no to, and by then it was clear that none of his children were interested in living here and carrying on the family’s affairs.

  My little abode is on the southernmost edge of our family’s still sizable holdings—we have over two thousand acres, although the greater portion of it is, as it’s always been, uninhabitable swamp. By the time I came upon this ramshackle mess, which is at the end of an abandoned dirt-and-oyster-shell hardscrabble road that stops at the edge of St. Ambrose Creek, one of the many small uncharted tributaries that feed into larger rivers that eventually flow into the Chesapeake Bay, it was on the verge of collapsing completely—floorboards rotted out, holes in the roof bigger than cannonballs, walls sagging, the well gone dry. In a couple more years the vegetation would have reclaimed it, as if it had never been.

  I rebuilt the place enough to make it livable—shored up the foundation, reframed most of the walls, put on a cheap plywood floor over which I laid surplus linoleum I got at a junkyard, dug new septic and water lines. For heat and electricity I put up some solar panels I found through a government surplus catalog and attached them to heavy-duty batteries for energy storage, for those extended periods in the winter when the sun is weak. I also bootlegged an electric line from a power cable about half a mile away. Probably my mother’s, although it could be a through line to somewhere else. I only use it in emergencies, so whoever owns it isn’t going to notice, because the power draw is minimal. (They haven’t so far, anyway.) My stove and refrigerator run on bottled propane, and my shower is a gravity feed. Not the Plaza, but it works.

  It took me four months to complete the job. Fortunately, the weather was mild this winter, so I wasn’t held up all that much. I had nothing else to do except fuck off—smoke dope, drink beer and whiskey, read, shoot film. I camped out in the bones of my shack while I was working on it. Two or three times a month I went up to my mother’s house for a proper shower and to do my laundry. If my mother was feeling charitable and not exceptionally pissed off at me she would invite me to eat dinner with her. Not that I was enjoying her culinary talents—she doesn’t cook; she never has. Mattie, the family cook for the last forty years, handles that. She is a superb cook, specializing in dishes of the region. I have been eating her cooking since I was born. We Tullises are damn fine eaters.

  Mary Bradshaw Tullis, my mother, is among the last of a bygone-era class: a genteel Southern woman of means. She was born in 1918, before the end of the First World War, less than twenty miles from the house in which she’s now lived for the past sixty-one years, from the day she was married to my father. At that time, horse-drawn vehicles outnumbered gasoline-propelled ones fifty to one in King James County. Most of the local farming work was still horse-driven until after the Second World War. Even in Washington and Baltimore horses drew milk carts, bread wagons, junk wagons, up to the early 1950s. Both of those cities were dormant, sleepy burgs then, not today’s booming metropolises. Air-conditioning was not yet common, particularly in private homes. People put pallets on the floor and slept with fans blowing across wet towels to alleviate the humid misery; or they flat-out suffered. When the history of the New South is written in centuries to come air-conditioning will be the defining characteristic, analogous to the pyramids in ancient Egypt or the Roman aqueducts.

  There was no television, and radio was in its infancy. No computers, of course, no Internet. People of my mother’s position had servants: maids, nursemaids, cooks, washerwomen, governesses, yard men, field men, chauffeurs. Two or three servants to each person in a family, man, woman, and child, was not uncommon. It was a languid, privileged life.

  Those days are long gone. My mother, still spry and energetic at eighty-three, gets by fine now with Mattie, who will be with her until one of them dies, a woman who comes in three days a week to clean, and a gardener.

  Anyway, getting back to my situation. Why am I, the son of rich parents, a man of intelligence and wit, with a powerful ego, a man who, until recently, was building a wonderful and exciting career, doing work that he loved, why is this man who is not yet forty living in a rebuilt sharecropper’s shack on the edge of his family’s property?

  The answer is long and somewhat complicated. And difficult for me to confront. But the basic answer is that I am doing penance for having fucked up, big-time.

  But where am I going? Which is what my mother asks me from time to time. Where is Fritz going? she will say, speaking of me in the third person, as if I’m not in the room. Will I ever marry and present her with grandchildren before she dies, which could be at any moment, given her age. (She says this, not me. I expect her to live past ninety; when people reach her age they usually keep going, they were strong enough to get to this point, they’ll be strong enough to keep on trucking.) I remind her that she already has grandchildren, courtesy of my older brother and sister. Your children, she replies. As if all of us must continue the family line. Or else it’s that there’s something about me the other two don’t have. Like thoughtlessness and willfulness; along with an almost pathological drive, it often seems, to self-destruct.

  Maybe I’m being too hard on myself about my present circumstances. I’m probably no more interesting than your garden-variety fuckup. I’m not violent, or overly critical of others. And the truth is, most of my life has been quite different from the way it is at present. Much more productive, in the socially acceptable scheme of things. My curriculum vitae is most impressive. Until very recently, when the devil in me overwhelmed my better gods, I was a star in my own small firmament.

  It’s a long way from the top—or near enough to the top to see it—to the bottom. For someone like me, living in a rebuilt sharecropper’s shack on my mother’s property is the bottom. Despite my present lowly station, though, I’m at peace. Living low-key, taking it a day at a time. The way I see it, I have nowhere to go but up; at worst, my movement, in the short term, will be lateral.

  I give myself a quick sponge bath and brush my teeth—using the toothbrush to scrape the caterpillar from my tongue—slip into a pair of shorts, T-shirt, Tevas. Going into the kitchen, I take a can of V8 juice and a Heineken out of the refrigerator, pop the tops, pour the two liquids in roughly equal amounts into a tall mug, and make myself a “red one.” Some people call this drink
a “tomato beer,” and use plain tomato juice, although I prefer the tang of V8. Rock ’n’ roll musicians have been quaffing this libation for decades—friends of mine in the country music business that I met in Austin told me that the King of the Road himself, the late, great Roger Miller, drank one about every morning of his life. It’s the best way to start the day when you’ve been drinking to excess the night before. Add a dash of Worcestershire, a few drops of Tabasco sauce, and you’re in business.

  I finish my drink, rinse the glass and set it on the sideboard, and unlock my special cabinet. I have over ten thousand dollars’ worth of equipment in this little space—cameras, a Nikon cool-scan slide scanner, an Epson 3000 printer, as well as my Apple PowerBook, with Adobe Photoshop 5.5 for printing out pictures of my transparencies. All top-of-the-line stuff. Anything better than this, you’d have to go to a professional shop. My pictures in particular—thousands of slides, and prints I’ve made of them on the computer—can’t be valued objectively: they’re irreplaceable.

  I select one of my cameras, a Canon EOS I bought last year. It’s a good camera for shooting in the wild. My normal lens of choice, a 35–350 mm zoom, a nice all-around lens for nature photography, is attached to the camera body. In addition, I take a super-long lens, 800 mm. For my purposes, an ultralong lens is often the only way I get close-ups of my subjects. I take two rolls of 50 ASA Fuji Velvia film (a good fine-grain slide film) down from a shelf, plus a tripod and a pair of Nikon 8×23 power binoculars. I toss everything into a waterproof canvas camera bag, secure the locks, grab a plastic jug of ice water out of the refrigerator and a sack of grain from under the kitchen counter.

  One last check of my houseguest. She’s sleeping like a hibernating bear—she tried to keep up with me last night in the drinking department, not a recommended practice for a novice. My watch reads a quarter to six—time to be motivating, get some shooting done before the day heats up to unbearable. I leave her a note on the empty pillow next to her head. Coffee and juice in fridge. Help yourself to anything.