The Falconer's Tale

by Gordon Kent

  He had borrowed a pair of binoculars from good old Dave—Swarovskis, 10x50, nice if you didn’t have to carry them very far—and walked the hundred feet to the top of the hill. He made his way into the bracken and moved toward a rock outcrop, keeping himself out of sight of the house he’d glimpsed below, until he reached the outcrop and put his back against it and turned the binoculars on the house.

  It could have been any house on the island—central doorway, two windows on each side, a chimney at one end, second storey with two dormers. The color of rich cream but probably stone under a coat of paint, possibly an old croft fixed up but more likely built in the last hundred years. At the far side of the house, clothes blew in the wind on a circular contraption with a central metal pole. Behind it, as if to tell him it was the right house, were pens and little shacks like doghouses that he took to be sheds for the birds; beside a half-collapsed metal gate, a dejected-looking black and white dog lay with its head on outstretched paws, beside it what was apparently supposed to be a doghouse made out of boxes and a tarp. The bird pens seemed to have been set out at random, the hutches put together by somebody who didn’t know which end of a hammer to hit his thumb with. That’d be Hackbutt, for sure.

  Piat studied the place. He hoped to actually see Hackbutt so he’d go in with that advantage. They hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years; let the other guy feel the shock of change. Hackbutt would have an idea he was coming but wouldn’t know when: Piat had sent him a postcard with a picture of a bear on the front, a nonsense message on the back signed “Freddy.” From “ready for Freddy.” It meant “get ready;” the bear was the identifier, an old code between them. Would Hackbutt remember? Of course he would. In fact, Piat thought, he’d piss his pants.

  After fifteen minutes, nobody had appeared near the house. Piat eased himself around the outcrop and walked back through the bracken to the car. He leaned on the roof and trained the binoculars around him, idling, not wanting to go down to the house yet. Apprehensive? Cold feet? He looked down the road. The goofy runner was coming back. He was making heavy going of it now, his feet coming down as if he were wearing boots, his hands too high on his chest. The too-big T-shirt blew around him. He had a beard and long, gray hair, also blowing, the effect that of some small-time wizard in a ragged white robe. Smiling, Piat put the binoculars to his eyes to enjoy this sorry sight, and when the focus snapped in, he realized with a shock that the runner was Hackbutt.

  The last time he had seen Hackbutt, he’d weighed about two-thirty and had had a sidewall haircut, smooth cheeks, and eyes like two raisins in a slice of very white bread. Now, there was the beard and the long hair, and the face had been carved down to planes that made his eyes look huge; his skin was almost brown, and he had lost a lot of weight—so much that his legs looked fragile. The T-shirt, Piat realized, must be one of his own from the old days.

  He still can’t run for shit, at least.

  Hackbutt toiled up toward him. Piat moved around to the rear of the car and leaned back against the trunk. The runner came on, his breathing hoarse and hard, his eyes on the crest. He was going to pass Piat without looking at him, Piat knew—eye contact had always been hard for the man, confronting new people a torment. Now, as he came almost even, Piat said, “Hey, Digger.”

  Hackbutt was the kind of nerd who actually did double takes. He might look like a wizard now, but inside was the same insecure fumbler. Still running, he looked aside toward Piat, looked away, then really looked back and, finally believing the evidence of his eyes, came to a stop with his mouth open and his T-shirt flapping. “Jack?” he said, breathing hard. He’d always known Piat as Jack Michaels.

  “Hey, man, you look good. Putting in the miles, that’s great.” Piat was still leaning on the car. He held out his hand. “Sight for sore eyes, Digger.”

  “Jeez, Jack, this is—” Hackbutt took a death grip on Piat’s hand. The guy was really strong. “I got your card, but I didn’t know when you were coming!” He grinned. “Wow, this is unbelievable!” Then they both said it was great, and unbelievable, and a long time.

  “You look good, Dig. Lost some weight, haven’t you?”

  “Some weight! Sixty pounds, Jack.” His breathing was getting better and he was able to stick his chest out. “Surprised?”

  “Amazing.”

  “Jeez, Jack, you haven’t changed. You look just the same. You look great.”

  “Little older, little grayer.” He grinned at Hackbutt. Piat was surprised to find he was pleased to see him. Good old, easy old Eddie Hackbutt. “Let me run you down to the house.” That was a slip; he shouldn’t have admitted he’d already seen the house. Hackbutt, however, didn’t notice; he was too busy shaking his head and frowning.

  “No, no, Irene wouldn’t like it. I can’t give in like that. Anyway, I’m just coming up on the big finish—over the hill and then I sprint to the front door.”

  Piat thought that would be worth seeing. Most of his concentration, however, was on Hackbutt’s “Irene.” Partlow’s file had said nothing about a wife, had mentioned only a “companion,” name unspecified. “Keeps your nose to the grindstone, does she?”

  Hackbutt’s face darkened. “No, it isn’t like that!” This was new—he’d grown a spine in fifteen years. “You’ll have to meet her.” And Hackbutt turned about and started his painful plod up the last hundred feet of the hill before his final sprint.

  Piat sat behind the wheel without starting the car; he wanted to let Hackbutt get home and tell “Irene” about meeting good old Jack. The house was no more than a third of a mile away—give the man four minutes. Five, so he could get out of that T-shirt. And Piat wanted to think: he’d made a mistake. He’d thought he’d told himself that Hackbutt would be changed, but he’d thought only that he’d be more like Hackbutt—fatter, nerdier—and not that he’d have reinvented himself as a skinny, bearded exercise freak. Or been reinvented by a woman named Irene, who now took on an importance that Piat hadn’t even guessed at.

  Losing my touch. Or getting rusty.

  He started the engine.

  Irene Girouard wore a long dress, as if she had something to hide, but otherwise she was very much in evidence. Piat thought that her first initial, I, probably summed her up, so he didn’t need the confirmation of the wallful of photographs that greeted him as soon as he was taken into the house.

  “Irene’s a photographer,” Hackbutt said. His tone said, I’m crazy about Irene.

  The photographs were all of Irene, taken by Irene. Irene’s left eye, Irene’s chin, Irene’s right knee, Irene’s vagina (oh, yes), Irene’s left breast in profile, full front, and close-up, emphasis on big nipple. Piat decided that the long dress wasn’t meant to hide her but to refer curiosity to the photos.

  “I’m doing an installation in Paris any time now.” Her voice had a hint of something foreign. “I just need to get my shit together and then it’s go any time I say so. Hackbutt’s gathering found objects for me.”

  Hackbutt smiled. “Irene’s going to be a household name.”

  “These are all, mm, you?” Piat said.

  “I don’t fuck around with false modesty. Yes, that’s my cunt, if that’s what you want to ask. The photos’ll be assembled on stuff we’ve found, mostly animal bones, to make a humanoid construction. I’m fastening the photos to the bones with barbed wire from an old fence he found.”

  “It’s called I Sing the Body Electric,” Hackbutt said.

  “Whitman,” she said.

  Piat thought of saying Whitman Who? but didn’t, aware that he didn’t like the woman at all, that she was going to be a problem, and at the same time finding a woman who took pictures of her own vagina perversely interesting. She also had a big, hearty, apparently healthy laugh, as if despite all the photos she was as sane as a stone and he ought to get to know her. For the sake of saying something, for the sake of having to put up with her, he said, “Are you going to cut the parts out of the photos when you, mm, barbed-wire them to the stuff?”<
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  “God, no, that would be so calculated!”

  That was just the central hall of the house, as far as they’d got at that point. There had been introductions, a pro forma question about something to drink—they didn’t drink tea or coffee, but they had water “from the hill” and juice, source not given—and then the photos, Hackbutt saying, as if they were the reason for the visit, “These are Irene’s photographs.”

  There was more of Irene throughout the house, Piat learned. Nobody picked up after him/herself, apparently, so parts of both of them were left where they fell: the living room, just to the left after you came in the front door, was thick with art magazines, falconry paraphernalia (Piat had bought a book in Glasgow, so he recognized the jesses, at least); batteries, probably used; a battery charger, plugged in but empty; a sizable number of animal bones; a plate that had held something oily. Four spindly plants in the windows, yearning for a sunnier climate. The kitchen, next behind the living room, was furnished mostly in dirty dishes, a camera, burned-down candles. Piat, himself scrupulously neat, wondered if he’d dare to eat anything that came out of it. On the right of the central hall were, first, a small bedroom (“You’re going to stay, aren’t you, Jack?”), then a closed door that led, he supposed, to their own bedroom, which he hoped they wouldn’t show him. He imagined dirty laundry in shoulder-high heaps. At the end of a corridor, another closed door hid what Hackbutt called “Irene’s studio.”

  Then it was out to see the birds, which were to Hackbutt as the photos were to Irene. They were hawks and falcons, different types that Piat couldn’t distinguish; hooded, silent, they sat on perches and occasionally turned their heads. Hackbutt insisted on feeding two of them for him to watch, and he demonstrated their training with one of them and an old sock that was supposed to represent a rabbit. Hackbutt almost had a glow around his head; his eyes were those of a fanatic. Partlow, he thought, had chosen well—if Hackbutt could be recruited.

  “I wish I’d known you were coming,” Irene said when she’d decided they had spent enough time on the birds. “We could have had lunch.”

  “I thought I might take you to lunch.”

  She laughed that big, healthy laugh. “Oh, Christ, you can’t do that in this godforsaken place! We don’t eat human food. We’re fucking vegans, nutcases. I go in a restaurant here and the smell makes me barf before I sit down!”

  “Maybe,” Hackbutt said, “maybe, honey, we could have a salad or something.”

  “I don’t think Jack is a salad type.” She looked Piat up and down. “He looks like a carnivore to me.”

  “Raw buffalo, mostly,” Piat said. He added no, no, he wouldn’t stay; no, thanks; no; but he had some things for them in the car he’d meant to bring in. Just sort of getting-reacquainted stuff.

  He hadn’t known why, but he’d thought Hackbutt would be poor. On a city street, Hackbutt could have passed for one of the homeless, but in his own context, he looked right, neither poor nor rich, certainly not needy. And Irene, no matter what she was now, had known money, he thought. The accent, a casual remark about “when I was at McGill,” a long-cultivated air of rebelliousness without penalty—no starving in garrets, please—told him she was doing a trapeze act over a very safe safety net. And the net, it turned out, was named Mother. “Oh, Mother sent that in her last Care package,” she said of a CD player. Said it with contempt, but then socked a CD into it and said she hoped he liked bluegrass. He didn’t, in fact, but knew it would do no good to say so.

  He brought in the plastic shopping bag he’d filled in a supermarket in Oban, feeling not like Santa Claus but like the guest who’s brought the wrong kind of wine. He’d been wrong about Hackbutt; he’d underestimated him. Now he’d pay with the embarrassment of the wrong gifts.

  “Oh, friend, this is so wrong for us,” Irene said as she took out a tin of pâté. And the crackers. “God, they’ve got animal fat in them!” And the Johnnie Walker black, which had always been his gift to Hackbutt in the old days. “Oh, Eddie doesn’t drink anymore, do you, sweetie? Ohmmmm—” Big wet kiss. Ditto the Polish ham, the smoked salmon, and the petits fours (white sugar and animal fat).

  “You think I’m a nut, I know you do,” she said. She ran her fingers through her long, untidy hair. “You’re right. I am. I’m a crank. I’ve turned Eddie into a crank. But we’re fucking healthy!” She grinned. “And I do mean fucking healthy.” Hackbutt looked shy.

  Piat decided things were awful and it wouldn’t work. Dumb Dave wouldn’t be able to run Hackbutt with Irene around; Irene would be running Dave in about twelve hours. But if it didn’t work, at least not to the point where Piat got Dave and Hackbutt together, he was going to lose half his ten thousand bucks.

  “Actually,” Piat said when Hackbutt went off to the john, “actually, Irene, you’ve thrown me a curve.”

  She smiled. Whoopee.

  “What I mean is, I have a sort of, um, business to talk to Hackbutt about.”

  “Oh, Jeez, I never would have guessed.” She gave that big laugh. “Sweetie, of course you’ve got business to talk to Eddie about! The first thing he said when he got your card was, ‘He’ll want something.’” She tipped her head, smiled with her eyes a little scrunched up as if he was giving off too much light, and played with her hair. “What kind of thing do you want?”

  “You his agent?”

  “I’m his damp crotch, and don’t you forget it. Look, Jack, Eddie’s a wonderful man, but he needs somebody to take care of him. Don’t come here thinking you can push him around. Okay?”

  “I never pushed him around in my life.”

  “Somebody did.”

  Piat opened his mouth to say something that would have been ugly, then thought better of it and leaned back—they were in the small living room, he on the sofa in a bare spot in a pile of mess—and said, “What did he tell you about me?”

  “He said you were a great guy.”

  “That sounds right.”

  “But he won’t tell me how he knew you, so that part doesn’t sound so great, does it?”

  “We used to bum around together in Southeast.”

  “Southeast?

  “Asia.”

  “Yeah, he said he knew you from Macao. So, what did you two do together?”

  “This and that. Some deals.”

  “You were in oil, too?”

  “I was in a lot of things. We just bummed around together, had some laughs, some drinks.” He thought he’d launch a trial balloon. “Some girls.”

  She didn’t like the balloon. “Eddie didn’t know his cock from a condom till he met me.” She gave all the signs of talking a better sexual game than she actually played, he thought. But you never could tell.

  Piat shrugged. “We were guys together, how’s that? Pals.”

  She looked at him. She put her chin up, ran her fingers through her hair. She said, “You look to me like bad news.” She laughed. “I like that in a man.”

  By then, Piat was hungry and annoyed, and when Hackbutt came out of the bathroom, he said he had to go. Both of them protested, but he could see that she wasn’t going to let him talk to Hackbutt alone, and there was no way he was going to go into his recruiting pitch with her there. He could see Partlow’s five thousand growing wings. He was damned if he’d let it fly away. “I’d like to come back,” he said.

  Oh, great, yes, great idea, sure!

  He gathered the handles of the shopping bag in his fingers—they absolutely didn’t want the stuff—and said, “I’ll come back tomorrow; how’s that?”

  Oh, sure, wonderful idea, yes, they’d even have lunch.

  “But I want to talk to Digger alone.”

  That was not so well received. Hackbutt looked pained; she looked insulted.

  “I need one hour with Hackbutt. Then he can talk to you, Irene, and then the three of us can talk, but first it’s just him and me, and the girls have to stay at the other end of the dance floor. Nothing personal.”

  Hackbutt said, “Honey
—” and looked at her. His face was flushed, as if he liked being fought over.

  She said, “Just gonna be guys together?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Unless you can offer him eternal youth and a lot of really cute chicks, I can make him a better offer than anything you can say. Can’t I, sweetie?”

  “It isn’t a competition.”

  She looked at him and then at Hackbutt and then at Piat again, and she fluffed her hair and said, “I need a bath, anyway. An hour’ll be about right.”

  They all smiled and touched each other and said tomorrow, then, right, yeah, tomorrow. And Piat went out to his rented car, but to temper the humiliation of seeming to have been chased away, he detoured by the dog.

  It was still lying with its head on its paws. It watched him come, then cringed when he put out his hand. Piat squatted and extended the hand, but the dog pulled back, then got up and went into its hovel, dragging a length of chain behind it.

  Frowning, Piat made his way to the car, still feeling like an asshole because he was carrying back all the gifts that Hackbutt was supposed to be pathetically grateful for. And because Irene had made it very clear just who was Hackbutt’s real case officer.

  When Piat wheeled the rented Renault into the grass in front of Hackbutt’s house next day, he was better prepared. During an evening much clarified by the Johnnie Walker he’d bought for Hackbutt, he’d scolded himself for poor preparation and overall laziness; then, the personnel work done, he had decided what he must do. It all came down to two things: learn to like Irene Girouard, because she ran Edgar Hackbutt; and accept the new Hackbutt, consigning the old one to history.

  Now, as he got out of the car, he grinned as Irene appeared in the doorway. She was in another long dress, blue denim, fairly waistless. Piat was wearing a black polo shirt and a sweater and a pair of khakis. He waved. She waved. He took a plastic sack from the car and loped up to the door. “I’m going to try this again,” he said, holding out the bag.