Bluebird Rising

by John Decure

“J.?” Coming from the backyard. I opened the kitchen door.

  “Help me!”

  Max was halfway across the yard, standing under the pepper tree and peering into the branches with great interest.

  “Max!” I shouted. He’s one terrifying dog when he wants to be, but he’s a smart one, and he usually picks his places to be ferocious. This wasn’t one of those times, and when he saw me he bounded over, his big tongue flopping. I gave him a quick pat and went to the tree to get Carmen down. She was about six feet up and looked at me queerly when I reached for her.

  “Not so fast … what about him?” Max had fallen in behind me.

  “Sit, Max. Stay.” As always, Max obeyed.

  “Thank God.”

  I lifted Carmen down. Her faded blue jeans were baggy and torn at the knees, but not from this latest little adventure. Even in a loose navy blue sweatshirt, her black hair in a plain ponytail, she looked just right. She was shivering and I wrapped an arm around her shoulder, her cocoa brown eyes never leaving Max.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded. No point asking her what had happened, she’d tell me soon enough.

  “How long you been up there?”

  “Couple of minutes. Man’s best friend there attacked me.” She said it like she was shaming Max in the process, and when I turned and shot him the old stink-eye, he lowered his massive head and slunk away. “I had no choice but to run for it.”

  Despite Max’s awesome physical stature, I’d never known him to attack anyone absent provocation or a direct command.

  “Bad dog,” I scolded Max. He settled onto the bottom porch step and rested his chin on his paws. I can tell when he’s upset or embarrassed, and right now he was both. Like me, my dog has a sensitive nature. “He won’t bother you,” I told Carmen.

  “He’d better not.” She seemed flustered by Max’s sudden and convincing display of passivity, and she glared at him until he had to look away. Oh, Max, I wanted to whisper to him, what I could tell you about women.

  “So—”

  “I thought I’d help you out tonight by feeding him before you got home,” she said.

  “That was very considerate of you. Thanks.” When I kissed her on the cheek, I spied Max’s shiny metal chow bowl lying upside down a few feet from the base of the tree, empty, a few loose nuggets of dry kibble nearby. He must have been hungry tonight. Cold weather affects his appetite that way.

  Carmen’s smooth brown face was still screwed up tight. “He was lying here taking a nap a little while ago.”

  “Loves his spot under the tree.”

  “Right. So I brought his food to him, put it down, and right then I remembered, you feed him over there, on the path by the garage.”

  Which was true, and by now I knew how she’d goofed.

  “You tried to move his food.”

  “I didn’t want him to make a mess on the patio.” She nodded at the used brick surrounding us.

  “It’s no big deal, Car. You didn’t need—”

  “It was to him! He practically lunged at me! I just dropped it and got up the tree. What’s the matter with your dog, J.? I’ve never seen him like this.”

  “Nothing,” I said, finding just the wrong word at the wrong time.

  She pulled free from my hug and crossed her arms. “Nothing?”

  “I mean … no, it doesn’t matter. Let’s go inside.”

  “What?” Waiting me out. “Tell me.”

  It was simple. “It’s not a great idea to take a dog’s food away while he’s eating.” Her look was blank. “It’s a survival thing. You remove his food, a primitive part of his brain sees red. Dogs are territorial.”

  “Territorial.”

  “Max wouldn’t attack you, Car, he loves you. You just threatened his space at the wrong time and he ran you out of it.”

  She eyed Max again. “Interesting.” Across the yard he was faking nonchalance, but I know that big boy, and his ears were burning. “I’ve never had a dog. Don’t think I want one.”

  I tried a warm smile on her. “Pretty soon what’s mine will be yours.”

  “That thought crossed my mind while I was seeking traction on the side of the tree trunk.” A good sign. Her sense of humor was coming back, along with the color in her cheeks.

  “Max loves you, Car,” I assured her, nodding at the big black beast. “Isn’t that right, buddy?”

  Max perked up instantly and loped over to make amends, Carmen wrapping her arms around my waist like a lifeline as he approached. He sat at attention, tongue sliding over those big pointy pearly whites that, regardless of his master’s rap on animal instinct, were all business, all the time.

  In a gesture of her trust in me, Carmen reached out and patted him on the head. “I love you too, boy. Just don’t eat me, eh?”

  Max was so happy he barked, making Carmen jump. But she held her ground.

  God, how I love them both.

  Dinner went smoothly enough. Albert didn’t say much when I laid an invite to go dawn patrolling on him, but he’s not exactly a wordy fellow. Down Syndrome casts an opaque haze over his personality and emotions much of the time. Then again, Albert will surprise you with a sharp observation when you least expect it, and a good sense of humor, like his sister’s, is at work beneath the surface, if you listen closely.

  Last July I took his sister and him to the on-the-sand wedding of a local friend and pier regular named Ted Strunk, a guy we’d affectionately called Dead Skunk since about the second grade. Fifty or so invitees huddled on the Southside beach down near the South Jetty near sunset on a windy late afternoon, the scalloped high clouds out past the surf going flamingo pink as a smiling young minister in a Hawaiian print shirt presided over the nuptials. Earlier, on the walk down Porpoise Way, I’d related to Carmen a few vital stats about the Skunkster. His silky smooth goofy-footer’s style on the Southside lefts peeling into the pier in the winter. An ingenious practical joke he pulled in junior high involving a visit from the superintendent of schools, a pair of black pumps and fishnet stockings, and a blow-up sex doll levitating in our tight-assed gym coach’s office window at precisely the right moment. Skunk’s gift for mimicry, and his up-and-down—but mostly down—employment status as a jazz saxophone man and local stand-up comic. Albert trailed along behind us as I spoke, saying nothing. As usual, I forgot he was even there, and wisecracked to Carmen that Skunk didn’t need two toasters and a crystal gravy boat to help ease him into matrimonial bliss, he needed some steady work.

  Down on the sand a half hour later, the smiling minister got to the part where he asks if anyone knows why the two lovebirds should not be joined, and if so, to speak now. A few seconds of bloated, obligatory silence followed, broken only by the faint cries of seagulls floating high above the wet jetty rocks. That’s when Albert, in that slow, stammering voice of his, said “J. says S-s-s … Skunk … n-needs a job.”

  That was easily the loudest laugh I’d ever heard anyone get at a wedding, and man, every last one of Skunk’s friends and family offered to buy Albert a drink at the luau reception that followed. For his part, Albert seemed happy but mystified, sipping on a fruit punch until his lips were stained red and dancing with Carmen a few times to some live reggae in that funky slow-mo style of his. Typical oblique Albert, content to wait quietly for the payoff we’d both promised him: that big slice of wedding cake, icing piled high, a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side.

  Albert likes weddings. Ask him why and he’ll look at you like you’re the one who’s slow. “Everybody’s happy, and the cake is good,” he’ll tell you. I guess that’s why I bristle—as does Carmen—when people label him “retarded” or the more PC “special.” Albert is just Albert.

  As I cleared the dishes away, Carmen noticed him grinding his teeth a little as his eyes stared into his empty pasta bowl. He does that when he gets overexcited. She gently brushed away the coal black hair from his forehead and let her hand caress his wide cheek. His eyes were still intent when she said,
“Baby, what’s the matter?”

  Albert said nothing, but he looked out of sorts. Damn, I thought. First night here and he’s homesick already. Not good.

  Ever since we’d met two years ago in juvenile dependency court, this had been a mighty sticking point between Carmen and me—what to do about Albert. Would he just live with us always, as if he were our own adult child? Or could he live in a structured home environment with other men like himself—and, most of all, would Carmen ever be able to let him go? None of this would be worked out tonight, or any time soon, for that matter. I took the dishes to the sink.

  “Papi,” Carmen was saying to her brother, “está bien. Sana sana, colíta de rana …”

  A home for Albert apart from us. I’d actually heard of such a place through the local pastor at St. Ann’s, Father Ashton. Father had seen the three of us at mass last year when they spent Labor Day weekend at my place, escaping a late-summer heat wave. A few weeks later I bumped into the old priest in the paint section at the hardware store. There he was, a man of the cloth, toting a gallon of “virgin white” in each hand. I had to laugh, and bagged on him a bit, which he handled with good nature. But we got to talking, and he commented on the dark, disarming beauty he’d seen me with at mass. Almost without thinking, I brought up the other half of the Carmen equation. There was a home, Father Ashton said, where adult men like Albert lived in rooms of two, eight to a house, fully supervised by caretakers trained in caring for specialneeds adults. A Catholic home called the St. Regis. Not that I gave a shit about the religious qualifier, but apparently it was the only ticket in, since some heavyweight Catholic donors had fronted the start-up bucks, currently sat on the home’s board, and had the last say about who got in. Fine by me—I liked the sound of a home where Albert could be with his peers. Carmen didn’t. Last month Father called to tell me there was an opening. I phoned Carmen, gently pitched the idea, tried to set up a visit. She hung up on me—twice. We haven’t spoken about it since.

  All was quiet in the dining room as I loaded the dishwasher, Max laid out a few feet away on his mat by the back door. When I came into the living room Carmen was reclined on the couch; she’d found my old hardbound copy of Lord of the Flies in the bookcase and was reading it on her back, one long leg on the cushions, the other dangling to the floor. She had to be bone tired from the early-morning move and dealing with her mother’s illness and Albert’s full-time supervision, but I liked seeing that she apparently felt free enough to slouch in my home, and I didn’t care about the reason. Albert was on the floor in front of the set, searching his bright blue L.A. Dodgers gym bag for another video, the nightly local news on the TV screen. He looked up, hesitant.

  “W-wanna … w-watch one together?”

  “Sure, buddy.” I peered into the bag and didn’t like what I saw: A Travolta flick involving a talking baby, a few Chevy Chase duds, a bony freckled kid named Pippi Longstocking riding a smiling biglipped camel, some second-tier Disney musicals. Christ. My instincts told me Carmen needed some maintenance, but my first evening at home under the same roof with her was about to go Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Maybe Big is still in the VCR, I thought as I made for the TV

  “Look, J.,” Carmen said, pointing at the screen, “that’s the state bar’s building, isn’t it?”

  It was. I found the remote and cranked up the volume. A local news reporter named Marty Handlesman was staked out in front of my place of employment, talking about the new blue-ribbon panel of bar evaluators and the “mission” they were embarking on beginning next month. “Their mandate comes directly from the governor,” Marty intoned soberly. “To clean up a disciplinary agency that’s supposed to be cleaning up the profession of law.”

  Supposed to be. Nice slam, Marty. His walrusine jowls flapped on about reform and accountability and budgetary this and that, the bottom line unchanged: we were in for another shakeout, this one by a hand-picked group the governor had dubbed “ADEPTT.” A strained but nifty acronym for Attorney Discipline Evaluation Panel for Timely Transition. A heavyweight panel made up of a few retired superior court appellate judges, a TV-friendly ethics professor from UCLA Law School named Bernard Schmidt, and the former city attorney from Riverside, Norma Erstad. Marty was telling the viewers at home how great it was that the panel was headed by the “esteemed” former state senator, attorney, and businessman Miles Abernathy.

  “Great,” I said. “Miles Abernathy. Two years ago he sponsored a bill to cut our operating budget in half. He should be very fairminded.” Abernathy was talking on tape now, his hair thick and pewter-colored, the tips like polished silver. His face was wrinkled but tan and handsome—a deal maker’s face—and his teeth were white and straight, but a size too small.

  Carmen and I stared at the tube, Albert an afterthought once more. “The guy looks pretty confident,” Carmen remarked.

  My dinner felt like a brick in my stomach. “He does, doesn’t he.”

  Marty was interviewing Abernathy now, asking for elaboration on the panel’s mission.

  “The state bar has often been criticized for being bloated and arrogant, Marty,” Abernathy said. “And rightly so. In the past, they’ve operated on an ever increasing budget, and have failed to listen to calls for reform.” He paused to stare straight into the camera. “If the bar doesn’t heed the call and follow the panel’s recommendations this time around, the only alternative might be to shut it down.”

  “Do you think it’ll ever come to that?” Carmen asked me.

  “I hope not. This guy and a handful of other gadfly attorneys in Sacramento have been saying that for years. They’d like nothing more than for lawyers in this state to be unregulated. They hate the bar but they don’t have a single alternative to offer when they talk about blowing it up. It’s bullshit.” As I changed the channel I caught a flash of consternation on Carmen’s face. Oops, no cursing in front of Albert. “Sorry about that,” I said. “I meant, it’s baloney.”

  “Be more careful, please,” she said. Albert was cross-legged on the floor, inspecting a comic book I’d put on his bed before he arrived this morning: “Space Replicants Invade!” It was full of muscled action heroes repelling alien invaders with insect faces. As usual, I couldn’t tell if he’d been listening. “Maybe the others on the panel will be more fair,” Carmen added.

  The news show shifted to another story, a piece on the mudslides the rain was causing in Malibu Canyon. I changed the channel just as a Mediterranean hillside mansion was shown slipping partway down a disintegrating hillside. Christ, the fundamentalists would love that. As I suspected, Big was still in the VCR, so I hit rewind.

  “Yeah, maybe they’ll be fair,” I said. “I don’t want to look for another job anytime soon.”

  Carmen sat up enough so I could slide in beside her. In the lamplight her brown skin emitted a subtle glow, like burnished wood. “You’ve got your hands full as it is, Mr. Shepard.”

  “Don’t I know it.” It was the first complete thaw since the Max episode, and I took advantage, leaning over to kiss her on the mouth. The doorbell rang.

  “Look!” Albert shouted, pointing out the living-room window at the spinning red lights atop a police car out front. “The Replicants are here!”

  Cops on my doorstep are nothing new. I’ve lived alone here since I was barely eighteen, a circumstance that provided for freedom of expression and debauchery on an epic scale. This was back in the day when partying with nothing to celebrate except getting wasted one more time was the thing to do every Friday and Saturday night. I knew all my neighbors and they knew me, and typically they tolerated the rumbling stereo thunder, the intoxicated war whoops from the upstairs balcony, and the rustle of ripped kids peeing on their front lawns in the dark. Then an anonymous call would be made and before long a Christianitos PD black-and-white like the one out front right now would cruise by to look in on the situation. The inquiring officer was always reasonable enough, nodding and grinning through the screen door mesh as if reminded of a tanned gir
l in a print skirt and sandals he’d once known, a night when he himself had shotgunned one too many cold ones and got a bad case of the whirlies. Usually they would ask me to give the word, I’d give it, and within a half hour the whole show would be history, Porpoise Way black and speckled with litter like an empty fairground just after the circus blew town. Then I’d be alone, plunging a backed-up toilet and plucking butts and empties from the rose beds out front, wondering, again, why I ever believed that filling this house with virtual strangers would make it feel any less empty to me.

  The officers on my porch tonight delivered their good evenings with a deference I rarely saw back in my party prankster days. The smaller one, a Latino named Terraza with slicked black hair, stood a few feet behind his partner, Officer Hale, and let Hale take the lead. I’d seen Hale around town for years, fishing off the pier on his days off, hoisting one in the Captain’s Galley at happy hour, buying a smoke alarm at Christianitos Hardware. He was big, standing eye to eye with me as he talked, his furry white eyebrows contorted as he adjusted the ample roll hanging over his belt to his satisfaction. I asked them to come in, Carmen and Albert wedged behind me in the doorway But Hale nodded over his shoulder at the street as if he didn’t want to take his eye off something.

  That’s when I saw Dale Bleeker’s tattered old Buick parked a dozen feet up from the squad car, bathed in rays of ethereal spotlight glow.

  “We picked them up at the pier, in the parking lot,” Hale said. “Guy driving is a regular down there.”

  “How’s that, Officer?”

  “Loiterer. He uses the toilet facilities for shaves and spit baths at night. I’ve never seen the old man, though. The owner of the vehicle says the gentleman is his ‘client.’” At that, Hale exchanged a smirk with his young partner.

  I opened the screen and, stepping onto the porch, peered into the street. I couldn’t make out Rudy, but I could see Dale’s dark silhouette, a cigarette pulsing red as he puffed hard, his big hand atop the steering wheel like he was still cruising down the fast lane the way he’d done earlier tonight.