Bird Lives!

by Bill Moody

  Another call came in. He shook his head, dispersing the haphazard mental footage that had clouded his vision. His palm greased the steering wheel as he checked his watch. He shook his head again and stared intently at the rattling phone. He didn’t expect any calls, and there was no caller ID, but this time he answered.

  “Sal.” The woman’s voice was as cold as this place in January.

  “Jesus,” he muttered and then lined up forceful words in her native Russian, his American accent nearly hidden. “I told you never to call this number.”

  “I have no choice. I left you many messages, and you haven’t replied. Not a sign. Nothing! What am I supposed to do?”

  “Isn’t that a sign?” he mumbled.

  He felt a rage accompany Irina’s exaggerated sigh.

  “I’m no fool,” she spat out. “You promised me...just last week. You swore you’d tell her. And I’m sure you didn’t.”

  Sal instantly replayed his own words that audaciously clumsy night when he’d pledged to her the world as their bodies frolicked in miasmic eroticism, the escape soothed by barbiturates and inebriation, with the one woman who could—and who did—take him to Shangri-La as often as his unrepentant soul meandered her way.

  He swallowed hard. “You’re right, I didn’t...”

  He anticipated her next rant. She’d warned him enough. And he cursed himself for having made the promise in the first place, not because it wasn’t what he wanted. God, no. He’d long craved to catapult his wife out of his life, and to set her on fire doing so. But he preferred to fuel his grotesque lies over surrendering any admission or giving up the charade. A divorce was the last thing he’d wanted to get dragged through. A man in his position couldn’t risk a scorned, vengeful wife. Lying was easier, then and now, no matter the price—easier because his wife was across the pond, a figure of distance, rather than a demanding, pestilent creature at his side, though now it all mattered less.

  “I’ve given you everything,” he said. “Look at your damn wrist. What do you think that cost me? And look in your living room. What’s there that I haven’t paid for?” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his pack of Marlboro Reds, plucked a cigarette out and brought it to his dry, chapped lips. “And your mother... her car, her new teeth?” The scent of bourbon rose from his wrinkled shirt. “What more do you want?” He flicked the lighter, his hands shaking slightly, enough to alarm him.

  “Your devotion, your honesty.”

  Sal snorted. “Fidelity is for the dim and the dead.” He then siphoned a long drag of his tobacco. “And honesty, my dear, is something you’ve never known yourself.” He replayed one of the first things she’d told him some eight months earlier—that she twirled from a brass pole to raise money for her sister’s surgery and for no other reason, only to discover that for years she’d tramped the tables of nearly every gentleman’s club in Minsk. There is no honesty among whores, he thought.

  “You don’t need me,” Irina said, her words crawling to a mere whimper. “It’s clear. I...I give up.” The line went dead.

  A glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror hit hard. His eyes were swollen, red and glassy, a raggedness worse than he’d ever put himself through. A killer in repose shouldn’t look like a corpse, he thought, the remnants of the pride he’d once carried with his gun withering each second he met his reflection in glass and in spirit. But he knew it wasn’t fatigue alone. His demise, as the doctor had said, would surface in many forms: pain, disorientation, weakness, gauntness. That’s what being terminal meant, no matter his effort to block this reality from his mind.

  He counted the hours he’d been awake: thirty, thirty-two, maybe, nearly the same number of years he’d been scouring the planet for someone else’s filth, without question, without remorse.

  The cell phone vibrated again.

  He’d always despised Irina’s feistiness, her condemnations, her relentless, futile search for concreteness, for certainty well beyond what he was capable of delivering. But it was not like him to back down. He’d allow her to be right, but she could never win. He reached for the phone and let it pulsate in his palm for a moment, his hesitation nearly accidental, until he flipped the cover and answered, his mind prepped to resume the duel.

  “What?”

  “Dad, it’s me.”

  His jaw dropped. “How the hell...?”

  “Please, hear me out. I need help.”

  Sal had heard those words before, and it stirred him up with disgust to witness another plea, and especially now when all that mattered was one important trophy—Yuri Chermayeff—about to roam the halls of Clinic Number 14 bearing the future resting place of his 9 mm hollow point bullets. He thought of hanging up.

  “Dad?”

  “I can’t talk now.”

  “Please, they arrested me.”

  Sal’s heart sank. His son had failed him once more. “This isn’t the time.”

  “I’m at the Sheriff’s. I can’t get ahold of Mom.”

  “Stop!” Sal fought his instinct to want to hear more. It seemed easier to hang up. He clenched his fist.

  “They’re saying I stole a ’Lex.”

  “A what?”

  Paul sighed. “A Rolex. At the mall.”

  “What do you mean they’re saying? You stole it, I’m sure, right? Didn’t you?” Sal slammed his fist on the door and kicked the brake pedal. He kicked it again. But the shock suddenly felt oddly artificial, morphing quickly into the same wrath he’d felt so often before. His voice hardened. “Why? Why the hell are you destroying yourself, your future? It’s wrong. You steal, you cheat, you lie...I didn’t raise you this way.” But Sal knew it wasn’t so clear. He was like so many neglectful fathers playing the blame game. He hadn’t been there much for Paul, not for many birthdays, even fewer Christmases. So many lost opportunities.

  “Help me; I’m begging you.”

  “No.”

  Sal’s heart raced as he suddenly remembered the countless unfriendly stares: the neighbors, the principal, the school bus drivers, the old woman at the convenience store, the whole pack of them armed with some tale of his son’s mischief, and he’d appeased them all as a father must. There was no more innocence left in Paul’s youth, not a thread of it for Sal to cling to. And it made him angrier to recall the past. But it also tore him apart to speak to Paul so harshly. A disarmed, disjointed part of him wanted to leap through the phone lines and embrace his son. It had been months since they’d been face-to-face, back in tranquil Pensacola, but even then they’d simmered over another disconnect. “Find your own way out of this mess,” Sal added. “You’re paving a horrible path for your life.”

  “Don’t preach to me, Dad. I know all about you now, what you do, what you’re hiding. I’ve known for longer than you think.”

  That’s impossible. He’d prided himself on his shroud, the elusiveness worthy of acclaim and infamy in the darkest corridors of power. His son was no smarter than any of the governments and syndicates he’d deceived. Sal didn’t answer. He didn’t believe.

  “I also know about your woman,” Paul uttered in a shaky voice.

  Sal cringed. “I’m warning you.” He rubbed his bristly cheeks.

  “How d’you think I got this number, huh?”

  He abruptly suspected a conspiracy. Was Irina capable of unleashing such malice? Or was his son toying with Sal’s failings? Nothing made sense. “Shut up!”

  Sal closed his eyes and rested his head on the glass, the coolness crawling across his scalp as he heard faint sounds of a bicycle, pedals cranking, training wheels wobbling, the chain rattling. The metallic noises blended into reality accompanied by sounds of giggling—a child. His own. “You can do it,” Sal had exclaimed proudly, pushing Paul’s back as he ran alongside. “Go for it, go, you’re almost there.” Laughter reigned. It echoed enchantingly until Sal opened his weary eyes.

  “I need bail money,” said his son, now sounding on the verge of tears. “And a better lawyer than that slacker
you used last year.”

  Sal’s hands began to tremble, his teeth grinding. He threw the cigarette out the window. “You’re doing this deliberately, aren’t you? You’ve always wanted to be the opposite of Joel. The bad versus the good. The rebel in the shadows of my little prince. And you know why he was a prince? Because he didn’t screw up his life like you’ve done ever since you could walk. But why now, why continue your streak of uselessness? He’s dead. Joel’s DEAD! Taken away for God and country, just as I’d feared when I fought so hard to stop him from going off to war. You don’t have to compete with him anymore. You win. You’re the winning loser. Why can’t—” He was abruptly overcome by his vile cocktail of wrath and shame, choking his diatribe into a feeble gasp, all the while wanting to hold his son ever tighter in his fold, ever closer to the vague notions of forgiveness that Sal briefly contemplated.

  “This is the last call they’re letting me make.”

  “I can’t help you now.”

  “Please!”

  “No!” Sal slapped the phone shut on his thigh and slumped back into this seat. He wasn’t going to cry. Damn it. He fought not to. “I love you, you fool,” he whispered alone, now feeling awful that he’d again let his anger go unchecked. And now he also worried over Paul’s words—that he somehow knew his father’s trade. This was the last thing Sal ever wanted his son to know, as it was unfathomable, unforgivable. Early on Sal had not been the father he ought to have been, and now, as a seasoned spy and occasional deliverer of death, there’d be no explanation good enough, and no hope at all, for repairing the broken past. I am a failure, Sal admitted, his fist still clenched.

  He closed his eyes and let himself get dragged into a remembrance minefield, reeling in from the past the very moment he crossed that line, when he’d given up on his younger son. He’d never forget. There was no overt act, but rather an omission, an absence, a message so scarring it now gripped him with such strength that he began to breathe erratically. Paul had purposely chosen to miss Joel’s funeral, his own brother, his own flesh and blood of twenty-four years. He’d disappeared for days, not out of sorrow, but rather to flaunt his spite on those closest to him, using a weapon even Sal couldn’t counter: apathy.

  Click here to learn more about The Serpent’s Game by A.C. Frieden.

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