by Paul Hawkins
Fly Whither, Finch
Copyright 2015, Paul Hawkins
License Notes
*
And so the three generations of Finch women met, drawn to the funeral from their disparate rough lives, and over conversations and the quest for antique butter churns and milk jugs for their country kitchens, they were gradually drawn into a common bond of understanding of the heart that lives in the shackles of its own design, a slave at once its own slave master, burdened only by the denial of what it can be, in moments of clarity it tries to avoid, the bold liberty of freedom denied out of duty, the heart too proud to be vulnerable, too injured to risk again, too young to be wise and too worldly to remember the untutored wisdom of youth, the desire to be free – a sensucht for a never-was that was nonetheless the only thing that it was made for, to want more than it could achieve, the rough and tumble of love, and to share that dream because only sharing it brought it closer, with the one you loved, opening a portal through which the impossible might be seen but not touched, if but for a moment almost in reach, when the language of denial has melted in the orange and purple hues of a sky that is neither dawn nor twilight but is the quiet place where someday greater things might be, a light of which the sun and moon are only promises, desire and desire and desire like a light that, finally, will never set. Fly whither, Finch, fly, whither? Fly free.
From “Fly Whither Finch,” (now available everywhere in paperback)
*
Sometimes things about myself strike me as funny that wouldn’t have struck me as funny when I was younger. But now I can be an object to my own self. I think about myself as if I was a history, and I try to put things down in writing. I have taken up smoking even though every scientist on the planet agrees it is unhealthy. It is one of the undisputed sins left. I don’t know why I’ve taken it up. Maybe I want to still be able to sin so I’ll know that salvation still counts for something. It calms my nerve as I think, anyway, when there’s nobody around me to offend.
I think with a clarity I have not had before. This is because I survived what I did not expect to survive.
*
In the end it’s always about the land. The inner-city Catholic neighborhood I grew up in is now a target of urban renewal via eminent domain. It has gone downhill since I grew up there, and the principal language spoken there is, as it always has been, Spanish. It is a high-crime area, but it also has holdout families, good people, and it has the church and the social services center. But it is now, in this riverside area, that the city wants to develop a business park, along with a sparkling public space called the “Bridge to Tomorrow,” in which a pedestrian bridge spans two riverwalks and joins a corridor of upscale shops to a world-class Convention Center, all in a greenscape environment.
Once it was only a slow green river cutting through dense trees, with collapsing fur trader structures hidden by the overgrowth along the bank. Then the United States wanted the Native Americans’ land and relocated them to this plot. But then this plot gained value and was settled by the land run and a tent city sprang up around the tanktown for the railroads. Then it became a city newsprung in a late gilded-age aesthetic, moneyed by oil. And in the 1970’s came the demolition of historic downtown for a great plan of urban revival – but that plan eventually devolved into parking lots nobody used and a downtown mall nobody visited. The high hopes had come to nothing, but they had motivated great leaders to risk someone else’s livelihood on their design, taken by force of law. In the end it’s always about the land.
The old Negro nexus of culture from the 1930’s has been annexed and turned into a white professionals’ neighborhood, complete with pristine loft apartments and coffee houses and high-end stores. The old warehouse district is now a thriving center for restaurants and pretend biker bars. The location of what was once the grandest hotel in the state was first transformed into a parking lot and then made into a public garden. They let butterflies loose there in spring.
In the end it’s always about the land.
And now they want the poor Catholic neighborhood as a place to make the Bridge to Tomorrow. Where do people go when they’re displaced? If you destroy the low-income housing, where do the poor live? Where do you ship the homeless to make your urban areas sparkle? To Tulsa?
*
A woman I knew fought the urban renewal. There were so many poor and homeless to take care of. Where could you build a home for the outcasts that would not drive down the value of the nearby property?
Maybe the city will pass a penny sales tax for social services.
The woman and I had known each other when we were much younger. I had thought I had loved her but it was with an early love of the heart, when a desire to be loved in return was all the heart knew.
For the longest time, in my mind’s eye, she was always in her youth, eighteen forever, no matter how many years had actually passed. This illusion was especially true when I was lonely and my mind was throwing strands at things to see what would catch. But now I am a widower and that ideal has long since died, and each of us loves but does not love each other, and that’s the way it should be when people move on.
But that’s all to get ahead of myself. In the end it all boiled down to my love of my son, and to explain that, I have to explain how I got to be the father I was. I was not the somber penitent this prosaic bit of an introduction might lead you to think. I am just writing this way because of the way I was taught in school, and maybe the way I was supposed to be serious in the confessional. In truth I was kind of a flake and an asshole.
*
I always had a way of making money – a Midas touch in software.
I lived in what had become a bedroom community of a prairie pretropolis, and I lived in a single story brick ranch house in an eclectic neighborhood built in the 1970’s, with no two houses alike, and my house had been identified by my neighbors as the “Oil Baron’s house” because apparently an oil baron had lived there at one time. I still got checks and stock certificates for the Oil Baron in the mail, but I always wrote “Not at this address: Dead” on the envelopes and put them back in the mailbox.
My house might have been modern at one time – it had alternating flat and peaked roof panels at different levels and a step-down living room and a sunken red bathtub in the master suite that apparently had cupholders. It was the only room that seemed to have been remodeled from the original design, and when we moved in, it was the first room my wife had torn out, even before the avocado kitchen. But slowly we had remodeled the whole house, room by room, and now it looked much more modern inside than out, which was frequently the case with the houses in the neighborhood as the original inhabitants died or moved out and were replaced by young couples or families.
My wife had died and my daughter had gotten married and my son had moved out to go to grad school even though the grad school was just across town, and that left me alone. I had work friends but I didn’t have any real friends. My wife had always made us sociable at church, but after she died I gave up church and took to nights sitting alone in my big arm chair sipping scotch, until it got to the point where I realized I was sipping too much scotch and sitting too long, and it was then that I decided I needed something to do and someone to do it with.
My first thought was to look in the Yellow Pages under “Friendship: Platonic,” but it was of course not a service offered there, or if it had been it would really have been something else, and I certainly did not care to navigate the minefield of the internet for companionship.
I had a cell phone filled with hundreds of business contacts all across the country but not one person I would call a friend. In fact, I began to wonder if I knew what a friend really was. Was it someone you knew well enough to have over to you
r house? Well, then what? Watch the ‘game’ together? Cook? Talk – simply talk? What did I have to talk about except business, and these days I thought I should let go of business.
I remember friendship from my childhood. A friend was someone you got into trouble with.
I never would have dreamed there’d be so few people I wanted to share my life with. My wife had been the person I loved to share my life with, but she had passed away. Now, deep down inside, I guess I felt as though I’d just as soon be left alone.
I remembered that friends are sometimes made by sharing and surviving adversity together. Then, if nothing else, you could be friends by talking about the adversity you’d shared – talking about it from every which direction as if you could never quite exorcise the thought of “What if we hadn’t made it – what if we had died?”
At that thought, something inside me suddenly wanted to seek out adversity. I was surprised at the intensity of the thought – I always did have a weird kink in my head. Immediately I wanted to jump into the car and drive down to Mexico – I didn’t care who with – you could get into real trouble in Mexico – and then just barely get out of trouble and maybe the guy you went with got put into jail and you had to call the consulate and try to bail him out – there was alcohol and a girl involved – and if you did get him out you’d be friends – or else never talk to each other again.
It was more tempting to seek out adversity when you had plenty of money like a safety net, like that billionaire who builds rocket planes as a hobby. I had plenty of money. I had bolted from a senior management position at an energy software company and launched my own firm and my company boomed and I retired many times a millionaire. I had, in a sense, become the Oil Baron, as if it was the house itself that dictated the destiny of its inhabitants. How had the first Oil Baron died? I wondered if would follow in his fate.
After I’d made my money my children had pleaded with me to move out of ‘that musty old home’ and into one of the cookie-cutter mansions springing up like mushrooms on the edge of town, but I had resisted, not so much because I had raised my family there, or because I had shared it with my wife – the memory of whom still stabbed me like a wound five years after her absence – but because in my mind it was an extension of myself, a cocoon where I could be myself, not some stranger in a mini-mansion staring out of an upper-floor window onto a new sod-rolled lawn wondering if the lady walking her dog was going to pick up its poo.
I sometimes had foolish ideas. I wondered if I should invite an acquaintance to go skiing with me and form a friendship by having us break our legs together.
I had the idea of going skiing in my mind when I went to visit a neighbor to see if he was a candidate for shared adversity and friendship. It was a man down the street who mowed his own lawn and pruned his bushes vigorously and walked a gorgeous Irish setter and seemed like a hale fellow well met, but when I’d invited myself over I found the man’s house to be full of animal heads – long horns, short horns, glassy eyes all around. He had an end table that was made out of a bobcat. The man was British and had been a mercenary in what he nostalgically referred to as “Rhodesia” and he had certain strong opinions that came out more as bourbon settled in him and his large bald head turned red, and he had written a hefty book on the Boer Wars that no one would publish. He got so plastered that when I excused myself the mercenary did not notice. I stepped over the recumbent setter and out the door. I had decided that I would not want to share the adversity with that gentleman.
The bobcat end table affected me profoundly. In some way I felt myself to be the bobcat, trying to escape petrifaction. I was a man who sometimes got strange ideas. I always had been, but the busy-ness of work kept it in check for decades. After my wife had died the world that had been grey routine through my decades of quiet productivity suddenly broke like the rent curtain in the temple, and now it made me feel like a stranger in a funhouse.
*
My name is Clayton Westbrooke, though in business circles I had called myself “Clay,” since people were more likely to buy energy-based software from a good-old-boy named “Clay” than from “Clayton.”Clay could wear cowboy hats – “Clayton” could push pencils. Actually, I preferred “Clayton,” but there were many many times when it was Clay who had sealed the deal by giving cowboy hats and boots to prospective customers in the Northeast and leaving them saying, “It takes a man like Clay from Oklahoma to understand the energy business from oil wells to electrons.”
I had made a name for myself as an inventor in gas pipeline optimization software. Gas had to move through pipelines the same way traffic flowed on freeways, but there were only so many pipelines and there were many suppliers and many consumers, and somebody had to coordinate all that throughput and keep track of who had injected what gas into the system, at what quantity and what price, and how loss and congestion effected the system and the price at different “sinks”, and whose gas was whose, and whose got priority, and so forth. Optimization of flow was an incredibly complex science, but just as complex was getting the participants on board. When I had started the industry was all good old boys and pats on the back and sweetheart deals with favorite utilities and whiteboards and phone calls and guesstimation. But government regulation of the energy industry helped force it to become more of a science, and I had been the right man at the right time, given my dual understandings of stochastic analysis and glad-handing, part college degrees and part horse sense.
But one never has a science of one’s self. I had always been a mystery to myself, though work had helped to bury it for decades.
*
My adult son blamed me for his mother’s death – he blamed me for not being at her side in her last days at the hospital. “It can’t be that bad,” I’d repeated to myself. “She’ll get better, the world will keep going – I have one more sale to make, one more agreement to negotiate, one more business trip to persuade clients that new regulations meant new software.”
I had loved my wife, but maybe toward the end I took her for granted as a business partner, someone who could hold down the family while I held down my career. At first she put on a good face, but then I could tell she resented my time away from home. In turn I told myself that even my secretary sympathized with me more than she did. I tried to be away from home even more than I had been before. I might have even been tempted for more sympathetic companionship.
She died of cancer. The prognosis had not been bad at first – one small lump removed from her breast. But things turned quickly when it was discovered that the cancer had metastasized into her bones. They tried a series of increasingly aggressive therapies, but they could never get ahead of it. She got weaker and weaker. At some point, finally, it came down to a will to live, so my son had said, and I had taken that away from her, not from her consciously but from a pattern of reducing her significance to me.
“I love you,” I had said, through tears, at her bedside. I had had my secretary pick out some very nice roses.
“Take care of the children,” she’d said.
*
My daughter Grace, who had married well and lived hundreds of miles away, came home for the funeral in something of a flourish. Her husband was an investment banker. They dressed in the well-tailored black of mourning. Their boy wore knee-pants and their daughter a small lace-fringed black dress that would have suitable at the funeral of a Kennedy.
My adult son, Robert – not Bob – showed up scruffy from graduate school, wearing a black suit he might well have gotten from a thrift store. The too-short sleeves were frayed.
He seemed the most reverent person there. He did not cry; he looked like an eyeless marble effigy that might grace a tomb. He shook his head as if he were concluding some internal conversation. After the funeral he hugged his sister but would not shake my hand. Then the children packed into their vehicles and left, and I was alone.
After three days of mourning I went back into work. Everything was running smoothly.
“Back so soon?” my assistant asked.
“You look tired – take more time off,” my right-hand man advised me.
“All right,” I said. “You call me if anything comes up.”
They never called me, except for me to sign things, or to report newly closed deals. Sales were always rising.
Then one day I called and said to take me out of the day-to-day operations. I offered to sell back my shares, but they said that would be foolish at the rate the company was growing. We agreed to a kind of titular directorship.
“You find yourself something you’d really like to do, Clayton,” my assistant, Tom, had said. “Life’s too short not to take new chances.”
I signed some papers that gave me the directorship. When I left the tall glass and chrome offices, I was a free man. I walked out to my Porsche and drove home.
Six months later I was wondering what to do with myself. My daughter insisted I go on a Mediterranean cruise. I did not like the idea but I loved my daughter and so I did it, though I was unpleasantly surprised that she had also signed up a couple from my wife’s old church to be my companions. It was not a good match – there were our religious differences. I had become more or less an agnostic after my wife’s death while they often insisted I lead them in grace over meal. In order to keep true to my lukewarm beliefs while fulfilling their expectations, I made half-hearted prayers; a typical kind of compromise prayer was,
“Lord, thank you for this food and for food in general since without it we would die.”
The woman spent most of her time making samplers with Bible verses on them while the man kept commenting on “My how beautiful the Lord made [Gibraltar, Greece, Morocco, the French Riviera, the Parthenon (even though he had technically not made the Parthenon)], and how wonderfully he had endowed the Mediterranean peoples with such ingenuity even though the Italians had not shaken off the shackles of pagan Rome. The couple and I drifted apart on cordial terms, and I spent the rest of my time on deck with some light reading – new federal energy regulations – and by the time we arrived back home I was all ready to set up a new corporation call “ElectronCo.” ElectronCo was a company dedicated to measuring the miliwatts consumed by a company's technological infrastructure and minimizing their power consumption through optimized scheduling of CPU usage. In short, a company could save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by turning off their computers at night. But it was more complicated than that - at least on paper - and paper, in the form of regulations to be complied with or surmounted, kept companies like ElectronCo in business. The government paid a lot of money to companies that tried to save energy, both in their operations and their products. Almost all electronic devices had a state of “sleep” when they were not in active use. Sleep saved energy – our company invented a more efficient form of sleep, and even now it was being beta-tested in a new line of cellphones for possible industry-wide adoption.
