Byrd (14 page)

William's hands are knobby, his fingernails outlined with paint. He smells faintly of solvent. He is tall, but bows his head like he's trying to reduce the distance between him and everyone else. Broad-shouldered, with silver-brown hair. Handsome in an arty, unkempt way. He and Peale look to Addie like older versions of the
Mod Squad
guys.

“If I dye my hair blond,” she says, “can I be Julie?”

It isn't just a matter of dabbing paint in blank spots. William takes photographs. He makes sketches. He scrapes off loose paint. He draws outlines in chalk so that he can erase his mistakes with wet rags.

The street people are curious. Every morning they come pecking around him like pigeons. He hires them to sweep up paint chips, hand his rags up and down, move his ladder. He pays them with footlongs and pink lemonades from Snoopy's.

When it rains, the street people huddle under the stairwell at Cooper Square to keep dry; William comes into the store. He leans on the counter and rifles though just-arrived books. He likes to collect things he finds in them—receipts, business cards, pressed flowers. He collects inscriptions, copying them into the blue spiral notebook he carries around everywhere.

He shows Addie this one from
Sister to Sister: Women Write about the Unbreakable Bond
.

What's curious, he says, is how this book ended up in a used bookstore, why Leslie's sister didn't want it.

Addie guesses maybe it embarrassed her. The pink cover, the girls in straw hats, Leslie's loopy handwriting.

“No,” William says, “I think it was something else. The unbreakable bond broke.”

It's less of a mystery how they ended up with
The Audubon Guide to Fishes and Mammals
, inscribed “To Michael, who thinks and acts and smells like a fish. Happy birthday, your Dad.”

A State student brings in a stack of Viking Classic paperbacks, including a copy of
Madame Bovary
on which someone has scrawled in thick black ink, “What should Emma do? Change her expectations!”

Addie says, “Sorry, we don't buy books with the answers on the cover.”

It's an actual policy, one they had to make after Vivian, a part-time clerk who also came with the store, bought a box of Agatha Christies from a customer who had written the name of the murderer on every title page.

“How could you not have noticed?” Addie asked her.

“Well,” Vivian said, “you still have to read the book to find out if the answer's right.”

William says his favorite writer in high school was J.D. Salinger. “I felt like I was related to the Glass family,” he confides to Addie. “Their long-lost brother William. For a while I even tried to write like Buddy Glass.”

“Lots of words?”

“And parentheses.”

“Footnotes.”

“Italics,
lots
of italics.” William smiles. He has brown eyes, hopeful, hungry, trusting. Like the eyes of a dog, Addie thinks. A dog can see into you, all your secrets, and still not leave you; that's what people say. She has never had a dog.

“Now you,” he says. “Tell me an embarrassing secret.”

“But that wasn't embarrassing,” Addie says. “Salinger was
every
body's favorite.”

“Not everybody pretended to be a Salinger character.”

“Yes, they did.”

“Tell me a secret anyway.”

“Okay. Here's something I've never told anybody. I've never understand all the fuss over
Madame Bovary.”

William laughs—a furry, barking laugh.

He always shows up when he says he's going to. He always tells Addie what he's doing so she'll know what she's paying him for. Once the basic mural is done, he says, he's going to “ghost” it—sand it with a belt sander, apply milk wash, tea stain. Spatter white paint to make bird poop. “It'll look like it's been here forever,” he says.

He talks to Addie about her work. “Bookseller—a perfect word. Double o's, double l's, k in the middle, breaking things up. Like a bookend in the middle of a shelf.”

He makes it seem okay to love your work and not worry about other things you would rather love.

On story mornings, another Peale idea, children line up on the sofa like dolls. Boys swing their legs, girls tug at their hair bows while their mothers browse the store for books they will never have time to read.

One week Peale invites William to lead story morning.

“William here is a mural painter,” Peale announces to the children. “Any of you know what that is?”

The children stare mutely at William. His face is cleanshaven and bright, his hair still damp from the shower. He's wearing a clean black T-shirt and clean black jeans. He says, “Who's heard of Roy Lichtenstein? Diego Rivera? Famous mural painters. My heroes.” He holds up a book he found on the art shelf. “This is one of Diego's murals. He was Mexican. Who knows where Mexico is? Diego used to eat people. He liked women best, their legs and brains.”

“Ew,” a boy says.

“Ew,” another boy says.

A girl in pink raises her hand. “I don't think that's true,” she says. “I think you made that up.”

“Be polite,” Peale says, and smiles at the girl so hard he scares her.

“What murals did you paint?” asks the boy sitting next to her. He is fat, with rolls in his neck and arms.

“I'm repainting the red hammer on the side of this store, for one,” William says.

“What else?”

“Have you seen the new restaurant in City Market, across from where they drop the big nut at New Years? I painted that mural.”

“It's an acorn,” the girl says. “The nut is an acorn.”

“Correct,” William says. “You, young lady, know your nuts.”

“Read to us,” she says.

William takes out his blue spiral notebook. He runs his hand through his hair. “Want to hear a story I wrote?”

“Yeah!” the boys yell.

“Okay, but remember, I'm a painter, not a writer. I just sometimes write things down. This is called ‘People in Cars.'”

He begins: “One day, everybody in cars forgot where they were going. A lot of them went to work because they couldn't think what else to do. Some made U-turns and headed back home or wherever they'd started from. Some pulled off the road and parked. Some took naps. They hoped everything would be fine when they woke up, but even in their dreams they were lost.”

One boy looks worried. He kicks at the sofa.

“Some just kept driving. They thought if they drove long enough they would get to the right place, wherever that was. Unless they ran out of gas first. They couldn't ask for directions, because what would they have said? ‘Excuse me, where am I going?'”

They laugh. “Excuuuuse me,” the fat boy says.

“Is that story true?” the girl says.

William continues: “Nobody knew everybody else was lost. They all thought they were the only ones. They started getting mad. Pretty soon they were all yelling and flipping the bird and crashing their cars into each other.”

“Flipping the bird!” the fat boy screams. He slides closer to the girl, crowding her.

She shoves him away. “Then what?” she says.

“The end,” William says.

“That's not a story. Read a real story. Read Angelina Ballerina.”

“Crash!” the fat boy says, and pounds the girl's arm.

The business next door, Curtain Call, sells theater curtains. Women show up for work early every morning wearing smocks and carrying Tupperware lunches. Their husbands drop them off. From her upstairs window, Addie watches the women kiss their husbands good-bye, then disappear down a hole in the sidewalk. They will spend the day in a basement full of sewing machines and bolts of flame-retardant velvet, coming up only for cigarette breaks and lunch.

Sometimes William calls to them from his ladder. Addie can hear him—“Beautiful morning, ladies”—but they never answer. They just go on smoking, eating, blinking like they've never seen the sun.

Swifts

William has been watching them all summer, counting. He wants to show someone. He wants to show Addie.

He picks her up at quarter to seven. The evening is hot, thick, no breeze. His truck's air conditioner doesn't work, so he turns on the fan he keeps clipped to the dash. When Addie gets in, it blows her scent around—sweet, soft, papery, like books. She's wearing a loose dress, green like her eyes.

“Where are we going?” she says.

“You'll see.”

He drives to the empty parking lot on Wilmington Street across from the Hudson Belk building. The store has been closed a long time. The windows are full of naked mannequins with vacant, dreamy faces. William parks, gets out, takes his cooler from behind his seat, opens the tailgate of the truck, and lays out a picnic supper: egg salad sandwiches, pickles, ice-cold bottles of Jamaican ginger ale. He wonders if a man has ever made Addie a picnic. He opens a bottle of ginger ale and hands it to her and she tilts her head back to drink. Her neck is long and thin. The bottle sweats.

“Mm,” she says. “Spicy.”

The sky is changing. Dusk is setting in.

They eat their sandwiches. “This is the best egg salad I've ever had,” Addie says, “and I'm an egg salad connoisseur.” Her face is luminous. She looks like nothing could ever make her happier than to be sitting on this tailgate in this parking lot eating this sandwich. William still hasn't told her what they're waiting for. She doesn't even know they're waiting.

“Kalamata olives,” he says, “chopped fine. That's my secret.”

At exactly seven-twenty, there is a loud whirring overhead and the sky clouds over, full of shadows, tiny black zeppelins.

“What are they?” Addie says, dabbing egg salad from the corner of her mouth.

“Chimney swifts.”

The birds fly in a giant storm cloud toward the Hudson Belk chimney and begin their wide circling. They look like a cyclone. For five, ten minutes, they spiral down.

William watches Addie's flickering eyes, the tiny shadows swimming across her face.

“There must be a thousand of them,” she says.

“Four thousand.”

“You're making that up.”

He shakes his head. He doesn't want her to think he knows too much.

“How do they all fit? Where do they perch?”

“They don't perch. They don't have feet, just little hooks that clamp onto the mortar.”

“What do they do in there?”

“Nothing. Sleep. They're too crowded to move. They're too close even to mate.”

They sit and watch as gradually the birds disappear into the chimney. Light drains from the sky. William starts to gather up the remains of their picnic.

“Wait,” Addie says. She looks sad, slightly dazed, the way William always feels when the birds are in for the night. “Is there anything you don't pay attention to?” she asks him. Then she leans over and kisses him on the cheek, a kiss so quick and light he will later wonder if it really happened.

Jackpot Land

Midnight. The sodium vapor light in the parking lot shines into Roland's living room, giving it an amber cast. Otherwise the apartment is dark. Roland is sitting on the sofa, holding the telephone in his lap, receiver pressed to one ear. He counts rings, wonders if she'll pick up. He wishes he hadn't quit smoking. He could kill for a cigarette.

Three, four. How many until her machine clicks on?

He tried her old number first, in Greensboro, but it was no longer in service. He talked to three different operators before he found a listing in Raleigh.

He's about to hang up when the ringing stops. “Addie,” he says before she can speak, “guess who this is.”

“Hello?” she says.

“It's me. Roland Rhodes.”

“How many Rolands do you think I know?” she says.

He laughs. He can't tell if she's making a joke.

“So,” he says, “how are you?”

“Asleep.”

He wonders if she's alone. She sounds alone. There's no background voice asking “Who is it, what time is it?”

“What time is it?” she says.

“It's late. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have called.”

“What's wrong, Roland? Is something wrong?”

“You're mad.”

“I'm not mad. Tell me what's wrong.”

“I'll call back when you're awake. I'm sorry, baby.”

He hangs up, walks to the kitchen, pulls a Dixie cup out of the dispenser and fills it with Jack Daniels. The cup has a Donald Duck on it. Elle hung the dispenser next to the sink where Dusty could reach it. Dusty likes to pull his own cups.

It's been almost a week since they left. Roland didn't understand at first what had happened. He'd come home Monday night so Elle could hand Dusty off and go to work as usual, but she and Dusty weren't there, and there was no note. He called the restaurant. He called Elle's friends. No one had seen her. Finally, not knowing what else to do, he called the police. They patched him through to a woman officer. “My wife and son are missing,” he said. “Are their clothes missing?” the policewoman asked. He had to put down the phone and go look. It embarrassed him to have to say, “Yes. She took clothes. She took the suitcases.”

Two days later, Elle called. She had taken Dusty to Reno. They were staying with her aunt and uncle, she said. Her uncle was going to get her a job in a casino.

“You're in Reno,” Roland said, but saying it didn't make it real.

“Yeah.”

“Jackpot land.”

“Don't kid yourself,” she said. “This isn't about money.”

“Then what?”

“It's you and me, Roll. We're just killing time.”

“That's not fair,” he said.