The Man Who Loved Birds (24 page)

“Gotta get a handle on that. Bad for your health.”

“I’ll tell you what’s bad for my health. Drug dealers are bad for my health. We have got to figure out a way—at least now I have the goods to make it stick.”

The judge lifted his drink to his lips.

“Don’t laugh at me. These are felonies. Impersonating a police officer. Theft of government property.
Your
property.
Our
property.” Vetch was pacing now. He related his conversation with the loading dock supervisor. “Half of me is mad at Johnny Faye and the other half at the Sears supervisor for being so gullible. And another half at you.”

“At
me?
Why me? What did I have to do with it? I suppose I authorized the purchase of the air conditioners. Are you going to name me as an accessory?”

“You put up with it. You think he’s cute. You practically encourage him.”

“Harry. Calm down. Have a seat. Please. Go on. Sit. Don’t get so bent out of shape. Have a drink. Lord, I’m beginning to sound like a Catholic. Maybe it’s rubbing off. Another ten years and I’ll be calling for a rosary on my deathbed.”

“You see?
You see? I’m
fighting the war on drugs and you sit around on your
fat ass
cracking jokes.”

One moment the judge was carefully placing his drink on the glider’s wide arm, the next he was in Harry Vetch’s face. In bare feet he was a head shorter than Vetch but he stood close enough to use the bulk of his gut to back Vetch against the porch railing. “I am about to offer you another pearl of wisdom and I advise you to listen up. You are not out to recreate the
pax Romana
, look it
up. You are out to get rich and get ahead in your so-called career and the courts are serving you nicely as a means to those ends. Now. Can you
prove
that Johnny Faye stole those units? All we know, unless you have information up your sleeve that you have not shared, is that someone disguised as Officer Smith presented himself at the Sears loading dock to take the order and that later that evening twenty units—”

“—nineteen. He probably kept one for himself.”

“—probably the same units but we don’t know that, showed up on the hospital loading dock, deposited by an unknown benefactor whom the hospital staff has wisely chosen to identify as Divine Providence.” Here the judge placed a finger on the county attorney’s chest. “And here we find the heart of my pearl of wisdom: Politics is the art of the possible. You are in service to your career, fine. I would have thought you’d do a better job as a real estate developer, given all your hoo-hah about Ridgeview Pointey—”

“Ridgeview
Pointe
. You don’t say the ‘e.’ As you know perfectly well and I wish you would stop—”

“As I was saying. In my day we didn’t have careers, we had professions. But those days are gone,
adios
, too bad, time marches on and we submit. May I remind you, though, that yours is an elective office which I assume you would like to retain and use as a stepping stone for the next way station in your glorious
career
. How may you best serve that ambition? You can forget about the air conditioners and focus your time, money, and attention on Ridgeview
Pwante
, if you want to get French about it. The county will report the air conditioners as stolen to its insurance company, which will conduct the most cursory of examinations to establish that they were stolen. Your investigation will ascertain what you and I already know: The supervisor at the loading dock will not be able to identify the culprit. Our thief is not dumb, and I
seriously
doubt he kept one for himself. With a few phone calls we should be able to get Sears to absorb the loss since it was their employee who improperly released the air conditioners. Everybody wins except
Sears or the insurance company, theirs or ours, and you show me a registered voter who gives a rat’s ass about insurance companies and I’ll
buy
you an air conditioner and personally install it.

“
Or
, you and your army of righteousness can take those air conditioners away from the sweet old innocent Sisters of Charity. The air conditioners will sit in some storage room for a year as state’s evidence so we’ll sweat out the summer in any case, but every overheated voter in this county will hear that twenty air conditioners were bought by the big bad politicians who took them away from the old and the infirm so as to cool our fat heads. Meanwhile you arrest Johnny Faye for a crime he may or may not have committed—my guess is that he sent somebody else to that loading dock, but who knows? So you launch another trial in which you
may
succeed convicting him. Or he may
yet again
make a fool of your puny, prematurely balding
fat ass
.”

Vetch pushed away the judge’s hand. “And so you are advising me to act as an accomplice to a felony. Which the last time I checked is a felony in and of itself.”

“Most explicitly I am
not
advising you to take any particular course of action, not at all. I am only pointing out the likely consequences of the choices with which our criminal, whatever his identity, has presented you. Based on my considerable experience as an elected official in this county. Which you may choose to ignore.”

The judge turned away. After a moment Vetch saw his shoulders quiver. The judge dropped into the glider, which protested this insult with a salvo of squeakings and groans. “I’m sorry, Harry,” he said. He took the paper towel from under his drink to dab at his eyes. “I can’t help myself, I’m a sucker for genius,” and the county attorney realized that the old fart was laughing, and that he, Harry Vetch, was the butt of the joke.

“You haven’t shown me your homework.”

Johnny Faye was peering into the crowns of the surrounding trees. “Caint decide if that’s a vireo or a Tennessee warbler. A little early for a warbler to be coming back through but maybe this one wants to beat the crowd.”

“You were supposed to write letters until you had them memorized.”

“Is that a fact. A warbler would be, I don’t know. More lively, kind of.”

“How can you learn to write if you don’t do your homework?”

“What homework.”

“Oh, come on. Next time I’ll give you a quiz.” Silence. “Johnny, that’s a
joke
.”

“I told you I
caint
write. How am I supposed to write something down if you aint taught me how. And the name’s Johnny
Faye
, Professor Tom.”

Flavian took up his clipboard and pens and paper and climbed into the sycamore throne. “Come up here.” After a moment of sullen hesitation Johnny Faye climbed up. Flavian yielded his seat, sitting on the limb so that he looked over Johnny Faye’s shoulder. He clipped a sheet of paper to the board. “Here. I’ll draw an
A
and then you draw it.” Flavian drew a large block letter
A
and next to it a small
a
, then handed the clipboard and the pen to Johnny Faye.
“Look them over. Got that? OK, now it’s your turn.” Flavian concealed his
A
s under a fresh sheet of paper.

“Let me look at the picture.”

“No, there’s not going to be somebody standing around to show you a picture, you have to write it from memory. Look, I rattle off nearly a page of the New Testament and you can say it back without missing a word, surely you can memorize a few letters.”

A long pause.

“Can I look at it again?”

“Sure, take as long as you want.”

Flavian lifted the top page. Johnny Faye squinted and stuck out his thick lip and pulled it back and chewed on it and then stuck his pen in his mouth and chewed on that. Flavian clipped the blank page to the clipboard and handed it over. “OK, give it a try.”

Johnny Faye touched the pen’s nib to the page. It stayed in that spot until it grew a little corona, the tip bleeding ink into the paper.

“I see.” Another long pause. “Have you always had this problem?”

Johnny Faye threw down the pen and jumped to the ground. “I aint got a problem. Or anyways, I don’t need to add more problems to the ones I already got.”

He took up his clippers, moving from plant to plant and clipping the strings of floss that tied them to the surrounding stakes. The side stems of the scrodded plants had grown toward the sun so that in some cases they were as full and bushy as their original tops. Johnny Faye worked his way around his plot until he was underneath the tree.

Flavian cleared his throat. “I think—I think I might be in love.” The sycamore cradled Flavian in its big arms. “I said—I think I’m in love.”

“Shit.”

“Please, Johnny. Johnny Faye. I’m serious.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean you. I broke off a stem of primo bud. It’s
a risk you take in scrodding and it’s worth it but it don’t make me any happier about it.” Johnny Faye waved stem crowded with palmate leaves about his head. “Yee-hi. Jesus welcomed to Jerusalem. I heard you the first time. What do you want me to do about it?”

Flavian shifted uneasily in the sycamore throne. “I don’t know. I just thought since you have so much experience maybe you could give me some idea of whether that’s what’s going on. I mean, I have a vow, you know, we swear—well, not exactly to celibacy, that’s an assumption that most people make that’s not really true, but we swear to undertake to reform ourselves in Christ’s image and as part of that we take a vow not to gratify the, the—promptings of the flesh. So.”

“So what.” Johnny Faye laid down his clippers and came to the sycamore’s trunk. He held his hand up in a fist, then counted off. “First, if you need somebody to tell you if you’re in love then you aint in love. Second, fuck this meeting of the minds shit, the question is what gets your dick hard. If Jesus gets your dick hard then I guess you’re in love with Jesus though I never saw much future in being in love with a dead man. Third, who’s the lucky stiff?”

“Well. I don’t know that I’d call her by that—”

“Well,
her
. That eliminates half the human race.”

Flavian jumped down from the tree. “If you think—”

“I don’t think nothing, I just pay attention and don’t take nothing for granted, I learned that in the Army. So who’s the lucky lady?”

Confronted so directly Flavian wilted. He found he could not shape his mouth around the words but Johnny Faye was waiting. “The doctor. You know the doctor.”

To Flavian’s surprise Johnny Faye did not laugh or make a smart remark but dropped to a crouch and began gathering his tools. “When do you got time to see the doctor?”

“On Sundays. After I leave here. She comes to Benediction, then we walk together and talk about, oh, I don’t know. Religion,
and ideas, and India, where she grew up. And what’s going to happen to the cows.”

Johnny Faye hid his tools under the rock ledge. “That aint love, that’s—talk.”

“I guess I figured people have different ways of coming to love.”

“You said a mouthful there. Where’s JC.”

“She told me
you’ve
been lecturing
her
on what
we
should do with
our
cows.”

“It gets boring out here sometimes, you smoke a little pot, your mind can get a little weird. Anyways, they aint
your
cows.”

“So whose cows are they? Oh, yeah, right. God’s. Well, we claim the right of ownership on this patch of earth and so
we
get to decide what happens to the cows.”

Johnny Faye hooked his fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. “Where is that damn dog. I caint leave him here.”

“Look, it’s not like I was chasing after her. Dr. Chatterjee, I mean. It’s just—I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sleeping very well, and I spend all my time thinking—”

“—about her?”

About you
came to Flavian’s lips.

“Close your mouth,” Johnny Faye said, “the flies will get in.”

JC came dripping out of the creek. He planted himself near Flavian and shook, spraying him with water.

Flavian wrinkled his nose. “
Pee-you!
That dog has tangled with a skunk.”

Johnny Faye sniffed. “I don’t smell anything. You smell skunk?”

“You can’t smell that?”

“I swear you could smell a gnat fart.” Johnny Faye put his nose to JC’s fur. “Yeah, you’re right but he aint tangled with one, maybe just got in the neighborhood.” He pulled the remaining tools together and heaved his knapsack to his shoulder.

“But you haven’t even written a single letter.”

“That damn dog. Now he’s gone and run away again. It’s like he can read my mind. When I want to stay he’s forever in my way and then I want to go and he disappears.”

The cornstalks had leafed out, creating a dappled canopy through which Flavian could just discern the bushy plants. “Well, your plants are looking good, anyway.” He regretted the “anyway” before it was out of his mouth but he was compelled to say it by some demon born of impatience and frustration and some other powerful force that gave voice to itself even as he would not give it a name.

“Anyways my ass. You aint seen a better grower than me and you won’t, neither. Plants know when they’re being taken care of by somebody who knows what he’s doing.”

“Right, absolutely. I’m impressed. I couldn’t raise a weed.”

Johnny Faye whistled again for JC. Flavian climbed down from the fork of the tree and listened to the silence grow. Minutes passed and the sun was sinking.

“If we’re going to make the lake we’d better go. I have to get back for Benediction.”

“I know when you have to get back.”

More silence. Flavian dusted off the rear of his jeans. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

Flavian climbed the bank and crossed the small bottom and forced his way through the wall of cedars, now dense and unyielding. He walked back to the monastery, the sun hot on his shoulders. He resisted an impulse to turn back but his every cell strained to hear the sound of ’Sweet’s hooves on the gravel. He heard only the stillness of the summer afternoon, broken by the high drone of a small plane somewhere overhead and then by the bells, a half an hour until Benediction. He would be early today and smelling of sweat instead of lake water and the plane’s droning overhead was a wound to the heart. Maybe Doctor Chatterjee would be at Benediction. Probably Doctor Chatterjee would be at Benediction, but though he tried to dwell in anticipation instead he drifted back to
memory—on this hot afternoon he wanted so many things, none of which had come to pass: He wanted Johnny Faye to show some small evidence of learning to write. He wanted their swim in the lake. He wanted . . . the only thing he knew for certain was his wanting, he was a convergence of desires and what was he to do with that?