The Man Who Loved Birds (25 page)

Harry Vetch arrived as the second hand crossed the hour of their date. He drove up in the dark blue Mustang and leapt out—concealed behind a curtain, Meena was watching. He wore jeans and sneakers and an open-collared polo shirt. For the occasion she had purchased a beige pantsuit with a long-sleeved white blouse.

“Hey, who knew such a lovely lady was concealed beneath that lab coat.” He held the door for her as they left her office but then stood looking at the building, his features curiously twisted. “You’ve made improvements.”

“I am not certain what—oh, the air conditioner! I returned one evening to find it installed in my absence. Do, please, convey my appreciation to your donors!”

“I suggest pinning a note on the air conditioner.” He slammed her door shut.

He had decided they would go to the caves. He popped a beer and tucked it into an insulated cup holder. A half-hour down the road and she was relieved to see his good spirits restored. He held forth on the power of capitalism, the brilliance of the unseen hand that guided the marketplace, how nature’s laws of supply and demand produce the best of worlds if only we will let them act. “The way to best serve the common good is for each of us to pursue our individual well-being. Like the great Darwin said, ‘survival of the fittest.’”

“Indeed Darwin was a great man. But those are not his words.”

“Excuse me?”

“Forgive me but I am a fan of Mr. Darwin.
Survival of the fittest
. Those words are commonly attributed to him but they were spoken by Herbert Spencer to justify the rule of the rich over the poor and the English over the dark-skinned world. Others took up the phrase but—”

“Ah, the inscrutable Orient.” Vetch gave her arm a playful punch. “I love it when you talk like that.”

She gave him her most dazzling smile. “Such a vast subject demands a long conversation.”

“I like the sound of that,” he said, raising his beer in a toast.

They drove through scrappy little towns, the road lined with small brick houses and an occasional farmhouse with its wraparound veranda, a relic of a time before air conditioning.
Veranda
—the word owed itself to Meena’s liquid mother tongue. They passed churches of steepled brick featuring stained glass rose windows and bell towers topped with crosses. Then a billboard
Last Chance / Last Liquors / Beer / Whiskey
, and they stopped at the drive-up window, where Vetch bought sodas and a pint of bourbon, which he stored in a backseat cooler. They crossed a small river. Through cables and girders she caught a glimpse of a boy standing on a rock above the water, alabaster against jade, his wet white underwear showing forth his vitals, the heads of the other boys bobbing on the rippling stream. She heard their shrill cries
Jump! Jump!
and at that moment the boy leapt, but then they were across the river and driving past small white clapboard churches with windows of frosted glass, each skirted with a close-cropped lawn flecked with gravestones upright and toppled. They traveled through dusty green hills under a cloudless blue sky—the white hot midday glare bleached the landscape of color. “So many churches!”

He patted her knee. “Welcome to the South.”

They stopped at a small store with gas pumps in front of a
decaying assemblage of cement tepees
BBQ / Burgoo Home Stile
. The air was redolent with tomatoes and onions and cooking meat. A small boy wandered into the store and stood in the doorway staring at Meena. She looked away, then looked back. He was still staring, transfixed. She closed her eyes. A paper bag was placed in her hand—she opened her eyes and peeked—Vetch had ordered bologna and cheese. The boy was gone.

Back on the road now, a bubble of cool moving through the glare, the pavement an unspooling shimmering black ribbon saying
strangers, more, better, somewhere else
, the asphalt littered with corpses of small animals, each attended by a cortege of vultures with shining black feathers and red raw meat heads. The heat stunned driver and passenger to silence.

Then they were driving past the sideshow, the 100 Life-sized Dinosaurs and JR’s Redneck Miniature Golf, the haunted house and the fossil shops. The road wound up a hill to the caves. There were two cars—theirs and the guide’s. A tour required five visitors. “Somehow I thought it would be more, I don’t know. Professional,” Vetch said. “Let me take you someplace else.”

“No, no,” she said. “Others will arrive. I have never been in a cave. A great adventure.”

Not far from the cave entrance a massive tree shaded a picnic table. Meena brushed away leaves and spread a sheet of newspaper on the tabletop. While Vetch opened their drinks she took a plastic cup from his cooler and filled it with water and plucked daisies to make a bouquet for the table. She used a towel as a spread and arranged their sandwiches atop paper napkins.

Vetch poured half of the contents of his can out, then refilled it from the pint of whiskey. “Baptist highball,” he said, raising the can in a toast. “A doctor
and
a homemaker. May she find herself a home.”

“Indeed two can accomplish together more than each can accomplish alone. But I fear I have been given the path of the solitary wanderer.”

“You and me both. But that’s nothing that can’t be addressed with a little help.” He grinned. “In my vision there are kids playing in the yard. I’ll need some help with that.” He made a show of looking over his shoulder, then dropped his voice. “Can you keep a secret? Sure you can, you’re a doctor. Just between you and me—I’m going to switch parties and run against the judge. Not a word to anybody, now. Timing is everything—that’s another lesson I learned in law school. But anybody with a licked finger can see where this country’s wind is blowing. And I like the direction. It’s
my
direction.”

“My vision—my
objective
is to obtain my green card and establish a private practice.”

“That’s a completely different question. That’s a career.”

“Of course. As you were saying.”

“I was not saying. Or maybe you misunderstood.”

“Or perhaps you misspoke,” she said, smiling.

He did not return her smile. “I’m trained in the art of making myself clear. That’s my job. I don’t misspeak. I make others misspeak.”

“But from time to time we all—”

“Take you, for example. You’re an illustration of Darwin. Survival of the fittest. That’s a compliment. You bailed from a bad deal. You took charge of your destiny.”

“I would be arrogant to consider myself in charge of my destiny.”

“So now you’re calling me arrogant.”

She turned to him, astonished. “No, indeed, and I beg your pardon if—”

“You said the word. Each of us is in charge of our destinies. If not us, then who? Does that make us arrogant? I’d say it makes us American.”

“But I am not American.”

Vetch pointed at the ground. “You’re here. Time to get with the program. Maybe I can help. I’d like that.”

The guide appeared in the doorway of the gift shop. “We got three more victims. Let’s head down to where we’re all going to end up anyway, like it or not.” Vetch drained his soda and dropped the can in the garbage.

Their guide was a thin young man with black hair and a mouth that pulled into a rosebud when he was given to thought but widened to a toothy grin at his own jokes. An older couple and a young woman joined them. The guide led the group down a set of metal stairs into the cool damp until they were standing in a glittering room walled with folded, dripping stone drapery. The guide spoke of stalactites and stalagmites and pointed to a standing mass of stone. “We call this a column,” he said. “We’d call it a pillar but in these parts a pillar is where you lay your head when you go to sleep.”

He asked the tourists what they did in the upper world. The older couple (government bureaucrat, school teacher) had retired. Their granddaughter was studying to be a veterinarian. “You work with people?” the guide asked. “I mean, as part of your training—you cut up dead people? Because people are just animals if it comes to that.”

The girl shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to work with people. They’d give me back talk and then they’d sue.”

“Not if they’re dead, they wouldn’t.”

“You might show some respect,” Vetch said. “We have a physician present. My companion. My date.” He pointed to Meena. “And I’m an attorney.”

The guide turned the flashlight on Meena, then turned to the girl. “Watch out now, when we’re down there in the dark she’ll steal your spleen. Doctors are like that.”

He led them down more stairs and turned on a second set of lights. He pointed out formations in the glistening rocks—an eagle with a hooked beak, a dragon breathing fire, the world’s largest nostril. “You all feel dripping on your backs? That might be something other than water.”

The young woman giggled. “What did I do to deserve this?” Vetch muttered.

They followed a passageway, twisting and turning, the meanders of an ancient river frozen in stone, its walls cemented with small creatures’ bones and shells. A touch of a finger could stop time—the smallest smear of oil from human flesh and this rock, thousands of years in its growing, would die. Meena allowed her hand to brush against a damp stalactite. She quickened her steps to catch the others.

“This was where the guy who discovered the cave found the skeletons,” the guide was saying. “The Indians used it as a burial ground, then outlaws hung out here and then rebels during the Civil War and some say
they
left bones, maybe a Yankee lawyer or two they shot because they were parasites on the people. Now I’ll turn off the lights so you can see what real dark looks like.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Vetch said, but then the cave went black. Meena waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark until she realized that her eyes would never adjust to
this
dark. Before this moment she had not realized how the universe was filled with light, even its farthest darkest reaches were illuminated by the light of the stars. Few places were truly dark and they were standing in one of them—at the bottom of a cave.

She closed, opened, closed her eyes—no difference. The blind knew more light than this. She feared that Vetch would take her hand and found herself grateful that he could in no manner find it or distinguish between it and the hand of any other person. The thought came unbidden and unwanted: She did not want to be here with Harry Vetch. She did not want to be here with anyone. She wanted to be here alone, in this sunless sightless place. If she could not be alone, if she
must
have company, then let it be—Johnny Faye, the outlaw, the character, the
force of nature
. A revelation. A shock.

“If you stayed in this room for six months you’d go blind,” their guide was saying. “A white film would form over your eyes
and you wouldn’t be able to see a thing. After a while you’d think that dripping was the voices of children, calling your name. You’d hear the cave breathing—yep, the earth breathes, in and out, every morning and around sunset, you don’t believe me you come back at suppertime—you’d hear that breathing and you’d think it was the voices of all the dead the Indians buried here. You’d feel the dripping on your skin and you’d think it was the hands of the dead—”

“Stop it.” Vetch’s reedy voice out of the black. “Stop this nonsense and turn on the lights or I’ll see to it that you and the owner of this place regret it.”

“Well, sure, sir, gee.” The lights came on. Now she was blind again, in a different way. “It was just a joke, all right?”

“Some joke. Get us out of here.”

Up the stairs they climbed through folded, dripping crystal drapes, the cave’s breath soft and cool on her skin, until they were back above in the bright steamy summer heat and Vetch was buying soft drinks from a machine. He put hers on the table, then poured half of his on the ground, his hand trembling. “Geez. You won’t catch me down there again. And that clown of a guide. He wanted a tip, did you see that? He was hanging around with his hand practically held out. Fat chance.” He tipped the pint into his can, then sat.

A bird’s flutter drew her attention to the tree, with its large leaves and dangling clusters of green nuts. “Look, a pawlonia!” Meena exclaimed. “It grows in Bengal. How strange to see it here—like encountering an old friend halfway around the world.”

“I don’t see what’s so strange about that. We live in a marketplace economy. I’ll bet half of what you see came from someplace else.”

“All the same. They are so beautiful when they bloom. So tropical, really.”

“Hey, at first you said you couldn’t wait to get out of your country, now you’re talking about it like it was paradise.”

She studied a file of ants, drawn by the soft drink’s sugared
spill. “I don’t recall saying I could not wait to get out of my country but—”

“Didn’t you say that you had never known anything but war and violence?”

“That’s not precisely—”

“Yes or no, did you say that or not? Were you thrilled to leave there or not?”

“I felt so many emotions, Harry, I am scarcely able to name one apart from another. Coming to America—my first trip abroad and I was committing myself to living in another country. I could not possibly have understood what that meant.”

Vetch groaned. “I ask a yes or no question and I get a lecture on human psychology. In the courtroom there’s a winner and a loser, a right and a wrong, a conviction or an acquittal. That’s the way the law works. And I know which side I aim to be on.”

He stood and went to the car. He pulled a map from the back seat, spreading it on the car’s roof. She sipped from a soda and a fiery sweetness filled her mouth—she had taken up his can, spiked with whiskey he’d bought at the
Last Chance
.

She followed him to the car, where she faced him head on. “Harry, you are speaking with the voice of the alcohol. The voice of your drinking.”

His mouth made a small “o,” then his face crumpled. On his face she saw warring impulses—to strike? Or to weep? She turned away.

A flock of birds rose from a nearby field. She watched as they flew, guided by an invisible, inaudible signal, turning and diving as one. “Swallows.” She pointed. “No, starlings.”