The Man Who Loved Birds (26 page)

“My, aren’t you the birdwatcher.”

“I have had a teacher.” A demon had got hold of her tongue. “A farmer named Johnny Faye.”

“
Johnny Faye?
Where in the—how have you come to know Johnny Faye?”

A little spark of triumph in her heart, overwhelmed in an
instant by a wave of remorse—surely one did not speak this way on a
date
. “He came to me as a patient, but he has shared a bit of his knowledge of birds.”

Vetch refolded the map and sat on the bench. “Look, I know you have less choice than I do about who walks through your door, but steer clear of that guy. He’s a criminal.” He narrowed his eyes into an uncomfortably direct stare. “Not the best acquaintance for someone whose future depends on the good will of the law.”

“Harry, you are a very good attorney.”

“Uh, Meena.” Vetch took up his drink and rolled it between his palms. “I know I sometimes say things—well, I have a few drinks and then I speak the truth,
in vino veritas
, you know, but I can sometimes be a little blunt, maybe a little too direct.”

“I have no difficulty with directness.”

He leaned across the picnic table and pecked her cheek. “But if I may offer you some counsel, as we say in my trade. For your well-being. For the sake of the dreams you must carry, yes? You are an immigrant. In the part of the world where you come from people just live in history. It sweeps them along one way, then another. In this country you can seize history and make it your own. Immigration was only the first step. Listen to yourself sometime, telling those old stories—what it was like back there. Why are you fixated on that place? What did it offer you? You’re here now. Let it go.”

“Home is the well of suffering and of love.” She had not known she possessed such words. She closed her eyes and turned away.

Vetch reached across the table and laid his hand over hers. “Meena, those aren’t necessarily connected.”

She withdrew her hand. “Now I know I am in America.”

A shadow crossed Vetch’s countenance. “Nobody here cares about your past. You’re free from all that—that’s what freedom means, don’t you see?” His hands grew animated, beseeching. “Of course you can’t see, you’ve never known it. America is the empire, we’re where the power is, we want to hear about action. We want
to know what you’re doing
now
, not what trees you lived under twenty years ago. Isn’t that why you came here?”

The starlings rose again as a mass. A hawk swooped and circled at the edges of the great fluid fluttering flock—whenever it tried to attack, the birds closed ranks. Finally it flew away. “The strong protecting the weak,” Meena said.

“What’s that?”

She pointed at the birds settling to earth. “A challenge to
survival of the fittest
. The flock flew as a group so as to protect themselves against their attacker. They concerned themselves not with any particular individual but with the whole. They prosper through cooperation, not competition.” She turned to him again. “Let me tell you a shocking thing. Perhaps the most shocking thing an American attorney can hear? I am not legally alive. I have no birth certificate. When I went to obtain a passport I was told I needed sworn statements from witnesses to prove the time and place of my birth. But any witnesses there might have been were dead. They had been bombed by planes or shot with guns bought with American money. Or they were Muslims killed by Muslims. Or they were Hindus killed by Muslims. What difference did it make? After the hearing I sold the first of the rubies my mother had sewn into the hem of my school uniform when she sent me away from the war. Within the month I had my passport. But let us for the moment imagine my fate without those rubies.” She took his hand and pinched it.

“Ow!”

“How remarkable! You feel my pinch, when according to the law I do not exist. Must you have a piece of paper to tell you who I am? Must I have a piece of paper to know?” She dropped his hand.

Vetch picked up a rock and tossed it into the midst of the flock. The birds rose as one, then moments later resettled to earth.

Then they were back on the road. The landscape grew wilder and more rugged, the houses more widely spaced. For an hour and
more they rode in silence until the traffic thinned and the roads narrowed and they were almost back where they came from.

Vetch pulled to the side of the road and turned off the car. “Meena. May I take your hand? Please, I won’t bite and I promise to give it back.” He took her hand. “I feel like we’ve gotten off to a rocky start, which is too bad because I think we really like each other. When you came into the room on the day of that screwed-up slide show—the one good thing that came out of that, shall we say, disappointing evening is that you walked into the room and it was like I heard a voice in my head that said: This is it. There she is. Maybe I’m old enough, finally, to understand the difference between what I want and what I need. I just wanted you to know that from the first time I saw you I thought: This lady is special. This beautiful woman is worthy of my love. Tell me at least that you’ll think over another date. What harm is there in a date? Think of your future in this community. Your future in this country. This is not a place that takes kindly to the presence of single women.”

She took back her hand and folded her arms and looked out the window. “If there is a place in the world that takes kindly to the presence of single women, I have yet to encounter it.”

He started the car and turned down a gravel road. “I want to show you something. The highlight of the day.” They came to a stop in a rolling green field sliced open by a dusty red gash. “This is it,” he said, waving his hand in a wide sweep. “Welcome to Ridgeview Pointe. Oh, I know it’s not much to look at right now. But you have to see it like I see it. Standing here we’re looking down the dogleg of the ninth hole fairway. My house”—he pointed at a hole carved into the woods—“will sit right there.”

“How lovely.”

He turned to her then and took her hand. “What’s good for me or for you is or can be good for everybody, that’s what you’ve got to get your head around. That’s the American way.” After a moment he put the car in gear and drove forward, bouncing across the rutted dirt.

They reached the site of his dream house and stepped from the car. He showed her where the great room would rise to its beam and where the windows would look out onto the fairway.

Meena murmured appreciative noises before turning back to the car, but before she could reach it the skies opened up—a brief, dense shower that came without warning, the kind of rain that precipitates itself after too many rainless humid days.

They jumped in the car and Vetch threw it into reverse, to hit a patch of mud—the summer’s drought had crumbled the bulldozed earth to the finest dust and the briefest wetting turned it slick. The wheels spun. He shifted again. The wheels dug deeper. He shifted to reverse and gunned the accelerator. A blue cloud enveloped them and rose to tangle itself in the limbs of nearby trees. Vetch muttered to himself, then sat back. “Well. I’m going to have to find a rock or a limb and wedge it under the rear wheel.”

He stepped from the car and into the nearby forest. The setting sun emerged from the clouds and the car grew warm. Meena climbed out and stepped through the mud to the rear of the car.

At her feet, a small orange flag, dug up by the spinning wheels—a pennant.

R
ID
V
IEW
P
O T

She bent to pick it up but could not pull it free—it was attached to a thin white pole that led to something deeper.

Vetch returned carrying rocks. She drew his attention to the dirtied pennant. He crouched to look at it more closely. “What the heck—”

“I should say it looks like a pennant,” she said. “Of the sort one sees on golf carts.”

He wrapped his hand around it and pulled but it did not give. “Um, would you excuse me?” He walked to the rear of the car, turned his back to her and raised his hands. A cry of anger and frustration. Meena stifled a smile.

Vetch climbed in the car and gunned the accelerator—forward, then back. She was surrounded by blue smoke, so much that
she took off her shoes and walked farther into the open muddy field . . . and then it began to rain again, another shower, a warm tropical rain, brief and intense, the monsoon rain of her childhood.

She threw her pumps to the sky and ran through the rain until she was far from the car’s exhaust and there she stopped and stood with her head tilted back and the warm rain falling in her eyes and ears and open mouth.

Across the ruddy field the Mustang bucked and smoked and lurched from its ruts. It moved slowly across the horizon against the backdrop of the forest, dark with evening shadow. She gathered her shoes and plodded across the mud.

Vetch was leaning against the car, arms folded. “What was that about?”

“Only a moment of pleasure at the feel of rain in this dry summer,” she said. “Mr.—Harry. In this country where I am in charge of my destiny I will ask for your help. As the physician responsible for Matthew Mark Smith, I am asking you to intervene to protect him and his mother from violence at the hands of Mr. Smith. Officer Smith.”

A pained silence, then Vetch moved from his car and stood before her. “Look, Meena. Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m thrilled to have a doctor in this county—I’m significantly responsible for your coming here, you know that, yes? But no good deed goes unpunished. Plenty of people are already saying, ‘We got along fine without a doctor.’ Some of them object to a—
foreigner
in our midst, a doctor who is first, a woman, and second—well, not like them. If you prove to be—
difficult
, you-know-who will get the blame. I have a vision for this place. I don’t want to see it derailed by finger-pointing and gossip. I’m assuming I don’t need to finish out that line of thinking.”

“You do not need to finish out that line of thinking.”

“Now. You understand that I’m not the bad news, I’m just the messenger, I’m describing things as they are, not as I might want them to be. You are the boy’s physician, you can push me to take
action against Officer Smith and I’ll oblige. But consider what might come to pass. The boy gets placed in a foster home and that’s no guarantee that his situation will improve, not in my experience. Or he doesn’t get put in a foster home and you’ve waved a red flag in front of the bull. And
you
don’t have to live with the bull. It’s his wife and the boy who are living with the bull.”

Meena turned away. “I understand what you are saying.”

“On top of which Smith comes from a big family in a small county and they vote for their friends. Watch your tongue—for the sake of the Smith child but first and foremost for your own sake. So long as you are not a citizen or at least resident alien you are very vulnerable. You understand this, yes? Forget about protecting
him
. Think about protecting yourself. I will help in every way I can but I need your assistance.” He met her eyes. “Or at least cooperation. Yes? Can I count at least on that?”

Then they were driving back to the town, around the central square with its symmetrical courthouse, past a large church with white pillars and a silver steeple. He stopped in front of her office. She opened the car door.

“Meena. Think about what I said.”

“On that front you need not concern yourself. I think of little else.” A gesture was wanted. She held out her hand. “Thank you for your concern.”

Inside her office, alone with her thoughts. The air was a hot wet clutching hand—it might have been the last of the nights before the monsoon except that there would be no monsoon, only more drought. No man in her life had ever worked to earn her favors. Her father’s voice in her head.
A hundred ways to do something and our Meena will choose the hardest
. Many years since she had laid eyes on her father and she would rephrase his observation:
A hundred ways to do something and the hardest will choose our Meena
. The room was a cinderblock oven.

She had not gone on this date for the sake of Matthew Mark. She had not gone even in hopes of marriage. She had gone in hopes
of being saved from herself. Saved from her responsibilities to Matthew Mark. Saved from Johnny Faye. And Harry Vetch would be happy to save her. All that was required was submission—no. All that was required was the
appearance
of submission. And she was a Bengali woman, well-schooled in the art of the appearance of submission.

She knelt and turned on the air conditioner and basked in its stream of cool air.

For the past year Harry Vetch had found himself conscious of his hands. He had always admired them—small and fine-boned. As he aged their veins had grown more prominent in a way that gave them character. Lately he had taken to displaying them to his clients—splayed against the polished wood of his desk they conveyed authority.

Driving home from his date with Meena he felt them acutely—he waved his right hand in the space above the passenger seat where a few minutes before Meena had been sitting. He removed first the left, then the right from the steering wheel and flexed each open, then shut. His fist was not as compact as it had once been—swelling in the joints. In the gesture he understood his growing consciousness of his hands’ breadth and length and bones, the tightness in their muscles and sinews, the prominence of their veins: Evidence,
prima facie
, inarguable, of his growing old—of his mortality.

The next day he sent her flowers.

“Listen.”

Meena tilted her head. A sweet bobbling, pure and cool—spring water.

“Carolina wren.”

“When are you going to tell how the birds got their names?”

“Are you asking?”

“Yes, I am asking. Please.”

“Well. Since you say please. Not long after settlers arrived in these parts the birds pretty much disappeared. I know all this because of a accident of the blood. My mamma is the youngest child of the oldest child of the youngest child in her particular family. And that meant that when she grew up the stories she heard every day were stories from way back because of the way remembering works. You see what I mean? Since her mamma was the oldest child she heard the stories of the oldest people alive and so her stories went way back. But since
her
mamma—my mamma’s mamma, my grandmamma—was the youngest child, she lived a long time into my mamma’s remembering and so my mamma heard all her stories over and over and she had plenty of chances to remember them.