The Man Who Loved Birds (32 page)

“You mean the hornets?”

“No, Sherlock, I mean the flying cows.”

“Well, I don’t see any more of them.”

“Did they get you?”

“Only once. How about you.”

“One on my arm, another on my back.”

“Let me see.”

They compared war wounds. Flavian had one, Johnny Faye had two bright little nips of flesh surrounded by scarlet aureoles. “Damn. Sorry. Must have swung into a nest.” Johnny Faye took Flavian’s arm and raised the wound to his mouth. “Hold steady—the spit does it good, neutralizes the poison.”

“It’s OK. I’ll live.”

“OK, your turn,” and Johnny Faye held up his arm and Flavian wrapped his lips around the meaty hunk of Johnny Faye’s biceps and he was very, very grateful that the water hid that part of his body with a mind of its own.

“Sit still. They come after anything that moves. We better hang out here for a little bit.”

“Oh, sure, yes. Let’s stay in the water. Absolutely.”

A canopy of green arched overhead, enlivened by the grating
of cicadas and the panting of JC, now sprawled on a wet ledge on the bank.

“So what made you become a monk, anyway? I mean, there must have been something besides the war.”

“Well, you’re right. Not at first—at first I was just hiding out. But then I spent more time at the monastery and I came to like the place, you know, it just made so much sense, I don’t have to tell you that. Living with the brothers and trying to make something as a community instead of this idiot notion that somehow magically a good world can come out of everybody being selfish. You drive along the highway and you can tell the second you come onto monastery land, there’s something
sacred
about the place, it’s like the land belongs to God. Which is who it belongs to anyway. And our job is to take care of it for Him. Her. It.”

“Which is why you should keep the cows.”

“All that God stuff comes out of people wanting—not to be so alone.”

“I can see that.”

“When we’re not really alone in the first place.”

“I can see that, too. That’s what people are looking for and aint finding in sex.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. All I know is that people want to be one with the One. One with the Whole.”

“You don’t say. I have always said that sex was about being one with the hole.”

Flavian leaned over to cuff him on the ear.

“Sorry. I got a smart mouth. In the Army they tried beating it out of me but might as well try to beat the kick out of a mule.”

“It’s OK. Maybe it’s the same whole. For you, anyway.”

“Wow. All those years I thought all I was doing was fucking when it turns out I was communing with God.”

Flavian sighed. “It’s not like that’s the only kind of desire. There are lots of kinds of desire.”

“Such as? I’m listening.”

“Well, you know. Desire.”

Johnny Faye made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, then poked his other forefinger in and out. Color rose to Flavian’s cheeks. “Well, I don’t mean that kind of desire. Or at least not only that kind.”

“Oh? What other kind is there? There’s only one kind I ever known and it drives me crazy and makes me alive at the same time. Caint do with it, that’s for sure, but caint do without it, neither. Sex is this funny thing. You got to have it. You caint think of anything but it. It makes you toss and turn—it’s like knowing that the next morning you’re going to start a long trip to someplace you never seen. You think about it all the time. And then finally you get it and you go to that place for a few minutes. Maybe it’s the place the animals live in all the time, I thought about that, a place where the only thing that matters in the world is what you’re doing right here, right now.”

“A monk would call that
perfect prayer
.”

Johnny Faye gave Brother Flavian a funny look. “Is that a fact. It don’t start out that way, of course. Most people have to be warmed into it a little—even most guys, even if they won’t admit it. And then you get hot, and then it takes over and you belong to it for a few minutes. And you’re alive, nothing dead about you, everything says go, go, go, live, live, live. And then it’s over and done with and all you want to do is smoke a joint. You’re a stranger to yourself—you have to lie there a few minutes to find your way back to the person you left behind a few minutes before. And the other person, the person you’re with, you want to be tangled up in them and away from them at the same time. Least, that’s how it is with me. I heard a guy say once that people used to think that a man could only do it so many times in his life, could only—”

He stopped here to search for a word and the searching grew too long.

“Come.”

He stretched his neck a little and dropped his shoulders.
“Like you say. And when I first heard that I thought, No, that caint be true and then another part of me, the smart part, said, But you know, I can see how you’d think that way if you didn’t know no better. Because it takes something out of you, it surely does. Religion ought to be all about it, you know. It’s not like the place I get to in church but it’s where I’d like to go.”

“You go to
church?
”

Johnny Faye’s eyes narrowed and he gave a little laugh that came from some secret place. “You act like you’re surprised.”

“Well, I am surprised.”

“I always like it when people trip theirselves up. They think they got somebody pegged and they aint got a clue. I’d never darken the door of that church in town, no way. Father Poppelreiter would have a cow, for one, and besides I don’t want to go giving people the wrong impression.”

“And what impression might that be.”

“Oh, you know, like I was getting their kind of religion, all that kissy-padre’s-ring-assed stuff. No, I go to mass at Calvary when the mood strikes. Good friends with the priest there. He’s happy to see me, if you get my drift.” Johnny Faye pinched his forefinger and thumb together and put them to his lips and made a sucking noise. “Don’t ask much where I’ve been. Pretty little church. And that priest, he’s been around, he served in Nam, he don’t ask questions. Most of these priests, they don’t know jack. The church is just like the Army—the more ignorant they are the higher up they rise. Hell, if you’re dumb enough and willing to stab enough backs, you just might make general. Or pope, same thing, more or less. You take a guy twenty-plus years old, stick him in a room with a bunch of other guys for four or six years, tell him he caint even put his hands on his own dick. Then you send him out into the world, all a sudden everybody’s calling him Father and kissing his ass and buying him supper at nice restaurants and he don’t know a thing about sex and life except how to feel bad about having it. Now how in the hell can he help people be better than
they are, when most of the time their problem is sex or something coming out of it. You tell me that.”

“Because when I’m alone and in silence some things reveal themselves that otherwise I can’t see or understand.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Like the birds. You can’t order the Spirit to show up when you want it to. Instead you have to sit in patience and silence so that after a while, if she chooses, she might raise her bashful head and look around. You walk through the fields and the woods making noise, talking with somebody else or just shuffling through the leaves the way we do when we’re with somebody else and you’d think the birds had all flown to Mexico. But then you go some place and sit alone and in silence and after a while they’re all around you.”

“Well, you got that right. Let me think about that one.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll think about it too. I never thought of being a monk like that until now.”

For a while they sat still, until Flavian relaxed a little and his tongue got the better of him. “So why did you go for a soldier?”

“Because I wanted to be a monk but I caint stand religion.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I mean it. I wasn’t so dumb as to believe all that shit about how we had to go save the world for democracy—I mean
follow the money
as some wise guy said, any idiot could see who stood to make money on this business and it was definitely not the guys in my platoon. But I wanted to join up with a—
brotherhood of men
, like you say. And they promised me they would teach me how to read and write and then I could find me a good job when I came back. So I made my mark because I thought if anybody could figure out how to teach me how to read and write it was the United States Army. And that was pretty much the last time it got mentioned.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that. I guess it’s one reason to believe in paradise. Surely all those guys who died got more out of life than just those twenty years.”

Johnny Faye spread his hands flat on the creek’s cool mirror. “I don’t believe in death.”

“What do you mean, you don’t believe in death?”

Johnny Faye grabbed Flavian’s head and ducked him under—he came up sputtering. “Don’t you get it?” Johnny Faye cried. “Aint you been paying attention to nothing? Dying is just a dream the devil cooked up to make us scared so then he could have his way. Get with the program, man! You’re a monk—act like one!” Johnny Faye pointed around the creek bank. “You show me where there’s death. You could climb all over the banks to find a dead bird or a turtle but you’d be a long time looking. Ever think about that? All that dying going on—least, if you see things your way—but we don’t see a single dead thing. I look around and all I see is life, life turning into more life.” He slapped the surface of the water. “And this is my paradise, right here, right now and hell is all those people that don’t know theirselves. Like Little. Or Harry Vetch. Where are the damn wild places anymore, is what I wonder. Some place a misfit like me can call home.”

Flavian touched his heart. “Maybe it’s in here.”

They sat for a moment in silence.

“I’ll be damn. Something else to think about.”

“For you and me both.”

A long burr from a cicada stationed in the water maple over their heads. Johnny Faye looked up. “I think the hornets are gone.”

“I think you’re right.”

They ducked under the water maple and retrieved their clothes from the bank and waded wordlessly up the creek. JC trotted after, tongue lolling. When they reached the oxbow bend they waded out of the creek. Their hands brushed. Flavian stiffened like a flagpole and turned away and worked his way up the bank in an awkward crabwise step, trying to conceal his privates. He pulled on his shirt and grabbed his jeans and tried to get one leg into them but in his haste he caught his foot in his pants leg and fell down, his cock pointing at the sky and then Johnny Faye had his
mouth around the thing, that is what happened. Flavian opened his eyes wide and took it all in and for one second he tried to think of something to say but then some other part of him took hold and spoke in a deep, calm voice:
Suffer the consequences
.

Then Johnny Faye stood and took his hand. “Come on. Come here. I aint lived forty years for nothing. If you’re going to do a thing you may as well do it right and it aint going to be paradise lying here in the mud.”

He took Flavian’s hand and led him to the great sycamore and climbed up first and pulled Flavian up after and all the while Flavian’s mind saying
No, no, no
and every other cell in his body saying
Yes, yes, yes
until Johnny Faye sat him down in the sycamore throne and knelt in front of him. He tucked his hand behind Flavian’s neck to pull him forward so that he could shrug the shirt off his shoulders and his arms. Then Johnny Faye took the shirt and folded it tenderly and used it to cover the tree’s scaly trunk. He placed one hand in the small of Flavian’s back and the other in the center of his chest and leaned him back until he was resting against the sycamore’s cloth-covered arm. He tucked a hand under each of Flavian’s knees and lifted them and propped his feet on the tree’s other arms. Then he took Flavian’s hands, one in each of his and raised and locked them over his head. He buried his mouth in Flavian’s open armpit, then he covered Flavian’s mouth with his mouth and for the first time in his life Flavian tasted that most familiar of smells, the smell of his own sweat. Then Johnny Faye took Flavian’s root in his hands like it was some kind of scepter. A timeless while of this and then Johnny Faye took his mouth to the sweet nether places and the next thing Flavian could remember was a loud cry
Jee-sus!
that echoed in the pantheon of green. He would never have believed any human being capable of making such a sound except that when he finally opened his eyes—he kept them closed very long, because so long as they were closed he was in some other timeless universe, one where actions had no consequences—
maybe that was what they meant by paradise, a place where
actions have no consequences
—and when he opened them he would be back in this ordinary world of telephones and mail orders and Benediction—
what about Benediction, my God!
—and then he opened his eyes to see Johnny Faye grinning his crazy chipped-tooth grin from ear to ear and he had been waiting, Flavian could read it in his eyes, for Flavian to open his eyes so that the first thing he saw was Johnny Faye lifting his arm and wiping his hand across his mouth like the lanky stringy-haired tempter that he was, and Flavian understood that he, Brother Flavian of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance familiarly known as Trappists, had been the one to shout at the top of his lungs and on this sycamore throne the name of the Lord.

“Sssh.” Johnny Faye pointed up. “Kingfisher.”

But Flavian’s glasses were cock-eyed and when he lifted his hand to straighten them the bird took off into the September sky.

“Now aint that something. He sits there through all that racket but then flaps away when you so much as make a move. Whatever. Now it’s your turn. You don’t have to swallow, that aint in the rules, but you got to at least give it a try and see how you like it, that
is
in the rules.”

Johnny Faye stood in the tree’s crotch and Flavian knelt before him and closed his eyes against the slipping sliding late summer light and felt Johnny Faye place his hands gentle as the setting sun on Flavian’s head so that they guided him in an act for which he was amazed to find he needed no guidance because he loved this man, every part of him he loved. And when Johnny Faye said in a low humble voice, “Excuse me, Brother Tom, but I am about to come,” Flavian raised his hands and guided Johnny Faye’s hands back onto to his temples and kept his hands over Johnny Faye’s hands until he heard a guttural moan and his mouth was filled with something like life and Flavian was seriously present to the cause, he had never not once in his life been so present to his own reality,
perfect prayer
. Then Johnny Faye gently tipped up Flavian’s head and pressed his thick-lipped mouth over Flavian’s.
For a very long while they stayed that way, Flavian kneeling in the sycamore throne, Johnny Faye bending to his mouth, and gradually the twitterings of the evening birds and the grinding of the cicadas coming back to consciousness until Johnny Faye stretched his hands to the sky and leaned back against the sycamore’s branch.