The Man Who Loved Birds (36 page)

She found herself lying on the earthen floor of the blind. In her limbs she felt the first chill of winter. In her womb she felt life. She stood and pinned her note to the door of the blind where surely he would see it, though she knew that on this front she need not concern herself. Nothing was lost on him who was always paying attention.

Flavian was an agony of guilt and desire. For a week now his loins had burned. At first he balked at thinking of himself in that melodramatic way, so much a product of that side of Saint Paul that he detested. But two and three days passed and every night he bolted awake for no reason other than from the pure heat of his longing. In the solitude of his bed he gave himself over to it—how else could he get through the next day?—but the harder he punished his cock, the more it sprang back unfazed, eager for more. It knew what it wanted—it knew what
he
wanted, which was Johnny Faye’s plank-hard
body next to him, on top of him, under and yes, inside him. There. He had said it, or at least allowed himself to think it and by God it was no more or less than what he had read some years back in Saint Theresa, Doctor of the Church, in a passage so steamy that it made him blush and shut the book, never to pick it up again even as he had taken care to dog-ear the page and in a library book, no less. Snatches from it came to him of their own accord, bolts of lightning illuminating his dark night . . . 
an angel in bodily form, bearing a great golden spear tipped with fire, that he plunged and plunged again into her heart and beyond until it penetrated her very entrails
, a word engraved in Flavian’s memory because so uncommon and so true. And what lay in those entrails but her great love of God, the great sweet love of God that Flavian had been seeking all along. In that union with another soul he would find that which he sought, he would find ecstasy, he would find faith, he would find God.

And following these thoughts came the thunder of accusation:
Blasphemy!

His whole being latched onto these images for long daydreaming minutes at a time until the voice of his reason asserted itself and wrenched him back to the job at hand. Was not wisdom defined as control of the passions? And this desire for an illiterate criminal, of all passions! My God, what had he sunk to? Alone in his bed, fumbling at his privates he sought to call to mind the image of Jesus crucified, but the moment he lost himself to what he was doing lanky Johnny Faye came to mind, with his smart mouth and thick lips and chipped white horse’s teeth and loud laugh and stringy sun-streaked hair and big hard dick, my God.

This went on for the week and then it was Sunday and he knew that Johnny Faye would be at the creek with JC and ’Sweet.

And so the mass. Flavian pulled on the snowy white alb, then the black hooded scapular, then cinched them with the wide brown leather belt. He took his place in his stall and went through the motions. The readings and the sermon washed over his head. He felt his desire was branded on his alb for all to see and that
the abbot would surely say something that everyone would know was intended expressly for him and he silently welcomed public embarrassment. Nothing. And then the liturgy of the sacrifice, the ancient blood rites disguised as theater but still fraught with visceral power for anyone who was paying attention. The bread becomes flesh, the wine becomes blood, we eat the flesh and drink the blood. Compared to this, the central ritual of his religion, sex seemed like horseplay. Even sex with Johnny Faye. Here Flavian was at the focal point of all he believed, the elevation of the host and chalice, and what was he but a flaming pillar of desire, the tool of, no, the devil himself, incarnate.

Then the abbot raised the host and Flavian understood that it was not a symbol of anything. It was what it was, as real as dreams or love, a living breathing presence in their midst, daily resurrected. He was naked, stripped bare. The body had brought him to the abyss.

He fell to the floor and cried out. The abbot stopped the service; his brothers rushed to his side. Brother Flavian looked up—he had never seen the church in this way. The thought occurred that he is where he is supposed to be. A barn swallow peered through a crack in the stained glass—she hopped through and fluttered to her nest, clinging to the highest rafter. Lying on the floor, looking up, Flavian saw. Because of Johnny Faye, he saw.

The noonday meal came and went. Flavian ate nothing. He climbed to his cell and lay down. He was aflame with desire. He looked at the little windup clock, a hand-me-down from some traveling Catholic matron. He watched its second hand tick by. He stood and paced. He lay down. This was unbearable. Every cell of his body, every cell of the living loving world was a summons to his foolish heart
Go, go!
And still he fought back, and still he said no.

He lifted his mattress and retrieved the stuffed manila envelope, with its block printing
DONATION TO THE DESERVING
. Not troubling to change from his formal robes he descended the stairs—the
place was still as death, the monks all napping. He entered the pure bright blue light of late summer and crossed the state highway, through the gate. At the fork he summoned his will, he called to it in prayer, and he turned his feet not toward the forest and its cedar thicket and the oxbow bend in the creek but toward the statues.

Flavian walked past the sleeping brothers, straight to Jesus in agony. He fell to his knees at Jesus’ side.

“Help me do the right thing.”

Silence.

“Save me in my time of trial.” He laid the envelope at Jesus’s feet.

Nothing.

And meanwhile all he wanted, all he wanted, was to lie in his vagabond lover’s arms.

And he didn’t go, and he didn’t go. The sun disappeared behind a scud of gray clouds and still he remained on his knees. At one point he wrapped his arms around the statue, half expecting that it would come to life and he would be saved by the miracle of stone into flesh, by the life- and love-giving touch of Jesus, come to life to rescue him from himself. But the statue was only cold stone that left his hands feeling greasy and chilled.

The sun slipped lower, below the spreading crown of sycamore leaves until a gray high cast of clouds covered it, and still Johnny Faye slept on. Only JC’s bark roused him upright. The filtered green autumnal light, the creek’s gurgle and slurp, the heady smell of the marijuana buds, but something was wrong—JC never barked, not down here. Flavian was coming—late, but he was here—except that by now JC knew Flavian like a brother and wouldn’t bark at him. Johnny Faye sat up, cleared his head, and understood what was wrong. Flavian had not come, Flavian was not coming. On the still sweet air he heard the bells for Benediction. He did not want to stand and slide down the trunk to the fertile creek bottom dirt because once his feet were on the ground
there would be no escaping the fact of the matter. Flavian had not come; Flavian would not come.

Johnny Faye let himself down from the tree. JC was up on all fours, a poised bundle of nervous energy with one ear cocked and his nose in the air, but Johnny Faye called him down “
JC!
” in a tone of voice that meant business and after a moment of canine doubt he trotted to Johnny Faye’s feet and Johnny Faye squatted and took his head between his hands. “He’s not coming, JC, and it’s OK.”

His heart was a trash-filled sinkhole and JC’s eyes were two dark wells of doubt. Johnny Faye gathered his tools and pulled on his white cotton singlet and an old flannel shirt—summer’s end and the surest sign was the cool wet dark that during July’s high heat hid out under fallen tree trunks and in the mouths of the muskrat dens but now filled the creek bottom, the sun hidden by clouds. Still Johnny Faye dawdled, waiting, even as he told himself that he was only taking his time, but finally the facts of the matter were plain. Johnny Faye climbed from the creek bed and untied ’Sweet’s bridle, mounted, tied his stick to the pommel, and rode into the forest.

But instead of returning home he rode to the statues. He would go to wait at the blind he had built for the night she had entered it and made it the temple that it was, plump and sweet as an autumn quail, all curves and flesh, this summer-ripe peach cupped in his hand, his fingers tracing the line of her love. Oh, he was a lucky man, and if this could not last, let it be what it was for as long as it was given to him to love. He had hunted enough deer to know that this moment drew power from its uncertainty, from his knowledge that most likely nothing would happen, most likely she would not come but then again she had come before at times of her choosing, miracles had been known to happen, they wrote about them in books.

Sunday afternoon and Smith stood at an entrance to the woods, shotgun in hand, .357 in his belt. Squirrel and dove season was not
yet officially open but since he was low in seniority he was stuck with a weekend shift and he would end up working almost two weeks without a break, and so he felt entitled to stretch the rules in his favor. In any case when you got right down to it,
he
was the law, Harry Vetch had told him so and nobody was likely to give him any trouble.

The day was warm and blue and though autumn was just around the corner he saw no evidence of it except in a certain quality of light that gave the feeling of decline and slippage. Smith entered the woods via a familiar path that led through a gravelly flat that in his childhood had been scattered with flint arrowheads. These had long been picked over by children—no one had found an arrowhead in years. This saddened him—as a child he had ventured into these woods often, sometimes by way of escaping his father’s drunken hand, and though he had never found an arrowhead, he had been sustained by the hope that one fine day he might come upon this remnant of a time when a man had no measure other than his skill at returning home from the hunt with his hands full of game. Charged by the fantasy of finding an arrowhead he returned home to dream of using a pliable strand of wild grape to lash his imaginary pointed flint to an imaginary shaft formed from an imaginary straight twig of ash. In his heart he fletched it with found feathers and proved his woodsman’s skills by shooting the finished arrow into his father’s neck.

As if in response to Smith’s thoughts the buck materialized. A magnificent buck, too many points to count, the kind of animal one did not see in these woods or in any forest outside the verdant forest of every hunter’s imagination. A brisk breeze stirred the leaves and carried away both the policeman’s scent and any noise he might have made—otherwise he could never have come within shooting range of this beautiful creature, who could not have attained his age and stature without some understanding of the ways of men in general and of hunters in particular. His appearance was luck of the kind that Officer Smith had known little of in his life and
he was not about to let it slip. He was indifferent to the meat. He wanted that rack. He raised his handgun and fired.

The deer’s hindquarters buckled. Officer Smith darted forward, gun drawn, but the buck was off into the forest, leaving a trail of broken twigs and green leaves spotted with bright red blood. Officer Smith followed him deeper into the forest—so deep that he lost track of his surroundings and still he pressed on. Through the dusty hot September green he could hear the animal’s thrashings—it was wounded badly enough that if Smith could sustain the stamina required to struggle up and down gullies, through briars, over creeks, sooner or later he would catch his prey.

And he kept going, following the buck through the most rugged terrain until finally he arrived at a clearing in the forest with no buck to be seen or heard. He tried to still his pounding heart so as to listen. Nothing. He saw blood at his feet—the deer had passed this way only to disappear.

He faced a dense stand of blue-berried cedars overgrown with honeysuckle, wild grape, cat brier. He had trouble imagining threading a needle through growth so dense but he saw no other possible route for his quarry. Several times he tried to force his way through the wall of green, only to be driven back by the scratchy cedars and the thorns of blackberry canes mingled with cat brier. Finally he raised his arms to the sky and cursed his luck out loud.

During his dash through the woods a dense cloud cover had moved in, so dense that the sun was useless in helping him determine east from west—on top of his misfortune he stood every chance of getting soaked. He kicked savagely at the unyielding limbs and then took his buck knife and began hacking one branch at a time until he cleared a large enough hole to push through, slapped and scratched by cedars and briars, but after several moments he emerged from their tight-fisted hostility to find himself overlooking an oxbow bend in a creek he had never before seen, he who knew this forest like the innards of his guns.

He walked to the lip of the creek’s deep smile. Below him, thrusting
through rows of cornstalks, as astonishing a sight as the buck—the most luxuriant patch of marijuana he had ever encountered.

He dropped to the ground. He lay there for a heart-pounding moment, then edged forward until he was peering through the broom sage that lined the lip of the steep bank. For several minutes he lay listening—still as ice; it might have been a frozen January afternoon instead of the overcast warmth of September with thunder distantly intermittent. Time passed until finally he summoned the nerve to scramble down the bank and justify his eyes. It was marijuana all right, cleverly concealed from any low-flying plane by rows of now-yellowing corn and soon to be harvested. The buds were longer than his thumb and so pungent that he could smell their thick narcotic scent on the warm still dog-day air. The policeman reached into the densest part of the patch—where even the most careful grower would not notice—and pinched off a few buds and tucked them in his pocket.

Elated, he turned to go. He had set out in pursuit of big prey but this was bigger, this could make his career—a promotion, a regular schedule, weekends off to hunt like a civilized man. And then he was facing the creek’s clay wall and etched into its shiny blue-gray self was