The Man Who Loved Birds (39 page)

Flavian spread his hands. “I want justice.”

The county attorney rolled his eyes. “You come to me speaking of justice when what I have to offer is the law. Allow me to realign your thinking. Now and always the question to ask is not,
What is just?
The question to ask is,
Who has power?
Now leave. That is a command, not a request.”

Flavian rose on unsteady legs, searching for something to say—stalling, he knew it, because once outside the door he would be alone with the magnitude of whatever it was that he had done or not done . . . and then he could stall no longer, he was outside, the door shut behind him, he was alone.

In the basement of the funeral parlor, the body. The coroner out of town. In his absence, the only local person empowered to sign the death certificate: Dr. Chatterjee, summoned by Harry Vetch and presented with paperwork.

“I cannot do this. I must—summon the proper authorities.”

“I am the proper authority.”

The body lay face down on a stainless steel gurney, covered with a bloody sheet. The room held no air.

“I will need to examine the body.”

“You don’t have to examine the body. You can take my word for the events as described as well as the word of Officer Smith who was present at the scene. The coroner would, if he were in town. I wish that he were here. I am sure you wish the same. But he is not here and the responsibility falls to you.”

“But I am not the coroner and I must examine the body.”

A long moment. Vetch closed his eyes and pinched his thin lips together. No one spoke. Finally he opened his eyes and nodded.

Officer Smith pulled back the sheet. Johnny Faye’s shirt had been cut away. The broad mottled shoulders and the skinny waist. The undertaker had wiped the blood from his back—two dark clotted gaping wounds. “You see? Enough.”

“I will need not merely to look at but to examine the body, starting from the front. Please turn him over.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Chatterjee, but those bullets do a lot of damage along the way and he was shot at close range. The mortician hasn’t had the time—he was waiting until we arrived. Now we’re here, you’ve seen what you need to see, let him finish his job.”

“Shot at close range while attempting to flee.”

“Yes, ma’am.” This from Officer Smith.

“I would like to examine him from the front.”

“Doctor Chatterjee.” Vetch passed a hand over his thinning hair. “Officer Smith may have acted without authorization—”

“Excuse me, sir, but you said—”

“—without authorization but he was well within the bounds of appropriate response. We need only your signature.”

“Mr. Vetch. As you are surely aware, professionalism assuages a guilty conscience. One may find solace in the knowledge of a bad business thoroughly done. I have no desire to compound evil with cowardice.”

“I will have none of that kind of talk here,” Vetch said, but before he could interfere she stepped to the gurney and lifted Johnny Faye’s dead weight. “Hold on,” Vetch said, “you can’t do that—” Meena leaned in with all her strength but the body was falling back and then Brother Flavian was at her side. He stepped in and placed his hands under Johnny Faye’s body and helped her turn him over. Johnny Faye’s chest presented two small bloodied holes. Their hands were covered in his blood.

“Brother Flavian. Leave immediately or Officer Smith will remove you by force.”

“Officer Smith. It is your contention that Mr. Johnny Faye fell on his gun? Shot himself in the chest, perhaps, while running away?”

“Bullets act in unpredictable and confusing ways,” Vetch said.

“A confusion an autopsy would resolve.”

“How could you know that crop was his?” Flavian cried. “How could you justify murder?”

“He made it easy,” Smith said. “He wrote his name in the mud. Like advertising. We got pictures but if you don’t believe me, go see for yourself. It’s still there.”

“Officer Smith. Enough. You’re not on trial. Keep your mouth shut.” Vetch turned to the doctor. “The law allows me to bypass an inquest in circumstances where I feel none is warranted. We have before us such circumstances. A chronic lawbreaker caught in the act of committing a felony tries to escape. An officer who’s done his best to resolve the situation is forced to resort to violence. The result is regrettable—I regret it—but that doesn’t absolve Mr. Faye of his crime nor render Officer Smith’s response anything but appropriate.” Vetch produced and unfolded a piece of paper, which he displayed to Meena. “This note was found in the pocket of the deceased. A very interesting note and, if I’m not mistaken, under your signature.” He refolded the note and replaced it in his pocket. He held out a file folder and a pen. “Given that you spread your signature so easily about, you can surely sign once more. That’s all we require for all of us to go home except the mortician who can then get about his work. With the signed death certificate in hand I may forget Brother Flavian’s explicitly illegal complicity in felony drug trafficking as well as the curious fact of a note under your signature in the possession of a drug dealer. Lacking your signature, all of our lives become much more complicated. Yours, Dr. Chatterjee, most complicated of all, if I am to believe what I hear from Miss Shaklett and I am given to believing what I hear from Miss Shaklett. She is, as you know, eminently reliable.”

Flavian reached out, then dropped his hand. He spoke in a low voice.
“Dr. Chatterjee. Meena. You don’t have to do this. This is America. You have choices.”

The doctor bent to the bloody corpse, to be brought up short by the strangest of sensations, so unfamiliar that she paused and straightened. She looked down to find her hand on her stomach. Before she could name the feeling it was gone, leaving behind not absence but presence and in that presence she understood: a stirring in her womb. Impossible this early, she knew that, but all the same there it was. The little voice.
I am
.

Every day of Meena’s childhood, a street vendor brought coconuts to her parents’ house. He had survived a childhood famine with his arms and legs grotesquely deformed but he lived in her memory not mangled and broken but as the peddler who set aside his smallest coconut for her, small enough that she could hold it in her little girl’s hands. He split the coconut with one chop of his machete and offered it to her with a straw.
With time I hope you may forgive
. But there was to be no time. What is time? Creator and Destroyer. She turned back to the body. Those bullet holes—the two small holes in front turning to gaping holes in back, then the single small hole in the back. She had chosen well. She had no choice. He is dead. She is alive. Their child is alive. She took up the papers and signed.

Flavian was inside his head and then he was outside his head. He had been outside the funeral home and then he was inside it. He saw the bloody corpse. He looked away. He looked back. He looked, he made himself open his eyes and see. He saw the doctor struggling with the body. He crossed the room to her side. Together they turned it over.

this was, how much, how long?

And the dog—where was the dog? What happened to the dog?
Where he goes I go and vice-a versa
. “What did you do with JC?” Flavian was shouting in Officer Smith’s face. “What did you do with the
dog?”

“I advise you not to answer that question.”

“I didn’t see any dog.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Officer Smith shrugged. “If that’s what you need to think.”

Where was JC? Flavian would find JC. He would find JC and they would go live with the cows that were on their ways to slaughter. Somehow he would pray his way into the place where the cows lived all the time, the place where they knew death as surely as they knew the cycling of day and night and they paid it no attention. Somehow he would forget that he was mortal man.

Shotgun wore a mask and Little drove and where the road turned right to go to town Little turned left toward the monastery, and though Johnny Faye knew what was coming down, that was when the fact rose from his gut to his gorge and he started to sweat.

And so what did the man think about as the law was taking him to his death?
A death he had freely chosen
. Johnny Faye’s mind went to the cloven hills, to his peacemaking place and below it the field, at least that was what he and anybody he had ever known except Brother Flavian would have called it, and probably it was just a plain old field. Flavian might have called it a
meadow
but the fact is that the creek running along one side had eroded its banks, exposing raw red clay, and the soil, though as good as it got in this part of the world, was stony and thin and gave forth equal parts of hay and thistles. But above the field a cleft between two rounded forested knobs held a clear-running spring where birds and deer went to drink, and each year between those two hills on one particular summer evening the full moon rose. Mist rose from the creek and hung above thistle and hay, thrush and doe and the mist was shot through with lightning bugs like starlight through angel hair and above the mist the clear mild light, soft as a lover’s hand and the hills dark breasts against the moonlit night. Johnny Faye thought of his longing to be anywhere else but here in the back seat of this police car, about to go to his rest in the place where
history had put him. For a man from Kentucky home is no other place. He had seen many men die and he was a singing bundle of fear. He thought of Meena, draping the sky around her earth-dark body only then to come walking through the fields to him, for him, for them. He thought of Flavian, what kind of big-worded answer he would give to these questions and how much he, Johnny Faye, loved his big words and mind and heart and clumsy hands. He thought of Rosalee, loyal to her duty, loyal to the law. He thought of Matthew Mark. He was muttering something over and over. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” until Little who was driving said without turning around, “Shut the fuck up,” and Shotgun who was wearing a ski mask said, “Let him talk.”

Then Shotgun undid his seatbelt and turned around. He shoved his gun under Johnny Faye’s nose and naturally that was the first thing he noticed but just about as fast he smelled his aftershave, volatilized by fear and anger.

“You don’t have to do this,” Johnny Faye said. He kept talking. He kept talking. He kept talking and the words were a balm on the wound, the ever-blossoming snakebite knowledge that Smith was surely a lousy shot and that it would not be a clean deal. What could he do? What can I do? What could he say? “Jesus, Mary, Joseph.” You will know what to do when the time comes. You will know what to say when the gun speaks. That was his gift. He’d been practicing all his life.

The car stopped at the gravel road that led into the monastery fields.

“Walk. Keep your back to us. You run, you’re dead.”

And so they walked a mile and more into the deepening September dusk, a serenade of screech owls, great horned owls, barred owls, chuck-will’s widows and whippoorwills, until they reached the cedar copse where the trees parted like the sea before Moses’ staff and Johnny Faye appreciated their kindness. Then they were at the bluff above the creek and then they were down among his babes, his marijuana plants, and the full moon shining
on his name circled with an unbroken circle, the circle only Flavian could have drawn because only Flavian knew of this time and place.

Johnny Faye took this in. He turned to face his captors head-on.

“Turn around.” The man in the mask talking. “I want to see your back—”

Johnny Faye smiled and clasped his hands not in supplication but in prayer—

“—turn around, you motherfucking son of a bitch, I said
turn around
.”

The masked policeman and Little were silhouettes, shadow puppets against the disk of the rising moon, one big shining piece of gold.
Shine on, shine on harvest moon, up in the sky, I aint had no lovin’ since January, February, June or July
. “You must not be getting any, Smith.”

“What the hell does that mean.”

“When I was a kid I said ‘fuck’ all the time. Fuck this. Fuck that. Motherfucking son of a bitch.”

Johnny Faye knew he should
shut the fuck up
but he couldn’t help himself, he was soon to be dead and he might as well give them a story to tell, something to remember him by.

“And then I got older and I knew what I was talking about, you know, I’d done the deed enough that I stopped treating it so common. These days when I hear a guy that says
fuckin’ this, fuckin’ that
, you know what I think? I think he must not be getting any. Because anybody who’s getting any pretty soon figures out some respect for the word, because there’s nothing to make you humble like your dick.”

Smith fired quick,
one, two
. Johnny Faye looked down at his chest where a red rose of blood blossomed, all the promise of summer in its petals. He raised his hands higher. “Why did you have to do that?” he said, and with blood pouring from his mouth, he fell to the ground.

Johnny Faye has some few seconds before Smith walks to his fallen self and turns him over—Johnny Faye is skinny but broad-shouldered and at first the policeman tries to accomplish this using only his foot but that fails and so he bends and takes Johnny Faye’s bloody shirt in both hands and flips him so that his face is pressed to his mother earth and then shoots him in the back and that completes the journey, Johnny Faye crosses over. In those few moments of transition between here and there the world is white hot pain and Johnny Faye’s only and all-encompassing thought is
This aint happening. This aint happening to me
.

But there is a place above and beyond and behind and before thought and this is some part of what lives there: He is looking up at the night stars and he returns to the wide porch with the ladder-back chairs and the cane woven seats that look across the chattering creek to the low rounded breasts of the knobs, springtime and they are dusted with pink and white and unfurling green, redbud and dogwood, he is sitting with his mother and she is smoking her pipe and humming a tune known to him from before time, and on the thin hum of her voice and the sweet smoke come the faces and voices and bodies of all the women and men he has known in the intimate way. He has loved every one of them. He regrets only those he let slip away or those whom he refused, almost always because of a failure of courage or his own stupid arrogance, how dumb, what a mistake. The lovely breasts of the women in all their variety, some round and full in the hand like melons, others small and sweet like peaches. And the men with the beautiful shallow “S” that runs from under the nipple into the biceps of the raised arm and their heady rich smell. He is supremely happy at the memory of himself in their arms, of them in his arms, witnesses in a great cloud around him. There had been nothing on earth worth doing but searching for love and allowing it to have its way. The secrets of the cave. The forthrightness of the pillar. In death he loves them all.