The Man Who Loved Birds (6 page)

The boy’s lips and skin continued to brighten. The mother slipped from the table to her knees like a dropped stone. She took the boy’s feet and pressed them to her forehead. On a table to one side Dr. Chatterjee was preparing a compress of gauze and adhesive tape. Flavian moved his hands from the boy’s shoulders to cradle his head. The pitiless fluorescent blue.

Dr. Chatterjee bent again to the boy’s ear. “His name is—”

The mother did not raise her head. “Matthew Mark.”

“Matthew Mark. Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?”

The boy looked up at Dr. Chatterjee and the monk. “Yes, ma’am. You’re Doctor Chatterbox.”

“Very good. And could you tell me what day today is?”

“Um—Thursday.”

“And could you tell me the name of the president of the States?”

“Yes, ma’am. President Ronald Reagan.”

“Very good, Matthew Mark. You are a brave boy, and smart, I see. I am very sorry that we had to treat you so roughly, but you know that you could not breathe and we had to make it possible for you to breathe, and now you can breathe, yes? Very good. Now you may close your eyes. Everything is going to be fine, but we shall take you on a short ride in the ambulance so you may have a story to tell your friends.”

“And will you tell me a story on the way?”

“You’re a young man now, you may go by yourself, though I’m sure you will have attendants. Perhaps they can tell you a story. Now turn on one side, so I can listen to your breathing.”

“Promise you’ll tell me a story.”

Dr. Chatterjee smiled. “If you will turn on your side, I will tell you a story. For now we will want to take a look at your back.”

At this the mother lifted her head. “Oh, I don’t think you need to do that, no, ma’am. You can see for yourself, he’s doing fine now. His color. I don’t know how I can thank, what I can do to thank—”

“Mrs. Smith. If you could just help me give him a turn—”

The mother stood. “Oh, no, he’ll be just fine, I don’t think we need—”

His eyes focused on the boy’s sun-streaked hair, Flavian took the boy by his shoulders and gently turned him on his side.

Dr. Chatterjee examined the welts. “The skin is not broken—that is good—I see no visible evidence of internal trauma, but an X-ray will be required. Evidently there was enough trauma to induce pneumothorax.” She spoke calmly and to no one in particular. “If a trauma causes a gap, even a small tear to open between the chest cavity and the exterior, each breath pulls in air and that serves to collapse the lung, making it impossible to breathe. Asthma is a complicating factor but only rarely is it the proximate cause. We have equalized the pressure so that the boy can breathe, and as a result he is in no immediate danger, but we will need X-rays to determine if he requires further treatment.” For a moment she held
her silence, then she motioned the woman into a chair and sat next to her and took her hand. The woman pulled away. Dr. Chatterjee gently took her hand again. “Mrs. Smith. Can you tell me again how this happened? Bear in mind that your son’s health depends on my knowing precisely what took place.”

At that moment Flavian heard the ambulance wail—it had been a half hour since his phone call, the time it took a driver breaking the limit to reach their small town from the hospital thirty country miles distant. The mother said nothing. The boy’s eyes were closed—asleep? or possum? The wail enlarged itself. Those welts striped across that small back. Flavian turned away and did not look at the boy again until Dr. Chatterjee had wrapped the torn shirt around his shoulders and the paramedics were wrestling a stretcher into the room.

The priest and the policeman were fishing. They had become friends because, as Father Poppelreiter pointed out, they shared a mutual interest in the law, whether that of God, in his case, or of man, in the case of Officer Smith. They became fishing buddies because they each took Mondays off. Father Poppelreiter recovered from a day of saying mass in five different parishes scattered across two counties. Officer Smith recovered from a weekend of checking IDs on underage kids or seething under the threats and pleas of speeders (they might as well save their breath, he always wrote the ticket, no exceptions, tell it to the judge). Smith was young, with a weak chin and small narrow black eyes and eyebrows so thin and faint and the folds beneath his eyes so dewlapped that he gave the impression of having always been old. He was young but not naive—he knew perfectly well that the old priest spent their first hours on the lake in an agony of desire. Smith could see it in the priest’s eyes, darting to the cooler under the middle seat, he could read it in the priest’s ruddy face, where the intricate branchings of broken capillaries bore witness to a lifetime of longing. Smith knew those signs since before memory—his earliest recollections were of the smell of whiskey on his father’s breath.

Smith stalled the small motor and let his boat drift in the middle of the lake. “No respect,” he said. He pulled out a cigarette, tapped it on a gunwale, took it between his lips, and cupped a hand
to shield his match from the slight breeze. “I get no respect. Not from the sheriff, not from my wife, not from the kid, not from the lawyers, and God knows not from the judges.”

“At least you carry a gun,” Father Poppelreiter said. “Imagine enforcing the law without it. I have thought on many occasions that my interests as well as those of the Church would be best served by small arms. And when you reach retirement age they’ll let you ride into the sunset instead of keeping you in the traces til you drop.”

“Pull up that minnow cage, would you.” The priest retrieved the cage, let the water drain into the lake, and handed it over. The officer pawed among the flipping and flapping minnows. He scooped one out, stuck it on a hook, and tossed his line and the cage into the murky water.

After a moment the priest retrieved the cage, baited his own line, and threw it into the lake on the opposite side of the boat. “You have to
command
respect,” Father Poppelreiter said.

“I do my job, I do it good. You got other suggestions, I’m listening.”

“That’s your problem,” Father Poppelreiter said. “You think doing a good job is the way to earn respect. You take it from me. Your sheriff is the same as my bishop. You’re not going to get respect from him unless you give him some reason to be afraid of you.”

“So how do I get them to be afraid of me? I’m just a cop. It’s their job to beat up on me. It’s my job to take it.”

“How about killing somebody? That will get their attention.” The priest cleared his throat. “That was a joke.”

They sat staring at the flat green water, with its two red-and-white bobbers.

“Kind of warm out here,” Father Poppelreiter said.

“You might wear something other than black. Jesus.”

The only sound was the quiet lap of water against the boat.

“I didn’t mean to whip him so bad,” Officer Smith said quietly.
“But he wouldn’t obey, he was just sassing me because he could get away with it—he gets those ideas from his mother—he sure as hell didn’t get them from me. Somebody has got to set him straight, right? Toughen him up for the world. Better now than later, right?”

The old priest sighed deeply and turned his back.

“I’ll catch him a mess of perch, that’s his favorite,” Smith said. “Nothing better than a pile of those little perch dipped in cornmeal with a little salt and pepper and a egg to make it stick and then fried. He does love his perch.”

The lake had been dug as a raw red hole in the earth and only junk saplings lined its banks. Though it was still spring, at midday the sun made its heat known. The aluminum seats grew hot.

Officer Smith’s red-and-white float bobbed. He flipped the butt of his cigarette into the lake and raised his line—a perch flopped at its end, shattering with silver droplets the lake’s green mirror. The officer raised the pole too quickly. He grabbed for the line, but it sailed out of reach and the hooked fish smacked the priest’s cheek. On the second try Smith brought the fish into the boat. He worked the hook from the perch’s mouth, then skewered it on a stringer, dropped it into the minnow bucket’s cage, and lowered the cage into the lake.

The old priest held his silence, even through the indignity of being slapped by a fish—he was a silent black pillar of longing. Finally Smith relented. “Calls for a little celebration, wouldn’t you say?” he said. The priest held his tongue. From under the middle bench Smith pulled out his cooler and extracted two beaded long-necks and slipped them into cup holders. “Keep ’em low,” he said. “I’ve known a nosy game warden too big for his britches who’d like nothing more than to come across me drinking in the park.” He reached under the bench again and pulled out his flask. “A little whiskey for a chaser?”

“It would be impolite to refuse.” The priest poured the whiskey into the flask’s screw top, then tossed it down.

They drank their beers in silence. Neither floater budged. The priest finished his beer first. The officer took his time, but in the end he was as interested as the priest in getting a buzz on and they had a second round.

The sun was nearing the treetops when they heard the first of many cars. The gravel road that served the lake continued past it to dead-end at a run-down house, lost now amid the greening trees of spring. Every few minutes a car whizzed around the lake, vanished into the trees, then came to an audible halt at the door of the shack. A few minutes later the car reappeared, whizzing back to the highway. The cars arrived exactly on the quarter hour—Smith timed their coming and going. “They say the guy who owns that auto parts lot across from the bank is into it big time,” Smith said. “You never see a customer in there. And the parts—”

“Not what we’d—”

“Strange.”

“You’d think he was building formula racecars. But nobody here—”

“Weird.”

“What is his name?”

“Foreign parts.”

“Sends his kids to the public school. Parochial school not good enough for them.”

“Or maybe he’s afraid his kids might talk about what they see at home. Benny Joe—that’s it. Big guy—they call him Little. I’m guessing the auto parts are a cover.”

A squeal of tires in the distance. A black van streaked by. “You don’t want to turn ’em in,” Smith said. “We’re the only people back here on Mondays. They’d know who did it right away.” He took out the flask and took a swig, keeping his eyes on the old priest, who no longer troubled to hide his interest. “And it’s not just from below,” Smith said. “Now the big guys from Washington are coming in with helicopters and fancy X-ray machines. Like I couldn’t tell them the location of every patch of pot in the county,
not that they’ll ask. It’s no problem finding it. The problem is getting a jury to convict a guy who’s their first cousin, or their cousin’s cousin, or their aunt, or their bastard son. Do you know what I get paid? These guys make my monthly salary in a single sale. The temptation, Father. Take Little. He comes to me offering—”

“Offering what?”

“Naw, never mind. Johnny Faye’s the ringleader. His trial’s next month. Third time he’s up for growing. The guy is guilty as a Nashville hooker and I’ll bet you a nickel the jury lets him off scot-free.”

“I’ll double that,” the priest said, reaching for the flask.

The officer moved it out of his reach. “Scare us up a few bites first. I don’t know that I’ve seen a slower day. Maybe they hadn’t stocked it yet. Maybe we’re too early in the year.”

The priest looked at his outstretched hand, then turned it palm down and extended it over the water. “‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch,’” he said. He pulled up his line—empty—some turtle or fish had nibbled away the bait. He gave up, laying his pole in the boat.

“I get a fish, you get a drink,” Smith said.

At that moment the lake swallowed his floater whole, dragging the line after it. Officer Smith tightened his grip on his pole, barely saving it from following the line. “Jesus!” he cried. “Must be a fucking whale!” Under cover of the excitement the priest took a sip from the flask, then a second, while the officer struggled with the pole, bent almost to breaking. The line moved in a frantic zigzag. “I didn’t know this puddle grew ’em this big,” Smith said. He wrapped the line around one fist and dropped the pole, then began taking the line in hand over hand, past the floater, until he pulled up a slime-covered gray-green creature as long as and thicker than a burly man’s arm. “Holy shit,” Smith said. “What the fuck is that?”

“Call it a miracle.” The priest surveyed the fish. “Around here people call them mudcats, though where I grew up we called them
hellbenders. They’re bottom feeders—they don’t usually move more than a few feet in their very long lives. No good for eating—you can’t get the mud out of the meat. You don’t want to let your hand near its mouth—they’ve got a nasty temper and sharp teeth. The question is, how did it get into this lake? My father told me that on wet nights they can crawl across land but I never believed it before now. Either that or it’s been here since before the dinosaurs.”

“Ugly motherfucker.”

“Officer Smith. Please.”

The officer pulled the gun from his holster. Taking the barrel in his fist, he slammed the butt down on the creature’s head. A trickle of blood flowed from its mouth, but the long muscle of a body still struggled and flapped and the fish glared up at them with baleful eyes. “Die, you fucker,” Smith muttered and pounded it until the boat rocked.

“Why do you have to do that?” the priest asked.

“It’s our God-given duty to rid the earth of vermin and I’d say this piece of shit qualifies. You said yourself, don’t get your hand near its mouth. Anyway, it’s dead,” and in fact the creature lay unmoving, a thick remnant of a time before time, blood oozing from its mouth. “Might as well save the hook.” Smith took up a pair of pliers and bent to the task. He was prying the hook free when the fish convulsed with a last twitching heave and clamped its bony jaws on the officer’s fingers. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Smith cried. He grabbed up his buck knife and cut the line and tossed the creature into the water, where it turned over and floated, white belly to the sky. He seized the flask and upended it over his bleeding hand, but under cover of the struggle the priest had drained the contents and only a few drops trickled out. The officer threw the flask into the bottom of the boat, pulled out his gun, and fired a round at the fish. The report echoed from the surrounding trees. The fish floated idly, untouched.