I seemed to be a bachelor. For years I wondered whenever the phone rang late at night if it might be Debbie. It never was. I realized now that it never would be. There were quite a few things like that.
“Did that fellow ever bring you an airplane?”
“Womack. Yes, a while back actually.”
“To start crop dusting again?”
“This is a different kind of plane. Takes off and lands on small runways. And it can carry quite a load.”
“To do what?”
“Oh, there’s always a call for a plane like that.”
“Mining equipment, I suppose.”
“Sure.”
“So, where is Womack now?”
“He got a room.”
“Where did he get a room?”
“One of those little towns. Over near Rapelje, I think, somewhere in the Golden Triangle.”
“And he looks after the plane?”
“What is this, Twenty Questions?”
So, later, Jinx came over, after doing her grocery shopping, and brought me a few treats, including a pint of Cherry Garcia, a little wedge of artisanal cheddar, and a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé, which I offered to drink with her, but she wouldn’t consider it as she meant to spend her evening reviewing cases. But we did have a cocktail, despite my being briefly low-spirited and envious that she would be working. I hadn’t had a drink in a week, and just one was enough to produce a wave of warmth generally, but especially toward my friend Jinx. Therefore I regaled her with an overly detailed account of my infatuation with Jocelyn, including hints of its erotic aura. It was a masterpiece of thoughtlessness, but Jinx bore it with her usual grace and composure, questioning me attentively about something I cared about, and only because I cared about it. I glimpsed that people at work, like Jinx, must look across a great divide at people like me, atwitter over their love lives, or even people like Jocelyn, trying to think what their airplane is good for. That was hardly an account of the facts, but Jinx’s world could not be called dull just for its steadiness. Adding to the picture, I years ago met Jinx’s parents: what a surprise, a retired car salesman with a highly visible gold tooth married to an aging but still painted party girl. Though it took thirty years, they finally drank themselves to death in the St. Louis apartment building where Jinx had grown up and launched herself into a real life of real work. I specifically recall the days she took off from the clinic, one year apart, to bury her mother and father and how downcast she was to lose two people who seemed spectacularly negligible to anyone who had ever met them. They had named her after Jinx Falkenburg, whom I could not recall. Jinx remarked ruefully that she was a “sweater girl.”
Ever since Throckmorton and I had our little kestrel, Speed, I’ve been interested in birds. Every bird I learned, if it was a migratory bird, I soon forgot. Didn’t we meet last year? I kept a life list, but its utility as a mnemonic device was quite limited. The spring warblers moved faster than my ability to memorize them, and frankly the sparrows were a nightmare. Anyone interested in birds and living near the Great Plains had to face the sparrow problem, which was that they all looked very similar: rufous, white-crowned, Baird’s, Henslow’s, house sparrows, grasshopper sparrows — all a blur, the bastards. So I switched to raptors, a bit of a copout, as they were more easily differentiated. Priapic male birders all liked raptors because they seemed flatteringly emblematic. Many of the hawk lovers I knew were big-bellied fellows with facial hair and a passion for cocktails. As yet, I didn’t fit this profile. My father, who never claimed bird expertise, remembered every bird he ever saw, even when he was overseas. He liked talking about them, too, but my mother would cut him off with, “Seen one, you’ve seen them all.” He assumed a conspiratorial air when he pointed into the willows and said, “Carolina warbler.” When he rode a tank into Germany, the storks on roofs were the thing that struck him most. He thought that a stork sitting on its eggs and watching an army roll by showed what nature thought about mankind.
With my new leisure following upon my indictment and my failure as a house painter, I had time to walk the woody creek bottoms where I observed the short-winged woodland hawks, Cooper’s and sharp-shinned, speeding through the trees with uncanny nimbleness. I had several times watched prairie falcons diving into blackbirds when I walked around the uplands, and the chaos they made seemed to briefly fill the sky. These jaunts were hardly adventurous, as I never went more than a few minutes from town, but it was greatly reassuring to find wildlife so close to humanity. In fact, I could still make out the old water tower through the trees where I first came upon the goshawk, a northern goshawk, to be precise. Since I came upon her unawares and she was going about her goshawk business under my eye, it made a tremendous impression on me: almost blue-black on her back with a creamy and precisely barred breast. She was swiveling her head from side to side, broadcasting her oddly relentless screams. Over time, I would see her often, hunting, soaring, sleeping. And she saw me often enough that she no longer fled at my sight, moving me by her acceptance.
I also went birding with Jinx, a genuine expert. She had a beautiful pair of Leitz binoculars whose protective covering she had nearly worn away. My optics were el cheapos from Wal-Mart but good enough for my skill level. I was hardly able to keep up with Jinx, whose bird cognition was Olympian and betrayed my slow-witted tagalong efforts to identify those blurry sparrows which she saw as separate races with little in common beyond their genus. I accepted my inferior status as a birder just to be with her.
However, I knew a lot about my goshawk, had watched her fly, run down songbirds, pluck voles, and dine. I had narrowed the field of vision to the point at which I actually knew what I was talking about. So I invited Jinx to join me, knowing she would have to rise above my recent pariah status to accept. Frankly, she was a bit wary on the phone, but the bird interested her and we made a first-light foray into the creek bottom east of town.
I couldn’t find my goshawk.
“Where’s the bird?” Jinx demanded after we had wallowed along the low-water perimeter of the stream, scanning the treetops.
“She’s always here in the morning.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“That she’s always here?”
“No, that there’s actually a bird.”
“Why would there be no bird?”
“I thought you might want to talk privately.”
“Oh, no, no, no. There’s a bird. I’ve watched her every day. Very beautiful. Very queenly. I thought she was the bird for you.”