Love you.
Hey.
Bat in his characteristic way suddenly appeared, leaping to the table, and sat watching me, tail sweeping slow, serpentine S’s. Nothing’s more important than the connections we make to others. It’s all we have, finally. We move towards one another and away, close again, all these half-planned, intricate steps and patterns. Stand there far too often holding our bagloads of good intentions, shifting them from hip to hip, looking foolish.
Bat leaned onto his front legs and stretched, rump pushed up, to show what he thought of my reveries. By way of thanks, I fed him.
I may not have hobbled down to the park, but it felt like it. According to doctors and therapists, there were no sequelae from the stroke, only a little residual weakness, which was to be expected. Neither Deborah nor Don admitted to being able to see any compromise or debility, any change in the way I got around. But I’d go to push up out of a chair and find myself grabbing at things-not so much that I couldn’t perform the physical act as that the world no longer represented itself to me as stable, dependable. I wondered if this was what Clare had felt, this pause, like a shield or a window, between intent and action, desire and spasm. Lester sat looking out over the park, a sheen of sweat, like varnish that hadn’t taken, on the mahogany of his forehead.
“Lewis,” he said as I sank onto the bench beside him. “How you doing?”
“Good enough, all things considered.”
“You’ve been poorly then? Know I’ve missed seeing you.”
I filled him in on my hospital stay.
He nodded. “Thing is, over the years you commence to spending so much time there, those hospital stays get to be like bus rides for you. Ain’t the way you’d choose to travel, but you know that’s the only way you’re ’bout to get from one place to another now.”
We were all but alone in the park. A scatter of unfamiliar faces. I asked Lester about this.
“People done got scared, I think, some of them anyway. Pondering if what killed them birds might not just come after them ’n’ their children next.”
“The deaths haven’t stopped, then?”
Lester nodded, not in agreement this time, indicating.
“Look at that sorry flock. What, ten or twelve birds? And most of them gimped up one way or another. You remember how it used to be, Lewis. They’d come in in swarms. Something startled them and they took off, all those wings, it was like this sudden great wind. They’d all but shut off the sun for a moment or two.” He sipped his drink, one or another of those horribly sweet concoctions, Zima or such, pitched to us blacks, and laughed. “’Course, this far along, remembering how things used to be starts looming large for us, doesn’t it? We don’t be careful, that can get to be all we think about.”
He took another sip. The container hovered in the hinterland between dumbbell-and vase-shaped, label bright red and blue. Some sort of dog on it? A naked woman? Could even be a truck. “You ever tried this shit?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t.”
The hand holding the abomination lifted, two ruler-long fingers unfurling.
“Walk over to the other side of those bushes, Lewis, and you’ll come across a fair stretch of grave sites. Lots of birds been laid to rest back there. We put them in the ground ourselves, the boy and me. Just a few at first, then sometimes, later on, as many as three or four a day. With whatever ceremony we could manage.”
He put the container, mostly empty, on the bench beside him. A group of Hispanic teens sat together atop a slide, stretch of dark midriff showing between the girl’s sweater and skirt, guys exhibiting their own brand of midriff: two inches or so of boxer shorts peeked out over low-slung denims. Thirty degrees out and they’ve got skin showing. Tough kids.
“Boy won’t come with me anymore,” Lester said. “Almost got him here a couple of times. Tell him we were going for a walk, maybe we’d stop off for doughnuts after. But then he’d see where we were going and commence to crying and shaking. You remember how much he loved being here, Lewis. It’s a sad thing, truly sad. Boy don’t have much. His room, the park. Now half that’s got taken from him.”
Lester sat shaking his head. “Maybe there really isn’t any more to it. Maybe it don’t make sense and ain’t meant to. Vanity and vexation of the spirit, just like it says in Ecclesiastes.”
He laid a hand on my knee and I found myself wondering if in all these years we’d ever before touched. Surely we’d at least shaken hands. Right: that single, pained handshake.
“Good seeing you again, Lewis. Good that you’re up and about again, too.”
“That’s a lot of goods for someone quoting Ecclesiastes, downer of all downers, just moments ago.”
“What can I say?” The hand came up off my leg; those impossibly long fingers unfolded in the space before us and moved there expressively, putting me in mind of branches in gentle wind, of Dante: Half into life’s journey I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. “It’s a character flaw. Try as I will, no matter how I practice and worry over it, I simply cannot stay glum for very long.” He pushed himself up off the bench. “I’d best be getting back to the boy now.”
I said good-bye, that I’d see him soon.
“Maybe, if you found time, you might even come see the boy again? I think, when you did, that was good for him. I noticed a difference just after.”
“I’ll plan on it, then.”
He looked off momentarily, adrift on his own thoughts. “Good.”
The teens, when I approached them, had some trouble deciding between wary, smart-ass or antagonistic as best response. One of the boys popped the joint they’d been sharing into his mouth and swallowed.
“?Que hay?” I asked. “?De donde son?”
Whatchu care? one of the kids wanted to know.
I told them.
“That boy? We seen him, sure. He ain’t right.”
They went in and out of Spanish as they spoke.
“Always with that same old man you been sittin’ wif.”
To them I was just one of a string of old guys without a clue. At worst a cop, child welfare agent or some other meddler from the outside world, otherwise someone inconsequential, and in either case so far outside the orbit of their lives as scarcely to exist. The Spanish helped. I didn’t come within a mile of speaking it well but, thanks to Rick Garces, on a good day with the wind blowing my way, I could fake it.
Guardedly they allowed as how, yeah, man, they were here most days, so? Had they taken any notice of the pigeons? Rats, they said, rats with wings, that’s what we call them. There used to be a lot of them.
Sure did.
But now there’s only a handful left.
He’s right, they told one another.
“Someone’s been poisoning them.”
The teens had stopped looking back and forth among themselves. Now they all looked at me. What they want to do that for? one asked. Yeah, don’t kill nothin’ you don’t plan to eat.
“Cases like this,” I said, “usually it’s someone from the neighborhood. Someone with a grudge, some private agenda. Maybe they’ve been hanging around, on the edge of things, face at the back of the crowd you never quite notice.”
Hey man, we don’t notice, how we goan tell you ’bout it?
Good point.
’Sides, it ain’t like we spend the day here.
Yeah, we be out here during lunch and once school lets out.
But that’s it for us, mister, we got other things to do. What’s that word you used? Agendas.
Fuck agendas, man.
Yeah, we got lives.
Gracias, I told them. Gracias por su ayuda.
De nada.
Hey, one of them called out, this time in English, as I turned. You need to talk to Mister Bones. He always here.
And it turned out that he was, though in all these years I’d never seen him. If I had, I’d have remembered, what with chicken bones through septum and earlobes African fashion and an Amerind-style breastplate of the same. If this had been a cartoon, some toothy black man would be doing a Lionel Hampton on those. Mister Bones never came in the park-something bad had happened here long past, he told me later-but neither was he ever far away. Mostly he resided under the porch of the abandoned house opposite. Had a mattress, most of a sleeping bag, boxes of canned and dry goods down there. Or else, when things got wet, he’d make his way up into the tree house some kids had built half a century back and half a block down in a massive water oak. Today, as usual, he was under the house. I shouted ahead then started under myself, thinking how my grandfather, working as builder, spent much of his life crawling under houses like this, crippled leg and all, fitting pipe, splicing wire, shoring foundations.