Picking up on my unvoiced question, he said: “It’s a bar and grill just off Claiborne downtown. Serves a kickin’ breakfast, so lots of night workers turn out, hospital workers, firemen, paramedics going off duty, camp followers. I pull graveyard shift at the coroner’s myself, have for years. So I’m sitting at the bar, just gonna have a quick one and head out, when Pryor comes up and says, Hey man, I know you. This here’s Levon, he tells me, my boy. We had a few drinks, scored breakfast, wound up back here. Next thing I know, you’re busting in.”
He still had his hands up. Now slowly he put them down.
“This over, man-or you just puttin’ in a new clip? Anything I can do to help convince you to let me walk out of here?”
“That could happen.” Briefly I told him what brought me there, about the boy, the dead pigeons.
“This bone man’s the one gave them up?”
“He sees everything that goes on in the park. One day these two, never been regulars before, take to hanging ’round, and they get to be like toothaches, just won’t go away. Turn up in the park with paper bags too small for lunches, anything like that, and leave empty-handed. Them boys weren’t proper, he said. Knew it from the first.”
“Proper?”
“What he said.”
“Well, they’re definitely bent. He got that right.”
“Finally one day he hauled himself out from under the house and followed them back here. Never did nothin’ like that before, he told me. Ain’t likely to again.”
“Not your typical concerned citizen.”
“Not the kind you usually hear about, anyway.”
We stood silently with that river of a couch beside us, bodies washed up on its shore. Behind him a diminutive arch showed a swatch of pinkish hallway.
“Anyone else back there?”
“Pretty sure not.”
“What is?”
He shrugged.
“Let’s go see.”
The hallway was about the size of a large man’s coffin. Bathroom directly ahead, bedrooms at either end. Barely enough wall space for the doors. We went left.
“Holy shit!” my companion said.
The entire back wall was paved with bird’s wings, single wings nailed there and spread, all at the same attitude and angle, one after another, a hundred or more. Like fish scales, covering the wall completely, floor to ceiling. Against the wall opposite, fifty or sixty cheap wooden cages were stacked. These contained the skeletons of birds.
I stood in the middle of the room trying to imagine such cruelty: where it would come from, why and how it would take this form. Had a vision of them starting out catching the pigeons, in the park or elsewhere, putting them in cages just to watch them starve to death. Then moving on to poisoning and scalping-collecting the wings we saw here. Finally letting the birds lie where they fell.
“You ever in the service?” my companion said.
“Yeah. Not long, though.”
“See action?”
“Not the usual sort.”
“You were lucky.”
I nodded.
“Me, I thought anything had to be better than watching my old lady toss that same coin in the air every night, wait to see whether she’d kill herself with the drugs first or get killed by some scumball she brought home. I was sixteen. By the time I was seventeen and threw away my helmet, I’d drunk sixty or eighty cases of beer and thought the world was mine, you know? Drop me anywhere, desert, jungle, I’d take the damn place, it belonged to me. That was an attitude rankers could get behind. So off I went to ranger school. Picked up some skills there that don’t do a lot for my resume.”
We were back in the front room by this time.
“Only place I ever saw anything like that,” he said, indicating the trophy room. “We’re cool, you and me?”
I nodded.
“Anything else you need here?”
Levon had pushed himself over to the wall and partway up it and leaned there clutching his privates. Pryor, turned facedown, was trying to get to his feet, pointed toes of his Western boots scratching at the floor.
“Think I’ll stick around a while, then, have a talk with these boys. Like in the old days. Put some of those skills the government taught me back to work? Recycle them, like.”
I kept expecting to come across a story about guys nailed to the wall, arms at least, but I never did.
That afternoon I stopped off at a friend’s place up on Carrollton. June Bug, everybody called him, another vet. He lived in a lean-to on the flat roof of an apartment house up that way, on a floor of tar that gradually liquefied as the day progressed, and he raised pigeons.
“Name’s Mr. Blue,” June Bug told me as we peered into the cage. I’m not sure I ever realized just how many shades of blue there are. The pigeon’s head was such a dark blue that it caught light and shone. Cerulean tipped its wings. Individual feathers were here dark, there light, powder blue, azure, aquamarine, indigo, no two of them alike. “And don’t you go tryin’ to change it, neither. Real thoroughbred, ain’t he?” The pigeon peered back out at me, cocking its head the way they do. Who the hell was I and what was I doing hanging around outside its cage? I’d brought a bottle of cheap brandy along. Mr. Blue and I left that and a fifty-dollar bill behind.
Dog Boy’s eyes when I introduced them were all I’d ever need as thanks. I’d stopped off at a pet shop on the way to pick up food, treats, cage-size avian equivalents of parallel bars and vaulting horses. You give someone a pigeon, you want it to be a fit pigeon. Mr. Blue looked every bit as pleased as the boy.
“Thank you, Lewis,” Lester said. I’d been doing my best to shuttle off unseen down the stairs, but Lester came hobbling after me. “Hope it makes a difference,” I told him.
I’d barely got home-to an empty house again, but no matter-when a call from Lester asserted that indeed it had made a difference. The boy’s up, moving around, he said, for the first time in weeks. “He and Mr. Blue are sitting by the window in his room, looking out. It’s a sight.”
The next call was from Don.
I’d managed to get out most of the first syllable, “Hel-” before he started in.
“How much you know about this Guidry character?”
“Don. Good to hear from you. I’ve been fine. And you? Jeeter fitting right in, Jeanette okay with it, they’re getting along?”
Silence at the other end.
Finally: “You through?”
“I guess.”
“So what do you know about Guidry?”
“Not a lot. Some kind of doctor, though I’m not sure he ever had much of a practice. He did have connections, though. Old money, I assumed. That whole underground Creole-society thing.”
“What I’m wondering about here is previous marriages-before LaVerne.”
“None that I know of. But you pretty much know what I know. He treasured Alouette.”
“So did LaVerne. Enough that, just to stay with her, she allowed her own life to be completely taken over by him.”
“True enough.”
“Guidry was well along in years when he and LaVerne hooked up. You think the wick stayed dry all those years?”
“Probably not, but-”
“No fucking way.”
For a moment I thought I heard steps on the porch. “Okay. So why do I get the feeling this conversation has suddenly gone multiple choice?” Key in the lock? Deborah? David? No. Just this old house breathing.
“Not that I have much of anything,” Don said. “Lots of blanks that need filling in. Like all our lives. Years of monthly payments stretching back to the Seventies, for instance-to Gladstone Hall, whatever that is. And something that looks suspiciously like a trust fund, though so far I haven’t been able to get in close enough for a good look. Administered by Guidry’s lawyers, at any rate. Firewalls thick all around. I’ll keep chipping away. Rick’s on it, too.”
He paused.
“You okay, Lew?”
“Tired. A little the worse for wear.” I filled him in on the party scene back at apartment 4-A.