My father’s parents considered me a legitimate member of his family, though he had gone to astonishing lengths to avoid me. His lawyers had called me “one night and one bad judgment,” arguing that his sole responsibility was to send my child support checks on time. Over summer break I would visit his parents, my grandparents, and stare at the photos of his other boy on their wall.
I thought of my father when I said, Hey, Lee, let’s you and me go outside for a second. They snickered. He looked around the room, dropped his shoulders, and said, Okay.
I slid the patio glass door open and walked out into the overgrown lot behind the apartment complex. Lee plodded behind me, said he was going to go home on the Greyhound. Said he and his dad had talked on the phone a bunch, had talked of his joining the Navy after high school. I didn’t respond, only kept walking through the tall spear grass, worried sick about how to throw a punch.
Lee said his dad was a hard-ass but all right, really. He then told me he wanted to go home.
My father’s lawyers wore poplin suits. I wanted to try cocaine.
It was hot and dark out in the field, and the tall grass swished against our jeans as we walked. The framed yellow lights of the apartment fell away, and, convinced that the others could no longer see us, I stopped. Lee stared at me and started to mutter something pitiful, then trailed off. He cocked his head like a dog and turned up his palms.
I said, You stole from me, man, what the fuck? which didn’t sound real.
He said, I’m, I’m sorry. . I was calling my father, I’ve been trying so hard to—
I don’t care, I said. My mother took you in and you stole. (I was still not angry, and wondered if anybody ever really was.)
Lee stepped towards me, arms out. Just let it go, he said. It’s me, man. I’ll pay you back for—
I said, Get off me, faggot, and shoved him, and this sounded more real, and he stared at me like I was a grotesque, a murder.
He said, You don’t have to—, and I swung and hit his forehead.
Lee righted himself, repeated, You don’t—
I stepped forward and hit him again. The blows were awkward, which made me try harder. Neck and head and cheek, again. Lee held up open hands. I demanded that he swing back.
He finally went down. I looked around, hesitated, then kicked him in the mouth. He curled up like a pill bug and screamed into his belly. I kicked him again, and again, until he finally shut up. I circled him. Spat.
As our panting subsided, he bolted up and ran off through the dark field. I crouched, and began to strike myself in the thighs and neck; I clamped my mouth shut with one hand and struck myself with the other, until I could no longer draw breath through my snotting-up nose. I took my shirt off and wiped my face, then slung it over my shoulder and walked back toward the light of the apartment.
Done? they asked when I came back inside.
Faggot spilled my beer, I answered. They howled in laughter and reached into the cooler and handed me another one. Feel good? they asked. I said, Sure, and slid my hands across my sweaty chest, as if I were sore or muscular. You know why he’s not here, right? they asked, and I answered, What? because I didn’t understand the question. You know why he’s not standing right here with us? I tried to think of an answer but then just said, No. They snickered at this, said, He’s not here because he’s a bitch. A man would have taken his blows, walked back to the party, shaken your hand, and then got you the beer himself. Cunt, they said.
Bird (on Back)
AT DAYBREAK, A bird flew into our bedroom, smacked the wall mirror, and fell on Darla’s back. She slept on. The meds really wipe her out.
Only minutes before this she was cheating on me, in my dreams. We’d moved back to the city, into a crummy third-floor rental. Darla was the only one of us who had a job (of course), so things were testy. And one night she went to a work party and never came home, and I sat on the apartment’s worn linoleum for hours, frantic that she’d been killed, or run off the road by rapists, or everything else you can imagine that keeps you awake and a wreck in a dream. She came home the next morning, swearing she’d just been too drunk to drive.
We both knew she was lying. It was, after all, my mind. Yet the more I begged for reckoning, the more she clung to her story. “Take it. Leave it. Whatever,” she said.
From the pain of this lazy lie I awoke, in our puny town, in the South. The room felt like a sweat lodge. The quilt was kicked to the foot of the bed, and the sheets beneath us were damp. I looked over at Darla, a vague ridge of shadows and dawn blush, and reached out to wake her for an argument.
The sound of the birds outside cut me off. A river, a symphony, I’d never heard anything like it in full daylight: layer upon layer of birdsong. Its construction made me think of my art, my process, and how I might capture this sound as diorama. For that matter, I wondered, what is diorama, when devoid of adequate light? When constructed primarily of sound? Can there even be an “-orama” without the seeing, the “di-”? Further, if my art can’t be seen, then what control do I wield? Who am I?
I drowsed in ambitious creative thought. . until something clanged from the other room. Bolting into the den, I found that Dim, the cat, had knocked out a window screen and fled. I figured that cat would be demolished in the street. I knew that Darla would blame me forever. I was the one who insisted the windows be left open, to save money on air-conditioning. I was the one who was unemployed — even in his dreams.
I was the one, always me.
I got back in bed and stared at the rose-lit ceiling. And THAT was when the bird flew through the open window, hit the mirror and fumbled onto Darla’s lower back.
I was terrified that the bird’s talons might break her skin, injecting some otherwise run-of-the-mill bacteria, and sending us straight to the emergency room, again. The bird, a big black one, stood up and stomped in place. Darla bore no thoughts of her sickness, or sepsis, or hospital; she didn’t budge. If anything, she probably reckoned it was Dim skulking atop her like always, kneading invisible biscuits with its de-clawed paws.
Teeming with anxiety, I moved only my eyes. (Such self-control is difficult, you know, when a bird is pacing Darla’s back.) It was a grackle, which I knew from many hours of looking at backyard birds while consulting the Sibley Guide to Birds, likewise scanning the book for birds I wished would visit Mississippi. It was missing one eye, and its feathers gave off a blue-purple hue in the sunrise.
Its dead socket stayed on me until I sighed, at which point the grackle whipped its head around, revealing a stark, corn-yellow eye. It cocked its head and blinked.
My God, I thought. What can I do?
I tumble around town a neglected dioramist. Though I constantly sketch, map, and digest every inch of our environment — town square to Yarn Barn to A.M.E. church, Civil War Memorial to Vanity Fair Outlet Mall — not one of the town’s seven thousand residents has ever asked me, seriously, about my artwork. If the subject even comes up I am generally lumped in with the cousin who carves melon sculptures at the Dogwood Festival, or invited to some snoozy brown-bag at the county library. I call my artist friends back in the city to complain, using an accent that Darla says is cheap and unfair and not even close. “‘Varmints’ abound in the South,” I declare, describing hawklike mosquitoes and vole infestations. “Ever’body down here smiles while talkin’ to you. But because they’re smilin’ they cain’t be confrontational. No suh, you must avoid unpleasantness at all costs!”
My old friends laugh at me. They use their own shucks-y accents to describe southern stupidities that I’ve never witnessed, and I indulge this, and it’s like I’m still with them, still a part of the scene.