A Catalog of Birds

  The elms around the house are on the edge of failure. No matter how much he doctors those trees, spending money they don’t have, and he’s sure to hear more about that when Marion joins him, he’s not going to be able to save them. He’s just been prolonging the inevitable. But he’s grateful every spring they leaf out, every summer he spends in their shade.

  It’s hard to sit on the porch without making a list of all that needs to get done. All of the usual chores and maintenance have been usurped by visits to the hospital, to rehab, and more recently, the weeks they’ve spent working on Billy’s car. If the roof could last one more winter, if the fence could go unpainted one more spring. And look at that, the pear tree isn’t just dying anymore, it’s dead.

  Marion sits beside him, the screen door slapping behind her.

  “I spoke to the hospital. We’ve worked out a more realistic payment plan. We’ve got eighteen months now. Twenty-four if we need it. And I spoke to Jim Denny, the assistant principal at the high school. I can teach summer school for a little extra cash. American History, here we come.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It won’t kill me.”

  “You sure?”

  “You’ll have to buy me a fan, though. My own personal classroom fan.”

  “I’ll pick one up this weekend,” he says.

  “You’ll forget.”

  “I won’t.”

  “There’s one thing I want.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I want them all home for Nell’s graduation. Like we did for the boys. Can you do that?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Not good enough, Jack.”

  “I’ll make it happen.”

  “Don’t let that fast-talking Brendan off the hook.”

  “I won’t.”

  “He’s a slippery son of a gun.”

  “I know.”

  “If you could arrange for that girlfriend of his to be too busy to come, that would be all to the good.”

  “Not likely.”

  They’re quiet for a moment.

  “How are we going to manage Cornell?” he asks. “Nell’s scholarship doesn’t . . . ”

  “It covers tuition, but not fees or room and board. I sent in a deposit. Not the deposit they asked for. I’m hoping it will take them all summer to notice we’re short.”

  “Short by how much?”

  “Let’s keep that worry at bay a little longer, okay?”

  Asa Alsop calls. The police stopped by. A man in Penn Yan has confessed to kidnapping and killing Megan, burying her along the abandoned canal path. The police are there now. Asa asks Jack to come along. He can’t face the trip to identify the body alone.

  An hour later Jack calls from a pay phone. The man was delusional. The police unearthed the carcass of a dog.

  Jack and Billy, with help from Harlow, get the car back on the road. Countless hours in the garage, the radio blaring, brash music Jack thought he disliked, but he finds himself glad for its insistent energy, pushing them to work another hour, and another, obviating the need for talk, or thought for that matter.

  Maybe that’s why Billy and Harlow like it. Mind-numbing music, tools in their hands, an engine spilling its guts and getting put back together. Santana, Led Zeppelin, Three Dog Night to push them past midnight.

  Jack watches Billy work one-handed, using his right hand to assist, awkward but getting stronger, more confident as the weeks tick by.

  They work nights, they work weekends; the parts they need cost more than they’re supposed to. Harlow scavenges what he can. Jack keeps a folder in the garage with the receipts. Marion stops asking.

  The car looks like crap, rusted and dented and desperately needing paint. The leatherette on the seats is cracked and discolored, ugly as sin. None of them gives a damn what the car looks like, if they can just get her to run.

  The night they take their first ride, Harlow stuffed into the backseat, 1 o’clock in the morning, the muffler rattles so loud it sounds like it will fall off before they get out of the driveway. But it doesn’t fall off and that engine runs without a hiccup, all down South Main Street, the only other car on the road the local cop.

  They don’t say much, don’t need to, the shared pleasure of a job finished, resurrecting an engine, gears in sync, the bald tires; one good thing about the bald tires, so quiet on the road.

  That first drive, Billy at the wheel, almost stately, he takes it so slow, like they’re kings of the town surveying their domain.

  They head out past the State Park to 5 and 20 and on the dark, empty highway; Billy opens her up, pushes the engine to see what she can do. Sixty nice and smooth, sixty-five she begins to rattle, seventy the shimmy’s so bad, Jack reaches out to help steady the wheel. He can tell Billy wants to push it further, but he takes his foot off the gas and drops back to sixty.

  “Not bad,” Billy says, looking at his father, meeting Harlow’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Not bad at all.”

  Asa Alsop surprises Marion by appearing at the back door just as she slides a meatloaf into the oven.

  He comes into the kitchen carrying a basket of eggs and a jar of honey. Marion puts the percolator on even after he says no thanks to coffee, offers him a kitchen chair. He sits, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his overalls patched, his hands rough but clean. She dries her hands on her apron and picks up the jar of honey.

  “The labels look good,” Marion says.

  “Schuyler’s wants every jar I’ve got.”

  “These will sell fast.”

  “That’s what he tells me.”

  “Let’s have some.” Marion slices bread, sets out the crock of butter.

  “Spoil our dinner,” Asa warns.

  “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  She pours coffee, sits beside him, butters bread, spoons honey from the jar. They both take a bite. Fragrant and sweet. Asa sips his coffee, smiles his slow smile.

  “How’s Billy doing for you?” Marion asks.

  “Steady. What I need.”

  “Will you join us for supper tonight?”

  “Thank you. Another time.”

  “When the school year’s done, we’ll all have a little more time. I’ll send Nell or Billy up to fetch you.”

  She gets up to put potatoes in a pot of water. “Thank you for the eggs.”

  “The hens keep laying like nothing’s happened. Be nice to be like that.”

  “Do you miss the ponies?”

  “Every damn day.”

  “How’s Evan doing over at Maeve’s place?”

  “As well as can be expected. He misses the farm.”

  “Any news?”

  “The detective came by today to tell me they’ve suspended their investigation.”

  “Why?”

  “They have no suspects, no evidence, no body.”

  “I don’t understand how that’s possible.”

  “Neither do I.” He finishes his coffee.

  “People do not just disappear.”

  “There was some talk of dragging the lake . . . ”

  “It’s too deep, isn’t it?”

  “And they have no reason to believe she drowned.”

  The late afternoon sun flares across the water. Marion waits.

  “They’ve downgraded the investigation to a missing persons case. Which will remain open, but, as far as I can tell, inactive.”

  “Oh, Asa.”

  “She’s not dead. I’d feel it. I’d know.”

  Marion reaches out to him.

  “But maybe there’s something worse than dead . . . that’s what keeps me up nights. Somebody got away with something, didn’t they? Maybe somebody right here, somebody we know.”

  “A clue will turn up. They’ll find he
r.”

  “I don’t know how to live with this. She’s just a kid. Hardly big enough to reach the pedals to drive the tractor. Some days I’d like to kill someone.”

  A Baltimore oriole flies through the open window into the art studio at the Smith Opera House. Anna asks the other students to leave the room while Billy imitates its call, a series of flutelike whistled notes, which calms the bird. Using his shirt he’s able to capture and release it. After the other students leave for the day, he and Anna tape strips of paper to the large windows, each strip a hand’s width apart. The pattern renders the glass opaque, making it impossible for birds to see their reflection in the glass.

  “About a billion birds a year fly into windows. Mostly migrating songbirds,” Billy says.

  “A billion? That’s a big number.”

  “It’s true, though.”

  “Can you whistle other birdcalls?”

  “A few.”

  “More than a few, I bet.”

  “I’m out of practice.”

  Anna starts to clean up. Billy tosses the collage he started in the trash.

  “You hate this, don’t you?” Anna asks.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Can you give it a little more time?”

  “You’ve got this idea I’m an artist.”

  “I’ve seen your drawings.”

  “It was never about the drawing . . . It was about the birds. The pencil, the pen . . . I don’t know how to say this . . . ”

  She waits.

  “It’s a doorway, a bridge, the space between us . . . Jesus . . . ” He falls silent. “It’s how I lived in the world.”

  She sets a large pad of newsprint on an easel, picks up a pencil.

  “I’ll hold the pencil. You direct my hand.”

  “That won’t work.”

  “Who knows? Let’s draw a branch.”

  “What kind of branch?” he asks. “Walnut? Willow?”

  “Surprise me.”

  He covers her hand with his own, then steps away from her.

  “You don’t draw with your hand or your fingers; you draw with your eyes, with your body,” he says.

  “Just see what happens.”

  “I’m going to lean into you.”

  “Okay.”

  He takes her hand again. “I can’t do this.”

  Without turning to look at him, she says, “Draw a line. One line.”

  Their first attempt: the pencil stammers across the page.

  “This is pointless,” he says.

  “Let’s try a brush.”

  She takes a watercolor brush, dips it in water and pigment.

  The paint drips while she waits. Then he takes her hand and sweeps it across the paper, pushing too hard, too fast. She discards the sheet of newsprint. Dips the brush again.

  She can feel his body move against her. She lets him have her hand, her arm, her shoulder. The lines sweep across the page, uneven, lacking control. But the impulse is there. He drops her hand. She turns and looks at him then, sees the hope and disappointment in his eyes.

  “Come home with me.”

  He looks at her for a long moment. He has wanted nothing but oblivion for a long time. That’s not what she’s offering. She wants him to wake up.

  It terrifies him.

  They drive her beat-up Chevy pickup out to her cottage.

  Anna lived in Rochester with her lawyer husband until their divorce a year ago. She left the large Victorian on East Avenue, the house that was to have been home to the children she was unable to provide. Walked out of her husband’s life and into her own. Winnowed her expenses and expectations to what she could afford as a teacher, leaving her time to paint.

  Entering the one-room cottage, Billy can see all of it, and all of Anna’s life in a glance. There are two tortoiseshell hair clips lying in the middle of the unmade bed, and sheer white curtains blowing in the open windows.

  Her work on the walls, pastel, gouache, watercolor, landscapes, this landscape, the lake in every season, some so bold they’re almost abstract.

  He reaches for her.

  She makes him slow down. She draws him out, asks for something—he can’t quite say what, yet—maybe it’s her way of not asking. There is none of the hurry up, now, now, now urgency of the town girls he’d known in high school, none of the yes, no, maybe dance required by the girls up at the college.

  Her one luxury is an outdoor shower. Spacious, plenty of hot water. If you can stand the cold moments between leaving the cottage and entering the water’s warmth.

  Making love in the shower, the hot water pelting them, the cold air like a curtain around them, the views to the lake, Anna avid and adventurous, eyes open, fully present to her own pleasure. Kissing her throat, her thigh, the thrum of her pulse beneath his lips, the sky above them breaking into dawn or closing into night, worlds away from the blind, obliterating sex he has craved.

  He licks the rime of sex and salt from her skin, wishes for a beer to chase it. Laughs.

  Esme Tinker pulls into the gas station early Monday morning. Billy and Harlow sit at the old metal desk in the office drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. Harlow heads off to change the oil in a Rambler.

  “There’s something I think you’ll be interested in,” Esme says. “One of my students—Danny, the kid who recorded the dawn chorus—is working with sound engineers to create listening centers at Sapsucker Pond. Microphones will be placed in key spots throughout the marsh and two or three blinds will be equipped with headphones.

  “We’ve got funding for this phase and I’m writing a grant for ongoing research.

  “Danny has the technical side covered and wants to get going as soon as possible. I want to bring you in on the project.”

  “It sounds great,” Billy says.

  “Is that a yes? I really want that to be a yes.”

  “Listen, Esme . . . ”

  “Danny knows you’re still healing, might need some time. He’s a good kid. You’ll like him.”

  A car pulls up to the gas pumps, the light bouncing off the chrome slicing into his head like he has no skin.

  “I have to get to work,” he says.

  “If you can’t give me an answer today, can you call me next week?”

  “I’ll call you,” he promises. “Thank you.”

  “And think about coming to work with me as my TA for the fall, okay?”

  “You couldn’t stand to have me around that much,” he says, stubbing out his cigarette.

  “Try me.”

  He turns away, turns back.

  “Look, my parents have spent everything they’ve got—and more—including whatever they saved for Nell’s college—on hospital bills. I need to work for a while, get my head on straight. And what I really want, once my hand improves—is to get my commercial pilot’s license. I know that’s not what we talked about.”

  “It’s all right, Billy.”

  “I feel like I’ve wrecked Nell’s chances. Can you help her? She could be your TA.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I know you want it to be me.”

  “You take your time.”

  “And she needs someplace to live. The dorms are too expensive.”

  “I know someone who rents rooms to students. I’ll call her.” She puts the car into gear. “If you can fly, Billy, you should fly.”

  After working late, Billy and Harlow are rerouted around the campus on their drive home. They park the truck and walk up to the quad to a huge bonfire. Students burn Nixon in effigy, call for his impeachment. Boys burn draft cards in a barrel. Music. Dancing. The intoxicating idea that Nixon could be brought down, the war and the draft ended.

  Billy and Harlow say nothing as they stand side by side. Billy understands t
heir protests, or thinks he does, but despises the students for all they are ignorant of: the tens of thousands of young men doing a job, fighting a war that no one wants, fulfilling their duty to their country, to each other.

  The honor in their service. They are not—we are not, he thinks—all baby killers and monsters.

  He looks up above the fire. In the dark pitch of night the stars are blooming. He hears a nighthawk, unusually close. Imagines its invisible trail, etched against the sky.

  “I’m gonna do some real damage if we don’t get out of here,” Harlow says, turning to leave.

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “It’s not worth it. Let’s go.”

  Tuesday, after swimming at the Y, Billy pulls over at the head of the lake, dark closing down the valley, the soft clatter of rain on the roof.

  Too much is falling away from him. He feels less and less alive. Come back; just come back, he thinks again and again, let me keep my promises to you, the farm, the horses, I want to buy you a horse, sit with you on the porch as the sun melts into the lake and bats dance in the trees. Imagines turning to find her waiting on the dock, asleep in the loft, naked on his bed, walking through the door of the old farmhouse, the boards loud under her feet, framed in the doorway, the sun spilling over her like water, like benediction, like the future in all its blinding hopefulness.

  He keeps trying to make sense of this, of being home, of Megan missing, of whether he should let whatever is happening with Anna continue to happen, whether it’s a betrayal of Megan somehow, until the buzz in his ears crescendos, making all thought impossible. He flips on the radio, trying to shut his mind against the flak in his own head. Is tempted to smash his skull against the steering wheel.

  Cars flick by on the road behind him. People going home. Families waiting. Children, dinner, homework, music practice. He thinks of letting himself be pulled into that orbit, remembers lying on the floor when they were kids, listening to Nell practice piano, the music playing on its own frequency inside him.

  Exhausted, he turns the car toward home. Where they keep taking him in, in spite of his foul moods, bursts of temper, and the coldness he retreats behind. As if it could save him. Or protect them.