Birds of America

  “What former Pittsburgh Pirates slugger was the only player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988?” Mack reads. It is Quilty’s turn.

  “I’ve landed on the damn sports category?”

  “Yup. What’s your answer?”

  “Linda Ronstadt. She was in The Pirates of Penzance. I know it went to Pittsburgh. I’m just not sure about the Hall of Fame part.”

  Mack is quiet.

  “Am I right?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you never used to do that—land me on those sports questions. Now you’re getting difficult.”

  “Yup,” says Mack.

  The next morning, they go to a Coca-Cola museum, which the South seems to be full of. “You’d think Coca-Cola was a national treasure,” Mack says.

  “It’s not?” says Quilty.

  Individual states, Georgia and Mississippi and whichever else, are all competing for claims: first served here, first bottled there—first thirst, first burst—it is one big corporate battle of the bands. There is a strange kind of refuge from this to be found in driving through yet another cemetery, this one at Vicksburg, and so they do it, but quickly, keeping the trip moving so they will not feel, as they might have in Tapston, the irretrievable loss of each afternoon, the encroaching darkness, each improvised day over with at last—only to start up again, in the morning, oppressively identical, a checker in a game of checkers, or a joke in a book of jokes.

  “They seem to have all this organized by state,” says Mack, looking out over the Vicksburg grounds, the rolling green dotted as if with aspirins. He looks back at the park map, which he has spread over the steering wheel. Here he is: back in the Bone Zone.

  “Well, let’s go to the Indiana part,” says Quilty, “and praise the Hoosier dead.”

  “Okay,” says Mack, and when he comes upon a single small stone that says Indiana—not the proper section at all—he slows down and says, “Here’s the section,” so that Quilty can roll down the window and shout, “Praise the Hoosier dead!” There are kindnesses one can perform for a blind man more easily than for the sighted.

  Guapo barks and Mack lets loose with an incongruous rebel yell.

  “Whose side are you on?” scolds Quilty, rolling his window back up. “Let’s get out of here. It’s too hot.”

  They drive some distance out of the park and then stop at the Civil War Museum they saw advertised the day before.

  “Is this a fifty?” Quilty whispers, thrusting a bill toward Mack as they approach the entrance cashier.

  “No, it’s a twenty.”

  “Find me a fifty. Is this a fifty?”

  “Yeah, that’s a fifty.”

  Quilty thrusts the fifty toward the cashier. “Excuse me,” he says in a loud voice. “Do you have change for a great American general?”

  “Do believe I do,” says the cashier, who chuckles a bit, taking the fifty and lifting up the drawer to his register. “You Yankees are always liking to do that.”

  Inside, the place is dark and cool and lined with glass display cases and mannequins in uniforms. There are photographs of soldiers and nurses and “President and Mrs. Davis.” Because almost everything is behind glass and cannot be touched, Quilty grows bored. “ ‘The city of Vicksburg,’ ” Mack reads aloud, “ ‘forced to surrender to Grant on the Fourth of July, refused to celebrate Independence Day again until 1971.’ ”

  “When no one cared anymore,” adds Quilty. “I like a place with a strong sense of grudge—which they, of course, call ‘a keen acquaintance with history.’ ” He clears his throat. “But let’s get on to New Orleans. I also like a place that doesn’t give a shit.”

  In a restaurant overlooking the river, they eat yet more hush puppies and catfish. Guapo, unleashed, runs up and down the riverbank like a mad creature.

  In the dusk, they head south, toward the Natchez Trace, through Port Gibson: “TOO BEAUTIFUL TO BURN”—ULYSSES S. GRANT, says the WELCOME sign. Quilty is dozing. It is getting dark, and the road isn’t wide, but Mack passes all the slow-moving cars: an old VW bus (northern winters have eliminated these in Tapston), a red pickup piled with hay, a Plymouth Duster full of deaf people signing in a fantastic dance of hands. The light is on inside the Duster, and Mack pulls up alongside, watching. Everyone is talking at once—fingers flying, chopping, stretching the air, twining, pointing, touching. It is astonishing and beautiful. If only Quilty weren’t blind, thinks Mack. If only Quilty weren’t blind, he would really like being deaf.

  There are, in New Orleans, all manner of oysters Rockefeller. There is the kind with the spinach chopped long and coarse like seaweed, scabs of bacon in a patch on top. Then there is the kind with the spinach moussed to a bright lime and dolloped onto the shell like algae. There is the kind with spinach leaves laid limply off the edge like socks. There is the kind with cheese. There is the kind without. There is even the kind with tofu.

  “Whatever happened to clams casino?” asks Mack. “I used to get those in Kentucky. Those were great.”

  “Shellfish from a landlocked place? Never a great idea, my dear,” says Quilty. “Stick with Nawlins. A city no longer known for its prostitutes quickly becomes known for its excellent food. Think about it. There’s Paris. There’s here. A city currently known for its prostitutes—Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Washington, D.C.—is seldom a good food city.”

  “You should write a travel book.” Was Mack being sarcastic? Mack himself couldn’t say.

  “That’s what Dating My Sofa was going to be. A kind of armchair travel book. For the blind.”

  “I thought Dating My Sofa was going to be a novel.”

  “Before it was a novel, it was going to be a travel book.”

  They leave behind the wrought-iron cornstalk fence of their little inn for a walk through the Quarter. Soon they are at the wharf, and with little else to do, they step aboard a glittering paddle wheeler for a Plantation River cruise. Quilty trips on a slightly raised plank on the ramp. “You know, I find this city neither big nor easy,” he says. The tour is supposed to be beer and sun and a little jazz band, but there is also a stop at Chalmette, the site of the Battle of New Orleans, so that people can get off and traipse through the cemetery.

  Mack takes Quilty to a seat in the sun, then sits beside him. Guapo lifts his head and smells the swampy air. “No more cemeteries,” says Mack, and Quilty readily agrees, though Mack also wonders whether, when they get there, they will be able to resist. It seems hard for them, when presented with all that toothy geometry of stone and bone, not to rush right up and say hi. The two of them are ill-suited to life; no doubt that is it. In feeling peculiar, homeless, cursed, and tired, they have become way too friendly. They no longer have any standards at all.

  “All the graves are on stilts here anyway,” says Mack. “The sea level and all.” The calliope starts up and the paddle wheel begins to revolve. Mack tips his head back to rest it against the seat and look at the sky all streaked with stringy clouds, bird blue cracked fuzzily with white. To the right, the clouds have more shape and against the blue look like the figures of a Wedgwood dish. What a fine fucking bowl beneath which they have all been caught and asked to swim out their days! “Look at it this way,” people used to say to Mack. “Things could be worse”—a bumper sticker for a goldfish or a bug. And it wasn’t wrong—it just wasn’t the point.

  He falls asleep, and by the time the boat returns to the wharf, ten thousand anesthesiologists have invaded the town. There are buses and crowds. “Uh-oh. Look out. A medical convention,” says Mack to Quilty. “Watch your step.” At a turquoise kiosk near the pier, he spots more missing-children posters. He half-expects to see himself and Quilty posted up there, two more lost boys in America. Instead, there is a heartbreaking nine-year-old named Charlie. There is a three-year-old named Kyle. There is also the same kid from Denny’s up north: Seth, age five.

  “Are they cute?” asks Quilty.

  “Who?” says Mack.

  “All those nice young docto
rs,” says Quilty. “Are they good-looking?”

  “Hell if I know,” says Mack.

  “Oh, don’t give me that,” says Quilty. “You forget to whom you are speaking, my dear. I can feel you looking around.”

  Mack says nothing for a while. Not until after he’s led Quilty over to a café for some chicory coffee and a beignet, which he feeds pieces of to Guapo. The people at the table next to them, in some kind of morbid theatrical contest, are reading aloud obituaries from the Times-Picayune. “This town’s wacko,” says Mack. Back at the hotel, someone in the next room is playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the kazoo.

  They speed out the next day—across the incandescent olive milk of the swamps, leafless, burned trees jutting from them like crosses. “You’re going too fast,” says Quilty. “You’re driving like goddamn Sean Penn!” Mack, following no particular route, heads out toward the salt marshes: grebes, blackbirds, sherbet-winged flamingos fly in low over the feathery bulrushes. It is all pretty, in its bleak way. Lone cattle are loose and munching cordgrass amid the oil rigs.

  “Which way are we going?”

  He suddenly swings north toward Memphis. “North. Memphis.” All he can think of now is getting back.

  “What are you thinking of?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing. Scenery.”

  “Hot bods?”

  “Yeah. Just saw a great cow,” says Mack. “And a not-bad possum.”

  When they are finally checked into the Peabody Hotel, it is already late afternoon. Their room is a little stuffy and lit in a strange, golden way. Mack flops on the bed.

  Quilty, beginning to perspire, takes his jacket off and throws it on the floor. “Y’know: what is wrong with you?” he asks.

  “What do you mean, me? What is wrong with you?”

  “You’re so distracted and weird.”

  “We’re traveling. I’m sight-seeing. I’m tired. Sorry if I seem distant.”

  “ ‘Sight-seeing.’ That’s nice! How about me? Yoo-hoo!”

  Mack sighs. When he goes on the attack like this, Quilty tends to head in five miserable directions at once. He has a brief nervous breakdown and shouts from every shattered corner of it, then afterward pulls himself together and apologizes. It is all a bit familiar. Mack closes his eyes, to sail away from him. He floats off and, trying not to think of Lou, briefly thinks of Annie, though the sudden blood rush that stiffens him pulls at his stitches and snaps him awake. He sits up. He kicks off his shoes and socks and looks at his pickled toes: slugs in a box.

  Quilty is cross-legged on the floor, trying to do some deep-breathing exercises. He is trying to get chi to his meridians—or something like that. “You think I don’t know you’re attracted to half the people you see?” Quilty is saying. “You think I’m stupid or something? You don’t think I feel your head turn and your gaze stop everywhere we go?”

  “What?”

  “You’re too much,” Quilty finally says to Mack.

  “I’m too much? You are! You’re so damn nervous and territorial,” Mack says.

  “I have a highly inflamed sense of yard,” says Quilty. He has given up on the exercises. “Blind people do. I don’t want you sticking your hitchhiker’s thumb out over the property line. It’s a betrayal and an eyesore to the community!”

  “What community? What are you talking about?”

  “All you sighted people are alike. You think we’re Mr. Magoo! You think I’m not as aware as some guy who paints water towers and’s got cysts on his dick?”

  Mack shakes his head. He sits up and starts to put his shoes back on. “You really go for the juggler, don’t you?” he says.

  “Juggler?” Quilty howls. “Juggler? No, obviously, I go for the clowns.”

  Mack is puzzled. Quilty’s head is tilted in that hyperalert way that says nothing in the room will get past him. “Juggler,” Mack says. “Isn’t that the word? What is the word?”

  “A juggler,” says Quilty, slowly for the jury, “is someone who juggles.”

  Mack’s chest tightens around a small emptied space. He feels his own crappy luck returning like a curse. “You don’t even like me, do you?” he says.

  “Like you? Is that what you’re really asking?”

  “I’m not sure,” says Mack. He looks around the hotel room. Not this, not any room with Quilty in it would ever be his home.

  “Let me tell you a story,” says Quilty.

  “I don’t like stories,” Mack says.

  It now seems to have cost Mack so much to be here. In his mind—a memory or a premonition, which is it, his mind does not distinguish—he sees himself returning not just to Tapston but to Kentucky or to Illinois, wherever it is Annie lives now, and stealing back his own-blooded boy, whom he loves, and who is his, and running fast with him toward a car, putting him in and driving off. It would be the proper thing, in a way. Other men have done it.

  Quilty’s story goes like this: “A woman came to my office once very early on in my practice. Her case was a simple divorce that she made complicated by greed and stubbornness, and she worked up quite a bill. When she got the bill, she phoned me, shouting and saying angry things. I said, ‘Look, we’ll work out a payment plan. One hundred dollars a month. How does that sound?’ I was reasonable. My practice was new and struggling. Still, she refused to pay a cent. I had to take out a loan to pay my secretary, and I never forgot that. So, five years later, that very same woman’s doctor phones me. She’s got bone cancer, the doctor says, and I’m one of the only German Jews in town and might have the same blood type for a marrow transfusion for her. Would I consider it, at least consider having a blood test? I said, ‘Absolutely not,’ and hung up. The doctor called back. He begged me, but I hung up again. A month later, the woman died.”

  “What’s your point?” says Mack. Quilty’s voice is flying apart now.

  “That that is the truth about me,” he says. “Don’t you see—”

  “Yes, I fucking see. I am the one here who does the seeing! Me and Guapo.”

  He pauses for a long time. “I don’t forgive anybody anything. That is the point.”

  “Y’know what? This whole thing is such a crock,” says Mack, but his voice is thin and diffident, and he finishes putting on his shoes, but without socks, and then grabs up his coat.

  Downstairs, the clock says quarter to five, and a crowd is gathering to watch the ducks. A red carpet has already been rolled out from the elevator to the fountain, and this makes the ducks excited, anxious for the evening ritual, their clipped wings fluttering. Mack takes a table in the back and orders a double whiskey with ice. He drinks it fast—it freezes and burns in that great old way: it has been too long. He orders another. The pianist on the other side of the lobby is playing “Street of Dreams”: “Love laughs at a king/Kings don’t mean a thing” the man sings, and it seems to Mack the most beautiful song in the world. Men everywhere are about to die for reasons they don’t know and wouldn’t like if they did—but here is a song to do it by, so that life, in its mad spasms, might not demolish so much this time.

  The ducks drink and dive in the fountain.

  Probably Mack is already drunk as a horse.

  Near the Union Avenue door is a young woman mime, juggling Coke bottles. People waiting for the ducks have gathered to watch. Even in her white pancake makeup, she is attractive. Her red hair is bright as a daylily and beneath her black leotards her legs are taut as an archer’s bow.

  Go for the juggler, thinks Mack. His head hurts, but his throat and lungs are hot and clear.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he suddenly notices Quilty and Guapo, stepping slow and unsure, making their way around the far edge of the crowd. Their expressions are lonely and distraught, even Guapo’s. Mack looks back at the fountain. Soon Guapo will find him—but Mack is not going to move until then, needing the ceremony of Quilty’s effort. He knows Quilty will devise some conciliatory gift. He will come up and touc
h Mack and whisper, “Come back, don’t be angry, you know this is how the two of us get.”

  But for now, Mack will just watch the ducks, watch them summoned by their caretaker, an old uniformed black man who blows a silver whistle and wields a long rod, signaling the ducks out of the water, out onto the carpet in a line. They haven’t had a thing to say about it, these ducks, thinks Mack, haven’t done a thing to deserve it, but there they are, God’s lilies, year-round in a giant hotel, someone caring for them the rest of their lives. All the other birds of the world—the mange-hollowed hawks, the lordless hens, the dumb clucks—will live punishing, unblessed lives, winging it north, south, here, there, searching for a place of rest. But not these. Not these rich, lucky ducks! graced with rug and stairs, upstairs and down, roof to pool to penthouse, always steered, guided, welcomed toward those golden elevator doors like a heaven’s mouth, and though it isn’t really a heaven’s mouth, it is maybe the lip of all there is.

  Mack sighs. Why must he always take the measure of his own stupid suffering? Why must he always look around and compare his own against others’?

  Because God wants people to.

  Even if you’re comparing yourself to ducks?

  Especially if you’re comparing yourself to ducks.

  He feels his own head shrink with the hate that is love with no place to go. He will do it: he will go back and get Lou if it kills him. A million soldiers are getting ready to die for less. He will find Annie; maybe it won’t be that hard. And at first, he will ask her nicely. But then he will do what a father must: a boy is a father’s. Sons love their fathers like nothing else. Mack read that once in a magazine.

  Yet the more he imagines finding Lou, the more greatly he suspects that the whole mad task will indeed kill him. He sees—as if again in a vision (of what he must prevent or of what he cannot prevent, who knew with visions?)—the death of himself and the sorrow of his boy. He sees the wound in his own back, his eyes turning from fish-gray jellies to the plus and minus signs of a comic-book corpse. He sees Lou scratched and crawling back toward a house, the starry sky Mack’s mocking sparkled shroud.