Gradle Bird

by J. C. Sasser

  He pinched her chin and jerked it up toward his mouth. His pelvis pressed against hers. “You,” he said, staring into her endless and cruel blue eyes, “are fucking crazy.”

  He kicked Delvis’s guitar out of his way, walked toward his truck, and looked over his shoulder to make sure Ceif was following not too far behind.

  The insects were loud and electric. They deafened the night and so did the frogs whose throaty dialogues warned of rain. It was sticky and suffocating hot, but on occasion a little breeze would come up and bring currents strong enough to make the Coca-Cola whirligig whine and spin. Gradle sweated as she scrubbed Sonny Joe’s urine from Delvis’s porch. She could still smell him. Dirt. Fish. Church pews. And her.

  Delvis sat on the red Dairy Queen booth and sliced petals out of a Sprite can with his switchblade knife. He had been working quietly, had not said anything since Sonny Joe and Ceif left, but she could tell he was talking loud in his head by the way his brows almost mumbled when he stopped his work and stared out into the dark and lonesome night.

  She wanted to apologize, but the silence between them was too perfect to disturb. She felt responsible. She could have stopped everything. She could have stopped Sonny Joe from ever getting out of his truck. But she didn’t. She went along and was lured like everybody else into the snares of Sonny Joe’s seductive games. And while Delvis had managed to overpower him and make him admit out loud his defeat, Sonny Joe still won.

  Delvis cleared his throat. It shut up the insects and frogs. He stabbed the Sprite can with a coat hanger, inserted washers on either side, and bent its cutout petals into a flashy-green flower. He rose from the booth and hung the Sprite-can whirligig on Gradle’s finger.

  She lifted it up and it spun in the breeze.

  “I don’t care one bit that boy pissed on my porch, but I ain’t no retard,” he said, picked up his guitar, and walked inside his shack.

  A TENDER RAIN TAPPED against the tin roof. Its raindrops clung to the attic window like crystal magnets. Annalee stood still and cold, stoned by the encounter with her son. She hadn’t moved for over a day, didn’t flinch as the moonflower burst into bloom or shift with the soft sunrise. There was a place people go when they die. But she had not gone there. She was not dead yet. And now she knew why.

  She gripped the window’s lever, and pulled it to, severing the moon vine’s green veins, stopping its green blood. She secured the lock, closed the curtains, and shoved furniture over the attic flap, sealing its seams with boxes and bricks. She wanted no light, no draft, no sound, no Leonard. All she wanted was to die.

  Against the far wall she went and lay upon the fainting couch. She removed the portrait from over her heart, stared at her reflection, and remembered when she was alive and the day Delvis drew her. It was almost summer. Of all things, it was the acute craving for a tomato that brought her out of the house that day. Her parents had been killed in a car wreck and ever since she didn’t have much reason to go out. Most days she kept to her bed, didn’t put on make-up or bother to take a bath. The days she didn’t keep to her bed, she kept to the house, wandering around the attic caught up in aimless make-believe. But on that particular day, her tomato craving snapped her out of it. She popped out of bed, took a bath, and applied red stain to her lips. She combed the matted knots in her hair and moisturized her skin. She wanted to be pretty again, the prettiest she’d ever been. So, she went to her closet and put on her white eyelet dress. So much time had passed, and it still smelled like Leonard.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. The dress still fit, but since she last wore it, sadness had stunted her growth and aged her prematurely. But she was still so ungodly pretty. She slipped her purse on her wrist and turned the front door’s knob. The sun blinded her eyes as the door broke through a seal of spiderwebs and a pile of mail collecting by the door.

  In the town square, she moved through the bundles of people who stared and whispered at her back. She could only imagine what they said. How could a young woman with so much beauty be so shut-in? Was she coo-coo? Had she been dented in the head? The poor child; what a tragedy about her parents.

  Annalee went from farmer to farmer asking for a tomato. They all estimated another two weeks, but still she waited all day under the shade of an oak, hoping a farmer from the next county south would show up with an early crop.

  When the farmers began packing up, a slight wind blew and carried the soft sound of chimes. She rose from under the tree, walked toward the sound, and found another tree with limbs decorated with wind chimes. Some were made of forks and spoons, others with bottle caps and colored glass, another with sparkplugs and fresh water shells, all of which made their own original sounds. A ratty quilt spread out under the tree and was weighted down with all sorts of trinkets and framed artwork for sale. She ran her fingers through a wind chime and picked up a music box from the quilt. It had been stripped, painted yellow, and layered with shellac. Instead of a ballerina, there was a tiny porcelain cat with a broken tail in her place. She wound the box and allowed the music to crawl in her ear, losing herself in the sound as the broken-tailed cat pirouetted on its stem. She hadn’t heard music since the day she made love to Leonard in the attic. Her eyes closed, but tears streamed down regardless, and when the music slowed and dwindled, she felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “Ma’am, I see you like my creations,” a voice said.

  Annalee flinched. She turned around and found a young boy, all of perhaps twelve, with a pair of blue eyes that already seemed to know her.

  “They’re my own originals, made out of stuff people throw away and don’t think ain’t no good no more. I shiny ‘em up and mix and match ‘em with other things to make my own creations. They’re copyrighted in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. so ain’t nobody can copy what I do. You can’t find this type of art work anywhere,” the boy said. “Not even China. I put my signature on every one of ‘em. It’s in a hidden place so ain’t nobody can mask over it.” The boy turned over one of the shells of a wind chime. “See it?” he asked, pointing to the inside lip of the shell. Scratched in the shell’s mortar were two letters: D-5.

  “I can sell you this for a decent price,” he said. “And it comes with a one hundred percent guarantee ain’t nobody in the county will have a duplicate. Nobody in the universe for that matter. One hundred percent guaranteed. Or, if you like, I’ll do your portrait. I got me a stool over there you can sit on for the posing. I like to draw pretty things,” he said. He took her by the hand and led her to the stool.

  His touch felt like electricity. It made her wonder if the feeling was there because it had been so long since she had felt someone, or if indeed there was some mysterious current between the two of them. She situated herself on the stool while he tore a sheet of paper from his book, secured it to his easel, and chose a pencil from his jar. He inspected the pencil’s tip and skinned it with a knife from his pocket. He handed the pencil to Annalee and moved his easel in front of her.

  “Make a mark,” he said. “You can draw a dot, a line, any kind of mark, and I’ll draw you from it. I like my subjects to participate in my artwork. You can do a circle for your eyes. An M for your lips. Anything you want.”

  A breeze picked up. It tickled her face and the chimes in the tree. She hovered the pencil over the blank canvas unsure of how to start her portrait. One of her eyelashes blew onto the canvas.

  “Can you start with this?” she asked, pointing to her lash.

  “I can work with anything. That’s my talent. I’m especially good at drawing lashes,” he said, licked the tip of his thumb, and sealed the lash to the paper with spit. “In fact, I’m semi-professional at it. Not yet professional. Four more years at practicin’ drawin’ lashes, and I’ll be a professional.”

  He took the pencil from her hand and began to sketch her face, starting with what people always said was the most perfect line of a forehead. As his fingers bridled the pencil, as his wrist moved across the canvas, she caught traces of
his scent. Carrots, sweet, sweet carrots. She looked around for the farmer that must have been nearby with a crate full of them, but the square was empty. The sky had turned twilight, and they were all alone.

  “Can you look forward ma’am?” he asked. “My memory ain’t photographic yet, and I need to make sure I get the angle of your cheeks right.”

  She was scared to look at him, but she had to validate what in her gut she feared was true. She studied the boy with as much intensity as he studied her. He was mostly Leonard. He had his ears exactly, his butterfly-winged ears. He had his hands, his long-fingered hands, musician’s hands, artist’s hands. His eyes were Leonard’s, too. Sparkling blue marbled mazes one could get lost in for days. And he had his smile, his magnetic, dimpled smile.

  She searched for herself in him, but it had been so long since she had seen a mirror she had almost forgotten her own face. It wasn’t until he finished the bones of her cheek and the heart of her chin that she found evidence he was hers. She shivered as if it was the dead of winter.

  He got close to her face and began to count her lashes. “Hold still,” he said. “Try not to blink.”

  She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t control it. Her eyes kept blinking, her lids like cloths trying to blot away her tears.

  “One hundred twenty-five plus thirty-six,” he said, moving on to her other eye.

  After he counted her lashes one by one, he drew them on his page, adding company to the real lash of her eye. With each pencil stroke he made, she felt her lashes being plucked out, three hundred and four times, as she remembered the ride home from that forsaken place and the man with the cherry-smelling pipe that had picked her up alongside the road.

  “Can you smile?” he asked.

  Her fingers went to her mouth in an effort to prevent it from wailing. She bit down on her ring as his hand moved her fingers away so he could study the mouth that had kissed his tiny little forehead once, once and never again.

  He drew her mouth, shaded her temples, and sketched her nose. As a final touch, he went back to her eyes, the right eye, and worked there for a little while, detailing something small, something intricate. When he was finished, he titled his work: “POrTrAIT of.” He removed the paper from his easel and presented it for her review.

  “If you don’t like it, I can do better,” he said.

  He must have seen her breathlessness and thought it was a result of his art.

  “I put two signatures on this one. My typical style signature using my code name. And then I put a special signature on this one. A little experimentation I ain’t never done before.” He pointed his finger to the right eye he had drawn, and there in her bottom lid, he had sketched a reflection of himself wading in the pool of her gathering tears.

  She stared at her portrait in awe of the detail and artistic rendering. He must be some sort of genius. It was a perfect mug shot. All these years, she had gotten away with her crime, escaped a jury, a long sentence in prison, until now. He had captured his perpetrator, his attempted murderer, his mother, down to every last lash.

  “Do you like it?” he asked. “If you don’t like it, I can practice some more.”

  Annalee reached in her purse and handed him all of her money.

  “I ain’t finished with it yet ma’am,” he said, pushing the money back at her. “I don’t take money until it’s complete. What’s your name? I need to put your name in the title.”

  She dropped the money at his feet. “I’m sorry,” she said. She ran off clutching the portrait against her chest.

  When she got home, she went up to the attic, locked the window, and pulled the curtains. She pushed every piece of furniture and stacked every heavy box atop the attic flap to secure her prison door, to seal up her grave. She hung her white eyelet dress in the wardrobe, clothed herself all in black, and swallowed hundreds of poisonous moonflower seeds. She lay on the fainting couch, holding the portrait against her chest. She took a deep breath, crossed her heart, and hoped to die.

  And now after reliving it all, she found herself in the very same place, in the very same spot, except now she was a ghost. She lay her head back on the couch’s rest, popped moonflower seeds in her mouth, and clutched the portrait now decades old against her chest. She took a deep breath, crossed her heart, and hoped to die again.

  DELVIS WOKE AT the split of dawn and immediately checked under the pillow to see if the Tooth Fairy had come. There was no sign of her, just his back molar and the bare floor on which he had slept. She must have had too many teeth to collect last night. If there were five billion people in the world and last night half of them lost their teeth, she would be busy. Maybe she was like Santa Claus and had reindeer to help out her speed. But he didn’t remember seeing any reindeer the last time he saw her. She was all by herself. All by her sparkling diamond self. He wondered if she would come back tomorrow, but maybe he had scared her so bad the other day she had no mind to come back anytime soon. He scared people all the time. He didn’t know why. He just knew he did. Maybe she had decided to let him keep his tooth and had hidden his gift somewhere else. Maybe she had forgotten. But something with that kind of magic must have an extra special memory. He would ask Gradle what she thought about it all once she woke up from her peaceful and pretty sleep.

  He unlatched the front door bolt and stepped out on the porch to see if maybe the Tooth Fairy was waiting for him outside. He always kept his doors locked up tight in case somebody like George “The Animal” Steele tried to get inside and put him in the Camel Clutch. A wild grey cat scared from the woodpile and ran up under one of his old fixer-upper cars. Its hood was ajar like an alligator’s mouth collecting rain. Along the horizon, a pink sun shredded the clouds and began to scare away the mist that looked like a ghost hovering over the hairy balls of dandelion weed. He walked to various places on his porch, stood still, and sniffed the world suspiciously. He grabbed an old rake that was propped up against the wall and raked the porch, concentrating in the area in front of the door. He looked for footprints and fairy dust. He looked for any sign, any clue somebody had come during the night.

  Somebody had. But the evidence didn’t appear in a footprint or with fairy dust, but rather it appeared on a handwritten note taped to the screened door. He snatched the note with his hand and read it out loud, “BE AT THE PIGGLY WIGGLY PAY PHONE AT 12 NOON SHARP TO ACCEPT A VERY IMPORTANT PHONE CALL.”

  Delvis grinned from ear to ear. It was a note from the record company. He had waited all his life for this to happen. Gradle’s friends must have gone out and spread the word about his singing and guitar talents, and now the record companies had caught wind of it. They must want to talk to him about recording some of his original songs and copyrighting them in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. He twitched with joy. They had driven all the way from Nashville, Tennessee, so excited about his music that they couldn’t wait until the morning. They had come in the middle of the night to deliver the note and didn’t knock on his door because they wanted to be polite. Maybe they had scared off the Tooth Fairy. He walked to the porch steps, pinched his eyes, and surveyed his property.

  “Wherever y’all are, y’all can come on out now!” he hollered off the porch. “I’m awake and we can talk business! We don’t have to wait ‘til noon at the Piggly Wiggly! I can set me up a table on the porch and we can draw up the contract right then and there!” He waited for the bushes to rustle, and when they didn’t, he scanned the woods, waiting for the music men to come out dressed in fancy suits and shiny boots, cowboy hats, and bolo ties.

  “Don’t be shy!” he yelled into the woods, thinking they may be nervous about meeting a music man with the biggest fan club in the universe. He waited around for another half hour, watching the woods and bushes for signs of the record company people, but the woods and bushes remained as still as the mist hovering in the morning. Then he thought better of it. These were big shots from Nashville, Tennessee. They’d have enough money to rent a room at the Magnolia Motel in town.
He figured he’d have to wait until noon to talk to them. By the height of the sun, he figured he had over four hours to prepare. If he was going to sign a music contract today, he better dress and look the part.

  He walked inside his shack and found Gradle awake and making up his bed. She was so pretty in that green dress with the short hairdo he’d given her. It was like she had never slept, like she was a constant dream.

  “Who are you out there yelling at?” she asked.

  He showed her the note he had found on the door. “Record company wants to meet me at the Piggly Wiggly at noon. They gonna call me up on the pay phone to talk some business,” he said, as Gradle read the note. “Will you come with me?” he asked. Gradle would help calm his nerves if they got too out of control. She would also help make him look like a genuine music star since genuine music stars always had pretty girls wrapped up in their arms.

  “How do you know this is from the record company?” she asked. She read the note again.

  He pointed to the word IMPORTANT. “‘Cause it says it’s a very I-M-P-O-R-T-A-N-T phone call I need to take. There ain’t but three things important in my life. My music, my art, and you.” He paused for a moment and contemplated her question. “You think that note might be from some art man wantin’ to see my sketches?”

  “I don’t know what to think about this note,” she said. “Do you get notes often?”

  “Not like this one. This is a once in a lifetime note. I need to get prepared,” he said. “It’s important I stick out my best foot forward.”

  He went to his clothes pile and selected his blue polyester suit and a white button-up shirt. Before he put it on, he worked on the stains with some baking soda and vinegar and then masked up the smell with several sprays of a half used bottle of Old Spice he’d found at the dump. He dry-shaved his stubble with his knife and massaged some second-hand Vitalis in his hair. He spit-shined his K-Swiss sneakers and tightened his bolo tie he’d made out of a piece of leather shoestring and a silver dollar. He slipped his gold rings on his fingers, situated his white cowboy hat on his shiny slick head, and presented himself to Gradle. His pants were a little tight in the thighs and his jacket was still damp where he’d worked on the stains, but other than that, he felt like a real live country music star.