Kathy Little Bird

by Benedict Freedman

“They’re tips. I figured the tips were mine.”

  “Now see here, Kathy—”

  “I don’t want to hear any lectures.”

  “No lectures. I’m giving you a last chance to be reasonable. We don’t even know for sure the guy was dead.”

  “He was dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I could tell.”

  Jack rolled his eyes heavenward, only there was a ceiling in the way. He wrote a number on a matchbook. “That’s where I’ll be. Call me when you come to your senses.”

  I watched through the window as he got in the car, slammed the door, backed out, and—I waited to see if he would drive off.

  He did.

  My spirits suddenly rebounded and I inquired when the next bus was due. There was time for a giant Coke and to play the jukebox.

  On the way back I sat behind the driver. The bus made some rural stops. People got in who he knew and called by their first names.

  “What is Martha like?” I asked, inching forward.

  “She’s a good sort. On her way to see her daughter four stops on. Now that young woman is no better than she should be. She’s got a kid too. Martha tries to be there when the little girl gets home from school. There’s lots of trouble in this world, missy.”

  “I know. You can let me off at the stop closest to the police station.”

  I walked down the main street, entered the building, and went up to the officer on duty. I gave my name and stated I was a witness to the stabbing on Hope Street.

  “Is the man dead?” I asked.

  “He’s dead all right.”

  “I thought he was.”

  I was brought in to see the sergeant, who was warming a pot of coffee. He offered me a cup and we sat with the desk between us, drinking the hot dark brew.

  The sergeant looked at me curiously. “How come you want to testify?”

  “I didn’t see anyone telling it as it was. They’re all friends of the guy who did the stabbing.”

  “Yeah.” Then drawled, “He’s got friends everywhere.”

  Did he mean here on the police force? I looked at him for confirmation, and he smiled over the rim of his Styrofoam cup.

  “Of course,” he went on, “all you need say to get the old bum off is that he just happened along.”

  “That’s how it was,” I assured him.

  “In that case…” He rummaged in a drawer and brought out a printed form. “Fill this out, sign it, and we’ll turn him loose right now.”

  I brought my hands together. “Oh, could we?” Then I attended to the affidavit. The sergeant looked it over, nodded, and led the way through a back room and down a short corridor with cells on either side. “There he is. Hardly worth bothering your pretty head about.” My man was stretched out snoring lustily under a thin gray blanket. He started at our approach, opened his eyes, and looked at us in alarm.

  “It’s all right,” the sergeant said. “I’m letting you go. This young lady was present at the brawl. I have her sworn statement that you just happened along.”

  “Did you have to wake me out of a beauty sleep to tell me something I already know?” the old man grumbled.

  “This young lady did you a big favor, friend.”

  “Hmmm,” was the response.

  No one thanked me, especially not the old tramp, but I felt good and started humming a Cree victory song.

  When we got back to the front office there was Jack, breezy as ever. “Hi, sweetie,” he said casually as I came in. “Ready to go?”

  “The man was dead,” I said to him.

  “Kind of thought he was. Leastways, he wasn’t looking too healthy.”

  I don’t know if I’d expected Jack to be there. Or what I would have done if he wasn’t.

  IT was back to the good life.

  That’s what Jack called it. And for him I guess it was. I was pulling down a couple of hundred weekly singing what he wanted me to sing and what the audience wanted to hear. And he was drinking it up.

  Don’t get me wrong. I loved performing, and singing three or four nights a week was great experience. The first time a drunk followed me on stage and started caterwauling into the mike, I didn’t know what to do. But I learned under fire, incorporating him into the act and setting him the task of beating time. The audience went for this and even liked the fact that he couldn’t get it right. It added a comedic touch to my number.

  No, I never tired of performing. But it looked as though Jack was right about the Indian songs; they just didn’t go over, even as encores. I put them aside. Later, I told myself, because I still believed there was an audience out there. At the same time I knew instinctively that singing other people’s songs and copying their styles would get me nowhere. If there was a route up, it certainly wasn’t this.

  Nevertheless, while my husband was lapping it up or busy conning a mark, my voice was growing stronger, louder, better. But there weren’t contacts to be made in these out of the way spots. No one of importance heard me. I’d be stuck in two-bit hole-in-the-wall places forever. My career was stalled.

  The closest I came to the big time was Minneapolis, where the owner applauded with the audience and signed me for the following year. But as we drove south through Wisconsin and the places got bigger and better, we started hearing, “Booked up…,” which meant, “Never heard of her.”

  Chicago seemed more distant than ever. If we were lucky, we’d make Madison.

  We were having breakfast, coffee heated in the motel and rolls out of a doggie bag, when…Jack let out a whoop and a holler and waved the daily paper in my face. “Look at this and tell me what you see.”

  I looked and handed the paper back. “I don’t see anything except unpronounceable Vietnamese names.”

  “No, no, here—the bit about the UN. Here it is. Erich von Kerll. It’s got to be him, the newly appointed trade commissioner from Austria.”

  “Von Kerll?” I snatched the paper back. “You think it’s my father?”

  “It’s got to be. It’s your father, all right, and we’re in the chips.”

  “Wait a minute, Jack. None of your wild schemes. If it is my father, so what?”

  Jack looked at me dumbfounded. “What do you mean—so what? So he’s the trade commissioner, with his name in the paper. He could open doors for you.”

  “We don’t even know it’s him.”

  “Of course it’s him. I told you that von meant something.” He settled down to read the article, and I read over his shoulder. There was a confirming sentence. “…left his home on the Bodensee to fill the post recently vacated by…” I stopped reading.

  My father was here in this country. And he was someone important—but what was I? A struggling nobody, just another girl singer…Someday, when I’d made it, I could see myself dining with him at the Waldorf, or one of the other posh spots Jack told me of.

  Not now. I didn’t want to meet him with my hand out for favors, introductions, acceptance, money. That wasn’t how I’d pictured it. In none of the Cree dreams where I’d so often met my father had it been like this.

  Jack chose to disregard my reaction. He was off and running. “Think what he could do for you.”

  I was unresponsive to these fantasies. “I’m sure that’s the first thing that would come to his mind.”

  He didn’t hear me. “First off, we attend to your wardrobe—” He broke in on himself to exclaim, “This is the chance of a lifetime.”

  “What would we do? Just show up? He must have a whole staff of people. They’d throw us out on our ear.”

  “Why should they do that? A beautiful, gifted daughter. He’d be delighted. Any man would. Besides, didn’t you always tell me it’s what your mother wanted—for you to meet your father?”

  When he brought Mum into it that changed things. “But he’s in New York,” I said feebly.

  “You stopped reading after they mentioned Bodensee. The article goes on to say…See, right here—he’s part of a team of experts vi
siting agribusiness centers to study the latest advances in farm machinery. Anyway, at the moment he’s in Milwaukee, just hours from here.” Jack grabbed both my hands and dragged me reluctantly into a wild conga. My feet found the rhythm and we whirled and pranced and whirled some more until he fell into a chair with me on top of him.

  “I won’t just barge in on him,” I said after I had caught my breath.

  I did agree to write.

  It seemed odd. I was suddently projected into the dream of meeting him. Only in my dream Jack Sullivan didn’t stand over me as I wrote. What would von Kerll think? How would he react? Someone turns up claiming to be his daughter, a daughter he didn’t know he had. Would he even believe me? I tried to picture the man who would open this letter. The second-in-command of U-boat 186. Tall, blond, with gray eyes that Mum had fallen in love with. Stories of him rushed through my head…a little boy in a sailor suit who lived by the Bodensee and had his leg amputated in the war, who married his nurse, and then left her. What would we think of each other?

  Would he despise me as a fortune hunter? A gold-digging opportunist? Because that’s what I was. I hated myself for writing.

  Jack told me to say he should reply care of the local post office. I objected, “Wouldn’t that look odd to him? No permanent address, no home?”

  “The man’s not going to worry about details like that. He is being told that he has a daughter.”

  In my letter I added nothing of myself or Mum. He hadn’t the right to know anything. Unlike Jack, I didn’t expect him to rush to embrace an errant daughter, lavish riches on me, incorporate me into his life. I no longer made up fairy tales.

  Apparently even an answer was too much. Jack and I went to the post office every day for a week. “I can’t believe it,” Jack kept reiterating. “How can any man be so coldhearted as not to want to meet his own daughter?”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want Jack to see how much it hurt. Erich von Kerll had shared winters with me and Mum. I’d wasted a lot of dreams on that man.

  Then finally a reply, sort of. The letter came back. Insufficient postage. I was glad he’d never received it. I knew in my heart it should not have been written in the first place. So I hid it and let Jack think what he would about Erich von Kerll.

  Chapter Eight

  IT was a routine evening. I went on, did my first set, and got a big hand. Guys crowded around. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Jack at the bar, pretty far gone. In this half-inebriated condition he wasn’t as sharp as he thought he was, and was squandering our money. I would have made a scene; after all it was really not our money, it was my money he was losing. But an uneasy possibility kept me quiet. A day or two might prove me wrong.

  A day or two proved the opposite. I was pregnant.

  I hated finding this out in an ordinary motel room. What I was experiencing was so extraordinary, so unusual. It was like a miracle had happened to me—in this everyday kind of place with ugly flowered wallpaper.

  Such a large event had never happened in my life before and I wanted to talk it over with Mum. I wanted her to tell me what it was like to grow a baby in your body, to have a new life to nurture and take care of and see that she became a really good person.

  Kathy.

  Another Kathy.

  I needed to be by myself to think it through.

  It was hard to get away from Jack, but I couldn’t think about it properly with him constantly at my side talking his Irish banter.

  As luck would have it, he ran out of beer, and I offered to go to the corner for a six-pack. The fresh air was bracing, and I ran a whole block just for the joy of being out and away and by myself for a few minutes. The wind was in my hair and I felt elated. I had life in me, and running was a celebration. It was then I was sent an omen—wild geese passed overhead, their flight an arrow in the sky. They were heading for home. I didn’t know until that moment that I missed the Canadian prairies that I had opened my eyes to every morning for eighteen years.

  I took a side street, and another, and wound up by docks, cranes, tramp steamers, bales, and boxes of cargo. They were being off-loaded.

  I liked the tangy smell of oil, fish, and salt. It stung my nostrils in an exciting way. I sat down on a coil of rope off to the side, pretty much out of sight, and watched men haul and lift, swear and laugh. I liked their arms, powerful, hairy, muscled.

  Jack’s arms weren’t much bigger than mine, only with orange fuzz. Yet he had made me pregnant, and it was this I had to think about, and the gypsy life we led. How could a baby be part of it? I’d read magazine stories where an infant slept in a bureau drawer, or the drawer of a wardrobe trunk. But that was not the way Mum raised us.

  I wasn’t feeling deliriously happy any longer. Jack was going to be furious that I’d gotten myself into this pickle. He liked things as they were. Why not? I was a meal ticket, with relatively little upkeep and hardly any overhead. It occurred to me that I’d gotten myself into another box.

  I decided to delay telling him. Once he knew, he would have the upper hand, and the baby and I would be dependent on him and his whims.

  “Well,” I said to the little package inside me, “your timing is not the greatest. But don’t worry, we’ll manage.”

  “YOU were gone an hour after that six-pack.”

  “I took a walk.” Spoken demurely, sweetly, so he wouldn’t dump us when he found out. Some people are naturally kind and sweet-natured, my Mum for instance. But it’s wearing on me to even pretend. I dreamed of being rescued by a big-time record producer. He’d hear me, the bucks would roll in, and I’d get a nanny for Kathy. Because of course the baby was Kathy, she couldn’t be anything else. One of those big blond Swedish girls would be perfect. We’d live in a penthouse in New York City or maybe a horse ranch in Nashville while I sang ethnic songs at the Grand Ole Opry. And I’d thought of a beautiful Cree lullaby to sing to Kathy.

  “So now what’s taking so long?” This from the couch where he sprawled watching the tube.

  “I can’t find the bottle opener.”

  “It’s in plain sight on the counter.”

  I was careful to pour the beer so it ran down the inside of the tilted glass. Jack didn’t like a head. I brought it and curled up beside him on the couch.

  It was hard when he was in one of his losing spells not to say anything. Hard to laugh at jokes I’d heard before. Hard to be all sweetness and light. Hardest of all was repressing a desire to tell everyone about my baby. Jas and Morrie were uncles. Imagine. How surprised they’d be. And Elk Woman should know so she could sing Cree prayers for Kathy. Elk Woman was able to dream the Grandmothers, who would protect and guide her. My thoughts, like the wild geese, flew in formation back to Alberta. Back to…but I choked on his name. I’d taken a different path. I’d left him standing alone before the preacher’s house.

  There was something else I had to repress—my music. That’s the way I had come to think of the Cree chanting that filled my head. I let it out only under my breath, and only in the bathroom. The power was in Jack’s hands. I couldn’t alienate him and I couldn’t lose jobs. We needed all the money we could pile up.

  I was almost six months along when I told him, and by then anyone with half an eye could see. It was New Year’s Eve and I’d pulled off an unexpected gig, subbing for a group stuck in a blizzard. The roadhouse gave me a bonus. I figured Jack would be in a good mood, and the time was as right as it would ever be.

  I’d nerved myself up to it once before, but then JFK was assassinated and Jack was upset, blaming LBJ, blaming Hoover, the New York underworld, even Castro. No one could come near him for days. Now he was a little high on champagne. I seized the opportunity, and with a big grin, which I plastered over a scared, sinking sensation, suggested we drink a toast to the baby.

  Rage, fury, accusations pelted me. I stood my ground. I wanted to say I hadn’t done it by myself, that he should try to be happy about it. But he had the power, and ended by saying, “We’ll have to a
ttend to this.”

  I smiled my most ingratiating smile. “Too late.”

  That precipitated another eruption. He accused. He calculated. Then in case he’d made a mistake, calculated again. He pleaded and threatened by turns. I went into the place in my head where I keep my music, and stayed there until he stormed himself out. When I saw he had simmered down sufficiently, I told him my plan. “I feel fine. I never have morning sickness. Sometimes I’m a bit on the queasy side when I turn in, but a cracker to nibble on fixes that. Anyway, since I feel good I’ll be able to sing right up to the end.”

  “No one’s going to pay money for a pregnant broad to get up on stage.”

  “I’m carrying it well. You didn’t even know. I had to tell you.”

  “Six months is not nine months.”

  “I’ve got it worked out. I’ll wear one of those caftans that hang loose, and I’ll have a flowing scarf. I’ll be a bit on the heavy side, but they won’t know.”

  “Well,” he considered, “I guess there’s nothing for it but to take things a day at a time.”

  “I wonder,” I asked the room in general, “if she’ll have red hair.”

  Jack glared at me. “She better have.” Then, “Wait a minute, why she? Boys run in my family.”

  “Girls run in mine.”

  My life with Jack hadn’t been what I’d imagined. I’d known for some time that the road map I’d drawn from Mum’s kitchen straight to stardom had been unrealistic. Things got in the way. People got in the way. Life got in the way, especially babies.

  I put my hands flat against my hard, smooth belly. I felt that each job now would be my last. This week or next or the week after I’d be given the boot. There are limits to what a caftan can conceal, no matter how voluminous. I’m sure most everybody guessed, but no one had said anything…yet.

  I prepared for the inevitable by saving whatever I could, watching out for sales, and forgetting the beer when I could get away with it, claiming I’d run out of money. Fortunately, Jack never knew for sure if I was holding out on him. He suspected though, and he was surly.