by Reed Arvin
“Bird?” he asked. He turned his head rapidly to the right and opened his eyes. The vulture was ignoring him, intent on a crack in the concrete several feet away. He was jamming his beak into the crack, turning his head this way and that, rooting and digging. Suddenly, he snapped his head back and pulled out a writhing beetle. He tipped his head up and swallowed. The Birdman watched, wondering if the vulture was eating his thoughts when he ate those bugs.
“Bird?” he asked again. At that, the animal flapped one wing lamely and walked in a circle. “That’s right, bird,” the Birdman said. “Pluck, pluck, eat, eat. That’s right. Eat them all.”
Boyd wanted to get up. He had wanted to get up for about an hour now, but so far hadn’t. He had been restless all morning, and now it was past one. He never knew what kind of day it would be: would the thoughts be burrowing thoughts, or his own thoughts? When the lawyer came it had been a good day, he had been peaceful and rested. But today wasn’t so good, which was bad, because he needed to think. Lawyers and papers and Ty Crandall, all thoughts from somewhere. He needed to think from where. Were they burrowing thoughts? Or were they his? He looked over at his bird, who was scratching at the grass near the sidewalk with a black talon.
That day a restless feeling had been growing. All morning long it grew and grew. He was having a new thought, a strange and dangerous thought. Wherever it came from, the thought had been growing all day. There was nothing at all vague about it. It was very specific.
“Bird?” he murmured, and without looking, he leaned forward and tipped himself up off the park bench. He was standing; he looked around, mildly surprised. That was when things worked best, when they just happened, when he didn’t think so hard and just tipped and he didn’t have to decide. He stuck his hands in his pockets.
“Where’s that damn junior Henry?” he asked the bird. “Where’s the boy that don’t live here no more?” He shuffled down the sidewalk toward town about ten feet, a worried look on his face. He scanned up and down the street, across the park. “Not here, no junior Henry today, no siree,” he whispered. He stopped. The lawyer made him feel better. He could go into town with him. With the lawyer, he didn’t have to explain anything. He could hide behind him, walk along and look at his buildings. The lawyer talked, and people couldn’t hurt him. He kept the people away. But alone was different. Alone he might get the burrowing thoughts, and then he didn’t know what would happen.
“Them’s my buildings, ain’t that right, junior Henry?” he asked the bird. He shuffled toward town again, moving a few feet before stopping. To avoid thinking the dangerous thought, he thought about the houses, the land. He started up again, moving at a good pace. He was nearly at the end of the block. He stopped and turned his head to the right and looked down Owendale away from his house. Four blocks away, he could see a stoplight. Cars were passing through the intersection. A few people stood and talked on Pawnee. They broke up into two smaller groups and headed in different directions. He thought about the grocery, the farm supply store.
“I own your store, Billy Payne,” he whispered, and turned the corner. He was walking again, the stoplight growing as he moved toward it. The granary. The two big silos full of grain. He walked along. “Them’s my buildings,” he repeated. The bank building. He slowed. He didn’t like to think about the bank. There were shadows there, shapes and memories that needed to be kept absolutely quiet. He ground to a halt, and looked back at his park bench; it was a hundred feet away. He could see the vulture staring after him, his head tilted and still. The Birdman stared back for a while, his face intense. He furrowed his brow and concentrated. It was okay. He would turn left at the light, away from the bank. He didn’t need to pass by there to get where the dangerous thought was taking him.
The Birdman walked on toward the stoplight. He crossed the street at the edge of Custer’s Elm. It had been four years since he had crossed that street; when Henry had taken him to the farm supply store, they had come up Hilldale, on the other side of the square. The Birdman walked, and the stoplight up at Pawnee grew. Two more blocks. He made his brain very hard, and concentrated. He made one more block.
Raymond Boyd stood at the corner of Pawnee and Owendale. Nobody was near, which comforted him, but there were people on the street farther up. He squinted his eyes and stared. To the north: the bank, which he didn’t like; the square, with the courthouse; the café; and farther on, the Feed and Farm Supply. To the south: the grocery, post office, and Benton Street. His dangerous thought grew and grew. He turned south, walking up Pawnee with his head down. He watched his shoes moving back and forth. Eventually he passed the grocery store on the other side of the street. A few cars were parked in front, and a lady was pushing a cart from the store to her car. She saw him and stopped dead for a second. The Birdman didn’t know her; he stared at her until she suddenly left her cart full of groceries and went back into the store. A few seconds later the Birdman could see several faces scrunched against the glass window of the store, talking animatedly. He looked at the window, but a car came between them, slowing markedly as it passed. The Birdman seemed to snap out of a daze, and without looking back he walked on toward Benton.
As he approached Benton, he slowed once again. The street was quiet. He stopped on the corner, facing straight ahead, Benton to his left. His dangerous thought was loud now, and it didn’t matter if he made his brain hard or not. It pushed him left, turning him and propelling him down the gravel road. The Birdman thought he could feel clinging webs against his face as he walked, and he put his head down and leaned forward, as if walking against a wind. It took him nearly ten minutes to cross one block. Another ten, another block. The dangerous thought was all he could hear now. Halfway down the third block he stopped, facing straight ahead on the sidewalk. He turned his head to the side. He gazed silently at the little white frame house, at the curtained windows and white mailbox in front. He looked at the mailbox. “Gaudet” was written on it, with the number “325.” It was Ellen’s house.
The Birdman stood without moving for a moment. Once more he looked to his right and left, mumbling softly to himself. He crossed the street rapidly, plunged into the brush to the left of the house, and vanished into the backyard.
“I’m not sure when I’ll get home.” There was a pointed silence on the other end of the phone. “Elaine?” Henry asked.
“Yes, Henry, I’m here. I suppose it can’t be helped. But it’s the last thing I expected, your being stuck for days on end in Kansas.”
Her voice. It was her voice that had intrigued him from the beginning. He had been drawn to its polish, its conspicuous education and finesse. When Elaine talked, Brandeis and Junior League were all in the audible range, ready to be picked up by anybody trained to recognize the sound. It was the mating call of money, the firefly and pheromone of upward mobility. With their torrid work schedules they had seen so little of each other in the early days that he had, in effect, fallen for that voice, a tenuous telephone connection that had always aroused him.
“If Sheldon says let someone local handle it, why not go along?” she was saying. “You’re letting yourself get personally involved, and that’s always a mistake. Anyway, it’s all from your past. It doesn’t have anything to do with you now.”
He hated to fight with her. Fighting with Elaine wasn’t fair. She was logical, incisive, and determined—she would have been a good lawyer, in fact; but she wasn’t above using her sexuality, which revealed his weakness to her power. Lately, their disagreements had gotten shorter and shorter. For one thing, he didn’t want to lose valuable time on disputes when it was so hard to carve opportunities to be together. But also at stake was power; she gravitated toward it effortlessly, as a matter of course. Inevitably, she captured more and more of it, instinctively jockeying for position. The only way he knew to resist that movement was to argue, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t, he realized, want his love life to look like work. “If it’s personal, that could be a good thing,” he said. “I d
on’t feel obligated to go through life never caring about a client.”
“Of course not,” she said. “But you have to remember that it’s business. Business, Henry. I sell stocks, you sell legal expertise. But we’re both selling our time. And I hate to see you waste it on that fruitcake.”
“Try not to refer to him that way, Elaine. I admit I don’t know exactly what he is, but that word doesn’t describe it.”
“How can you side with him? You can’t mean you want the family cut out from the estate. I don’t know these horrid people, but I do know that isn’t fair.”
He felt the drift from disagreement toward dispute and wanted to stop the inexorable slide. But he didn’t know how to prevent it. She was so relentless, and he couldn’t just cave in and pretend he didn’t have opinions. “No,” he said, “I don’t like that part about it either. Although Roger’s such a jerk it’s easy to side against him. But that’s the point, in a way. Roger can take care of himself. Boyd’s different. He doesn’t stand a chance, not in Council Grove.”
“But isn’t that his problem?” Elaine asked. “You can’t take up every cause you run across. You don’t have that kind of life. There’s legal aid for that kind of thing, Henry. People like that don’t get four-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers.”
Exactly, Henry thought. “Look, Elaine, it’s only a couple of days. You sound like I’m derailing a whole career.”
There was silence on the phone. “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just a mistake. You haven’t made any before. I don’t understand why you would upset Sheldon. The thing I don’t like about it is that you don’t know what it will end up costing you.”
“Sheldon’s not upset, Elaine. He cleared me to do it.”
There was a pause, and he knew what was coming. “We’ve been over this kind of thing before, darling,” she said. “I love your compassionate side. It’s what makes you adorable. But you’re much too much like your father.”
“I know.”
“And I want to put this as delicately as I can . . .”
“You don’t want me to duplicate his career.”
More silence, tactful and effective. Then, in a more seductive voice, “Come home and let someone else handle it, darling. Sheldon needs you, he told you so. And I miss you.”
She was magnetic, pulling him from both poles, physical and intellectual. He felt her body across the phone line, the memory coalescing in his mind. Of all the imperatives he had left behind in seminary, the one he enjoyed losing the most was celibacy. Elaine made love the way she made money, with total intensity. “All right, Elaine. It’s late, and I don’t want to argue. I’m not claiming to understand Boyd, anyway. But I do know that it wouldn’t take much to snap him. Whatever twig he’s hanging on to won’t take much more weight. So maybe it’s just that I don’t want to be the last bit that crushes him. At least you can understand that.”
There was a pause, and Henry listened to the silence. After a moment Elaine said, “I don’t mean to sound cold, darling. And I’m sorry if this Boyd man is just a pawn in some game. But I would hate it if he got one cent of the money, and I’ll tell you why. What on earth would he do with it? He would be a mess, and you know it. It would be a complete waste, and I don’t think you’d be doing him any favors to get him any of it. Money is a privilege, Henry. You earn the right to have it by being the kind of person who understands and appreciates it.”
God, she thinks like Parker. “Elaine, are you listening to yourself?”
Her voice turned brittle. “What does that mean?”
He sighed, a tired, spent sound. “Look, I’m going to stick around here and find out what I can. There’s probably nothing to it. But my whole legal career doesn’t have to be about dissecting corporations. I can actually protect somebody once.”
“So you’ve decided.”
“Yes, I have.”
Her voice was instantly cold and impersonal. “What about the party at the Hargroves’ on Sunday? My party?”
Elaine was receiving an award for outstanding junior broker at her firm, and the senior partner was giving her a reception at his home. It was all she had talked about for days, and he hadn’t blamed her. She had worked incredibly hard, and the award was a terrific honor. “I don’t know. If I can’t crack this in a couple of days, Sheldon’s going to pull the leash anyway.”
He heard her exhale, a tortured but nevertheless sensuous sound. It would have been much easier for him if she hadn’t been so sexy. But even when she was at her most irritating her erotic side hooked into him like fingernails into flesh. “All right, Henry,” she said. “I think it’s a mistake to use up favors with Sheldon, but that’s your affair. In the meantime, keep your distance from that man Boyd. I’m not convinced he’s safe.”
“I’m not either, but I think that may be the point.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m tired, and I’m hungry. Don’t listen to me right now.”
“I’ve already stopped listening. Good-bye.”
Henry clicked off his cell phone and leaned back in his chair. She was utterly, profoundly under his skin, and when he thought of her his body had a mind of its own. Her high-maintenance side he had initially accepted as the cost of the package; Elaine had her own, highly successful life, and she would never be content to make cookies for a man in quiet acquiescence. But now he found himself wondering what there was, in the end, underneath her fantastic competence. What touched her and moved her? In the year they had been together, he had never seen her cry. There was something calculating about her that gave him an utterly surprising and fleeting sense of revulsion; he dismissed it instantly, unwilling to accept its implications. Being attracted to what you despised wasn’t a new idea to him; he had read enough psychology to understand the phenomenon. But he had never considered himself a candidate for that particular neurosis. No, he thought, she’s probably right about all this. Keep a level head and don’t get sucked into anything serious.
A glance at his watch pushed all thoughts but digging into the remaining Crandall books from his mind. It was nearly nine-thirty on Friday morning, and he hadn’t had breakfast. He decided to pick something up at the Trail-side Diner, the one restaurant in town. He would be at the bank when it opened at ten, hoping to make progress. The manager would be back that afternoon, and he wanted to be through everything before he returned.
Henry drove over to the Trailside, shaking his head at the unchanged place. The restaurant time forgot, he thought. The diner faced the square, with an old-time western facade that looked like it had been taken off a movie lot. A sign swung from a bar above his head: AUTHENTIC NAVAJO KACHINA DOLLS. He walked in, taking in the checkerboard tablecloths, the row of ball caps hung neatly on nails in a line by the door. A handful of people were at the tables, farmers mostly, the men wiry and in need of a good washing, the women pools of defiant fat, settled in for a plate of biscuits and gravy. Henry got his breakfast to go, yielding to the temptation of a Danish and coffee to save time. He crossed Main, made his way down the square, and looked past the bank; his father’s empty storefront office stood fifty yards beyond, looking like a forlorn relic of the past. You’re far too much like your father, Elaine often said. That was her smart bomb, her weapon of mass destruction that ended all combat. But it was also a complex idea, more complex than she could have realized. In most ways, Henry admired his father as an idealist, a fighter for the rights of others. But what did those sacrifices mean in a world in which your life could end in the blink of an eye, and you vanished, barely remembered, underappreciated, having lost most of your battles? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die. And no one, he had to admit, knew more about being merry than the extraordinary band of overachievers at Wilson, Lougherby and Mathers.
Henry turned away from his father’s office and walked to the bank. He entered and greeted Ellen at her desk, eager to put philosophical thoughts out of his mind. Nothing cleared his head like work. Ellen looked
noticeably tired; she was showing her age today, with dark circles under her eyes. Henry found himself wondering if she were an insomniac.
“He didn’t come in,” she said. “I would have called if he had.”
“I didn’t think he would. The number was just in case.”
“Well, he didn’t.” Her mood, along with her face, was dour, in contrast with the day before. She seemed preoccupied, as though she had been worrying about something.
“Well, I’m here to finish up on Mr. Crandall’s records,” Henry said. “Then I’ll be out of your hair.”
She looked at him, and for a moment he wondered if she might refuse him. But she dutifully rose and retrieved the folders of Crandall records. She pointed to an empty desk at the back of the bank, and Henry carried his work over and started in.
He worked all morning, poring over the records meticulously, looking for some unknown clue to connect Ty and Boyd. It was tedious work, especially since he had no specific idea of the target. A single check stub could be the break he was looking for. He tried to formulate a theory in his head, some possible scenario to explain what had happened. He drew blanks: it was one thing to connect Crandall and Boyd, another to connect them in such a way that explained why Crandall left Boyd with most of what he owned. And why now? Crandall’s will had been amended to include Boyd just before his own father’s accident. It was, in fact, one of the last pieces of legal business he had conducted. What had happened to prompt Crandall to take such a measure?