by Chris White
“That’s not what the paper says.”
He looks back, obligatorily. “Well, that’s what’s written on the paper.” Xanax, Vicodin, Klonopin, codeine.
“No, actually, it isn’t.” She chuckles and squints up at him. “Would you like to try again?” She raises her eyebrows in anticipation.
“Okay, whatever. Just . . . go ahead.”
Stella flashes the paper again, then thrusts it against her chest.
Yes, he sees it perfectly.
“ ‘A bird in the hand,’ Stella.” This is ridiculous. “What are you trying to prove?”
“That your brilliant brain and superior eyes are, quite simply, deceiving you.”
“Give it here.” He attempts to snatch the paper from her, but she sweeps it behind her back. “I hate shit like this. Stop.”
“No, read the words. Read the letters. Read them. All.”
“Okay, I’m not deaf.” She is a bullying, self-satisfied stranger. “You don’t have to be so fucking mean.”
She shoves the page just inches from his face. “What’s it say?”
“A, bird, in, the, hand!” He bats impotently at the paper.
Stella pokes her finger at it. “XXX, okay? First it says, XXX. Then it says, ‘A . . . bird . . . in . . . the . . . the . . . hand!’ Two thes.” She barks with bitter laughter.
“Let me see that!” Adrian lurches at her, holds the page in his hands, examines the double-crossing words.
We got disconnected.
“You’re the slowest one yet,” she says with a condescending pat on his shoulder. “Slower than the entire woodwinds section.”
He makes for the hallway. Adderall, oxy, morphine, fentanyl.
“Oh, now he’s mad.” She trails after him. “Just thought I’d turn the tables on you for once, you’re always so—”
“Don’t you’re always me!” he shouts, wheels around. “I’m not always anything. Why do you always say that?”
“You can’t even see whether your own wife is in the car with you!”
“I’m sorry, okay? I’m guilty! I’m fucked up.” He’s in her face.
“Get away from me!” She shoves him by the shoulders, her nails skim his chin.
“You gonna fight with me now?” he says, stumbling backward, and starts to laugh.
“You asshole,” she breathes.
Come home.
Stella seizes her keys from the kitchen counter and storms out. “I’m never going on a fucking birding trip with you again.”
Chapter Five
* * *
Two hours later, Adrian’s going nowhere but away. He floats along the Peak to Peak Highway in his Saab, north from Nederland through Ward, the isolated town of eccentrics already packed with snow: bare-bones old shacks, rusted-out pickups and SUVs, cords of firewood piled against every lean-to and shed, houses and cabins clinging here and there to the rocky landscape like barnacles on the back of a gray whale. Two gnarly dogs sit on a weathered porch with bandanas around their necks, whistling a happy tune.
Decidedly high on three Vicodin, he’s pretty sure he could be perfectly at home with these hippies and rebels. They make their own warmth. Do what they need to do. Doesn’t matter what it looks like or what anybody else says. They’re a hell of a lot closer to what matters: staying warm and dry, stockpiling their supplies, gas, food, and water, living and dying. It’s a paradise up here.
The clarity of the mountain air is transcendent. The branches of the trees have been etched into the sky. He opens his window just a scratch, so he can feel the cool air lick his face and—there is the smell of woodsmoke. He can see it, actually. Trailing from a handful of chimneys into the air. This air is so thin, and so sparklingly transparent—like the world’s best lens—it gets him remembering, suddenly, the first time he did acid, which he hasn’t thought about in years. LSD did not become his drug of choice, obviously—too much loss of control, too much psychic danger, too many variables (like the pharmacology, for instance!), plus almost nobody looks good in light that bright—but he loved the neon, the slow dance of the arms of trees, the complete freedom from the demands of the body.
He was in college at UVA, years from meeting Stella, miles from his mother. He was “friends” with this older guy who hung out in the student union, who always wore threadbare clothes with a permanent smell of sandalwood in his dreads. This guy said he’d give Adrian (and his buddy, Freemont) a hit of LSD but he said they had to swear an “oath of respect”: they couldn’t smoke pot or drink beer (to tamp down the high), couldn’t sit around laughing their asses off all night (to ward off deeper insight), couldn’t drink Coca-Cola products or eat shitty food (to destroy the purity of the “vessel”). This ended up being somehow correct, as it turned out.
Adrian was crying uncontrollably in the shower, foreseeing his own death in an alien landscape, as Freemont tended a small fire they’d made in a cast iron skillet that was part of the kitchen décor, when the bird god appeared. Initially, Adrian was frightened. The creature doesn’t exist in literature—either biological or mythological—but it had great, long red legs like a huge chicken, black-and-white downy wings, and the head and shoulders of a pit bull. Adrian tried to step around it to slip out the shower door, but it was too big, and he soon realized he wouldn’t be able to escape the beast. So he bowed down to it instead, theoretically; he treated it with sober respect, compassion, care, and by the end of the long shower, Adrian was sitting on the tile floor of the cramped stall with his knees up, letting the now-cold water cascade over his head and his balls get hammered, with the bird god curled tame and ghostlike at his feet. When Freemont showed up, it disappeared down the drain.
Being in the high mountains is like an acid trip. If you don’t give it the respect it demands, it can (and will) maim you, what with the sharp rocks, icy-cold water, and dizzying heights. It will take you down. Adrian’s got to be especially respectful right now, actually, because he hasn’t driven high in two years, and it’s a long trip over the guardrail.
Adrian wants to go see Jeff, that’s what he wants to do. Sometimes talking to Jeff, even when it’s not about the subject at hand (and it clearly won’t be) is comforting, and right now Adrian is full of a sort of liquid glee but a little bit lonely, so before he gets to the town of Raymond he turns around and drives back the way he came. Faster this time. Whooshing around the bends in the road, now that he has a goal in mind. He can talk to Jeff about the Lassiter memorial he’s inviting him to in Orange County, show him photos on his phone—the mansion, the mission, the hotel where Adrian usually stays—pick up a couple of coffees on the way.
Ten minutes or so south of Ward, he comes upon a woman just off the pavement wearing a colorful scarf, waving her arms in the air, while her red Volvo waits patiently on the side of the road. He slows, so as not to frighten her, and waves at her through the glass. Friendly. Beautiful. Everything beautiful.
When he rounds the last curve into Nederland, he brakes a little too hard and turns onto 119 to take in the view at Barker Reservoir for a minute, thinking maybe he’ll see some birds, nothing too special probably, though a couple years back he saw three Trumpeter Swans up here, which is pretty crazy. When he’s approaching the water, he makes out a man instead, small against the amphitheater of the valley, painting a picture on an easel, and Adrian just fucking pulls over. Pulls over to the side of the road. Scoots the ass of the Saab back into a gravel path. Takes his last slug of the codeine cough elixir and watches the guy paint, though the canvas is too far away to make out the subject (presumably the water). He remembers his binocular, though, after a moment, and whips it out to see if he can get a glimpse of the painting itself. Yes. Sort of. It appears to be, as predicted, the landscape before him: electric-blue sky above, Barker Reservoir deeper blue and wide before him, and the valley sweeping back and up into mountains of green.
The car still running and the light in the sky waning, as he’s watching this timeless scene—the easel, the painter in a hat and jacket, t
he sky, the water, the world—the story of Alexander Wilson comes to him, the story his mother told him the night after the two of them thought they saw the ivorybill and couldn’t sleep from excitement. Adrian knows all about Wilson now, of course, and it’s a true story, about the renowned, if mediocre, Scottish draftsman and painter on a quest to chronicle in watercolor every bird species in America.
This is the story June told. One day in the early 1800s (right near where they lived at the time in Greenville) Wilson shot at a male Ivory-billed Woodpecker to make a painting of it. That’s what the guy did. Shot birds, then painted them. For posterity. And science. But Wilson didn’t make a clean shot and only wounded the bird in the wing, and when it didn’t die, he thought, Excellent, now it’ll be even more lifelike when I’m painting it, because it is actually alive, but conveniently crippled. Then he wrapped the bird in a blanket, tucked it under the seat of his carriage, and drove to a nearby hotel to set up shop.
The next part of the story is about the sound the bird made when it was being carted away like a prisoner, which was so eerie and mournful that it made Wilson’s horse rear back and just about throw Wilson out of the carriage. It sounded so human. Why is this required for true empathy—a human sound? Isn’t it enough to sound like a captive bird who’s bleeding to death? Adrian’s never understood it. Nevertheless, “a humanlike” cry, a childlike cry, in fact, is what Wilson reported, and that’s how the story goes and likely always will.
Next thing, Wilson is checking in at the hotel front desk. He’s got the bird hidden under his coat because he’s afraid the hotel manager won’t let him in with an enormous wild bird, and the ivorybill lets out another one of these unworldly, childlike cries, and the manager is like, “What the fuck is that?” and Wilson pulls the woodpecker out from under his cape like a bunch of flowers. This is what June said. Adrian has never forgotten the image. “Like a bouquet of flowers.” Well, Wilson and the hotel manager have their laugh, because they’re both fucking dweebs, they exchange money and keys, and Wilson takes the bird up to his room like it’s Lolita.
In the room, the ivorybill lies there on its side on the hard floor, its chest rising and falling fast, and after a couple minutes, Wilson feels thirsty and thinks his horse is probably thirsty too, so he goes back out to feed and water his horse and drink a beer and maybe eat a brat, and when he comes back, twenty, thirty minutes later, the ivorybill is wailing and flapping its wings, way up on top of the window. Curtains are flying, chunks of plaster are scattered all over the bedspread, and a two-foot-square hole has been blasted through the wall all the way to the weatherboard. Wilson is in awe that this bird with the wounded wing is so strong and resourceful, but he also thinks, maybe this bird is hungry too, so he ties the ivorybill to the table by its leg so it can’t do any more damage and goes off to find it some grubs. When he comes back again, with what grubs he might have found just out in the yard there, the ivorybill has essentially destroyed the table.
Now Wilson is a little pissed, and he knows he’d better get to work painting, and fast, because he’s no match for this bird, and that’s what he does, while the ivorybill stabs at his wrists and fingers with its sharp keratin bill, staring him down with cold yellow eyes.
Adrian remembers how when June told the story, he hoped the ivorybill would break free and blast its way out into the night, with the painter’s book spoiled forever, always missing one bird. But no.
Wilson finished his precious painting, still one of the most famous illustrations of the ivorybill in existence. Later that night, and the next day and the next, he tried to feed the wild creature, but it refused to eat and refused to eat and, on the third night, it died in a corner of that little room under the hole it had made in the wall when it still held out hope of escape.
June said Wilson was terribly sorry about the death of the bird, that when he’d written about the experience, he said he’d loved and admired the ivorybill and would never forgive himself. Then June said, “But listen,”—swiping Adrian’s tears away—“I think that’s the bird we saw.”
It’s a sad story. Adrian sits in the idling Saab, the empty cough-syrup bottle in his hand, having forgotten what it was he was so intent on doing earlier. He licks the inside of the rim of the bottle, just for the musky flavor. He almost wishes he had a hit of acid right now. But not really. He takes one more Vicodin instead, pushing it to the back of his throat, eyes comic book wide as he swallows with the familiar jab to the throat. He wishes he could paint, like the guy standing out in the brisk weather with a brush in his hand. Maybe he’ll go talk to him. He looks lonely too, out there all on his own, with that chill coming off the reservoir—though, for all Adrian knows, somebody’s probably making him lentil soup and homemade bread, feeding logs into the woodstove in the soft light of their stained glass windows, in a house just up the road that the guy built himself, something like that.
Adrian does not know what his mother wants. He doesn’t know why now. He doesn’t want to find out. And he’s not going to fly out to Kingston and show up at her front door. Clearly, there’s something she wants to tell him in person, or show him, but he’s no longer at her beck and call. If it’s important enough, she’ll leave another message, one that actually says something. “I want you to know I’m s—” she said. I want you to know I’m setting up a trust fund for your children. I want you to know I’m stripping for young boys in the afternoons and starting my own website. I want you to know I’m straight. Stranded. Stuck in a briar patch.
That woman on the side of the road, the waving woman, Adrian thinks suddenly, had been having car trouble, you idiot, and he slams the Saab into gear, pulls out onto the road, and speeds north again. Probably too late now, but it’s worth a shot.
• • •
When he climbs a little light-headed out of the Saab, the auburn-haired woman blurts out, “Dr. Mandrick?”
Her nose is running. She clomps toward him exaggeratedly, as if to say, Thank God.
He’s startled at first, because he is not, in this moment, Dr. Mandrick, not the Dr. Mandrick he wants anyone to recognize, because this Dr. Mandrick is too high, but he realizes this woman works at the hospital, and nothing can be done but smile broadly.
“I am so sorry,” he says. “Did you see me whiz by you earlier? I was listening to a podcast.” No idea why he said that.
“I’m just happy to see you now!” she says. Deborah. It’s Deborah.
“I actually thought someone was just waving to be friendly, but of course I didn’t know it was you, Deborah.” He points at her like she’s won a round of a game show.
She chuckles. “It’s no problem, Doctor. Thanks for coming back.”
“You bet. What’s going on? You didn’t call anybody?”
“Phone’s dead. Perfect for a hospice nurse, right? Let’s hope nobody dies before sundown.”
“Right?” he chimes in, standing with his hands on his hips for support.
“I was just about to start walking. I thought somebody would stop, but three people dissed me. Sorry, not you.” She smiles like she’s drinking a hot toddy in front of a warm fire, and it makes him smile too. “I’m just out of gas. My gauge is screwed up.”
Adrian nods, then throws open the passenger-side door to the Saab. “Hop in.”
• • •
During the ten-minute drive to Nederland to purchase a can of gas, Adrian offers to plug Deborah’s phone into his car charger, which she accepts. They’re both giddy for their own reasons, Adrian can only assume, yet they are giddy. They make some slightly off-color jokes about the town of Ward. They laugh about how Adrian waved to her when she was broken down, like he was saying, Hello! Tough shit about your car! Deborah says she used to be a certified nursing assistant, then volunteered in hospice, then decided to get her RN, and is now a hospice nurse. She spends a decent amount of time at the hospital, where she interviews with potential clients and their families but does the bulk of her work in-home, for hospice. When the hospita
l “can no longer serve.” Adrian’s experience with hospice people has been varied. Occasionally he finds them a little self-satisfied, but Deborah has a sort of devil-may-care attitude that cheers him.
At one point she says, “You have to attend to your own joy,” not in relation to him, but to her own assertion that she’s going to get a fish tank. She says she refuses to apologize for it, and why should she? Attend to your own joy. Adrian can’t argue it. He doesn’t mention the birds, but he tells her he loves the outdoors, even the cold.
When she’s inside paying for the gas, he rereads the text that came in from Stella hours ago, before he even left Boulder.
Hey. I don’t know where u are. I’ve been thinking about this morning. You need to do what you need to do but you’re very far away and I’m locked out. Michaela said it too. What’s wrong with Dad? I’m sorry if you don’t like hearing it but it’s true. I’m sorry I pushed you. . .Come home okay? Can we talk??
As Adrian is again considering a reply, Deborah comes back, the car floods with cool air and happy noise, and he pockets the phone. She says she’d like to buy him a drink for helping her out. A drink sounds so good to him. He says he should probably get home, though, and she says they could go somewhere for just one drink.
Adrian sticks to his guns and starts back to the highway instead, saying no thanks necessary, he’s just glad he happened by.
Once they’re driving north again, she says, “Tell me what made you want to be a doc. Unless everybody always asks you that.”
A doc. He likes that word. Like a man of the people—a mechanic or a bricklayer. Everybody does always ask him that, and he has a rote response: something about his deep respect for science, and the importance of modern medicine in an increasingly complex world. But that’s the Twitter answer, the 140-character response.
“You know, I’ve never cured a single patient,” he begins, twisting the steering wheel with the palm of one hand.
“Well, but—”