The Bird Boys

by Lisa Sandlin

  “So why’d we get this first page? It’s from the 1940s.” Delpha turned it over, read out the note scrawled on the other side. “‘I have always enjoyed talking to gentlemen with baritone voices. That’s how I got eight kids.’” She looked up. “It’s signed Yours Cordially, Mayella Singleton.”

  “Mrs. Louisiana Archives.” His ego petted unexpectedly for the second time in one day, Phelan perked up. He gave the stack to Delpha, who picked up the heavy Selectric and set it aside. She lined up her pile, opened her desk. Phelan didn’t know when she’d bought a ruler, but she had one.

  He pocketed the carbon copy of Homebuyers from the folder on her desk. “I’m gonna go see if E.E. talked to his mama, then get a bite and go find out who these guys are.”

  “You know, you could wait till I finish the babies and find out who all’s on both lists. That’d save you from having to run down twenty-seven people.”

  “Or I could find Rodney tonight, and you could shitcan the babies.”

  “Yeah. Like that idea better, I guess.”

  “Thought so.”

  “Isn’t there a ballgame tonight?”

  “Saturday afternoon. How’d you know I like baseball?”

  “All your newspapers get folded to the baseball page. Like all Mrs. Bibbo’s—you know, the old Italian lady over at the Rosemont?—hers get folded to the Watergate stories.”

  His head tilted to the side, he looked at her a second. “Don’t imagine I’ll finish twenty-seven homeowners tonight. If I don’t, you can help me tomorrow. When you finish the babies.” He grinned. “That beat-up Dodge drove OK for you?”

  Delpha nodded, turned her gaze back onto the Louisiana Archives. Phelan clattered down the stairs. Footsteps halted. Clattered upstairs.

  He told her to please lock the door when he wasn’t here. Keep it locked. He’d ask Milton the dentist/landlord to have his handyman Calvin install a peephole and a bell. Tomorrow. Milton didn’t, he would.

  “Security,” Phelan said to her stare. “Make me feel better.”

  XVI

  PHELAN CHECKED IN at the station with a young desk sergeant. Not Fontenot, who must be either lodged in the john or home marinating pterodactyl wings in onion, garlic, and crushed red peppers. Allowed past, Phelan tracked down his uncle at his desk. He just couldn’t leave it alone, could he?

  E.E. raised his head and looked at him like he was a bellringer for the Salvation Army.

  Phelan located his gaze on the floor, so as to respond in a humble fashion, and asked if his uncle had had a chance to make the phone call to his mother.

  “I did. You know, I’d forgot that at Christmas-time, she used to work gift-wrapping at some shops in the Quarter. She loved that pretty paper. And she loves talkin’ bout those shops.” E.E. smiled in spite of himself. “Oh, that make her happy, talking ‘bout annés passés, I tell you what. Been a long time since I heard Mama laugh like that.”

  E.E.’s smile felt like a break. Was funny how some people didn’t get themselves, wasn’t it? Talking to E.E. made you smile back, laugh, feel a little yank below the breastbone cause you wanted to be with him or be like him. Phelan didn’t have to stretch to understand that his uncle’s mother was jubilant to have her son on the line for as long as she wanted, for once.

  E.E. had prompted her to remember the shops that sold old stuff—pistols, swords, rare coins, furniture—not dago fruit-sellers, no, Mama, not artists with funny clothes or painters with splattered ones, teashops, and all the food, oh the cafés, cher, les restaurants…He did a creditable and fond imitation of Mrs. Estelle Guidry, who had recalled merchants with relish, if not precision. Here and there he broke into French and Phelan hung on best as he could. Belatedly, he drew out a notepad.

  Well, she had a personal friend, Miz Smith, who ran her shop down there for years and years, sold heavy furniture from estate sales and estate jewelry, pictures in gilt frames, and what all. Bless her, she passed this summer, but long time she’d been retired. So nice…Nother sold coins and swords and such, he had a son came back from the war with medals, the other war…she couldn’t remember the daddy’s Christian name. Mean old pot-bellied man wore his trousers too short…come to her in a minute. There was Mr. Wertman, the Jewish fellow. Then there was Georges Athene the bachelor, ooo wasn’t he a rogue, chased after the married ladies, run a mile from the single ones. Anton Hebert, now she had been a friend of his wife, Eugenie. His first wife. He had a second one, too, Vera, at the same time, and neither wife ever made a fuss ‘bout the other. Did good business, Monsieur Hebert. Les marchands, didn’t they all love money, though?

  His mother had had to hear about the grandchildren for a good while. When they finally got back on the topic, she lamented the number of shops that now sold ticky-tacky tourist junk. She added that two of the old shops, Mr. Chamberlain’s and Mr. Hadfield’s, were still in New Orleans, run by the children now. One other, Mr. Wertman’s, had moved away somewhere, maybe during the war, after the war, around that time, to Texas, to Beaumont, she thought, where E.E. was. One poor soul had hung himself, but he ran a tailor shop. She asked him if he wanted tailors. And when he was coming home for a visit.

  E.E. came out from behind the desk to hand Phelan the sheet of Beaumont Police Department notepaper Dedication Integrity Honor with five names scrawled on it. “Here you go. I got work to do.” Then he cut off the blood flow to Phelan’s brain by squeezing his neck with one thick arm.

  Phelan hugged his uncle back.

  He light-footed it back to the office to find Delpha still there, told her he was going out again shortly to pursue the homebuyers. He ripped out his own note on Mrs. Guidry’s memories and stapled it to the police notepaper, handed both to her and started for the door. Half-turned back.

  “Don’t lose it,” he said, just to watch her roll her eyes. He was rewarded.

  Delpha Wade would not lose a paper, he knew, she’d install it in a file folder, label the folder, and place the folder alphabetically in the gray file cabinet. Going down the stairs, Phelan felt a pang, funny and not. If he were to make a list of all the things that to him meant freedom, office supplies would not be on it.

  XVII

  AT NOON, DELPHA unwrapped her pimento cheese sandwich, sliced tomato sprinkled with salt and pepper, bread and butter pickles. She ate and sucked her fingertips, then went over to the Rosemont, snagged some napkins, and bought an ice-cold Coke in a bottle. Oscar took her money, reminded her, Bring it back, hear?

  If Calinda Blanchard had been in there running the kitchen, Oscar wouldn’t have cared about the deposit on any Coca-Cola bottle. Delpha could return it to its wooden case of empties, or she could blow it to pieces with a pump shotgun. Add the bottle to Oscar Hardy’s watch, though, and he would hunt you down for it.

  “Miss Blanchard’s loving you,” Delpha said, smiling with one side of her mouth.

  “I’m loving me,” Oscar said and dropped her quarter in the petty change box.

  “You after advancement, Oscar?”

  He fixed her with a serious look. “So I’m keeping track of food costs, so what. It’s what a chef does. And knowing that—that’s initiative. You hadn’t had any chance of that, where you been. But dig it. How much opportunity you see at the Rosemont?”

  “Miss Blanchard’s past seventy. You could manage the place for her. Fulltime.”

  “You sound jus’ like my mama. Jus’ like her. Listen here, Miss Blanchard die, hotel get sold, probably tore down, and I’m on the pavement without a Thank You card. You know how many fancy restaurants they have in Houston?” Oscar pivoted around to the counter, reached over his mirror sunglasses and perched them on his nose, showing Delpha her distorted reflection in emerald green. He struck a proud pose. “‘The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.’ Malcolm X said that.”

  Delpha cocked her head.

  Oscar’s pose deflated as he laughed, “You look like that RCA dog in the old-timey advertisements. And, hey, that saying’s not for you, hear? J
ust something I’m thinking ‘bout. I mean, I am twenty-five years old, and I got my future glasses on. The New Rosemont Hotel is not in their forward view.” He set the shades back on the counter. “Pork tenderloin for dinner. Sage, bay leaf, little clove. Best not miss it.”

  That’s not for you. Not for you.

  What’s not for me? Future glasses?

  Delpha drank the Coke stretched out in her office chair, ankles crossed. Odd that of the young people she knew best—though she didn’t know either well—both Oscar and Angela were focused on getting ahead. So was Phelan for that matter, or at least focused on his business succeeding. At thirty-two, older than all of them, she found getting ahead was kind of a complicated idea. Theirs was not the angle she was seeing it at.

  She’d known a number of women on the inside who had focus. Just not your regular one. Their passions did not lead to advancement. Maybe to…headway.

  During the time Delpha had worked the prison’s infirmary, anybody sick enough to need a surgeon got carried out to a hospital. A new girl on kitchen duty drenched herself with a sixteen ounce bottle of vanilla extract and fed her sleeve to a gas burner. No infirmary for her, took her straight from the kitchen floor. Infirmary dealt with less terrible injuries: sprained ankles, black eyes, strep throats, lacerations, bites, infections, flu. Also hopeless cancers. If a hospital could do nothing for you, no reason to charge the state. You passed in the infirmary.

  An inmate named Fayann Mackie had developed breast cancer sometime in 1962, had had her breasts cut off in a hospital and been brought back to Gatesville aching and scar-chested, with a couple falsies in her bag. Her mama had passed from cancer and her Nannie and already two of her four aunties, and she harbored no pretty dream that old Raw Bloody Bones would skip her. Delpha nursed Fayann during her recuperation. She got better but could not go back to hauling around wet sheets, not with missing chest muscles. They sent her to the library, where she sat titless and sullen, until she pulled down a handbook of anatomy from 1930 and began to leaf through its pictures.

  The illustrations that had skin were white people, all of them, but most illustrations had no skin. Underneath, the bones and veins and muscles were shades of gray, black, and white. Fayann recognized that these pictures also applied to her body, that her bones and veins and muscles were placed in this exact, same way.

  She had a ball of pure bone in her shoulder. Her muscles over it, beneath the skin, were long thin stripes. In the drawing of the whole skinless arm, the muscles looked loosely braided and tucked, tied together like a white woman’s hair.

  Some illustrations in the book shocked Fayann. Drawings showed half a person as though sawn through. There was the side view of the middle of a man, an egg in clear sight inside the one ball, his limp talleywhacker with a stripe down it that ended at the hole. Bone endings looked like Fig Newtons. A brain was missing. A man angled back his head and offered his throat, skin peeled away to reveal tubes and spidery veins.

  The chapter “The Female Organs of Generation” transfixed her. There it was, the slit drawn large with curly hair like black flames and the outside parts labeled. Another illustration displayed the sawn half of a woman. She oriented by the exterior: a curve of butt to the right and the springing bush at the left, but the inside was foreign shapes, packed, stacked, and folded. The scratched-metal shelves of books surrounding the librarian’s desk lifted, rotated in a dizzyingly slow, full circle, and set back down.

  Her womb was a thick, folded pancake, hers, Fayann Mackie’s.

  She was helping another inmate locate a romance novel when a guard strolled by her desk, where the anatomy book was opened to “The Hymen.” Five slits, each differently patterned in its center. When the guard deciphered what he was seeing, he chokingly confiscated the book on grounds of horror, the assistant warden pinning on the charge of obscenity. This warden ordered a survey of the library after that, and that book was thrown out, but it was too late. Fayann found another book. She could barely interrupt herself from her own book to stamp yours. She abandoned her path of surly hopelessness and climbed up onto the hard dirt of a divergent road.

  The books with romances showed her feelings she knew, acted out in fancy houses she didn’t. It was the feelings that mattered, not the houses. Business books and Nancy Drews were dull, Fayann set those back. Slow going, but she read the one where the man got the poor girl pregnant and then drowned her so he could marry the rich girl. Maybe she hadn’t seen outright murder in that situation, but she had known plenty girls left in the dust for a whole lot less than a rich daddy. She was about to re-shelve Tarzan of the Apes because of the author’s running off at the mouth when she got to the sentence that said Lord and Lady Greystoke sailed to Africa. About Africa she was curious, so she kept on. Then the captain beat the old sailor, and the little old sailor’s huge, fierce friend, Black Michael, beat down the bully captain, and Fayann exulted, hooked. When she finished Ann Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, she cried with her forehead against the cell’s block wall, for wrongness and for waste that could not be measured. And for herself.

  The cancer resurged in 1966, and Fayann’s tough, folded pancake was removed, and more. Delpha, who’d rotated through the kitchen during ’63 and ’64, was again in the infirmary. She cleared Fayann’s drainage tubes, cleaned her incision, supported her to the bathroom, and stayed next to her as Fayann, hunched and talking, crept around by sliding the flat of her hand along the infirmary wall. Talked to Delpha, to other inmate patients, to the walls. Well before then, Fayann had been set afire by a scuffed book from 1901 titled Harriet the Moses of her People. She’d paged through two decades of donated Book of the Month Club’s to hit upon the one story called Black Boy. There it was—the everlasting meanness and scorn, the being held down, the doing what you have to, the hunger.

  The hunger, Fayann knew where she was now. I could be in a book like anybody else, she assured Delpha, as she reached out, like you, white girl and jabbed the younger woman’s shoulder. She weighed one hundred and one pounds, and her dark eyes snapped in their deep sockets. If she heard any patient or C.O., any attendant, including Dr. Yount, including the doctor his almighty self, call an inmate the usual word or any of the ugly terms that were supposed to be cute, Fayann hauled herself up in bed and corrected: Black. This was the line she chose to stand on, from which she could not be moved. In her clotted voice, Black, she is a black woman.

  Fayann’s change of language, at least in the infirmary, at least in her presence, was accomplished. Delpha was a keen student of this stand. She heard Fayann’s call for respect, but that wasn’t all. How did this declaration from one black inmate contain the rest of black women, a continent of them, alive and dead? How? To Delpha’s ears, it did. What did that have to do with her, a white girl raised in swampy bayous, in jail for years to come?

  Delpha sat her frail patient on the side of the single bed, went to get her some water. Brought back the glass and helped her tip it up. Then she laid her down, fixed her sheets, all the time digging at this way Fayann had found. Without having one thing people usually cried out for—money or position or a true sweetheart, a ripe body, freedom—Fayann was weighing in with her life. To herself first of all.

  Second, to anybody who had ears to hear.

  Delpha finished the Coke and set Oscar’s bottle down beside her purse. Advancement in the way others thought of it was not her aim. She better understood headway. That meant moving forward on your own terms. To a place you recognized but maybe others didn’t.

  She took up the trusty green ruler, and though it was still light outside, switched on her desk lamp. These proper office tools fortified her. No fluorescent tubes spewing out light too bright to relax under but too shadow-throwing dim to read by. No headache-light. Clear yellow light falling on the children of Louisiana.

  XVIII

  AROUND THREE-THIRTY, FOOTSTEPS sounded on the stairs. Fast ones. Delpha leapt up, eyes locked on the door, a pencil gripped in her hand.

  A r
attle, and Phelan elbowed through the door, smiling, with two Dixie cups of ice cream and the little wooden paddles. He took note of her, and his smile slid off. He said only “Break time,” walked over and gave her the cup. She thanked him. Pretty soon he was shuffling through desk drawers, and she was back to rustling pages.

  Some new disturbance in the air caused Delpha to lift her head. She glanced around the office. Stretched to see Phelan at his desk. Her gaze passed over the window, the rounded, seagreen chairs. To the door.

  The doorknob.

  She took three quiet steps to Phelan’s doorway. He looked at her, and she inclined her head toward the door.

  The doorknob was rotating incrementally.

  He was up and laying both his hands on her waist, pushing her efficiently and rudely back into his office space, and he was in front of her and moving forward as the tumbler clicked.

  A head with a sunburned nose poked inside the door.

  “Hi, Tom. Or should I call you Mr. Phelan? I mean, now you’re kinda my boss. I mean, you are my boss.”

  Phelan concentrated on the face. His weight settled back on his heels.

  “Ben. Took a second to recognize you. Come on in.”

  Flash of acknowledgment from Ben the Bellas Hess photographer as he entered. His whole face was red. “New glasses. My dad wants me to keep my eye on the bottom line.” He gave a laugh, then strangled it. “That’s a joke. Just not a funny one.”

  The boy had jettisoned not only the Buddy Holly specs but also the striped t-shirt. Moved on to wire rims and painters’ pants. No paint smears but various stains, and his formerly slicked hairdo had not been slicked today. Or this week. Phelan did not comment further on the transformation. The kid had just needed new glasses. Couldn’t be the influence of stakeout and discretion, could it? Not to mention the art of photography. His daddy would not be liking that.