Vetch poured half of the contents of his can out, then refilled it from the pint of whiskey. “Baptist highball,” he said, raising the can in a toast. “A doctor and a homemaker. May she find herself a home.”
“Indeed two can accomplish together more than each can accomplish alone. But I fear I have been given the path of the solitary wanderer.”
“You and me both. But that’s nothing that can’t be addressed with a little help.” He grinned. “In my vision there are kids playing in the yard. I’ll need some help with that.” He made a show of looking over his shoulder, then dropped his voice. “Can you keep a secret? Sure you can, you’re a doctor. Just between you and me—I’m going to switch parties and run against the judge. Not a word to anybody, now. Timing is everything—that’s another lesson I learned in law school. But anybody with a licked finger can see where this country’s wind is blowing. And I like the direction. It’s my direction.”
“My vision—my objective is to obtain my green card and establish a private practice.”
“That’s a completely different question. That’s a career.”
“Of course. As you were saying.”
“I was not saying. Or maybe you misunderstood.”
“Or perhaps you misspoke,” she said, smiling.
He did not return her smile. “I’m trained in the art of making myself clear. That’s my job. I don’t misspeak. I make others misspeak.”
“But from time to time we all—”
“Take you, for example. You’re an illustration of Darwin. Survival of the fittest. That’s a compliment. You bailed from a bad deal. You took charge of your destiny.”
“I would be arrogant to consider myself in charge of my destiny.”
“So now you’re calling me arrogant.”
She turned to him, astonished. “No, indeed, and I beg your pardon if—”
“You said the word. Each of us is in charge of our destinies. If not us, then who? Does that make us arrogant? I’d say it makes us American.”
“But I am not American.”
Vetch pointed at the ground. “You’re here. Time to get with the program. Maybe I can help. I’d like that.”
The guide appeared in the doorway of the gift shop. “We got three more victims. Let’s head down to where we’re all going to end up anyway, like it or not.” Vetch drained his soda and dropped the can in the garbage.
Their guide was a thin young man with black hair and a mouth that pulled into a rosebud when he was given to thought but widened to a toothy grin at his own jokes. An older couple and a young woman joined them. The guide led the group down a set of metal stairs into the cool damp until they were standing in a glittering room walled with folded, dripping stone drapery. The guide spoke of stalactites and stalagmites and pointed to a standing mass of stone. “We call this a column,” he said. “We’d call it a pillar but in these parts a pillar is where you lay your head when you go to sleep.”
He asked the tourists what they did in the upper world. The older couple (government bureaucrat, school teacher) had retired. Their granddaughter was studying to be a veterinarian. “You work with people?” the guide asked. “I mean, as part of your training—you cut up dead people? Because people are just animals if it comes to that.”
The girl shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to work with people. They’d give me back talk and then they’d sue.”
“Not if they’re dead, they wouldn’t.”
“You might show some respect,” Vetch said. “We have a physician present. My companion. My date.” He pointed to Meena. “And I’m an attorney.”
The guide turned the flashlight on Meena, then turned to the girl. “Watch out now, when we’re down there in the dark she’ll steal your spleen. Doctors are like that.”
He led them down more stairs and turned on a second set of lights. He pointed out formations in the glistening rocks—an eagle with a hooked beak, a dragon breathing fire, the world’s largest nostril. “You all feel dripping on your backs? That might be something other than water.”
The young woman giggled. “What did I do to deserve this?” Vetch muttered.
They followed a passageway, twisting and turning, the meanders of an ancient river frozen in stone, its walls cemented with small creatures’ bones and shells. A touch of a finger could stop time—the smallest smear of oil from human flesh and this rock, thousands of years in its growing, would die. Meena allowed her hand to brush against a damp stalactite. She quickened her steps to catch the others.
“This was where the guy who discovered the cave found the skeletons,” the guide was saying. “The Indians used it as a burial ground, then outlaws hung out here and then rebels during the Civil War and some say they left bones, maybe a Yankee lawyer or two they shot because they were parasites on the people. Now I’ll turn off the lights so you can see what real dark looks like.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Vetch said, but then the cave went black. Meena waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark until she realized that her eyes would never adjust to this dark. Before this moment she had not realized how the universe was filled with light, even its farthest darkest reaches were illuminated by the light of the stars. Few places were truly dark and they were standing in one of them—at the bottom of a cave.
She closed, opened, closed her eyes—no difference. The blind knew more light than this. She feared that Vetch would take her hand and found herself grateful that he could in no manner find it or distinguish between it and the hand of any other person. The thought came unbidden and unwanted: She did not want to be here with Harry Vetch. She did not want to be here with anyone. She wanted to be here alone, in this sunless sightless place. If she could not be alone, if she must have company, then let it be—Johnny Faye, the outlaw, the character, the force of nature. A revelation. A shock.
“If you stayed in this room for six months you’d go blind,” their guide was saying. “A white film would form over your eyes and you wouldn’t be able to see a thing. After a while you’d think that dripping was the voices of children, calling your name. You’d hear the cave breathing—yep, the earth breathes, in and out, every morning and around sunset, you don’t believe me you come back at suppertime—you’d hear that breathing and you’d think it was the voices of all the dead the Indians buried here. You’d feel the dripping on your skin and you’d think it was the hands of the dead—”
“Stop it.” Vetch’s reedy voice out of the black. “Stop this nonsense and turn on the lights or I’ll see to it that you and the owner of this place regret it.”
“Well, sure, sir, gee.” The lights came on. Now she was blind again, in a different way. “It was just a joke, all right?”
“Some joke. Get us out of here.”
Up the stairs they climbed through folded, dripping crystal drapes, the cave’s breath soft and cool on her skin, until they were back above in the bright steamy summer heat and Vetch was buying soft drinks from a machine. He put hers on the table, then poured half of his on the ground, his hand trembling. “Geez. You won’t catch me down there again. And that clown of a guide. He wanted a tip, did you see that? He was hanging around with his hand practically held out. Fat chance.” He tipped the pint into his can, then sat.
A bird’s flutter drew her attention to the tree, with its large leaves and dangling clusters of green nuts. “Look, a pawlonia!” Meena exclaimed. “It grows in Bengal. How strange to see it here—like encountering an old friend halfway around the world.”
“I don’t see what’s so strange about that. We live in a marketplace economy. I’ll bet half of what you see came from someplace else.”
“All the same. They are so beautiful when they bloom. So tropical, really.”
“Hey, at first you said you couldn’t wait to get out of your country, now you’re talking about it like it was paradise.”
She studied a file of ants, drawn by the soft drink’s sugared spill. “I don’t recall saying I could not wait to get out of my cou
ntry but—”
“Didn’t you say that you had never known anything but war and violence?”
“That’s not precisely—”
“Yes or no, did you say that or not? Were you thrilled to leave there or not?”
“I felt so many emotions, Harry, I am scarcely able to name one apart from another. Coming to America—my first trip abroad and I was committing myself to living in another country. I could not possibly have understood what that meant.”
Vetch groaned. “I ask a yes or no question and I get a lecture on human psychology. In the courtroom there’s a winner and a loser, a right and a wrong, a conviction or an acquittal. That’s the way the law works. And I know which side I aim to be on.”
He stood and went to the car. He pulled a map from the back seat, spreading it on the car’s roof. She sipped from a soda and a fiery sweetness filled her mouth—she had taken up his can, spiked with whiskey he’d bought at the Last Chance.
She followed him to the car, where she faced him head on. “Harry, you are speaking with the voice of the alcohol. The voice of your drinking.”
His mouth made a small “o,” then his face crumpled. On his face she saw warring impulses—to strike? Or to weep? She turned away.
A flock of birds rose from a nearby field. She watched as they flew, guided by an invisible, inaudible signal, turning and diving as one. “Swallows.” She pointed. “No, starlings.”
“My, aren’t you the birdwatcher.”
“I have had a teacher.” A demon had got hold of her tongue. “A farmer named Johnny Faye.”
“Johnny Faye? Where in the—how have you come to know Johnny Faye?”
A little spark of triumph in her heart, overwhelmed in an instant by a wave of remorse—surely one did not speak this way on a date. “He came to me as a patient, but he has shared a bit of his knowledge of birds.”
Vetch refolded the map and sat on the bench. “Look, I know you have less choice than I do about who walks through your door, but steer clear of that guy. He’s a criminal.” He narrowed his eyes into an uncomfortably direct stare. “Not the best acquaintance for someone whose future depends on the good will of the law.”
“Harry, you are a very good attorney.”
“Uh, Meena.” Vetch took up his drink and rolled it between his palms. “I know I sometimes say things—well, I have a few drinks and then I speak the truth, in vino veritas, you know, but I can sometimes be a little blunt, maybe a little too direct.”
“I have no difficulty with directness.”
He leaned across the picnic table and pecked her cheek. “But if I may offer you some counsel, as we say in my trade. For your well-being. For the sake of the dreams you must carry, yes? You are an immigrant. In the part of the world where you come from people just live in history. It sweeps them along one way, then another. In this country you can seize history and make it your own. Immigration was only the first step. Listen to yourself sometime, telling those old stories—what it was like back there. Why are you fixated on that place? What did it offer you? You’re here now. Let it go.”
“Home is the well of suffering and of love.” She had not known she possessed such words. She closed her eyes and turned away.
Vetch reached across the table and laid his hand over hers. “Meena, those aren’t necessarily connected.”
She withdrew her hand. “Now I know I am in America.”
A shadow crossed Vetch’s countenance. “Nobody here cares about your past. You’re free from all that—that’s what freedom means, don’t you see?” His hands grew animated, beseeching. “Of course you can’t see, you’ve never known it. America is the empire, we’re where the power is, we want to hear about action. We want to know what you’re doing now, not what trees you lived under twenty years ago. Isn’t that why you came here?”
The starlings rose again as a mass. A hawk swooped and circled at the edges of the great fluid fluttering flock—whenever it tried to attack, the birds closed ranks. Finally it flew away. “The strong protecting the weak,” Meena said.
“What’s that?”
She pointed at the birds settling to earth. “A challenge to survival of the fittest. The flock flew as a group so as to protect themselves against their attacker. They concerned themselves not with any particular individual but with the whole. They prosper through cooperation, not competition.” She turned to him again. “Let me tell you a shocking thing. Perhaps the most shocking thing an American attorney can hear? I am not legally alive. I have no birth certificate. When I went to obtain a passport I was told I needed sworn statements from witnesses to prove the time and place of my birth. But any witnesses there might have been were dead. They had been bombed by planes or shot with guns bought with American money. Or they were Muslims killed by Muslims. Or they were Hindus killed by Muslims. What difference did it make? After the hearing I sold the first of the rubies my mother had sewn into the hem of my school uniform when she sent me away from the war. Within the month I had my passport. But let us for the moment imagine my fate without those rubies.” She took his hand and pinched it.
“Ow!”
“How remarkable! You feel my pinch, when according to the law I do not exist. Must you have a piece of paper to tell you who I am? Must I have a piece of paper to know?” She dropped his hand.
Vetch picked up a rock and tossed it into the midst of the flock. The birds rose as one, then moments later resettled to earth.
Then they were back on the road. The landscape grew wilder and more rugged, the houses more widely spaced. For an hour and more they rode in silence until the traffic thinned and the roads narrowed and they were almost back where they came from.
Vetch pulled to the side of the road and turned off the car. “Meena. May I take your hand? Please, I won’t bite and I promise to give it back.” He took her hand. “I feel like we’ve gotten off to a rocky start, which is too bad because I think we really like each other. When you came into the room on the day of that screwed-up slide show—the one good thing that came out of that, shall we say, disappointing evening is that you walked into the room and it was like I heard a voice in my head that said: This is it. There she is. Maybe I’m old enough, finally, to understand the difference between what I want and what I need. I just wanted you to know that from the first time I saw you I thought: This lady is special. This beautiful woman is worthy of my love. Tell me at least that you’ll think over another date. What harm is there in a date? Think of your future in this community. Your future in this country. This is not a place that takes kindly to the presence of single women.”
She took back her hand and folded her arms and looked out the window. “If there is a place in the world that takes kindly to the presence of single women, I have yet to encounter it.”
He started the car and turned down a gravel road. “I want to show you something. The highlight of the day.” They came to a stop in a rolling green field sliced open by a dusty red gash. “This is it,” he said, waving his hand in a wide sweep. “Welcome to Ridgeview Pointe. Oh, I know it’s not much to look at right now. But you have to see it like I see it. Standing here we’re looking down the dogleg of the ninth hole fairway. My house”—he pointed at a hole carved into the woods—“will sit right there.”
“How lovely.”
He turned to her then and took her hand. “What’s good for me or for you is or can be good for everybody, that’s what you’ve got to get your head around. That’s the American way.” After a moment he put the car in gear and drove forward, bouncing across the rutted dirt.
They reached the site of his dream house and stepped from the car. He showed her where the great room would rise to its beam and where the windows would look out onto the fairway.
Meena murmured appreciative noises before turning back to the car, but before she could reach it the skies opened up—a brief, dense shower that came without warning, the kind of rain that precipitates itself after too many rainless humid days.
They jump
ed in the car and Vetch threw it into reverse, to hit a patch of mud—the summer’s drought had crumbled the bulldozed earth to the finest dust and the briefest wetting turned it slick. The wheels spun. He shifted again. The wheels dug deeper. He shifted to reverse and gunned the accelerator. A blue cloud enveloped them and rose to tangle itself in the limbs of nearby trees. Vetch muttered to himself, then sat back. “Well. I’m going to have to find a rock or a limb and wedge it under the rear wheel.”
He stepped from the car and into the nearby forest. The setting sun emerged from the clouds and the car grew warm. Meena climbed out and stepped through the mud to the rear of the car.
At her feet, a small orange flag, dug up by the spinning wheels—a pennant.
RID VIEW PO T
She bent to pick it up but could not pull it free—it was attached to a thin white pole that led to something deeper.
Vetch returned carrying rocks. She drew his attention to the dirtied pennant. He crouched to look at it more closely. “What the heck—”
“I should say it looks like a pennant,” she said. “Of the sort one sees on golf carts.”
He wrapped his hand around it and pulled but it did not give. “Um, would you excuse me?” He walked to the rear of the car, turned his back to her and raised his hands. A cry of anger and frustration. Meena stifled a smile.
Vetch climbed in the car and gunned the accelerator—forward, then back. She was surrounded by blue smoke, so much that she took off her shoes and walked farther into the open muddy field . . . and then it began to rain again, another shower, a warm tropical rain, brief and intense, the monsoon rain of her childhood.
She threw her pumps to the sky and ran through the rain until she was far from the car’s exhaust and there she stopped and stood with her head tilted back and the warm rain falling in her eyes and ears and open mouth.
Across the ruddy field the Mustang bucked and smoked and lurched from its ruts. It moved slowly across the horizon against the backdrop of the forest, dark with evening shadow. She gathered her shoes and plodded across the mud.
The Man Who Loved Birds Page 20