The Man Who Loved Birds
Page 31
Then Shotgun undid his seatbelt and turned around. He shoved his gun under Johnny Faye’s nose and naturally that was the first thing he noticed but just about as fast he smelled his aftershave, volatilized by fear and anger.
“You don’t have to do this,” Johnny Faye said. He kept talking. He kept talking. He kept talking and the words were a balm on the wound, the ever-blossoming snakebite knowledge that Smith was surely a lousy shot and that it would not be a clean deal. What could he do? What can I do? What could he say? “Jesus, Mary, Joseph.” You will know what to do when the time comes. You will know what to say when the gun speaks. That was his gift. He’d been practicing all his life.
The car stopped at the gravel road that led into the monastery fields.
“Walk. Keep your back to us. You run, you’re dead.”
And so they walked a mile and more into the deepening September dusk, a serenade of screech owls, great horned owls, barred owls, chuck-will’s widows and whippoorwills, until they reached the cedar copse where the trees parted like the sea before Moses’ staff and Johnny Faye appreciated their kindness. Then they were at the bluff above the creek and then they were down among his babes, his marijuana plants, and the full moon shining on his name circled with an unbroken circle, the circle only Flavian could have drawn because only Flavian knew of this time and place.
Johnny Faye took this in. He turned to face his captors head-on.
“Turn around.” The man in the mask talking. “I want to see your back—”
Johnny Faye smiled and clasped his hands not in supplication but in prayer—
“—turn around, you motherfucking son of a bitch, I said turn around.”
The masked policeman and Little were silhouettes, shadow puppets against the disk of the rising moon, one big shining piece of gold. Shine on, shine on harvest moon, up in the sky, I aint had no lovin’ since January, February, June or July. “You must not be getting any, Smith.”
“What the hell does that mean.”
“When I was a kid I said ‘fuck’ all the time. Fuck this. Fuck that. Motherfucking son of a bitch.”
Johnny Faye knew he should shut the fuck up but he couldn’t help himself, he was soon to be dead and he might as well give them a story to tell, something to remember him by.
“And then I got older and I knew what I was talking about, you know, I’d done the deed enough that I stopped treating it so common. These days when I hear a guy that says fuckin’ this, fuckin’ that, you know what I think? I think he must not be getting any. Because anybody who’s getting any pretty soon figures out some respect for the word, because there’s nothing to make you humble like your dick.”
Smith fired quick, one, two. Johnny Faye looked down at his chest where a red rose of blood blossomed, all the promise of summer in its petals. He raised his hands higher. “Why did you have to do that?” he said, and with blood pouring from his mouth, he fell to the ground.
Johnny Faye has some few seconds before Smith walks to his fallen self and turns him over—Johnny Faye is skinny but broad-shouldered and at first the policeman tries to accomplish this using only his foot but that fails and so he bends and takes Johnny Faye’s bloody shirt in both hands and flips him so that his face is pressed to his mother earth and then shoots him in the back and that completes the journey, Johnny Faye crosses over. In those few moments of transition between here and there the world is white hot pain and Johnny Faye’s only and all-encompassing thought is This aint happening. This aint happening to me.
But there is a place above and beyond and behind and before thought and this is some part of what lives there: He is looking up at the night stars and he returns to the wide porch with the ladder-back chairs and the cane woven seats that look across the chattering creek to the low rounded breasts of the knobs, springtime and they are dusted with pink and white and unfurling green, redbud and dogwood, he is sitting with his mother and she is smoking her pipe and humming a tune known to him from before time, and on the thin hum of her voice and the sweet smoke come the faces and voices and bodies of all the women and men he has known in the intimate way. He has loved every one of them. He regrets only those he let slip away or those whom he refused, almost always because of a failure of courage or his own stupid arrogance, how dumb, what a mistake. The lovely breasts of the women in all their variety, some round and full in the hand like melons, others small and sweet like peaches. And the men with the beautiful shallow “S” that runs from under the nipple into the biceps of the raised arm and their heady rich smell. He is supremely happy at the memory of himself in their arms, of them in his arms, witnesses in a great cloud around him. There had been nothing on earth worth doing but searching for love and allowing it to have its way. The secrets of the cave. The forthrightness of the pillar. In death he loves them all.
Afterword
Those familiar with central Kentucky may recognize in this book certain features of its geography, history, and culture, but these characters and their stories are fabrications of my imagination. This is a work of fiction inspired by real-life events, researched in the course of writing a feature-length article for the New York Times Magazine (“High in the Hollows,” December 17, 1989).
On September 9, 1971, the Kentucky State Police staked out a cornfield in Spencer County, Kentucky, where they killed a renegade storyteller and petty criminal named Charlie Stiles. Detective Marion Campbell, who shot Stiles, was later promoted to become a Kentucky State Police Commissioner. In 1986 Campbell was suspended with pay pending an internal investigation resulting from his indictment in federal court for his role in cocaine smuggling.
The press release reproduced on pages 224–225 describing the “Cornbread Mafia” was issued by the Western Kentucky office of the District Attorney of the United States Department of Justice on June 16, 1989. As of this writing several of the men who were convicted of growing marijuana and whose farms were confiscated remain in federal prison, serving mandatory sentences without possibility of parole.
In composing the speeches of County Attorney Harry Vetch I have borrowed phrases from the speeches of President Ronald Reagan, Vice President Richard Cheney, and President George W. Bush.
Song lyrics are drawn from the following sources:
“Shine On, Harvest Moon,” 1908, Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes
“Slumber, My Darling,” 1838[?], words and lyrics by Stephen Foster
Acknowledgments
The following individuals have lent their intelligence and support to the writing of this novel. Most of what is good I owe to them; the faults I claim as my own.
Dr. June McDaniel, Dr. Gerry Forbes, Bharati Mukherjee, Clark Blaise, Dr. Darril Hudson, Sandip Roy, my kind and endlessly hospitable hosts in Calcutta (especially Manas Ray, Sharmila Ray, Tanusree Shankar & Company, Tapas Mondal, Somnath Banerjee Bandhopadhayay), Dr. David Heiden, Margaret Jenkins, Molly Sutphen, Haney Armstrong, Shirley Abbott, Alfred McCartney, O.C.S.O., John Brennan, Cathy Cravens Snell, Pam Houston, Katherine Seligman, Shirley Abbott, the courageous and remarkable J.K.Vickers, diva in exile, Dr. Sanjukta Dasgupta, Dr. Krishna Sen, Dr. Aparna Viswas, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Dr. Richard Eaton, Dr. Rajarshi Dutta, Dr. Swati Dutta, Dr. Anjanlal Dutta. Pawan Dhall, my friends at Swikriti, Calcutta’s brave LGBT rights organization, and Rae Douglass.
A special thanks to the Camargo Foundation and its staff, especially Jean-Pierre and Mary Dautricourt, who provided me four months for writing and research overlooking the serene Mediterranean. The Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona has been generous and forgiving in allowing me several leaves without pay.
A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation supported my final revision.
English-to-Bengali translations were provided by Ms. Supurna Datta, Dr. Shompaballi Datta, and Ms. Shantanu Das, former Bengali lecturer, Stanford University Language Center.
A special bow to the staff of the University Press of Kentucky, most especially my editor, Ashley Runyon, and my copyedit
ors, Julie Wrinn and David Cobb.
KENTUCKY VOICES
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Driving with the Dead: Poems
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Upheaval: Stories
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Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place
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Crossing the River: A Novel
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The Man Who Loved Birds: A Novel
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Scissors, Paper, Rock: A Novel
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Many-Storied House: Poems
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With a Hammer for My Heart: A Novel
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Famous People I Have Known
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The Land We Dreamed: Poems
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At The Breakers: A Novel
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Come and Go, Molly Snow: A Novel
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Nothing Like an Ocean: Stories
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Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York
Frank X Walker
When Winter Come: The Ascension of York
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The Cave
Robert Penn Warren
The Birds of Opulence
Crystal Wilkinson