Lost Birds

by Putrius, Birute

  “Sorry, I’ve had too much to drink.” Taking a deep breath, she looked around and shivered. “Can we go back inside?”

  Al flicked his cigarette into the gutter. “Listen, Irene, I think you did a great job with this party, and I’m so grateful. And, this is nothing against you, but I just can’t go back in there.” He shook his head. “It was a great party, Irene, but…” He hesitated, upset that he was stuttering his way out of this, not knowing what to say. “It’s just…” He took a deep breath and plunged in. “I just have to go.” Al knew there were a million things he wanted to say, but he just couldn’t.

  “But Al, this is your party. All your friends are here. Don’t go.” Irene’s eyes pleaded with him. “We’ve just begun. There’s so much I want to tell you, and so much I want to hear from you. Stay with me.”

  “I can’t, Irene. Not yet. I’m so sorry.” He took her hands. They felt like small fish in his large hands. “I wish to God I could, but I just can’t.”

  “Yeah, OK,” she said, unable to hide her disappointment. She slipped her hands out of his and back into her pockets—slender herrings returning home. “I was kind of hoping…” Irene smiled a crooked smile. “I don’t know what I was hoping for. Oh hell, I was hoping to be swept off my feet.” She laughed a little, but Al could see the tears in her eyes.

  His heart was racing. He wanted to ask Irene about the draft dodger she had been with. He wanted Irene to hold him, to tell him that she still loved him no matter what, to heal him, but he was frozen like the waves on the Michigan beach. What he wanted was to get away from all of the raw emotions he was pushing down.

  “Hey, I’m freezing and a little dizzy,” said Irene, glancing back at the bar. “If you’re not going back, then I am. To warm up if nothing else.” Irene tried to take his hand, but he gently pulled it away. They stared at each other for a long moment.

  “Thanks for the party,” he said, trying to smile. “It was great.”

  “Yeah, you’re welcome,” Irene said quietly as she turned, quickly walking away.

  He watched her go into the noisy tavern, wiping her eyes before she went back in. The snow started again as he slowly walked home, smelling the familiar scent of Kool-Aid from the factory where his mother worked. His leg hurt, so he walked carefully, his limp more pronounced than usual. He passed the old Sinclair station and the houses he had known on Talman Street. It all looked like a stage set for a bad movie.

  A disintegrating Chevy drove by loudly chugging exhaust, leaving a noxious cloud hanging in the air. It backfired and Al jumped for cover. The smell reminded him of the plumes of napalm, of percussive grenades, the constant whoop-whoop of the choppers. Had it all been a dream? The familiar nausea returned.

  When he reached his house, he sat down on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette to calm himself. His heart was still racing, and a crushing desolation was growing until it felt like it would swallow him. He looked up at the snow falling in the night sky and felt like the smallest speck in the universe. All of those deaths he had seen in Nam—too many to count. One death stood out from all the rest, though. It was the face of their ten-year-old errand boy who shined their shoes, bought them cigarettes and whores and anything else they wanted in Saigon. His name was unpronounceable, so everyone called him Beaver like the TV series. One day, while Al was playing blackjack with the guys, Beaver ran into the courtyard screaming hysterically. The soldiers grabbed their rifles, thinking it was Viet Cong. And then Al saw that Beaver was running toward them, his arms held high and his body strapped with explosives. In an instant, Al knew they had to shoot him, or they’d all be blown up. He picked up his rifle and looked Beaver in the eye as he shot him.

  The snow was falling unhurriedly in the dark night. He sat there for a long time watching the gossamer snowflakes float from the sky, watching as they piled up on his jacket sleeve and his leg, feeling as if he could sit there forever.

  When someone tapped him on the shoulder, he shot up like a rocket, pushing whoever it was away. When he turned and saw it was Magda, wrapped in her quilted robe, he felt bad. “Sorry, you scared me.”

  She frowned. “It’s cold out, Al.”

  “Listen Magda.” Al shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  She cocked her head to the side.

  “I’m sorry about earlier too, with the muffler. When I got so upset.” He shook his head. “Maybe I’m a little shell-shocked from the bombs.” As soon as Al said that he regretted it, realizing that his sister had been shattered by a bomb. “Sorry, Magda, I didn’t mean…” He stopped himself. Everything he did was wrong.

  She came over and took his hand. “No more bombs, Al.”

  “No more bombs, Magda.” His voice was muffled.

  She stood there holding his hand until he could feel her start to shiver.

  “You’re freezing, let’s go inside,” said Al, as he led his sister up the snowy stairs. Only when he got to the door and touched his cheeks did Al feel the tears that had frozen on his face.

  Chinese Red

  Irene Matas, 1976

  Last June, Vida and I moved to the North Side of Chicago, near Belmont Harbor. My old Lithuanian neighborhood had gotten too insular for me, too focused on holding on to its lost past. For me, Lithuania had become too much a myth of golden fields and thatched cottages with carved wayside crosses at the crossroads. The myth was beautiful, but it was crushing me. I wanted something else, something new.

  I got a job as a substitute teacher and jumped from school to school until I finally got a long-term assignment in March at the freshman branch of Marshall High School on the West Side. The separate branch was called Dante, but the teachers called it the Inferno. But not me—I was an innocent idealist who longed to help the neighborhood that had rioted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I took the El and, full of zeal and good will, walked four blocks to the school, smiling and greeting women and children sitting on stoops. When I reached the school and saw the Black P Stone Nation, the most feared gang in Chicago, milling around at the entrance, I was rattled, but not enough to leave. Two armed guards were stationed at every door, because, as they said later, trouble seemed to visit often.

  The first day, when I walked into the remedial reading class and found some students scanning the sports section, I was overjoyed, thinking that if they could read the paper, my job wasn’t going to be as hard as people said. But when the students looked up and saw that a substitute teacher had come in, a low grumbling started, followed by a folding of newspapers and then some of the young men opened the windows and bailed out, without a direct word to me.

  I stood at my desk, stunned by the sudden exodus.

  As a freshman in high school, I had won a prize for a poem about the plight of blacks during the civil rights demonstrations I had watched on the nightly news. It hurt me to see dogs snarling at school children or when demonstrators got blasted by water cannons. Afterward, I vowed to help right the wrongs done to blacks, angry at the injustice of such discrimination.

  Each week at school, I was happy to see that fewer students jumped out the classroom windows, hoping I was beginning to make some progress. During our preparation period, the teachers were expected to patrol the halls. About two months into my new job, as I was patrolling the second floor, Charles Washington, one of my students, came from behind and grabbed me in a chokehold, putting a knife to my throat until I felt the pain of skin broken. I stiffened in shock, recognizing his voice at once. Though I was trembling with fear, something elemental clicked in, some survival instinct, and a strange calm came over me. I started talking to him in a soothing, almost kidding voice. “Oh Charles,” I said. “Come on, put that thing away before someone sees you,” I said, gently trying to push the knife away from my throat.

  “Where’s Patricia?” he whispered thickly in my ear. “I need to see her right now.” I could tell he was hopped up. Last week he had been
expelled after being caught shooting heroin in the bathroom.

  “Don’t worry. I know her schedule,” I cooed. “She’s downstairs. Let me take you to her.” I felt him loosen his grip, and I just took his arm like we were about to take a leisurely stroll down to the park. Where did this cool-headedness come from? As we walked down the stairs, I spotted the two security guards at the front door but kept chattering to Charles to make sure he didn’t panic. Behind Charles’ back, I waved my arm, hoping the guards would spot him, but they didn’t catch my semaphore. I continued down the hall to Patricia’s class and told Charles the bell was about to ring in ten minutes and then he could talk to his girlfriend. While he looked through the small window in the door to make sure she was there, I gestured wildly to the security guards, who finally woke up and came over to investigate. Once they saw it was Charles, they quickly grabbed him and pulled him away to the office, as he cursed us, struggling to get away. As I watched them go down the hall, I was trembling, too stunned to move, belatedly paralyzed with fear. This could have been my last day. The vice principal found me in the hall and helped get me to the nurse’s office, where my neck was bandaged and a report was filed. I sat there for a long time, trying to come to terms with what had happened, but I simply couldn’t. There was no way I could ever return to this school. Before the day was out, I went to the principal’s office and quit. Then I walked the four blocks to the El, shaking like a leaf, looking around at everyone I passed, as if each person was a threat. By the time I reached home, I was a wreck, locking the door and diving under my comforter.

  For the next week, I sat home brooding, feeling shaky and unmoored, my confidence as a teacher lost. Each day, while Vida went off to work at the community theater, dressed like a chic Gypsy, I sat near the window immobilized, looking out at the gray street and the pale green emerging maple leaves trembling in the wind, feeling frozen by inertia, not wanting to do anything but read. Flattened by ennui and melancholy, I was hardly able to muster the enthusiasm to leave my apartment. I simply wanted to leave myself behind, like an old limp sock.

  The truth was, I didn’t have a clue what to do with my life. After the attack, I felt uneasy and jumpy but didn’t want to move back home because the old neighborhood was slowly disappearing, and I didn’t want to move in with my parents, who had recently bought a house in the Chicago suburb of Lemont.

  I brooded while tearing through the novels of Dostoyevsky and Gogol, wallowing in the bleakness. But as the days warmed and brightened, I turned to something lighter—Anaïs Nin’s journals. Reading her, the clouds of my gray Chicago life parted momentarily and I had a glimpse of a life unlike my own. This tiny bird-like woman seemed to have such a rich and full life. I envied her travels, her long conversations with interesting people like Henry Miller and Otto Rank, her romantic love affairs.

  But after two weeks of Anaïs and ennui, I got a phone call from my old friend Milda Gudauskas, who was getting her master’s in psychology in Los Angles. She said her roommate was moving out, so she wanted to know if I wanted to move in with her. I told her I’d think about it, but with each day that went by, it seemed like a better idea. My roommate, Vida, was getting married to Jonas Janulis at the end of June. It seemed all my friends were getting married and moving away to the suburbs, while I was one of the leftovers for whom wedding bells were not even a distant tinkle. And, besides, I couldn’t bear to keep running into my old love, Al Vitkus, who seemed to go out of his way to avoid me since his return from Vietnam. Once, I even saw him cross the street to steer clear of me. It tore at me, but no matter how many times I tried to talk to him, he managed to slip away without saying much of anything.

  I finally decided to shake myself out of my inertia. One of the images from Anaïs Nin’s book had caught my fancy. Like the colorful rooms in a Matisse painting, Anaïs chose her peach robe because the color went so well with her Chinese-red walls. And just like that, I went to the hardware store to buy red paint, and my tiny kitchen was transformed, borrowing a tiny sliver of Anaïs’ life. If that didn’t cheer me up, perhaps it would brighten our kitchen in time to throw a going-away party for myself and invite all my friends. I couldn’t stop myself from asking my brother, Pete, to invite Al to my party, hoping that if he heard that I was leaving Chicago, there might be a flicker of hope for a reconciliation. My heart was simple-minded and stubborn.

  I called Milda to tell her that I would fly to Los Angeles after Vida’s wedding. I had visited her last fall and had so loved being with her. Our week together had been filled with talk of books and music and movies. Life with Milda seemed to be just what I was hungering for—culture and the wider world.

  A few days later, Milda’s brother Paul called, asking if he could come to the party. He had just returned from a trip to the homeland and wanted to give us a taste of Lithuania and Russia, bringing some krupnikas, the Lithuanian honey liqueur said to cure ninety-nine ailments. Since he was the first of us to go to Lithuania, we were very curious to hear about it. All my life I had heard my parents curse Russia for occupying Lithuania after the war. Now, it seemed kind of exotic to have Paul arriving like a delegate from the other side of the globe—the enemy’s side. He said he was also bringing some Russian herring and vodka, instructing me to boil some potatoes with dill because that was how they did it in Russia.

  Paul was the Lithuanian most likely to succeed from our group, having graduated from Dartmouth. The rest of us hadn’t gone farther than the University of Illinois in Chicago or Urbana. He was smart and funny, but with a self-conscious stiffness that was sometimes off-putting. I had never seen him wear a pair of jeans or a baseball cap. He always dressed elegantly, sometimes affecting a British Raj look from the last century, even sporting a thick mustache. In the summer, it was seersucker and safari gear, wearing a pith helmet to the beach or a white linen suit to a wedding. But we had all grown up together, so we forgave him no matter what he was playing at. He was Milda’s brother, after all.

  When Vida returned, she frowned when she saw the red walls. “What the hell kind of color is this? Opium-den red? Bordello red?”

  “It’s Red-Square red,” I said flatly. “In honor of Paul’s visit to Moscow and Lithuania.”

  She frowned. “A little dark and creepy, if you ask me.”

  “You think so?” I looked around the tiny kitchen. “I thought it looked so bohemian,” I said hopefully.

  “Bohemian? It’s like a room in a crazy fun house—the kind you try to get out of as soon as possible.” Her mouth twisted into a half smile. “And the paint stinks like hell. Did you forget about the party tomorrow?” she asked with an annoyed twang.

  I opened the back door leading to the rickety back porch to air out the paint fumes. “It’ll be dry by then,” I promised, lighting vanilla-scented candles to mask the smell. I put one of the votive candles on the five-foot-high styrofoam dinosaur skeleton in the living room so that the ribs sent shadows over the walls. I’d show her crazy fun house. On the wall, over the brick-and-board bookcase, three black-and-white Alice in Wonderland prints by Tenniel undulated in the flickering candlelight. We fretted that the two circular wicker chairs that Vida had brought from her parents’ house wouldn’t be enough seating for a party, so she borrowed some folding chairs.

  The party started early, as my newly married friends, Connie and Joey Cicero, came over to help me prepare. Connie, her frizzy red hair almost tamed, brought chips and dip and champagne. I lit the candles and soon Pete came in the door, bringing two younger girls I didn’t know. Looking at their fresh faces, I realized that soon I’d be the last unmarried woman in our crowd, not counting Milda. I scanned the hall to see if, by some chance, Al had come with him.

  “Don’t look too hard,” said my brother. “He’s not coming.” There was a note of fatigue in his voice, like we had played this scene once too often.

  I frowned, realizing how transparent I was. “Did you invite him?” I asked. “I t
old you to invite him,” I said, my anger rising.

  “Sure,” said Pete, shrugging. “But you know Al. He’s not going out much these days.”

  I knew that all too well, but I was still hoping. I’d known Al since I first came to America. He and his sister Magda were my first friends. We all grew up together, and then one day I noticed I was falling for him. My love grew like a deep root in my heart, one I couldn’t pull out without tremendous pain. But Al was an old wound by now. The pain of losing him was deeper than tears. I’d spent years waiting for him to heal, hoping he’d return to me, but when he didn’t, I started feeling cast off. I rarely saw him anymore, and when I did, it was awkward for both of us. He’d returned from Vietnam looking so handsome, but something had changed. The war had broken him in some way, but he wouldn’t talk about it. Words didn’t work anymore, and when I looked into his eyes, all I saw was searing pain.

  Soon Paul came in the door looking like Chekhov in a long black coat with a beaver collar, wearing a fur-lined Russian hat with ear flaps. “Krasavitsa maya,” he said to me with his usual slight stutter and affected accent. He took off his dark overcoat and stood there wearing a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, a pipe sticking out of the pocket. The rest of us still had remnants of that scruffy hippy look, which made him stand out all the more, but, then, I guess that was the point. He was as pale as ever, and his black-framed glasses slid down his nose, eyes at half-mast, always checking to see if he was impressing the rest of us.

  “My sister called me from LA today,” he said. “Milda said you’re moving there. Is that true?” He put his arm around me, but I slowly eased away.

  “That’s right. Joining Milda as soon as our lease is up.” I twirled around. “Ochi chornaya, California,” I sang, mimicking the Russian songs I’d heard.

  “California with the two of you—sounds like trouble,” Paul added, chuckling, as he pulled out the promised salted herring and vodka from a paper bag and put them on the small table in the kitchen. “Did you boil some potatoes?” I put the pot of potatoes on the stove and told him they’d be done in twenty minutes.