The Hummingbirds

by Ross McMeekin

  He finished telling his friends about the recent developments with Sybil and Grant.

  “Bro. Bro,” said Bryce. “It’s just like the movies. Pool boy handed the forbidden fruit. Here’s what you do: Take his money and get with Sybil Harper.” He smirked and tugged at the neck of his black Milky Way T-shirt, which was half-covered by a green flannel with cuffs flipped back at his wrists. A personal trainer, he was tall, broad, and cut like a linebacker. After a decade of auditions, Bryce’s dreams of movie stardom tempered into hopes of landing a recurring role on a sitcom, or perhaps a string of commercials. Then he could quit his job and fully commit to his high-concept screenplay, which involved space, time travel, and heroic deeds. “After that? Sell the pictures.”

  Maria shook her head and looked to Ezra. “That must have been tough. I mean, feeling that Grant Hudson might be into your photos.” She searched his face, probably for any sign of hurt. She was a physician’s assistant and had come straight from work, wearing scrubs dotted with colorful, nondescript birds. As far as Ezra knew, Maria had no industry dreams. But a few years back she’d lucked into a spot for a big pizza commercial, posing as an everyday customer, which ended up paying for an industry card and a couple of years of grad school. “And Sybil Harper putting you in a bind . . .”

  “I hear she likes it that way,” said Bryce.

  “It’s no big deal,” Ezra replied to Maria.

  She was earnest without fail, and in that way the opposite of Bryce. The two of them lived together and slept together and were married in most everything except name. Ezra considered her the perfect woman. Smart, sweet, independent, and with no edge. Not that she was dull; she just didn’t seem to feel the need to impress or top anyone, which itself was intimidating. He admired her. Looked up to her. Could have loved her, even, but there was a problem, beyond the fact that she and Bryce were together. He didn’t yearn for Maria in the gloomy way he did for other women. There was a darkness missing. A desperation. Ever since his mother had passed—no, even before that—Ezra’s deepest arousal came from tragedy, which was one of the many reasons he never allowed himself to pursue anyone, nor surrender to anyone’s pursuit of him.

  Bryce started talking about some new brand of organic greens he’d purchased for his iguana. Ezra took a small sip of beer, rubbed his thumb into the tabletop, and considered both of their reactions to Hudson’s proposal. How the two of them hadn’t considered, other than as a joke, that he’d do what Hudson asked. Talk about having no edge: he, in their eyes, was the epitome of dull, virtuous consistency. They assumed the money and sex weren’t even a temptation.

  That they hardly knew him was Ezra’s own fault. For years he’d presented himself as being as neat and tidy as the grounds he kept. Which wasn’t to say there weren’t benefits to the act. Bryce and Maria respected him, trusted him, and liked having him around. And though he felt bad about it, fooling them at times made him feel superior—and that feeling in his life had been rare enough to covet. He suspected it was the same feeling that had sustained his mother for years—that delicious knowledge of being sly, enigmatic. He remembered her saying one night, near the end, God’s power rests not in our certainty, but in our doubt.

  But what was the cost of evasion? Loneliness. And after a while, loneliness wasn’t situational but organic. A habit. An approach. With most diseases you could question how much control it had versus its host, since they were at odds. In this kind of loneliness the two worked together. Ezra felt both manipulative and wooden, as if he was his own marionette.

  This feeling wasn’t new. As Bryce and Maria sipped their drinks and used the argument over his situation as an avenue to flirt each other into foreplay, Ezra’s mind veered toward a moment where he felt a similar woodenness—a time he wished he could forget.

  He was nine, maybe ten, in the gymnasium of the small school run by his mother’s church. Metal cages encompassed clocks and dome lights dangled from the ceiling. One of the teachers struggled through a ragtime hymn on a pitchy upright piano while students milled about, most crowded in front of the industrial-strength fans posted in the four corners of the basketball court, yelling at each other over the hum. It was nearly summer and the air was virile with sweat, as was Ezra’s body—particularly his legs—which stuck to the hardwood floor as he waited for the weekly assembly to begin.

  There was a trace of fresh pine wax in the air, but the stench of bird shit overpowered most everything else. In congruence with the theology of the Prophetess, Ezra’s school hosted a plethora of colorful, omnipresent birds. They fluttered. Preened. Pecked seed from the massive feeders hanging in every corner. Roamed freely through every classroom in the school, every hallway. This was not strange to Ezra. It was the part he loved the most growing up. It was home.

  A school bell rang bright through the chatter. The piano music stopped and one of the teachers began a slow rhythmic clap as other staff members unplugged the fans. Soon the students joined in and clapped in rhythm, faster and faster, until a teacher up front gave a quick flick of the wrist and everyone went silent.

  A thin, pale visitor with a short beard and wavy brown hair strung into a ponytail skulked up to the foldout stage. His loafers, jeans, and T-shirt were black.

  “Who’s this weirdo?” whispered a girl seated in front of Ezra to her friend.

  Despite himself, Ezra wondered how the visitor onstage would look naked, if his penis would be just as skinny and pale as the rest of him, if his hair below would be just as dark as his beard and eyebrows. In an attempt to shun that image from his head, Ezra pinched the skin on his forearm, which was already dotted with bruises.

  “I understand that you’ve heard,” the visitor said, speaking as if every syllable deserved its own consideration, “of God’s anger over our sinful and degenerate culture—”

  As the visitor held forth on the many varieties of sexual sin, Ezra scanned the room in search of relief from his guilt and the arousal the sermon was causing. He browsed his way to the back and caught his mother’s glare. She stood in a magenta suit, arms crossed, black hair perfectly parted and falling in equal shares down her shoulders. She flared her eyes at him and tilted her head toward the stage.

  Ezra turned back around.

  “—Do you know why I haven’t allowed myself to see the sun for the last two years?” The visitor put his hands near his crotch. “Do you want to know why I wake up every morning and wrap my privates in copper wire?”

  There was murmuring. The two girls seated in front of him snickered and leaned into each other to whisper. Ezra imagined his own penis, wrapped in cold metal. The thought aroused him further. He pinched the skin of his arm and twisted until pain overtook the pleasure.

  From the piano in the corner came an awkward, tinkling hymn. From the back row, the rusty wheels of a cart began to screech, announcing the procession of large goblets of honey mead and small bowls of mustard seed.

  “I can feel it from up here: your guilt, your shame,” the visitor said, roaming the stage. “I’m talking about sacrificing those evil desires brewing in your heart. Give them over!”

  The pitchy piano music swelled, and with it, Ezra’s body and nerves.

  “He’s actually pretty good,” whispered one of the girls seated in front of Ezra.

  “Anointed,” said the girl next to her, absently. But Ezra could have sworn there was a gloss to the second girl’s eyes, and a gathering of small dark smudges on her forearm . . . were those bruises? She glanced back at Ezra and placed her palm over her forearm and, after a brief look of terror, said, “All these little perverts need to hear this.”

  Ezra said, “Amen,” and busied himself in retying his shoes.

  A pigeon hiding behind one of the lamps flew up into the rafters, startled. The visitor froze, as if in a trance, hands out, fingers curled. His eyeballs rolled back and his mouth fell ajar, eyelashes fluttering. The piano player stopped and everyone hushed and waited.

  The visitor took a deep breath, clasped
his hands together, and continued. “The Lord has just given me a word for you. Did you know that every thought you think is as good as a deed, if not worse, for its secrecy?” He looked right at Ezra.

  The tinkling on the piano commenced, then louder, rousing.

  “Now,” the visitor said, pointing to the ground, “before you even dare step up here and partake, I want you to make a commitment. Among your friends and teachers, among the great cloud of witnesses in heaven. Who of you little devils wants to get serious about your private evil?”

  Ezra looked around, stomach clenched, sweating. A few young kids raised their hands as if wanting to be picked for a kickball team. A handful of others did as well, looking bored.

  But then his fifth-grade teacher, a busty, hawk-nosed woman whose beauty had compelled Ezra to pinch more than a few bruises on his arms, hurdled around kids and up the walkway from the back of the gymnasium to stand first in line to take the elements. She turned on her heels to the rest of the audience, eyes glimmering with tears.

  Ezra tried to adjust himself in his seat but found no relief. His taut little organ rebelled by pressing further into the tight area between his thigh and the fabric of his underpants and shorts.

  “See, your teacher is giving herself over. She wants the peace!”

  The teacher fell to her knees, her cheeks and neck blotchy and irritated. She grabbed handfuls of the hems of her skirt, revealing her skinned knees. Ezra buckled over as waves of pure, unbridled pleasure soaked through him. When the orgasm slowed, he looked back up to see the speaker’s finger pointed directly at him.

  “Do you see the struggle of your classmate? The devil inside him, fighting?”

  Ezra shivered with pleasure and embarrassment and looked down. The navy blue of his shorts began to darken. The sound of the preacher’s voice, the piano, and the shuffling of his fellow students around him faded. I am a piece of shit, he thought.

  When he opened his eyes, everyone else was standing around him, watching as he kneeled. The piano went quiet. There wasn’t a sound. He could see it in their eyes—most assumed he was on his knees praying, experiencing some sort of holy moment that they were not. Even the girls in front of him gazed in wonder.

  That they thought he’d experienced some sort of epiphany with the Lord? It was something. It may not have been the truth and the light, but it was a way.

  “Have you received a message for us, son?” the visitor asked from the stage.

  What else could he do, but pretend? Mimicking the preacher, he held out his arms in front of him, fingers curled, and let his jaw gape. He rolled his eyes back in his head, fluttered his eyelashes, and stopped. It was completely silent. He took a deep breath and raised his hand and pointed to the ceiling, to the birds, to the sky, and to the heavens.

  Yes. He was his own marionette. Except for that one part he couldn’t bury.

  Don’t listen to her,” said Bryce. “Bro, this is jackpot. It’s all under the table. Hudson can’t get at you. And dude, Sybil Harper?”

  Maria scoffed, but Ezra could tell that she loved every dirty word proceeding from Bryce’s mouth.

  “Sex and money,” Ezra said. “What more could you possibly need?”

  The waitress breezed by with plates up to her elbows. Ezra glanced up from the table and saw April pushing through the silver rimmed doors of the diner. He hadn’t realized she’d been invited. Maria and Bryce had been trying to set Ezra up with her for a couple of months now. Rumor had it April thought he was attractive, or, as Bryce had put it, wanted his bone. It wasn’t clear if this was true or just his friends’ wishful thinking; Maria and Bryce had failed countless times as matchmakers, but they seemed to have endless energy for trying to reproduce in others what they felt for each other.

  Not seeing their table yet, April drifted over to the bar and checked her phone while lowering herself onto a barstool. She wore a thin cream blouse and lapis-blue skirt. Classy—sexy even—but she was one of those people who could be stunning in photographs yet off-kilter in person. From Ezra’s view from the booth, her shoulders seemed to slouch forward and her back hunched over the bar. She was attractive but skittish, the kind of person who in the old black-and-white movies would be portrayed as having a nervous tic of crossing her arms, looking about, and restlessly flicking ash from her cigarette. She’d worked as a model and had wanted to become an actress, but her allure in photographs didn’t translate. As she’d aged, and her soft features sharpened to a more adult ferocity, her modeling career faded. To pick up the slack she found some odd jobs in makeup, which over time grew into a career.

  He’d met April a few times and noticed she had a penchant for demeaning others and took pleasure in doing so. It gave Ezra the sense that she was bitter and lonely—though her loneliness lacked conviction. She was still looking for a scapegoat.

  Thus, Ezra wanted her. She had dark edges. But it didn’t take the gift of prophecy to predict what would happen if they hooked up. He knew he would trade one kind of loneliness for a closer, more destructive one.

  Ezra adjusted his camera, which hung from his neck, and snapped a quick picture of her. Maria and Bryce turned. They waved and tried to catch April’s attention.

  She squinted. Recognition spread to her face.

  Ezra stood and pulled out a chair. “They didn’t tell me you were coming.”

  “The shoot ended early.” April kissed him on the cheek before giving the same greeting to Bryce and Maria.

  The waiter arrived and took orders. When she left, Bryce cupped his hands and whispered loudly to April, “Our little Ezra’s in a love triangle.”

  “Hardly,” Ezra said.

  “Who’s the victim?” April flipped back her hair.

  “Who said there was a victim?” Ezra asked.

  “There’s always a victim,” April said.

  “Then Ezra,” Maria said.

  “I vote the other two,” said Bryce.

  “Who are we talking about?” April asked.

  “The Sybil Harper and the Grant Hudson,” Maria said.

  April smirked.

  “Believe it,” said Bryce.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Okay,” said Ezra. He took a sip of beer and a deep breath. A part of him wanted to provoke April, to stir that darkness they had in common. “It really wasn’t that big of a deal. Around midmorning Sybil brought me iced tea–”

  “–vodka iced tea,” Bryce said.

  “And then that night she swam some laps.”

  “Nude,” Bryce added. “And might I remind you the pool is right outside where Ezra lives.”

  “Which is her prerogative,” Ezra said. “It’s her swimming pool. And she didn’t know I was there.”

  “Oh, she knew.” Bryce said. “Dude. C’mon.”

  “She didn’t,” Ezra said. “But the interesting part was this: Grant Hudson came by the next day and asked me to spy on her while he was gone, to see if she was cheating.”

  “Meaning, to take pictures. PI, noir shit,” Bryce said.

  “Did we really need a clarification?” Maria asked.

  “Let’s back up,” said April, arms crossed. “She was naked?”

  “Completely.” Bryce rubbed his hands together.

  “I think it’s really kind of tragic,” Maria said. “I mean, she’s married.”

  The waiter interrupted with drinks. Ezra scanned the menu, even though he knew what he wanted, or at least what he was going to order.

  April swilled her glass and plunked it down with authority, causing a few lines to spill out and retreat down the bowl. “So Sybil Harper is a slut. I guess it makes sense, considering what I know about her.”

  In Ezra’s mind stirred images of evenings with his mother, her feet up on the recliner, red wine in hand, cigarette between her fingers, talking about the whores of Babylon giving the weather report on the evening news. “Swimming nude in your backyard,” Ezra said, “doesn’t make you a slut.”

  “Maybe not. But her film ca
reer has set women back a few decades,” April said. “Not that that’s important or anything.”

  “Wait. Weren’t you once a lingerie model?” Ezra asked.

  She stared him down. “Isn’t it funny, Maria, how boys find sympathy so easy when it’s toward women they want?”

  Ezra stared back, thinking of how she had no idea how true that was, but that it didn’t mean the sympathy was wrong.

  “Just don’t get involved with either of them,” said Maria. “Do I even need to say that?”

  Nobody said anything. Flatware clinked against plates. Ezra watched as Maria flushed and looked into her drink, seemingly embarrassed at the power of her words. Ezra had noticed that people sometimes mistook her gentleness for a lack of resolve.

  “Well, since everything is all downer, Maria and I have a fun announcement to make,” Bryce said.

  “Not now,” Maria said, nudging him in the ribs with her elbow. She glanced up at Ezra and for a moment looked as if she had a question for him.

  “It turns out we’re not just celebrating Ezra’s birthday,” Bryce said. “I asked Maria to marry me last night.”

  A grin crept across Maria’s face. She dug into her purse and pulled out an engagement ring, then scooted it onto her finger. It had one small diamond in the middle of a band of white gold. She seemed embarrassed, but then blinked her eyelashes and held out her hand, fingers limp, like royalty.

  April gasped, got up from her seat, and hugged Maria.

  Ezra stood up from his chair and shook Bryce’s hand. Then, in a pathetic daze, he executed all of the appropriate congratulations. He wasn’t expecting this. No, that wasn’t true. Bryce had told him he’d gone ring shopping. But something inside Ezra hadn’t let that sink in. He’d never really believed this would happen. Sure, he knew that he himself was incapable of having anything resembling a normal relationship. And yes, they were all good friends, and he wanted the best for them. But it never failed. There was what you thought would happen, and what you hoped in a perfect world might still happen. Hope rarely listened to sober logic or sense, never gave a shit about anything so thin as reason.