The Hummingbird War

by Joan Shott

  I let the tears come, but they were ones of joy now. Santa hadn’t forgotten me after all.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Danny was checking the oil on Mrs. Porterfield’s old Plymouth when we pulled into my father’s service station a few days later.

  “Nineteen forty-three,” Matthew whistled. “That’s quite a car.”

  “Mrs. Porterfield only drives it to go shopping on Tuesdays and to church on Sundays and keeps it in her heated garage,” I said.

  Danny walked towards us, nervously wiping his hands on his rag and stuffing it into his pocket. “Hi Diane. You look really nice today.”

  “Thanks, Danny. Where’s my father? I’ve got to sign the papers so he can sell my car for parts.”

  “Went to the bank.” He kept his eyes trained on Matthew while he spoke. “Gonna get some money or take some out. I can’t remember which, but he’ll be back real quick.”

  “Danny, this is Matthew.”

  Danny slowly offered his hand. He’d had a crush on me for years, and as long as he couldn’t put a face to the threat of the man who’d stolen my heart, he’d been able to pretend I could be his someday. But now his make believe world was falling down around his ankles.

  “That’s one nice car, isn’t it?” Matthew nodded at the old Plymouth as they shook hands.

  “You…like cars?” Danny asked.

  Matthew grinned. “Who doesn’t?”

  “You want to see the ‘48 Chevy woody I’m working on? It’s around back under the lean-to.”

  “Yeah, I’d like to see that. I’ll meet you inside,” he said to me. He walked with Danny to the back of the garage, their heads together, talking hemis and carburetors.

  I opened the door to the office where the space heater kept the temperature a steady seventy-five degrees. I pulled off my gloves and wiped the condensation from the window to the unlit garage. I could just make out the Volvo sitting in the second bay. As I opened the door, the smell of burned oil surged over me like the remnants of my old car’s last breath.

  A product of the Great Depression, my father was a stickler for skimping on electricity, gas, food, words. He always turned the lights off, even when he was running a short errand. I pulled the chain of the fluorescent above his tool bench.

  I leaned into the Volvo, opened the glove compartment, pulled out the registration, and closed the door. When I stepped back from the car, I saw the outline of someone sitting in the corner, hidden by the shadows cast by rows of fan belts hanging overhead.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. My father wasn’t one to sit around in the garage when there was work to be done.

  “Waiting for you, my beautiful wife.” Bobby’s voice, unexpected, made my heart jump. “I see your old friend is dead. Came for the funeral, did ya?”

  I’d once craved the sound of the hard drawn-out a’s of his New England accent. Now it made my legs weak. “Does my father know you’re here?”

  “Your car,” he pointed at the Volvo. “It’s dead. Maybe you should see it as a warning.” He was wearing his old leather jacket, the empty sleeve part of his past I hadn’t shared. He’d draped that jacket over my shoulders so many times to keep me warm, and I thought of the place in my heart he’d filled once with such caring gestures. Now that empty place inside me ached. It was my phantom limb.

  “You’re not making any sense,” I said. I was quaking with the reminder of what had happened between us days earlier.

  “Diane, you’re not going to leave me.” He took one step towards me, but was still half hidden by the shadows.

  “I won’t change my mind. You got the papers from my lawyer, didn’t you?”

  He laughed. “Those? By now they’re halfway to Canada on the tide. Words on paper mean nothing to me.”

  I wanted to run, but my feet wouldn’t move. I didn’t know if it was because of fright or determination to see this through.

  “I have a friend,” I said. “She’s a social worker, and she knows a good psychologist. I care about what happens to you. My friend can help you.” I wanted him to believe me when I said I cared about him — because I did. I’d been broken down by the war, too, but I’d built myself back up. Time and people who loved me had helped me heal. Bobby hadn’t gotten even a scrap of a chance.

  “Can she? Can she help me turn back time to when I had a wife, and both arms, and flew planes faster than the speed of sound?”

  “You know the answer to that.” A trickle of sweat crawled down my side like some icy-fingered bug. And what had happened to Matthew? When Danny talked about cars it was nearly impossible to get away.

  “I don’t need the kind of help you’re talking about,” he said.

  I thought about offering my hand to lead him out of the dark corner where we could talk more easily, but after what had happened at the house, I knew it wasn’t a good idea. I took a small step backwards. “I don’t know what else to do. I want to help you get through this, but I’m not a therapist.”

  “I don’t need a goddamned therapist. I need my wife.” He lunged towards me and grabbed me by the arm. I fell back against the side of the Volvo, and he leaned his weight against me.

  “Let me go. We’ve been through this already. It won’t solve anything.”

  “To hear you talk, nothing’s going to solve anything except me getting out of your life. It’s not that easy, Diane.”

  The vise of his fingers dug into my arm. “You’re hurting me.”

  “You think you hurt? Let me tell you about being beaten and starved. Living hunched in some little cage for so long you lose count of the days, and when you finally crawl out and try to walk the pain is like you’re on fire. I made it through two years thinking only about you. You’re not going to change my mind by pleading for that baby. It should have been mine. I always dreamt of how it would be when I got home. I imagined you missing me the way I missed you. And then I come home, and this is what I find. You sleeping with someone else and he’s living the life I dreamt of.” His voice was as dry as death, choked with the wreckage of a life blown to bits.

  “You know they told me you’d died. I mourned for you.”

  “Not long enough.”

  The office door opened, and Mathew looked across the garage. “Diane, who are you talking…” He spotted Bobby and his expression darkened. “Hayes, I told you to stay away from her.”

  “This is none of your fucking business.”

  “I told you to stay away.” Matthew moved in our direction, keeping his eyes on Bobby.

  Bobby still had me pinned against the Volvo. He shifted his weight, and I tried to push away from him, but when I looked up he had a gun in his hand.

  Matthew stopped, put his hands up. “Hey, hold on. Don’t do something stupid.”

  “You think you can sneak up on me like some fucking gook? Your big-shot father gonna get you out of this like he got you out of Vietnam?”

  “You don’t want to do this,” Matthew said, trying to sound calm, but I knew he was as scared as I was.

  “What should I do instead? Be the best man at your wedding?” Bobby asked.

  “Bobby, you have the rest of your life,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me what I have. I have nothing.”

  “Let her go. Take me, let Diane go,” Matthew said, inching closer. “We can work it out. Between men, soldiers. You know, with honor.”

  “Honor? The only honorable thing to do is kill you. You stole my life.”

  “Bobby, we can figure something out,” I said. I had no idea what to do, other than to keep him talking.

  “Don’t lie to me, Diane.” He waved the gun close to my face. “As long as he’s around you’ll never listen to reason. He’s got you crazy, brain-washed. You’re coming with me. I’ll fly us out of the country. Either move, Diane, or I’ll shoot him in front of you.” He wrapped his arm around my neck and pointed the pistol at Matthew. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re not taking her anywhere,” Matthew said, moving closer.
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  “I told you, Bluestone, get out of our way or I’ll kill you.”

  “Go ahead, but let her go,” Matthew said.

  Bobby held me tighter and pushed me towards the door, still holding the gun towards Matthew.

  The sound of a gunshot rang from the other corner of the room so close to my ear I heard the sound of its zing, felt its echo in the marrow of my bones. Bobby’s arm dropped to his side. He fell against the stack of tires and slipped to his knees, and the gun he’d been holding skittered across the cement floor.

  Matthew ran to me and kicked the pistol to where my father stood, his old army rifle resting on his shoulder.

  Danny ran through the door.

  “He’ll live,” my father said. “I just caught his hand. Danny, call the cops.”

  “No, don’t call the police. Let me handle this,” I said.

  “Diane, you want this guy outta your life or what?” my father asked. He put the rifle down on the hood of the Volvo and picked up the pistol from the floor and checked the chamber. “It ain’t even loaded,” he said, shaking his head. “You made me shoot you and the goddamned thing ain’t even loaded.”

  Bobby was leaning against a pile of old tires, his hand pressed to his side and his jacket soaked in blood. “If I’d had a bullet, I would have put it in my own head,” he said.

  “I’ll take him to the hospital and tell them it was some kind of accident.” I knelt down next to Bobby.

  “Let them lock me up.”

  “You need help.”

  “I need you,” Bobby said.

  “I’ll drive him to the hospital,” Matthew said.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’m going to do this. Alone.”

  “Let her do it,” my father said. “He can’t do nothin’ with a bullet hole in his one hand. She don’t want to just let him go off on his own. That wouldn’t be right. You know what I’m talkin’ about, little girl?”

  I grabbed some clean towels from the back room and wrapped them around Bobby’s hand. “Let’s get you to the hospital,” I said.

  Matthew opened the door of my father’s truck, and after Bobby slumped into the passenger seat he said, “At least let me follow you there.”

  “No. It’s like letting you go off to Vietnam. I had to believe you would come back to me.”

  I watched Matthew and my father in the rearview mirror as I drove out to the road and turned the corner towards town. “The hospital is just a couple of minutes from here,” I said to Bobby.

  He rolled his head along the back of the seat and looked at me. “You could have let the cops arrest me. That would have solved all your problems.”

  “I can’t do that to you. I still remember how it was. You were a good man; you can find that man in you. You can even fly again.”

  “Diane, you are still the same girl from back then, believing in fairy tales.” His voice trailed off, his eyelids fluttered.

  “No, I believe in love and patience and hard work. That’s what makes a life. I had to learn that all by myself. My mother once told me to dance with my heart, not my feet. I know now that it takes both.”

  I waited outside the ER until a State Police officer showed up. He was taking my statement when the nurses wheeled Bobby towards the operating room. Bobby reached for me with his wrapped hand.

  “Mrs. Hayes, you’re saying the shooting was accidental?” The trooper asked, looking up from his notepad, eyeing me skeptically.

  I hesitated, looked at Bobby, and said, “Ask my father, Ed Miller. He works on your patrol cars, doesn’t he? You know his service station down the road? That’s where it happened. Bobby was cleaning his gun, showing my father what he used in the war.”

  “That’s the victim, Lieutenant Hayes? Your husband? He the one…” he left his question unfinished when he caught sight of Bobby’s missing arm.

  “Yes, he’s my husband. The Navy pilot who just came home,” I answered.

  “Yes, sir, Lieutenant,” he nodded at Bobby. “Thank you for your time.” He walked through the door leaving us alone.

  “Bobby,” I said. “Someday you will fly again.” I hoped he’d do more than fly. I hoped he’d find love. I hoped he be Bobby Hayes again, not Lieutenant Hayes, not the fighter pilot, not the former POW, not the poor soldier who’d lost so much over there and here.

  “Don’t forget me, okay Birdie?”

  “Never.”

  And the doors swooshed closed and he was gone.

  I knew they’d sew him up, pump him full of painkillers and antibiotics, and whatever else it took to get him on his feet again and send him down the joyless road he had to face. I hoped he had the strength he needed to survive one more battle, maybe the biggest of all.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  After the shooting, the Veteran’s Hospital fitted Bobby with a prosthetic arm, but according to my friend, Nancy, he didn’t want to wear it until he found out he’d be able to fly with it. She had been visiting him almost daily since he was admitted, and the two of them seemed to hit it off.

  “I think he’s the man I’ve been looking for. He needs me more than I need him,” she told me one day, half joking. I knew she felt funny about falling for the man who had been my husband, but I told her I only cared about her happiness, and his, too. But once he was released from the hospital, he disappeared. He took to the road, probably looking for a place where he could fly planes. Shortly afterwards, Nancy packed up and headed for Vermont to open her own social work practice.

  After our divorce, Bobby didn’t want to live in the Useless Bay house, so I bought my half from him. Matthew took the job in Washington for the MIA and POW his friend, Gerry, had mentioned when we’d met in Chicago. When we left for the East Coast, my father offered to live in the Useless Bay house and take care of things until I came back, as he knew I would. House-sitting might have been a poor substitute for fixing my old car, but he felt useful and connected to me, and I knew he’d always remember to feed the birds.

  Just before our move to D.C., I was standing in the open fields in front of my little house, holding our three-month old son, Henry, in my arms. The rising sun was painting countless shades of blue on the Olympics as a plane flew low across the sky. The wing dipped, and the pilot turned a few miles north, came back across the landscape, brought the aircraft into my sight again, and rocketed upward. I held my son tighter, afraid of the tug at my racing heart, strong enough to make it skip a beat. I’d never thought of a machine as having the ability to dance, but that one did. I knew it was Bobby in that cockpit. He was looking down on what should have been his: the house, the child, the wife. The war had taken it all away.

  Matthew had been watching me from the front porch and had seen the plane, too. “That him?” he asked. He must have felt the same presence enter our lives that moment. It had been too strong to ignore.

  “It was Bobby,” I said, nodding at the plane disappearing in the low clouds.

  Matthew walked over and put his arms around Henry and me, circling us into his fold. We were his, he seemed to say. “I hope someday he finds what he’s looking for.”

  I couldn’t answer him, because I knew if Bobby ever found what he was looking for, someone else ― Matthew and Henry and Lilly ― would pay the price. Like in war. If someone wins, someone loses, but in the end, no one wins.

  I came back to the island when my first exhibit of photographs, entitled Hummingbirds Home on Whidbey, was displayed at the Oak Harbor Library the following year. I had numerous pieces from my collection for the showing, but it was the one recent set of photos I’d taken during my last days at the Useless Bay house I considered the centerpiece. I’d spent half a day hidden behind my perennial border photographing the Anna’s hummingbirds at the feeder. It was fall, and food was becoming scarce. The flowers were drying on their stalks, and the birds must have understood winter was on the way. I snapped frame after frame of the little jewels, sitting next to each other on the feeder, sipping away at the sugar water even as they eyed
each other suspiciously. I guess I’d never caught them at it before, had never realized that they could call a truce when times were tough. They could end their war if the conditions demanded. But it would be, I knew, temporary.

  I returned to Washington, D.C. after the exhibit, just before Matthew’s brother, Max, was released by the Vietnamese and returned to the U.S. He eventually took over Matthew’s job, and a year later Matthew and I moved back to Useless Bay with Lilly, Henry, and our new daughter.

  The land and the sea and the birds were in my blood, and I wanted my children to learn to love what I knew. We built an addition to the house that included an office for my photography, ornithology research, and my old anti-war files. My children love to watch the birds soar over the garden I planted so many years ago when Mommy was a girl. Each time I see a hummingbird zipping across my yard, I think of Bobby, and I look for his plane, trying to call to me with its speed and grace, but it has never returned.

  The war is over now, but because of it, my life has changed: for the better — I have Matthew and my children and Lilly — and for the worse — what happened to Bobby and every other life it derailed.

  Each time I walk the trails at Bowman Bay, I can’t help but think of the day I met him and all that happened to us. Divorce, remarriage, and children haven’t taken away my feelings for him. I once believed I’d stopped loving him after I thought he had died, but I hadn’t stopped loving him, I’d only made room in my heart for others. If Bobby was looking down at all he’d lost the day I watched the plane fly by so close, I had been looking up at what I’d lost. We’ll never get it back, but we have the past. It belongs to us.

  About the Author

  Joan Shott teaches memoir writing at a Seattle rehab clinic. She also teaches English as a Second Language for adults. She is hard at work on another novel which, in many ways, picks up where The Hummingbird War leaves off.