No Birds Sing Here

by Daniel V. Meier Jr.

  “Stop! If you’ll stop, I’ll help you.”

  “No, you won’t.” She kicked again when he moved closer. She held the tangled hair and branch in both hands and was now lying on her side, both legs kicking like a fallen bicycle rider.

  “Don’t you touch me! I’ll call the police! I will!” She tugged furiously at the entanglement for a few moments.

  “What were you doing here?” he demanded. Beckman hunched down close to her, but out of range of her feet.

  “That ain’t none of your bisness.”

  “I saw you looking in my window.”

  “I was not. I ain’t never done any such of a thing. You can’t prove it.”

  “Suppose I went in, got my camera, and took a picture of you here in your strange predicament.”

  The desk clerk pulled frantically at her hair, making a humming sound. She stopped after a while, breathing hard. “That don’t prove nothin’. I thought I seen somebody sneaking around out here, a thief or somethin’ like that. So I came to check it out. That’s all.”

  “But you did look in my window?”

  “Well, what if I did? It could be somethin’ totally different from what you’re thinking. I might have saw the thief go into your cabin. Maybe I just wanted to make sure before calling the sheriff. I was just looking out for y’all, and here you go accusing me of somethin’ terrible and disgusting.”

  “I only want to know why you were looking in my window.”

  The desk clerk started to cry. “I wasn’t. That’s only the way it looked to you.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “You can’t stay here. God knows what kinds of things will crawl over you in the night.”

  “Oh God!” She was close to sobs and still clutched, but weakly, the knot of branch and hair. “There’s a pair of scissors in the office, in the desk drawer, on the left. Please hurry.”

  Beckman trotted toward the office, still seeing the image of the desk clerk rolling on the ground; dress gathered around her mid-section, massive rolls of flesh, unidentifiable sexual parts, and featureless face. The office was unlocked, a possibility Beckman had not considered until he reached for the door. He was at the desk in two long strides. A shaded lamp on the desk provided the only light. Beckman tore open the top left drawer. Nothing. And then the bottom one. No scissors. He tried the top right drawer. The scissors were there, lying beside an old-fashioned scrapbook which was bound with heavy, brown, cardboard covers and fastened with thick, black ribbon.

  Beckman placed the scissors gently on the desk and slowly lifted the scrapbook from the drawer. The first few pages were devoted to pictures of not very intelligent-looking adolescents, all in the forced poses of their senior class pictures. The middle part was crammed with newspaper clippings of weddings, birth announcements, divorces, court records, a weekly gossip column, and tabloid reviews of soap operas, all carefully preserved under a plastic overlay.

  Further on, there were pictures of movie and television stars cut from fan magazines, and the last few pages of the scrapbook were devoted to glossy, color, pornographic pictures of couples, heterosexual and lesbian, joined in an ecstatic union, carefully pasted and covered with clear plastic.

  Beneath the scrapbook, in the same drawer, were stacks of pornographic magazines, most with glossy color covers. Beckman replaced the magazines and the scrapbook carefully, and eased the drawer closed. He was moving like a house thief now, quickly snatching the scissors off the desk and stealing out of the office.

  “What took you so long?”

  “Nothing. I had trouble finding the scissors.” Beckman crawled under the bush beside the desk clerk. “It’s going to be difficult without much light.”

  “Just don’t try anything funny.”

  “I’ll try to cut the branch. Maybe we can save your hair that way.”

  “Oh God, I hope so.”

  “Don’t move. Not even if a snake bites you.”

  The woman shuddered. Beckman cut at the smallest part of the branch, just beyond the knot. He tried to cut with the scissors in the conventional way, but the branch was too large and much tougher than it looked. He tried sawing with one of the blades, but that was hopeless.

  “I’m sorry. The branch simply will not give.”

  The woman started crying again. Beckman found all the hair that was caught, separated it from the free hair, then flattened the tangled hair between his two middle fingers, running his hand up to the knot. He placed the scissors against the front of his fingers and cut. The sound was like tearing flesh. He could feel the hair giving way, like the severing of a tight muscle. She cried as though she was experiencing real physical pain. When the last group of strands had parted, she scrambled out from under the bush and ran away. Beckman heard her running, great thudding steps fading in the night, but could not see the direction she took. He twisted and worked the offending branch until it broke off, leaving jagged green ends, slimy with organic juices.

  The cabin had not been entered. A few of Malany’s things were on the bed—a comb, a pair of old running shoes, panties, and dirty socks with holes. Beckman rolled the stuff into a ball and put it into his duffle bag. He gathered up his own things and put them on top of Malany’s. He double-checked the room and the bathroom to make sure that he had not forgotten anything. He lowered the venetian blind at the window and settled back on the bed with his clothes on. He would sleep in his clothes and leave early in the morning.

  The green branch with the woman’s hair lay on the bedside table. He reached over for it, looked at it, and turned it over in his hand until it became the only part of his vision in focus. The hair was silky, light brown, and looked like delicate feathers caught in a trap. It was beautiful hair and well cared for. If he had not known for sure, Beckman would never have guessed that it belonged to the desk clerk. It was hopelessly entangled—a Gordian knot of hair and branches. He tossed it into the plastic trash can.

  A feeling of Malany’s absence washed over him, leaving a sudden vacuum in the center of his body that hurt. He rolled across his bed and dug back into his duffle bag until he found his book, Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind. The page marker was where he had stopped two months ago, before Herschel, before Malany. The chapter wasn’t clear. He couldn’t remember some of the important parts. He turned back to the beginning. A review of what he had read before would be necessary.

  It was still dark outside when he awoke. His book rested flat on his chest, opened to where it had fallen. It was the same scented night that he had left in the library parking lot, the same night that he had freed the desk clerk. Yet it seemed like those events were far away, distant memories separated by an infinite chasm. The silence seemed profound when he stopped outside the closed office and dropped the room key into the door slot. He struggled for a moment with the question of paying for his few hours of rest. The question took the form of a hallucination, something grotesque but laughable. He wanted to wait and let the imaginative possibilities unfold, but he was overcome with a sense of urgency to leave, to flee.

  He walked, for a time, along the roadside. Several cars passed, but he didn’t bother to put out his thumb. He was happier walking. Each step made him feel a little cleaner, a little more ebullient. Hope flowed again and seemed to grow with each step forward. When he was ready, he turned to face what cars might be going his way and noticed, with almost painful joy, that it was becoming daylight and that there were no cars in sight.

  A thin, sweet-smelling mist hung motionless in the air, veiling the trees and highway and lacing the grass on the edge of the road with droplets of water that turned into dark, wet footprints as Beckman walked. Beckman believed that, if it had not been for the paved highway, strictly divided and regulated by white and yellow lines, and for the trash deposited along the grassy shoulders, he could have been in some medieval forest, populated with knights, magicians and beautiful ladies in long gowns and veils suffering some quiet distres
s of the heart.

  Beckman stopped and looked down the road, away from the light. His imagination could see, formed in the complex shadows and waves of mist, a parade of knights. Could it be St. Louis leading an ethereal army of followers on another noble crusade? Beckman had read about St. Louis and concluded that history’s sainted king had been gifted with psychic ability and a defective understanding.

  St. Louis never seemed to understand the power of selfishness. He was used and then abandoned by his brothers. The Knights Templar, considering him a bad investment, refused to loan him his own ransom money. Even his most faithful knights, knowing he was bankrupt, demanded increases in pay and an honorable means of escaping an unprofitable Holy War. Yes, Beckman thought, it would be like St. Louis to lead pure and holy crusades against the dark forces of evil and missing the mark for all eternity.

  Beckman had walked for some time, thinking about St. Louis, before he heard the truck behind him. He turned and stuck out his thumb. Two headlights were approaching out of the evaporating mist. They were dimmed by the creeping sunlight. The truck rumbled past. It was an old-model, mud-splashed farm truck with two monstrous brown pigs in the back. Beckman saw the truck’s brake lights flash on. Then the truck moved toward the shoulder, but not on it, and came to a stop. He ran toward it to show his appreciation but hoped that he could find a polite way to refuse. He opened the door, which immediately sagged on its hinges. The farmer at the wheel glanced casually at him.

  “I almost didn’t see you in this fog. It’s awful dangerous hitchhiking in this mess. Get in before somebody comes along and rams us into kingdom come.”

  Beckman climbed in and closed the heavy metal door. The farmer shifted gears and the truck lurched forward. It was no longer a world of sweet smells, of mist and shadows. The truck, dented and scarred like the farmer, encapsulated the noisy world of machines, human bodies, and the faint but omnipresent odor of pigs.

  “You ain’t the kind that hits people over the head, are you?”

  The question startled Beckman. He looked at the farmer and saw that the man was truly apprehensive. His larynx moved jerkily up and down. He apparently held this attitude about strangers foremost in his order of things, but why then had he stopped? Beckman felt ashamed at being a living part of the man’s fear, but an answer to the question was expected. He wondered for a moment what the man would do if he said yes.

  “Of course not.” Beckman made it sound serious and slightly defensive.

  The farmer exhaled a long breath of relief. “Where ’bouts you going?”

  “Which way are you headed?”

  “I’m going to Selby to sell them hogs.”

  “Which way is that?”

  “Well, it’s down this road ’bout ten mile, then down I42 for another five.”

  “Yes, but which way? What direction: north, south, east or west?”

  “Why, west. At least until I42, then south to Selby. That whor you’re going, to Selby?”

  “No, I think. I’ll go west. Maybe to California.”

  “Cal-i-for-ni-a,” the farmer repeated slowly, biting his bottom lip. “Now that’s a long way off. Never been there. Fact is, I’ve never been west of the mountains and don’t know if I want to.”

  “The Rocky Mountains?” Beckman asked. The very sound of it unexpectedly thrilled him.

  “No. The Appalachian, the Smokies, and I only saw them from afar. Never really cared much for going places.” The farmer looked over at Beckman with a smile.

  Beckman looked down the road. A surge of nausea and confusion passed through him. It truly seemed like the “road to nowhere”. Wasn’t that the title of a movie? Nowhere seemed to offer the best choice, the greatest shroud of protection.

  He started to walk. He didn’t want to hitchhike anymore. He wanted to walk to California. That would be his new fulfilling ambition, something approaching impossibility, but not “the impossible”. That would be his new, higher goal, motivating him through all the grim drudgery, the peaks and valleys along the way. He would make his “road to nowhere” mean something.

  He walked all that morning, occasionally tripping over objects hidden in the grass. He looked up at a large winged bird circling overhead and slipped off the shoulder, tumbling down a five-foot slope. He was uninjured, but wiser. His first big lesson—look where you’re walking. Every foot of road ahead would have to be scanned, judged, and decided upon. He would know the road taken; every blade of grass, every crack in the highway, every bit of roadside trash. He would know his road the way a lover knows the body of his beloved.

  Beckman climbed back up the slope and stood next to the highway feeling perversely proud of himself. He’d had his first tempering blow, and he felt now that he would accept anything nature could deliver. The gravity of this thought, the direct and, admittedly, pompous challenge to nature immobilized him for a while. It wasn’t immobilization from fear but more of dimension, his mind trying to grasp the meaning of his new self, and his situation. He wondered, too, if it might not be a prelude to death, the romantic images of an explorer freezing to death but shaking his fist at the blizzard.

  Could it be one of fate’s last tricks on a desperate man, lulling him into the peace of indifference before closing the doors? Beckman reached down and picked up a piece of broken glass. He dragged the pointed edge across the top of his forearm. The cut wasn’t deep. There was some blood, but the pain was not the same. It was only physical pain, biological, curable. It was not the pain that had been with him most of his life. That pain had been a living being, without form or visible cause but, nevertheless, a constant companion. One that he had come to rely on, a stable reference when all else was undefinable. Now it seemed to be gone, or at least left behind. He had been propelled into a different region of emotional space; foreign, but not threatening. Walking to California, something few pilgrims had done, was his destiny.

  Beckman started to walk again; one part of his mind concentrating on the ground, the physical requirements of walking, the rest, racing toward some critical limit. Was he going insane? Was he walking into the world of endless distortions along the fusion line of mind and matter?

  A car passed, blasting him with a concussion wave of hot air and scattering his hair like a madman of the desert. Had he slipped over into the prophetic ability to conclude without logical reasoning? It had happened to other casualties. Some had been friends of his. They had been thinkers then; wading in doubt, mystified by unfounded meanings, searching for and horrified at reality. He would see them later; clear-eyed, a beatific expression lighting their faces, and expounding opinions with undoubted conviction. “Just believe and be happy.” This behavior seemed to happen so often that at times it seemed like a contagious disease. Had he picked up this disease somewhere along the road? Was he soon to start raving like some off-Broadway prophet?

  He brushed his hair back into place. Malany had been right during one of their sleepy talks in bed. It was the destructive dichotomy—Malany’s favorite word—of today’s world that was terminating twentieth century mankind. It was insidious and incurable unless you were armed. Beckman realized, at that moment, that Malany was the only person he knew who was armed.

  He stopped again. This time he heard something familiar, as familiar as Malany’s voice. He turned and saw the diminutive face of Malany’s car growing larger and roaring louder. The car was beside him before he had time to sort out his feelings. Noisily, beating rhythmically, it gave off the tremendous heat of an old beast determined to live, defying extinction. Malany leaned over to the passenger’s window. Beckman was thrilled at seeing her long, angular face and her dark, fluid eyes that, in weaker moments, he had dreamed of loving.

  She said, “Where are you going?”

  “West,” Beckman replied. “West.”

  “I thought so. Get in.”

  “I want to walk,” Beckman said, shocked at the betrayal in his own voice.

  “Nonsense. Get in.”

  Beckman opened the
door, hesitated while his mind said goodbye to the private world he had known, and got in. They rode for a while in silence, Beckman readjusting himself to the world of Malany.

  “How did you know where to find me?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “I resorted to your psychokinesis.” She waited for this to take effect. “I simply allowed my mind to seek you out. It was like switching on an energy field and probing with high-sensitive electromagnetic feelings. Then, just like poetic inspiration, I knew where you were. I couldn’t actually see you, of course. There wasn’t an image. It was just that I knew where you were. I never doubted it.”

  “Why did you come?” Beckman asked.

  “I had an intense feeling that we weren’t finished.”

  “What if I think we are?” Beckman snapped.

  “Are we?”

  “Could it also have something to do with this being the only paved road going west out of town?”

  “Don’t be cynical, Beckman. I will not acknowledge it.”

  Beckman wanted to shout, “Yes!” The word erupted in his throat but dissipated before he could say it. He wanted to believe what she said, but conviction wasn’t there. Abruptly he switched on the car radio, tuned to a rock music station.

  “Please, would you turn that off ? It’s become tiresomely repetitious and conventional.”

  Beckman switched the radio off. “What happened back there?” he asked.

  “Nothing unpredictable, I’m afraid. The timing was too distorted. I realized after you left that he was at the end of something and that I was at the beginning. Call it what you want. I’ve reached a point where I wish to only interpret life poetically, and he can only interpret it allegorically.