No Birds Sing Here

  “Come on, we ain’t got all night,” said Chandelier. “Just drive us around. Then I’ll let you know. You can even watch. You might change your mind by the time we get back.” Chandelier laughed, a practiced, mirthless bar room laugh.

  Beckman tried to apologize to Crystal, but she ignored it and looked, instead, with considerable irritation as her partner climbed into the back seat. Beckman drove away, leaving the young prostitute standing alone next to the empty parking space, her bare legs looking thin and vulnerable.

  The blonde worked furiously trying to peel off Hoss’s stiff new jeans. The western belt buckle clinked like a small bell as she worked first at the waist, then pulled and jerked them farther down the legs. She pulled and tugged and grunted and cursed until she finally cleared the last obstacle and Hoss’s pants lay wadded around his knees. Next came Hoss’s jockey shorts, which she rolled into something resembling a giant white rubber band.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said to Beckman, “this ain’t gonna work. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to turn a trick, sweetie? I’ll even throw in a few extras, free.”

  Beckman had to stop for a red light. All language seemed to evaporate from his mind. He tried moving his lips, hoping the right words would fall out, but nothing. All he could do was look in the rearview mirror where he could see Hoss, totally passed out sitting upright, his head lolling on the back of the seat like a loose ball. Chandelier was frantically struggling to open the door, her hands full of Hoss’s money. She popped it open. The noise sounded like a gunshot. She was running. Beckman hit the accelerator, skidding the car around, and followed, relieved that the traffic light had turned green at the same moment.

  Chandelier, unencumbered by her dress, which flogged in the wind around her hips, ran with amazing speed. Beckman passed her, saw her image momentarily frozen in the strobe effect of his passing headlights. She was a grotesque wingless bird, running with great white legs and featherless wings, pumping the air in a useless, forgotten attempt at flight.

  He swung the car to the curb, skidded, and screamed to a stop. He leapt out and saw her turn and run in the opposite direction. He caught up with her quickly, but as he reached for the flying skirt she turned and darted like a gazelle to the left, now between two buildings in a space too small for vehicles but wide enough for a single person to run through. She was a natural, that prostitute, an undiscovered track star, and she ran as though she was truly running for her life.

  Beckman thought that he was going to lose her. She was gaining distance. She reached the end of the space and made a quick turn to the right, behind the building. Beckman was sure that he had lost her then, but he heard the unmistakable clashing of metal trashcans and the dull thudding of soft material falling on the pavement. Beckman rounded the corner of the building and saw the prostitute struggling, like a netted tiger, amid a falling pyramid of cardboard boxes and trashcans. He knew that this would be his last chance to retrieve Hoss’s money. Having a sudden, strong desire not to spend the night in the car with Hoss, Beckman sprinted with his last reserve of strength toward the fallen prostitute. Seeing Beckman lunging toward her and assuming the worst, she held up her hands in surrender.

  “Don’t hit me. Don’t hit my face, for God’s sake.”

  But Beckman, already airborne in a final lunge toward his target, could not, regardless of how hard he wished it, change the irrevocable force of impact. Together they tumbled deeper into the pile of boxes, and for a while there was silence from their cubistic pyramid. Beckman pushed aside the boxes and crawled out of his entombment, dragging the prostitute by the hand and apologizing like a dazed victim of a tragedy.

  The prostitute stopped pleading and fell to her knees in a posture of one about to be executed. Beckman pulled back her fingers from the wadded money and carefully extracted the bills from her hands. He flattened each bill out, neatly folded them, and put them into his pocket.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Beckman assured her. He turned to walk away.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like just one trick, mister? I can make you feel things you’ve never felt before.”

  Beckman didn’t answer or look back. One hesitation, one moment of pity, and he would not be able to walk away with the money. She continued to plead, even as Beckman blindly stumbled down the hideous gap between the buildings. He covered his ears with his hands so that his own racing blood would drown out her cries, and he did not uncover them until he was back in the car with all the windows closed and the doors locked.

  It was after three a.m. before Beckman found a cheap motel still open. He unloaded himself and Hoss into its cheerless interior. There were two beds, both sagging in the middle, but nothing mattered now but sleep. He dumped Hoss onto one of them, making sure that he was lying on his side. He could breathe easier this way and if he threw up, he would not choke on his own vomit. Beckman then took a shower, staying under the hot water for a long time to release the twisted cords of his nerves and muscles. The motel’s towel had a large hole in the center, and it was small, half the size of a regular towel, but he made do.

  He felt exhausted and fell into bed with the expectation of instant sweet sleep. Sleep did not come, however; at least not for a long time, not until the light of the coming day began to make gray-black shadows on the wall opposite the window. Only then did something switch off in Beckman’s mind, and he stopped seeing the prostitutes who had made the night their home.

  Beckman thought about them all and about what he felt for them, especially why he had felt no anger toward the prostitute who had stolen Hoss’s money. Most bothersome, however, was an expanding wedge of fear that none of them were ever going to reach California.

  Hoss was still drunk late that afternoon when Beckman roused him out of an alcoholic sleep and pushed him under the trickle of water passing for a shower. He was drunk on the way to Overton Park where Beckman stopped to kill a few hours so that Hoss could sober up before going to the professor’s home.

  They walked through the park, stopped by the pond to watch the ducks, and browsed through the small art gallery so that Hoss could see the nudes.

  “All fat,” was Hoss’s observation. “Why did them artists all like fat women?”

  “I don’t know, Hoss, maybe fat women were considered beautiful, looked upon as healthy and sensuous.”

  Hoss made a face of disapproval. They walked around for a while longer, Hoss perking up and noticing the girls. They stopped at a McDonald’s before going on to the professor’s. Hoss ate two quarter pounders, claiming that meat and bread were the only things that could sober him up.

  The professor greeted Hoss and Beckman warmly. The atmosphere was jolly in the home. Honey dashed around doing last minute household things. They were offered brandy and cigars, which they refused. Even Hoss turned a bit pale at the suggestion. Malany had even dressed in a light blue suit, borrowed from Honey, which looked unexpectedly natural on her. With her hair pulled back, she looked strangely like a mature, young English professor. She was seated on the sofa, her book and a black notebook tucked securely under her arm. She waited patiently for Honey, who finally burst from her room bedecked in a long, white evening gown and jewels. The appearance seemed timed to dazzle. It did bring Hoss to the edge of his seat and, for a moment, stunned Beckman with the realization that he was in the presence of a truly beautiful woman.

  “Malany, please don’t be offended, but I think it’s best if we go in our cars. I mean, your car is so old and can’t possibly be in the best repair.”

  Malany looked as though the thought had never occurred to her that her car was old, in need of repair, and that her friend feared it as she would fear an ailing and unpredictable animal. It wasn’t because of this new awareness that she consented, it was the usual disregard for the trivial. Deciding on a means of transportation seemed vastly unimportant. It was a concern of people who always worry about what they will eat or what they will wear. Malany’s face looked as elongated and as expressionless as eve
r.

  “Good,” Honey said, “you and your friend can go with Leon and, Beckman, you go with me in the Model A.”

  Leon smiled and nodded his approval.

  The arrangements seemed at once suspicious to Beckman, and he knew, from the way Hoss looked at him, that Hoss felt betrayed and defenseless. Beckman, stunned, groped at nearly the speed of light for an adequate protest and only vaguely considered Honey’s rationale that a Model A could be safer and newer than a 1970 Oldsmobile. Beckman found himself tagging along with the others, all following like a school of fish behind Honey.

  Outside, Hoss, in a tone of desperation, expressed the desire to see Honey’s Model A. Before Honey could respond, Hoss was standing beside the car and pretending to inspect it in the dim light of the garage.

  Honey was talking with Malany in the professor’s car. “Buddy,” Hoss whispered, “I don’t like what’s going on. Now I’m only going along with this because I want us all to go to California. You know, it’s become a kind of thing with me. But I can’t take much more of these creeps. So, buddy, you do what you have to, then let’s get out of here.”

  “What about Malany?” Beckman asked.

  “Well, you can handle her. I can’t.” Hoss slapped the hood of the Model A and said, loud enough for all to hear, “Yeah, they sure don’t build ’em like this anymore.”

  He waved tauntingly to Honey, who was now sitting behind the steering wheel of her Model A, and walked back across the front yard to the professor’s car. Beckman felt a strong surge of admiration for Hoss; the inexplicable rightness of his vanity, his uncluttered knowing of the present, all somehow geared to his wonderful ability to take action.

  Beckman felt swept away and thrust in the middle of a torrential stream. He almost blurted out that he didn’t care about riding in a Model A. He hated the false past of antiques and Model A’s as much as he fumed with passion at the sight of her.

  But the feelings subsided, and he found himself riding in the soft, rolled leather seat of the Model A. The engine ticking along like a toy car and Honey, with her silken blonde hair, her flashing jewels, her non-stop femme chatter and the indefinable darkness outside, did seem to transport him to 1928. It was as though the ideas and feeling of the time had been forged with the car’s carbon, oxygen, and iron, into the real substance and form of the car. Beckman began to think seriously about Prohibition, the dying gasp of Puritanism, the loss of faith in capitalism, the frenzied, unabashed assault on the vestiges of the nineteenth century. He felt it all as deeply as if he were there.

  It seemed such sensible madness as he stepped out of the car onto the grounds of a solid home, rooted firmly among ancient trees and dated, unquestionably, before the Civil War. Pierre greeted them at the door, an individual smile and handshake for everyone but in the general don’t-give-a-damn manner of his French ancestors.

  “Oh,” he said, clasping his hands a bit too theatrically. “So, you are our young poetess. We are anxious to hear you. Honey has said so much about you and your work.”

  He took Malany’s hand in both of his as if he had been wearing a Cardinal’s habit. Beckman thought he could have been the essence of a Renaissance prince of the church seeking favors.

  “I want you to meet our young poet in residence, John Darling.” Pierre snickered. “Oh, don’t laugh, dear. It’s really his name.”

  He led Malany by her still captive hand across the room to a large man with Walt Whitman hair and beard, but dressed conventionally in a clean tie and jacket. The poet stood off, just away from the main body of people who had gathered in the library where the reading was to take place. He talked quietly with several students and occasionally cast a contemptuous glance around the room. He was already acquainted with the professor and his wife and thrust his hand toward Malany. He said, in a tone suggesting esteem, that he was looking forward to hearing her work. Beckman was introduced and dispensed with. Then Hoss, who momentarily silenced the room by mispronouncing the poet’s name, said:

  “What was that again? John Dillinger, you said?”

  “Darling. John Darling,” the poet whispered.

  “Darling, John Darling,” Hoss repeated with contrasting volume. “Well, I just think that’s just a darling name.”

  Hoss laughed. The poet was clearly taken aback. His bespectacled eyes went into uncontrolled fluttering and, it seemed to Beckman, that his face and body visibly deflated.

  A bell tinkled, announcing the start of the reading, and all present moved in loose groups to prearranged rows of chairs. Some, mostly students, found places on the carpet, where they casually leaned against shelves of rare books. One girl, dressed in house painter’s coveralls and a train engineer’s cap, leaned casually against an early English translation of Homer.

  The poet lurched toward the wooden stand where he placed his notebook. Looking more formidable against the background of a wall of books, he began, to Beckman’s disappointment, by clearing his throat and reading one of his recent works, “Where is Love?”

  Beckman looked around at all of the pretty, intelligent, gifted people, listening intently to Darling’s rhythmic recitations of “my hard cock,” “your sweet cunt, kissed before and behind,” “young breasts that bring forth the milk of life, where is love?” Honey seemed mesmerized. Malany stared straight ahead like a priestess and Hoss, slouching in his metal chair, tried to talk with the woman next to him.

  Darling finished the poem and acknowledged the excited applause which followed. Then he launched into what he said was the rewriting of Paradise Lost, showing Satan as a liberator of, and the misunderstood symbol of, Puritan sexual repression. After thirty minutes of this, a fog of boredom had settled in the room, stunning everyone with a paralysis that maintained the appearance of attention, but severed their awareness at the optical nerve.

  Darling had finished a full minute before a general applause rippled through the audience, and the stillness was broken by sporadic hand clapping. The poet smiled broadly and waved like the Pope from the balcony of the Papal residence. Beckman suspected that Darling had misinterpreted the audience’s reaction.

  Malany was next. She walked up to the stand, deliberately slowing her movements. She placed her opened book on the stand and, for a few long moments, gazed around at the people in the room until it was as quiet as a laboratory sound chamber. Then she read her best works as they should be read, stressing and hesitating at the right places for the best aesthetic effect. Beckman realized, hearing her read this way and making a blood-sweating effort to do her best, that he had only read her poems with his eyes.

  He was seized with shame and guilt and, in the accompanying sense of helplessness, forgot about Honey, who had begun, sometime during the reading, to press her leg against his. Beckman, at that moment, realized the unbridgeable gap between them, and knew also that if somehow the great mystery of things had been different, he and Malany could have loved, and there could have been love to fill the distance. They could have been writers together, or school teachers, anything. And, for the first time since Herschel had urinated on him, tears burned his eyes.

  “Oh, Malany.” The words bubbled from his throat in a hoarse sigh. “What?” Honey whispered next to his ear. “What did you say?”

  Beckman didn’t answer. He could not. Not until Malany had finished and Darling had leapt to his feet, leading the audience, clapping and yelling, “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!”

  The rest of the room, following his example, rose and applauded. Some rushed to talk to Malany before she left her place by the stand. Malany had, at last, tasted success and recognition, however small, from a literary establishment.

  As the excitement subsided, people began drifting into the next several rooms, all wretchedly decorated in French Rococo. Beckman thought he could hear the music of Couperin coming from the walls, almost totally masked by the general noise of people and tinkling glasses. Honey led him to the punch bowl where she ordered drinks for both, and a delicate French cheese on a tasteless waf
er. Hoss had followed them and ordered a glass topped with bourbon and as many wafers of cheese as he could hold in one hand.

  “Listen, buddy,” he said the moment Honey’s attention was taken by a talkative guest. “This fella Moskowski is really hot. The son of a bitch won’t leave me alone.”

  “Well, why don’t you just tell him no, Hoss?”

  “I would, but he ain’t asked me yet, and if I make the wrong move before then and piss him off, it could mean trouble for you and Malany, and I don’t want to do that. Especially now.”

  Beckman looked over at Malany, who had now transformed into a flushed, talking creature basking joyfully in her microfame.

  “You see, boy,” Hoss said in a whisper, “I’m afraid Malany’s done forgot all about California and all about you and me.” Hoss stopped abruptly as Honey quickly broke off her conversation and returned.

  “Malany has made quite a hit, and it seems that Darling is very enthused,” Honey said. “Poor boy, he gets all juiced up over anything new. He goes nearly crazy each year when the new crop of coeds pour in. And Malany, being a struggling poetess, desperate, vulnerable, and all that, has probably excited him to near madness.”

  The professor came up beside Hoss and was greeted with an icy stare from his wife. Beckman felt the flash of a wordless, but clearly understood communication between them.

  “Come, Beckman. I want you to meet a few people.” Honey grabbed him by the hand and towed him across the room to a straight-backed man in his fifties with wavy gray hair, all of which seemed to be tumbling over his forehead.

  “Malany tells me that you’re interested in ESP. I thought you would like to meet Dr. Drew of the Psychology department. He’s done a lot of work in that sort of thing.”

  Beckman went through the formality of introduction, handshakes, smiles, little jokes, until he felt reckless and challenging. He asked the doctor how he felt about psychokinesis.

  “Nothing, young man,” the doctor said. Beckman took it, and correctly, as a put-down. “I am a scientist. I don’t make judgements on the basis of feeling. But I will tell you what the research has shown, and that is that there is no basis for the claims of parapsychology. Oh, I know what people have said, what they have claimed. But, subjected to controlled experimentation, they simply don’t hold up. There are no constants, no predictability, nothing really to give these claims appreciable validity.” Dr. Drew tossed out these words as though he were brushing away annoying flies.