No Birds Sing Here

by Daniel V. Meier Jr.

  The man walked in, leaned his gun against the table, and held the captured prize up by the neck, his one eye gleaming in the yellow lamplight like a small oval mirror. Without a word, the man sat down. He threw his feet up onto the table, leaned back in his chair until it creaked under the strain, and drank, letting the whiskey take him wherever it would. His one eye became dull and it stared, through the light, across the room and beyond.

  “I think we’ve had it,” Beckman whispered, but instantly wishing he had not said it.

  Honey knew what he meant and looked on with increasing horror. The man continued swilling from the bottle.

  They waited for the unknown effect of the whiskey, which came first as a song, something alien and mournful. Beckman could not understand the words. Then they heard maniacal laughter, interspersed by a loud dialogue with a phantom named Febus, and concluding much later in a wild solitary dance around the table until the man stopped, glared into the darkness with his eye, and flopped back into the chair. He wavered for a few moments before passing out, head-first, on the table.

  Beckman struggled with renewed desperation at his bonds; pulling, jerking, twisting, when unexpectedly he felt them give, just a little, then more, struggling until he had wiggled a hand free. Quickly he pulled the rest of the cords from his other hand and ankles, then untied Honey, who was breathing the way she had in the back seat of the Model A.

  “Quietly now, let’s creep out of here.”

  Honey nodded, disheveling her hair. “The keys,” Honey whispered.

  Beckman put his finger to his lips. “Go to the car. I’ll get them from his pocket. If you’ll . . . ”

  “No way. I’m sticking with you.”

  “All right, but be very quiet.”

  Together they tiptoed to the old man. Beckman, with soundless gentility, picked the man up from the table and leaned him upright in the chair, retching at the decayed stench that swam up from his body. The moment Beckman reached into his pocket the man’s eye popped open with drunken surprise. Beckman jammed his hand into the man’s pocket again, fingers hunting madly for the keys.

  The old man opened his mouth, but before he could get anything out, Honey grabbed one of the bones off the table. It was sharp and jagged at one end where it had been broken and gnawed. Holding the rounded joint end and, using the jagged end of the bone as a primitive knife, she jabbed it into the man’s one good eye. He yelled a bubbly, underwater type scream and fell backward. Beckman quickly found the keys in the other pocket as the old man twisted in agony on the floor.

  Beckman was, strangely, most aware of the drumming their shoes made on the wood floor as they charged, headfirst, out of the house. There seemed an interminable lunging for the car. The starter ground over forever, and it was only after the car started and there seemed to be a chance, did Beckman realize that the old man’s dog had torn both of his pants legs off, along with some of his skin. The dog was still outside, leaping repeatedly at the car window.

  Beckman shoved the gear lever in reverse and spun the car around. For a moment he caught sight of the old man stumbling, blindly, out of his door, gun in hand and blood covering one side of his face. Beckman pushed the gear lever in low and drove toward the road as fast as the car could take the bumps. The gun started blasting away behind them, and with each blast he and Honey flinched.

  Beckman didn’t really feel safe until they were back on Interstate 55, which he welcomed with uncontrollable tears. Even the hustling, eighteen-wheel, tractor trailers blasting by him made him delirious with joy. Honey cried and laughed, and impulsively hung her head out of the window, letting the wind blow her hair into wild, Medusan confusion.

  She would yell into the wind and breathe deeply. “Oh God, don’t you love the smells and the noise? I love it. I love it. Hurry home, Beckman, hurry home.”

  Beckman, growing more self-conscious of his and Honey’s condition, drove quickly into the driveway and into the garage, which was surprisingly empty. “Where is the professor?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. That isn’t important right now, come on.” Honey scrambled out of the car, motioning for him to hurry.

  “What’s the rush?”

  “I want to get clean.”

  “Well, go. I’ll wait.”

  “No, let’s get clean together.”

  She took him by the hand and led the way through the connecting doors of the house, to the bathroom. Beckman felt oddly like an adolescent, being led to his first sin.

  “It’s a small version of a Roman bath house, copied from Naples. It was largely Leon’s doing, but I insisted on the freeform tub. Stimulating, don’t you think?”

  Tiles with large mosaics, of nude male and female figures in various poses, covered the floor of the bathroom. The room was bordered with multi-colored tile squares. Roman columns supported a shower stall. The fixtures were of assorted erotica—the shower head resembled a limp penis and the hot and cold water knobs young, erect breasts, all done in a smooth, flesh-colored, ceramic material molded over the metal parts.

  Honey turned the shower on, adjusted the water as hot as she could stand it. Taking Beckman by both hands, she stepped in with him. The idea of hot water did seem restorative, and he felt the way Honey said she felt. He even echoed her in a kind of singsong refrain, “I want to get clean, I want to get clean,” and it wasn’t because of the sex, for he felt no guilt about that, and he knew that Honey didn’t. It was rather an attempt, he thought, to clean away the event, the close meeting with an ignominious death; and it would take more water, more heat, more sex to restore life and to switch off the memory.

  Honey began to take off her clothes. Beckman followed, realizing with sobering clarity at the same time, that this was his last pair of pants. They were torn to shreds and bloody from the dog bites and where he had cut his leg on something. He dropped his clothes next to Honey’s and together they stood under the shower, motionless for a long while, letting the water streak away the blood, the tears, and the heavy dirt from their bodies.

  Then, taking a bar of highly scented soap, Beckman gently scrubbed Honey’s back, the gleaming hills of her breasts, the two firm little mounds of buttocks, and the soft, fleshy cavern between her legs, alive with sensation—all were washed clean, then anointed with rare perfume. Honey washed Beckman’s body, taking care to be delicate and thorough with his genitals.

  They moved from the preparatory shower to the sunken tub, which resembled a shallow wading pool, with marble steps descending into clear water. Assorted tropical plants thrived at the other end of the tub, under the white light of a frosted glass skylight. Water ran from a chrome fish’s mouth, down a stepped ceramic fall, through the plants and into the bath. It was a restful sound, like a small, isolated waterfall in the tropics. The water was recirculated, if desired, through an opening shaped like a giant uvula in the side of the pool.

  Beckman submerged his body and looked across the pool at Honey. She was completely submerged except for her head, which rested on the edge of the pool. Her eyes were closed, and her face had regained its former fullness. The lines had disappeared, and she smiled contentedly.

  “Mrs. Moskowski.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “Why isn’t the professor here?”

  “I don’t know. And please, will you call me Honey?”

  “Aren’t you worried about him finding us?”

  “No.” She closed her eyes again and sighed.

  “Then it must be true?”

  Her eyes popped open. “What must be true?”

  A pause.

  “Hoss says that your husband is a homosexual.”

  Honey smiled. “He is.”

  “Then he’s . . . ”

  “After your friend Hoss? I’m sure he is. I’m surprised you didn’t notice sooner. Leon had a hard-on for him the minute he saw him. He’s got a thing for the rough trade. Tough guys really turn him on.”

  Beckman sat up abruptly, splashing water over the edge onto the tile fi
gures.

  “Oh, don’t worry about your friend. He can take care of himself. Besides, Leon never forces anybody, he just pays. Your friend Hoss is probably going to cost him a month’s salary.”

  “Listen, Hoss wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  Honey laughed in an explosive way.

  “Maybe not. I’ve certainly learned something about what I will and will not do in the last twenty-four hours. I know it’s a rather worn out cliché, but until last night I really believed money could buy anything.” She shuddered. “Oh, I wish to God it would go away.”

  “Time, give it time,” Beckman said, fearing she might go under with a second, more destructive wave of remembering.

  “You’re strangling with curiosity, aren’t you?”

  “Not necessarily.” Beckman tried to sound indifferent.

  “Yes, you are. I know you, you would-be writer and magician. You’ve got that terminal disease. I can see it wasting you already, so I’ll tell you. It might calm my nerves and help me forget.

  “It’s the old story of the student-teacher thing. Malany and I were students in his class. Leon was a graduate teaching assistant, working for the big PhD. Jesus. Now that I look back at it, it was all such classical textbook stuff. But how can you know the truth until you know what you’re looking at? Leon was in the throes of resisting and compensating for his growing homosexuality. I was the cute rich girl from the house on the hill, heavy into toppling the towers of Ilium. You know, doing it with the working class; demonstrating for minority rights during the days, and going down on a selected one at night.

  “I even had pictures of me doing it with a black stud to send to my old man, but they got lost somewhere. I don’t know. Anyway, I was sort of on the rebound when Leon came at me like a Mack truck. Well, his being Jewish and a future professor was a different kind of turn-on for me. Plus, I’d heard all these stories about how great the Jewish boys were in bed—until then I hadn’t made it with one. So, after we’d had the obligatory shack up for a few months, Leon starts talking about marriage. I was getting nowhere in school, and the idea of being the settled-down professor’s wife rather appealed to me, so we did it. Lived like Mr. and Mrs. Super Straight for a year. Then, one morning at the breakfast table, Leon drops it on me that he’s now a homosexual and has had a steady lover for the last two months.”

  “Didn’t you suspect? I mean, when he couldn’t make it in bedroom?”

  “Well no, actually. There were periods of impotency during his psychotherapy but other than that, he seemed to enjoy it as much as any man. I asked him about that, and he said he simply thought about fucking some guy that he had the hots for, or he would think about his lover. He even kept a couple of fag magazines hidden so that when all else failed, he would turn on by looking at erotic pictures of men, then give me a quick bang.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  Honey submerged her entire body—eyes and mouth shut tight—into the warm, circulating water. Beckman waited with some anxiety until she came back up, sweeping her wet hair behind her ears and brushing the water away from her eyes.

  “Let’s say I learned a few things about myself. Up to then I thought I could tolerate anything, another woman, okay, but a man, a homosexual, a fag, I felt like a complete fool. I screamed and threw things. Leon kept dodging the plates and apologizing. It was like something out of a porn comic strip.

  “Then, suddenly, I realized that I was free. I mean really free. Not just divorced free, but free of any trace of emotional commitment, or repercussions, or any goddamn thing. We, quite coldly, I might add, worked out an arrangement. We would maintain the appearances of marriage so that Leon could keep his public deniability, and we could both be free to have lovers, to do anything we wanted so long as it didn’t openly jeopardize the other.”

  Beckman shook his head. “It must be really tough. I mean, don’t you miss never being in love?”

  Honey looked genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m in love all the time.”

  “Never mind,” Beckman said. “Does Malany know about this?”

  Honey laughed. “Hell, no. Poor kid. She is so fucked up, going around half dazed all the time, writing those silly poems. She really believes in that stuff, going to be another Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

  “I thought you were friends,” Beckman said.

  “We are, but you can only have so much sympathy.” Beckman looked puzzled. Honey clearly saw that further explanation was necessary. “I think she could have done better by staying at home with her husband,” she continued. “But she had to take off, live like a vagabond poetess, starve, freeze, the whole suffering bit, and then to go with that vanity publisher. Christ, I’ll bet that cost her husband a good jolt . . . ”

  Honey continued talking. Beckman watched her lips move, her expression change. She was a good actress, keenly aware of her face and hands. He tried to appear interested, and she seemed not to immediately notice the changes coming over him. A fierce ringing in his head silenced the outside world, and he was afraid that his body would crumple under the near perfect vacuum that it had become. Honey stopped talking and looked at him strangely. Beckman allowed himself to slip under the water, into a not-so-quiet world of bubbles and gurgles, of blood pounding in his ears and the creak of tight muscles holding down air. He considered suicide, but he didn’t think of it as suicide at the time. It was more like some sweet and wonderful voice had whispered “relief, peace and solitude” in his ear. Just the words whispered softly, like a mother’s promise. It wasn’t even painful holding his breath, but just in case his body refused to go along, he tried to edge his head into the great sculptured uvula, feeling at once the water being drawn swiftly past his head. His hair lurched straight into the cavity. There was, for a few moments, a pleasant sensation of falling, just gently tumbling through a tunnel lit with sparkling lights of red and blue and green. Then, although he wasn’t truly aware of it at the time, he was drawn, with almost painful violence, from the uvula up to the surface.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Honey shouted.

  Beckman laughed. “Trying to return to the safety of the womb in your bathtub. Why?”

  “Jesus. Because of what I told you about Malany? You mean Malany got to you like that? Christ almighty, I’m glad I didn’t tell you about it when that smelly Cyclops had the gun on us. You might have let him eat us.”

  “I might have,” Beckman said, laughing. He continued laughing until his face turned purple and the vein in his forehead stood out like a heavy rope covered in thin plastic. He laughed, pounded the water with his hands, and thrashed it around like a frenzied child.

  Honey got out of the tub, wrapped herself in a large towel, and sat on one of the marble benches near the edge. She waited, legs crossed, chin resting in her hand until Beckman’s seizure subsided, and he lay in the churning, rippling water, quiet and resigned.

  “What was it, Beckman? The dark soul, the unapproachableness, the irresistible appearance of a literary mind, or all of it? That’s what seeped its way into the core of your pampered self, isn’t it?”

  Beckman did not answer.

  “Oh well, it doesn’t matter. You’re really lucky. A lesson in reality didn’t cost you a dime. Think of her poor husband.”

  “She has a husband?” Beckman asked and immediately thought of the man he had seen her with at the bookstore. “Who is he?” Beckman demanded.

  “Don’t act totally stupid, Beckman. Get out of the water. You’re starting to look ridiculous.”

  Honey rose abruptly from the bench, towel still draped over her body in terrycloth folds.

  “Come on. Let’s go to the bedroom. We can get dressed or we can have a celebration of life, whatever you want.”

  Beckman pushed himself out of the water. For a long while he stood frozen in Honey’s gaze as the bathwater ran off his body and formed a spreading pool at his feet. Honey handed him a towel, letting her hand rub across his butt
ocks.

  “Who is he, Mrs. Moskowski?”

  Honey rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, I don’t really know. I’ve never met him, but Malany tells me he’s rich, he’s in the investment business, in his mid-fifties, and for some completely unfathomable reason, worships at her feet.”

  Beckman followed Honey up the stairs to her bedroom which had an adjoining bath, both furnished and decorated in Louis XIV style.

  “All originals,” she was quick to add. “I’ve left this chair unrestored.” She motioned casually toward a delicately lined chair, covered with faded red upholstery, woven with patterns of dancing unicorns. The gold leaf on the wood had almost vanished, but enough remained so that the effect of pure elegance was still there. If the craftsman didn’t believe in the divine right of kings, he knew how to convince his royal patron that he did.

  “Wait here,” Honey said, stepping into the adjoining bathroom and closing the door behind her. Beckman felt a cold shiver ripple through his body. He rubbed himself with the towel until parts of his skin felt raw. He understood now why Malany had never appeared to need money—and the black Lincoln. The man he saw in the bookstore with her must be her husband. He had followed her across the country, dropping white envelopes stuffed with money whenever she needed them. Why didn’t she tell him? It would not have mattered that she was married. What did matter, and what now angered him, were the appearances she presented.

  The struggling poetess trying to make it on her own, rejecting the good and warm things of life so that she could write. Beckman had respected her for that above all else. The sincerity, the self-denial, the radicalism and the determination had all been an illusion that she had called, with conviction, “reality.”

  Beckman dropped down on the edge of Honey’s bed, tears running from his eyes.

  “Here, cut that out, I can’t use it,” Honey said.

  She stood before him, naked except for the columnar white wig worn by the ladies of Louis XVI’s court. His eyes immediately traveled to the black nevus pasted on her right thigh. Before he fully realized it, his nose was only a few inches from the delicate, oval indention of her navel and while his tongue explored its beautiful wonders, she quickly arranged a powdered white wig on his head. He started to laugh at the image of himself sitting on the edge of a football-field-sized bed, covered in a body towel like a lecherous Roman senator, wearing a George Washington wig, and staring into the navel of one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting.