No Birds Sing Here

by Daniel V. Meier Jr.

  Beckman’s existence down on earth seemed very remote from his seat in the plane. It seemed really pointless and trivial, more like the life of a primitive organism running away from or going to some stimulus. He wanted, for a moment, to stay in the plane. He envied the flight crew, their life spent floating between earth and space, to the point of tears. Thinking about the landing depressed him, so he ordered two drinks and, hoping to impress the stony gentleman next to him, drank from both three-ounce bottles simultaneously.

  It was fully dark when the airplane touched down on earth again. Beckman hurried through the deplaning routine and through the terminal. He hailed the first cab he saw and gave the driver Honey’s address. The driver maintained the speed limits and drove very efficiently, the only cab driver he had ever ridden with who didn’t treat an automobile and traffic rules like natural enemies, and it had to happen when Beckman was in the most desperate hurry of his life.

  Beckman seemed moved into a kind of Doppler world from the speed and instantaneousness of the jet to the slowing down of a receding howl. The cab seemed to barely roll along, stopping at innumerable traffic lights, gaggles of pedestrians, yield signs, stop signs, and speed signs. Beckman had never before fully realized the complexity of simply driving a car. For a moment, he briefly considered jumping out and running; at least the illusion of speed, of action, would be preferable to the agony of sitting innocuously in the back seat of a law-abiding cab.

  He tossed a $5 bill over the front seat even before the cab came to a stop in front of Honey’s house. The place was dark except for the yellow illumination of the streetlight. Beckman hurried up the driveway to the side door. He tried the keys but they did not fit. He then tried the front door, then the back, but nothing worked.

  It was just like her to remove them, Beckman thought. He even considered the possibility that this had been a part of some elaborate plan of Honey’s, a clever and intelligent way of demonstrating her power.

  He went back to the side door and, with the useless keys, broke out the windowpane next to the lock. He reached through the shattered glass and around to the lock and turned the bolt. A dog barked from somewhere nearby, in the darkness. The explosiveness of the sounds caused him to jump and cut his hand on the glass. The animal’s awareness of his presence accelerated his sense of urgency close to panic. He pushed open the door and ran, stumbling, through the darkened house.

  He knocked over objects and fumbled for light switches until he found the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. He charged up the stairs, burst into Honey’s bedroom and began wildly collecting his clothes, stuffing them into his duffle bag and, for some reason still unknown to him, then began switching off all of the lights. Once again, he stumbled in the dark to the side door, closed it behind him, and relocked it.

  He leapt down from the small side porch. The duffle bag snagged on something, and the energy of his weight pulled it over on top of him, striking his head first, then slamming across his back. Beckman wrestled the bag onto the ground, wildly kicking and pushing until the bag lay quiet and dead beside him. Then, as though he had been rehearsing the scene known to everyone but himself, he scrambled to his feet, stunned and confused. He irrationally brushed the dirt from his suit. With the bag under control, he began to run, dragging and bumping it along. Something caused him to stop; a voice, a sound? He waited in the tense silence. Then an explosion of lights enveloped him, blinded him, and nearly beat him back down to the ground. He covered his eyes with both arms. A voice from beyond the ring of terrible white rays demanded that he halt and put his hands up.

  Beckman could not take his arms away from his face. The hideous light penetrated everywhere. It blazed through the threads of his suit and it even appeared to glow like a red X-ray through the flesh of his arm, outlining delicate bones and a nexus of veins, nerves, and arteries.

  Powerful hands jerked his arms away and held them straight out on each side. He squeezed his eyes shut against the light until he could see only two opaque red ovals. The pain which had shot through to the back of his head lessened. Something, or someone, jerked him up to a standing position with his arms still pulled out into tight bands. A pair of hands indelicately fondled his body. A hard voice, reeking of old cigarettes, shouted next to his ear to someone behind the lights, “He’s clean.” The high intensity lights switched off and smaller, more subtle flashlights probed his face. Steel-jawed manacles locked around his wrists.

  “Buddy, you’re under arrest for breaking and entering. Read him the shit,” the same voice said; the same voice that had been behind the lights.

  The man with cigarette breath held a worn card up to his flashlight and read, in a hurried monotone, an unintelligible list of Beckman’s rights as a suspected felon. The man’s breath sickened him, and the blow on his head from the duffle bag made his brain slosh inside of its cranial tomb. He couldn’t have stopped the compelling release of the contents of his stomach even if he had tried.

  The policeman reading from the “rights” card, failed to see the warning signs and Beckman spewed forth a column of foul, hot, chunky liquid. The policeman jumped back but continued reading from the card, speeding his voice up to Donald Duck rapidity, then saying, “Son of a bitch. Somebody give me a towel. He got it all over my shoes.”

  Laughter was all around Beckman.

  “Well, who’s he going to go with?” another voice asked.

  “Not me,” Cigarette Breath quickly injected. “If he shits in his pants, I want it to get on somebody else.”

  More laughter.

  “Come on, boy,” a different voice said, and someone grabbed him by the arm, pulled him to a dark police car, opened the rear door, and shoved him in.

  The ride to the police station was mostly in silence, except for the last few miles when the policemen started to complain about the smell of the vomit.

  “Take him upstairs and get him cleaned up,” the older man in the right seat told the driver.

  Beckman was led through the wide door at the rear of the station where they had parked in a large police parking lot. The driver, a pale-faced man of about forty, held on lightly to Beckman’s arm and pointed him up one flight of stairs to the men’s toilet. Inside the toilet, the policeman unlocked the manacles and waited—lips compressed, one hand resting on his nightstick, the other on his bullet belt—while Beckman washed his face and hands and diligently wiped at the spots on his tie and jacket with a paper towel.

  The policeman’s cap bill covered his eyes, and his uniform seemed segmented by crossing vertical and horizontal lines. Beckman felt a painful contraction of his genitals. He was in the grip of some terrible force, mindless and deadly as a raging tyrannosaur. The reflection of the policeman in the mirror, the white florescent light, the white walls and white toilet fixtures seemed, and he truly believed, inescapable. He had a couple of dry heaves before turning to the policeman who re-handcuffed him and, staying within arm’s reach, motioned him toward the door.

  They walked down the lower hall, also shimmering in white light, and entered an elevator. The elevator stopped at the first floor where a muscular black man in a torn shirt and hands cuffed behind him was escorted by two policemen. They stepped into the elevator. The door closed and the elevator started up when the black man started screaming, full volume, and charged, head-first, against the elevator door. Beckman and his escort flattened themselves against the back side of the elevator while the black man’s escorts tried to subdue him.

  The black man was very strong, naturally strong, and the madness he directed at breaking down the elevator door was now turned against his antagonists. He started kicking. One kick caught a policeman on the side of his leg. He groaned but did not drop. The black man seemed to be all moving legs and bobbing head.

  There was a short hiss like the stroke of a tire pump, and Beckman’s eyes felt filled with sand and fire. His throat constricted and he, along with all the occupants of the elevator, erupted into spasms of wild coughing. Then the door op
ened, sounding like an explosion, and everyone burst out into a top floor lobby.

  “Why in the goddamn hell did you use that, and in an elevator?” one of the policemen demanded.

  “Now there’s no use to get that way about it. What the hell did you expect me to do with this crazy asshole? He’d already taken you out. If I’d waited for him to use that foot on me, he’d have raised my voice to a squeak for the rest of my life. If I’d had my old blackjack, I wouldn’t have had to use this shit.”

  He slapped contemptuously at his mace holster. He turned to Beckman’s escort. “Sometimes you just can’t get along without an old-fashioned blackjack. Know what I mean?”

  Beckman’s escort nodded but remained erect, even while wiping the chemical tears from his cheeks. The black man’s escorts traded accusations for a moment, then led the man away.

  Watching the black man go to his fate, Beckman knew with immutable awareness that here everything was real, that the craziness outside, whether wonderful or terrible, would be—if it were captured—bludgeoned, gassed, stomped, or electrocuted out of existence. Absolute sanity ruled Beckman’s actions, and he was more afraid now than at any time since he and Malany fled from Herschel and the restaurant.

  As they walked down another white, luminous hall, past innumerable closed doors without so much as a scratch to distinguish them, Beckman felt, and truly believed, that Honey, with her veiled superiority, had planned this for him all along. He had been helpless and without hope from the very beginning, like all experimental animals, and this is where it would end.

  After Beckman had handed in his breakfast tray, he strode back to the corner of the cell where he had spent the night. His thinking was a little clearer now, less fractured by his own mental spasms of self-reproach and the exterior shouts from other cells. There had been a fight in the next cell during the night. He could hear the grunts and blows of the combatants. No one came in to stop it. The last policeman he saw was the one who had walked him to the cell. No one even cheered the fight on. The grunts and blows simply went on until they stopped, and were replaced by the night noises of squeaking beds and regular breathing.

  Beckman squatted in the corner, thinking. His cellmate, staring at him from darkened caves, kept his worn and spotted coat pulled close to his body, even though it was hot in the cell.

  Beckman stared back and, with a surge of daring, asked the man, “What are you here for?”

  The man, without changing his expression—he had no expression to begin with—said through ventriloquist lips, “Food and shelter.”

  “You mean you got arrested so that you could come here to eat and sleep?”

  The man nodded. “It used to be easy. All you had to do was stagger down the street and they would pick you up, but now—I had to get on the bus and go all the way to Germantown. I staggered around out there about fifteen minutes before they came and got me. It’s getting to be a real problem. I don’t do it much, you know, not like some of the other fellas who are always trying to get in here. I just do it whenever I really need a square meal and can’t find it no other way.”

  “One thing I’ve always wanted to ask men like you.”

  “Men like me?” the cellmate repeated, with a smile.

  “How did it happen? How did you end up like this?”

  “You’ve asked the wrong man, my friend. You should ask them.” The man swept his arm toward the cell door and window, “They’d know better than I would. All I seem to remember is one day realizing that I didn’t care about anything. They could do what they wanted to me.” He swept his arms toward the window again. “And I didn’t give a real damn. I figured I’d be dead in a week, but that didn’t happen. I’ve lived like this for ten years now, and still don’t give a damn.” The man stared at Beckman more intensely and, with a smile, said, “Young man, I think we have a lot in common.”

  Beckman was struck with horror. He crouched back in his corner, his former courage gone. The cellmate stared at him for a long time, then climbed into his bunk and lay facing the wall.

  Beckman trembled in the heat of his corner. The prophetic truth of the man’s words resounded in his head, obliterating thought as well as standing beliefs, invalidated memory, and pounded with demonic force at the walls of his heart.

  For a moment the sound of the jailer calling his name was terribly confusing. He hesitated to answer but when the jailer showed himself in front of his cell, red-faced and angry, and shouted his name with finality, Beckman jumped up and lurched out of his cell.

  He followed the jailer down through the cell area, possibly to his death, or to a beating, to torture, to God knows what, but he was happy, almost to tears, to be out of the cell and free from his cellmate. He decided, in that brief walk to the jailer’s office, that he would gladly accept death, even insist on it, rather than go back to that cell.

  Honey was waiting in the jailer’s office, dressed in the Park Avenue fashions of the ’20s. Seeing her so confident, so able, he gasped with pure joy. He rushed over to her, jerked her gloved hand to his lips and began kissing it.

  “Please, Beckman,” she slowly withdrew her hand. “The gentleman has something for you to sign.”

  The jailer dropped into a swivel seat behind his desk, “You have been released to this lady’s custody for a period of—”

  “Yes, yes. What do I sign? This?” Beckman pulled one of the papers on the desk toward him.

  “Now hold on, wait a minute, boy; goddamn if you ain’t anxious.” The jailer laughed and, looking at Honey, shoved a folder of papers toward Beckman.

  “You see how it is, ma’am. I tell you, if everybody had to spend at least one night in jail, there wouldn’t be no more trouble in this world.”

  Beckman signed everything before him, giggling like a rescued castaway, and accepted joyfully, without checking the contents, the small envelope containing his personal effects.

  “Don’t be so polite, sweetheart, you’re saved. I saved you,” Honey cooed.

  Beckman wiped tears from his cheeks and thanked her again.

  “But, you see, there are conditions.”

  Beckman nodded and let his head dangle after the last nod.

  “You see, dear, I paid your bail and had you released into my custody, guaranteeing your appearance in court on the proper date. Oh, of course you will not have to go to court; that is, unless you do something as hurtful as you did at Palm Beach and force me not to drop the charges. Running off like that during the party. It was very embarrassing, and I must say I was a little angry at the affront. I knew you would return to pick up that smelly old army bag, so I checked the flight that I thought you would probably take. You know, the earliest one. Then I calculated how long the cab ride would take and then called the police. I was really in a sweat, dear, for a while, wondering if the timing was right. But, you see, everything worked out perfectly.”

  Beckman resumed nodding. They walked across the police parking lot to her car. Beckman was slightly behind her. She had on a wide brimmed hat of pre-World War I style.

  “Oh, and there’s one other thing, dear. You signed your own bail bond agreement which means that if you do something foolish again, the bondsman will come and get you. And, from the look of the character I dealt with, I wouldn’t advise leaving until he’s paid.”

  Beckman nodded and followed her quietly to the car.

  “It’s early morning yet, dear. Let’s go for a drive until lunch. I know just the place.”

  They climbed into the wax-smelling Model A, and Beckman felt the comfortable pleasure of its leather-covered seats and the solid, definite, metal locking sounds of the doors. Honey started the engine, listened to its gentle tapping rhythm for a minute, then started off. Beckman settled comfortably in the seat, almost overjoyed. He grinned and inhaled deeply, the warm Memphis air beating past his face.

  “I’m so glad you still have your suit on. I was really afraid they would put you in dungarees or one of those awful jumpsuits. Straighten up your t
ie, dear, and you would be a perfect Henry James.”

  Beckman straightened his tie.

  “And who do you think I am?” Honey asked.

  Beckman wrinkled his brow theatrically and said. “Edith Wharton?”

  “Oh, that’s right. Wonderful, you’re catching on.”

  “What about sex, Honey? You’ll have to give it up.” Beckman thought he saw a counter.

  “Only with my husband and, as you know, that was never a problem . . . Oh, by the way, read this.”

  She thrust a wrinkled letter at him. Beckman read. It was a short letter and, despite the bouncing and lurching of the Model A, he was able to read it quickly:

  Dearest Honey,

  This will come as a surprise to you, as it certainly did to me. And, believe me, I thought a long time before making this decision. Actually, it wasn’t a question of whether I was going to do it, since the first time I laid eyes on Todd, I knew what I wanted, and that I was going to get it. The problem was, how was I going to tell you?

  I know that what I’m going to do will destroy our little setup, but let’s face it, dear, it couldn’t last forever. Things were bound to happen.

  And happen they did: When I met Todd, I knew that it was the purest love. I am ecstatic, delirious with happiness. For the first time in my life—and it’s nearly half over, you know—I found something real and lasting. I feel like a real person. I know how corny that sounds, but it’s true. Now that I think back at how I was, I don’t even recognize myself. No more icy, dead cynicism, no more anger. It’s wonderful. I only hope that, someday, you can experience what I have. Then maybe you’ll understand. I hope so, dear, for your sake. Please try not to be too angry.

  Yours Sincerely,

  Leon

  P.S. All I know is that I want to spend the rest of my life with Todd, and he feels the same.