The Man Who Loved Birds Read online

  The

  Man

  Who

  Loved

  Birds

  The

  Man

  Who

  Loved

  Birds

  A Novel

  FENTON JOHNSON

  Due to variations in the technical specifications of different electronic reading devices, some elements of this ebook may not appear as they do in the print edition. Readers are encouraged to experiment with user settings for optimum results.

  Copyright © 2016 by Fenton Johnson

  Published by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johnson, Fenton.

  The man who loved birds : a novel / Fenton Johnson.

  pages ; cm. — (Kentucky voices)

  ISBN 978-0-8131-6659-9 (hardcover : acid-free paper) —

  ISBN 978-0-8131-6661-2 (pdf) — ISBN 978-0-8131-6660-5 (epub)

  1. City and town life—Kentucky—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.O3766M36 2016

  813’.54—dc23 201503417

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of

  American University Presses

  For Dr. Darril Hudson

  scholar, patron, friend

  and for all teachers and learners

  Part One

  The Earthly Paradise

  . . . this scripture must be fulfilled in me: And he was counted among the lawless.

  —Luke 22:37

  Chapter 1

  Brother Flavian was not entirely certain what brought him, a Trappist monk soon to celebrate his seventeenth year in the monastery, to be standing in the Miracle Inn with a draft beer in one hand and a pool cue in the other. That afternoon he had set off to deliver the remnants of last year’s fruitcakes to the diocesan soup kitchen in the city, where they would be sliced and used in . . . well, he didn’t really know how they would be used and didn’t much care. The errand was an excuse to go over the wall, a term Flavian took some grim satisfaction in knowing was used by both monks and prison inmates to mean the same thing, except that at the end of the day the monks usually came back.

  The day had been warm, fox spring, with the promise of summer in the bright sun but with many idyllic days to come before the big heat clamped down. For miles he drove along country lanes where nameless birds soared up from the fencerows and the sky was a great bowl of blue. Then he was negotiating crowded city streets with parallel parkers and confusing intersections and children darting from who knows where bent on self-destruction.

  Flavian triumphed over these obstacles and performed his task dutifully and was heading back down the road in time to make Vespers at 5:30, when at the fork where he ought to have continued straight he turned left, toward the tavern in the town. He would stop in the tavern and order a beer. His pulse raced at the thought—he was thirty-eight years old and had never paid for a beer at a bar, he’d been just shy of legal age when he’d entered the monastery. He fished in his pocket—a few dollars and change left over from the allotment he’d been given for lunch and gas. He promised himself he’d find a way to pay it back. No one need know he was a monk—he was wearing jeans and a plain white shirt, clothes any farmer might wear for a trip to town, and in any case he had made a lifetime practice of anonymity.

  He was thin, slant-shouldered, with thin lips, sharp features, and a nose that drew into something startlingly like a beak. The effect was so remarkable that his eyes, a pale, watery blue magnified by thick eyeglasses, stood out as a kind of genetic conjuring trick. As he’d grown older his features softened—the saddlebag spread that transformed his fellow brothers into overstuffed feed sacks served to fill Flavian out, making him look a little less like a heron and a little more like a bespectacled owl. Even so, his was not a face that drew attention. He’d order a beer and stand in the corner and breathe in the smell of freedom and vice, cigarettes and stale beer, and then he’d leave. With any luck he’d be inside the enclosure wall in time for Compline.

  The bar was long and slim and smoky and dark, lit only by the fluorescent wings of a duck flying eternally over a Miller Lite waterfall and a single bulb covered with a green glass conical shade hanging above the pool table. Flavian hung back in the shadowy corners, watching how the men propped their feet on the bar rail and ordered, and after he felt he had the routine down he closed his eyes and steeled his will and delivered himself an ultimatum: You will cross the room and do this thing before that duck makes one more trip across that falling water, and on the third try his feet moved and the rest of him followed, six long bony feet of elbows and knees. “I’d like a beer, please,” he said to the bartender, as thin and angular as Flavian but sporting a drooping handlebar mustache and a goatee of black flecked with silver.

  “Draft or bottle?”

  Even so simple a question caused Flavian’s heart to leap but going this far he figured he might as well choose the unknown over the safe. The bartender nodded and pulled a frosty glass from the freezer and a few moments later Flavian stood taking comfort in the sting of the ice-cold mug against his palms. He took a sip—how could something be both bitter and bland? He was on the verge of setting it down and leaving when he found himself face-to-face with a ruddy-cheeked ham of a man with a huge paw of a handshake. “Benny Joe,” the man said, “but most folks call me Little.”

  “Uh, Tom,” Flavian said.

  “You don’t look like no Tom I ever met. Who’s your daddy?”

  And then there was another voice, this one from the shadows beyond the cone of light over the pool table. “He means what’s your last name.”

  “Aquinas, Tom Aquinas,” Flavian said and then felt a little smug about how he’d pulled that rabbit so easily from the hat.

  Little (Flavian secretly named him Ham) laughed. “No Aquin-asses around here.”

  “It’s Italian,” Flavian said, even as he thought, Lord, Lord, what lies we weave.

  “They play pool in Italy?”

  The voice from the shadows spoke. “He’s looking to shoot a game.”

  “Sorry,” Flavian said. “I’ve never played.”

  “First time for everything,” this from the voice in the shadows. “Let this be a lesson,” and that was when the cue stick came sailing into the light, and only because he hadn’t seen it coming Flavian caught it with his free hand like this was the most natural thing a man could do when in fact before this particular moment he’d never caught a flying object in his life.

  “Hope you can find a better teacher than that sorry-assed son of a bitch,” said Little.

  “Watch your tongue,” said the voice from the shadows, “this one’s got manners.” A quarter flipped onto the baize.

  Little put the quarter in the slot and the balls thunked from some secret place into some less secret place and each falling ball drove a
nail into Flavian’s racing heart. Little gathered them up into the triangle and rearranged them, his hands moving in a complicated little dance (an education, to see such big hands perform such a delicate maneuver) and then he removed the rack gentle as squeezing a peach and there they were, a pristine triangle of colors with a spot of black at their heart. “Break?” Little asked.

  “I think I will, if you don’t mind,” Flavian said, and went to the bathroom. Then he returned to palpable impatience and realized he had been given a request, that this had been a question of some sort and so he guessed the obvious and said, “No, you go first.”

  And so they played. Little sank a stripe on the break and emitted a little grunt of pleasure. He clutched at his crotch and said, “I got the big balls,” and then proceeded to knock them down one by one while Flavian watched until he finally missed a shot—deliberately, or so it seemed to Flavian, leaving the cue ball lined up with a shot that any child could make. Flavian muffed it, striking the cue ball so hard it jumped off the table.

  “Easy, easy,” and the voice from the shadows stepped partly into the light. “Let me show you a thing or two,” and he had his arms wrapped around Flavian and his hands on Flavian’s hands, and Flavian, who had never in memory been held by a living soul, was spoons with a stranger. The Voice (for that was how Flavian thought of him) guided his hands onto the cue stick. “Think about when you’re jerking off,” the Voice said. “Do you pump your pecker fast and hard or slow and easy?” To this question Brother Flavian could summon no response.

  Little sucked on his cigarette and then rested it on the pool table’s edge so that the burning ember stuck out, then took a shot with his eyes closed. The ball did not drop into a pocket but Flavian got the message: Little was the cat and his job was to be the compliant mouse.

  But now the cue stick rested more easily in his hands and on his next turn Flavian knocked a solid into a pocket—not the pocket he’d been aiming for but still he glowed as if it were Christmas, until he realized that Little was waiting and he guessed that he was being allowed a second turn. Once again his teacher draped his body around Flavian’s and nearing the bottom of his beer Flavian relaxed into it, let himself be guided by the Voice. “Check the angles. It’s all about angles, angles and English and power,” the Voice said as he lined up Flavian’s cue stick. “Take a breath, always a deep breath and let it out easy, easy, the power comes natural, it’s already there, it’s always been there, you don’t got to make it happen, what you got to do is to learn how to use it,” and then Flavian was free to take the shot. But once freed from the guiding hand of the Voice he was too rattled to stay focused and again hit the cue ball too hard. It caromed around the table, dangerously close to the black ball, which, even in his ignorance of the game, Flavian understood was a fate to be avoided.

  They played three games. The Voice stepped in from time to time and offered help and Little seemed not to object until they were into the third beer and the third game and some part of what the Voice was showing him clicked for Flavian and his body took over the job at hand. He had a vision of the cue stick as an extension of himself—he stopped thinking of the stick and the balls as objects, as nouns, and began seeing the whole picture, he and the stick and the balls and the table as a process outside of time, as one big verb. And then he ran three in a row and the Voice said, “Hot damn!” and Little said, “Beginner’s luck,” and when Flavian finally missed a shot he took as great a pleasure as he had ever known from seeing the newfound seriousness with which Little took up his stick.

  Then they played neck and neck, ball for ball, and it came down to this, the white ball and the black ball on the grassy green field in the smoky cone of light and the Voice with his arms crossed over his taut white t-shirt and his full lower lip stuck out and no longer offering help or even so much as a word of advice. Then Flavian muffed a gimme and left Little set up and Little, as close to a pro as came in these parts, sank the eight ball with a smooth quick stroke and a smack of his lips and it was over.

  Flavian turned to the Voice. “Thanks, teacher.”

  “Your favor to return.”

  “I’d buy you a beer but I have to go,” Flavian said, uncomfortably aware that he was too late to make Compline.

  “Suit yourself, Brother Tom.”

  “How did you—” and then Flavian caught himself and turned to the door and then he was crossing the parking lot to the monastery minivan and wondering if he’d said or done something to give away that he was a monk, or maybe the Voice called everybody brother at the end of an evening of pool and beer? Flavian was in the driver’s seat and had the van started when the Voice appeared at the window.

  “Hey, listen. You’re one of the brothers at the monastery, right?”

  Flavian considered denying the fact—after all, the apostle Peter had denied Jesus himself—but in the end he resolved to play it straight. “How did you know?”

  The Voice shrugged. “It’s in the walk.”

  “The walk?” Flavian set aside this cryptic comment for later consideration. “Anyway, I was just stopping by . . .” His voice trailed off into the certainty that any excuse he gave was only going to dig his grave deeper, besides which he had none. Why had he “just stopped by”?

  The Voice stuck a stuffed, oversized manila envelope through the window and dropped it in Flavian’s lap. “I put this together for the abbot but hadn’t found the chance to get it over to him. Much obliged for the favor,” he said and vanished.

  “Hey!” Flavian turned off the van and jumped out but the Voice was nowhere to be seen. Flavian walked over and peered in the bar windows—the bartender was wiping down the bar top, where Little’s broad beam was tossing down one last draft. Flavian looked up and down the street, around the corner of the building—nothing, no one.

  Flavian sighed, climbed back into the minivan, tossed the manila envelope on the passenger seat, and put the van in gear. He rolled his window down—the night held the chill of winter and the cold clean air rushed over him but he could still smell beer and smoke, the sweet smell of possibility and of sin. He drove under a high bright full moon and as he moved under the early spring sky he spoke aloud the prayers of Compline, the day’s last office he’d long since missed. After seventeen years he was indifferent to the ritual—in this world of television and cars and planes, what was the point of all that hocus-pocus? But some childish part of him still took comfort in saying the Salve Regina.

  Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope

  To you we cry, poor banished children of Eve

  To you we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

  Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy upon us,

  and after this our exile

  Show us the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, o precious,

  o sweet Virgin Mary.

  Flavian pulled into the monastery drive—all was dark. He unlocked the wide metal gate to the enclosure. It swung open with a screech that would wake the dead—how had that rusting hinge escaped his notice? All the same, he doubted anyone would wake. If anybody asked he would make a clean breast of everything he’d done. Maybe. He would deal with that tomorrow.

  He extinguished the headlights and used the light of the moon to pull the van into its parking spot. He studied the battered manila envelope, bequeathed by the Voice, riding shotgun. It had no address, no markings at all—it might have been salvaged from someone’s garbage. Flavian served as the abbot’s personal secretary and would be responsible for opening it in any case but he considered tossing it right here, right now. He’d had what for him passed as a wild and crazy evening. With luck it would be a long time before the demon seized him again and in any case opportunities were few and far between. He’d made no commitment to delivering the envelope. He was entirely within his rights, legal and moral, in pitching it in the can.

  He considered this dilemma carefully. The stranger had bought hi
m two beers and taught him a bit about shooting pool, and brief as the evening had been, it had held the bond of companionship. The Voice had asked a small enough favor in return. All the same, discretion required that Flavian open the envelope in the privacy of his own counsel to see what sort of business his teacher and unwitting partner in crime might have with, of all people, the abbot.

  Flavian turned on the van’s dome light, undid the clasp on the envelope, and looked inside, to find it stuffed with cash.

  When the talk came to cars or guns Johnny Faye went outside for a smoke and didn’t return until the conversation came back to a subject he knew something about—growing knock-your-socks-off marijuana, say, or breaking the law and getting away with it. He was relieved when his flashlight revealed that this particular backhoe had only a button for a starter. He jumped in the seat and got to his business.

  The construction site was remote, adjacent to a stretch of woods that Johnny Faye’s mother owned where fully mature black walnuts grew straight to the sky, each worth several thousand dollars. More than once Johnny Faye had suspected that in choosing the location for his golf course subdivision the county attorney had his eye on those walnuts, that some plan was afoot involving his mother’s land. The site favored the making of mischief exactly because it was so far from anybody who would be listening or looking in the bright light of a full moon night.

  Blu-ue mo-on of Kentucky, keep on a-shinin’ . . .

  Johnny Faye tested the levers while he sang. He glanced at the moon in all its splendor, well above the dark line of woods to the south. He lowered the bucket until he felt, through the roaring, jaw-rattling machine, the bite of its steel lip against the earth.

  He was nearly one with his moonshadow by the time he had the hole dug as big as he planned but the second half of the job would go faster. Filling in was always faster than taking out. By the time his shadow began to lengthen the hole was finished. He parked the backhoe to one side, then switched it off. The roar faded from his ears. He took a swig from a flask of bourbon he carried in his back pocket, then lit a joint and took a couple of hits slowly enough that by the time he was buzzed a nearby whippoorwill felt comfortable enough to raise its after-midnight voice.