The Man Who Loved Birds Read online

  He studied the golf cart, to be struck by a moment of panic—when he arrived he hadn’t thought to check to see if it required a key. But then he saw the key right in the ignition where the county attorney left it because this was his county and he thought himself immune to anybody wreaking mischief with anything that belonged to him.

  Johnny Faye drove the cart down the little earthen ramp and into the hole, its little grave for a little while. He was pleased to see that even with only the full moon to light his work he’d dug the hole as big as it needed to be. Only a couple of inches of dirt would separate its bright orange pennant RIDGEVIEW POINTE from daylight and discovery.

  For the second time on that soft spring night he lit his joint, but as he was taking a hit he was struck by an avalanche of dirt from the pile beside the golf cart’s grave. “Jeee-sus!” he cried. The falling dirt knocked him sideways into the cart frame and buried him to his knees.

  Gently he leveraged himself sideways and crawled up the pile to the grave’s lip. A quick sign of the cross—“Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” he breathed and inspected the damage. His shirt was ripped down its side and his skin burned raw. He reached to pull his flask from his back pocket and felt the real damage—the stab of pain made him yelp. Gently he reached for his back pocket with his other hand. He unscrewed the top of the flask, gritted his teeth, splashed some whiskey on the bloody raw wound, and took a swig.

  Now, though the ache in his side grew into a throbbing wracking diamond star of pain, he smoked while he worked—time was getting short, the last thing he needed was the contractor’s men deciding to get a little work done in the early dawn light and coming across him smoking pot astride one of their backhoes. He pushed dirt into the golf cart’s grave until the cart was covered.

  By the time he finished smoothing out the dirt the woods were giving a horizon to the brightening light and he could see the lines on his hand when he smoked the last of the roach. The flame was a puny child of the rising sun but he had finished the job before dawn as he had figured he must do. A backhoe alone on the site where before there’d been a golf cart to keep it company and no trace of the latter and no one the wiser.

  The sun broke free of the trees’ tangle of limbs and leaves. Johnny Faye took up his walking stick—before setting out on this expedition he’d considered leaving it at home, but it turned out to be a necessity, his third leg as he limped across the field and vanished into the brush as if he were a whitetail deer or the whippoorwill whose night of courtship he’d so rudely troubled.

  The government agency that assigned Dr. Meena Chatterjee to this poor rural county had warned her that men were more reluctant than women to visit a doctor, the more so if the doctor was a dark-skinned woman from a country they’d never heard of whose Bengali-accented English they found hard to understand. After two weeks of seeing women she received her first male patient—a farmer, she guessed, from his coarse, ruddy complexion—complaining of chest pains.

  Dr. Chatterjee held out a clipboard and a medical history form and pointed him toward the second of her two examination rooms. “Please provide the basic information. I shall be with you in a moment.”

  He raised his cane and waved aside her clipboard. “My mamma told me never to put down on paper nothing you don’t want nobody to read. And I’m in the habit of obeying my mamma. I just need you to take a look at my side.”

  “The paperwork is not for you, Mr.—”

  He took her hand and gave it a vigorous shake. “Johnny Faye. Pleased to meet you.”

  She extracted her hand from his grip. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Faye. Now, if you would—”

  “No Mister to it, nor Faye neither. Just Johnny Faye.”

  “You must have a last name.”

  “I got a belly button, if that’s what you mean.” He gave her a broad wink.

  “Mr. Johnny Faye. Please restrict yourself to the subject at hand.”

  He furrowed his brow in contrition. “I never made the acquaintance of my daddy. Which is just as well, according to my mamma.”

  “Whom you are in the habit of obeying.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Surely your mother would tell you to complete this form.”

  “I’m sure she’d never tell me to do no such thing. Besides, you aint my mamma, and if that aint the best news you’ll hear all day I want you to tell me better.”

  “I have no intention of being anyone’s mamma, thank you, the world has quite enough people without my contribution.” She waved him into the tiny hallway that led to the examination rooms. “Let me take a look and we’ll proceed from there.”

  When she entered the examination room he was shirtless and standing. She pointed at the table. “If you would, please, take your seat, Mr.—Johnny Faye.”

  “Thank you, ma’am, but I’m more comfortable on my feet. A man can run faster with his pants up than a woman can with hers down.”

  She tightened her lips into a puckered line. “You will please keep personal comments to yourself.” Then she noticed his right side, where a yellow-blue bruise blossomed amid a broad scrape of clotted blood. “A nasty scrape. You have most likely cracked a rib. When did you injure yourself?”

  “This morning, ma’am. Or last night, depending on how you look at it.”

  She pressed the stethoscope to his chest. “Take a slow, deep breath, please.”

  He breathed in. “I aint going to be taking any fast breaths, that’s for certain.”

  She removed the stethoscope from his chest. “You have not punctured a lung. Most likely the rib is cracked, not broken.” She pressed her stethoscope to his back. “The ribs are encased in muscle, which expands and contracts the chest with each breath.” She pressed the stethoscope to his sides, then again to his chest. “When you breathe deeply, you’re moving that cracked rib, which is letting you know that it’s cracked. You should obtain an X-ray to be certain you have no jagged edges and unless you have had a tetanus booster recently you should renew that. You do not want a punctured lung and you do not want tetanus. Then you would have—” she paused, searching for an Americanism “—real trouble.”

  “I been in real trouble most of my life. My mamma tells me it’s my natural state. Considering the alternatives I kind of come to like it. Ever noticed how much trouble people go to, to get into a little real trouble? From my point of view I’m performing a community service. Which I would be happy to perform for you.”

  She took up her pen and clipboard. “You will do me the courtesy of not taking me for a fool. Please tell me how this happened.”

  He gave her a sly, conspiratorial glance. “Promise not to tell a soul.”

  “As your doctor I am sworn to confidentiality.”

  He cupped his hand at her ear and whispered, “I was burying a golf cart.”

  She felt as if she were interrogating a child. “And what were the circumstances that led to your burying a golf cart?”

  He grinned, showing big horse teeth with a wide gap. The front center tooth was chipped, making him look a little crazed. “It’s a good one but this time you got to cross your heart.”

  “Mr. Faye. You may be certain—”

  “Johnny Faye. Go on, do it.”

  She pantomimed a cross over her heart—a gesture she had last performed late in her one year at the Loretine Sisters boarding school in Calcutta, where an English classmate with ruddy cheeks and flaxen hair had decided to teach the heathen how to keep their word.

  He told her then how he had decided to play a little joke on Harry Vetch, the county attorney, to get back at him for building his mess of a subdivision right next to Johnny Faye’s mother’s woods. “No great harm done,” he said, since he had taken care to bury the cart so that once dug up it would have suffered only a few permanent stains on its green-and-white striped upholstery—“a little reminder, might teach him a lesson, not likely but anything is possible, right? But I guess it was the teacher that got taught.” He pointed to the scrape down his side.


  She bent to look more closely. “Unless you object, I had best provide your tetanus booster now.” She removed a vial from a small refrigerator, swabbed its top, stuck in the hypodermic and withdrew its contents. She swabbed his arm with disinfectant. “This will sting.” She thrust in the needle.

  “Ow! Damn!”

  “I am so very sorry.”

  “I aint. I’m glad to see you get riled up. That’s a good sign.”

  “Sign of what?” She pulled out the needle and swabbed the bright drop of blood, then picked up his right thumb and pressed it over the ball of cotton.

  “How much you’d enjoy a little walk in the woods. I built this little shack where I go when I want to keep myself out of real trouble. Sort of a blind except I don’t use it for hunting, just for watching birds and such. Not too far from here, neither, over by the monastery.”

  “There is a monastery nearby?” She applied a Band-Aid and gave it a pat.

  “Sure, a big one. Well, used to be big. A lot of the monks are gone now, to the grave or married or whatever. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard of it. That’s what usually brings strangers to these parts.”

  “I must say I know very little about these parts.”

  “I could show it to you sometime. The blind, that is, not the monastery, even if the blind’s on monastery land so I guess it is the monastery, sort of, but it’s outside the wall so women can go there, no problem. A afternoon walk before it gets too hot.”

  “I do not socialize with patients.”

  “And I do not go to the doctor.”

  “Well, then, there we have it.” She handed him his shirt.

  “Anyways I’m not your patient.”

  “For the last fifteen minutes you have been sitting in my office.”

  “Show me the paperwork. If it aint been writ down it aint happened.”

  “Which is why you must now complete this form.” She handed him the clipboard and form and opened the examination room door. “There is really nothing you can do about a cracked rib except to return home and suffer. I could write you a prescription for something stronger than aspirin—”

  “I don’t take nothing stronger than aspirin except whiskey and a certain not-so-secret little vice. Matter of fact I don’t take aspirin.”

  “Then I am at a loss as to why you paid me a visit.” She moved to the door and made a pointed gesture of holding it open. “Ring me or ring somebody immediately if that scrape gets red or swollen. I assume you have a family member whom you may ring up to drive you home?”

  “We got no need for a chaperone.”

  She placed her hands on her hips. “You bring to mind a phrase I learned from a medical school colleague but that I never thought would have professional application. When hell freezes over.”

  He stood but paused in the doorway, pensive. “Just try and stop the light from changing.”

  She handed him his stick. “You may find your cane useful.”

  “I aint telling a living soul about burying that golf cart, not even my mamma. Better for her to be ignorant. So I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that story to yourself. Though I do understand how a good story wants to be told. Later,” he said, and he was gone.

  He would leave without paying, that was why he dodged the paperwork, she understood that, but that was why she sent him into the front room, so as to get rid of him. The singsong rhythm of an old and familiar prayer, learned from her grandmother, came to mind.

  Cows in the cowshed and

  Corn in the storehouse

  Vermilion between the parting of my hair

  Every year a son and

  May not a single one die and

  Never may a teardrop fall from my eye

  “One hundred two weeks remaining,” she muttered. She heard the front door open and shut. In the waiting room she found the blank form, with five twenty-dollar bills clipped to its top.

  Chapter 2

  On her first afternoon in her assigned post, delivered to her new office and home by the county judge executive, Dr. Chatterjee had to acknowledge that hers was not an auspicious beginning. The judge executive (so very American his title, with its seamless blend of government corruption and corporate inefficiency) had dropped her here, mumbled something about an appointment with the garbage collection agency, and vanished. In their one phone conversation before her arrival he’d told her only that, since the town had gone many years without a doctor, its men’s clubs (Optimists, Knights of Columbus, Fish & Game) had joined forces to acquire and refurbish “a former commercial site” into a medical office and living apartment. In the transparent light of a spring afternoon she could not escape the thought that she had risen to the bait in a trap.

  In its first incarnation her office had been a gas station. The pipes and valves that had once serviced fuel pumps still protruded from the cement apron, a troubling sight, though she rather liked the weathered sign of the winged horse hanging from rusting hinges that creaked with every breeze. In the tiny waiting room with its speckled Formica countertop sat a telephone, a desk, and an oak office chair scarred with pocketknife carvings and cigarette burns. At the building’s other end: A small apartment cluttered with mismatched furniture. Here she would live for the two years of her term of service as specified in the contract under which she had retrained in an American medical school. As she distributed her meager belongings around the rooms, she recalled the words Krishna spoke to Arjuna as he and his companions were banished from their forest home: Profit from exile.

  She carried with her a hole in her heart. She would not describe it as a longing to return to the land of her birth—on this point she could not be more clear. Once, though, she had been whole and round—for better and worse she had belonged to a particular place, her family’s village situated on one of the many branching arms of the delta of the great mother Ganges. She lived in the assumption that the whole world resonated with her landscape of memory. Everyone knew and dreaded the brutal heat just before the monsoons came on; everyone knew the longing for rain and the joy of dancing in its first drops; everyone knew how tiresome it became, how troublesome to be confined in the village by flooded roads and turbulent rivers. Everyone knew the heart’s leap of anticipation at the news of guests and the crushing disappointment when some obstacle prevented their arrival.

  She had not known then and could not have understood that in leaving she was cutting herself off from any possibility of knowing that kind of belonging. Now she was a wanderer, a planet, an exile, and as such one place was as good as another, though her experiences of cold and snow had persuaded her that she would trouble her wound less by living someplace warm.

  On darker days she lived in envy. She did not envy them their big shiny cars or their brick houses or their television sets or even their plumbing—no. She envied their casual assumption of place. They walked on the land as if they knew the wide world in all its grandeur and heartache from these lumpy hills and snakey valleys. Having known no other place, they assumed—as she had once assumed—that all places were like their place. It was their unknowing that she envied—she who had grown up with the distant, palpable presence of the Himalayas presiding with calm majesty above the fertile plain; she who had walked the paths of the living, breathing jungle, and had seen that same green labyrinth of shadow and light burst into flame, while jets screamed overhead and she stared, unable even to run, transfixed in awe and learning that this was the way the world is, the only way it could be because it was the only way she had ever known. A neighbor’s child, whom she’d been charged with watching while her mother worked the fields, was struck by flying, burning debris and fell to the earth. In that moment Meena felt herself chosen to seek a life in medicine.

  Among her first local patients was a young, garrulous woman whose face was already creased from a lifetime of smoking. “You must feel mighty lucky to have got yourself here,” the woman said.

  “Of course I am very fortunate.”

  “Aint th
is the most beautiful spot on earth? You’ve been all over, you tell me.”

  Dr. Chatterjee acknowledged that this place was very beautiful indeed.

  “’Course, it’s getting ruined, but I guess that’s probably true of every place. People, they see we got a good thing here and they want to get in. Oh, I don’t mean you—you’re bringing us something important, but all those others—I don’t blame ’em, mind, I’d do the same, but even so. Every bird protects its territory.”

  To go through life without a place—she who had been raised in a family whose roots reached deeper than the mountains. Compared to her people, the mountains were young—that was how she’d once thought of herself and her family. And here she was, placeless on the land.

  On long slow Sunday afternoons the bright spring weather called Meena to take her first steps toward becoming American: she took to the road. During her retraining she learned to drive and had acquired a monstrous, rusting Buick Electra from the graduate student whose apartment she had taken. Recalling her conversation with the wild man with the cracked ribs, she set out to find the monastery.

  A lightly traveled country road led to its ornate, rusting gate—Meena slowed to a crawl and craned her neck but she could see little more than the abbey steeple poking through greening trees rising above a nubbled cement block wall with a rusting metal sign WOMEN NOT PERMITTED INSIDE ENCLOSURE. Not far down the road, she encountered a small graveled parking lot with a sign TO THE STATUES, from which she deduced that these, at least, were available to visitors.

  At this time of year—high spring—the path made its way through delicately branching dogwoods and redbuds that lifted clouds of white and lavender against a budding spring green, with the last of the bright yellow daffodils underfoot. Along the way the monks had scattered fragments of a century of outmoded religious statuary—a grinning gargoyle peered from behind forsythia, a Virgin and Child poked from a clump of bleeding heart.