Fly Whither, Finch Read online

  So I drove across a gray old bridge that looked like it would sway in the wind, across the Canadian River to the old neighborhood and followed the winding roads of stucco houses down toward the smaller boxier blocks near the river and on past the grocery store and the empty theater and the abandoned dime store to the tall white stucco church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which had seemed small even when I was a kid, but now seemed smaller. I went in through the creaking tall brown wood doors and in past the vestibule to light Mother’s votive candle. It was afternoon and inside the dim church with the Stations of the Cross on the stained glass windows some old ladies were quietly cleaning the sacristy. I went over to the rows of candles on one side and slid some coins into a box and then lit a candle with a taper. I went to the closest pew to kneel by it for a minute to say my mother’s rather broad prayer and then a genuine prayer for the health of my mother, and I saw one other figure kneeling and I figured it was one of the old ladies of the parish but when she got up I could see she was much younger and so I hastily concluded my prayer inthenameoftheFatherandoftheSonandoftheHolyGhost and followed her outside into the bright afternoon and recognized her as a girl I had gone to school with as a child in the parish, but her folks had moved away. Now she was back and she was beautiful. Her eyes were black and long-lashed, her cheekbones were high, her eyebrows were arched, and her lips were a ruby. When she smiled I knew she remembered me and I remembered her name: Amelia.

  We stood side by side on the asphalt in the pale afternoon heat.

  “Where have you been gone for such a long time?” I said.

  “We had to go live near my aunt when she was sick – my mother was the only family she had. And then my dad couldn’t get a job back here for a long while. What have you been up to?”

  “Well my mother remarried and we moved up to the ritzy north end of the city, but I don’t fit in up there. I got sent to live with my uncle in Fresno for stealing a car.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Stealing the car wasn’t my idea,” I added hastily. “I fell in with a bad crowd.”

  “You always seemed nice. I can’t picture you as a hardened criminal.”

  Something about her eyes looking down and then looking back up at me made my heart melt and put a lump in my throat.

  We said our goodbyes but I asked her if I could call her and she said yes.

  I knew then and there that I was going to spend my senior year at the southside Catholic high school with her instead of at that country club high school in our school district. I went home and insisted on it. My mother wept that I’d found religion but Don was savvy enough to know better but he let us keep it as a secret. He could have paid for everything himself but he arranged it with the principal there to give me a chance to earn my way on work scholarship. He believed it’d be more important to me that way and leave me less time to get in trouble. It turned out Amelia was on work-study too, and we spent afternoons after school sweeping halls and dusting erasers and emptying trash pails. I was assigned my half of the school and she was assigned hers but we always ended up working together. That first week of school she had to let down easy a nice boy who’d thought he was her steady and then after that I knew that she and I were something. I was wild about her. I took her to every dance. At nights she let me hold her hand, and then she began letting me kiss her as I was dropping her of, but she never let me get further than that. But I could give her long kisses on the lips and she didn’t seem to mind.

  “I have got to get out of here someday,” she said one evening as sunset painted the sky pink and orange when we left the school after completing our chores. “I’m not going to grow old here. This neighborhood is becoming a dump.”

  “What do you say we get out of here together?”

  She squeezed my hand and laughed. There was a tear in her eye. “What would we do for money?”

  “Damn money!”

  She laughed and we walked hand in hand in silence toward my car. “Everybody needs damn money.”

  The next day she seemed to have decided something inside of herself because when I went to hold her hand she stood off for a second and said that we each had to complete school if we were ever going to be serious about having a future together. People who got married too early got trapped and never escaped. I agreed and we both studied hard the rest of the year but she got accepted to the University of Texas in Austin and I got accepted to the University in Oklahoma and so we had to agree to wait for each other four years. I studied my hardest and chose petroleum engineering for my major because I wanted to make good money for her, and we wrote every week but after a while her letters talked more and more about social justice and I had a feeling something was changing inside her and that someone was bending her ear. Finally it sounded like she was ready to conquer the world for economic justice but with another boy, and so I drove all the way down there in one night and took hold of her hand, but she pulled back and told me she had a higher calling now, and I said she didn’t really mean that and she said that sometimes deciding what you really wanted to do meant growing up differently than you’d expected, and she had a boy who shared her feelings and they were going to Guatemala together, and I saw her consciously harden herself against our old emotions and I almost cried but then I left. I could feel her eyes follow me but when I turned around she was staring at the floor and only said “Good luck.” And so I left heartbroken, and threw myself into my work, and I guess I decided to grow up, too. I got hired three years into my degree and never finished it but I went to work for one of the largest petroleum exploration companies in the world, all headquartered in a dusty nothing of a town in southwestern Oklahoma.

  I learned the industry from the ground up, but while everyone else was talking mechanics and new drilling tools, I began talking software.

  As I said I learned the industry and saw how disorganized it was. I invented software to put all the drillers’ knowledge down on paper, to sort it by type, to set it aside for empirical research and to store the results in a database. We organized the database by drilling technique, geological formation, time and effort and productivity and long-range output and contact info. And then we made the database accessible to every crew in the field – first by mail then by fax then by computer workstations hooked up to the company’s private network. I went from being a paid tinkerer to being in charge of the whole division. This being over a span of a decade. It was work I felt like I personally owned and I immersed myself in it. I had little time for anything else – perhaps I made sure of that.

  I persisted as a busy single man for some time. Maybe I kept myself busy to forget about being single. I was not good with women – at first I thought I did not want anything to do with them anymore, and then when I found out I did, I was so awkward I never knew what to say. Women friends offered to teach me how not to dress like a nerd, and I took them up on that, but it never occurred to me that they might be hitting on me. But one day when I had almost given up looking, a very attractive woman caught my eye. Her name was Aubrey Jones. She was one of the first female engineers in the field. She was petite (I always liked petite girls) and had auburn hair and clear grey-blue eyes and had a serious look about her and always seemed to hold a clipboard as if she were measuring how and why oilfield engineers managed consistently to be jerks, but somehow I managed to get past her armor, and when I asked her to go with me to a casino night being held by a local church she agreed. I think she liked me at first because I made her laugh. I told her about my wayward youth and packing fruit. She said how gentlemanly of me to get all the bullshit out of my life before I became a professional, and we laughed a little at how prehistoric some of our co-workers were and how she’d used her clipboard to smack someone in the head who’d pinched her butt and how he gave her a wide scared berth after that. She wouldn’t tell me who it was so that left me hundreds of guys to guess from. Then I told her about my bachelor uncle who fixed cars and packed fruit and had a shelf full of books you’d only ex
pect a scientist to own, and how I’d learned so much from them I could see I grew in her respect. She told me she came from a family of all boys and how each of the lettered in athletics and she sure wasn’t going to be told to be a pretty little housewife and so she studied engineering and earned all of their respect and was the confidant of her father.

  We grew very close over the next few months, and were engaged only six months after we’d first met. By the next May we were married, and three months after that we were expecting our first child – my son.

  She is the one I still dream about. She is the one I still wake up holding. Decades later – today, I dream I’m holding her and then she disappears, and I can’t remember her phone number. There is something dusky and ruby in those dreams, and they end with me in a deep deep well with no ladder to climb out of it, and I realize she is gone.

  *

  I acquiesced to my son’s challenge to live with him as a kind of a penance. Not the feel sorry-for-yourself kind, but the reliving the past to atone for missed opportunities. I wanted to be near him now because I felt he was at the brink of pulling away from me forever. And I wanted my son to be my friend.

  I had to arrange for someone to watch my house for a week while I was gone, and so I reluctantly reached out to a man I knew named Art Gibbons from my wife’s old church. At first I had to find out if he was still alive, and, finding him alive, if he remembered me. Of course he did. Art offered me his condolences, as if my wife had died just yesterday. I felt the bond of widowers – his wife had been dead for years, and I had the feeling he longed for something to do. I gave him the keys to my house and my phone number. All I asked was the he take in the mail and call me if the house caught fire or got burgled. He seemed as happy as if I had asked him to guard Fort Knox. I was relieved when he did not salute.

  That evening my son picked me up in his beat-up compact car. I stood at the curb with two small suitcases. I don’t know why I hadn’t invited him in – somehow waiting at the curb seemed like the way to start a journey. He took the two bags from me and threw them into the trunk.

  I could see from his eyes that he was in one of his moods. He spoke curtly and would not look up at me.

  “I didn’t think you’d do it,” he said.

  “Well, I’m here.”

  “Good.”

  He drove grinding roughly through the gears as we made our way from my neighborhood off to the other side of a main street and then down amongst winding roads then cul-de-sacs of former glory, and finally into the small squares blocks where older houses sat on too-small lots. We arrived at a two-story, paint-peeling grey house just this side of the highway in a district crowded with old houses converted into apartments. His apartment was reached from an outside staircase leading up to a second-level orange door lighted from the outside by a single bare bulb. My son Robert lugged my two bags up the stairs, set them down, and then pushed open the door. I followed in behind him.

  The place was well-lighted inside, and the first thing you saw was a poster of Jimi Hendrix over a beaten down orange couch that sank in the middle like a reverse camel. The poster curled at the edges and was held up by thumbtacks.

  Robert gestured to it as he carried the bags. “The poster came with the apartment,” he said. “Nobody knows how long it’s been there, but to take it down is bad luck. The wall’s a different color behind it.”

  We walked in past Jimi and set my bags outside a door. “That’ll be your room,” he said. “We had a guy skip out on his share of the rent.”

  The living room/kitchen was warm and well-lit by yellowed once-white bowls over too-bright bulbs. The furniture was a hodge-podge of garage sale leftovers. Nothing matched, but it all looked comfortable.

  His roommate set down some utensils he’d been working with in the kitchen, wiped his hands off on the billowing tails of his open flannel shirt, and extended a hand in greeting.

  “Hi, my name’s Edwin Reid – pleased to meet you.”

  This was the man I had heard offhandedly referred to as “Uncle Carlos.” Only later did I inquire about the name “Uncle Carlos.” The man was neither Hispanic nor anyone’s uncle. It turned out he got the nickname from playing in a local bar band called “Uncle Carlos,” but no one remembered where that name had come from either, so I suspected it had been a nickname for a strain of weed.

  Edwin was a tall man with long brown hair and a brown bushy beard and thick black-framed glasses. He looked to be about 28. Immediately when you were in his presence you felt a gust of liveliness. He had the kind of medium build that would become quite sturdy in middle age. He was quiet and polite and exuded the kind of warmth you might expect from people who cared for stray cats – which Edwin did, setting food and water out on the back porch every night for a neighborhood tabby, petting her when she’d finished her meal and was rubbing against his legs. He had even gotten her fixed with his own money, which was not plentiful.

  “Food’s on,” Edwin said, leading us to a blue turquoise table such as might have sat in a diner 20 years ago. We each pulled out our own mismatched chair.

  “Smells good,” I said.

  My son, still in his pet, said nothing.

  “It’s just stew,” Edwin said. “I made it in the crockpot using smoked sausage, peppers, onions, potatoes, and Veg-All. I’ve found that the secret to almost any crockpot recipe is Veg-All. I get it by the case from the church charity pantry.”

  I scooted in my chair and let the steam from the bowl rise over my face and then took my first bite. It was very good. Edwin could see I liked it and seemed pleased but also apologized a little.

  “It’s not much…”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “It’s delicious. You keep hoarding that Veg-All.”

  My son sat back not looking at either of us. I waited for him to lash out at me, but he did not. I had a second bowl of the stew and some bread and then I insisted that Edwin let me do the dishes, and he acquiesced, but once I was done I turned to see him greeting me with two cold domestic beers. I took one.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I noticed my son sitting in a chair in the corner, sipping his.

  We sat there saying nothing for a while, and I was about to break the silence by saying something about the weather when my son kind of laughed and looked nowhere in particular and said, “Tell Dad about your thesis, Ed. Your perpetual dissertation-in-progress.”

  “He wouldn’t want to hear…”

  But my son sat forward in his chair and for once looked straight at me. “Get this Dad: it’s called "Class, Race, and Gender in Matrices of Identity in ‘The Fox and the Hound’: or, When is a Canine Not a Canine?"

  I looked at them both. “You’re bullshitting me.”

  “No,” my son said. “Film studies is a big deal.”

  “Film has a bigger impact on our culture than almost any medium,” Ed said. “Certainly more than books.”

  I conceded that. “But ‘The Fox and the Hound’?”

  Ed opened up on the Fox and the Hound as being crowded with thinly-veiled messages of race and class identity. It was a civil rights primer on mixed relationships for children. But more than that: it tried to redefine what race and class were, as social constructs. When the city met the country which was which? Was the fox a hound or the hound a fox?

  I sat back and scowled but as Ed went on and on I appreciated how much it made sense within the set of rules he’d been given to play in. Parts of it were brilliant. So just for fun I went hammer and tongs with him a little. That made him puff with gusto and rise to the occasion.

  “But really, Edwin, what is pedagogy?”

  Oh how that uncorked him. He owned the floor. My son just looked at him and then at me and laughed. He could see I was kind of feeding Ed line like a fish, but Ed and I were both loving it.

  Two hours later Ed said, “So do you see now?”

  “Yes, I see, but I also see you’ve got to finish your damned degree, Ed. Take that theory of yours and wrap i
t with a bow and call it done. You deserve the formal recognition of the work you’ve done.”

  “You never finished your degree, Dad,” Robert said.

  I huffed a little. “Well, that was different. The oil industry was hiring left and right. They offered me a career opportunity right then and there if I’d just come on board.”

  “See, Dad knows what’s best for other people,” my son said.

  Ed could feel the tension and said, “I had more fun explain my ideas to you, Mr. Westbrooke, than I’ve had explaining them to my professors. Thanks for letting me rant for two hours.”

  “You can call me Clay.”

  “Thanks Clay.”

  “I’m going to bed,” my son announced to no one and turned the corner into his bedroom and shut the door. The door shut hard but doorframe was warped and the door didn’t latch.

  I said I probably would get to bed as well, so Ed showed me my room and where I could put my things and where the bathroom was. So I changed into my pajamas (I never wore pajamas) and lay in bed a long time. I could hear the TV from Ed’s room for a while, but then it turned off, and the apartment was quiet and black.

  I lay there and could not sleep. Then I got up and tip-toed into my son’s room. His raven’s hair hung over his pale skin, but on his face was a look of peace. It gave me a catch in my throat. I loved him so much. For a moment, while he slept, he could still be my angel.

  *

  The next day my son said he did not feel like going in to school, so I rode in with Ed.

  I got to use my son’s back-up bike. It was a chalkboard green one-speed bike with upright handlebars with a bell on them because the screw that held it on was rusted and the screwhead was stripped so no one could remove it. I rode right behind Ed. I did not use the bell.