Closer, Still
Part One
Pete opened a jar of black olives and hooked one with his finger.
"Can't you wait?" Marlee said to her son. His half-drunk can of Mountain Dew rattled in the drink holder on their shopping cart. The Sav-A-Center on Carrollton Avenue had re-opened with new wood floors, a bakery, a coffee shop, and track-lighting in the wine section.
"Let me push," Pete insisted, swerving the loaded up basket out of her hands. They were replacing the pantry staples that'd gone stale. He and his mom had evacuated New Orleans and lived in Houston for four months. Their street -- N. Solomon -- hadn't flooded, but neighboring streets stayed under six feet of water for three weeks. Pete liked the look of the new store, an improvement over the old version.
Marlee said, "You're too big to stand on that," but he was on his way to the seafood section, where a tall man in a barbecue apron tended to a kettle of boiling crawfish, churning the water with a long metal spoon. Pete waited with the other customers for samples, and answered questions from strangers about where he'd gone after Katrina.
Her son was fourteen, but Marlee still panicked in grocery stores when she lost sight of him. When he was seven he'd wandered two aisles over and she'd gone the wrong way to look, back to the candy aisle where she'd earlier barked No! to a bag of Snickers. Pete wasn't there. She'd run to the front of the store, grabbed the microphone from the manager who was announcing hot bread in the bakery, and spoke in a normal voice to her son so he'd find his way back to her, but a woman already had him by the hand and was walking him to her car. One of the check-out kids noticed Pete struggling, pulling away from the woman, and called security.
Marlee poly sneezed from the red pepper seasoning. Her usual four in a row and then a runny nose. "One sneeze isn't enough," she said to the young guy standing beside her. He offered his handkerchief.
"I don't want to mess that up," she said. ESM was monogrammed in the corner in black letters.
He shrugged and pulled a second one from his back pocket. "I keep a spare."
Marlee blew her nose. "Thank you."
"I see you're home again," he commented. "You live across the street from my brother. Just get it back to me when you can."
Mr. Robichaux had been her neighbor for two years. A widower, he worked at the paper mill in Bogalusa. His unmarried daughter, Krista, lived in the other side of his double with her baby boy, Giacomo. This man looked to be more the daughter's age. Krista and the baby strolled in the mornings, visited the playground in City Park. Marlee had never seen a brother.
She needed to pay better attention to Robichaux's house. All she knew was that the old man kept to himself, and worked the day shift, leaving at 6:30 and returning home at four.
Krista lolled on the front steps in a purple halter and a tiny ruffled skirt, sunning her shoulders and legs. The baby fretted in the stroller beside her. A college-aged kid distributed flyers on their street for PIZZA HEAVEN NOW OPEN. He walked slowly, weighed down by his satchel, and wedged one beside the flag on the mailbox.
Marlee retrieved the flyer from the mailbox. The ink must've been wet because the carrier had left behind a perfect fingerprint in red.
"How's Giacomo?" she asked Krista from across the street.
"Cutting a tooth." Krista gave him her finger to chew on. "He's cross."
"I met your uncle." Marlee shaded her eyes with the junk mail.
"Who's that?"
"He didn't give his name."
"My dad only has a sister. In Baton Rouge. We stayed with her after the storm."
Krista jiggled the stroller to stop him from crying. "Someone needs Anbesol."
Marlee stopped by Pete's room. He'd walked in after school, thrown his bookbag on the table and gone to his room to nap. She wanted to ask him if he'd noticed a young guy across the street, but he'd fallen asleep with his arm thrown back, bare-chested, the quilt pushed below his waist. The lava lamp beside his bed glooped from green to blue to gold.
He hadn't liked Houston, the geeky school uniforms, the school day that began at 3 p.m. and ended at 9 because 400 of the boys from his high school were also there, too many to be mixed into the student body. Marlee felt safer in the tiny apartment in The Heights, just she and her son, starting over with the basics, him doing homework until midnight, sleeping until noon, sandwiches together and then she'd drive him to school. Pete couldn't wait to sleep again in his own bed.
She borrowed the microscope from her son's desk and unpacked the fingerprint kit she'd bought at The Discovery Store. New Orleans had fewer people, but the city felt tense. The deserted neighborhoods were over-policed, and the streets with people back in their houses seemed vulnerable and underserved.
Marlee positioned the pizza flyer underneath the glass and compared the patterns to the information booklet. Tentarch. Whorl. Double Loop. His was a pocked loop, with lines forming into a small circle in the middle. The guide said the flyer guy had had this fingerprint since he was a fetus. She studied a pepperoni, which was made of red-yellow-blue-black dots in different clusters that from a distance turned into brown.
Pete said, "What're you doing?"
"Brown's not really brown," she said.
"O-kay?" He used to catch his mom in his room at night. For the longest time he'd slept under a tent of covers, a place to hide from bad guys, and she'd walk over to the bed and give him a poke to make certain someone hadn't taken him, hadn't made a boy-shape out of towels to fool her. It gave him the creeps.
While she waited for Eric to come over, Krista smoked a cigarette on the steps. He visited after her father left for work.
"Brother?" she said, on the first ring. "That's fucked up you telling my neighbor you're my uncle."
"She borrowed my handkerchief," Eric said.
"Your what?"
"I figured she'd see me at your place and want to give it back."
Krista's father never trusted the guys she dated. He had his policeman buddy check them out. Eric had been busted last year for selling pain meds. Robichaux told Krista he didn't want him near the house, but Krista knew her father wasn't going to miss work. He'd commuted five days a week from Baton Rouge to Bogalusa. He'd have to be falling over sick to come back home.
"Come see me?" she said, pushing her cigarette butt in the planter near her foot.
He got there in under fifteen. Krista kissed him on the mouth and brought him inside to have carpet sex while the baby chewed on frozen rings.
Pete hosed off his mint green Bianchi, the Alfa Romeo of bicycles, dusty after months in the garage. He dried the frame with a clean cloth, and rubbed the tires with Armor-All. He turned the bike upside down, and removed the chain for the first time to grease it, concentrating on what he'd done so he could reverse those steps and get it back on.
Eric stood in the driveway. "Need help?"
"I'm good," Pete answered.
"Sweet bike you got there."
"My dad has money," Pete said. "He lives in Sacramento." He went to shake Eric's hand, remembered his was grimy. "My bad."
"You watching the Tour de France?" Eric asked.
"Yeah. You saw those guys treat the mountains like flat top?"
"It's not the same without Lance," Eric said, walking up to the bike. "I see your yellow bracelet."
"It's a wristband," Pete said.
"I work at Crescent City Cycles," he said. "I could put that chain back on with my eyes closed."
Marlee watched her son from the kitchen window. The handkerchief guy had come out of Krista's side of the house, stood in the front yard, then moved into their driveway. The guy's bangs hung in his eyes and looked like they'd been cut with nail clippers. His goatee was sketchy. He wore cargo shorts and a T-shirt that said "I Got Blown by Katrina" on the back. Marlee noticed everything possible before she went outside to ask him what he wanted.
"I can handle it, Mom," Pete said.
"Handle what?" Eric said.
"How old are you?" Marlee asked.
"Kind of personal," he said, giving Pete a gentle punch in the arm. "Gotta get to the office." He canted his watch at Marlee and headed back to Krista's where he pulled a scratched-up mountain bike out of Robichaux's bushes.
The only answers Pete gave his mom at dinner were the guy's name -- Eric Stanley Moore - and that, yes, he'd seen him before at Crescent City Cycles even though he hadn't really. She'd embarrassed him again.
"Something's off with him," she said.
Pete, head down, shoveled turkey and peas into his mouth so he could get back to his bike. The chain needed grease.
"He's not who he says he is," she said, tearing open two pink packets for her iced tea.
"He offered to tape my handlebars for free, Mom. You're ruining it."
Robichaux retrieved his newspaper around 6 a.m. so Marlee met him at the end of the driveway, picking up hers.
"How hard is it to throw this closer?" she asked him.
"When I had a route," he said "if people wanted it between the door and the screen, that's where I left it."
"I met your brother," Marlee said. "At the grocery."
Robichaux scratched his face. "My brother's dead. Three years."
"Eric?"
The name registered on Robichaux's face, and he turned, thought twice, then banged on Krista's door. She answered, sleepy, in boxer shorts and a tank top.
"Where is he?" he asked.
"Who?" she answered.
Eric came up behind her. "I told you to stay away," Robichaux told him.
"Not your call," Eric said.
Robichaux reached around his daughter to poke at him. "Stop it," Krista said.
"He's a doper," Robichaux said, pulling him out the front door and down the front steps. The men pushed each other, but Eric hardly budged. "You can't knock me down, buddy," Eric said. Robichaux lunged and caught him. They stayed wrapped up in an ugly embrace, too close to land punches until Eric threw Robichaux on his back, moved away and waited for the old man to stand up. Fair play, but Robichaux was just getting started. He threw roundhouse punches. Some missed by a foot, one hit Eric in the face.
"Stop!" Krista said. "What are you doing, Daddy?"
Blood dripped out of Eric's nose. Robichaux lunged again for him and Eric put him in a headlock. It looked like they might stand that way until morning, but then Robichaux punched Eric in the kidney and Eric dropped to his knees. "Cheap shot," Eric said. Krista rushed over. "Jesus, Daddy." She sat on her haunches so Eric could rest in her arms. The two men looked finished, but Marlee, at her kitchen window, was uneasy about the spectacle of men fighting, the clumsy, unspent violence. It looked weaker than on TV where someone won with a final blow. Robichaux had won but Eric didn't look done. There could be an ambush, Eric waiting in the bushes for Robichaux to get home, this time with a kitchen knife, or a hidden gun in a shoebox, because nothing had been resolved except that Eric was a liar. She called 9-1-1.
Before the storm, Pete used to sneak out for twenty-mile bike rides in the middle of the night on quiet streets. He'd missed his bike in Houston, which was one big messy web of interstates and construction. He slipped the Bianchi out of the door on the side of the garage and snapped his shoes into toe clips. His mother slept soundly from midnight to 3 a.m. and then she'd get up and look out the windows, check for strange cars, open the door to his room to check on him, re-lock the front door, read herself back to sleep. By then he'd be back in bed.
He shifted into low gear and glanced at his speedometer. 35 mph. On the open surface of Paris Avenue, it required six rotations of the pedals to travel a half-mile. He turned left at Elysian Fields and continued on to Haynes Boulevard. The moon was bright, but strafed by clouds. In New Orleans East, houses were gutted and waiting for insurance money, so he had the place to himself. There was no electricity and it was dark and dead quiet. He'd gone out nine miles and now was headed back.
Haynes mimicked the levee that ran beside Lake Pontchartrain, and Pete imagined he was liquid, like water down the Rattle & Snake slide at Six Flags. He'd gone there the summer of seventh grade with his dad, before he moved to Washington State with his new wife. Pete needed to find a man for his mother, someone to make her feel safe because he didn't. In Houston, she'd relaxed, but she was acting weird again, chasing him around the grocery, asking about suspicious people he might have noticed in the neighborhood. "Other than the professor-looking guy who asked me to help him find his dog . . ." he answered, but she didn't have a sense of humor about pedophiles. He couldn't wait to go away to college so she'd lose track of him.
Lake Vista was the neighborhood where most of his friends had lived, and he rode up and down streets named for jewels, and checked on their shelled out homes. New Orleans felt like a Will Smith movie, gray, abandoned, alien. People had dragged their belongings to the curb -- soggy sofas, warped chests of drawers, duct-taped refrigerators -- and were waiting for mold remediation.
His friend, Brandon, lived on Topaz. He'd gone with him to see what the water had done. Brandon's dad's chair was stuck on the staircase, and the kitchen table and chairs had swapped places with the furniture in the living room. Fuzz covered family photos in the front hall. Brandon didn't cry but he couldn't speak. "Oh, fuck," is all he could say. Pete helped him salvage some old trophies, a pair of lamps that could probably be cleaned, and crystal from the cabinets above the sink. Dirty water filled the glasses. Stuff on the second floor of Brandon's house had stayed dry. His family had given up on New Orleans and moved to Mobile.
At a gutted house on Sapphire, he saw two guys carrying a TV to a van. They might be looters, picking over what the family had stored on the second floor. When they went back inside, Pete wrote down the house address and the license number of the truck.
He rode his bike to old Jefferson, where it hadn't flooded, and looked in dimly lit windows. There was a bearded man he used to see up late, reading in his chair. He might've lost his job, moved to another city. The hospitality magazine Pete's mother worked for had almost folded because the tourists had been scared away, but the publisher decided to wait and see if they didn't come back, so she still had a job.
The bearded man's house was yellow with blue shutters, and he never closed the drapes. Tonight he walked through his living room with what looked like little birds on his shoulders. He was still there; he'd come back.
Part Two
The next morning, Robichaux, newspaper in hand, rang Marlee's doorbell. "You didn't need to do that," he said. "How was this your business?" He explained that Krista had driven away in the middle of the night with the baby. He said, "If I want your help I'll ask."
The police had arrived within minutes, backed up by the National Guard who'd come to New Orleans and had never left. Robichaux told them he was okay and took a seat on the steps to catch his breath, but Eric wanted to jaw. "The bastard came after me," he said, poking a finger into Robichaux's chest. An officer pushed Eric up against the hood of the car and patted the baggie of pot in his pocket. Krista crossed the street with the crying baby on her hip and pleaded with Marlee to say the call was a mistake, send the cops away, but the pot couldn't be undone.
Saturday morning, Pete rode his bike to the birdman's neighborhood. He deflated his tire on purpose.
"Sorry to bother you, but do you have an Allen wrench?" Pete said, when the man answered the door. He had a square book about Brazil in his hand, rimless glasses, gray in his hair, and his shirt was faded, Hawaiian.
"Sure. I put the toolbox in the trunk of my car." He extended a hand. "I'm Jameson."
"I'm Pete."
Jameson sat behind the wheel of his Toyota, looking around for the release. "You live very far?"
"Mid-City," Pete said. He knelt and pointed at the lever Jameson needed to pull.
"Thanks. Would've bit me if it'd been any closer," Jameson said, handing him a set of wrenches. "That's a hike from here," he said.
"I ride fast." Pete looked over at the house, wondering where he kept the birds.
"You need some water?" Jameson said.
"Yeah, sure," Pete said, handing him the water bottle he kept clipped to the bike's frame. He pumped air back into the tire, and tightened the bolt with the wrench.
Jameson came out with two cold drinks and a yellow parakeet on his forearm.
Pete wasn't sure how to set up a date with his mom. He lifted his knee high and adjusted the Velcro strap on his shoe.
The parakeet sipped from Jameson's water glass. "I work in the aviary at Aubudon Zoo."
Pete said, "You're a zookeeper?"
"For fifteen years," Jameson said.
"Listen," said Pete. "Do you have a wife?"
"That's a curious question," Jameson said, "but no. Not anymore."
"Would you meet my mom?" Pete said.
Jameson knelt beside Pete's tire, listening for a leak. "I don't like blind dates."
"You'd be helping me out," Pete said.
Marlee visited Eric in Central Lock-Up. The officer at the front desk scanned the roster and had her sign in. A guard escorted her down the hall to a holding pen for recent arrests.
When he saw her, Eric charged to the front of the cell. "What did I ever do to you?" he said, banging his hands on the bars.
"That's no way to treat your brother." She made air quotes with her fingers.
Eric squinted at her. "You care about family trees?" He grabbed the bars and leaned forward. "The thing is, the old man didn't want me visiting his daughter."
Marlee pushed his handkerchief through the bars and he grabbed it. "I thought you looked too young."
"You're some kind of amateur detective?" he said. "If I hadn't let you use this I wouldn't be here."
"If I hadn't sneezed I wouldn't have needed it," she said. If Pete hadn't gone to the crawfish pot, she wouldn't have followed him. Crimes made easier sense when you ran them backwards. You had a conviction based on evidence, and a person got put away and maybe you had some peace, an ending, but at the beginning of the story was an arbitrary world with a million possibilities that didn't care whose kid got picked up, or what woman got lied to by a punk in a grocery store. It could've been anyone, but it wasn't. Who set the crime in motion?
A thick-chested guard hurried over and Eric quickly handed her back the handkerchief. "Don't be giving me things," Eric said to Marlee. "You're killing me here."
"This isn't your first offense," she said.
"You're right," Eric said. "I don't touch hard drugs anymore."
"My son was almost kidnapped. By a woman who looked like everyone else."
"I know," Eric said. "Pete told me. You'd stopped to talk to some man in the grocery."
Bob. He worked in her office.
The woman who'd tried to take Pete had given birth to a stillborn son with curly black hair and long lashes. She'd shown the police a photograph of the baby. Just let me keep him, the woman kept saying as they handcuffed her. I beg you. The detective had explained that post partum depression caused some women to have psychotic breaks. From then on, Marlee had tried to keep an eye on Pete's teachers and bus drivers, the cafeteria ladies, the lifeguards at the swimming pool, like her spotty surveillance might keep away the float of random crimes.
"I came hoping you'd understand why I did what I did," Marlee said, pulling old cycling magazines out of a plastic Sav-A-Center bag. "Pete said you might want these."
Jameson stopped by Pete's house on Sunday afternoon with daisies in his hand. "She'll like those," Pete said, when he opened the door. "Mom," he called over his shoulder. At breakfast he'd mentioned that a nice person he'd met on a field trip to the zoo might be stopping by. "Just give him a chance," Pete had said, when she automatically shook her head no.
She'd put on pink lipstick and pulled her hair back with a turquoise clip. Extending her hand to Jameson, she said, "I'm Pete's mom, Marlee. I didn't know his school went to the zoo. They used to send home permission slips."
Saturday morning was humid, sunny, and Eric was working out front in cut-offs and a Saints visor, edging Robichaux's driveway. He'd been released on his own recognizance, and he'd asked the old man to give him a chance. Orleans Parish had a Diversion Program and he'd enter it. Krista wore a striped sundress and sky-high platforms. She held only the baby's fingers because he'd started walking on his toes. They were both having trouble navigating the lawn.
She'd phoned her father from his sister's over in Baton Rouge. "Eric would never hurt me, Daddy." She'd stormed out before over boyfriends, temporarily certain that she wouldn't go back, but he'd worried that this time she might not cry wolf; he kept leaving messages until she returned his call. She said, "I don't want to be sneaking around with him, but I will, I promise you that," when she finally returned his call. "Just bring the baby home," Robichaux had pled into the telephone.
Marlee watched them from the living room window. "It's like nothing ever happened," she said to Pete.
"It's like moving on, Mom."
A pile of lumber and shingles sat on the lawn. Robichaux had let Eric use his truck, and he'd brought home the wood and carpet and wallpaper from Home Depot that he needed to make a playhouse under the scrub tree in the front yard.
When his mother went to shower, Pete ventured over, worried they hated him.
"Hell, it's not your fault your mother's kind of a nut," Krista said. "Look," she said, nodding toward Eric. "A model citizen. Guys need projects," she said. She kicked her shoes into a pile by the front steps. "They were comfortable in the store." Pete stared gratefully at her perfect toes, each one polished sky blue.
"Hey, man," Eric said, dapping knuckles with Pete. He looked across at his house. "Your mom's there?" he said.
"Always," Pete said. "But not right now."
"Make yourself useful," he said to Pete, and he and Krista helped Eric frame the little house while the baby played V-legged on the grass with his bottle. "A second home," she said, standing close to Eric, her hand slipped in the back pocket of his jeans.
"This one's in the woods," he said. "A place for a little man to get away."
At Bangkok Garden, Jameson answered Marlee's many questions about working with birds. His parents had been zookeepers in Miami. "It's the family business," he said, smiling, "but they worked with primates." His eyes were kind, and when he spoke, he rested his hand under his chin, like he had plenty of time if she wanted to take it. She'd never known an animal expert; he was like her private National Geographic special.
He described how parrots in the Amazon, to not be eaten, passed themselves off as flowers.
"Good trick," she said, cutting a spring roll in half to share. "What happened to the birds at the zoo during the storm?" She'd wondered. When she and Pete had evacuated, they'd seen enormous, misshapen clouds of birds moving across the spillway in a panic, out of order, unable to decide in what direction to head, or maybe they weren't sure what bird to put in charge. Six thousand fish had died in the tanks at the Aquarium after being overheated and not fed for three weeks.
"We put them in safe houses so they wouldn't get hit by debris. We lost one. A red-tailed hawk that I hope has set up shop in a tall tree."
"You took Yvonne home with you?" she asked.
"She rode with me and the parakeets to a colleague's house across the lake. A pine tree crashed onto his roof."
He picked the caramelized shrimp out of his pad Thai, put them on Marlee's plate because he was allergic to shellfish, and she pushed the pile around with her fork, afraid to squander the gift. "Most of the zookeepers stayed in the Reptile House," he said. "I should've done that. River Road was passable. I got stuck in Mandeville with no power while New Orleans was under water. When did you come back?"
"Pete and I went to Jackson for the storm and Houston for the flood. He went to school for a semester there. We got home in time for Christmas. I liked being with him in a small place, but he couldn't wait to get back in the house."
"Some species are more adaptable than others. The penguins came by Fed Ex last week, back from Monterey, and two of them are in shock. They haven't budged."
"Did they have to stand the whole trip?" Marlee asked.
Jameson laughed. "They did."
The waiter brought them thick coffee and papaya sherbet.
"Do you know how birds sleep?" Jameson said. "Is that something you'd like to see?"
They drove to the zoo, parked in the maintenance lot, and Jameson swiped his card so they could enter through an iron gate. Jameson held her hand and led her around the African safari exhibit. She stayed on the lookout for animals, still and hidden in the habitat. When a lion roared, she jumped. "We're bothering them?" Marlee asked.
"We're a new sound," Jameson said. "Hear the giraffe baying?"
She did. A rhinoceros walked up to the fence and snorted and pawed the ground until Jameson spoke to him by name. Theodore. "They're passing the message," he explained.
Marlee liked Jameson, and she didn't want to panic, but what if an animal broke loose and mauled them? There were no other zoo visitors to mow down, only two humans to choose from and they knew Jameson so they'd come right for her face. She squeezed his hand. "I gotcha," he said.
The glass aviary stood near the front entrance, silvery in the moonlight, a cupola lit from within. They entered a rain forest overgrown with tropical plants, flowering hibiscus and giant orchids, waterfalls, and three-story-tall crown palms whose fronds pressed against the ceiling. Certain birds recognized Jameson and shook their feathers to flirt, while others, wary of Marlee, held so still they looked stuffed, but of this she was certain: every living thing was wide awake, their eyes pinned on Jameson and her. A huge blue and yellow parrot screeched a greeting, then flew low over their heads to another branch, which set off a clangy symphony of shrillness, stuttery birdsong, whistles, panic in the house. "That's Yvonne," he said. Yvonne took another swoop at them, grazing Marlee's hair with a wing.
"Ack!" she said, ducking. "Make her stop."
"She's acting up," Jameson said, walking Marlee out to the sidewalk. "Better let her settle down."
"Was it safe to go in there? She's a dive bomber," Marlee said.
"Give me a second." He ducked back inside to say goodnight. Marlee could see his silhouette, and a large, worried bird -- Yvonne -- land on his shoulder and nuzzle his neck. She felt a stab of jealousy. Was he kind like that to people? She hadn't dated anyone since the divorce. Bob had been asking her out to dinner when she lost Pete at the grocery; they were deciding on a restaurant. After that she never left Pete with a babysitter.
"I should worry?" she asked Jameson when he returned, but he didn't answer.
They walked through more empty zoo. He kissed her quickly in front of the seal exhibit, built to look like a Roman peristyle, cupped her face in his hands and grazed her nose with his. "Yvonne and I have been together since 1997," he said. "I brought her from Florida. She used to live with me but I thought she'd be happier in this habitat." He held Marlee, pressed his cheek into her hair. "You," he said, "don't have to worry." She held still because his arms felt like safety. If people could hold each other all day long, they'd never lose each other. The day had too many moving parts, people in motion, fending for themselves, casual, staying alive like that was the most natural thing in the world: to not be duped by harm. Since Pete had been taken, she never forgot to worry. He was home now, probably doing schoolwork at the kitchen table, then to bed with the TV on because it blocked out creaks as the house settled. "I should go," she said to Jameson.
"Pete's a smart kid," he said, like he'd been reading her mind. "Stay out?"
He drove her to his yellow house beside the levee. The river was high and a tanker glided by as if pulled by strings. "The flag's from Norway," he said. They kissed in his hall, fumbled with clothes and had sex on the sofa. Marlee wrapped herself in a crocheted throw while Jameson made a pot of coffee. Her eyes adjusted to the dark and she wondered about the shapes of things in the room. Two arm chairs, a coffee table, tall stands on either side of the sofa, shrouded.
"We need some light, don't you think?" he said, turning on table lamps. They were birdcages. Pete had explained to her that he had birds. "What kind?" she asked.
Jameson uncovered the cages, and candy-colored parakeets traded tunes, happy to see again. They swung on trapezes, jumped from stand to stand, drank from tiny water dishes. While he cleaned their cages, they darted around his apartment. An orange bird landed on Marlee's head. "Oh!" she said, but held still, not wanting to startle it and be shat on. "I'm getting birded tonight."
"Come here, June," Jameson said, snapping his fingers. June landed in the palm of his hand and he set her back in the clean cage with the other months and hooked the door closed.
Part Three
The flyer guy was leaving coupons in the neighborhood for TREE M.D. Krista sat on her steps with the baby, her white legs stretched out to catch the sun.
The student switched the satchel to his other side. He only got paid if it came back empty.
"Hey," Krista gave him a little wave.
"Hey," he wiped sweat off his lip with his wrist. "Wanna buy me a drink?"
Krista went in the house to get him iced tea and he awkwardly patted the baby on her head. "He has a cold," Krista handed him a glass. He reminded her of a guy she knew from high school who still collected comic books. "What if you just dump that crap in the trash like we do?"
"Checkers follow us around." He pointed at an El Camino parked half a block away. "That's probably one."
"Nah," she said. "I'm guessing unmarked pizza delivery. Here. Give me some to pitch."
He handed her a stack. "You in school?"
"GED," she said. "Saving money for my own place."
"Looks like it feels pretty good to live here."
"Not when your dad's beating on your boyfriend." Krista rubbed tanning oil on her legs, remembering to put thick white sun block on the baby's face and chubby arms. "Need some? The back of your neck's a tomato."
Pete watched Krista put lotion on the flyer guy's neck. He checked his own arms for sunburn. His tanned arms and neck made his white torso look like a shirt. The flyer guy leaned back into Krista, and she pushed him away and laughed.
While she was at the office, Jameson left a note under the only rock in Marlee's garden. A fake she bought at the mall with a secret compartment for her house key. Unlocking her front door, she spied the paper sticking out. He'd printed a single word in boxy handwriting on an index card folded in half: Friday and illustrated it with wings. She scrutinized it under the microscope. The blue ink had been soaked up by the cottony white paper, and the edges, unruly, branched into tiny rivers of extra.
"He called?" Pete said, when he walked in after school, but his mother didn't answer.
Pete tried again. "He's nice, Ma, don't you think?" It'd been four years since the divorce and this was the first time she'd gone out with a man.
"Kind of odd about birds," she said, but her heart was skipping beats and she tucked the note into the pocket of her jeans.
Pete threw his backpack into the corner and changed into cycling clothes. She found something wrong with everyone. She looked too hard at things, expecting the worst. Maybe that's what she wanted. The worst. For bad things to happen so she could be right. If you believed in the bogeyman in the closet, why not leave the closet door opened?
In the hall closet was a shoebox with clippings about the woman who had taken him from the store. Della Winstead. His mother had saved the police report, and the letters the woman had written to her from the psychiatric hospital across the lake, where she'd been committed for ten years. Pete sat on his bed and read Della's letters. Her handwriting was neat, her lines straight as a pin. She asked Marlee for forgiveness, and for news of Pete. She hoped she hadn't frightened him. She'd mailed his mother crockery she made in crafts class at the psychiatric hospital. A tea party set with small bowls, small cups, saucers no bigger than coasters. The pieces were brightly painted, some with stars and spirals, one with a cow jumping over the moon, all dated with her dead child's birthday. Marlee had reported this to the judge, and the woman didn't write her again. The pieces of pottery had been pushed to the back of the pantry so Marlee could keep them but not see them.
Pete put the box back in the closet. He sat at his desk and wrote Della. He said he'd grown up fine, made good grades and was training for a road race to Bogalusa and back. One hundred miles. Because of you, I am careful, he wrote. He rode to the post office and mailed the letter to her return address, a group home.
The next hundred flyers the college student dropped were for PET SMART. He rang the bell to see if the pretty girl was home, but she didn't answer, so he shot around the back, let himself in through the screen door and swiped the silver chain-link bracelet out of the soap dish by the sink. He squeezed his hand left hand into it, let the pretty thing slip up and down his arm as he delivered the rest.
When Marlee got home from work the next day, she checked under the rock for another word, but there was nothing. She stuck a No. 2 pencil into the ground next to the stone as encouragement.
From the silver maple tree in the front yard, she hung a pinecone slathered with peanut butter, studded with raisins, jeweled with pecans.
Robichaux brought over catfish fillets wrapped in plastic. "They're good with lemon, butter, some black pepper," he said.
"Would you like to stay for dinner?" Marlee said.
"Another time, maybe. I'm working graveyard." He looked around the living room, noticed Pete's bike leaning next to the wall. "Doesn't want it stolen?" he said.
"He's worried it'll rust outside in the humidity," Marlee said. That's what Pete had told her. Not that Krista had walked over to see if he'd noticed anyone suspicious walking around because her stuff was disappearing.
That night, Marlee searched for Jameson on Pete's computer, Googled his name, and found his photo there with the other keepers at the Audubon Zoo. Yvonne sat, cocky, on his shoulder, nuzzling his neck with her curved beak. Her head was bright blue and sleek, her body electric yellow. Many websites were devoted to the nobility of parrots. 3,400 years ago, Indian literature assigned parrots the early morning role of guardians of the fading moon. They arrived in Europe in 327 BC, brought home by Alexander the Great's sailors from a campaign in India. Explorers in the 15th century looked for parrot colonies, convinced that where they settled there was gold. The Vatican accorded talking parrots a closer place to God than nonlinguistic animals.
She wrote a word that meant more than sex and put the paper under the fake rock in her garden: again.
The kid with the flyers left daisies in a cracked water glass for Krista to find.
When Eric came in from work she hugged his neck. "Thank you, baby."
He paused, decided to take the credit. "Were they on the porch?" he asked.
"Funny guy."
Krista cut up bits of hotdog and gridded a slice of cheese into stamp-sized pieces. The baby liked to sit at the table in his booster chair, and he was banging around with his spoon. "Little Barbarian," she said, tying a bib around his chubby neck. "Watch he doesn't choke," she said to Eric. "I'm gonna go change."
Eric took the baby outside to see Pete. He was working on his bike in the driveway, and Eric wanted to give him a special handlebar so he could put his weight on his elbows.
"Easier on the back," he said. "I'll install it if you hold the kid."
"Can I pay you?" Pete said, shadowing the wobbling baby around the front yard.
"No problem. Five-finger discounts."
It rained for three days. The weekend had passed and Jameson hadn't called. Marlee's brain roiled like it did in high school when the boys she liked so quickly didn't ask her out again. They shouldn't have fucked after the zoo visit. Deep black sky, night-blooming jasmine, jungle cats calling out to each other like the Walton's before they settled down to sleep - all sucker punches.
The fourth day she put on red lipstick and a lacy black bra and panties under her t-shirt and Levis. "I don't need a man to wear lingerie."
"How do birds sleep?" she asked Pete, hoping he knew. He sat hunched over his cereal bowl, reading Sports Illustrated. "Why?" he said.
She fixed him lunch, curried chicken salad, and sliced a celery rib into thin arcs, cubed apples, halved walnuts. In what second had she started to care about Jameson and could she pull it back? There was the dinner date, the wary small talk, the bird talk, the particularity of his concern for feathered things, which she took personally.
"Why are you making that?" Pete said. "I'm not going to eat that." He grabbed change off the counter, and left for school.
Marlee left the quiet house and went for a walk on the levee before work. When the door clicked shut she remembered she'd left her key on the kitchen table. But the extra key wasn't in the rock. Maybe a raccoon had picked up the smell of her hands and jimmied the trap door open. The neighborhood was infested with raccoons. During the day, they slept in trees; at night, they rooted through garbage cans and ate leftovers.
Marlee dug in the dirt but couldn't find the spare. She tried breaking the small bathroom window with the pencil, which split in half. She threw the rock hard and shielded her eyes. It took two tries before the glass shattered and she was able squeeze through. Shards stuck to the sleeves of her sweater, and Marlee tweezed them out and lay them on her dresser like diamonds. Her thumb was cut and she examined it under Pete's microscope. A whorl with circles that started wide and cycloned in the middle of the finger had been bisected by a thin red line. The bright blood was darkening to the color of garnet.
"You were in my room again?" Pete said, when she got home from the office.
She offered him her bandaged thumb. "I cut myself. I read that increasing the size of something lessens the impact and I wanted to see if that's true. This didn't start hurting until I covered it."
"Weird, Mom." Pete picked up the microscope. "Why don't we move this to the kitchen," he said.
She followed. "Have you seen the key I hide?" Her sweater was buttoned crooked, and she had dirt under her nails.
"I wanted my own so I had a copy made at the hardware store," Pete said. He dangled a purple and gold LSU key chain. "Eric gave me this."
She picked at leftover chicken in coconut milk from Bangkok Cuisine. The food tasted even better the second time.
Part Four
The owner of the pet store warned Marlee: "Parrots attach themselves to one family member at the expense of all the others. They scream when frustrated, and take offense at a dirty look."
"That doesn't worry me," Marlee said.
"Large parrots can live to be eighty."
"That does," she said, but she brought home a bright green male with a yellow crown named Rondo. She set up a cage in the living room with perches of different heights to prevent foot fatigue. His previous owner had taught him to speak. Rondo's repertoire included, "This bird's got to fly" and "Honey, I'm home."
This is what Rondo said when Jameson knocked on the front door and Pete let him in. Marlee was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, drinking decaf and picking at a bowl of peanut M & M's.
Jameson pulled up a chair, scraping the legs on the terrazzo floor. "I'm sorry," he said, "One of the toucans needed heart surgery and I flew with him to Miami."
"It's been a week," Marlee said.
"Eight days," Jameson said.
"No phones?"
"Out of range," he said.
Marlee pulled her sweater around her. Pete had gone to bed and lowered the thermostat in the house to 65 degrees. Condensation covered the windows.
"I bought a parrot," she said.
"He's cold," Jameson said, looking into Rondo's cage.
"I made a mistake." She opened the door to pet him on the head, but he ducked her touch. "I'm frightened of him," she said. "The man in the pet store said he can break my finger in one bite."
"Extend your hand low," Jameson said, "so he doesn't think you're swooping in."
"I can't," she said, pulling her sleeve down.
"Why did you get a bird?" he asked, trying to pull her hand out of the sweater so he could hold it.
"I don't want to be afraid of them," Marlee said. She pulled her hand away. "You're upset with me," he said.
"You don't owe me anything." Marlee said.
"No, I do," he said. "Sure I do. Yvonne stopped breathing and had to be flown on a commercial plane to Florida. I went down there with her so she wouldn't be alone."
Krista didn't notice stuff disappearing until she couldn't find her red sandals. Then the bracelet, the black silk shirt and jeweled barrette she thought she'd misplaced added up in her head like a printed receipt.
"Mother fucker," she said to Eric, who was watching Man v. Nature on TV.
"What?" His finger was in the baby's mouth so Giacomo could work his gums.
"Are you selling my stuff?" she said.
"Fuck you, no," he said. "I don't do that kind of shit anymore."
Pete took a night ride to try out the new handlebars, lowered himself over the front of the bike, relaxed, like leaning on the kitchen counter.
Fog gathered on the river. The streets were slick with humidity and he selected a low gear to grab the road. It felt good to have the weight shifted off his butt. Even with padded shorts, his sit bones still got bruised.
Light rain fell, and the smell of tarmac kicked up, hot, clean, one of his favorite smells. He'd been practicing riding with no hands, and bisected the solid white line with his narrow tires. Eyes up. No doubt. Like that instant when he first rode a bike without training wheels, his father running beside him, his hand firm on Pete's shoulder, then just his fingers, then one finger, until Pete had left him behind. Right then, Pete knew he would never not know how to ride a bike. Nothing could make him forget how to swim, or dive, or walk on his hands. Or have sex. Once he had sex.
He leaned gently into a wide turn, trusting the bike underneath him, enjoying the fresh air on his face. He didn't see the oil slick. His bike slid sideways, wrong, and Pete smacked to the ground moving cross River Road until grass stopped the fall. Still strapped into the pedals, he had to kick himself loose. He lay on his back to catch his breath. The sky over him had moved closer. "Shit," he said, holding out his arms. There was no blood, but one leg of his bike pants had been ripped away. His thigh looked like raw-meat mixed with gravel.
Jameson didn't live far and Pete limped down the middle of River Road to his house. He was reading a book in his chair by the lamp and startled when he saw Pete standing in the window.
"I wiped out," Pete said.
Jameson cringed. "Looks bad."
"Don't tell my mom," he said. "Promise me."
Jameson drove him to the ER, let Pete clench his hand when the antiseptic stung and the needle went in, waited with him while the doctor picked out the gravel. "They're gonna have to resurface the street where you fell," the doctor said, adjusting the light to make sure the wound was clean. "You're going to be tempted to pick the scabs," he said. "Don't."
When Pete got home, his mother was still asleep. He stood beside her bed. "Mom."
She must've been dreaming, because she sighed and pulled the covers tighter, and turned toward the wall.
"Mom?" he whispered. When he was young, she'd hear a sniffly nose at fifty yards.
While her son stood beside her bed, Marlee dreamt she'd fallen asleep in a young boy's arms and had slept through her 11 p.m. curfew without a care, until she remembered and called her mother on the cell phone, frightened, but sure, and promised to call back in a few minutes. She needed time to think of an excuse for why she hadn't wanted to go home, because she was home, asleep in this boy's arms. "I wanted to," is all and everything she knew.
Rondo's cage sat on a brass stand beside the window. Pete lifted off the cover carefully so the bird didn't wake and shriek. He was hanging bat-like from the bar by his toes. Pete covered him back up.
He went to his room and tried to rest, but the anesthetic was wearing off and his leg ached. In the morning, he'd slipped on long jeans to hide his bandage.
There was a foot-long scratch on the frame of his bike, and one of the pedals had been bent. Pete hammered it straight. He sponged the frame clean in the driveway, and dug gravel out of the tires with a screwdriver.
"Had your baptism?" Eric said. He handed Pete a Green Lizard Beer racing jersey. "The fabric is revolutionary." He balled it into his fist, then shook it out. "Weightless."
"Cool," Pete said. "What team?"
"Not sure. Some city in Colombia," he said. "Micro-cell air dry 100% polyester."
His mom wouldn't like him advertising beer, but he slipped it over his head. "Tight."
Rondo hopped from the low bar to the high bar without wings and missed, thudded on the bottom of the cage.
Marlee hurried over to check on him. "Do you want out?" she said, and offered the parrot her lowered arm, which he took, as if he were stepping off a curb. "You're not going to bite me, are you? Where can we go?" she said, circling the room with the heavy bird.
"Honey, I'm home." He flew off her arm and down the narrow hall, wings grazing the walls, into Pete's room. Pete's leg stuck out of the cover. Marlee saw bandages.
She said, "You're hurt."
"I know," he said, rubbing his eyes and leaning up on his elbows. Rondo rummaged through Jolly Rancher wrappers on the desk.
She sat on the end of Pete's bed and touched the gauze. "The bike?"
"Yeah," he said. "It's good to have a wipeout under my belt."
"No it's not," she said.
"No, Mom, it is."
"Did Eric mess with your bike?" she said.
"What are you talking about, Mom? He knows what he's doing."
She unhooked a silver clip that was keeping the gauze wrapped.
"It's mine," Pete said, moving his leg.
"Show me," she said.
Rondo flew to the headboard and puffed up his wings before settling down.
Pete unwrapped the bandage, blood spotting through as he came closer to the wound, and his mother shuddered when she saw raw skin.
"A real accident might worry you less than the one you're always expecting," he said.
"This needs Neosporin," she said.
"I've got some," Pete said. "Jameson took me to the emergency room?"
Marlee looked confused. "Jameson? You called him when you fell?"
"I was near his house," Pete said.
"When did this happen?" she said.
"Don't worry about it, okay? Stop having to know everything."
Pete lets her pat the wound with Neosporin. She didn't usually touch him except for a quick hug, or to straighten his crooked eyebrow. He couldn't remember the last time he'd called out for his mother because she was always there.
Part Five
The flyer guy walked down the street with a pretty girl in skinny jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, bright red sandals. She was a senior at Pete's school. Her hand was stuffed into the guy's back pocket, which stuttered Pete's heart. When he spotted her in the hall, he lingered where she'd been to catch the flower-smell of her hair.
Krista folded a basket of little clothes on her front steps, stacking them in a pile. The baby bounced in his Johnny-Jump-Up, ready to travel but the wheels were stuck in the grass. "I used to have those same shoes," Krista said to the girl who looked down at her feet.
"I found this," the flyer guy said. "Someone must've dropped it." He handed Krista the silver bracelet. "Come on," he said, pulling his girlfriend by the hand, but she did a double-take on Pete straddling his bike, because she'd seen him before somewhere, yes, the kid who stalled in the hall to tell her hello. She gave a half-wave, which Pete enjoyed as 100% maybe.
The woman who took Pete waited at the end of the street for him to get home from school. She'd driven by the week before, seen him dart out of his garage on his bike, wearing a red helmet with flames on the sides. He'd waited politely until her car passed, and then took off the other way. "A careful boy," she thought.
She made an excuse, asked him for the nearest gas station because her El Camino was on empty.
"There's one on Carrollton," he said, pointing behind him.
"I got your letter," she said. There were tears in her eyes. "Thank you."
He thought about running home, escaping with his life, but then he remembered he was fourteen, five foot seven, strong, a racer. He shifted his book bag to the other shoulder. He couldn't be taken anymore, not without a gun. "You shouldn't be here," he said, walking closer to her car. "I saw this car last week."
"I wanted to see how you grew up," she said. "Don't be afraid of me."
Pete shook his head, made a face. "Afraid of you? I could knock the shit out of you."
The woman stared sadly at her hands on the steering wheel. "Probably so," she said. The country singer on her radio was going on about the sweetness of living on a red dirt road.
"You need to get out of here," Pete said.
"I hurt you," she said.
"More like my mom," Pete said. "My life is what you screwed up."
"Do you think she can forgive me?"
"I don't see how that would change anything."
"Can you?"
Her voice sounded soft like it had that day in the Sav-A-Center: someone talking to a baby. He'd needed help reaching the Cap'n'Crunch and she'd handed him the box and offered to pay for it. He'd trusted her, taken her hand, but she kept walking through the checkout. "You have to pay," he'd said, but she kept walking, pulled his hand so tight it hurt.
The woman said, "I work at the Dollar General across the lake, I live in a house in Abita Springs with other women in a group home."
"You should probably get out of this neighborhood," Pete said. "Before my mother calls the police. She's probably dialing right now."
"Tell her I don't want to take you anymore," she said. "I have my daughter."
Rondo left one of his feathers in the hall. Marlee explored it under the microscope, the perfectly aligned rows, not downy but like plastic, as hard-edged as crops seen from an airplane. She looked into the shadow between the rows, where the color gave in to darkness, pulled the focus back to brilliant green.
"Science project?" Jameson said, walking into the kitchen.
Marlee jumped. "What're you doing here?"
"Pete said to come on in. I wanted to see you."
"And check on him?" she said. "You were there when he fell."
"He asked for help," Jameson said. "I was happy to give it."
"See why I'm afraid to let him out of my sight," she said. "The minute I take my eye off him, something happens."
"Every time?" Jameson teased.
"Don't humor me."
"So Pete getting hurt makes you angry?"
"Worried," she said. "Also, yes, maybe angry. I feel duped."
"He's gonna be okay," Jameson said. "Have you thought about trusting that?" He leaned into the microscope, adjusted the feather. "Notice the quill. It's keratin, like fingernails, and beaks."
She looked through the lens. "Hollow?"
"While the feather was growing, it carried blood," he said. "It's made to function in a few different ways."
"Nature isn't haphazard," she said.
"Not with plumage." He slid the feather from under the microscope.
"Or random?"
"Nope. Or wasteful. Close your eyes," he said. "A feather can also be used for this," and he brushed it gently over her temples, across her eyelids, down the bridge of her nose. Her lips trembled.
"Luck is," she said.
"What?"
"Haphazard. Random."
"You're tracking one event," Jameson said. "Maybe you want to count the pleasures of Pete, too."
"Maybe I want you to do that some more." She rested her head on Jameson's shoulder.
"You lost him, yes, and you found him," Jameson said.
Rondo squawked, then belted out, "This bird flies," in case they forgot what he'd rather be doing in the Amazon.
Marlee draped Rondo's cage with the dark cover. "Easy, bub," she said.
"Are you up for one of my famous kitchen sink omelets?" Jameson said later, lying next to her in bed, his foot grazing hers. "Or I can make the best grilled cheese and pepper jelly sandwich you ever tasted. Or pancakes with chocolate chips if you have some in the pantry. I'll short-order you into liking me," he said, but already Marlee's heart gripped the branch.
On his late night rides, Pete noticed private things:
A woman sitting on her front swing held her phone with both hands, like she was listening to a seashell.
An old man pulled his newspaper from the metal box in front of the TimeSaver, looked around, and helped himself to an extra copy.
A couple walking on the levee stopped to kiss, and the man ran his hands up the woman's skirt.
A woman in a nightie had left her toddler in the front seat and run into the Pac-n-Save for a gallon of milk, a pack of cigarettes, to pay for her gas?
Pete disconnected one shoe from the pedal and waited near the truck until she came back out. Inside the store, he could see her over at the freezer, lugging a gallon of ice cream, changing her mind, grabbing three pints so everyone got their flavor. She was pretty, blonde with tanned legs and toaster-sized Snoopy slippers.
The little guy who'd been left in the front seat recognized Pete and banged his Dum-Dum against the window. Krista's kid.
"You should be in a car seat," Pete said, walking over to him. His leg was stiff. He was on his first midnight ride since falling. The kid jumped around on the seat like a monkey so happy for company that he forgets he's behind glass.
Pete opened his door, picked him up and balanced him on the narrow seat of the bike. He had on Power Ranger pajamas and what smelled like a full diaper.
"Do you know your name yet?"
"Momo! Momo!"
"Hey, Paul Revere," Krista said, a loaded-down plastic bag in one hand, a freshly lit cigarette in the other. She looked angelic backlit by the store's neon. He couldn't see her nipples through the sheer fabric.
"Couldn't sleep," Pete said.
"Yeah," she said. "I see you heading out sometimes, when Giacomo's fussing and I'm rocking him in my chair. Must feel great out here with no cars."
Pete said, "Easier to ride no hands." And then he blushed over how stupid that sounded.
"You're adorable," she said. "I might just wait for you to be legal." She put the ice cream in the bed of the truck, and took a long drag on her cigarette. "Wanna smoke?" she said.
"I'm in training," Pete said. "That fifty-mile Causeway Classic across Lake Pontchartrain."
Giacomo bounced on the seat of the Bianchi, expecting the ride to deliver, so Pete jiggled him a little. He wanted to say something else clever for Krista, but he'd gone blank, like stage fright.
"Eric told me about how you almost got kidnapped," she said.
"Yeah," Pete said. "That was a long time ago. I heard my mother's voice calling me through the whole store, even out in the parking lot, in a panic, but I couldn't get back to her. The woman who took me heard her too and pulled harder, so I started crying for my mom, and the bag boy looked at this weird situation and called security.
"No shit," Krista said. "I would've also been yelling, but bloody murder. I'd kill anyone who tried to take my kid."
Giacomo, frustrated with the bike ride that didn't go, started to cry. Krista threw her cigarette down and swung him on her hip. "So, someone needs a change," she said. "You gonna stay out?"
"I have a little longer," Pete said.
He watched the truck drive off, kept the popping red tail lights in sight long after Krista and the baby made the turn toward home, and imagined the day when she'd kiss him the way she kissed Eric on the steps, slow and long, like no one was watching.
