The Bird Boys. Lisa Sandlin
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soldier’s teenage sister and his small brother. From the first step onto the chapel linoleum, there were wails and weeping and folding and contorting, thrusting arms and beseeching the Lord.
Looks passed among the inmates on the left side. Many of them had not seen black women freely carry on like this, it was a strange window they were seeing through. Ridicule rose up. Most swallowed it. One girl who sniggered took a swift elbow to the ribs. Though this greeting of death was different than what most of them were used to, they sweated in silence. A lot of women in there had sons. Didn’t matter if they were two-year-old babies. Or six years old or ten. The white inmates saw a mother beset with the mother of all fears, and it had come-to-be, and they feared it for themselves. A moan broke out from the chapel’s left side, mingling with those from the right. Then another.
Delpha had been to one funeral: her mother’s. That was a tight-jawed affair. This was something else, but what? The black women and girl, the brotherless boy, made their way toward the altar as though barefoot on shattered glass, and Delpha distinguished two things: the suffering of grief and the expressing of grief. Both were real—she read that in Mary Buell’s murdered eyes, in the sisters’ clutching and entreating. The griefs were intertwined, as if Agony itself were crawling down the aisle, one bloody body with many arms and voices.
Afterward, when Mary Buell was escorted to her cell, she found just outside the bars a jar of the flowers that grew haphazard around the prison garden: milkweed. A gallon glass jar, de-labeled and buffed to a crystal sparkle. Its tin lid was poked with holes, the jar filled with a green leafy stalk sprouting purplish-pink florets. Mary picked up the jar. Jostled, a Monarch butterfly arched gold-red wings and flitted to another floret. An inmate heard Mary murmur that her son was found. She lifted her voice. Her Clayton was not lost in a foreign land, he had waked up in the mansion of the Lord.
To Mary from Glinda.
That was how they caught her. An inmate near the garden had been struck by the sight of a girl with a yard of cheesecloth, creeping and pouncing, chasing and swiping like a lunatic. She didn’t know the girl’s name was Dolly Honeysett, she called her “the one with the Dumbo ears.”
Soon enough, some girls cornered Dolly. Was she the one who gave people stuff? Was she Glinda?
Dolly shook her head.
Hit on the shoulder she said,
No.
No.
No.
No.
Then yes.
Why on earth?
Dolly shrugged.
Why did she do that?
Backed up against a wall, she stammered maybe because it helped some.
Some what?
What did she mean, helped?
Helped what?
Well, because she had to do something to make up for misunderstanding her mother. For burning George’s head. Her prayers were dry. The only thing she could figure to do was give something to another person who needed it. Certain people, it was just large in their face what they needed. After she left her offerings, Dolly had found that, for about as long as a kitchen match would burn, she felt clear.
There was no magic in this answer. Some people didn’t understand it. Other people did. But nobody talked about Glinda anymore, not like when she was a mystery. Whichever sad people received candy or Lipton tea bags or pink Suave shampoo mumbled thanks to Dolly, and that was that. Until—wasn’t too long after Otis Redding had plane-crashed, was it, Christmas, 1967—Dolly’s trial attorney with the polished Florsheims, his legal vanity torpedoed by Mrs. Honeysett’s image-burnishing perjury, assassinated the woman’s character in a parole hearing. He managed to spring the obedient girl who’d swung the gas heater.
Goodbye, Glinda, goodbye.
Both Dolly and Aileen stuck in her mind, Delpha understood, because they saw things others couldn’t, but Aileen craved the spotlight on herself while Dolly had shined it on others. Really, the girls were opposites.
Like Delpha and Isaac.
Back in the late spring Delpha had had a lover, a college boy mourning his dad. She’d unlock the Rosemont Hotel’s kitchen door around eleven and let in Isaac. Him almost twenty, astonishing her with his open nature; her thirty-two, a wary ex-con—not that she told him that. What fiery nights they’d spent up in her room. They had gone slow, touching slow, had lingered learning each other’s bodies. Other nights they were wild, pushing. Tall, a shade stooped, and crazy to learn, Isaac was in the flush of leaving boyhood. Delpha, lifting the floodgate prison had locked, had known that craziness, too. Until summer was almost at its end.
Last week, Isaac had sent a shiny postcard of what looked like the biggest brick church she’d ever seen. Princeton University.
Dear Delpha, You were right that I had to go back, the card said. And you were wrong, too. I don’t understand how that works, but I miss you. Isaac.
She’d kissed the handwriting side and put away the card in the night table’s drawer.
Delpha shook her head as a misty gust blew leaves across the vacant parking lot. Her hair brushing against her cheeks, she turned her mind away from Isaac, from Aileen, to the right now. See there—her blessed focal point: the line between treetop and sky. Then down, to a fan of broken brown glass on the cracked blacktop, the orange stars of sweetgum leaves. She breathed out. Placed her hands on the wheel.
Tomorrow either she or Tom would finish off the realtors’ offices, then they’d have a list to work from—names of men who’d bought homes, and one of them just might be Xavier Bell’s missing brother Rodney. What if Rodney wasn’t on that list? Well, they’d try something else. Delpha sighed.
What you always do. She put the car in gear.
X
BY SIX O’CLOCK Phelan was out on the Bellas Hess floor, selling cameras, tape decks, and televisions. He was boxed in behind a little corral of a counter with a nineteen-year-old named Ben. That night he’d sit in his dark car in a mostly-deserted parking lot at a judicious distance from the back door. That would be his post, in view of the loading dock. A store security guy would cover the locked front door. The manager had furnished them with a pair of walkie-talkies from Radio Shack.
“How come you get to walk all over the store and Ralph doesn’t chew your butt?” Ben complained when Phelan had rambled back into the corral from reconnaissance. The teenager glared at him from Buddy Holly black plastic glasses, hands planted at his waist where his hips would have started if he’d had any. His black gabardines were staying up courtesy of a workhorse belt.
“You’re so sharp with the merchandise he can’t spare you.”
Ben’s sull reduced a little. “Well, I tried to teach you.”
Phelan stared at the kid. Ben went over to the other side of the glass counter and polished.
Ralph the manager had introduced him to the staff. The assistant manager Dean was a short, squat young man with thinning blond hair and a dog-like expression. Ralph had wanted to let him in on Phelan’s role, but Phelan had shaken his head no. There were girls and middle-aged women, both black and white, behind the counters, and an old man janitor for spills. A food area where two bored boys speared hotdogs off a heat-lamp griller, and handed over potato chips and Cokes. A loud, friendly pharmacist in the pill house with a pretty girl out front ringing up the white prescription sacks. Phelan’s guess was the stockroom, since they were the ones handling boxed goods, appliances, knowing the inventory, what was coming in. He’d have to make it back there. Meanwhile, Ben with the slicked-down hair was the only man on the floor proper. And it was easy to get him to talk about himself.
He was the next Ansel Adams, he told Phelan, looking for the impress-o-meter