“Shut up,” he whispered. “Who are you? I’ve seen you with Boy. At her job. And you try to boss her around at the grocery store. Queen of Sheba my ass.”
(We haven’t seen you.)
“I’m Bird.”
He said: “You are Bird.”
“Yeah. I’m—Boy’s my mom, that’s why I’m with her a lot.”
The other kids’ voices faded into the distance, and he let go of me once we were alone again. I never saw what he did with the syringe. I don’t think he dropped it. Hands shaking, he fumbled around in the top pocket of his shirt, pulled out a pair of eyeglasses, put them on, and looked at me. Then he took the eyeglasses off and muttered: “Well. What can I do?”
He looked sick to his stomach. He tried to hide it, but he couldn’t. His skin turned a little gray and his cheeks puffed out. I could have stood there for hours, watching him turn to stone, watching the gargoyle appear. That was his real face. Or do people only turn ugly for as long as they’re looking at something ugly? I played dumb. I said: “Uh . . . what’s wrong? What did I say?”
He answered me so quietly I pretty much had to lip-read. “I came to meet with my granddaughter, and you are her.”
I dried my eyes on my sleeve and sighed. I didn’t want it to be true, would have given a lot for it not to be true, so it had to be true.
He raised his voice. “You are slow or something? You didn’t hear me?”
“I heard you.”
“Well?”
“Well.”
“What has your mother told you about me?”
“Nothing.”
He rubbed his chin. “You hungry?”
“What?”
He offered to buy me a cheeseburger. I said I’d eat at home, but changed my mind and went to the Mitchell Street diner with him after he promised to tell me how to catch rats, and also what Mom had been like as a kid.
“Do you really want to know how to catch rats?”
“Yeah.”
“They just want the rats to go away. They believe that they should not have to think about the rats that sneak out of their garbage and into their walls, they should not have to see how those disgusting creatures die. That’s what I’m paid for. I’m supposed to catch my rats and hold my tongue and let it all be like magic.”
“Well, tell me about it.”
“You are not squeamish?”
“Yeah, I am. But I still want to know.”
“I shouldn’t have treated you this way that I have treated you. I’m sorry.”
I didn’t believe him and I walked behind him so I’d have fair warning if he went for me again. I guess I wanted to have something to tell Snow.
We took a booth at the Mitchell Street diner. Susie Conlin handed him a menu before she took me to the restroom and soaked my hands in a basin. She dabbed disinfectant on the cuts the linden tree gave me. There were seven. She counted them aloud and made me count along with her. She was my regular babysitter for about a year and a half, so she still talks down to me something awful, and maybe always will. I don’t mind her doing it, though. She just likes looking after people. Dad’s making her a tiny rainbow stud for the piercing she just got in her nose.
—
i ate my cheeseburger with a knife and fork so it wouldn’t taste of disinfectant. But Frank thought I was trying to be ladylike. “Your father teach you that?” He grinned, and I did the same. I just took what was in his grin and gave it right back to him. He choked on a french fry and I passed him a napkin.
When he really started talking, I borrowed a pad and pen from Susie and took notes. Taking notes meant I didn’t hear his tone of voice as much.
FRANK NOVAK
He was flattered that I was writing down what he said. Flattered or he felt he had a message to give. He spoke slowly and repeated himself so I could get it all down.
He wanted to know if I was going to call the police on him. “Good luck getting them to believe you.”
“You are not adopted?” he asked, hopefully.
How can he be Mom’s dad? There’s no trace of her in him, or vice versa. And that’s weird, because he’s a forceful man. For instance, I couldn’t push back against his accent. My vowels started to copy his—he thought I was making fun of him. Mom would’ve had to be really careful and deliberate in her decisions not to do anything the way he did it. No moving her hands through the air in an almost musical way as she speaks, no pursing her lips, no excitement, calm, always calm. Maybe he noticed what she was doing. I’ll bet he hated that.
When he talked about rats, his forehead tightened and he looked lost. It was as if the words he was saying didn’t mean anything to him, they’d decided to say themselves and he was hoping they’d leave him alone if he just cooperated. He didn’t tell me how to catch rats in the end. He kept working up to it, then he’d say: “It’s all I know. Maybe you shouldn’t say everything you know. Maybe it leaves you empty-headed, eh?”
I asked him about the syringe, what the liquid in it was. He said: “What syringe?” (What did he do with it? If I’d called the police, would they have found it on him? I went back to the linden tree with Louis a couple of days later and we searched for hours. If he’d dropped it, we would have found it. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Acting? I half believe I could dream up a syringe. But only half.)
He says a rat bit him on the face when he was a boy. Mom was really surprised that he’d told me that. She doesn’t know if it’s true; that was the first she’d heard of it. He said he used to have to go through trash cans looking for food. And there was a rat in the trash can, and the rat was hungry too; he was taking its food, so it bit him on the face. I tried to dislike him a little bit less after he told me that, because that’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen to anyone. “Where’s the scar?” I asked. He laughed. “It healed well. It healed well.”
He read to me from a little suede-covered book. “The bites of rats are sometimes difficult to recognize. They always attack the parts that are fat, i.e., the cheeks and the heels—” The book was falling apart onto the tabletop, and the pages he was reading from didn’t have any print on them. “They divide the skin in a straight line, which often has the appearance of having been cut with a knife; so close is the resemblance that it’s often difficult to avoid a mistake—” He said those were the findings of a French doctor from a long time ago. I just said okay. He said: “Look it up sometime. I’m serious . . . look it up.” I said okay.
Hard to know how to take the things he said about Mom. I don’t accept what he said but I can’t get past it. He told me Mom is evil. I said: “What do you mean, ‘evil’?”
FN stands for Frank Novak and BW stands for Bird Whitman. (I had to be quick; I think I said more but I can’t remember what I said.)
FN: I’m not talking about powers of darkness or something you can protect yourself from with crosses and holy water. Of course it is difficult to describe, because it seems so ordinary. Seems so, but is not. Evil studies the ordinary and imitates it. Then you can say it was just a little bad temper, we all know what that is. But some people . . . with some people the spite goes so deep, it is a thing beyond personality . . . you don’t want to understand me. I’m speaking of a little girl who was born too early. She was so small. It was crazy how small she was. She didn’t open her eyes for days after she was born. She kept her eyes closed and shivered and shivered, like someone was yelling at her that she wasn’t going to make it and she was doing all she could to ignore them. Maybe she wasn’t meant to live, I don’t know. But she wanted to, this baby girl. She struggled. She really struggled. I didn’t work for a month. I held her, walked around the house holding her in a blanket. They couldn’t do much at the hospital. They didn’t have those good machines to help out back then. I remember a nurse told me I should have a Mass said for the baby’s soul. A wet nurse came every day—it was the one time in my life I’ve wished I was a woman, so the wet nurse wouldn’t have had to come for my child. The doctor came every other day. I don’t know how she pulled through. This is the thing—maybe it wasn’t her that pulled through. Maybe it was just that will to exist in the world. I mean, it wasn’t the will of someone young, it was the will of . . . something that has had life before and knows that life is good.
It’s not Mom’s fault if she was born too early.
There was so much he wasn’t saying I didn’t know where to start with the questions.
When I opened my mouth, he held up his hand.
FN: There was a morning I was sure that she was gone. I woke up and she wasn’t shivering anymore. You see, I slept sitting up in a chair against the wall, so it couldn’t tilt back. I slept that way so I could have her against my chest through the night. To keep her warm, I suppose. To keep her alive. If anything was wrong, I wanted to feel it immediately. So. She wasn’t shivering. I lifted her up and she was so much heavier than she had been the night before. She didn’t move at all. I put my cheek against her cheek and I cried. I cried so much. And I said Why? There was knocking at the outside door as well. I heard it but I didn’t answer, I held the dead child. It was afternoon when I looked at her again . . . I’d been crying all that time. I looked at her again and her eyes were open. She was alive again. There was a tear-drop on her chin and she was trying to see it.
BW: You think it was the crying that brought her back?
FN: Without question it was the crying. She liked it. She got better after that. She got strong. The first time I saw her smile—I switched on the wireless set one evening and tried to find some music for us. A woman was being killed in a radio play on one of the stations, and the actress screamed. I thought it’d make Boy nervous, but Santa Claus himself couldn’t have gotten a wider smile out of her.
BW: That all?
FN: I could tell you tens of stories about the pain she caused other children before she learned to be scared that I’d catch her at it. Most children get into fights, but it’s a bad sign when a child fights dirty, without anyone even showing her how. One girl angered Boy in some way—she said something, I think—this girl had a sore leg; she’d had some small accident days before . . . it was the sore leg that Boy went for, quick as quick. She kicked that sore leg out from under the girl. The happy children, the ones who had friends they could rely on, those children were safe from her. She was drawn to the anxious ones. The ones who had potential for misery. I watched her. When she ran away from home, I knew she’d gone to find someone who was unhappy, and once she’d found them she’d use her gift to make it worse.
BW: What do you think Boy would say if I told her all this?
FN: Don’t know. Try it.
He suddenly became a gentleman and asked if I wanted the rest of his french fries. He said he hated waste.