Winter Birds (31 page)

I set the trash can down and move to the door of my apartment. A boy with low-slung pants stands two feet away from Rachel, who is backed against the stove. I can see the tip of the gun he is waving. Rachel’s face is white and round, her eyes fixed on his. She is holding a wooden spoon in one hand, a stick of butter in the other.

“I know she comes here! I know she’s here now!” the boy says. Rachel’s eyes leave the boy’s face for a moment and follow the gun. I used to wonder if I would be capable of heroics if threatened with violence, but I learned long ago that I would not. I cannot think of a single thing to do. I have a handgun in a drawer of my dresser, but I stand rooted in the doorway, the same feeling of numb horror flooding through me now as on the day I stood in another doorway behind another boy with a gun.

Rachel speaks. “You’re Prince, aren’t you?” Her eyes have returned to his face.

He utters a profanity. “Mindy!” he shouts. “Come here! We’re going!” He swings his head around, sees me standing in the doorway, and grabs Rachel’s wrist. The wooden spoon falls to the floor. He yanks her away from the stove and puts the gun to her neck. He has her in a choke hold now, facing me. “Girl! We gotta go! Come on!” He is shrieking. “Make a move, old woman, and I’ll blow her wide open,” he says to me. I feel something large inside my chest, something slowly inflating, filling up my breathing space. My heart is racing. Somebody’s foot is stuck on the accelerator.

“Mindy’s not here,” Rachel says. She is still holding the stick of butter in one hand. “You’ve got your information wrong. She comes earlier than this. She’s already had her lesson. She’s gone.” I hear her clearly though she barely opens her mouth. The barrel of the gun is jammed into her neck. The boy glares at me with his mean snake eyes.

“Drop that!” he screams. I look down to see the remote control still in my hand. I drop it at once, at the same moment Rachel drops the stick of butter.

He curses again, a long vile stream of words. Then, “I know she’s here! You’re lying! Both of you, you’re lying!” This, even though I haven’t spoken a word. Again he bellows, “Girl! Get out here
now!
”

“You need to leave,” Rachel says. “They could put you in jail for doing this. You don’t want to go to jail.”

“Don’t tell me what I want to do!”

“Okay, okay,” she says. “I just want you to think about what you’re doing.”

Here’s what I want: I want her to stop talking. The gun is deadly, and the one holding it is young, wild, and angry. A question leaps to my mind, one I asked Mindy today in our discussion of Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun.” It was printed in the teacher’s manual: “Is Nancy’s terror rational or irrational?” Mindy’s answer was brief but perceptive. “Both,” she said. “When you’re afraid, there’s always a reason, but you don’t stop to think about it.”

And then there’s a noise at the kitchen door, and suddenly Patrick is standing there, frozen in place, looking as if something is lodged in his throat. All I can think of is the gun against Rachel’s neck, the boy’s demonic eyes, his quick finger on the trigger. I think also of Patrick’s gift for doing and saying the wrong things.

“Get in and close the door!” the boy screams.

Patrick does. He stands facing Prince across the room, his hands hanging limply by his side, his mouth open as if, for once, he can think of nothing to say. I want him to be quiet, but I know Patrick. For now his eyes are riveted on the boy and Rachel.

I want to tell him the boy is insane, that the least provocation will end Rachel’s life, but the words will not come. I feel the room starting a slow twirl; I see the edges filling with black around the white spotlight of Rachel and the boy. Perhaps this is how I will die. No, I tell myself, the boy told you not to move. You will not fall to the floor; you will not die. I think of life without Rachel, and my vision clears. The room settles.

And then Patrick speaks, raising one palm in entreaty as if about to humble himself. But here is what my nephew says to the crazed boy holding a gun to his wife’s throat: “Turn your weapon on me. If you have to kill, then kill me, because if you don’t, and if you harm a single hair of her head, I’ll hunt you down and make you beg to be put out of your misery if it takes the rest of my life.”

This is uttered in an absolutely level tone, as of a teacher telling his class what to study for the final exam. It is spoken by a drab, ordinary little man whom I have heard read aloud from the Bible words concerning loving one’s enemies and turning the other cheek, a man who is considerably older and smaller than the assailant.

Prince looks momentarily confused, as if unable to follow all of the conditional clauses Patrick has laid out. Then he erupts. “Shut up! Just shut up! I don’t take orders from no—” And he describes Patrick in the most graphic language, ending with “Maybe I’ll just kill you all.”

“I don’t think you’ll do that, Prince.” This is spoken by Rachel, very softly. “I don’t think you want to kill anybody. You don’t want to go to jail.” There is a long, silent pause before she adds slowly, “Would you please just put the gun down now? I don’t feel very good. You’re hurting my neck.” She seems to go slack, but her eyes are still alert.

Prince looks distracted.

“Just put it down, Prince,” Rachel says, more firmly now. “Mindy’s not here.” She raises her hand and ever so gently touches his arm, the one that has a stranglehold on her. “You’ve got to let me go now,” she says. “Would you please help me to the floor?” Her words are coming in short, broken gasps.

And slowly she sinks to the floor, aided by Prince still holding the gun.

Chapter 24

Trifles Light as Air

The male marsh wren is fervent in his nest building, often with a dozen at a time under construction. During courtship, then, he has a variety of nests to offer interested females, thus setting himself up as father of multiple broods. A competitive bird, he also plunders nearby nests left unattended
.

In the kitchen I hear Patrick’s voice. He has eaten his supper and is preparing to leave for his creative writing class. The last step in his preparation each week is to read his assignment aloud to Rachel. As always, the volume and pitch of his voice inform me that he is reading not only to Rachel but also to me.

“‘I saw the murderous glint in his eye,’” Patrick reads, “‘and I heard the shrill desperation in his voice. He was a monster, and he had my wife by the throat.’” If I didn’t know what had happened in the kitchen the day before, I might think my nephew was writing dime-store fiction.

His assignment for tonight was to write a personal experience but to transform it into a fictional scene by altering significant details. After what happened yesterday, he discarded the original paper he had written and dashed off a new one late last night. Patrick’s writing professor imposes word limits, a great challenge for Patrick, who thinks the whole world stands with gaping mouths to hear him give expression to each thought that flits across the small, dim screen of his mind. I am grateful to Patrick’s professor for the limit of four hundred words on this paper, for his reading of the scene is mercifully brief.

In Patrick’s version of yesterday’s ides of March incident, which he has titled “Terror in the Afternoon,” Prince is holding a knife instead of a gun to Rachel’s throat. I am absent from the scene. Mindy, who has turned into Patrick’s own daughter, is standing in the hallway, suitcase in hand, instead of sitting in the dentist’s office with her mother, as she was yesterday. These are the significant details he has altered.

The truth was that Prince confused the time of Mindy’s English tutorial with the time of her dentist’s appointment. How messages are transmitted between parties when one is banned from using the telephone and the computer, I do not know, but yesterday’s mistake testifies to the unreliability of alternate methods, whatever they may be. None of this figures in Patrick’s story, however, only the sudden appearance of the boy bent on “rescuing his girlfriend from the clutches of her overprotective parents.”

As I may have predicted, Patrick is the hero of his own story. Arriving home in the nick of time, he finds the boy holding Rachel at knife point so that Mindy can escape to his car, which is waiting by the curb. From there they plan to “flee this one-horse town and head south to the Gulf Coast.” Thinking quickly, the courageous, noble, and highly intelligent father in the story composes and delivers a calm but powerful speech to both the boy and Mindy, in which he states and restates a truth that obviously serves as the theme of his paper: True love “hems in,” “plants hedges,” “builds forts,” and so forth “to defend the loved one.”

No mention in this version of his threatening to hunt the boy down and make him beg to be put out of his misery for any harm done to Rachel. No mention either of Rachel’s slowly slumping to the floor with a surprised Prince struggling to support her weight. No mention of Rachel’s reaching out a steady, purposeful hand to knock the gun from his hand, then sweep it underneath the stove. Certainly no mention of the words that came out of Prince’s mouth when he found himself suddenly unarmed.

It is an image that will remain with me until I close my eyes in death: Rachel, usually so gentle and guileless, staging a fainting spell.

No mention in Patrick’s paper of Rachel’s later explanation, that something told her that Prince wouldn’t shoot a person who fainted, especially a woman, and that it might distract him enough that she could knock the gun from his hand. She had a glimmer of hope, also, she said, that somewhere under all the layers of meanness Prince might have retained a vestige of the good manners most little boys in the South were taught at some point. So while she could have crumpled to the floor on her own, she was assisted by Prince. So there it is—youth outwitted by age, male by female, strength by weakness, violence by hope. The steel magnolia triumphs once again.

No mention, either, of Prince’s subsequent bolting from the kitchen to the front door, shouting vile imprecations as he fled, and no mention of his backing his car wildly out of the driveway right into the path of a white utility van slowing in front of the mortuary. No mention of the corpse in the van, on its way to the back entrance of the mortuary and the processing mill inside. And no mention of a third vehicle involved in the collision, a red Cadillac coming from the other direction, the driver of which was preparing to turn into the parking lot to pay her respects to Tillie Flower inside the mortuary. Imagine, not even a passing mention of this curious sight: a black Chevrolet sandwiched between a white van and a red Cadillac in front of a funeral home.

It is a wonder to me that Patrick did not include this part, seizing upon the ripe opportunity to make much of the colors black, white, and red—colors his religion elevates as symbols in themselves. It is a wonder also that he did not utilize the stick of butter on the floor. What fun he could have had with it. He could have had Prince slip on it, bang his head on the stove, and lose consciousness. Bent on moralizing, however, he chooses instead to end his piece with a bit of verbal tripe that he does not recognize as such. After the father delivers his persuasive speech from across the room, Patrick writes, “All was quiet for an agonizing moment before the boy, with a look of defeat in his hollow eyes, raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, then clutched fistfuls of his hair and wept bitterly, finally dropping the knife onto the floor.” It is a sentence glutted with verbs and emotions.

In the silence that follows Patrick’s reading, I wonder if Rachel is contemplating, as I am, the obvious difficulty posed in the final sentence: how one can still hold a knife while clutching handfuls of his hair.

“So how do you like it?” Patrick says. It is clear that he himself likes it very much.

“I guess it’s a nicer ending than the real one,” Rachel says. “But what happens to Mindy after the boy does that?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell everything in four hundred words,” Patrick says, “but she’d probably give up, too. She’d understand that what her father said was true, just like the boy did, and she’d know there was no future for the two of them.”

What faith my nephew has in the power of mere words, especially his own. To think that two teenagers would be deeply touched and instantly changed by an adult’s speech shows no knowledge of humankind.

Rachel makes no reply. I hear the jingle of Patrick’s keys as he prepares to leave.

“You’ll be okay?” he asks. “You need anything? You have Steve and Teri’s number handy.” He seems to know he will get no reply, and he rushes on, allowing no time for one. “Well, I better go now. I’ll be home around ten, ten-thirty.” He pauses. “Oh, and I’ll stop and get milk somewhere.” He pauses again. “I’m locking the door behind me.” And he leaves.

Burglary, assault with intent to kill, kidnapping, and unlawful carrying of a weapon. Besides the traffic violation for the accident he caused, these will be the charges pressed against Prince for yesterday’s incident even though he stole nothing, caused no lasting physical injury. I wonder what thoughts go through his mind as he sits in the Washington County Jail tonight. I wonder what thoughts go through Mindy’s mind as she thinks about him bursting into her neighbors’ house with a gun. She offered no words today when she came for her lesson, gave no sign that she felt anything at all when she stepped into the very room where Prince had threatened to kill us all, when she saw the purple bruise on Rachel’s neck. During Mindy’s lesson she was even quieter than usual, answering only in single syllables or not at all.

Seeing that his car was trapped between two larger vehicles, Prince did what came naturally. He ran from the scene on foot. And he went straight to the person he knew would help him—his mother. She did what comes naturally to mothers. She tried to protect him from the law. The two of them were stopped less than an hour later, in her car headed north on Highway 1.

Have I said that Prince is a black boy? If I have not, let me say it now. Whether his race is the chief cause of Steve and Teri’s dislike of him, I cannot say, but in Mississippi, even in the twenty-first century, it must be a factor. As for me, it is his behavior, not his race, that has condemned him in my eyes.