Bird Timing

Jonathan Smit

What kind of name was Silk anyway?

Steaming down from the North Pole, Kale decided to marry Burt - Burt was a shade too wide and a tad too dull, but no matter age would even things out she figgered. For one thing sure she would get wider, although an impartial observer would never predict it. One look at her slim hips and curved buns, winningly stuffed tighter than a squirrel’s cheeks into her Jordaches, was all it took for most men. They’d hover around her over at Willy’s, waiting for a chance to try their best line, but she’d heard ‘em all and didn’t care anyway since Silk split with the best pup in Dora’s litter and left her heart shredded like an old curtain.

What kind of name was Silk anyway? Kale’s mom liked to say that a stiff prick was better suited for a hat rack than anything else, but considering that she’d fucked her way from Maine to Saskatchewan you had to take it with a grain of salt. Anyway it wasn’t Silk’s cock that got to Kale so much as the way the hairs fanned up from the crack of his ass like spider grass. Lodged as she was against the driver side door of her 83 Subaru wagon with Dora’s ear grazing her cheek like a hair kiss, she got a little wet and a little teary and a little wet again at the picture of it. At that point Kale decided she’d rather be a lesbian than get choked up over shithead Silk’s hairy butt and took dead aim at a magpie pecking the maggots outta some road kill fifty yards ahead on the right shoulder. As the Subaru bore down on its lunch, the bird seemed to look Kale dead in the eye. Kale screamed “FUCK YOU SILK” but pulled the wheel left at the last second as the magpie floated up from the road.

When Kale’s greasy dad used to drive her down to Toronto on one of his rare swings through Ontario, she would grip the seat cushion of his Mercury 6 with her tiny grubby hands as he’d take dead aim at the pigeons that strutted around the side streets like bank presidents. There was no game to it - he had the same murder in his eye as when her mom turned her hard eyes on him and called him loser, but he always laughed when the birds scattered at the last possible second and were back to their business before she could turn around to look. He called it “bird timing.” “Gotta get me somma that bird timing,” he’d say. “I’m tired a taking it ‘tween the eyes.”

Kale had seen her mom in the picture albums looking as skinny as Kale was now. Most of the pictures were her and her best friend Morgan who moved to Oregon. Kale liked one picture best with the two of them in hippy clothes standing in front of a teepee. Some guy named Steve took the pictures but he was only in one. He looked a little like James Taylor on his first album cover when he had hair. Kale’s mom wouldn’t talk about him except once when Kale asked her and she was drunk and then she just started to cry and left the room so Kale never got much information. Kale’s mom still called Morgan every other week or so though. Anyway Kale had photographic proof that her mom was skinny once even though by the time she was old enough to remember she was wider, and when her dad was still around he was always telling Kale that her mom was getting “broad in the beam.” “What?” “Fat, honey.” So Kale figgered she’d be broad in the beam soon enough herself.

Not that that was a reason to marry Burt in and of itself. It’s not like you figger you’ll lose your figure someday so you decide you’ll marry some guy who won’t remind you of it. With Silk, Kale always felt a little prickle down her spine when he walked into the room, or grabbed her arm and stuck his tongue in her ear. It was the feeling she had when she was six and stood at the end of the high board and looked down at the grownups with their sunglasses and highballs peering up at her. It was always a feeling she thought she liked, and she thought that liking it defined her in some way - like “I like men who make the hairs stand up on my arms,” or “I like men who make me feel like I’m falling over backwards.” Her friend Casey used to say she liked men who made her want them without quite knowing why. Until she met Burt, Kale thought she liked men who made her want them and she knew exactly why. Silk was that kind of a man. Kale still didn’t know if she wanted Burt. She wasn’t even totally sure that Burt wanted her. Five years ago she wouldn’t have wasted five minutes on a guy like Burt. For Chrissake he wore weejuns. And scent. She’d never even met a guy who wore scent before. When she went to pee after they had sex the first time it was sitting on top of the toilet - “Canali Uomo.” Italian scent. Christ. She laughed about it when she called Lorreen the next day to give her the play-by-play. “And get this, Lorreen, he wears some Italian perfume or something.” “Scent.” “What?” “When a man wears it they call it scent.” “OK, scent…you think he’s queer?” “What’s it smell like?” “What? I don’t know.” “I dated a guy who wore patchouli once. It made me gag.” “I don’t know…Nuts, maybe.” “What?” “Maybe it smells like nuts.” “What kind of nuts?” “Nuts and something else.” “Does it make you gag?” She never said as much to Lorreen but she kind of liked it. The smell kind of stuck to her after she’d been with him and she’d get these unanticipated whiffs at odd little times at work like at the copier or in the middle of a conference and she’d feel this heat rise up in her belly. Silk used to stick his finger between her legs in the movies or when he was taking off in the morning on those rare occasions when he spent the night and rub her juice behind his ear. Eau de beaver he called it. He claimed women could smell it on him. “Unconsciously, every woman’s a lesbian deep down inside,” he liked to tell her. When he told her his little sex secrets he liked to lean in a little so that his breath was hot in her ear. “Even if they’re the kind who hate their own smell so much they douche six times a day, most women will get a little hot at the smell of some other woman’s pussy. I don’t think it even registers. But when I’ve got a little eau de beaver behind my ear, I get women who wouldn’t gimme the time a day lookin’ at me like I’m better’n chocolate.”

Thinking about it now, Kale realized that some part of her had changed to that now it made her squirm a little remembering herself lying next to Silk right after sex and feeling lucky while he told her in his huskiest most confidential voice about his never ending adventures with other women. “Fuckin’ embarrassing,” she said out loud, as she gunned the Subaru around a decrepit grey Toyota wagon that was spewing so much smoke she couldn’t tell the make till she pulled along side. Some college kid was at the wheel. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of scraggly yellow hair, a dirty wife-beater and a tattooed bicep. The kid had his window half down never mind it being around -3˚C. with a stiff wind. Kale figgered he was fighting sleep. Dora sniffed at the crack in the passenger side window and growled a little as they went by. Kale winced at the thought that it wasn’t that long ago she would’ve thought the guy was hot. Now she just thought he was young and probably full of himself - the kind that talked you into bed, came in half a minute, and didn’t know the difference. She’d laid enough of them to know the story and at this point she’d rather tell it than live it. The first time she’d slept with Burt, more out of curiosity than desire, he got a little teary after and it freaked her out so much she would have left ‘cept it was her place. He must have felt it because he said something mushy like “That felt really special to me,” or something that Kale’s old self would’ve seized as a guaranteed laugh line on the phone with Lorreen the next day. But this time something different happened. It relaxed her and instead of hopping up and rolling a joint and asking how he wanted to do it this time, she amazed herself by waking up three hours later in the crook of his arm.

A half hour’s drive from her house was a stretch of national forest with a stream running through it where she liked to take Dora to run and take herself to think about things. There was a rock on the bank that warmed in the sun on the coldest days, and Kale would sit there, season to season, staring at the birch and balsam trees on the far bank while Dora rooted around the rocks for smells and sticks. As the Subaru rolled on down towards Portland and dinner with Burt’s parents, the dark green of the pine forests framing her vision like the decoration on a never-ending crèche, Kale thought she remembered when it first dawned on her. Three weeks or so after sleeping with Burt, who’d she’d been steadily putting off with “busy” and “maybe,” and three months or so after getting dumped by Silk had left her so down she seriously thought, for the first and so far only time in her life, of snuffing herself, she had taken Dora to her spot and drifted into a thinking daze as the newly golden birch leaves trembled in the ghost of winter’s breath that eased among the balsams. Without her really meaning to, she thought of her dad and her mom and then she thought of Lorreen and Kathy, the girl at work who bragged that she bought herself a new piece of jewelry on bling.com every time her husband cheated on her. Kale felt sadder than she’d ever felt sitting on that rock that day and the tears spread over her cheeks so that her face shone like glass in the late light and Dora, who had a nose for nothing if not salt, came over and licked up the sorrow with her big rough tongue. Kale thought how her mom and Lorreen and maybe even Kathy were nothing if not good people, but they all, and not just them but most of Kale’s best girlfriends, seemed to save their best and deepest love for the one person on earth who could inject the most betrayal, hurt and pain into their lives. From what Kale could tell, most people didn’t even question it - they accepted love’s cruelty with a dumb and willful complacency, and even seemed to cherish their suffering as if it was misery, the loser’s cheated solitude, that was the real and ruthless locus of their hearts’ desire, as if the heart was like an insanely implacable charioteer who spurned any respite, any oasis, but whipped his horses towards some mirage that dissipated in the desert sun but always reemerged as shimmeringly seductive as before. Kale thought of her time with Silk - how many mornings she’d woken up alone, the soreness between her legs and the lingering smell of his sweat the only imprints of his visit. She’d light a cigarette and curse him, but sitting on the rock with Dora, Kale knew that it was never Silk that she loved, but the devastation that he left behind. She loved the loneliness and the rancor, and the conviction that something about her, something special - her smell, her tits, her cunt -would impel him into her bed again. And the magic of that quality - that he would never admit to and she could never identify - was her power over him - the power that made his cock grow hard when she touched it - the power that made him whimper and moan when he came. She thrilled to it. She thrilled to the achievement of it - this victory that her body won over his. But that thrill, Kale realized, sitting on the rock, was not really where she owned him, but where he owned her. Maybe it was something like that thrill that’d made her mother choose her father over Steve. Kale thought of the defiance in her mother’s eyes when the subject of her father came up. “I kept him in one place as much as any woman could’ve,” she liked to say. Kale’s cherished relationship with her dad, her love for him, her inner assurance that he loved her, rested on a similar point of pride. She kept him coming round - something about her - some special thing-could lure him back from his wanderings over and again. She didn’t hear from him much - a rare postcard would arrive from Montana or Idaho and once even from Siberia - but that made his unannounced appearances even more magical. Kale realized that men like her father - men like Silk - gloried in the power of their neglect - the power of the gratuitous visit. Her father’s reward, her joy in seeing him, was earned only through his absence. His real flaws were masked from the easy scrutiny of daily intercourse.

Kale’s heart jumped when she realized, sitting on her rock, that’s that what men like Silk and her Dad were afraid of - people knowing them and the idea started to form somewhere inside her that maybe loving someone wasn’t wanting someone but knowing them and letting them know you. It was a simple thought and probably stupid and obvious to most people. But Kale had to fight with herself to let herself begin to accept the fact that her Dad was maybe more of a coward then a hero.

A whimper from Dora and a few seconds later, a nudge from a wet nose behind her ear brought Kale back to the present. “Gotta pee, baby?” she said. And she started to scan the roadside advisories for the nearest rest stop. She slipped Beth Orton into the CD player and by the time it was on track 3, she was guiding the Subaru off the highway and up the gently graded exit of the Pautatonk Memorial rest stop and tourist facility. Besides a dozen or so Kenmores and Peterbilts idling steadily like a pod of snoring Leviathans, the lot was empty. Kale slid the Subaru into place a few slots down from the rest rooms, slid on her parka and stepped out into the cold Maine air. The light was starting to go and the sparse trees that leaned around the lonely picnic tables and empty stone fireplaces in the grounds behind the travelers’ aid building glowed pale and transparent against the backdrop of the wall of darkness where the deeper forest staked its claim, like they were giving up their souls to the coming night. Dora was practically trying to jump through the closed back window of the wagon by this point, so Kale opened the back door and the dog poured out of the car, shook herself, barked at Kale and bounded onto the frosty grass, skulking and sniffing till she found the right spot in the middle of a faded patch of snow, where she squatted delicately and let the pent up pee come steaming out. Kale laughed as Dora looked over her shoulder to give her a look of sheer gratitude, kicked up a shower of snow and dead leaves with her hind legs, shook herself again and went off snuffling round the trees for varmints.

The next part happened so fast that when Kale thought about it afterwards it felt like she was watching somebody else, like Jodie Foster or somebody, in a sped up Hollywood movie. She remembered seeing something move out of the corner of her eye and then her whole body freezing for an instant as a small red fox darted across her field of vision. Maybe it was chasing something or being chased by something because it seemed like it didn’t even see Dora until it tore past her - Dora must have seen it or smelled it because she picked up her head just as the fox skidded to a halt as it got to the concrete sidewalk that made a boundary between the picnic grounds and the parking lot. Dora and the fox stared at each other for what must have been a tenth of a second and then, maybe feeling trapped or disoriented or panicked the fox feinted as if to run back into the woods and then took off across the parking lot towards the highway. Dora, who Kale always thought had the soul of a hunting dog, raised her head and bayed like a coon hound and took off after the fox, and Kale, seeing disaster unfolding in front of her startled eyes, could never remember what she did but she must have been screaming Dora’s name and running after them and waving her arms and all the stupid stuff you do out of sheer hope that you might agitate some sense back into a suddenly wayward universe. And in a way it must have worked, because out of nowhere a smoking blur of grey cut in front of her and into the gap between the fox and Dora blaring its horn and as Dora swerved to follow the fox as it disappeared into the oblivion of the southbound traffic, the door shot open and the scraggly blond fifty second guy seemed to float like an angel through the air before he crashed down on Dora bringing the two of them to the asphalt. Then the guy was pulling Dora by the collar back across the tarmac toward her, and Kale could only remember standing there like a zombie, like she had just witnessed her own death, or something so close to it that her soul had taken flight from her body and gone to hide in the tops of the trees. Her heart seemed to sputter weakly back to life when she knelt down and wrapped her arms around Dora’s neck. She didn’t even have the presence to thank the guy until she’d put Dora back in the Subaru and the guy told her she looked kind of pale and he had some tequila in his car and she looked like she could use a snort - he said snort - and she was sitting in his car, which he had pulled in next to hers, with the engine running and the heat on and she pulled a swallow out of the pint bottle he handed her and her throat warmed and her eyes teared and she started to breath again. “Thanks,” she said, looking at him for the first time. His name was Jimmy and he went to Bates College and he was on the lacrosse team and was heading down to Boston for a big game with Boston College by himself because he missed the team bus and she was still in a kind of daze because she didn’t really get the rest. And maybe he put his hand on her leg or said something about how sexy she was - whatever it was it didn’t take much till the back seat was down and they were in the back of the Toyota and she was on him - pulling at his clothes and her clothes and telling him what she wanted to do to him and doing it and telling him what she wanted him to do her and letting him and only stopping when he laughed and said “Uncle.” She must have fallen asleep for five minutes - she opened her eyes and it was that much darker and he was out cold and she pulled on her clothes as quietly as she could and when she was dressed she poked him awake and stuck her tongue down his throat one more time and said she had to go and she would never forget him for saving her dog. But when he asked for her number she shook her head and stroked his hair and got out and went back to her car. Dora was shivering in her sleep in the back and only opened one eye when Kale started the Subaru and got back on the road. The traffic had thinned to almost nothing and the Subaru’s headlights seemed like tractor beams that were pulling the car into a dark tunnel to nowhere. Kale called Burt and told him she’d had engine trouble but got it fixed and she was running late and then flicked on the radio to NPR-Terri Gross interviewing some B movie director-not listening but the voices filling the lonely car with the calming cadence of human communication, like the sound of a grown up cocktail party that drifts up the stairs and through the parted door of your six-year-old bedroom filling the scary darkness with the reassurance that the world of light will still endure.

An hour later, she was off of the interstate and turning left off of Brighton Avenue onto Beacon Street and looking at the numbers for 973, and something, some discarded piece of Drake’s Cake or some other fatal attraction, must have lured some nocturnally-inclined pigeons down from their street light perch into the pool of light below at just about 967 and Kale reflexively stomped on the accelerator and then uselessly jammed on the brakes as the pigeons floated calmly down through the narrow landscape of her rear view mirror.

And something swelled up like a balloon just above Kale’s solar plexus and her mouth opened and Kale lost herself to herself - sitting in her car in the middle of the road as the oblivious pigeons went back to their dinner, until Burt who’d been watching for her, came to find her and hold her and took her and Dora inside and sat her down in a chintz covered Queen Anne’s chair and his Mom sat next to her and held her hand while Burt went back out to park the car.