The Man Who Loved Birds Read Free

by the time he had the hole dug as big as he planned but the second half of the job would go faster. Filling in was always faster than taking out. By the time his shadow began to lengthen the hole was finished. He parked the backhoe to one side, then switched it off. The roar faded from his ears. He took a swig from a flask of bourbon he carried in his back pocket, then lit a joint and took a couple of hits slowly enough that by the time he was buzzed a nearby whippoorwill felt comfortable enough to raise its after-midnight voice.
    He studied the golf cart, to be struck by a moment of panic—when he arrived he hadn’t thought to check to see if it required a key. But then he saw the key right in the ignition where the county attorney left it because this was his county and he thought himself immune to anybody wreaking mischief with anything that belonged to him.
    Johnny Faye drove the cart down the little earthen ramp and into the hole, its little grave for a little while. He was pleased to see that even with only the full moon to light his work he’d dug the hole as big as it needed to be. Only a couple of inches of dirt would separate its bright orange pennant R IDGEVIEW P OINTE from daylight and discovery.
    For the second time on that soft spring night he lit his joint, but as he was taking a hit he was struck by an avalanche of dirtfrom the pile beside the golf cart’s grave. “
Jeee-
sus!” he cried. The falling dirt knocked him sideways into the cart frame and buried him to his knees.
    Gently he leveraged himself sideways and crawled up the pile to the grave’s lip. A quick sign of the cross—“Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” he breathed and inspected the damage. His shirt was ripped down its side and his skin burned raw. He reached to pull his flask from his back pocket and felt the real damage—the stab of pain made him yelp. Gently he reached for his back pocket with his other hand. He unscrewed the top of the flask, gritted his teeth, splashed some whiskey on the bloody raw wound, and took a swig.
    Now, though the ache in his side grew into a throbbing wracking diamond star of pain, he smoked while he worked—time was getting short, the last thing he needed was the contractor’s men deciding to get a little work done in the early dawn light and coming across him smoking pot astride one of their backhoes. He pushed dirt into the golf cart’s grave until the cart was covered.
    By the time he finished smoothing out the dirt the woods were giving a horizon to the brightening light and he could see the lines on his hand when he smoked the last of the roach. The flame was a puny child of the rising sun but he had finished the job before dawn as he had figured he must do. A backhoe alone on the site where before there’d been a golf cart to keep it company and no trace of the latter and no one the wiser.
    The sun broke free of the trees’ tangle of limbs and leaves. Johnny Faye took up his walking stick—before setting out on this expedition he’d considered leaving it at home, but it turned out to be a necessity, his third leg as he limped across the field and vanished into the brush as if he were a whitetail deer or the whippoorwill whose night of courtship he’d so rudely troubled.
    The government agency that assigned Dr. Meena Chatterjee to this poor rural county had warned her that men were more reluctant than women to visit a doctor, the more so if the doctor was adark-skinned woman from a country they’d never heard of whose Bengali-accented English they found hard to understand. After two weeks of seeing women she received her first male patient—a farmer, she guessed, from his coarse, ruddy complexion—complaining of chest pains.
    Dr. Chatterjee held out a clipboard and a medical history form and pointed him toward the second of her two examination rooms. “Please provide the basic information. I shall be with you in a moment.”
    He raised his cane and waved aside her clipboard. “My mamma told me