by Jennifer Marie Donahue

originally published in Grist: A Journal of Literary Arts, Issue # 12, 2019

Every Saturday morning a group of us guys met at Wyman Park to
collect trash. I didn’t look forward to it after a full week of digging
holes for new swimming pools, but it filled the community service hours
I needed for my parole. Our cleanup initiative was organized by Danny
Fletcher who had worked out a formula correlating pounds of trash picked
up with percentage success in the regular, law-abiding world. At one time
Danny had been like us, a young fuckup and fresh out of detention. My
incarceration had lasted for two years, five months, and seventeen days.
Everyone said to me, “Travis, you’re young, you can still turn your life
around.” I had just turned nineteen but I sure as hell didn’t feel young. Can
you still be young when you’ve exchanged your name for a number or taken
a shit in plain sight of a cellmate you don’t even know? As far as the whole
trash-collection-turned-model-citizen approach, I had my doubts about that
path of reform, but it made my PO happy so I kept that opinion to myself.
It was late August, hot as hell, everybody sweating and slow. So far that day
we’d found a normal haul of soda and beer cans, cigarette butts, wrappers from
fast food joints, and newspapers. Nothing particularly unusual turned up, like
the box of doll bodies with no heads we’d found by the dried out, dilapidated
fountain the week before. Paul, Luther, and I were on break around lunchtime
when Luther first spotted the bird in the tree by the picnic tables. This was no
ordinary bird. Dazzling emerald green, a hue lighter and brighter than any of
the leaves it hid within, the bird’s body was larger than a sparrow or pigeon
you’d normally find in a city park. With each hop on the branch, new colors
emerged—an orange and yellow curved beak that looked like candy corn and
red patches beneath its wings. As the bird flew across the path toward us, wings
outstretched roughly two feet wide, there was a flash of fluorescent blue and
yellow tail feathers.
“You rang?” a voice called out. It sounded really familiar.
“Was that fucking bird talking?” Luther asked. I’d met Luther when I’d
first gotten out. We were placed in the same rundown halfway house full of
cockroaches near the bus station. Tall and skinny, he never really ate lunch with
us, but took the break as an opportunity to chain-smoke as many cigarettes as
humanly possible.
We all craned our necks to get a better look at the bird, hiding in the
magnolia tree, camouflaged in the teardrop waxy leaves. Then it hit me, the
bird sounded exactly like that guy on The Addams Family reruns I used to
watch with my brother, Kenneth, after school. I whistled the theme song to the
show. We waited, but the bird only stared at us with beady yellow eyes. It felt
strange having a bird staring at you like that, like it could see inside you.
“What a weird looking bird,” Paul whispered in his thick country drawl. He
crumpled his paper lunch sack into a ball and then used his fingernail to pick
the sandwich leftovers from his teeth. It was his third sandwich and he’d already
polished off a bag of cheese puffs and a tin of caramel popcorn. He was a big
guy, or as Luther called him, “One badass, cornbread motherfucker.”
“Lucy, I’m home!” the bird called out in a perfect imitation of Ricky Ricardo.
Luther’s eyebrows arched high on his face. Paul’s mouth fell open.
“Man, didn’t anybody tell that bird his future’s fucked if he watches too
much TV?” Luther asked. Paul and I laughed.
“Where do you think it came from?” I inquired.
“Not from around here, that’s for sure. A bird like that doesn’t belong in
a shithole like this place.” Luther fieldstripped his cigarette, letting the fiery
center fall to the ground and tossed the butt into his trash bag. He stood, put
his hat on backward, and walked to the base of the tree.
“Where’d you bust out from, bird?” Paul asked. He laughed at his own joke,
and his laugh had a softness like running water. Paul had one of those faces that
looked hard and serious until he smiled, then he looked as harmless as a damn
teddy bear.
“Shhh!” Luther ordered as he stepped closer to the tree. The leaves rustled as
the bird hopped to a higher branch, cocked his head, and whistled a few notes
of what I had whistled. Then the bird flew away, high in the air, arcing toward
the Union monument with the solider and the winged goddess that looks like
an angel watching over everything. After a minute, the bird soared toward us
and landed on the back of the bench where Paul and I sat. We didn’t move, but
the creature was close enough I could have touched it. Up close, the coloring
was even more magnificent. The green of the feathers shone in the midday sun.
The candy corn beak slightly open with something inside. The bird dropped
the object on the bench beside me, spread his wings, and flew into the safety of
the magnolia.
“Fuck. What is it?” Luther asked.
“I don’t know. A tooth, I think,” I replied. I held the tooth cupped in my
hand for Luther and Paul to see. It was very nearly white, smooth like a pebble,
and the root sharp with irregular edges.
“Is that a baby tooth?” Paul asked. He and Luther moved in to get a
better look. Paul plucked the tooth out of my hand, turned it over. As
he studied the tooth, he held it close to his eye as though words
or some identifying information would be printed there. He looked
up, his face clenched in equal parts surprise and pain, like a man who’d
been sucker punched.
“Who was that masked man?” the bird quipped from above.
“What does this mean?” Paul yelled, the normal, even cadence of his voice
breaking into a loud boom. He curled the tooth into a tight fist.
“Is this for me?” he asked.
A few of the other guys jogged in our direction, including Danny. We were
all conditioned to this kind of yelling being the marker of a fight.
Paul plucked the tooth out of my hand, turned it over. As he studied the
tooth, he held it close to his eye as though words or some identifying information
would be printed there.
“That’s from The Lone Ranger,” Luther explained.
“The tooth?” I asked. I felt disoriented, like I’d entered a room full of funny
mirrors.
“No, idiot. The phrase—’Who was that masked man?’–is from The Lone
Ranger. Didn’t you ever watch The Lone Ranger?”
I hadn’t. Paul’s dark brown eyes were full of tears and laser-focused on the
bird. He looked at it but beyond it at the same time.
The other guys tightened an expectant circle around us, waiting for
someone to throw a punch. What was it about that tooth? Danny broke
through to the middle of the confused spectacle. His presence made everyone
take a step back. In his late thirties, he had the kind of strong, tough body and
browned skin a man gets from years of hard labor outdoors.
“What’s going on? Travis?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. This bird appeared out of nowhere,” I replied, unsure of how
to describe what had happened. It sounded like the kind of story a four-yearold
would conjure when caught drawing with crayon on the walls.
“So?” Danny asked, his voice laced with impatience. He pulled a ragged
yellow bandana out of his pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow. Despite
the heat, he didn’t push up his shirt sleeves. Even if it were one hundred
degrees in the shade you never saw his arms.
“He dropped a tooth here and now Paul’s gone off the fucking deep end,”
Luther replied.
Paul was entirely unresponsive to the sound of his name or the mention
of the tooth.
“Okay, well, show’s over, ladies. Get back to work,” Danny ordered. I
couldn’t see his eyes under the polarized lenses of the sunglasses he always
wore, but he kept turning back toward Paul, who stood as still and quiet as a
statue. Slowly, all the guys picked up their bags and gloves and wandered to
the corners of the park where the trash waited.
Luther and I worked the playground. It was one of the worst places for
trash, full of everything from dirty diapers and candy wrappers to the bags
the druggies left behind: crack, smack, crank, the works. Not to mention the
dog shit.
“For fuck’s sake, look at all the shit here today,” Luther said, and
gestured to the path where piles had petrified into hard lumps. The city
had installed a dispenser of dog-shit-sized bags but people still left the
excrement to rot on the ground.
“At least it isn’t raining,” I said. When it rained you had to
practically peel the shit off the ground and it got stuck all over your
gloves and eventually your clothes, no matter how careful you tried to
be about keeping clean. Rainy days I’d go home and couldn’t get rid of
the stink of dog shit in my nose. Luther and I settled into a rhythm of
work, but I kept turning around to see if I could catch a glimpse of Paul
or the bird. Both had disappeared.
Next Saturday, I was so preoccupied looking for the bird, who
Luther kept referring to as Ricky Ricardo, I couldn’t focus on the trash
collection at all. With every flash of green, I thought I saw him out of
the corner of my eye. Luther and I took our break again on the bench
near the playground by that tall magnolia with the trunk as thick as a
person’s body. The area around the bench smelled vaguely of piss and
rotten fruit.
Paul hadn’t shown up to work. It had me worried. “Do you think it
was the tooth?” I asked Luther.
“Fuck if I know,” Luther replied. “Paul is weird. All those reformed
drinkers are like that. You know, saved.” He made finger quotes in the air and
snorted, before clicking on the flame of the lighter to start a fresh cigarette.
All week I’d wondered about the bird. I’d gone to the library and sat in the
500 nonfiction stack looking at books about parrots, trying to remember the
bird’s features so I could give it a name. Where had it come from? But all the
birds in those books looked the same to me. How could a person distinguish
one from another? It wasn’t like I could measure or weigh the damn thing.
I was eating my bologna sandwich and Luther was complaining about
having found a bunch of used condoms in the corner of the park when the bird
swooped down from the tree. Who knew how long he’d been there watching us,
waiting for us. He perched on the bench.
“Lucy, I’m home!”
“Hey, Ricky,” I said, conversationally, but I felt like I could hardly breathe.
There was something about this bird that made me feel like my skin was burning.
A new recruit named Aaron, sitting on the bench across from us, noticed
the bird and walked over. We explained about the previous Saturday but didn’t
mention the tooth. Ricky hopped to the tree and returned a moment later to the
bench. He had something in his beak again. This time it was a C-note. A shiver
passed over my body. I hated the bird and wanted to wring its neck. It reminded
me of the time my brother Kenneth and I had gone to see a magician perform at
the summer art festival when I was five. The magician had placed a white bunny
in a box, tapped it with his wand three times, and speared it with four knives.
My brother chastised me as I cried: “It’s only a trick, doofus, don’t worry.” I kept
crying even after the box opened and a white bird flew to a perch in the corner.
For days, all I could talk about was the bunny. Where had the bunny gone? I
imagined it lost in a space of nothingness, like a never-ending cloud.
The hundred-dollar bill floated to the ground. Luther retrieved it and held
it to the light so the images were transparent. “I stand corrected, Ricky, you may
indeed be magic if you start bringing us money,” he said. The sight of the money
had sparked a dark energy in his eyes.
“Don’t get too excited,” Aaron said. He leaned in to look at the face of the bill,
reached out and felt the paper. “See, there isn’t a watermark on Franklin here.”
He pointed to the front side. “Feel the paper.”
I reached out to feel the bill and it was true, the paper felt slightly off to me.
There were irregularities on it when you looked closely.
“How do you know that?” Luther asked.
Aaron shrugged and gave us a sheepish grin.
“You were busted for counterfeiting?” I asked. Luther and I exchanged
incredulous glances.
“Did you make this?” Luther asked.
Aaron nodded.
“It’s a pretty good fake,” I said.
“Thanks,” he whispered. “They took all of them when I got caught. I haven’t
seen one in years.” He admired the bill like a person admires a painting hanging
in an art museum. We let him keep it. It felt like the bird meant it for him. Old
Ricky had a plan. We watched Ricky fly to the corner of the park and land on
the goddess’s head. I had a queasy feeling in my gut, the kind that signaled
imminent danger.
By the next week, I had figured out what kind of bird we were dealing with:
eclectus parrot. It was male, as females were bright red and had different color
patterns. No mention of retrieving and storing objects. There were various
subspecies according to a natural history book I found, depending on the
area the bird came from: Indonesia, Australia, the Solomon Islands, and New
Guinea. The was a sharp contrast of the landscapes pictured in those books,
lush jungles full of multicolored flowers, to our park with the shadow of the
buildings always on the wide-open, burnt out spaces.
Paul had returned and all morning I worked near him, asking open-ended
questions: “Where were you last week? How are you feeling?” He’d gone home
last Saturday to visit his family, and they’d roasted a pig. As usual, Paul wanted
to talk about food and spent the next two hours telling me about every pie he’d
ever eaten.
We settled on the bench for lunch. I told Paul and Luther what I’d learned
about Ricky, where he’d come from.
“I told you he wasn’t from around here,” Luther replied. He took a drink of
soda and crushed the can flat.
“I’ve prayed on it, friends, and I believe the bird is a messenger,” Paul said,
his eyes wide and serious.
“Christ, here we go,” Luther said.
“Shut up, Luther,” I said.
Paul slid a glass vial out of his pocket, shook it, and the tooth clinked
against the side. “This tooth was my sister’s baby tooth she lost right after she
turned seven. She sent it to me on my birthday when I had first gotten locked
up because my momma had told her about my teeth getting knocked out in the
accident. There was a fight, a big one in the cafeteria that day I got my mail, and
her tooth was in my pocket. When everything settled down, I went in my cell
and opened the letter but the tooth was gone. Lost, I thought, forever.”
“Seriously?” Luther said, “Let me get this straight, you think some random
bird somehow found your sister’s lost baby tooth and brought it to you? Give
me a fuckin’ break, man. That bird is picking up random shit it finds on the
ground. It is a pure fucking coincidence.” Luther was practically yelling, his
voice high and tight.
“Keep your voice down,” I ordered. Guys on the crew had started to take
their break in our same spot. News of the bird and speculation of the strange
things he brought had traveled from person to person. Most people didn’t
believe it, but they were curious. Even Danny took his break nearby on the
picnic benches at the playground.
“You lost your teeth in the accident?” I asked. I knew that he’d been drunk
and hit another car head-on. Involuntary manslaughter.
“These front ones are implants,” Paul replied. He reached up and tapped
his fingertips against the teeth. “I remember seeing my teeth all over my lap.”
“So, why do you think he brought you a tooth?” I asked. Maybe, I thought,
Paul’s answer would give me a clue to what I could expect.
“Well, I’m not sure,” Paul replied. His voice sounded far away, like an echo
on a bad phone call connection. “But I went home last weekend and spent some
time with my sister. Maybe I was meant to do that, maybe she needed me to be
there. She’s thirteen now and y’all remember how shitty that can be. I told her
to keep her head up, don’t worry about those dumb-ass people who get down
on you for wearing the wrong kind of clothes, you know. . . .” He trailed off and
shrugged. We all thought about that, about going back in time to being thirteen
again. At least that’s what I thought about. My brother would still be alive. My
future wouldn’t yet be ruined.
As if on cue, Ricky the male eclectus parrot arrived. He landed on the
branch of the tree. “Yabba Dabba Doo,” Ricky said in perfect imitation of Fred
Flintstone. He surveyed the crowd and then in one graceful leap took to the air,
leaving us all following his arcing path, his blue tail feathers like a contrail in
the sky.
When he returned, he dropped one of those weird little troll dolls on the
bench, right in front of Luther.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Luther yelled, and he hurled the tiny doll with its
neon orange hair toward Ricky as he flew away. He missed. The crowd around
us had gathered and waited for Luther to explain, but he said nothing more.
Luther only pulled out a cigarette and lit it, his hands shaking.
Danny strode over and stood on the edge of the path near the grass.
“Where do you think he finds these things? Where does he keep them?”
I wondered. Panic fluttered in my chest. The real question, of course, wasn’t
where he was getting it, but how and why.
Everybody started talking at once but paused when Luther cleared his
throat and said, “Who cares. It’s not like he’s robbing a fucking bank.” He took
another angry drag off his cigarette. We all knew it was a slight change from
what he’d been saying, explaining, about doing his own time. It wasn’t like I was
the one robbing a bank. What could you say? It didn’t matter if you only drove
the car. It didn’t matter at all because you’d gotten caught. I wondered if that
troll doll was related to the bank robbery somehow.
“Well I say that bird is picking up trash, like you ladies should be doing right
now,” Danny said. “Time to get back to work.”
You could hear Luther clear across the park, cursing and pitching bottles
into his trash bag. I found a nest of newspapers and disposable coffee cups in
an overgrown hedge by the ball field that I slowly collected. What would Ricky
bring me? Something about the fires? The biggest one I set, with the flames so
high you could see them from the good part of town, was the last. Size didn’t
matter, it was the guy inside. Seventeen years old. Same age I was at the time.
If he’d been anybody else, from the neighborhood, nobody would have cared.
But he wasn’t. He was from suburbia, the son of a city planner or something.
He didn’t die but was seriously disfigured. He was a witness at the trial, and
I could hardly look at him, the way his skin was misshapen and waxy white.
Maybe Ricky would bring me the woven bracelet they submitted as evidence
in the trial, the one with the multicolored fibers that melted into his skin and
had to be cut out thread by thread. The emergency room doctor had testified
to that horrible fact.
Back then, I imagined myself some kind of fucked up superhero, cleaning
the world with fire. I believed bad elements could be remade, redeemed. Crack
houses? In their sooty remains, something good could rise. The rundown
hotel where the pimps trolled out front and the hookers greeted the cars like a
225
goddamn valet service. All those broke down girls, who didn’t even get to keep
their own money. Nobody cared when that place burned. Maybe Ricky would
bring me the fake mustache I bought at the Halloween store and wore when I
set the fires. The stupid disguise I thought would
keep me safe from identification.
As the weeks went by, summer gave way to fall and the leaves lost their luster, which
made it easier to find Ricky in the trees turned crimson, gold, and orange. He brought us
more objects: a tiny frog keychain, a WIC card for a guy who illegally sold food stamps,
a picture of a dog that went unexplained. He brought us more catch phrases:

“Right, Reorge!”, “Come on down!”, and “Danger, Will Robinson!”

The group of guys waiting for
the bird grew larger, expectant. We were all on edge. Even Danny kept taking his lunch by the
playground with us, scanning the sky for Ricky. Every time the bird arrived, I worried it was
my turn. What would he bring me? I made lists, became obsessed with dredging up
items from the junk drawer of my mind.
Maybe it would be the reed from the clarinet I used to play in the middle school
jazz band. Kenneth had come to every stupid concert. He didn’t even like jazz.
I remember how upset he got when I dropped out in the eighth grade because
I’d told him only nerds played music.
I was sitting in my normal spot with Paul and Luther when I saw the flash
of brassy metal in Ricky’s beak even before he landed on the bench. Danny
must have seen it too; he sprung forward and grabbed the object before the
rest of us could move. What was it? It looked like a ring, but it had a symbol
I couldn’t make out on the front. He took off his sunglasses and stared at the
thing, rubbing his bicep with his other hand. It was the first time I’d ever really
seen his brown eyes. His shoulders slumped and in an instant he’d grown
smaller. Something about him was gone, we could all see it.
Every time the bird arrived, I worried it was my turn. What would he bring
me? I made lists, became obsessed with dredging up items from the junk
drawer of my mind.
And then he really was gone. No yelling at us “ladies” to get back to work,
no tallying the names of the guys present and the number of hours worked
for the court. He walked out of the park and left. Should we keep collecting?
Nobody knew.
Luther inspired a wave of exodus when he yelled, “Fuck this,” and threw his
gloves and everything into a trash can and walked away.
I jogged to catch up with him.
“So are you ever going to tell me about that troll doll, or what?” I asked.
Luther whirled around and gave me a half smile like I’d told him a really
terrible joke. “Gee, Travis, I didn’t know you were interested,” he said.
“Well?” I pressed. He looked me up and down like we were about to fight.
“I got it when I was sixteen from my crazy ass Rastafarian driving instructor.
It was just some dumb prize he gave to the kid in the class who got the best score
on the test,” he explained. “So, total bullshit.” Yet, there was something that had
softened in his stance, like he was remembering something good. Being first, the
best. “Bullshit,” he repeated, and walked away.
It wasn’t a huge surprise when my PO called and said the program was on
hiatus. Did I need a list of other places for community service hours? It didn’t
matter. I started going to the park every day after work. Then I called in sick. I
wanted Ricky to bring me my object. I needed it.
On Saturday, Paul showed up and sat on the bench next to me. “Here,
Travis,” he said, and handed me a plastic container of peanut butter cookies.
I thanked him. He’d remembered they were my favorite. He grinned,
showing his implanted, false teeth. “I heard you skipped out on work. I
knew you’d be here, waiting for that bird,” Paul said. He took a cookie from
the container between us and ate it in two bites. “You know, he might
not come. Maybe he doesn’t have a message for you,” Paul said, after he
polished off another cookie.
I didn’t know how to reply. I felt touched that Paul was worried
about me. Why did I need it so bad? Did I require absolution,
forgiveness? I’d spent weeks afraid of what Ricky would bring me,
but now I was more terrified that Paul could be right. Maybe
there would be nothing, no object, no chance at a message. Paul sat with
me all day, against the loud backdrop of children on the playground that
afternoon, and the parade of people walking their dogs and not picking up
their shit, until the trees were dark silhouettes against the sky. Ricky never
showed. Maybe he knew I’d been reading a book about how to capture a bird,
thinking about how to lure him close to me.
On Sunday morning, I sat on the bench, still wet from the evening rain,
and wrapped my arms around my body to stave off the chill in the air. Church
bells echoed in the distance. I heard a scream, a bird call, and Ricky flew in
an irregular loop toward me. It was the first time I’d heard his real bird voice.
“You rang?” Ricky asked in his imitation Lurch as he settled on the end of
the bench.
Finally, he had come. I would have the answer, the gift of the past that
could help me find–what? Forgiveness? Forgetfulness?
“Do you have something for me?” I asked.
He cocked his head, studied my face. Could he see my desperation? He
flew away, beyond where I could reach him. I sat on the bench counting time
with each pull of breath. Ricky returned with something in his mouth. He
dropped a pack of black matches in my lap. On the cover, a white top hat and
gloves, a pool ball, and script spelling The Magic Cue. On the back side, the
address and phone number.
What the hell was this? I’d never been to this place, I’d never lost this pack
of matches. Was this about the old magician who’d made me cry? My brother?
“Is this about the fires I set? I was doing good work, Ricky,” I said. The
bird studied me from the tree branch and offered no canned catch phrases in
reply. I pulled a match from the pack and lit it, enjoying the smell of sulfur. I
held the match aflame until it burned too close to my fingers. Then I let go.
I lit another match and brought the flame to my face, so I could see the blue
edges. I stood and started walking. Old Ricky followed me, flying ahead and
waiting until I got close enough. At the edge of the park, I stepped into the
woods on the junkie trails, the ones that go along far enough to be out of
sight, behind the trees and overgrown bushes. The junkies go here because
they need a safe place to shoot, lie down and go somewhere else, become
someone else. When it gets cold enough they’ll go inside, to foreclosed and
abandoned houses. I never did smack, if only because I had to find some way
to differentiate myself from my brother, who had already claimed “druggie” as
his own title.
I gathered brown leaves. I lit a few matches in rapid succession and threw
them onto the pile. My fire licked at the few dried out sticks, the husks of the
leaves flashed and burned, the crackles and pops growing bigger, stronger.
There was plenty of fuel to feed it.
“I was out of my fucking mind, Ricky,” I said. Not bothering to wonder why
I would explain this to a bird. I could save them, I had thought, I could save all
the guys like my brother. My father had saved people, so I should be able to do
it. Then they wouldn’t wind up blue and lifeless, like Kenneth, with the needle
still stuck in his arm. No fire would bring him back. Not a single one.
I got away with burning lots of buildings because nobody gave a shit about
the drug houses going up in flames, when the hookers had nowhere to turn
tricks, or when the blackened shell of cars used to haul drugs into the city
were found puffing out their toxic fumes in the night sky. These things were an
improvement.
“I didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt,” I explained. “I went through that
building myself before I set it up and there was nobody in there!” I kicked at
the fire on the ground, picked up a few bigger sticks to see if it could grow. But
the sticks were wet, soggy with the earlier rain, and my fire turned to smoke
and then went out.
My father was a hero, the kind who sacrificed himself for others, who they
remember in a bronze plaque. I’ve run my fingers over his name etched on the
memorial for Flight 83. He was driving home from work and stopped when
he saw the crash. He dove into Chesapeake Bay in January, pulling people out
of the water, until he went under and never came back. I wondered if being a
hero was a kind of magic. I wanted to be a hero, but all I wound up being was
a criminal. How does a regular person transform into something great? How
do they escape the limitations of the ordinary? How could my brother never be
saved? How could my father be such a hero but not pass that on to me?
“What am I supposed to do now, Ricky?” I asked.
He squawked a loud bird sound that pierced my ears and flew into the air.
The eclectus bird soared higher into the sky than I had ever seen him fly before,
until he was a speck of green.
I left the park and walked along the street, where the abandoned houses
rotted away like missing teeth. I found my way to The Magic Cue. My clue. I
checked the matches against the sign out front before going inside. The front
half of the place was a dimly lit pool hall with eight tables in two rows, balls
clinking together in a steady rhythm and people gripping pool sticks and
angling for shots. Behind that were a few tables and a bar with a rundown feel,
like years ago someone had given up polishing the brass and dusting the lights.
I found an open stool and sat. The bartender came over and I ordered a beer. I
was underage and looked it, but he didn’t seem to care.
There was a group of loud men at the table near the projection screen,
watching the football game. They yelled insults at the players. A thin, wiry
fellow with glasses dressed in all black—pants, shirt, even a black bowtie—
approached the table. He carried a black derby hat under his arm. He asked the
men, “Would you like to see a magic trick?”
One of the drunk assholes replied, “Yeah, bud, why don’t you disappear?”
and all his friends erupted in laughter.
This treatment didn’t deter the magician. He removed a spoon from inside
his coat. “Watch as I bend the spoon with my mind,” he said. He ran his hand
near the utensil and pulled away quickly to reveal a bent spoon. The magician
worked the room, doing the spoon trick over and over.
“Looking for some magic?” a familiar voice behind me said. When I turned
around, there was Danny Fletcher sidling up to the bar.
Danny pulled off his jacket; he was wearing a short sleeve T-shirt. The pale
skin of his exposed arm bore faded, dark lines of a tattoo that ran from the
curve of his shoulder to his forearm. There were intricate swirls of lines that
faded out to a patchwork of red and white scarred flesh.
“I’ve had six laser treatments so far, but you can still see it,” Danny said,
catching my stare. He traced with his fingertips the pattern on his arm. “Even
if I could find something to wipe it clean away, it’s always going to be there. See
where it says Sonny?” he pointed to the middle of the tattoo.
“No, all I see is wings and,” I leaned in closer, “is that a snake?”
“Sonny was the first girl I ever loved. You never really love someone exactly
like you do that very first time, right? She loved my best friend. I loved my best
friend too, but I lost him and then I don’t know what happened.”
The bartender came over and Danny ordered a beer.
“What you see is the angel with wings battling a green serpent. That was the
cover-up tattoo I got, to try and erase Sonny and what I did, camouflage myself
and blend in. Then I did the laser treatments to get rid of it once and for all. But
it’s no use because I can see her name.”
“Does it hurt?” I asked. I knew, of course, seeing her name hurt, but I
wondered if the process of erasing it was worse.
“The laser? Hell yes. It burns like someone’s thrown hot grease on your skin.
It keeps hurting for hours after the laser is done zapping it.” A small smile
appeared on his face as he spoke of the pain.
“So the object the bird brought you?” I asked.
Danny rubbed the top of his head. “That was my boy scout neckerchief
slide.” He must have seen the puzzlement on my face. “You were obviously never
a scout, Travis. You tie your neckerchief and then use this metal slide to keep
it all neat and tidy. My best friend George and I were scouts together. George
was afraid of everything in the world. Except for snakes. We went camping on
this godforsaken island full of alligators and snakes one time. We were walking
back to our tent one night and I was terrified. He said to me, ‘Danny, the trick
is to remember that they are useless creatures, they don’t even have any arms
or legs.’” Danny paused here, chuckled, and took a swallow of beer. “Anyway,
somehow I lost my neckerchief slide that night. George always joked the snakes
stole it. I thought that bird was a huge crock of shit until I held that slide in my
hand. It felt like I could see myself back in time with George, and then later
when I punched him over Sonny and broke his face open. There was so much
blood. Not long after I set fire to her house. It was just one bad thing that led to
another.” Danny took a deep breath and blew it out with a heavy sigh.
“He brought me a pack of matches,” I mumbled. I dug into my pants pocket,
retrieved them, held them out. “I don’t understand what it means,” I said. I
flipped the cover of the matches open and closed.
“What did you want him to bring you?” Danny asked.
I realized that was a question I’d never asked myself. I’d been so worried
about what Ricky could bring, that I never stopped to consider what I
wanted. What I wanted were impossible things: my brother alive again, that
long-lost bunny from the fair, safety. Nothing Ricky could have brought me
would have been good enough. I looked to Danny, to the faded tattoo on
his arm, and wondered if Ricky had wanted me to wind up here with him.
“Do you think the bird is. . .” I trailed off, not even sure how to describe
the peculiar thing that had happened.
“What, magic? Like this guy?” Danny paused and gestured to the wiry
man doing his spoon trick. “I don’t know. And really, it doesn’t matter.
He’s doing his tricks and maybe you can see him palming the spoon or
the cards or whatever. It doesn’t matter if you believe or not. He’s still
doing it, grinning like a bastard.”
The magician headed toward us, pulled perhaps by Danny’s gesture
in his direction. Up close his glasses sat crooked on his face and he
appeared older than he had from a distance.
“Would you like to see a magic trick?” he asked us.
“Yes,” I replied. If you believe in the bird, in the recovery of lost
things, you believe you can be saved. Ricky had a plan. He’d brought
me here, he’d brought me something after all.
I expected the spoon, but the magician pulled out a green
silk scarf, waved it around and then bunched it up into a ball. He
placed the scarf in the hat, tapped it with his fingers—one, two,
three—“Abracadabra!” he exclaimed. He angled the hat to me.
“Go ahead, reach in and get it,” he instructed. There inside the
hat was a white stuffed rabbit with green eyes.
“Look at that,” Danny said, “the old rabbit in a hat trick.”