Bird Lovers

Abstract

Bird Lovers Gabriel Louis (bio) She was from a town you would never pronounce right if you read it from a highway sign. You’d have to spend time there, or know somebody who called it home. Her angled bangs fell to her brow, framing a stare that conjured gemstones and tundras. Laron nearly died when he heard she smoked Newports. He raised the doors on the industrial dishwasher to stop its churn, and asked his bewildered question into the new quiet. How did a white girl come to develop a taste for those? She said it was something about the way that menthol hit when she was high, then she strode out to check on her tables. Laron had to clench the doorway to the kitchen with both hands. You could see the gold in his mouth. His look said he was thinking love. In her little town there hadn’t even been one whole black person, she said. In kindergarten there had been a boy with a black dad, and they made fun of him on the first day. She stood up and told the class that she had a black dad too. Her mom had answered the phone during dinner that night. Then she returned to the table and said, Colleen, did you tell a lie today? Under his breath, Laron said Colleen’s child could most definitely have a black dad. Only I heard him. I wasn’t thinking love, but there was something about her name, old fashioned, that made me picture a robe and slippers, the newspaper and a wingback chair. I had my dead grandfather’s robe and was short the rest. I didn’t read the paper much. Still, I imagined putting it down when she was upset and saying her name in a patient way that might calm her. I recognized sexism in the vision. It persisted. Laron washed the dishes. Once they’d been artfully layered with cheese and meat to complement the wine, Colleen and I brought them to the front of the house. We described the fanned arrays as we placed them on the table, and we kept the drinks full. Before returning the plates to Laron, we scraped the half-finished ones into the trash. Sometimes I ate from them. [End Page 98] ________ Often after work I couldn’t sleep. With the downstairs neighbor away at his girlfriend’s, Congo the rescued pit whimpered into the morning. I watched syndicated shows, decades old, on my little television. They were from before my time, but I understood that nostalgia was some drug. My favorite was the fairy tale with the black brothers living well-adjusted lives in a wealthy white man’s home. The brothers had the cutest pajamas. On the internet, I learned it had ended badly for all the actors. Even the nightly advertisements were rich with narrative. Necklaces with alarm buttons for the elderly, so they didn’t die slow deaths on the tiled floors of their bathrooms. And when the necklaces couldn’t save them, there was a company accepting monthly payments to insure their funeral arrangements. Most dramatic, perhaps, was the black cross against an orange sky slowly roiling with dark clouds, the word REPENT simple and urgent. ________ At work, a freckled server named Regan liked to ask the other servers what they thought would happen. She danced her fingers from their wrists up to their shoulders, miming panic. She could have been asking about the Super Bowl—a game in which she had no stake but knew could ignite passions. She never asked me, and I was glad for that. I clenched my teeth hard on my tongue. I’d heard spies could pass polygraphs this way: create a baseline of pain during the easy questions, and dull the difficult ones to follow. I didn’t understand the suspense; I knew. The cop would fly before a grand jury indicted him. ________ An unlikely constant in my life was fresh laundry. For work I needed black button-down shirts. I washed them with anything that wouldn’t leave lint, so I always had clean darks. The dress shirts would hang...