"Hey, it's all right, we all lose jobs. Forget about it," said Mr. James, a man with a bristling white marine haircut and deep creases in his face. He sat next to Phil at the wooden table where all fifteen of them ate their meals.
"I'm glad to hear that."
"You all right?"
"Yeah," he said.
"Sure?"
"Yeah, I'm all right."
He'd not picked up his fork and knife to eat the roast beef and mashed potatoes because his hands shook; he didn't want Mr. James to see them.
"Hey, Slim, heard about your tough luck today," said Jumper, a man, like Phil, who came off the streets into the mission for bed and board. "Don't worry about it. One time I had seventeen jobs in six months. I figured it out once. No shit."
Someone else at the table said, "Rookie."
Another brought out cards; they played poker with matches until past midnight. Phil went up to the room where he'd been sleeping for two months. It had been a refuge after he'd left his wife and two girls. He lowered himself onto his bed and watched the rectangle of the window, hoping that within its frame might emerge another past, a different past, one that he could use as a puppeteer does scenery and people, to exchange with his own. He smoked cigarettes to pass the time until the sky began to hold light.
He pressed the pedal to the floor, but the policeman stayed with him. He knew that this road, Highway 42, went out beyond the confines of Mt. Airey and cut through farmland, past where his grandfather lived, and he figured that he could abandon the car on it somewhere far away then disappear, but the policeman had caught him speeding away from the scene. He looked into the rearview mirror; the policeman's car seemed huge, like a locomotive. He and the policeman fled together in a kind of privacy and silence. Phil had the car up to one hundred and twelve miles per hour, but he couldn't separate himself from the policeman. It was as though he towed him along. Not once did they overtake another car from behind, though a few came from the opposite direction and whipped by like bullets. Finally, he'd done something about it. It couldn't get on her like it did him. He felt calm in his chest, like he'd not felt in two years, since he was thirteen. The policeman stayed close behind and the metronomic blue light tick-tocked through the car; the siren howled. There was too much noise screaming in his ears. They hurled single-file along the empty highway for a timeless while until he felt the car give away its power, give it up as a person gives up dreams in the morning. He eyeballed the instrument panel, saw the fuel light and the needle on the gas gauge read empty. As his speed decreased the car seemed to settle closer to the earth. He and the policeman slowed and stopped together in the middle of the road. A beaten stillness pounded his ears, as if he had been riding in the open-air cockpit of a stunt plane. Phil felt an urge to get out of the car and join the policeman, to talk to him, in the way a lost traveler hungers for company. The policeman flooded the car with a stream of white light, and behind it the blue rotating light from the hood rack glazed the black, vacant space. He heard a click when the policeman opened the throat of a bullhorn then he heard a voice fill the air, as if it were coming down from heaven. It demanded that he leave the car with his hands up over his head. Phil didn't move. He stared forward, looked into the blinding glare of light bouncing off his windshield, and waited. The policeman waited, too, until nine or ten squad cars surrounded them, all with their lights throbbing in the black of this momentous night, establishing the atmosphere in which policemen move with such rigorous authority. After there had been quietness, he again heard the same man's voice projected by the bullhorn telling him to leave the car with his hands up, but Phil remained. The voice lasted for no more than a minute before in conjunction with it another policeman rose up on Phil's right and smashed the window and thrust the open nose of a shotgun barrel into the car, pointed it at him, and shouted, "Out!", who then turned to the others and said, "You're right, it's a kid," before all of them, the entire corps of midnight police, hustled toward him.
Phil holed up in his room at the mission for two weeks. Mr. James brought his food to him, which he hardly touched. The window to that memory had slid open and the substance of it blew through the room and polluted him. Mr. James asked him to talk about it, but he, instead, waited until it filled the cavity of his head.
He packed his one small duffel bag with the sum of his possessions and eased himself out the door, back onto the streets. He set out for the newspaper shack where he would again live and sell dailies. Butch Peters told him he could come back anytime.
He bought a pint: he lay on the board that he used for a bed within the 4x10 shack at the edge of a wide, tree-lined boulevard, listening. He couldn't let his mother find out. That could not happen. One afternoon she called him from the couch. He suspected she'd discovered, he heard it in her voice, and while she sat with knitting in her lap, he became the bird. He killed her.
He sold newspapers. The days went by.
Across the street from his shack was a park bench, one of several scattered about the spacious and graceful boulevard. After a busy morning, he stretched out on it and watched as the sun drenched the street and filled the trees with shadows. While he stared across from himself with disinterested attention, a young mother with two girls appeared and sat down on a nearby bench. Each girl held an enormous orange balloon and upon seeing the triumvirate of women, we have the girls now, and they're not happy and neither he remembered that he'd been married once.
He stood. The ground twisted beneath him, and he was spilled onto his back. The hot ash of his cigarette burned his hair, and he fought off the falcon; he kicked and shouted, felt its beak bite into his hand, heard the guttural liquid-growling in its throat. He screamed until the inside of his eyes turned white, but he couldn't keep it from sinking its hooked bill into the meat of his brain.
"Hey, buddy, let me cut that thing off your wrist." An orderly, a young college kid, held Phil's arm as gently as his mother might.
"Thank you," Phil said.
"Hope you're feeling better," he said. The orderly's eyes were steady.
"I am," said Phil. "How do I get out of here?"
"This way. I'll walk you down."
The inside of his arm hurt where he'd got the shots, but he forgot that when he felt the sun warm his face. He unbuttoned the top half of his shirt and walked, smoking cigarettes and staring at people who turned from him: this good-looking young man who carried a worn and broken overcoat, whose pants and shirt were filthy. He had his legs, though, his legs were good. He walked for miles, orbiting about familiar places. Tomorrow he would make his way back to the newspaper shack. But tonight he would stay under the freeway in the city, drink a pint, listen to sounds around him.
He cut the binding bands of newspapers and magazines with a sharp knife he kept on a board up near the ceiling of the shack. Dawn had pinked the sky, his favorite time of the day. He stuffed the papers then stacked them efficiently, first against the back part of the rack then into the rack itself. Customers would come and he would lose himself in the momentum of selling, and that he liked also, but not as much as this: the quiet lull before the workaday, the bond he felt with the rising city, the sounds of far off cars bringing in the routine tide of work-people. Behind him a cup of coffee he'd bought from 7-Eleven smoked in the morning's chill. As he finished with the last of the papers, still bent over stuffing them, he heard the sound of a shoe scuff against the sidewalk and he looked to make his first sale.
"Well," he said to Mr. James. He lit a cigarette, already nervous.
"Just in the neighborhood," said Mr. James.
Phil attempted a smile.
"I'd like to see you over at the house sometime, Phil."
"I got bad habits."
"Well, goddamn it who's an old man like me supposed to play chess with?"
Phil laughed. "Sorry, Mr. James," he said. "How about this: I'm not half the man I used to be."
"Things been rough?"
"You haven't seen rough."
"I've seen rough, Phil. Remember, I joined the staff over there because it offered three squares, a bunk, and decent pipe tobacco."
"You smoke a pipe?"
"Used to but they stopped with the tobacco. Phil?"
"Yeah?"
"Your first name wouldn't be Adam, would it? Adam Phillips?"
"So now you're an FBI man. What makes you think..." He put his face to his hands.
He heard from the periphery of his thoughts his name being called. He looked through his tears. Mr. James stood with his arms folded over his chest like a lumberjack. He stayed with Phil throughout the remainder of the morning selling papers. When all the customers had gone, Mr. James sat on the stool and raised his eyebrows ready to hear what Phil had long wanted to tell him. But Phil wandered into the park adjacent to the shack and went to an open place beneath the wide sky, surrounded by flowers and shrubs and tall elms, man's paean to nature, and called down the bird. Mr. James watched him, the wired, nervous young man, screaming at the sky.
The bird circled around and around as though describing the circumference of an enormous plate before diving down. Phil threw off his shirt and stood poised as the bird feigned an attack then made a high looping arc to again jet down at him. Phil swung wildly, and it once more creased high before it rocketed down and tore into him; he grabbed the bird by the wing and yanked it to the ground where for a moment it lay flightless. Phil kicked it hard but the bird recoiled, wound skyward in corkscrew turns, and attacked. It wanted him dead. The bird attempted to knife its beak into Phil's eyes. Phil grabbed it by the throat and pressed. The bird let out a shriek and twisted free and flew away.
He stood in the middle of the idyllic park. The city moved around him. A mild breeze blew through the tall elms. The flowers were beautiful right now. He breathed quietly, certain above all, joyous news indeed, that he would eventually die and leave the world to someone else.
Kevin Lavey says, "I teach at an alternative high school in Baltimore County, Maryland. My stories have been published in about twenty literary magazines, which include Witness, Slipstream, 42opus.com, poeticdiveristy.com, and Stickman Review. In 2000, I won an Artist of the Year for Fiction award granted by the Maryland State Arts Council. My novel, Rat, won a contest sponsored by RockWay Press at the end of 2004; RockWay published it in 2007. In June of 2006, I won the grand prize in the novel contest sponsored by the Maryland Writers Association; recently I won the Association's short story prize."