B003UYURTC EBOK (17 page)

“Oh. Okay. Well, what now?”

“What now? Well, I’m gonna sit in this room until someone better-looking than you comes to pick me up, and then hopefully she’s gonna remind me of why I have hands and a mouth,” I said, half-seriously.

“You mean Ada, right?”

“Right.”

“She’s at Russell’s,” Lucas said, his expression nervous.

“The Quit Man’s?”

“Thought you were gonna stop calling him that,” Lucas stated plainly.

Every morning I would hear from my bedroom window the sound of John Barling slamming the Dumases’ front door, letting the screen door shut (
tap tap tap
), and, a few seconds later, cranking up his monstrosity of a truck and backing out the gravel drive. Fulton Dumas informed me one awkward day in the yard that John Barling had been sleeping in the guest room for some two and a half weeks. He also said that Barling stayed up all hours of the night, usually in the kitchen, flipping through books, listening to audio recordings of birdcalls, and
speaking his notes into a handheld tape recorder. Fulton Dumas said that if John Barling didn’t find that bird soon and leave, he would personally slit his throat as he slept.

“Why wait?” I asked him, laughing.

“My mom used to think he was brilliant,” he answered. “I think she wants him to find the bird even though she hates his guts now.”

“Is he brilliant, you think?” I asked.

“He’s maybe the dumbest person I’ve ever met.”

Dr. Webb says that people like John Barling will always be looking for something, whether it’s a two-foot-tall woodpecker or the meaning of life; they are simply born and stay incomplete. And when I thought about it enough, I decided that maybe everyone I knew was looking for something in different ways. Lucas Cader looked for his lost brother in everyone he met, but in Gabriel and me in particular. Aunt Julia would, from then on, look for Oslo in the people she met. And like-wise, I assumed that my mom and dad would always look for Gabriel, both literally and figuratively speaking. And as for myself, well, I was still trying to find out who I was back then. Trying to figure out why I said and did the things I said and did. Trying to understand why I cried ten minutes after Lucas told me Ada was at Russell’s but never shed a tear when my cousin dropped dead. Wondering why I had written nearly ninety titles, but not one single book. Questioning why I couldn’t do a damn thing to bring my brother back, no matter how often I sat and tried to think of ways to do so.

When one is sitting on the floor of his bedroom and waiting
for a girl to show up who might not show up at all, he begins to remember the last time he sat in church with his little brother. He remembers that after Reverend Wells’s sermon, the congregation began a discussion on the remaining funds needed to complete various and largely unnecessary renovations to the building. He remembers rolling his eyes, looking over at his mother, who was doing the same, and then whispering in his brother’s ear something very close to, “They shouldn’t discuss money here.” He then remembers, just as some ass-hat from the balcony shouts down the number “two thousand,” that his little brother, showing little hesitation, said loudly enough to be heard but not shouting, “Why don’t we give it to the poor?”

I walked into the living room to find my mom sitting alone and looking at a photo album the way a woman who has one missing child would do. I sat down beside her on the couch. She looked up at me with a sort of what-are-you-about-to-say-to-me-that-I-don’t-want-to-hear? look, and I began to speak.

“Why do you do this to yourself?” I asked.

“Because there’s nothing else I can do,” she answered quickly, as if she’d rehearsed it in her head.

“These are from last Christmas,” I said, pointing to one of me standing in front of the Christmas tree.

“There aren’t many of Gabe,” she said plainly.

“He’s camera shy,” I said back.

“I remember when we snuck into his room and took that picture of him sleeping just so I’d have something besides your school picture to put on the fridge,” she said, laughing.

“Yeah. He tried to convince me once that pictures steal part
of your soul. He saw it on some documentary or something,” I said.

“That’s Gabe,” she said, shaking her head, “always coming up with something bizarre to freak us out.”

“It’s been eight weeks, Mom,” I said.

“It seems like so much longer, doesn’t it?”

“Seems like eight years,” I said quietly.

“We’ll be buying school supplies soon,” she said with a sigh.

I did not see Ada Taylor that day or the next one either. Instead I saw her car parked at the Quit Man’s house and saw red when I closed my eyes. I saw Lucas Cader trying his best to make me laugh as we drove past. I saw Mena Prescott telling me I was better off. I saw my mom and dad watching TV in their bedroom, wearing their pajamas at three p.m. I saw Fulton Dumas mowing his front lawn slowly, headphones attached to his head, his hair in tall spikes, his eyes glazed over with boredom.

Lily’s first annual Woodpecker Festival made me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit. I was only there because Lucas Cader had convinced me that it was a sure way of seeing Ada Taylor, who was becoming increasingly skilled at avoiding me and screening my phone calls. The festival took place where anything in Lily takes place: the city park. Let me give you a visual of this park. Two swing sets. One merry-go-round. Three slides, one metal and two plastic. One potentially dangerous seesaw. A set of multicolored monkey bars. A ditch full of elephant ear plants and soggy grass. And best of all, a hexagonal
gazebo with white latticework and a steeple. This park is where I first learned not to trust kids holding handfuls of dirt and not to jump from things when dared.

For the Woodpecker Festival, metal trailers had been brought in from as far as Harrison, and they now enclosed the park in a full circle. In the center, near the gazebo, a wooden fence separated the passersby from horses giving rides for five bucks each and a small petting zoo complete with goats, deer, and one black-and-white calf. To the left of the animals was a trailer that folded out into a stage, where, when Lucas and I arrived, a herd of glittery young girls clogged and tapped in unison to a song about honky-tonk, whatever the hell that is. On both sides of the stage hung long, narrow banners with crude likenesses of the Lazarus and the words
LILY LOVES THE BIRD
.

The one thing I did like about small-town festivals was the food. And more specifically, the corn dogs. There is a certain uniqueness to a festival corn dog, an undeniable combination of grease and cornmeal, of hunger built up from maneuvering around the crowd, of anticipation from the fifteen-minute line. Mustard? No thanks. I like my corn dogs bare and thrown nonchalantly into a paper sleeve. I like to see how fast it takes me to talk myself into a second or third one. As I was waiting in line for corn dog number two, a small boy ran by me with a stick horse between his legs, shouting, “Ride ’em, cowboy!” I laughed.

“When I was a kid, I made many a mile on stick horses,” the man behind me said in my general direction.

“Is that right?” I asked, turning slightly around.

“Yep. Till I got a real one, and then it just wasn’t the same,” he said with a laugh, elbowing me in the shoulder.

I’d like to tell you that at that point I suddenly remembered a time when Gabriel came bouncing through the house on a stick horse, but that wouldn’t be true. I did, however, imagine it happening anyway as I waited there, staring down at the little boy with sweat dripping from his temples as he raised one hand up into the air, let out intermittent yelps, and then trotted away.

“Makes you glad you don’t have kids, huh?” the man behind me said.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said back.

“My grandson’s about your age. What are you, fifteen or so?” he asked me.

“Seventeen,” I said blankly.

“Oh. You look young. Lucky. Hold on to that. One day you’ll appreciate it.”

“I bet,” I said before turning around to give my order.

Lucas Cader walked up to me as I sat on the steps of the gazebo, finishing corn dog number two and gazing over at the Baptist church choir performing on the stage. He sat down beside me, a burger in hand.

“These aren’t so bad, really,” he said.

“What?”

“Lazarus Burger,” he said.

“Good Lord.”

“Shut up. Festival’s not so bad, is it?” Lucas asked.

“Not so good, either,” I said.

“Well, have you seen her yet?” he asked.

“Ada? No. Have you?”

“No. But I saw Russell. He’s over there, by the face-painting booth.” Lucas pointed across the way to a small table surrounded by children that had been set up by my church.

The Quit Man sat in a wheelchair, connected to some sort of breathing machine. His face was swollen and bent to one side, his eyes larger than I remembered. His mother stood behind him, her hands grasping the handles of the chair and her head down close to his left ear. I watched as she pushed him down the narrow sidewalk and over to the petting zoo, where she parked him beside a bench and had a seat. The Quit Man no longer looked tough. He no longer looked mean. There was little to be intimidated by save for the pure amount of machinery enveloping his body. Just as Lucas was suggesting that we go check out the live snake exhibit, I saw Ada Taylor walk up to the Quit Man and give him a peck on the cheek. He smiled. I elbowed Lucas, who looked directly where I was looking.

“Shit,” Lucas said.

“You got that right.”

When one is watching the girl he thinks is his girlfriend whispering into the ear of her ex, he immediately imagines Russell Quitman suddenly yanking out the tubes from his neck, breaking free of his wheelchair, and lifting Ada Taylor off the ground in one quick swoop. He sees the Quit Man slowly plant a huge movie-star kiss on her lips and then put her down, laughing. His face goes from normal to zombie and back and forth. And behind them all the people cheer and clap and suddenly their faces too begin to shift and contort: Some drool, some develop
sores, some hang their mouths open and begin to slide toward the laughing couple. And the boy with no brother stands alone in the center of the city gazebo, an army of zombies approaching. He turns to what he thinks is Lucas Cader to find none other than the Lazarus woodpecker seemingly floating beside him. He touches it to see if it’s real and it bites his hand. Now bleeding, he watches the zombies move faster, Russell and Ada leading the pack. She, too, is now one of them, and in desperation, he looks over at the bird and whispers, “Can you find my brother?”

“It just looked like any other woodpecker to me,” I said to my mom that evening in the kitchen.

“Yeah, but was it, like, huge?” she asked, stretching out her hands.

“It was big, but no big deal. I don’t think, anyway.”

“Lucas, what did you think?” she asked, dismissing my opinion.

“I thought it looked pretty amazing. It was a pretty good shot, too, right in the sky in between two trees, flying there like it had no clue it’s the biggest mystery in Arkansas,” he said excitedly.

“Dork,” I said to him, kicking him under the table.

“Cullen, just because you think it’s stupid doesn’t mean we all have to,” my mom said.

“I just think everyone’s making a big deal out of something meaningless, that’s all,” I responded.

“It never hurts anyone to think life gives you second chances. God knows we need more of that around here lately,” my mom
said, tossing her dishrag onto the counter and walking out of the room.

Because Lucas had to go run some errands for his mom, I went out back and sat on the swing set that my dad had a friend weld together for us when I was six or so. It faced nothing but an open, grassy yard and a line of trees that began miles of woods filled with things making noises that used to keep me up all night. I began to whistle the song that Gabriel had jotted down on the folded piece of paper. I was known back then and still am for my remarkable ability to whistle any song I’d ever heard. I used to dream, when I was thirteen or so, that I’d hear about some national whistling contest and get to fly out to L.A. or something and win millions of dollars and be on the covers of magazines and have a trophy named after me.

As I sat there, I heard the
tap tap tap
of the Dumases’ screen door and heard someone walking around the side of the house. I looked over to see John Barling, a cigarette in his mouth and a phone to his ear. He was standing near the back corner of the Dumas house when he began to shout into the phone.

“Damn it, Kathy, let me talk to my girls!”

He said something else that I couldn’t make out before throwing the phone hard onto the ground and leaning his entire body against the side of the house. He stayed like this for a moment and then turned around and, crouching, began to reassemble the phone, whose battery had flown out. He looked up to see me swinging there. I did not try to hide the fact that I’d eavesdropped or that I was still watching his every move. He popped the battery back into the phone, flicked his cigarette to one side,
and stood up. He began to walk toward me, his face emotionless.

“You mind?” he asked, pointing to the swing next to me.

“Go ahead,” I said, unable to think of anything better.

He sat down on the swing and tightly grasped the chains on either side of him. He did one quick push and was then rocking back and forth. I was barely moving. He slowed down after a while, putting his feet down onto the ground again, and scratched the back of his head.

“My wife won’t let me talk to my kids,” he said.

“Oh,” I replied.

“She says they don’t wanna talk to me, but that just doesn’t compute.”

“How old are they?” I asked.

“Valerie’s seven and Susanna’s about to turn three,” he said.

“How long’s it been since you’ve seen ’em?” I asked.

“Too long. I try not to think about it too much. I’m a shitty father.”

“Oh.” This is what I say when I’m uncomfortable.

“Ya know, Cullen,” he began, “your mind has a way of not letting you forget things you wish you could. Especially with people. Like, you’ll always try your best to forget things that people say to you or about you, but you always remember. And you’ll try to forget things you’ve seen that no one should see, but you just can’t do it. And when you try to forget someone’s face, you can’t get it out of your head.”