Quite a Year for Plums (6 page)

“Look, Jim Wade,” said Andy, “there's a fan.” It sat on a shelf over the kitchen door between a butter churn and a kerosene lantern—a twelve-inch General Electric desk fan with four brass blades and
an all-brass guard. For just a minute Jim Wade stared without moving. Then he put his hands on his knees and blew out a little puff of air. He got up, walked over to the doorway, and stood, looking up at the fan, his hands clasped behind his back. The waitress set three glasses of iced tea on the table, pulled out her pad, and licked her pencil. Then she looked over at Jim Wade and sighed. “Is he gon’ eat?” she asked.

With a slow, studied saunter Jim Wade made his way back to the table. He settled himself gently into his chair and lounged back. He picked up the menu and flicked it casually aside. His fingers were trembling. The waitress eyed him suspiciously, took a step back, and asked, “What do you want to eat?”

Jim Wade stretched out his legs and let out a long breath. “How much for that fan?” he asked.

“Oh,” said the waitress with relief. “This stuff ain't for sale. It's the decor.”

“Decor!” said Jim Wade, and he shoved himself up out of his chair with both hands. The dish of pickles slid to the edge of the table. “Decor! Woman, that is a 1914 GE 940566 with a collar oscillator!”

The waitress thrust her pencil behind her ear and snapped her pad against the palm of her hand. “Don't you get rough with me, mister,” she said. “You got a problem with the decor, you talk to Mr. Loomis out at the pit.”

“No sir, that stuff ain't for sale,” said Mr. Loomis. Smoke and flames shot up as he swabbed grease off
slabs of meat with a mop. “That's the atmosphere, the country charm.”

“Country charm!” wailed Jim Wade, staggering around the piles of firewood. “Atmosphere!” He picked up a piece of hickory wood and threw it back down. “Man, GE only made that collar oscillator one year—1914!” A thick-shouldered red bulldog crouching under a pickup truck watched warily with squinny eyes as Mr. Loomis dragged a pork shoulder from a Styrofoam cooler and hurled it onto the grill.

“Jim Wade,” said Ethel.

With a practiced swing and a smooth toss Mr. Loomis fed another piece of wood to the fire. He reached in with a poker and shifted things around, settling the new wood in among the coals.

“It ain't for sale,” he said.

“How about a trade then?” said Jim Wade. “I've got a fan with me right now, a twelve-inch GE, 1922, open S-guard, steel blades, to the untrained eye indistinguishable from the 940566—slip yours out, slip mine in. Your customers would never notice.”

Mr. Loomis's eyes were red from the smoke. His short blue T-shirt was stuck to his back in dark blue splotches. His forearms were streaked with black, and his face glistened with soot and sweat.

“Jim Wade,” said Andy.

“I'll pay the difference!” said Jim Wade.

Mr. Loomis slowly straightened up and turned to Jim Wade, balancing the poker lightly in one hand. He took a step away from the pit.

“Mister,” he said, and just then the dog, in a slink
ing crouch, shot out from under the truck and snatched at a side of ribs. Without looking around, Mr. Loomis picked up a chunk of firewood and threw it with a neat, snapping toss. It hit the dog hard, square on the side of the head, and knocked him flat. He lay on his side among the pieces of firewood, without making a sound, his feet twitching. “It ain't for sale,” Mr. Loomis said.

Back in the restaurant Jim Wade sat as tight as a knot, his back to the fan, chewing up cinnamon-flavored toothpicks and staring out the window at the sun setting on the plywood pigs. Ethel ate a pickle, but no one touched the ribs and coleslaw. From a back booth the surly waitress glared at them with a cigarette clamped between her lips. Andy kept staring at the pigs on the bathroom doors. One of the pigs had long eyelashes and was wearing a dress with pink polka dots and a bow; on the other door a stern-faced pig dressed in blue overalls was holding a pitchfork.

“Heat makes people mean,” said Andy.

The window was higher than he expected. When he had unlocked it from inside the bathroom, the sill had only come up to his waist, but from out here on the ground it was over his head. He had to make a rickety tower of pigs to reach it, and he scuffed up his knees and scraped his elbows scrambling in. Inside, it was dark. The air-conditioning had been turned off and the air was heavy with the smell of cigarettes, vinegar, Pine Sol, and smoked meat. Two phrases
kept going through his head, and he chanted them under his breath—“Fans acquired through death” and “It ain't for sale.”

In the morning it was drizzling rain. It felt almost cold. Ethel stood at the window of the motel room and looked out at the herd of plywood pigs hovering above the mud in the rain with their cheerful painted-on faces and their silly clothes. “I don't care if I never see another jigsawed pig as long as I live,” she said. Andy stood on the sidewalk, watching the diners with their umbrellas and raincoats scurrying in and out of the Kountry Kitchen Restaurant. And Jim Wade stood in the rain at the back door of his van, holding on to the edge of the roof with both hands and staring in at the brass blades of the General Electric 940566.

No one felt like eating breakfast at the Kountry Kitchen and they got home before noon. “Beans, corn, tomatoes, and pickles,” said Eula, but Jim Wade said he didn't think he'd better stay for lunch. Andy sat down on the floor and gathered as much of the dog as would fit into his lap and hugged him and hugged him, crooning, “Good dog, good dog,” while Ethel told the story of the man and his barbecue and his bulldog and his 1914 GE fan with the rare oscillator.

“I know that like to killed Jim Wade,” said Tom, “not getting that fan. No wonder he didn't want to talk about it.”

“Good dog,” said Andy. “Good dog.”

“That fan sitting on a shelf, just for looks, not
doing anybody any good” said Tom. “You know, if it had been me, I'd of stole that fan.”

Then from out on the porch Ethel called, “Mossy pots!” and sure enough, on the moldy sides of the pots they could see little tendrils of green twining through the black scum.

P
rothonotary,” said Roger, peering through the binoculars.

“Eeenh,” she said. It was a sound she made, indicating uncertainty or polite disagreement. In the three hours they had been together on this bird-watching expedition, she had made that sound twice. Roger was uneasy. He handed her the binoculars.

“Pine warbler,” she said. Marsh birds were her specialty, but because of the nature of her art she would be uncomfortable with a misidentified warbler. She did not know that Roger was in love with her, that he had been smitten ever since the day she had left a Hamilton Beach electric blender at the dump. She did not know that he had spent hours studying her paintings at the gallery downtown, admiring the sunlight on the black water, the glistening lily pads, the birds visible only in glimpses, almost hidden in reeds and grasses. She did not know how very much he admired the spare, straightforward
titles she gave her pictures—
Nesting Coot, Common Gallinules, Pied-billed Grebe and Young.
She did not know that he had been stalking her in a civilized way for weeks, working up from the startling “Have a nice day” at an accidental meeting at the Dumpster to this bird-watching expedition in a wildlife refuge on a barrier island off the coast. She did not know that simply reading Peterson's description of her birds, family Rallidae, “… rather hen-shaped marsh birds of secretive habits and mysterious voices,” made him weak and shaky.

So it had not been easy for Roger, standing in the litter of the dump on that summer day a week ago, a swarm of sulfur butterflies congregating on a puddle of drool from the Dumpster and a spent “easy glide” tampon applicator at his heel, it had not been easy for him to draw a breath and say, “Have you ever seen the marsh birds in Little Tired Slough out on Cathead Island? Because of my plant work I have a permit, and I could take you there.”

And yet how easy it had been for her to heft her bag of garbage up over the lip of the Dumpster and turn to him as the swarm of sulfur butterflies rose up and surrounded her in a winkling yellow column, how very easy it had been for her to lift her hands, palms up into the butterflies, smile, and say, “Might we see rails there?”

On the ferry to Cathead Island they had sat side by side between canvas bags and ice chests, listening to a lively, talkative woman describe with animated
gestures a study she was conducting on the life cycle of the oyster. Roger couldn't stop watching her dry-looking, rather gray tongue, which wagged restlessly back and forth in her open mouth during pauses as if it were feeling around for the next phrase. Delia sat very still, her hands cupped in her lap. Every now and then, with a practiced sweep she would lift her binoculars to her eyes, follow a gliding bird for a minute, then lower the binoculars and curl her hands back in her lap. Nothing but pelicans and gulls. What have I done, Roger thought, and then she leaned over to him and whispered, “Like the tongue of a bored parrot.” Roger longed to hug her, but he could only close his eyes and nod emphatically.

Since that shining moment, however, he had misidentified a warbler, and in their three hours of walking along the little sandy trails through the marshes and scrub, they had seen nothing more exciting than a kingfisher, an osprey, an anhinga, and some herons. She kept poking things at the edge of the marsh and making minute examinations of bits of dung.

“Otter,” she said, delicately picking around in it with two sticks. Roger stood and looked out toward the gulf, thinking of the birds he would will to this marsh for her: the big pink and green waders—a pair of roseate spoonbills with blood-red drips on their shoulders, American flamingos, a flock of scarlet ibises blown north of their range by a hurricane. Then a scattering of little jewel-like birds—painted buntings, golden-crowned kinglets, blue grosbeaks.
and vermilion flycatchers. She put down the two sticks and stood up.

“They've been eating fiddler crabs,” she said.

In the midafternoon they sat down to rest on a plank bridge at the marshy edge of a little pine woods. The trees had been turpentined in the 1920s, and they were stunted and brushy-topped, with old chevron-shaped scars making something like faces on their trunks. The hot sun brought out the droughty, sharp smells of a forest that has lived a hard life—oozing pine sap, baking lichens, and dry sand. From the woods they could hear the raucous laughter of pileated woodpeckers, and from the marsh the herons gave out their hoarse croaks. Roger watched her feet dangling over the black water of Little Tired Creek in their battered tan boots and remembered Peterson's picture of a coot's foot, in the corner of a page, elegantly enclosed in a circle, the ankle relaxed, the toes swagging gracefully. “Lobed foot of Coot,” the caption read.

Then she said, “Feet!” and she pointed. “There's a snowy egret; I have nightmares about those yellow feet,” she said urgently, handing Roger the binoculars. Sure enough, at the end of the bird's gleaming black legs were a pair of startling yellow feet.

“You have nightmares about the feet of snowy egrets?” said Roger, lowering the binoculars. In an access of love, he began unpacking food and spreading it out on the bridge. Hard-boiled eggs, bread, cheese, pickles, Penrose sausages, jalapeno peppers, apples, and an alligator pear. “What do the feet do in
your dreams?” he asked. He started handing her bits of food, which she ate solemnly, still looking at the edge of the marsh.

“Usually they just stand there,” she said. “But sometimes one foot will pick up and begin to step. That's what makes it a nightmare instead of just a dream.” Then she recited, “ ‘When feeding, rushes about, shuffling feet to stir up food.’ That's what it says in Peterson's.” She looked at Roger with her steady and earnest gaze. “Just think about it, Roger.”

But for the rest of the afternoon all Roger could think about was how much he wanted to protect this peculiar and delicate woman from every harm, to keep her safe and well fed, and to rid her dreams forever of yellow, shuffling feet. The sun was dipping down below the tops of the trees as they headed back through the little woods to the ferry dock. She didn't talk, but now and then she would lift the binoculars to her eyes without breaking her stride and whisper the names of birds on an intake of breath: “Coot,” “Grebe,” “Sandpipers—Snowy, eeehn, no—” and she stopped. “Ha! immature little blue.” In the distance, across the last stretch of marsh, Roger could see the ferry dock. The water had turned from its midday aqua and indigo to a dark greasy gray. “I'll just take one last look,” she said, and she left the little sandy path and carefully stepped along a narrow trail through the marsh grass. She moved slowly, stopping and starting like a snake sneaking up on a rat. At the edge of a little inlet she squatted down and lifted the binoculars.
her elbows propped on her knees. On the other side of the water, a little dark shape rustled in the grass and was gone.

Delia straightened up wearily, like an old fighter might stretch at the end of a great fight. She straightened her legs with her hands on her knees, then she straightened her back, then she straightened her shoulders. She turned and made her careful way out of the marsh. “Whoo!” she said, and she smiled. She stood in front of Roger and put one hand on his chest, fingers spread, and looked at him at arm's length. “A black rail,” she said. “Number 397.”

The ride back to the mainland was peaceful. The parrot-tongued woman was quiet, wearied by her day's study of the lives of oysters, and Delia had the beatific look of a satisfied birder. The boat captain set the autopilot and sat down in an aluminum chair with his book. The engine droned.

Delia turned to Roger. “I enjoy chickens,” she said.

But Roger was not surprised. She didn't smile, and he didn't expect her to. She was a serious woman, with her mind on birds.

“Not White Leghorns, though,” she said.

“No,” said Roger slowly. “Certainly not White Leghorns.” He squinted thoughtfully. “I would think Golden Sebrights.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding emphatically. “And Silver-laced Wyandottes.”