Wolf Whistle (23 page)

Uncle said, “That's right.”

Alice whispered in a loud, educational voice: “Can anyone tell me who was in the truck?”

A thumbsucker took his hand out of his mouth and said, “I own know.”

Alice whispered, “Keep watching.”

The prosecutor said, “What happened next?”

Uncle said, “The man in the car hit Bobo in the face with his fist. They was talking, I couldn't hear what they was talking about.”

The prosecutor said, “But you could see, couldn't you? You could clearly see what was happening?”

Alice whispered, “Anybody else want to guess?”

A little girl with John the Conqueroo, a voodoo charm made of spices in a felt bag around her neck, said, “Mr. Dexter?”

Alice said, “Excellent! Yes, very good!”

Uncle said, “That's right.”

The prosecutor said, “How well could you see this happening? Wasn't it dark?”

Uncle said, “I could see. Light come on in the ceiling of the little car.”

The prosecutor said, “So you could see clearly the faces of both men who came to your house in that car that night?”

Uncle said, “That's right.”

The prosecutor said, “All right, then, Uncle, I want you to do something for me. I want you to tell me something.” He said, “Will you please tell this court whether your own life has been threatened since the day of these events?”

Uncle said, “Sho has.”

Alice leaned first one way and then the other, down the line of children. She said, “Is everybody understanding this?”

One child said, “The misuse of power is the root of all evil?”

Alice said, “Well—”

Another child said, “There is no justice on the earth?”

Alice said, “Well—”

Another child said, “We are all alone in the world?”

Alice said, “Well—”

Another child said, “The greatest depth of our loss is the beginning of true freedom?”

Alice said, “Well—”

Another child said, “The disposal of human waste is the responsibility of the brokenhearted?”

These were all phrases Alice had put on the chalkboard after other field trips. It occurred to Alice, hearing these phrases now, that she might have attempted to do too much with a class of fourth graders. She was willing to admit to some excesses.

Alice said, “Just listen.”

The prosecutor said, “How often would you say your life has been threatened since then?”

Uncle said, “Most every day, I spect.”

The prosecutor said, “Are you afraid to testify here today, Uncle?”

Uncle said, “Sho is.”

He said, “Are you afraid for your life?”

Uncle said, “That's right.”

He said, “And can you identify those white men who abducted your nephew that dark night?”

Uncle said, “That's right.”

Alice's eye fell once more upon her Uncle Runt, with the parrot in his lap.

The prosecutor said, “All right, one more thing before you do. Would you please tell the court whether you have ever pointed your finger in the face of a white man. Have you ever done such a thing before?”

The parrot seemed to have waked up. It shook its head in a delicate little way, and opened its eyes, and looked first one way and then the other.

Uncle looked like a little boy in the witness chair, he was so scared.

He said, “Naw-suh, never pointed my finger in a white man's face.”

Runt stroked the parrot's head with his finger.

The prosecutor said, “Well, then, right here in this courtroom full of white people who hate you just for being here—and some of them are carrying guns on them, right this minute—”

The New Orleans lawyer said, “Your honor, honestly!”

Judge Swinger said, “Just ask your question, Mr. Prosecutor.”

The prosecutor said, “Can you, for the court, please point out the man who entered your house and then pistol-whipped your nephew and pushed him out the door to the car?”

There was no warning at all for what happened next, none at all, the parrot's leaving Runt's lap and becoming airborne.

Solon Gregg only sat impassively at the defense table, in a chair pulled slightly away from the chairs of the better-dressed gentlemen for the defense, waiting to be pointed
at, and wondering how better to threaten with death the man being asked to point him out.

Auntee only wondered which direction the gunshot would come from.

And so the parrot rose up, without prelude or pretext or announcement.

Uncle was wearing clean overalls and a clean shirt. In this strange moment in his life, in which he was being asked for the first time ever to point into the face of a white man, he lifted his right arm as if it were a heavy weight.

The parrot ascended from Runt's lap as if by magic, straight up into the air, the atmosphere, the great interior above-water sea of humidity and disappointed lives. Up and up and up, high up into the high-ceilinged room of the courthouse, as if the room were the wide, endless, hopeful, and magical canopy of the African sky.

Later, trying to recall the details of the parrot's takeoff, Runt would say that he did not even remember the bird's fine claws, strong as a bobcat, releasing from the fabric of his gabardine pants. He would say that he did not remember at all the brush of wing feathers against his face, as there must have been when the bird gathered up enough air beneath its wings to lift off, as if the first several feet of the parrot's upward flight had nothing at all to do with aerodynamics or hollow, pneumatic bones, or wingspan, or
wing-shape, or muscle and sinew and hot blood, or anything at all that could launch so heavy and earth-bound and satisfied and silent a creature as this feathered beast, not even a good strong jump or push-off.

One second the parrot was sitting there, content as a well-fed cat, actually purring, and the next, in the tropical humidity and other-worldly heat of this room with the same climate as an Amazon rainforest, it was rising in a straight line as if through liquid, like a porpoise torpedoing its way upward through blue bubbles from the sandy floor of the Gulf of Mexico into another atmosphere, another world, new life.

Perhaps only Uncle, preoccupied with grief and the probable imminence of his own sudden death, failed to notice the wild and magical ascent of the African parrot, generations closer to their shared homeland than Uncle himself, brother to bright plumage and courageous heart. He was lifting his weighted arm, the hand, on the end of it, which would do the pointing, like an anvil.

All other eyes were on the bird, Alice's eyes among them, the children's eyes, the Judge, who was pounding his gavel, “Order, order!” Solon Gregg, the murderer who knew nothing of magic or of metaphor, the great, green bird, with white feet and a red tail, that now, without apparently a single wingbeat, had attained the fullest height of the courtroom, above the great windows, and had begun in
earnest to fly, and now at last using its wings, and feathers, and all the other instruments of natural and normal flight.

The parrot was large and it flew, as it must, with deep strokes, but now it flew, or seemed to, anyway, as if it were far, far larger than its actual size. It flew with enormity and ponderousness and sadness and strength, it flew with the deep, slow wingstrokes of a condor, an albatross, oh deep, deep, deep the piston plunges of those sad wings, long the distances that each stroke took the bright bird along its circular course around the courtroom.

High up in the balcony, Alice and her wide-eyed children and the embankment of dark faces saw the parrot best, the strange shape, the layers of feathers, close up, the amazed eyes, the massive open beak and prehensile tongue, the dear, white, and yoke-toed feet, the green plumage and red tail, the underwater quality of its slow-motion flight.

Alice did not travel in this magic moment, as the ebony-colored women and men around her may have done, to dark Africa, Kilimanjaro, and the Ivory Coast, and sorcerers dancing with poison cobras to ensure rainfall, as birds and monkeys chattered and jabbered from the jungle trees.

Alice traveled to her childhood in the swamp, in winter, at night, before her father died, where always, though it was Mississippi, there seemed to Alice to be snow, and always gray footprints, and smoke from the crumbling chimneys of the Negroes' cabins and a song of trains and
farm dogs through the still, cold air and the black pine trees, and her father's face a bright mask in the light of the big moon.

These were the days when her father took her owling, when she stood beside his leg and he lifted his mittens to his mouth and called, “Whoo, whoo,” and sometimes an echo threaded its way back through the trees, and the echo, her father told her, was the voice of the Great Horned Owl, answering—these were her father's words—“blood with hot blood.”

The parrot kept on flying, in its wide circle around the courtroom, and Alice remembered a time when her father had told her, “Call him,” meaning the owl, and she had said, “Me?” and he said, “Nobody else,” and little Alice, when she was that child in the wilderness with the only man she had ever really loved, put her own hands up, no mittens, and from her throat released into the moony fragrance of the Mississippi darkness and a hunter's moon, a voice she had not known was inside her, a sound of
Whoo, whoo
, which for the first time in all these years came back to her now like a spirit, like justice and freedom, and she had said to her father in that moment, “My breath warmed my hands just now,” and her father had said, “You got to make your own heat, sweetness, always, always.”

The great exotic bird, the parrot, went on flying, once around the courtroom, twice around the courtroom, faces
turned, necks craning to see. Alice heard the bird in near-silent, buoyant flight. It hissed like a cat. It clicked with its bill. Its pneumatic bones creaked with strange joy.

Alice thought of the owl that she called up that night, the voice, the deep boom and monotone of its need. She thought of the cypress trees, like great silver candlesticks in an enchanted wood. She thought of the swamp water, white as a snowfield, though there was no snow, of course, not even in winter. She thought of the rising mist, like the liquid air of this courtroom, and the silence and impossible solitude.

Solon Gregg sat in his chair, in the steaming intensity of hatred and body odor and old fear, and with a blast of hatred and ancient rage at his father for his sister's rape and for everything else he ever lost or feared, with the glare he directed towards the old colored man up on the witness stand, he dared Uncle to point a finger at him.

Alice watched the parrot make its third, its final circle around the courtroom, hopeless beast, world-weary bird. She thought of Jeeter Skeeter, the little Indian boy who could sometimes not speak to Alice at the end of a day, or even look at her, but could only walk around and around her chair, where she sat, as if to weave some magic spell of gratitude and love, or maybe of disbelief that good things are real.

She thought of Dr. Dust, and of Kubla Khan. She called
out loud to the parrot from her balcony roost: “Weave a circle round him thrice, for he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise,” and even as she chanted this magic charm, she knew it did not apply to the murderer around whom the circle was woven, unless all magic was black to the core and there was no difference between murder and the poetry of owling with your father, and this she could not accept.

The children in the front row of the balcony called out after her, in unison: “Weave a circle round him thrice!” It was their favorite poem. Don't leave us, Alice, don't ever leave us in our narrow coffin of a world without you! “And drunk the milk of Paradise!” they called out to the bird.

The parrot set its wings and began its incredible descent. Down and down, through the liquid atmosphere, the parrot dropped, wingfeathers like a green umbrella, a canopy, a tent so large, so vast, so green that it cast a green shade upon everyone seated in the room, especially Alice and the children, whose lives it changed forever, repaired all damage, and proved the magic of sudden and eternal transformations of the spirit.

To the children the bird was Alice, all in green, their love riding. To Alice the bird was the dead boy. It was Bobo—the magic of good and evil, both.

The parrot landed on Solon Gregg's head. It dug its fine yoke-toed claws into his fire-scarred scalp. For one second
it swayed like an eagle on a mountain crag, whipped by strong winds, and then it steadied itself and was firm there.

It shit down Solon's back, great farting blobs of liquid white bird dooky.
White!
it seemed to say,
White, white, white!
It opened its beak as if it had forgotten that it knew no words, and so did not speak, though there was noise that issued forth, more human than animal, before it rang once with its cash register voice,
ching-ching!
and then spoke no more.

With the parrot still standing upon his head, Solon Gregg stood up from his chair and leaned forward upon the table in front of him as though he had no idea that the bird was in the courtroom, let alone upon his own head. The bird was like a strange turban on his head, its big red tail was like a cape down his neck and back.

The scream of villainy and old rage that Solon released from his troubled and violent guts spewed forth from him like spontaneous fires from deep in the Gehenna bowel-pits of the Arrow Catcher garbage dump, flames leaping out, unexpected and dangerous, into peaceful air.

He screamed, “You better not point your nigger mother-fucking finger at me, you nigger motherfucker nigger motherfucker motherfucker motherfucker motherfucker! Oh Christ, you goddamn nigger, you better not!”

Judge Swinger pounded his gavel many times.

He said, “Order, order!”

Uncle's arm was no longer heavy, his hand was light as air, lighter, a peaceful, small, floating balloon.