Look at the Birdie (17 page)

“Them innocent looks about who I been talking to,” said Red.

“I honest to God don’t know, Red,” said Slim. “It’s so long since you been home, it’s kind of hard to figure out
who
you’d want to see
special.”

“So many people come and gone …So much water under the bridge … All your old friends growed up and settled down,” said the chorus.

Red grinned unpleasantly, to let them know they weren’t getting away with anything. “A girl,” said Red. “I been talking to a girl.”

“Oooooooooooh,” said Slim. He chuckled lecherously. “You old dog, you old sea dog. All of a sudden got a hankering for some of the old hometown stuff, eh?” His chuckle died as Red glared at him.

“Go on, enjoy yourself,” said Red angrily. “Play dumb. You got about five minutes more, till Eddie Scudder gets here.”

“Eddie, eh?” said Slim, helpless in the midst of the puzzle.

The chorus had fallen silent, their eyes straight ahead. Red had killed their welcome, and given them only fear and bewilderment in return.

Red pursed his lips prissily. “Can’t imagine what Red Mayo’d be wanting to see Eddie Scudder about,” he said in a falsetto. He was infuriated by the innocence all around him. “I really forgot what this village was like,” he said. “By God—everybody agrees to tell the same big lie; pretty soon, everybody believes it like it was the gospel truth.” He hit the counter with his fist. “My own folks, even!” he said. “My own flesh and blood—they never even said a word in their letters.”

Slim, deserted by the chorus, was now terribly alone with the surly redhead. “What lie?” he said shakily.

“What lie, what lie?” said Red in a parrot’s voice. “Polly wants a crack-er, Polly wants a crack-er! I guess I’ve seen just about everything in my travels, but I only seen one thing to come up to you guys.”

“What’s that, Red?” said Slim, who was now an automaton.

“There was this kind of South American snake, see?” said Red. “Liked to steal kids. It’d swipe a kid, and raise it just like it was a snake. Teach it to crawl and everything. And all the other snakes’d treat it just like it was a snake, too.”

In the silence, the chorus felt obliged to murmur. “Never heard of such a thing…A snake do that?…If that don’t take the cake.”

“We’ll ask Eddie about it when he gets here,” said Red. “He always was real good at animals and nature.” He hunched over, and stuffed his mouth with hamburger, indicating that the conversation was at an end. “Eddie’s late,” he said with a full mouth. “I hope he got my message.”

He thought about his messenger, and how he’d sent her. With his jaws working, his eyes down, he was soon reliving his day. In his mind, it was noon again.

And it seemed to Red at noon that he was steering the village from his steel and glass booth, six feet above the roadway, on a girder at one end of the bridge. Only the clouds and massive counterweights of the bridge were higher than Red was.

There was a quarter of an inch of play in the lever that controlled the bridge, and it was with this quarter of an inch that Red pretended, God-like, to steer the village. It was natural for him to think of himself and his surroundings as moving, of the water below as standing still. He had been a merchant sailor for nine years—a bridge tender for less than two days.

Hearing the noon howl of the fire horn, Red stopped his steering, and looked through his spyglass at Eddie Scudder’s oyster shack below. The shack was rickety and helpless-looking on pilings in the river mouth, connected to the salt
marsh shore by two springy planks. The river bottom around it was a twinkling white circle of oyster shells.

Eddie’s eight-year-old daughter, Nancy, came out of the shack, and bounced gently on the planks, her face lifted to the sunshine. And then she stopped bouncing, and became demure.

Red had taken the job for the opportunity it gave him to watch her. He knew what the demureness was. It was a prelude to a ceremony, the ceremony of Nancy’s combing her bright red hair.

Red’s fingers played along the spyglass as though it were a clarinet. “Hello, Red,” he whispered.

Nancy combed and combed and combed that cascade of red hair. Her eyes were closed, and each tug of the comb seemed to fill her with bittersweet ecstasy.

The combing left her languid. She walked through the salt meadow gravely, and climbed the steep bank to the road that crossed the bridge. Every day at noon, Nancy crossed the bridge to the lunchroom at the other end, to fetch a hot lunch for herself and her father.

Red smiled down at Nancy as she came.

Seeing the smile, she touched her hair.

“It’s still there,” said Red.

“What is?” said Nancy.

“Your hair, Red.”

“I told you yesterday,” she said, “my name isn’t Red. It’s Nancy.”

“How could anybody call you anything
but
Red?” said Red.

“That’s
your
name,” said Nancy.

“So I got a right to give it to you, if I want to,” said Red. “I don’t know anybody who’s got a better right.”

“I shouldn’t even be talking to you,” she said playfully, teasing him with propriety. There was no mistrust in her mind. Their meetings had a fairy-tale quality, with Red no ordinary stranger, but a genial sorcerer in charge of the wonderful bridge—a sorcerer who seemed to know more about the girl than she knew about herself.

“Didn’t I tell you I grew up in this village, just like you’re doing?” said Red. “Didn’t I tell you I went to high school with your mother and father? Don’t you believe that?”

“I believe it,” said Nancy. “Only Mother used to say little girls should be introduced to strangers. They shouldn’t just start talking to them.”

Red kept the needles of sarcasm out of his voice. “Quite an upstanding lady, wasn’t she?” he said. “Yup—
she
knew how good little boys and girls should act. Yessirreeee—good as gold, Violet was. Butter wouldn’t melt in
her
mouth.”

“Everybody says so,” said Nancy proudly. “Not just Daddy and me.”

“Daddy, eh?” said Red. He mimicked her. “‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy—Eddie Scudder is my great big Daddy.’” He cocked his head watchfully. “You didn’t tell him I was up here, did you?”

Nancy blushed at the accusation. “I wouldn’t break my word of honor.”

Red grinned and wagged his head. “Gee, he’ll really get a big boot out of it when I all of a sudden just kind of drop out of the sky, after all these years.”

“One of the last things Mother said before she died,”
said Nancy, “was that I should never break my word of honor.”

Red clucked piously. “Real serious girl, your mother,” he said. “Back when we got out of high school, the other girls wanted to play around a little before they settled down. But not Violet. Nosir. I made my first voyage back then—and when I come back a year later, she was all married and settled down with Eddie, and she’d had you. Course, you didn’t have any hair when I saw you that time.”

“I’ve got to go now, and get my daddy’s lunch,” said Nancy.

“‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’” said Red. “‘Got to do this for Daddy, got to do that for Daddy.’ Must be nice to have a pretty, smart daughter like you. ‘Daddy, Daddy.’ You ask your daddy about red hair, like I told you?”

“He said he guessed it usually ran in families,” said Nancy. “Only sometimes it pops up from nowhere, like it did with me.” Her hand went up to her hair.

“It’s still there,” said Red.

“What is?” said Nancy.

“Your
hair
, Red!” He guffawed. “I swear, if anything was to happen to that hair, you’d just dry up and blow away. Comes from nowhere, does it? That’s what Eddie said?” Red nodded judiciously.
“He’d
know. I expect Eddie’s done a lot of thinking about red hair in his time. Now, you take
my
family: if
I
was ever to have a kid that
wasn’t
redheaded,
that’d
start everybody to figuring and wondering. Been a redheaded family since the beginning of time.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Nancy.

“Gets more interesting, the more you think about it,” said
Red. “You and me and my old man are about the only redheads this village ever had, that
I
know of. Now that the old man’s gone, that just leaves two of us.”

Nancy remained serene. “Huh,” she said. “Bye, now.”

“Bye, Red.”

As she walked away, Red picked up his spyglass, and looked down at Eddie’s oyster shack. Through the window, he could see Eddie, blue-gray in the twilight interior, shucking oysters. Eddie was a small man, with a large head majestic in sorrow. It was the head of a young Job.

“Hi,” whispered Red. “Guess who’s home.”

When Nancy came back from the lunchroom with a warm, fat paper bag, Red stopped her again.

“Saaaaaay,” he said, “maybe you’ll grow up to be a nurse, after taking such good care of old Eddie. I wish there’d been nice nurses like you at the hospital I was at.”

Nancy’s face softened with pity. “You were in a hospital?”

“Three months, Red, in Liverpool, without a friend or a relative in this world to come see me, or even send me a get-well card.” He grew wistful. “Funny, Red—I never realized how lonely I was, till I had to lie down and stay down, till I knew I couldn’t ever go to sea again.” He licked his lips. “Changed me, Red, like
that.”
He snapped his fingers.

“All of a sudden, I needed a home,” he said, “and somebody to care about me, and keep me company—maybe in that little cottage out there on the point. I didn’t have nothing, Red, but mate’s papers that wasn’t worth the paper they were printed on for a man with one leg.”

Nancy was shocked. “You’ve only got one leg?”

“One day I was the crazy, tough kid they all remember down there,” said Red, including the village in a sweep of his hand. “The next day I was an old, old man.”

Nancy bit her knuckle, sharing his pain. “Haven’t you got a wife or a mother or a lady friend to look after you?” she said. By her stance, she offered her services as a daughter, as though it were a simple thing that any good girl would do.

Red hung his head. “Dead,” he said. “My mother’s dead, and the only girl I ever loved is dead. And the lady friends, Red—they’re never what you’d call
real
friendly, not if you can’t love
them
, not if you’re in love with a ghost.”

Nancy’s sweet face twisted as Red forced her to look at the grisliness of life. “Why do you live up the river, if you’re so lonesome?” she said. “Why don’t you live down here, where you’d be with your old friends?”

Red raised an eyebrow. “Old friends? Funny kind of friends to have, who wouldn’t even drop me a postcard to tell me Violet’s kid had bright red hair. Not even my folks told me.”

The wind freshened, and on the wind, from seemingly far away, came Nancy’s voice. “Daddy’s lunch is getting cold,” she said. She started to walk away.

“Red!”

She stopped, and her hand went up to her hair. She kept her back to him.

Red wished to God he could see her face. “Tell Eddie I want to talk to him, would you? Tell him to meet me in the lunchroom after I get off work—about ten after five.”

“I will,” she said. Her voice was clear, calm.

“Word of honor?”

“Word of honor,” she said. She started walking again.

“Red!”

Her hand went up to her hair, but she kept on walking.

Red followed her with his spyglass, but she knew she was being watched. She kept her head turned, so he couldn’t see her face. And seconds after she went into the oyster shack, a shade was drawn across the window that faced the bridge.

For the rest of the afternoon, the shack might as well have been empty for all the life Red could see. Only once, toward sunset, did Eddie come out. He didn’t so much as glance up at the bridge, and he kept
his
face hidden, too.

The screech from his own stool in the lunchroom brought Red back to the present. He blinked at the sunset, and saw the silhouette of Eddie Scudder crossing the bridge, big-headed and bandy-legged, carrying a small paper bag.

Red turned his back to the door, reached into a jacket pocket, and brought forth a packet of letters, which he set on the counter before him. He put his fingertips on them, like a cardplayer standing pat. “Here’s the man of the hour,” he said.

No one spoke.

Eddie came in without hesitation, with a formal greeting for everyone, Red last of all. His voice was surprisingly rich and deep. “Hello, Red,” he said. “Nancy said you wanted to see me.”

“That’s right,” said Red. “Nobody here can figure out what I’d have to say to you.”

“Nancy had a little trouble figuring it out, too,” said Eddie, without a trace of resentment.

“She finally got the drift?” said Red.

“She got it, about as well as an eight-year-old could,” said
Eddie. He sat down on the stool next to Red’s, and set his bag on the counter, next to the letters. He showed mild surprise at the handwriting of the letters, and made no effort to hide his surprise from Red. “Coffee, please, Slim,” he said.

“Maybe you’d rather have this private,” said Red. He was a little disconcerted by Eddie’s equanimity. He’d remembered Eddie as a homely clown.

“Makes no difference,” said Eddie. “It’s all before God, wherever we do it.”

The straightforward inclusion of God in the meeting was also unexpected by Red. In his daydreams in his hospital bed, the resounding lines had all been his—irrefutable lines dealing with man’s rights to the love of his own flesh and blood. Red felt the necessity of puffing himself up, of dramatizing his advantages in bulk and stature. “First of all,” he said importantly, “I wanna say I don’t care what the law has to say about this. This is bigger than that.”

“Good,” said Eddie. “Then we agree first of all. I’d hoped we would.”

“So’s we won’t be talking about two different things,” said Red, “lemme say right out that I’m the father of that kid—not you.”

Eddie stirred his coffee with a steady hand. “We’ll be talking about exactly the same thing,” he said.

Slim and the three others looked out the windows desperately.

Around and around and around went Eddie’s spoon in his coffee. “Go on,” he said happily.