The Home for Wayward Clocks (11 page)

James nodded. “The bird doesn’t actually make the noise. It’s just part of the mechanism. The voice is inside the clock.”

“I never knew that!” She shrugged. “I thought the cuckoo bird… you know.”

You thought the cuckoo bird was alive, James said to himself. Individually alive, as if the clock was just a house around it and only the bird made it work. Everyone thought that. But the cuckoo bird was just a part of the cuckoo clock, a part of the whole. Like your tongue or your eye or your knee. A part of your mechanism.

She followed James down to his workshop where he set the clock gently on the bench and began rummaging around the skeleton boxes for perchless cuckoo birds. “So what happened to this clock?” James asked. “Where’s the bird? It would be best if we could put the original back.”

“I don’t know.” She sighed and put her hands on her hips. “My son went nuts the other night. He had a date with a girl and you know how boys get before a date.” She waggled her eyebrows.

James didn’t date until after he was an adult and then he only dated one woman, Diana, whom he met at the beginning of the town’s rejuvenation. He remembered the first time they went out, just for lemonade and hot dogs at the park. He wasn’t ever sure what made him go with Diana that day, a woman whose name he didn’t know yet, a stranger in town. She just looked at him and didn’t look away. James kept glancing up from his place in line at the hot dog stand and there she was, her eyes flat on his. The Home had been open for only about a month at that time and it was still a rare treat for James to eat out. It felt like a celebration, being able to afford a hot dog and fries and now a girl was looking at him too. He checked his fly, made sure it was closed. He reached the vendor first, but she stepped beside him and said, “He’ll order for the both of us.” So he swallowed and splurged and ordered four Chicago-style dogs and cheese-covered fries and two large lemonades and then he followed her to a bench under a tree.

That morning with the cuckoo woman in his basement, as he dug through boxes of homeless cuckoo birds, James remembered the flutter-heart feeling and sweaty palms as Diana’s hips swayed in front of him, her hair curling like beckoning fingers. “You know how boys get before a date,” the cuckoo bird woman said and James put her words and his memory together and thought, Oh, that.

“Then, right before it was time for him to pick her up, she calls him. And she ditches him. Says she got a better offer. A better offer!” The woman paced around the room, looking on the shelves and into corners. “There is no better offer than my boy, my Ty.”

“Your boy, Mai tai?” James said.

She nodded and her eyes went out of focus. “Ty. Tyler. He’s mine, my Ty. I named him after my first boyfriend, in the fourth grade, imagine! Tyler Ostman.” She blinked. “Anyway, he gets mad and he slams the phone down just as my cuckoo goes off. So he turns and grabs the bird, rips it off its perch, and throws it through the window.” She stopped and touched James’ window, as if checking to make sure it was in one piece. “I mean, through the window, a little bird like that! There’s glass everywhere, inside and out. Then he locks himself in his room and doesn’t come out for the rest of the weekend. Though he ate the food I left on a tray.” She stopped and smiled.

James looked at the clock. Other than the missing bird, there wasn’t a scratch on it. It seemed well-maintained. “Did the clock land on something soft?”

She looked at him, her eyes sort of glazed. “What?”

“When he ripped the bird out, the clock must have fallen off the wall from the force. What did it land on?”

“Oh.” She waved a hand. “It didn’t fall. My husband had it up there on an anchor. He anchors everything, even our crucifix. That clock wasn’t going anywhere. It was a real bitch to get it down.”

Every bird James found was either too small or too big. He scooped them up, admired the colors, red and blue and yellow, and the realistic ones too, their feathers a mottled brown. “And you never found the cuckoo?”

“Nope, and I looked everywhere. It disappeared in the snow. I even shoveled.” She leaned briefly against the window and for a moment, James saw the tired slope of her shoulders, the sag in her face.

James wondered what it must be like to raise a boy. Especially a boy who gets hurt by girls. Especially a boy who takes it out on a poor cuckoo bird. James wondered if it was harder to raise a boy like that than a boy who rarely talked, who stayed quiet and out of the way, even when he wasn’t put in an out-of-the-way place. He thought of Ty locked away in his room, his own choice, and he wondered what Ty did that kept his mother from grabbing him and throwing him down the root cellar. James shook his head and looked at the clock again and tried to get the picture out of his mind of a shivering cold-blue cuckoo bird trapped in snow in the middle of a suburban lawn. Thrown there by a boy whose mother still brought him dinner on a tray and worried if he ate. “Well, if I can find the right size bird, I should be able to fix it for you,” James said. “Or maybe the real bird will show up with the thaw.”

She straightened. “Actually, I don’t want the clock back. I just thought, well, you like clocks. Maybe you could fix it and find a home for it.”

“You don’t want it?” Under his hands, James felt the clock gasp.

“No. It would just remind my boy about this girl. He feels just awful. I don’t like it when he feels bad.” She smiled directly at James then and he saw it. Her love for her son was plain, in the rise of her cheeks, the squint of her eyes. It was right there.

Just not on the right face and not for the right person and many, many years too late.

James patted the clock. “I’ll take care of it,” he said and Ty’s mother left.

This particular clock’s bird remained extinct. James went to antique malls and flea markets, estate sales and rummages, and even to other clock shops to look through their skeleton boxes. He brought home entire flocks of bright little wooden birds. But none of them fit just right.

James finally chose a bird that was just a little too big. Too small, and the clock’s door wouldn’t open. It needed the momentum of the beak to flip it outward. The chosen bird, a plain but glorious yellow, willingly threw himself at the door and thwacked it the correct number of times. But the noise was painful to hear and it always reminded James of a boy and his mother and a bird thrown through a window.

That morning, when the bird stopped thwacking, James patted the clock gently and then continued to the front door. On his porch, he found a girl reading his newspaper. She sat on the top step and looked at James openly; no sign of guilt at being caught.

James recognized her right away. She was part of a gaggle of teens that hung around downtown until all hours of the night. Sometimes they were there during the day as well, ducking behind buildings if someone from the schools or a police officer drove by. James always crossed the street to avoid them. Unfortunately, avoidance wasn’t enough to keep from hearing their jibes and seeing their sneers. Their laughter always followed him home.

There was one taunt in particular. They liked to yell, “Clockkeeper! Clock-keeper! Too bad you’re not a cock-keeper!” And then they laughed that laugh.

James never knew just what that was supposed to mean. Were they saying he wasn’t a man, that he didn’t have a penis? Once, James heard one of them say, “Or maybe he is a cock-keeper. Maybe he keeps lots of cocks.” And then it seemed like they thought he was homosexual. But it never made sense to him, and he never understood the gusto and hilarity behind the shouted verse.

Their laughter invaded James’ sleep sometimes, the taunting tone of it, echoing back to all the laughter he ever heard. That sound, that clear-as-a-bell you’ll-never-fit-in sound.

Bad enough to hear it in the streets. Worse still to hear it at night, in voices that he could never forget.

So now James stared at this girl and she looked back at him. Then she smiled, showing the most even set of square teeth he ever saw. Folding the paper neatly, she handed it to him. “I like the comics,” she said. “My folks don’t get the paper.”

“Well, from now on, go buy your own,” James said and turned to walk in the house. All he wanted was his newspaper and a cup of coffee. He liked the comics too.
Mary Worth
was his favorite. But then something glinted on the girl’s lap. James looked a little closer, the thought coming unbidden that maybe she had a knife. Maybe she was going to rob him. He knew from reading the front page that teenagers were like that.

But it was a clock. From the way the sun reflected on it, James knew it was either brass or brass-plated. He tucked the newspaper under his arm and waited.

The girl looked at her lap. “My alarm clock broke,” she said slowly. She fell silent, then she just lifted it toward him. Its face was steel gray and mute. He began to reach out, to pick it up.

But then the clock-keeper cock-keeper rhyme came into his head again and he pulled his hands back like they’d been burned. “I guess you’ll have to get a new one,” he said and turned to leave. From the open front door, he could smell the coffee. He had day-old crullers too, just sitting there at his place at the table, waiting.

“But I don’t want a new clock.” There was real misery in her voice, enough to make James stop. “Can’t you fix it? You’re the clock-keeper.”

“That’s what you tell me, every time I walk into town,” he said, not turning. He waited, and then he heard her sigh. It wasn’t an exasperated sound, it was softer. She sounded sad. But she also sounded trapped.

“I’m real sorry,” she said.

James wanted to tell her that this went beyond sorry. He wanted to tell her that sorry wasn’t enough. And he wanted to just walk away, to leave her with her broken clock. But before he could speak, she started talking again. Her voice was just above a whisper and it felt like she was telling James a secret.

“This clock’s gotten me up pretty much every day of my life. My mom says someone gave it to me on the day I was born, but she doesn’t remember who.” She stopped for a second, then her voice dropped even lower. “I don’t think my mom even remembers me sometimes.” James looked back at her as she picked the clock up, then held it out again, its legs balanced neatly on her two palms. “Anyway, the last two mornings, it didn’t go off. I…well, I miss it.”

James nodded and picked up the clock. It was a Baby Ben, a tiny version of the classic round-faced wind-up alarm clock. The alarm clock that was James’ first friend, that shared the space with him inside a cardboard box in the root cellar, was a larger version, a Big Ben. James knew he would miss it if it ever stopped. The Ben line had a loud clanging alarm that used to wake up millions every day, before clock radios began zapping people to consciousness with rock music.

He held the girl’s little clock to his ear and heard its steady ticking. The hands were on the correct time. “It’s just the alarm that won’t work?”

The girl nodded.

“And it’s always worked before. For how long? Fourteen years? Fifteen?”

She smiled, but just barely. “I’m fifteen,” she said. “Sixteen in December.”

James thought again about turning her down. About handing the clock back and going inside without another word. This girl needed him to fix her clock and he didn’t care for her at all. But the clock was heavy in his hands and it needed him too and he did care about that. It wouldn’t be happy unless it was doing its job, even if its job was to wake this girl up in time to skip out of school. “Walk around back,” James said. “That’s where the entrance is to the repair shop.” He saw fear in her face as he carried the clock inside and closed the door. The clock’s tick seemed to slow for a second, but then it picked up again.

James looked longingly for a moment at his breakfast and he took a deep sniff of the coffee. It would all have to wait. Food and drink weren’t allowed in his workshop where crumbs could gum up a mechanism and a spill could be disastrous. He shook his head at the little clock as they headed down the stairs. “You could do better, you know,” James said. “You could do so much better. She’ll probably just throw you through a window someday. Teenagers do that. If something makes them mad.”

James’ basement was exposed to the back yard, so there was an outdoor entrance. The girl was already standing there, her face pressed against the window. James waved at her, then unlocked the door. She practically fell in.

“I thought —” she said breathlessly. “I thought —”

“That I was going to steal your clock?” James set it carefully on the worktable.

“Yeah. ‘Cause you were mad.”

He shook his head. “I don’t steal clocks. Not ever. I buy them, they’re given to me, but not one clock in this house is stolen.” Except for his mother’s anniversary clock. He did take that from her dressing table. But his mother knew about it and never took it back, so James figured it didn’t really count. His mother was dead anyway.

“There’s lots of clocks here, huh?” She pulled up a stool, sat close to James. Close to her clock.

He glanced at her. “There’s a few. You’ve never been in here?” He knew she never set foot in here as a teen, but he thought maybe, as a little girl, her parents came for a tour.

“Nope. My folks say it’s like living in Paris and never seeing the Eiffel Tower. You never see the neat stuff in your own town.”

James liked having the Home compared to the Eiffel Tower. He flipped the clock over on its face and pried open the back. The girl leaned closer, looking over his elbow. “You said it’s just the alarm that’s not working, right?”

She nodded. Her shoulders were tense, hunched up close to her ears.

James saw the problem right away. Two springs were broken, keeping the timing mechanism from figuring out the correct time to make the clock go off. Confused, the little clock just decided to stay silent. It was like it had a couple broken blood vessels in its brain and couldn’t think quite right. That could be fixed. Just had to reconnect the arteries. “So, do you have a name?” James asked as he went in search of some replacement springs.

“Cooley,” she said.

He stopped to look at her. “I never heard that name before.”