Birds of Bad Omen

Category: Uncategorized

  • Settling Up

    He had a hard time with debt. It started when he was four or five and realized that he was accruing debts he could never repay. He believed his parents would hold the notes for the rest of his life. (He could imagine himself dying but not his parents.) Just tracking all the money they spent on his food, clothing, school supplies, sports equipment and fees, zoo admission, movie tickets, and the rest of it would’ve been impossible. He hated the control Dirk and Alice exerted over his life because he was poor and dependent. They told him when to go to bed and when to clean his room, and what could he do? He owed them. He came to understand that his parents schemed to make him subservient and keep him that way. It was a system. As he learned more about slavery and other economic injustices, he saw his parents as worse than the worst pawn shop owners and company town bosses.

    Despite the futility of his situation, he swore to them that he’d someday settle the debt. Dirk and Alice told him not to be crazy, that he didn’t owe them a thing, not a cent. They said that if it helped him, he could think of their expenditures as investments. He would take the enrichment they’d given him into adulthood, become a responsible man with a good job, and eventually take care of them in their old age. At other times, they said he could think about what they spent on him as charitable contributions, like the annually renewing contributions they gave to the public radio station. They also pointed out that there were tax advantages to having him as their child. But he wasn’t stupid, far from it. He saw right away that the investment thing was nothing more than a clever repackaging of the entanglements that set the constricted boundaries of his life. Same thing with thinking about his parents as his own private philanthropists. He was their ward, and he owed them in ways that were hard to understand — even though he hadn’t asked for any of it. And he knew that their earned income credit would never come close to what they were spending on him. His mind boiled.

    He gave them half of his allowance, which was itself a touchy subject because he couldn’t choose the chores for which he would be paid or negotiate the pay rate. Even at that, Dirk and Alice thwarted him by secretly putting the money into a savings account that they gave him access to when he turned 18.

    During his college years, one of his roommates told him late one night that someone who achieves a perfect credit score can kill people with no legal ramifications. They got a special dispensation from the government. He immediately fell in love with the idea and set about organizing his life to achieve a score of 850 as soon as he could.

    But that required him to take on and maintain debts of various kinds and sizes — because you couldn’t handle debt perfectly without actually taking it in your hands. So he overrode the part of him that despised debt. Within a few years of graduating with a degree in computer engineering, he owned a car, a house, and boat, and he was routinely paying off and building balances on eight credit cards, always careful to keep his overall usage rate under ten percent. Once he had this system of credits and debits down, it was only a matter of repetition. But as his score approached 850, his progress slowed dramatically. It was down to time. The credit-rating agencies had to decide at which point he’d responsibly handled credit long enough. They decided on a little more than five years.

    On the morning he checked Credit Karma and found that he’d finally attained a perfect score, he called his boss to say he was taking a personal day and pulled a box that contained a Glock and bullets from under his bed. He’d bought the gun with cash from his first real-job paycheck after college.

    He parked up the street from his parents’ house and hid in the tall bushes next to the driveway. When his father came home for lunch, he followed him into the kitchen where his mother was waiting. He shot them both in the centers of their foreheads. He was an excellent shot. He’d gone target shooting hundreds of times.

    An hour later, a small crowd of neighbors watched from the end of the driveway as he casually pulled up his credit score on his phone and showed it to the two officers standing in front of him. They frowned and slowly shook their heads — not because there was no such dispensation, but because it was never intended for people like him.

  • Accident Scene

    Cristina and I were going to Burger Boy on North St. Mary’s Street to pick up dinner. It was dark and I was driving. I’d taken the exit from Loop 410 to Interstate 10 East, speeding down the on-ramp, when we saw a girl face down on the road about 50 feet or so in front of my car. Her left arm was bent around her head, the hand laying on the pavement and partially covered by coils of her black hair. Her right arm was angled like she was waving to someone in the distance. Her legs were straight, the sandaled feet turned inward, the toes almost touching. She was intensely motionless, like she hadn’t moved for a long time and maybe would not move again. The girl was tall but obviously a child. She was bony like a 11 or 12 year old. She wore a tank top and matching shorts, speckled with pastels. She glowed in my headlights. Her body captured and contained the light — it didn’t reflect it. The girl looked like a luminous cutout set on a black, felt-covered board, an object that consumed space but not time.

  • Mount Simile

    Her heels striking the terrazzo tiles sounded like explosions deep in the seam between two mountains.

    As the storm clouds moved in, a shadow spread over one of the Davis Mountains and onto the plain like a drop of black ink in a dish of water.

    From the airplane, the Davis Mountains looked like brown bacteria erupting in a dirty yellow solution.

    I traced with my index finger the foot trails across the mountain’s southern face from a couple of miles away. Most of them began and ended abruptly like scars on a face years after it had been slashed in a knife attack.

  • What the Boatman Said

    Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Over the next 45 minutes it’ll be my pleasure to tell you the story of San Antonio and its world-famous River Walk.

    But first I need to go over a few rules. One, please keep your arms and legs inside the tour barge at all times. Two, please do not throw anything, like a candy wrapper or empty soda cup, into the river.

    Please follow my directions to the tee in the unlikely event of an emergency. And don’t gesture to or otherwise address anyone on the River Walk’s beautiful limestone walkways, especially groups of drunks, unless you want to know what getting hit with a fusillade of beer bottles feels like.

    And please don’t stare at or ask about my robe and hood.

    You also need to be aware that gravity is denser on the San Antonio River and so time is slower down here than it is on the River Walk. If you left any friends or loved ones up there, once you’re reunited with them, they will talk mournfully about the many long days they endured without you, and they will be that much older than you. While the new difference in your ages won’t be that much, only a few days, it will eat away at the foundation of your relationship. It has to do with the shock of becoming aware that time doesn’t insist on treating you and others the same, even those close to you.

    Finally, tipping is strongly, very strongly, encouraged.

    Now let’s get started.

  • Real Texans

    “There are things you’ll never understand about this state or about being a Texan,” Michael said.

    He was wrong, of course. I’d moved here from Michigan decades ago, and my carpetbagging made me as Texan as him. But I knew who he was talking about. He meant the kind whose seven-year-old cheeks and forehead were smeared with the blood of the first deer he killed on the family ranch as an old man with thick whiskey breath said some incantation in atrocious Latin as he swayed over the boy. This also probably happened to Michael: his mother sent him and his brother out to shoot doves, and she talked reverentially about her brothers going out to hunt and her father and his brothers before them, and about the dishes she would make out of the meat in the afternoon. But when the boys returned hours later sweaty and grimy, with dozens of doves stuffed in an ancient leather bag, they found her passed out drunk on the toilet. And at one time or other, when Michael was a prepubescent, his parents and aunts and uncles must have encouraged him, through a series of blinks, silences, glances, and small smiles, to touch his first cousin inappropriately. And the secrets he was so good at keeping — about the crimes that were the wellhead of the family fortune, about the rapes and drunken rages that left puddles of blood soaking into hard wood floors. I’d never heard a word about them even though I’d known Michael for 20 years, had spent weekends at his family ranch in South Texas. I guessed, too, that Michael had a handgun with a long silver barrel under the driver’s seat of his Range Rover, a sidearm too beautifully made to ever be fired.

    This I knew for a fact: like most Texans of his caste, he was sent out East for his schooling and then out West to start his career, and he came home to run things.

    But not to rule, as in the old days — and that’s what made Michael flush with anger, push his plate of gnocchi to the middle of the table, and accuse me of being unable to understand Texas or Texans.

    I’d delivered a message from the lieutenant governor, who like me had come from somewhere else and didn’t have a family to brag about. Ambition, debts of various kinds, and a desire to overcome brought us to Texas.

    “The lieutenant governor knows you’re still moving ahead with plans for the office tower even though as a friend he advised you that the market wasn’t quite right for the project, to maybe build it somewhere else. Since indirectness is your ancestral language, you must have gotten the message. Going ahead and bringing in more investors and signing design contracts means you’re being willful. So now the lieutenant governor wants to be very clear — you are a mandarin and it’s time to stop what you’re doing.”

    I can’t describe the joy I felt as he pushed away his plate.

  • Saint Francis and the Dogs of San Antonio

    Saint Francis brought the dogs of San Antonio together in a series of convocations around the city. They met in parks at night. He stood in the middle of packs of hundreds of stray dogs, all of them panting in the lingering heat. No human got close enough to hear what Saint Francis said to them, but the dogs cried and yelped and none of them fought. During the day, Saint Francis walked up and down neighborhood streets stopping at fences to talk in whispers to dogs that had collars and their shots. After these discussions, which usually lasted no more than 10 minutes or so, the dogs became taciturn and stared vacantly over the rooftops of their neighborhoods. After a month or so, Saint Francis walked out of the city on the shoulder of Interstate 10 West. Thousands of dogs followed him in rows of two or three. They eventually stopped and watched him continue to make slow progress in his coarse brown robe. And then they turned around and went to back to where they came from. A few days later, they turned on the humans, attacking them on the streets in blurs of foam and teeth and blood-slick fur. The first day and night, they killed more than 500, mostly old people and children, and maimed 2,000 or so. Most streets and sidewalks were stained with blood and littered with human noses, ears, fingers, limbs, and ragged sheets of skin. The next day, the humans rallied, patrolling in packs of five or six, all of them weighed down with guns and ammunition. The dogs adapted. Dozens of them would rush a patrol. The ones that weren’t slaughtered in the first barrage bore down on the humans, who often fired again in panic, shooting as many people as dogs. Thousands of dogs died, but so did another 400 humans. The third day, the governor declared martial law in San Antonio, ordered people to remain indoors and sent in the Texas National Guard to kill every dog they could find. As San Antonians began burying and cremating their dead, they blamed Saint Francis for the bloodshed. He must have put the dogs up to this. State troopers launched a manhunt, but they couldn’t find him. Over time, however, the message of San Antonio’s archbishop and his priests prevailed: whatever Saint Francis said to the dogs, they must have misunderstood his meaning. After all, they said, dogs aren’t very bright.

  • A Guy Gets Hit By a Meteorite

    A man walking across his front yard at night was killed by a golf ball-size rock traveling from space faster than the speed of sound. It punched a hole through his left shoulder blade, singeing the bone. It tore through his heart and exited through his abdomen. His body did very little to change the meteorite’s trajectory. An astrophysicist, who heard about the man’s death on the news and got curious, later determined the deviation was probably half a degree or less. Probably less.

  • When It Rains

    The rain pounded everything. It broke up the topsoil and swept it away, exposing tree roots clutching at oozing mud. It stripped hillsides down to the limestone. The rain beat the clothing off of people and bruised their skin. It cracked the bones of cats, possums, skunks, and squirrels. It broke the drought and replaced it with thick, stinking floodwater that didn’t recede for years.

  • On Inauguration Day

    Cristina is about to get on an airplane, and I’m worried. We’re being left alone with the airlines, which are untrustworthy. I’m afraid their planes are going to run out of fuel mid-flight because the pilots never have enough money for a full tank and it’s so easy to lose track when it’s always near empty. I’m afraid pilots will put off oil changes and that their planes’ engines will seize up after takeoff. I’m afraid engine warning signs will go off and the pilots will ignore them, and whatever problems they’re warning of will spread until the planes are on fire on the shoulders of runways and the passengers stand a few dozen yards away wrapped up in silvery blankets and looking dazed, and the pilots and co-pilots are a little to the side of the crowd looking sheepish and avoiding eye contact with the cops who are trying to find out what happened before the fire broke out. I’m afraid that planes will start landing at random times and random airports and the pilots will pretend those were always the times and places they were supposed to arrive at. I’m afraid airports are going to be like that truck stop in flat, muddy eastern Arkansas where Cristina went into the women’s restroom and listened from a stall as a woman with a tired voice said to her companion that they had to keep trying to suck off this truck driver because she had to get to Fayetteville. It was the meth – he couldn’t cum because there was no water left in his body. But she had to get to Fayetteville, so please. In this scenario, the airlines are the truck driver and some of us are the woman and others are her friend.