T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

The impact was dramatic, as you would have had reason to testify had you been meditating over a pint of bitter at the rattling window of Magnuson’s Pub that day, and the bird woman, before she’d had a chance even to discover the whereabouts of her lodgings or offer up a “good day” or “how do you do?” to a single soul, was laid out flat on the flagstones, her lips quivering unconsciously over the lyrics to a tune by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. At least that was what Robbie claimed afterward, and he’s always been dead keen on the Artist, ever since he came by the CD of Purple Rain in the used-disc bin of a record shop in Aberdeen and got it for less than half of what it would have cost new. We had to take his word for it. He was the first one out the door and come to her aid.

There she was, flung down on the stones like a wilted flower amidst the crumpled stalks of her limbs, the rucksack stuffed full of spare black tights and her bird-watching paraphernalia, her kit and dental floss and all the rest, and Tiger just pulling himself up into a ball to blink his eyes and lick at his spanned paws in a distracted way, when Duncan Stout, ninety-two years on this planet and in possession of the first Morris automobile ever manufactured, came down the street in that very vehicle at twice his normal speed of five and a half miles per hour, and if he discerned Junie Ooley lying there it was anybody’s guess. Robbie Baikie flailed his arms to head off Duncan’s car, but Duncan was the last man in these islands to be expecting anything unexpected out there in the middle of the high street designed and reserved exclusively for the traffic of automobiles and lorries and the occasional dithering bicycle. He kept coming. His jaw was set, the cap pulled down to the orbits of his milk-white eyes. Robbie Baikie was not known for thinking on his feet — like many of us, he was a deliberative type — and by the time he thought to scoop Junie Ooley up in his arms the car was on them. Or just about.

People were shouting from the open door of the pub. Magnus Magnuson himself was in the street now, windmilling his arms and flinging out his feet in alarm, the bar rag still clutched in one hand like a flag of surrender. The car came on. Robbie stood there. Hopeless was the way it looked. But then we hadn’t taken the wind into account, and how could any of us have forgotten its caprices, even for a minute? At that crucial instant, a gust came up the canyon of the high street and bowled Robbie Baikie over atop the bird woman even as it lifted the front end of Duncan’s car and flung it into the near streetlamp, which never yielded.

The wind skreeled off down the street, carrying bits of paper, cans, bottles, old bones and rags and other refuse along with it. The bird woman’s eyes blinked open. Robbie Baikie, all fifteen stone of him, lay pressed atop her in a defensive posture, anticipating the impact of the car, and he hadn’t even thought to prop himself on his elbows to take some of the crush off her. Junie Ooley smelled the beer on him and the dulcet smoke of his pipe tobacco and the sweetness of the peat fire at Magnuson’s and maybe even something of the sheep he kept, and she couldn’t begin to imagine who this man was or what he was doing on top of her in the middle of the public street. “Get off me,” she said in a voice so flat and calm Robbie wasn’t sure he’d heard it at all, and because she was an American woman and didn’t commonly make use of the term “clod,” she added, “you big doof.”

Robbie was shy with women — we all were, except for the women themselves, and they were shy with the men, at least for the first five years after the wedding — and he was still fumbling with the notion of what had happened to him and to her and to Duncan Stout’s automobile and couldn’t have said one word even if he’d wanted to.

“Get off,” she repeated, and she’d begun to add physical emphasis to the imperative, writhing beneath him and bracing her upturned palms against the great unmoving slabs of his shoulders.

Robbie went to one knee, then pushed himself up even as the bird woman rolled out from under him. In the next moment she was on her feet, angrily shifting the straps of her rucksack where they bit into the flesh, cursing him softly but emphatically and with a kind of fluid improvisatory genius that made his face light up in wonder. Twenty paces away, Duncan was trying to extricate himself from his car, but the wind wouldn’t let him. Howith Clarke, the greengrocer, was out in the street now, surveying the damage with a sour face, and Magnus was right there in the middle of things, his voice gone hoarse with excitement. He was inquiring after Junie Ooley’s condition—“Are you all right, lass?”—when a gust lifted all four of them off their feet and sent them tumbling like ninepins. That was enough for Robbie. He picked himself up, took hold of the bird woman’s arm and frog-marched her into the pub.

In they came, and the wind with them, packets of crisps and beer coasters sailing across the polished surface of the bar, and all of us instinctively grabbing for our hats. Robbie’s head was bowed and his hair blown straight up off his crown as if it had been done up in a perm by some mad cosmetologist, and Junie Ooley heaving and thrashing against him till he released her to spin away from him and down the length of the bar. No one could see how pretty she was at first, her face all deformed with surprise and rage and the petulant crease stamped between her eyes. She didn’t even so much as look in our direction, but just threw herself back at Robbie and gave him a shove as if they were children at war on the playground.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, her voice piping high with her agitation. And then, glancing round at the rest of us: “Did you see what this big idiot did to me out there?”

No one said a word. The smoke of the peat fire hung round us like a thin curtain. Tim Maconochie’s Airedale lifted his head from the floor and laid it back down again.

The bird woman clenched her teeth, set her shoulders. “Well, isn’t anybody going to do anything?”

Magnus was the one to break the silence. He’d slipped back in behind the bar, unmindful of the chaff and bits of this and that that the wind had deposited in his hair. “The man saved your life, that’s about all.”

Robbie ducked his head out of modesty. His ears went crimson.

“Saved—?” A species of comprehension settled into her eyes. “I was… something hit me, something the wind blew…”

Tim Maconochie, though he wasn’t any less tightfisted than the rest of us, cleared his throat and offered to buy the girl a drop of whisky to clear her head, and her face opened up then like the sun coming through the clouds so that we all had a good look at the beauty of her, and it was a beauty that made us glad to be alive in that moment to witness it. Whiskies went round. A blast of wind rattled the panes till we thought they would burst. Someone led Duncan in and sat him down in the corner with his pipe and a pint of ale. And then there was another round, and another, and all the while Junie Ooley was perched on a stool at the bar talking Robbie Baikie’s big glowing ears right off him.

—

That was the beginning of a romance that stood the whole island on its head. Nobody had seen anything like it, at least since the two maundering teens from Cullivoe had drowned themselves in a suicide pact in the Ness of Houlland, and it was the more surprising because no one had ever suspected such depths of passion in a poor slug like Robbie Baikie. Robbie wasn’t past thirty, but it was lassitude and the brick wall of introspection that made him sit at the bar till he carried the weight of a man twice his age, and none of us could remember him in the company of a woman, not since his mother died anyway. He was the sort to let his sheep feed on the blighted tops of the heather and the wrack that blew up out of the sea and he kept his heart closed up like a lockbox. And now, all of a sudden, right before our eyes, he was a man transformed. That first night he led Junie Ooley up the street to her lodgings like a gallant out of the picture films, the two of them holding hands and leaning into the wind while cats and flowerpots and small children flew past them, and it seemed he was never away from her for five minutes consecutive after that.