Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

I give him a twenty and wait in the car. He’s in the Citgo for what seems like half an hour. He’s in there so long I get out and wipe off the squeegee streaks he left on the windshield. Finally, he comes back with a six-pack of Schlitz and a family-sized bag of Funyuns. “Listen,” he says, handing me a beer, “we have to make a quick stop to Jasper.”

Jasper, Indiana, is where his ex-girlfriend Lupita lives.

“I knew it,” I say, and hand back the unopened beer before starting the car. “You’re in trouble.”

He opens the can, looking as though both the Schlitz and I have disappointed him. One of the fluorescent lights overhead blinks out. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Why do we have to go to Jasper all of a sudden?”

“If you shut your mouth and go to Jasper you’ll find out.”

“This is mama’s car,” I remind him. “She wants it back.”

“Why you gotta act like everything I ask you to do is gonna kill you? You my son . I tell you to do something, you obey.”

I do obey, and hate myself for it, turning the car out to the service road. I try to imagine the worst that can await him in Seymour, figure out what he’s running from: men who’ll tie him up at gunpoint and demand the twenty dollars that he owes them, policemen waiting at his door, but those thoughts give way to the only thing we’ll find in Jasper: Lupita, watching TV, painting her toenails. I’ve been to Lupita’s place twice, but that’s more than enough. It’s full of birds. Huge blue-and-gold macaws. Yellow-naped Amazons. Rainbow lorikeets who squirt their putrid frugiverous shit on you. Tons of birds, and not in cages either. I don’t think my father liked them perching on his shoulders any more than I did, but the birds could land anywhere on Lupita and she’d wear them like jewelry.

Then it occurs to me that this is the only reason he cleaned the windshield. “You’re going to make me drive you and Lupita around so the two of you can get drunk. I knew it.”

“If you don’t shut up—”

I don’t speak to him, he doesn’t speak to me. We pass a billboard that reads, WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, MAKE LEMONADE. I try to think of what my mother will say. She knows I had to get him out of jail, that’s why she let me borrow the car. But she wasn’t about to pay bail, and she definitely won’t want me coming home at midnight, her car smelling of cigarettes and Mad Dog.

My father sees me fuming and says, “I told you I was going to get your money back, right? Well, there’s going to be a march, tomorrow. A million people in Washington, D.C. One. Million. People.”

“No,” I say. “Dear God, no.”

“Exactly,” he says.

Even though the windows are closed, I feel a breeze pass through me. At one point, I wanted to go to the March; I imagined it would be as historic as King’s march on Washington, as historic as the dismantling of the Wall. The men’s choir of my mother’s church was going, but I didn’t want to be trapped on a bus with a bunch of men singing hymns, feeling sorry for me being born with Ray Bivens Jr. for a father. And what’s more, I have a debate tournament. I imagine Sarah Vogedes, my debate partner, prepping for our debate on U.S. foreign policy toward China, checking her watch. She’d have to use our second stringers, or perhaps even Derron Ellersby, a basketball player so certain he’d make the NBA that he’d joined the speech and debate team “to sound smooth for all those postgame interviews.” This was the same Derron Ellersby who ended his rebuttals by pointing at me, saying, “Little Man over here’s going to break it down for ya,” or who’d single me out in the cafeteria, telling his friends, “Little Man’s got skills, yo! Break off some a your skills!” as if expecting me to carry on a debate with my tuna casserole.

I’d never missed a day of school in my life, and my mother had the framed perfect-attendance certificates to prove it, but the thought of Sarah Vogedes’s composed face growing rumpled as Derron agreed with our opponent makes me feel something like bliss; I imagine Derron, index cards scattered in front of him, looking as confused as if he’d been faked out before a lay-up, saying, “Yo! Sarah V! Where’s Little Man? Where he at!”

For once I’m glad Ray Bivens Jr. is scheming so hard he doesn’t see me smiling. If he could — if he sensed in any way that I might be willing — he’d find a way to call the whole thing off.

“That’s in Washington, D.C.,” I remind him, “nearly seven hundred miles away.”

“I know. But first we’re going to Jasper,” he says. “To get the birds.”

TECHNICALLY, the birds are my father’s, not Lupita’s. He bought them when he was convinced that the animals were an Investment. He tried selling them door to door. When that didn’t work and he couldn’t afford to keep them, Lupita volunteered to take care of them. Lupita knew about birds, she’d said, because she’d once owned a rooster when she was five back in Guatemala.

It is completely dark and the road is revealing its secrets one at a time. I ask, once more, what he plans on doing with these birds.

He tells me he plans on selling them.

“But you couldn’t sell them the first time.”

“I didn’t have a million potential buyers the first time.”

For a brief moment I’d wanted to go to the March, perhaps even see if Ray Bivens Jr. got something out of it, but no longer. I tell him that I can take him to Jasper, Indiana. I can take him home, even, which was what I was supposed to do in the first place, but that I absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, cut school and miss my debate tournament to drive him to D.C.

“Don’t you want your money back?” he says. “One macaw alone will pay back that bail money three times over.”

“What are a million black men going to do with a bunch of birds? Even if you could sell them, how’re you going to get them there?”

“Would you just drive?” he says, then sucks his teeth, making a noise that might as well be a curse. He stretches out in his seat, then starts up, explaining things to me as if I’d had a particularly stupefying bout of amnesia: “You’re gonna have Afrocentric folks there. Afrocentrics and Africans, tons of Africans. And what do Africans miss most? That’s right. The Motherland. And what does the Mother Africa have tons of? Monkeys, lions, and guess what else? Birds . Not no street pigeons, but real birds, like the kind I’m selling. Macaws and African grays. Lorikeets and yellow napes and shit.” He might as well have added, Take that .

He’s so stupid, he’s brilliant; so outside of the realm of any rationality that reason stammers and stutters when facing him. I say nothing, nothing at all, just continue on, thinking quickly, but driving slowly. He hits the dash like he’s knocking on a door to make me speed up.

Off the interstate, the road turns so narrow and insignificant it could peter out into someone’s driveway. The occasional crop of stores along the roadside look closed. We pass through Paoli Peaks and Hoosier National Forest before finally arriving in Jasper.

We pull into Lupita’s driveway. In the dark, her lawn ornaments resemble gravestones. Motion-detector floodlights buzz on as my father walks up to the house. Lupita stands on her porch, wielding a shotgun. She’s wearing satiny pajamas that show her nipples. Pink curlers droop from her hair like blossoms.

“What do joo want?” Her eyes narrow in on him. She slits her eyes even more to see who’s in the car with him, straightening herself up a little bit, but when she sees that it’s just me, just nerdy οl’ Spurgeon, she drops all signs of primping.