Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

I stay in the car. She and my father disappear into the house while I watch the pin wheel lawn daisies spin in the dark. The yelling from inside the house is mostly Lupita: “I am tired of your blag ass! Enough eez enough!” Then it stops. They’ve argued their way to the bedroom, where the door slams shut and all is quiet.

But the calm doesn’t hold. Lupita breaks out with some beautiful, deadly Spanish threats, and the screen door bangs open. My father comes out clutching cages, each crammed two apiece with birds. I can hear birdseed and little gravelly rocks from the cages spill all over the car interior when he puts them on the backseat. The whole time he doesn’t say a word. Looks straight ahead.

He makes another trip into the house, but Lupita doesn’t go in with him. He comes back with another cageful of birds.

Lupita follows him for a bit, but she stops halfway from the car. She stands there in her ensemble of sexy pajamas and pink sponge curlers and shotgun.

“Don’t get out,” Ray Bivens Jr. says to me. “We’re going to drive off. Slowly.”

I do as my father says and back out of the driveway.

Lupita yells after us, “Joo are never thinking about maybe what Lupita feels!” For a moment I think she’s going to come after us, but all she does is plop down on her porch step, holding her head in her hands.

ONCE THEY get used to the rhythm of the road, the birds swap crude, disjointed conversations with one another. The blue-and-gold macaw sings “Love Me Do,” but recent immigrant that it is, it gets the inflections all wrong. The lorikeet says, repeatedly, “Where the dickens is my pocket watch?” then does what passes for a man’s lewd laugh. If there’s a lull, one will say, “Arriba, ’riba, ’riba!” and get them all going again.

“Bird crap doesn’t have an odor,” my father says. “That’s the paradox of birds.”

“She loved those birds,” I say. “And you just took them away.”

“They learn best when stressed out,” he says. “Why do you think they say ‘Arriba!’ all the time? They get it from the Mexicans who’re all in a rush to get them exported.”

He almost knocks me off kilter with that one, but I stick to the point. “Don’t try to make excuses. You hurt her. And what about the birds? You didn’t think to get food, did you?”

“You are a complete pussy, you know that?”

He’d only used that word once before, when I was twelve and refused to fight another boy, and said if I didn’t whup that boy the next day that he’d whup me.

“You need to go to this March. When you go, check in at the pussy booth and tell ’em you want to exchange yours for a Johnson.”

I check the rearview mirror, then cross all lanes of I-65 North until I’m on the shoulder. It’s the kind of boldness he’d always wanted me to show to everyone else but him.

“You better have a good reason for stopping,” he says.

“Get out,” I say, as soon as I stop the car. The birds also stop their chatter, and when I turn around they’re looking from me to him as though they’ve placed bets on who will go down in flames.

Ray Bivens Jr. clamps his hand to his forehead in mock dumb-foundedness. “You ain’t heard that before? Don’t tell me nobody never called you no pussy?”

“Get out, sir,” I say.

“Yeah. I’ll get out all right.” He opens the passenger-side door just as a semi whooshes by, and even I can feel it. He slams the door and traps the cold air with me.

IT’S LATE: past midnight. I stop at the next exit to call my mother. She says if I don’t get my tail back in her house tonight, she’ll skin me alive. I tell her I love her too. She likes to pretend that I’m the man of the house, and says as much when she asks me if I’ve locked all the doors at night, or tells me to drive her to church so she can show off what a good son she has. But it’s times like this when it’s clear that the only man of the house is Jesus.

I buy a Ho Ho at the gas station and as I separate the cake part from the creamy insides with my teeth, I think about how Derron would have shrugged Ray Bivens Jr.’s schemes away with a good-hearted hunch of the shoulders. “Pops is crazy,” he’d say to the mike in an NBA postgame interview, then put his gently clenched fist over his heart like someone accepting an award, “but I love the guy.”

I get back in the car and the birds squawk and complain at having been left alone. I return to the last exit before heading north again, going slow in the right-hand lane. When I see my father, I pull off to the shoulder, pop open the electronic locks. He acts as though he knew I would come back for him all along. We don’t talk for nearly an hour, but everything is completely clear: if I am not a pussy, I will cut school, forget about debate, and go to D.C.

JUST OUTSIDE Clarksburg, West Virginia, I pull over. I can’t make it to the exit. Twice I almost nodded off. When I slump onto the steering wheel my father gets out and rouses me enough for us to exchange places, even though he’s not supposed to be driving.

I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep, but I wake to the umbrella cockatoo chanting, “Sexy, sexy!” My eyes adjust to the dim light, first making out the electric glow of the dash panels, and then the scenery beyond the cool of the windows. We are on a small hilly road. It is so dark and so full of conifers I feel like we’re traveling through velvet.

Ray Bivens Jr., I can tell, has been waiting for me to wake. At first I think he wants me to take over the wheel, but then I realize he wants company. He raps on the car window and says, “In ancient Mesopotamia it was hot. There was no glass. What they did have was the wheel—”

The yellow-naped Amazon breaks into the Oscar Mayer wiener jingle before I can ask my father what the hell he’s talking about.

“Shut up!” he yells, and at first I sit up, startled, thinking that he’s yelling at me. The bird says “Rawrk!” and starts the jingle over, from the beginning.

He sits through the jingle, and as a reward, there is a peculiar silence that comes after someone speaks. For once in his life, he has had to use patience. “Here’s why windows are called windows,” he says with strained calmness, but the lorikeet interrupts: “Advil works,” the bird says, “better than Tylenol.”

My father blindly gropes the backseat for a cage, seizes one, and slams it against another cage. All the birds revolt, screeching and shuffling feathers, sounding like bricks hitting a chain-link fence. One of them says, almost angrily, “And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson!”

But Ray Bivens Jr. raises his voice over the din. “The Mesopotamians cut out circles, or O’s, in their homes to mimic the shape of the wheel, but also to let in the wind,” he yells. “And there you have it. Your modern day window. Get it? Wind-o.”

I look to see if he is taking himself seriously. He used to say shit like this when I was little. I could never tell whether he was kidding me or himself. “You’re trying to tell me that the Mesopotamians spoke English? And that they created little O’s in their homes to let in the wind?”

“All right. Don’t believe me, then.”

WE MAKE it into Arlington at seven in the morning, park the car at a garage, and take the Metro into D.C. with the morning commuters. White men with their briefcases and mushroom-colored trenchcoats. White women with fleet haircuts, their chic lipstick darker than blood. The occasional Asian, Hispanic — wearing the same costume but somehow looking nervous about it. More than anything though, we see black men — everywhere — groups of black men wearing identical T-shirts with the names of churches and youth groups emblazoned on them. Men in big, loose kente-cloth robes; men in full-on suits with the traditional Nation of Islam bow tie.