Megan Bergman - Birds of a Lesser Paradise - Stories

The night before, I’d dreamed that Smith had climbed into my bed while I was sleeping. It could happen; we never locked the doors, no one in our town did. At first, the idea of him in the house at night was petrifying, but the imagined trespass only underscored his air of mystery.

I wanted to lay eyes on him, thank him for what he’d done for Dad.

But maybe Smith had no intention of coming back. He had the inherent toughness a thing must possess to survive on its own. Perhaps I was romanticizing him because he was my only option, the one piece of luck I’d brushed up against in this lonely place. You don’t know him, I reminded myself. You don’t know the ways he’d change your life.

After dropping the bird-watchers off at the swamp, I went to fill Dad’s truck with gas. The station attendant was holding court behind the counter.

You could take each one of these small Carolina towns, the man said, these towns without stoplights and no tax base and no real post office to speak of, turn ’em upside down, and shake ’em. All sorts of characters would fall out. Nazi war criminals in Burgaw. Hoffa in Wilson. Earhart in Duck. At least when I was a boy.

I put a ten-dollar bill on the counter and let the screen door slam shut behind me. Outside, I took a deep breath. I could hear the man laughing, decades of tar in his dark lungs. What better place to hide?

Across the street: a tobacco warehouse, lumber supply company, and garden center. Bulldozers moving earth for a shopping mall. In a few months, men would come here for hunting licenses. I wouldn’t leave the house without an orange cap. I’d tie orange ribbons to Betsy’s collar, keep the cat inside. The smell of woodsmoke would fill the town. Pickup trucks would roll by, still-warm deer piled in truck beds like trophies.

The only ivory-billed woodpeckers I’d ever seen were stuffed and mounted on dry branches. I wondered, if he could go back to that day in the swamp, would Dad have put a bullet in the bird’s heart to prove he’d seen it? To watch it longer, watch the life fall out of it?

For thirty years, he’d wanted to know for sure that what he saw was the real thing.

Days after seeing Smith for the last time, I knew I was waiting for someone I didn’t understand. Maybe I’d spend the rest of my life waiting, another refugee made into myth by the swamp. Maybe it was for the best; some people and places are better left unchanged.

The night before his surgery, Dad went to bed early. I cleaned the kitchen and stared at his closed door. I missed him. Already. I walked down the hall and knocked.

Can I come in? I asked.

He was propped on his pillows, Betsy sleeping against his feet. She looked up as I entered. His television was not on; there was no book in his hands. He’d placed a picture of my mother on his nightstand. I opened a window.

For the morning, I said. So you can hear them sing.

He didn’t speak, but reached for my hand.

The air was too warm, but we were used to it. The crickets were loud and I let their noise chip away at my worries. I rubbed my father’s rough hand with my thumb.

I did see one, he said. Once. I’m positive. It was the real thing. A bill the color of chalk.

Somewhere in the distance, a train ran over the old swamp tracks, tracks Dad had followed in and out of the swamp as a boy, tracks he’d known before he fell in love, before he spent two years grading our backyard into a golfing green.

He’d seen the last wild things, the early hunting cabins, the last virgin timber, and maybe even the last living ivory-billed. He’d seen the last great bucks, the last great hunters, the skin-laden trappers emerging from the woods at dawn smelling of sulfur and musk.

His family had made it through the Depression selling mink; I’d once watched Dad carefully tug the mangled body of one from a chicken-wire fence, desperate to save the skin. He still ate the chickweed and creasy greens that had been self-seeding in the backyard since his father’s time. Dad’s old-school frugality was harsh, endearing, maybe a lost art.

Will you put socks on the bed, he said, in case I get cold?

The rhythm of the crickets outside muffled traffic, and every now and then the clear note of a jay cut through the air like a circular saw. Maybe it wasn’t the same as it had been when I was a child, but the swamp remained a wild place, wild enough to hide whatever wanted to be hidden.

You had a good childhood here, he said.

It was the beginning of a good-bye that I didn’t want to hear. Even if he made it through the surgery, he’d be a different man. Older. More careful.

I could smell the swamp rose, harlot pink and fragrant in the hot night. Dry magnolia leaves scratched against the vinyl siding of the house. Dad relaxed into his pillow. Betsy fell asleep, no longer on guard.

For minutes, maybe an hour, I held his hand, and I think he slept.

I wished for things to stay the same. I wished for stillness everywhere, but I opened up the rest of the bedroom windows and let the world in.

Lila had two things to do that day: have dinner with her fiancé, Clay, and evaluate the working farm at Sandhill Prison. She put on her work boots, the steel-toed ones with worn and hay-packed heels, stuffed a change of clothes into a bag, and threw a box of shoulder-length gloves into the back of her pickup.

After her work at the prison was done, she’d join Clay in a diner car some urbanite had turned into a second-rate wine bar. She’d put the wedding on hold a year ago; now he wanted to discuss the future, reach a final decision. Because she didn’t know what she wanted, she was dreading the meal the way she dreaded obligatory Sundays at church with her mother, or the therapy sessions she’d started recently. But she packed a black dress and the only tube of lipstick she owned.

Lila drove the flat, pine-shadowed highway toward the correctional center. She kept her windows down and public radio on.

Most buildings in this part of town were churches or sad municipal structures, some vacant, some half used, mildewed, ugly, and too expensive to fix.

It’s the kind of year you keep your old shoes, she thought, passing a man in a lawn chair on the side of the road who’d been begging as long as she could remember. His sign said: Vietnam Vet. 1 Wife, 2 Kids, 3 Skinny Cats. Need Food and Bud Light . Betcha can’t hit me with a quarter! he shouted at the passing cars, a cigarette between his teeth.

Lines were long at the dollar hot dog stand downtown, while tables at Brodie’s Italian Bistro sat empty. Her mother was cutting coupons again. Her father had offered her a spare bedroom in her childhood home in case she wanted to drop her lease, but her veterinary practice was breaking even, and she valued her independence.

Lila had an apartment downtown over a bakery. Every night her three cats climbed into bed with her, kneading her arms, legs, and chest. They were not demanding companions. They settled into the nooks of her knees and at her feet. The white noise of their purring sent her to sleep feeling less alone.

It was summer, but Christmas decorations still hung from the lampposts surrounding Hoke County City Hall — no one wanted to pay to have them taken down. The green tinsel had faded in the sun and birds had nested in the hollowed-out candy canes.

Tacky, her mother said, but sooner or later you stop noticing. That’s life in Raeford, Lila said.

Lila drove her pickup past the barbed-wire fence line and the brick prison and down a dirt road toward the prison farmhouse. In recent years someone had tacked vinyl siding to the house. The facade was dented and yellowed by the dry dirt that rose from the road. Sorry-looking air-conditioning units sagged in the windows.