MOCKINGBIRDS MUST HAVE BEEN fighting over the territory at the edge of the prison, because Roscoe had heard them singing frantically, at their best, some time after three that morning. He lay there until daylight and couldn’t go back to sleep, listening to the birds twitter, call, warble, each song more anxious and perfect than the last.
He knew what they were doing only because his son Louis had come home years ago from the junior-high library to tell him that the mockingbird who sat on the telephone wire above their fig tree wasn’t singing for joy all day and night that spring, but fighting to keep other birds away. By the time the road crew got on the bus, Roscoe’s head banged against the glass when he fell asleep; he sat next to the window, trying not to think about Louis, and shook his cheeks to the left and right to wake himself up. But Jesus Trevino’s hair was black and iridescent, feathered as a crow’s wing, in front of him. Damn, he thought, birds all night, birds all I’m likely to see today. Crow time right now, when at home on the Westside the only people who would be up were Red Man, Floyd and him, the ones who worked outside and started early. Roscoe let himself wonder what Louis was doing this early, where he was sleeping. Louis was the one who called it crow time, had his father thinking of it that way ever since. The huge black birds thought they owned the streets this time of morning, stalking up and down the asphalt and into the yards, diving and calling to each other. Louis used to come into Roscoe’s bedroom, wake him up and ask, “Daddy, what are they saying to each other? They talking about something, huh? But I don’t know what it is.”
Roscoe saw desert outside the windows, not the landscaping that meant they were headed to work the city freeways, and he rubbed his eyes, the skin in front of his ears. If he’d been one of the old-timey, suspicious women from Mississippi, the ones who always sat talking in squinty whispers when he was small, he would think of magic, that someone was working a strange power on him. Yesterday had been exactly a month done of his three-month time, and the road crew had worked in Rio Seco, along the main freeway that ran through the city. He’d found a matchbook with an elegant, every-colored parrot glossy on the cover. One match left. The bird sat inside a fancy letter P, and on the back “Palms Resort Hotel and Country Club” curled across the shiny white. He stared at the parrot, saw his son’s face rapt at the pet store, the vivid reds and yellows, blues and greens of the perfect feathers, and he’d put the matchbook in his pocket. Only two hours later, during the afternoon when the traffic from L.A. back to Rio Seco got heavy and slow, he’d seen Louis.
The Sixth Street exit, main offramp to the Westside, the last place he wanted to be in his bright orange county uniform, matching plastic bag in his fist, the outhouse bobbing along on the truck next to him and Jesus. He’d just dropped another nasty disposable diaper into the bag, and then he heard a thundering drum from a car stereo, jumping against his skin it was so deep and loud. When he turned, Louis’ face was just sliding back around, away from him. Louis said something to Jimmy, who was driving the Suzuki Samurai. What all the boys called the dope man’s vehicle of choice. Roscoe knew Louis wasn’t dealing, but he hung around with Jimmy, partied with him and Lester. The Suzuki was caught on the offramp just ahead of him, and the bass thump went through Roscoe’s ribs to his heart, it felt like; Louis didn’t turn around, kept his shoulders tight until the music began to fade up the ramp to the green light.
Hell, what had he wanted the boy to do? Wave? Pass him a swig of soda? Holler out, “Thanks for going to jail for me, Pops?” Roscoe listened to the grumpy voices scattered through the bus. Damn, he thought, I’m too old for this shit. He pulled out the matchbook from his pocket, looked at the parrot. Birdman—that was Louis’ nickname.
Shit, and whoever was working that evil on him had stirred something into something for the last two days, because when he looked up the desert was butting up against Palm Springs; he flipped the matchbook over to read the script again, shook his head. He’d been born in Palm Springs, hadn’t been out this way for years. Damn, he was too old for this. Jesus started up again about his wife, the child support he couldn’t pay, which was why he got picked up. He was getting out in two weeks, he whined, how was he gonna pay it now that he’d done time for three months? “Man, shut the fuck up,” Williams said from across the aisle. “I’m so tired a hearin about your wife I’m ready to kill you so the bitch can get Social Security.” The men laughed, and the bus tires crunched on the gritty sand at the edge of the highway just outside Palm Springs, pulling off to let the first ones out.
They didn’t double up out here. The trash was scattered by the wind that swept through the desert every day, the wind he remembered from his childhood when it tossed and rubbed sand against the walls of their tiny house on Indian land. Not as much garbage stayed beside the road in the desert, not like the city freeways that they usually worked. All the Rio Seco County system, that stretched to the edge of Los Angeles County and came the other way almost to San Diego. Near the cities, the clothes and cans, shoes and icechests were thick in the oleander and ice plant along the banks, and he was always teamed with Jesus. He’d thought it would be better to work alone, instead of hearing Jesus complain all day, but now he thought that Jesus and his laments about wife and money were almost songlike. Yeah, a boring, repetitious song, but background music, where you could listen if you didn’t want to let your brain work. And Jesus was a couple of miles ahead, probably talking to himself.
The wind blew the bag against Roscoe’s legs and he stood, looking down from the roadside at the shifting grains of dust. The sun was winter-bright, and he felt his cheeks rise close to his eyes. He still looked young, not many lines around his eyes because he’d always worn a hat when he worked, he thought; no lines around his mouth because he didn’t smile. All those years of trimming trees, hauling brush and branches to the dump with Red Man, but his skin was still smooth. Yeah, and so? So the judge hadn’t believed he was almost forty-two when he sentenced him to road camp. Usually the younger guys got camp.
Red Man was only a few years older than Roscoe, but he looked sixty from all his squinting and frowning and laughing in the sun. If my brain could have wrinkles, though, Roscoe thought, from too much frowning and squinting and shit, it would damn sure be cracked and lined as the mud down there. The ditch that cut between the railroad track and the highway was dry patchwork. Like a quilt, he thought, mud in little patches, the edges curled up because no one had sewn them down. He stood very still, didn’t feel the twisting bag slick against his arm, and saw the image, all colors and the rims of the mud squares, and then a car passed, tore a seam through the air. How poetic. He bent to the ground. Yeah, put another Coors can in the bag. You’re not a poet anymore. Pick up the trash and leave the metaphors in the ditch.
But they kept coming, made everything look like what it wasn’t. The brittle bush with stiff gray branches, bare clumps in winter, caught Kleenex and baggies and wrappers; some of the plants had so much shredded tissue hanging from the stems that they looked like cotton, ready to pick.
“Niggers and Mexicans picking cotton,” he said into the wind. A Cadillac rushed past, going at least eighty, and he shouted, “Your tax dollars hard at work.” Only February and hot as hell, sweat already between my shoulders, but don’t worry about us in the heat. That’s why we were imported from Africa in the first place, remember? We could stand it better than those paleface settler types. And Mexicans, they beg to work in the fields, right?
He pulled at the tissue. Where had he seen cotton? He walked, saw the long stretches of fields, the huge bales of picked cotton and the snowlike traces in the ditches by the road. The Golden State Freeway, Interstate 5, from L.A. all the way to up near Oakland, and he’d been riding with Claude Collins, keeping him company on his trucking route. Claude had stopped the truck for Roscoe, smiled when Roscoe got out and said, “Man, I’ve only seen this stuff in pictures! Look at it. King Cotton!”
“I seen enough of that in Mi-sippi to last me till I die, man. Get back in here, we got time to make,” Claude said, shaking his head.
Everyone on the Westside—Red Man, Claude, Lanier, Floyd, their wives—they were all from Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma. They laughed at Roscoe when he talked about being born in Palm Springs. He watched the cars flying past. “With me you got the best of both worlds today! How would you know that?” he shouted, asking them. “A nigger born in the desert, got some Mexican blood, some Agua Caliente Indian somewhere in here.” He saw the hills purple behind the cars. “No, you say, you didn’t know niggers lived in Palm Springs! Don’t let that stop you—you gotta get to Palm Canyon Drive, to the shopping.” He thought of bumper stickers he’d seen—Born to Shop, and Shop Til You Drop—and laughed.
“Those Indians owned all that land you heading to,” he said to a dark blue Mercedes, taking out his matchbook again. Section 14, the only place colored people could settle when his father came from Mississippi, and since the Indians owned it, the few white people that he saw when he was small were selling something or collecting money. But it was all underneath hotels now. When he was eighteen, in what—’66?—the resorts wanted Section 14, so all the houses were condemned. No one would sell them land, except on the Northside of the city, another square, and Roscoe told his father he was leaving. “Ain’t nobody telling me where I can live,” he said, and his father shouted, “All them hotels goin up, you know you gon get a good job. Where the hell you think you goin?”
“To L.A. I’m a poet,” Roscoe said, and his father laughed, threw balled-up sheets of notebook paper at him.
“You gon write poems to the bank?” he yelled. “You fixin to eat them goddamn poems?”
Roscoe touched the brittle bushes now, stroked the spiny branches, the spires. Blowing air out through his nose, he shrugged his shoulders. The first poem he’d ever written was for a bush. He walked through the desert, going home from high school, and close to the road he saw a big, pointed bush; someone must have emptied out an ashtray there, because butterscotch wrappers, deep clear gold, and foil from chocolate kisses studded the branches. In the desert sunlight, it was a Christmas tree, glittered and reflecting against his arms, and he wrote a poem for the bush. His English teacher said it was very good, but not what she’d expected from him. “Aren’t there things you want to write about from your experience, your race?” she said.
The flatbed with the guards came toward him slowly, and he saw the outhouse rocking in the wind. He turned away. Nobody ever used it—there were plenty of bushes, gullies, where you could pee. And you held the other till you got back to “the facility.”
Frayed steel belts, black and flattened like dead snakes, lay along the asphalt. He kept walking. They didn’t keep an eye on you as close out here; where you gonna run? Long way to anything. And you definitely weren’t getting a ride from somebody passing by—nothing but Cadillacs, BMWs, Mercedes filled with one kind of people, and the four-by-four trucks carrying off-road vehicles and the other kind that came out here. Less than likely to pick up a brother.
They were driving like maniacs, too, and the traffic was getting heavier. Why were there so many cars today? He paused to pull a piece of white plastic from a stretch of barbed wire; the wind puffed it tight as a pillow between the strands. OK, it was Friday, and Monday was a holiday. Presidents’ Day, uh-huh, people starting their patriotism early.
The trucks weaved around the older people who cruised stately in their big tanks. A few trucks even passed on the shoulder, raising swirls of dust down the road from Roscoe. Shit, if he did that once he’d get a ticket so fast the dirt wouldn’t have time to settle. He wondered whether the Rio Seco cops would be giving him tickets for the rest of his life, to pay him back, or if the three months he was doing would be enough to turn him into a good nigger. Three months time for tickets.
After the two white policemen had been shot on the Westside in 1973, he’d been taken down to the station along with every other black male wearing white shoes. That was what the suspects wore. How old had he been? He tied the plastic bag closed and left it on the edge of the road. He’d come to Rio Seco from L.A.; he was twenty-two. Spent a weekend in jail with all the other Westsiders, getting yelled at, threatened. “Who shot them?” over and over.
Then last summer, an addict named Ricky Ronrico shot two cops coming for him on a parole violation. Shot them on the other end of the city, but of course they came looking for Ronrico on the Westside. And they’d been about to take Louis by the second night, because he and Lester and Jimmy were fool enough to stand on the corner and talk shit on that long weekend when cops were everywhere and angry. Rio Seco’s finest cruised past again and again, and when Louis came in the house, Roscoe said, “go in the back room and shut up,” even though he hadn’t seen Louis for a couple of weeks. The two officers were in the process of tearing up the living room, talking about evidence and getting ready to work their way to the back, and Roscoe stood there and hollered that he’d sue till he was blue. The call came over their radio that Ricky Ronrico was found, in a house on the south end next door to where the shooting took place, but the next week, Roscoe started to get tickets.
The officers did it practiced and perfect as he and Red Man clearing out the trees and brush from a vacant lot. Red Man with the chainsaw, then Roscoe with the stumper, chewing the wood to chips. The motorcycle cop, stationed around the corner from Roscoe’s house, then his buddy, pulling Roscoe over about a mile away to tell him he’d been weaving or making illegal lane changes. Fix-it ticket for the broken windshield on the truck. No seat belt, no insurance—that was a hundred bucks. Another seat-belter, and then no car seat for his baby granddaughter, Louis’ girl. “And how you gon tell me what I have to do by law to save my life, or hers?” he said to the motorcycle cop, and the man’s sunglasses slid closer to his moustache. Warrants were out by then, and when Roscoe’s arms wouldn’t meet behind his back because of their shortness and muscle, it was obvious that he was resisting arrest.
The Westside was cleaned out—some went for receiving stolen property just after two white guys came by selling tools and gardening equipment, and some went for old warrants. Make us all good niggers for another ten years.
And Louis was still in the streets, Red Man wrote in his letters. Nobody was at Roscoe’s house; his granddaughter, whose mother had dropped her off with Louis, a three-month-old baby, and never come back, was with Big Ma. Around the corner from Red Man’s house. Maybe they’d come to visit this weekend.
He heard droning from up ahead, a constant whining like giant wasps or mosquitoes, and he walked faster until he reached the bridge over a dry wash. A long line of four-by-four trucks was parked in the dusty streambed, in the shade of the bridge, and women sat in the truckbeds sipping drinks and watching the men and boys ride up and down the hills in their three-wheelers. The tracks crisscrossed the hills like ribbons, like the land was giftwrapped. Roscoe stared at the precise trails, but then he felt the riders begin to watch him, and heads turned to look. He walked off the bridge, away from the high buzzing and the smiles.
A forest of wind machines stood still and idle past the bridge. The wind scoured his ears, hot and insistent, but the blades didn’t turn, and he remembered that some doctor Red Man cut yards for told him that the machines were tax shelters. It didn’t matter if they worked. To Roscoe, they looked like trees, trees a maniac had pruned.
When he first began trimming trees, after he’d come to Rio Seco and gotten a gardening job at the university, he’d been afraid to cut too many branches. The supervisor yelled at him until he got ruthless, pruned them right. When Roscoe met Red Man, while they took their breaks and watched the students, he’d shown Red Man the poems about palm trees, about cars and women. But he’d never gotten any of them published; people he sent them to wrote back to say that a black poet had an obligation to write about his race, or that they didn’t understand how his imagery fit with power and revolution.
He and Red Man quit the university to start their own gardening and tree-trimming business. Louis was three, Roscoe’s wife Joyce was mad, and she left, went back to L.A., saying any fool who quit a job with benefits for a beat-up truck and climbing trees was too foolish to support her right. Roscoe told her to go to Palm Springs, visit his father’s grave, and tell his father all about it. When she was killed in a car accident, her sister brought Louis back to Rio Seco, to live with Roscoe. Louis was six then, tall and thin, with fingers long as these brittle stems. He was quiet for months, walking around the yard, looking at the trees and birds, at Roscoe; he’d seemed soft, too quiet, but then he began to play with Red Man’s sons, shooting baskets in their driveway.
Roscoe looked back at the wind machines, then ahead to the long stretch until the hill where he was supposed to stop for lunch. Nothing now but barbed-wire fence and telephone poles straddling the gully. He went partway down into the ditch and peed in a long crack that rainwater had worn into the bank. A red hawk bore down suddenly and landed on one of the telephone poles near him, settling to look out over the desert for rabbits. Roscoe stayed still for a moment after he’d zipped up his pants, but the hawk didn’t even turn.
The red hawks still hunted the fields near the Westside; he wondered if Louis ever watched them now, hurt his neck looking up for so long, the way he had when he was small.
His son had always been in a trance when the flocks of crows passed over the house in winter, at five-thirty every night, Louis told Roscoe. It took them an hour to cross the sky, crowds of them and then a few stragglers, more pecking and fighting in a stream of black. They nested near the river-bottom, Louis said. He had books with pictures of every bird in North America, and he waited for robins, scrub jays, any of the birds with color. Once he came running inside to tell Roscoe he’d seen a cedar waxwing in the fig tree. Roscoe had said, “Okay, and now he’s probably gone. And?”
The kids called Louis “Birdman” one summer when colored feathers were all he looked for in the streets; they laughed at him, pulled him away to the gym to play basketball. And the name got confused when he was in high school, when he was six-five and his hands as big as fig leaves, when the coach pressed him to play harder, to jump, and everyone thought he’d been called Birdman because he could leap. He had a vertical of forty-two inches, but the coaches said he was lazy, that his mind was always somewhere else. Roscoe hollered at him, told him if he didn’t start playing better, he’d never get to college, and Louis began then to keep his face as distant and new as when he’d been six.
Roscoe came up out of the gully; he couldn’t be disappearing like that for too long. The hawk swept down from the pole, but not because of him, he saw; it curved toward a spot far into the desert, and snatched something off the ground.
Roscoe faced the traffic coming toward him, and now the cars were moving so slowly faces were visible in the windows. A winter holiday in Palm Springs. Snowbirds—what the older tourists from Canada and the colder states were called, the ones who crowded the desert every winter. He saw them stare at him, saw small dogs in the windows sometimes. The kind that were either wrinkled or shaved, pressing their noses to the glass to see him. Some of the cars had kids in the back seats, and he watched all the mouths in those cars moving. “I’m on the chain gang,” he said into the wind they made, and he knew all the windows were rolled up anyway. The parents were telling their kids, “Those men in orange are bad men. They committed crimes, and now they have to pick up trash.”
Yeah, I am a bad man, he thought. I did lots of bad things. He couldn’t stop seeing Louis’ face kept turned away from him, the Suzuki pumping out music, and these faces all turned to watch him in silence, the purr of expensive motors lost in the racing air.
He’d done bad things. He’d taken Louis up that same highway where cotton laced the barbed-wire fences, up I-5. A small state college in Northern California had offered Louis a basketball scholarship, a free ride, and Roscoe drove him there in the truck, motor rattling loud in the cab. Louis had never been past L.A., and Roscoe hadn’t gone anywhere since riding with Claude years before. Hawks sat on fenceposts along the road, and Louis’ head swiveled to look at each one. His voice grew higher, excited, while he ignored Roscoe’s talk about basketball and the team. “Look,” Louis said, “the hawks guarding those fields. Like each one is saying, okay, this is my thirty-nine posts, and don’t none a you come near them. I wonder if it’s thirty-nine…”
He chanted words to Roscoe, to the window, all the way north. “Egrets,” he shouted, and Roscoe hadn’t heard him so loud, sitting so close to him, ever before. “I can’t believe it, a crane, look, standing in that water by the field!”
Mud nests were mounded on the cement overpasses, made by swallows, Louis said, and once they saw a shimmering tornado of blackbirds rise from a plowed section of land, bodies turning and twisting in perfect unison, swirling and riding to fall and curve back against the sky. Louis was silent for a long time. And when they came closer to the college, Roscoe told him to forget about the bird foolishness and start thinking about practice. It would be harder than high school, and he didn’t want anyone telling him his son was lazy and absentminded.
Like his own father had told him, all day, every day, in Palm Springs. Roscoe couldn’t stop himself, though, his voice deep and harsh, saying, “You want to see some birds, buy a canary. Put him in your dorm room, and he can sing to you after you win.”
On the way back down, after he’d seen the coach, shaken hands a couple hundred times and left Louis in the gym office, thick fog had settled near the college, and all the way down the interstate. Tule fog, he remembered Claude calling it. He could barely see the fences, the hawks hunched down into their thick necks, feathers puffed ragged against the cold wind. They were too close together on the posts, he found himself thinking, watching, and quickly he was angry. Who gave a damn about how close the birds were to each other? But when he passed the exits for Bakersfield, the sun came back, and he stopped to stretch. One of the big white birds that had made Louis’ voice jump high in the cab stalked near a pool of irrigation runoff. Was that an egret? It was clean, stark white as the new socks he’d bought for Louis, and with a long, curved neck held high, the bird looked tall as a child.
Roscoe dropped another orange bag. People were still staring at him, he knew, but then he saw a circle of clear, blue-green water ahead, sparkling, wavering in the heat. He almost ran to be closer, and came to a mound of broken windshield glass in a small turnout, aqua chunks that were so greenish moss could be under their surfaces. He didn’t even look at the strips of tire nearby, the burned car seats. He laid the new plastic bag down and sat on a rock near the glass, imagined it water. Not much water in Rio Seco; dry river, that was what the city had been named for. But Louis went to the man-made lake with the other boys, and they told Roscoe that while they fished and caught crawdads to boil for dinner, Louis watched the ducks, the geese. They laughed at him, said to Roscoe, “We told him he can’t eat no duck, but homeboy wanna feed them ducks. Don’t come home with nothin, either.”
Louis lasted only a year at the college. He came back to the Westside loud and telling everyone he didn’t get enough playing time, in a hick town anyway. No soul, nothing to do. Shit, Roscoe thought, listening to the plastic bag ripple near him, what would he have done learning about birds? Be a professor of birds? What was that word—he’d known when he worked at the university. It came to him after a few minutes—ornithology. Yeah, and what was Louis going to do with that? Look through some binoculars?
He could have been a dope dealer anyway, taught trained pigeons to deliver bags of rock cocaine that Lester and Jimmy sold. Hell, I don’t know.
Roscoe heard a low noise, knew the flatbed, the outhouse, the guards were coming up the shoulder of the road, passing the stalled traffic. I don’t give a shit, I ain’t getting up. Crow time was long over, it was almost lunchtime. But cat time would be the hardest—when the afternoon turned purple and he was back at the facility, when the evening was coming fast and Louis used to say, “Why do the cats come out now? How come they all sit on the porches at the same time? How do they know what time it is?”
Roscoe pulled at his eyebrows, listened to the flatbed with his eyes trained on the glass. The mockingbirds would have a songfight again tonight. He closed his eyes to keep the heat inside them. He’d never known what to answer when Louis asked, when he sat at the edge of his father’s bed. “Why’s the mockingbird singing now? It’s three in the morning.”
“He’s drunk.”
“No, Daddy, he ain’t singing like he’s drunk. Like he’s sending a message.”
“Message is go to sleep.”
When he woke again, Louis’s eyes were shining, reflected in the streetlight. An hour had passed, and he was still listening, trying to decipher the song.