The Bird I Couldn't Save

I came out of the house yesterday morning to find an angry purple martin hopping toward my front steps. Purple martins, in my opinion, are an under-appreciated bird. He sat there with his purple and black sheen and his startling, piercing eye and I was taken aback as he hopped aggressively forward.

I immediately realized why he came at me, when there was a rustling from the bushes and a neighborhood cat leaped toward him.

"Hey, get outta here! Stop that! GIT GIT GIT!" I waved my son's bright blue windbreaker at the cat, scaring the bird nearly to death and my son into a fit of screaming tears. The cat paused and looked at me, unafraid, and hunched down a little, looking over the grass around him as if to show that this momentary interlude was entirely his idea.

My son, meanwhile was bawling, "Kitty... Kitty..." as if to demonstrate what a mean Mommy I am and what a terrible injustice I was committing on the cat. I explained to him that the cat was trying to eat the bird and that I didn't want him to do so.

J seemed to understand the problem and started helping by yelling, "Bad Kitty! Go! Go, Kitty!"

I got between the cat and the bird and herded the cat one way, herded the bird another way. The cat crossed the street and the bird hopped under my car. I bent down and looked at him and tried to explain, to no avail, that I was trying to help him. One eye stared at me from underneath the car. I had an Edgar Allen Poe moment, although as I'm writing this I'm not even really sure what that means.

My neighbor came out onto her porch and yelled across the street to ask if something was wrong. I told her what kind of craziness I was participating in and she talked about the neighbor cat for a while. By the time we finished the bird had disappeared to somewhere -- I didn't know where. The cat was also gone, skulking its way to another part of the neighborhood. I knew he would be back but I hoped it would be later, after the bird had found a place to hide.

I mentioned to my mother what had happened and how it had made J cry. She predicted that the bird was done for. "The cats always come back. He'll get the bird; they always do." I am not fond of fatalism but I accept that as part of my mother's character and try not to take it personally or try to persuade her into a new line of thinking. It's not my job to change her.

I got home that night and pulled into the driveway and glanced across the street to the big cedar tree and under the tree in the fading light was a glint of purple-black sheen, a feathery lump of dead bird that I presume is my purple martin who was, as my mother predicted, not keen enough to overcome the natural outcome of a fight between cat and bird. She was right.

It made me feel bad, but at the same time one small part of me was glad that -- at my age and with the occasional knocks I have had from life -- still I hold on to my optimism with a tight fist, still I fan a tiny flame of hope that every now and then some small fragile part of nature will win out over what is usually inevitable.

***

My grandmother is in the hospital and I sit by her bed and think about how small she looks. She's in a thin, cheerless hospital gown in an austere room with a big monitor hanging over her bed. The monitor flashes in red and green, numbers that I mostly don't understand. Some of them I do and those are what I stare at when I can't stand to stare at her anymore. I know what the numbers are supposed to be and I watch intently as they creep into ranges that are unacceptable.

I was amazed how much like a random old woman she looked, as if she was a stereotype of every woman who is nearly at the end of her life. She is 94 years of living that is collapsing in on itself like the universe, creating a black hole that will suck the rest of us into it for a time, only to spit us back out into some other galaxial relationship that is slightly different from the one before. Life goes on.

For a moment she looks nothing like my grandmother and I have to look around for a time and remember what it was I'm doing here.

My mind gently arches back, sliding into a memory of being 11 or 12 and having a rare glance into my grandmother's closet. She always had matching shoes and handbags, was always exceptionally put together. The Queen Mother. Vanity personified.

Hanging in the closet, her dresses were all inside out on the hangers and I asked her why. She said it was so the dust would settle on the inside and if anything every soiled the dress when you turned the dress right side out, nothing would ever show.

The blood pressure cuff starts to inflate but she sleeps through it, the grinding whirr and pinching cramp on her frail arm. Her skin looks strange, soft and paper thin and I want to touch it to see what it feels like, but I don't.

The doctor comes in and wakes her up to talk to her. He tells her they will be keeping her for a while so another doctor can look at her and make his diagnosis. The doctor rubs his hand across her hair, smoothing it back in a way that I remember my mother saying Grandma hates. He runs the back of his hand down her cheek in an intimate gesture that bothers me. I want to tell him to stop, that it's not his place to touch her like he knows her. He doesn't know her. I know her and I won't even touch her like that. I set my jaw and stay silent and decide to save my steely voice for a fight that matters.

Alone with her again I wait for another long time. I see my purple martin lying in a heap below the cedar tree and fan that tiny flame of hope.

Fiyaah!

Last night the entire family was in the kitchen getting ready for dinner. I was standing at the sink, Rob was getting salad ready, there was steak in the broiler and the J-man was in his high chair swinging his legs and waiting for Mommy to hurry-up-already with his lasagna.

So, I'm standing there cutting up his dinner in little pieces and all of a sudden he yells at the top of his lungs (not very loud considering his voice condition), "FIYAAAH!"

I turned around quickly to the stove, but there was nothing on it. I looked at J who calmly looked back at me and didn't say anything further. I turned back to the counter, blinking in confusion trying to think what in the world J could have meant by that. Rob laughed.

I turned back around and looked at J who swung his legs a couple more times and just looked at me. On a whim, I bent down to look into the stove and sure enough there was a fire in there. I didn't even know J knew what fire was.

"Hey, honey, your steak is on fire!"

Rob bounded across the kitchen with a yellow oven mitt and began to beat the crap out of flaming dead cow flesh as J began yelling "FIYAAAH" again.

The child has far greater potential for genius than Rob and I, that's for sure.

Murder, She Sold

Real estate is not without its small (sometimes large) intrigues.

I had not been in real estate long when I called another office and told them I needed to show a particular home. The agent on the other end of the phone said, "You know there was a suicide in that house, right?"

It's a requirement that one disclose a violent death occurring in a home.

"What's the story," I asked.

Apparently a disgruntled husband had had enough of whatever was going on between he and his wife at home. So, he shot his wife, then shot himself. He died, the wife didn't and now she was selling the house. She was definitely getting the last laugh.

I wondered what it was like to be responsible for selling a home where such craziness had occurred. We see lots of difficult circumstances, but rarely violence as it's a small community and that sort of thing doesn't go on a lot.

Until lately, it seems.

Mr. B. and his girlfriend came to my office and said they were considering buying a house. They wanted out of Little Rock because it was crowded and sometimes unsafe. They desired a quieter life out of the crush of the city.

I spent the day with them. He was a quiet, nice man, a writer and psychologist who worked in some way with the criminal field. I think he worked with sex-offenders and did some sort of research having to do with that particular type of crime. The girlfriend was odd and I was having a little trouble figuring her out, deciphering a relationship I couldn't quite sort out at the first few glances.

Didn't matter, though. It made my job a little more difficult but not impossible. When you're selling real estate one of your big tasks is to figure out the relationship dynamic -- who is the decision maker, who signs the checks, who is the driving force, etc. Their relationship still seemed quite new -- he was the one buying the house, they had their own apartments, but he seemed to be letting her pick out the house for purchase.

I went about my way showing them houses and we spent the good part of a day together. I found them something really nice that they liked and they made an offer on it. Between the time of writing the contract and the closing there were some strange interactions I had with the girlfriend and it seemed like she was inebriated quite frequently. We had some difficult conversations on the phone that only made half sense. She was aggressively friendly with me but at the same time... something else. It was strange and hard to understand.

About a year and a half later an agent of mine was telling me about a house she was about to list where a murder had occurred. A man had picked up a homeless lady on the street, ended up marrying her and months later they divorced and somewhere in the timeline she ended up shooting him. She described the house which didn't sound familiar to me.

I didn't think much of it at the time beyond the details of making sure who had the right to sell the home. There was some intrigue there as somehow his first wife ended up as executrix of the estate. I wanted to make sure we got all the details perfect so as not to cause problems down the road when we sold the house.

And still wasn't giving it much thought until Brenda showed up at my house one weekend afternoon. I was sitting at the kitchen table as she described going through the house, described how the dead man had lain where he was shot, in his recliner in the living room, for three weeks before anyone realized he was dead. She described the river of goo that flowed across the floor as the integrity of his body failed over time and he eventually turned to liquid and foul rot.

I was fine with all that. I was fine until she told me about finding in the contents of the house an orange folder that had my card stapled to it. The room tilted slightly sideways as I began to understand what that meant. Whenever I conduct a transaction, I always put copies of the buyer's papers into a folder and staple my card to the tab of the file. He was my buyer. One of my buyers had been murdered in a house I sold him.

"What did you say the name was?" I'm sure I must have stammered. "Was it Bill B.?"

She nodded.

I reflected back on all the stories she had told me about the circumstances before I knew who the dead man was -- how this woman had killed him, how he supposedly turned out to be a deviant sex pervert himself, how the woman who killed him was apprehended, etc. None of it seemed to match Mr. B. himself at all.

My head was reeling at the thought that I'd spent much of a day with these people and Brenda was saying she was surprised they didn't drag me off into the woods and have their way with me considering some of the stories she had heard.

When people get interviewed after murders they always say, "He seemed so normal, such a nice man..." and now I get why they do that. It just seems so messed up and wacky that it all turned out the way it did.

A few months later, the house is well on its way to being sold, dried goo and all. Nothing much left but a vandalized house, some human crust stuck to the floor, some neighborhood intrigue and the memory of a couple who were not what they seemed.

And then there is me, forever left wondering who I'm driving around in my car and wondering as they sign papers how it will all turn out for them in the long run.