Blackbird Fly Read Online Free PDF Page B

you’ll be all right, both of you. Tristan’s had
some trouble but he should go back next week. ”
    “ He’s supposed to see a
counselor.”
    “ Oh, rubbish. I knew a thousand boys
like Tristan.” Bernie taught junior high school algebra for
twenty-five years but always sent the bad boys home to their
parents. “Good boys who are picked on by bullies. It’s been going
on for centuries. You just have to put on a face and go
back.”
    Bernie’s advice for most everything was to ‘put on a
face.’ If they didn’t think you cared they couldn’t hurt you, and
the piddling little concern, whatever it was, went away. It worked
wonders in the courtroom and the schoolroom. But in your family it
let you hurt in silence and fester in privacy. Merle was an
excellent pupil; she’d been putting on a face to Harry — and maybe
to herself — for years.
    “ And what about you?” her mother
said. “You’re thinner, not that it doesn’t look good on you. But
you have dark circles under your eyes like when you were in law
school.”
    “ Sleeping's not so good.”
    “ Do you have pills? Dr. Farouk gives
everyone pills.”
    They left a half hour later, after two cups of milky
coffee and a full rundown on their Florida neighbors who had cooked
a giant octopus on a charcoal grill and made such a stink they got
cited for a public nuisance. Her parents came from the
pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps era, when everything bad could
be pushed down and hidden, when to get by you pretended you didn’t
care. You carried on, until carrying on — and not caring — became
your life, robotic shell of existence that it was.
    Merle poured herself a large glass of red wine and
set Dr. Farouk’s pills next it, spreading out the financials again.
They meant well, her parents. They tried to distract her with
coffee and octopus. She’d just have to figure out how to help
herself. Maybe that actually was the old bootstrap approach. Maybe
it would work if she applied herself. On a new sheet of paper she
made lists: Connecticut. France. IRA statement, bank statement,
Legal Aid salary. Potential lawsuits. Lists would keep her sane.
Well, as sane as she ever was.
    She drank wine, poured more. The financials didn’t
change. They didn’t grow zeros. The lists grew longer but not in
the plus column. There was no money for college. No money for prep
school. Her salary would barely pay the utilities and train fares.
Property taxes were out of the question. The sleeping pills stared
at her until she dumped them in the toilet. The swirling black
capsules stayed in her mind as she poured more wine. Don’t need
no stinkin’ pills. She felt stronger then, like she might find
an answer to the rest of her life, somewhere, somehow.
    Tristan bounded down the stairs, waving his English
book. He read her a poem by Dylan Thomas; he was trying to write a
short paper on it. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, one eye
swollen shut, and read it theatrically, arms waving, one toe
pointed just so. He was so adorable, hair uncombed and shirttail
out, she had trouble focusing on the words, let alone their
meanings. When he finished he reread certain passages.
    “ 'A weather in the flesh and bone/
Is damp and dry.’ What do you think that means? How can something
be both damp and dry?”
    “ Well,” she began. She had struggled
in English, at least the interpretation of metaphor that was the
heart of poetry. She was too literal. “Um. Let’s see. Flesh and
bone. So the flesh is damp and the other is, like, bone
dry?”
    “ Yeah, but.” He frowned at her. She
apparently wasn’t helpful. “What about this line: ‘the quick and
dead move like two ghosts before the eye.’”
    She knew this! “Quick means alive, so dead and
alive.”
    He squinted at her and slammed the
book. “Dylan Thomas liked to think about death. Mr. James
thinks he was obsessed.”
    Merle bit her lip. Was this Tristan’s way of telling
her she was thinking about death too much,