We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone Read online

  But then I didn’t.

  I said nothing.

  I replaced the sack of birdseed back behind the counter and reclaimed my position on the stool in front of the cash register. Behind me, John came out of the stockroom. He was whistling and in a good mood. He was always in a good mood on Fridays. The woman stood for some time and watched the birds eat. It occurred to me that she had become a permanent fixture, and that it was no longer peculiar to have her stand there and watch the birds eat. I saw John eye her up, then shoot a conspiratorial glance in my direction.

  “Hello,” John said to her, not pausing in his stride.

  The woman did not mutter a word.

  “All right,” said John.

  I told him about the dead finch.

  John backtracked, unfettered, and peered at the floor of the cage and at the dead bird. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Look at that.” Then he looked up at the woman. He did not say anything but I wondered if he was thinking the same thing I had been just moments before—that the woman had either murdered the bird with noxious bodily fumes or that she was perhaps here to bring the little creature back to life. However, if the importance of either concept registered with him, he was quick to dismiss them without further consideration. He said, quite unceremoniously, “Go flush it down the toilet.”

  The next day the woman returned, and wordlessly watched the birds eat. I had spent the early part of the morning, before John arrived, relocating some of the birdcages to the stockroom, just to see what the woman would do when she arrived and found them missing. Halfway through, however, I began to fear I was perhaps disturbing some otherworldly balance, and I moved all the cages back to where they belonged. I did not want to be responsible for the destruction of mankind and the world as we know it. You can’t be too careful. Anyway, some of the cages were heavy and had broken casters, so I would not have been able to transport them on my own.

  I watched the woman watch the birds. Again, I imagined the parking lot infused with birds, suffocated by birds, blanketed in a mass of feathers, all gray and filthy from pollution, and tiny clawed feet clicking on the macadam. I saw feathers floating lazily in the air, twisting and spiraling and manipulated by the wind. I envisioned them taking flight all at once, blotting out the sun and dropping all of Sacramento into premature nightfall. I saw them filing blindly into the turbines of passing airliners until the engines coughed and seized, and the planes plummeted, missile-like, to the ground. There would be mass confusion, car wrecks, explosions, looting, rioting, people flinging themselves from their office buildings. Rivers would clog with down; water would be rendered undrinkable. Massive piles of molted feathers, brittle and dried from the sun, would spontaneously combust in the heat, and the roads would be too congested with birds for the fire trucks to get through. The air itself, clogged with feathers, would make breathing an impossibility. It would be Armageddon. Suddenly, I did not like birds very much. And I could only sit perched on my stool and watch the old woman watching the birds. I could feel sweat cascading down from my armpits and along my ribs; I could feel hard, angry knobs of gooseflesh break out along my bare arms. And still I just sat there and watched her. The end of the world, and all I could do was sit and watch.

  She was not very pretty and not very young and she was always dressed the same way. What was with that umbrella, anyway? I should have asked. I should have asked about the umbrella, I knew. But more importantly, I should have asked about the birds, all about the birds. It was such a bizarre preoccupation and I should have asked about it.

  But after that day, the old woman never came back, and both John and I eventually forgot all about her.

  Couples Seeking Couples

  At the restaurant, Jack Pagewater suddenly felt the urge to vomit. Lois was too busy fawning over the Capshaws to notice the sudden change of expression on his face, and the Capshaws themselves—well, their eyes hadn’t lifted from their drinks all evening.

  “Excuse me.” He stood and accidentally bumped Lois’s chair. She waved a hand at him without interest. He hurried down the hallway to the restroom where he leaned his head against the tiled wall, staring into the mouth of the toilet, breathing in great, wheezing gasps.

  Behind him, two young men entered and straddled a pair of urinals. He could hear them talking through the stall.

  “You run the marathon?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Marines?”

  “Twisted some tendons in my left calf. You know how the—”

  “Isn’t it like the—”

  “Twisted. And I had to stop at mid-mark.”

  “What do they do for that?”

  “Massage.”

  “You can wear a brace?”

  “Couple of weeks.”

  Five minutes later, Jack was back at the table. He hadn’t thrown up, but his stomach had settled somewhat.

  “Jack,” said Mark Capshaw, “we were afraid you’d left us.” Mark was forty and completely gray. His hands were slender and well-manicured. He wore French cuff shirts and 1940s swing-era tailored suit jackets with butterfly lapels. White teeth, shiny and even.

  Lois patted Jack’s hand. “Too much to drink, dear?”

  “No,” Jack said.

  “We’ve got another round yet,” Mark explained.

  “Several rounds,” Mark’s wife, Miranda, insisted. “Jack, don’t go all rubbery on us now, darling.” She patted his other hand.

  “He’s been running lately,” explained Jack’s wife, as if apologizing for her husband’s abrupt departure from the table. “Mornings, evenings…trying to reach—”

  “Miss the youthful body, do you, Jackie?” Mark said. He thumped his own broad chest with a massive fist. “Miss your jeunesse?”

  “Where do you find the time, dear?” Miranda asked. She gripped Jack’s hand firmly, as if to offer condolence. She was an attractive woman in her late forties who did her best to present herself at half that age. Her fingers were cluttered with a wedge of sparkling rings—all real—and the perfume she wore was nearly cloying.

  “Really, I haven’t even been running all that much lately,” he admitted.

  “Ne pas etre si modeste,” Mark said.

  The waiter returned, carrying a bottle of vin rouge and four snifters of brandy. Anxious to get at the drinks, Mark plucked the snifters from the waiter’s tray without haste and distributed them around the table.

  “Wine?” the waiter asked them. “Ladies?”

  “None for me,” Lois said. “My head is already spinning.”

  “Lois!” Mark Capshaw said. He was drunk enough to be too loud now. “Lois, please. It’s on me tonight. Miranda and me.”

  “Well,” she stammered. Jack watched her—watched her eyes—but she never thought to face him. To the waiter, she said, “Maybe just one glass.”

  “Two,” added Miranda.

  “And cigars,” Mark said. He looked at Jack. “What’s your preference?”

  “Jack doesn’t smoke cigars,” Lois answered, wrinkling her nose. “Filthy, filthy things. That’s a dirty habit, Mark Capshaw. Miranda—what’s the matter with you, letting that fit man smoke such horrid things?”

  “I am my own man,” Mark the fit man said. Jack thought his eyes were beginning to look red and sloppy. “Jack, son, what flavor? Come on, now—a man shouldn’t smoke alone.”

  “I don’t know flavors.”

  “Don’t do it, Jack,” Lois harped…although she sounded like she really wanted him to.

  “Robustos!” cried Mark to the waiter. “Two thick Robustos, son!”

  Lois frowned playfully. The waiter nodded and slipped away.

  “Did you tell Jack about your hunting trip, sweetheart?” Miranda prodded her husband.

  “Yes,” Lois said, “do tell it, Mark.”

  Mark finished his brandy and rubbed his thumb along the lip of the glass. “I own a Winchester Model 70 Custom African Express with walnut stock, ebony pistol grip, and adjustable front and rear sights. What’s yo
ur make, Jack-o?”

  “I don’t own a gun.”

  “You don’t hunt?”

  “I have twice before…”

  “Well, you should take him, Mark,” said Mark’s wife. “Jack would love it. You would love it, Jack.”

  “Back-ended a two-hundred-pound buck last week. I was perched in a tree, maybe twenty yards from the ground, and I’d been sitting there for—oh, I’d say forty-five minutes. Quiet. I felt like an Indian.”

  The women laughed.

  “Waiting is the hardest part,” Mark explained. “It takes a lot of patience and skill to wait in silence, and to keep alert. And then this beautiful animal strides out onto the fairway—magnificent, with a rack the size of…well, the size of this table, no doubt.”

  “No doubt,” Miranda agreed.

  “A spectacular head,” Mark said. “You wait for the precise moment. Too soon and you might scare it off; too late and you’re out of the picture. They move like lightning and will be gone just as quick. Snapshot, Jack. Like a camera flashbulb. You watch it, you try to become part of it. You breathe when it breathes. You blink when it blinks. Swear to God, if you had a tail, you’d both be flitting them in synchronization. Do you know what it’s like to bring down such a beast, Jack? To pull the trigger and feel two tons of power ricochet in your arms, and see such a beast go down?”

  “I’ve only been duck hunting.”

  “Oh, now!” Mark bellowed. “Ducks? What’s a duck? That’s insignificant. I mean, when that great buck went down, I could feel it, as if it were a part of me. Do you know what I’m saying? So strong. You have to kill it to appreciate such a thing, Jackie. I mean that, son. Superb.”

  “All right,” Jack said.

  “The first thing you do,” Mark continued, “is heft the antlers. You just feel them, delicately but with force, too, like the way you’d feel a breast, and you can surmise the entire weight of the creature just by the thickness of its headgear. Experienced hunters can, anyway. Then you wait for it to stop breathing—you can see its chest heave. Once, twice—then like a blowup raft that’s gradually losing air. Again, experienced hunters know how to snap the neck if you don’t want to wait it out. But sometimes waiting it out is part of the reward. You’ve ended this thing, Jack. You’ve conquered. You’ve earned it.”

  “Jack caught very nice ducks,” Lois said.

  “Shot ducks,” Jack corrected quietly.

  “Hmmmm?”

  “You don’t catch them,” he said, “you shoot them.”

  “Break a duck’s neck in a similar fashion,” Mark said. “You shoot and wing it, wait for it to fall, then find it in the brush. Grab its head and give the bugger a twirl—”

  “Mark Capshaw!” Miranda cried playfully, swiping at her husband’s shoulder. “At the table? Is it really necessary?”

  Smiling, Mark did not take his eyes off Jack. “Forget duck, Jackie. A nice buck is the way to go.”

  “I’ve never even eaten venison,” Jack said.

  “Eat it? No—you mount it. The head, anyway. I mean, you can have it stripped, gutted, and cleaned if you want, but I never eat it.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t enjoy it.”

  “Red meat doesn’t agree with Mark,” Miranda said.

  “You see, it’s a sense of pride, Jack. Every man should kill a buck once in his lifetime. You’re almost not a man unless you mount that head, Jack. You need to heft those antlers and let that creature know why man is the superior being. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” Jack said.

  “It’s important that you do.”

  “I understand,” Jack said.

  “Take him hunting sometime,” Miranda insisted.

  “Heft them,” Mark said. He mimed grabbing a rack of antlers, but it looked more like he was gripping an invisible steering wheel. Then, grinning, he finished off his wife’s brandy. “Just feeling it—it’s like a surge of power.”

  “Power-power-power,” Lois muttered playfully.

  “What happens if the buck gets away?” Jack asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you shoot and miss. Or if you just injure it and don’t kill it.”

  Mark laughed. “You can’t miss, Jack. I mean, maybe with ducks you can miss, but who bothers with ducks?”

  “What’s a duck?” Lois said, giggling.

  When the cigars came, Mark’s face lit up like a child at Christmas and proffered one to Jack. “No, no,” Mark insisted as Jack stared at the smoke. “You’ve got to clip the end.”

  “Bite it off like they do in the movies, Jack,” Miranda said, winking at him.

  “Don’t bite it,” Mark said. He produced a silver cutter from the inside pocket of his jacket and clipped the tip of his cigar. “Snip. See that? Can’t bite it. How can you be such a damn fool, Miranda?”

  “Oh, Mark…”

  “Really, she’s such a damn fool sometimes.”

  Lois and Miranda giggled.

  When Jack and Lois first met the Capshaws two months ago, the Pagewaters were in awe of the couple. They were clever and mysterious and utterly refreshing. They used words like “hence” and “moreover” and “therefore,” and occasionally used the word “summer” as a verb. Now, two months later, Jack had fallen out of awe. Lois continued to be intrigued by the couple (with each passing day, Jack thought, Lois loved them more and more), but Jack now only acknowledged the Capshaws with the mild curiosity of a weary movie-goer. Sixty-two days since their introduction and the Capshaws were no more interesting that a pair of glossy insects scuttling across a piece of dirty linen.

  Mark clipped Jack’s cigar, lit it while he puffed, then handed it across the table to Jack.

  “Puff,” Mark said. “Don’t inhale. You don’t inhale cigars.”

  Jack puffed. The cigar tasted vaguely like cinnamon but mostly like wet leaves and tar.

  “Give it here, then,” Lois said, grabbing it from Jack’s mouth and popping it in her own. She sucked the life from it, then coughed. “Really,” she sputtered, “you men are so primitive!” She thrust the stogie back at her husband.

  Just when the check came, Jack began to feel nauseous again. He rose, plodded off to the bathroom, and hung himself over the toilet again. The cigar hadn’t agreed with him. Also, he was light-headed and dizzy from all the drinking they had been doing.

  Mark entered the bathroom, his voice booming some operatic song. He adjusted his silk tie in the spotted bathroom mirror.

  “Jack,” he said, “do you have any idea how much Donn Mason Mutual cleared for me last year?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Up thirty-five percent. That’s more than ten percent better than the New York Life return, did you know that? Thirty-five. I cleared about fifty grand in eleven months. That’s what thirty-five percent will do for you, Jackie. Why do you waste your time floundering with real estate, anyway?”

  Mark Capshaw was drunk. With the exception of the house he and Lois lived in, Jack had never touched real estate in his life.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” Mark Capshaw said. “If I could do it all again—pharmaceuticals. That’s the way to go, and you better believe it. Pharmaceutique, Jack. Generic medicines. Your Tylenol, Advil, Whatever-the-Hell. You botch one tiny micro-atom or whatever you call it, modify the prescription, drop below the high-profile drugs by eighty percent—Christ, Jack, you’d have the whole goddamn market. And that’s what it’s all about: marketing. Can’t you see that? And here you are, puckering around in real estate. It really is quite pitiable.”

  Mark wet his hands beneath the sink, then ran his fingers through his silver hair. He examined the closeness of his shave in the mirror as Jack became suddenly ill and vomited into the toilet.

  “No embarrassment,” Mark said. “An old Army buddy of mine threw up the first time he smoked a cigar.” He produced a joint from his coat. “Here’s the real treasure. You want to smoke before sex, Jack?”

&
nbsp; Jack shook his head.

  “It’ll make you feel better, son.”

  “No,” Jack managed. The letters of the wall graffiti blurred and doubled before his eyes. In his spinning head he heard Mark Capshaw’s phantom voice say something about antlers, hefting antlers. “I don’t think I could stomach it right now.”

  “What’s the matter, anyhow?”

  “I haven’t been feeling well lately.”

  “Have you said anything to Lois?”

  “No, but she knows.”

  “You should speak with her, if it’s serious.”

  “She knows. And I don’t know if it’s serious.”

  “You should tell Lois,” Mark said. He lit the joint and took one long drag. “She’s looking very nice tonight, by the way. She’s lost weight?”

  “Lois?” Jack said. His head was still spinning. He flushed the bowl so he wouldn’t have to look at what he’d just brought up.

  “Her thighs have gotten less and less…” Mark paused, searching for the perfect word, “messy. She’s a lovely woman.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Fifteen years,” Jack said. He righted himself against the wall, took three deep breaths, and pushed his way over to the sink beside Mark. The stink of the marijuana made his stomach growl.

  He thought of Mark Capshaw, naked in the glow of the fireplace except for his dress socks and his expensive wristwatch, nestling his groin against Lois’s buttocks while his knobby red knees pressed into the worn plush of the Pagewaters’ living room carpet. Lois laughed and said something while craning her neck back. Her breasts, slightly drooping with middle-age but still suggestively round, dangling from her as she held herself up on all fours. Miranda Capshaw, half-nude against the far wall, watching and clapping and cheering them on. And Mark Capshaw, his face ruddy in the firelight and glistening with perspiration, a thin smile on his lips, saying, The world is waiting for you, Jackie! The sexual revolution is at hand!

  “She’s just so lovely,” Mark said, snapping Jack back to the present. Mark’s reflection winked at Jack in the bathroom mirror. “We brought the van,” the reflection said, “because I know how you and Miranda groove to it. It’s right out in the parking lot.”