(In honor of Memorial Day, an excerpt of Birdman, including the foreword to the second edition, copyright 2012)
Foreword – Second Edition
It has been almost a dozen years since Billy Kagan, aka Bert
Smith the Birdman wandered the Irish hinterlands seeking his soul. Much has
changed. The Celtic Tiger has come and gone. The world seems to have survived
the passage into a new millennium, albeit semi-fractured in its consciousness
and its ability to carry on.
It is instructive to look back on the world Billy was
watching in those wild-eyed days.
We seemed to be perched on the edge of a yawning chasm, pursued by the
ghosts of our former misdeeds, and uncertain of a future providence. Nowadays,
a new generation looks to the birds, “perchers, songsters, blown by the wind and
content to sit in the early and late days of the lingering sun, faith in
perpetual sustenance, sharp-eyed observers of the moribund and settled,” as the
waves of creative destruction crash down again on the rocks of these shores.
It is time to bring Billy forward on the bridge he foresaw
being built, bypassing the architecture and snares of the old city, into a new
land of opportunity. This electronic edition of Birdman is for the reader who
knows that sometimes you have to step back in order to move on.
Chapter One
The countless ways of yearning, the winged and white-backed
beasts, crossed the ocean behind Kagan, in hot pursuit. The Atlantic beat
against the cliffs of this present citadel, laying siege to his dreams. The
light of day gave a nightmarish aspect to the misted fields, the silent cobbled
street with its electric cables sagging and shrieking in the wind, the three
public houses, the post office in requisite green, the shop and the sharp
hairpin up the hill. Across the water in one direction lay Europe, in the other
America. Goat Island, the last spurs of the land’s spiny back, seemed in a
winter’s dawn to have been thrown up out of the sea by an improbable hand.
“Sit down, Mr. Smith,” said Francis, the eldest brother. He
rose from his chair at the small rectangular table.
“No, that’s all right. I’ll take the plate up to my room,”
Kagan said.
“You can sit here if you please,” said Francis, pulling out
his chair in a gesture of invitation. Murphy senior grunted an assent. Mrs.
Murphy cleared her plate and Francis’s plate away from the table. The rest of
the Murphys resumed eating as if on cue, satisfied that the situation with
Kagan would resolve itself one way or another without impacting their ability
to finish breakfast.
Kagan would have insisted on going upstairs with his food,
but thought of Bert Smith, birdwatcher and student of man, and accepted the
offer. He walked around the table by the steamed window, the sill with its
statuette of Mary in her cloak of sky blue, so unlike the Irish sky this
particular morning, and sat down as Mrs. Murphy loaded his plate with food in
whiplike motions from the range.
Francis lit a cigarette, while Murphy senior directed a comment
at Kagan he did not understand. He wiped his mouth in a scholarly fashion and
asked Mr. Murphy to repeat himself.
“You’ll be walkin’ the cliffs for the birds this mornin’,
Mr. Smith,” said Murphy.
“That’s exactly what I plan,” said Kagan.
Murphy mumbled to himself, mumbles Kagan took as tokens of
disbelief, and his stomach sank. To play Smith would require more than
imagination. It would take balls. Kagan suspected Smith would be of a taciturn
disposition and so kept quiet, finishing his food.
The Murphys gathered in twos and threes by the front door,
said goodbye to Mrs. Murphy and headed out across the lawn to the Hiace van and
the Toyota Carrera on the curbside followed closely by Heidi, the yapping
dachshund. Kagan observed through the open front door beyond Mrs. Murphy’s
midriff as the two vehicles wheezed into action and drove off. Mrs. Murphy
closed the door, leaving Heidi sniffing for remains outside on the wet lawn.
“Not a very nice day, actually,” said Kagan.
“’Tis not the day but the fish that are in it,’ said Mrs.
Murphy. “You could do with a good lie-in, Mr. Smith, you look half dead. I’ll
get you some more tea.”
“Call me Bert. And thank you, Mrs. Murphy.”
She poured him another cup of tea and seemed unfazed by his
forwardness. Apparently Smith was an intimate, theatrical sort of man and had a
winning way with older women. This disclosure, along with the breakfast, went a
way towards allaying the gnawing pain in his gut, a product of pints the
previous night. The beer flowing through him seemed to have eroded a large
chunk of his liver.
Upstairs, Kagan gathered up the binoculars and the bottle of
Bushmills, put on waterproofs, porpkpie hat and boots, all of which except for
the Bushmills he’d acquired at a sporting goods outlet in Mallow on his way
down from Limerick, and descended the stairs again. Mrs. Murphy was dusting
down the table, Heidi sleeping in her basket by the range.
“You could do better than going out on a wet day like
today.”
“Ah, but I have my duties to the birds.”
“I suppose it’s one thing or another.”
“Very true. I’m just a bird-watching fool, Mrs. Murphy.”
“I know. I know. And I’m thinking that old David Bellamy
himself would give up on the birds and stay inside with the fire going on a day
like today.”
“Yes, well. It’s a severe sort of calling.”
“Not for the faint-hearted.”
“No.”
“And you seem yourself a sort of stay at home man. Although
there is a touch of the rough to you, as if you’d seen better days.”
“You flatter me, Mrs. Murphy.”
Heidi stirred in her basket but thought better of it as
Kagan went out of the house. He walked past the sleeping village, folded up on
itself in the mist, and climbed the mine road up the long hill to the top of
the island, hopping a ditch gurgling in the gossamer rain and over a short wall,
his boots squelching in the mud.
The rain blew in from the southwest, the direction of
nightmares. Sitting on the edge of the cliff, Kagan could see the ocean far
below him bashing against the rocks. Through the binoculars he scanned the
waves for a sign monsters or vessels of calamity. But all he could see were
swooping gulls along the lower portion of the cliffs, some cormorants skimming
the water, and a group of seals further along the rocky coast. There was
nothing out there but the wind and the waves as far as the eye could see. Kagan
clung to his perch, pre pared well for this sort of battle, facing down of
fate, manning the watchtowers of the imagination, seeking with the radar of the
mind for friend or foe. They would be coming after him. They always did. They
had the patience of landowners, the law on their side. All Kagan had was the
waves. He wiped the water off the lens of the binoculars and put it away.
Unscrewing the top of the whiskey bottle, he regretfully considered his
situation.
***
Barry’s was strangely silent, although a good number of
people sat at tables and three or four at the bar. Barry, a man of gruesome
demeanor and appalling personality, had that morning received notice from his
solicitor in Lamareen that the sale of his pub had been completed, something
he’d been trying to pull off for ten years in a half-hearted attempt to change
his life. But the sudden idea of a Dublin man, a stranger, getting to stand
behind the counter and glare at people who came down the steps had put him in a
total funk, a mood which rubbed off on the clientele, despite the fact that
most people who knew Barry would not miss his service in the pub, as he was
miserly, with a long memory, and unforgiving of debts.
Kagan sat at a corner table finishing his lunch and admiring
Barry. He had a really ugly face, glaring and suspicious, but Kagan intuited
that Barry was misunderstood, and in a different situation, under perhaps ideal
circumstances, may have turned out to be a decent sort of man, respectful and
considerate. Kagan’s meager awareness was enough to set his mind reeling with
incommunicable insights. He sat and drank his beer, grateful for his private
thoughts.
The pub’s yellow walls reverberated with the light coming
through the opaque, low set windows. The brass beer taps and puddles of water
on the counter reflected this mysterious incandescence, while the faces of
Barry’s customers were lowered and secretive, grim expressions broken only by
half-winking, jeering smiles and cackles of delight.
A man approached Kagan’s table from the bar carrying a full
pint glass of beer which he set next to Kagan’s half empty one.
The man studied him momentarily while Kagan garnered his own
impressions. He grinned, more like a grimace, showing a row of crooked, brown
lower teeth.
You bein’ a stranger here you need to know a few t’ings,”
said the man.
“What are they?” asked Kagan.
“The man who owns this pub is standing over there behind the
bar. His name is Donal Barry and he’s selling the place to another man from Dublin
and none of us here will be sorry to see the back of him.”
“I see.”
“Yes, I’m a blow-in myself. Where do ye come from?” he
asked, poking his face next to Kagan’s and screwing up his lips.
“America.”
He stepped back, considering.
“You don’t seem a half-bad sort of American.”
“Thank you.”
Kagan tipped back his glass.
“What brings you here and what keeps you here?”
The man was still standing in an idiotic way before him.
Kagan put the glass down.
“Birds,” he sighed.
“Birds it is and birds it shall remain,” said the man.
“Yeah,” said Kagan, hoping not to have to be more specific.
Luckily the man seemed to require no more information. It had been perhaps an
inspired choice of line.
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