Wounded wing, how strange to fall from blue. Like a fish that suddenly forgets the way to swim. When men fly, they know, by instinct, they defy. But to a bird, as to a god, nothing’s more natural than sky …
Needing somewhere to think about the words forming to a nonstop percussion in his mind, not to mention needing a cold brew, Teo gimps out of daylight into the Zip Inn. A slab of sunshine extends from the doorway. Beyond it, the dimness of the narrow, shotgun barroom makes the flowing blue water of the illuminated Hamm’s beer sign on the back wall look like a mirage. The TV screen flickers with white static that reflects off the photos of the local softball teams that decorate the walls. Teo doesn’t remove his dark glasses. Zip, the folded right sleeve of his white shirt fastened with a yellow clothespin, stands behind the bar before a bottle of whiskey and raises a shot glass.
“Qué pasa, amigo!” Zip says, a little loudly given there’s just the two of them.
“Nada, hombre.” Teo is surprised to see him drinking alone in the afternoon, an occupational hazard of bartending to which Zip has always seemed immune.
“Knee acting up? Have one with me,” Zip says, filling a second shot glass.
“What’s the occasion?” Teo hooks his cane on the lip of the bar, carefully sets the bowling bag he’s carrying onto a stool, and eases onto the stool beside it.
“Today is Thursday,” Zip says, “and if you ask me, and I know nobody did, Thursday’s a reason for celebrating.”
“To Thursday,” Teo says. “Salud!”
“Na zdrowie,” Zip answers. He draws a couple of beer chasers.
“Let me get the beers,” Teo says, laying some bills on the bar. Zip ignores his money. After a meditative swallow, Teo asks, “TV broke?”
“No game today,” Zip says. “Giants are in tomorrow. You work Goldblatt’s?”
“No, Leader Store,” Teo says. He pushes a dollar at Zip. “At least let me buy a bag of pretzels.”
“I heard Leader’s is going under. Any shoplifters even there to pinch?” Zip asks, ringing up the pretzels.
“A kid in Pets trying to steal one of those hand-painted turtles. A pink polka-dotted turtle.”
“Give him the full nelson?” Zip asks.
“Only the half nelson. He was just a grade-schooler.”
“I think the dress disguise actually reduces your effectiveness, my friend. I mean, if there was a problem in my tavern, you know, say, theoretically speaking, somebody pocketing eggs—”
“The eggs are free,” Teo says.
“Then pretzels. Say I got a problem with some pretzel sneakthief, so I hire you and you’re sitting here, supposedly undercover, in a polka-dot dress wearing a wig and dark glasses and a cane and maybe smoking a cigar. I mean, you wouldn’t be fooling nobody. It might be a deterrent, but not a disguise. You might as well be sitting there in your secret wrestler’s getup. Whatever the hell it is.”
“Amigo, you really want to see the wrestler’s outfit?”
“Why not?” Zip says. “Liven things up. This place could use a little muscle.”
“You’d be disappointed. And, by the way, it was the turtle with the polka dots, not the dress.”
Lately, Teo has been stopping at the Zip Inn on weekday afternoons when the bar is mostly empty. Zip seems to know when Teo is in a mood to sit scribbling or simply to sink into his own thoughts, and he leaves him alone then, but other times they swap stories. Zip has told Teo hilarious tales of the world-record muskies he’s lost, and Teo, trying to make his story funny, too, told Zip how his knee was injured when he was thrown from the ring onto the pavement during an outdoor wrestling match.
“You mean like those masked wrestlers when they set up a ring on Nineteenth Street for Cinco de Mayo?” Zip had asked. “What are they called?”
“Luchadores,” Teo told him.
“So, you’re a … luchador … with a secret masked identity?” Zip had sounded genuinely curious.
“Not anymore,” Teo had answered.
Now, from the bowling bag, Teo pulls the hem of the dress he dons occasionally as part of his store security job. It’s the dress they gave him when he began working for Goldblatt’s — blue paisley, not polka dots — and, contrary to Zip’s wisecracks, Teo has caught so many shoplifters that he’s begun moonlighting at Leader Store on his days off.
“Yeah, this one is more you,” Zip says, fingering the fabric, then asks, “What the hell else you got in there?”
Teo lifts out the pigeon.
This morning, he tells Zip, on his way to work he found the pigeon, a blue checker cock—columba affinis—dragging its wounded wing down an alley, and took it with him to Leader’s, where he kept it in an empty parrot cage in Pets and fed it water and the hemp seed he carries with him as a treat for his own birds. Teo thinks of it as the Spanish pigeon. He doesn’t mention the message, in Spanish, that he found tied to its unbanded leg.
“So it ain’t one of your birds?” Zip asks.
“No.” Teo shakes his head. He’s told Zip how he keeps a palomar, a pigeon loft, on the roof of the three-story building on Blue Island Avenue where he rents a room, but he hasn’t told Zip about the messages arriving there. Teo hasn’t told anyone but the sax player, and he’s gone missing. Over the last month, Teo’s pigeons have been coming home with scraps of paper fastened with red twine to their banded legs. The first message arrived on a misty day, attached to the leg of one of his bronzed archangels. It wasn’t Teo who first noticed it but the sax player, Lefty Antic, who practiced his saxophone on the roof. Teo untied the message, and he and Lefty read the smeared ink: “Marlin.”
“Mean anything to you?” Lefty Antic had asked.
“Just a big fish, man,” Teo had told him.
“Maybe it’s his name, Marlin the Pigeon,” Lefty Antic said.
“No,” Teo said. “They don’t tell us their names.”
The next morning, slipped under his door, Teo found two hundred and fifty dollars in crisp bills rubber-banded in a folded page from a Sportsman’s Park harness-racing form with “Merlin” circled in the fourth race and a note that read, “Thanks for the tip. Lefty.”
Teo saved the winnings and the message in a White Owl cigar box. A few days later, out of a drizzle, a second, barely legible message arrived fastened to one of his racing homers. As far as Teo could tell, it read: “Tibet.” He took the message and half his winnings and knocked on Lefty Antic’s door. There was no answer, and Teo had turned to go when the door opened, emitting the smell of marijuana. The sax player looked hungover, unshaven, eyes bloodshot, and Teo was sorry he’d disturbed him, but Lefty Antic insisted he come in. Together they studied the harness races in the newspaper and found a seven-to-one shot named Tidbit in the fifth race. There was also a buggy driver, J. Tippets, racing in the third and eighth races. Lefty decided they’d better bet both the horse and the driver and went to book it with Johnny Sovereign.
That night Teo had a dream in which his cousin Alaina was riding him. She hadn’t aged — the same bronze-skinned, virgin body he had spied on through the birdshit-splattered skylight on the roof in El Paso where his uncle, Jupo, kept a palomar. Uncle Jupo had taken him in when Teo was fourteen after his mother had run off with a cowboy. It became Teo’s job to care for his uncle’s pigeons. He was seventeen when Uncle Jupo caught him on the roof with his trousers open, spying on Alaina in her bath. His uncle knocked him down and smashed Teo’s face into the pebbled roof as if trying to grind out his eyes, then sent him packing with eight dollars in his pocket. In the dream, Alaina still looked so young that Teo was ashamed to have dreamed it. The pain of her love bites woke him at dawn, and even after waking, his nipples ached from the fierce way her small teeth had pulled at his body, as if his flesh was taffy. Waiting under his door was an envelope with eight hundred dollars and a note: “It was the driver. Thanks, Lefty.”