The Hawk Is Dying Read online

  THE HAWK IS DYING

  A novel

  HARRY CREWS

  1973

  For Charné

  HUMAN LANGUAGE IS LIKE A CRACKED KETTLE ON WHICH WE BEAT OUT TUNES FOR BEARS TO DANCE TO, WHEN ALL THE TIME WE ARE LONGING TO MOVE THE STARS TO PITY.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Part One

  TRAPPED

  1

  Billy Bob Mavis had been in twice that morning—talking to George with his mouth full of tacks—about Volkswagen headliners. They were too tight; they were too loose. There was no way you could make money on them. Billy Bob had stood sucking on the tacks and saying with the time it took to do the headliner in one Volkswagen, you could do the headliners of three American models, anything that came out of Detroit. But the upholstery in a Volkswagen was put together like a glove, seams that were straight and true as a plumb line and the slightest bulge or wrinkle showed up from forty feet away and it took a journeyman craftsman hours to get it right and so they couldn’t make a penny on it and half of the professors at the university had at least one Volkswagen and sometimes two and of course they brought them in to be upholstered and thought they were doing you a favor. And every time one came into the shop Billy Bob felt compelled to tell him all over again that they couldn’t make a penny on them as though he did not already know that.

  “It’s your sister.”

  Betty had come into George’s tiny office at the back of the shop. He’d heard the telephone. It rang like a fire alarm all through the place, out back where the cars were parked, inside where the cutters and seamstresses worked, and even in his little office. But George hadn’t answered it. He almost never did. Somebody else could pick it up and take an order or listen to a customer complain about his seat covers as well as he could. Besides, he was afraid it was going to be his sister, Precious.

  “Tell her I can’t talk now.”

  Betty went away and came back and said: “She says to tell you she thinks the hawk is dying.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “She’s still on the line.”

  “Does she want an answer to that?”

  “Well, I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

  That’s what comes of getting in the bed with the hired help, he thought hopelessly, it makes them talk back.

  “O.K.,” he said. “Tell her you told me and I said it was all right.”

  Betty went away and came back and said, “Precious said to tell you it was dead. Said tell you she was sure it was dead.”

  He stared dumbly back at her from where he sat at his small splintered desk.

  “She said while she was waiting for me to come back to the phone the noises stopped. They stopped and she knows it’s dead.”

  “Is she still on the line?” he asked finally.

  “No, she hung up,” Betty said.

  “O.K.”

  She made as if to go and then stopped in the door, half-turned, the pert slope of her young rump caught and held in the sunlight like an insolent question.

  “No,” he said before she could ask. “I’m not coming by tonight.”

  “Then I’m taking the afternoon off,” she said. “Got to get registered for art appreesh.”

  What could he say? He watched her walk out through the shop, through the streaming window sunlight, her tight little ass sassing him with every step.

  She had no sooner left than Billy Bob was lounging in the door, chewing reflectively on a jaw full of tacks.

  “She gitten off again?”

  “The goddam hawk is dead,” George said. “Precious called.”

  Billy Bob had his head turned, watching Betty through the window as she got into her car. She had a Volkswagen.

  “I bet that’s tight enough to squeeze the balls off a gnat,” said Billy Bob.

  “Maybe the hawk’s not dead,” George said. “It may not be. Precious said it was before when it’d just stopped making noise because it’d gone to sleep.”

  “You ought to git yourself right, George,” Billy Bob said, “It aint natural to think about hawks so much.”

  Besides being the best automobile upholsterer in the state and a great sucker of tacks, Billy Bob thought he was also an authority on what was natural. He talked about it all the time, and it made George so mad he could hardly stand it. Billy Bob presumed too much on the fact that he was the shop foreman and a magician with tailor-made seatcovers. Some day George would fire him, wait and see if he didn’t.

  “She had to go register for art appreesh,” George said, feeling his lips tighten around each of the words individually as though spitting out stones.

  “Art appreesh, well,” said Billy Bob. He sighed slowly and showed the needle points of a whole row of tacks between his teeth. “I can look at that girl and tell she has known pleasures that aint natural.”

  He winked at George, and George wondered if Billy Bob could possibly know what was going on between him and the girl. Could he know and still have the gall to say something like that? Jesus, why did everything have to be so awful? Or if it was so awful, why couldn’t he handle it? Other people seemed to be able to handle it, why couldn’t he?

  “Don’t you think?” said Billy Bob.

  “I don’t think about that,” George said.

  “You ought to,” said Billy Bob, turning to leave. “It aint natural not to think about that.”

  George picked up the requisition order that he had been trying all day to get filled out. He hadn’t been able to because birds flew in his head, wings beat against his ears. He heard the falconer’s bell back at his house in the total darkness of the closet where the starving bird was shut. He stared at the requisition form and saw buzzards sailing out of his childhood.

  In Bacon County, Georgia, where he was raised, buzzards were important. You watched the sky for them and they led you to what was dead. Whatever was dead may be something of your own. A swarm of high-circling buzzards over a distant field meant you had to get on the mule and ride over the field and make sure a hog or cow was not down dying, perhaps already dead. Hawks circled the same way. But high-circling hawks were looking not for what was dead but for something to kill.

  He snatched up the order blank and went out into the shop. Nine sewing machines whined where nine seamstresses sat, thick seatcover fabric rifling through their hands. A tenth machine sat silent. The dustcover had not been put over it. George thought of the girl and what her room smelled like. He went over and put the dustcover over the machine before Billy Bob noticed it, because if he noticed it, he’d only start talking about the girl again and George didn’t think he could stand any more today.

  George looked at the bolts of material hung from spools on the wall and tried to think about what he had to do. Colors. Yardage. Texture. Naugahyde. That was very big now. There was one manufacturer making a deep red Naugahyde with a pattern of little blue and white peace symbols in it. College kids were crazy for it. Goddam college kids and their goddam peace symbols. It cost three hundred dollars for a sportscar, and that was just for materials. Three hundred dollars’ worth of peace symbols. He tried to keep his mind on material for covers and headliners and dashboards. But it was no use. Precious was probably right: the hawk was dead.

  2

  “I thought you said you couldn’t come tonight.”

  She was clearly displeased. He stood in the weeds, gone purple now with first dusk, with one foot on the bottom doorstep, and waited for her to say something else. But she did not. She watched him through the screenwire, looking much prettier than she was in the yellow light from the bulb hanging over her head. He was standing in the front yard of an enormous roach-infested house where students lived in tiny rooms, drinking apple wine and pissing on the walls. The walls always smelle
d of piss. He could smell it from where he stood in the failing light, kneedeep in purple weeds, waiting for her to do something. He didn’t know why he’d come.

  “I thought you said you couldn’t come tonight.”

  She had repeated it exactly. Not just the words, but the inflection and even the tone. Her lips looked pouted and full under the light. But he knew how thin and pinched they were. He knew she faked her orgasms too.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She moved her head back and the light poured down her face as she rolled her eyes toward the ceiling in exasperation.

  “Yes, what?” she said.

  “I said I couldn’t come tonight.”

  “But here you are.” She made it an accusation. He felt rotten. He wished to hell he had not come.

  “The hawk died.”

  “I’d say it was about time,” she said.

  She had been answering the telephone at the Trim Shop for a week, bringing him messages from Precious that the hawk was dying.

  “I’ve got it right here,” he said.

  He lifted a sandwich Baggie up in front of him, up toward her face. He had the hawk in the Baggie. Two ragged tail feathers rose over the top.

  “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” she said. “Bringing me a dead bird in a sandwich bag.”

  That was the first time it had occurred to him that she had not got off from work that afternoon to register for an art appreciation course. He didn’t have to ask or inquire. He didn’t need any proof. He knew she hadn’t. Off blowing dope. Or somebody.

  He went up the steps toward her. He opened the door. She backed away from him down the narrow hall to her room. The smell of piss was overwhelming. At least to him it was overwhelming. She never seemed to notice it.

  She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off the broken tail feathers where they drooped over his hand. He was still holding it out toward her. She had backed into her room and stopped. It was a very small room.

  “That’s a hawk?” she said.

  “A dead hawk,” he said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Opening the Baggie.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” she said.

  “I brought it for you to see.”

  “That’s a mockingbird,” she said when he had it out in his hand.

  “Look at his feet,” he said.

  The little yellow legs were thinner than pencils, but the end of each leg was raked with curving talons.

  “It’s obscene,” she said. “A choirboy with a pistol.” She was a psychology major. She liked wild images. She had told him all about it. She had taught him the word similitude. She was going to be a writer. Novelist. He had been ashamed to tell her he had never read a novel. So far he’d been able to keep it from her.

  “Without his feet, he’d be a mockingbird,” she said.

  “It’s a sparrow hawk,” he said. “A dead sparrow hawk.”

  “I’d be ashamed to kill something that little.”

  “He’s more dangerous than he looks,” he said.

  “He’d have to be,” she said. “But I’d still be ashamed.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” he said.

  “You starved him to death.”

  “All he had to do was hop on my hand and eat,” he said.

  “You starved him to death.”

  He put the bird down on top of a dictionary that was beside a Colonel Sanders red-striped box of chicken bones. He couldn’t remember how long the bones had been on the table. He’d been seeing them for a long time now though. That same box. Suddenly the air was ripely thick with the smell of warm piss. She sat on her bed. He sat on a stool. It was a four-legged stool but one of the legs had been broken off. He had to balance himself carefully.

  “It is a very cruel sport,” he said.

  She was watching the bird as though she expected it to move.

  “Probably the oldest persisting sport in the world,” he said.

  She looked at him as though she thought he had gone crazy. He wondered if he had used the word persisting right. That was exactly the way the phrase was in the book. But he didn’t feel good with persisting. He didn’t know exactly what it meant. He thought he’d better hurry on and cover it up.

  “Hasn’t died out—ever, not even for a little while—in over three thousand years.”

  From where she sat on the bed, her eyes were now holding on the bird, and she did not appear to be blinking.

  “There’s a picture of a Babylonian with a hawk on his fist in Khorsabad.”

  “Ka-whores-bad?” she said.

  “Right,” he said.

  He hoped he had pronounced it right or if he hadn’t that she didn’t know how to say it either. It didn’t seem to him like a place very many people would know about.

  “Where is that? Ka-whores-bad,” she said.

  “Babylonia,” he said. He thought: Where else would a Babylonian live?

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Attila, King of the Huns, had a picture of a hawk on his helmet,” he said.

  It pleased him to be able to rattle off things like that. In the last two months he had read almost four books on hawks. They were the only books he had ever been able to concentrate on long enough to read. He remembered a sentence—an entire sentence that had stuck absolutely and forever in his mind the moment he read it. It seemed the clincher to any argument and the thing he might ought to say to her now.

  “If hawks don’t want to be trained, they possess the last inviolable sanctuary of death.”

  She cut her hard nervous eyes at him. “Did you come over here to fuck me?”

  “I came to show you the hawk.”

  It did look a little like a mockingbird lying there, and he was almost glad that it had starved rather than submit, that it had chosen death. It was only by dying that the bird could let him off the hook.

  “Inviolable sanctuary, my ass,” she said. “You starved a deformed mockingbird.”

  “Did you get registered?”

  She paused just a beat, just long enough for the lie to set like cement when it came out of her mouth. “Yes, but just barely. Long line.”

  “Art appreciation,” he said. “Was that it?”

  “Right,” she said. She cut her eyes toward the bird. “Could we get that thing out of here?”

  “I’ll take it with me when I go. What is art appreciation anyway?”

  “It’s what it says it is. About appreciating art. Just what it says it is.”

  He stared her down. Made her look at the bird again.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “It’s nice for things to be what they say they are. Just exactly what they say they are.”

  It was a long time before she said anything. When she did her voice was tired, bored. “So big deal, I didn’t get off from work to register.”

  “But you’ll expect me to pay you as though you had a legitimate reason for being off for the afternoon, right?”

  Her hard eyes squinted at him again. “And you’ll expect me to fuck you tonight, right?”

  For a long minute he watched her thin yellow lips and thought of her mouth full of bad teeth.

  “The other,” he finally said, looking away.

  Her laughter sounded genuine, even joyous. Then: “You poor hungup sonofabitch. You want it and can’t even ask for it by its right name. But sure, why not?”

  She went on her knees and crawled the two feet toward him across the gritty floor. She took her time and he didn’t enjoy it. The muscle in his left thigh was cramping from balancing himself on the three-legged stool. The hawk stared at him from the table with one dead yellow eye the size of a pea. He wished he was close enough to touch the feet. You could feel those feet, you knew it was no mockingbird.

  3

  Fred was waiting in the driveway, drunk. He wasn’t really waiting. Fred was just in the driveway. Standing there with a Budweiser tallboy in his hand. It was three o’clock in the morning and there was no telling how long he had been stan
ding there. He may have been there since midnight. In the same spot. Not moving a muscle. After George had maneuvered his car around Fred and into the garage, the door of which opened automatically with an electric eye, he took the sandwich Baggie with the stiffened hawk, which in death was looking more and more like a mockingbird and less and less like a hawk—he took the Baggie and went back out into the driveway where Fred seemed to be trying to find something on the ground. He was staring intently at the place just in front of his shoes. It was not a dark night. Stars burned in the trees beyond the house. George took the Budweiser out of Fred’s hand. As he had thought it might be, the can was full. He popped the top and took a long pull at it. The beer was warm. It had been warmed by Fred’s hand. That could only mean that Fred had been standing here in the driveway in front of the house for God knows how long. George put his hand on Fred’s shoulder. There in the dark, he felt very close to the boy.

  He wasn’t really a boy, but George always thought of him that way: twenty-two years old, his sister’s boy, of limited vocabulary and even more limited mind, but beautiful in an odd sort of way, tall, lean, with a loose perfectly shaped mouth, and hair the color of wheat. He was the first and only child of his sister whose husband had fled the moment it became apparent the child was not normal—fled the scene of the crime.

  George had taken in his sister, along with the boy, to live with him. It was an odd family, but still a family, and at that moment there in the dark, George was profoundly grateful that he did not have to go into an empty house. His melancholy and sadness was something he tasted on his tongue. He took a last frothy suck at the beer and raised the Baggie with the stiff hawk in it. He held it up in the dark starlight, little splintery glints catching in the cellophane, up where his nephew could look at it.

  “Well,” said George, as though he had just that moment found out about it, “the hawk is dead.”

  Fred raised his eyes from whatever he was searching for. His gaze turned on George. It was a look of primal intelligence. It cut back through all George did not know and could not say about hawks, their dying, his wanting them in the first place.