CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
FOR POP, SPENDING THREE WEEKS IN IRELAND, WHERE THERE WAS a pub under every rock, was like being hooked up to a Budweiser drip—between his unabated reeling drunkenness, Aunt Brigid’s clueless matchmaking, and Uncle Tom’s haranguing phone calls, I decided to quit the trip and come back home earlier than we’d originally planned.
On the flight back to the United States, the plane, bucking and pitching, wrestled with turbulence as I struggled to keep Pop from turning into a human liquor balloon. By the time we landed, he was both bombed and belligerent, immediately refusing to obey an order to remain in our seats while some British VIP was escorted off the plane.
“I will not!” Pop stormed, standing and reaching up for his overhead bag.
“Sir, please sit down,” the flight attendant ordered calmly but firmly.
“Sit down yourself! I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to wait like some sort of serf while some third-rate pasha is carried out of here on a sedan chair.” He looked around at the other passengers, who were clearly stunned by his outburst. “What’s wrong with you people? Putting up with this feudal nonsense—are you all card-carrying colonials?”
A handful of others began to express agreement as the stewardess, recognizing a minor mutiny in the making, went into the cockpit looking for reinforcements.
My first instinct was to try to get him to settle down, forget about it, let it pass, but watching him there in the aisle, up on his feet and raging—Pop never would take anything sitting down—well, it had a certain appeal. I stood up, hooked my bag over my shoulder, and took my place alongside him. “Come on, let’s go,” I said.
Several other passengers followed us as we headed toward the exit, where the decision was reluctantly made to let us off as Pop punched the air triumphantly with his fists.
“So,” he said, opening the cab door as the driver loaded his luggage, “I suppose you’ll be going to your grandfather’s house.”
“No, I think I’ll come home for a while,” I said, lifting my bags into the backseat of the car and sliding in next to them while Pop took up his preferred spot next to the cabbie.
We’d been home for a couple of days. It was mid-May, late at night, around eleven o’clock, and Uncle Tom and I were at the northernmost tip of the island, listening for areas of low-frequency sound generated by the earth’s magnetic field.
“There it is. Do you hear it?”
“I don’t hear anything, Uncle Tom.”
“And why am I not surprised? You’ve no facility for listening—it’s an art form, you know. When it comes to listening, you’re a paint-by-number proposition, Noodle. Shhh . . . quiet . . .”
He froze, cupped hand midway between his shoulder and ear. He was next to me in the passenger seat of the car—neither he nor Pop drove; Uncle Tom never learned to drive, and Pop had lost his license years earlier, driving drunk. I can still see him nodding off behind the steering wheel, eyes rolling, and me under orders to pinch him whenever he fell asleep.
“Clear as a tuning fork. Perfect. Here’s where we’ll do our first training toss in the morning,” he said.
“What do you mean, we?”
“I need your help if we’re to be in shape for the race. We haven’t much time, only a month, but I have a feeling we’ve got a tiptop team.”
“Uncle Tom, I’m not interested in racing pigeons.”
“Is it the money? Is that what this is about? Do you want me to say I’ll split the purse with you? Ten thousand dollars, fine, I won’t give you half, but I’ll give you a third of ten percent.”
“Give me a break. It’s not the money. I just can’t get that excited about training pigeons. . . .”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot who you are. Dr. Collie Flanagan is too good for the likes of a band of pigeons. It’s canaries all the way for you, isn’t it? Just like when you were a boy and you wouldn’t help me plant vegetables because you thought gardens were only for growing flowers, do you remember that?”
“Kind of.”
“And you’d still plant a tulip over a potato, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess I might.”
“Well, if it will appease your snobbery, then think about this. At one time, the common man was prevented by law from owning pigeons; it was an honor reserved for the high and the mighty. And here’s another fact that may appeal to your discerning mind and fragile temperament: Racing pigeons are more properly termed racing doves. Is that balm enough to your gentility?”
“I don’t care about all that. I just can’t get that worked up about a bunch of birds. . . .”
“And what does inspire your interest, Noodle? Brooding? Moping? Creating great dramas in your head with yourself as the main actor?”
“Uncle Tom, for crying out loud, would you respect me more if I just shrugged off what I’ve done? A kid is dead because of me. What am I supposed to do? Roll my eyes and say, ‘Shit happens,’ and forget about it?”
“Say, keep your Alans on! All I know is that the dead have no currency among the living. You might just as well be devoting all your thoughts to leprechauns as moon over the dead. You owe me, the person sitting next to you, more than you owe the dearly departed. And by the way, while we’re on the subject, you owe me plenty. It’s time you started paying me back for all I’ve done, and instead there you sit, gnashing your teeth over a stranger and not showing even the tiniest whit of gratitude for all I’ve done. But I suppose you’ll cry buckets at my funeral and get me a fancy coffin. Is that it?”
“It’s not so easy, Uncle Tom. My negligence cost a seventeen-year-old boy his life.”
“It’s a sorry business all right, but there’s no need to compound the tragedy by making my life more difficult.”
We turned off the road and slowly drove up the long laneway leading to the house. Brendan and Kerry, two Irish wolfhounds, appeared out of the darkness, Pop and Tom’s dogs, their favorite breed, the only breed Ma never liked. Barking and racing from door to door, they banged their front paws on the car windows, towering over the roof. I turned off the ignition and opened the door. Tom tapped me on the shoulder.
“Anyway, enough about you—you know, Collie, the world wasn’t made just for you. Be sure to get a good sleep. I’ll be shaking you awake at five-thirty. We’ll want to toss the birds at seven on the dot.”
At five o’clock the next morning, Uncle Tom woke me up the same way he used to when I was a kid: He threw a glass of ice cold water in my face.
“Holy shit!” I said.
“Hey, hey, language, Collie, language. That type of talk is as old as Adam and Eve,” Pop yelled from his room directly across the hall from mine.
“Did you learn that cursing from Brown, or was it Harvard?” Uncle Tom asked before disappearing into the dusk, his footsteps sounding heavy on the stairs.
“All right. Time for you to meet the team. Let’s see what they think of you. Here’s Francis, and then there’s Patsy, Raymond, Joe, Martin. Further down is Kevin, then Kieran, Thomas, and Michael and—”
“I know. Bobby Sands,” I said with a sly glance.
Uncle Tom wouldn’t look at me. “I suppose you think you’re very intelligent right about now.”
“I just happened to recognize the names of the hunger strikers.”
“Just remember, you’re never so smart that you can’t learn something from a pigeon—it’s a philosophy that’s served me well my whole life. You think about that, Noodle, when you’re congratulating yourself on your cleverness.”
“Who’s this?” I said, stopping in front of a solid red bird, russet feathers sleek and shining in the early morning sunlight that streamed into the loft.
“Here’s the champ. He’s one in a million. I call him Bingo. . . .”
“Oh, I guess Bing would like that, I think he would. Don’t you?”
Uncle Tom rolled his eyes. “Well, say, use your head. How would I know? And anyway, what difference does it make?”
“Well, none, when you put it that way. . . .”
“He’s named for the game, not the nephew. I have more in my life than you two nitwits, you know. If I’d named him Collie, would you assume it was in your honor?”
“Not any more I wouldn’t.”
“You could use a few lessons in subtlety—and while you’re at it, stop drawing the obvious conclusion,” Uncle Tom said, rumbling with annoyance.
Tom’s pigeons were bred from a strain imported from Holland years ago. They could trace their lineage back to the frequently mentioned legendary Michael Collins, the pigeon who walked home after breaking his wing. Uncle Tom had plans to enter them in the prestigious Chilmark Classic, a five-hundred-mile race from Rogue Bluffs, Maine, to Martha’s Vineyard. Since I was the only one who could drive and help him safely transport the birds, he named me assistant coach, introducing me to his fellow pigeon racers as Barney Fife, which somehow mutated into Harvard Barney, my official pigeon-coaching name.
My Ivy League education was always good for a laugh among Uncle Tom’s cronies.
My principal practical duties seemed to be cleaning out the loft twice a day while listening to endless lectures about the care, feeding, and handling of racing pigeons, along with complicated sermons concerning the aerodynamics of flight.
Uncle Tom was always pulling pop quizzes, just the way he did when I was a kid.
“What is the name of the pigeon awarded the French Croix de Guerre for bravely continuing his mission for the American Army signal corps despite being shot twice?” he asked one early morning as he sipped his coffee while I scraped pigeon shit from the loft’s wooden floor.
“Cher Ami.”
“Can pigeons read?”
“No.”
“Oh, is that so? Explain then why they can distinguish all twenty-six letters of the alphabet?”
“How do I know?”
“The answer is obvious—to read directions and the occasional biography. They also enjoy limerick books and how-to manuals.”
Uncle Tom drew up a twenty-eight-day training schedule. The first day, we drove to the farthest tip of Vineyard Haven and tossed them skyward—it took them about two hours to make the twenty-mile flight home. Bingo was the first back at the loft, followed by Bobby and then Patsy. Within a week of training, which included a couple of days off, they were able to find their way home in less than thirty minutes.
Bobby, Patsy, and Bingo were the consistent front-runners.
“We’ve got our three top competitors,” Uncle Tom said as we traveled by boat out into the ocean, where we were getting ready to release them for a longer flight—forty miles.
“Lovely birds, Tom,” Pop said, accompanying us on the trip, reaching for Patsy, cupping him in the canoe of his hands. “Collie tells me you expect great things from them in the race.”
“I do indeed. This is an exceptional group—the finest birds I’ve ever bred.”
Pop and Uncle Tom could be inexplicably formal with each other. I was holding Bingo in my hands and leaning against the deck, listening as they talked— sharing their mutual love for birds and animals, they were practically cooing.
“Six hundred heartbeats per minute for up to sixteen hours . . . their wings beating up to ten times per second.” Uncle Tom was reciting his favorite statistics to Pop, who was listening avidly.
“Who is the fastest bird?” he asked.
“Bingo,” I said.
“What’s his fastest time?”
I said, “Ninety miles an hour—”
“Look here, Noodle, quit interrupting, that’s for me to say,” Uncle Tom said. “I’m the senior coach.”
“Sorry,” I said as Bingo gently pecked the knuckles of my other hand.
“Has Collie been a big help? I’ll bet he has,” Pop said to Uncle Tom, who looked sorely put out.
“No, he has not. Every moment I feel the effects of dealing with a listening-impaired amateur.”
“So, Collie, you seem to be enjoying your stint as a pigeon coach,” Pop said.
“Not really,” I said as I tossed Bingo high into the sky, watching as he powered straight up into the air, followed closely by Patsy and Bobby, all three beginning their mysterious journey home.