CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
NOODLE, ONE LAST THING . . . ,” UNCLE TOM SAID WHEN I WAS halfway out the kitchen door.
“Yeah?” Pausing, one foot on the veranda, I turned around to face him.
“Don’t forget to whistle the way I taught you to. Bingo’s very partial to that tune.”
“I won’t,” I said.
I drove myself nuts singing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” over and over again as I toured the island looking in vain for Bingo, retracing the route I used for the race. I was clipping along the back roads and main roads, looking everywhere for a little pumpkin-colored bird. It seemed like such a dumb thing to be doing, I didn’t even know why I was doing it, I felt like the patron saint of futility, but I was responsible for what happened to him. I let him go, and I shouldn’t have. He was happy in his little world. The greater world isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.
The windows in the front seat were sealed, the air-conditioning was on, it was hot for June, more like July. I was driving slowly, the Vineyard was loaded with tourists, people behind me honking and passing in disgust. I was scanning both sides of the road as I drove, and I wondered how it had ever come to this.
Earlier, I had argued with Uncle Tom about searching for Bingo. “For Pete’s sake, Uncle Tom, it’s only a pigeon.”
“Only a pigeon?” He looked at me in disbelief, hands gripping either side of the armrest in the chair where he sat, staring up at me. “Is that what you said? Only a pigeon? Why, I’ll have you know that pigeons can hear the wind blowing a thousand miles away. They can see over a twenty-six-mile expanse. Compete with that, why don’t you?”
Nobody knows how pigeons find their way home. How do they do it? Why do they do it? Why the hell does anybody do anything?
“Everybody’s looking for a little magic, Collie,” Pop used to say, polishing his framed Karl Malden autograph.
“Except for Collie,” Bingo would answer back. “He doesn’t believe in magic.”
I wouldn’t be driving around looking, would I, if I didn’t believe in magic?
After a couple of hours driving in and around the shoreline, I was feeling a little discouraged and tired, and then I remembered that Uncle Tom had packed me a lunch. So I turned into a conservation area bordering the ocean and kept going until I came to a clearing in the dunes on the beach that had three or four picnic tables set up for day trippers.
After parking under the shade of an enormous tree, I undid the laces of my running shoes, slid them off, and walked barefoot to the beach with my homemade lunch.
Within moments, the seagulls arrived and shouted out demands. Sitting at the picnic table, I tossed out thick pieces of crusty white bread and watched them bicker over who got what.
Uncle Tom only ever made three kinds of sandwiches—white tuna fish, red sockeye salmon, and egg salad—and he always made them exactly the same way. I bit into my two pieces of fresh bread, buttered lightly and then filled an inch thick with a combination of tuna fish, mayonnaise, sweet gherkins, and slivered scallions, and it tasted the same then as it had when I was a little kid. He made great chocolate fudge, too. I started going over in my mind some of my other favorites. I was thinking that maybe when I got home I could talk him into making what Bingo and I reverentially dubbed his “green salad” when it occurred to me that food was probably the only thing in life that never disappoints.
“And that,” I said to one of the seagulls poised tentatively on the tabletop within striking distance of what was left of my sandwich, “is pretty damn disappointing.”
Something on the shoreline caught my eye; squinting, I decided to get a better look. The seagulls scattered as I stood up and jogged up to the waterline, where a huge rock sturgeon had washed up on shore and was dying in the sun. Three or four feet long, the olive brown fish was struggling for air, rubbery elongated mouth frantically opening and closing. Grabbing him by the tail fin—he was heavy, about forty pounds—I dragged him back into the water to ease his passing. He floated on top. He was being carried away by the undertow; there was no struggle left in him.
I hadn’t seen such a big sturgeon in years. He must have been fifty years old. Sturgeons are bottom-feeders. Pop told me that sturgeons can live to be one hundred years old—some may even live to be two hundred. I watched as the giant fish settled in for the inevitable, rocked by the water’s gentle motion.
Dogs go into decline after a decade. Bingo was only eighteen when he died. Ma was fifty years old. Eighty years is considered the top end of a human life. Yet for some reason, God thought it was important to confer virtual immortality on sturgeons.
Thinking about it had the odd effect of buoying my spirits— looking for a lost homing pigeon didn’t seem quite so crazy when you consider some of the ways that God chooses to entertain Himself.
Back at the car, I pulled on my running shoes, swung the car into reverse, and decided to devote a little more time to the search for Bingo.
I boarded the ferry and thought about what I was going to do—retrace the whole trip to Maine, hoping to spot him somewhere en route? Chances were he was dead, a raptor got him, a cat, maybe a car. He could’ve flown into a store window, or some creepy kid probably nailed him with a BB gun.
The more sorry fates I conjured up for Bingo, the more motivated I was to keep looking.
I drove around on the mainland for a couple of hours. At one point, a mourning dove flew up in front of the windshield and I slammed on the brakes, thinking it was him, trying to reconcile my conflicting feelings of hope and futility.
I’d been driving for most of the day, the sun was beginning to set, and I was considering calling it quits—but then, Jesus, there he was. Over there, it was him, Bingo, there was no mistake about who it was. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
I almost missed him. I was on this narrow country road, quiet, sweet, overgrown, smelling like clover. I couldn’t even say what made me take this offbeat side road, but I spotted him: There he was, walking, full of purpose and looking straight ahead, pausing occasionally to peck the ground but steadily making his way on the train tracks, his wing a half-extended fan and dragging on the ground.
We were about twenty-five miles from home. He was hoofing it on this defunct railway line, overgrown tracks surrounded by cornfields and open pasture—the only sounds the buzz and whir of insects and the chirping of birds. He couldn’t have chosen a safer route; those tracks hadn’t seen a train in years.
The sun burned down on the top of my head as I stepped onto the grass at the side of the gravel road and softly shut the car door—I didn’t want to scare him. I didn’t feel like chasing a bird through a field of weeds and rock. I walked slowly toward him, calling his name and whistling “Bye, Bye Blackbird” to attract his attention.
He paused at the familiar tune and, cooing, continued pecking along the track, looking up finally as I came toward him. After pausing for a moment, I bent and scooped him up in my hands, where he relaxed. As I was walking back toward the car, I was hoping there was no one around, no one watching and wondering what the hell I was doing.
Sliding in behind the wheel with little Bingo in my hands, I couldn’t believe how lucky he was that I found him. His wing was obviously broken, but it was easy enough to repair a broken wing.
I set him beside me in the passenger seat and then lifted open the carrying case Uncle Tom had made me bring just in case I found him.
I put him inside, and his contented cooing grew stronger. He was safe. He knew he was going home. I turned onto the narrow two-lane highway, shut off the air conditioner, and rolled down the window, the air warm as a blanket; I took a moment, half laughing, half crying, to breathe in the consoling aroma of a perfect day in June.
“Maybe we should change your name to Karl Malden,” I said.
Overhead it was dusk, the blackbirds circling above me in feral benediction.