The Talker. Mary Sojourner

getting sick of chicano Larry and his inside track on things. The guy’s mom’s mom’s mom had come up from Sonora and his dad had been a trucker passing through on his way back home to Iowa. Larry was the kind of dude who stuck a big magnetic Guadalupe on the dashboard of his truck and hung a pair of electric blue fuzzy dice around its neck. He talked constantly about going back to his family in Sonora. And he wore a trucker hat that read Don’t touch my chingaderas. Davy figured the hat was to cover up the fact that Larry’s hairline was the only part of him heading south.

      “Peace,” Sophieann said. “But you watch. Next thing you know there’ll be all these snake-eyed guys in great suits around, you get my meaning? You know, where afterwards you’re not sure you really saw them?”

      “Sophieann,” Davy said, “you’re straight from Ponca City, Oklahoma. You’re twenty-six. You go to business college days. When did you ever see a Mafia to know one?”

      “Movies,” she said. “Not just Al Pacino flicks or The Sopranos. Real documentaries. I feel quite informed on this. You wait and see.”

      “What documentaries?”

      “On PBS. That building is a tax write-off. They build it, it stands empty, they lose money, they write it off. That was in The Family: Behind the Scenes. That was PBS, Davy. They don’t lie.”

      “The Mafia doesn’t pay taxes,” he said. “But I sure will. Lisa’s going to make sure of that.”

      “Ah,” Sophieann said, “now it’s getting interesting. Hold that thought. I gotta key in.”

      “Jesus, Sophie,” Davy said. “Where’d you learn that? Lisa’s shrink always says, ‘Hold that thought.’ But it’s always only me that’s holding my thoughts.”

      “Everybody says it,” she said. “Just hold it. We’ll tear those biotches apart when I get back.”

      Bitch hung in the air like a bad smell. A red light flickered on the monitor board where a green light was supposed to be. Davy hit a key and things went back to normal. Bitch. It amazed him that it was one thing if he thought it about Lisa and another if somebody used the word about her. It roused him to a dumb chivalry. It made him want to say, “You don’t understand, you didn’t know her the way I did.” Sometimes he thought he’d seen her with the same goofy magic with which he saw the Inc. In a certain light, at certain times, with his mystery brain.

      He never got used to the hour before Lisa dropped Jacob off. It was partly four cups of coffee, partly that no matter what he did with the trailer, it was too small, too bare and too grown-up. They were fixing up a room, he and Jacob, cruising garage sales, checking the toy bins at Goodwill, beginning to cover the walls with Jacob’s drawings, making space for Jacob’s birds. The birds were another story. They were doves. Lots of them. And they were totally invisible to the ordinary, meaning non-Jacob, eye.

      Davy set a box of frozen Danish on the shelf. Ray C. scouted it from the floor, but he was cross-eyed and always missed his jump by humiliating inches, so he just sat there, giving Davy long, tragic, visually-impaired looks. That was another draw-back to the trailer. Ray C. was having a last surge of senile and improbable lust. Davy figured the phenomenon was like the old guys he saw around Phoenix, the sagging fellows in their pastel pants and white shoes, their tautly held-together, somewhat younger wives on their arms. He felt that same sorrow and affection for Ray C. that he felt for those old guys. No way he’d kick him out.

      Jacob liked to have a second breakfast. They ate whatever he wanted, which was always a raspberry Danish, glass of milk and bag of nacho chips. Davy checked the cupboard. He had enough nacho chips for all of Larry’s mythical Sonoran relatives. He poured himself another cup of coffee and waited for Lisa’s truck to roll in over the gravel.

      Two mourning doves on the telephone wires were setting up their liquid ruckus. They made him think of love, of how silky Lisa’s skin could be. Consequently, they made him mad. Besides being consistently late bringing Jacob over, she’d somehow become maddeningly desirable to Davy. Once he’d known it was over, he’d gone from limp disinterest to a steady readiness that tormented him day and night. He called it “The Phantom.”

      The Phantom wanted Lisa. It wanted only Lisa. It had demonstrated this on the one mutually unfortunate date Davy had attempted. Her name had been Claire. She’d been nine years younger and she had never encountered an unwilling member before. She’d been the one that cried and Davy’d been the one to console. He hoped it wasn’t going to become a theme. Only The Phantom knew.

      He opened the chips and ate one. You could taste the chemicals. The cooking course had taught him that. He closed the bag. The clock jumped one minute. Lisa was an hour late. The doves had shut up and gone wherever doves go in the brutal heat of a Phoenix noon. He called. The answering machine told him she was out, but she did want to know who called and have a nice day and, uh, if it was Brad, would he please meet her at the pool at three. Davy set the receiver gently down. Lisa hated people who hung up without talking. He called back five times and hung up five times. He knew how to change her message from remote. He didn’t do that. He wanted her to hate him and want him. He didn’t want her to think he didn’t have any class.

      He heard Jacob before he saw him.

      “Davy, Davy, we’re here!”

      Davy opened the door. Lisa’s truck was already gone. Jacob stumbled toward him. He wore his little turtle backpack so his hands were free to safely carry the doves’ cardboard box up the steps. The old fake Indian blanket was draped across the top of the box. That was the signal that the doves were in there. Later Jacob and Davy would take them to the side fence for the first time and let them go. You could only do that at sunset. You could only do that when it was almost too dark to see.

      “Davy,” Jacob said, “I got tons of them this time. Mom said it was okay to let them loose here.”

      Jacob didn’t call Davy “Dad” anymore. Lisa had been working on him. Maybe there was a move in the future, one of those legal kidnappings guys get to live through. Maybe there was even a new candidate for “Dad.” Somebody safe, somebody mature, somebody named Stephen or Charles or Brad.

      Davy took the box. It weighed almost nothing. But that was how doves were, Jacob said. You couldn’t hardly feel them because they were almost always flying around in there. And they were gray and that was a light color.

      “Davy,” Jacob said, “I’m pretty hungry. I could eat some breakfast now. I caught almost all these doves this morning before Mom even waked up.” He pulled himself up into a chair. “You can put the doves next to me,” he said. “I like to hear them while I eat. They’re not plain ordinary doves, you know. They’re rock doves!”

      Davy set the box on the end of the table. Jacob picked up the blanket’s corner and scattered something inside. “It’s their seeds,” he said. “Springtime, you got to give them more than just left-over nacho crumbs.” He tugged the blanket firmly over the box. Ray Cooper cruised hopefully around his chair.

      “No way, Ray,” Jacob said. He moved the doves closer and dropped a nacho chip on the floor. “Besides, these birds taste like clouds.”

      Next day Sophieann came in late. She sat next to Davey and kept her shades on. “How’d it go with Jacob?”

      “Same old, same old,” Davy said. “Unbearably good. And this time, we let the doves go. Lisa hasn’t let him bring them over till now.”

      “Sweet,” Sophieann said. She sounded tired and a little sad. “What was it like? Letting them take off?”

      “Jacob waits till the sun’s down, till there’s practically no light left in the sky. He says they like gray light. He lifts up the blanket and he talks to them in dove talk. He coos. He really sounds like doves. Then I have to close my eyes because it scares them if a human being is watching. I hear him pull the blanket off the box. He says, ‘You go home now.’ Then he starts to giggle. I have to wait till he says ‘Okay,’ then I can open my eyes.”

      “I have to ask,” Sophieann