The cabby drives one block on Eighth Avenue and turns west on to Fifty-fifth.
Steven expected him to turn off Fifty-seventh. It is the proverbial six of one and a half a dozen of another. Not important enough to comment on, except that he believes that traffic moves faster on Fifty-seventh Street. Already, they've waited for two red lights before they reached Ninth Avenue. On the third red light they reach the corner. At the green, they cross Ninth, but instead of continuing the driver pulls over to the curb and stops alongside a Key Food Supermarket.
I must do something, the driver says, as he shuts the meter. It will only take a couple of minutes.
Steve is too surprised to respond. Nothing like this has ever happened to him before.
They are waiting for me, the driver says and leaves the cab with a brown paper bag in his hand.
Steven is alarmed. A result of the September Eleventh attack on the World Trade Center. For a moment, he has a vision of the supermarket being blown to pieces. But by comparison such an explosion would lack the enormous consequences of the one at the World Trade Center.
Even as Steven rejects the idea that the cabby is a terrorist, he opens the brown bag and pours its contents next to the supermarket's wall. Within a second or two the pigeons arrive. A few land on his shoulders. Others on his shoes. He imitates the sounds made by the birds.
When he returns to the cab, he says, they're happy now. And, as he eases the cab away from the curb, flicks on the meter.
Do you do this every day? Steven asks.
Oh yes, the cabby says. They are happy to see me and I am happy to see them.
By this time Steven realizes that the cabby speaks with a typical Indian accent, has a large black mustache and has a dark complexion.
I have many bags of food for my friends in other places, the cabby says.
Steve smiles and tells him that his father raised pigeons.
The cabby glances over his shoulder at him.
He loved those birds, Steven says softly, as if he's reminding himself of something he'd forgotten, if not forgotten, had pushed so far down into the depths of his mind that it could erupt into his consciousness only if triggered by an extraordinary event. Like the one that just happened. And then the images come flashing back . . .
###
His father's friend's house in Canarsie.
The ride there was on a trolley car. Open on two sides with canvas shades to protect the passengers from rain and snow. In the winter there was no protection from the cold. The trolley raced between the backyards of the houses on either side of the track, stopping where it crossed a street to let passengers on or off. The faster it went the more it yawed.
It was always a Saturday or Sunday trip, unannounced until the day they were to go. The closer they got to Canarsie, the larger the backyards became and the houses fewer until there were large open fields specked with shacks. Squatters, his father called them. Even the air changed. It was sharper. Salty.
At the end of the line, where the motorman turned the trolley around on a large turntable, they were within a few hundred feet of Jamaica Bay and the Canarsie Pier, a structure made of wood to which a three-masted ship was tied with thick hawsers. Sometimes he and his father would go aboard. The Sea Scouts used it until it was destroyed by the nineteen thirty-eight hurricane. But most of the time, they'd cut across the fields and go directly to Kogel's house, a wooden ramshackle two story affair whose open windows invited every kind of flying insect, of which there were many because of the nearby swamps.
Kogel's pigeon coop was in back of the house. It was very large. That was the first place they went to. He followed his father inside, who immediately began to examine certain birds. He never said what he was looking for or why he was only interested in a particular bird. When he was finished, he went back into the yard and shouted, Kogel, Sam is here.
Kogel came out of the house. The birds told me that, he said. He was a tall, rangy man with a lean face and unkempt pepper and salt hair. In summer he was bare-chested and very tan. In the winter he wore a heavy flannel shirt and torn, paint-spattered sweater. Summer or winter his pants were always worn and stained with oil and paint.
Kogel scarcely looked at him. He had four sons of his own. All were older than Steven and wilder, often entering the house or leaving through a window rather than the door.
The two men immediately set the birds free and waved long bamboo poles to keep them in the air. To Steven it seemed that they did that for the entire time he and his father were there. And maybe they did. They seldom spoke. Their attention was totally focused on the weaving flock of birds and its constantly changing shape, making a myriad of geometric patterns. A kind of lace in the sky.
Not all of their visits to Kogel were the same. Those times when his father and Kogel waited for their racers to return were more important than other times. Both men puffed away on cheap cigars, spoke in low tones and drank homemade red wine and black coffee until the first bird entered the coop and clocked in. Later the arrival times of Kogel's racers were matched against the arrival times of other birds at the local racing club. Winning the race meant money, and because of the Depression money was very scarce. His father sold diamonds but no one had the money to buy them. They lived in a tenement house on Chester Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Kogel was a bricklayer and a mason, but no one was building anything. He worked at odd jobs.
One or the other of them would spot the bird before it landed and found its way into the coop. The birds were often sent as far south as Miami or west to St. Louis where they'd be released to fly back to Canarsie.
Satisfied that all of their birds had returned, they shook hands and his father would call him for the trolley ride home, during which he usually slept.
###
Not only did his father share pigeons with Kogel, he also had his own birds. Four: two Red Checkers, one Tumbler and a Fantail. He flew them every day and taught Steven to fly them. Though the four never made the wonderful patterns in the sky that Kogel's birds could make, he enjoyed watching them whirl gracefully around the pole. It was also an adventure just to be on the roof. He looked down and saw the people sitting on the stoops or near an open window to be cool. But on the roof, it was always cool, or so it seemed. During the hot summer nights, he and his father slept on the roof.
###
Then one day his mother said to his father, We have nothing to eat. They were in the kitchen. Steven and his three sisters: Shirley, Roslyn and Gail. They were older than he by many years.
His father asked, No bread? No potatoes?
She shook her head.
Can't we borrow--
No, she said.
No, he agreed.
His mother took a deep breath and exhaled. The birds, she said.
His father said nothing.
The birds, she said again. I could make a thin soup that would last us for a couple of days.
His father's light blue eyes went from child to child. Then, he pursed his lips, left the kitchen and went up to the roof.
Steven followed him.
His father walked slowly up the steps, pushed open the door to the roof and stepped out on to its black surface.
Steven did not go beyond the doorway. The coop was directly in front of him, near the low brick wall at the back edge of the building.
His father went up to the coop but did not open the door. He stood with his back toward Steven. He was hunched over, as if he were protecting himself from blows too painful to bear. He seemed smaller than he was. His body shook with waves of emotion, of sadness. He sobbed softly.
I can't do it, he suddenly shouted. I can't do it. He opened the door to the coop and stepped back. The birds were in the air within moments.
His father used a handkerchief to wipe his eyes and blow his nose. Then he moved away from the coop and watched his birds until they were specks in the sky.
###
His father never again owned pigeons, and though they continued to go to Kogel he no longer took any part in racing pigeons.
Years later Kogel died. One by one Steven's sister's married and left the house. World War Two came and went. He finished college, married and went off to the Korean War. By the time he returned both his parents were in their seventies.
When it wasn't raining or snowing, he often found his father sitting on a bench close to the Parkside Avenue entrance to Prospect Park feeding the pigeons. More than once he told Steven, They're happy when I come. I'm sure they know me.
Could Steven deny it?
###
The cabby pulled up to the corner of Eleventh Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. The tab on the meter was four dollars and sixty cents.
Steven gave him a ten-dollar bill. For bird food, he said.
The driver smiled. Yes, food for my friends.
Our friends, Steven corrected, and left the cab.
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