Let the Birds Have It

By Travis Klempan

The pundit repeated nonsense about marking one year since bin Laden killed, and I remembered it was the way the terrorist was killed or how it was announced (I wanted to blame it on anything other than my own dumb decisions) that set me down this path that began with a drunken kiss and led to a meteoric but ill-advised relationship and ended in Kirk telling me he was bored with me, that he thought “it” had run its course, “it” being “us,” and could I move out before Sofie moved in.
Bored. Not with the relationship, or with what was happening between us (or not happening), but bored with me.
Fuck that.
One year plus however many hours it was to that late-night, rage-filled celebration, the macabre spirit animating all of us out of our apartments and offices and bars and into the streets, like it was V-E or V-J Day, and even then (not that it earns me any credit; any I might have saved up was spent by participating that night, even with a beer-soaked heart) I thought the whole impromptu party was immensely stupid, and missed the entire point, that this was, yes, a long overdue death of an asshole responsible for horror, but Hey, listen, I tried to say to beer-swilling Midwesterners and bandwagon transplants displacing their unfulfilled enthusiasm for a Cubs’ victory a century deferred amid a sea of polyester jerseys and spilled Miller Lite, and Hey, hey! I shouted, this isn’t V-A Day, are we gonna celebrate like this when Kissinger dies, or the Saudi king, or when Dick fucking Cheney’s stolen heart gives up? but by then I was swept up, too, and the chants of “U-S-A, U-S-A” drummed their way into my brain and I finally grabbed some other drunk and kissed him, and he slipped me his number, and in a bout of guilt for my blood-screaming I actually called him, in the stupid humidity of Lake Michigan and early May sunshine the next day, and I mistook Kirk for a good person.
I realized early on I was the exotic arm candy, the not-quite trophy girlfriend sure to turn heads at cocktail parties, and yes it was fun, parts of it (the sex was great, the travel and gifts a departure from my previous semi-impoverished life, and Kirk was more than enough fun to be around, most of the time), and yes I played the part better than I had to, and yes it was a far cry from sweating into my sheets in Louisiana, teaching children who wanted to learn, damn it, but it was hard without fucking pencils, in a town where they’d shut the pencil factory down and shipped it off to China, and when the town itself shut down (and me, completely unaware that towns were still subject to being shut-the-hell-down, like an underperforming K-Mart, and the K-Mart references lost on my new high-society companions) I’d drifted north, ignoring hints dropped by parents who’d stopped asking after a husband and grandchildren and would settle, begrudgingly, for holiday visits and a serious boyfriend, and I landed in Chicago in time to let random chance and a SEAL team’s success throw me into a mob and guide me to Kirk and keep me there a while, so when he dropped Sofie’s name I kind of lost what little respect for any of it, and him, and her, and me, I’d managed to cling to over the past year.
Unclenching the fists I hadn’t realized I’d been holding, I slumped into the couch cushions and muted the television while Kirk retreated to his bedroom.
Nothing thrown—no desire to be a cliché, even as I divorced myself from the clichéd life we’d patched together—and a voice raised only enough to yell at him and not our neighbors and only briefly so as to check some sort of box of obligation, and of course it was Sofie he would slide into my place: a woman just slightly less exotic, just slightly more acceptable to his very, very race-conscious parents, and somehow I managed not to storm out.
I mean, enough of the stuff in our apartment was mine that I didn’t want to pull up stakes immediately.
I might have been arm candy, but I’d kept enough dignity over the last year to work.
A job obtained through some small measure of Kirk’s intervention, the act of a man who dispensed favors like fishhooks, an office in the Sears Tower (not the fucking Willis Tower, screw the corporate busybodies who thought they could rename people’s memories) and oh yeah, that’s also where Sofie worked, and damn if I didn’t feel the overwhelming need to wash the stink of sweltering Chicago off my body.
I ran through my exit options more quickly than it would take to stuff a duffel bag with my most generic and adaptable clothing. No slinky dresses, not even the combination floral-and-gold number that I wore not for Kirk but for me—that would be left behind, but Sofie would never in a million years be able to fill it, and even then, in the dark of the living room, sitting on my couch that I would be abandoning behind me when I left in the morning (destination: TBD), the glow of my laptop (which would, of course, come with) cast shadows across the bricked interior walls and I took the first deep breaths since Kirk had dropped his bomb.
“Slow it down, Mo,” I told myself.
My thoughts slowed and I smiled. Kirk thought he was dropping a bomb, balancing a disinterested demeanor with what he might have imagined would be earth-shattering news, but a growing part of me was grateful, if not to him, at least to the sudden casting-off feeling that animated my fingers across the keyboard. I didn’t want to crash-land in Boston with my folks, who, gods love ‘em, wouldn’t judge, not outright, and in the apparent not-judging would somehow still make me feel…inadequate.
And no way did I want to be around that many aunties and cousins who’d pepper me with questions, no subtlety required. I spent a brief minute considering how hard it would be to lay low, hide there until I got my feet back under me, and knew there was no way to stay anonymous in a town as small as Boston.
I heard a chime from what used to be our bedroom but was now a confirmed disaster zone; I didn’t turn my head, continued scrolling through phone and email contacts. The glow under the door suggested he was still awake but didn’t have the fancy ceiling fan lights on but rather the brass vintage floor lamp, the one we’d bought at an estate sale in—
I opened a tab for eBay, wondering what I could get for the floor lamp, knowing I wouldn’t have time before I got the hell out but wanting something like revenge. I closed that tab, returned to my email, and let that animosity go.
No room for it where I was going.
Wherever I was going.
College roommates and sorority sisters scattered far and wide, and a quick mental rundown reminded me why I couldn’t reach out, not after ignoring donation requests and e-vites to “Spring Break Ten-Year Reunion 2012!”
Of all Kirk’s skills—which, to be honest, were plenty—one I hadn’t noticed at first was his ability to burn bridges on my behalf, often without me noticing until the water flowed over the remains. Case in point: we couldn’t make it to my cousin’s wedding, even with three months’ notice and a short flight to Denver, but somehow managed to attend Kirk’s little brother’s lacrosse game in San Diego and stay for an “impromptu” fraternity reunion.
It had been this way for a year: deliberate chipping-away at any part of my life that had existed prior to or without him, so that I barely spoke to anyone outside our constricted social circle, which meant his friends, his parties, his family, and I was damned if I tried to set up something as simple as a getaway to Minneapolis without him tacking on a trip to his parents’ cabin in The Dells. Enough declinations and weeks without speaking made it hard to even approach the ruin of those bridges he burned for me, let alone rebuild.
Another skill: erecting walls around me until he declared they were collapsing, and the bricks would be used to do the same to Sofie.
“Maybe in another ten years, Gamma Phi,” I said.
I considered going back to grad school, but one, I had no idea what I’d study, and two, I’d missed the deadlines at all the schools worth a damn.
And oh yeah, three: money.
I ran through the list of newlyweds to whose weddings I had been invited in the last few years, stunned at how many either already had kids (my friends) or were still living the honeymoon lifestyle (Kirk’s).
A sudden flare of possibility sprang up as I scrolled down, thankful that for some reason I saved every email I ever received: Anita, a roommate from my first real teaching job, down in Louisiana, hard and fast down in the bayous of Zeebrugge, the two of us—
My heart caught in my throat and I nearly tossed the laptop to the floor as I remembered there were three of us, and I’d buried my memories along with our third, and a sudden crashing of my heart against my ribs, eyes watering for Sera—
“Hey, Mohini?”
I turned my head at the sound of my full name…only used when Kirk was trying to be serious. He’d likely never call me “Mo” again, at least not to my face. I hid my mouth behind my shoulder so Kirk wouldn’t see my curled lips and squinted at him through tears.
Not for him but suddenly for Sera.
He leaned against the exposed bricks, that little element adding something like fifty dollars a month to the rent I no longer had to pay. One hand idly scratched his stomach and grazed the waistband of his flannel pajama pants, and holy shit, would he just say what he came out of his, soon to be their, bedroom to say.
“I just got a text from Sofie. She’s coming over.”
I turned back to the laptop. “Okay.”
He stood there, useless as a tree stump.
“Can you—”
“I’m not gonna put on clothes just to go to a bar just so the two of you can…I’m sleeping on the couch, and I’ll be gone in the morning.”
He hovered for a few heartbeats longer, then retreated to the bedroom, cutting off his music.
Fucking U-2.
I pulled a blanket around my shoulders against the blast of the A/C, covering my tank top and pajama pants, and ignored the sound of our front door opening—she must’ve been waiting outside, already had a key; wow—and Sofie tiptoed her way past me and I stared hard and fast at the last email chain Anita and I had exchanged.
We’d returned Sera’s body to the red-wooded hills of California’s Lost Coast, her parents as sorry for us as for themselves and far more attentive than we deserved, and it was more than four years ago that we’d parted ways and I hadn’t checked in since.
I wondered if the memory was still as hard for Anita as it evidently was for me.
A small thought tugged as I finished reading our email chain for the third time, prompted by the next message buried deeper in my inbox…
From: John Mackenzie.
Torn between screaming into the laptop, hoping the anger and hurt would transmit through Wi-Fi and fiber optic cables to find him, wherever he was, and deleting the email he’d sent, having missed Sera’s funeral because he was still in Iraq, and why had he survived over there and our friend, the woman we both loved in different ways, hadn’t survived back here, and I could neither scream at nor destroy anything.
I shrugged off the blanket and opened a new email. I typed in the last contact information I had for him, a civilian address as plain and unadorned as he was, John dot Mackenzie at free provider dot com, and my fingers hovered over the keyboard.
John. Total shot in the dark: I need a place to crash, ASAP, and you’re literally the last person I can contact.
-Mo
I didn’t hate John, never hated him, in fact. He’d stumbled into Sera’s life, then into mine, and for the deep and powerful joy he’d brought her I couldn’t fault him.
But for altering her course, sending her sideways, for being the last man to touch her before…
The surge of anger dissipated like fog, a lingering chill plunging between my bones, and I’d used up enough on Kirk already, so I pulled the blanket back into place and sighed, remembering loss on top of loss covered by loss.
I just ached.
As far as John, though, I remembered his bare and honest simplicity which, for him, was not an affectation…his ability to answer questions readily and admit ignorance…the innate courage it took to weather multiple deployments to a country torn by combat—
Wait. Was he still in the army?
Not knowing where John was, in which time zone he now lived, I figured any response would be delayed. As likely as not he was over there again, or living on an army base and unable to take in a wayward soul.
I straightened my legs off the couch and grabbed the top of my laptop, ready to shut it and plunge the apartment into darkness, ready to bury myself in our couch cushions until daylight—
Ping.
Not Kirk’s phone.
“Huh.”
My laptop. An email.
Mo—Of course, anything I can do to help. Come and crash whenever you need to.
-John
“Wow.”
He provided an address, somewhere in…MT. Montana? Last I remembered he was still in Georgia, thinking of whether he’d re-enlist or get out. Were there military bases in Montana? If he’d been down South I could have flown there, enough money to buy a last-minute ticket to Atlanta, but…
“Fuck.” Could someone even fly to Montana?
I plotted a route, a long, long line stretching through the Midwest, across the length of a Dakota, a jaunt through Wyoming, and ending somewhere in Montana, near…Yellowstone.
The unexpected notion of a road trip, blasting down the highways, bound for mountains and pines and buffaloes, the sum total of the last…damn, hours, or maybe the whole year…fell off my shoulders.
I typed a quick reply and hit send before I could stop myself.
As for the immediate problem…
Kirk and Sofie scrambled to cover themselves as I pushed the door open. Whether or not they were doing anything barely registered—vague thoughts of Kirk, as always, being lazy and letting her ride on top—as I opened the closet, searching for a coat. I could check Montana weather in a few hours, once I’d finally gotten the hell out of Chicago, but the vaguest idea I had was that it might be chilly.
“Mo, what the hell?” Kirk scrambled back to the headboard, Sofie falling to his side and covering herself. “Are we…” A dumb grin grew on his perfectly formed face. “Is something about to happen?”
“What?” Sofie and I demanded simultaneously. I turned from the closet, a mid-weight denim jacket in my hands, the closest thing to an outer garment at hand, the rest of our winter stuff packed away—
“No,” I said, shoving more clothes in a duffel, including (yes) the floral-and-gold number. I shut the closet, slipped off pajama pants and into jeans, a shirt for a shirt, and finally turned to face Sofie.
“Where are you going?” she asked, her voice quiet and eyes wide.
“I’ll let you know when—no, you know what? I’m leaving. That’s it. Have fun, but be careful, Sofie,” I said. She clutched the blanket at her chest and I rolled my eyes. “This time next year, Kirk might be bored with you.” I slung the jacket over my shoulder. “If not sooner.”

*

I dug into the package, retrieved the last Red Vine, and held it in front of my eyes. No worry about distracted driving, not here; the road was straight and unpopulated, and the sun wasn’t quite at the point where I’d need to squint.
Twelve Red Vines, each one an opportunity I’d given myself to go over everything, one more time, and see if what I was doing was truly crazy. After all, I could still turn around before the end of this licorice.
I shook my head. “No, not before the end,” I said over the music, a Minneapolis rapper I’d seen and fallen in love with, having cajoled Kirk into a road trip months before to the Twin Cities, to anywhere but Kenilworth, please not one more weekend at his parents’ house on the lake, yes it was nice but fuck those particular memories. The fact it took an argument and a bargain to secure a weekend trip somewhere other than Kenilworth or Las Vegas, the fact that Kirk had to exact some sort of victory from what should have easily been a quick up-and-back to see a hip-hop collective recommended by public radio and the few friends of his who weren’t total jags—
The Red Vine stuck to my fingers and I blinked, one eye at a time.
Dessa busted out of my speakers, no one on the Minnesota prairie to hear her but me, and I was grateful for it, and I was down to my last Red Vine and only a few miles to the state line into South Dakota.
I smiled at the licorice. Kirk had cared about things like hip-hop and art and movies other than Vince Vaughn films only to the extent he had to in order to appear at least partially with the times. He wasn’t the worst, but damn, the bar for not the worst was way too low if he cleared it by not being physically abusive, or not stealing my money, or being kind of fun some of the time. I mean, we’d made a few memories, but was he the kind of guy I could hang out on the couch with, pajamas and reruns and all that…to say nothing of growing old or—
Fortunately, Kirk was likely to come up less in my thoughts as I replaced him with, well, anything else. I’d used as business-like a tone in a text and asked him to sell off the remainder of my stuff, the nonsense accumulated in twelve months of living together and living large, if not well; I would let him know where to send the check once I got somewhere long enough to receive mail.
The tip of the Red Vine disappeared quickly, snapped and pulled off between my teeth, and this was it. The last one.
“The last Red Vine,” I announced to a field full of black cows, injecting as much gravity into the words as I could, lifting the remainder of the licorice whip while the name of a cartoon popped into the forefront of my memory—The Last Unicorn was hardly a movie for children, but I remembered watching it as a child and thinking, perhaps for the first time, of finality.
“Fuck!” I shouted. I’d made a promise, that this was the last chance to run through as much of everything as I could, and after that, when the last bit of corn syrup and food coloring was gone, that was it: I’d be at least committed to the next few days, even if I was having trouble focusing for more than a minute at a time.
“Okay, Mohini Chopra,” I said, “this is it. The last Red Vine. After this, if I can’t come up with a reason—a real reason—not to keep going, then I won’t question it.”
To call the road ahead of me a “whim” made it sound like I had choices and selected one among many. It also discounted all the other points along my path when I’d had the ability to do the reasonable thing, and ended up okay even when I went a different direction. Driving to Montana with so little planning that I needed to stop by an REI just to make sure I survived—the fleece jackets and down vests and everything else stuffed into the back of my little Camry, cargo enough to actually fill up the backseat—was, in fact, arguably not the craziest thing I’d ever done. It was probably not the safest decision I could have made, but again, this wasn’t the frontier days, this wasn’t getting on a boat to give your children a better life, this wasn’t even that bad simply because it was a reversible decision.
Somehow, I was still trying to convince my parents.
They’d left home, two smart but otherwise hapless people, and with luck and connection had landed in Boston, he to earn a position teaching high school math, she English, though both had taught at university back in Jaipur. Sisters, both before and after me, were scattered to the four corners of America, with enough extended family to provide a landing pad or crash couch in any of a dozen states—though not Montana—but I’d been headstrong enough upon setting out to study outside the intellectual hotbed that was turn of the century Boston that I’d vowed to only come back when I was successful enough to be invited back, not by family but by one of those schools to which I had never applied—a small part of me wondering if they’d have admitted me and a growing part not caring.
Leaving Boston and leaving Chicago were somehow connected by more than just me being the one doing the leaving. I didn’t consider either a retreat or surrender.
“Okay, so I’m leaving because I want to, not because I had to, or because someone told me.” My fingers on the steering wheel vibrated along with the engine of the car, and the Red Vine between my fingers felt slimy.
No going back to family, not yet. It wouldn’t feel like a failure so much as a final admission that all the air had been let out of my balloon, and family was the safe and easy option, easy enough that I could suddenly find myself where I would find myself for a much longer time than I was ready to admit.
But was striking out west the best choice?
What did I really know about John Mackenzie?
(What did any of us really know about anything? the annoying philosophy student in my head chimed in.)
“Shut it,” I said out loud.
I’d ended up in Zeebrugge—a town in a state I knew nothing about, in a parish of the same name, and who outside the bayous even knew they didn’t have counties but parishes—after finishing TFA in St. Louis. I came after Hurricane Katrina, the town’s name included as an afterthought of the hard hit areas, but not the hardest, the ones that might have a chance to reinvent themselves in the recovery. Selfishly, I thought I could help with the rebuilding, though a Boston girl with a liberal arts degree and two years teaching under her belt might not have been the best choice for the task.
I was one of the few volunteering, though, and found Anita from Raleigh, another college-town daughter of immigrants, and we’d agreed we were there not as missionaries or zealots, but to teach the children as best we could, and maybe enough that they could go off, study, and come back, teachers homegrown and organic, and itinerants like us could move on.
Sera was already there, though, like she’d channeled the collective thoughts out of our ether and embodied them and made us a home before we even thought to map the route to Louisiana. Sera took us in without question, and we got to work.
It was hard work, and good, and we convinced each other we made enough headway each day to feel less like aliens from other planets and more like, well, good-intentioned weirdos. We listened as much as we could, taught the kids as best we could, and earned small amounts of respect from parents who’d seen enough empty promises not to raise their hopes at us.
Almost two years after we’d parachuted in, Sera had a weekend off and chose the most random way to fill her time: a Christian music festival in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma.
She wasn’t Christian—at best she could be considered a pagan, or more accurately a heathen, and being from Humboldt County meant she was even less religious than that—but she showed a great curiosity about a great many things, which was one of the things that endeared to her to everyone she met.
And she met John at that festival, somewhere in the middle of a song about, I don’t remember, she’d told me once, but it wasn’t the music or the faith or any other thing that brought her guard down enough when he’d found her in the crowd, it was a whim, a sudden yes in her chest.
I shook my head at a water tower as it sped past me in the opposite direction.
“Fucking whims.”
Sera told me once she wanted to be brave; I’d laughed and called her an idiot, told her she was braver than me, probably Anita, too, and what did talking to a random man in a crowd have to do with being that kind of brave?
She told me she recognized him right away, that she wanted to know more, and that she told him to find her. She told me what she’d never revealed to John, that she wanted to test him, though she could tell he’d been tested before, and it was her only defense against not knowing if she should have put more thought into it.
Her challenge to John was like my licorice, I guess.
He’d found her again, as ordered, in the middle of a prairie hurricane, stumbling into her tent, and he’d fallen asleep just outside. She’d taken him in, a wayward stray, tagging along back to Louisiana. I thought it odd, but really not that odd, to find a lost young man in our kitchen the next morning, but for two weeks the prodigal soldier had fit right in to our routine. He was kind, not just to Sera, but to all of us, and the people of Zeebrugge, but most importantly to our students.
He and Sera knew they lived under a deadline, that John had to be back at the airport in time to return to Iraq, to survive the rest of his tour as best he could, and Sera had promised him. I never really knew how much, or what, but she’d gifted enough of herself to him to guarantee not just a return but a commitment.
And then, like a punch to the soul, Sera had died in a car accident a month later.
I squinted, the sun finally clearing my visor enough to convince me to pay a little more attention to the road, and I told myself it was the twilight shine that summoned the tears.
It was on another of her random road trips, this time to the Mississippi Delta—which, I’d learned, was different than the delta of the Mississippi River—and a fucking car accident. The definition of tragic coincidence. Not even a drunk driver to blame it on, just a set of failed brakes in the other car.
John had been unable to come to the funeral, though not for want of trying. The army, he’d told me in an email, didn’t grant emergency leave for soul mates, at least not without the legal endorsement of a marriage license, and he’d raged at whatever admin officer had denied him the grace to say goodbye.
We exchanged a few emails, his tour had ended, and then… silence.
I’d lost track of him, caught up in my own attempt to return to normalcy, and the end of a school year, and another, and then, out of the blue, the town shut down.
As a non-local I wasn’t given a departure package, but then, it would have felt like stealing. As it was, each citizen of Zeebrugge was given five hundred paltry dollars and told to vacate. We would not have felt right taking the money, but our families and students took it in stride and likely expected more of the same wherever they landed.
I snapped off a piece of licorice and chewed, the remainder of Red Vine a glaring and shrinking notification that I was running out of opportunities to reason my way away from Montana.
After Zeebrugge disappeared, a friend invited me to Chicago. I missed the tail end of a brutal winter, then bin Laden was killed, I met Kirk, and that part of my life was over.
Until John.
“John. John Mackenzie.”
He was not Kirk. He was not anything, other than a man from years before who’d offered help when I asked with no questions of his own. He had been good to Sera, good to Anita and our kids, and had a brain and a heart.
I smirked. This also wasn’t the 19th century. I could turn around when I got there, or a week after I got there…I just didn’t have anywhere else in mind to land.
I stared briefly at the bitter end of the candy, a nub chewed down, and smiled.
I rolled down the window and tossed the remainder of the Red Vine out.

Let the birds have it.

****

Travis Klempan is the author of Have Snakes, Need Birds, a war novel about love and magic. He was born and raised in Colorado, joining the Navy to see the world. After realizing most of it is water, Travis returned to the Mile High state, collecting tattoos and degrees along the way. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in such literary venues as Proximity, Windmill, and Bombay Gin. He helped launch a short-lived guerrilla 'zine, and his work has received recognition from Proud to Be, Flyway Journal, and the Veterans Writing Project. He is a member of the Military Writers Society of America and remains in Colorado with his wife, cats, and dogs.