Bird Island

By Paul McConnell

An eco-terrorist loses his girlfriend in a mudslide; a woman undergoing fertility treatments blacks out behind the wheel of her car. A little girl is kidnapped.
Was it a desperate move for motherhood? Or the zealous nanny who closes the child up in her house, and reads the scriptures to her? Or the strung-out twin bother - the lifelong architect of the family misery- who has finally ceded in the battle of the twin psyches?
What about the girl’s mother, who is MIA on a job interview? Or the bereft eco-terrorist, who is looking for his own Tiananmen Square moment?
Meanwhile, can the lead detective get to the bottom of this twisted enclave without compromising his values as a cop and a member of the community?
And finally, what happens when a Hollywood reality show descends on an unsuspecting neighborhood and crosses paths with a pair of migrant herons who have decided to nest on the set of a ruthless TV director?
In a climax befitting of Nathaniel West, we have a modern, end-of-times parable about the dissolution of our communities, told with a magnifying lens turned in on a neighborhood in a city that has always been its own best audience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul McConnell
• Release date: Sep 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301347926

Paul McConnell

Paul McConnell lives in the land of sun and smog. He has written several books and intends to write more. He maintains a training wheels website at hairypaul.com and can be reached for further epistatic commentary at [e-mail].

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Bird Island

By Paul McConnell

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Paul McConnell

All Rights Reserved.

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Chapter 1

James looked past the French windows to the foyer. After crossing the hallway and placing her recycling on a bench, a woman answered the door wearing a tracksuit with the letters L-I-A-T stitched onto the back of her pants. He could smell the morning coffee across the threshold, and though it was afternoon, her hair had not yet given up the contour of her pillow.

Good Morning, she smiled. Can I help you?

A breath of stale wine came over the transom, bumping past the pink gloss on her lips that matched her outfit.

James smiled back and appraised the woman’s figure in the hall mirror. She had a workout body. Fit to be sure, and sexy too for her early forties he guessed, but a little on the hard side. Places that you expected to be soft – like behind the knee or where a neck chain might cross the shoulders – would feel like stretched clothesline instead.

I was just walking by and I saw your lemons, he said, realizing at once that he had been reading her ass backwards. ‘TAIL’ it said and now he felt a little ashamed that she was probably as misguided as any teenager who went around advertising her junk like that, the difference of course being that she should know better.

Oh those, she said, pointing to the side yard. I already have a gardener and he takes care of all my trees.

James nodded. Maybe the stress of his under-employment was affecting his bearing. Perhaps finally and acutely he has joined the ranks of the have-nots going door-to-door asking for fruit.

You’re welcome to help yourself but I think Hector usually takes it with him.

She took a half step back into the hallway.

I can show you the backyard too if you like. It came with the place. I don’t mind really. I have the morning open. Boot Camp was canceled. The trainer was called in for jury duty. I guess that could be interesting. I’ve never been. Have you?

James shook his head. He still hadn’t moved from the porch. He wasn’t sure. Lately he’d taken a cultivating interest in other people’s backyard fruit, most of which, he sensed, grew and rotted without an intervening hand. But suddenly he was fraught with the implications of a divide between someone like himself, with borderline strange, yet perfectly respectable ambitions, and this woman, whom he imagined, was content to pay someone else to manage her abundance without a thought otherwise.

Besides the usual supermarket varieties, the starters people bought at the nursery chains, James romanticized about the mutants, the trees and vines planted by people who brought the seeds with them from wherever they came so they could be reminded of home. Heirloom fruits from around the world were hidden all over the city and were being lost and forgotten because the people who planted them were gone and forgotten and the people who took their place didn’t trust the dirt they bought. Like the woman he was facing, they’d rather eat something that traveled halfway around the world that was dipped in wax and artificial coloring.

But to walk the neighborhood was to take a tour of those who came before, and here they were: the Chinese with their guavas and loquats; the Jews with their pomegranates and figs; the Italians with their grapes and citrus; the Mexicans with their nopales and avocados; the islanders with their papayas and cumquats and bananas – all of it could be found right here in a little neighborhood called Echo Park that was part of the vast outlay of urban desert that was Los Angeles, itself an ongoing experiment of hybridization and mutation.

James found himself seated at the kitchen table passing the sugar bowl. In it were the pink and yellow packets of dietary restraint.

I don’t take sweetener, she said. I keep it around for company.

Really I don’t want to take up your time, he said, apologizing. I’m not an expert – just an admirer, I suppose, but I think you could have Sorrento lemons in your backyard if that’s possible. I realize of course they won’t be the same thing without the sea air and Mt. Vesuvius but…

Jeanne wasn’t listening to a word he said. As far as she was concerned he could chop down the trees and take them home if he wanted. She would even pay him if that were what it took.

So how long have you been in the neighborhood? she asked without the slightest concern that she had interrupted him or changed the subject."

She was fishing, expecting the plural: We own or We bought back in… but instead he answered her discretely she thought.

Almost 20 years with a break or two.

Being one of the relative newly landed eastsiders – having lived here for only a few years – she still felt out of place in the neighborhood and was forever bumping in to people like James who put her on the defensive whether or not they meant to.

In other neighborhoods if you had the money and, let’s face it, the right skin color, you were instantly part of the club but in Echo Park that put you apart and made people suspicious of how you were going to change their niche in this city of niches because most people didn’t want Silverlake or the South Bay or Santa Monica to happen here.

There was a simple distinction: you were either Echo Park Lake, at the heart of this neighborhood with its smog-lensed view of downtown and its migrant herons; with its ghetto corn and impromptu kitchens and Cuban dominos, or you were Silverlake Reservoir, in which case you went in for a predominately white, well off cast of daytime pedigree dogs and supermodel dog walkers and Whole Foods shoppers. It was the tale of two adjoining mentalities: you either walked the neighborhood or you started your car and drove out of it every morning to drop your kid at a faraway school before attending Pilates class.

Anymore the neighborhood battle was being waged on another front by a separate faction of newcomer – a horde of androgynous twenty-somethings with pasted down hairdos and pegged pants – a generation of Bob Dylan look-alikes that collectively had no ass. In fact, no one had any physique at all. These kids were just there in all their parts resembling the human form but somehow marking a departure from it.

For James it was hard to imagine what theses millennial foundlings did (besides go clubbing at the Echo) because there didn’t seem to be a crease of wear on any of them. They were unblemished by life and beautifully styled. Even the boutiques that popped up around their hangouts seemed to exist on thin air, on the spirit of not being about anything. James called them lifestyle stores – part art space, coffee shop, retail, nail salon where you could consign your leather belts or just hang out on the ubiquitous sofa and listen to records. They usually stayed open for less than a year and then a same/different version of the store would take its place. James missed the old Botanicas and appliance stores that he had known for almost two decades. He missed the old neighborhood.

He had been asked that question a lot lately, about how long he’s lived here. And it always came from people who just got here, more or less, like this woman. He wondered what kind of person came along and bought up houses and businesses and heedlessly changed the fabric and landscape of a community. Did they expect a thank you from the people who had been there all along?

James looked down at his coffee. Several Argentine ants were circling the rim of his cup, suspended over the steaming black crater.

Non native, he said. But they’ve taken over haven’t they?

I don’t mind them. They’re hard workers.

A leaf blower had just started up next door and James realized that she thought he was talking about the Mexican gardeners, presuming of course. He let it drop.

About the trees.

Look, I told you already. You can have any tree out there you want and take it with you today, but you have to do me a favor.

It doesn’t work that way.

Then I’ll leave the details to you.

The Argentine ants had finished their survey of the great crater and had begun hurling themselves off the rim into the sweet acid below. James swallowed a couple of times before he realized.

Meanwhile, Jeanne pulled a bottle down from the cabinet and added a heavy splash of its contents to her mug.

I guess I’m a bad hostess, she said, already reaching her arm over. Would you like some?

James shrugged.

I’ll keep the tree until you’re ready for it, and I’ll make sure Hector takes good care of it, but what I need from you – the favor I’m about to ask – I need today.

She stood up and came around the table, laying her hands on his shoulders.

And maybe more than once just to be safe.

James looked out at the backyard orchard and took a long drink of his spiked coffee. The aroma of anise surprised him. As Jeanne stood behind rubbing his shoulders, he followed a trail of licorice-scented memory and suddenly the chair he sat in and the ground under his feet were no longer adequate. In place of the usual terra firma was a mix of wild fennel and rain slickers and sand bags and roots and mud and unloosed rocks tumbling into the back of his head in a torrent.

Chapter 2.

Ben seemed ok – but