Jason Schwartz

Chimney Swift

She knits now

I said: Climbing up the bark now. Woodpecker. No, kingfisher. No sapsucker, no chickadee. No, sapsucker, I said, the white belly up, the black patterned back, the beard, red yarmulke, I finally knew by the single red cap on him. I said: like a spider going straight up the bark.

My sister said: The less you say about nature the better.

I said: Even stairs are little floors we stand on just the same.

She said: Let me knit.

I said: It’s the same with fish.

Back there my life was still boring, but I didn’t have to look inside myself for frustration, fuss, etc.. Other people and things, trains, for instance, Miss Julia, supplied that for me in abundance. In the country I’ve become a different repulsive, a bullshit plant, a liar.

My sister said: Well fine, what about the nature?

I said: I saw a falcon dive-bomb a starling and pin it there screaming.

She said: No, I was right before, forget it.

Everybody

I was with my sister and we were at Dave Ford’s, the three of us were there and so were Chad and Little Chad. But they didn’t say anything to me or us, they’re such G.G. heads, nihilists, they have some name for it, their mumbling, staring. Tex and Rex were living with them in Bushwick, but they moved out because not only did Chad and Little Chad not use drawers or closets but also because they didn’t even use the bedroom that they, the Chads, shared. Tex and Rex said they hardly had any common space, a Chad was always sleeping in the living area, the kitchen on the floor, clothes everywhere; I admit, I only made it out to Bushwick once while that was going on. What I did see was that Chad and Little Chad had their own bathroom but didn’t use the dustbin, so hardened tissues piled beneath the sink, blew and tumbled across the tile, crunched under your shoe. Also something grew in the shower, it jutted out from the wall like a soap dish, sprouted a cedar’s fungal analog. At some point Chad and Little Chad abandoned that bathroom and started using Tex and Rex’s. So Tex and Rex went to Clinton Hill.

My sister was in her underwear and I was too. Dave was at his desk playing online hearts. Chad and little Chad were communicating with each other in the corner, something. Two sniffing, nibbling rats, I didn’t understand what they said, especially the little one, but I did know they both wanted to fuck my sister. Together I imagined was how they preyed, and there she was in her underwear, sweat between her breasts and in the creases of her tummy. They were not in their underwear, but Dave was, I see him in his skivvies at his desk. No breeze, a hundred and ten in that brick and sheetrock box.

My sister wasn’t crying, but she was very upset. She said: Don’t go, don’t go. That was the first time she said anything like that to me, she or anybody. I thought everybody was happy for me. Everybody said it would be the best thing, going out there, etcetera, everybody said I missed nature, that the city was not for me. Everybody convinced me of it. She was perched on a leather office chair with wheels, sitting catwise on her bare knees. Her hands went to her cheeks, she said: I don’t want you to go, she said: you belong here, she said: I need you here.

Then everybody was asleep in their chairs, everybody but me. Somebody had sleeping pills, must have been Little Chad. I was so tired, but I didn’t let myself fall asleep, kept drinking warm green soda to stay awake. I sat there all night thinking how lucky I was to have her, and also standing guard, I’m embarrassed to think of myself like that: big brother in the sad love-haze of imminent departure, lorazepam, almost naked, reading Plasticman on and off. A big green three-liter.

Plastic makes me like the country, talk fast

Great, great, I’m great, you’re great, great, great, pines are great, everybody’s doing great! Ice cream man does not sell crack! Can’t hear his bells at 4AM! Main Street’s sunny sidewalk must have once been truly great! No, it’s still great! But clogged with old men! Old men with paper cups! I bet the men themselves are all clogged! I’m being harsh! How could I know? They’re probably flowing just great in the sun! And who needs Main Street when you got a nice pond?!

Miss Julia visits, does not care to see the country

I was glad to see Miss Julia when she visited in October. I’d been in the country three months. It had become bare-tree winter, she said: You said there was foliage. I said: For two weeks. You missed it. She said: What are you doing here? Then she said: Poor baby. Come here.
She was horny and generous and did not care to see the country.

I wanted to take her to the Audubon site. I told her the last time I went I saw snakes everywhere. Snakes on the path, under logs, I saw three or four wound up together in a bush, all their heads watching me, six or eight unblinkable serpent eyes. She said: I know where I can find a snake in a bush.

Comments like that from Miss Julia do not excite me, not from her; I wonder if she ever noticed. What was between us, what I perceived was between us, seemed distorted, inappropriate when depicted by those lippy lips. Back in the city she let me stay in her apartment for a little rent relief and also because there was something, a little thing between us, or maybe just that I was her little thing, which was fine with me (I had my thing, she had her thing); she wanted to be a model. She was too old, but at any given time she had three or four men, photographers, calling her up, coming to see her, leaving five minute messages on voicemail: dumb, begging, Australian or whatever. When they came over I had to say I was her nephew from Maine, sleep on the couch.

She said: I’m this close to getting somebody to fill your futon rut.

We left my house twice that weekend—for breakfast on Saturday and then for breakfast on Sunday. I took her to the train station after pancakes.

I’m happy I do not live with her anymore. It was nice to get laid, that weekend, first time for me in the country. I thought I’d find somebody. I go to bars, I do my laundry. I thought I’d find somebody, overalls, garden gloves in the back pocket, canned beer with the pull tabs.

Country cops are OK

I knew he was a nice man. He asked was I in a hurry to get somewhere. I said: I’m in a frightened, flustered hurry. That was not the thing to say. He took my cards and I had a lot of time to think about what a stupid thing to do: alliteration. Trying to be pathetic I sounded a wino.

I watched the blue flashers in my rearview. They spun. It was immediate, memory, the hand-held spinning lights we got at the circus, me blue, my sister red. Same construction, flashy spinner inside a color cylinder.

When he came back he said: I can’t just give you a warning. I’d get in trouble. Fifty six in a thirty five. I lied, I said I was a teacher. My students were waiting for me, that was my hurry. He held up the little paper. It said: I’m already written! Sorry!

I said: No it’s OK, I’m sorry.

That was only my third week in the country, I said: I promise to go slower. He said: Please try. You know, be calm. Enjoy the nice day.

(My sister apologizes

I drove very slowly back to my place, and the first thing I did was call my sister. I kept saying I was pissed at myself. We’d talk a bit, my mind would come off it, and then I’d say: I’m so pissed at myself. Or: I’m so stupid. A hundred and eighty dollars. She said: You’re doing great. Everybody is so proud of you.

I wanted her to tell me to come home.

I told her how the flashers reminded me of the circus lights.

She said: Oh, you mean the visors with the little colored lights?

I said: No, the hand-held ones, the flashers.

Glowsticks? she said

I said: You know which ones. Like little flashlights but vertical. I got blue, you got red.

My sister said: It’s so long ago. Maybe I remember. I’m sorry.

I said: It’s fine. Never mind. I’m better now I guess.)

Neighbors, Part I

I had a yard full of catshit and lived on the top floor. Downstairs lived a couple of plastic junkies with wide pants that covered their sneakers. They glared in matching squints because the sun was too bright for their capillaried eyes.

I asked the boy where I could find something (anything) and he said: Don’t ask me man, I’m sorry.

I was sitting on the front steps. He got into his car then out. He said: Know what, come inside. His body was thin and long and there was friction when he moved. Pants on pants, shoes on gravel, the top layer of his mushroom hair floated above his head. He said: I’m Chad.

I said: Chads, Chads.

His place was very neat except for the kitchen table, which had a little chemistry set, bugled tinfoil tubes, clear plastic lighters, blue and red. We sat on the couch. I never spoke so fast and was very happy but had no control over the truth of my words. I said I was a teacher, a lie that had become a badge I flashed when I wanted to show I was complicated. Nobody knows a thing about me here.

He and his partner were nineteen. It troubled me. They were nineteen and despite the blandly complex circuitry of the seven years since I’d been nineteen, there I was, in the same exact place as them, that little room. Or really what troubled me was that I still wasn’t doing anything but was constantly aware of life’s potential to persist despite failure and disfigurement.

She let me go

By November I was calling my sister every day. She could see my number on her phone. I wondered if she knew I knew that when she didn’t pick up.

I sat in a chair and looked out the window talking to her. She didn’t always listen to what I had to say. All of a sudden, she loved to knit.

I would talk and she would knit and hardly say anything except when she wanted to get off the phone. Then she’d start saying: OK, or: Anyway, or:

Could you please stop talking? She’s good to me, and even though she didn’t get the bird gene from Mom, she usually let me talk; she usually let me go on and on.

A real journalist

In the country my day is simple. I am alone. I work at a sandwich shop. I am supposed to do research. I am supposed to be a real journalist now, but I’m not. My face goes right up when a winged shadow sweeps the ground.

In the city I was alone when the sun was out. Here’s my day there, also simple: Wake up at nine-thirty to Miss Julia in the bathroom with her hairdryer, screaming: You are so beautiful! Such a hot, sexual woman! Her prep. Typically she had no time for me in the morning.

For the next four hours I portioned off breakfast. Coffee: an hour and a half. A break. Grapefruit. A break. Something solid, oats, bacon. Something chocolate for lunch number one. That summer the rest of the day was spent half-naked, picking aphids off Miss Julia’s withered indoor plants. I’d heat a pin with a lighter and pop them on the leaves. There was an elementary school across the street. I felt perversely wicked and stayed away from the windows during recess and from two-thirty to four.

It’s easy to earn a living if you know somebody at Volleyball Monthly or Parenting, and you’re somebody’s thing.

Another word on habits

I have overcome my fear of renting pornos. I was wrong: People do not stare at me when I come out of that door. Also, I find the video guy doesn’t try to make small talk. At first I was grateful, now here’s me: Do you know this one?

My sister called when I was fabricating affection.

She said: It’s final, I’m moving in with Chad.

I said:

I thought: She’s trying to scheme me back.

Then I thought three things: 1. At least it’s not Little Chad, 2. It’s probably hazardous to reach under their sofa cushions, 3. Is she that lonely?

I said: Can you believe how short the days are getting?

My sister said: What do you think? What do you think about me and Chad?

I said: Can we live on the same street when we grow up?

She said: I’m coming to visit you soon. Promise.

If you can imagine, we both were sobbing, very similarly as we do.

Later on, my sister in knit, I said: There is a robin on a naked branch. I think he sees me. He’s coming closer, closer. He’s hopping. I never noticed this. Robins have a white pattern under their beaks. White with little black lines.

My sister said: Pufferbellies?

I said: Yes.

She said: Tangerines?

I said: Yum.

Yum, she said.

Neighbors, Part II

The man next door is a mechanic I think. His high school daughter shoots a basketball in the street. A mourning dove does not like it or me: You no, o, o, o.

Their backyard is full of things with wheels and wheels without things, fat black trash bags like tires. There is a silver trailer, diner-style, a big gray Mercedes, a two-tiered clubhouse—brown shack on top of a wood-grain shack. The brown slats go horizontal, the wood goes vertical. There is a small deck for the top shack, little steps, a milk crate on a pulley. The bottom shack is the house of the shy, scraped-nose dog that trots around the junkyard, never looking up at me. The grass is gashed in the middle by an eight foot long ditch. Can you see it? Is it clear how much I like it?

I am sitting on my stoop. The girl shoots from her breast. Yes, of course I see the flash of her stomach. Yes, of course I am watching, you know, bounce and breaststroke.

The man pulls up, parks in the driveway, lot, really. He gets out, gives his girl a kiss and watches me smoke my cigarette. The mistake I make is to pretend I don’t see him. That I don’t do something as redemptive as saying: Good afternoon.

I never get to repair that damage, and for the rest of my time in the country he skids out his tires when he sees me, gives me looks, and my part in the economy is to never notice or look back. I think: letting him win reduces his threat, but then I think of him, his sharp metal tools, every time I chain my door.

The party’s in the valley

I drive the same road every day for nearly twelve miles. It goes to a town where somebody decided to open a sandwich shop. There is a mountain range to the west. As I ride back home at dusk it is on my right. Where it dips it reveals a field of light, a glow beyond it though it is dark where I drive. It is still day past those hills. I think: Am I in the wrong valley?

Bugs with eyes on their legs

I do not hate Miss Julia as my friends do. She did the yoga whenever they came by, her bare feet behind her head, crotch in the air on her little blue mat, and then she offered everybody candy.

My sister said: She’s so exotic. But my sister also said to me: Listen, I don’t really understand why you live with that woman.

It was a good deal. Miss Julia was in Miami half the time anyway, and we were a few blocks from several subway lines. Before I left that summer I was mostly getting along with Miss Julia, a problem. She had taught me backgammon, and we walked around the park at dusk, one time through the mist and got chased by a hissing swan. We cooked dinner together and brought it to the roof in a milk crate. I felt fine with her except for one thing: she was always looking at me, usually not my face, up and down. In the shower, in the bedroom, kitchen, always looking at me and not my face and trying to pass it off by acknowledging she knew I knew she was looking, I thought: I sleep naked. I thought: what is she thinking about.

So yes, Miss Julia was part of the reason I left, part of feeling disgusted. I described it as: sweaty, insects crawling on me.

Faulty rationale

The way I chose this place was part of the mistake. I visited once when I was in college, drove up two hours in the night with John C. O’Neill and stole an Ampeg stack from a dormitory. Also, my friend Ptolemy lived here for four years. He went to stop drinking and came back to the city as The Psychedelic Farmer. I thought: If Ptolemy can do it.

Ptolemy said: You should work at the sandwich shop I worked at.

I said: As long as they have good pickles.

Ptolemy said: I don’t know man. Like I said, it’s extremely rural.

I disregarded the answer as if it and the question had no clear relationship to the way I lived.

The country is for trips

Our parents used to bring us to a farmhouse, a time share with a little pond. This was in the summer always; it’s where my mother taught me the difference between turkey vulture, sharp-shinned, red-tailed, red-shouldered, broad-winged, and juvenile bald eagle. We found golf balls everywhere: in streams, animal carcasses, bird nests.

Evaporation isolated some catfish eggs. My sister and I came out and found a black pool the circumference of a basketball rippling and slimy with baby fish. We scooped them into a salad bowl, cutting ourselves on dorsal barbs.

I said set them free, my sister said keep them. I didn’t fight her I think because really I agreed. There must have been a hundred fifty, two hundred. Something, we could hardly see their faces, but they shined, tailed heads of obsidian squirming in the pond water, tiny splashes.

The next morning they were all dead. My sister cried a little— not for the fish but because she was sorry—until she was sure I didn’t care. We put the bowl on the grass and threw the tiny carcasses at each other, cutting up our hands even more. Then we found a chubby bittern and tossed the baby catfish at him one by one. He loved them and walked to us nervously, sideways, leaned forward and took them from our palms. Maybe it was a green heron.

Migration is productive

It was getting colder. I was sitting with the country, downstairs Chad on the front steps. The chimney swifts were out floating and swirling around our neighbor’s house. They looked like bats but could go slow then quick, all as a group or on their own, it was not like bat footage.

The plastic we smoked made me more nervous and fast than anything. I was clenching my teeth to not talk and also because I was shivering.

The swifts are what I’m talking about though, not Chad, not plastic.

The swifts, the purple sky, the brick chimney that cut it, the circle of them, black against the dusk, the melded (or imagined) white hiss of all of their wings, their high, sixteenth-note kisses, the red maples, the yellow birches and oaks on the hills beyond them; I did not know then how brief autumn would be in the country. I felt Halloween coming, watching their dark circus in the dusk, routine for them, performed at any chimney or barn. Visually for us, me and Chad, and for the couple who had pulled over on 121 to watch the speckled bird wind through binoculars, it was a perfect environmental convergence, tragically fit, there in autumn’s banquet hall, literally. The shadows and vegetable corpses on the street, the cold new on everything, the ghosty storm of bat birds, I said: Wow. Wow. I’m going trick or treating this year.

Chad said: Now you see why we do speed in the country, dude.

Shaking my head, pointing, going backwards, I said: The swifts, the swifts.

Miss Julia apologizes

Miss Julia called to say she was suing somebody again. She had her own lawyers. I was her nephew once when we cooked dinner for them.

It was a photographer. He took pictures of Miss Julia naked and they were on the internet. I said: How did you find out?

She said: He told me. I told him he could do it, you know?

I said: Yes.

She said: Nobody can know I told you that.

I told her about the chimney swifts. I said: I can’t tell what they’re doing. All in one big cloud then one breaking off, flying away, rejoining, disappearing into it.

She said: You can go look at them. I haven’t told him I’m suing yet.

I said: The only place I can do internet is the library.

She said: Poor baby.

I said: Can you send me some printouts?

She said: I’ll sing to you.

I said. You have my address.

She sang: When you came and you gave without taking, but I sent you away.

I said: I have to go.

She sang: Oh Mandy, when you touched me and stopped me from shaking.

My sister

I said: I hope you’ll see them. They might still be here.

She said: They won’t leave?

I said: There’s no way of knowing.

She said: Are they eating or mating?

I said: They aren’t doing anything like that, I don’t think.

It stopped us talking for awhile. I felt stung.

My sister talked first: Well I think I’ll knit.

Can we stay on the phone though? I said.

She said: I have to plug in my ear.

She had moved in with Chad and Little Chad, who would have been evicted if she hadn’t helped them out. I told her I didn’t like her living in Bushwick. It was none of my business to say anything about Chad, but I had to protest something. She said: You just don’t want me living with Chad.

I said: Promise me you’re there to live with Chad. Not both. Not Chad and Little Chad.

She said: Don’t be disgusting. Little Chad is just a baby.

I said: Really? I thought Little Chad was older.

She said: Do you think so? Then she was quiet. Her needles chirped.

I said: Promise me.

She said: Stop it. I’m not promising anything.

No, I said. You have to be able to promise me something.

She said: I’ll come see you, how’s that? You and your pretty birds.

Out on the reservoir, out of the sun

I go there by myself. It doesn’t matter that the sun is not out. By autumn’s end it eludes me, finds alleys around my apartment windows, hides before I get a second look. It is sunny when I glance out my window, but out on the street I’m in fog, dusk, wind. A field of angry crows takes the cold breeze west. I can hear the distant screams at their rendezvous across the reservoir.

Before I am at the water, dusk has passed and I can barely see the other shore. Black pine teeth stab the cobalt sky, there is a dark hump of grass, gravestones I hardly see but they are there, teeth also. I sit on the ground and dump the flat stones from my sweatshirt pocket. I am too late. The reservoir is black; it wants to freeze. In the dark the air loses control of itself, lets its heat follow the light beyond the hills. I feel repellant, retreated from. I stand up and spit in the mud.

My sister mailed me something called Vita-Lite. She said: Believe me, you’ll feel better. I sit at my desk in front of its bulb. It is not very bright. There is nothing to do but sit, so I sit, inside at my desk, warm now in orange light.

Nothing happens suddenly

I come home from the sandwich shop after dark. I haven’t seen the chimney swifts in a few days and know they are gone.

Nothing happens suddenly for weeks. Once autumn is gone, everything slows, flattens out, intentions are revealed before the drawn-out process of action. Instead of slowing things, it unites them. This is because time has become like fluid being poured from one glass to another, perfectly similar glass. I fall into a habit, begin to remember dreams.

I call my sister. She says: For best results use the Vita-Lite two hours a day.

I say: It’s a good reading light.

She says: I wish you’d tell that to Chad. Then she laughs. She says: Forget it. Forget it. She is laughing. She says: I am so bored. I can’t believe I live here.

I listen to her laugh. I want to laugh with her so I force something out, something like a laugh, but really I don’t understand. My sister has a confusing way of being nice. I say: Winter is coming. I’m ready for it.

She says: I’m knitting you a scarf. It’s white with black bars.

I say: A white scarf?

She says: White and black.

I say: I’ll wear an orange shirt.

She says: Orange shirt and charcoal jacket. You have a charcoal jacket, right?

I say: Black.

She says: Close enough. She seems finished laughing, knitting now.

And then

And then, finally my sister comes to visit. It is winter, full winter here. We have already gotten snow. It is the weekend before Thanksgiving. I would have seen her at home on Thursday anyway. She says: You look incredible.

I am confused. She says: I expected a beard and a belly. You look great.
We are in my kitchen. I say: Here’s my life.

She says: I love it.

I say: It’s good. It’s good. She gives me the scarf. It is nine feet long. I say: Is this a full chest scarf?

She says: I lost myself. We can chop it.

I say: No, no, let me try it on. I don’t want to chop it. I wind it around my neck, but it’s as wide as my shoulders; I could never get the collar of my coat around it. I try hanging the ends down my body, but it’s not right, it’s not the right effect so thick under my skinny head.

My sister pulls it off. She says: Where’s your orange shirt?

I come back with an orange t-shirt on. My sister has found kitchen shears and is cutting the scarf down the middle.

I say: It will fray.

She says: I’ll fix it. Just put it on.

It fits better, and I put on my black jacket. I am wearing my black pants, black socks. My sister says: Now hop to me.

I hop toward her. She laughs. She bends forward at the waist and claps laughing.

She says: Don’t only look at me. Be nervous. Look around. Remember you’re a bird.

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