The Big Green Bird

This is the first story with my character, Buck Crimmins. As with the previous post, Avast, there wasn't a place for it in the novel so I thought I'd share it here.
Not a lot of places publish humorous short stories. Maybe I should have marketed it as quasi-zen, existential, magical realism.



THE BIG GREEN BIRD


I sipped and waited while the beer bubbles broke on the roof of my mouth, then I swallowed. The five o'clock evening new break was a tinny din on the cheap radio. I sat tilted back on the cheap lawn chair and watched the cheap weeds wilt. I heard the five oh five drive time traffic 'copter report begin, "Things are very, very nasty out here this afternoon, and it looks like a lot of you are going to be getting a late start on your weekends. The north bound I-75 at Crooks Road: an accident has traffic backed up to Adams. At Pembroke, the John C. Lodge Freeway is stalled in both directions with concrete falling from the overpass. South bound Southfield at Warren, a steel hauler has dropped its load, and east bound I-94 at Twelve Mile Road, a large bird on the embankment has caused a gawkers slowdown backing traffic up to Harper."

I didn't decide to go; I just went. The old Chevy ground and choked and started. Blue smoke obscured three directions and then trailed behind me as I turned down Russo Highway and left onto the I-94 service drive. I caught three red lights and ran them all. In a car like mine you don't stop unless you have to and red lights don't count as "have to." Near where I reckoned the bird was I slowed to under twenty-five. It was a good thing I guessed right because the car bucked twice, clanked one last time and stopped. I left it where it died and hopped the chain link fence to the embankment.

As far as I could see to my left traffic was oozing by at no more than five miles an hour until they got past the spot where the bird was and then they sped up. I scuttled down the grassy grade until I was level with the bird and turned towards him. He was fifty feet away. I stood real still for a few minutes until I was pretty sure I wouldn't spook him. I closed until I was within twenty-five feet and stopped. I scrunched down on my haunches and squinted against the sunset. He was green and very large-maybe over three feet from claw to crest with long skinny legs-a kind of stork, I thought. He looked at me while I smoked a cigarette and when I flicked it away he turned and pecked the grass at his feet. He didn't snare any bugs but he didn't seem to mind. He looked at me again. A guy riding shotgun in an old Ford pickup chucked a spark plug at him and missed. I waited for the bird to fly but he didn't. He took one step and pecked again. Then he didn't peck any more and just stood still. My knees ached so I plumped down on my butt and crossed my legs. I lit another smoke and we watched commuters for a long time. My last beer was ready to be recycled so I told the bird to wait a minute. I strolled over, darkened the concrete on the nearest overpass and came back to the bird. I sat down and lit one more. I found four corn nuts in my pants pocket, ate three and tossed one to the bird which he ignored.

I looked left which was upstream for the east-bound lanes. Upstream. I understood why people talked of traffic flow and the stream of cars. The road was like a river and the moving cars were like water, sluicing and slowing around curves, then faster in the straight places. And stalled cars were like rocks and rapids, the surge balking and swirling then swooshing on. There were overpasses for the freeway and bridges for a river. I was just starting to reason out the place of semi-trucks and busses in this scheme when the bird brought me up short.

He said, "Bullshit." He made me know that this was, indeed, a road. It might remind me of a river or a herd of wildebeests or love in the afternoon, but it was a road. I was chastened and decided not to mention my last thought on where motorcycles fit in.

Traffic was thinning out but now people were lined along the chain link on either side of the freeway watching the bird; watching both of us, I guessed. TV news trucks never showed up and that was a good thing because I didn't want to attract any loonies who might scare him away. I was a loony who had been attracted here but I wasn't scaring him. I did ask him, though, if he was a sign or a portent or something. He didn't answer very directly so I looked for signs of him being a sign. I didn't know quite what I was looking for since I had never looked for omens previously and wasn't sure what to expect. But there were no patterns in the grass and the face of Jesus didn't reveal itself among his feathers.

Around seven-thirty he left. He ruffed his feathers and stretched his wings one time and with a leg hop and a wing stroke he flew. He flapped mightily and made a great rising circle over the freeway. He headed out generally west and in a straight line. I watched him until he disappeared over the horizon of the Shell gas station roof.

I stayed on for a while, uninteresting to chain link fence gawkers and freeway drivers. I pissed one more time and smoked my last two cigarettes. I didn't decide to leave, I just left. The Chevy had forgotten it was dead and fired to a clanking start. It got me home.

Back home I couldn't find any point to it all. Really, it's not even hardly a story somebody would buy you a beer to hear about. But not every tale has a story, and not every story has a moral, and many, many things in this life have no point beyond the obvious. Like, don't look for Jesus in a big green bird.