The old man they called Papa, head bent, showing the straight part in his white hair combed flat, was pouring himself a cup of coffee. He stood at the room-service table with a bath towel wrapped high around his waist, white against tan skin, almost to his chest: this man who always dressed in style, a gold pin fixed to his shirt collar, always with a tan. But look how frail he was, dried up, aged in the sun. A bird could perch on his shoulder blades, hop to his collarbone.
Now a shower was turned on. In there beyond the open bedroom door. The girl giving him privacy.
“Papa?”
The old man looked up. Surprised and then frowning with the windows in his eyes: the same way he had looked when a government commission, the one investigating organized crime in Canada, asked him what he did for a living and the old man said he was in the pepperoni business, he sold it to places they made pizza.
He said with his heavy accent and a note of hope, “You got something for me?”
“From your son-in-law.”
The old man’s hope left him as he said, “Oh, Christ,” sounding tired. He looked down at the room-service table but seemed to have forgotten what he wanted. He stared for several moments before looking up. “I told my daughter don’t marry that guy, he’s a punk. She don’t listen. I’ll give him six months, they gonna be another funeral.”
The Blackbird said, “You want him done sooner than that, tell me.” He saw the old man staring at him, frowning again, and he said, “You don’t know who I am?”
“I can’t see you,” the old man said, coming around the table, one hand gripping the towel, the fingers of his other hand touching the edge of the table. He seemed so small, his bones showing, his eyes, as they looked up, tired and moist. He said, “Yes, of course,” and seemed to shrug as he moved close to the window.
The Blackbird watched the old man staring at the beginning of Ontario reaching out beyond the city and across open land to the sky.
“You know Walpole Island, Papa?” The Blackbird pointed upriver. “It’s that way past the lake, on the Canadian side of the channel. The big ships go by there, up the St. Clair River to Lake Huron and around through Lake Superior, go to places over there, and back again till the ice comes. Walpole Island, it’s an Indian reserve where my grandmother lives.”
The old man took his time to look up at him, patient, not going anywhere, making these moments last.
“She’s Ojibway, same as me. You know what else? She’s a medicine woman. She was going to turn me into an owl one time, I said to her, ‘I don’t want to be no owl, I want to be a blackbird,’ and that’s how I got this name. From my brothers, when we were boys and we visited there.”
The old man was staring out again and seemed off in his mind.
“You remember us, the Degas brothers? One dead working for you, shot dead by the police. One in Kingston doing life for you. Papa, you listening to me? And I’m here.”
“Can she do that,” the old man said, “turn you into an owl?”
“If she wants to. Listen, when we went there in the summer when we were boys, we had a twenty-two rifle, a single-shot we used, go in the marsh and hunt for muskrats. See, but we hardly ever found any, so on the way home to her house we’d shoot at dogs, you know, cats, birds. Man, it got people mad, but they wouldn’t say nothing. You know why? They were afraid the grandmother would do something to them.”
The old man was listening. He said, “Turn them into something they don’t want. How does she do that?”
“She has a drum she beats on and sings in Ojibway, so I don’t know what she saying,” the Blackbird said. “Imagine a day you don’t even see the trees move. She beats on the drum and sings and a wind comes in under the door and stirs the fire in the fireplace. She wants to, she can burn a house down. Or like if you do something to her and she gets mad? She can get a bird to shit on your car. She does it best with seagulls. A seagull flies over, she beats on the drum, points to the car. That one. The seagull shits on the hood, on the windshield. Or she can get a whole flock of them to do it, all over the car. I’m going to go see her. Drive up there, you take the ferry over from Algonac, a half-mile across the St. Clair River from the U.S. side to Walpole Island.”
The old man’s head was nodding as he thought of something and said, “I could use a woman like that. Have her turn me into a blue jay.” He smiled, showing his perfect dentures. “Those fucking Jays, they gonna do it this year, go all the way to the World Series. I’ll give you five to three. I don’t care who they play. We going tonight, see them beat the Tigers.” The old man paused. He turned and looked up with his tired eyes. “No, I’m gonna go in there, put on my robe . . .” He paused again. “No, I think I like to be dressed. Is that okay with you?”
“Whatever you want.”
The old man walked toward the bedroom saying, “That fucking son-in-law, I never like that guy.”
The Blackbird gave him time. He stepped to the room-service table and poured a cup of coffee. It was barely warm. He ate a croissant with it and two strips of cold bacon he believed the girl had ordered and didn’t eat. What did she care, she wasn’t paying for it. She had taken one bite out of each half piece of toast. He could hear the shower running. There was a Coca-Cola bottle on the table and a glass half full she had left, wasting it, not caring.
It was warm in here and he was uncomfortable in his wool suit, a black one, double-breasted, he wore with a white shirt and green-blue tie that had little green fish on it. A Browning 380 automatic, stuck in his waist at the small of his back, dug into his spine. It was a relief to pull it out. The Blackbird worked the slide to rack a cartridge into the chamber. The pistol was ready to fire and he believed he was ready. But now his pants felt loose and he had to adjust them to stick his shirt in good and straighten his tie and button his coat before going into the bedroom. He had to feel presentable. It was something he did for himself; no one else would think about how he looked, notice the suit was too tight for him and needed to be pressed. The old man wouldn’t care.
The old man wouldn’t even see him. He was lying on the unmade bed in a starched white shirt and tan trousers, brown shoes and socks, hands folded on his chest, his eyes closed.
The shower was running in the bathroom, the door open a few inches.
The Blackbird brought the sheet up over the old man’s body all the way, covering his face. Now he was looking at the outline of the face and saw the sheet move as the old man breathed in, sucking the white cloth flat against his mouth. That was where the Blackbird placed the muzzle of the Browning and shot him. He fired once. The sound filled the room and maybe it was heard on the other side of the wall in another room, or maybe not. It was sudden; if anyone heard it and said what was that and stopped to listen, there was nothing else to hear.
Only the shower running in the bathroom.
When he pulled the shower curtain aside the girl with long blond hair, the hair darker now, her face and body glistening wet, looked at him and said, “Are you through?”
The Blackbird said, “Not yet,” raising the pistol, and watched the girl’s expression finally change.
***
The last time he came to Walpole Island was nine years ago, with his two brothers. They had finished some business in Sarnia for the Italians and drove down through Wallaceburg and across the bridge. That way, it wasn’t like coming to an island.
This time he came from Algonac, Michigan, on the U.S. side, drove over the metal plates from the nine-car ferry to the dock and pulled up in the Cadillac to tell the customs guy he used to live here when he was a boy and had come back. He followed the road south along the ship channel where he and his brothers used to throw stones at the freighters going by. They had seemed so close in the channel, those ore carriers sliding past forever without a sound. This was when their mother would send them here from Toronto, in the summer. Once they swam the channel to Harsens Island on the U.S. side, maybe a quarter of a mile, and his brother now in Kingston for life had almost drowned.
Then he and his brothers didn’t come again till they were grown men: came to visit because they were nearby, that time in Sarnia, and stayed to repaint the blue cottage and fix some leaks in the roof. The cottage was damp and smelled, full of mice the Degas brothers caught in glue traps they got at the A & P in Algonac. The traps held the mice by their feet in a sticky substance; or sometimes the mouse’s face would be stuck in it. The brothers would carry the traps outside, the mice still alive, and shoot them with their high-caliber pistols.
This time, when he came to the cottage, it seemed deeper in the trees, its blue paint faded and peeling, its
