Schroeder thinks he’s too good for the morning races. Instead of beating the pavement, he sits above the world: the flat-top of the American Bank building on the corner of 11th and Lehrer. The building was the peak of architecture when it was constructed around the time that Ellis Island was hemorrhaging the tired and the poor, but Schroeder wouldn’t put a nickel on anyone saying that now. As an architect, he knows. He knows, too, that structure is the greatest advance in human antiquity. No greater security can be had than that of a foundation¾no greater strength than buttress, column, and brace. He has scrutinized the failures from a breath away, so though his signature sits on no blueprints, his initials on no cornerstones, his name on no degrees, he is an architect. One fit to look upon the great successes at a distance and ponder the intricate spider’s netting of ideas that led to such artistry. “How many men do you think it took to build those things?” Schroeder asks the pigeons in the American Bank hutch. The stool-birds, who see the world in wide-eyed wonder every moment of their life, do not respond. Schroeder tears off a crust of his kaiser roll and feeds it through the chicken wire. Like him, they are not morning racers; those birds are ten stories down right now doing the deed.
A pigeon race attracts the rat race.
Bums crowd into the rectal alleyways of Hell’s Kitchen, each carrying a speck of the city lights in his hand: Zippos that snap like Lenny Bruce, cigarette tips, and hand-crank flashlights spotlight the birds on the docket tonight. Six of them identical in pattern, stripe, and bug-eyed fear, their names are lashed to one leg in color-coded cartridges that let the spectators know who’s who at a glance. Blue for Sawed-Off, red for Turkish Folger, black for Franz Ferdinand. People tell Schroeder the name invites disaster¾“One of these days that bird is getting shot out of the sky,” Ewing says¾but it’s staying. Franz Ferdinand: few souls have flown faster into history. The owners of the birds stand at the other end of the alley, two steps from the fog line that marks roadway proper, with headlights running over their backs and turning Ewing’s rain slicker into a blossom of neon; rush-hour is eight, nine hours gone by and vehicles are still choking through. Jerry Krone’s got a cigar as big around as a quarter in his mouth. Every nervous tic brings the log further between his teeth, flaying the brown paper casing. “By the starting gun you’ll be smoking that out your ass.” Krone gives Ewing the bird.
Krone gives Schroeder the bird. He holds it gently, like he’s holding a fragile tower of toothpicks. Hold it like a football: support the underbelly, keep the wings down (but don’t hold the wings, hold the feathers), never hold it by the chest or you’ll stop its breathing, and don’t keep Krone waiting for the cash or he’s liable to lick you. Such a beat of opportunity in Schroeder’s hands is thrilling. It’s like clutching gold¾the rawest nugget of it driven out of the earth by sheep herders on the banks of the Euphrates however many generations ago. Dug up rough and smoothed by aerodynamic friction into the sleek, opalescent droplet of water before him. He wonders suddenly about the complexity of ancestry that must be needed to produce such a perfect specimen. “No half-baking about this bird,” Schroeder says to Krone.
Krone says back, “I bet your old man would be beaming to hear about you racing wings.” If not for the pigeon in his hands, Schroeder would pop Krone’s lip.
Len Schroeder had a busted lip when his wife gave birth a month premature¾busted in a brawl that started as a word over on the east side and ended below the railroad tracks. He stared down at the runny, pink watermelon of his wife and told himself that the itch at the back of his throat was pride. The midwife told him the child weighed three pounds and nine ounces but that it was going to survive. The itch died in a sour shrivel then, and Len realized it had been hope.
The next line is, “Had to have been more than a million. You’re right; probably took a million each,” with a pause over the period to let the birds frightfully coo in response. Even they have no respect for themselves. “Probably took a million each,” Schroeder finishes, and the statement is punctuated by the popgun on the side street that means open the cage and fly, fly, fly goddammit, fly, and means also the orgasm will come any second now where the winners jump like they’re riding the lightning at Riker’s and the light-wallets sink to their knees with the promises of never again already eliding in their lips. The promises fall to pieces on the stairwell to the heart because the body is designed by fools.
When Schroeder told his father he was going to New York for university, Len laughed. Whole-hearted, full belly, in his chest, rolling like a hurricane up from the gulf about to tear through the Bible Belt. Then he’d said, “Half-baked and college-bound,” and that set him off again, rolling like a dynamite truck. When he was finished, he’d met Renee’s judgmental eye and said, “What? The boy’s an ass.”
Schroeder’s lips are cold, chapped, run through by striated igneous gorges with frost on the rims. He needs to put this call through because he decided the night before was going to be his first and last and only wing race, and he had the shortsightedness to tell everyone. Pound 0 for the operator. “Len and Renee Schroeder, Poughkeepsie, I don’t know the number.” While the operator hems and haws through the phonebook, Schroeder finds there’s rot in his columns. He hangs up before he can learn that his father has forgotten his voice¾that he never really knew. It’s alright; he hardly would have heard him over the construction anyway.
Deconstruction is for religion. Structures are demolished. It is care that defines the going up, and efficiency the bringing down. You could have walked every square meter of the Chrysler’s ribs when it was getting it on and been just as peachy as a babe in swaddling. Just look at the boys out on that I-bar eating lunch.
The pigeons eat kernels or legumes, whatever Krone can get for them. They look like little, solid pebbles of nutrients, unpleasant going in or out. Maybe those are only the gizzard stones, and the real food comes later when Schroeder isn’t around. His gizzard stones are kaiser rolls for breakfast and lunch, and they put their halfhearted labor in when he gets soup for dinner at the kitchen a few blocks over. He’s halfway through the second crust of kaiser when he hears the roar. The pigeons hear it, too. Their roost becomes a flutter of mad wings, all of them compressing into one shit-stained atomic center. There’s a plane coming home to land. Schroeder keeps on with the script: “It wouldn’t take near as many to bring them down, no sir. I bet you could do it with a few. Or one who really knows what he’s doing.”
Wasn’t that a father? One who keeps the family together, who is judge (The boy’s an ass.) on all matters of the domicile, who is responsible for any harm that may come its way. He is the cornerstone, so pull him free and see how the son stands. The structure goes to Jell-O¾carrots for the bones, struts, fathers. The best racing pigeons are divers: birds that that dip down and use the gravity to their advantage, birds who aren’t afraid to go so low they might scrape the asphalt. Not likewise for a good structure. Not likewise at all.
At the last moment, Schroeder’s mind grasps that there is no error in depth perception or trick of forced perspective. Then the whoosh of the engines is replaced with a colossal boom as the side of the trade center folds inward. In its place there rises a dust storm, like the photos of Oklahoma, c. 1930, only in lower Manhattan, tumbling out in ionic clouds with bolts of heat at the center. Red-hot, like love or anger depending on your angle. The men down in the alley have stopped their whooping, and Ewing faintly calls up to Schroeder, “Shit, what the hell was that?” Schroeder is speechless to respond. In sixteen minutes, story time will be interrupted down in Florida by a second plane, and the structure of the world will have started to topple over. All Schroeder can think right now is that the tag was blue.
Sawed-Off wins the race.
The Tributary 