Every Sparrow's Fall, 1 of 3
DAVID
This is the first in a series of three interconnected stories set around the time of the Spanish Civil War.
The three brothers watched from the darkened balcony. The sailor stumbled out of the alley and into the light of the street lamp. He was drunker than usual; it was perfect.
The boys moved swiftly down the stairs, the last one grinning stupidly, but quiet like the others.
They were out in the street just in time to see the man drifting sideways into the park.
They followed the crunch and thud of his heavy footsteps along the unlit gravel path, barely able to see him, until, just as the babble of the fountain could be heard, he came to a sudden halt.
“Who’s there?”
The sailor was an Englishman.
The tall one with the dark red hair was David. He unsheathed his long knife, but was otherwise motionless in the haze and moonlight. They all held their breath.
“¿Quién es?” the sailor growled. He spoke a little louder this time, frightening the resting birds into the air, seeming to shake the leaves on the trees. There was something ravenous and predatory in his voice.
The sailor took in a long, deliberate breath. He waited. When the wind shifted he took in another, his head tilted, his eyes closed.
The boy with the stupid grin was scared now and took a tentative step backward. The gravel crunched under his foot. David reached out with his free hand, grabbing his brother by the shirt collar. He whispered,
“You know what to do?”
Roberto and Juan nodded silently.
“Go.”
David kept his eyes on the sailor, and the footsteps of the two boys could hardly be heard as they retreated back along the path.
The sailor’s wild grin softened into a smile.
“Left you alone did they? Plans come apart so easy, mate.”
David could not quite breathe. He took a step forward, knife held out before him like a crucifix.
“You there? Ah, there you are. I can just make you out… who are you?” The wild grin returned as he began to move toward the boy.
“Stop!” The boy felt real fear now. He felt that if he moved, his feet would come off the ground. The sailor stopped, though still grinning.
“I’ve seen you,” David shouted.
“I know what you do.”
The boy’s voice was frightened and unsteady. The sailor savored the sound of it.
The sailor again took a slow, deep breath.
“What’s that? You know what I DO? I must be misunderstanding your Spanish, my young friend. Step into the light. “
“I know what you do and I know where you live,” David said. Neither was really true, but especially the latter. David had been fighting the instinct to run, and now he finally gave into it. He pivoted on the balls of his feet and ran back toward the light of the city. The sailor gave chase.
The sailor was much faster than David had allowed for, he barreled down on the boy, growing larger with each step. David imagined himself in the man’s grasp. Neck throttled and broken. Blood leaking from his mouth and nose. The boy ran swiftly as the monster gained in his pursuit.
The sailor was himself thinking something similar, but his vision of what to do with the boy was something more elaborate than David had the experience to consider.
The sailor was almost on him now. He loved the way the boy’s breath sounded like a panicked animal. He loved the way the boy’s legs wavered and buckled as the fear pulsed through him. The sailor loved the smell of the boy, which carried past him like a roasting ham. He savored it.
Roberto and Juan had taken up their positions on either side of the pathway. They watched their brother come flying by them in a pale shaft of moonlight. As soon as David passed them they pulled hard on the rope. The sailor’s foot caught, and he tumbled wildly, and the boys could hear the sound of something snap as he crashed into the ground. The sailor groaned. He took some heaving breaths and began to laugh as David approached, knife trembling in his unsteady hand.
~
David was alone when he first saw the sailor, waiting for the old woman on La Calle ——. Each night she would leave a loaf of bread on the doorstep, wrapped in a page of the ABC. He waited patiently for her to close the door and retreat down the hallway, before emerging to grab the stale bread. He had to do it quickly or the hungry rats would start to swarm it, and he would have to fight them off. Neither he nor his brothers had eaten since the night before.
As he was about to emerge, David heard heavy footsteps coming up the alley. The sailor smelled like rum. He wore a red scarf. David’s jaw clenched tight so that hours later he could only open it painfully, and with difficulty.
The sailor walked up to the old woman’s door. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a strange looking key. He fiddled with it in the lock, which made a subtle groan and a cracking sound, and the door opened. The sailor slipped into the house.
The rats made for the bread and, snapping out of his disbelief, David ran to snatch it up. He thought he could hear, very faintly, the old woman scream. He waited for a long while in the dark and listened. He heard another soft cry, then … nothing. The sailor reemerged a few minutes later. He had a bottle in his hand and he drank as he walked.
And David followed him toward the park.
That night David had followed the sailor just along the same path which took him toward El Retiro. David had from a young age learned to walk with a soft step, first to avoid the anger of his father, and later as a thief. In a narrow street just off the plaza the sailor had stopped and seemed to be waiting for someone. The sailor wore a heavy brown coat with a hood. He had short brown hair and a weird, square face with eyes that were at once wholly blank and sedated, the next moment lively and curious and intelligent. He was whispering to himself. Seeming to go over various arguments, imagining responses, he laughed several times as if someone had said something stupid, and with the wave of his hand and a sharp look away he was heard to say, several times, “you must not believe everything people say.” His Spanish was not perfect. David knew he was a foreigner and by his red scarf a communist. David had learned about the communists from his father. His father was a gullible man, a drunk and an ideologue. The old man was plagued with headaches and when he drank he was mean. David’s father was also an insomniac, whose boredom and drunkenness and sleeplessness were fertile ground for his cruelty.
The sailor’s face was occasionally illuminated as he smoked his cigarette, deep drags which caused the cherry to glow bright orange. The sailor blew a cloud of grey smoke which swirled and revolved like a primitive galaxy in a shaft of moonlight. The smell of it was sweet. David was tired and half mesmerized by it. The sailor took a piece of chalk from his deep pocket and kneeling, put a small indiscreet mark on the doorway. He moved along and David followed him silently through the park and out the other side where he disappeared into a boardinghouse as the boy stood numb in the eerie blue of the early dawn.
It took three agonizing days for the story to appear in the newspapers. He had become expert in stealing newspapers during this time. You could learn to steal almost anything if you really tried. And the cheaper something was, the easier it was to steal. Finally on the third day, the story appeared. The old woman had been killed by an intruder. There was some money on the old woman’s dresser, and the killer hadn’t taken it, and the police mentioned this to all the reporters.
David sat reading one such report when he came across an alarming detail. One policeman claimed that a young boy may have acted as lookout. A neighbor had seen a boy lurking in the shadows, around the time of the murder. A feeling : a lurch and a drop. He took a deep breath. He tapped his finger on his knee and his face contorted subtly as he continued reading. The policeman said, “A neighbor saw him, a little boy, hiding there… and we have his footprints in this spot.” He read the sentence over and over. He went to the bathroom and threw up. He came back pale. He put the newspapers away in the closet.
His mother had held up for a few days after his father died. She was always a quiet woman, and her sad eyed blankness was taken for grief. David tended to speak for her. At her side, holding her hand. David kept the other boys clean and fed them all for a few days on the money they had taken from their father’s pockets. When David’s father’s angry heart wore out, with no ceremony or even well chosen words to mark the occasion, he fell over on the kitchen floor. But the money soon ran out.
David was pompous, the way many little boys are, and he was too proud to beg for food. So he began to steal. What made it pompous was the hours he spent going over his plan with his little brothers, drawing little diagrams of this or that plaza, such and such a tienda and which escape routes, etc. Oddly, even though his mother was again soon lost inside her mind and unaware, mostly, of what was happening, she would eat what he gave her, she would wash herself every few days, and mostly she said nothing to anyone else, sitting and praying the rosary. David took this to be a quite lucky state of affairs. He had heard about the orphanages. His great fear was that they would be discovered, and sent away. His mother sent away. He wasn’t sentimental. He viewed it practically. Or so he told himself.
A week passed and the sailor had not been caught. David would make a round in the morning and steal one newspaper, he’d find a place to sit down and read, then he’d steal another. He stole food as an afterthought. His brothers would tear into whatever he tossed on the table for them. His mother’s portion he would place on her bedside table. On this day his mother seemed almost half lucid. He was glad. “You must not forget to take your brothers to mass”, she said. He had not forgotten.
The grey haired priest with the sharp face would be looking for him. The old man was meddlesome, he could often be seen coming and going about the neighborhood. Clicking his cane as he went like a cop. The old man would come to the house if David didn’t go to mass. So David went to mass. He dressed himself and his brothers in their best clothes, hand-me-downs, ill fitting. A family from the parish had given them some clothes after seeing the rags they all wore at their father’s funeral. So David dressed them all in their best, and marched them down to hear the mass. The grey haired priest with the clicking cane and the sharp face nodded to David as he ushered the boys into a pew in the back. Another priest said the mass in Latin. The boys kneeled and prayed and listened with practiced, performative devotion.
The next day was the first mention of a reward. Now David’s imagination began to run wild with possibilities. He knew he could not go to the police empty handed. They would never believe that he wasn’t a lookout. They would find out the sailor was a communist, he thought, and they’d think David was one too. No. He’d have to capture the sailor himself. A plan began to formulate.
He hardly knew what he might do with the money, he imagined it would make them impossibly rich. In reality, the 500 pesetas would keep them going for a year at most. He was dreaming of glory, perhaps even a commendation from the mayor of Madrid, perhaps the general himself. He imagined sitting in the front pew in mass, the old priest nodding in approval. David spent the next hour lost in fanciful speculations until roused by the church bells. He went out hurriedly, stole a length of rope, a loaf of bread, and a newspaper. He was back in his room in 1 hour.
David first tried waiting outside the old boarding house he had seen the man enter. In the morning, he felt he was too conspicuous, so he came at night. He kept up this vigil for a few days before giving up. Then he thought he would look for the sailor outside the old woman’s house. Perhaps he would come back, or perhaps the little alleyway was along a path he often took. But he was afraid of being seen by the police, who may have had the same idea.
Then he remembered the mark that the sailor had made on the doorway. The next morning David had his little brothers distract their mother while he retrieved his father’s hunting knife from his top dresser drawer, where it still sat atop the old man’s folded underwear. David stuffed the knife into the waist of his pants.
Late that same night, David waited at his mothers door, listening to her breath. When she was finally asleep, her breath became steady and deep; there was an audible release of tension in the sound. He crept out into the darkness of night to try to find the sailor.
He had followed the sailor east from the old woman’s house. So he retraced his steps until he came along the building where the sailor had knelt and left the mark. There it was, about ankle high, and faint. David waited an hour before deciding it was too cold. When he came back the next night he brought a warm coat but there was no sign of the sailor and David went home disappointed. The third night as David approached he could see that the door to the marked house was eerily ajar, opening and closing with the wind as if it were the scene of some great gathering of invisible spirits. The doorway across the street was covered by a deep shadow, and the boy stood there for a long time in the dark watching the open door, expecting the sailor to emerge, which after a while, he did. The sailor made no attempt to close the door. He walked confidently into the night air, again, toward the park, where he was soon lost amongst the shadows and the trees. Again, however, he stopped and had a short conversation with himself, illuminated by the glow of his cigarette. And again, he marked the door where he stood.
The next night there were police everywhere. Nevertheless, David made his way toward the door with the mark. The door was a green so dark it seemed black. Women’s clothes were hanging on a line above it. They were worn but colorful and soft. Red, orange, blue and green. They twisted in a high wind that continually whipped up in the mountains and came pouring down through the narrow passages. David hid and waited, but the sailor didn’t come. The police were continually coming and going, smoking cigarettes and complaining about the cold. Loud steps on the cobblestone.
The next night the police were fewer. And the next night there were almost none. When David saw that it was safe for the sailor to return, he knew that the sailor would soon be breaking the lock on the house with the mark. And that he would do horrible things to whoever lived inside, possibly kill them. It never occurred to him to try to save them. He was afraid to lose the trail.
David took frequent walks about the neighborhood, looking for chalk marks. It was the dead of winter and fairly cold. The wind blew steadily and everywhere there were the sounds of flags, and sheets whipping, and shutters banging out an irregular rhythm. Like far off gunfire. It was on one such morning that David first noticed the empty apartment. The terrace was oddly blank and there were no curtains in the window. The ornate edifice was easy to climb and that night when he made his way up to the second floor balcony, he found it as he had suspected, as he had hoped, unoccupied.
The apartment was much larger and nicer than the one he lived in. He imagined his family there. Even his father, who had perhaps purchased the mechanics shop on some money he had saved. Or his mother who would be treated more kindly by the women at church, even by the priest. He saw that there were rooms enough for him to have his own. His brothers would still have to share but their new room would be twice the size of the old one. David didn’t want to go home. He spent a long time pacing the old hardwood floors there.
David reasoned that the sailor would always walk through the park. So, when the sailor finished up in the house with the mark, he would turn left at the corner and walk directly under the balcony, where David would be waiting. He thought about trying to trap him there. But it would draw out the neighbors if anything went wrong, and David was afraid of drawing out the neighbors. For a reason he didn’t understand, he simply did not wish to be seen by them.
The next morning, David told his brothers the plan. No plan of David’s was too much for them. Once they had tried to build a parachute out of sheets and a rope and a harness men used for painting houses. The summer before Juan had jumped, at David’s insistence, from the roof of a three story building. Luckily, the parachute “worked”. It grabbed onto a bit of wrought iron, and brought Juan slamming into the side of the building, rather than falling swiftly to his death. One of the sheets began to rip and that lowered Juan another six feet or so, where he then fell again. This time he was able to break his fall by grabbing the railing on the second floor balcony which came off in his hand and sent him crashing into a wooden cart below. Juan was miraculously uninjured, and the foregoing episode quickly became an object lesson in David’s ingenuity and leadership. Of the two, Juan was particularly devoted to David. When he explained his plan to them about how they would capture the sailor, and collect the reward, and perhaps even use the money to move into a larger apartment, Roberton and Juan did not require convincing. They swallowed his vision easily, like tea with honey and cream.
And so, they were full of naive confidence as they waited in the darkness of the abandoned apartment. And no one but David was surprised when the sailor came, drunk and stumbling down the alley only an hour or so later. And they were generally satisfied with the genius of their older brother when, as he predicted, the sailor had tried to run David down in the dark, and tumbled catastrophically over the trip line. They were not, like David, afraid. They were in a waking dream, as boys often are.
David, despite his fear, ran at the man with his knife drawn. David took a mean, deliberate swipe at the sailor’s leg as he tried to crawl away. The sailor screamed in agony and blood seeped from the open wound. Meanwhile Juan was working the rope.
David was wild with excitement. The sailor turned to face him, tried to stand, and failed. His left collarbone was broken, and he was concussed from the fall. David continued to swing the knife at him, and the sailor continued to feebly back away.
Juan tied the rope as David had taught him. They had practiced for an hour the day before. With David coaching him and giving instructions, watching him work, with a pretend seriousness, as if it were a technique of some great art. Two quick knots, one loose and one tight.
Juan fed the rope into the loop. He crept around to the back of the man, who kept his eyes fixed on David. Juan took a breath. He slipped the simple noose over the man’s head and pulled backward violently.
David was crouched over like a predator. The blade no longer seemed strange in his hand. It felt warm and heavy and comfortable. He just stopped himself from pouncing on the man. Roberto ran over to Juan and they both pulled backwards on the rope like a game of tug of war. They dragged the sailor some way before tying the end of the rope hastily to a tree.
David checked that the man was alive. He was, somehow. David wished he had brought more rope. He sat down in the dirt beside the sailor, exhausted. Roberto and Juan ran for a policeman. After a few minutes David could hear them calling out. A man’s voice shouted back in the distance. In a few minutes the police had arrived.
The sun was just rising when the two policemen found David trembling in the cold. He put down the knife as they approached and got to his feet. He hadn’t really eaten in weeks and had slept even less. He was delirious and happy. They took him into custody. They were a little bit rough with him. He told them, “This is the man that killed the old woman on La Calle ——— “. They didn’t believe him at first. It seemed unbelievable. But then they found the chalk in the sailors coat. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence which pointed to the truth of the boy’s story. But the chalk sealed it. They let the boy go.
The family got the reward. David and his brothers got new clothes, but not a new apartment. There was no parade for him, no one gave a speech in his honor, and it didn’t bring his father back to life of course. But David didn’t notice any of that.
David became a kind of legend among the boys in the neighborhood, and they collected around him like a warband. They listened to his story over and over, which he recounted with his nose ever so slightly in the air and his chest swelled with pride. The boys took to patrolling the city, harassing drunks and vagrants, hoping for a sequel to the drama of the sailor. But they were soon a public nuisance and the police would break them up when they saw them.
David began to read more and more about politics; his bigotry began as an imitation of his father’s but soon outstripped that man’s simple prejudices with something far darker and more intelligent. He began giving little speeches to the neighborhood boys, and he loved the way they looked at him. He was sorry the police had taken away his father’s hunting knife.
He never heard what happened to the sailor. It wasn’t in the paper.