Gerald tapped the butt of his fork against the already dented, uneven, sidewalk metal table. He followed a precise, premeditated rhythm, but the table still wobbled. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hairy, pudgy, non-fork-holding hand and worried that the table leg clanging against the sidewalk would sabotage his message.
“Ger, that's not going to make your pancakes get here any sooner,” the platinum-haired waitress sang. Or so she sang in Gerald's mind's eye – she actually spoke in a monotone as she held the coffee pot not quite directly above his left thigh.
For his part, Gerald smiled apologetically because he didn't know how to tell Cheryl that she was interrupting his conversation with a pigeon. And that was her name, Cheryl, not because she wore a name tag but because he had finally screwed up the courage to ask her it five weeks ago.
And the pigeon, that big-breasted black bird had appeared exactly two weeks ago.
Gerald knew all this and more, since making sense of details was what he did. Thus, this big, soft man would've noticed if the black pigeon had tapped another talon or ruffled a feather. The bird, however, remained motionless, head cocked and beady, orange eye intent on Gerald, the semi-astute human who still held his fork suspended mid-letter. The man squirmed, set the fork down, and searched his pockets while the woman poured more brown liquid in his cup.
“Cheryl, you got a pen I can borrow?”
“What do you want my pen for?”
“I need to write my last will and testament.” Cheryl's eyes widened slightly at his remark. Gerald noticed, blushed, and made little consoling noises in his throat.
“Just take it and don't put it in your mouth.” She grimaced, and Gerald tried not to wince when her fingers failed to brush his in the passing of the pen. He looked back at the pigeon, which was starting to shuffle on its side rail in impatience, as Cheryl with her loose grip on the coffee pot moved off to threaten the future generations of other customers.
Gerald had already noticed the obligatory adornment for diner tables everywhere, a fat stack of napkins. He didn't know why he hadn't thought of this before, but if the pigeon could communicate through talon taps, then it wouldn't be a stretch to assume it could read as well. After scribbling on the napkin, he held it up for the pigeon to see.
(Why should I help you?)
The pigeon raised a talon and considered. The last time the pigeon had done this was when it had first met Gerald and had crapped on his hand.
Don't misunderstand; the pigeon had pooped with intention. It had noticed the man noticing it and had spent a full minute clanking out a greeting, managing to include its backstory and its predicament without coming across as too desperate. This was lost on Gerald when Cheryl, not to mention his pancakes the size of dinner plates, arrived mid-greeting.
“Thanks, Cher.” He began to pour syrup and carve out a pancake crater, since slicing and dicing were for amateurs. Cheryl didn't move from the table.
“What did you call me?”
“I guess I called you Cher, since you're always calling me Ger, get it, right?”
“And what did I say my name was when you asked?”
“Uh, you said it was Cheryl.”
“Yeah, let's just leave it at that.” And so the woman left the man hurt and confused and totally stole the pigeon's thunder.
Gerald couldn't know that Cheryl thought their names already sounded too similar, which is why she stuck with calling him Ger. That endearing tub of lard, who left the embarrassingly generous tips, was obviously infatuated with her for some reason. She didn't want to give him the wrong idea, especially since she wasn't planning on sticking around for much longer.
As an outside observer, the pigeon may have seen the signs or her early demise, but its hopes of salvation were set on Gerald, so it had pooped on his hand to help him pay attention.
When Gerald glanced down at the path of skin between forefinger and thumb, his first thought was that perhaps a glob of partially melted butter had leaped form his pancake crater onto his hand. He shifted his gaze to the pigeon that, despite its zero degree turn radius, was still rotating to face him once more.
The soft, pancake-consuming man contemplated violence while gumming up napkins with his soiled hand. He decide to lightly rap the pigeon on its foot with his fork, especially since the bird was still waiting there and might strike again. The pigeon raised its targeted food when he tried to smack a talon with a fork tong. Gerald tried the other foot with the same result.
Yes, the human was getting it. The pigeon shuffled to the side to give the fat man room to beat out the rest of his message. Imagine its surprise when the man smacked its foot instead. The pigeon was at a loss for taps, so it stood and considered.
Gerald pumped his fist victoriously, until he noticed a couple and their small child at a nearby patio table looking at him, not eating – and the pigeon too – it hadn't flown away. He attempted to avoid the stares by drowning himself in a syrupy abyss.
The pigeon revised its message, adding a (please, please, please) at both the start and finish. The man didn't lift his head from his plate, and the pigeon didn't have any more conversation starters, since its stomach was empty.
Add a week minus some minutes - Gerald spotted two discrepancies between a towering precedent and current legal proceedings that saved the law firm, where he worked as a paralegal, a case; Cheryl managed to survive another week and found that she could achieve medium-grade hallucinations if she consumed enough Red Bull with her Ambien and vodka; and the pigeon ate and pooped and avoided other pigeons, since they weren't really his type.
Thus, all made it back to the diner at their appointed times. The pigeon switched tact; it didn't poop, and it waited until the man had finished shoveling food into his mouth and the woman, who made the man do strange things with his face, had left her piece of paper.
Gerald had forgotten about the tap dancing pigeon until it resumed its side rail scraping and clanking. He noticed that the pigeon was following a rhythm halfway through its first repeat. Without really trying, he managed to replicate this pattern by tapping and sliding his fork on the table by the time the pigeon had repeated itself for the third time.
The pigeon was puzzled but pleased when the man chimed in with his fork – not only that, but the man also seemed to have the same problem – no, it wouldn't be possible for not-a-pigeon to face the same trouble. Yes, the man was repeating what had been said to him in the manner of one who does not yet know a language but tries to communicate nonetheless. The pigeon tapped out a follow-up message and was equal parts frustrated and hopeful when the man repeated this as well.
Gerald was also puzzled but not overly curious – curiosity was a blinder, favoring certain details over others. It was best to mull this one over at his leisure, since, in his experience, the supporting details would fall into place at their own leisure too. When he retreated from his table, the pigeon watched longingly. It would have followed, but it had never gotten comfortable with the idea of flying. Instead, it stayed put and observed the woman – her lips curved slightly and she wiped at her eye when she picked up the same white paper she'd left before as well as a stack of green papers that the man had left on top. The woman ruffled the very fine feathers that grew only on her head, which the pigeon knew was a universal sign of pleasure.
* * *
(Why should I help you?) The man set down his fork and revealed the words, and the pigeon was able to read them, although it wasn't sure why. The pigeon's clank-and-scrape response along the side rail amounted to this:
(I can help with the woman)
Gerald almost asked what woman before realizing that would be a pointless question. There weren't many women in his life – his Mom, of course, but that didn't really count. He had french kissed a girl with braces at camp, the summer before high school. Then there had been the girl at community college, the one with the eye-twitch thing – Gerald had thought that she'd been winking at him. She'd been sweet, but it had been an availability and proximity arrangement that tapered off after graduation. Thus, the pigeon was obviously referring to Cheryl, that pancake angel who had taken the time to think up a flashy nickname for him.
Gerald worried about taking dating advice from a bird, but he reasoned that this was probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Plus, the excitement of discovery from the previous Saturday evening still burned within him.
The details had fallen into place during some late-night manga reading with the TV on in the background. The sound of dots and dashes had interrupted his train of thought. It came from one of those paid programming commercials that bordered on soft-core porn. A buxom blonde with 1920's style curls who wore oversized, adorable glasses was operating a telegraph. The subtitles below, which supposedly corresponded to the dots and dashes, said that she was desperately searching for nice guys to talk with, since most of them were too intimidated by her good looks to strike up a conversation. That was just the first segment of the lengthy commercial – the girls, while all still beautiful, changed as the technology, the modes of communication, improved. The message remained the same; there was a surplus of beautiful women out there, all waiting to to talk with average guys. One could help these lonely girls out by subscribing to a website where personal profiles and phone numbers galore could be found.
Gerald wouldn't know where to start with such a service – but dots and dashes, clanks and scrapes! Did the pigeon that had pooped on him know Morse code? He spent a sleepless night learning the code and confirmed that the pigeon did indeed know it within fifteen minutes of sitting down at his usual diner patio table the next day.
After some decoding, he came to the conclusion that the pigeons' predicament was this: a few blocks from the diner, there was a fountain with coins scattered along its bottom. There was a particular coin that the pigeon wanted very much. Being a pigeon, it did not have the ability to go underwater, no matter how shallow, and retrieve this coin. That's where Gerald, with his big hands and opposable thumbs came in.
Gerald used another napkin to ask the pigeon why it wanted this one coin so much. The pigeon either didn't understand the question or was being evasive, since its clank-and-scrape answer amounted to “because.”
Cheryl noted that Gerald seemed a little distracted this Sunday. His attention was still mostly on her, but he kept periodically staring off at a space over the sidewalk and not trying to talk to her as much – this somehow made him less awkward. Had he met someone? That'd be a good thing, right? He'd probably stop sitting at her table every Sunday and doing that dumb thing with his hand, where he wiped it across his forehead even though there was never any sweat – and then no one would be around to notice when she finally worked up the nerve to get gone.
“You sure you finished with that, Ger?” she asked as she laid down the check. His syrupy crater had failed to make it to the outer rings of pancake dough for once.
“What? Oh yeah, I guess so. Thanks, Cher – Cheryl. Have a beautiful Sunday.”
What did that even mean to have a beautiful day? And why did that sloppy pancake slob make her wish that she knew what it meant? Cheryl tried not to watch from inside the diner as he left her table and took short, halting steps down the sidewalk.
Gerald had offered to the carry the pigeon to the fountain, but it had fluttered down from the side rail when he'd extended his palm. He now trailed slightly behind the bird as it shuffled down the sidewalk.
The fountain that the bird had mentioned wasn't mystical, no legendary creatures spouting water; it was a run-of-the-mill, shallow basin with a single, gushing stream in the middle and located in the outside courtyard of a shopping outlet, where people, mostly families, whiled away their Sunday early afternoon by looking for affordable clothes to wear to affordable places.
The black pigeon hop-fluttered onto the fountain's rim as Gerald scanned the waters. He spotted the coin beyond wished-upon nickels and dimes near the fountain's center. The coin was bronze, ridged and irregular like a poorly flipped pancake; it was too far to reach, so he hesitated while the pigeon stared him down. He felt in his pockets for answers and grasped the pen he had accidentally stolen from Cheryl and quickly tossed it into the fountain next to the bronze coin.
“My pen. My pen dropped in the fountain,” he said a little too loudly to everyone and to no one in particular. A few passerby glanced at him momentarily as he waded into the fountain. Gerald was in and out of the water in twenty seconds flat, having slipped the the coin into a pocket and holding Cheryl's pen at eye level as a token of sanity.
He wasn't sure how to give the coin to the bird (put it in its beak perhaps?), but the pigeon was already on the move once more. He followed it to a loading dock behind a Forever 21 store, and decide to just set the coin at the pigeon's feet.
This seemed to work, since the bird tottered toward the coin and placed a talon upon it. The coin may have glowed, or it could have been an effect of the Sunday sun. Gerald took a step back and so did the pigeon.
Beady, orange eyes regarded him before being lost in a burst of black feathers. He gasped, a gasp that kept coming as he watched the feathers spiral in slow motion away from where the bird had once stood, fluffy shrapnel from a silent explosion. The gasp went beyond any reasonable lung capacity and became a surrounding suction that terminated into a wet pop as everything but the feathers lost focus.
* * *
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