Pigeon Dance

It was an unseasonably bright spring afternoon. Though it had just snowed, like the April Fools blizzard I was nearly born in, the snow stood sweating in the midday sun. Trash strewn on blackened mounds of ice marked the road. Cars hummed on Ocean Parkway, the whirring leading right to the beach.

My dad took a half day to get me after school. If he could wrangle another day off, we might walk around the zoo of Williamsburg’s streets of foreign tourists, stopping to eat too much from cafes that smelled like burnt butter.

I was born when they were still holding on to being young. We were babies, my mom responded anytime I asked, enough with the inquisition. It was a long process of letting go for both of them, and for me, their only child.

Dad’s tank-like car idled out on the corner of Beverly Road.

“So we’re locked out again?” he asked as I stared at the front door to the bottom-level apartment I lived in with my mom half the time. I could almost see the keys staring at me too through the wood and concrete.

“I forgot them on the side table.” I winced in shame. Dad shrugged, mostly gregarious but also disengaged.

We headed back down to the street. He lifted my school bag to the front seat, his phone still perched in his right hand, and turned off the car.

“Let’s go sit out on the bike path.”

A troupe of women biked past us, some with those tiny cages to carry children in tagging along in the back.

I knew Mom’s boyfriend would be home soon. We sat down a few benches away from a man with a grocery cart full of plastic bottles. The man resettled his collection and continued on his way once we sat down, as if we were leaning too close into his silent conversation.

I didn’t feel all that in the mood to go across the city as we sat together in silence, my dad pacing through his phone. I was just beginning to sense that pulling ache of teenage girl adolescence, that unknown feeling of destiny and sadness on the horizon.

Across the intersection, I saw Mom’s boyfriend Malcolm waiting on the curb. He spotted us right away, waving with his long arms. He smiled a broad, goofy hello as he approached.

I wouldn’t admit to anyone, let alone my dad, but I liked Malcolm a lot. He was always getting into some new creative endeavor, pouring candles on our stovetop, composting with no success in the sliver of our backyard. He delighted Mom, too, but she didn’t admit it either.

Dad gave him a one-handed pat on the back. “We’re locked out again.”

He smiled, digging his boots into a chunk of snow near our bench, then started toward the front door, waving us over. I ran in to grab my things. Dad waited on the landing stiffly, fingers gracing peeling paint over rust.

As I emerged with my night bag in tow, Dad was already heading down the stairs. I noticed an older man on the path very near to us with a large net in his hands. He was making rhythmic circles back and forth on the bike path where we had just once sat. There was a single pigeon, slowly dotting the path in front of the man. It was a game I didn’t understand.

“That’s odd,” I unconsciously whispered to Dad as I neared him again, my hand stretched out, pointing slightly.

Dad cocked his head to the side as we stared together. The dancing pigeon man was spartanly dressed and methodical in his task. He kept waving the net back and forth, tracking the city bird. He was speaking or cursing in another language but only ever so softly.

In a whoosh of air and net, he caught the bird, like it was nothing, like it was a speck of dust you’d only see in the afternoon light. He brought the bird up carefully to his face, holding the beak closed with a gingerly touch, to stare at the bird’s black eyes. Then, in quiet motions, he carried the pigeon to a van parked off to the side of the exit road that paralleled the bike path and put the creature inside the back doors.

No one seemed to notice, not the large Orthodox family walking in double rows down past our bench, nor the Bangladeshi teenagers racing lowrider bicycles on the sidewalk. The lights turned red for several stops in a row, ushering in a preternatural lull on Ocean Parkway.

There was a dizzying image of pigeons in flight back there for a brief glimpse, but none appeared to escape, and you could grasp the scene for a flashing moment only if you were in the right spot, like we were together.

“If we followed him,” I said to Dad as the pigeon man prepared to leave.

The door to the bird ballet closed up suddenly. He hastily placed the net in the passenger-side door, adjusting the grate that separated the back of the van from the front.

In a moment of singularity, Dad agreed with me. We rushed down the parallel exit road, the white van with faded Cyrillic decals a few cars ahead.

I let my hand out the window as we drove, moving it in the waves with the wind, even if it was cold outside. Ocean Parkway led straight to the beach, to a boardwalk of revelers where Brighton Beach and Coney Island met when the season was in. Soon enough we were in a section of the neighborhood benchmarked by sex-segregated school students congregating in large numbers on either side of the road.

The van stopped at the light, signaling to turn left into the residential streets. I could see the pigeons, I thought. I was dreaming of their flight in my mind.

“Maybe he fights them.” I didn’t want to imagine the pigeons bludgeoning each other, their beaks gnarled in thick clots of blood.

We were tracing a path through dense blocks of residential homes, so many of them painted bright Victorian yellows and greens. At each light I held my breath in case we’d lose the van and the birdman’s path.

We ended on the edge of the beach finally, coming at a tiny inlet of concrete land that led to the sand. The van parked a few rows down next to an apartment complex’s mound of trash and recycling in an alleyway. The man got out but left the net. He didn’t see us as we pulled into a municipal lot in eyeshot.

The air was thick with the smell of trash and salt as we approached hesitantly. The beach was hardly occupied but kept its silent vigil in front of us nonetheless. In the distance there were a few teenagers drinking beer near a dog running off leash.

The man opened the van with a whoosh, and then some, but not all, of the birds were released. They hovered and cooed but didn’t fly off. It was a flock of pigeons swarming above his head. He was their keeper, we knew without saying. He moved with them, some flying farther now but circling back. A few perched on his hands. They were dancing together, finally. It was a bizarre delight to see.

The man waded out farther onto the beach. We just watched, not sure what else to do.

After his figure settled farther from us and the dance continued, we just started walking in silence. The peculiar calmness of the beach was a pause in our expected day together, a trip we’d never take.

It was nothing more than a Friday evening, but it was altered, like tuning the dial. I didn’t know it then, but it was only a few months before I would move across town with my mother to the border of Ridgewood and the section of Queens crammed full of cemeteries, those rolling tombstones I traced from the car window on our drives out of the city.

It was also only a few months before my dad would meet his soon-to-be new wife, whom he’d marry, leaving for Arizona and the dry heat. Our time would be spaced out then, no more structure to weekends in a routine across the city. I’d learn how to fly alone. He’d buy me turquoise from the Southwest, a collection growing on my dresser. But I’d get older. I’d gain a baby brother I didn’t know. We’d see each other less and less, sometimes almost not at all.

On that supposedly average Friday before all that, though, the pigeon keeper dancing behind us, we stopped out in front of Tatiana’s on the boardwalk. The sun was casting an orange glow on the pockmarked sand, with seagulls edging closer to the restaurant in vain hopes of scraps.

A man with a delirious accent ushered us in. We sat with plates of the late lunch special. A woman in a fur hat sat alone next to us, eating every last drop of sour cream with a gentle f

inger, extended like a declaration.