The old man glares down at them, then grimaces in pain. So he sighs instead and sits back and watches the sparrows circle instead, sparrows like hawks above us, swirling in some current of air we cannot feel. He is too lazy to relight it, too wearying with the heat to restuff it with tobacco from his pouch, a pouch he keeps tucked under his shirt next to the picture of his dead son. I suspect he inherited them from his mother. Today, the hot and dry air taunts him, though his expression suggests some deeper disturbance he will not discuss.
More sparrows come.
And their flight becomes a tangle of fluttering wings, all forming private patterns above us and the river. Down, down, they fly, rushing at the ground like the Japanese Zeros out of the old man's stories of war, each aiming its beak at the crusty floor of the lower river, pulling themselves up just before they crash. The old man stares them, and then, in a dramatic change of mood, winks at me, before going off again on another tirade about rain. Only we didn't have so many factories then, just a handful of paper mills. None of these chemical places we got now, springing up like poison ivy, taking possession of the banks like they owned them all along.