The Wild Birds Page 4

  “I am inclined to believe this soreness in my eyes is caused by some impurity of blood,” Richardson rubbed harder with the heel of his hand at his eyes. “But perhaps if I were to catch the occasional glimpse of the female form divine,” he chuckled, “perhaps then the swelling might be alleviated.”

  Olive tried to force the blood back down her neck by sheer will, eating the rest of her bland stew in silence.

  “Tomorrow I will introduce you to the other lighthouse assistants and the small community that calls this island home.”

  “Oh! There are more people?” Olive asked.

  “There are. But be warned. The people living here have a slender hold on mankind.”

  Olive wondered what that might mean back in her room after dinner. The continual roar of the surf on the rock edged her closer to sleep on her small cot. She pulled the insufficient wool blanket closer, wrapping and tucking it into every crevice. She wondered where Richardson hailed from. He spoke the words of an educated man and seemed knowledgeable in many fields. On this strange West Coast, one never knew where anyone came from, it seemed. It was hard to imagine that the hardened folk were once their mothers’ children. Her mind darted to her own mother, then to the collection case under the bed, and images from Martha Maxwell’s Denver curio shop filled up the space just before dreams.

  Despite her ailing spirit, the month before her mother died, she took Olive on an outing to Martha Maxwell’s famous and controversial taxidermy shop. Her mother had wanted to take Olive to visit the shop as a gesture of encouragement, of what exactly Olive wasn’t sure at the time. Though it was difficult for her mother to walk the ten-block journey there and back, they made their way slowly, arm in arm. Once inside the small, unassuming storefront, the rooms opened up into magnificent galleries of taxidermied animals. Mrs. Maxwell had two large rooms with catamounts and owls and pheasants, all shot and stuffed by her own womanly hand. She even had a perfectly stuffed terrier curled on a rag rug that Olive swore she could see breathing. As she greeted the two women, Mrs. Maxwell stood beside a deer with her hand gently resting on the haunch. The creature was so lifelike that Olive expected it to snort and quiver at any moment. A sea of pictures on the wall showed Mrs. Maxwell out in the forest, at work in her studio, and standing above her kill. One photo in particular caught Olive’s eye—a picture where Martha stood up to her ankles in a duck pond, in men’s pants, with a rifle slung over her shoulder. Olive stared at the photograph a long time as her mother and Martha engaged in polite chatter about the shop.

  Once outside the shop, her mother stood clutching the railing, coughing with the death rattle as Olive wanted nothing more than to stop time, to stop each second from moving forward and to split the moments like a log. She would keep splitting them until tomorrow never came. But time, the cruel adventurer, continued on, and that night, as her daughter made a dinner of mutton stew, Olive’s mother lay quiet, better for the moment, contentedly clutching a present—a silver box with a velvet lining from Maxwell’s shop. She knew her daughter would be pleased to receive the gift. It was a place for new memories to be made, collected, and esteemed long after she was gone.

  Unbaking the Cake

  Burning Woods, Oregon, 1994

  On her way out of the house in the early morning, Lily stopped by her mom still splayed on the couch, mouth open and drooling on a needlepoint pillow of dogs wrestling. Lily felt for breath under Alice’s nose with the back of her hand, confirmed, then slipped out quietly and started the long walk up the driveway to wait for the school bus by the highway. There were barred owls out in the early dawn, hooting at her with some urgent message she felt too sleepy, or too human, to understand. Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoooo. Her science teacher mentioned that there was a pneumonic phrase for this call. Who-cooks-for-you? Who-cooks-for-you? Who did cook for Lily? Not Alice, certainly. As she waited for the bus to come rumbling up the highway, she leaned against a milepost marker, sighed, and wondered how her mother came to be the way she was. She shuffled her feet to keep warm, thinking about it. It seemed to Lily that Alice had a sort of perverse, destructive nature like a volcano or virus—she couldn’t exist without destroying something else in the process.

  In third period science class, Lily sat next to Max at the raised lab desk, slowly stirring a hot bowl of pineapple mush. On the board, their teacher Mr. Janowicz drew a denatured enzyme, its once tightly curled form unfurled across the chalkboard like a garden snake, or a sperm, as Sarah pointed out through a crude, concealed hand gesture from across the row. Mr. Janowicz lectured on the effects of heat on the enzyme, how once it became denatured there was no way to wind it back into its previous form.

  “Think about it this way,” Mr. Janowicz said. “You can’t unbake a cake, or unfry an egg. That’s because once heat is applied, the molecular structure is changed forever.”

  Max doodled a picture in the margin of his notes of a decidedly unscientific scene—a dragon and a warlock doing battle with similar-looking denatured enzymes flying through the air all around them like lasers—not paying much attention to Mr. Janowicz’s lecture. At least some of it was getting through, Lily thought, looking at the little enzymes flying out of the wizard’s fingers. Or were they lightning bolts? Lily knew that no matter what, Max would still ace the test.

  “Max? Care to join us?” Janowicz asked, peering over their desk at Max’s drawing before returning to the front of the classroom.

  “Ooh. Caught red-handed,” Lily whispered.

  “That’s totally racist,” Max said, cocking his head, deadpan. “Like saying thieving red Indians.”

  “Really?” Lily asked, heat rising yet again in her neck. “Dude. Sorry.”

  “Nah. Just fucking with you,” he said, poking her in the rib, ignoring the narrow-eyed gaze from Janowicz. He scribbled a note in the margin below the dragon and warlock.

  It’s actually Scottish in origin. It means to have blood on your hands after the hunt.

  Blood. After the hunt. Lily became acutely aware of his presence not inches from her right thigh, her side and waist, the curve of her ribcage and cheek. She could still feel the point where his finger met her rib. She saw him with his nose in an etymological dictionary. She saw him after the hunt with bloodied hands, straddling a slain animal. She felt how close their own bloods were to one another. It was a matter of inches. Eleven, maybe. She stirred her puree and added a little more hot water. She told herself, Denature those enzymes. Focus! Her cheek burned, her fruit steamed, and she could smell Mr. Janowicz’s garlic breath from just outside her field of vision. The combination overwhelmed her, leading her down a familiar dark tunnel, releasing a spreading blackness in her brain. The tunnel led her into a new and different form. Sound wound in on itself and disappeared like someone abruptly turning down the radio dial. She was unfurled—she was the snake—as she slid down and out of her seat. The world faded away into complete darkness and she heard Sarah’s somewhat blasé voice, as if from a valley away:

  “Mr. Janowicz. Lily fainted again.”

  When she woke, she lay prone on the floor. Her vision returned slowly. Mr. Janowicz and his strong garlic odor bent over her, his white dome of backlit hair glowing in the fluorescent lights. He snapped two fingers in front of her face, holding her head and neck with the other.

  “Welcome back,” he said. With her head in his hand and his glowing white, frizzy hair luminous under the fluorescence, Lily thought they almost looked related. Maybe he could be her father? She closed her eyes a moment and pretended he was, which felt kind of nice, the knowing.

  “Nothing broken?”

  “Nah. Not that I know of.”

  “You have a ride home?”

  “No,” she said, closing her eyes again.

  “I’ll take her.” Max peeked out from behind him. “She lives on the way to my uncle Boomer’s.”

  Lily felt the blood returning to her heart and limbs, faster
and faster. She cursed Max a little for his control over her blood flow. Any self-possessed girl should be able to take care of her own oxygenation needs. Any feminist daughter knew that.

  After school, Lily gazed out the passenger’s side of Max’s old Ford truck as they waited to turn out of the parking lot onto the street. Two of the Dickerson boys, junior Todd and fifth-year senior Dempsey, walked in front of the truck and went down into football hike positions and growled like they were going to charge the truck. They found their own antics extremely funny as they walked off up the street kicking inanimate objects.

  “The accent’s really on the first syllable of those boys’ last name, isn’t it?” Max said, shaking his head.

  “Absolutely.”

  “You know why I did that rain dance last fall?”

  “Because they’re total douchebags?”

  “Yes, but also because those boys actually took the time to save up their feces and leave them on the hood of my truck. I mean, do you know what kind of planning and foresight that must have taken? They probably busted the one working neural pathway between the two of them.”

  “Man. I’m sorry. People are shitty.”

  Max laughed. “Pun intended?”

  “Absolutely.” Lily gazed in bashful self-satisfaction into the blurring trees as the truck picked up speed heading toward the highway. She enjoyed seeing everyone disperse after school, as though the density of so many youths in one place were unnatural, dangerous. There was relief in the untangling of souls back to their wooded nooks. Max revved the engine as they headed away from the school, and as though he had read her mind, yelled out the window:

  “Run, rabbits!”

  Kids bussed in from teensy towns like Burning Woods or Logsden that dotted the patchwork Siuslaw Forest and Willamette Valley to come to high school in Philomath. Some of the “towns” were no more than an intersection with a fruit stand or a market selling beer, fishing supplies, and candy. Every day after school, said rabbits scattered back to their corners of the musty, wet woods. They fell back to their logging, milling, or farming families. They retreated to their back-to-the-landers or skittered back to the commune. The green squares of the checkerboard forest somehow managed to pad the enormous gaps between people and their politics. The freaks nestled in nicely next to the rednecks, the trees acting as silent wardens of the peace.

  Some twelve miles away from school, Max turned off the highway onto the forested two-lane highway out to Lily’s house. The gray sky hung threateningly low and the dark green leaves quivered in the overcast light, waving a manic plea for sunshine as the Pacific squalls shook them up. When they dropped down from the blacktop onto the gravel of Lily’s driveway, something big in the bed of the truck made a loud thud.

  “What’s back there?” Lily asked, eyeing a blue tarp covering something large in the bed.

  “Elk.”

  “Seriously? Dude, that’s totally out of season,” she pointed out, puffing up a little, self-righteous as a dandelion bloom. “It’s spring.”

  “I know, I know,” Max said. “Relax, kitten.” He made a tiger-scratch motion with one hand while he cranked the manual steering hard to go around a curve. “Someone poached him out on my uncle’s cabin on the rez, probably for the velvet antlers. There’s some big market for velvet. Supposedly cures cancer. Helps with the sex drive, or some shit.”

  “Really?”

  “Who knows. But people apparently take the ground-up horn in capsules or teas. Some ancient Chinese hoo-ha. People will do anything for a boner. Anyway, my uncle chased off the poacher and gave me this little elk here to process.”

  “Well, ashes to ashes,” Lily said, hearing her grandmother’s words caught in her throat, feeling just about as prissy as her grandmother would have at the mere mention of a boner.

  “More like elk to jerky,” he said. “We don’t exactly get down with the King James in my family.”

  “Right. I mean, neither do we. Not really. Not since my grandparents died, anyway.”

  They rode the remainder of the long gravel driveway in silence. So he will be straddling a slain animal, after all, Lily thought. As her dilapidated white farmhouse came into view, Lily felt a little embarrassed by the dirty set of Tibetan prayer flags flapping in the wind, and by the prominent scrap-metal Gaia sculpture out front. Moreover, she was washed by a weird sense of shame at the giant carved Native American wooden salmon in the side yard, leaping, forever leaping, into the air. As if seeing herself for the first time through Max’s eyes, it became clear to Lily that her mother’s world was one of appropriation. She tried on beliefs like they were costumes in a dress-up chest; hers was a sort of spiritual tea party.

  “How’s Donnie Jr. doing?” Max asked.

  “Aw, she hates wearing the cone. But I have to say, it’s kind of hilarious.”

  “Well, take care of that sweet little duck of yours,” he said, knocking her gently on the jaw with a slow-motion punch as she stretched to get down from the tall truck cab.

  She watched him as he backed up and turned around, rumbling fast up the gravel driveway, the blue-tarp lump in the back of the truck slumping to one side. Did Max just wink at me? She felt a bloom of warmth where he had gently grazed her chin with his knuckles and had to sit down on scrap Gaia’s knee for a minute to let the dizziness pass. She was curled up, sharing Gaia’s lap with a sculpted version of the earth as constructed from old tires, fenders, radiator tubes, springs, and tractor parts, when it started to rain. The drops came slowly at first, then poured cool and fast down her face. She closed her eyes and let the water roll over her, each drop pinging loud on the metal goddess, and tried to melt back into some sort of state she could understand.

  Inside the house was empty and cold. It felt as if no one had been in there since the morning hours. The patchwork quilt was crumpled on the floor next to the couch and the previous afternoon’s dishes remained in the sink. Ladybugs clung to the hole in the wall, but in significantly smaller numbers. One of her mom’s books on feminism was propped open on the kitchen table next to an empty magnum of wine. It read:

  The sort of flaw that is often excused in men—the precipitous fall from grace—is commonly perceived as “ruin” when observed in females.

  After reading the passage, Lily went to the library and leafed through the dictionary on its little podium to look up the word “precipitous.” The second definition was “very high and steep” and she thought of the quote again, picturing naked women falling off mountain peaks like pink flightless birds flapping their arms, a pile of them squirming below, ruined. She closed the book and put some kindling in the wood stove and started it with a match. Two days before it had been sunny and warm, and here she was again, the air in the house cold as winter. Oregon spring is like that, Lily thought. It would love and leave you with the passing of a cloud over the sun.

  Rubbing her hands together for warmth, Lily could see the partially fogged window to her mom’s sculpture studio, the back of her mom’s friend Darla’s head taking up most of the space with her giant black bouffant, the two of them presumably imbibing and talking shit about recent ex-boyfriends. Darla went through at least as many boyfriends as Alice, almost as though it were some competition. The two tried not to overlap, but in their town that was an almost statistical impossibility. Smoke curled from the chimney in the studio and Darla’s old Dodge Dart waited patiently in the drive.

  Lily walked outside and circled the small studio like a coyote. The one window was cracked open to let in air but was almost completely obscured by condensation. Lily heard the two friends’ voices drifting out the space and paused to eavesdrop. They slurred their words a little.

  “You know, that fucker Randy wasn’t even good in bed,” Alice said. Darla cackled and they both started laughing. “Like two minutes, tops. I swear.”

  “Good riddance. He was also not father material, if you ask me.”


  “You really think I need a father for Lily? Naaaah,” Alice said. “That girl is better off without one. She’s a genius, you know.”

  “She’s very bright, for sure,” Darla said. Lily peeked up and saw them pouring some more wine into handled mason jars—the “fancy” glasses, her mom would joke to friends.

  “It’s almost scary sometimes. Like I don’t really know if she could be an evil genius or just a genius. Did I ever tell you why I named her Lily?”

  “No. Why?”

  Alice threw back her wine, paused for a long moment with her face pointed skyward, as if to reconsider telling the story, then finally said, “Because when I found out I was pregnant at fifteen, I tried to get rid of the baby by drinking a whole bottle of Lillet I stole from my parents’ cupboard. I was almost two months along. My parents found me passed out in the pasture with cuts on my body, and when I woke up they were force-feeding me ipecac to make me throw up. I guess I must have spilled the news in my drunken state. They carried me inside into bed where they bandaged my cuts. Then they tied my arms and legs in place with belts.”

  “That’s horrible,” Darla said, sounding a bit sobered.

  “That’s just how they were. Well, my mom, anyway. My dad said so little I feel like I hardly even knew him, you know? He certainly never stood up to my mother. She turned me over in the field that day and must have thought, ‘You’re not going to die? Good. Now go stay in your cell.’” Alice poured herself more wine. “After a few days they took off the belts. But they locked me in my room for most of the first trimester and kept me under supervision for the entire pregnancy. When I had to throw up from morning sickness, they gave me a bowl. I peed in a bedpan.”

  “Alice, I’m so sorry.”

  “Well, you know, my mother believed it was a child of God they were protecting. But that little girl, she was meant to be here, child of God or Gaia or whomever. She just grew and grew into the most intelligent thing. She changed my whole life, that little one. I’d never really known love until I met her.”