by Kaela Noel
“What was that, dear? Are you wearing—is that a plastic bag? My goodness. Where are your parents?”
Even sparrows could sound out a few words of pigeon, though their pronunciation was always very silly. Not this human. Her speech was just squab babble.
“Hurt. Broken. Wing.” This time Coo unwrapped Burr’s pouch.
The healer scooped Burr from Coo’s hands and peered at him with large, watery blue eyes.
“A pigeon. Poor thing. I can help. I’ve helped others from this flock. But never mind the bird; we need to get you help. Right away.”
Still holding Burr, the healer stooped down. Her eyes squinted.
Coo scrambled back.
“Your hair is so matted! There’s dirt all over your face. You’re barefoot! When was the last time you took a bath? Or ate a decent meal? You’re thinner than a string bean, sweetheart. Where are your parents?”
“Help him, you?” asked Coo.
The healer frowned. “Do you speak English?”
Coo stared.
“Can’t talk, healer,” she said to New Tiktik as the bird zipped past. “Why not?”
“No humans talk pigeon. Only you, Coo.”
“Why?”
“Just can’t,” said New Tiktik. “Not smart like birds, humans. Very sad, it is.”
Coo gazed at the healer. She kept speaking gibberish.
“I can’t understand you, but maybe you understand me. What’s your name, dear? Let’s start there, at least. Name? My name is Bettina Tully, but everyone calls me Tully.”
The human pointed at herself and said, very slowly, “Tully. TULLY. Tul-lee.”
Maybe humans just had their own speech, like sparrows, and crows, and seagulls.
“Tul-lee,” echoed Coo, finally.
“Yes! That’s my name. I am Tully. But who are you?”
Slowly, Coo pointed at herself and clucked the name the pigeons had always called her. “Khooo.” Long, soft, and fluttery, the sound came from a place deep in her throat.
“Coo,” Tully said.
“Khooo,” Coo said again.
“Coo,” Tully said, with a harder c sound and only the slightest breathy hoo in the oo. Coo felt a bit sorry for the healer. Not to be able to speak! It was horrible to think about.
“Well, nice to meet you, Coo.” Tully frowned. “You’re in such rough shape. I’d call for help right now, but my cell phone is charging at home.”
As she babbled, Tully pulled a box with holes from her bag and shifted Burr into its dark, open mouth.
Coo’s heart panged watching him disappear. She hadn’t thought about this part, not at all.
“There,” said Tully, closing the small metal flap on the box. “The pigeon is nice and safe now. I’ll see what I can do for him.”
Coo stared at the box holding Burr and tried to decide whether to rip it away from the healer.
“Would you come with me?” Tully reached out her hand. “We’ll go somewhere you can get help.”
Coo scooted backward.
“I promise I won’t bite. Are you hungry?” Tully pulled a brown paper sack from her scruffy tote and opened it. “I was saving these for later, but perhaps you would like them. A reward for caring so much for a hurt bird.”
Coo looked at the healer in shock. She was holding a donut. A perfect, round donut with pink sprinkles! Donuts usually arrived on the roof mashed, mangled, and stale. A perfect donut was a miracle.
In one swift dart, Coo snatched the beautiful donut from Tully’s hand. She scurried back and began to devour it.
“You’re famished,” murmured Tully. “Oh dear. I have a sandwich, too. It was my lunch, but you should eat it.”
Coo peered at the bag Tully handed her. Inside were plain bread slices and between them gloopy green shapes and even sludgier light brown mud. Mixed with all that muck, smashed between the perfect bread, was a bunch of weeds.
“Avocado, hummus, and sprouts,” Tully said. “A health food sandwich.”
Did humans really eat mud and weeds?
Coo hesitated. Her stomach rumbled again. She could nibble the bread at least, and hopefully wipe off the dirt and whatever the rancid green stuff was. She’d long ago learned to tell when food had spoiled, and she didn’t want to get sick. The weeds would be easy to spit out, too. She’d eaten plenty of bagels that had spent time in puddles. This wasn’t much different.
She took a small bite and swallowed in shock. It was different. The bread was normal bread, but the mud was not like any kind of dirt she knew—it was wonderful. So was the green muck. Smooth, salty, a little sweet. Not at all rotten. The weeds were strange, but tender, not tough like the ones on the roof.
Coo could have eaten ten more sandwiches. She peered at Tully.
“I can see food is the way to gain your trust,” Tully said. “How about warmth? Here, take this. You look so cold.”
Tully removed the red top of her head and the layer of brown feathers around her neck. Underneath were gray hair and bare skin.
“I knitted these. I hope they aren’t too big.”
Tully pushed the fluffy things toward Coo, who stared at them.
“Here. I’ll help you.”
Coo froze as Tully plopped the red fuzz onto her head, then wrapped the strange strand of brown feathers around Coo’s neck. Suddenly everything felt warmer.
“There. Hats and scarves always help.”
Coo had never been so close to someone who wasn’t a bird, nor had she ever felt anything so soft against her skin as the hat and scarf. Not even new feathers were this soft and warm. Swaddled in them, Coo felt like she’d discovered another kind of summer.
“They’re yours to keep,” said Tully. “I knit far more than I know what to do with, anyway, especially now that I’m retired.”
Coo crouched beside Tully, who watched her carefully.
“Okay, you?” Coo asked Burr. How strange it was to whisper into a dark box.
Burr’s faint coos came from the shadows. “Okay, me. Be careful, you. Go back to the roof, you.” He took a deep, ragged breath. “Quick!”
“Do you spend a lot of time with pigeons?” asked Tully, staring down at her.
Coo glanced at her warily.
“Coo’s an unusual name,” Tully continued. “Is it short for something?” Tully paused. “How about you tell me while we take a walk together to someplace safe?”
“Heal, you?” Coo whispered to Burr, ignoring the human babbling beside her. “Heal and return, you? Promise?”
“Only safe with flock, you.” Burr’s voice sounded faint. “Roof now, you! Go!”
Tears started to burn around Coo’s eyelids. She took a few steps back, then a few more. Leaving Burr hurt more than the worst stubbed toe. More than ten stomachache mornings.
“Wait, don’t go!” called Tully. “Coo!”
Coo turned and scampered to the fence. She crawled through the hole and hid behind the bushes. For the first time she took a good look at the side of her building. Some crumbling concrete steps, tangled with vines, led up to a hole in the wall bigger than the windows. It was half-covered in boards, too. A door of some kind. Mysterious.
“At least take these.” Tully tossed another brown paper sack over the fence. “They were for my dessert, but I don’t need them. I’m coming back as soon as possible with some help. Just hold on, little one!”
Coo peered through the bushes. Tully paced back and forth for what felt like a very long time, her face tight and frowning. Eventually she trudged out of sight.
Coo imagined Burr in the dark box, disappearing up the alley, around the corner, and then—she couldn’t picture anything past that point. Her imagination’s blankness grew and grew until it blotted out everything else. This was real, not like playing pretend games. Her heart pounded. She hunkered low against the scratchy ground and shut her eyes. At least she felt warm. Never in her life had she felt so warm when it was this cold outside. She pulled the soft red hat down over her ears and rubbed the
scarf against her cheek.
“Come back, Burr will,” said New Tiktik, flying over the fence and plopping down in front of Coo. “Like Hoop.”
New Tiktik was trying to make her feel better. Coo forced herself to open her eyes.
“Come on, you,” New Tiktik continued. “Back up, you. Getting colder now.”
The sun had raced away across the sky, and the alley was deep in clammy shadow. A few flock members pecked at the last bits of seed scattered in the gravel, but most were already back on the roof. Coo remembered Burr’s terror about her being down on the ground. It seemed more urgent than his fear about his broken wing. A shiver ran down Coo’s spine.
What if there were bigger cats? Cats that ate humans? Coo jumped to her feet.
Somewhere up the alley, something growled. It sounded like the shiny things that zoomed over the gray ribbon on one side of the factory, but louder.
Cars. Unlike the trains that slinked slowly across the tracks nearby, cars weren’t predictable. They scuttled fast all over the wide gray paths that ran between the buildings. Sometimes they hit pigeons. They didn’t even eat them, just smashed them and kept going. Her flock was deeply wary of them.
Coo forgot all about giant cats. What if a car came around the bend right now? Maybe that’s what Burr was warning about. It could smash her.
Getting back up to the roof seemed impossible—she hadn’t thought that part through—but Coo gripped Tully’s brown paper bag in her teeth and rushed back to the ladder anyway. The metal was colder now. It rubbed her palms raw as she struggled to haul herself up, step by freezing step. She reached the first landing, where the stairs began, and sighed with relief.
“Back, you?” Roohoo looked down at her from the next landing. “Not staying with humans, you? Too bad.”
Coo started to cry. But there was nothing less pigeon-like than tears. She didn’t dare let Roohoo see them. He was the sort of pigeon who noticed differences like that. She stopped and closed her eyes.
Suddenly fear gripped her, a new kind of fear. The world was so much bigger than the roof. She couldn’t fly. What if she fell?
When she opened her eyes again, twilight had come. Below her, something rustled in the bushes.
“Flock?” she called, hoping someone would swoop down to join her on her climb back up to the roof. “New Tiktik? Hoop?”
Most pigeons hated leaving the dovecote at night, but she called again. Coo was different, after all. She was important. Wouldn’t someone come to check on her?
“Hem? Ka?”
No one responded.
“Can’t hear me, them,” Coo said out loud, her voice shaky. “Must be it.”
Loneliness enveloping her like the evening shadows, Coo steeled herself and started climbing again. At last she reached the safety of the roof and scrambled through the darkness into the sleepy warmth of the dovecote.
Chapter Four
Officers
Coo was so distraught over Burr, and numbly bewildered by her terrifying trip to the ground and back, that she forgot all about looking inside Tully’s brown paper sack until late that evening. The sun had long since set, and the sky was a chilly purple. In the rail yard the big evening lamps were lit, bathing the tracks in yellow.
Coo discovered three more exquisite donuts inside the sack. One was creamy white, like clean feathers, and dotted with perfect orange sprinkles; one was palest pink, like a good sunrise; and the third was a rich blackish brown.
It could have been dirt, like the dirt that collected in the roof corners, but Coo knew otherwise. Her heart soared. Chocolate! Chocolate was rare. Pigeons didn’t like it. They didn’t even like carrying it in their beaks from the dumpster, and Roohoo made fun of her for asking for it. She’d have Tully’s chocolate donut all to herself, she decided.
Rare donut in hand, she wiggled out of the dovecote to sit on the roof ledge. She huddled under some newspaper and slowly licked the frosted top, looking out at the world beyond. She stared down at the wide gray ribbon and shuddered as a car zoomed over it. How much bigger and stranger and more terrifying the world was now than it had been this morning. Her head hurt just thinking about it. Cats. Humans. Tiny skies.
How could Tully keep Burr safe in such a world?
Hoop had tried to soothe her by describing what she could of Tully, but Coo dwelled on Little Beak, one of the pigeons Tully had taken years ago who had never returned. She thought about the box Burr had disappeared into and the bend in the alley where Tully had vanished. She swallowed a chunk of donut.
Where was he right now? Was he safe and warm? It was very cold outside. Was he in pain? She imagined him lying somewhere alone and hurting, abandoned by Tully, and lost her appetite.
She looked toward the dovecote. The pigeons seemed to have forgotten about Burr. That was their way. The flock always mattered more than any one pigeon. Always had and always would.
Coo tucked the half-finished donut back into the bag with the ones she planned to share with the flock for breakfast. She was about to shimmy inside the dovecote when she turned back to look at the roof. It was exactly the same, but also somehow different. The moon had risen, full and merry, casting cool light over everything familiar: red chair, pile of pebbles, tall weeds.
Her eye fell on the solid, hulking tower that had always lurked in the center of the roof. One side had a reddish-orange rectangle set into it, and when she was bored Coo often shoved bits of twigs and rocks through the mysterious small gaps that ran around it. When the roof’s wildflowers bloomed, she liked to pick them and stick them into the gaps, too. The white and yellow blossoms looked very pretty against the rust color. Now she recognized the rectangle. It was like the plywood-covered hole in the side of the factory, above the crumbling steps.
A door. Where did it go?
Coo tiptoed toward it, her bare toes curling against the cold. She reached for the metal ball that stuck out from a stem on one side of it, and tugged. Over the years she had pushed and tugged on it many times without anything happening. This time was no different. It did not budge.
Suddenly she felt very tired. Shivering, she hurried back to the dovecote and crawled into her nest. She stared out the dovecote’s opening at the soft, blurry ridges of the skyline twinkling far in the distance. The buildings’ starry little lights glowed brighter than the real stars scattered in the sky. She gazed at them for a long time.
“Different now,” Coo whispered to no one in particular. “Everything different.”
She watched tiny orbs of light glide high up in the sky on the flight paths she knew by heart. Strange birds those were. Tonight she couldn’t stop looking at them and wondering about things the pigeons couldn’t quite explain. Human things.
Packed tight in the shelves of the dovecote all around her, the flock slumbered. Coo had never in her life felt so alone. She had never felt so human.
Many hours passed before she fell asleep.
The next morning Coo waited a long time in the alley. The sun came up over the sides of the building. New Tiktik and Hoop, who had accompanied her down to the ground with Old Tiktik and Roohoo, grew restless and fluttered back up to the dovecote.
Tully was very late today. Coo thought about trying to walk up the alley herself. Maybe Tully was just beyond the bend where the alley disappeared behind the buildings. Maybe Burr was there, too. Maybe there were donuts.
Coo stood up from the sunny patch of gravel where she’d been squatting. She took a few steps forward. Then a few more. She was nearly at the corner when she heard Tully’s voice.
The healer was not alone. Coo heard slamming sounds and other voices, deep ones. Human feet came crunching up the gravel. Heavy feet, not like Tully’s at all. Coo scrambled back to the fence. The hairs stood up along the back of her neck. She needed to hide.
The pigeons sensed it, too.
“More humans,” said Old Tiktik, from her perch on the fence. “Odd, this.”
“Whole human flock,” said Roohoo when he returned
from scouting around the bend. “Human flocks, bad!”
Coo scampered back as far as she could into the bushes. Tully’s red hat caught on a thorny branch. She quickly took it off and stuck it down the front of her plastic romper. Luckily there was an evergreen that never lost its dark green needles, and she was soon well hidden behind its scratchy bulk. Peering between branches, she still had a decent view of the alley.
Coo had thought Tully was large, but the two other humans coming down the alley with her were huge. They towered over Tully. They wore dark blue pants and shirts with many metallic glinting bits. Many more heavy-looking metal things dangled around their waists. One held a crackling metal box in its hand.
“You really shouldn’t be back here in the first place, ma’am,” one of the humans said.
“Feeding pigeons is not illegal, Officer,” said Tully.
“It’s not, but this property belongs to the city. No trespassing.”
“Okay, now I know. But the girl!” Tully raised her hands in the air, palms up. “I’m afraid she’s been abandoned here. Or she has a family that is not caring for her properly. She’s filthy and neglected!”
“Ms. Tully, you said she was about what, eleven? Height, weight, race?”
“Short, Officer. Painfully thin. White. Brownish, matted hair. Very suntanned. Boyish, but I’m almost sure she’s a girl. As I said, she doesn’t seem to speak English. She just gobbled up the food I gave her like a stray dog.”
“She hangs out in the alley here? You sure she’s only eleven?”
“She might even be younger. Whoever is caring for her is doing a terrible job. I would take her in myself.”
“Getting ahead of yourself there, sweetie.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Tully frowned. “Just please look for her! It’s much too cold for her to be out here in nothing but a plastic bag and the hat and scarf I gave her.”
One officer was holding a small rectangle and scribbling on it with a stick. “We’ll poke around,” he said.
“She ran into the bushes when she got scared,” said Tully, pointing directly to the place where Coo was hiding. “Over there.”