The Bitching Tree

by Scott Hungerford

  Even as he pondered time, he didn’t know he was holding the object until he was holding it. It was the heavy thing from his back pocket, the one with the smooth plastic sides. He’d done something with his index finger on the thingy at the bottom—and now the screen was glowing with light and symbols.

  “Cordova?” Cobb said as he held the magic box up to his mouth, hoping that it would do something that would help him.

  “Do you want a Jaunt?” the box said back to him.

  He just stared at it, wide-eyed, not sure what to say or do.

  “Do you want a Jaunt?” the device repeated. He wasn’t sure if it was irritated or not.

  “Yes,” Cobb finally said, risking all.

  The device dinged in his hand, and a maze of squares and squiggles took over the screen. “Your Jaunt will arrive in two minutes. What is your destination?”

  “Cordova.”

  “Do you mean the Cordova Talent Agency?”

  “No. Cordova.”

  “Do you mean the Cordova Senior Health Care Center?”

  “No. Just Cordova.”

  “Your Jaunt will arrive in one minute.” Then the box suddenly stopped talking, and Cobb was afraid he’d broken it. As he shook it and poked at it, and even tapped the screen a couple of times with his nose, a car suddenly pulled up right in front of him.

  He didn’t even know what he was doing until he was crouched down next to the idling vehicle. The man driving the thing, a skinny man with flesh tanned a color that Cobb had never seen before, rolled down the glass window with a push of a button.

  “Are you Cobb Edison?”

  “I am today.”

  “Okay, then …. Well, hop in. Where to?”

  Cobb fumbled with the rear door handle a few times, but eventually managed to open it up far enough that he could slip inside the cramped interior. He took off and dropped his backpack on the seat beside him. “Cordova,” Cobb said, proud that he got the word out on the first try. “Fuck, yes! Cordova!”

  “Watch your mouth,” the driver warned him, raising a hairy eyebrow, “and close the door.” Feeling oddly ashamed at being corrected, Cobb did so, swinging the heavy door shut on its hinges, hard enough so it would latch. “Now, my GPS doesn’t know of any street named that in Seattle.”

  “It’s far away,” Cobb explained. “Not near here. Far.” He thought hard for a moment, trying to remember what else Old Thom had told him. “There’s white snow? Lots of it?”

  “Oh!” the driver exclaimed, as if he were getting it. “Like, Cordova, Alaska?”

  “Is there white snow there?” Cobb had seen two snows in the time he’d been alive, with drifts as tall as he could stand, covering up everything that was good to eat. It had been a hard time, but he could still remember moonlight shining off the clean, new-fallen white. It was one of his favorite memories.

  “I suppose so,” the driver said. “Some times of the year. But you’re going to need to go the airport. Cordova—I don’t even know if you could drive there.”

  “The airport?” Cobb said quizzically.

  “The airport,” the driver said slowly, drawing out the words. “Where you catch planes?”

  “Right,” Cobb said, unable to filter through the wash of unfamiliar, alien memories. Long lines of people, nuts in plastic bags and unbelievable boredom. “Can you take me to this … airport?”

  “I’ll get you there fast. Don’t you worry.” Cobb barely had time to sit back in his seat when the driver took off with a start. The unfamiliar feeling of vehicular acceleration scared Cobb quite badly. As they drove between buildings and under tangles of lights and wires strung above intersections, a growing feel of claustrophobia began to press on Cobb—especially when the car had to slowly push through the crush of early morning traffic at speeds no faster than he could fly.

  Moving from one side window to the other, then peering past the driver through the weird tilted window in front of them, Cobb tried to get his bearings. But he couldn’t determine where he was by the limited view; he couldn’t see which way was which due to the gray, overcast clouds overhead. Sitting back, he tried to not think about his situation, but only succeeded in making his anxiety that much worse. The driver, eyeing him from time to time, said nothing as Cobb twitched and muttered to himself.

  When the vehicle finally wove its way down the side of the hill where he lived, it abruptly merged onto a wide, flat ribbon of highway. When they left the snarls of traffic behind them, the sudden burst of speed thrilled Cobb. He’d always been a good flier, and as a youngster could do drops and rolls better than any other crow his age. It was one of the things that had gotten him noticed by Old Thom, to be chosen as one of his five sacred lieutenants, to take on a life of duty instead of matrimony. The exhilaration of flying, of diving down toward the ground at breakneck speed, pulling up just in time to avoid a skidding crash—these were things Cobb loved more than life itself!

  But this car, it was going fast enough to pass other cars like they were standing still. It made him feel like his feathers were standing on end, set him tingling from head to foot with the thrill of speed and motion. He’d never flown this fast before! No crow had ever flown this fast before! It was a great feeling to close his eyes, to trill to himself and just listen to his ears, to feel the vehicle tremble with the rise and tremor of acceleration.

  Far too soon the ride was over, and they were getting off the gray highway onto a series of smaller, slower roads that led beneath green signs and past impossibly high round towers. As the driver merged into a new set of lanes and slowed down to a more normal speed, Cobb’s anxiety set back in and the stifling veil of claustrophobia began to cloud over his senses. He heard a muffled roar in the distance, a sound loud enough to make him uncomfortable even above the noise of the car’s engine. He knew it was a plane, as he’d seen enough of them fly over the city during his years. But in this body, with the knowledge that he might soon be using one of these things to get to Cordova, it made things entirely different.

  “Here you go,” the driver said as he pulled up alongside a long row of glass and metal. There were lots of people outside, dragging things on wheels behind them. Some of them were shouting at one another in a not-happy fashion, which made Cobb a little bit nervous.

  “Thank you,” Cobb said without thinking. He pondered if he should give the driver some food or an interesting object in return for his service, but figured that would just complicate things.

  “Are you going to be alright? You do know where you’re going, right?” The driver seemed concerned, as if Cobb were a fledgling rather than a fully grown adult human.

  “I’ll be fine,” Cobb said.

  “Okay, then. Have a good day. Leave me a good review, okay?”

  “Okay,” Cobb said, having no idea what he was agreeing to. Then he gave the driver a polite little nod, before spending fifteen seconds trying to figure out which part of the door actually would let him out of the car. When he finally triggered it to open, he stepped out, leaned back in to grab his backpack, and then smartly slammed the door. He gave the driver a cheery wave as the vehicle pulled back out into traffic.

  The droning muffled-mouth speakers overhead didn’t give him much clue about what was going on. But he trusted his body to find what he needed, so he just followed a group of people through the sliding doors into the big building, marveling at the high ceilings and the interior girders overhead that would make for excellent perching spots.

  Following a woman who smelled a bit like spoiled milk and rose bushes, Cobb got into a line, waited for a while behind her as the queue steadily moved forward, and then got to talk to a uniformed woman who told him they didn’t go to Cordova, and he would need to walk farther down the terminal and find an airline that did. Two more tries later, including standing in one line that didn’t ever seem to move, Cobb finally found what he was looking for. Behind one of the ticket counters was a giant mural of snowy mountains and vibrant lakes, featuring a beautiful winter l
andscape.

  Once he made his way through the line of people also wanting to go to the mountain, he finally got to the counter. A lady in a blue uniform with paint on her face and strange black eyelashes was waiting for him. He was sure he’d never seen her before, but he’d seen a human that looked like her down at the University during his first year with Old Thom.

  “I’d like to go to Cordova, please.”

  “Cordova, Alaska?”

  “Yes, please,” he said excitedly.

  “Do you have any baggage?”

  “Just this,” he told her, proudly showing off his backpack. She didn’t seem impressed.

  “Will this be round trip or one way?”

  “I just need to … get there?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “One way, then.” She punched some buttons on the computer in front of her. “I’ll need to see your picture identification. Then the amount due is $216.”

  He took the leather thing out of his back pocket and handed it to her. “That should do it,” Cobb said proudly.

  “Umm,” the lady said, trying to hand the object back not once, but twice. Cobb just averted his eyes, as if trying not to notice. “Sir, you need to show me your identification. I don’t want your whole wallet.”

  “Oh,” Cobb said, a little embarrassed. Taking it back, he opened it up and chose one of the cards from inside, one that had a picture of him on the front. “How about this?”

  “That’s good,” she said, nodding that the picture looked like him. “Now for a credit card?”

  Cobb put the card back, then chose one of the plastic things at random from the interior. “How about this?”

  “That’s a department store card. That won’t work.”

  “And this one?” He pulled out another, even as he tried to fumble the first one back into its slot. In his haste, he nearly dropped the whole thing to the carpeted floor beneath his clunky, booted feet.

  “That’s a coffee shop card.” The lady seemed to be getting irritated. Cobb was nearly overcome by the urge to preen.

  “This one,” Cobb said, handing over a silvery card with a shining logo on the front with melodramatic relish. There were only two other cards in the wallet aside from the bits of green paper, so he knew he had to be getting close to finding the one she wanted.

  “That one I can use,” she said with a narrow smile. She swiped the card through the machine on the counter in front of her, punched in some numbers, then handed the card back to Cobb with some important pieces of paper with printing on them. “Are you flying with anyone? You do know where you’re going, right?”

  “Cordova,” Cobb said proudly as he returned the card to its slot and put his wallet back in his pocket.

  “Alright, then. Your flight will be boarding at gate C3 in an hour and twenty minutes. You’ll need to go through security, so have your ID card at the ready.”

  “The one with the picture on it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Gate C3,” he repeated back, though he had no idea what that meant. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, sir. Have a good flight.”

  Feeling the irrational urge to hustle, to hurry so he didn’t miss a thing, Cobb put his ticket in his teeth for safekeeping. He then bolted at a full run down the hallway, backpack banging off his spine, drawing the attention of every other person waiting in every line.

  By the time he reached the next big atrium, he could see that there were hundreds of people milling through more lines. Seeing no option but to join the flock, he just did what everyone else was doing, and took his place standing behind a man in a black shirt colored with bright yellow sunflowers. When he asked the man about gate C3, the man kindly told him that he was in the right place.

  For as long as it took, Cobb waited in line, which seemed to be a thing that humans did a lot. When it was his turn, he showed a grumpy uniformed man the plastic thing with his picture on it. Then he waited in another line, took off his shoes like everybody else, and smiled at a man in uniform when he walked through the big white rectangle. He was fascinated by the conveyor belt and wondered where his bag and shoes were going to when they went through the flaps—but was relieved to retrieve them safe and sound from the other side.

  Once he’d laced his boots back on, Cobb started looking for an indication of where he was supposed to go. The electronic wall in front of him was covered with moving, flickering symbols that didn’t make sense to him, no matter how long he stood there and squinted and tried to make out what they were saying. But after a little bit of searching, including standing on a bench next to a man reading a newspaper, he saw the same snowy mountain vista picture down in one of the waiting areas.

  Coming up to an older uniformed woman, who was standing behind a tiny desk by the mountain picture, he took the papers out of his mouth and handed them to her.

  “Good afternoon,” she said cheerily as she took the papers, chose the one she wanted, and handed back the rest.

  “Cordova?” he asked emphatically. “It has a lot of snow? Like the mountain?”

  “You’re in the right place. You’re just in time, as we’re finishing boarding.” She beeped his paper on a machine and then directed him through a new door, into a square tube that smelled strongly of bus exhaust. Moving down the sloping ramp, Cobb ducked through an even tinier door and into a long waiting room packed with sitting people. It had a low ceiling and lots of tiny windows.

  “Do you know where your seat is?” asked a pretty lady in a different blue uniform. Her blonde hair was done up in a bun.

  “Cordova?” he asked again, just to make sure.

  “This flight does go to Cordova. If you’ll take your seat—”

  “I’m going to meet a friend,” he told her proudly. “I haven’t met him yet, but we’re going to get along great. He’s going to teach me to be a man.”

  She blinked, and her face contorted into some kind of unreadable facial expression. “Do you know what seat you’re supposed to be in?” He shook his head and she took the ticket from him, noted the writing around the bite marks, then led him about halfway down the aisle to where one of the last open seats remained. At her gesture, Cobb sat down next to the window, put on his seat belt, then tucked his backpack underneath the seat in front of him like everybody else. He kicked his bag a couple of times for good measure, so he had all the room he would need for his feet.

  Sitting beside him in the middle seat was a human child dressed in a striped shirt and green pants. He was playing with the same kind of device that Cobb had in his back pocket, but with little characters running around the screen. Beyond the child, all around him were hundreds of people sitting in their seats, reading magazines, fussing with objects, or trying to sleep, as if they anticipated a long wait ahead. Hunching his neck down to look through the window, Cobb saw an endless field of gray concrete outside, populated here and there by tiny signs and lights embedded into the concrete. He wondered how long it was going to be before he got on to the plane, whatever that was going to be like.

  Then, the room—moved! Even as the flight attendant started to drone on about exits and water landings, the roar of the engines rose, filling the cabin with a terrifying rush of sound and fury. Clutching his armrests, Cobb snapped his neck this way and that, mouth wide open in panic, looking for an exit hole through which he could fly to safe skies beyond. As the scene outside the window started to scroll by, changing in angle and perspective as the room continued to move around, he suddenly knew that the car ride hadn’t been bad. This was unbelievably worse.

  “Are you okay?” the kid next to him asked, looking up from his toy with a quizzical expression on his face. “We haven’t even left the ground yet.”

  Cobb fought back an instinctive urge to defecate, then shook his head no, he wasn’t okay. In response, the kid shrugged and went back to his game.

  When the plane made one last swiveling turn and stopped, Cobb let out a sigh of relief, hoping that they were already in Cordova. But afte
r a few suspenseful seconds, the plane suddenly accelerated hard, pressing him back in his seat. At this charge, Cobb’s reaction abruptly changed from terror to pleasure. When the plane finally lifted off the runway, roaring up into the clear blue autumn sky, the ground falling away beneath them, Cobb leaned back in his seat, euphoric bliss roaring through him like a wave of pleasure.

  No crow in the history of the world had ever flown so fast!

  The roar of speed, the flush feeling of movement at such a high velocity thrilled him, soaked away his fear and terror and replaced it all with a giddy rush of fun. In all the times he’d dived and rolled and baited the ground to rise up and smash his beak and break his bones, he’d never gone so fast, not even a fraction of this breakneck speed!

  As they rose further up into the sky, he kept forgetting to shut his mouth. His astonished expression caused the lady in the aisle seat to check on him, to make sure he was alright. But Cobb nodded yes, he was fine. Just leave him in the fiery embrace of the patron god of speed, rocketing through the sky at a pace that could outrun eagles, hawks—and even Mother Death herself!

  Cobb barely remembered the first stopover in Juneau, as the thrill of the flight had left him in an exhausted, nearly catatonic stupor. Sleeping hard, chin on his chest, he heard passengers gather their things and get off the plane around him, but he couldn’t seem to find the energy to rouse himself or care. The boy next to him, after tapping on his shoulder to try to wake him up, finally just pocketed his device, then followed along with the rest of the exiting passengers.