The crows signaled silence. Budiwati carefully trotted along a bucolic road, lined with old wineries and snaking vines. Abandoned tracks daydreamed about the touch of a train. And then we passed Woodinville Whiskey and the Hollywood Tavern, where Big Jim and I would perch by a blazing firepit and share a whiskey and peanut butter milkshake, and the hypnotic blue of the flames and the amber liquid inside us made the world seem like a womb.
We caught up to the crows. They made a blanket of black in front of enormous wrought-iron gates.
My feathers stood on end. Algae-stained stone and swirling letters spelled out Chateau Ste. Michelle. A once-upscale winery with imposing gates, shackled in rusting chains and austere-faced locks. Two signs flanked the Chateau’s main entrance. One said, “It’s The End Of The World. Please Join Us As We Drink Every Last Bottle For A Smooth Finish.” The other was in funny-font graffiti and said EAT LOCALS. We all turned to the trees across the street, wizened maples swaying with scoliosis. They were alive, flanking the sign for the Columbia Winery, their limbs stretching through a blurry fog of time to show us.
“There,” said the trees with their beautiful bodies and their sweet-sap souls. I heard the frangible skir skir of crisp-shelled insects, thrumming support for the trees. We were listening.
The trees’ sharp branches pointed beyond the wrought-iron gates of Chateau Ste. Michelle with feather-raising insistence.
They routinely raided ours, but we had never been at the frothing mouth of The Changed Ones’ den. The heart and home of these warped and violent things. Kraai had evaded their cavernous jaws by the grace of being airborne. I, an earth bird, would not have the defense of flight. With a tormented look in his eyes, Kraai stared at a bird with only one wing.
A wing and a prayer.
A shiver snuck up Budiwati’s spine. I looked at the twisted metal of gothic gates.
I’m coming, Dee. I’m coming.
Footnotes
1It’s tempting to worry for a bird that only weighs four grams, but fear not! They’re whimsical little warriors with jabby nasal knives, strong enough to lift the soul, merciless while hunting life’s sweet nectar. They hum with the bidding of their beloved flowers and belt out a little “fuck you” anthem that will make you think thrice about trespassing on their territory.
Chapter 27
S.T.
Chateau Ste. Michelle, Woodinville, Washington, USA
Crows hopped through gaps in the gothic gates. I followed. A cluster of rusted locks glowered at us, bleeding tangerine tears. Most of the murder lifted silently and touched down on the patchy grass of the Chateau grounds. Budiwati—legs made of electrical springs and the intensity of the Napoleons (Bonaparte and Dynamite)—leapt effortlessly over the wall of the Chateau, snatching me up in her beak and flinging me onto her shaggy back with manners akin to a coupon-clipping hippo at a Walmart on Black Friday. Her head snaked high, darting side to side. I gasped at the scene stretched out in front of us.
“Houston, we’re not in Kansas anymore,” I whispered.
The long path that bisected once-beautiful soft green lawns hosting rustic vine rows, gossiping geese, and a receiving line of white mulberry trees was desecrated. I saw tattered signs, phantasmal decorations from when the winery had turned fifty years old. Piles of trash sat in moody lumps across the muddy grounds. Car parts, filthy bathtubs, rusting things that once had the value of gold, when gold had the value of gold. A huge oil spill brooded like a dark rainbow lake. The shells of dismembered trucks, plastic, six-pack rings, straws, and the skins of burst balloons made a grotesque cemetery of MoFo waste. But I noticed a pattern to the trash piles. One pile, a Jenga tower of rusting rifles and guns. They had organized. Stockpiled weapons. But what good were weapons without the fingers to man them? Nothing but gawdy tinsel for a septic landfill.
The crows were terrified. Tail flicks. Wing flaps. Everyone’s feathers lifted from their skin. Smells fought with one another—sharp metallic slice, the cloying stench of rot. We didn’t need to stare at the rotting corpse of a Changed One, at the slack jaw exposing a mouth full of deformed body parts. Too-fat fingers, a nose, a lump sprouting hair and milk teeth, more of those ghastly eyes. A sickening spectacle of failed reproduction. We didn’t need to see blood trails and giant ghostly cobwebs woven by horrible things to know—this was a very dangerous place.
Dee. Where are you?
The hollow ache in my chest was unbearable. My lungs were collapsing sails.
I felt the wind stir my wings and found I was flanked by Pressa and Kraai. The look in their eyes—a look that said whatever happened, we were all in this together, code of murder, code of crow—filled me with a pride that fizzed in my bird bones. Kraai gave a nod and we all committed to the path ahead, the murder slipping into stealth flight above us.
Budiwati padded the crumbled asphalt and starving soil. Tufts of animal fur flitted across the ground like tumbleweeds. Bones glowed, riddled with the indented signatures of their calcium sisters—teeth.
“Hssssssssssss.” From the base of her neck to the tip of her beak, Budiwati was a hooded cobra. I felt melancholy exhales and couldn’t believe that the two rows of white mulberry trees that lined the road were still living. Living, but victims of violence, etched with scars. More garbage mounds, and then we were under a giant sequoia, a variegated western red cedar, an umbrella pine, and what was once a place for MoFos to park their cars. Budiwati tensed as she maneuvered her enormous feet up stone steps.
And then we were in the heart of the Chateau.
Across from us, the winery’s biggest building. An old dairy barn with a mansion facade, its windows were glassless, oversize doors still intact. Victorian lampposts had their glassy heads smashed in.
Budiwati rumbled, an internal boom like thunder caged by ribs. My eyes followed the arch of her neck. Her beak pointed to crowns of the estate’s massive interspersed giants—red oaks, a European copper beech, firs, fern-leaf maples, Japanese Stewartias, and twisted-limbed London planes. They were up in the trees and on the Chateau buildings’ roofs. Changed Ones, imitation birds, some brown and hawkish, others with bald, bluish heads, sinuous necks, and the daggerlike bills of herons. All of them gruesomely grotesque and squatting in the tired boughs of trees. They were dormant, some eyes closed, some open but captive in the middle distance. Torpor, I thought, to conserve energy.
My murder looped above, a black cirrus cloud that wheeled and swirled around the crown of a mighty copper beech tree. Their kaleidoscopic dance surged and poured around the ancient tree and then balled into a fist. Then a quick burst—a jolt of energy—as they shot back toward us, landing all around Budiwati gently, as if ground from a pepper mill. Pressa and Kraai landed on Budiwati’s back, next to me.
Budiwati swung her head around with an expression that would shear a sold-out stadium of overgrown sheep.
This is my family, I told her with my eyes. When I was sure she wasn’t going to pulverize them, I focused on my murder.
“She’s there,” said Pressa, her voice paper-thin, tied tight with fear.
“Is she—”
“Yes,” she said, saving me from the pain of asking. I pictured Dee’s nose pulling in oxygen, releasing carbon dioxide in a steady stream. A hominid mirror to our beloved trees. Pressa’s beak gestured to a large mass. There, in the arms of a hundred-year-old European copper beech tree, was a hideous construction. It looked to be some sort of nest, a jumbled mayhem of plastic bags and metal parts and rusty weapons and, predominantly, glass. Shards and shards of glass, the glittery, tinted, and dull, all in a monstrous mosaic.
And poking out here and there were things that would make you crap on your cassowary. The metallic bodies of dormant electronic items. Broken laptops. Cell phones. Speakers, cameras, projectors. They still coveted the very cause of their extinction. I shivered. And from the center of the humongous nest, peeking out from behind a ledge of broken toasters and motherboards, I spied an Angora rabbit, Dee’s ShamWow of hair.
I looked up to the nest, willing Dee to let me know she was alright, to wave her strong arms and show me she’d been buoyed by the swarm of crows above her. Pressa sensed this.
“Don’t call out,” she said through the ruffle and puff of her feathers.
I stayed silent and made out more of the flotsam of that strange nest—a chain saw, strips of corrugated metal, a rifle. Some sort of sticky secretion held them together, suspending the coppery-penny patina of bullets. The rifle had my attention. Dee knew how to use a gun. I’d taught her because I’d watched Big Jim, and Big Jim would have loved this little MoFo with all his gigantic heart, and he would have taken her under his wing and taught her how to protect herself. And then a memory, swift and beesting sharp, drove into my mind.
A dry day in Toksook Bay. I stood on the ground next to Dee, who’d woken up in the pube labyrinth of Oomingmak’s fur that morning as if summoned, quietly trotting across the dew-kissed grass. She had stooped to examine bent twigs and flattened grass. I hopped along after her as best I could, as always unable to sense what she could. She listened to what a hungover Turdus migratorius had to say and eventually hid behind a tree to watch an arctic fox washing herself in a patch of sunshine. Time spent watching the paper-white fox had put Dee in a very good mood.
“Finger off the trigger until you’re ready, Dee,” I told her, eye on the basketball she’d chosen as a target. The rifle looked enormous in her arms. “Focus on the basketball. Dee?”
Dee was staring at the azure-blue box of a house next to us. A line of pudgy willow ptarmigans studied her from the roof. On the rotting railing of the house’s steps, Dee fell under the spell of a male bluethroat—a tiny ornament of a songbird. The petite bird was a bit of a trickster and had stolen a song that wasn’t the kind a bluethroat sings. But Dee was enthralled by this saucy little being, lost in the cornflower-blue of his music-box throat, his pumpkin-orange bib. He was curious and playful, a kindred spirit. Dee made an O with her mouth, instinctively mimicking the shape he made as he sang.
“Dee! Concentrate!” I scolded her. “The goddamned gun is loaded!”
Dee’s eyes were smiling when she turned to focus on the deflated basketball. In a state of blue-throated bliss, she squeezed the trigger. The rifle blasted, bucking back into her shoulder. Our heads rang. When Dee recovered from the shock, the ptarmigans were gone. A floating white feather was all that was left of their fleeing. The bluethroat had vanished. Dee wailed and flung the rifle aside (I dove into our old toilet-training bucket for cover). She ran from me and I had to let her go, to scream at the ocean and scale trees and lose her fingers in the moss kingdom. To tell the bees what had happened. The ptarmigans never came near Dee after that. Much as she searched, listening to the wisdom of the world around her—“here is fresh water,” says the red-throated loon; “here are the berries,” says the jay; “here are the clams,” say the merganser and the spoonbill—Dee never saw a bluethroat again. From then on, I couldn’t get her to touch the metal menace of a gun. And here she was, trapped in a nest adorned with them.
Kraai leaned in close. In whispers like wingbeats, we deliberated.
“We need to do this in silence, while they are dormant. We are enough crows to fill the crowns, but there are many Changed Ones here. If we can help Dee shimmy down the arms of the copper beech—if we can do it silently—we can sneak out of here.”
As we stood there, in the heart of a desecrated winery, from the back of a cassowary, I felt something. A swelling beneath me that I couldn’t pin down. I chalked it up to the overpowering reek of rot that washed over us in dizzying waves. I nodded to Kraai. We had to be quick about it.
“I’ll fly up to her and let her know you’re here. That we’re all here for her,” said Pressa. And I pictured what she was about to do, how she’d flutter up to Dee and Dee’s beautiful cheeks would lift, the waterlines of her eyes would fill and glisten in that way that they do, and Pressa would reassure her with a very gentle Kkkkr. Crow for friend.
I realized too late what the growing pressure was. I was sitting on a proverbial pressure cooker, a barn stuffed with flatulent cows and no ventilation. The dinosaur with a crow perched on her back had been slowly absorbing the horrors of this lair, a place that wasn’t her home but perhaps had been ravaged like her tropical island on the other side of the big beautiful blue. She was furious, displaced. Perhaps she’d had her nest raided, her eggs and hope crushed, chicks snatched away from her by things with craning neck bones. And I felt it—like the snap of a taut rope—Budiwati couldn’t be small or silent anymore. She had, at last, been free and there was no wrangling her back into the jar. I was sitting on Mount Vesuvius. And my ass was about to get Pompeii-ed.
Budiwati let out a roar that shook the leaves of the hundred-year-old copper beech, gnarled London planes, and giant oaks. She charged. Pressa and Kraai shot into the air. I snatched up shaggy, pimp-cloak hair and we were suddenly galloping straight toward the giant red oak and the horrible, monstrous clone of a hawk on the lowest branch, now awake, red-ruby eyes wide and trained on us. It leapt onto the ground, screaming at the other Changed Ones. Budiwati—shrieking back—leapt into the air. We were suspended for seconds, and then I felt those lethal legs swing forward. The Changed One dodged. Budiwati’s legs slammed into the trunk of the giant oak. Screeches rained down from above as The Changed Ones felt the impact, launching themselves from the mighty oak. Budiwati—the last primal echo of the velociraptor—faced the Changed One. They circled one another, a string of red drool hanging from the beak of the horrible creature.
The crows sounded out the corvid alarm.
“Run, earth bird! Run!” They had lived in hiding from these things longer than Budiwati. “Look out! Look out! Look out!”
The Changed One flung its beak—giant forceps—toward me, leaking blood. It missed my bad wing by the length of a ladybug. An eye flared as it registered me, pupil tightening. I leapt from Budiwati’s back and started a mad dash across the grounds, away from the giant red oak, eyes on the copper beech tree and the abomination that held Dee.
Brave crows dove and mobbed, their valiant cries sparking in the air. I turned to see the Changed One snapping at their inky wings. Budiwati screamed and swung her toe across the Changed One’s breast. I focused on my run. Behind me, I heard the slimy slip of internal organs loosed from a broken body.
All around me, dropping from the great trees, were more winged Changed Ones. Caws crescendoed—loud as a jet—and then a mass of crows was all I could see. And Pressa was next to me and Kraai in front of me, and this was my family, screaming at The Changed Ones.
We are more powerful when we work together because we look out for one another by being one. That is the code of murder, I heard Kraai say, a lifetime ago.
“Go! Go to Dee!” I yelled to Pressa and Kraai and the booming black tornado of crows. “Go to her!”
“We won’t leave you, S.T.!” said Pressa. Two crows, strapping young crows I recognized as Pressa’s sons, grabbed me by a wing each and I was hoisted into the air, a blizzard of black swirling around me. My feet snatched up the low branch of the maple where they placed me. And I didn’t know what we would do, now that The Changed Ones were awake. They knew we had come for Dee and they were all around us, some on the ground now, stretching out their warped wings. Waking up to intruders in their lair.
Two more of The Changed Ones dropped down and began to circle Budiwati. Their necks craned forward, horrible shrieks dragging across our skulls. But the crows were already calling out the alarm for anoth
er danger. Something had emerged from the mansion of the Chateau.
Fear stitched the air into an impenetrable knot.
It was upright. Tall as a lamppost.
The crows were stunned to silence.
It stood on many thin, vitreous limbs. The Changed Ones—those still in the trees and the two circling Budiwati—stared motionless at the being. Budiwati was stretched to her full height, staring at the eerie enigma that had slipped from the mouth of the mansion. Only one sound now—the susurrus of wings.
The creature had an exoskeleton, smooth and shiny, perfectly transparent. All of its insides were on display. Visible through a pellucid shell was an unmistakably human jigsaw of bones, as if a MoFo skeleton had been cocooned by the shell of an insect. It looked like an animated X-ray. Claws had conquered the territory of hands. It had a mandible in lieu of lips. Languidly waving antennae. Its torso was bisected like an insect. In its compound eye, bulbous and beelike, there was authority that everything in the Chateau felt. An icy intelligence. I spun around to see birdlike Changed Ones waiting for this towering Changed One. For movement, a command—I didn’t know. And when I took my eyes off the Changed One’s glassy torso, its eerily narrow waist and exposed organs, the way it was assessing the environment, I realized that there were actually two more of these things standing by its side.
Budiwati broke the silence with a sharp snort. And the largest of three Insect Creatures, towering at the oversize wooden door of the mansion, opened its pellucid mandible. Four sharp clicks fell out. The response was instant. The bird Changed Ones circling Budiwati bolted in that deformed scamper—an abomination of twisted limbs, beaks biting the air. Budiwati thundered after them, racing past the London plane trees, disappearing behind more trees and trash and into a territory none of us knew.
Seized by panic for Budiwati, I turned back to the Insect Creature. It had just used a command to lure Budiwati away. This see-through creature, with its human bones and its glassy insect exoskeleton was calculating. It was in charge. I didn’t know what it was capable of, but all the internal squishy bits of Shit Turd were screaming.
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