The Someday Birds

by Sally J. Pla

  Even the twins gag and groan.

  “No, really!” She smiles, and tiny sparkles in her pink lip gloss glisten.

  But she has dark, tired skin under her eyes, and so does Jonathan Dylan Daniels, who’s actually been the one doing all the driving.

  “Does Gram know?” I say. “When do we get there? Did you call Gram? Will she have to get an extra hotel room for us or something?”

  Davis looks at me from the visor mirror, where she’s putting a tiny wand of black stuff on her eyelashes. Mascara. Like from the word mask.

  “Don’t worry, Charlie. We’ve got a ways to go first. I’m gonna talk that over with her real soon,” she says.

  Jonathan Dylan Daniels gets back in and chucks a bag of Twizzlers to Joel and Jake. He doesn’t give anything to me.

  We keep driving and driving and driving and driving through the hot beige wasteland, listening to horrible drum-bashing radio music . . . And then, a few billboards start cropping up. A few more. Billboards showing fancy-dressed people laughing around a casino table. Billboards showing magicians, and sequin-dressed singers, and the American flag.

  Finally, the city of Las Vegas just kind of rises up out of the sand. One minute you are in this big, monotonous desert, nothing but beige. And then: bam! You’re on this big wide fancy boulevard, with all sorts of sights clamoring for your attention.

  “Look! The Eiffel Tower!” Davis says. “I’ve always wanted to go to Paris!”

  “I’m hungry!” says Joel.

  “This is Vegas—not Paris—right?” Jake asks, and Joel shoves him.

  “How could it be Paris, you dork?”

  The twins look sweaty. Their eyes are big and round. Something about them seems much younger this morning.

  Jonathan Dylan Daniels keeps driving. There are these huge fountains, giant walls of water spurting up and down in different rhythms and colors. And plazas, and sculptures, and huge hotel entrances—all this stuff jumping in front of your eyes. And it’s still early in the morning, just past dawn, so there’s practically no one out yet. All this “look at me look at me!” craziness is competing for the attention of hardly anyone right now.

  “Hey, check it out!” Joel shouts. “That guy’s puking!” Sure enough, on the sidewalk up ahead, near a bar, a businessman in a rumpled suit is on his hands and knees.

  “Ugh, his tie is hanging in it!” Davis says.

  We’re still shouting “eewww,” when we notice a runner, a lady, rounding the corner. She’s so busy fiddling with her headphones and trying not to break her stride, that she doesn’t notice the puking guy. At the last second, she decides to hurdle over his back. She leaps high in the air and lands, stumbling, on the other side of him.

  Everyone thinks this is hilarious, and they’re laughing and clapping and looking back down the street, and that’s when Jonathan Dylan Daniels doesn’t notice something. He doesn’t notice that there is a huge, black, truck fender, looming into view in his driver-side window, about to hit us.

  9

  BAM!

  A jolt.

  Time stops while the car silently spins.

  We land backward, halfway up the curb, just past a sushi bar. I peer forward through the cracked windshield and notice we are facing the wrong way down the wide Las Vegas boulevard. I crane my neck sideways; someone is running toward us. It’s the jogging hurdler lady. I don’t know how to describe her face.

  A weird feeling. A sick feeling. A few other cars pull into view in the small area of cracked windshield. Their car doors open. I can’t see Davis’s or Jonathan Dylan Daniels’s faces. Just two big white air bags.

  A car alarm is going off. Maybe it’s ours. A strange man is yanking open our doors and yelling, “Don’t move! Just answer if you’re okay!”

  Davis says yes in a super-high, needling kind of voice. The twins are crying, but they manage to say, “Yeah, uh-huh!” I say, in a hoarse, weird voice that doesn’t seem like me: “Yes. I am okay.” Jonathan Dylan Daniels groans.

  A siren.

  We are surrounded by EMTs. They yell, “Stay where you are! Don’t move!” It’s like we’re in a police drama. But they just want to examine our medical situation thoroughly before they let us out of the car. Which they eventually do.

  Davis’s face floats next to me, so white—except for a big purple mark on the side of her forehead.

  I am angry at her. So angry I don’t know what to do with what I am feeling. The twins come and stand next to us. They are shaky and pale, but okay. Just very silent.

  Joel suddenly turns and throws up all the Twizzlers he’d eaten at the gas station, right there onto the sidewalk. That’s the second puking I’ve witnessed this morning.

  EMTs take Jonathan Dylan Daniels out of the car and help him get on a stretcher. He is complaining. “I’m fine! Really man, this is . . . ,” he starts to say, but his voice sounds half swallowed. Then he stops protesting when he sees his arm. We all stop when we see his arm. His left hand is bent from his wrist at a weird angle and there is a really strange-looking bone-lump under the skin. Also, the left side of his face is starting to swell up.

  “Whoa, dude!” says Jake.

  The trucker who hit us comes over. He is the biggest person I have ever seen. He seems completely fine—not a scratch. “Thank God you stopped in time,” an EMT says to him.

  More paramedics and firefighters appear out of nowhere. They look us all over, tell us how lucky we are, a glancing blow, how good that we were all buckled in. No one is seriously hurt except Jonathan Dylan Daniels, who is being loaded into a small ambulance. An EMT guy is helping Joel wipe Twizzler-puke off his face, giving him water.

  A policeman is talking to Davis, who is by the curb now, her arms crossed over her chest, shivering, even though it is a really hot morning. It looks like the policeman is asking her questions, but she is not answering.

  “Where are your parents?” That is what the one policeman is asking, but Davis only scrunches up her face funny. “I need to call somebody to tell them what happened to you. If you don’t give me a number, I’m calling social services to come get you. So can you talk to me, please, miss? Who should I call?”

  Davis is whimper-crying and staring at Jonathan Dylan Daniels’s stretcher, which is disappearing into the ambulance.

  I walk over to the policeman, calm and quiet, like I am in a movie about myself. I stare into the officer’s mirror sunglasses, and tell him the only number I know by heart. Gram made me memorize it only a few weeks ago, when she found out I didn’t know any of my contact information. “Jesus H. Christ, Charlie,” she’d said. “What if there’s an emergency?”

  It wasn’t hard to memorize. It’s no problem to tell him our home phone number. I can see it like it’s burned in the air, right in front of me.

  10

  No one would guess, looking at this unassuming little shorebird, the astounding long distances he’s willing to travel.

  —Tiberius Shaw, PhD

  Jonathan Dylan Daniels’s family doesn’t have insurance, so he wouldn’t let the EMTs bring him to a fancy expensive Vegas hospital. We went to a free clinic almost out of town, far away from the strip. In the crowded urgent care, I can hear people arguing in Spanish, medical equipment clanging and beeping, a vacuum cleaner, phones. It smells like toilet cleanser and machine oil.

  Jonathan Dylan Daniels is pretty much all right, except for a new, bright blue cast up to his elbow, and a black eye. His face is all twisted-looking. Which is either because he’s in pain, or because Davis and he are having a huge fight. Or both.

  I tug at my sister’s shirt, but she pays no attention. I want to tell her that the twins got sick of waiting around in this place, and they’ve completely disappeared, and I’m worried.

  The police left us here in the care of this lady who is a registered social worker. She filled out a bunch of forms and made a bunch of phone calls, and then she told us we’re supposed to stay right with her until an adult comes for us. We’re supposed to s
tick tight and wait for our ride. But about an hour after she said that, the social worker lady got an emergency phone call that sounded way worse than our emergency. Now, she’s nowhere to be found.

  And the twins are gone.

  And Davis doesn’t seem to care. She is only interested in yelling.

  “We should have left your stupid brothers behind,” Jonathan Dylan Daniels says.

  “Like it’s their fault that you hit a truck?” Davis shouts. She has something called a “butterfly” bandage on a little cut on her temple. It is not as pretty as it sounds.

  They hurt my ears, so I leave them to go look for Joel and Jake. The sidewalk outside the clinic is filthy: there’s cigarette stubs and dented old beer cans and dirty, soggy old plastic bags. It’s quiet, though. Despite everything that’s happened to us so far, it’s still pretty early in the morning. We’ve only been gone from home about seven or eight hours, which is almost impossible to believe.

  Where are my brothers?

  “JOEL! JAKE!” I call down the street.

  Nothing. My stomach feels strangely tight.

  Where did my brothers go?

  11

  If I study bird behavior, I am hoping I will eventually increase my understanding of human behavior as well.

  —Tiberius Shaw, PhD

  I wander down the street, calling and calling for Joel and Jake.

  A few doors away, I see a shabby junk shop with a dirty front window. Above the door is a big old-fashioned sign, with two black crows painted on it, along with the words: Twa Corbies Curiosities.

  My brothers love junk. Maybe they went in here.

  Twa corbies means “two crows.” It’s from an old Scottish poem—I learned this because Dad’s an English teacher, and learning boring poetry trivia is what Dad calls an “occupational hazard” of having to be his kids. I don’t mind, really. In the poem, two black crows plan on how they’re going to eat the body of some dead guy in a ditch. Pretty creepy stuff.

  Most people think corvids, such as crows and ravens, are scary death symbols. But what they don’t realize is how smart and cool corvids actually are. For example, they have incredibly long memories. If you hurt a crow, it will remember your face, or the shirt you were wearing at the time, and avoid you every time it sees you again. Every single time. Forever. I like this fact a lot, because I, too, have an incredibly long memory.

  Also, I read about this crow incident that happened in Ontario, Canada. Hundreds of thousands of crows would migrate through this one small town, and they’d cause such an awful ruckus, that one year the townsfolk decided to have a crow-hunting day to try to shoot them and get rid of them. Well, one hunter shot one crow. ONE CROW. And guess what happened then? Every other crow flew off—and get this: they stayed away, forever. Talk about “getting the message.” Those hundreds of thousands of crows somehow got the word out to each other never to fly over that particular unfriendly town ever again. They all changed their whole migration pattern, forever. Because one single crow got hurt.

  I wish flocks of people would look out for each other like that.

  Also, there’s this girl in England who has been feeding the crows around her house, every day, for years. They are grateful for the food, so they leave her gifts. They bring shiny little bits of broken glass and beads and stuff, as if to say thank you. She has boxes full of crow-gifts.

  Seriously. Crows.

  So. The Twa Corbies. Curiosities. Junk. My brothers. I open that shabby, creaking shop door and go in.

  “Joel?” I whisper. “Jake?”

  Nothing. It’s totally silent in here. Behind a tall wooden desk, no sign of anyone.

  There aren’t even aisles in this junk shop. It’s crammed to overflowing with boxes and books, crates of old dishes, glass cases of jewelry, rickety chairs. A mangy old stuffed raccoon sits on a shelf, his marble eyes dead and dusty. For some reason I don’t like, that makes me think about Dad.

  In the back room, a giant stuffed raven with sleek black wings sits on a top shelf. I get the feeling that wherever I turn, he’s looking at me. Below him is a wall of old, dusty books. Each shelf has a category: Biographies. Nevada history. The Wild West. Philosophy, Another wooden crate of dusty old books sits on the floor.

  On top of a random pile in the crate something catches my eye: it’s a faded green book, with a gold feather painted on the cover.

  I’ve seen that particular gold feather before. On the old yellow card, by the birds on the shelf in the hospital gift shop.

  That gold feather looks like the logo of Legendary Ornithologist, Artist, and Philosopher, Tiberius Shaw, PhD.

  I pick up the book and crack open its dusty spine. On the first page is an old, faded pencil sketch of a mallard duck.

  Mallards are the most common duck in America, you know. People ooh and ah when they see their shiny green heads, but they are really no big deal. Sometimes the most exotic-looking things are common underneath, and the most boring-looking things turn out to be rare.

  An old bookmark is stuck in the pages: it shows the same photo as back in Ellie’s hospital gift shop! Brown leathery skin and white tufted eyebrow wings. Underneath the photo, it says:

  One of this nation’s foremost authorities on ornithology and human nature, birds, and mysticism, the reclusive Dr. Tiberius Shaw, PhD, lives, writes, sculpts, and paints from his abode within the world-famous Sanctuary Marsh in the state of Virginia.

  I turn to the first page in the journal, and get a shiver. In neat handwriting that’s not too different from my own Human Typewriter lettering, in old blue ink, are words that—could it be? Yes, it could!—words that must be—have to be—from the very hand and pen of Dr. Tiberius Shaw, PhD, himself:

  Dec. 26, 1969

  If I study bird behavior, I am hoping I will eventually increase my understanding of human behavior as well. . . .

  My heart leaps. I hug the book tightly and jump up and down. I feel shock pangs leaping through my veins, but in a good way. What a find! I can’t believe it. I know my mission right now is to find my brothers, but I have to take a minute out to buy this book. I run to the wooden counter, clutching the green journal.

  A dusty old shopkeeper dodders out of the darkness of the back room. He looks like a wax figure—bald, with wisps of white hair. I hand over my treasure, and he turns it around in his skeletal hands, peering at it, frowning. I feel breathless while it’s out of my grasp. I need that book back. Now.

  He holds it out at arm’s length, peering. He gets out a pair of rimless glasses. The suspense is killing me. His mouth hangs open with the effort of trying to find a price. I can almost see my heart knocking against my T-shirt.

  I whisper a prayer that it costs less than a dollar. I only have the money that’s in my pocket. I left my backpack with Davis in the clinic!

  He says, “Well, this is an interesting old volume.”

  I swallow and nod.

  The shopkeeper peers at me, opens the book up to the middle somewhere, reads something to himself, murmuring. I can see yellow snaggleteeth in his wrinkly lipless mouth. Then he suddenly snaps the book shut. “That’ll be a dollar.”

  I gasp, and hand over all my change, weak with relief. When he hands me the book and I am able to hug it to my chest again, it’s like it helps free up my words. “Please, sir,” I say, “did you maybe notice some ten-year-old twin boys around here?”

  His mouth is a squirmy line. “I happened to, yes. I kicked them out for knocking over a display about ten minutes ago.” He drops my coins, one by one, into an ancient cash register. “You just missed them.”

  I leave, clutching the journal. Tiberius Shaw actually wrote the words inside this book! Just like I have my Bird Book, Tiberius Shaw, when he was young, had this green journal with the gold feather that he, himself, probably painted on the front! This very one! His private book! How could they sell this thing? Where did they get it? Well, I can hardly believe it.

  I know I still have to find my brothers. But I ca
n’t help stopping to sit on the bench outside the shop to just flip quickly through a few pages.

  My heart’s home in Sanctuary Marsh is precisely two miles north of the old visitor center, beyond water inlets that stretch fingerlike into the sanctuary. . . . It is on a knoll, a small hill covered in old-growth pine, oak, and maple, and from that vantage point I look out over the purity of Nature. You’d never know you were so near the corruptions of the capital, mere miles away. . . .

  First I found Shaw’s statues at the gift shop.

  Then Dad got moved to a hospital that’s super-close to Shaw’s sanctuary.

  Now I am holding Shaw’s old journal. His personal journal.

  I can’t believe in all these coincidences. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that it’s almost like Shaw’s been trying to reach out to me or something. But of course, that’s just crazy-weird.

  I flip a few more pages, and notice a little pencil sketch of a shorebird. It’s very similar to a sketch I did once, of a sandpiper. But this bird’s bigger, with a longer beak. It’s a beautiful sketch, better than I can do. And underneath, in his careful lettering, it says:

  The little bar-tailed godwit, without breaking for food or drink, will fly seven thousand miles in nine days, from Alaska to New Zealand, as if it is nothing. What stunt of bird bravery is this? His tremendous urge to join family and flock is stronger than any wind or current. It is stronger than anything. And so we should ask ourselves: What can the godwit teach us about our own connection to home?

  12

  I finally found them. It took me ten more minutes of frantic shouting down every single side street, to locate Joel and Jake, but I did it. Then, we all went to find our social worker lady in the clinic, but she was still gone on her big emergency. The nurse in charge didn’t even care. She just told us to “take that mangy beast outside.”

  More on the mangy beast in a minute.

  So now, we’re all of us piled on a bench outside the clinic, waiting. Davis has just broken up with Jonathan Dylan Daniels, so she is either sobbing into her hands or staring into space. She seems too upset right now to keep us safe, or deal with hard reality at all. She just stares, and cries.