by Sally J. Pla
“Phew! Ick! I can’t believe that’s how those poor things have to live,” says Davis.
The disgusting, stinky cow prisons whizz past. Scrub pasture turns to rolling hills. It gets wilder, really big and empty, like the open space is just going to swallow up our car. The sun set behind us hours ago, but the moon’s so bright, we can see silhouettes of pretty much everything.
And ahead looms the silhouette of a mountain, jutting up out of the darkening sky. Ludmila exits the highway and angles us toward it.
“Is that where we’re going?” I wheeze. I am sick from all the bad smells and the disturbing cow prison.
She nods.
“I don’t see why we couldn’t just go home.”
“I know, kid. Sometimes you don’t get a choice.”
We drive some more. The mountain doesn’t seem any closer.
“Where is your home?” I ask her.
“San Diego, like you.”
“No, I mean, like, where were you born? You talk with an accent. You were born somewhere else, right? Like, Russia?”
She snorts. “Russia, kako glupo!”
“What?”
She doesn’t answer. A big bug splatters on the windshield. Ick.
“Okay, not Russia, so where?”
“I was born in a place that doesn’t really exist anymore,” she says as she tries to spray wiper fluid on the windshield to clean off the bug guts, but we’re out. We watch them turn into big bug-gut window-smears. She curses, then starts to laugh.
“Okay, I’ll tell you this. My brother was notorious for wasting windshield-wiper fluid. One teeny speck on the windshield, and he’d press the button and hold it down until blue liquid streamed all over the car. I hated this! So wasteful! He did it just to hear me yell. And he could never remember the English word for this windshield liquid, so he used to call it the psssssht psssssht fluid, you know, like the noise it makes when it comes up out of the dispenser. ‘What do you know, we’re out of psssssht psssssht again,’ he’d say, and I’d say ‘Well of course we are!’ and it totally infuriated me. Amar loved infuriating me.” She glances at Davis. “Maybe this is a brother thing.”
“Well, we don’t infuriate Davis,” I say.
“No?”
I don’t say anything for a while. The mountain looks a little bit closer. Then a lightbulb goes off in my head. I point at the tattoo on her right hand. “Did you get that because of your brother?” I ask.
She nods. “When things got bad, he always told me: ‘Don’t worry Mila, I’m your right-hand man, I’m always here for you.” She shakes out her fingers and wrist, then puts her hand back on the steering wheel. “So this is where I put his name. On my right hand. My Amar.”
I want to ask her if he’s alive or dead. But something about her face makes the words stop in my throat.
15
Each time a birder spots and identifies a bird, a small connection is made between the two of them. A new relationship is kindled—not just with the bird, but with the whole natural world.
—Tiberius Shaw, PhD
Finally, we’re crunching over a gravel drive at the base of the dark Wyoming mountain. My bones feel numb, except for in my butt, which I can’t feel at all. Crickets are chirping everywhere around us, and there’s a misty chill sifting through my half-open car window.
Our headlights flash over a flat parking area to the right; we see a few other cars, an old RV, and a big machine called a Sno-Cat on giant caterpillar treads, half covered with a tarp.
“That’s how they get up the mountain in the winter,” she says, pointing to it. “In the warm weather, they use a four-by-four.”
“Who’s they?” asks Joel.
“Yeah,” says Jake, yawning. “Where are we?”
Maybe she’s bringing us to some scary cult headquarters or something. That’s where cults are usually located: mountains. Kids at school were talking about this mountaintop cult near us in San Diego. It was a long time ago. The cult members wanted to hitch a ride on a comet, and they thought they had to kill themselves to do it.
Maybe this is some other type of horrible mountaintop cult she’s bringing us to.
Boom, boom, boom, goes my heart. Chirp, chirp, go crickets. It is black-dark out.
Ludmila doesn’t answer Joel’s question. She walks away from us, pulls out her phone, and talks into it for a few minutes. Then, with her phone flashlight, she walks over to an old RV camper parked near the bushes, and shines her light along a faded-looking orange stripe on its side. She taps her fingers along the stripe, smiling, still talking.
The twins have tumbled out of the car with Dog on his leash. He limps around in circles, then starts sniffing under rocks. We’re all glad to get out and stretch.
“Don’t lose track of that dog in the dark,” Davis says. “Hold on to that leash nice and tight.”
“And don’t let him sniff around too much,” I add. “He could get ticks.”
“And by the way,” says Davis, “I’m sick of calling him ‘that dog.’ When are you going to name him already?”
Jake says “Popeye” and Joel says “Limbo” at exactly the same time. Then they start arguing. The dog barks.
“I give up,” says Davis.
I’m glad they’re making a lot of noise. Maybe it’ll scare away any wild animals that might be lurking nearby. I bet there’s bears. We’re in the pitch-black, in the middle of nowhere. There must be bears. Or, at least, ticks.
“She’ll be right down to get us,” says Ludmila. We are standing in blackness, lit only by two light blue rectangles: Ludmila’s phone, and Davis’s. I shiver.
“Who’ll be right down?” I ask.
Ludmila’s voice says, out of the blackness, “It’s a fun surprise. Just wait. You’ll see.”
In my past experience, the word fun has never had much to do with the word surprise.
Wait—Ludmila just used her cell phone! There’s coverage!
“We need to call Gram. NOW.”
Davis’s voice says, “Charlie, it’s two a.m. on the East Coast.”
I feel so lost in this dark. Like I don’t have a body, just a nervous system that’s freaking out. “Then I want to speak to Gram myself first thing in the morning. She needs to know where we are.”
“Of course,” says Ludmila’s voice from above one of the blue phone-lights. “There will be a lot to tell her about, once you get to the top.”
(Like: We’ve been abducted into a cult by a Russian spy, and are being forced to catch a ride on a comet.)
The dog starts to growl, then bark. Something’s coming. . . .
In a moment, we hear the low roar of an engine. Then, high-beam headlights slant down and around the lot like searchlights, and a big, black, muddy truck bursts into view. The cab door opens, the light goes on inside, and behind the wheel is the tiny head of an old lady. She’s got short gray hair tufting out from under an old baseball cap. She puts the truck into park, hops down, and wraps Ludmila in a tight hug.
“I’m so, so, sorry about Amar,” I hear the older lady whisper.
The right-hand brother. The tattoo. The pssssshht pssssshht.
Ludmila’s back goes a little bit stiff at the words.
“Now,” says baseball cap lady, turning her flashlight on us. “This gang must be, let’s see. Davis, Joel and Jake or Jake and Joel—right? And of course this tall skinny young fellow over here is Charlie. Do I have it right?” We nod. “Well, come on. Time’s a-wastin’!”
“Where are we going?” asks Joel, looking at the truck.
She points her finger up in the air. “Straight back up to the top. Assuming I don’t drive the damn thing over the edge.”
“What’s at the top?” asks Jake.
“Didn’t Ludmila tell you?”
We hoist ourselves up, and into the blackness we go. We growl around steep curves, so steep that if you look down, you can catch the headlights flitting quickly over tops of pine trees below us that look as small as flimsy green
toothpicks.
I don’t look down, after that glimpse. I glue my eyes onto the back of that lady’s baseball cap.
Joel leans forward and yells out to her, “So . . . who are you?”
“Dr. Joan,” she yells back. “Sit back and buckle in!”
“You’re Ludmila’s friend?” he asks.
“Yup. Long story,” she says. Then, suddenly, she points up out the window and shouts, “There he is! That big fella!” I quickly look, follow her finger, but I don’t see anything except blackness. “We got GHOs up here,” she says. “You better hold on to that little dog of yours.”
“What’s a GHO?” asks Davis.
But my heart bounces in my chest. I know what it is.
“It’s a great horned owl,” Dr. Joan says. “Up here, with all the pine forest? We’ve got ’em up the wazoo.”
Someday Birds List:
Bald Eagle
Great Horned Owl
Trumpeter Swan
Sandhill Crane
Turkey Vulture
Emu
Passenger Pigeon
Carolina Parakeet
Dad would be so excited. If I can tell him that I’ve checked a great horned owl (GHO) off our list of Someday Birds, he would like that. It would make him feel happy. And feeling happy makes you heal quicker. That’s what Gram says.
I think about that as the truck shifts gears and roars forward, chugging up and up. What if I tried to spot all the birds on our list? Then I could tell Dad I found them all, that I did it for him. It could be like a gift I could give him. A gift to help him get better.
That feels right.
We level off and level off, and now we’re driving horizontal instead of vertical. We are at the top of the mountain on a small, flat, dirt-covered area. Next to us is a big silver observatory dome with a house attached to one side. A few other buildings, barely bigger than trailers, are scattered here and there. Some huge generators squat, humming, connected up to the dome. Yellow light pours out of a window on the house part.
“Welcome to WIRO,” says Dr. Joan. “It’s just me and a couple grad students tonight, so you guys are welcome to the extra bunks. In the morning I’ll take you back down to the RV. I checked her over and changed her oil this morning after you called. She’s all ready for you.”
“WIRO?” Joel asks. “RV?”
“Wyoming Infrared Observatory. And RV, in case you don’t know, stands for Recreational Vehicle. Old Bessie, the camper. Ancient but powerful, just like me.” Dr. Joan smiles. “Ludmila asked me to lend it to you, and it’s damn clear I need to, because you’d never make it all the way back East in that little can opener she drives. Lord knows how you made it this far.”
“Old Bessie will remind me so much of good times,” Ludmila says to Dr. Joan, who smiles and gives her a quick hug.
“So, like, what is this place?” Davis asks. “What’s an infrared observatory?”
“Come on inside. We’ll be glad to show you!”
We walk over toward the front of the little house that’s attached to the big silver dome.
“How do you know each other?” Davis whispers to Ludmila. “What kind of doctor is she?”
“Of astrophysics. It’s a long story between us,” Ludmila says. “Dr. Joan was my foster mother for little while, when I was about your age. My favorite foster mother, she was. Is.”
“Yup,” says Dr. Joan, overhearing. “And she wasn’t easy. Mila gave me a run for my money, all right.” Ludmila and Dr. Joan smile at each other and hug again.
I don’t get it. But anyhow. So far, we know:
We’re not being forced to join a cult. Probably.
Ludmila’s from somewhere in Eastern Europe but doesn’t want to talk about it.
She’s got a secret involving our dad.
She is a way better driver than Jonathan Dylan Daniels.
She has had a few foster mothers, including Dr. Joan.
She was trouble when she was Davis’s age.
Her dead brother’s name was Amar.
She doesn’t tell us too much. But I don’t think she lies.
Well, that’s progress. I will have to write all that down in my Bird Book as soon as possible.
The girls go inside the silver-dome house, but I stay out in the dark with Joel and Jake. I want to watch out for GHOs, for Dad’s list. And also to help protect the dog, while the twins run around with him and try to get him to pee. They are a little bit careless, and it’s dark out here. And I don’t want the poor puppy to get picked off the mountain by a hungry owl.
There’s also the danger of slipping off the side. The edges of this area slope away fast. And the edge is right where he goes, of course, tottering on his three scrawny little legs.
“Max, come back!” says Joel.
“Leonard, watch out!” says Jake at exactly the same time. Then they glare at each other. But the dog ignores them both—he is busy nosing around in pine needles. Then, his whole little body stiffens. He darts forward, picks up something in his mouth, and starts prancing around with it. “He’s got a mouse!” shouts Joel. But that’s not what it is.
It’s a tight, neat, rectangular brown packet. Joel wedges it out of the dog’s mouth. And when he shines his flashlight through it, it looks like someone wrapped the skeleton of some small, delicate animal in a rectangle of brown, fine leaves.
“Ugh! That’s disgusting!”
“Whoa! Gross! What is it, do you think?” they ask.
I am so excited, I am jumping up and down. “It’s an owl pellet!” I say. “When owls eat mice and stuff, they digest the good parts, and then burp out these neat little packets of all the stuff they don’t digest. But I’ve only read about it in books. I’ve never seen a real one!”
“Congratulations,” says Joel, handing it over to me, wrinkling his nose.
“Gross!” says Jake. “Charlie washes his hands like fifty times a day and won’t go near the garbage can because of germs, but he’s happy to hold something an owl pooped out. Tell me that makes sense.”
“He didn’t poop it out,” says Joel. “He puked it. Right, Charlie?”
We take the owl pellet and the dog inside. Coming in out of the dark, it’s all homey and brightly lit in there, with a living room and kitchen. It’s like a weird smashup of a giant high-tech telescope and a small cozy house.
Dr. Joan and Ludmila are in the kitchen, putting together a midnight supper. They are laughing and talking. The air smells like onions and peppers and garlic sautéed in olive oil, which makes my eyes sting. It smells both good and bad—way too intense—and my sinuses start panging and throbbing. Nobody believes me when I try to describe this, so I’ve stopped even bothering to mention it, but overwhelming cooking smells are just another of my tragic burdens.
We sit at a table—Dr. Joan, us, and two sleepy students in rumpled sweatshirts. Dr. Joan throws all kinds of food at us. Sausages, toast, omelets. I sit on the far edge of the bench and nibble around the raisins in a cookie.
“Why don’t you show these kids how the telescope works?” Dr. Joan asks the college students, after we eat. So they bring us through a door into a big, domed space. It’s cold in here, and in the middle of the room, there’s this enormous yellow and black piece of machinery that bends at right angles up to the domed roof. It’s the telescope itself! They show us the computer system with a keyboard control panel that lets them control it. They show us how they adjust two big mirrors, one concave and one convex. Once they’re in front of the keyboards, they wake up a bit.
“So. We can adjust the accuracy within one-tenth of an arc second, which is 1/36,000 of a degree,” says one of the students. “Pretty damned precise for a heap of junk built back in the 1970s.”
I can’t even imagine numbers that small. Not to mention looking through a telescope that powerful at a universe that big.
“Yeah,” says the second student. “This place isn’t even set up for remote viewing. You know, I’d guess probably most astrophysicists
have never even looked through a real telescope like this. They do all their viewing remotely online.”
“Way easier,” says the first student. “But truly, way less fun.”
After we’ve had our tour of the telescope, the twins go into the bathroom and try their best to wash Dog in the shower, with dish soap and warm water, because Davis insists. But he still smells awful, if you ask me. Then, pale and tired, they go in to sleep. Davis is also so tired, she can barely talk. She just waves goodnight.
Meanwhile, Ludmila and Dr. Joan are talking quietly together in a back office. I’ve been trying to listen really hard, but I can’t tell what they’re saying.
I decide to draw Dad a drawing of a great horned owl on Jelm Mountain, Wyoming. Maybe that’s enough, along with having found the owl pellet.
I get to work. The eyes are the most important—they have to seem like they’re glowing, and that’s a hard effect to get right with these particular colored pencils. I am just starting to write in some owl facts when I realize Dr. Joan is looking over my shoulder.
“Hey! That’s good!”
I snap the Bird Book closed. I don’t like to share my artwork. It makes my stomach feel weird.
“Very realistic. Have you spent a lot of time birding? Spotting them in the field?”
“I don’t really ‘bird,’ so much,” I say. “I just copy facts and pictures out of other books.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because I don’t like to go outside unless I have to.”
“Oh now. You got to get out in the field. Secondhand information in this world only takes you so far.”
“Well, I think inside is cleaner and safer.”
“That so?” Dr. Joan folds her arms and frowns at me. Then she crosses the room, grabs a jacket off a hook, and throws it at my face. “Come on. We’re going out, and that’s an order.”
I already washed up for bed. If I go out, then I’ll have to wash my hands all over again, twelve times. And this jacket smells funny, and it has buttons; I don’t wear buttons, and I don’t want to put it on.