by Sally J. Pla
The next thing I know, birds are tweeting and the sun’s beaming in. Everyone’s up already, clunking around, packing stuff. Ludmila is nagging the twins to help her stash the folding chairs and secure stuff in the little kitchen so it doesn’t roll and clank around once she starts driving.
Almost time to leave Yellowstone.
I stumble down the steps with Tiberius and around the corner of the camper, to find a spot for us both to pee. There’s that guy Tony and Davis, standing way too close to each other.
“Get out of here,” Davis says.
“Come on, Tiberius,” I say, and I glare at them. “Let’s leave these obnoxious people alone.”
I walk Tiberius on his leash toward a patch of trees, and we do our business. I sit on a log, looking in through the leafy branches. Tiberius sniffs around. I pick a maple leaf and twirl it around in my fingers while he meanders. Millions of these leaves all around, so many you don’t even really think of them as leaves, until you pick one single leaf, and it comes into focus. It’s got veins running through it, and it’s soft, with a dark green summer color, and it’s got this amazing symmetrical beauty. And then, you think: wow.
I crouch down and spread the leaf over my knee, feeling its rough backside. I don’t want to think about anything right now except this leaf. Can’t I just stay here and be a hermit, and live in a hut in the woods? A very hygienic hut. Hidden, so no one can find me.
Tiberius whines, as if he knows my thoughts and doesn’t agree with them one bit.
Suddenly, by my left ear, away from where he’s sniffing and turning in circles, I hear a loud scrrrrritch. Like scraping metal.
I peer over at a big oak tree, and I have to let my eyes adjust before I see it. There’s a little screech owl, no bigger than my hand, fluffing up its feathers, peeping out of a hole in the trunk. It looks at me from its round black doorway, and I look at it, and it blinks its yellow eyes once, twice. Tiberius barks, and in a flash, the owl’s gone, back inside that snug hole.
My heart is pounding. How can such a little cute bird make such a huge, obnoxious noise? Amazing.
“Why’d you scare it, Tiberius?” I scold him, but he doesn’t care. Well, at least now I can add a screech owl onto the Someday Birds List, as a bonus prize for Dad.
I like the screech owl. I like to think of it living here in the woods, hidden away all snug in its tree trunk among the big soft maple leaves, all alone, the whole world leaving it alone and in peace.
I am starting to deeply hate riding in that crowded camper. I wish I had a hole.
21
The gears of Old Bessie grind and growl as Davis reads from yet another of her thick stack of brochures. She took pretty much every free pamphlet and map the Yellowstone Area visitor center had to offer, while we were out with Tony yesterday, and they’re in a stack on our little wood table. She’s got us cutting northeast through Montana now, just because she’s always wanted to see it. Plus, she wrote a history paper on Little Bighorn, so apparently now we have to go there.
Davis puts on a loud, TV announcer’s voice and leans forward.
“The historic Beartooth Highway has been called the most beautiful drive in America! It was first traveled by Civil War General Sheridan in 1882.”
“Really? Something tells me that Native Americans probably traveled it before that old general did,” says Ludmila.
We are powering through switchbacks to make it up and over a super-steep mountain pass. Switchbacks are when you change directions with 180-degree turns. It feels like you’re going to roll right out of your seat. Switchback is a good word to describe what it’s like, too, when you think your life is going one way (peaceful summer at home), but instead, it slides off in a whole other direction (crazy drive across country), one way (Dad working from home and healthy), and then a whole other way (Dad going to Afghanistan and getting hurt).
Back and forth, up and up, this way and that, lurch and slosh. Tiberius whimpers in his sleep, in his blanket-nest between the seats.
A few feet from my window, the road drops off into nothing but air. A rocky abyss waits below. It’s terrifying. We pass snow—snow!—on a cliff ledge that juts out into sky. I close my eyes to keep from fainting.
“Charlie,” says Ludmila, sneaking a glance at me. “Why don’t you close that book if you feel so sick?”
“I wasn’t reading it,” I say, gulping air. “I was just looking at this picture of the archaeopteryx.”
“The what?”
“Archaeopteryx. The very first bird that evolved from dinosaurs.” I look down at the yellowed photo that Shaw had taped into the book: a very delicate skeleton of a tiny, pterodactyl-like thing, wings akimbo, pressed into rock. One day, this little guy fell back into the mud, and one hundred million years later, people found him. They even found a preserved feather.
We swerve around another cliff face. The rock’s so close, I could put my arm out Old Bessie’s window and touch it. The brochures say Montana has over a hundred fossil sites, and some of the oldest rocks on the earth. They’ve found lots of dinosaurs, even prehistoric crocodiles here. I wonder what mystery could be behind this very rock we’re passing. Who knows? We could be like ten feet away from dinosaur-birds that no human’s ever seen.
A snowflake swirls down onto the windshield; I watch it melt.
“You’re crazy,” Joel says, resting his chin on the back of my seat. “How could a dinosaur turn into a bird?”
I sigh. This is hard to explain. “The theory is that the reptile scales sort of turned into quills. Which eventually spread into feathers.”
Ludmila says, “I can’t believe so much change could happen.”
“That’s genetics. It didn’t happen overnight. It was after millions of years living in treetops and lots of generations,” I say.
A few more minutes go by, then Davis says, “That archaeopteryx thing is cool. I wonder if people could ever do that. Physically evolve, I mean.”
“To get wings?” I ask.
“No,” says Davis. “In other ways. Wouldn’t it be cool if we evolved to be smarter? And more peaceful? Like, our bodies would just not be able to be violent?”
Ludmila snorts loudly. “That will never happen,” she scoffs. “In fact, sometimes I think we are evolving in the reverse. Too much insane fighting, with the whole of this crazy human race.” She glares straight ahead, past the rock face, and guns the engine a little too wildly.
I close my eyes while my head and stomach lurch, and the engine keeps complaining, grinding hard as we head even farther up and up and up, switchback and switchback, switchback and switchback, until it feels like we’re heading into everywhere and nowhere at once.
22
Real Bird behavior can differ from our assumptions. I have witnessed bloody battles between Jays and Crows that have filled the air with the squawking black chaos of war.
—Tiberius Shaw, PhD
“Okay, we’re nearing Little Bighorn,” says Davis, reading from one of her many brochures. “Site of the great battle. Two thousand Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne, peacefully hanging out. Along comes General Custer with well under a thousand men, trying to slaughter them. He screwed up his information, messed up the odds. And in self-defense, they had no choice but to destroy Custer. And afterward, the US government retaliated by destroying their whole way of life. It’s all so, well, awful. But there’s a museum. Should we?”
Ludmila clears her throat. “I don’t like war monuments,” she says.
“And we want to get to Wall Drug and check out the free ice water!” says Joel. “That looks funner.”
We’re not exactly sure what Wall Drug is, but there have been tons of road signs advertising “free ice water,” which the twins think is incredibly fun and mysterious, like maybe that means there’s a magic well there, or something.
“But I wrote that whole report on Little Bighorn. I had to read books and books about it!” says Davis. “Can’t we just check it out super quickly? It’ll earn me some
great brownnoser points if I actually go. Plus, I have to pee.”
So we follow the signs to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Everything seems really peaceful, with hills of prairie grasses waving this way and that.
“You’d never know that once upon a time, these peaceful hills ran with blood,” says Davis in a scary Halloween voice.
“Ne budi glup—don’t be stupid,” says Ludmila.
We park in a lot that’s already almost full. People are milling about, unloading cars. The air smells like cigarette smoke and barbecues and dust and pollen, and I get one of my major sneeze fests. My record is fifty-one sneezes in a row. I think I may surpass it today. Tiberius looks up at me from the end of his leash, waiting for the onslaught of spray to stop.
“Gesundheit!” says a deep voice.
A man with a giant beer belly and sweat dripping from his eyebrows is standing by a huge truck parked next to us. He reaches in and pulls out a rifle with a red, white, and blue strap. I think for a minute he is going to shoot me for sneezing.
“Here for the reenactment?” he says. “Might be my last stand, wearing all this gear in today’s heat.” He puts a Civil War–style cap on his head. He looks straight at me, expects me to answer him. I just look down and shake my head around in a yes-no ambiguous fashion, because I have no idea what he is talking about.
Behind Beer Belly man, a tall, thin boy about Davis’s age appears. He’s got broad shoulders and scruffy brown hair. He scratches his head and looks around, and when he sees my sister, he blushes. She sees him, too, and they sort of smile at each other in this goofy, familiar kind of way, even though they clearly have never seen each other before.
Davis grabs my hand and says “Come on!” and before I can complain about how I hate holding hands, she pulls me and Tiberius up the hill where Ludmila and the twins are already walking toward the museum building.
“That boy and you were looking at each other funny,” I tell Davis, shaking out my fingers.
“Shush,” Davis says, glancing back. “God, Charlie. Do you have to notice everything?” The boy, with his Beer Belly dad and mom, is heading off to where folks in old-fashioned clothes are setting up under a big tent. When I look back, he’s still staring over here at Davis.
We catch up to the twins and Ludmila by the museum entrance, where a big sign says:
Battle Reenactment Today!
“YES!” shouts Jake. The twins jump up and high-five each other.
“I hope the guns are real!” says Jake.
“Stupid, why would they shoot real guns at each other?” says Joel.
“Stupid, they’d be blanks,” says Jake.
I pick up Tiberius and hold him close to my chest.
The little museum’s practically empty. There are glass cases full of old uniforms, maps, swords, guns. At the far end, they’ve opened a set of double doors through which you can see a bright green hillside, with gray stone markers scattered in the grass.
“Ludmila, can we go see the people in the tents? Please, please?” says Joel. He clasps his hands together and tries to look cute.
“I’ll keep an eye on them,” Davis quickly offers.
“Well,” says Ludmila.
After they leave, I tell her, “I think she just wants to keep an eye on that tall boy she was looking at in the parking lot.”
Ludmila smiles.
I wonder how Jonathan Dylan Daniels’s arm is healing. Does Davis even remember him? I thought they were going to get married or something. Now it’s like he never existed.
The twins are already running past Davis up the hill. They spy the Beer Belly couple at a picnic table, and go right up to them. Davis is standing with the tall scruffy boy, her hands clasped behind her back, in her pink top and white shorts, her long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. The tall boy kicks at a rock with his toe.
How do they do that? Just go up to strangers and talk to them, and then suddenly they know them?
It is so hot! My shirt is sticking to my underarms and my head is pounding. How can they stand it on that hillside? My body is twitching and buzzing, my hands crawling with grime. I squinch my eyes. No washing. I don’t need to wash. I can handle this, I tell myself.
No, I can’t.
I give Tiberius’s leash to Ludmila, and head to the bathroom.
Soap-rinse-one-soap-rinse-two-soap-rinse-three-soap-rinse-four-soap-rinse-five . . .
And when I come out, I notice that Ludmila has taken Tiberius back out to the entry, to stare at some strange words that are displayed on the wall there. I can’t tell what language they are in. They look as mysterious as the Bosnian words that Ludmila mutters sometimes.
But underneath the strange words, there is an English translation. It says:
Know the Power that Is Peace. —Black Elk
Ludmila’s eyes are kind of heavy-looking. Her eyebrows are scrunched. Her mouth is turned down and kind of twisted. If I were to read her visual cue, I’d say she looked . . . sad? Mad?
“Hi,” I say.
She doesn’t turn. She keeps staring at the wall. “I hate this whole idea of reenactment,” she says. “Because too many people just think of it as a celebration. Imagine. In a hundred years, what if they reenacted the Sarajevo siege?” she asks the wall. “What if a bunch of people in the future think it would be fun to dress up in clothes like my family wore in the 1990s, and have a celebration picnic? And pretend to kill each other?”
I don’t understand what she’s talking about. “What was the siege?” I ask.
“What was the siege?” She blinks hard at me. “What do they teach you in those schools?”
“We did up to the Industrial Revolution.”
She stamps her foot. “There was terrible war in my country!” She is almost shouting. Tiberius stops nosing around, looks up and stares at her. So do some other people. “Thousands of innocent people killed! My whole country, bombed! Destroyed! Innocent families, women, and children.”
I do not know what to say. I do not know if she is mad at me, or at the war, or both. I say, “I am so sorry to hear that.” Of course I am. I truly, really am. I can’t even imagine that.
Ludmila stands so close to me, I can see a half inch of blondish-brown hair roots starting to grow out under all that pink. She stares through the thick dirty lenses of her glasses right at me, and says, in her deep voice, “We were murdered, in the middle of Europe, in the 1990s, and the whole world, they just watched and did nothing.”
Ludmila hands me the leash and turns away. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and sort of clomps off in her heavy black platform shoes, white knee socks, and flowery sundress.
There are some older ladies near us who have been looking at her. People do look at Ludmila. People look at me, sometimes, too—but not usually until after I start talking.
“It’s not nice to stare,” I say to them in a loud, flat voice, and they quickly turn away.
Tiberius and I find Ludmila back near the parking lot. She is sitting on a bench in the shade, staring at the stack of brochures. I loop the dog’s leash under the leg of the bench so he can mosey around if he wants. But he just decides to sit down right on top of my feet. His butt warms my toes. I keep my feet still so as not to disturb him.
I take out Shaw’s green journal and flip through the pages, making the words fly past like birds. I like to see what my eye will suddenly catch, see what turns up. You never know.
I notice a colorful sketch of two ruby-throated hummingbirds doing battle. Beneath it is written: The hummingbird will fight his own brother to the death. I show it to Ludmila. She is just about to say something when the loudspeaker crackles and beeps.
“Howdy, folks!” says a monster-truck-commercial voice. “Just a reminder that we’re two hours away from the annual Battle of the Little Bighorn reenactment, hosted, as always, by the Real Bird Family. If you’re interested in sticking around, it’ll be down at Medicine Tail Coulee.”
I look down at the page in Tib
erius’s green journal, where his handwriting says: Real Bird behavior. “Did that guy just say something about a REAL BIRD family?” I ask Ludmila.
She nods, and points to the brochure in her lap. “I guess it’s the last name of the Crow Indian family that organizes the show. See? It says it right here. Real Bird.”
That’s another kind of a weird coincidence, I think. I note it in my own Bird Book. I’m starting a list of things that I want to ask Tiberius Shaw when I find his house in the Sanctuary Marsh in Virginia. Most of the questions I have written down are about real bird behavior, and real people behavior. And then, some of them are more personal, and kind of about Dad.
We are not going to hang around for the reenactment—we are getting right back on the road. So Davis and the twins are hugging their new friends, the Beer Belly family, good-bye. Mrs. Beer Belly turns to the twins and smiles. “Now you two behave yourselves and have a super-duper fun rest of your trip, okay?” she says, bending down to embrace both of them at once.
They hug her back.
“And know for sure that I’ll be praying for your poor daddy. Praying hard. He’s just bound to be all right. I know it,” she says.
“How do you know it?” I say to her.
Davis suddenly appears out of nowhere to stand next to me. “Don’t mind Charlie,” she says to the lady. “We’re sorry.”
What is there to be sorry for?
Ludmila is thanking Mr. and Mrs. Beer Belly for their kindness while Tiberius barks. Davis’s new boyfriend is on the other side of the pickup truck. He blows Davis a slow kiss when he thinks no one sees.
Ick.
That night, at our campsite in the RV park, we’re all tired. The twins smell like sweat and dirt—it’s been a long day. Davis is not saying much, just sitting at the little table, staring out the dark window with her earphones in, smiling to herself at something. I don’t even want to think about what. Or who.