The Someday Birds

by Sally J. Pla

  Tiberius is not interested in hexes, distelfink, or stores. Instead, he is fascinated by horse poop. There’s a whole disgusting ton of it in the street. I have to keep yanking his leash to get him back up on the curb. I have to yank gently or he’ll fall over, due to his one back leg, and the last thing we need is Tiberius falling into a pile of horse poop.

  The people walking around here are all either touristy-looking, or Amish-looking. They wear white caps and long dresses, or those flat-topped hats, and beards without mustaches, and plain dark work clothes. Their clothing is simple and functional, which I like, but still, they have too many buttons. Give me stretch-waist shorts and a T-shirt any day of the week, please.

  As usual, Joel and Jake are starving—STARVING!—so we turn into the first diner we see. All the waitresses are dressed Amish. Ours has a name tag that says “Anna,” and she doesn’t look any older than Davis. Her hair is all combed tightly back into her white cap and held in place with metal hairpins that look horribly painful. When she turns her head, I see a small pinprick on the side of her nose, like she used to have a nose earring in there. That looks painful, too.

  Anna makes a fuss over how cute Tiberius is. “Such an adorable little wee face, yah? But he gets around just fine, now, doesn’t he, the poor thing,” she says.

  For dessert Ludmila orders all of us something called shoofly pie, which Anna reassures me doesn’t really have flies in it. Davis forces me to try a crumb. It’s kind of brown-sugary. I reject it on principle.

  After we eat, Ludmila asks Anna if she knows of a place a small RV could set up for the night.

  “Well, we have a campsite at our farm. You’d be welcome, if thou wish. There’s a hookup, water pump, and picnic table by our fence. It’s not far at’tall,” she says, smiling. “But I’ll warn you, it may be a bit crazy later on, account of a party we young folk are having.”

  After the food and more walking around, we get back in the camper. We turn off the main road and follow Anna’s directions, and about ten minutes out of town, just like she said, a little farm appears. Cornfields, white farmhouse, red barn with one of those hexes on it, with distelfink.

  We nervously unhook the gate and drive in. She said to put a few dollars in the mailbox “if thou would be so moved,” so we do. Right where she said, by the far fence, is a campsite with a picnic table and water pump—and an old-fashioned wooden outhouse with a small cutout of a star carved into the door. I laugh, because it’s so true: This is definitely a one-star operation.

  The minute we open the camper door, Tiberius darts right past me! Right into the huge cornfield!

  “Get him out of there!” I yell to Joel. “He’ll get lost! He’ll get ticks!”

  “Chill out,” says Joel. “There’s nothing to hurt him out here. Let him stretch his legs!”

  We can hear him yipping happily, barking along the cornrows. He must have disturbed some big black crows—two of them flutter up and circle the air above us, cawing and complaining. Then a third shoots up—it has a long rat tail curling down from its beak! It takes off like a shot toward a distant stand of trees, pumping its wings like crazy. The other crows chase it, squawking protests.

  “Ew,” Davis says.

  “Lots of ew-y things, yes,” I say, looking at the outhouse.

  Tiberius the dog comes bursting back through the soft green cornstalks, happily panting, and barks at my feet. “I’m not picking you up till somebody checks you over for ticks,” I tell him.

  “Why don’t you do it yourself, Charlie?” Davis asks.

  No way. I’m not going near that.

  It’s dusk when we all sit around eating sandwiches at the splintery picnic table. The twins have a stash of candy they got in one of the shops today, which they’re planning to devour for dessert.

  “How come the bins said ‘penny candy,’ but everything cost a dollar?” Joel asks.

  “Because it’s a cruel, deceptive world,” Davis says.

  “Well, this is nice,” Ludmila says while we munch stale sandwiches and slap mosquitoes. It totally isn’t nice.

  Finally, we go inside Old Bessie and call it a night. I crawl in my bunk and make a blanket-nest for Tiberius at my feet, as usual. But I am so sick of this thin blue mattress. The top sheet is always slipping off, so my face gets sweaty from sleeping directly on the disgusting, moldy blue plastic, and don’t get me wrong, I love Tiberius, but he’s giving me cramps in my legs by hogging the whole bottom half of this stupid bed every night.

  Davis is across from me, reading with a flashlight. She clicks it off and says goodnight.

  I toss and turn.

  Toss.

  Turn.

  It doesn’t seem long before the muffled bass thump of a rap song wakes me. I crack open my window. The beat’s so low it hurts my ears. Faint laughter floats across the field, and the buzzy sound of lots of people talking—it’s that “young folk” party that the waitress Anna was talking about.

  Rap music, like nose piercing, doesn’t seem very Amish to me.

  I slide my legs slowly up away from the dog. Tiberius sighs and twitches one back paw, like’s he’s dreaming about running. The empty hip joint also moves. It’s so funny when he does this. I wonder if he has two legs in his dreams.

  (It’s amazing, the things we are capable of, in our dreams. If only we could harness that power when we wake. —Tiberius Shaw)

  More laughter and voices float across the field outside my window. Everyone else is still snoring. But I give up on sleeping. “Come on, beast,” I tell Tiberius. He yawns and licks my hand when I clip on his leash, as if to say, “Really? A walk is great, but does it have to be now?”

  I grab a flashlight, just in case, and together, we creep out the RV door. Slightly uphill, a long distance across the field, a huge crowd of kids is milling around under the light on the big red barn. I can’t make out any Amish caps or dresses or suspenders on anyone. No. It’s a sort of modern, smoky drinky noisy party that Dad would probably kill Davis for going to. Boys are whooping, and girls are laughing and dancing in small groups.

  Just then, as I’m staring across the field, there’s a super-loud CRACK!

  The music suddenly cuts out. There’s the sound of commotion, of some people arguing. I walk Tiberius up a little closer, to see what’s going on, and then, there’s the waitress, Anna, running toward me.

  “Ach! Oh my gosh! Are you okay?” she shouts, panting.

  “Um, yes?” I say.

  “Two stupid boys just shot a rifle right across the field at you. They said they saw a deer. When I told them we had a family in a camper staying right over at the clearing, they nearly—well, they could have killed thee!” She is breathless, her face pale in the darkness. “I’m so sorry! Oh gosh! Well—if you’re okay, I have to—”

  She turns on her heels and starts running back in the opposite direction to the barn. I watch her rejoin the group and wave her arms around, angry. It looks like Anna is throwing everybody out.

  I wonder where her parents are? I hear car doors start to slam, then a line of headlights rove over the field as vehicles turn slowly toward the lane.

  And in the flash of one of those headlights, as I’m walking back to the camper, I notice something: an indentation in a cornrow, about ten feet in. Do I dare move closer to see what it is?

  Hm. Those boys with the rifle didn’t hit me, but they did hit something. The rump of the poor deer twitches, then stills. I freeze, and watch, and wait. It doesn’t move. It is dead, but dead. There is nothing I can do to save it, or help it.

  I think of Dad, telling us about the circle of life, when I was five and our cat Chigger died. He was trying to make us feel better, but he was more upset than us kids. Chigger was mean, and only ever spat at us from under the couch, so we didn’t even like him. But he had been Mom’s cat.

  I remember, looking at this poor dead deer in the cornstalks, that day Dad had buried Chigger. It was out near the canyon, and he had dug for a long time. He had dug d
eep. When he came back in, Dad had said, “I just wanted to make sure the coyotes and the big old vultures leave the poor guy alone.”

  “Come on,” I tell Tiberius. “It’s almost dawn. Let’s go get a sweater and blanket, and then we’re coming back here to wait. I have an idea.”

  I sense dawn before it comes. In a few minutes, a haze of blue-gray hits my eyelids. Things turn from gray shadows into surreal color, lightening by dim degrees. Across the field, a thin yellow lip of sun peeps up, until I can just barely, finally make out the outline of the poor shot-dead deer. It is a lifeless lump, flattening the cornstalks about fifteen feet away from where Tiberius and I are hidden.

  Tiberius snuggles in closer. “Just a while longer,” I whisper. “It’s almost better, sleeping out here in this cozy blanket, than it was in the camper on the sticky blue mattress. Right? It sure smells better.”

  He turns around three times and heaves into my side to sleep some more. Meanwhile, I scan the sky. And finally, amazingly, two black pinpoints appear against the pre-dawn gray. It must be crows.

  I hold my breath. I wait.

  And: yes.

  The pinpoints grow into two great hulking shapes that pass over, blackening the sky above me. Then they wheel and spiral down just beyond the dead deer.

  I want to do silent fist pumps. But I stay tight, frozen, a watching statue.

  The birds are ink black, with bright red, bumpy, fleshy heads and tight, spiky neck ruffs. They look around, heads bobbing, checking out the neighborhood.

  Tiberius whimpers. I hold his snout shut and hug him tighter to my chest.

  I can’t see them very well, so I shift just a bit over to the right—and the thicket of cornstalks aligns better, into perfect rows, straight as an arrow. There they are: two turkey vultures, strutting around the dead deer. Or, as they would call it, breakfast.

  They arrange themselves behind its belly. The deer’s back is to me. Its hind leg is bobbing now from some movement the vultures are making. I definitely don’t want to know any more details than that.

  Vultures are kind of like nature’s trash removal workers. And their digestive tracts actually kill off dangerous bacteria and illness-causing germs, so vulture poop comes out totally sterile. In goes bacteria-filled, stinky dead meat. Out comes completely clean, sterile vulture poop. Talk about efficiency. You have to respect that.

  Another fun fact: they poop all over their own legs to cool off.

  This Pennsylvania morning’s vultures are like a gift. A gross gift. I never thought I’d really get to see them. I never thought I’d be able to cross those birds off my list.

  Tiberius and I creep away and head back to the camper, where I brush off all the hay, grass, and dirt, and make extra sure the both of us are tick-free. The others are just waking up. Tiberius scarfs down his kibble breakfast on the picnic table bench. As for me, after seeing those vultures at work, I’m not up for breakfast.

  In fact, I think I might go vegetarian.

  36

  You enter Colonial Williamsburg through this big brick building filled with panels and panels of information. It’s very professionally done. I stop and read every panel very carefully, because that’s what they are there for, which drives Davis, Ludmila, and the twins crazy, because they just want to get in and get going.

  But soon enough, we’re through the building and out the other side, like we’ve passed through a time warp. We’re walking the town green in a make-believe world. Men are wandering around in black hats, topcoats and gaiters, ladies stroll in caps and gowns, and everyone’s pretending it’s the 1700s.

  A man is striding along in a brown overcoat, black hat, and one of those old powdered wigs. I don’t know how he can stand it, when it must be ninety-five degrees already.

  “Down with British oppression!” he shouts, waving a stick and trying to get a gang of sweaty tourists to join him in an angry mob. But they’re more interested in buying T-shirts.

  On the other side of the street, a town crier waves a noisy bell while swaggering by in brass-buckled shoes. “Muster on the green in ten minutes!”

  “What’s a mustard?” Joel asks.

  “They shoot off cannons,” Davis says.

  “Let’s GO!” shouts Jake.

  I tell Ludmila I don’t want to. Stand around for an hour in the heat, hearing ear-pounding cannons and choking on gunpowder smoke? No, thanks.

  “Okay, then you just go straight to the tavern, Charlie,” Ludmila says, giving me a dead-eye look worthy of Gram. “And don’t leave it. Stay there until we come for you. Hear me? Don’t leave there. I’m not chasing after you.”

  Inside the tavern are a bunch of small rooms with bumpy wooden floors where tourists clomp by, sighing happily about the air-conditioning. I find myself jostled off into a room where an old Colonial guy is standing with his arms crossed. He is wearing a homespun white cotton shirt, brown pants, and buckle shoes of black leather. He has gold-framed glasses slipping down his nose, and silver-gray hair in a ponytail tied with black ribbon. When he sees me, he makes a low bow.

  “Well, young lad, and what can I do for you?” he asks. Then, suddenly, he lunges forward and squints at me strangely. He makes a big show of polishing his gold-framed glasses and then squinting at me harder. Some of the other tourists in the room start to laugh.

  “Why, faith! Ah’n’t you the cobbler’s boy?” he asks.

  “Nnno?” I say. My heart starts pounding.

  He raises his hand as if to strike me. “Off with you, back to work, you lazy scalawag!” he shouts.

  “Wait! You have the wrong person,” I squeak out. I can hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears. What does he want with me? “My name is Charlie.”

  He brushes my words away with his hand. “Sure and if you’re not the apprentice of that Tory scoundrel, Cobbler Smith, then my name’s not Marcus McGinty! Away with you now!” He takes a broom from the corner and starts poking and swatting at me as if I’m a cornered rat.

  “OW!” I cry, howling, because he’s just lifted his broom and pretended to swat me across the rear end. What the heck? I thought he was really going to hit me! What is going on?

  More people are starting to come into the little room to watch me and McGinty and the broom go at it.

  I notice a plump lady in a white cotton cap and a long blue dress and apron. She’s watching, too.

  People are laughing at us. My face is red, my heart pounding. My brain doesn’t have time to figure out what this means because I’m too busy trying to keep one step ahead of McGinty’s broom.

  The plump lady finally steps forward. “Stay your hand, sirrah,” she shouts. “I fear you are terrible mistaken!” She swoops in front of me with a great swish of her skirt. “Sure as I’m the landlady of this fine establishment, I swear it to ye this is not the Tory scoundrel Cobbler Smith’s lad!”

  I guess this is just some kind of an act they put on. But I can hardly breathe. My heart is pumping. People are looking at me. Staring at me and laughing. They think this is fun, but I don’t like being stared at, laughed at. I want these dusty old floorboards to swallow me up.

  Mr. McGinty raises his hand as if to strike me over the top of the lady’s head. She cries out, throws her arms around me, and hugs me to her big mushy chest of bosom, which is all covered up with some cottony material. “Leave the poor child, will you sirrah!” she shouts. “By heavens, just look at that face!” She takes my chin in her hands. “Just look at the likes of ’im!” She pinches my cheeks. “How dare ye inflict injury on an innocent lad such as this? This, sirrah, is no cobbler’s boy!”

  I am like a rag doll, no will of my own, as she flops me to her chest again. The audience roars.

  This whole thing takes only a few minutes, but it feels like an eternity. When it’s finally over and the crowd’s moved on, I collapse into a chair.

  “Well, young lad,” says Mr. McGinty, winking. “You are a good sport, indeed. May I offer you a free lemonade, by way of recompense?” He puts a
glass carefully down on a cotton napkin on the table by my hand. It’s sweet and tart and cold; I drink it down in big heaving gulps to help wash away the lump in my throat.

  “Do you put that act on every day?” I ask him. “With different kids?”

  Mr. McGinty steps back, throws his hands up, his mouth a big O. “An act? Never such a thing, sir! Acting is an ignoble career for wayward guttersnipes and immoral tramps. I am no actor, by troth. I am a clean-living barkeep and the faithful resident historian of this fine establishment.” He crosses his arms. “Go ahead. Ask me any fact about Colonial times.”

  “Um, okay. How many American rebels fought in the Revolutionary War?”

  He rattles off the answer like a machine. “Over eight years of war, 1775 to 1783, it’s estimated that somewhere between two hundred seventeen and two hundred fifty thousand soldiers rallied behind our leader George Washington, whom Congress declared our commander in chief in June 1775. Of those men and boys, it’s estimated that a full eight thousand souls may have been killed, and up to twenty-five thousand wounded, in battle. Ask me something harder.”

  “I can’t think of anything right now.”

  “Then swab down these tables.”

  Is he for real? McGinty dives behind the bar and comes up with a white rag and an apron. “There’s a certain way I want you to do it,” he says, putting the cloth rag in my hand. “Are you right-handed? Counter-clockwise. A dozen passes, no more, no less.”

  I look out the window, longing to see Ludmila, Davis, and the twins come up the walk. No such luck.

  I wipe down tables.

  Tourists wander in now and then. McGinty always challenges them to ask a history question. They usually just ask: “When was the Revolutionary War?” Or “What was the biggest battle?” He’ll rattle off long answers, full of battle trivia, while they itch to get going. And every once in a while, if there are a lot of people around, McGinty chases me with the broom again, shouting: “EARN YOUR KEEP, YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING SCALLIWAG!”