Plumage

by Nancy Springer

  All around Kleet, suntop treeplume rang with the caws and warblings and chirs and whistles and skreeks of wingmales calling for mates. But Kleet could no longer find courage to lift his head and sing forth his own sweetmate song.

  *Please,* he asked Deity again very softly. *Please?*

  Racquel was getting footsore, Sassy saw. He was limping. “It’s not much farther,” she told him.

  “You sure?”

  “No,” she admitted. “Actually, I think we should be there by now.” She was trying to lead them to the waterfall-to-die-for and the river in which she had seen the head of Orpheus, faithful lover of Eurydice, drifting and singing. She was doing this not because Racquel had showed any interest in sightseeing, but in an attempt to locate the cowboy, or for that matter, anyone who spoke English. She hoped that a friendly native guide might be able to point them toward one or more of the items on the loose operating agenda they had agreed on, including, but not limited to, Find Food And Shelter, Find An Oval Mirror, Get Me The Hell Out of Here (Racquel’s top priority) and Find Parakeet (Sassy’s goal, but far down the list for Racquel, who continued to favor ear piercing as Sassy’s next move toward establishing identity).

  “Face it,” grumbled Racquel, picking his way ouchily over the moss, “we’re lost.”

  “Well, naturally. This is the forest for lost things.” Despite all common sense and her already-hungry belly, Sassy felt breezily at ease here, with sunlight sifting down gold into silvergreen shadows and birds flitting and singing all around. More—she felt profoundly at peace here, and loopily happy, so much so that her good humor was evident and Racquel was finding it hard to bear.

  He scowled at her. “Give me a break.”

  “Okay. We might as well sit down.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “But it’s no use going on if we’re lost.”

  “We won’t get anywhere by sitting on our butts!”

  “Sit on the ground, then. Just sit already. I want to look at your feet.”

  He rolled his eyes but did as she said. Sassy sat down also, lifted his sizable feet into her lap and studied the soles, suddenly and shamefully aware that she was not sure what color they should be on a black person. Was ecru the equivalent of pink? She didn’t see any bleeding cuts, but there were some raw-looking patches. Racquel hadn’t complained, but he had to be really hurting. “Look,” she said to him, “you stay here. I’ll go back and get that plastic thing you left—”

  Racquel gave her no opportunity to complete her thought, a vague one postulating plastic slippers. “No, you don’t! You’re not leaving me. I know how that goes.”

  He spoke with such vehemence that she knew it would be no use to argue with him. She thought some more. “Well, we can pull off the hem of your dress—”

  “We’re not ruining my dress!”

  She sighed, hitched out from under his feet, rose to her knees and for no conscious reason began to comb his long hair with her fingers. His eyes widened, but otherwise he did not react, so she kept combing. His hair was dry now, its texture pleasantly coarse, like that of a horse’s tail. It made her think of the Rapunzel hair tech with many many braids, and because her fingers wanted to, she began to braid Racquel’s hair.

  After a minute he tilted his head back for her, and his shoulders eased downward, relaxing as Sassy braided tiny plaits around his face. She wished she had bright cotton strings or slim ribbons or something to wrap around them, but the braids stayed even though she had not even a thread to bind the ends. This should have surprised her, but did not; in this world small miracles seemed possible. Not far away, standing in the shadows, two tall white cranes were—voguing, that was what they were doing, in hypnotic slow motion, their long necks and great wings dipping and aspiring in the graceful postures of their dance. Right by Sassy’s face something iridescent flashed by, then another in pursuit; there was a rainbow whirl and tussle in the air. Sassy did not look to see whether they were fighting or mating. Same thing sometimes. Anyway, she did not want to watch birds court or mate anymore. It hurt. She was finding too much of what she had lost.

  Braiding, she worked her way around to the back of Racquel’s head. He sighed. Not moving, he said slowly, as if to check his reality, “Anytime you look in a mirror, all you see is a blue parakeet?”

  “Yes.”

  “And other people’s reflections are birds to you too? I’m a—whatchacallit?”

  “Hornbill.”

  “And that’s how you knew I was—”

  “Male. Yes.”

  Silence. The rainbow wrestlers flew away. Above Sassy some bird was calling, calling. Intent on Racquel’s head, she did not look up.

  With just a hint of pathos Racquel asked, “What does a male hornbill look like?”

  “Strikingly handsome,” Sassy replied at once, laying it on thick. “Savagely elegant. Shining black with bright barbaric wattles and an absolutely daring bill. And,” she added, “the most adorable eyelashes.”

  Racquel contemplated this in silence as Sassy finished a fringe of braids around his neck. She had forgotten how much she liked braids. Maybe she’d grow her hair long, she thought, so that she could braid it every day. Old ladies were supposed to keep their hair short, but so what. She would wear hers long and gray and she would braid it in plaits and pigtails and buns over her ears and she would decorate it with yarn and flossy bows and fake flowers. And it would give her fits, probably. It would never be as thick and user-friendly as Racquel’s. She plaited coils at his temples and there was still plenty of hair left to play with. She stroked it up to the top of his head and began French-braiding a sort of Heidi crown for him.

  She asked him, “Do you have any brothers?”

  “Two.”

  “Older?” She was kind of hoping that he had one much older, a lot like him but of a masculine persuasion and maybe widowed.

  “Younger.”

  “Oh.” Damn. “Do you see them much?”

  “No.”

  The flat word dropped like a stone. Sassy could almost hear it cavitating all the birdsong in the air.

  “I got nothing in common with them,” Racquel said more quietly. “They’re brothers.”

  It took Sassy a moment to figure this out. Of course his brothers were brothers—oh. “You mean like in a gang?”

  “Street brothers, yeah.”

  She didn’t dare to ask anymore, but he went on anyway. “My parents, I got nothing in common with them either. I mean, they’re okay, I see them at Christmas and whatever, but—we can’t talk.”

  Sassy picked up a tiny iridescent blue wingfeather from the ground and tucked it into his hair.

  EIGHT

  “Racquel,” Sassy asked, “what have you lost?”

  “Huh?”

  She stood still to give him a break from limping along after her. In the green twilight between the trees, deer grazed on the moss; one of them was pure white and looked soft-focus, as if it were posing for a Breck shampoo ad. Two ibises stood on the rocks like spirits; overhead two small pomegranate-colored birds fluttered and giggled, beak to beak, while others called, out of sight in the green labyrinth above. Sassy wondered whether Racquel was seeing it with the same yearning that she was, or even seeing the same scene. What he found depended on what he had lost, and she knew that he must have lost something; everyone has lost something. Life was loss, in her experience. “What are you finding?”

  “Huh?”

  “Here. In—”

  “In this damn jungle?”

  “It’s not a jungle!”

  “Yes, it is.” He glared at the deer. “Look at them. Graze, graze all day, but wait’ll you lie down to sleep and they sneak up and stick their horns in you.” Before Sassy could recover from speechlessness, Racquel shifted his glare to the ibises. “Those ten-inch beaks, you know what they’re for? They’re for picking your liver out after the horny sneaks kill you.”

  “Racquel, they are not!”

  “Are
too.”

  “You big baby, nothing is going to hurt you!”

  “Says who? What they got such big beaks for, then? I tell you, something is going to kill us if we don’t die of starvation first.” His glare widened into a stare of desperation. “Tell you what. You grab one of those funny-looking birds, and I grab the other, and we wring their scrawny necks—”

  “No!” Sassy recoiled from him the way she would rear back from a snake. “Don’t say things like that!” Unthinkable to kill the bird-spirits of this paradise; didn’t he know that?

  “—make a fire,” Racquel was saying, “and—screw it, forget the fire, I’ll eat them raw.”

  “You’re talking just like a man,” Sassy told him. Oddly, seeing him as a man made her willing to forgive him. Men were supposed to be insensitive and require humoring. “Get a grip, doofus. Raw ibis is never served in the finer restaurants.” Mushrooms were, however. And mushrooms grew everywhere, their moonstone colors underfoot nearly as vivid and various as the birds overhead. Feeling an eerie sureness prompt her, Sassy bent and grabbed several periwinkle-blue ones, caps, stems and all. Straightening, she took a large bite out of one. “Manna,” she declared, offering a handful to Racquel.

  “Are you crazy?” he yelped, flinching away from her. “That could be poison!”

  “It’s good. Like blueberry bread.” Sassy ate greedily as Racquel watched her with white-rimmed eyes like those of a spooked horse, as if he were waiting for her to topple in agony or perhaps to emulate Alice in Wonderland in sudden feats of gigantism. Sassy did neither. She devoured all the mushrooms, belched with satisfaction, and told him, “They’re really very good.” Remembering he was a man, she added, “Meaty. Like portabella.”

  “I’m happy for you.” Judging by Racquel’s sardonic tone, he had more to say, but he was interrupted by a jingling sound and the muffled rhythm of hoofbeats. The deer lifted their elegant heads and bounded away, and with their harness ringing two young men came riding on swan-necked white steeds, richly caparisoned, and the youths rode them in cloth of gold—afterward Sassy could remember little of their clothing definitely not purchased at Wal-Mart, for her gaze was caught on their warrior faces, scarred yet deeply innocent, and alight as if all their sorrows were over. Lovers, Sassy thought with hot angst prickling her eyes. Lovers in the most fundamental sense—they loved each other. Faithful friends, faithful comrades, faithful lovers. One of them looked at the other and smiled for no reason. He carried a curling horn, an elephant’s tusk rimmed with silver.

  “Hey!” Racquel bawled at them, flailing his arms and pointing at Sassy. “She just ate the freaking mushrooms!”

  The warrior youths turned, smiled, and lifted their right hands in courtly greeting as they rode past. One of them called something in some liquid, melodious language.

  “Wait!” hollered Racquel.

  But they rode away. “Roland and Oliver,” Sassy said as they jingled into the shadows. “I think.” Judging by Oliver’s horn. In the chanson it was called an olifant.

  “Like I care?” Racquel folded to the ground, letting his legs spraddle ungracefully in his skirt, his despair visible; he clutched his braided head in his hands. “It’s probably next Tuesday by now at home.”

  Sassy stood wondering where there might be a pearlescent pinion to guide them. That was why she had eaten the mushrooms, she realized with a flutter of insight; their nacreous mottlings were like those of the feather she had followed her first time in shadowland. And the mushrooms were good, she knew they were good—but was she to wander lost, eating manna, for forty years, or eternity, or what? Where was her yahweh, her guide? To see a feather was good luck, the knight in a shining Stetson had said; to catch one …

  She looked up, searching the distant treetops for a sign, but saw nothing except birds in love.

  Limping along, his astonishment deepening to match his despair, Racquel kept watching Sassy as she watched the tree-tops and turquoise sky, the labyrinthine green of creepers and mistletoe, the gigantic oaks and pines and—and mimosas for all he knew. The orchids far overhead, the lapis-lazuli frogs clinging to the leaves, the black-and-scarlet butterflies bobbing in sunrays, the moss-colored shadows, the birds. He watched the way she gazed, her face rapt and deeply innocent, as if her troubles were all over. There was something almost supernatural about Sassy in this place, something ethereal about her face, as if she could stay here and be a cataract running between the rocks or a songbird in the green canopy or one of those people on a horse, an eidolon.

  Looking at Sassy, prompted by her uncanny certainty as well as by the emptiness of his belly, Racquel decided to go ahead and eat the damn mushrooms. Right by his bare sore feet he found a cluster of fungi wearing little wisteria-colored caps like toques and asked Sassy, “This kind?”

  “Yes, those are good. Sit down a while.”

  They both sat. The mushrooms tasted like coffee cake or maybe more like boysenberry Danish or a bran-apple muffin; in any event, they made him want a cup of espresso, and of course he couldn’t have it. Too bad. Sassy didn’t say a word while he ate; Racquel glanced over at her and saw her staring up at a pair of those little blue parrots she said were the most endangered bird in the world. The way those two looked, dancing cheek to cheek on their branch, they were about to take care of that problem by making more.

  “You watching to see how it’s done?” Racquel asked a lot more harshly than he intended to.

  Sassy gave him a sideward look and a half smile. “I don’t know why I’m watching.”

  She was probably thinking about that uxorious louse Frederick.

  “It kind of hurts,” Sassy said. “Lovebirds.”

  Racquel didn’t know what to say, so he promptly opened his mouth and barfed out something stupid. “Huh. He’ll leave her the minute he’s done with her.” Whichever one “he” was. The two blue—macaws, that was it, macaws were different than parrots somehow—the two chambray-colored birds looked exactly alike.

  Sassy had turned back to watching them. “No, he won’t,” she said. “They mate for life.”

  That eerie sureness of hers again. Almost frightened, Racquel blurted, “How do you know?” and realized that he sounded rude.

  Sassy did not react to his tone even to look at him. She gazed at the blue macaws nibbling each other’s faces as she said, “Most birds, you’d be right, the male would up and leave. Most birds, the female is plain and the male is the gaudy one, a dandy.”

  “Hey, I like that in a male.”

  “I figured you would.” Sassy gave him her sidelong smile again. “The female is plain, so she gets to sit on the nest; she blends into her environment. Just like the typical housewife.”

  “Another endangered species.”

  Sassy swiveled to gaze at him as if he had said something amazing. “Darn,” she said, her voice hushed. “You’re right.”

  One of the blue macaws turned coyly away, sidling along the branch; that would be the female, Racquel opined to himself. The other one fluttered his wings and nipped at her tail.

  “So anyway,” Sassy said, focused on the macaws again, “with most birds, the male gets the freedom. Just like with people.”

  Racquel didn’t like her bitter tone. “He has to bring home some worms now and then, doesn’t he?”

  “Bring home the bacon. Traditional hubby.”

  “Aren’t there birds where the wifey gets to bring home the bacon?” Odd, Racquel realized; he knew scads about feathers, but almost nothing about birds. There was an aphorism somewhere in that thought, like not seeing the forest for the trees.

  Sassy said in a low voice to the forest, “I think there’s one species somewhere in South America with the female brightly colored and the male sits on the nest.”

  The female macaw had taken a pose like a sculpture in blue lapis, proud-breasted, proud-winged, tail up and head thrown back so far that head and tail nearly touched.

  “But those two are colored alike,” said Sassy with a wistful n
ote in her voice. “And birds like that, like the Canada geese, hawks, swans—you can’t tell the difference between males and females, and they share everything. The nesting, sitting on the eggs, the feeding, everything. And they mate for life. They’re faithful.”

  Racquel blurted, “What the hell makes you think you’re missing a soul?” It seemed to him that she had more soul than most people.

  She gave him a startled look. “Well,” she said after a moment’s hesitation, “I’d forgotten that I really do like hats.”

  She did? That was a change of key. Of course, Racquel now realized, she couldn’t see herself in the various hats he had tried to put on her.

  “Oh!” he said.

  “And braids,” Sassy added.

  Well, those were serious matters to have forgotten, okay. But still—

  Racquel’s attention was diverted as the male macaw advanced on the poised female, his eyes shining like tiny silver dollars. “He’s getting ready to stick it in!” Racquel cried with enthusiasm as if he were Joe Husband watching a football game. Too late, he realized that he sounded a trifle crude.

  Sassy gave him an expressive look, very Jane Housewife, but said merely, “They’re not that much like people. Male birds don’t have a stick-it-in. They have cloacas.”

  “Huh?”

  “Cloacas. Kind of a vent. A hole. The only ones who have—you know—” She actually blushed. “Some waterfowl,” she murmured. “Ducks.”

  Racquel could barely conceive what she was trying to say. He cried, “Only ducks have dicks?”

  Sassy blushed harder. “Yes.”

  “But—why?”

  She gave him that look again and turned away without replying, standing up to turn her back on the mating macaws as well.

  For a timeless time, as they walked on, Sassy thought about something Racquel had asked: why did she think she was missing a soul, and not just a reflection? She had not known how to answer Racquel’s question; it was hard to describe the emptiness—not just the loss of Frederick, but a great loss made up of many small losses over the years. She had ended up explaining it to Racquel in terms she had thought he might understand—hats, hair. But there was more, far more. She vaguely remembered that she had once been a person who liked organza, eyelet, daisy lace, dotted swiss. Who had taken a pair of bell-bottomed blue jeans and put a scalloped flower-embroidered hem on them. Who had preferred filmy nighties to flannel ones. Who had wanted to have someone rub her temples when she had a headache and give her a backrub whether she had a backache or not and—and love her, all of her. For a moment she ached anew, remembering what it was to have that body-love in her. But she could not remember well enough to say it. These days she seldom even noticed that she had a body.