The Southern Cross

by Skip Horack

  Shannon stomped her foot. “That damn jukebox stole my dollar.”

  “Watch your mouth,” said Deb.

  Lately small things like this could sometimes make his niece go psychotic. Their Christmas had been a disaster. Deb hooked a finger in Shannon’s belt loop and tried to calm her. “You can listen to all the music you want in the car, sweetie.”

  “No,” said Shannon. “I already put my dollar in.”

  “I’ll give you another dollar,” said Colson.

  “No,” said Shannon again. “It ain’t fair.”

  “Not” said Colson. “It’s not fair.”

  Deb tugged her closer. “Please, baby. How about we just get going?”

  “No, no, no.” Shannon broke free and ran to the other side of the diner. She went into the bathroom and Colson heard the door lock, a metallic slap like a shotgun racking.

  “Fuck,” said Deb.

  She stood and went over to the bathroom. Colson watched as she whispered something through the door and after a moment it opened and Shannon let her in. The door closed again and then locked again. The waitress came for his order and Colson told her not yet. He thought about lighting a cigarette until he remembered the jukebox. He hated to waste music and so he walked over and kicked the machine hard on the side. Customers stared but the jukebox flashed and then it was working. Colson flipped quickly through the playlist, then punched the first of three songs that he thought might just sound good together.

  Visual of a Sparrow

  Five hundred seventy-three. Gladys had been so bored once that she’d counted them, every last one of the simple white trailers. Row after row in the dusty pasture. Renaissance Village, FEMA called that hopeless field.

  Buses left for the Wal-Mart every couple of hours, and in the beginning Gladys made the trip two or three times a day, something to do. She first met Mrs. Powell at the Wal-Mart; both of them were in the garden section, looking at cat’s-eye pansies. They talked about how this was the time of year for pansies—winter—about how much the tiny flowers love the cold, how quick they burn up when summer comes.

  Flower talk led to questions about Gladys’s circumstances, and her Ninth Ward nightmare earned her a weak cup of sympathy coffee at the snack bar, that and a cash-pay job offer. Mrs. Powell ran a small bed-and-breakfast in the pinewoods, could use someone to help out on the weekends.

  The next morning Gladys met her new boss at the entrance to Renaissance Village. She climbed into the old Mercedes and together they rode north to the Brittany House. That had been five months ago.

  A pair of domestic peacocks guarded the manicured grounds of the Brittany, and on Friday afternoon their alarm screams announced the arrival of the Atlanta doctor and his fiancée, the only two guests for the weekend. Gladys watched from the shadows as Mrs. Powell greeted them at the door. The doctor’s jeweled hands were a flash of gold as he ran them through his silver hair. He paused in the doorway, sizing up the interior of the house like a general approving good ground.

  Dr. Cooper was about the same age as Gladys, but the girl—she was at least two decades younger than them both, barely thirty, so far as Gladys could tell. She introduced herself as Megan, then clapped her thin hands together in delight as she stepped in from the February cold. Her skin had a carrot tinge, and stiletto heels peeked out from beneath her tailored jeans. Gladys listened to them click on the pine floor as Mrs. Powell led the couple up the stairs to their room.

  Gladys saw Dr. Cooper standing outside on the flagstone patio that overlooked the lake. He raised binoculars to his eyes, began studying a lone blue heron hunting in the distant shallows. Gladys slipped through the French doors. “That’s Muggy,” she said.

  Dr. Cooper looked up from his binoculars and gave a confused grin. “Excuse me?”

  “That heron you’re looking at,” said Gladys. “I call him Muggy because he’s cranky with the other birds. He flies off snorting if they crowd him too much.”

  “Oh.” Dr. Cooper laughed. “That’s wonderful, Miss Gladys. Ardea herodias. Fascinating birds.”

  Gladys shrugged.

  “Did you know that a great blue heron can float on the water just like a goose?”

  Gladys rubbed her bare arms for warmth. “Why would I know something like that?”

  “I’ve never seen it myself,” Dr. Cooper admitted. “But the books say they can. Even your Muggy.” He focused the binoculars on a distant hay field, then handed her the Nikons.

  Gladys peered through the lenses. “What am I looking for?”

  “See those white birds roosting in that big pine tree?”

  “Those are egrets,” said Gladys. “We have thousands of egrets.”

  “Right, Bubulcus ibis, very common now—but did you know that cattle egrets have only been in Louisiana for about fifty years?”

  Gladys shook her head, and the egrets were sent sliding from left to right in the frame and then back again. “Where’d they come from?”

  “Africa,” said Dr. Cooper. “Sometime late in the nineteenth century, they say a flock was caught in a storm and blown to South America. At least that’s what most bird folks think happened.” Gladys continued watching the preening birds; in the low branches, three of them seemed to be fighting. She passed the binoculars back. Dr. Cooper patted her on the arm, a teacher lecturing a child. “And now here they are,” he told her. “You see, Miss Gladys. Even the most common birds can be fascinating.”

  The glass doors opened behind them, and Dr. Cooper turned to greet Megan as she joined them on the patio. Her strawberry blond hair had been washed and blown out, and she wore flared ivory slacks, a wispy chiffon top. Something in Gladys ached to grab hold of that saffron blouse, to feel the strange and feathery crush of the fabric between her callused fingers.

  “Oh Lord.” Megan rolled her blue eyes and then bumped Dr. Cooper with her small shoulder. “Is Richard boring you with bird talk, Miss Gladys?”

  “No, not at all,” said Gladys. Then, since her job was to please all guests, she sly-winked at Megan and added, “It’s all very interesting.”

  Dr. Cooper laughed and draped his blazer around Megan, protecting her from the cold. “I probably am,” he said. “Can’t be helped, I guess.” He returned his binoculars to their patent leather case, then offered Megan his arm like a gentleman in the soaps. “You look beautiful,” he told her. “We should get going now if we want to make our reservation.”

  Gladys followed the couple into the house, then watched from the kitchen as they drove off down the long gravel driveway that led to the highway and town. When they were gone she turned and walked back out onto the patio. In the failing light she tried to remember the first time she ever saw a cattle egret. Growing up in the Delta—working Mississippi fields before her family’s big move to the city—there must have been a first time, had to have been. Still, for the life of her Gladys couldn’t remember not having those white birds around.

  Gladys awoke to the sound of men arguing outside her trailer. She watched through the blinds as Reverend Gray, her neighbor to the right, confronted two boys trying to steal his propane tank. They were young but full grown, ropy teenagers in white tanks and baggy jeans. They slouched through a sermon, then the bigger of the two said something rude. Reverend Gray slapped him hard across the face, and the boys went shuffling off into the night.

  It was very dark inside the trailer. Gladys knelt beside her bed and slipped a hand under the mattress. She held her breath until her fingers finally played across the stacked bills, then she glanced at the alarm clock glowing demon red in the corner. In a few hours that clock would be calling for her—telling her to shower, get dressed, go meet Mrs. Powell on the loose-rock shoulder of the highway. She pushed her money farther toward the wall and then lay back down in the small bed, closed her eyes, and fell asleep dreaming of African birds ambushed by a storm, an entire flock sent tumbling across time zones.

  Dr. Cooper took his morning coffee at the kitchen table. Gladys sat across f
rom him and listened as he explained that he was hoping to see a Henslow’s sparrow over the weekend, a dwindling species that wintered in what was left of the country’s longleaf-pine savannas.

  Gladys nodded and then brushed butter atop the last of her scratch biscuits. Dr. Cooper had a satellite map spread out across the lacquered-cypress table, and the space photo showed the refuge that bordered Mrs. Powell’s property. He told her that he planned to scout while Megan slept in, and so Gladys foil-wrapped three biscuits for him to take along in his daypack. She wished him luck in finding his rare bird as he walked out into the still-dark morning. He was wearing a tan jacket that had at least a dozen pockets. Gladys knew nothing of a Henslow’s, had never seen such a creature so far as she knew.

  By the second day after the storm, summer had settled back in. The sun beat down on the city and made tar-black shingles hot enough to blister skin. Gladys stood atop the roof of her sunk and crumbling home and watched a stream of debris float by: a doll’s head, some tires, a styrofoam cooler that she fished in with a stick. A forty-ounce bottle of Country Club lay inside the dry cooler. Gladys knew better but she was also very thirsty. She unscrewed the cap and began to drink.

  The beer was warm and stale and left Baptist Gladys spinning in the sun so that later, when the game warden saved her, she stumbled getting into his boat and fell hard against the others—friends and neighbors who caught her and told her that she would be okay now. As they picked their way back through the Lower Nine, the whine of the outboard set hungry dogs to barking. People hollered from here and there but the boat, already full, kept on.

  Somewhere along St. Claude they surprised a flock of wild ducks and sent them splashing for the sky. The game warden told Gladys that they were teal—greenwings—and she watched as they took flight. They circled her neighborhood once, twice, then left altogether to put down in some other distant corner of the flooded city.

  Megan appeared in the kitchen not long after Dr. Cooper had left. The peacocks crowed from their roost in the live oak, and Megan laughed as she told Gladys how much she loved the morning cry of peacocks. How they reminded her of a wonderful week she and Richard had spent on a spice plantation, guests of his partner’s family in some far-off place called Kerala.

  Her tinted hair was secured atop her head with a red plastic clip, and she wore satin warm-ups the color of Christmas tinsel. Gladys watched as the girl wet her lips with orange juice, then nibbled at the corner of a cathead biscuit. She was fascinated by this Megan. What could she be thinking about at that moment? What had her life been like as a child? When she made love to her doctor, was she a wild little thing?

  Megan returned to her room to shower at about the same time that Gladys heard the redbirds—the first birds—begin to sing in the twilight before dawn.

  For months Mrs. Powell had tried to bait Gladys, leaving fives, then tens, lying loose around the house. But Gladys knew better and had always resisted—she left the money folded neatly on the nearest table every damned time. Finally Mrs. Powell came to treat her with something like trust and would leave Gladys in charge so that she could meet her friends for bridge at the club in Baton Rouge. Gladys figured those card-club Saturdays, in command of that beautiful house, were the closest she would ever come to living like the princess her father had always insisted that she was.

  With her two guests fed and the kitchen cleaned, Gladys was now free until lunch. It was time for her morning walk. She changed from her housedress into blue jeans, then put on old tennis shoes and a heavy corduroy coat. Her canvas bag was in the hall closet. She filled a thermos with coffee and struck out.

  The nature trail led from behind the Brittany into the refuge, meandering through a soft forest of magnolia and willow before the woods opened up onto a vast savanna dotted with fire-scarred pines. Day was breaking, and a thin line of brilliant orange spread across the eastern horizon. Gladys watched as the sunrise was swallowed up by the aluminum sky—damp and cold and threatening rain—and was reminded of her long-dead blacksmith grandfather. Of the moment when he would drop iron, hammered even and glowing, into gray water to cool and to strengthen.

  At the edge of the savanna, beavers had dammed several streams that drained into the forest, and a small pond had formed. Gladys spread a worn blanket out over a patch of sandy soil hidden within a wax-myrtle thicket. Two beavers were still awake and working. Gladys sat and watched them dive alongside the dam, desperate to finish repairing some invisible breach.

  She was on her second mug of coffee when she spotted Megan walking along the south fork of the trail. The path ran beneath Gladys, then ended at a washout bank of the pond. Megan approached, and the beavers vanished beneath the surface before the girl ever even knew that they existed.

  Megan settled onto the trunk of a fallen tupelo, just a few feet from the bank, then started tracing sand circles with the toe of her hiking boot. Gladys crouched lower in the thicket. She had developed a servant’s sense of when people wanted their privacy and knew better than to disturb the girl. Besides, Gladys enjoyed studying her. The way she tossed pebbles into the beaver pond. The way she removed a colorful handkerchief from her ski jacket and unwrapped a cigarette lighter, a single secret joint. The way she could almost feel her worrying about Dr. Cooper as distant storm clouds commenced their slow roll across the savanna. The way she laughed out loud when the rain began to fall and sent her jogging back up the trail toward the house.

  Walking home, shivering beneath her raincoat, Gladys could still smell the linger of marijuana but noticed that—in a few low spots on the muddy trail, interspersed with the tracks of deer and feral hogs—Megan’s small footprints were already beginning to fill with water.

  “I found a field alive with Henslow’s,” said Dr. Cooper. He was sipping chamomile tea by the fireplace with Megan curled at his feet. She leaned against his leg, cupping her own mug with both hands as she listened to him. “They chirp, almost like an insect. I heard them all around me before the storm came.”

  Gladys was polishing a hammered-copper vase that Mrs. Powell had purchased in Mexico. “How many did you see?” she asked.

  Dr. Cooper laughed. “Not a single visual, Miss Gladys. They stuck to the ground cover, and I couldn’t flush the first one.”

  “The rain should let up in a few hours.” Gladys returned the vase to its place on the mantel. Dr. Cooper’s jacket of pockets hung dripping from a hook beneath it. “Maybe you could try again this afternoon.”

  “Yes” said Dr. Cooper. “We were discussing that very idea while you were making our tea” His fingers danced across his fiancée’s head. “Megan has even agreed to help me work the field. That’ll double my chances of kicking one up.”

  Megan smiled and leaned back as Dr. Cooper began stroking her hair. Her eyes were closed and she spoke without opening them. “Would you like to join us, Miss Gladys?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Would you like to come along?” Megan rolled her head along the contour of Dr. Cooper’s knee, then finally focused on Gladys. Last night the girl’s eyes had been blue; today they were hazel. “It might be your only chance to ever see one,” she said.

  “Absolutely,” said Dr. Cooper. “Please come along. I need all the troops I can muster.”

  Gladys watched the firelight play off the antique wine bottles embedded in the chimney. The day before her sister had called with another invitation to join them in their Houston apartment. More thrown-together charity for the never-married Gladys. “Storm or no storm,” Loretta had said, “Daddy didn’t get us out the fields to have you become some old bitch’s slave.”

  “If you really don’t mind,” Gladys told her guests. “I do think I’d like to tag along.”

  The field was just as Dr. Cooper had promised: alive with the cricket calls of sparrows. He spaced Gladys and Megan off on either side of him, and they moved as a line toward the bank of a narrow creek that ran through the flatwoods.

  They were armed with snapped boughs of p
ine, and Dr. Cooper ordered them to make noise as they lashed their way across the field of khaki winter-dried grass. He laughed and said they reminded him of low-caste beaters on a tiger hunt. Megan grinned and challenged the sparrows to show themselves, then Dr. Cooper slapped at her flat ass with his pine branch. The two of them soon fell into a conversation about the waitress from the night before, how right she had been about the trout amandine.

  Gladys had nothing to say. She tried calling for the sparrows to appear but felt silly and quieted.

  “Come on now,” said Dr. Cooper. “Help us out, Miss Gladys.”

  Since he was, after all, a guest of the Brittany, Gladys began to hum and then sing the only verses she could remember from one of her father’s songs, a song that he would sing in the picking fields.

  What good is sunshine when you are blue?

  When there is no one who cares for you?

  The birds are singing songs by the score,

  You just wonder who they’re singing for.

  I’ve got the blues,

  But I’m just too damn mean to cry.

  Gladys reached the last verse, then turned and realized that she had pushed far ahead of the line. Dr. Cooper and Megan had paused and were listening to her sing. Gladys stared back at them; she was embarrassed and wanted to go home now.

  “Don’t stop,” said Dr. Cooper. “In fact, we’re not moving another step until you’ve taught us both that song.”

  “Yes,” said Megan. “Please.”

  Before Gladys could refuse, the line collapsed in on itself and they huddled around her. Vapor trails of steam escaped from their three mouths to mingle and then disappear. Gladys whispered the verses of the old blues song a couple of times before they spread back out and began to sing, an off-key wall of music pushing across the field—and, Gladys supposed, forcing invisible sparrows against the creek bank.