The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “You’re slower this year,” she said, a warning, and then left to count ticket receipts.

  Cluck put his hands in his pockets and let a long breath out. “No, I’m not,” he said when she’d gotten far enough not to hear him. “I just hate this town.”

  Más vale pájaro en mano que ciento volando.

  A bird in the hand is worth a hundred flying.

  Lace didn’t have to ask why her family had set out for Almendro so early. Abuela wanted to make sure the Corbeaus couldn’t steal the lakeside.

  The Corbeaus had held their own shows there twenty years ago, forcing the Palomas to set up along the river. But after the night the water rose up onto the shore and swallowed the Corbeaus’ favorite trees, the Palomas claimed the lake. Those trees, now on the lake floor, were the only ones near the water strong enough to hold the Corbeaus’ bodies and wings. But Abuela still worried that their magia negra could make birches and young magnolias grow big as sycamores.

  “Those cuervos should never have taken the lake for themselves when we’re the ones who need the water,” Abuela said. “And now we’ll keep it. I don’t care if it means we come here in February.”

  “We’re gonna freeze our asses,” Alexia whispered as the mermaids wriggled into their tails at the river’s edge.

  But none of them could blame Abuela. This was the town where the Palomas and the Corbeaus always crossed paths. Sometimes, in other counties, they overlapped for a couple of days, the end of one family’s run coming up against the start of the other’s. But Almendro was their battleground, even before that night at the lake twenty years ago. And if one family didn’t show, the other won by default.

  Lace and her cousins slid down the bank, the heat fading with the light. The water felt cold as the first minute of their motel showers. Their skin puckered into gooseflesh. They held their grumbling under their tongues, but their grandmother still sensed it.

  “The spring in Weeki Wachee was colder than this,” Abuela said. “Seventy-two degrees.”

  A shiver of excitement crossed Lace’s escamas whenever Abuela talked about Weeki Wachee. In that little spring-fed town, Abuela had performed with a dozen other women in ruched elastane. Playing to the aquarium glass built into the side of the spring, they combed their hair with carved conch shells, chased each other’s spangled tails, kissed sea turtles. They smiled underwater without making bubbles, something Lace practiced in every motel pool from Magalia to Lake Isabella.

  In a little more than a year, she’d be there, sharing the spring with wild manatees, swimming in the town that made her grandmother a famous beauty.

  The Paloma sirenas weren’t Weeki Wachee mermaids. They didn’t perform in front of plate glass. They were less like circus girls and more like the world’s tallest thermometer (134 feet, for the record high in Baker, California), mechanical dinosaurs made out of scrapped car parts and farm equipment (Lace and Martha snuck off to see them in Cabazon), or the world’s largest concrete lemon (ten feet long, six feet wide, five miles outside El Cajon).

  But the real tourist trap was the Corbeaus’ show. Lace had never seen it herself, but from what Justin told her, all the Corbeaus did was climb trees with wings on their backs. At least the Paloma mermaids were quick, darting through the water, dancing in the drowned forest. Vanishing and reappearing.

  “They want to work to see you,” Abuela reminded them. “Don’t start la danza too early. You let them find you first. They find you, they feel smart.”

  “Half of them are here for a festival about a berry,” Lace said as she fixed Martha’s smudged lipstick. “How smart can they be?”

  Abuela stood over Lace, her shadow great as a jacaranda tree. “You make them feel smart. You make them feel special, or you’re not doing your work. ¿Entiendes?” She looked around at Lace’s cousins. “All of you. You understand?”

  “Sí, Abuela,” they murmured.

  Abuela turned back to Lace. “¿Entiendes?”

  Lace did not round her shoulders the way Martha or Reyna did when Abuela looked at them. She kept her back straight.

  “Sí, Abuela,” Lace said, barely parting her teeth. Always Abuela, never Abuelita.

  Emilia—Abuela called her la sirena aguamarina—leaned toward Lace. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “That’s a good sign. The day she starts calling you fat and saying your poses are sloppy is the day she’s decided you’re one of us.”

  Emilia would know. Her hair glittered with strands of paillettes and river pearls that marked her as a lead mermaid. She swam in last, perched in the center of those sunken trees, posed for tourists. But when she first joined, it was months before Abuela even let her choose her own tail, a blue-green like Colorado turquoise.

  They all wore tails bright as tissue paper flowers. Butter yellow. Aqua and teal. The orange of cherry brandy roses. The flick of their fins looked like hard candy skipping across the lake.

  Lace’s own, pink as a grapefruit, branded her as the youngest, in her first season. Same with her hair, loose, no decorations. At the end of this season she’d earn a gold-painted shell or a strand of beads. Then another every season after. When the light hit Martha’s wet hair, sequins shimmered like constellations. Reyna and Leti wore clusters of shells at their hairlines. Her older cousins had so many strands clipped in that their hair looked made of paillettes.

  They used those same plastic coins, sheer as beach glass, to cover their birthmarks. Their escamas were not some spectacle to be displayed in the show. Apanchanej, the river goddess who had blessed them with their love for water, had given them these marks, and they were not to flaunt them. Lace had barely gotten the high school equivalency all Paloma girls had to earn to join the show when Abuela filled her hands with paillettes and told her, “I don’t care if you have three GEDs. You cover your escamas, or you don’t swim.” So every sirena did, even though the waterproof glue made their skin itch.

  Lace touched up her cousins’ cream eye color, fixed the pins in their hair, and then slipped into her own tail.

  “Don’t let the water keep you, la sirena rosa,” Tía Lora whispered.

  The sun turned the trees to fire and gold, and Abuela called them to their places. Lace’s uncles sold their aguas frescas to the audience at the lakeside. Mothers charged their camera flashes. Fathers held video recorders, speaking the year and month and panning across the lake. Children held up plastic binoculars, seesawing the focus bars. Couples soaked up the light off the water and the fever of looking for mermaids.

  The stretch of river Lace’s grandmother had her swimming from ran through deep woods, the edge of where the Corbeaus would set up their show.

  “But you are a good girl,” her grandmother said. “So you will not go into the woods.” A statement and a warning. ¿Sí, mija? ¿Verdad?

  Lace clutched an algae-slick rock and listened for the hollow whistle of her uncles’ zampoñas. To start the show, three of them blew into the long pipes. The arundo reed gave back clean, full sounds. Those thin walls meant louder notes, but only a few of her uncles knew how to hold them without snapping the pipes.

  “Los turistas are gullible, huh?” they said as they warmed up the zampoñas. “They think we can call mermaids with these things.”

  But it added to the show’s mystery, one man, silent and sun-weathered enough to look wise, standing on a near bank, two others in the trees across the lake, where the audience could spot them. All three played those wooden pipes, fastened with strips of cane and braided bands, the notes long and steady as their breaths.

  Lace kept listening for the deep call of the arundo wood. Tangled river roots gave the air the scent of cool earth. It mixed with the tart fruit of the aguas frescas.

  She took the deep breaths she’d need to stay under. The tail was heavy, and if she didn’t have the air to kick against it, it pulled her down.

  A few low trees shivered. A handful of night birds scattered. Lace crossed herself, like her mother told her, to keep away feathers.

/>   The silhouettes of branches trembled in the fading light.

  “Hello?” Lace called out, but the wind choked the sound.

  She ducked behind a rock, ready to dive into the current. She’d never been quick on her feet, but she could swim away so fast anyone would think she was a trick of the light, the flicker of a candle in a glass jar. Half her job was disappearing.

  The branches parted, and a pair of enormous wings emerged from the woods. Their shape stood black against the sky. They loomed over the bank. A few more steps, and their shadow would find Lace. If the wearer brought them down, they could crush her. The Corbeaus’ magia negra would harden them into flint.

  The feathers vibrated with all the evil that family carried. These crows had left Lora Paloma nothing. There were reasons a flock of crows was called a murder.

  Lace waited for the figure to click his back teeth like the rattle of a comb call. If she let him, he’d get those teeth into her, his bite sharp as a beak.

  The water grew colder against Lace’s back. She peered around the rock, looking for the frame of a Corbeau man big enough to make the trees shrink away from him.

  Her breasts stung from the chill. The current pulled at her hair. She’d only ever seen pictures of the Corbeaus’ wings, all those feathers fastened to arched wire. They were wide as a hawk’s span, so tall she wondered how the wind didn’t tip them.

  They twitched on the back of their wearer.

  Lace squinted into the dark, making out the body attached to these wings.

  It wasn’t a man, but a woman, smaller than the shortest of Lace’s cousins. How did she stand up against wings that size?

  She stumbled, lost or drunk. Her feet grazed where Lace had hidden her dress in the undergrowth.

  The woman tripped on the underbrush, and her hand bumped her lips. A smudge of red-orange came off on her thumb and forefinger.

  She pinched her fingers, making the imprint of her mouth move. She laughed at her own hand.

  Then she noticed Lace.

  She turned her head and took in the pink of Lace’s tail, the matching cream eye shadow, the plum-red lipstick.

  The woman’s stained fingers froze in the air, a tethered balloon.

  “Ah, ouais?” she asked, as though Lace had said something.

  Her hair was cut to her chin, with thick bangs, like the girls in Martha’s old postcards. By the light of the candles Lace’s father left burning in glass jars, it looked orange like flowering quince. Her crown of flowers and leaves reminded Lace of fruit topping a tarta.

  She was iced as a cake, her eye shadow the mauve of new lilacs. Painted wings spread from the bridge of her nose across her eyelids and temples. Rhinestones glinted at the corners of her eyes. The blue and bronze peacock feathers on her back rippled like wheat. Not the black ones Lace and her mother kept finding. Those, her cousins swore, grew from their heads like hair, another mark of el Diablo.

  Lace’s fingers dug into the rock. She and this woman could tear each other’s hair out. Lace could scratch at those feathers. The woman could wade into the river and shred the soft fabric trailing from Lace’s fin.

  Lace could take off her costume top and swing it at the woman. The scallop shells and fake pearls would leave her lip bloody.

  She didn’t.

  If the woman pulled a wire loose from her wings, she could put Lace’s eye out.

  She didn’t.

  Lace slid down into the water.

  The woman backed toward the woods until the tree shadows swallowed her whole.

  On ne marie pas les poules avec les renards.

  One does not wed hens with foxes.

  They didn’t want money. If they did, they would’ve gone for his wallet as soon as they’d gotten him on the ground and then just left him outside the liquor store.

  In the dark, he could only tell them apart by size. The biggest one. Another a little shorter, quick enough to get him in the stomach before he could tense. The third a couple of years and a few inches behind them both.

  “You don’t talk, chucho?” the biggest one asked. He hadn’t hit him for a couple minutes. He let the other two get the practice.

  The smallest of the three got Cluck in the jaw. He hit the hardest. More to prove.

  The salt taste thickened inside Cluck’s cheek.

  “You speak English, chucho?” The quick one kicked him in the shoulder.

  Pain spread down Cluck’s arm. Letting them get him on the ground was his first mistake. He knew that now. But it always worked with Dax. Once Dax got him down, Cluck wasn’t fun anymore. Better not to fight back.

  This was about territory. These guys didn’t like him in their part of town after dark. He’d figured if he went slack, they’d know he’d gotten the message.

  Next time, he’d just walk the extra half-mile to the grocery store.

  “¿Hablas español?” the quick one asked.

  It wasn’t the first time Cluck had gotten mistaken for something he wasn’t. Women often asked him for directions in Spanish. His mother said it was his Manouche blood. His whole family had it, but in him it came through like a stain spreading. It made him darker than anyone in his family except his grandfather. It streaked red the feathers that grew in with his hair, made him le petit démon to his mother.

  “You don’t speak none of them, chucho?” the smallest one asked.

  Cluck tongued the blood on his lip.

  The oldest one grabbed his shirt. “Talk, chucho.”

  The cornflower came unpinned from Cluck’s vest, and the blue-violet bloom tumbled to the dirt. He still didn’t look up.

  The oldest one shook him. “Talk.”

  Cluck’s shirt collar came off in his hand, and he fell back to the ground.

  The oldest one’s lip curled up. He’d probably never heard of a detachable collar. Cluck wouldn’t have either if his grandfather hadn’t worn them when he was his age. The buttonholes had grown soft over the last half a century. The collars came off more easily than they once did.

  “Used to be very fashionable,” Cluck said. “The mark of a gentleman.”

  The oldest one hit him in the temple. The force spun through his head. He felt his brain whipping up like one of his aunts’ meringues. Beat to stiff peaks. Just add sugar.

  Something about Cluck always rubbed somebody the wrong way. If it wasn’t his clothes, it was his left hand. These three hadn’t noticed it yet. Too dark. The light from the liquor store barely reached them. The ring of red-orange stopped just short of the ground where Cluck braced his hands.

  A shadow broke the neon. The shape of a girl, hands on her hips. She set her shoe down a few inches from the fallen cornflower.

  Cluck looked up. The red-orange caught one side of her face and body. It lit up the hem of her skirt and one sleeve of her jean jacket. It brightened her lipstick to the color of pincushion plants, and streaked her hair. Black or brown, he couldn’t tell. She had on a thin scarf tied like a headband, the tails of the bow trailing on her shoulder.

  She cleared her throat.

  All three of them looked up. The bigger one dropped Cluck’s collar.

  The girl tilted her head toward the road. The three of them backed away, like Cluck was something they’d been caught breaking.

  “You gonna say anything?” the youngest one asked as he passed her.

  “Still thinking about it,” she said.

  She held out her hand to Cluck. He hesitated. She wasn’t as little as Eugenie or Georgette, but he was still more likely to pull her down than she was to get him on his feet.

  The muscles in his left hand twitched. He kept it still. He never could talk his body into believing it was right-handed.

  She grabbed him just above his elbow and pulled him to standing. The force of her surprised him, her small hands stronger than he expected. He stumbled, stopping himself from falling forward.

  “You got an arm on you,” he said. “Well, two of them.”

  “I do a lot of swimming.” />
  “Around here?” He brushed off his hands on the front of his pants. “I don’t recommend it. Not with the colanders.”

  She stared at him, her lips a little parted.

  He picked up his collar, dusted it off. “The roots of the trees growing in the river tangle together, form these big strainers.”

  “I know what a colander is,” she said.

  “Of course you do.” Anyone who lived around here did. He buttoned his collar back on his shirt. “Do you always have that effect on men?”

  “I know their mother.”

  He blew the dirt off the cornflower and pinned it back onto his vest. “Same sewing circle?”

  “Something like that,” she said. “You could’ve fought back, you know.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You take out the biggest one first. Do you have any brothers?”

  “Just one.” He folded his collar down. “He’s the biggest alright.”

  He straightened up, collar and cornflower and the rest of him all put back in place. He had about six or seven inches on this girl, her body small but not willowy. There was enough on her that she seemed soft instead of fragile like the thinnest and shortest of his cousins.

  He wished he hadn’t noticed. Noticing came with the thought of touching her, and a sureness that she would not break under his hands.

  “What’s your name?” Cluck asked.

  “None of your business,” she said.

  “How’s that look frosted on a birthday cake?”

  She laughed, but didn’t want to. The corners of her eyes fought it.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asked.

  “You first.”

  “My family needed milk.”

  “You couldn’t have gotten it in the morning?”

  “They get up early.”

  “First shift at the plant?” she asked.

  The plant. Two words, and Cluck’s tongue tasted dry and bitter as the charcoal off burnt toast. The plant, where his grandfather once worked as a safety engineer, making sure everything ran clean. He oversaw the safety measures, implemented new ones. That was before the plant let him go, all because of what the Palomas did.