by Robert Elmer
He snapped the cell phone shut and limped back to the restaurant. Now his finger was bleeding from the broken glass. Wasn’t that a badge of honor? And he’d totally forgotten what Merit had sent him out there to fetch in the first place. Good thing it wasn’t…
He paused for a moment in front of the entrance to the restaurant and held out his hand to feel the first drops of rain. He imagined what it would take to duct tape a garbage bag in place over the window to keep the inside of the car from getting soaked.
“Perfect,” he mumbled. “Just perfect.”
five
I can’t say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
DANIEL BOONE
Strange, the snow.
Not so strange for the Idaho panhandle, just strange for April. Even yellow-and-black-striped Townsend’s warblers, the males normally twittering this time of year, just huddled in the budding aspen branches and stared quietly at the blanket of wet white as it continued to fall.
The snow was good for birdwatchers like Stephanie, who crouched behind an old fir and adjusted the eyepieces on her field binoculars. She focused on the closest Dendroica townsendi, the first of the season. She imagined the chilly little creature thinking perhaps it had taken the wrong turn on its way back from wintering in Mexico. Was this the right lake? the right state? Or maybe he was questioning his internal calendar.
“No, little guy,” she whispered, “you’re in the right place.”
The warbler puffed up his feathers, shook his shoulders, and eyed her suspiciously.
Easy for her to say, with her toasty Land’s End parka and gloves and a view of the southern lake that never failed to quicken her pulse, no matter how many times she saw it. Across the water, Bernard Peak burst from the rocky east shore and jutted another thousand feet into dusky, lowlying clouds laden with the unexpected snow. If the birds weren’t inclined to sing a praise song, perhaps she would—or the rocks might.
The nice part about the snow, though, was how it muffled sound in the woods and made Stephanie feel like the only person alive for miles. After all, Kokanee Cove, population 501 in the off-season, lay at the head of the inlet, perhaps a mile behind her, still dozing on a Saturday morning under a comfy blanket of wood smoke. Few campers would have shown up yet at the adjacent state park this year, and no one else was silly enough to be out in the woods tramping around in a late spring blizzard.
“Well, no one’s ever called me sensible,” she told the warbler.
And just to prove it, she cinched up the hood of her parka and turned her head up toward the slate-gray sky, opening her mouth wide and catching the biggest flakes on her tongue. In the process, she bumped into a low-hanging fir branch, which dumped a load of wet snow on her head.
“Ack! Enough ofthat.” She shook out her long, dark hair and kept walking. Good thing no one but the birds was watching, and perhaps the occasional deer if she was patient enough to wait for them to show. Following their tracks through the brush brought her to a hint of crumbling asphalt covered with a layer of moss and meadow grass—all that was left of the old Navy training base that had occupied this remote, unlikely site back in the 1940s.
Well, not quite all. She passed the foundation of what had once been an officers home and tried to imagine the men and women who might have lived here. Kids playing in the yard, surrounded by hundreds of acres of north Idaho woods and tens of thousands of boot camp recruits. In the distance, the kids would hear the cadence of young men, shouting as they marched, preparing for combat duty on both oceans, some unknowingly living the last months of their young lives.
“Whoa. That’s a morbid thought,” Stephanie said out loud. She looked up at a skinny crow eyeing her from its perch on a dead alder, keeping his own noisy cadence with unseen pals. She’d already seen plenty of crows on her walk this morning, dutifully checking Corvus brachyrhynchos off her Kootenai County Bird List. “But you wouldn’t know anything about morbid, would you? And please don’t say nevermore,’ even if you aren’t a raven.”
The crow shook its head obligingly and flew off toward another chorus of squawks.
For the first time on her morning walk, Stephanie shivered. Why did she always walk down this crumbled trail from the state park and down to the crumbled Kokanee Cove resort? Just to feel more depressed?
Who me? Depressed? She did her best to avoid the thought dogging her with each step. And though she slowed as the trail wound down the hill to the lake, she still lost her footing and sat down—hard—in the slush.
“Oh!” This wasn’t supposed to be a sledding hill, though she made it one as she slid several feet. Finally, she found enough traction on a granite outcropping that she could stand back up. And once again, she was glad no one was watching.
Except You, Lord, she prayed, brushing off the slush and taking in the sight of the little resort below. Ex-resort, actually. The store and snack bar, where she had worked summers as a teenager, balanced off-kilter on its foundation of floating logs. It could use a coat of paint, for starters. The icy lake waters had not yet claimed it, but that would change before long if someone didn’t do something.
Adjoining docks had shed half their planking, which seemed to suit a pair of Bucephala clangula just fine. Stephanie liked the cute little Goldeneye ducks, with their high foreheads and white breasts. When she got too close, though, they skittered off across the mirror-gray waters of Kokanee Cove, then flapped their wings and took off. They flew low across the fjord-like inlet, keeping a close but informal formation as they looped north for a fly-by of north-shore vacation cabins, then corrected back toward the blurred but still jagged outline of Bernard Peak.
The old resort hadn’t looked like much when she’d worked there a few years back, but it had looked better than it did now. The boathouse at the far end of the floating docks looked almost as bad as the little log caretaker’s cabin just up on shore. She crossed her arms and sighed.
It had been nice, once. Everyone had their own version of the story, but no one had ever really explained to her why it had sat empty for the past couple of years or how the previous owners had run out of money. Mr. Mooney at the Kokanee Cove Mercantile said they got sick and moved to Central America to stay warm. Stephanie thought they should have just tried Tucson like all the other snowbirds around here. Better to sit in a trailer park in the middle of the desert and play cards all day. She didn’t mean to grump on the snowbirds. There was nothing wrong with heading south in November. Her warblers did it every year too.
Looking at this old resort was a lot like standing at the hospital bedside of a person you cared about, praying they might get better. Not that she had any personal experience in hospital ministry. The closest she could come was when her grandma Betty died when Stephanie was twelve, after they went to see her in the rest home. But she could imagine how it might feel. She imagined a lot of things she hadn’t actually experienced.
But what did she expect? Kids from Kokanee Cove didn’t get out much, except the ones who graduated from nearby Timberlake High and left the next day to join the Navy. And then there were the girls who got married when they were eighteen, had babies a few months later, and spent their lives in mobile homes, changing diapers. Wonderful.
Sorry. She hadn’t meant that last snide remark, even if she’d only thought it.
But really, what did she expect? Here she was, barely twenty, homeschooled her whole life, even before it was cool to be homeschooled. She’d never made many friends around Kokanee Cove, except perhaps some of the older people. Few ever had a chance to get to know the bookish little girl who told people she wanted to be an ornithologist and who had grown into the bookish young woman who didn’t tell people much of anything. She still remembered the guy who kept a cabin cruiser at the resort, though, the one who first called her Bird Girl.
“Bird Girl!” She said it out loud for the benefit of a Turdus migratorius perched on the windowsill of the resort cabin, staring menacingly at his own reflection
. “You hear that, robin?”
The robin didn’t care, just pecked at the window as the tears ran down Stephanies cheeks. She swiped at them with her glove. What had brought this on? Her parents were happy enough that the Bird Girl still lived at home with a house full of books and Sandra, her mother’s parakeet.
Of course she loved her parents, even with all their…well, everyone had quirks. It was just that…
“I give up,” she told God, but it was only a formality. He knew and she knew she’d given up a long time ago. If Kokanee Cove were big enough to support a newspaper, she could just imagine how the headline might read: LOCAL GIRL STAYS HOME, STILL WATCHING BIRDS.
Still home, here in this achingly beautiful, hauntingly quiet, lovely, lonely place, where she could live the rest of her life like the old buildings of the resort, perched by the lake she loved and hated at the same time, crumbling and decayed.
This isn’t all you have for me, is it, God?
She waited for the answer but only heard the breeze off the lake whistling through the tops of the firs and a loose shingle flapping on the roof of the boathouse below. She didn’t think that was the “still, small voice.” Actually, she wasn’t sure she even wanted to hear the answer, though she still dared to ask the question.
Dad would have an opinion about still, small voices, but that was his job as the pastor of Kokanee Cove Bible Chapel, where he’d preached for the past twenty years—as long as she could remember. Pastor Bud. He’d already given her all the answers he knew. Most ended with a Scripture verse, but what was wrong with that?
Nothing.
But still she listened, until her ears picked out a faint fluttering, a whimpering cry.
What?
She thought it might be coming from the owl’s nest behind the cabin, but it didn’t sound like an owl. She started slowly toward the noise, now louder, now more of a chirping sound—not an owl, but close. She spied movement behind the cabin in the shadow of a fir tree, weak and desperate in a pile of branches and needles, probably a nestling out for its first flight, maybe hurt.
“Look at that.”
The young kestrel fluttered about on its side, its blue gray wing feathers askew and a few clusters of down still clinging to its brand-new feathers. Falco sparverius, with a wingspan of fifty-one to sixty-one centimeters, only something was clearly wrong with this fellows wingspan. This runt of the litter had fallen or tried to fly out of the nest and had been left to die.
“You’re hurt,” she told it. “Don’t move.”
The young bird looked up long enough to panic. It tried to flutter away but only managed to turn in awkward circles with its one good wing. If she was going to do something, it would have to be fast—and now.
“Stop!” she commanded. The bird took that as encouragement to flutter its wing even more desperately, though it hardly worked as it should.
Meanwhile, the bird’s would-be rescuer stripped off her parka and gave pursuit.
“You can’t do this!” she told the bird, but he could, and he did. He flopped around like the bird her father had hit years ago on Highway 54, plastering feathers all over the front grille of their Explorer and reducing Stephanie and her mother to tears. But this little bird would not end up as road kill.
Stephanie dove with the parka stretched out in front ofher like a net and missed. While she regrouped, the young kestrel fluttered down the hill toward the old resort’s gravel beach, screeching thewhole way.
Kree-kree-kree!
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she whispered, advancing more slowly this time and crouching nearly down to her knees. The injured kestrel eyed her warily, his little chest heaving in fright. She would have to get this over with quickly. “Just…sit…still!”
This time her aim was better and a moment later, her parka came alive, dancing across the beach, draped over the animated young bird. Stephanie caught up to the animal and scooped him up in her arms.
“Settle down,” she cooed in her best mother kestrel imitation. Under her firm grip, the bird had little choice and settled down for the double-time hike back to town and the Mercantile. Stephanie breathed a quick word of thanks that the kestrel wasn’t very big, the way a red-tailed hawk or an osprey might have been, and forty minutes later she backed through the Mercantile’s door, bird bundle in hand. The door’s jingle bells nearly jangled off the string.
“Mr. Mooney!” Stephanie called when she didn’t see anyone behind the counter.
No one answered.
“Hello?”
She checked down the aisle with the fishing lures, canned soups, and local maps. No Mr. Mooney, which meant he was probably out back with the animals. She hurried through the compact store past the milk and soda pop cooler and pushed past the back door marked Kokanee Cove Animal Rescue.
It wasn’t much by city standards. Two rows of small cages against one wall, like a pet store, and a couple of larger pens in the back. A tiny bald man crouched at the far cage, refilling a water dish for a raccoon with a bandaged head.
“Got something for you, Mr. Mooney,” Stephanie called.
“Huh?” The little man looked up at her with wide eyes, then smiled and dipped his shoulders. “Steph! I didn’t hear you.”
“Sorry.” She explained how she’d found the young bird.
“Kestrel, eh?” Mr. Mooney took a look as they carefully unwrapped the bird. Stephanie held the head as he felt the bird’s wings and talons. “Wing’s broken, probably. We’ll give him some time here, see if we can get him healed up, then set him loose before he gets too used to us. Where’d you say you found him?”
He nodded as she explained.
“The resort, huh? Heard an out-of-town developer is going to buy the place, turn it into some condos with a casino.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Stephanie looked around the back room. A little coyote pup peeked out at her from one of the cages.
“You know, people coming in the store. The Kokanee Cove grapevine.”
“Right.” She groaned. That was the main mode of communication around here. No newspaper and no radio, except for out-of-town stations. She’d grown up around the grapevine.
“Anyway, good thing you found him.” Mr. Mooney gave her a wink as he hoisted their newest patient into a holding cage.
“Even though officially I’m not the one with the federal raptor permit?”
“If you want to get technical about it. But from the look of this guy, I don’t think he would’ve lasted too long out there in the snow. You did good, Miss Bird Woman.”
Bird Woman. Stephanie nodded. Better than Bird Girl, for sure. And coming from Foster Mooney, it didn’t sound half bad.
But…a casino?
six
And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
One, two…”
Michael counted lug nuts as he replaced another customer’s tires. This rig carried four of WallyTire Tire Center’s most expensive all-season rubber, which put a little more ka-ching in Wallys cash drawer. No problem with that, and Michael didn’t mind the work so much. It sure beat working on Humvees in…
Don’t go there. He cut off the memory before it had a chance to splash mud on his day.
Just put your head down and work, he ordered himself. Don’t look back, and don’t think back. Tighten another wheel down, go on to the next. Tighten one more…
“Sullivan!” Marilyn the cashier’s voice echoed through the door. “Phone call for you!”
“Got it.” Michael wiped his hands on a rag and trotted over to the wall phone. A moment later his mother apologized for calling him at work.
“Not a problem, Mom. Really. What’s up?”
Her voice sounded different, like she’d been crying or something, but he wasn’t going to embarrass her by mentioning it.
“I just wanted to give you a heads-up. Your father is probably going to be calling you, and—”
“Oh yeah? What about?”
She paused, sort of catching her breath. “Actually I promised I’d let him be the first to tell you.”
“Oh. Sounds like a big secret or something.”
“No, no. Nothing like that. I just want you to have an open mind when he talks to you. You know what I mean?”
“You mean ‘open mind,’ like I should say ‘great idea no matter what he lays on me? You sure you can’t tell me what this is all about?”
Another pause. “It’s just that…well, okay. Your father and I got a call today, and—”
Good thing Michael looked around the work bay just then.
“Gotta go!” he interrupted. “Jason’s about to…”
…dump a whole stack of bright green plastic antifreeze jugs, piled care-hilly into a seven-foot pyramid. Michael hung up the phone and dove for the nearest corner, just in time to keep the whole display from tumbling to the floor.
“Whoa.” Jason’s eyes widened as he stepped back from the near disaster. “Good catch, dude.”
“You take them from the top.” Michael straightened up and demonstrated. “Like this, see?”
“I knew that.” Jason was about Michael’s age, graduated from the same high school, but maybe not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. “You built this thing, huh?”
Michael nodded as he straightened everything back up. No harm done. Nothing to do but return to tightening lug nuts on the tire he’d been working on.
“Hey, Mike!”
Michael sighed and glanced over his shoulder. Please, no more dumb questions about what it was like over there, and did he shoot anybody, or did he meet any Iraqi women.
“Did Wally ever tell you we get a fifteen-minute break every two hours?” Jason asked.
“He told me.” Michael nodded and moved to grab the next wheel—the one Jason had leaned his foot on.
“So how come you never take it? Dude, you’ve only been here two weeks, and you’re already making me look bad.”