The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  “I thought you left me,” he said, leaning up against the wall. “You offered me your fruit then ran away.”

  “Um,” Alice said, attempting to sidle around him in the narrow hallway. “I didn’t offer you anything.”

  “You were seducing me from across the fire all night,” he said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

  “I was just spacing out,” Alice said, for some reason still bound by the tight boundaries of a politeness that had been disciplined into her with each lesson in Sunday school, each prayer before a meal. She felt roped by the confines of graciousness and courtesy when all she wanted to do was run.

  “What you need is to loosen up,” the man said, offering her white powder from a teeny round jar, heaping the powder into the spoon hanging from his neck.

  “No, thank you.”

  He snorted the powder himself, then pinned her to the wall and kissed her in a sort of vicious way. She squirmed, but he held her by the shoulders, thrusting himself against her, holding her captive against the wall. She had never felt or seen an actual penis, but an image of what was grinding against her flew into her head like some toothy, demonic creature escaped from a black hole.

  “No.” She managed to get her mouth away from his for a moment. “No, no, no.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the man said, pulling her by the shoulders into the bedroom with a pile of coats on the bed. “Don’t be so disagreeable, honey.” He threw her down into the coats and closed the door behind him. She felt her ankle twist again in pain.

  “I have to go,” she said trying to get up out of the coats. “I don’t want to.” To her own ears she sounded like a toddler.

  Then, as if she were moving three times slower than the man, he was on her, his pants were down and her skirt up, and a new pain was ripping through her middle, far stronger than the throbbing in her ankle. The man was inside her and grunting like he had been while eating the strawberries, pinning her shoulders down but with his head turned up toward the heavens, as if to close his eyes against his own sin. She tried to make a noise, but only a little hiss of an exhale like a deflating tire came out. The man put his hand over her mouth, his other forearm across her throat pressing down. Still he refused to look at her and her wide, horrified eyes. Her mouth covered, Alice looked for something to focus on beyond what was happening. Her eyes settled on a large spider in the corner of the room, making its way from one wall to another, pausing briefly in the corner as if to watch.

  He got up quickly, pulled his pants back up, and said, “Thanks, doll.” As though she had given him something willingly.

  He left the room and Alice buried herself in the coats, burrowing deeper like an unweaned kitten trying to hide, to find the smallest, darkest place she could. She wanted to cry huge, loud tears into the fibers of the partygoers’, coats, but nothing came out. She rolled and punched the coats with quiet fists. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She looked again for the spider, as though its witness mattered somehow, but it was gone. She stamped each and every coat with her fist. What had she done wrong? Clearly she had done something wrong. She wished she could rewind the evening and change every moment. She needed to restitch, to sow time into neat, orderly, understandable rows.

  After what might have been minutes or hours lying there, Alice extracted herself from the coats and pulled up her underwear. Outside in a tree on the dark side of the house, a western screech owl made its call like a bouncing ball. It sounded to Alice like the creature was mocking her with its laugh. Ha-ha-haha-hahahaha. There were two bright streaks of red on her thighs like someone had rubbed strawberries on them. She felt sick and ran downstairs and out into the darkness where she threw up all the delicious fruit, the beer, everything she could, into the grass. She vowed she would never touch a beer or a strawberry again, as long as she lived, and walked back toward the light of the fire, trying not to limp.

  Back at the fir, Sal asked her if she was okay, putting her arm around Alice’s broad, but somehow very fragile, shoulders.

  “You were limping,” Sal said.

  “I just twisted my ankle is all,” Alice lied.

  “Can I help you?”

  “No.”

  She stared into the fire feeling emptied and knew that she would never be able to tell Sal any of it, that she loved her too much, that the blond man in moccasins had raped her. She felt simply empty. The man with the tiny spoon was nowhere in sight and Alice understood somewhere deep inside that she would probably never see him again. And then, as quickly as a rain cloud covers the sky, the atmosphere of the party turned chaotic. There was a sort of running around of headless chickens, as it were. Everyone was looking for answers to a question they didn’t understand.

  “Where’d Donnie go?” Alice heard an unfamiliar man say from across the fire. “Son of a bitch owed me a pound of grass,” he mumbled, getting up to refill his cup.

  “Don’t invite that dealer junkie over here again,” Sal’s dad Charles said from across the fire. “He’s not welcome here, and you know it, John.”

  “He owed me a pound of grass, man. Relax, Mao.”

  “Calling a Korean man Mao is not funny in any way, man. And your tone is not conducive to open communication, John.”

  “And your tone sounds like an old dictator,” John said, slurring his words and tossing a spray beer from his cup. “King Charles the communisss dictator is not happy?”

  “Somebody take John to lie down?” Charles asked the crowd of onlookers.

  Drunken John was escorted to the house by Kenneth-the-Jesus substitute to sleep off his drink. The rest of the party continued, feebly trying to shake off the chaos. A woman came over and comforted Sal by putting her arm around her.

  “John didn’t mean it,” she whispered. “Your dad is no dictator.” She whispered the word like it was the worst swear word in existence. “He’ll apologize tomorrow.”

  “We can’t fix all the unkind men of the world, as much as we may try,” Charles said, settling in beside them, unsmiling. “And tomorrow doesn’t always fix what’s broken today.”

  Alice suddenly understood this to be true. There were some universal truths about breaking. Plans break, bones break, and spirits break. She knew then that some people break whatever they want. Across the fire pit, Sal smiled and waved her hands in the air in conversation with an older woman, probably describing some beautiful desert creature she would be abandoning Alice for in a few days. Sal looked so innocent and in love with life. Like gravity pulling water to flow downward, all the affection she felt for Sal drained into resentment, pooling at her feet in the shadows of the flickering fire. Sal remained unbroken and was probably unbreakable, at that. She sat and watched the fire in a decidedly unsultry way. The way the fire moved and flickered on the wood pleased her. The destruction felt deliciously final. She looked around at all the people laughing, saying nothing about something, and all she wanted to do was to burn it all down, piece by piece.

  Russian Blue

  The Farallones, California, 1874

  Olive made her way along the path to the rabbit traps, but when she got there they were empty. Strange, she thought. There were so many rabbits around she could hardly empty and set the traps back up before another little brown creature had jumped in and snapped its neck. She looked around but saw no one. The birds ceased their cries just long enough that she could hear voices descending down the rock face to her left into the fog. She peered down over the edge and saw three eggers with rabbits draped around their necks like fancy be-stoled ladies going to an opera.

  “Hey there!” she yelled down. “Those rabbits belong to Richardson.” The men paused their thievery briefly, but after seeing her size and distance began to laugh. One waved a dead rabbit over his head like a lasso.

  “Come down and get them, then.” They continued their deft descent.

  Olive paused only briefly before making the way down herself. She
had to grip the rocks with her fingers in an awkward, unsure way to find holds, imitating a crab with arms and legs akimbo. She slowly descended, the fog rolling in all around her and gulls hanging in the air nearby, pausing in curiosity to check her out before letting the wind roll them past like kites. Almost at the bottom near a miniscule sand beach, she became caught with one foot searching for purchase but could find no niche to settle her weight. She finally found a small lump on the cliff with her toe, but when she tried to stand on it, the rock crumbled and she tumbled backward and fell about five feet down, landing hard on her back in the sand. The contact with the earth flung her empty rabbit-collecting basket some feet away. She gasped for breath with a quiet opening and closing mouth like a fish on the deck of one of the Greek fishermen’s boats that circled the islands, but no breath came in or out. She had knocked the air completely out of her lungs. As her lungs refused to fill, she closed her eyes and waited for whatever was next.

  When she opened her eyes again, there were three bearded men standing over her, laughing.

  “Looks like we caught ourselves a grouper.” One gave her a kick in the side. “Good eating, I hear.”

  “A little small,” another chuckled. “Mostly bones.”

  A hand reached down and pulled her up. She finally gasped and could get a trickle of oxygen into her lungs.

  “Now why don’t you go back up that cliff now, boy,” the tallest one said, stroking the rabbits surrounding his neck like a king would his stole. “At the rate you were moving, by the time you get back up there those traps will be full again.”

  “Give me my rabbits,” Olive squeaked, her voice cracking high from lack of breath.

  “Look at the pluck on this one,” the tall man said to his friends. “Sounds a little like a seal pup, doesn’t he? Looks a little like a lady, if you ask me.”

  “He sure is pretty,” said the shortest one, stroking Olive’s hair.

  “Prove to us you’re not a pretty lady,” said the quiet one, giving her trousers a yank. They had her surrounded and she had her back to the cliff wall with nowhere to run.

  “Yeah. Just prove us wrong, boy.” The tall one dragged his boot up the inseam of her trousers. The balanced rabbits shifted and one fell forward, its foot swinging out and catching her on the cheek. It was still warm.

  “Leave me alone.” She lowered her voice and put up her fists.

  The men laughed at the thought of fighting the tiny creature but were cut off from their fun by a rifle shot in their direction, above their heads. A fourth man emerged from the fog and said, “Leave him be, boys.” He was taller and wider than all the men, with an even wilder beard and black hair that reached his shoulders in dark curls. “Take those rabbits back to the tent and get them undressed for dinner. No need to undress the new lighthouse assistant before you go.” He gave Olive a little wink and gestured the barrel of the gun back toward the eggers’ meager tent camp. “Back you go, now. Go.”

  The men looked hard at Olive before retreating and making their way back up over some rocks and back to the next beach down.

  The man towered over Olive and looked her up and down, unsmiling.

  “Oliver, is it?” he asked. “Richardson’s new assistant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, you’d be wise to steer clear of those three from now on. There’s a reason some men became egg men, and it’s not because their mothers taught them proper etiquette.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked, hoping to catch a moment more with this man before making her way back up the cliff.

  “Warren. Charles Warren.”

  She laughed. A loud laugh from deep in her diaphragm. A full, deep breath of air finally entered her lungs and felt delicious as she exhaled in a chuckle. It was the first time she’d heard her own laugh since her mother passed.

  “And what’s so amusing about my name?”

  “You sure found the right island to call home with all these rabbits running everywhere.”

  He laughed and slung his rifle back onto his shoulder.

  “Ah! A clever one. Indeed. Give my regards to Richardson.” He took five eggs out of a pouch in his vest and handed them to Olive. “Put these in your basket with some weeds as padding and take this trail up here.” He pointed to a clear switchback on the far end of the little beach behind them that wound its way back up to the ridge. “Tell him if he wants some more eggs as payment for those rabbits to come see me and not go taking them directly like last time. He’ll know exactly what I mean.” With that he stepped away and was enveloped by the thick fog.

  The trail switchbacked up the rock and met up with the footpath that led back to the lighthouse. The men were right—by the time she made it back up the hill, there was already another rabbit in the trap. But there was something different about this rabbit. Its fur glowed a beautiful silvery blue in the late-afternoon light. She unclamped the trap and put the animal in the basket at her hip. There was no blood on the fur, but the rabbit lay limp in her hands. She wished for a moment that she had the power to reanimate the creature, to see it jump off into the distance unscathed. She put its body into the wicker basket, briefly laying her hand on its silky back before securing the clasp.

  Back at the lighthouse camp, Richardson was seated at the table trying to write a letter, rubbing his eyes in the dim light. Light poured in behind Olive after she opened the heavy door and stood there, unclasping the rabbit basket from her hip. Her illuminated outline lent her the kind of beautiful halo that halts a man. It was the kind of diffuse light on a womanly form that tears a man’s heart asunder and wrests him from the mundanity of living. He looked at her with his hands paused mid-rub of the eye as though caught by a strange notion.

  “I swear there must be some impurity of blood I’m experiencing, for my eyes are playing tricks on me.”

  “What kind of tricks?” Olive said, setting the blue rabbit on the kitchen block.

  “Oh, never mind, boy,” Richardson said with impatience, as though Olive had imposed on a conversation with himself. “What’s this? A Russian blue? I thought they’d all been trapped out. Nice work, boy. They are the most delicious of all the island rabbits. They’re a vestige of the Russians who trapped all the fur seals out of existence back in the early eighteen hundreds.”

  “There were more, but some eggers took a few right before I got there.” Olive took out the speckled murre eggs and laid them on the counter next to the rabbit. “Warren sent these to make amends for his men. Said if you wanted more to come talk to him.”

  “His men, you said?” Richardson laughed. “They are no more his men than these eggs belong to any human. He’s just one of the boys, no more than nineteen years of age. But he does seem to strike fear in the hearts of meeker men than he, does he not?”

  “I just assumed he was in charge.”

  “He’s a good man, that Warren. I figure if anyone can keep peace between the eggers and us lighthouse folks, he’s our best bet.”

  “What is the source of the conflict?” Olive asked, pushing the rabbit to the edge of the cutting block to make room for potatoes.

  “Well, there used to be a lot more open fighting before the Egg Company took exclusive rights to collection on the island. Now the trouble’s just gone underground. A’brewin’.”

  “How so?” Olive asked.

  “They complained to the inspector that we lighthouse men were collecting and selling eggs against the law, and other falsehoods against my character. But I wrote to the inspector myself recently and I showed up those egg men in their true light.”

  “I see.”

  “But now the rugged Egg Company fools think they own the island with the divine right of kings. There’s a war developing between the lighthouse keepers and those dastardly egg men. Did I tell you what happened to my last assistant?”

  “No, you didn’t,” Olive said.

/>   “He fell and broke both his legs after being cornered by some rough eggers. He was out collecting abalone near the cave on the west end and they cornered him and tried to take the shells. Shots were fired. He got away, but fell and broke both legs.”

  “So that’s why we stick to rabbit stew, then,” Olive said, gingerly peeling the skin from a potato.

  “We haven’t retreated in fear, Oliver, and I’m remiss to hear you say that.” Richardson sat up straight in his chair. “Those men thought they could frighten me into subjection. But I’m not that man.”

  “I only jest,” Olive said, returning her eyes to the task at hand, noting how her vocabulary had taken on the Richardson hue.

  “In fact, I’ll prove it by going to gather abalone tomorrow after we’ve attended to the lens, if you’d like to join me. We can visit seal rock while we are at it.”

  “That sounds nice,” Olive said, setting to free the potatoes from their little green-sprouted eyes. She heard a rushing noise loud as a tsunami wave crashing over the island. She leaned over the sink to look out the window to see what kind of monstrosity might conjure such a sound. Just then, the blue rabbit twitched and sat up, as though it had only been sleeping the whole time.

  “My god, boy. It’s not dead.” Richardson pointed at the rabbit, who looked Olive in the eye only briefly before jumping off the counter and under the table.

  “Get it!” Richardson shouted.

  “I’m trying!” Olive scrambled after the rabbit. On the floor, both on their hands and knees, they met eyes one more time before the blue rabbit jumped toward the crack in the door, pausing in the dark entry before bounding into the wild night. Olive ran after and followed it outside. She saw the rabbit bounding smooth and cool under the moonlight, then paused by the pathway back to the traps.

  “Don’t go that way,” she yelled. “That’s where the traps are.”

  But the rabbit just jumped around in a circle and finally came back to where Olive stood as though waiting for a treat. She leaned down and picked the rabbit up and held it in her arms.