The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  Thank you for being a friend,

  Sal

  Sal paused before the only mailbox in the town of Needles, Arizona, with the letter half in the slot, the sealed and signed message to Alice growing warm between her thumb and forefinger. She pulled it back suddenly from the darkness, the foreverness of the mailbox belly. Perhaps her judgment wasn’t sound. Perhaps the datura hadn’t worn off yet. This admission of her long-held affection for Alice felt too bold, too hotheaded. She was a scientist and needed to think like one. How might pregnant Alice respond? The outcome felt unclear. Risky. She would collect more data and process her thoughts. Perhaps it was wise to hold onto the letter another week, and maybe next time they rolled through town, she would have the courage and confidence to send it. Then again, maybe not.

  Whenever she and her field partner Ed came into town, they split up to “get shit done” as Ed would say in his crooked-toothed smile. Ed had been a stock car racer, a bartender, and a lobster fisherman before he started as a biological field tech, and he wore his different life paths as topography on his leathery, wrinkled face. What he did during his days off, Sal didn’t need to know. Women, booze, or gambling—she didn’t judge. She stuck to her own path, and she preferred others to stick to their own, too.

  Sal shopped at the only grocery store for food staples she would need out in the desert wilderness the next week—tortillas, cheese, eggs, peanut butter, carrots, celery, oranges, gorp, five gallons of water, Tang, ice, and a couple six-packs of beer. These two full bags of groceries and water would keep her alive another week, she supposed, as she threw the ice into the cooler and the canvas bags into the back of the huge silver work truck before stepping up into the cab. She glanced at the letter again and threw it onto the dash. She felt her thinking clearing up, as if there had been an impetuous fog hanging in her brain. Alice would surely think she’d lost her mind if she mailed such a manifesto of love. The letter landed neatly under a growing collection of items she and Ed contributed after each day in the field, a shrine to their own scientific gods that included some dried wildflowers, a small rodent skull, some Long-billed Curlew feathers, and a perfect quartz heart. She stared out the front window of the truck before turning the key, but just before starting up the rumbling engine, she paused, something across the street catching her eye. Scrambling back down from the seat, she made sure the cooler was shut and secure, so the desert heat wouldn’t spoil her groceries, and walked across the street. No need to look twice for traffic in this small town.

  NAKED ANTIQUES read the worn wooden sign. Sal opened the door and was hit by a cool, musty blast of air. She looked around the small shop at the old saddles, photos, tin cups, Navajo weavings, and a glass showcase with medals, coins, and old jewelry. She was admiring an old Victorian hair brooch when she heard rustling behind the counter. A small, old man with bright blue eyes looked back at her, with tanned brown sagging skin and not a stitch of clothing on except a tiny sack on his junk held up by a string that went around his waist. Around his neck he wore a pair of reading glasses and a collection of necklaces with various animal teeth and shell fragments hanging from them.

  “Welcome to Naked Antiques,” he said, smiling as though nothing were out of the ordinary.

  “Well, sir,” Sal smiled and looked him in the eye. “You’ve already answered my first question.”

  The old man laughed. “Glad to hear it. Let me know if I can be of any other assistance to you, dear.” He put on the reading glasses and started sorting and pricing some old postcards. The combination of his nudity and reading glasses on a silver chain started to give Sal the giggles so she had to find something on the other side of the store to occupy her attention. She looked the shelves over one by one until something on a high shelf caught her attention and she reached up onto her toes to get it down. It was a beautiful antique silver collecting box with beveled glass and reddish velvet lining. There were five different windows cut in the side that allowed an admirer to look in as though through a portal. Inside sat a three-quarters-full collection of bird eggs, all perfectly drained and nestled into the soft velvet bed, separated by thin wooden dividers. It had a tag hanging off it clearly marked NOT FOR SALE. She brought it back over to the old man who had since opened a can of beer and slipped it into a bright blue koozie sleeve reading: Why Limit Happy to an Hour?

  “This is a fascinating object,” she said. “Does it have a story?”

  “Uh-oh,” he said, peering over the tops of his glasses at her. “You have great taste.”

  “This has to be some sort of hummingbird egg,” she started out by pointing at the littlest one. “And this bluish, speckled one with the pointed end looks like a seabird. Maybe a murre or a guillemot. This one looks like a green-tailed towhee, if I’m not mistaken? But it could be an eastern towhee.” She looked up at the man whose twinkling eyes showed approval. “Not a bird from around here.”

  “You are not mistaken. Hummingbird, murre, and green towhee. And this one here I’m told is a hermit warbler.” He pointed to a speckled brown-and-white overgrown jellybean of an egg. “My favorite. Hermit warbler that I am.”

  “We’re birds of a feather,” Sal said.

  “So how does it come to be that a young woman such as yourself knows so much about bird eggs?”

  “Bird gun for hire.” Sal smiled, tipping her dirty, sweat-stained USGS baseball cap. “I’m out here studying birds for the government.” She waited patiently for the laugh, or snide reaction she usually received when people in the area discovered that their tax dollars were going toward this girl cataloguing the desert avian populations.

  “Finally. Some action by the powers that be that I can get behind.” He smiled.

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “You know, I can’t sell you this collection, unfortunately.”

  “Oh, I know.” Sal smiled, sliding the collection back his way. “I was just so interested if you knew anything about its origins. I love a good story. Especially one that involves birds.”

  “Well, I can tell you there’s a great story associated with this collection. All you might want in an epic tale—death, love, a war over eggs, pirates, daring escapes, and more death.”

  “That sounds like quite a tale. But I would imagine that death and more death might apply to any number of items in this store,” she said.

  “And you would be absolutely correct.” The naked man looked hard at Sal before walking into the back room. She heard a rooster cry from the back room as he puttered around with boxes back there, and the naked man gently clucked back at the rooster. He brought back with him a box and set it on the counter. He offered no explanation for the rooster pecking around his stockroom. “Like I said. I can’t sell you this collection because it is not the kind of thing that should be bought or sold.”

  As he said this, an enormous truck rumbled past outside the shop, cutting him off. He looked stunned for a moment as if lost in memory or remembering something important. After the rumble died down, he came back to reality and looked back at Sal who seemed utterly unfazed by the sound, almost as though she hadn’t heard it at all.

  “But I do believe this collection belongs with you. If you’d like to buy something else in the store,” he put his hand on a forty-dollar saddle hanging on the wall, “then this will be yours to take with you free of charge.”

  “Deal,” Sal said, resting her fingers gently on the counter.

  The old man put his hand on the collection and sighed. “I knew someday I’d have to give her up. But parting is such sweet sorrow.” He packed the box up inside another box, padding the space between with balled-up newspaper. Sal saw a flash of a picture of some judges and the headline, “Supreme Court Grants Women Freedom of Choice” just before the naked antiques seller crumpled up the paper and carefully tucked it into the side next to the collection. She instantly thought of Alice. The rooster crowed again from the darkness.


  “I’ve always liked the company of roosters,” he said with a sly smile. “Good friends, no judgment.” His seemingly permanent smile was suddenly gone as he looked very seriously at Sal. “Take good care of this artifact. And I hope you can add to the collection. There is still some room in there for another leg or two of the story.”

  Sal nodded as though she were being knighted, or sentenced.

  Ed waited for her back at the truck and laughed huge belly laughs when he saw diminutive Sal cross the street with a saddle under her arm and a box wrapped in string held firmly in her other hand. She threw the saddle in the back of the truck and set the wrapped and twined box in her lap.

  “All right, cowgirl. Where’s your horse?” Ed asked, as they started up the truck and rumbled out of town into the pastel pink, blue, and orange sky of a cloudless Mojave night.

  “None of your biz, man. Let’s blow this pop stand,” Sal said, popping in a cassette of Black Flag and turning it up.

  That night, after Sal had dropped Ed off at his starting location a few miles away where he would be surveying the next day, and as she unrolled her thin sleeping pad and lay it out under the stars in the desert wash she would call home for the night, she decided not to send the letter to Alice after all. Instead, she would send her the egg collection, and the gift would have to speak for itself. But first she would have to add to the collection, and she knew just the egg to add.

  A cactus wren nest she had been monitoring had been depredated just two days before. The nest was settled deep into a jumping cholla in what seemed like an impenetrable fortress of spines but had still been torn apart by some larger bird, most of the eggs cracked, whitewash sprayed over the wreckage, and minute droplets of blood cast as though some final act of birdy Santería over the whole thing. Previously, the nest had been incredible—lined with downy feathers, soft green arrowweed leaves, and grasses, with a leaf hanging, inexplicably, by a spider web at the entrance in what seemed like an unusually welcoming way. Bird #36 had a flair for interior decorating, it seemed. Sal didn’t usually get torn up about things like nest depredation, as it was part of the reality of being a bird and the biologists who love them, but this nest had been especially beautiful and she couldn’t help feel a little wan as she marked down depredated 4/20/78 on the nest card. Alone in the night, Sal lay down on her soft bed and let the sound of the elf owls courting nearby draw her into a quick and heavy sleep.

  The next day, she woke a full hour before dawn in order to have a moment to sit with a cup of sock coffee before walking to her first point. She boiled the water on her camp stove, squatting in the wash, and poured the water through the coffee sock, the smell of the hot black liquid filling her nose. She popped a couple aspirin to ease the stubborn pain in her ankles and hips and pulled on her gators over her boots and field pants for added protection from the desert’s dangers. The little bit of extra clothing was worth sweating it out under the hot afternoon sun. Surely, there was nothing worse than a stray jumping cholla ball sticking into your ankles. And it sure did seem to jump sometimes, from the ground and into the shins, wounding the flesh with its ungodly barbed thorns.

  She gathered up her map, compass, first aid kit, her pens tied to flagging, binoculars, range finder, thermometer, nest cards, data sheets, clipboard, camera, sunglasses, hat, snacks, and extra water bottles. She double-checked everything, reviewed the exact latitude/longitude coordinates, checked the township and range lines, and marked the location for the truck before leaving the campsite and heading out toward her first point. As she loped uphill in the sand, the dawn chorus erupted into a manic cacophony of birdsong. A slender pink line appeared on the horizon as she scaled a small cliff out of the wash, walked through some joshua trees, cholla, and into a creosote patch. Soon the hot sun would surface and she would have to shed her warm layers, so she enjoyed the coziness of the desert cold and tried to keep it close, as though she could store it up for later. Her boot slipped through the sandy ground up to her ankle where a ground squirrel had dug a tunnel long ago, but she picked it up, shook it off, and kept going. She was a woman on a mission.

  By the time Sal arrived at the depredated nest of Bird #36, the sun had only been up a couple hours but was hot enough that she had already sweat completely through her bra and peeled off all but the protective layer of a thin, long-sleeve shirt. She set her backpack on the ground and surveyed the nest hidden among the folding, labyrinthine, thorny branches of the cholla cactus. It took a trained eye to notice what had been the entrance to the nest, a small, grass-lined round opening just big enough for a small mirror to go into. She took a stance in a deep squat and pulled out her mirror pole—a compact mirror glued onto the end of a telescoping car radio antennae. Still squatting, she slowly allowed the mirror into what once had been such an inviting entryway but was now relegated to a mess of grass and feathers. Sure enough, she could just see in the mirror that one sage-green-and-brown speckled egg still remained. She leaned forward carefully and slipped her hand into the hole to grab the egg. And just as she did, she lost her footing and fell forward just a few inches. She yelped as pain seared through her chest. She pulled the egg out and dropped it into her pocket. A round cholla ball had found purchase, its barbs sinking unforgivingly into her chest right between her armpit and her heart. She yowled, screamed obscenities, and bounced on one foot in a demented dance of pain. She used one of her layers to pull the largest part of the spiky cholla ball off her chest and flicked it away using a pen. A dozen or so spines still remained staunchly rooted in her flesh, sticking out like acupuncture needles. She got out her tweezers from the first aid kit and painstakingly removed the needles one by one, pulling unnaturally hard to get the spikes out. Little droplets of blood rose to fill the void as she pulled the hooked barbs through her skin. When she had removed the last one, she looked down, amazed at the pattern on her chest. If one were to connect the dots, the little red droplets of blood formed a perfect spiral inward. As if some kind of hypnotists had lured her into this mess.

  “I’ll be damned,” Sal said, taking a picture with her camera before wiping off the blood. Some twenty meters away, she heard a cactus wren begin its harsh rising song. It must be #36, she thought. And I thought she had sung her last song. The sound reminded her of a scolding from the beyond—the winding, cranking pitch upping intensity and culminating in a final chaaa before pausing just long enough to let the listener think about what they’d done. Sal thought that perhaps she was being punished for the sin of love. Or perhaps the bird was scolding Sal for doubting her resilience. Sal tried not to apply human emotions to the subjects of her transects, but the fact that #36 was alive and well brought tears to her eyes, just to the point of warping her vision. She wiped the tears away and inspected the egg in her pocket, finding it unscathed. Wrapping it carefully in a handkerchief, she stowed it away in a safe pocket of her backpack for later. She would add it to the collection, a subtle token of her longing for Alice. Then, as Sal moved through the desert with the solitary lope of a coyote, the cactus wren wound up its scolding song all over again. The sound wandered upward and dissipated into the waves of heat, the crashing of wavelengths, the melding of modes. The song left her and found its place up in the blue.

  Blood Moon

  Among the Siuslaw’s Sitka, Oregon, 1994

  The more of an effort Alice made to assuage her daughter’s resentment by cleaning, cooking, or offering to play games, the colder Lily grew. Lily’s unshakable feeling that she had been betrayed deepened with each clear attempt at bribery. Alice spent money she didn’t really have to buy Lily presents: a new PJ Harvey CD, a subscription to National Geographic, some new jeans she had been talking about for over a year. Lily neatly stacked all the presents in the library and put a note on them that simply stated, “Not interested.” She wanted answers from her mother—the truth, not trinkets.

  Lily was on her own path. She would seduce Max in her own way, with no help from her l
ying mother. So she went shopping in Toledo at the only nearby thrift store, aptly named “God’s Closet,” looking for an appropriate outfit in which to lose her virginity. A huge mural on the parking lot outside the thrift store depicted a preacher floating on a hill, the valley below filled with followers who all appeared to be in nightgowns. The anatomical dimensions on the followers were a bit off, making them resemble pinheads.

  Inside God’s Closet, Char, dear Char with the dyed-red perm and ceramic nails painted with American’s flags or cats depending on the season, puttered around pricing items. She greeted Lily as she entered the store and perused the racks. Lily held up a pair of vintage ruffled underwear that went all the way down to her knees and said, “Char, I think it’s just perfect that in God’s Closet I can find ruffled women’s underwear.”

  “Honey,” Char smiled, “God’s got even more goodies in his closet than we can ever imagine.”

  “Too true.” Lily held up a suit jacket and tie.

  Lily and Char were never exactly on the same page, but somehow they always found an easy way of chatting.

  “What are you lookin’ for today, Miss Lil?” she asked.

  “Well, something with a little style. Maybe even some sex appeal,” Lily said, feigning embarrassment and raising her eyebrow a little.

  “Ahh. It truly is spring, isn’t it, lamb? Here, try this. I actually thought of you when it came in.” She pulled out from behind the counter an old plaid housedress from the fifties with a little belt and buttons up the front. Lily held it against herself and admired herself in the full-length mirror. She never ever wore dresses.