“Look at that,” Char said. “It’s just your size.”
Lily remembered the last line on the outline for losing her virginity she had drawn up a few nights prior:
Be something NEW
“How about three dollars,” Lily offered.
“Done,” said Char, ever the dealmaker.
Char and Lily found themselves yet again approaching from two very different roads, but meeting at a comfortable junction. To Lily the dress was an ironic, iconic statement. To Char, she had finally gotten the local tomboy with the black nails and lips tucked into a dress.
“Take anything in that box, hon. It’s all donated stuff I can’t sell in here, but maybe you or your mom would want some of it.” Her tone lingered and dipped deep into the well of judgment on the words your mom. “I know how you two love the kitschy stuff.” She pronounced “kitsch” more like “quiche.”
Inside the box were a couple of bodice-ripper romance novels, a Rastafarian figurine smoking a rolled “cigarette,” a brass ashtray with a naked lady perched on the lip, and a poorly printed pamphlet called Animism: a guide to breath, blood, and life.
“Wow, Char. Can I take the whole box?” Lily asked.
“’Course, love. Get it out of here. Most of our customers don’t have room for that kind of stuff, now, do they.” This was phrased like, but was not, a question. Lily rolled the dress up and tucked it among her newfound treasures.
◆
The next day, Max brought to school the two-pronged velvet antlers from the poached and butchered elk that had bumped in the back of his truck and laid them on the counter next to Lily during science club.
“For you, my queen.”
Lily stroked the soft, brown slopes and considered the gift to be a very good sign. In their developing friendship, Max had pegged Lily as mildly obsessed with death, which, as she pointed out, wasn’t exactly new as far as obsessions were concerned.
“Now you can think of me and think of death.” He grinned a terrifying smile like that of a skull.
“Aw shucks,” Lily said, punching him on the shoulder gently.
Their science teacher, Mr. Janowicz, approached and touched the antler gingerly.
“Amazing specimen, Max. Did you kill it yourself?”
“Nah,” Max said, “someone poached it on Rez land. My uncle chased ’em off and I helped him process it.”
“Ahh.” Mr. Janowicz looked relieved. “Did you know that velvet antlers grow up to an inch a day? Isn’t that incredible? At the cellular level it’s the fastest reproducing bone cell in existence.”
The teacher and his two students all stood with a hand on the antler to ponder its miraculous growth, abruptly halted. Lily thought for a moment she could feel the soft antlers shiver and move like a Ouija under their fingers. She thought about something she’d read in the animist pamphlet that said it was a misconception that only humans housed souls, that animals and objects housed spirits in equal ways. She wondered what kind of messages the antler was trying to spell out, what kind of tender plea.
◆
When Max dropped Lily off after school, she tucked the antlers under her arm and nonchalantly leaned up on the truck. On the drive home, Max had stripped down to his Garbage Pail Kids T-shirt with Roy Bot on it, the little cabbage patch robot shooting flames out of his hands. The way it clung to his strong form made Lily shudder a little as she asked him if he wanted to come by her house on Saturday to watch the lunar eclipse. She had to clench her jaw to disguise her involuntary clattering of teeth. The result might very well be perceived as contrariness.
“It’s late, like eleven p.m.,” she told him. “But if you come earlier we can drink some whiskey up on the hill, maybe have a picnic or something.”
“Where’d you get the whiskey?” he asked her.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it,” Lily said.
“Aw. You think I’m pretty,” he said, shimmying his shoulders a little, bringing Roy Bot to life.
“You in?”
“Sure. What should I bring?” he asked.
“Just your fine self,” she said. She could see a slight flush on his neck under his golden brown skin. She felt momentarily jealous that his pigmentation acted so successfully as camouflage. If they were ducks flying along together, she imagined, she would be the first glowing white orb shot out of the sky.
On Saturday morning, Lily went around the house collecting materials she’d need for the evening’s festivities. But when she got to the liquor cabinet, really just an old paint-peeled cupboard under the stairs, the half a bottle of whiskey she’d seen there two days before was conspicuously missing. All that was left was a bottle of cooking sherry and a tiny amount of ouzo knocking around in the back. She popped the cork out of the sherry with some difficulty. It smelled terrible, but it would have to do. She put it in a wicker basket along with mismatched teacups, some cloth napkins, pickled vegetables, salami, some crackers, and cheese.
Lily originally bought the basket as a birthday present for Alice’s thirtieth birthday. At the time, Char gave her a toothy smile with little dots of lipstick on her teeth and said, “What an interesting woman that Alice is. A little collector of all of God’s people.”
“People collector. That’s a good one, Char. I’ll have to use that,” Lily said. On the way home from God’s Closet that day, Lily swung the empty basket and thought of all the people her mother had collected over the years, from Original Donnie, Randy, and Lobo to Sal and herself. There were many whose names she never even knew. She pictured her mother tossing folks in like berries one by one into the basket, letting them bump around and mush together. She saw all those people, the good and the bad, just rolling around having a collected people party, drinking collected people cocktails, having collected people fights. She also realized that day, that her basket was empty. It made her feel like an egg, an inkling, a mere suggestion of the woman she would someday be. It made her want to start collecting, stat.
She packed up all the materials needed—binoculars, blanket, sherry, teacups, picnic foods, animist pamphlet—and the full wicker basket creaked in time with her anticipation at an evening of teenage deviance. Though she had told Max to drive in the back way and to meet her up on the back hill, she still had to avoid her mother’s inevitable line of questioning.
“I’ll be out on the far hill,” she told Alice in her cramped and messy office. Alice was filling in little squares on a black bound ledger book, nervously pulling a piece of her long hair, winding it around her finger. Her brow was knit tight.
“I’m going to go watch the eclipse on the far hill. Sarah is joining me,” she lied. “Don’t wait up for me.”
“Oh, I almost forgot. The eclipse.” She looked up, distracted. “Tell you what, I’ll come join you when I finish my books tonight.”
“I kind of wanted some alone time with Sarah. She said things are bad at home again,” Lily lied again.
“Oh.” Alice sat up straight in her chair as if taking notice of her daughter for the first time since she entered the room. “Nice dress. Is it new?”
“Yeah. Another Char special,” Lily said.
“I haven’t seen you in a dress since you were a little kid.” Alice narrowed her eyes a bit and cocked her head to the side.
“Well, change does us good, right?”
“I suppose so,” Alice said, not entirely convinced by this line of reasoning.
In the harsh light of the office desk lamp, Lily saw the fine wrinkles around her mother’s eyes and mouth clearly. Her skin had begun to sag under her chin and she looked tired. There was a whiff of loneliness in the room. That, and whiskey. It occurred to Lily that these might be one and the same—that her untouchably beautiful mother, the flawed and brazen people collector, might actually be growing old alone.
Lily laid out the blanket in the twilight out o
n the hill and practiced sitting in the womanliest way she knew how. But no matter what she did, the dress lay flat on her front like a little boy’s school uniform. She lay back on the blanket and gazed up at her favorite Douglas fir, known affectionately as Dougie. She read from the animist pamphlet as the sun sat just above the horizon.
The root of the word Animism comes from the Latin word anima, meaning breath and soul. Animism may be one of man’s oldest beliefs, with its origins thought to date back to sometime around the Paleolithic age. From its earliest manifestations, animists held the belief that a soul or spirit existed in every object, even if it was inanimate. Trees, rocks, or clouds could all harbor a soul the same way people or animals could.
She looked up at Dougie and the other nearby trees—a few ash, a big-leaf maple, and the shrubby bitter cherry. They all shimmied their leaves in a rising breeze and Lily could immediately identify their personalities. The maple was a showgirl, fluttering leaves like sequins in the low light. The bitter cherries were, well, bitter, not quite bush and not quite tree. Then there was Dougie. She felt he had a real humility to him. He didn’t ask much except to dance a little in the wind from time to time and sway like the tallest kid on the dance floor. She turned her head and thought of the orchard trees down below all lined up in tidy rows. They were the golden retrievers of trees—compliant, loyal, but prone to illness and genetically flawed by inbreeding. She continued reading.
Then, after leaving an object or being, this soul or spirit would exist in a future state as part of an immaterial soul. In effect, the spirit was thought to be universal. No one being or creature held spiritual dominion over another, as it was known that this spirit would be transferred at death.
The sun went down behind Dougie as she leafed through the rest of the pamphlet, taking note of an animist breathing technique for “sharing breath” with a partner that looked a hell of a lot like making out. She looked up as points of light caught in Dougie’s needles like cartoon stars. She pulled on her hooded sweatshirt against the spring’s sudden turn from warm afternoon to evening chill and closed her eyes for a minute, breathing in the resin-scented air. Before long, she fell asleep.
In her dream, Dougie bent down and pulled her up into his branches. He tickled her feet with his soft green needles. She laughed, then slipped into a panicked gasping as she couldn’t breathe. She told him to stop, that she’s a fainter, that he’d be sorry when she fell from his branches and died, but Dougie told her not to worry in this huge, booming tree voice. She patted his trunk and felt very, very small. He lifted her, then set her down on a sturdy branch and slowly slipped a small branch up the hem of her dress. The bark felt rough on her thighs as he moved his way up her legs. All her sense of dimensions seemed off, like her hands and feet were huge and then suddenly very tiny. Her whole being was in flux. Her body folded in on itself like origami and she resisted the flushed feeling that flowed into her like golden beams. There was an image of Roy Bot the Garbage Pail Kid shooting fire through her body and she felt her body break apart into a thousand confetti pieces of light and bones, scattering into the strong winds. She was flying.
Just then, she was awakened by a howling and shaking in a nearby bitter cherry. It was completely dark and she flailed around on the blanket confused by the awkward reality of night. She tried to extract herself from the blanket but couldn’t. A high-powered beam of light moved across the blanket and landed on her face. She recoiled like a prisoner under interrogation.
“Halt, little lady. What are you doing there?” a deep voice asked from behind the light.
She tried to untangle herself and muttered, “I think I just had a sex dream, or something. About a tree.” She instantly regretted the statement.
Max howled again, this time with laughter.
“Oh, you are a precious, precious thing, Lil. Only you would jack off to a tree, my friend.”
He sat down next to Lily and patted the blanket smooth, tacking the corners straight.
“I didn’t say I jack…” she broke off. This was not an auspicious beginning to their evening of romance. “It was just a dream,” she said softly.
“There’s an old myth my grandma used to tell me about a woman who fell in love with a cedar tree,” he paused. “But I can’t totally remember what happened in the end. I think she either became a bird or drowned.” The cadence of his voice was so sweet it could drown a person.
“Thanks for the reassurance.”
“What you got in your basket, little blue riding hood?” he settled into a spot on the blanket and patted Lily on the point of her hood. He was also in a hooded sweatshirt, but his read Minor Threat across the chest.
“Well.” Lily took out the teacups and sherry ceremonially. “This was all I could scavenge.”
“Sherry? Like for cooking? Oh, that is classy, sis.” He pulled the cork and made a painful face. “Smells like a couch that’s been left out in the rain and peed on by bears.”
The moon had just risen above the horizon when they poured out the pinkish liquid into the cups and took their first sips. There was a slight sweetness to it, but it punched at the taste buds like Whack-a-Moles. The heat forged a hot trail down Lily’s throat and by the second cup she felt warmed enough to throw back her head and pronounce, “Max. I’m officially ready.”
“For what, officially?”
“To try the animist breathing technique.”
“Say what?”
“There’s a diagram in here.” She pulled out the pamphlet and turned to the back where the recommended activity for “experiencing another’s breath” showed line drawings of a man and woman acting out the technique. She took his flashlight and shone it on the drawings.
“Hmmm,” he studied them for a long time without looking up. “Looks weird.”
“I thought you were the lord of the weird.”
“True,” he paused. “What the hell. Let’s try it.”
They opened their mouths in the oval shape as per the directions and slowly leaned in toward one another. Lily could smell his breath when they get close, the odor of something like onion, or even earthier, mixed with sherry. When their lips touched, they waited there a moment, neither one breathing at all. Lily tried to tell him to breathe in, but the words were garbled without the use of her lips. He pulled back.
“What?”
“You breathe in first,” she said, “then I will.”
“Oh.”
They placed their lips back together and they were both dry, kind of sticking to one another in patches. As he tried to breathe in, Lily could feel the suction and pull of his inhalation at the back of her throat. Her body didn’t want to cooperate and for a moment they were stuck in a breath stalemate. Then, her nose opened and she felt the rush of resined night air rush into her nose, down into her mouth and out into Max’s mouth and body. He breathed out and the air reversed, back into her own mouth, almost making her choke. Before Lily knew what she was doing she pushed her tongue forward like a shot into his mouth and moved it around awkwardly, unsure what exactly she was looking for in there. She slammed her hands down into his lap in a clumsy hammer motion and searched blindly for something, anything. He grabbed her shoulders hard as he pulled away from her.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“What? I don’t know. Just.”
He was still holding her shoulders hard, keeping her at arm’s length.
“Are you trying to make out with me?”
“Yeah. Sort of. Maybe.”
“Did you honestly not realize that I’m gay, Lil?”
“Shut up. You are not.”
“It’s pretty obvious. I am so gay.”
“No. You’re not. Stop messing with me. You can’t be.” She shook her head in denial, but it occurred to her that, of course, he was, in fact, gay.
He laughed. “I can be and I am. It’s not like I advertis
e it at school or anything. I mean, would you if you were full gay, half-Native from a disappearing tribe? Think about all the possibilities for awkward social speed bumps, there.” He looked at Lily hard, eyebrows up. He seemed all of a sudden to be made of stone, the perfect sharp angles of his face glinting in the moonlight. “But I very much am,” he softened a little. “I guess I just thought you knew because, well, because you seem to know me better than anyone else around here. Remember when you called me flower?”
“You were wearing a damn T-shirt with damn flowers on it,” Lily grumbled.
“I thought it meant you knew.”
“I was just making fun of you. Because I liked you.”
Lily sat there quiet for a minute and looked up at the sky. A crescent of orangey red had just barely pulled itself over the corner of the moon like a blanket slipping off the edge of a round silver bed. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes as the blood rose in her neck, focusing on not fainting, on breathing deep. But instead of fainting, she let out a deep and resounding howl, a “nooooooooo,” her voice pulling loud out of her body like a long chain up into the sky. She pulled and pulled until the knot around her heart gave way. Max joined in with her, then some coyotes on a far hill. When they finished, they collapsed onto their backs and looked up at the disappearing moon.
“Sometimes I just see what I want to see, I guess,” she told him.
“I love you, Lil.” He pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her back, nestling her head into his neck with a warm hand. “Just not like that.” This position was far more intimate than any diagram, or anything she’d ever known with any man, for that matter. They lay down and held each other for a while, and as they lay there entangled, a crashing made its way up the grassy hill.
“Stop! Don’t do it! Stop it right now.”
Alice came lumbering through the sedge to their left, wagging her long hands in the air before her.
“I’m not too late, am I?” she fell down onto her knees before them looking serious. “It’s not worth it, you guys. It’s just not.”
The Wild Birds Page 13