“They call it a sea ear,” Warren said. “Should we listen?” He placed the shell over Olive’s ear and she heard the distillation of the sea bend its way into her head. The sound was calm and sure and led straight ahead. She found it within herself to raise her eyes and look into Warren’s. What she found there were his thick-fringed brown eyes telling her she was not alone in her feelings. Her costume felt suddenly absurd and unnecessary.
“You know,” she started, then stuttered. “You know, I’m not…”
“I don’t care what you are not,” Warren said. “Because I know what you are.” He put his hand on his heart.
As if afraid of her response, Warren sidled away toward the edge of the pool and set to cutting an abalone away from the wall. He brought it over and sliced the shell open, revealing a very slimy blob. He cut away at one side.
“This here is the guts. Best to remove it before eating.”
“Hmm.” Olive was not sure her stomach was settled enough to eat this creature. Was it still alive? She was not sure. Warren pulled a lemon out of his pocket and sliced it in half, squeezing the juice onto the now gutless abalone. Olive had never met someone who kept lemons in their pocket. In fact, she had never tasted a lemon at all. The first one she had laid eyes on was at the market in San Francisco a month ago with Hazel by her side. Who she had been then, and who she had become, seemed a lifetime apart in their realities. Warren made crosshatch cuts in the flesh with his knife as Olive watched him. She let herself consider what might happen were she to reveal herself. The idea felt suddenly magnetic, enticing.
“The tang of the lemon helps bring out the flavor.” He pulled the floppety white flesh from the shell and held it quaking near Olive’s mouth. “Quick now. Down the hatch.”
Olive paused only briefly before catching it in her mouth like a seal. She chewed and the flavor was salty and tangy, maybe even a little like butter. The flavor was so fresh and smooth she closed her eyes to better allow her taste buds to experience the ribbons of changing flavor on her tongue. There, on her tongue, she felt the moment approaching when she might safely reveal herself. When she’d swallowed the abalone, she opened her eyes and looked into Warren’s expectant eyes for just a moment before he leaned in and kissed her on the mouth.
His unruly beard and mustache poked into her soft cheeks and upper lip, but the softness of his lips landed perfectly on hers. She finally knew what the beard felt like on her skin, and it was softer than she’d imagined. The salty flavor from the mollusk lingered between them as they kissed. She felt his arms fold around her and she let his warmth wrap her in iridescence. He held her for a long time and finally whispered:
“Is your name truly Olive, then?”
“Yes, Olive,” she said softly.
“Well, Olive. Will you run away with me?”
She paused and said more loudly, “We won’t get too far on this island.”
Her head rested on his chest, and the sound of his laugh as it traveled through his bones and blood, past muscle and skin, finally into her ear, filled her with a sense of satisfaction. Enclosed in the cave together, like a single creature in its shell, she felt that the tides could come and go through their little portal holes, but she was content to simply sway in this glittering ballroom as long as the fates allowed. There was relief in the telling of the truth.
“I have a plan,” he said, leaning back and holding her at arm’s length to look at her face again, smiling like a little kid. “Are you ready to be a pirate?”
“Aye aye, matey,” she said. She would have been the peg leg, parrot, or the very ship, if he had only asked her. “Let us plunder and pillage the sea.”
He took out of his sack a beautiful bottle with light amber liquid inside. It had the name Coors printed into the glass on the outside.
“Beer. Have you ever tasted it?”
“No.”
“This company just started bottling a year ago. Just hit the San Francisco markets. I bought a case back on my last trip in the city. Go ahead and try,” Warren said, offering her the bottle.
The delicious bitter taste of the bubbles on her tongue washed down the lingering salty flavors of the abalone. Her mind hummed with the sound of her own heartbeat and the sly possibilities love whispers to the newly bewitched. The two sat on a rock outside the entrance to the cave and silently watched the clouds move across the horizon. They traded pulls off the bottle and Warren took her hand in his. After a while he revealed the details of his plan to steal a shipload of eggs from the Egg Company. He figured if they got away with it, there would be enough money to buy some land up north, maybe start a little farm in Northern California near the Oregon border. Olive considered the plan as the sun slunk weary below the horizon. They paused their strategizing as an enormous being, a blue whale, surfaced its silver-spotted back into the air and took an audible breath, the power of it pushing spray high into the air loud as a steam engine. She looked up again at Warren and examined the way his wild beard grew and coiled in every direction possible. The whale, she thought, lived under the ransom of their world. It had to come to the surface or die. And love, it seemed, perpetuated similar acts in those compelled by its force. She breathed deep like the blue whale. She would steal and cheat, plunder or murder, in order to keep this thin grasp she had on beauty. Raising her face upward, she let herself bask in the unknowing blue, the sky and ocean reflecting the absence of answers back and forth on one another.
Season’s Quake
Yreka, California, 1941
The weather felt unseasonably warm for November on Highway 99 heading north toward the Oregon and California border. Men with rifles blocked all lanes on the north-south route of the two-lane highway and a long line of cars at least a half mile deep waited to be let through the barricade. Each driver was handed a pamphlet reading:
Proclamation of Independence
You are now entering Jefferson, the 49th State of the Union. Jefferson is now in patriotic rebellion against the States of California and Oregon. This State has seceded from California and Oregon this Thursday, November 27, 1941.
Patriotic Jeffersonians intend to secede each Thursday until further notice.
For the next hundred miles as you drive along Highway 99, you are travelling parallel to the greatest copper belt in the far West, seventy-five miles west of here.
The United States government needs this vital mineral. But gross neglect by California and Oregon deprives us of necessary roads to bring out the copper ore. If you don’t believe this, drive down the Klamath River highway and see for yourself. Take your chains, shovel, and dynamite.
Until California and Oregon build a road into the copper country, Jefferson, as a defense-minded state, will be forced to rebel each Thursday and act as a separate State. (Please carry this proclamation with you and pass them out on your way.)
State of Jefferson Citizens Committee Temporary State Capitol, Yreka
The late fall sun baked down on the crowds. Eyebrows were lifted. Leather seats stuck to the skin. People started getting out of their cars and wandering up and down the grass shoulder, pacing confusedly with the pamphlets just handed to them by the state of Jefferson secessionists crumpled in their hands. Insults flew through the air between stuck motorists and the Jeffersonians blockading traffic.
Some two acres away from the stopped traffic across a fallow field, an old man sat on his front porch smoking a tobacco pipe and reading the newspaper. “Damn secessionists,” he muttered to himself. “It’s just greed for greed’s sake.” The acreage between the man and the now crowded highway included a field with two old horses and a young border collie trying to get the horses to let him chase them around, the horses blatantly ignoring his pleas to play. All three animals seemed particularly excitable, pawing the ground and shimmying their manes. The man looked up and listened to the string of muffled car horns across the field and stroked his clavicle-l
ength white beard with only a thin streak left of the dark black it once had been. He sorted his mustache hairs evenly on either side of his nose before sighing, then rising from his chair. Struggling up the front porch steps, he went inside to repack his tobacco laid conveniently on the mantle above the fireplace.
Next to the tobacco pouch sat a Victorian egg collection. The man wiped the five beveled sides with care every time he laid eyes on it. His wife Olive used to call the oval windows “portals to the unknown.” He peered in one of the windows and saw the blue-green speckled murre egg and sighed. The collection was the last earthly vessel that embodied any concrete representation of her, the singular being he’d loved most in the world. A small lock of her hair tied with a ribbon sat at the front of the egg collection, mingling its fine protein forms among the cotton and silk of the smooth pink velvet.
A worm of darkness rimmed in light ripped through his mind and the man tried to remember why he had come into the living room in the first place. Where was Olive? Was she tending to the hens? He couldn’t remember. He looked down at the collection and slowly recalled as he wiped away the nonexistent dust, pausing to think about his wife’s hair. The brown lock was hers. Was it true that she wasn’t outside in the yard brushing the horses? Was she not about to come up the front steps in her clodhoppers to fix dinner? It seemed hardly possible that she was gone. Another worm of light traced its way through his brain, and he remembered that reality was cruel and it was up to him alone to feed the dog. He ran his finger along the brown lock of hair, as it held within its chemical makeup traces of meals and drinks they’d eaten together, laughing and toasting, long after they’d retired from raising bovids on their small farm. They had never had children, but had instead collected a group of animals on their farm that would make Noah green with envy. They had everything from llamas to emus, rabbits to rehabilitated wrens.
He stroked the hair with his forefinger. Perhaps what he was feeling was the residue of the pasta primavera he’d prepared for her the Valentine’s Day before she died. They’d spent a romantic evening delivering a pair of baby goats together in the bitter cold. They named them Valentin and Valentina and collapsed exhausted and full of life into their two chairs before the fireplace, devouring the simple pasta and opening a well-deserved bottle of Sauterne, clinking glasses to a day well spent. He missed the way she laughed before she’d fully produced a punch line, always “ruining the joke” as she liked to say. He remembered it clear as a bell, and then, as if in imitation of one, the memory faded like sound waves into air.
As he looked at the collection and lost himself in half memory, a collection of shooting stars ripped through his mind and the entire house began to shake. The glass rattled in its silver frame, the eggs inside bouncing on the velvet. The vines on the filigree legs of the collection were alive as the earth moved below. The house swayed a bit—the dance every object unable to move of its own accord waits in silence for. The trees outside shed clouds of golden and brown leaves into the air. He thought he could hear faint cries and gasps from the crowds down on the highway as their cars must have bumped and jumped out of their neat rows. And then, as abruptly as the quaking had started, it was quiet again.
On the mantle, the silver filigree box settled out of its wild dance. The largest of the eggs, the common murre’s masterpiece sixty-some years old, revealed a crack the size of a thumbnail splitting the past from the present. The man stared at the egg in a sort of disbelief before going outside to check on the horses, an animal that never seemed to do well in an earthquake. That was an earthquake, right? He couldn’t trust himself anymore to know what was happening at any given point in time, and it made him angry with himself. The horses trotted a circle around the field and neighed in mild discomfort but otherwise seemed unfazed. The border collie was nowhere to be seen. Was there really a dog to feed or was that a lifetime ago, too? The man stroked the neck of the mare and whispered calming nothings to her when he noticed a figure with a very large knapsack on his shoulders walking up the drive.
As the figure approached, the old man noticed how young he was. Could hardly call him a man, really. He couldn’t be more than seventeen. He had the air of a wanderer, with stains on either legs of his jeans and greasy hair tamped down under a Greek fisherman’s cap and tucked behind his ears. The sight of the cap made him smile with memories of days spent with actual Greek fishermen. He remembered a story of sirens told by an old Greek, the way they had devoured men after dashing them on the rocks, blood from the sad, simple men roaring down their lovely necks. As the boy approached, he shook his head to unearth the memory and try and settle the lightning worms in his brain. Behave, he hissed at the half thoughts inside his head. The boy looked tired but approached him with a friendly smile, dark wavy hair, and earnest clear blue eyes, a color that had been burned brighter yet by long exposure to sun. The old man swore he smelled salt on the air for a moment as the boy approached. What a strange thing, the man thought, to smell a memory like that.
“Hello, sir,” the wanderer said, putting his hand out for a shake.
“Well that’s a fine start, son, but you can drop the ‘sir.’” The old man returned the handshake. “What brings you up my drive? You’re not a secessionist, are ya? Because if you, are you can just turn around right now and march back out.”
“No, sir.” The boy shook his head. “Unless you count seceding from my old life and hitting the road, then, yes. I am.”
The old man laughed, and the surprise of the sound inside his ribcage rattled him. He hadn’t laughed out loud in months. At least, if he had, he couldn’t remember doing so.
“I’m glad you think that’s funny,” the boy’s blue eyes crinkled at the edges, lines baked into his skin beyond his years by the unkind sun. “Coulda gone either way.”
“Name’s Warren,” the old man said. “Why don’t you come take a load off and have some water. Sorry I don’t have anything else to offer you.”
“Thank you kindly,” the boy said, avoiding speaking his own name, as the sound of it had come to make him uncomfortable. The two lumbered up the steps with matching creaky joints and tired movements.
The old man walked carefully through the front door and went inside for water. The boy set his heavy pack down on the porch and sat down in an actual chair for the first time in days. In the kitchen, the old man turned on the faucet and immediately a flash in his brain erased all memory of the boy. He opened himself a can of beer and stood staring out the kitchen window into the backyard where someone’s dog, a border collie, was running wildly around in a circle. Who did that damn dog belong to again? Probably a secessionist. On the front porch, the boy put his feet up on a footrest and waited for his water, his mouth parched and dry. He wasn’t sure how long it had been, but he closed his eyes and listened to the rustle of leaves overhead. Before he got any water, with the car horns blaring down on the highway and the sun beginning to set, he fell fast asleep.
An hour later, Warren came outside to get the newspaper and was surprised to find the boy sitting on the porch, a flash of recognition reminding him of the situation. He went back in to get a glass of water, muttering admonishment to himself, and let the old screen door slam into its frame. When he returned with water, the boy was sitting upright, his arms stretched upward, yawning.
“Must have dozed off,” he said. “Mr. Warren, can I ask you…”
“Just Warren,” the old man interrupted.
“Warren. Can I ask you a favor? Please feel free to say no.”
“Doesn’t hurt to ask.”
“Can I stay the night on your front porch? I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in quite some time, and it’s fixing to rain tonight.” The warm afternoon had led into an overcast and increasingly cold evening.
“How about I do you one better and you stay on the couch instead?”
“I won’t argue with that.”
“Do you know how to boil p
asta?”
“I do indeed.”
“Then we better get started on dinner.”
Warren felt a sort of desperation to stay in the moment because as long as he was exchanging pleasantries with the kid, he felt he might be able to stay conscious of where, who, and what was going on around him. He wanted to tether time and keep it right there tied up on the porch like an obedient dog. The dog! He hasn’t eaten! he thought, quite pleased for the moment with the idea that the dog was his. He knew just what to feed him and where it was kept, but when he went to the cupboard to find the food, all he found was an empty bag with big shredded holes at the base and rodent signs littering the cupboard floor. The sight of the torn-up bag empty as the day made him want to cry, but he gathered himself up and looked in the fridge. He found an old bone with some chicken still on it and some old hard rice, which he put in a bowl with a little milk to soften it, and asked the kid to take it out to the backyard. From the kitchen window, he watched the boy enter the yard and the dog bark in tight circles as he approached, until it realized he was bringing him dinner, at which point the dog reversed the direction of his circles and licked and licked his hands and ankles as though he were the best friend he’d ever had.
Warren took out a pen and paper and began a letter, putting it in an envelope with all the money he owned. The bank would be coming to take his house soon, he figured, as he hadn’t paid a dime on it in almost a year. So those bills in the envelope, they were the rest of what he knew as wealth on this earth. Better pass them along before the bank came to claim them for their own.
The Wild Birds Page 15