They passed by a newly logged patch next to the highway. Boomer glanced at her dark gaze.
“Salvage, they called it,” he broke the silence. “But that hardly seems the right word for it.”
“It’s just like a graveyard now,” Lily said. “Each stump is like a little tombstone sticking up.” She suddenly felt naked and wished she had her black lipstick to apply. She combed her fingers over her bare, dry, cracking lips.
“Max told me you had the poet in you.” Boomer put his foot down on the accelerator to pass a Vanagon with surfboards on top. “And he wasn’t lying.”
“Thanks,” Lily said, reapplying her imaginary black balm. “Cursed by metaphor, I guess. That’s my lot.” She closed her eyes and tried to rid her mind of the vision of Max among a graveyard of trees, as though she could séance the Sitka, smudge the serviceberry, or cleanse the ash. The embarrassment of the night of the blood moon rose high in her chest once again.
Once they reached the beach, they pulled into an almost full parking lot, including a long, antennaed news van. Lily had never seen so many cars gathered at once at the shore. They got out and joined a crowd walking toward a group gathered around something down by the water. They found a place on the side of the circle and gazed at a motionless, fat, black sea mammal maybe twenty feet in length. It raised its head an inch, then let it rest back on the sand. It was clearly very near death.
“What is it?” Lily whispered.
“Pilot whale,” the woman next to her in a bright blue windbreaker with NOAA printed on the breast said, without taking her eyes from the gruesome scene.
“I wouldn’t want it to pilot me anywhere,” a man next to the lady said. She looked toward Lily and rolled her eyes.
“He has a point,” Lily shrugged. “What is being done about it? Can they put it back in the water?”
“It’ll just keep stranding itself,” the woman said. “Something’s thrown its internal navigation way off. They strand themselves in the hundreds elsewhere, but it’s extremely rare to see, much less find one on shore, here in Oregon.”
The whale had a little fat rounded forehead like a toddler and a mouth line seemingly stuck in a coy little upturned smile.
“At least he died happy,” Lily said, turning to Boomer.
“It’s like we’re all awkwardly trying to have a conversation at a funeral,” he leaned down and whispered. She felt simultaneously listened to and chastised for cracking jokes at a wake.
“I remember one thing from my grandparents’ funeral,” she said as her hand automatically rose to the scar on her chest. “I remember watching everyone’s legs from under the porch and seeing how no one seemed comfortable in their own bodies. They just kept changing and shifting, crossing and uncrossing in order to try and find a position that felt okay.”
“I think that’s what a lot of people do their whole life,” Boomer whispered. “Shifting, afraid to face reality.” He turned to look at her. “Running away from their problems.”
“Hmph.”
“We’ll all end up stranded on a beach taking our last breaths if we’re not careful.”
The two wandered away from the spectacle and back toward the truck. They got in and Lily sucked on a salty piece of hair in contemplation. She squinted out toward the huge expanse of gray-blue water looking for answers.
“Maybe I could just stay with you and Max for a couple days?” she asked. “Until I figure some stuff out?”
They sat quietly staring out to sea until Boomer started the truck up, the familiar rumble making Lily feel a little better.
“I don’t see why not,” Boomer said cautiously, rounding the corner out of the parking lot and getting back on the highway. “But you should call your mom and let her know you’re okay.”
“That wouldn’t be completely true,” Lily said. “Can you just call her for me? I need some more time before I talk to her.”
“I guess that will do,” Boomer said, switching on the radio. Merle Haggard sang a song about an “only rebel child” where “mama tried to raise me better” and “mama tried, mama tried, mama tried.” The two looked at each other with wide eyes before bursting out in laughter. Boomer rolled the window all the way down to let the cooling evening air rush in and lift their hair from opposite ends of the chiaroscuro up off their heads like they’d seen a ghost. Lily threw her head back and sang along, yowling a little like a lost coyote.
Breeding Season
The Farallones, California, 1874
A tufted puffin flew in a perfect straight line overhead, its long yellow ear tassels tucked flat against its head with the movement of its body through the air. Its mouth was full of silver sardines that bulged from either side of its bright orange beak and reflected the bright sun in glints, food destined for the hungry, gaping mouths of its young tucked deep inside the burrow nest. Olive regarded the bird with a sense of awe. The birds of the island had such a sense of purpose, especially so, it would seem, in breeding season. They appeared to know just exactly what they needed to do and never second-guessed their instincts. Olive felt the opposite in her gurgling, deep distrust of her own actions, as she paced behind the barracks with the Russian Blue tucked neatly on her hip in its basket. It was the day for which she and Warren had been preparing for weeks, but how could she know if their plan would put them on the right path? It could easily backfire if any single element of the strategy didn’t go exactly as they intended. They could verily lose their lives by the end of the day.
The plan was that Warren would scope out the eggers during mealtime and make sure no one was near the brimming egg house, while Olive would signal to their compatriot captain, an underling Greek fisherman named Mikos, on his dinghy, that it was time to move in toward the target. They had chosen to work during the dusk hours so that they might slip away into the darkness of night toward the fishing vessel and then to San Francisco.
Warren had managed to set the whistle blowing—a ghastly malfunctioning contraption that often failed to blow when there was dense fog, but that instead necessitated only high tide to be triggered. That afternoon, the fog whistle reverberated its most unpleasant tone in stark sunshine. It was built over a natural blowhole in the rock, with a chimney to harness the breath of the island. Even on clear days, the whistle would sound for no apparent reason, as though the island were yelling at its occupants to leave it be. She considered the alarm as a sort of exhale, or sigh, by the island. In that sense, the whole rock was a living, breathing entity, with its most spectacular appendages those dwelling underwater. Standing up high on a peak of barren rock, she recalled the day at the abalone cave and how the brightly colored creatures living just under the water’s surface had performed a sort of mesmerism on her, almost leading her to be swept off the rock and into the ocean forever. It wouldn’t have been the great island animal’s first capture of a pesky human into its underworld. She heard the whistle blow again from across the island and felt it in her chest as a cry to be left alone. The desperate sound helped her to justify their act of piracy. So often to Olive, it seemed this jagged landscape, littered with men and their need to take, take, take what little the island had to offer, begged to be left in peace.
When Olive heard the whistle blow another, third, constant, unending whistle, she knew that Warren had managed to rig the contraption to play its warning despite the unusually clear skies. She would have to work fast and signaled with a flash from a small mirror and the waving of her arms overhead toward the absconded dinghy. It began to come round with its empty crates toward the egg house. As the lighthouse men attended to the broken whistle and the egg men were busy eating dinner, the three thieves would meet at the egg house and gather as many of the eggs as the dinghy could carry and slip away unnoticed. That is, unless any tiny detail were to lay bare their plan. And on an island with no trees, where every living thing lived its life exposed to danger, there were certainly any number o
f angles from which the hammer of uncertainty might land.
Olive scrambled along the path toward the egg house, the rabbit bumping along at her hip. Inside, under the soft green leaves it had taken her all day to collect from different nooks of the island, tucked next to the rabbit, bounced the well-wrapped collection box. With each rise and fall of a veil of birds as she trundled past, she said her farewells. Goodbye murres, goodbye guillemots, goodbye gulls and cormorants. Goodbye puffin, oystercatcher, and auklet, alike. She had just started to learn their idiosyncrasies and habits. They had become friends, the many bird mothers tending to their young, keeping a slender thread attached to the memory of her own.
When she arrived at the fork in the path that led down to the egg house, her heart began to race. She could still turn back and return to the lighthouse barracks, to Richardson and the other lighthouse men. Perhaps she could finally befriend one of the two other women on the island who hid away in their small quarters with three or four children hanging in various weights from their skirt dresses. The women had turned up their noses when she offered to help them with their washing baskets one day. “Not necessary, young man,” one said firmly, as though Olive might steal their babies and dash them on the rocks. I’m a girl, she longed to yell at them. I’m just like you. But she had taken their rejection in stride, as was necessary on this island where mankind held onto the most slippery of ropes when maintaining the sails of normalcy.
She paused and thought about poor Richardson and felt a twinge of regret at leaving the man alone with his delusions of grandeur and ailing eyesight. What would become of that funny, half-blind man trying to run a lighthouse? she wondered. He was one of four keepers, but so often it seemed as though he thought he was alone in the venture of keeping the light shining into the night. She would never be able to look back. There would be no carefully penned letters to Richardson with polite inquiries as to the functioning of the giant Fresnel lens, no recipes for meatless stew exchanged, no tender goodbyes. She felt that human twinge that exists, not quite in the heart or the head, but somewhere in between, that twinge that plucks all the strings of regret at once. The chord struck was not a tender or comforting tone. Across the island, the incessant fog whistle reminded her it was time for action.
As she made her way down the path, she looked out for anyone who might be waiting to ambush her during her incursion. It occurred to Olive that in stealing this shipment of eggs, they would be stealing from the thieves themselves. Her mother had loved to tell old Irish myths about thieving animals, many of which she took credit for crafting and embellishing herself. As Olive slid and skidded down the narrow trail, she recalled one particular story about a boy who stole eggs from wild birds and boiled them. He ate them down hungrily, but oddly found himself more hungry than before he had eaten the first round, and so he ate more and more. He stole from the songbirds and stole from the seabirds and even risked his life to steal from the eagle atop its giant precipice nest. But the boy just could not shake his hunger and grew weaker and leaner until one day, among the rocks of the Byrne, searching for a bird he had not yet stolen from that might satisfy his hunger, his life was suddenly and painfully seized from his very body by a lightning flash of talons. The bird flew off with his beating heart still tapping out a slow rhythm. As her mother told it, birds were prophets, so to steal from the birds, especially the raptors, was to steal the future right out from under one’s own feet. Olive was eight at the time and she asked her mother, Are not chickens birds, Mama? To which her mother replied, Not exactly, dear. Chickens are not wild, and they are certainly not prophets. They are in-between souls that give their bounty freely. But a young Olive still wondered, as she paused with a forkful of omelet the next morning, if a large bird might swoop through the chimney to carry off her tiny beating heart once she took a bite.
Still wading through the boggy, bloody memory of myth and hearts being torn from chests, she ran almost headlong into Warren, who greeted her with open arms at the bottom of the path. After crashing right into his chest, he allowed himself to hold her only a few seconds extra, as they had urgent business to attend to. She could hear his heart beating fast and hard as a drum in the short moment he held her close.
“Are you ready to pull off this caper?” he said, holding her at arm’s length.
“I’d call it more of a coup,” said Olive, wild-eyed.
Their accomplice, Mikos, stayed in the dinghy as it rocked gently in the unusually serene ocean by the egg house. He had tied off with a long rope in order not to crash into the rocks and fashioned a smaller raft on which they floated the crates of eggs from the shore to the boat. Olive noted that the men had made quick work as she had made her way across the island from her signal post near the barracks. The egg house was open and over half empty already. The dinghy was almost full, with just enough room for a few more crates and perhaps three people to tuck into the spaces. As Warren floated over the last two crates full of eggs, they heard a loud shout from just beyond the crag behind them. It sounded like someone had called Warren by name with the kind of yell that usually begins a bloody first battle. It was the cry of war.
Warren pulled the rope of the dinghy with such force that two lines of red instantly burned into his palms. Olive remembered her stigmata from the first day she’d arrived at the island and felt a shudder in her bones as she was lifted and almost thrown between Warren and Mikos on the boat. She fell down into the crack between the egg crates and felt a sharp pain in her ankle as it twisted under her. By the time she had righted herself, Warren was in the boat and was pulling in the long rope from shore as Mikos pulled hard on the oars. The boat pulled sharply away from the shore and listed hard to one side with the burden of the weight aboard. A few gallons of water seeped over the edge, but they all leaned the other direction in ballast before the whole ocean was able to hop aboard.
Up on the rock, four armed men had just scaled to the top and were joined by a few more as they pulled themselves up from their mountain climber’s ascent from basecamp. One of the men Olive recognized from the day on the beach as the one who had stolen her rabbits and questioned her gender. He loaded his coach gun with some effort and colorful language audible even at fifty feet and pointed his shotgun directly at the boat and yelled, “Halt! Warren. Do not dare take those eggs.”
“Those don’t belong to you,” another man added.
The boat was some thirty feet off shore and moving quickly in the glassy water. In only another thirty feet, they would be hidden from view and the men would have to scramble up and down another peak, by which time the trio of egg thieves would be gone.
“And nor do they belong to you,” Warren boomed back, cupping his hands to allow the message proper trajectory. And just as soon as his words had stopped resonating, the sound of a shot rang in the direction of the boat. Olive felt the world slow with the boom of the shot, her body only registering pain after her mind had already allowed itself to wonder at what kind of purpose these guns served to men on islands such as the Farallones. Did they shoot fish in the water? Shoot birds out of the sky? It seemed to her, before the pain began to tear into her side, that men used guns to gather by force that which didn’t belong to them. These eggs, they didn’t belong to anyone but the birds. But these eggs would never become young; they had been off the nest far too long. They couldn’t put them back even if they wanted to. The damages had been wrought. She felt the pain rip through her body as though it were some penance for all the misdeeds of man. Then she fell into the hull of the boat and disappeared into darkness.
Warren uncupped his hands and checked his chest before noticing that Olive was slumped in a new way in the crevasse between crates. Her body lay limp, perfectly filling in the space between two crates as though it were trying to putty a drip, or caulk two bricks. He pulled up her shirt just as the dinghy rounded the corner out of view of the eggers and into the safety of smooth, quiet waters. Even if the men scrambled at ful
l speed over the rock, their boat would be out of rifle range by the time the men caught up. The vessel moved swiftly over the darkening sea.
Under her shirt, there was hardly any blood at all, but Olive’s breathing was slow and she still hadn’t opened her eyes. Warren searched her soft skin desperate to find some scratch or wound that would explain how she had been hit. It wasn’t until he turned her on her front that he saw the small hole, probably made by a single bead of shot as it entered her body, just above her angular, wide hip bones. No blood seeped out, but clearly something had gone in. A low moan emerged from Olive as he shifted her onto her back again.
“They belong to the birds,” she said, and then slipped into a sort of quiet sleep with deep breathing as Warren watched in helpless terror.
In the cover of night, it took the dinghy only an hour before they reached the Greek fishing vessel, whereas they had planned for closer to two. It was fully dark, with an almost full moon lighting the path as the boat left a silver rippling wake behind. The men shouted greetings at Warren and congratulations until the dinghy pulled close enough to reveal the unconscious boy and the two pallid men’s grave faces. Both Mikos and Warren were drenched through with sweat from pulling as hard as they could at the oars for an hour. The fishermen helped hoist the dinghy up onto the side with cantilevers and pulled Olive out first. The captain came to pat Warren on the back and ordered the ship’s doctor to come and take a look at the still breathing boy. It wasn’t until the doctor had Olive on the table that he discovered that she was bleeding not from her back, but from between her legs. The shot had found its way directly into her womb, where it ricocheted a few times before landing like a fishing weight on the bottom of a lake, just above the internal opening to the outside.
The Wild Birds Page 18