The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  Dear Alice,

  My dear one! I just witnessed one of the wildest and most thrilling things. I think you would have totally hated/loved it. I’m still trying to make sense of it. Well, you know how you were afraid of Gila monsters so long ago when I first told you about them? Without knowing it, I just swam with one! And then, from shore, I watched it eat a baby bird. The whole thing took only a matter of minutes, but it’s the kind of vision that I imagine will be with me for a long time to come. And I know this will sound sort of callous, but it was one of the most natural and beautiful things in the world. There’s a part of me that feels so pleased when I watch energy transfer hands like that in the wild. I mean, the survival rate of songbird offspring into adulthood is less than one in two, anyhow, and the odds get even worse after that, so I guess in that sense it was a sort of commonplace occurrence. But to see the rare and secretive Gila monster killing to live another day? Incredible.

  It’s dastardly hot today at 110 degrees, but I’ve got a cooler of cold beer and water and I wish for nothing else than you here on this towel with me right now under this willow. I know you can’t just pick up and come visit, but I really wish I could show you all the things in this country that so many people don’t even know exist. They say the desert is barren. But, baby, it’s the most full kind of landscape I’ve ever known. Drop me a line sometime, maybe one of your amazing postcards? I miss you.

  Love,

  Sal

  She folded up the letter and put it back in the clipboard case, but she didn’t feel satisfied. Why was she always dancing around everything she truly wanted to tell Alice? Was it the fear of rejection holding her back? Why could she not tell her about breathing in a landscape and allowing it to be part of her heart? Why could she not tell Alice that the smell of her strawberry blonde hair at the end of the day after a hike, the salty pungent scent of her oils and sweat, had been a part of Sal’s heart for years? She took the letter back out, read it over, ripped it to shreds, and threw the shreds into the muddy water. Back to the earth, cowardice.

  ◆

  That very afternoon in Burning Woods, Alice stood at the mailbox a few extra seconds in her raincoat, staring into the empty cavernous space, and wondered why it had been so long since she’d heard from Sal. She couldn’t remember whose turn it was in the long chain of correspondence, but she felt a little pissed off about the whole thing. I guess she’s moved on to another adventure that’s more important than me, she sighed, closing the mailbox against the drizzling rain. She felt very much alone as she walked the road back to her truck with the rain ticking away on the hood of her jacket. She sat in the old aqua Chevy and watched the water run in rivulets on the windshield as the truck warmed up a few minutes. Once purring, she would go pick up Lily from the bus stop. There had been some disturbing developments at Lily’s grade school and she wanted to minimize the moments when kids might pick on her daughter. She’d heard from the teacher that the other fourth graders had started calling her “brainiac” and “wordy weirdo.” Someone had also thrown many little pieces of shaved metal, lord only knows where they came from, into her fluffy white hair during class. Alice had spent a good hour plucking the metal bits out like a mother gorilla when she came home. Lily didn’t want to talk about any of the cruelties to her mom, but instead just stuck her nose directly into a book the instant she came home.

  At the bus stop, Alice saw Lily get off the bus and watched as a little boy pushed her off the last step. Lily stumbled but didn’t fall all the way to the muddy ground. The bus driver ate a sandwich and looked the other way, as if on purpose. Alice felt a sort of beast take her over, the blood rising in her body, white lightning in her brain. She jumped down from the truck and clomped over to the boy in her galoshes and raincoat. She squatted directly in front of the boy—one of the Dickersons, she figured—held his shoulders in her hands, and looked lasers into his eyes.

  “Look, kid,” she said keeping her eyes locked on his. “If you touch my daughter again, I’ll send all the evil ghost succubi vampire demons into your room at night and they will suck your soul right out of your mouth.” The kid wiggled his shoulders a little and his brother laughed.

  “Watch out, Dempsey. She’s a super scaaaaaary witch.”

  “And you, too,” she said, pointing a finger in the face of the older one. “You won’t even know it has happened but you’ll just find yourself wandering around like a zombie. No soul. Nothing.” Little bits of spit flew from her mouth as she overannunciated.

  The two brothers put their arms up and made like they were the walking dead, groaning and eating pretend brains.

  “Nice job, Mom,” Lily said as they climbed up into the truck. “You just bought me some more special attention from those boys.”

  “You’ll see. That will teach them,” Alice said.

  “That will teach them to make sure my life sucks,” Lily said, looking out the window.

  On the drive back up the long gravel driveway, Alice glanced at her brooding little girl and felt like a failure. She had failed to defend her daughter, failed to keep the written affections of her beloved Sal flowing, failed to keep the monsters at bay. She parked the car and they ran inside under a sheet of rain. As the girls peeled their soggy layers in the silence of the foyer, she thought of only one thing she was good at. And so she went to the kitchen as her little daughter went straight for her book to escape the day and pulled out a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet. She poured the rest of the bottle into a highball glass, right up to the rim, and watched as the rain came down in sheets outside. The drink blazed a trail down her throat and into her belly. Where warmth is lacking, a foreign voice sounded in her brain, there you must start a fire.

  Sheep vs. Goat

  San Francisco, California, 1874

  Olive recuperated hidden away in a small apartment in the Marina District belonging to the Greek fishing boat captain, his mother, his wife, and their six children. The scent of charcoal, citrus, and bay leaf floated on the air, filling the space with a sense of sharp newness as she rested. There was distinct relief from the unrelenting winds of the islands as she lay in the still, warm air that floated from room to room. While the constant flow of screaming children and bickering was not the most ideal place to rest, Olive didn’t mind. The babies were a welcome distraction after months on the Farallones without any contact with the young or old of the human variety. Olive’s rabbit hopped around the apartment and delighted the children. The grandmother fed Olive magical lemon soup with rice, fried squid, and a hard sharp cheese called feta, layered with strong grassy oil. Olive had never tasted such glorious flavors and the tang revived her body, starting with her taste buds. The grandmother laughed when they told her the new guest’s name.

  “Olive,” she scoffed. “Like zee oil.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We name our children after gods, emperors, or muses,” she clucked, “not food.”

  “Can you imagine?” her daughter roared, “My little baby Myzithra?” She mimed kissing a baby loaf of cheese.

  Olive knew they were poking fun at her, but she was floating in a happy fog of big-bosomed women bringing her plates of delicious, fortifying food and shots of ouzo to numb the pain of the wound. She was, though still in pain, a happy clam.

  Warren spent the week in San Francisco making deals with various black market vendors. He unloaded the shipment of eggs bit by bit, so as not to arouse suspicion on the street. The fishermen had told him that the next ship wasn’t scheduled to go out to the Farallones until the following week for deliveries, so he had to work fast before word could travel back from the island about the pirate egger and the lighthouse assistant boy who’d helped him pull the job.

  He stopped at the door to a Chinese restaurant and regarded the naked plucked fowl hanging in the front window. Flies buzzed around and feasted on the goose-fleshed naked skin. Below, a tank with two live fish filled up
the small space with their fatted bodies, watching and waiting for the flies to make the deadly mistake of landing on the surface of the water. Warren’s mind began drawing circles and arrows from being to being, as though to illustrate the cycle of life. He took out his notebook but put it back in his pocket without documenting his thoughts, as he was late for his scheduled meeting with the restaurant owner.

  He had an appointment to sell three crates of eggs but was surprised to find the place empty and dark. The tables were set apart by thin wooden screens elaborately carved with serpents, birds, and the gnarled limbs of a foreign species of tree. He started to think he had arrived at the wrong time and turned to go when an old man emerged from the back holding an armload of oranges and a large knife.

  “What?” the proprietor said, as if quite ready to use the knife.

  “Warren, here.” He placed a hand delicately to his chest. “With fresh eggs. As per our appointment.”

  “Aaaaah.” The man looked relieved as he let the armful of oranges fall into a crate. “Lots of men coming in here lately talking Chinese corruption. Prostitution. Many threats made on our lives. They make raids on some others, I hear.”

  “Yes,” Warren nodded. “Men are distrustful of what they don’t understand. The celestial culture is foreign, therefore threatening. It’s their own ignorance at play.”

  “It is.” The old man stood taller but still eyed Warren distrustfully as he twirled the end of his mustache. “You brought samples for me?”

  Warren took out a murre egg hidden away in his inside breast pocket and handed it over to the proprietor. The old man held the egg up to the light and inspected the beautiful shape and brown-speckled bluish surface.

  “They are fresh,” Warren said. “But you must not tell anyone where you got them.”

  The man brought out a glass of water from behind the bar and let the egg drop into the water. It stayed on its side on the bottom, the sharp end just raised up enough to look like some pointer toward the divine.

  “Good. How many crates can you give?”

  “How about six?”

  “Okay. Our secret,” the old man said. “We can have egg flower soup again. All the neighbors have been missing it. Bring them tonight to the back door.”

  The men settled on a price agreeable to each and Warren left with half the agreed-upon sum, a stack of bills tucked away in his breast pocket where the egg had been. Outside in the sun, he watched the fish again, feeling the promise of a new life outstretched before him. The fish tried to move in a circle but was too large for the container and doubled back, folded in on itself. He was feeling the urge to free the fish, so that it might swim away as he was about to, when a man walked past on the street and hissed traitor in his ear as he passed. Warren watched the man as he retreated in the distance but did not turn his head to look back. He felt suddenly unsafe, unsure, and revealed on the city streets. The man was probably a run-of-the-mill bigot like the owner had mentioned, one of the increasing number of hooligans who had been storming Chinese businesses and looting, even killing, owners and patrons. He had been warned that the recession was causing outbursts of anger and desperation across the city. Citizen groups were forming on both sides. There were whispers of laws being drawn up to curb Chinese rights as contract workers and owners of land. Their rights to housing and employment had already been minimized five years prior. The vise of the white economy was clamping down, and hard. The man’s hissed traitor was probably nothing more than a commonplace assertion of judgment on Warren after he saw him leave the restaurant.

  But Warren couldn’t be sure that the man wasn’t referring to his heist. What if he was someone from the Pacific Egg Company? What if somehow word had traveled back? What if the Greeks had betrayed him? There would be a mob of angry eggers who would surely hunt him down and dismantle him limb from limb. His traitor body would be thrown into the sea to be taken by the sharks. He hurried along the sidewalk, his feet kicking up dust as he hustled back to the Greeks’ apartment. He would hide out there for the rest of the day until it was time to deliver the eggs unseen. At least back at the Greeks’, he could be by the side of the one human he trusted as she convalesced.

  Under the cover of night, he sold the rest of the eggs over the next two days—to a baker, another Chinese restaurant at the opposite end of Chinatown, and the last crate he gifted to an orphanage at Olive’s behest. After the fishermen’s cut of the profits, there was enough money left for two passages north and for a small parcel of land, possibly even a cabin. Warren had heard that they were practically giving away land in the copper belt in southern Oregon and northern California. But they would have to leave town soon, before the Egg Company learned of their whereabouts and sent the police, or worse, to their door.

  Olive was still weak, but able to stand, so she and Warren made plans to take passage at night on a freight train. They needed to leave no trace of their path and so finagled a deal with a rancher Warren knew who was planning to move some sheep north. On the evening of their departure, he ushered her out into the cool, foggy San Francisco night and through the streets as the ladies of the evening replaced the daytime throngs on the planked sidewalks of downtown. Olive held tight to the wicker basket containing the Russian Blue. Every corner held a potential threat, so they made as though a newlywed couple, kissing and engaging with one another in conversation. The ruse did not require great acting skills from the two. As they passed a tall braided prostitute who smelled strongly of roses and smoke, Olive grabbed his arm and asked to stop.

  “There’s no time to stop,” Warren urged.

  “Just a few seconds,” Olive said.

  Hazel looked confused by Olive’s short cropped hair, but held a glimmer of recognition in her opium-laden gaze.

  “Can I help you, dear?” she asked with lidded eyes as Olive approached.

  “It’s me. Ducky,” Olive said.

  Warren watched from a few feet away as the two embraced and Olive put something in the woman’s hand, holding it tight with both of hers. The woman gave her a warm smile and whispered something in her ear before Olive walked slowly back to Warren.

  “Who was that?” Warren asked.

  “A lesson I learned early,” Olive said, “was that hardships befall us all, and that all people deserve kindness. That woman helped me learn that.” Warren smoothed her short hair back out of her eyes and decided not to inquire further. They just had to reach the train platform, find the right freight car, and they would be free. They hurried along the street, Olive clinging to Warren’s side, and past a group of rowdy drunks arguing about a gamble gone wrong. One pushed the other just as Olive and Warren tried to pass close by and the man’s shoulder hit Olive hard in the side. She winced and doubled over in pain. Warren’s brain flashed to the fish in the tank and her limp body laid among the crates of eggs, then it flooded red. A fire burned in his brain and he was suddenly on the man, pinning him to the wooden ground, spit flying from his mouth like foam as he growled in an ur-language. He slammed the man’s head into the sidewalk hard, grunting as he twisted the man’s arm in a position the arm is not meant to ever go. A trickle of blood grew to a stream, headwaters behind the drunk’s ear. The men pulled Warren off and skulked back into a doorway with their unconscious, bloodied, drunk friend like a pack of cur. They retreated en masse, nary a soul choosing to face off with Warren and his raging eyes, beard mottled with spittle, hair wild and unruly. His black eyes were open wide and invited anyone to dare step up. The men retreated down the street carrying their friend and he trapped their one small piece of luggage under his arm and picked Olive up carefully in his arms, sailing her the rest of the few blocks to the train station where he carefully set her down on a bench.

  “Stay here,” he said, as though nothing horrifying had just happened. “I’m to find the switchman.” And with that he ran off across the empty tracks and disappeared behind a brick building. Olive sat wi
th her hand on her abdomen, considering what had just occurred. This was her last chance to disappear. The drunk could potentially die from those wounds. Warren’s outburst had scared into her the feeling that she was lumbering off with a wild bear as his wounded prey, being led into a dark, tunneled forest. She could be stuck on a train for days with him, lying with a murderer. Or she could take the money she had from their exchange, as Warren had thought it best to split the money into both of their coat linings in case they should be mugged or separated along the journey. She could continue to live as Oliver, she thought. There was a certain amount of freedom she had truly enjoyed as a male that she wasn’t entirely ready to give up. There were conspiratorial whispers from other men. Richardson had called her a “brick” and one time even “boss.” It felt good to be part of the secret fraternity and she saw the portal to that world closing. She could go back to the island and tell Richardson she’d been kidnapped or drugged. Or she could go back to find Hazel and live a new life. She could save her. The taste of salt rose on her tongue, the lemon of possibility. She considered her options, but remembered the kind soul she’d found in the cave and the feeling he’d unlocked in her chest like bubbles rising in the sea toward the surface to join with the beloved air of the sky. She would stay and allow herself to slip back into Olive’s skin, she decided. She would stay and inhabit her old flesh, but on her own terms.

  Warren arrived back and picked her up once again, completely ignorant to her struggle, and took her down the platform toward a still freight train in the distance. They paused before an open cargo car and he checked the number in his notebook before helping her up onto the hay-covered floor.