“Warren,” she said. “If I’m to go with you and this is to be our life together, I will not tolerate fighting and bloodshed. Promise me that.”
“I see,” Warren said, looking confounded and for the first time remorseful of his actions toward the drunk. “I can promise that.” He helped her up into the boxcar and followed awkwardly, his shoulders hunched like a sad giant or a dog that had just been shackled to a tree.
Once safely boarded, they inspected their surroundings. They shared the train car with an enclosure of goats and sheep, animals that despite their similarity in size and shape didn’t seem to get along swimmingly. The animals’ heads butted one another and pushed each other up against the walls of the train car. Olive inspected the profile of this burly man as he watched them without emotion, this man who seemed not to notice Olive’s concern at his earlier brutish outburst. He blinked the innocent lashes of a babe as he inspected the car and set down the rabbit gingerly in the corner.
The racket of the sheep and goats’ braying made getting sleep almost impossible. Warren arranged a comfortable corner for Olive with hay, blankets, and a very small down pillow he had purchased at a specialty store in downtown San Francisco and produced from his breast pocket. She thanked him, but still she tossed and turned. He adjusted her hair on the pillow and petted her forehead with his warm hand as she dozed in and out of sleep, minutely adjusting her position with each waking to minimize the pain. The wheels clicked and the car swayed back and forth like an impatient mother rocking a child to sleep. The little blue rabbit hopped around in a brand new basket twice the size of his last one, munching happily on his first-ever apple.
Warren held in his pocket a secret thing that he hoped to find just the right moment to reveal to Olive. She moaned a little and shifted in new sleep. She had become an annul of a woman, never able to reproduce. As the train rounded a bend she winced. The clacking marked the slow passage of time. She just wished to make it through each moment, hoping the next might hurt less than the last.
The early morning sun-streaked rays through the slats of the train car, a bright finger of light landing on Olive’s face. She sat up with some difficulty, the pain of waking a harsh reality of countenance first thing in the morning. Warren lay curled around her like a baby but snored like a hog. The sheep and goats seemed to have worked out some basic truce and lay snoozing in segregated piles on opposite ends of the pen. Olive sat up against the wall and stretched her short legs out in the hay. It was these quiet moments when she wanted nothing more than to be waking to the sounds of china and cutlery clinking in her mother’s tiny kitchen as she started the day. She longed to hear her say just once more, “Good morning, my fawn,” as though they were simply two little forest creatures waking into the wildness. Instead she found herself clacking and chattering in a train car smelling of animal dung, with a man capable of great kindness and great brutality curled around her. She wondered if perhaps life was predicated on this kind of paradox—the tenderness all wound up in a knot with the threatening.
After two full days of travel, the train came to a stop and stayed that way for over an hour. She had been asleep as the train pulled up to the station but she woke at the sound of the boxcar door opening. Warren slipped out and talked with someone on the platform. The scent of sagebrush drifted in through the slats in the car. Olive put her nose up to one of the cracks and breathed deep. It reminded her of back in the Rockies, when her mother was well and they would leave the city for a few days to stay in a little cabin in the sagelands. The smell had always seemed to her the freshest scent on the planet. It came in through the nostrils and wove a path through the body like some careful, cleansing ghost. Sitting there in the hay, the smell revived her to boldness. The pain had just that morning subsided to the point of being tolerable enough to rise on her own, so she carefully stood and peeked out through the slats at the forms of the men talking on the platform.
Warren had his hands folded and his hat pulled down over his face as if to hide his identity from passers by. He spoke to a cattleman who gestured back at the train car where Olive sat watching. She couldn’t quite tell if they were arguing or greeting one another, but arms began to fly in the air, gestures of some form of excitement or another. She scanned the faces of everyone passing by on the station to see if she recognized danger lurking in their eyes, but recognized no one. Finally, the crowd dispersed in wagons or on horseback, off to their destinations. When the two men were alone on the platform, Warren took out some bills from his pocket and handed them over to the cattleman who walked toward Olive and the bleating, increasingly impatient animals.
Once all the animals had been deboarded, Olive and Warren shuffled their belongings off the car. A pang of paranoia grabbed at them both once the sunlight hit their skin for the first time in days. Warren looked around nervously to see if he recognized any egg men who might have trailed them on their journey north. A painted wooden sign hung over the bench reading “Y R E K A.” Olive stood with her hand shading her eyes, looking at the sign for a long time before breaking out into laughter.
“What’s so funny?” Warren asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Olive put her hand over her mouth and whispered, “Eureka, I think we’ve found it.” She put her hand in Warren’s warm hand. “It seems we may have found our home.”
Rooster Riots
The Mojave Desert, California, 1941
Victor had come down out of the slot canyon after the peyote ceremony feeling sleep-deprived but alive and full of veneration for the common. Colors hummed on the still cool morning air and lifted off the surface of all living things in lingering hues. He made a mouth trumpet and hummed a little Sousa tune as he hopped down into the wash at the bottom of the canyon and headed back toward the highway. The sounds of the desert waking up filled him with a sense of wonderment at how a place that one might think of as desolate could come alive in such tremulous chorus—birdsong, the rustle of wind through hearty stems and branches, and the sound of the very earth waking up danced in his ears. The sun rose hard and fast and with it spread an urgent heat over the crusted earth. Victor had never felt like he belonged anywhere, but he thought perhaps he had finally found a place he could settle down with these strangers, the fringe folk of Needles. His first duty was to find a place to rent, then he could begin mapping out what staying in one place for longer than a day might look like.
On his way back into town, he hugged the side of the highway until he noticed some wide circular cement tubes sticking up from the ground some 150 feet off the side of the highway. Curious, he wandered toward them and climbed a short set of steps to the top of the cement tube, sat down, and looked inside the rim. Inside, there was a sort of dusty floor some twenty feet across, sunk about ten feet below ground. Pecking around on opposite sides of the tube, two roosters scratched in the dirt. They looked scrawny and were missing tail feathers. The sun was already starting to heat up and Victor felt bad for the two beasts. He rifled through his backpack for some small morsel to give them to eat and found a half-eaten apple. Without further thought, he tossed the apple down onto the dusty tube floor.
The first rooster to notice the apple pecked at it with nonchalance. He threw it up in the air using his beak and ripped little pieces of apple flesh off the core. Once the second rooster noticed the first playing with the apple, the atmosphere shifted steeply. The second rooster flew over from its far side of the tube and landed hard on top of the first rooster. He pecked aggressively and the other rooster responded in kind. They tumbled over one another and stole the apple core back and forth, neither creature getting a chance to actually enjoy any of the fruit.
After a few minutes of the two roosters pouncing and posturing, spreading their wings and viciously attacking one another, the apple core flung up and down, up and down, blood began to fly. Little droplets speckled the dusty floor and both roosters’ feathers began to grow matted with one another’s blood. The se
cond rooster ripped a little piece off the first’s coxcomb, leaving the once proud appendage drooping and dripping with blood. Victor’s heart beat faster and faster in his chest as he realized that he had started this bloody battle with his apple core. These must be fighting cocks. And he had just unintentionally started them fighting.
How to end a battle such as this, once it is begun? He couldn’t think how he might subdue the fury between the two roosters unless he managed to separate them. So he jumped down into the pit with the two cocks and set about capturing one. First, with some difficulty, he was able to recapture the apple and fling it up over the edge of the tube. But this did nothing to calm the fight between the roosters. They continued to fight, as the one with the intact coxcomb pinned the other to the ground like a dog would a rabbit. It looked like the death grip for the pinned rooster. He grabbed the rooster on top and flung it over to the other side, the flapping of its wings spraying a fine mist of blood onto Victor’s cheek. He picked up the rooster on the ground, now quiet and perhaps even dead, and put the bird under his arm. He looked for a way back up and out of the tube but could see no ladder. Finally, after running around in a circle with the other rooster hot on his trail, still mad as hell, he found some indentations in the cement that must be used to climb in and out of the tube.
He tucked the bloodied, apoplectic rooster into his shirt and started to climb. The other rooster jumped up and pecked at his legs as he climbed out. The warm bird’s blood seeped out on his belly as he climbed up the cement wall using the hand and footholds. When he reached the top, he looked down to see the first rooster lazily picking out pieces of apple, or whatever it could find in the dirt, as though nothing had happened.
He pulled the rooster out of his shirt and inspected its wounds. His eye opened, which at least meant that he was still alive. It watched and flinched as Victor inspected the largest wound on its side. Rustling for a first aid kit inside his backpack, he looked back at the rooster and said, “What a strange way to start the day, huh?”
The rooster did not make a noise, but blinked its second eyelid, the thin sheath covering closed as he wrapped its body in gauze. When the bandaging was done, he ruffled his neck feathers as if settling into a new shirt.
“You should see the other guy,” Victor said, winking at the rooster as he secured him in the top of his rucksack, pulling the string closed gently around its neck so it wouldn’t try to fly away. He adjusted the torn coxcomb gently and tried to prop it back up, but it kept flopping back down and seemed like it might be a permanent alteration to the rooster’s aesthetic. The rooster made a little cruuu-cuuu-ruu noise as Victor started on the road toward town, its head sticking out from the top of the pack bumping up and down like a baby on its mother’s back.
“Let’s go find ourselves a place to call home,” he said as they headed back into town.
The town seemed more bustling in the morning than it had the day before when he’d first arrived and been led out into the desert by the boy. People set about on their errands, determined to get the bulk of their activity done before midday, when the desert heat would cast everything through a febrile, wavy lens. He walked toward a line of palm trees he guessed might be planted to lure travelers to stay at a motel. It seemed hard for Victor to believe that he’d only been gone up in the slot canyon a day. There seemed to be so much more time between the boy who disembarked from the back of a chicken truck to the person he was today. He had traveled the arc of a rainbow and through the ground as water, traveled the back of a single note along the rock face in echo. And here it wasn’t even twenty-four hours later, yet he felt like an altered being. He stood in front of the iron gates surrounding an unnaturally blue swimming pool and sensed that when he went through the threshold he would be starting his life anew.
Secured in the cool of the motel room, he lay back on the bed and let the springs creak in lessening increments until the room was completely quiet. He let himself be completely still, relaxed and prostrate, for the first time since leaving Seattle, entire seasons, lifetimes ago. A little chirrup of a noise came from his backpack and he sat up slowly and took out the poorly bandaged, but still breathing, rooster and brought it into the cramped bathroom with him. He unwrapped the bird and set him carefully in the tub. The bird stood up briefly, demonstrating that both his legs still worked, but sat back down again, tired by the mere act of standing. He ruffled his blood-encrusted feathers and shook his waddle a little, peering up as if waiting for a command from his master.
“Well, champ,” he cocked his head like the rooster. “What say you? Let’s assess the damages.”
The rooster was resigned to patience as Victor poured cups of warm water over his wings and torso to wash the dried blood off. The bathtub ran in rivulets of hot red. Anyone peering in through the crack in the window or a chink in the curtains might think there had been a motel massacre. Once the water ran clearer, he checked the wounds to see which ones needed attention. Only one gash truly needed a bandage, a two-inch-deep cut in the rooster’s side where its opponent must have sunk a claw in good. Victor fished out a butterfly bandage and managed to make it stick to the bumpy fowl skin below the feathers. He nestled the rooster in a towel and set out some water and little bits of saltine, then closed the door to let the creature find its footing.
He lay back on the bed and let the exhaustion of everything he’d been through over the last few months, days, and hours, wash over him as a tender tsunami. He slipped fast into sleep and woke up after what felt like only a matter of seconds, but was probably hours, and heard the rooster crowing a strong cockadoo-dle-doo from the bathroom. This, he guessed, was a good sign.
In the shower, rivers of grime washed off Victor’s body in little brown streaks, finding their way toward the drain like snowmelt toward the ocean. He let the warm water wash over him in a kind of ecstasy of leaving. He let the rides in truck beds and nights spent on the hard ground wash down and into the drain like an exodus of filth and hardship. As he showered, the rooster pecked around after a trail of saltines and peanuts in the room. While toweling off, a harsh knock sounded at the door. A large woman in pin rollers and a hair net stood with her hands on fleshy hips.
“Boy, I’m not sure what kind of establishment you think you’re in,” she started, “but we do not allow farm animals in our rooms.”
“He’s not from a farm, ma’am.” He glanced behind him at the rooster, holding the towel closed with one hand. “Found him half dead in the desert.”
“Even worse,” she clucked. “There have been complaints. Please pack your bag at once.” The woman accented the singular bag and glanced at the boy’s single, dirty rucksack behind him, letting her eyes linger only briefly on his toned half-naked body, unable to keep a blush from rising in her neck and thus unable to maintain the purity of her superior tone. She turned in a huff and padded back to the office, adjusting the apron around her middle.
Back in the room, the rooster settled back in on the top of Victor’s rucksack as if he knew it as home, allowing the rope to tighten the canvas around his winged shoulders. After dressing, the two set back out into the town through the gates, Victor giving the glowing blue pool one, last sidelong glance as they walked back to the street. He had missed his chance to let his body glide through the rippled, electric blue water. It had been one of his favorite things as a child to slide under the water in the community pool as if he were a porpoise. He would open his eyes and watch the blurred forms kick awkwardly under the water, pitying the poor humans who didn’t understand how to channel their inner cetacean. The surface was smooth, undisturbed, as he stood and watched the light bend and dapple the bottom of the pool, the late afternoon sunlight painting the floor with slow, reaching fingers. He closed the heavy gate and let the brief chapter of comfort and shelter close, a motion he was more than accustomed to performing.
Man and rooster walked along Main Street until they stood in front of the Oasis Dine
r with the large picture windows and curved blue booths. The same waitress as the day before, a lifetime ago, set up the round tables for dinner. She wore fatigue in her shoulders and neck, the way she slowed as she leaned down to land the fork next to the knife. Victor settled the rooster down deeper into the pack and put the top flap gently over its head. He would not have his new companion erase all chance at being allowed in the establishment. His freshly washed hair he smoothed over his ears and he headed in to take the corner booth. A hunger as large as a continent raked at him from within.
He managed to secure the corner booth and the waitress brought him a hot cup of coffee and took his order: steak and eggs. Victor chuckled to himself that he would eat the flesh of a cow, the eggs from a chicken, but couldn’t bear to watch the rooster churring softly at his feet meet his end in the ring. He took out the crumpled envelope the old man had given him and counted the bills again. It hardly seemed possible that he was now in possession of such funds. He remembered the way his wealthy, estranged father used to slip crisp bills off his thick billfold with a face like wrought iron. Each dollar that ran away from him was another dollar not in his hand and it was as simple as that.
Victor brought out the egg collection, careful not to disturb the rooster too much, and unwrapped it from its cloth. There were still two spots left to make the collection complete. He admired the object from all angles, as the beveled glass cast a tight little rainbow of color onto the Formica table. It delighted Victor to think of where this object had traveled from and where it might travel to in the future. As he inhaled his dinner, he wondered about spirits and how they inhabit objects. Did they live inside the very silver and silk threads of velvet? He had written a poem about the idea of spirits in objects and his dad had found it and burned it in the fireplace, holding the shoulders of his young son to make him watch. “That is what becomes of nonsense,” he said. “I’ll have no more of it.” And so the young boy began hatching a plan to seek out and relish the nonsense of the world, to study it and make sense.
The Wild Birds Page 22