The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  It was in this reaching back into childhood that Victor came to the idea of opening a curio shop. He would collect and share as much beautiful nonsense as he could lay his hands on. It seemed like Warren, the old stranger, would be proud. The waitress came back and asked if he was interested in pie.

  “Apple or Coconut,” she said.

  “One of each.” He smiled up at her.

  “I like your spirit,” she smiled. “What’s your name? Haven’t seen you ’round.”

  “My name is Victor,” he said, just as the rooster chirruped a half crow from under the table.

  “And who’s your friend?” she whispered, darting a look back at the kitchen.

  “His name is Champ.”

  “Victor and Champ,” she said. “A match made in heaven.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Victor felt the sound of his own name, spoken out loud for the first time in months, and thought that maybe he, after years of doubt, finally matched it. He was going to welcome the strange and curious objects of this world and he would be victorious over the boring, turgid life that others had meant for him to live. He was unshackled and tender as a new shoot of green in the desert, ready to make his way. He hoped he would make Warren proud in his path.

  Cryptobiotic

  Oregon and Arizona, 1994

  Dear Alice,

  In your last letter you asked me to tell you about something especially fascinating that’s found in the desert. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Of course people are always gushing over the desert’s charismatic megafauna—the cougar, desert ram, or condor. And they all certainly have their stories and caché. But what I’ve decided to tell you about, my dear one, well, it’s cryptobiotic soils. Dirt, you say?! But oh, this is not your average dirt. Without a doubt these cryptobiotic soil crusts are some of the coolest things I’ve ever encountered. They are a combination of cyanobacteria, lichens, mosses, fungi, and algae. But it’s the cyanobacteria that are the dominant and most amazing part. Most of the year, the cyanobacteria lies dormant. But when the summer rains come, when exposed to water, they become active, secreting a trail of mucilaginous sheath material as they grow. Microcoleus vaginatus is the name of one of the most important species found locally. Ha! I fuck with you not. It really is microcoleus vaginatus! Some taxonomist out there had as bizarre a sense of humor as you and I do, my dear.

  So, the important function of these cyanobacteria as they forge their way slowly and slickly across the desert floor is that they hold the soil together, making it less prone to wind and water erosion. It’s like a thin layer of slow-spreading glue holding all that topsoil down. The cool thing is that they don’t have to be alive to hold the earth together. Even the abandoned sheaths, the trails of the dead if you will, help hold down sandy soils. It is this expansive network of growing filaments and abandoned sheaths, like snakes and their shed skins all joined as one, that make up the enormous organism know as cryptobiotic soil. It is the pulling and threading of millennia of time into a highly nutritive blanket that benefits all desert life. I know the romantic poet in you has perked up her ears. Do with that what you will. There is literally a sheath of nutrients covering the desert floor.

  Now here’s where the story turns sad. These soils are very easily destroyed. Even a footfall can break the brittle soil up in the dry season. Add an off-road vehicle to the equation, or grazing cows, or a hundred trucks on a construction site, and you’ve got erosion disaster. Since the soil only grows when conditions are wet, the slow process of building a soil can be five thousand to ten thousand years in arid areas. That means if it is destroyed by human traffic and development it is pretty much considered a lost cause. A thriving desert area with a blanket of microscopic life that helps fix carbon and nitrogen for all other plant life can become a wandering sand dune in months. That magical time tapestry can be unraveled in a matter of moments.

  This soil saga got me thinking. Some things are so slow to grow, but so incredibly important. What took centuries and millennia to grow can just be destroyed and washed away in a matter of minutes. How is it that in my thirty-two years I have not yet seized the day and asked you (and Lily) to come stay with me? What if I’ve spent my whole life like a tiny filament winding my way to forge an understanding of the natural world, but forgot to bind with you, my soil? Will you consider coming out to stay for six months or a year and see if you like it out here? After the harvest someone can take over the orchards if you promise them the yield. Maybe one of your workers wants to give it a go? Or maybe one of those vanity farmers moving out from the cities and into those pressboard-housing complexes will jump at the chance. It will be a win-win affair. Someone can learn to farm filberts and could potentially help you should you choose to return, or you can pass the baton and sell the damn place. Just give it a good think and let me know what you decide. I’ve tried to write this same letter to you in a hundred ways over the years, but was always held back by my own fear. Those other letters ended up confetti in the wind. Well, not this time. This sucker is going out across the wires to you, my love. Write me back at my Globe PO Box. You have the address.

  Your lonely little filly-ment,

  Sal

  As if to demonstrate her point about soil erosion, wind picked up and whipped through the mesa, bearing on it the gasoline smell creosote leaves let off after a rain. It was the trail end of monsoon season, most would say it was over, and the rain had been only brief, not enough to tamp down the dust as it whipped up from the topsoil and sailed into the town of Globe, Arizona, in gusts. Sal huddled with her back against the brutal sandy wind as she stood in front of the blue mailbox. The letter made a little metronomic fwap fwap fwap sound as it sputtered and flapped against the metal in the wind. The sound bore resemblance to a cartoon bomb counting down to detonation. She pushed the envelope through the slot fast, before she could change her mind. It was done. And with that, she put her handkerchief over her mouth to avoid inhaling the sediment wind. She coughed and hopped up into the driver’s seat of her old Nissan 4x4, rolling up the windows as fast as she could, and headed out to find a windbreak to camp in for the night. The field season had just ended and she was free to roam in whatever direction she chose. Virga clouds loitered in the evening sky and caught the sun’s last rays, reflecting them in bursts of golden orange. The fingers of condensation trailed down from the virga like fringe evaporating into the air before the water could even reach the ground. She had sent the message and there was no going back. All she could do was lose herself in the freedom of wandering and wait for an answer.

  ◆

  That very same night in Burning Woods, Alice sat alone in her house drinking a tall glass of bourbon and drawing a picture of Zombie Cat on a postcard-sized piece of thick paper. She hadn’t heard from Lily all summer, but received regular updates from Boomer on her daughter’s well-being. She finished strong in her junior year, of course. Honor roll, yet again. She was doing well in the first few weeks of her senior year, too. According to Boomer, Lily had joined Max in a craft class and was learning the ancient art of basket weaving from a woman named Yolanda, known to friends as “Mama Pepper.” Alice felt a twinge of jealousy at the idea of anyone being any sort of Mama to her daughter, even if she was a pepper. Boomer also reported that Lily had stopped sticking out her tongue in disgust every time he mentioned her mother, which Alice could only take as a sign of progress.

  All summer long Alice had been sending postcards every few days to her daughter with little snippets of information about the farm—updates on the battle with the fungus, the filbert yield, Donnie Jr. and her triumphant return to laying eggs. With each postcard she added one line of cryptic apology or a veiled appeal to come home. “Dougie sends his regards and says sorry he was such an ass,” or “Zombie Cat seems a little down. I think she misses her partner in crime.” She signed each card with LOVE YOU, triple underlined for emphasis, just in case Lily didn’t notice the all
caps.

  Alice finished the postcard and downed the last finger of brown alcohol in one gulp. She had been consumed with the business of harvest time, and after paying the seasonal workers, thought there was a slim chance she might still come out on top. The harvest season was rising to a climax, a time that normally would have been exciting, but without Lily, she found herself knocking around the quiet, empty place like an agitated squirrel in the final days before hibernation. Never especially good at being alone, she felt restless. She called up Darla and made a date to meet at the Re-Bar and proposed that they get into some trouble. I need to escape harvest madness, so let’s party, she said. Let’s make Randy jealous. And find some guys to flirt with.

  Pulling on her tightest jeans, she lay back on her bed and lifted her legs and pelvis skyward so she might zip the pants closed. She lay there with the tight pants hugging her insides like a vice, with nothing else on top, like some sort of encased creature trying to free itself from a too-tight chrysalis. She danced around the room to Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” singing like a madwoman, letting the freedom of dance move and jiggle her top half wherever it wanted to go. She would let the night find a random path for her and would not feel bad that she was a wild woman. For years people had called her a slut or a heathen. So be it. She would give the people what they wanted. They didn’t know how bad bad could be.

  It was the first time Alice had been to the Re-Bar since she and Randy split. Inside, the bar glowed red, blue, and green from the neon Bud and Rolling Rock signs on the wall, the colors highlighting the hair of a packed Friday night crowd as they wandered among the ribbons of light.

  “They’re unintentional punks,” Alice leaned in to whisper to Darla. “Manic Panic on the streets of Philomath.”

  “Maybe we should just stick to beer tonight,” said Darla, raising her eyebrows, not a clue as to what her friend was talking about.

  It was not Randy tending bar but some young, tattooed girl, probably his new girlfriend. Alice was disappointed he wasn’t around to make jealous. She sighed and morosely stuck her tongue in and out of the top of her beer bottle. Darla requested they duet on the karaoke stage, something old country. The women pulled on their beers, perched up on two of the vinyl covered swivel bar seats, and faced out to survey the room. Two young men were playing shuffleboard and one leaned down in concentration before he let his puck sail down the long, salted field. He knocked his opponent’s puck off the end as his settled just a third of the way off the end of the board garnering double points.

  “Get schooled,” he stood up and pointed at his friend, “in the realm of the master.”

  There was something very familiar about the guy. Alice could swear she knew him from somewhere. The curly, black hair, the way the planes of his face lined up like a perfect geometric puzzle. Darla said she’d never seen him before. But Alice couldn’t stop staring at him, and then realized—he looked like Sal’s male doppelgänger.

  “Let’s go play.” She pulled at Darla’s arm like a toddler.

  “But what about karaoke?” Darla whined.

  “Later,” Alice said, adjusting her pants on her waist. “We have more important things to do.”

  The women introduced themselves to the two men and they played the next game in pairs. Darla and Alice planned a strategy and took their turn. Alice stood on her toes and raised her ass up as she bent down and grazed the puck back and forth over the grains of sand, taking aim. She waggled her butt slowly before the Sal lookalike. He watched her every move and grinned, gripping his beer with sweaty hands. Darla glanced back toward the karaoke stage and fiddled with her cuticles like someone watching a scary movie, looking for something to distract them from the plot at hand. Alice took aim and way overshot, the puck rebounding off the back board with an alarmingly loud noise that made people from all the way across the bar look over.

  “Whoops,” she said. “Looks like I don’t know my own strength.”

  “You are freakishly strong,” Darla giggled nervously. “Like a cougar, this one.”

  The other guy laughed. Alice narrowed her eyes at Darla, getting the message.

  “How old are you two, now?” Alice asked, nonchalantly.

  “Twenty-five.” The Sal lookalike pointed at himself. “And twenty-eight, for that old man.”

  “How old are you two?” the friend asked suspiciously.

  “Don’t you know you never ask a lady’s age?” Darla said.

  “Young enough,” Alice said.

  “I’m Zev,” the lookalike said. “And that’s boring old Trevor over there.”

  Zev, Zev, Zev. Alice tried to remember hearing about a Zev. It rang a faraway bell drowned out by a long, whiskeyed distance. He excused himself after the first game to go to the restroom. From the back of the bar he motioned for Alice to meet him by tipping his head sideways, bending at the knee, and putting out one hand toward the back hallway as if to welcome a princess out of a carriage. Alice waited until he disappeared then excused herself as well, ignoring Darla’s look of warning. Zev was waiting in the dark hallway and smiled when she joined him, then walked behind her as she trailed a hand along the graffiti-littered walls, past the bathrooms, and out through the back screen door into the parking lot. He followed her silently as she led him to the edge of the parking lot and slipped through a hole in the chain link and into a field of exotic waist-high grasses. She paused for a moment at the threshold like a runner in the blocks and looked back at him. And with that, they were off into the field under the rust-colored moon.

  They chased each other around taking off one item of clothing at a time. Alice unlatched the button of Zev’s jeans then ran away, quickly hidden by the grass. He found her and pulled her thin sweater off and tossed it up in the air with a whoop. They danced around each other like this, taunting and chasing until they were both down to their underwear. Zev grabbed Alice’s hips and pulled her close to let her feel him hard against her as he grabbed her ass. The two fell to the ground, entwined, and rolled over one another with the particular passion that comes from feeling another person’s skin for the first time. Zev took down his underwear and felt his way inside her as she closed her eyes. She saw Sal behind her closed lids, and imagined her lying naked across her kayak, sunning herself after a swim, arching her back. She imagined Sal with her head upturned to the heavens, beset by some sort of trance at the magic of the stars. As Zev groaned and she flipped him over and rode and arched, she imagined she was a falling star, just waiting to be caught. They shuddered as if the light fell from the sky and shot right through them.

  “And that’s how crop circles are actually made,” Zev said, rolling over in the grass to trace the outline of her behind with his hand.

  “And all this time we thought it was such a mystery.” Alice shrugged, getting up and picking up her items of clothing one by one, plucking the grass and sticks off one by one. “We should probably get back before we are considered our own unsolved mystery.”

  “You’re a truly beautiful woman,” he said, lying on the ground pulling on his pants and looking up at her. “Not sure if I mentioned that.”

  “I’ll take it,” Alice said, giving him a hand to help him up.

  ◆

  Sal drove a half hour outside of Globe and found the most wind-protected spot she could to camp that night. The wind rattled the windshield wipers on her truck, threatening to rip one right off and fling it into the desert. About a mile off the highway, she pulled up to the bottom of a slot canyon with a sandy wash between one high wall and one shorter wall. The sand had clearly been run over by the monsoon rivulets, washed and rewashed by the intense summer rains. It looked like the footprint of a river that had recently been there but had disappeared through some sort of sorcery, simply lifted into the air. One could almost hear the rush of the water over the sand. Sal knew where the water had gone. It went straight down into the sand and the rest evaporated in th
e desert sun. It had sprouted bright green leaves on plants that months before looked dead to the untrained eyed. But Sal reassured herself that the monsoon time was over. It was fall, and the cool nights would bring a particular brand of quiet over the land. She just needed shelter from the intense wind, and quickly, as the moonless night was drawing in close and fast.

  The winds and her recent declaration of love had driven a sort of exhausted madness into her mind. Sal, against all her training, set up her tent in the arroyo. She muttered something to herself about the heavy rains being gone for the season as she set up her tent and rolled her sleeping pad out inside. She cursed the new, giant inflatable mattress pad she’d splurged and bought for herself at the end of the season. It took so many breaths to fill she nearly passed out by the end of inflating it. But she was getting old and she had told herself the extra inches of cushioned air would help rest her tired bones. She inflated the mattress and flopped down on it. The wind still whipped and grabbed at the top of the tent, rocking it back and forth a little. Before falling asleep, she briefly considered getting up and sleeping in the bed of the truck up on the road, but knew the wind would keep her awake all night if she did. Finally, she let go of her anxieties and let the wind pick them up one by one like pollen in the wind. Let someone else worry about everything for a while, she thought. She was too tired to do it.

  KRACK THA-KOW BA-BOOM. She woke in complete darkness to the sound of bone-crunching thunder close and loud as a detonating mine. One second later and the tent lit up orange and white with the complete illumination of a nearby lightning bolt. No rain accompanied the lightning and thunder, but she didn’t need to wait for the pattering on her tent. She felt an urgent need to pack up and leave. She gathered up her things inside the tent as fast as she could and tucked them under her arm to head out of the arroyo, scramble up the cliff, and back to her truck.