“Sounds like my kinda guy. Own drum, and all that.”
“Yep. I really wanted you to meet him. Not really sure why, but I just always thought you would meet him someday.”
“Well,” Alice put her hand on her clearly fatigued friend’s back. “I have a little part of him on my mantle at home. Sometimes the legacy of someone is even better than the real thing.”
“I suppose so,” Sal sighed. “Why don’t we get on the road and back to the cool green of Oregon, huh? I’m looking forward to some of that really soft, misty rain. Not the kind that tries to flood you out and murder you.”
Over the next two days the scenery changed from banana agave to creosote flats to sparse grassland leading into sagebrush. The treed mountains rose up from the sagebrush as they headed west toward the ocean in Northern California. They stopped in Weed for a minute to get a bite to eat. Sal said she was feeling better and didn’t think she needed the pain pills anymore. But as they wore off, Alice could see the pain when Sal winced, sliding into the booth. A veil had been lifted and she sensed for the first time how close her friend had been to death. She held her hand across the table and the two held hands, garnering an unfriendly stare from the couple across the aisle with their cadre of redheaded children and overflowing waistlines.
“Maybe you should take the medication until we can get home and rest up properly,” Alice said.
“Yeah. You’re probably right.”
They sat the rest of the lunch in silence, burdened by the weight of all the things they needed to say, the years of unspoken thoughts all shyly lingering in the dark until it was their turn to be spoken. Finally, Alice sighed.
“I guess I should just tell you that I’m pregnant.”
Sal looked up expressionless.
“I’m not really sure what to do about it.” Alice continued. “I mean. I’m still young.”
“But the great thing is,” Sal said cautiously, “you have a choice in the matter.”
“You’re right. And that makes this whole thing feel so much easier, to be honest.”
“Was he at least charming and handsome?” Sal said, nudging a leaf of her salad across the plate.
“Both, unfortunately.” Alice grimaced a little. “Reminded me a lot of you, to be honest. You don’t have a little brother named Zev out there somewhere do you?”
“Not that I know of,” Sal said. “But I wouldn’t put it past Charles, king of free love, to have forgotten to tell me about one of his many progeny.”
They kept holding hands and ignored the judgmental clucks and stares from provincial, closed-minded diners as they filed past. Alice paid the check and they settled back in the truck before getting back on the road. They drove a little while before passing a sign printed on the top of a metal barn roof on the side of road. YOU ARE ENTERING THE STATE OF JEFFERSON, it read. Underneath the sign a group of unhappy cows wandered around in a small, grassless pen reeking of manure. Sal switched the airflow on the dashboard to recycle the air already in the truck.
“I’ve heard of that movement. Whenever people think they can make money from the land,” Sal sighed, “they’ll find a way to justify their own madness.”
“It’s a big freak show, this country,” Alice said. “Too many strange notions to find a consensus.”
“It’s why I’m mostly just friends with the birds. Honestly, they seem to have their act together more than we do,” Sal said. Then she remembered who was driving. “And I’m friends, of course, with you.”
“Well, some of my friends call me little bird,” Alice smiled. She had been waiting to tell this to Sal for a long time.
“My big, little bird,” Sal patted Alice’s long leg, a shiver running up both their spines. An unearthly, loud noise, perhaps a hunter discharging a rifle on the side of the road, resounded in their bones. Both women’s skin dotted with goose bumps despite the warm air blowing in from the vents. They looked at each other quizzically, raised their eyebrows, and let the feeling pass in and out of their bodies like a ghost.
“So, is the egg collection full?” Sal asked.
“Almost. There’s just room for one more egg.”
“Perfect,” Sal said. “I know just the one.”
“Perfect,” Alice said, her hand resting gently on her abdomen. “Not all birds are meant to fly.”
Sal and Alice both felt a certainty come over them that they were on exactly the right path, a sensation that had eluded both women for a long time. They drove the last six hours watching the land change and shift along the road as the tires rolled, heating with the tread of each mile. The light shifted and the sun hid and returned. As they rushed up into the lush Willamette Valley, greens swayed from the yellowed to the blued and back again in patches, in blankets of light and dark. Their minds wandered in and out of duty and consequence, family, and vice. Alice wanted a drink, but also enjoyed the feeling of depriving herself. It was time she took a good, long break from her habits, but she knew she needed help in doing so. Just sitting next to Sal filled her up with newness and possibility. Meanwhile, Sal felt the beating of her own heart in her ears and marveled at how everything still seemed to be working inside. In short glances she admired the curves on the jaw and cheek of the beautiful woman sitting next to her.
They pulled off the highway and stopped at a roadside turnout to look at a kettle of turkey vultures numbering in the hundreds overhead. The birds circled slowly and wobbly on their wings as though they might drop out of the sky at any moment. But still they hung and wobbled, the wind warm below them as they circled and circled looking for food.
“What would we do without the majestic vulture?” Sal remarked, her head tilted skyward.
“We’d be overrun by carrion,” Alice said, her face lit up by the evening light. “Swimming in death.”
“They are the arbiters of tender rot. Death isn’t an end for those birds.”
“Oh, it’s definitely more of a beginning.”
Once they got back in the car, questions still to be answered started to line up on both their lips, but waited to jump. They sat in silence as the truck rumbled back to life. The sun was setting and the vultures settled into the trees to roost with precision and speed, as though trusting the trees to catch their hefty bodies as they hurled their way toward the earth. Back on the highway, farmhouses, cities, and factories flew past. The two women drove by life upon life—human, animal, and plant—but could not possibly know what would become of every last one, as much as their difficult, scientific hearts might yearn to catalogue them all. The living world flew by in a rush of greens and browns—the hues of beginnings and ends. These things would live; these things would die. An intense, deep blue settled in the sky behind the dying light. As they moved north, there was an unspoken agreement that this movement they took together was that particular kind of migration that, while complicated by the buzz of uncertainty and danger, compelled a being to keep going, to stay in flight.
Acknowledgements:
I feel extraordinarily lucky to have so many people who helped me in the process of writing this book. To every one who is listed here and to all the people who aren’t but were involved in one way or another, a huge thank you for helping me take this journey one step at a time.
An enormous and emphatic thank you to Bill Clegg, my super agent, who, in the editing process, managed to maintain prodigious levels of intuition, acuity, insight, and humor. Without your eye for the details of structure and meaning, this book would not hum quite the same song.
To the incredible team at Rare Bird Books—Tyson Cornell, Julia Callahan, my editor, Andrew Hungate, and everyone else on the team, an enthusiastic and heart-felt thank you for everything you have done, the details of which are too many to enumerate without drastically altering the page count of this book.
And now to thank my family and friends, who together comprise a beautiful sea of love an
d support that I often feel overwhelmed by in the most wonderful way. To my mom, my first ever reader, who said, maybe this very, very, long short story should be a novel, honey; and to my dad, who I’m so thankful trickled down some of his humor and literary prowess through our DNA; and also to my sister, who I love dearly for being such a patient, loving ear. To Matthew Dickman, who has been a critical eye, a helpful hand, and a belly laugh along the way. To each and every one of the Tillinghasts. I’m so lucky to have married into such a wonderful, loving, and literary family.
To Melanie Nead, my brilliant studio mate, reader, and rosé-sipping friend, who workshopped our manuscripts and gazed out over the beautiful city lights of Portland with me. Without all your support and insights I might have just chucked the whole dang manuscript out onto the train tracks below our studio window.
A huge thank you to Lisa Mangum, my oldest and cherished friend, and Liza Rietz, Megan Kohl, Belle Chesler, more old and treasured friends, and Renee Jenkinson, Caroline Buchalter, and Julia Perry, who in our many ladies’ nights and escapades together banded together to provide the most wonderful, supportive fabric of lady love along the way. You are my people, you believed in me, and I cherish you.
Thank you to my teachers. First, to Allyson Goldin for being one of the first to help me find and focus my passion for writing, to Maya Sonenberg, David Shields, David Bosworth, and Charles Johnson. Your gentle nipping at my grammar’s heels, your stellar book recommendations and literary guidance all helped urge me toward finding my voice.
Thank you to the birds, who through their incredible feat of migration and breeding moved me to see beyond my own nose and write furiously in the bed of trucks, and in tents, inspired by the perseverance of such tiny, fragile creatures as you. And thank you to all the field biologist friends I worked with along the way. Your ways of seeing the world as a biological systems and beyond was truly inspiring.
Moon, thank you for shifting in me the tides of my mind and heart as I pieced together the mystery of human connectivity over the years.
Lastly, and most certainly not least, a thank you to my husband Andrew, who is my most beloved and treasured reader. You rescued my kayak when it flooded, bought me pens when I needed them, extracted cholla needles from my chest, and read my words and responded thoughtfully with that big, beautiful brain of yours.
The Wild Birds Page 26