Firebirds Soaring

by Sharyn November

  “Viens,” she says. “I found us the greatest place for the night. Guillaume will like it.”

  She takes me to one of the sheds. She’s put herself exactly where I wanted her to be.

  It’s a one-car-garage-sized shed. Obviously deserted. It has one tiny, dirty window at the back. The whole place is dirty and full of spiderwebs. There are shelves, empty except for old paint cans. Mouse turds on the floor. I’d rather be in our tent, but if she likes it . . .

  She’s laid out our three sleeping pads, Bill’s in the middle. She’d rather wait in a place like this until she finds us a palace. I wonder how long she’s expecting to live in it.

  She sits down on her pad, cross-legged, all knees and elbows. I wonder when she last combed her hair. Her fingernails are as dirty as mine.

  “So where’s Guillaume?”

  She’s so pleased with herself for finding this place, she doesn’t sound upset anymore. She thinks everything is fine.

  “He’ll come back when we’ve settled down. When we have jobs.”

  “He’d better not try to go back to that school. They just teach nonsense.”

  “I’m afraid he’ll hurt himself if he doesn’t get to go.”

  “Why would anybody hurt themselves? Besides, they don’t teach the things he needs to know. They won’t even teach decent French.”

  “You can do that. You taught me. Think of it. We’ll earn money and then we’ll go there. To France.”

  “I’ll bet they don’t even teach good biology.”

  “It’s grade school, for heaven’s sake.”

  But then it starts. I sit down on my pad and get ready to look as if I’m listening. I try to glance at her watch as she waves her arms around. I figure it’ll take about twenty minutes before she’ll stop bad-mouthing schools.

  I wonder if we’ll ever be able to trust her to stay in one place. She might get all settled down and Bill will come back and everything will seem rosy and off she might go, dragging us along.

  This town is too small to hide them from each other for long. And Bill will go to school even if he has to sneak in and out the back door. Maybe it’ll work.

  But what about me? Will I ever get to go? And can I get a job? Would I look more grown-up if I wore lipstick? I’d have to steal some.

  She’s often embarrassed after one of these talking sessions. Finally she sits down and says, “You must be tired.” That means she is. She gives me cheese from two days ago. It’s her way of apologizing without saying so. I give her a wormy apple.

  She says, “Where’s our big flashlight?”

  “Bill has it.”

  When I call him that, she gets up again and turns away, but she’s too tired to go into another tirade.

  The king’s cloak is edged with ermine.

  No hat must be taller than the king’s. No white jacket more white. No buttons more shiny.

  Bill and I meet the next day behind the Senior Center, not inside it, and not that near.

  He spent the night nowhere near that mattress. He slept in the other, smaller bedroom. Somebody came in, in the middle of the night, rattled around a lot too. Next morning somebody made a fire of sticks on top of the stove and cooked eggs and bacon. Left the fire of sticks (smothered with a metal pan lid). Bill found the matches and the bacon, but not the pan. He lit the fire again and cooked some of the bacon wrapped around a green stick. Trouble was the fat made the fire bigger than he wanted.

  “They mustn’t see smoke.”

  “I know, but he got away with it. Besides, there’s trees all around.”

  I ask Bill did he smell any liquor, and he says no.

  He watched the person out the bedroom window as he left. He says, he’s a thinnish man, nice and neat in a dark suit and tie, carrying a briefcase and wearing a hat. The dressy kind.

  “For heaven’s sake, are you sure?”

  “Of course. I know what I saw.”

  “You can’t stay there.”

  “I like it. I’ll have an address.”

  “So does he. We have to find a different place.”

  “This one is practically right on the trail. There was a jackrabbit in the backyard this morning. And quail. I saw a coachwhip snake. It’s pretty far north for them and kind of cold. They’re usually way far south of here.”

  “He could be dangerous. Sometimes men prey on good-looking boys like you. You know that.”

  “If anything bad happens, I’ll go out the window.”

  “You trust people too much. Actually, Mother does, too.

  Or she trusts that people will give her what she needs. I hope you know better than that.”

  He shrugs and makes a face as if to say: Why are you telling me what I already know?

  “Well, don’t. I mean, trust.”

  We’re close. We have to be. We only have each other. Usually he listens to me, but I’ve lost him this time.

  “You don’t have to sit up straight just because Mother says to.”

  “I know.”

  He’s sitting like a gentleman and keeps on doing it.

  “So you didn’t go to school today?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “So that teacher helps you?”

  “I trust her.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I know.”

  “How did you sleep without a pad?”

  “’K.”

  “Bet you didn’t.”

  “Did too.”

  “I could get your pad for you, except . . . Mother will be furious.”

  “I know.”

  “But I’ll do it anyway.”

  “’K.”

  “Meet you back here in half an hour. Did you have anything to eat besides that bacon?”

  He shrugs, and I know he didn’t.

  “I’ll see what I can find.”

  But he’s the one who finds food for me. Wrapped-up egg salad sandwiches. He won’t tell me how he got them. I’ll bet he stole them. Though maybe not. He’s good at finding odd jobs and getting people to give him food. Maybe it’s that natural majesty of his, though I hate myself when I fall into Mother’s way of thinking. The royal smile. Ugh. Yet there it is. As if bestowed on us underlings. Though maybe a little bit too shy for royalty.

  I give him his sleeping pad. Mother wasn’t there, so I didn’t have to deal with her. I hope she was out looking for a job.

  Bill hugs me when we say goodnight. A sure sign he’s lonely and worried. That worries me, too, but I don’t want him coming back to us. We’d be on the trail in no time and who knows how many trees he’d punch next time or who he’d cut.

  The five trombones of the king play fanfares.

  The spotlight will shine on him alone: his velvet lips, the ivory of his collarbone.

  I find Mother washing clothes in the duck pond. It’s good she’s found a sheltered spot to do it in. I don’t think the townspeople would like that.

  First thing she says: “Isn’t this a great place? It has everything. Even water. Guillaume will like it. Except you took his sleeping pad.”

  “You want him to be comfortable don’t you?”

  “I’d rather he’d be comfortable, here with us.”

  “Did you find a job? When you’re settled in for a while, I know of an even better place for us to stay.”

  I’ll take her to that Overridge Lane place that I think she followed me to. There won’t be . . . at least, I don’t think there’ll be . . . somebody else living there. Of course there won’t be any water, and maybe there’ll be just as many mouse turds as here.

  I help Mother bring the clothes back and hang them up on a frayed piece of rope above our sleeping pads.

  “So did you get a job?”

  “Maybe.”

  But that’s all she’ll say. She does have food. Packages of sliced chicken and sliced cheese. A huge bag of lettuce. I don’t know if she bought them or stole them.

  “If you need an address, use this one. I’m hoping to get us all there. It’ll be better f
or getting a job.”

  “This is a good enough address. I like it here. You’ve been seeing Guillaume.”

  “Leave him alone.”

  She starts turning red. Looks at me with that wild-eyed look. She’s never hit me but she often looks as if she will.

  “No, no, just for a little while. He’ll be back with us soon as we settle in.”

  The king’s fencing lessons. His music lessons. His several languages, deportment classes, geography. . . .

  Bill got discovered. By that man in the house. All because of a stray dog. How could he? One more mouth to feed. One more thing to keep secret besides himself. Only he didn’t. I suppose he wanted . . . needed . . . company. He’s never been alone before. But it sounds like it came out all right. At least so far.

  Bill and I weren’t going to meet until four o’clock. I got myself a job right away. Five to seven, three weekdays and helping out on Saturdays and Sundays if I want to. An after-school kind of job. They said I had to be sixteen, and I said I was and got away with it even though I don’t have breasts. It’s in the arts-and-crafts gallery, doing everything: cleaning, keeping records, hanging pictures for when the shows change, putting up posters, running for coffee. . . .

  I went first to the place where I’d like to work best of all and I got the job. (Second was going to be the library.) They’re going to let me sit in on their evening classes for nothing. They have everything, from knitting to Tai Chi to painting. I wonder if they’d let Mother teach French there. I wonder if she would. Except I’m not sure I want anybody here to get to know Mother.

  So then I pretend I have to go off to school. I wander around town, kind of looking for a job for Mother and trying to watch out for where she is.

  At four I go meet Bill (he already went back and got the dog so I could meet him) and he tells me about getting discovered. He actually sounds happy about it. I guess I don’t because he says, “Hey, don’t you get all crazy, too. If you want to meet him and talk to him, his office is upstairs over the barbershop. He made me a big breakfast. He fed my dog, too. Matt . . . Mathew. Not the dog. I named the dog Spider.”

  It’s a funny little dog. Kind of looks like his name. Skinny, mostly white—dirty white—with black and brown spots. Bill is dirtier than ever, too. I suppose from sleeping with the dog. I should have brought him the T-shirt Mother washed.

  “Did you go to school looking like this? What did you do with the dog?”

  “The man . . . Matt . . . said it was okay to leave him in the house. Matt has a big jar of water and left some for the dog. I guess I should have washed but I didn’t want to ask Matt for some more. He doesn’t have much. I told him we were hiking with our father.”

  Father again.

  Suddenly I start to cry. For no reason. Everything is working out fine. I don’t ever let Bill see me crying. I think somebody in his life should at least seem competent. It scares him. He turns away and starts to pet the dog, but the dog comes over to me and licks my arm. I guess it is kind of nice to have a dog.

  I say, “Sorry, I must be tired.”

  “’K.”

  I was afraid one of these days I’d start to cry and never stop, but I do stop. It only takes a few minutes.

  “What’s Matt’s last name?”

  “I forget. It’s hard.”

  “I’ll bring you some clean clothes. Don’t come down to the pond to wash. Mother might be there. Wash at school next time. Did you eat?”

  He says yes, but I give him some of Mother’s cheese and chicken anyway.

  He says, “Tomorrow we could meet earlier, maybe back on the trail behind the house.”

  “Aren’t you going to school?”

  “You silly, it’s Saturday.”

  I forgot there would be Saturday and Sunday. I forgot it even though I have a Saturday and Sunday job.

  “Tell you what, meet me where I work, but try to get cleaned up first. They might even let you do some work, too.”

  Then I go to find the man. If he was nice to Bill he may really be a good person, but I want to check.

  Upstairs over the barbershop, it’s full of offices. Like at the school, you can look in the little windows in the doors and see who’s there.

  There’s only one man who looks like the right one: thin, dark suit, glasses, long nose. . . . It says KARPINSKY on the door. He’s younger than I thought he’d be. Even though he’s balding.

  I watch him at his computer for a couple of minutes, but then he looks up and sees me staring at him. He looks right into my eyes. Right inside me. Suddenly I don’t know what to do. I wouldn’t know what to say. I run down the stairs and then all the way down the block. Two blocks. I wasn’t ready. Besides, I don’t want to lie about our father being with us. I wish Bill wouldn’t keep saying that.

  Crown the king a lover of honey and of bees.

  He owns all the swans.

  His trees will bear golden pears and silver nutmegs.

  When I come back, Mother has built a campfire behind the shed and . . . my God . . . she’s cooking a duck. Right out in the open. The head and the feathers are in a pile just inside the shed door.

  “Mother! This has got to be against the law.”

  “Pooh. This is for Guillaume.”

  It smells so good I hope she gets away with it.

  “He’s not even here.”

  “Well, then, you’ll take some to him.”

  “Mother!”

  I squat down beside her. “Did you at least look for a job? The grocery store would be a good place to work. You could get food for less or maybe nothing.”

  “I don’t do that kind of work.”

  There’s no use talking. It would just be the same conversation over again.

  We have a good supper. She also roasted potatoes in the coals.

  She wraps up the leftovers in a plastic bag and hangs them over the edge of the pond to keep cool.

  A king should walk as if he balanced books on his head, and the books he balances should be law books.

  Saturday, just as I figured, Bill and I both get to work at the gallery. They don’t even mind having the dog there. One good thing, though—they sent Bill to the back alley and had him give the dog a bath. And Matt Karpinsky has given Bill another nice breakfast. Bill says, “Pancakes. Because it’s Saturday. Matt asked a lot of questions about you.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That you’re really a princess and really a dummy. That you forgot there was such a thing as Saturday.”

  I give him a fake punch. Actually a little harder than I meant it, and he gives me one back just like it.

  “Did he say why he’s camping out in that house?”

  “Same as me. To have a nice place to be.”

  “I hope you didn’t tell him a long story about your father.”

  He shrugs. Should a prince shrug so much?

  He has homework. He says he’s even doing stuff for extra credit. How nice to see him sitting in the back office of the gallery doing his schoolwork, his leg twisted around the chair leg, and the dog at his feet. I bring him a glass of cider and he smiles up at me. I think, what long eyelashes, and how like a prince he looks, even with that bad haircut, even with his torn and too-small jeans. Maybe things really will work out.

  Among the several languages a king must know are Greek and Latin. He should also be trained in dialectic, Aristotelian logic, and aesthetics.

  . . . and they do. For a while.

  And even though Mother keeps killing ducks. Each time she does, she invites Bill for dinner. I say he won’t come, but she says, Ask him anyway.

  “Will you call him Bill?”

  But she won’t. She never will.

  I don’t know what Mother is doing during the day. I know she’s seldom at the shed. I keep imagining ridiculous things, like that she’s busy making handcuffs and chains for Bill.

  Actually, I don’t think anybody will give Mother a job looking like this. Lately she’s messier than ever
. Not having Bill around upsets her. If she tried to comb her hair I’ll bet the comb would get stuck, or even lost forever. I’d cut it for her, but I don’t dare suggest it. I wonder if she’s doing it on purpose so as not to get hired.

  There’s a secondhand store here, and I get Bill a pair of jeans for fifty cents. Unlike other boys might, he doesn’t mind that they’re much too big. I get him a red T-shirt with black ants crawling all over the front. It’s hardly worn at all. I knew he’d like it.

  Since we’re not heading south, we’ll need some blankets pretty soon. Our sleeping bags won’t be enough. It sometimes gets pretty cold in these hills.

  I’m still not going to school. I’m worried that if I try to go, it might get Bill kicked out. It’s one thing for a ten-year-old to suddenly appear in school and another for somebody my age. Besides, that teacher is doing something not every teacher would. I’m sure she’s breaking rules. I don’t want to get her in trouble, too.

  These days I sleep late, wander around, gather firewood for Mother, gather bugs for Bill, study at the library, then go to work at five and take classes at the gallery in the evening. I get the cheese and crackers and wine and cider for the openings of the art shows and programs. I eat a lot of that myself. I’m having fun . . . sort of . . . but I wish I was going to school.

  Bill is the only one getting everything he wants. He meets me at the gallery, does a little work, and then does his homework. He’s also found the bug books in the library. Matt makes him breakfast every morning, and he gets lunch at school. I’m sure the lunch is because of that teacher.

  The offices over the barber shop are practically across the street from the gallery. I see Matt lots of times. When I do, I go around the corner fast or hurry into a shop. I don’t know what Bill has been telling him—especially about having a father. I wouldn’t know what to say. Besides, there’s that time he looked right inside me.

  And it’s as if I want somebody to take care of us (instead of me) and I’ve picked him to be the one. He’s a little young for that. Looks to be—even though his forehead is almost all the way up to the top of his head—hardly even thirty.