The Bird Saviors

by William J. Cobb

  Well, then, says Juliet. If it's not the Donkey Woman or a coyote in cowboy boots, I think you're going to live.

  Cookie, says Lila. Cookie duck duck.

  She wants one of the Nilla Wafers in the duck cookie jar, says John. She's crazy for those things.

  Then let's go find a cookie duck duck, says Juliet.

  She carries Lila to the kitchen, where the lighting seems to have dimmed. The back door shudders and a fine spray of dust sifts through the cracks of the doorjamb. Out the window a clay- brown cloud of dust roils across the prairie toward them. Juliet finds the Daffy Duck cookie jar and takes a handful of Nilla Wafers. Lila yelps with delight. As soon as Juliet hands her a cookie, she smiles and her eyes go wide and electric with joy.

  I hope Ruby isn't out counting birds in this duster, says John.

  Lila makes a face and reaches into her mouth, removes a masticated lump of wafer, and drops it on the floor. She reaches her hands into the air and starts to whine.

  What is it, baby? asks Juliet. I don't know what you want.

  Lila continues to whine, drops her head, and huddles into Juliet's thighs, whimpering.

  She wants her pacifier, says John. She can't go five minutes without having that thing in her mouth. She's still teething. It makes her feel better.

  Juliet finds a pacifier beside the kitchen sink and waves it in front of Lila's face. Look here, look here. Is this what you want?

  Lila smiles when she sees it, grabs the pacifier, and plops it into her mouth.

  That's what I do all day, says John. He smiles. It beats getting your head shot at in the desert. Or playing Ping- Pong on one leg.

  I clean up dog crap is what I do. Juliet rubs the back of her neck. Not all the time, of course. But maybe too often.

  John puts a teakettle on the stove. I thought you were the one who wanted to work. You were the one who thought working for a vet would be fun.

  I didn't say fun.

  What'd you say? Rewarding?

  It is. Sometimes.

  Juliet? The word out of John's voice sounds odd, off- kilter. As if he were trying to speak another language. Juliet? What can I do? Tell me what is and I'll do it. In a heartbeat.

  What do you mean?

  You know what I mean. What can I do to bring you back? I don't want to live this way. We've been married for eighteen years. And you know I love you. Doesn't that count for anything?

  Juliet doesn't reply. She watches the teakettle boil and puts an animal cracker in Lila's mouth. You want a cup of tea?

  I can do that.

  They sit down at the table and both smile at Lila and stroke her face, giving her animal crackers, hiding the pacifier behind the sugar bowl.

  Isn't she the prettiest thing ever? says Juliet.

  She is. John rubs the spot where his prosthesis connects to his thigh. She's a little angel is what she is.

  A f t e r C r o w f o o t r e s c u e s Becca Cisneros from the Saints, he takes her to his trailer, leaves her there alone, and explains nothing.

  Hang loose, he says. I've got errands to run, but I'll be back.

  What am I supposed to do? she asks.

  Nothing, he says. Relax. I'll be back with something for dinner.

  I can cook, she says.

  He frowns. That sounds like work, right? You've been working

  enough. I think you'll be safe here for a few days. There's no lock and key. You want to leave, it's your choice.

  That's an improvement, then, she says. Maybe I'll just lay low here for a few days, you think?

  He nods. I think.

  She watches him leave, his beaten truck bouncing over the rocky driveway, disappearing behind a ridgeline of junipers as it switchbacks down the mesa. Becca senses he's a badass but a good man, the kind who gets misunderstood, easy- like. She's heard his name before, and placed him in her mind as something of a legend, like the blind circus knife thrower El Ciego or the Donkey Woman.

  Turkey vultures float by the windows, catching updrafts out of the valley below, their raggedy black wings and ugly red heads stark against the blue sky. Alone in his trailer, she doesn't know what to do with herself. Liberated from a work camp into a hermit's nest.

  She cleans his kitchen and straightens his living room. She finds a pile of oil- stained rags and wipes the sandstone dust from everything and sweeps the floor. She scrapes old bacon grease off his stove. She doesn't go near his bedroom.

  Early evening he comes home and looks around. What the heck? he asks. I seem to have misplaced some coffee stains and dirt clods.

  I take that as a thank you very much, says Becca. If not I'll beat you with a broom.

  She sits in a folding chair and watches clouds roil out of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The metal chairs perch beside a wooden cable spool used as a table. Everything is makeshift and functional. Atop Wild Horse Mesa, the trailer sits in the shadow of a cliff face above Cañon City. There's no running water. She has to hike a short ways to the outhouse perched above a shallow rock pit.

  He has no electricity except a sheet of solar panels on the roof hooked to a pair of truck batteries, plus an arc of solar lawn lights in front of the trailer. I've been off the grid for years, he tells her. They say the oil is going to run out and the power plants close. Okay, then. He smiles. Bring it on. I'm ready.

  At dusk Crowfoot builds a fire in a pit of blackened stones at the foot of the cliff face where the trailer is tucked. Soon the solar lights leak their blue glow into the air and flames of the campfire toss their shadows against the sandstone cliff face. It seems they're living in a time beyond work shortages and immigration wars.

  Lightning zigzags over the plains, over the old Arapaho lands now full of cattle ranchland and dry crops, all of it parched with drought. Crowfoot cuts an onion and takes a pound of ground meat from the ice chest that serves as his refrigerator, puts the onion and meat in a cast- iron skillet on the fire, stirs it with a rough- hewn wooden spoon he carved himself.

  Can I help? asks Becca.

  At first he doesn't respond. She's about to repeat the offer when he says, What say you clean up after.

  It's a deal, she says. What are you making?

  Sloppy joes. He offers her a rare smile. You ever had buffalo?

  He places a foil- wrapped bundle of tortillas on the hot stones

  at the fire's edge. After a few minutes he flips them with his bare hands, wincing and waving his fingers in the air. Then he yanks them from the stone and opens the foil, rubs a stick of butter on one, rolls it up, and hands it to her.

  Appetizer, he says.

  She eats a half- dozen tortillas like this, licking the butter from her fingers. The moonless night opens before them like a black hole. There's a sharp drop- off at the cliff edge not twenty paces from the pit.

  When Becca steps away from the flames' glow she looks up at the black velvet sky. Above her the Milky Way flows like a powdered- sugar river of other suns. After two months as a polygamist captive, she feels the cool air on her face, the stars in her hair, like proof of the world's wheeling.

  You're welcome to sleep on the sofa, says Crowfoot. It might be a bit dusty. But I got a spare pillow and a good wool serape. He grins. Actually, it's a horse blanket.

  Do I look like a horse? she asks.

  He squints one eye and cocks his head. What about a pony? Graceful and high- spirited?

  You're a sweet talker, says Becca. And yes, she adds. The sofa will be fine. Besides, I can't thank you enough. You saved me. I won't forget that. Ever.

  Crowfoot shrugs. Whenever you save a person, it doesn't end there. It's like you're tied together the rest of your life.

  I'll pay you back somehow.

  You make dinner tomorrow night, he says. We'll call it even.

  Okay, she says. We won't be even. But we can pretend.

  After dinner a gibbous moon rises, swollen and bright above the eastern plain. Crowfoot says, Come here a sec. I got something I bet you never seen the likes of.


  He leads her away from the trailer, along the sandstone cliff face on an ever- narrowing ledge. They find their way in the moonlight. He leads the way and she follows. At one point he turns and says, It gets kind of tight here. You best hold on.

  He hooks her hands to his wide leather belt and slows for a moment. In the pale blue moonlight Becca sees they're on a cliff edge no more than four feet wide, with a good forty- foot drop to a jumbled talus slope below. They shuffle on.

  You scared? he asks.

  A little.

  Don't be. I wouldn't let you fall.

  I know.

  I saved you, remember? He says this with a hint of humor in his voice. Wouldn't make sense to tumble off a cliff after all that, would it?

  I guess not, she whispers.

  The ledge widens. After what seems a long passage they reach a hollow in the cliff face. Crowfoot removes a wooden pole jammed into a crevice, takes a butane lighter from his pocket, and lights the end of it. The torch burns fitfully for a moment, but he rolls it this way and that until it burns smoothly and casts a smoky flame.

  A little art project of mine, he says, holding the torch against the cliff face.

  Becca stands for a moment, spellbound, until she realizes her mouth is open and her eyes sting from being kept wide.

  What in the world, she says. I mean, amazing. You did all this?

  No big deal, says Crowfoot. Like I said, it's a project. Been working on it three years now.

  On the cliff face before them, illuminated by the smoking torch, stretches a tableau of petroglyphs. The figures are palm- sized or bigger, in arching rows, rough but recognizable figures of cars and planes and trains and explosions. In the lowest left corner is a figure of stylized towers in flame, into which two planes crash. Beside it a giant wave. Farther down the wall a circle with a long tail to symbolize the great comet.

  It's the twenty- first century, says Crowfoot. A history of it. I started with the towers and I don't know what I'll end with.

  Who's this devil figure?

  Take your pick.

  Fields of crosses. Hordes of running figures. Cactus and slanted lines and stylized suns to symbolize the drought. Kachinas shaped like angry machines. Hooded executioner figures.

  Crowfoot points to faded figures repeated here and there — coyotes and elk, human hands, weird turtles and birds— telling her that these are original, ancient Native art. The entire cliff is a palimpsest of petroglyphs past, the smoking torch illuminating a cliff from a thousand years before, a reckoning of ways past meeting ways future.

  Becca feels her eyes burning but she can't blink. Crowfoot's torch luffs and looses a steady swirl of black smoke. She feels sucked inside the history of the world. There are oil wars and riots and the comet that frightened everyone blazing through the night sky, the omen of the first great oil shortage. She's seen handprints inside caves in New Mexico. She never thought much of them, crude art in a crude world. This is something greater.

  Her skin fizzes like a shaken can of soda. She wonders what George Armstrong Crowfoot has in his heart that gives him the confidence to offer his own depiction of the history of the world. There's a daring quality to it. A bravery against the wind and sun.

  This is amazing, says Becca, and immediately regrets it. The words are weak and meaningless. She can't express her thoughts clearly and knows if she gushes too much Crowfoot will think her a phony.

  He shrugs. It kills the time, he says. I don't have TV, right?

  That's a good thing.

  If you say so.

  He steps back and holds the torch high, the flickering flames casting ripple shadows on the painted wall like light reflections from burning water. He says it's something he believes in. A body has to find a thing worth doing, and then do it, he says. I get so mad sometimes I could kill someone, like the Saint with the weak chin. I could have slit his throat, easy. Crowfoot shakes his head. But then I'd be smelling that blood the rest of my life. As it is, he's just one scar uglier.

  He'll get over it, says Becca.

  Check this out. Crowfoot plays the torchlight upon the end of a row of figures— horses, a ring, a death' s- head face. I got a place for pretty boy at the end of that line. I'll show you when I'm done.

  But it's a shame it's out here so far from everything. I mean, you should share this with the world.

  Crowfoot keeps the torch held high. It's where it should be.

  Who's going to see it? she asks.

  You.

  Becca feels that same buzzing, this time like an alarm clock smothered by a pillow. Without another word or warning Crowfoot pushes the burning torch into a pile of sand at the base of the rock face. All goes dark. Becca puts her hand on his arm to steady herself in the pitch blackness, the sharp tang of smoke in her nose. When he moves to head back, she grabs a handful of his shirt and holds tight.

  On the cliff ledge not much wider than twice Crowfoot's shoulders they short- step back to the world of the living. Becca lets her fingernails dig just a tad into Crowfoot's skin to remind him she's there. Clouds now blanket the Arkansas River valley and shut out the moon and stars. She can see nothing but the rough black wall of cliff on her right, her only link between the past and future being the tall, hard body of the legendary George Armstrong Crowfoot, the kind of man who cuts his enemy for the rough scrape of retribution.

  Her heart pulses in her throat the whole way and when she thinks she can't take it anymore she sees the brightest blue- white constellation so low on the horizon she fears they'll step on it. She wonders if she's hallucinating. Any minute Crowfoot could shapeshift into a Raven and flap away. Then she smells wood smoke. The ledge widens and they're back at the trailer. The constellation she sees is nothing more than the arc of solar lights.

  Crowfoot opens the trailer door and after a moment has a pair of candles burning, filling the aluminum- sided box with an amber glow. He folds out the sofa and gives Becca a flat pillow and a dusty- smelling serape. It's not the Waldorf, he says. Then again, what is the Waldorf ? I never been there.

  Becca thanks him and says she'll be happy to sleep on rocks if it comes to that.

  She lies in bed and listens to the wind in the canyon. The pillow and serape hold the smell of dust and mice but the cool night air carries a sweet tang of juniper and pine through the open window.

  She can't sleep. At one point she gets up and walks out the front door, wrapped in the serape, and watches the stars through ragged holes in the clouds. She finds a smooth stone near the fire and it warms her rump. A Great Horned Owl hoots somewhere in the cliffs below. Its call is poignant and lonesome and when she thinks her heart will turn to wax and melt, the moon comes out and she sees George Armstrong Crowfoot standing beside her.

  I couldn't sleep, she says.

  I figured as much.

  Crowfoot sits down cross- legged near the fire. Clouds cover the moon and hide his face. Beside her he is no more than a black silhouette. He says nothing. He stirs the coals until he has a cluster of orange embers pulsing. He breaks a handful of kindling and carefully places it on the embers. The twigs begin to smoke and soon burst into flame. The moon rips free from clouds and shines on their cliff face. It's clearing, he says. Soon we'll see the Milky Way again.

  It's nice here. I love it.

  But you can't sleep.

  Becca nods. I don't know. I might not sleep all night.

  They sit by the flames for a while without speaking. Crowfoot stands and stretches. You can have my bed if you want.

  I couldn't do that. Where would you sleep?

  He takes a moment to answer. I'm not going anywhere.

  She looks at him and can only see a hint of expression on his face.

  A half hour later she creeps into his bed. He's awake, lying on his back, his head resting on his hands.

  I'm glad you came, he says. I don't like to sleep alone.

  Me neither, she whispers.

  Becca wakes naked in Crowfoot's bed. He's gone and a
woman is standing in the doorway, staring at her. She has short black hair and wears an onyx necklace.

  Where's Sonny? she asks.

  You mean George?

  The woman steps to the window and peeks through a gap in the curtains, looking outside. We call him Sonny. I thought he'd be here.

  Becca sits up, holding the serape to her chest. She blinks and tries to look alive. I don't know, she says. I just woke up.

  You want some coffee? asks the woman. I know how Sonny makes it here, on a little white gas stove. It's crude but it makes a good pot o' java.