The Absence of Sparrows

by Kurt Kirchmeier

  I was so dizzy afterward that I couldn’t stand up for a full five minutes. I felt like a kernel of corn that had gone through the popper. I guess it taught me an important lesson, though: The cruelty of birds might be an illusion, but the kind that lives in the hearts of boys like Lester and Lars is very real indeed, no matter its true root cause.

  SIXTEEN

  Just be ready,” Pete had told me, but of course I wasn’t. I’d had too many hours to consider what might go wrong, what probably would go wrong. I couldn’t believe that I’d ever agreed to the plan in the first place. I wondered if Pete was having second thoughts as well.

  “Sneak downstairs and get us our shoes,” he whispered to me in the darkness, which pretty much answered my question. “I’ll get the window open.”

  It was past midnight now, and we finally had the “all clear” sound that we’d been waiting for: Dad snoring from across the hall.

  I shifted in the darkness. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” I said.

  Pete rounded on me. “No way!” he said. “You can’t back out now!”

  “I’m not backing out,” I told him. “I was just thinking—”

  “Oh yeah? Well, don’t. Just go and get us our shoes. And stay off the creaky stairs. You know which ones they are.”

  I did know, and since Pete had just brought it up, I could no longer purposely step on them in order to sabotage the plan. My only hope now was that our old sliding window might jam up inside its frame. It did that sometimes, although it was usually only right after it rained.

  I managed the stairs without any problems and was back in our room in under a minute. Pete, meanwhile, had made short work of the window.

  I took a deep breath and tried to steel myself.

  “Here,” said Pete. “Put this on.”

  He handed me a ninja mask—the same one I’d worn the Halloween before last. Pete had one, too, as well as a pair of nunchucks stuck in his belt. I almost asked him where my weapon was, but since I couldn’t imagine actually using one (against a Messam or anyone else), I held my tongue.

  “Just try not to fall on your head,” Pete said. And then he was up and over the sill, and into the leafy arms of the elm tree beyond. He moved as if inspired by the mask he wore, swinging and dropping from one branch to the next, even flipping himself upside down at one point, just to show off.

  My own journey down was much more methodical. I moved less like a ninja and more like a three-toed sloth on a vine. By the time my feet touched grass, Pete had already gone into the garage and come back out again. Not with our bikes, but with the wagon. He also had a can of WD-40, to grease the wheels to keep them from squeaking.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him. “You promised!”

  He shrugged. “I changed my mind.”

  “You pinky swore!”

  “Just think about it for a second,” he tried to reason with me. “It doesn’t make sense to take our bikes. I mean, what if the generator is right outside? Just sitting there in the yard? We might as well take it while we can.”

  I felt like slugging him. “And what’s Dad going to say?” I asked him. “When we tell him where it was and how we got it?”

  “We won’t tell him,” Pete said simply. “We’ll just put it in the back of Uncle Dean’s truck when we get back, with a note on it. It’ll look like someone dropped it off in the night, because of a guilty conscience or something.”

  He reached into his pocket and took out a piece of paper, unfolding it so I could read it.

  I believe this belongs to you was all it said, in bold black marker. Pete had obviously been thinking ahead, which meant that he’d changed his mind long before we climbed out our window.

  I took off my mask and threw it on the ground, so angry now that I could feel heat in both of my cheeks.

  “I’m going back,” I told him.

  “Why?” said Pete. “We’re already both outside. We might as well just go.”

  “You should’ve told me!” I blurted, no longer caring if anyone heard me.

  “Shh! Don’t yell! I was going to tell you, but then I decided that it would be better if I didn’t.”

  “Better for who?” I said.

  “Everyone,” he replied. “If we come back with the generator.”

  I just stared at him. “You pinky swore,” I said again. The pinky swear was supposed to be sacred.

  “I meant it when I said it,” he tried to reassure me. “I just changed my mind.”

  I looked down at the little red wagon and was reminded of the last time that Pete and I had taken it out, how we’d dumped our flyers that day instead of delivering them—and not for the first time. Pete had talked me into it. He said that nobody actually wanted them anyway and that nobody would notice or complain. He was wrong, of course. Dad turned red when he found out. I honestly believed that smoke might pour out of his ears.

  “What’s the big deal?” Pete had asked, ignoring the lit fuse and showing no sign of remorse at all. “They’re just flyers. Everybody throws them in the garbage anyway.”

  “And if they do,” Dad replied evenly, “that’s their choice to make, not yours. What exactly do you think you’re getting paid for? To push a wagon twelve feet and lift the lid on a garbage can? And then what? Go to the park and play around on the monkey bars? What’s going to happen when you’re older? Do you honestly think that someone will pay you for doing nothing? That you’ll be able to just stand around all day and then collect a check? Is that how you think the world works?” He looked from Pete to me and then back to Pete again. “Well, is it?”

  “No,” we both replied meekly.

  “Well, you could have fooled me,” Dad went on. “How many times did you dump them? Once? Twice?”

  “Three times,” I admitted.

  “And where’s the money you earned from those three batches?” Dad asked.

  “We spent it,” Pete replied. On hockey cards and sour candies.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Dad. “So you can pay Mr. Young back with labor. You’re going to take turns cutting his lawn for the rest of the summer. Backyard and front.”

  Mr. Young was the man who gave us the job.

  “The rest of the summer?!” screamed Pete. “But that’s not fair!”

  “Keep it up and you’ll be shoveling his walk all winter, too,” Dad warned him.

  Pete opened his mouth and then closed it again. He stared at Dad for a moment before storming off to his room. I kept standing right where I was, waiting to be dismissed and feeling smaller than I had ever felt before. I felt angry, too, both at Pete for talking me into dumping the flyers in the first place and at myself for letting it happen two more times.

  “Well?” Dad asked me. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  All I could muster was a simple “I’m sorry.”

  Dad nodded and sighed. “I hope you are, Ben. I really do. I expected more from you.”

  Of all the things he could have said, of course he had to say that. I felt skewered by my shame.

  “Go to your room,” he told me, somewhat more gently now, as if he sensed how much he’d just hurt me. “And don’t come out again until I say so.”

  It was impossible to look at the wagon without thinking of that afternoon. Or at least for me it was; I wasn’t so sure about Pete. He never did seem particularly bothered by what we’d done, only that we’d gotten caught for it.

  “Well?” he asked me. “Are you going to come with me or not? I need your help.”

  His tone was almost pleading now. He clearly didn’t want to go alone.

  I stood there a moment longer before bending down to pick up my ninja mask. Pete had never taken his off. How strange he looked in the pale light of the moon, a hopeful shadow warrior with his little red wagon, its wheels and axles freshly greased.

  We left without another word, out through the gate and into the dark of the night.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Messam house sat at the v
ery end of Warman Street, right up against the berm that ran alongside the railroad tracks. Pete and I approached from the alley, our little wagon temporarily parked in a patch of weeds beside a garbage can.

  The back fence was leaning in some places and completely fallen in others, the old white paint on the weathered pickets faded and peeling like dry dead skin. The gate itself was nowhere to be seen, as if someone had come along and stolen it just for the lumber. A four-foot gap marked where it had stood. Pete paused before crossing this threshold.

  “Stay behind me,” he whispered through his ninja mask, as if I had any intention at all of rushing past him into the grass, which the Messams obviously never bothered to mow. It was higher than our knees. The lights were all off in the house, the windows dark.

  “Maybe I should just stand watch,” I replied, my heart pounding at the thought of the twins gazing out at us from between their curtains. I strained my eyes to find a reflection through the uppermost windows, a glint from an eye in the darkness behind the glass. But there was nothing.

  “Don’t be a wuss,” Pete said quietly. “Just stay low and don’t make any noise. They’re probably not even home.”

  I was willing to bet that their dad would be, though. I just had to hope that he’d be drunk and passed out by this time of night.

  I wondered if those Desert Storm stories were true, and if what I was feeling now, as I waded into the long grass with shaking hands and wobbly knees, was anything like what soldiers might feel when plunging headlong into enemy territory. At least Sergeant Messam would have had a rifle. All I had was Pete and his pair of cheap red nunchucks, which I knew for a fact he’d never really learned how to use. If it came down to it, he was probably just as likely to knock himself out as he was either one of the twins.

  I paused for a second and wondered what the heck we were doing here, how I’d let him talk me into this.

  “C’mon,” he whispered back to me over his shoulder. “Quit screwing around.”

  I wasn’t screwing around, though; I was scared. I felt like I’d somehow stranded myself in the middle of an active minefield. My best chance now was to turn around and retrace my steps back to safety, only I couldn’t because Pete was counting on me.

  “Hurry up!” he said, his voice slightly more than a whisper now. He was crouched so low in the grass that I could barely even see him.

  I took a deep breath and continued on.

  Pete took his nunchucks out from his belt and headed off toward the garage.

  “Watch your step,” he told me a moment later, as if land mines were now on his mind as well, which of course they weren’t. He was simply warning me about the numerous empty glass pop bottles that were strewn about in an old sandbox-turned-firepit at the edge of the yard.

  I looked down at the bottles and remembered Uncle Dean saying that whoever had broken into his shop had busted into the pop machine as well. I shook my head. We’d been right in our suspicions, it seemed. Not that I’d had much doubt.

  I placed my feet with care, my gaze moving away from the bottles to the firepit itself. In the center of the ash pile was a hollow spot, as if the ashes had been cleared away in order to find something, perhaps the charred remains of something they’d burned. I leaned in closer and, sure enough, something was there, something that I couldn’t quite identify on account of it having been blackened by the fire. I don’t know why, but I picked it up, my fingers falling into natural finger-holes that, upon closer inspection—and to my horror—I realized were actually eye sockets, empty above a small nasal cavity and jaws with sharp little teeth. I was holding the skull of a cat.

  I dropped it, my breath hitching as I took a step back. My foot came down on one of the bottles, which rolled beneath me and sent me flying. I landed hard on my back, the impact forcing most of the air from my lungs. I sat up, hurt and wheezing.

  Pete spun around. “Darn it, Ben!” he whispered. “I told you to watch your step!”

  It was obvious that he hadn’t seen what I had, the evidence of a teenage sacrifice in the form of a skull. There were two sticks as well, just off to the side, both of them sharpened to fine points. Good for poking.

  I’d seen enough. I no longer cared if the twins had the generator. They could keep it. The only thing that mattered to me now was getting the heck out of there, away from those two empty eye sockets, staring up from the ash and the sand.

  I got up and ran, back through the overgrown grass and out through the space in the ramshackle fence, adrenaline fueling my muscles and narrowing my mind, neutralizing every thought that wasn’t connected to the word escape.

  I guess I just assumed that Pete would follow, or maybe I didn’t even consider him at all. All I knew for sure was that I reached the end of the alley in the blink of an eye, and that when I got there, my brother wasn’t behind me.

  I stopped for a moment and waited, my heart pounding, ears ringing as if they’d been boxed. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three… Still no Pete. Now what?

  And then I heard it: the unmistakable sound of Messam laughter, coming from down the street. I turned my head to see the twins about a hundred feet away on their BMX bikes, below a stop sign that Lester appeared to be vandalizing.

  Despite their being identical, it was easy to tell the twins apart. Lester always wore a baseball cap (the camouflage kind that hunters liked) and Lars never did. Lester usually wore it backward, but not always. Tonight he had it on straight. He was wearing a black pullover and black gloves as well—they both were—and was holding a can of spray paint. I heard the loose marble sound as he shook it, and then the hiss as he set about spraying. Laughter again.

  I was standing out in the open. All they had to do was turn their heads and they would see me. Heck, I was probably already visible in their periphery, which was exactly why I hadn’t moved yet. If there’s one thing that birding teaches you, it’s that motion is often the surest way of attracting attention. Sometimes if you just stand perfectly still, nature will go on about its business right around you. Birds will sing and forage as if you’re not there; squirrels will come out to investigate their surroundings; if you’re lucky, you might even get a fox or a coyote to cross your path.

  The twins began to move off, but not before horsing around a little on their bikes, the light from the nearest streetlamp reflecting off their spokes and rims as they attempted a series of freestyle tricks, all of which I’d seen before.

  The twins liked to show off on their bikes in front of the school, doing tail-whips and bar-spins as the school bus honked at them to get out of the way. Some of the tricks looked borderline suicidal (one of them was even called a “suicide no hand”) and they didn’t always go as planned either. As good as the twins were, it was almost inevitable that one of them would slip off a foot-peg or mistime a jump, resulting in a wipeout. The smart kids knew better than to laugh when that happened, but it seemed that there was always at least one numbskull who couldn’t resist a quick little chuckle or a serves-you-right smile. A lucky few got away with it, but more often than not, the twins would close the curtain on their bike show and then wipe the floor with whoever the poor sap was who just couldn’t keep it together.

  I was guilty of laughing once myself, but thankfully Pete was there to elbow me in the side before anyone noticed. If there was one thing I could always count on my older brother for, it was that: protecting me—even if I didn’t want it or thought I didn’t need it. He definitely wouldn’t have left me alone in the Messams’ backyard.

  Not that the twins were actually in their yard, of course, although they might be in a moment. It all depended on whether or not they turned right or just kept going straight. I silently willed them to pedal off down the block, only to feel my heart sink as Lester said, “C’mon,” and then aimed his handlebars toward the road home.

  I hesitated a second longer, praying that Pete would suddenly appear from the darkness, but he didn’t, which meant that I had to move, and quickly. My adrenaline was ebbi
ng, though, my body feeling three times heavier than it had only minutes before. Nevertheless, I ran, the night feeling suddenly thick and substantial around me, like something that might harden if I stopped.

  I saw a light as I approached the fence, from Pete’s little flashlight, I realized. He was shining it through the window of the Messams’ garage, and had his face almost right up against the glass, completely oblivious to the fact that the twins were probably coming up the front driveway at that very second.

  “Psstt!” I whispered, as loud as I dared to. “Twins at nine o’clock!”

  Pete glanced my way first and then in the direction indicated, his head jerking with fresh alertness, as if my warning had been immediately followed by the sound of bikes being dropped to the pavement in the driveway out front.

  His flashlight winked out a second later, at exactly the same moment that a voice cut through the darkness.

  “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I knew that Pete was fast—definitely faster than I was—but I didn’t realize just how fast until that moment. He shot toward me as if he had a jetpack strapped to his back, his feet barely touching the ground.

  Lester appeared a split second later, not on his bike now but sprinting, his arms pumping madly. I only saw him for an instant, but it was all the time I needed to know that I was doomed, that Pete would overtake me easily and that Lester would catch me before I even got out of the alley. My only hope was to hide, and pray that Lester had only seen one of us. Pete might be able to outrun him on his own, but not if he had to wait for his slow little brother.

  I took a few quick steps and dove sideways into a big patch of rhubarb growing along the fence. I curled myself into a ball and tried to be still, listening for the sound of Lester’s footsteps. What I heard instead, though, was a loud and metallic snap sound, followed by the sort of scream that, up until that moment, I’d only ever heard in horror flicks. It was shrill and strangled and desperate, and it kept on going.