Soon, night would seep its dark oil, and I didn’t want us to be caught out here—wherever the hell we were—in these horrid haunted streets when that happened.
“Where are we—”
“Shhhh!” the great blue skimmer shushed me. Migisi’s back muscles clenched. Dee and the big cats crept along a long yawn of a street with a sneezing of dormant vehicles—one Nissan Rogue, a midlife Chrysler, and an obscene number of Subaru Outbacks.1 A minivan with the bumper sticker “Watch out for the idiot behind me” sat dust caked and dreaming of destinations. I surprised myself. In Toksook Bay, I had never expected a MoFo to suddenly materialize. And yet here, after all these years, I held my breath as we passed each bumper, in case a bright-eyed being poked their head through the glassless window and hollered in a bright voice, “You’re here! I knew you would come! I never gave up hope!”
A great scholarly brick building loomed above us. The great blue skimmer kept its compound eyes on this building.
“Here,” said the dragonfly.
Dee was already face-to-face with brick. She ran her fingers—fingers that had coaxed a newborn owlet from its frangible egg, fingers I’d really come to count on—along a foreign barrier. It objected with a squeak under the pull of her skin.
A window. Glass.
I was dumbfounded. “How is this poss—”
“Shhhh!” spat the skimmer, shushing me for the second time. “Not safe here. Not yet.” He hovered in the air mechanically, wingbeats like summer rain.
“Wait here,” I said with great authority to Dee and the cats, who all proceeded to completely ignore me. We wound around to the side of the old school, which opened up to a grass field. Dee gasped. The tigers’ warning growls slipped under the soil. Migisi chittered in shock. My eyes beheld bodies. Great moving mountains with hearts bigger than homes. Noses as dexterous as MoFo arms. Smoke-stained skin with wandering creases that rippled under the frolic of a fly. We were staring at a large and healthy herd of elephants.
I lifted my good wing. “You all stay back while I—”
Dee was moving toward the herd as if in a trance. Her hand, a hand that had lovingly dabbed yarrow across the dark hole where a beloved owl’s eye used to live, reached out to the herd.
“Dee, wait!” I hissed and when I realized there was no stopping her, I addressed the herd. “She is safe! Please, she’s just a calf!”
Eko’s roar burst out of him. The largest elephants stepped forward, trunks lifted. Gray ears fanned like the great leaves of jungle plants.
“Dee, stop!” I yelled as she moved like a woodland sprite toward the enormous proboscideans. Disobedient Dee had placed herself between perennial enemies of an Indian jungle. And as the herd tightened their protection circle, a female elephant exposed her side and I saw words. MoFo words. She’d been branded by a species who used fire and metal, so that now her tattoo was a darker gray than her own skin. It had happened long ago, but elephants carry everything with them—they live closer to tree time than we do; memories reside in the soul of them—and all I could think was that if these elephants had suffered trauma, then little Dee could be a scapegoat for the deeds of her species. A present-day punching bag for the sins of the past.
The female elephant’s burnt scar read:
CDC LYING! DON’T GO 2 QUARANTINE CENTERS!
The largest elephant trumpeted so loud, endangered glass rattled. The tigers flattened their ears, growling. Dee froze. The blazing cats paced with fury. Protests bugled from the herd. The large male charged toward Dee. I ran as fast as I could toward Dee. Puddles rippled under pounding steps. In a few great strides of tree trunk–like feet, he dwarfed her.
“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!” I yelled as I anticipated fangs clamping down on my body, for Olan The Asshole to do what tigers do when you turn your back on them. I made it to Dee. I crawked in gratitude as she snatched me from the ground.
“She is not like them!” I said. “She is good and kind!”
The enormous bull elephant lifted his trunk into the air like a bullwhip. He brought it down and brushed it across her delicious cheeks, over hair like the crispy noodle nests of a Chinese restaurant. He let his great trunk slide down the length of her arm as her eyes glittered like a sky stabbed with stars. A low rumble rolled from inside him as he swayed from side to side.
“This way,” he said, turning. The herd turned at his beckoning and suddenly they were walking to the red brick building.
I looked back at three tigers who simultaneously flashed a great many teeth.
“She is mine!” roared Olan. “Mine for bringing her here!”
“Silence!” trumpeted the bull elephant.
“The Keeper is mine!” Liem roared, setting off minor earthquakes in Guadalajara.
The largest elephant’s voice lowered to an earthy rumble. “You will not place a paw closer. You have shown that you cannot be trusted to keep a truce. And we will speak of it no more.” He turned to me. “They know the rules. They cannot pass this threshold.”
We left the tigers pacing in a tangle of snarls on the sidewalk. Dee reinforced the elephant’s orders by calling out to the tigers with a nasal, “Stayee! Dee come back!” Migisi did a victory lap in the air, laughing like a maniacal Disney villain. We walked toward a door, away from tooth-rattling growls, shrill whimpers. I felt a little bad about lying to the tigers, but not that bad. Olan and his stripe-spangled buttocks would have had me for breakfast. A quick bowl of crowtmeal.
“Phew,” said the skimmer as he whizzed past me. “Wasn’t sure if they would get you smush smush.” I felt my fondness for him dwindling.
Dee turned to face the herd of elephants before committing to the red brick building. She lifted her arm to mimic a trunk. The male elephant lowered his great head toward me. “You have protected her all this time.”
“Since she was a hatchling,” I told him. “She’s the very last.”
“I remember. I remember you and your friend.” Dennis. “He is very proud of you.” If a crow could cry, I would have; I’m man enough to admit it. In his wise eyes, I saw the baby zoo elephant I had watched chase a murmuration of starlings all those years ago. He had made it. He’d grown, beaten overwhelming odds to adolescence. In spite of everything, his herd had thrived. A female elephant, the one with a sentence of scars, let out an insistent rumble like a machine’s tired sigh. They wanted us to go in through a door too small for them to follow. A door wearing a sign that said “Tavern on the Square.” And so, we did.
And the first thing that hit us was a smell that would quell the consciousness of a devout dung beetle. Dee sneezed. Deafening alarm calls echoed across a building that used to be a large restaurant. Dee thrust one hand up to an ear to curtail decibels on par with a Guns N’ Roses concert—if it were held on an erupting volcano and Axl Rose had been replaced by a blue whale. I looked up to a spectatorship of birds, passerines perched on dusty chandeliers and ledges, wings outstretched, throats keening. Migisi surprised me by sitting on a once-gold railing to catch her breath.
Dee tipped her head back, staring at a grand bird ball. She spotted an owl and called out to her in a feathery, pitch-perfect tone. The birds, shocked to silence, looked like they’d flown into frying pans. Dee responded with a gentle hum, the drone and bumble of hive dwellers.
“No, Dee, speak properly!” I whispered. Once again, I was ignored, treated like a pungent plate of diced liver. The birds bobbed their heads for a better view. Many did not have a name for the witchcraft below. They’d been born into a world without MoFos; they were never-persecuted dodoes, glistering eyes agog. They were blissfully unaware of her violent history. It was as if they were witnessing the coruscating dance of a ghost. A bending back of time’s hands. They stared at a unicorn, mythical in her motion. They were looking at the impossible. A one. An only. The birds stared with trilling hearts at a rising from the soil, from history, from horror.
They stared into the lonely eye of the sun.
And it wasn’t
just birds inhabiting this mildew palace. A puppy yawned. Its parents pointed at Dee with wet noses, tails and ears erect. Cocaine-faced possums blinked. A tortoise craned his neck to aid ancient eyes. Newts with glassy skins twitched. Chestnut-eyed elk sat frozen, their legs folded beneath them in a wooden booth that may have once hosted brunch. A snake fly waved her antennae, guarding eggs that glistened from the emerald leaves of a sprouting fern. Banana slugs painted velour furniture in silver. There was a bevy of brown—mule deer, beavers, moles, and marten—all watching the bipedal the elephants ushered in. A knot of garter snakes pulsed with anticipation. Ant and termite stilled their skittering. Dee captivated a constellation of creatures. And when they awoke from their shock, I didn’t know what they would see. Whether they would see my precious nestling or a predatory ape.
I realized then that fauna that should have run from her had not. They could not.
What had happened was that we had walked into a zoo.
A starless zoo where none of the animals were caged. My head darted—back, forth, repeat—scanning the makeshift zoo, looking for who was in charge, hunting for the MoFo who had created it. No one—not skunk nor salamander—made so much as a soup slurp.
Every entity stared at Dee as though she were an exotic animal.
And then movement. Emerging from what had once been a bar and where a sign said “No Minors,” a shadow slithered toward us. Its caster stepped from the blackness. He grew as he lumbered closer and closer, until he was towering over us. Waves of recognition and relief broke on me. He smoothed a hand over his long ginger cords.
My god. Orange the orangutan.
Orange, legend and hero, had helped me many years ago in Seattle. He helped us infiltrate MoFo homes and free the domestic animals who had been trapped inside when their owners succumbed to the virus. Without opposable thumbs, homes were impenetrable to us feathereds. It had earned him the nickname The One Who Opens Doors.
Dee wore an expression I’d never seen, her eyes suffused with starlit admiration. Some force of nature had waved a wand to conjure her closest living relative. Her heart pulsed like a moon jelly, the horizons of her world stretching with possibility. With hope.
Dee sat down in front of Orange with an involuntary oomph—the breath knocked out of her. Each finger trembled, her heart thundering in my ear. Her nostrils were the wings of a butterfly as she sucked in Orange’s musty smell. She mimicked his movements and gave the cracked chirrup of a happy owl. Orange studied the water in her eyes, the great gray plate of his face lit with wonder. He snorted—cautious excitement, a colossal creature maneuvering as if he were made of delicate folds of rice paper. He lifted a blue banana finger and pointed at her leg, where the tigers had opened up her calf. Caked blood and mud painted her skin. A tear tobogganed down her cheek. I will never know what she felt in this moment—what it’s like to see yourself reflected in another for the first time, to suddenly not feel utterly alone in the skin you’re in. This was the closest to a Magic Kingdom moment she’d ever get, the heart-billowing joy and magic, the chance to witness a beloved beast rising from the pages of a fable. She twisted her leg to help him examine the wound. He kept his burnished brown eyes, stagnant pools of euphoria and sorrow, on Dee and her injury.
Dee gingerly slipped the sealskin jacket from her shoulder to show him a scar, an old tattoo from the Toksook days. He ran a rubbery digit across its slim white road.
Orange thought very carefully, reaching back into the recesses of his memory and his heart. He lifted his beautiful leather fingers, floating them in a dance as delicate as cottonwood fluff. He repeated the polished motions with the utmost tenderness, concentrating by pursing his lips. Orange put every ounce of energy into a long-dead language. Neither Dee nor I understood sign language, but we watched him paint the air with words, and for a moment, I felt like I could fly again.
“Can she understand me?” Orange asked me in gentle grunts.
“Yes,” I told him. “Use your body and your eyes. She’s listening.”
“You are…you are different from the others,” Orange said to Dee.
“She is very special,” I told him.
He reached out slowly, wrapping my body in his fingers and pulling me toward the great gray moon of his face. Dee’s muscles said no. They wouldn’t allow him to take me. Her fingers whitened, tightening on my chest. Orange’s eyes were gentle, full of fondness. He placed his finger on her shoulder scar again to convey empathy and that raspberry-flavored treasure—trust. In the animal kingdom, there is no greater gift. Dee released me.
“Old friend,” the great orangutan said to me as I studied the rutted terrain of his faceplate up close. “Welcome home.”
“Orange, I’m so very glad to see you.” He looked fantastic, apparently one of those beings that gets mysteriously better with age, like Stilton cheese or Diane Keaton.
A terrifying voice elbowed out from behind the enormous male orangutan: “Get the fuck out of my way.”
Orange turned, and we all watched a tabby cat swimming in scars saunter in like he had a saltwater fishing rod lodged up his rectum. Arthritic and acerbic, he was as feisty as fire. He minced toward us in saucy steps, glaring as though mentally rehearsing a plan to assassinate us all in our sleep. The cat brushed past Orange, rubbing against him possessively.
Dee instinctively stuck out a finger for the cat to smell. He cautiously sniffed the digit and rubbed it across his cheek. With a great deal of sass, he forced his way onto her lap.
“Fucking finally—I sent the tiger brothers to find you and bring you to me, even though they’re shit at following orders,” he said as he lay there, purring like a Harley-Davidson.
“How did you know we were coming?” I asked him.
“A little fish told me.”
Dee attempted to pet him, which worked 50 percent of the time. The other 50 percent, Genghis Cat swatted at her with claws like prison shanks. He closed his eyes, purring in rapture, only to open his lids and ask her if she’d brought him any “fucking cheese.” I felt the tigers had been excellent training for this moment. Good old Genghis was another badass from our Seattle past, a ferocious tabby who’d forged a fierce and unlikely friendship with Orange and his family. Dee started to purr, the cadence of a cat, of a creature who had finally been accepted by wild things. This, I thought, was where we could hide. Yes. Dee could be safe and happy here.
“Who is in charge?” I asked Orange, whose family—both orangutans and feral cats—was surrounding him, choking on their curiosity. Dee excitedly pointed a finger toward a window, where a flutter of newspaper-colored feathers had emerged.
“Goobarry!” she said. Genghis purred louder at her words. Orange touched Dee’s lip with his leather finger.
An African gray fluttered down to the crap-adorned carpet we sat on. “My dear old friend!” he said to me in a voice like a cascading waterfall. A voice I’d missed as much as Cheetos®.
“I cannot tell you how good it is to see you, Ghubari.” I tried to play it cool and hold back a dam of emotion but still managed to sound like I had a northern red-legged frog in my throat.
Ghubari studied Dee, how she mimicked Orange’s gentle movements, how she avoided the unprovoked swipe of a cantankerous old house cat.
“Goodness gracious. How on earth? Just…look. Here she is. You’ve manifested miracles, Shit Turd. Look at this young lady before us, alive despite so many odds. A little seedling determined to reach the sun. The tiny turtle determined to taste salt water.”
I beamed, I’m sure of it. “Where is Kraai?”
“Kraai and the crow murder are the night eyes; you will see them in the morning.”
“What is happening?” I asked him, gesturing to all the eyes upon us.
“Come, we must talk in private.” Ghubari—a parrot who puts the RAAAAAAAA! in brain, truly a suppository of knowledge—didn’t miss the tension that suddenly filled the air; he could feel my resistance. “She will be safe here. Just advise her not to touch G
enghis’s belly. Or his legs. Or anywhere around his back. And also, not near his nose.”
I looked up at Dee, and down at Genghis Cat who was audibly rehearsing a plan to assassinate us all in our sleep. “I’ll be right back, I promise.” Dee made to stand, but Orange placed his finger on her shoulder again. I nodded at her.
You’re okay, my nestling; everything’s okay.
I looked over to the railing at Migisi. Dee had adventure eagle eyes on her.
“Come, Shit Turd,” said the wise old African gray. “I have much to tell you.”
Footnotes
1The Subaru Outback was the rusty steed of the tattooed, flannel-clad hipster MoFo, second fiddle only to the bicycle or an actual fiddle.
Chapter 16
S.T.
McMenamins, Bothell, Washington, USA
Ghubari and I hopped out the building through a gap between bricks. Night began bruising the sky, the clouds claw marked. I saw no sign of the elephants or tigers. I marveled at Ghubari’s pewter gray, the bold crimson quills of his tail, flashing on the last time I’d seen him, all those years ago. It was in our Toksook Bay cabin. We’d made the long journey there from Seattle with Pressa, Kraai, a sharp-shinned hawk, a northern harrier, and a Steller’s sea eagle with a beak like a stand-up paddle board. We met the five snowy owls who came to be like family to me as they huddled defensively around my little nestling, tiny Dee, who was starving and in desperate need of someone to love her. We were so busy, eschewing sleep for days on end to help the last MoFo on earth. I remembered the conversation like it was two hours ago.
I hopped around the dusty cabin planning Dee’s salvation, pelting words at Ghubari like spit seeds. “We need to gather more food; she’s still malnourished, and her skin is too cold! We can probably sort out a better shared living situation and take her care in shifts—”
“Steady, Shit Turd, steady. We came here to help the owls, to answer their plea. We must share our knowledge, teach them how to keep her alive, and then we must return home. A lot of lives count on us.”
Feral Creatures Page 14
