Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  Julian moved a pawn and slouched back in his chair.

  Celia’s face drifted through his mind. She wasn’t the type to say so, but it was clear from the lack of give on her end of the conversation that she disliked him. It hadn’t been that way early on, when he first met her. She’d been friendly then, could even be called bubbly when she had a drink or two in her. But now when she looked at him it was with an air of dogged patience, as if she were a kindergarten teacher dealing with a tiresome child.

  She didn’t look that way at Eric. When Eric came into the room, that lanky girl with the odd clothes and crooked teeth was transformed. Her slanted face became suddenly fragile and mischievous. Her voice curved with flirtation. Her skin changed color, even, like a chameleon, a delicate pinkening that made the freckles seem to dance across her nose.

  And Julian, watching, would feel a hard, sucking pull at his heart, as though it were tightening, shrinking inward to an inelastic knot that ached and struggled against his ribs.

  Earlier in the day while the others were out skeet shooting, Julian had gone into the bunk room he and Eric were sharing. His own things were hung neatly from the clothes rail, but Eric’s bag looked as if a small bomb had gone off inside. Clothes were strewn all around—uncharacteristic for Eric, who was almost as tidy as Julian himself. His shaving kit was lying open on the floor.

  Julian stood beside it, looking down.

  This is an asshole move. Leave it alone.

  But he recognized this as a token protest, from a powerless, womanly source in the recesses of his mind.

  He dropped to his knees and started to rummage through Eric’s bag. Good-quality clothes, he noted mechanically. Jeans, sweaters, socks, ski skins. But at the side of the bag he found an inner pocket, and in the pocket a paper envelope. He pulled out the envelope and opened it.

  Inside were three photographs of Celia. In the first she was gazing out the window of what was maybe her childhood bedroom, those wide gray eyes on the horizon, one bare leg stretched toward the camera and her hair lit from behind like a flame. This must have been years ago, because her hair was only just past her shoulders, and the lines of her cheekbone and jaw held a childlike roundness. In the second picture, probably taken within minutes of the first, she was laughing, her head thrown back, slender throat arched like a swan’s neck and one shoulder turned as if to ward off Eric’s humor.

  He had seen that gesture a dozen times but always from a distance.

  He flipped to the last photograph, a black-and-white: Celia, her chin lifted, staring straight into the camera from under a tangle of hair. Her arms were drawn back to expose her breasts, so small and delicate they barely cast a shadow. And she was wearing makeup, a lot of it, a dark shadow smudged around her eyes as if she’d gotten into her mother’s makeup drawer and put it on with her fingers. Her lips were swollen and blurred with lipstick, open a little and with her tongue against her teeth. She looked arrogant, defiant. A little dazed.

  Freshly fucked. That was what she looked like.

  He sat on the edge of Eric’s bunk with the picture in his hand. A teeming pressure sank painfully into his groin.

  What had Eric done to get her like that?

  Was she fooled by the bad-boy tattoos, the pierced ears, the unpredictable aggression? Eric was a good-looking kid—was it anything more than that? Surely she could see this boy was a coward. He didn’t deserve her admiration any more than Julian deserved her coldness. But the proof remained, in black-and-white.

  For Eric she’d painted her face.

  Across the chessboard, Eric shifted his pawn. Julian smothered his resentment and dragged his mind back to the conversation.

  “You know how other women say a girl’s being cheap when she does shit like that,” Zig was saying, “with the cameras in the bedroom and whatnot. It’s a good word. I mean, obviously it’s sexy and I’m as much in favor of porn as the next guy, but a chick like that does degrade in value.”

  “So why’d you ask for the crotch shot, then?” Charlie said.

  “’Cause I’m a guy.”

  “It’s all on her.”

  “Well, yeah. Sucks for her, I guess.”

  “The hell it does,” said Vann James. “I’d love to be able to look at a chick and go, ‘Yeah, I’ll do her,’ or ‘Mmm, no, can’t be bothered,’ and have it all be up to me. Unfathomable. That’s power right there.”

  “They’ve got more than they know what to do with.”

  Charlie had pocketed his phone and was perched on the arm of the sofa. He picked up the Tupperware box and started to break up some weed.

  “But can you imagine,” he said, “how awful it would be to be a chick? Men are disgusting—look at us. Zig with his pube beard—”

  “Hey,” said Zig, stroking his chin.

  “Vann Jimmy, burping and farting all night—”

  “Jules made chili!”

  “And never will again,” Julian said.

  Charlie shook his head. “Disgusting. Men are fucking gnarly.”

  “You’ve got a point,” said Zig. “We’re clearly getting the better end of the deal.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Julian said. “Women don’t get their hearts broken.”

  “Not true, to hear a woman tell it.”

  “Yeah, but that’s bullshit,” Julian said. “Do you really think a woman is going to get herself as worked up about you as you are about her? How many times have you broken up with a woman and felt like you were dying? Literally dying. You can’t eat, you can’t sleep, can’t think of anything but her. You’d do anything to get that woman back. You’d howl outside her window like a dog if you thought it would change her mind.”

  Julian reached over and dropped another couple of logs onto the fire. Eric’s eyes followed, glazed with weed, lit with orange firelight. Unreadable.

  “And any other woman you could lay your hands on means less than nothing,” Julian said, “because it’s that woman, that one particular chick, and you can’t even say what it is, but it’s that one woman you need more than you need your next breath. You don’t think a woman feels that way, do you?”

  “No,” Zig said. “A few years back I got lit up that way about a chick I met in rehab. She was pretty fucked up but she had this way of looking at me. Like I was a god, man, like she was hanging on every word. And when she stopped looking at me like that—”

  “Hell,” Eric said under his breath.

  Julian stared into the hearth as the first tongues of flame curled from the underside of the logs. He remembered something else he’d found in Eric’s suitcase: an orange prescription bottle, now buried in the snow twenty yards behind the cabin.

  “‘This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,’” he said softly. “You start to feel that woman belongs to you, and you get that fire...”

  The shadows danced across the chessboard. Julian picked up the black king and set it down. “Checkmate.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Eric couldn’t find his meds. He was on his knees beside his duffel bag, the contents of his shaving kit turned out on the floor.

  “Have you seen my prescription?” he said. “Little orange bottle, I thought it was right here...”

  “Goddamn right I have,” Julian said. “You left it on the bathroom counter, and it’s a good thing, too. You can’t take that shit out here, skiing these runs. It will slow your reactions.”

  “Dude, I’ve been taking it for years and my reactions are fine. I need it.”

  “Says who? Celia?” Julian shook his head. “Look, man, I know she means well, but some women just want to keep a guy placid. That’s not you, not now. This mountain is the only thing you need.”

  From the distance came the throb of the helicopter blades. The men outside sent up a whooping cheer: “It’s
on!”

  “Not a good time for this conversation,” Eric said. “Where’s the bottle?”

  Julian clapped Eric on the back, hard enough to nudge him toward the door. With his hand on Eric’s shoulder, he kept them moving through it.

  “I’m doing you a favor, kid. Get your board.”

  * * *

  The helicopter set them down at the top of the Isthmus. Julian’s boots sank into the powder as Eric hopped down next to him, both of them ducking under the thunderous beat of the chopper blades, trudging through the snow to make way for the others. They collected their gear from the basket, and Julian waved the pilot away.

  The mountains tumbled out beside and below them, white-capped spines and unforgiving stone cliffs with the helicopter retreating along them like a fly on the bedroom wall. All around the sky stretched to thinness, laced with clouds so close that Julian could feel them on his cheeks.

  He glanced at the young man next to him.

  Eric was well able to ski this mountain, right down the face. But physical ability and mental readiness were two separate things.

  “Here it is, man,” Julian said. “You ready to do this?”

  Eric lifted his chin and looked around. His head bobbed in short jerks like a bird, eyes moving too quickly to alight. He drew a deep breath and blew it out, puffing his cheeks. Next to them, Zig and Vann James had their heads together, gesturing as they picked out their lines, while Charlie framed up a picture on his phone.

  Julian sidestepped over to point out the landmarks.

  “You got some pretty gnarly shit on the other side of the spine. You drift too far left and you’re in a world of hurt. No way to recover, either, because if you miss it left you’ll be diving off a cliff. But you want to stay out of the chute, too. It’s tight right there. You want to really watch it.”

  Eric nodded, sharp little nods all in a row.

  Julian gave him a sidelong glance, noting the quick puffs of steam clouding the air around Eric’s face.

  “Tell you what, though,” he said. “If you swing down the right-hand spine, you’ll have a much prettier ride. This one here’s the kamikaze, but it’s just a bullshit showpiece if you want to know the truth. More trouble than it’s worth. No shame in it if what you want is a sweet double black through the powder.”

  He grinned at Eric.

  “No point getting dead, you know?”

  Eric craned his neck, comparing the options.

  “They both come out in the same place,” Julian said.

  Charlie had set his board. He gave them a small salute and slipped over the edge. The slope was so steep that for several seconds they lost sight of him. Then he reappeared, tucked and soaring, before disappearing behind a snowy ledge.

  Zig went next, then Vann James, his jacket shrinking to a bright red dot, darting over the snow. In the distance, they saw him barreling over the rocky point, tipping sideways as his arms swam through the air for balance.

  “Shit,” Julian said. “Hope he doesn’t blow out that knee again. On the other hand, at least he missed the cliff.”

  He pushed off, calling back to Eric, turning his back to hide his grin. Eric would be taking the right-hand run—he was sure of it. The kid was all shook up.

  “See you at the bottom.”

  * * *

  Eric stood at the top of the mountain, the veil of clouds settling over him. The pearly air was dizzyingly silent.

  It was never this quiet at home. Though the slopes of Telluride were famously uncrowded and contained pockets of momentary noiselessness, there hung over the mountains at least the possibility of sound. Another skier might come by, or a bird might sing, or there might be the far-off squeak of the lift. Here was a silence beyond that. Above it.

  A wave of homesickness washed over him. Not for Colorado, exactly, or even for Celia, but for Rory. If Rory were here, he’d be brimming, delighted, full of enough confidence not just for himself but for Eric, as well.

  It had always been that way, since they were little kids. Rory was the instigator of dangerous games, the one to send them charging down a tree run, jumping from the roof, barreling on their bikes around the hairpin turn at the far end of town. There had been innumerable batterings of their small bodies against the earth, though none stood out in Eric’s mind like the tumble he took on the edge of the Ridge.

  They must have been about ten at the time. They’d both gotten bikes for Christmas, and by spring were so desperate to ride them that it was almost all they did until the end of summer. But on that day the road was still muddy, and Eric had forgotten that the brakes were now on the handlebars instead of the pedals, and he’d skidded through the scrub and stinging gravel before coming to rest with his legs hanging over the ledge, the weight of momentum having carried him halfway over.

  He screamed then, and the shame of screaming superseded even the terror of knowing he was going to fall. Then Rory was beside him, flat on his belly, his hands like a vise around Eric’s wrist and their faces nose to nose above the scrabbly mud. Rory’s vivid blue eyes locked on his. But Eric remained paralyzed with fear, one hand in Rory’s and the other on a rock, which was slowly uprooting itself from the ground.

  “You’re not going to fall,” Rory said. “Grab my arm.”

  The confidence in his voice snapped Eric’s frozen joints apart, and he scrambled up, using Rory’s outstretched body like a series of tree roots, until they were both on solid ground. They rolled over and lay for a minute, panting and trembling under the indifferent sky.

  Then Rory sat up and said, “How’s your bike?”

  Like he hadn’t just saved Eric’s life, totally ignoring that scream.

  The kindness in Rory went all the way through.

  If he were in Alaska with Eric right now, he’d pretend not to see that Eric was scared out of his mind to take on the Isthmus. He’d be sunny, matter-of-fact.

  You can do this. Just keep yourself pointed in the right direction and you’re golden. Follow me down.

  And he’d be off, tugging Eric after him.

  Don’t stop to think about it.

  That was the problem. Eric was thinking. Overthinking. He wondered what had happened to Vann James, whether he’d blown out that knee—or worse. What if he’d gone the wrong way, gotten too far off course? And how much was too far? How did a person go balls-out down a forty-five-degree run with no more advice than “Not too much to the left”?

  His heart was leaping up his throat. He leaned forward, peered over the edge.

  Fuck.

  September 2008

  A BASKET FULL of Celia’s clothes sat on the floor of the laundry room, ready to be washed. She hung out her laundry every Thursday, a colorful bunting made of blouses, scarves, long skirts, cutoff jeans and tiny pairs of white cotton underwear that she hung in clusters from a single clothespin.

  The clothesline seemed indecent, somehow, to Julian. Sleeves waving, hollow skirts floating upward, teasing glimpses inside a shirt as two halves parted at the buttonholes. He hated the way the empty garments hung there, spread wide across the line. It was like seeing her undressed in public.

  “Must be hard to get your clothes dry in the winter,” he had said the week before, trying to keep the mocking tones out of his voice.

  She clipped one shoulder of her blouse with a clothespin, then the other. In the delicate cloud-light, her skin absorbed the colors of the pinned-up clothes: green, blue, pink, a shifting tint as she moved along the line.

  “I use the dryer in the winter.”

  She never would follow him into a joke, even when he teed it up ready to go. It was a form of rudeness, in a way. A level of aloofness and brevity that made him feel like a fool every time.

  It had amused him at first. Like sparring, flirtation. But lately he had the feel
ing that she wasn’t playing. She wanted something from him, some particular response. Damned if he knew what it was.

  She had stopped, pointing to the grass.

  “Look,” she said. “Oh, look.”

  A sparrow had collided with the kitchen window and lay there on the ground with its twig-like legs curled in the air, its eyes shut tight. One brown wing fanned out beside its body, the feathers pristine and utterly still.

  Celia backed away a step, her face twisted with revulsion and fear, as if they’d encountered a wreck on the freeway instead of a small harmless creature, barely dead at all.

  Julian stared at her curiously.

  “Pick it up,” he said.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Why not? Are you afraid of birds?”

  She shook her head and took another skittish step back.

  “It’s dead,” she said.

  “So it can’t hurt you.”

  “I can’t touch anything dead.”

  He clacked his tongue. “We’ll all be dead someday.”

  “I know.” She shuddered. “Doesn’t that freak you out?”

  “I don’t think about it,” he said truthfully.

  “I do. I think about it all the time.”

  Julian picked up the bird, cradled its cold little body in his palm. Celia shrank back as if she thought he was going to throw it at her.

  “What a strange girl you are, Celia. I didn’t know you felt that way.”

  She stared at the sparrow as if she hadn’t heard.

  “I had a parakeet once,” she said, “when I was about five. It was fine, totally fine, chirping and fluttering around its cage. But when I woke up in the morning, it was dead. Hard, stiff, like it had turned to wood. It wasn’t...real, anymore. It was just a thing, a hollowed-out thing. Its eyes were open, but there was nothing...”

  She looked up at him, hushed and urgent.

  “Don’t you think it’s awful that we have to die?”

  He grunted a laugh and tossed the bird over the rocky ledge.

  “There are things worse than dying,” he said.