Plumage

by Nancy Springer

  She wasn’t there.

  He felt a jolt in his gut. Waking up alone, all too much like too many sad songs—but he was being stupid. Probably she was just taking a pee somewhere close by.

  He stood up, yawned and stretched some more, and addressed the forest, “Sassy?”

  No answer.

  Damn. If she’d gone to the corner store for a quart of milk or something, you’d think she could have left a note. In lipstick on a tortoise, maybe.

  “Sassy?”

  No answer. Just damn birds singing like nothing was the matter.

  Now his brain had kicked in he was really starting to get worried, because where could she have gone? She didn’t know the way back to the outlaw camp. For that matter, neither did he.

  Damn. What would Robin Hood do? Look for clues, probably. No, that was Sherlock Holmes.

  Look for—something. Tracks. Yeah, right. But something. Broken branches. A trail of bread crumbs. Stuff like that. Racquel started to circle the shady dell where he and Sassy had snoozed.

  Sometime later, he realized that he had succeeded in losing his way back to that place as well.

  Even though he had napped, he was still tired. And now he was hot. He was cross. And he was scared. Sweaty scared. He felt sweat trickling down his spine to creep under his rudimentary waistband and into his ass cleavage. He hated sweat. He hated it most of all when it ran down his back into his butt crack.

  He stood still and yelled so hard that his eyes squeezed shut, “God damn it all to hell anyway. Sassy!” Where the fuck was she?

  As the echoes of his shout wavered away he heard a familiar sound he could not place. He opened his eyes.

  Sweeeet. Kleet!

  Chirping, the parakeet whirred up to him and landed on his shoulder. It was the first time Sassy’s pet had showed the least friendliness to him. And gee, that feather-light weight and those little warm feet did feel kind of good. Bird better not poop on him, though.

  “Hi, Kleet, honey!” And where Kleet was, could Sassy be far behind? Racquel looked all around, expecting her to pop out from behind a bush or something, but she didn’t. “Where is she?”

  “Twee,” said Kleet disconsolately.

  “Has something happened to her?”

  “Twee.”

  “Yeah, Twee. Lead me to her, Kleet! What’s that you say, Lassie, Timmy’s in the well again? Good fellah. Lead the way, boy!” He shrugged his shoulder to dislodge the parakeet, then yelled, “Wait for me!” and loped after it. Yeah, right, probably it was on its way to a birdie gang bang or something, not to Sassy. But what the hell else could he do?

  Sassy stood—a feather could have knocked her down, but luckily none offered to do so. She stood literally breathless looking at her second self. In this mirror world, her reflection. Yet she felt a sense that Shadow stood there more vital and real than she was. The girl’s hair glowed like silk fire in the sunshine. Color glowed in her tawny cheeks. Her eyes shone. She stood—

  Stood. Sassy caught a breath and gasped, “You have feet!”

  “About time,” Shadow agreed, her tone more wry than harsh. “Why the devil did you name me Shadow?”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Not really.”

  “But it’s pretty! I mean, the shadowland under the trees. All kind of muted and gray-green.” Subtle colors, the kind Sassy liked. Moreover, a mirror reflection was kind of a shadow, and there was the whole me-and-my-shadow thing, and all the Jung stuff she had read when she was young. Get it? Young. Ha. Probably Shadow wouldn’t get it. “Actually,” Sassy added humbly, “I feel more like your shadow than vice versa.”

  “Well, no wonder.”

  Shadow said this with decision but no visible spleen. Sassy asked, “You’re not mad at me anymore?”

  “Not right now.” Shadow did a funky little shuffling dance with her bare feet to illustrate why. “Sometimes.” In a judicious tone she added, “You have been trying very hard lately.”

  They looked at each other.

  She is so beautiful, Sassy thought, not even seeing the wings anymore, not even caring about them anymore—Shadow liked feet on the ground better. Just seeing the girl. She is so beautiful. How could I not have known I was beautiful?

  She blurted to Shadow, “Do you like hats?”

  “Yes!” Shadow’s whole face lighted up with her Julia-Roberts grin. “We’ll get lots of hats. Big floppy flowery ones and little goofy ones.”

  “Okay. Sounds like a plan to me. You like long hair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Braids?”

  “Yes! And barrettes—”

  “They have stuff that’s better than barrettes now,” Sassy informed her. “Scrunchies and plastic gripper things with lots of feet, like big bugs. And butterfly wings. All colors.”

  “Super!”

  “And we can get hair ribbons, and feathers, and scads of lace—”

  “Not white lace.”

  “No,” Sassy agreed, “not white.” She stood gazing at the young wonder before her. She gazed so long that Shadow actually asked, “What is it?”

  Sassy requested, “Teach me to really, really cuss?”

  FOURTEEN

  The damn parakeet really did seem to be leading him somewhere, Racquel decided. Kleet flew from one tree to the next, perching on low branches and peering at Racquel over his feathered green shoulder as if to say Come on, hurry up. As Racquel ran after him, limping and panting, all too aware that he had never in his life been what you would call athletic. Not that he was fat, but not no jock either. He was not liking this, but he persevered. And every time he puffed up to Kleet, the damn bird would take off with a busy buzz of his pointed wings, fluttering onward.

  “Give—me—a—breather, dammit!” Racquel gasped.

  Necessity gave him one in the form of a stitch in his side—why the hell they called it that, who knew, but it sure did feel like somebody had just inserted a giant needle between his ribs. Through clenched teeth he whispered, “Shit.” He couldn’t run another step. For the moment he couldn’t even walk, and standing upright was not an option, either. Hunched and gasping, he focused on not moaning more than was necessary. An outlaw had to preserve some semblance of dignity.

  After a minute, as his pounding heart and his breathing quieted, he grew aware of two voices conversing at no great distance.

  “Okay,” said a clear, sweet, girlish voice, “repeat after me: prick, dickhead, asshole, cocksucker.”

  The second voice obeyed in wispy tones. A mumble.

  The girlish voice said, “Louder.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t? How you going to cuss Frederick out like that? Repeat after me: you dickheaded cocksucker—”

  “I can’t say that!” It was Sassy. Racquel felt sure now. He breathed out.

  “Do you want to learn to swear or not?” The other one—and Racquel hoped he had guessed right who it was—sounded more amused than pissed.

  “Yes, I do!” Sassy sounded as sincere as a tract pusher about this. “But not like that! You’ll have me saying the f-word next!”

  “What are you going to do? Grade-school insults? Tell him he thinks he’s hot snot on a silver platter but really he’s a cold booger on a paper plate?”

  “He’s what?”

  “When he was born, his mama looked at his head and his butt and said oh boy, twins?”

  “Shadow, you’re going too fast!” Sassy wailed. “How am I going to remember all this?”

  “You’re not supposed to remember! You have to learn to extemporize. Cock, prick—”

  “I can’t!”

  “Okay, okay, for you we’ll bend the rules.” The girl sounded downright mirthful. “Look, if you need to vent but you don’t want to really offend anybody, the thing to do is take a bad word but just combine it with a stinky food. Like this: Onion balls. Baloney dick. Salami ass.”

  “Onion balls,” Sassy repeated obediently. “Baloney dick. Salami—” She started to gi
ggle. “Salami—” She giggled harder, then burst into a laugh such as Racquel had not yet heard from her, a happy laugh that came from somewhere deep under her belly button. “Salami dick!” she howled.

  “Or ass. Whatever.” The girl was laughing too.

  Still hurting, Racquel managed to turn and look. A breath of light over there beyond the trees. Clearing.

  Hoo boy. He bet he knew which one, too.

  Uh-huh.

  Standing in the shadows of the giant hemlocks looming over the dingle, with Kleet perched silently nearby, Racquel looked down a gentle green slope to the glassy oval pool in its frame of glossy stones and white flowers. Sitting cross-legged in the grass, face-to-face and giggling like long-lost friends, he saw Sassy and her strange angel.

  Hmm.

  “Banana cock,” Sassy suggested.

  “Good!” The Sassy girl bounced Tiggerishly on her bony little bottom. Her auburn hair bounced, and her glossy wings.

  “Burger butt.”

  “Burger butt?”

  They both became incoherent with giggling again.

  Racquel looked over at Kleet with some degree of understanding. “Jealous, dahling?” he inquired. He intuited that Kleet might be feeling a bit cut out of Sassy’s affections. He assumed that jealousy might be the motivation that had made the parakeet fetch him. Or might he be projecting onto an innocent bird? In a subrational way he was feeling a wee tad jealous himself.

  And in a far more rational way he was wondering: what was Sassy going to do now?

  How would she get herself together? Would she just stay here, where all a person had to do to eat was lean over and pick a mushroom?

  Would she ever want to go home again?

  “Okay, then there are the intensifiers,” the Sassy-girl was lecturing again. “You know: damn, goddamn, hell, bloody, freaking, like that. You use them mostly to fill in and put together a nice cuss string.”

  Racquel realized that he couldn’t just stand there under a tree forever. He had to get moving one direction or another.

  Stay with Sassy?

  Or go away?

  Go home?

  He didn’t know. He stood there.

  “Son of a goddamn banana pickle,” Sassy said.

  “Good!”

  In that moment Racquel realized that she didn’t need a whole lot of help from him any longer.

  He swallowed and reached out a hand toward Kleet. The parakeet stepped tamely onto his finger. With the bird on his hand he walked down the gentle slope toward the oval pool and the two Sassies sitting in the grass.

  For just a moment Sassy saw a falconer approaching, perhaps a hero, a tall man in medieval garb striding out of the sunset with his raptor riding on his hand. Then she blinked, and it was Racquel, and her heart started pounding as it had not before.

  Racquel walked up to her and Shadow, and Kleet flew from his hand to her shoulder, where he perched without speaking.

  Racquel did not speak either. He was not smiling. It was not that he was being moody, Sassy intuited. It was just that he did not know what to say. And he was restraining himself from the sort of babbling he usually did in that case, trying not to put on a clown face.

  She told him, “I’m sorry.” She stood up to face him more levelly, although Shadow remained seated on the grass. “I’m sorry, I didn’t like to leave you like that, but I had to.”

  Racquel nodded.

  “The feather came for me, and—”

  “It’s okay.” It was not, really, she could tell by his voice, but what was he supposed to say? What could either of them say?

  He said it first. “What now?”

  She did not know. She looked at Shadow.

  Shadow returned the look, peering up at her with a pixie grin, but did not speak. Shadow’s eyes shone with a fey gleam. Mischief? Fun? Prescience?

  Racquel stood silent, waiting.

  Sassy turned back to him. “For me, I don’t know,” she said, her voice wavering a little. “For you—I think we ought to get you home.”

  “That’s not your problem,” he said.

  “Yes, it is. You could lose your shop.”

  “I’ll worry about that.”

  “Racquel, it’s because of me that you’re here. I worry about you too. I love you.”

  The 1-word stopped everything for a moment. The sunset, the slow dancing of clouds in the sky, the tree frogs singing, the winging of birds, earth, air, Racquel’s breathing, Sassy’s heart, all seemed to stop. He gazed at her.

  Sassy’s heart jump-started itself and pounded. “I do. I love you.” She strode to him and hugged him. Warm, it was so warm and solid and good to press against his chest and shoulder, his arms around her. She felt him swallow hard. Felt him bow his head to lay his face against her hair.

  Heard him say, low, “I love you too. More than you know.”

  True. It was hard for her to understand how he loved her, even though she knew how much he had done for her.

  But she understood what she had to do for him.

  She nodded against his shoulder, then pulled away to face him, her hands on his shoulders. She looked straight into his eyes, seeing hope and pain there, the hope and pain of a lost child found. “I will always love you,” she told him. Then, gentle yet hard, she ordered, “Now you get your salami butt out of here.”

  “Salami butt?”

  “Whatever. Racquel, you’ve got to go home.” She released her grip on his shoulders and stepped back.

  He took a deep breath, his chest heaving.

  “Try the pool,” she said.

  He nodded.

  Sassy sat next to Shadow again and watched, wordless, as Racquel walked to the tip of the oval and knelt there, placed his hands on the smooth blue-green stones and looked into the water.

  Nothing happened.

  Sassy listened to birds chittering, tree frogs chirring.

  Nothing more.

  After a moment Racquel called to her over his shoulder, “I’m just seeing me, that’s all. I mean me the way I am right now. Braids and lipstick and a dirty jerkin.”

  “Keep trying.” Sassy heard the strain in her own voice.

  For the first time in his presence Shadow spoke, her voice clear and mirthful. “Let Sassy try for you.”

  Racquel stood up, turned around and took a good look at Shadow. Sassy peered at her as well. Shadow sat there with her lips closed in a smile like a new pink moon, her eyes glinting with fun, not saying a word.

  “She’s up to something,” Racquel said.

  No kidding. There were several trenchant things Sassy could have said, mostly to Shadow, but she pressed her lips together. She clenched her teeth. She got up, her back hard; she had been dared, and she knew it. She walked over to stand beside Racquel at the edge of the oval pool.

  Without a word she crouched and looked—at the pool, not into it, for it was inscrutable. She scanned its shadowshining face, its thin skin dimpled by Jesus bugs walking. Not knowing what to expect, she took care to expect nothing.

  Too late, she realized that her attitude was all too much that of a wife. She gasped. From the water, Frederick peered back at her.

  She froze. Time seemed to slow down, glacial, giving her opportunity to experience all over again his plastic smile, his cinnamon hair and freckled watermelon-pink skin, his pallid eyes. There was time to fear all over again his power to make her miserable. His power to make lifeless wood of her as she stood there, petrified.

  He smirked and reached for her.

  And she couldn’t move, and time sped all too fast now, no time to get away, frozen where she stood—

  From right inside her head a fierce, almost forgotten voice said, To hell with this.

  Sassy unfroze.

  “No!” she shouted, struggling against Frederick as he grabbed her by the forearm. She tried to brace her feet, but damn, it was too late, the stone edge of the pool sloped all too smooth, she was slipping—

  “Hey!” she heard Racquel yell as he lea
pt to help her. He bent over her and grabbed her around the shoulders to keep her from being pulled in. His tall shadow fell on the water. Frederick looked past Sassy to see who was interfering, and he lost his smirk. He seemed to recognize Racquel, but not pleasantly. His face curled as if he were about to make like a vulture and try projectile vomiting. His mouth gaped. “You!” he belched, froglike, from the water. He let go of Sassy and seized Racquel.

  “Aaaaa!” Caught off-balance, Racquel toppled forward and splashed at the edge of the water. Sassy snatched at his jerkin to hold on to him.

  “No!” she screamed at Frederick. “Don’t! Let him alone! Let go of him, you—”

  You what? You coward, you womanizer, you liar who took the best years of my life and left without even a thank-you-ma’am, you—you toad-prince who destroyed my dream—

  Frederick’s pink-and-orange head protruded snakily from the water as he tried to wrestle Racquel away from her. What the hell he wanted with Racquel, Sassy had no idea, but judging by the glare shirring his pink face, something about Racquel bothered him enough to make him forget all about her. Of course, when hadn’t he forgotten about her? Frederick, what a snarf. The way his wet head stuck out of the water almost froze Sassy again. She could see Frederick’s once-beloved lumpy ears, his piggy little eyes, his nose hair—he had more of that than he did eyelashes.

  You—betrayer—

  She felt fire run through her veins. She felt herself blaze into incandescent fury.

  “Let go of him, you banana turd!” she screeched. “You goddamn consummate dick-challenged jackass! Traitor! Go ahead, take everything I’ve got! You did it before, try it again, you jellobutt, you donkey breath, you—you pretzel stick! I hope you get pinkeye all over. I hope you get crabs. I hope you get foot fungus and jock itch and terminal acne and—and pickle dicks grow from your ears. Salami face! Onion balls! Stinking tomato fart, go—”

  She wasn’t nearly finished telling Frederick all the things she had never said to him, she had raised her voice to a banshee howl to be sure he could hear above the splashings and thrashings, what a mess, dripping sopping wet with her feet in the water at the edge of the pool she hung on to Racquel while Frederick kept trying to pull him in and Racquel yelped like a scared puppy and Sassy cussed and blurrily amid too much slosh Sassy heard somebody laughing, laughing like music, a clear sheer soprano laugh of delight while Sassy yelled at Frederick, “Go eat boogers! Go stick yourself in a weed whacker! You cheese prick! Garlic tits! Son of a slime mold! You—” and she still had more to say but she heard Shadow’s laughter right in her ear, felt Shadow’s breath warm on her cheek, felt warm slender arms go around her from behind, hugging her, oh heaven, oh help, thank Shadow, Shadow would help pull Racquel away from Frederick—