The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “Those things’ll kill you, you know,” Cluck said.

  “So will the things they eat in this country,” Pépère said. The soda in the liquor store horrified Alain Corbeau, those colors bright as neon tubes. He thought Kraft Singles contained, within a few square inches, all American evils. His career at the adhesive plant had only strengthened his belief that chemicals belonged on the flaps of envelopes and between layers of pressboard, not in the stomach.

  Cluck laid two new peacock feathers out on the dashboard, both pale as swans’ wings, thanks to a recessive allele. Leucism. It left nothing but white, and the faintest flashes of sunrise colors if the light hit the barbs the right way.

  Locals swore the white peacock of Elida Park was a myth, no more real than a green flash at dusk. But today the bird had dragged his train across the grass and left behind these two perfect tail feathers.

  Cluck’s grandfather lifted one off the dashboard. It let off a little blue. “What will you do with them?” he asked.

  Cluck held the passenger door handle. Whenever the truck upshifted, its weight pulled on his fingers. The latch was so old that if Pépère sped, it might come unhooked, and the door might fly open. “Same thing I do with the blue ones, I guess.”

  His grandfather set the feather down. “Your hard work will never be worn, then. You’ll never catch anyone in this family in white wings.”

  Pépère parked the Morris Cowley behind the Craftsman house, their home for the weeks they’d be in Almendro. The plumbing squealed, the floorboards groaned back and forth, and on windy nights, the attic murmured to the second floor.

  Cluck didn’t have to hear it though. He slept in the costume trailer, a blue and white 1961 Shasta Compact. It saved his cousins from arguing about who had to sleep in the same room with him, calling not-it like they were still in grade school lessons. To them, his left-handedness and the red in his feathers made him dangerous as a matagot. Worse luck than a black cat brought across a stream. When the family went to church on la veille de Noël or le Vendredi saint, they did not bring him. So Pépère stayed home with him, reading from Luke. “Let them have their Latin and their hosties,” he told Cluck.

  Pépère pointed out the window. “Regarde.” He lifted his hand toward a flitter of movement. A red-winged blackbird, all dark feathers except for a brushstroke of deep coral on each shoulder, crossed the sky.

  This was his way of telling Cluck not to mind the red in his own feathers.

  Pépère set the parking break. “I left Eugenie’s wings for you. She tore the right one.”

  “Again?” Cluck slammed the door.

  “Malheureusement.”

  “I’ll get to it.”

  First Cluck got the tire pressure gauge from inside the costume trailer. If the Shasta would sit for the show’s run here, he had to make sure the tires weren’t sinking into the ground.

  He’d just put the gauge to the front right tire when Dax grabbed him by the back of the neck.

  “You just had to go start something, didn’t you?” Dax slammed him against the side of the trailer. He caught a handful of Cluck’s hair, pulling at the back of his scalp.

  “What?” Cluck asked.

  “Don’t ask me what.” Dax flicked Cluck’s temple. “This.”

  Pépère had made Cluck forget the bruising, the soreness. He always made him forget, no matter who gave him the bruise. Locals. Dax. His mother, when he was small, catching him in the eye with her elbow and then telling him “Le petit imbécile, stay out of my way.”

  “You went to start a fight,” Dax said.

  The smell of Dax’s aftershave dried out Cluck’s mouth, his tongue a parched sponge.

  “I didn’t start anything,” Cluck said.

  “Then where’d you get this?” Dax pressed him into the aluminum siding so hard the ridges cut across his body.

  “Some guys in town,” Cluck said.

  “What guys?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” Dax pulled him off the side of the trailer enough to slam him into it again.

  Cluck held himself up, but didn’t fight. “I don’t know.” A metal seam pressed into his cheek.

  “If you went to settle the score, you better tell me now.”

  “What?” was all Cluck could get out.

  “Don’t go near them.” Dax held him harder, wringing out the muscle at the back of his neck. “Got it?”

  “Who?” Cluck turned his head.

  The rage in Dax’s face shifted, the edges ground down.

  He loosened his grip, dropped his hand. “You don’t know.”

  The back of Cluck’s neck cooled.

  “They’re in town,” Dax said. “That family.”

  That family.

  The Palomas were already here. They came back every year, never any guilt. Because of them, Clémentine’s oldest brother had lost his first wife twenty years ago. Cluck had heard stories about her, the woman with so much grace on the highest branches none of them could believe she had no fildefériste blood.

  La magie noire the Palomas carried in their birthmarks had taken her.

  The Palomas meant for every performer to die, drowned with those branches when the water flooded up onto its shores. All to steal the lake they thought belonged to them. It was only by the grace of God that the rest of the Corbeaus managed to swim against the pull of their own wings, scramble onto rocks, claw at the shore.

  The Palomas lost one of their own too, a man who must have been at the lake to draw the water onto the land, la magie noire ready in his hands. But the Palomas still set up their show where the trees had been, on that man’s grave and the grave of a Corbeau.

  Cluck’s family moved to the other side of the woods, as far as that stretch of forest would let them get from a family that danced where one of their own had died.

  Cluck’s neck prickled to hot again. This was where the Palomas had ruined their grandfather. And every year they came back to rub it in.

  “Does Pépère know?” Cluck asked.

  “Since when is it my job to tell him?” Dax shoved him, this time to let him go. “You swear the fish didn’t do that to you?”

  The fish. Dax didn’t like saying the name Paloma any more than Cluck did.

  Cluck pulled on the hem of his shirt to smooth it. “It was some guys from around here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Another local told them off.” The girl in the red lipstick knew the man at the liquor store enough to give him the finger and get a laugh. And Cluck would have known a pack of Palomas. He would have seen la tromperie in their eyes. His mother called the Paloma girls les sorcières. They must have been, she said, to draw an audience when all they did was swim.

  “What are they doing here this early?” Cluck asked.

  “They know our schedule,” Dax said.

  “We should’ve canceled the stop.”

  The words drew their mother’s shadow toward the trailer. The idea must have summoned her, called her like a spirit.

  She stood with arms crossed, thin elbows resting in her palms. “This family hasn’t canceled a stop since we came to this country.” She’d starched her linen shift dress so well the breeze didn’t move it. Her eyelashes looked sharp as chestnut spines. “Not for rain. Not for the earthquakes. Not even for snow, not that either of you would remember that year.”

  It was what set them apart from the Palomas, who had to cancel their shows every time it rained. The drops disturbed the water too much to let the audience see them.

  “Not another word about canceling shows, understood?” his mother asked.

  Dax’s “Compris” and Cluck’s one nod satisfied her. She went back inside, slamming the kitchen door.

  “Don’t go near them,” Dax told Cluck.

  “I never have,” Cluck said under the screen door’s rattle.

  “But you’re thinking about it.”

  Every Corbeau thought about it. Cluck never did anything tho
ugh. Dax and his cousins were the ones who used to place nets where the Palomas swam. They’d only stopped when Dax and Cluck’s mother ordered them to. “Only cowards set traps for little girls in costumes,” she told them; true men did not go after women. Cluck had tried telling them before that someone would drown, and all he’d done was earn a few more bruises from his brother. Dax only listened to their mother.

  But Dax throwing out the nets hadn’t kept the Palomas from slicking the tree branches with petroleum jelly last year. The Palomas had even been smart enough to pick branches shadowed by leaves, so the performers wouldn’t see the light shining off them. They were lucky Aunt Camille had broken her leg and not her neck.

  Pain throbbed through the roots of Cluck’s hair. “I won’t do anything,” he said, though God knew he wanted to sometimes. Fighting was the only safe way to touch a Paloma. Half this family believed if they ever let a Paloma brush their arm or bump their shoulder, they’d wither and die like wildflowers in July sun. But fighting was safe. The rage made it true and good. The anger and honor of defending this family shielded them like a saint’s prayer. Hitting and kicking were safe. Anything else could bring sickness.

  “You better not.” Dax followed their mother, his slam of the door as fast and loud as hers.

  Cluck set a hand on the trailer door frame and pulled himself up the step.

  Eugenie sat on the trailer’s built-in, her skirt rippling over the threadbare mattress.

  There were only two reasons Eugenie showed up in the costume trailer. Cluck only had to check her hands to know which. Sometimes it was a torn dress, usually one of Mémère’s chiffons or silks, skirts she had danced in at Eugenie’s age. Eugenie would hold the fabric out to him, and he stitched up the tear.

  This time his cousin’s palms cupped not one of their grandmother’s dresses, but a plastic bag of freezer-tray ice cubes. She said nothing, just held it out to him the same way she offered a ripped dress.

  He took it, his nod as much of a thank you as he had in him.

  She got up from the built-in and hopped down from the trailer door, the hem of her dress dragging after her bare feet.

  The bag wet his palms. He didn’t know where she meant him to use it. His temple, the back of his neck, where his ribs hit the trailer siding.

  Cluck made out the sharp, far-off call of red-winged blackbirds. Pépère always meant for the sight of them to make Cluck feel better about his own feathers. Cluck could never bring himself to remind his grandfather how easily crows killed them.

  Una oveja que arrea a los lobos vale más que la lana.

  A sheep that herds wolves is worth more than her wool.

  Lace’s uncles stood at the picnic tables in silence, half-juiced fruit filling their hands.

  They were never this quiet when they made the aguas frescas. Every afternoon, their laughing carried all the way to the motel with the scent of limes and oranges.

  Had they just killed a crow? Last summer, Lace had seen a black-feathered bird peck the heart from a halved passion fruit. Her uncle loaded the Winchester 1912 her father used for scaring off bears and coyotes, and shot it. Lace could still remember its eyes, shining like mercury drops.

  Lace searched for the crow or the shotgun. Instead she found Abuela, standing between wooden picnic tables, her presence hushing the men.

  “Rosa,” Abuela said. The wrinkles in her face thinned to cracks.

  Rosa. Pink, the color of Lace’s tail. Her name to her grandmother.

  Tía Lora caught up, her eyes tight. Worry pulled at her mouth.

  “After the show, you stay,” Abuela told Lace.

  This was it. Tonight Abuela would tell Lace off for throwing ice on Justin. He and Matías, los soldados. Abuela blessed the work of their hands. It didn’t matter that Justin knew Lace was right. To Abuela, it would never be Lace’s business to correct him.

  Lace nodded.

  “After the show you make yourself pretty and show your tail,” her grandmother said. “Let them take pictures of you.”

  “What?” Lace asked. Only Abuela’s favorite mermaids draped themselves on rocks after the show. “Why?”

  Abuela put her hands on Lace’s shoulders and pressed down, like she did to bless her when she was sick. “Una oveja que arrea a los lobos vale más que la lana,” she said.

  The sound didn’t break the squish of fruit under the men’s hands.

  A sheep that herds wolves is worth more than her wool.

  This was a reward. This was for Justin and the bucket of hotel ice, for telling him to keep Rey and Oscar out of fights.

  Abuela understood. She knew even better than Lace did that if Justin and Rey and Oscar hit whoever they wanted, soon the Palomas would get run out of town. Abuela treated as sacred the fights with the Corbeaus, all those bruises and the broken arms. But Abuela would not bless sending a local home with a black eye.

  Lace would never have Martha’s shape, thin and jeweled as a violet eel, or Emilia’s wide, pageant-queen smile. But she had thick hair that fell to her waist, mermaid’s hair, and she was una niña buena. A good girl.

  Her grandmother had decided this was enough.

  “Gracias, Abuela,” Lace said, accepting the blessing.

  Her grandmother crossed the afternoon shadows, the crepe myrtles and salt cedars casting the shapes of their leaves.

  Lace’s great-aunt squeezed her shoulders, laughing like she’d remembered a joke. Each of her uncles picked her up and spun her once, for luck, “Para que nada cambie tu rumbo.” So nothing will turn you around. It was always their blessing to las sirenas, because the river’s depth was so dark a mermaid could forget which way to the surface.

  An hour before the show, Lace layered on pink eye shadow, added a last coat of red lipstick, rubbed in more cream blush. At the sound of their uncles’ zampoñas, the mermaids swam in from their different spots along the lake and river, like creatures called from faraway grottos.

  They held their breath and took their places in the underwater forest, made of trees the Corbeaus had sunk twenty years ago. This was Abuela’s greatest triumph, that every time they came to Almendro they used the stage the Corbeaus had built them, the grove the Corbeaus once called their own. Now audiences who sat on the ridge just above the shore could see down to the lake shelf, where the trees locked together into tangles of branches.

  The mermaids treated those branches like a coral reef, settling into the hollows, perching on the edges of submerged boughs. They swam in pairs, then clusters, then each out in a different direction. They circled, then broke away. Their bodies formed the shapes of hearts or stars. They lined up so their tails made a rainbow.

  No canned music. Just the reed pipes and the soft rush of the river emptying into the one side of the lake and flowing out the other. The applause came in bursts, like the mermaids were fireworks blooming into sparks.

  They draped their bodies to look as though they were sunning themselves, even though they were underwater and the light had fallen enough to turn the edges of the lake copper. A few of them dove in and out of the lake like flying fish.

  It was being under that Lace loved most. The lightness of her own body, the water trying to lift her toward the surface. The silhouettes of the underwater trees, like a forest on a fall night. How everything looked blurred like she was seeing it through stained glass. How water that had felt cold when she slid into the river now felt as warm as her own body. Even the sharp sting in her lungs as she swam out of view to take a breath.

  Just as the audience began to believe they were spying on unknowing mermaids, las sirenas looked at them. They swam up to the rocks, hiding and flirting like water nymphs. The tourists caught those flashes of color on camera.

  At the end of la danza de las sirenas, Lace and Martha posed on the steep bank, fanning their tails out on a rock. The trees filtered the last sun, and the sequins lit up like raw quartz. Los turistas left the low cliffs where they’d been watching and took the path down the slope, to the na
rrow stretch of beach.

  A girl in jelly sandals the color of hibiscus flowers took a few steps toward Lace. Her eyes wavered between the shimmer of Lace’s fin and her painted face.

  “Do you want to touch my tail?” Lace asked, like she was told to, in the voice she’d heard her older cousins use, soft as the whispers of river sprites.

  The girl opened her small hand and stroked the fin, first hesitant as touching a snake, then surer, like petting a cat. To her, the soaked elastane and sequins might feel a little like a mermaid’s scales.

  Their season’s receipts were at the mercy of children and their favorite cuentos de hadas. The Corbeaus called her family’s show kitschy, as artless and plastic as souvenir snow globes. Matías and his brothers had thrown punches when Corbeau men made fun of the bright colors, the glitter, the wide-eyed looks Abuela made the sirenas wear, as though dry land was magic they’d never imagined. But Lace’s mother told her that tourists probably couldn’t even take their children to the Corbeaus’ show. “They’re French,” she said. “I bet they take their clothes off halfway through.”

  When the crowd thinned, and the families left, the mermaids watched Abuela. At her nod, they slid back into the water, smooth as knives. Martha swam toward her far corner of the lake, Lace back to her spot up the river. She kicked down to where the river’s current didn’t pull.

  A shriek like a car alarm echoed through the water.

  Lace startled, losing her rhythm, and the current swept her.

  She spread her arms to swim, but her tail jerked her back.

  Her fin fabric was caught. A colander had gotten the end of her tail.

  Lace doubled her body over and felt at the fin. Her hands found not just river roots, but tangles of slick threads.

  The nylon of a fishing net.

  The Corbeaus. They hadn’t put a net in the water since what happened to Magdalena. But tonight they’d left one in the river for Lace and her cousins.

  She pulled at her tail. The fin stayed. The net had balled and wrapped around her, holding her to the colander. She twisted and swam, but the roots and the net only gave enough to let her fight.