The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “Are you okay?” Lace asked.

  “This is the last time I let my daughter give me one of her sleeping pills,” he said. “This morning I was so foggy I tried to brush my teeth with my razor.” He forced a smile. It started out kind, then twisted, wry and wary, when Lace didn’t return it.

  Mixing up his razor and his toothbrush. It was so strange she almost believed it. But he’d made a little too much of a point of showing the blood-dotted handkerchief while he said it. For how unimportant she was, he cared a little too much about her taking his explanation as truth.

  “And you?” he asked. “Why are you here?”

  “I do the makeup now,” she said.

  “I know what you do. Why are you doing it here?”

  His eyes drifted toward the feather burn on her arm. She’d covered it the same way Nicole Corbeau had taught her to do her face, layers of foundation and powder as thin as the dried husks of tomatillos.

  To anyone except Lace, it wasn’t there. But the old man studied the patch on her arm like he could see it.

  He knew.

  He met her eyes. She read the bargain in his face, the offer, an exchange of silences. Don’t tell, and I won’t tell.

  She shut the door and pressed her back to the hallway wall. The sound of his coughing stabbed into her forehead. Maybe this man was the Corbeaus’ version of her father, skeptical of las supersticiones. As long as she didn’t make trouble for him, he’d let her stay.

  If she told, she’d lose any chance of getting the scar lifted, along with this small, feathered thing growing between her and the boy called Cluck.

  But the sound of the kitchen faucet came back to her, this time with the things Cluck had said about his clothes. They’d belonged to this man, coughing a mist of blood into his handkerchief. This man Cluck wanted to be like so badly he wore collared shirts in the heat of a Central Valley summer, hoping the invisible things that made his grandfather who he was would rub off like a scent.

  If Cluck could lose him, he needed to know.

  Lace heard Cluck’s voice upstairs. She stood in the front of the wooden staircase and looked up at the second floor. She could’ve called his name, but then Cluck’s grandfather would hear her. He could tell her secret in a few words. The Corbeaus would trap her in this house, and she’d never have the chance to tell Cluck that his grandfather had a secret of his own.

  She took a breath in and ran up the stairs, quick as las sirenas slid into a cold river.

  The second floor barely looked different from the first. A few closed doors. A few open. An unscreened window at the end of the hall. But even with the hardwood under her feet, she felt the distance to the ground. The third and fourth floors of motels had never bothered her, but here, she was sure a coin tossed out a window would fall forever. This house may not have belonged to the Corbeaus, but by renting and staying in it they’d filled it with their reckless love of heights. They made their living by not fearing falling.

  Cluck stood at the end of the hall, talking to another Corbeau about lights and cables. She took a few steps down the hall as fast as she’d taken the stairs and put her palm to Cluck’s shoulder blade.

  He turned around. “What’s wrong?” His eyes flashed over her face.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” she whispered.

  Cluck said something in French, and the other man nodded and left.

  “What happened?” Cluck asked.

  She dragged the words off her tongue. The coughing. The blood. The handkerchief.

  Cluck did not flinch. He got on the phone and didn’t put it down until he found a doctor three towns over who could take a last-minute appointment.

  “How do you know he’ll go?” Lace asked.

  “I’ll tell him the appointment’s for me,” Cluck said. “I’ll say I want the company.”

  That bought Lace time. Cluck’s grandfather wouldn’t know she’d told, not for sure, until they got to the doctor’s office. That gave her a chance to run.

  “What if he doesn’t believe you?” Lace asked.

  “He will.” Cluck’s eyes ticked toward his hands, scarred from pulling at the cotton of her dress. “I can’t believe this. How many years working at the plant? And he acts like all those chemicals are just dye and water.”

  The floor wavered under Lace. “Your grandfather worked at the plant?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Cluck said. “For most of his career.”

  Lace didn’t know any of the Corbeaus had done anything outside of this show.

  Cluck pulled on a blazer, soft with half a century of wear. “You know where the thread is. If someone tears a dress, you think you can handle it?”

  “Yes,” she said. She’d do everything they expected tonight, painting all their faces. If she left them, took off without doing her job, it would be one more wrong against Cluck. One more stolen Camargue horse. She might wake up with a feather on her other arm, her back, her neck.

  But once the show started, she’d run.

  Cluck set a hand on her upper arm. “I’m glad you told me.”

  She nodded, bit the inside of her cheek, kept her face from telling him that when he came back, she’d be gone.

  Celui qui veut être jeune quand il est vieux, doit être vieux quand il est jeune.

  He who wants to be young when he is old, must be old when he is young.

  Pépère barely acknowledged the nurse who took his pulse and blood pressure. When she told him the doctor would be right in, he looked out the window like he was waiting for a bus.

  The nurse flashed Cluck and his grandfather a smile, bright as the flowers on her scrubs, and shut the door behind her.

  Pépère nodded at her, his mouth in the same pinched smile he gave children. Cluck knew that look. His grandfather gave it to Dax and to Cluck’s cousins when they were small. How Cluck escaped it, he didn’t know. Probably because his hand bothered the rest of them so much they didn’t want to be near him. Pépère took their disdain as a recommendation.

  “I don’t like that gadji,” Pépère said.

  Cluck leaned against the sink and flipped through an old copy of Popular Mechanics. “The nurse?”

  “Your new makeup girl.”

  “You don’t like her for telling me about the blood on your mouchoir.”

  “You let her follow you around like she is your little sister.”

  Cluck cringed. Yes, that was exactly how he wanted to think of Lace.

  “I understand,” his grandfather said. “You saved her life. She has nowhere to go. You want to care for her like she is some stray cat.”

  Cluck turned the page. “So which is it, Pépère, is she my sister or my cat?”

  The doctor came in, asked Pépère a few more questions, told him, “You should stop smoking.”

  “I’ve told him that my whole life,” Cluck said. A waitress from Calais had gotten Pépère started on cigarettes before he left le Midi for the United States.

  “Yes, it is the smoking.” Pépère stood and shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for your help, Doctor.” His way of ending an appointment he hadn’t wanted. Feign repentance of his half-century cigarette habit, and be on his way. This was why Cluck’s mother didn’t drag him to doctors anymore.

  Cluck hadn’t even told his grandfather the appointment was for him until they’d parked and gone in. He’d said he was going in to see someone about his hands, still spotted the pinks and reds of worn brick. Only Pépère’s pity had kept him from suspecting on the drive over.

  Like Cluck cared what his hands looked like, as long as they worked enough to make the wings. His guilt felt like an elbow jabbing his ribs. But if he hadn’t lied, Pépère never would have come.

  The doctor scrawled on a prescription pad. Wrinkles softened the skin around his mouth. His hair had more gray than Pépère’s. Pépère must have been hoping for a resident. They were always pleased thinking they’d converted a smoker. Easier to con.

  “I’m writing you a s
cript.” The doctor tore off the sheet and held it out to Pépère. “For antibiotics. The way you’ve weakened your lungs, they can’t fight off infection the way we’d like.”

  Pépère wouldn’t take the prescription. He pretended not to see the paper flapping in the man’s hand.

  Cluck reached over for it. “Thank you.”

  The doctor left.

  “I’ll meet you in the lobby,” Cluck told his grandfather.

  Pépère rolled down his shirtsleeves. “Where are you going?”

  “To apologize for you.” Cluck followed the doctor into the hallway. “Do you have a minute?”

  The doctor looked up from a chart.

  Cluck checked the hallway, in case his words might bring out a risk manager. “What about the accident? Could that have anything to do with it?”

  The doctor hesitated, his mouth half-open.

  “Please,” Cluck said. “I just want to know.”

  The doctor lowered his voice. “With what the smoking’s already done to his lungs, and now with everything that might or might not be floating around in the air…”

  “Might or might not?” Cluck asked.

  “They won’t tell us anything. We know there was some kind of ECA or MCA, but we don’t know what else. They’re calling it ‘trade secrets.’ That means there’s only so much we can do.”

  Cluck’s eyes stuck on the hallway carpet.

  “But it means the same thing,” the doctor said. “He’s probably a lot more open to infection than he would be.”

  Cluck folded the prescription paper. “So get him to take the pills?” he asked.

  The doctor nodded. “Get him to take the pills.”

  Bonne chance; il en aurait besoin. Cluck would have to crush them up and ask Clémentine to slip them into his food.

  De la vista, nace el amor.

  From what you see, you love.

  Cluck had told Lace that he and his grandfather wouldn’t be back until late. But now she heard the Morris Cowley’s tires crunching the leaves, an hour earlier than she’d expected.

  The truck parked outside. Alain Corbeau would have told Cluck by now. They would come for her.

  She got the trailer’s back window open, ready to climb out into the dark, a borrowed kitchen knife in her hand. But Cluck and the old man’s steps led away from the trailers. Away from the yellow Shasta.

  If she wasn’t gone by the time they came back, they’d kill her. The Paloma among the Corbeaus. When she was little she had nightmares about them all turning to crows, the spears of their beaks poking a thousand holes in her.

  She pressed her suitcase shut.

  The door flew open, and Eugenie stumbled in.

  Lace’s ribs felt sharp, jabbing at her lungs. She backed toward the trailer wall, gripping the suitcase and the kitchen knife. She could knock Eugenie down with one swing of that suitcase. Anyone else she’d wave the knife at.

  Clémentine appeared in the doorway, still in a show dress like Eugenie. Only their wings were off. Wouldn’t they want them on to kill her? Wouldn’t they want the last thing she saw to be the cover of those enormous wings?

  “What are you doing?” Clémentine asked.

  They hadn’t turned to crows. No black feathers sprouted from their arms. They looked at her not like they planned to kill her and scavenge her body, but like they’d caught her undressing.

  They didn’t know. The old man hadn’t told him.

  “I think I broke the lock,” Lace said. “I’m trying to get it open.”

  “With a steak knife? You’ll kill yourself.” Clémentine pulled a pin from her hair. “Here.”

  Lace set the suitcase down and pretended to fiddle with the lock.

  “What’s the matter?” Eugenie asked.

  Lace turned the suitcase so they couldn’t see the lock, and kept moving the hairpin. Her heart felt squeezed tight, giving off blood like juice from a plum. Maybe the old man had told only Cluck, and would leave her to him.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything about Alain,” Lace said.

  Clémentine sat on the built-in bed. “Alain Corbeau’s an old mule. If he felt a heart attack coming on, he’d say he was too busy, could it come back next week.”

  Lace jerked the hairpin like it had done the trick. “Thank you.” She handed it back to Clémentine.

  Eugenie hopped up on a counter. “If it makes you feel better, he’s angrier with Cluck than he is with you.”

  Lace dropped her shoulders, the tension swimming down her back. Maybe Alain Corbeau hadn’t told Cluck. But his stare told her it was not her place to interfere. Entre dos muelas cordales nunca pongas tus pulgares, her uncles would say. Don’t put your thumbs between two wisdom teeth.

  The old man’s face would never tell her anything. She wanted to look at Cluck and find out what he knew.

  “Where’s Cluck?” Lace asked.

  “He’s at his tree,” Eugenie said.

  “His tree?”

  Clémentine swiped a cotton pad over her face, rubbing off her eye makeup. “Every place we stop, he has his tree.”

  Eugenie gave Lace vague directions to the cottonwood. But Lace did not go there first. She found Cluck’s grandfather leaning against the Morris Cowley, a half-burned-down cigarette between his fingers.

  He took the pack out of his shirt pocket and held it out to her.

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I’m trying to quit.”

  He hummed a quick laugh and put the pack away.

  She wanted to ask why he hadn’t told Cluck who she was, but bit back the question in case she’d been wrong. If Alain Corbeau hadn’t recognized the Paloma in her, hadn’t seen the feather on her arm, she wasn’t telling.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But Cluck had to know.”

  “It made the boy feel better,” the old man said. “And it was nothing to me. Doctors are les crétins. They can’t make me do what I don’t care to.”

  The end of his cigarette glowed against the dark, a flake off a harvest moon.

  Lace tried not to touch the burn on her cheek. “You used to work at the plant?” she asked.

  “Years ago.” He put out his cigarette and went inside.

  Lace followed the clean, honey scent of wild roses through the trees. It drifted over the old campground, heavier and sweeter at night, like gardenia.

  She spotted the white of Cluck’s shirt and the pale soles of his bare feet, moon-brightened. In the dark, they were all of him that stood out. The black of his hair, his dark trousers, the light brown of his face and hands faded into the tree.

  “Well.” He saw her and climbed down, hands and feet gripping the branches. “If it isn’t the only person my grandfather likes less than me right now.”

  “That’s not how Eugenie tells it,” she said.

  Cluck got down from the lowest bough. “She’s probably right.” He gave her a worn-out smile.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Just angry.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t take care of himself. Never has.”

  She set her hand on the trunk and looked up. “How do you climb without shoes?”

  “I’m not sure I could climb with shoes. I’ve been doing it without since I was five.”

  “What do you do up that high?”

  “I just like being up there. It’s quiet.”

  No one in her family liked heights. They’d never understood why anyone put themselves somewhere they could fall from. But now she wondered if being up high was a little bit like swimming, when the shelf of a lakeshore dropped out to the water’s full depth. The light thinned out before it reached the bottom. The distance to the lake bed felt endless as the night sky.

  The difference was gravity. There was no falling to the lake bed. If she stopped swimming, she drifted toward the light.

  “Looks dangerous,” she said.

  “You can’t avoid everything dangerous.”

  “I try.”

&nbs
p; “Oh yeah? How’s that going?”

  She slapped his upper arm, pulling her hand back as soon as she touched him. The last time she’d done that, he’d said it meant she was a Corbeau. She felt the words like a stain.

  He grabbed her hand before she let it fall to her side. “Thank you,” he said. “For telling me. If you didn’t, nobody would.”

  She held onto his. She never got to see his wrecked hand this well. It was always doing something with wires and feathers.

  She guided his thumb against her palm. “Does that hurt?” She touched his curved-under fingers.

  When he slow-blinked, his eyelashes looked blue-black, like the river at night.

  “No,” he said.

  Their hands weren’t crossing the space between them, her right to his right. His left hand held her right hand. Nothing between their bodies.

  He’d reached out for her with his left hand. Without thinking, he used his left hand.

  “Are you left-handed?” she asked.

  He pulled his hand away. “No.”

  “But you just…”

  “I work with both. It makes you ambidextrous.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Lace had been sewing since she could hold a needle, and that had never happened, not even when she broke her right wrist jumping into a shallow pond.

  “What happened to your hand?” she asked.

  “I told you. Bull fighting.”

  The more she asked the same questions, the more he lied. It made her own lies smaller, easier to stuff into her suitcase with her tail, pink as agua de sandía.

  “So what’s special about this tree?” she asked. It was a plain cottonwood, dull brown, the leaves full but the ordinary green of a Bubble Up bottle.

  “This, I’ll have you know, is a perfect climbing tree.” He set his palm against the bark. “It’s got a good trunk. You can’t climb a tree if the trunk’s skinnier than you are. It’s got to be at least two, three times as thick as you.” He touched one of the lower boughs, twisted and hanging down. “It’s got branches low enough to reach. You can’t get up there if you can’t get on the first branch. The branches are close enough together to climb, and they’re sturdy. They don’t have to be as strong as the trunk, but they have to be pretty solid.” He stared up into the tangle of boughs. “You want to see?”