The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “Sure.”

  He got onto the lowest branch and held out his hand to her.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “You want to know what’s special about this tree,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  “I don’t climb trees.”

  He looked at her like she’d said she didn’t eat, or didn’t own a Bible. “You’ve never climbed a tree?”

  Her mother kept her out of trees. No damita dirtied her dress on maple boughs or fiddle-leaf figs. Abuela kept Lace’s male cousins on the ground too. Branches were where the crows lived, she told them.

  “If I do, will you tell me your real name?” Lace asked. If she knew his name, she could fold it into the same place she hid his fallen feathers.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “I promise.” He took her hand and pulled her up, showing her where to brace her heel on the trunk.

  “See?” he asked when she’d gotten her footing. “Easy, right?”

  She pressed her back against the trunk.

  “Stop looking down,” he said. “I’m not gonna let you fall. If I did, I’d have to find a replacement by call time tomorrow.”

  “Very funny.”

  She set her hands and feet where he told her to, pulling herself up. He went with her, following after on some branches, going ahead of her on others to help her up.

  Her arms liked the work. They’d missed fighting the river’s current. Now they snapped awake.

  The wind raked the branches, and she laughed at the leaves brushing her hair.

  “See,” Cluck said. A branch blew between them, and he held it aside. “You’re a natural.”

  “I’m up here,” she said. “Now what’s your real name?”

  “It’s Luc,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “What’s so embarrassing about that?”

  “I never said I had an embarrassing name. I just like people calling me Cluck.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because my brother hates it.”

  “That’s mature.”

  He picked a leaf out of her hair. “My mother likes him better.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I do.”

  She pulled a scrap of twig off his shirt collar.

  “I gotta hand it to my mother though,” he said. “None of that ‘I love my kids the same’ stuff. I appreciate the honesty. It’s refreshing.”

  “Nobody loves their children the same.” Abuela had always liked Lace’s mother best. She had the spirit and spine to tell Abuela off, but not the nerve to go against her. Justin, Oscar, and Rey’s mother loved Justin a little more, because he had realized, before he had words for it, that his place as the oldest brother would have to spread and grow to fill the space their father left. If Lace had brothers or sisters, she was sure she’d be her father’s favorite, and sure she wouldn’t be her mother’s.

  A black, red-streaked feather settled between Cluck’s neck and shirt collar. He didn’t seem to feel it. Maybe he’d gotten so used to the downy barbs against the back of his neck, he didn’t notice them any more than Lace did her own stray hairs.

  She picked the feather out. Her fingers grazed his neck, and he shivered.

  “Why do you do that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Save those things.”

  “Do you want me not to?” she asked.

  “I just want to know why.”

  She held it up to the sky. The moon brightened the red. “I like them.”

  “You’re alone there.”

  She slipped it into the pocket of her jean jacket. She felt it through the fabric, hot against her rib cage. One more feather for the collection in her suitcase.

  The wind brushed another one from his hair. It swirled down, settling on a lower bough. She climbed down after it, from one branch onto the one under it.

  She let go of the higher branch, and her right foot slipped. Then the dark looked like she’d imagined, the same as the deepest lakes on bright days, the light reaching down and then vanishing.

  Cluck’s arm hit the small of her back. His hand gripped her side, and her escamas glowed like a fever. “Put a little of your weight down before you put all of it down.” He held her up, tight enough that the feather in her pocket burned into her. “Shift too fast, and that’s what makes you feel like you’re falling. If you think you’re falling, it’s more likely you will.”

  His mouth almost brushed hers. The way he held her made her stand on her toes, sharpening the feeling that the ground underneath them was the same endless depth as those lakes.

  He didn’t stop her pressing her fingers into him. She didn’t stop him when he took her top lip between his. Her hand found the feathers under his hair, soft and thick as river grass, and she kissed him back. She opened her mouth to his and pretended the sky was water.

  Quien no tiene, perder no puede.

  He who has nothing, loses nothing.

  When Lace passed Cluck in the hallway the next morning, he nodded in greeting but didn’t make eye contact. The minute he walked into the kitchen that afternoon, Lace left, Eugenie in midsentence. They did that until call time, him not looking at her, her leaving any space he entered, and she took it as a shared understanding that what happened last night would stay in the trees.

  Then the sun turned from gold to copper, the slight change in light that came just before it went down. If how he kissed her was something that had to stay in those branches, she wanted to know if it also had to stay in the night before. Or, if tonight, once the show was done and the sky was dark, they’d do it again.

  She made up an excuse to stop by the blue and white Shasta, something about costumes.

  She forgot it as soon as she shut the trailer door behind her.

  Cluck’s dress shirt had been flung onto the built-in bed, and he worked in his undershirt.

  He saw her and set down a wire cutter.

  The feeling of his mouth still glowed hot on hers from the night before.

  He put his hands in the pockets of his dress pants. Odd, considering how much she knew he had to do and how little time they had before the show. Then his eyes flicked down, and she realized his hands might have been in his pockets because he wasn’t sure whether to put them on her.

  She caught his eyes as he looked back up, and held them. He took one step toward her. He didn’t take another one, but it was enough to tell her he was in if she was.

  She kissed him as hard as when they were in the cottonwood. He held her waist, felt her body through her clothes. She held him against the trailer wall, and he shoved the empty wire frame of a pair of wings out of the way. It rattled against an age-spotted mirror.

  He slid a hand under her shirt and onto the small of her back, his palm half on her bare skin, half on the waistband of her skirt. A skirt she thought she would not wear as long as she was among the Corbeaus. His fingers pressed against her escamas. As long as he didn’t look, he wouldn’t see the birthmarks. The texture of her healing body would hide them.

  It hurt, his hands on her burns. It stung like a hot shower, pins of water and steam stabbing in. She was ready for it. The sting reminded her she was a body knitting itself back together. It was why she liked his hands on her. His wrecked fingers knew how to handle something ruined.

  He kissed her like her lips were not chapped and scarring. Ran his tongue over the curve of her lower lip like it was soft. Like the rose and lemon oil she spread on her mouth at night made a difference. Maybe he did not feel it because his were just as rough. He and Lace were sewn of similar fabric, the raw edges of their families’ cloth.

  Her mouth left a smudge of lipstick on his. She rubbed it away. He closed his eyes and held her hand there, kissed her thumb and took it lightly between his teeth, holding onto it. It trembled the veins that held her heart, that feeling of his teeth on her thumb pad and fingernail.
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  The feather on her forearm flared with heat.

  She kissed him so hard he kept his breath still on his tongue. He left the taste of black salt on her mouth. The woody flavor of charcoal. The sugar and acid of citrus peel. The soft metal of iron.

  A knock rattled the trailer latch.

  “Cluck?” said Eugenie.

  Lace ducked down behind a counter.

  “What are you doing?” Cluck asked.

  “She’s gonna wonder why I’m in here.”

  “She’s gonna wonder why you’re on the floor. Just say you’re helping me fix something.” He opened the door.

  Lace stayed down.

  Eugenie handed him a few rolls of satin ribbon. “Closest match I could get.”

  Cluck held the tail of one against another spool of ribbon. “Good enough.”

  Eugenie’s eyes wandered over to the counter, her feet following. She stood over Lace, hands on her hips. She already had on a dusk-blue dress, but Lace hadn’t done her face yet.

  “I lost a needle,” Lace said.

  Eugenie shrugged and left her to it.

  Lace tried to follow her out. Cluck shut the door behind Eugenie and held his arm to the small of Lace’s back, the same as he had in the tree last night.

  He wore his loneliness like his scar. Most of the time his sleeves covered it, but when she cuffed them back, he couldn’t hide it. She wanted to tell him she was not afraid of what he was, this red-streaked thing in all the pure, perfect black. But the words dissolved between their lips like ice crystals.

  She pulled her mouth off his. “I still have to put makeup on half of them.”

  “You’re fast.”

  “Later,” she said.

  She stepped down from the trailer and left Cluck to the wings, the taste of violet-black salt still under her tongue. She made up the last of the performers, and the Corbeaus drained toward the woods like sand through fingers. Lace put away the powders and colors, cleaned the brushes, swept the flour off the wood.

  A small shadow broke the light. Lace turned her head. A girl no older than five or six stood near the vanity. She had hair dark and coarse as Cluck’s, but eyes pale as dishwater.

  She sipped from a plastic cup. “Will you do me next?” she asked.

  Next? Who was ahead of her? The performers had gone, and no one was out here. Cluck’s grandfather was inside. Yvette had Eugenie’s younger brothers and the rest of the children in the house, cutting construction paper with craft scissors. Georgette, thanks to a heavy dose of cough syrup, was sleeping off a cold. “She chooses now to be sick,” Nicole Corbeau had said.

  Lace pulled out a chair. “Bien sûr,” she said, one of two or three French phrases she’d picked up.

  The girl set her cup down and closed her eyes, letting Lace give her a dusting of powder. She swung her legs, her shoes brushing Lace’s skirt. “When I’m in the show I’m going to wear a purple dress, like Violette’s.”

  That told Lace what color eye shadow to use. She washed on the lightest tint of lavender.

  The girl reached out for her cup, eyes still squeezed shut. Before Lace could help her get it, the girl’s small hand knocked it over. Grape juice splashed across the desk and onto Lace’s skirt and top.

  The girl’s eyes snapped open. She took in the mess, and her face scrunched up. Lace knew that look from her younger cousins. It meant she had about five seconds until the wailing started.

  “It’s okay.” Lace mopped up the spill. “I’ve done it a hundred times.”

  The sugar soaked through Lace’s skirt, stinging the burns on her thighs.

  “In fact,” Lace whispered. “How about we don’t tell anyone? I spill stuff so much, if we tell, they’ll think I did it, and I’ll get in trouble. So we won’t tell, okay?”

  The girl nodded, a smile showing her baby teeth.

  Lace breathed out, her shoulders relaxing. The last thing she needed was Yvette and the girl’s mother wondering what she’d done to make her cry.

  She blotted the juice from her skirt, but the sugar still stung. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

  The little girl nodded.

  Lace went to get a clean dress from her suitcase.

  The sound of arundo reed pipes echoed through the yellow trailer. They reached out from the other side of the woods like fingers. She wondered if the girl had heard them. She wouldn’t have known what they were. But they might have sounded enough like the cry of far-off wolves to startle her into tipping over the cup.

  Lace peeled off the blouse and skirt, and splashed water over the stains. Happy? she wanted to call back to the arundo sounds. They’d quieted now that she was out of her skirt and top, her foolish choice. She’d put on a dress that would hide her escamas.

  The trailer latch clicked, and the door opened.

  She couldn’t grab her dress fast enough.

  Cluck stood in the doorway. His eyes found her lower back, where the arc of white birthmarks crossed her skin. No paillettes hid her escamas now. She felt them glow under his stare.

  He stepped down from the trailer. “Go inside, okay, Jacqueline?” Lace heard him tell the little girl.

  The little girl skipped inside. The house’s back door fell shut behind her.

  Lace pulled on her dress and followed Cluck into the trees.

  “Son of a bitch.” He let out a curt laugh. “When you said you did a lot of swimming, you meant it.”

  She buttoned her dress, trotting to keep up with him. “Cluck.”

  He stopped. “Did your family send you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you here to sabotage us? Or just to spy?”

  “My family doesn’t know where I am.”

  “Right.” He kept walking.

  She got in front of him. “It’s your fault I’m here.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This.” She held her forearm to his face, letting him see the garnet-colored scar. “You did this to me. You put this on me, and now my family doesn’t want me.”

  “I didn’t do that to you. The plant did that to you.”

  She blocked his way. “It’s because of your feathers.”

  “They’re part of my hair. They can’t do anything to you.”

  He knew. He had to know.

  “If you thought I did this to you, why were you keeping my feathers?” he asked.

  “I thought it would give me something on you,” she said.

  “Something on me,” he said. “So when you came here, it was to try to get me to fix that.” Not a question.

  He looked at her, and the truth sank through her, a stone through a river. He’d thought she’d come here because she wanted him.

  The night she first came here, she was so quick to hold down thinking of him that way. Now something ticked inside her, an urgency to tell him that yes, she came here about the scar, but she had already wanted him that night. She should’ve come here for no reason other than that she wanted him.

  If she’d known how his hands would feel as they spread over her body, or how his mouth tasted like black salt, or that he was beautiful in ways that made him ugly to his family, she would have. She would’ve left the hospital still in her blue gown and gone looking for him.

  But she could see the last few days crossing his face. The two of them scrambling over each other in the front seat of his grandfather’s truck. Her fingers catching in the feathers under his hair. Him holding her in the high branches, and her letting him, giving him her body so completely that she would’ve fallen if he’d let go.

  “Cluck,” she said.

  “This was all because you thought I could take that off you?” he asked. “Wow, you really know how to commit, don’t you?”

  The place where his hands had slid over the small of her back went cold. Now he thought she’d kissed him, cupped each of his red-striped feathers in her palms, for no other reason than that she wanted the mark off her arm.

  “Luc,” she said, calling him
his real name without thinking, some wild grasp at getting to him.

  All he gave her back was a hurt smile that said he thought it was cheap for her to try it, and almost funny that she thought it would work.

  “You and your family,” he said. “You really think I have nothing better to do than curse you? What kind of old wives’ tales do you all tell each other?”

  “Our old wives’ tales? You’re one to talk. You won’t even admit you’re left-handed.”

  “I’m not.” He almost yelled it.

  She picked up a pinecone and threw it at him. He caught it with his left hand, his thumb and index finger gripping the scales.

  He hurled it at the ground.

  “If you don’t believe me,” Lace said, “ask my family why I’m not with them.”

  He gave that same dry laugh. “Sure. Why don’t I just stop by? I’ll bring a salad.”

  “They don’t know who you are,” she said. “My cousins sure didn’t.”

  “Your cousins?” Then it registered. “The guys at the liquor store. Those were your cousins.”

  “You really think I’m here to spy? Go ask my family where the pink mermaid went. They’ll tell you I’m not with them anymore. Or they’ll pretend I’m dead, or I never existed, I don’t know. Go ask them.”

  Water glinted at the inner corners of his eyes. His jaw grew hard, eyes stuck on the pinecone. “I think I know enough, thanks.”

  He took a step away from her.

  “Cluck.” She reached out and clasped the curved-under fingers on his left hand.

  “Don’t.” He pulled his hand away, not rough but decisive. Final.

  Her guilt over hurting him drained away, and the empty place filled up with anger. He took every time their lips brushed, her body up against his, and threw it all out like scraps of ribbon.

  “I don’t want to see you around here again,” he said.

  “Or what?” Lace asked. “You’ll get the shotgun and take care of me?”

  “No. That’s your family, remember?”

  The burn on her forearm pulsed. He’d seen the dead crows. He knew about her uncles with the Winchester. She dug her nails into her palms, thinking of Cluck finding one of those birds, eyes dull as black beach glass.