by Chris White
“Not worth much to me,” the man said. “Guess it’s not worth much to you either,” he smirked, but his mother didn’t smile or laugh. Neither did Adrian.
As they walked out onto the street again, she folded thirty-five dollars into her wallet, and Adrian found himself peering into alleyways, half expecting his father to burst forth and demand to know why his ring was lying at the bottom of a yellow plastic bowl.
“Dean is capable of anything,” he had heard his mother say.
• • •
Within the space of a few weeks, Adrian’s mom secured work at the brand-new Hudson River Maritime Museum, at the information desk. It wasn’t a real museum, she told them, just a historical one, but Adrian was deeply relieved. Even Evan hugged her and said, “G’ job, Ma.” The first Saturday she had a day off, she brought both boys for a visit, and they saw intricate models of ships, a real, life-sized tugboat, and Adrian’s favorite, tools for “harvesting” ice. The museum seemed like a victory they’d all won, and soon they were living in a house again.
Their mom drank wine in the evenings instead of whiskey; she bought oil paints and brushes and turned out paintings one after another—sunrises on the water, fruit in a bowl, roses on a table—mustard yellow, cadmium orange, cobalt blue, deep red. She made a close friend at work, Suzanne, with hair like a well-made brown hat, who began coming over to bring little tables and pots and pans and blankets and folding chairs and food, until everything was new.
Before Adrian even learned Suzanne’s last name (Bingham), she had moved in with them. His mom subtly stroked her forearm at the dinner table and left notes for her on the refrigerator when she left for work: “Can’t wait to see you tonight—xo June.” The two of them made meals with courses and desserts. They bought a new television. Evan was allowed to bring home friends (girls as well as boys). Adrian read for hours without ridicule and set up a bird feeder so he could watch pigeons loiter outside his window. His father would never have allowed any of it. And though Adrian was pleased by all the new freedoms, he feared things were too quiet. Like they said on the cop shows. Too quiet wasn’t good.
In the late afternoons before the women came home from the museum, when he sat working on his fractions and division at the kitchen table—any pop or crack in the yard, low noise, or familiar motor sound from a passing car made him breathe shallowly and his heart pump in his ears. He leapt up from his work to peer through the curtains at the front window, imagining the possibility of standing opposed to his father, should he find them and come to call—imagining his father stalking around the corner of the house, BB gun braced against his shoulder, ready to take back what was his: his wife, the Pontiac, the small TV from the kitchen, and the two boys.
None of this plagued Evan, who sat hunched over in his bed with a jar of beef jerky at his side and a roach clip around his neck, playing the Doors, the Stones, Santana, and Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. Evan wanted to stay sane until he got through high school, he said. He had no interest in writing a part for himself in the family’s little suburban drama, just wanted out of the whole fucking movie, “no offense.” He wanted to be an easy rider, like Dennis Hopper.
Stakes were highest at night. How could his mom hear the sounds on the street or in the yard when she was making so many sounds of her own? Adrian had heard night sounds plenty of times between his mother and father—repentant, punishing, or triumphant sounds. When his mom and Suzanne were together, though, the sounds were different and went on longer. Sometimes he couldn’t distinguish between the voices at all, which sounded like two starving women feasting at a dinner long denied them, or like the cooing of pigeons, or like two people breathing one breath, over and again.
Why couldn’t his mother have found another man to be with? The strangeness and exclusivity of two women together wasn’t lost on him, but men were, Adrian assumed, impossible to live with (at best) and unpredictably violent (at worst). It was just that unpredictability that he couldn’t forget.
His father didn’t like to lose. So Adrian stayed up as late as he had to, sometimes past midnight—listening for the creaky front door, the sticks in the yard, the passing cars and trains, and the boats chugging and yawning a half mile away out on the Hudson—so they wouldn’t all be shot down like a murder of crows.
Chapter One
* * *
Adrian’s got his Ray-Bans on, lurching along a desolate two-lane road northeast of Valmont Reservoir. He’s gripping the steering wheel so tight his knuckles bulge, craning his neck to see if there’s really a yellow patch on the head of the bird flying ahead of him or if it’s just some prank of the light.
This morning he explained to his audience at the main branch of the Boulder Public Library how migratory birds get back home—over thousands of kilometers of land, by way of the sun, the constellations, and genetic imperative. A kind of warm-blooded, feathered compass (that’s how he described it this morning), a migratory bird feels the pull of the earth’s poles in tiny grains of magnetite under the feathers above its beak. Using the olfactory organs in, mainly, its right nostril, it’s able to smell geography into some kind of full-blown, retrievable map in its brain, a map it never loses sight of, no matter how far it gets off track, even if it were to be shuttled a thousand miles off course.
“Not to say birds don’t get lost,” Adrian had chuckled, the notes he didn’t need folded on the podium. And if there is really a Golden-crowned Sparrow winging along in front of his new 2009 Saab, it is definitely lost.
Birds go missing, he told his small audience, mainly because of factors outside the realm of navigational error, “unlike us,” he joked. They fall victim to genetic mutation and can’t decipher the clues in the landscape. They happen onto environmental degradation. They’re socked in too long by fog or blown off course by storms. Which of these may apply to the Golden-crowned Sparrow in question, Adrian doesn’t know. He ticked his in Oregon years ago. But Colorado? No. Right now, this bird should be somewhere en route from California to Alaska, not a hundred feet in front of his car, a few miles east of Boulder.
At the age of forty-one, Adrian has sighted, correctly identified, and catalogued 863 species of birds, many more than reside on the continent. He lays claim to the third-longest “life list” in the North American birding region—the sweat-and-blood register of bird species observed over the course of a lifetime: a chronicle of loons, hawks, waterfowl and perching birds, tubenoses, grebes, shorebirds and pigeons, owls, goatsuckers, woodpeckers, kingfishers, vultures, herons, and cranes. Just two autumns ago, he saw the mega-rare Brown Hawk-Owl on St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea (displaced from Japan, or maybe Siberia); early last year, a White-crested Elaenia on South Padre Island, Texas, all the way from Chile.
Now, without warning (and why would there be one?), the sparrow makes a sharp right-hand turn across an open field. Adrian hits the brakes so hard the shoulder strap flattens him against his seat, then he squints to follow the bird’s flight—against a backdrop of plains stretching to the horizon, toward an abandoned cadaver of a house—disappearing.
He’s out of the car in seconds—five feet, eleven inches tall, brown-haired, lightly tanned, and bright-eyed—wresting open a barbed-wire fence so he can squeeze through, sprinting into the open, soggy field like a soldier on reconnaissance, dragging his feet one at a time out from under his weight to keep advancing. He should have changed his shoes. And his pants. It doesn’t matter.
Binocular up, he bends to one side to try and zero in on the light patch of feathers on the bird’s head. It may or may not be too close to the eyes, split into two white sections instead of one the color of mustard. (It could be a White-crowned Sparrow, common as a saltine.) The heel of his right shoe slides on a spate of horse manure, and when he scrambles to catch himself, the bird startles and ruffles right in through the gaping doorway of the house.
“Nice,” Adrian says aloud, then sprints to the threshold, teeth to the wind. There, he hesitates with that tugging feeling that h
e’s forgotten something—left the car running, or the window open in the rain—and when he can’t think what it could be, creeps inside.
This is a first: venturing into a domestic dwelling in search of a bird. He’s used to going into the wild, not away from it. He smells humanity. Motor oil and old woodsmoke and . . . sulfur or uncapped sewage.
Before he’s taken three steps more, a musical phrase bubbles through the room—a sweet, descending lament that sounds like, “Oh. Oh, dear me.” The call of the Golden-crowned Sparrow. He’s next to certain, but that isn’t enough for him, can’t be. So he proceeds in slow motion toward the sound, softly humming, “Mm-hmm,” passing his hand along a crumbling plaster wall.
In the kitchen: the western sky, purple through a fist-sized hole in the door; the ghosts of wild horses careening across the wallpaper over the sink; a rusted-out stove; an old Frigidaire; a muddied floor scattered with bits of rubber, twisted aluminum shards, broken glass, and so many tiny metal balls Adrian could fill his pockets with them. Shot—from the exploded, shredded shotgun shells of some vandal.
He tilts back his head, allows his eyelids to drop, and listening acutely for the call that will lead him to the source, hears instead the ding of a text.
Stella saying:
Where are u? We need to leave
Adrian takes in a pull of air. There’s the squeeze from the wife he loves.
It’s nobody’s fault. Maybe he’s minutes from seeing the bird—but he is late. He promised the kids he’d be there for Halloween, and he doesn’t want to disappoint them. He could, if he were a certain type of person, call and tell Stella he has to attend an emergency C-section, and it wouldn’t exactly be a lie; an hour ago, he was turning off the inhalation agents and laying a reassuring hand on a young father’s shoulder. Stella and the kids could trick-or-treat without him, he could keep searching for the bird, and Zander and Michaela would be counting out Nerds Ropes on the living room floor by the time he got home. He’d report the golden-crown to the Colorado state listers, if he could confirm it . . .
Nah, he thinks, he’s got to let this one go.
Back at the edge of the pasture, he searches his pockets and retraces his steps, unable to find his keys before realizing he left them in the ignition. He tosses off his matted shoes and pulls off his muddied pants, then changes into his hiking boots and scrubs.
He slides back into the driver’s seat and eases back onto the road, disappointed, sure, but not exceedingly so. Drinking sake from the thermos, watching the kids parade in and out of the stores along Pearl Street, and feeling Stella’s hand in his back pocket sounds pretty good. As he turns into town, he calls her, his spirits still high.
“Hi, honey,” she says too loud. “You should see this place! It’s insane. Because of the Pumpkin Run.”
“What do you mean?” Adrian knows the Pumpkin Run: a Boulder Halloween tradition, when a hundred and fifty people jog naked but for shoes and for the pumpkins on their heads down four city blocks. It’s too early in the evening for that nonsense.
“Michaela!” Stella calls. “Stay with us.”
“What’s going on? Where are you?” Adrian asks, unable to hear her well, unable to turn from Pearl Street to Fifteenth Street, finding it inexplicably lined with orange warning cones.
“They outlawed it,” Stella says. “Said if people streaked again, they’d all be arrested and registered as sex offenders.”
“Well, what’s that have to do with us?”
“Nothing, the police are just trying to make a point.”
“Police?”
“Just park somewhere and meet us, okay?” she says. “We’ll wait.”
“Stell, why don’t—”
“We’re at Fourteenth and Pearl,” she says. And clicks off.
Adrian squeezes into an illegal parking spot on Pine and hurries along the sidewalk into what looks like an affluent, militarized Hollywood Carnival. Wooden blockades manned by SWAT troopers line Pearl Street with costumed Power Rangers flanking them like backup singers. Boulder city police cluster at the corner of Broadway and Pearl alongside the Joker, Freddy Krueger, and Jack Sparrow. In his sky-blue hospital scrubs, Adrian jogs, on and off the curbs, past blinking red signs that all say Don’t Walk.
Amid a boisterous crowd, across the wide, bricked thoroughfare of the outdoor mall, he searches, suddenly frantic. Not for the Stella who looks like his wife, but Stella as Marilyn Monroe—standing about five ten in her tight black skirt, stilettos, and cheap blond wig; Michaela, his youngest, as a Native American scout in buckskin pants with a feather poking up from her headband; and Zander as Frodo from Lord of the Rings in linen shirt and short trousers, thigh-high cape thrown back over his shoulders. Though Adrian’s precisely at the corner of Fourteenth and Pearl, he can’t see them.
He takes out his binocular and hovers on the edge of the sidewalk, peering through the revelers, just as a troupe of jack-o’-lantern-headed men and women begin to spew from the alley. The Boulder Halloween pumpkin runners. Dozens of them, clothed at the moment in zippered hoodies and running jackets, jeans and sweat pants. They usually come out only in darkness. They usually trickle along in a mild naked rush under a canopy of trees and darkened storefronts, when the town’s children are long since back in their beds. Now they look both rowdy and organized, organic orange faces carved into masks of outrage, and there are still pockets of light in the sky.
Adrian texts Stella:
Better get the kids out of here.
He spots a tall blonde tottering toward the far corner, turning back to wave wildly at him, exaggeratedly mouthing something he can’t make out—but it’s only a man in drag—as the pumpkin heads form a mumbling circle in record time, from the gyro place to the kite store, along the courthouse lawn, spilling onto the sidewalks and the curbs, blocking his way across the mall.
Cops unclip walkie-talkies from their belts and pull billy clubs from their holsters.
Suddenly, there is Adrian’s thirteen-year-old son, Zander, cell phone in his hand, standing alone atop a bench, at the opposite side of the restless circle, longish hair uncharacteristically in curls.
“Dad!” he yells blindly into the crowd, as Adrian’s iPhone rings in his pocket.
Adrian snatches it out. Without looking at his screen, without taking in the number carved in sharp pixels across the glass, he waves toward Zander and says into the phone, “Hey. You see me?”
“Adrian?”
In a sudden rash of goose pimples, he hears his mother’s voice for the first time in years. His Adam’s apple lifts against his will. The commotion of the scene thrumming all around him, Zander included, stills and distorts, as though he’s plunged under deep water.
He pictures June sitting at her kitchen table, nervously running her thumb along the edge of the wood, until, when Adrian doesn’t talk, she stills her fingers and stares straight ahead, barely breathing, as if stillness will make a response more likely. What is she staring at? The collection of petrified flies and bees caught between the closed window and the screen, the rectangular bits of fried egg left on her plate from the morning, her change purse sitting out from paying a boy to rake the lawn this afternoon. Knees knobby through green or brown slacks.
Adrian is unable, unwilling, to speak, so she does.
“Adrian. Are you there? It’s your mom,” she says. “Listen . . . I just . . . I want you to know I’m si—”
He jabs at the animate screen, disconnecting, and the pandemonium of the mall rushes back louder than ever.
Before he can rebound or react, before he can feel relief or remorse, before he can even locate Zander again, the pumpkin heads begin whipping off their jackets, shirts, and sweaters en masse—exposing bras, bare chests, camisoles, nipple rings, tattoos—followed in breakneck speed by their pants—flashing thongs and boxers and buttocks, pubic hair like clumps of seaweed or nests of silk or shaved into indistinguishable shapes or shaved off altogether, penises flinging loose or bobbing at the root or shr
inking deep into their ball sacks, pumpkins lolling on their heads, while the mall erupts with hooting and whistling, bouncing and unzipping, all caught, as in a corral, in an encapsulating ring of escalating hooves.
Mounted police gallop onto the scene from three directions. For a split second, Adrian thinks it’s one of his nightmares, where everything is animals and creatures with the wrong heads and he’s some apocalyptic Alice slipped down into a manhole. But there is Zander, still standing above the crowd, not thirty feet away, trying not to look turned on or grossed out or embarrassed or panicked, like he’s trying to resist the pull of the Ring.
As Adrian tries to bolt for him right into the naked throng, a burly cop seizes him by the arm. “Hold up.”
“Just let me grab my son, all right?” Adrian urges, pulling back to test the earnestness of the hold, cursing himself, cursing his mother. “He’s right there.”
“Hang on a minute, buddy,” the cop says almost casually. “Let us get these idiots out of your way,” like a couple of pranksters are knocking the lids off trash cans.
Adrian watches, helpless, in his Armani jacket, hiking boots, scrub pants, and Swarovski binocular, wondering where Stella could be, while people dart around for their clothes, cuffs snap closed around wrists, masks spatter to the ground, and mounted police clatter down the bricks giving chase.
Zander disappears from the bench. In a hurried blur in the mayhem, Adrian makes out Stella, looking like Marilyn after a bender. She holds on to Michaela with one hand and grasps at Zander with the other as though they’re threading their way across a collapsing footbridge.
“Stella!” Adrian yells, waving his free arm high above his head, then “Hey, Zander!” hoarse and raw, but they’re gone, disappeared into the crowd of half-assed disguises.
When the cop finally releases him, Adrian lumbers into waxing darkness. He takes out his phone again to discover a red “1”—a voicemail from his mother—but he clicks off it. Dials Stella.
