by Chris White
Three hours and four blustery miles from the foot of the pass, Jeff says, “That bird’s just gone, man,” stopping to breathe.
“I told the kids I’d call,” huffs Stella. “Come on, Adrian, it’s snowing. Let’s go back.”
“That bird’s up at the lake, I’ll just bet ya.” Adrian sniffs and begins re-Velcroing his boot. They are now thirteen miles from where they arrived the day before. He’s back in his element, gathering steam.
“What lake?” Jeff asks.
“Up Sahale Arm, that way. It’ll be a great place to camp. Come on, Stell, you’ll love it. Plus maybe we can get up above the snow.” He can salvage this thing. He can salvage it all.
Jeff says, “This wind’s nippy, though, man, seriously,” but Adrian keeps working at his boots.
Stella takes her upper lip between her teeth, turns, and walks up the trail.
Adrian calls, “I’m right behind you!” chucking Jeff on the back on his way toward Stella. “You with me, bud?”
They continue on through vine maple, stinging nettle, tangled growths of alder. Every so often, Adrian takes out his MP3 player and sends the bird’s call into the air—ti-ti-ti—hoping the Accentor will be duped into looking for a counterfeit mate, lost in the same place at the same time, miles and miles from home.
At some point, Stella calls out, “My ears are killing me, you guys.”
Adrian hears it as a sort of accompaniment to the wind, but no one responds, not even Jeff. Adrian only barks an occasional comment or command now, hunching his shoulders against the blowing snow, setting an unwavering pace for all their sakes—consumed with the punishing ache of his muscles, the numbing cold of his face and fingers and toes, the whiteout bliss of the increasingly impossible task at hand.
When they finally come upon the alpine lake, they halt at the sight of it. It ruffles with the wind, then stills in seconds, only to ruffle again—a shelf of shining water in the eaves of a rugged cathedral surrounded by a snowfield—and in the next thirty seconds, before they resume movement, the swirling snow begins driving down harder, thicker, and wilder, in a stinging milky squall.
Adrian screams, “Unbelievable! Get the tarp, let’s get the tent up!”
In some burlesque pantomime, they grab and fall upon each other, trying to unload poles and cords from each others’ backs, uncoiling flying ropes with tarps nearly lifting them from the ground then folding around their bodies like capes—finally whipping out of their hands entirely. When they try to secure the tent, they can’t. It’s all they can do to keep their belongings from blowing down the mountainside.
“Over there!” Jeff points, trudging toward a huge lone rock, a stain of gray, near the lake.
Stella doesn’t move, just bobs in the sea of snow, barely moored. Adrian reaches out to pull her through the storm by her jacket, both their hiking boots brimming.
Jeff shouts, “We’re just going to have to wait it out! There’s nothing else we can do!”
“Just stay with me, okay?” Adrian wails to Stella. “Stay with me.”
• • •
Mount Terror, Mount Challenger, Mount Fury, Mount Despair, Mount Torment, Desolation Peak: these are the names people have given this place. Once the blizzard has passed, they set up the tent (though the tarp has flown away and can’t be found), then crawl one at a time into its dark womb. As the wind rushes outside, they pick through their belongings to see what they can use. Is there a shirt left dry? A pair of socks? They take off what is soaking and put on what is salvageable, and in the blue-green light of the lantern, Jeff is asleep in minutes.
Stella wriggles herself into her sleeping bag and downs a handful of almonds while Adrian gathers everything wet into one nylon bag and tosses it out the flap into the snow.
When he’s zipped up the tent again, he stands over her, the approaching weight of defeat tugging him by the kneecaps. “Stell, I’m so sorry about the gas station. I don’t know what happened in my brain. Can you forgive me?”
Either she doesn’t hear him or chooses not to respond, only curls up like a potato bug and closes her eyes.
When she opens them again moments later, Adrian is lying beside her in his own bag, peering at the fleshy rise above her nose, beneath her eyebrows.
She says, “Tell me, okay?” Her lips are slightly parted. Her eyes are watering from the wind and sun.
Adrian unzips his sleeping bag and pulls her hand to his chest. Tell her.
She whispers, “I walked on the highway in the rain, Adrian. I waded through the blizzard. I’m with you, right? I’m with you right now.”
Outside the tent, the wind kneels down to the blue silence of snow. Something breaking echoes from the distance.
“Did something happen?” she asks, her voice like a slowly opening palm.
“Nothing happened,” he lies. “I really wanted that bird,” which is true. “That thing with Lassiter passing . . . I mean, this could finally be my time, you know?” What can he say? I’ve been a freak since I was thirteen years old but somehow forgot to mention it?
She withdraws her hand from his chest, her expectant face suddenly lax. She mutters, “Okay, Adrian.” Then she douses the lantern, turns toward the rustling tent wall, and zips the sleeping bag over her head.
This is how disappointment looks from the back.
Adrian closes his eyes. The echoing crash sounds again. The glaciers. They can’t re-form in winter anymore. There isn’t enough snowfall to offset the spring melt.
He lies anxious, listening for another crash that, for the moment, doesn’t come. There is only the hard ground beneath his hip through the mat. Stella’s breathing. The cold and ache. The miles they’ll travel tomorrow across Desolation Peak Trail.
He finds the tiny zippered bag in his vest pocket and fishes out a Lunesta, identifying it by its familiar size and shape—small, like Xanax, but a bit flatter, harder—and a Vicodin for his legs and back. That’s what it’s for, after all. It’s so fat and white it gleams in the dark. He gropes around the tent willy-nilly for his pack and finally locates it only a foot or so from his head, where he finds his water, frozen. He doesn’t need water anyway.
How could he have forgotten Stella on the road? How could he so easily accept there were two in the car when there should have been three? She had slipped out at the gas station without anyone noticing. Plus these days it’s always just Jeff and him, and he was ridiculously groggy from lack of sleep. Worthy justifications, all. He vows to try and believe them.
He takes deep, conscious breaths and waits for the pills to enter his bloodstream. Like a priest presiding over some strange mass, he silently recites:
Accípiter coóperii.
Accípiter gentílis.
Accípiter striátus.
He summons to mind the three auklets and the Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaíus phoeníceus), and by the time he gets to Ánthus hódgsoni, the Olive-backed Pipit, his life list is corporeal and firm, the subtle weight of it like a companion on his arm.
Sun in his eyes, he sloshes through warm swamp water, the canoe rocking behind him, the huge woodpecker hammering, hammering, hammering, then silent as a pool cue. His father stands on the riverbank, steam rising from his shoulders, with a briefcase dangling from his hand like a Bible salesman. His mother crouches naked, dripping wet, in the boat—not like a mother at all—as mounted police crash through branches and stalks, collapsing a path from the forest to the waterside. Their enormous snorting horses back up, inch forward, back up, inch forward, while the police train their guns at the arm of the cypress.
• • •
Adrian’s pants are frozen to his ass. He liberates his thighs from one another and creaks open his jaw. He chokes back the snippet of a dream that jabs at his throat like an ice pick. Maybe it’s the frozen zipper of his jacket, jutting into his neck.
Stella’s head is heavy on his belly. He carefully lifts it, as he would a patient’s when he unhooks the breathing tube from round her ears.
&nbs
p; “Don’t,” she says, before she’s even fully conscious.
Adrian slides out from under her with his lips blubbering out of some primal emotional reflex and crawls along the ground to the opening.
When he emerges, Jeff is shuffling around in the snow. Chipper, he calls out, “ ’Morning, Colonel!”
They pack up, nothing fitting back into its container right, too many things wet or frozen, too stiff or dripping to pack, and they look like three nomads—pieces of clothing hanging from bungee cords on the outsides of their packs, tent poles slick with ice protruding from their carriers, sleeping bags and mats in haphazard clumps, scarves encircling their faces.
As they slog through the clouds down the mountain, Stella finds it.
“Adrian, Jeff.” She pokes her toe at the snow. “Look at this poor guy.”
She bends to pick up a stiff sparrowlike bird the colors of butterscotch, cherrywood, and sandstone. She turns it over in her gloved hands. Its eyes are milky brown and staring from a black mask under yellow brows, with a bill like a finely sharpened lead pencil.
“That’s him all right,” Adrian says, looking down on the creature. “That’s the Accentor.” His sinuses start to fill with pressure, but he shakes it off and walks away.
“I can’t list it, though, Stell,” he calls back, watching his step over a patch of uneven rock, willing himself forward. “Dead birds don’t count.”
Chapter Four
* * *
4601 (11/7/09): Yesterday I sat on a log and smoked a cigar after work (5:45 p.m.). I was watching a blue heron fishing on the SR sound. I don’t smoke cigars much any more because it usually makes me want to drink. But this time it didn’t. Blue herons have yellow eyes that shine like they have a fire in there belly. If there is one they act like they don’t want anybody to know about it because they act so cool on the outside. I talked to one of the new boys when I was patching a sidewalk out by the bowling alley. Said he was pretty impressed by the reservation. Real nice guy. Even asked if he could help me out. Thats a first. Down here from one of the Carolinas I forget which. Nice to have a conversation.
Adrian sits at the kitchen table in front of his laptop eating a whole-grain English muffin with butter and grapefruit marmalade, shaking his head at this increasingly pathetic excuse for a birding post. When he checks his own account on the site, he finds that this man, this amateur, is the most frequent visitor to his page. There you have it.
Honestly, at this point, it would be nice to have a conversation.
“All you ever care about is your list,” Stella said when they got home from the Cascades. “Where are your priorities?”
She’d made implications like this before—that he was obsessive, that he had trouble seeing the forest for the trees (or, in this case, the trees for the forest), but he won’t apologize for his one strength. Besides, no one finds nearly nine hundred species of birds for the sake of a number. If she can’t see this about him, she doesn’t know him at all.
He clicks onto the new Audubon study. He used to find respite in the traditional, almost nostalgic feel of the site, but these days it’s nothing but an early warning system. Based on forty years of data, the study says global warming is driving 60 percent of the 305 bird species found in North America in winter far from their normal wintering grounds. A continent of species is moving, year by year, decade by decade, as far as four hundred miles north—from Kentucky to Minnesota, from Louisiana to Wisconsin, Montana to Alaska—out of environments they’ve adapted to for centuries, eons, to escape the unseasonably warm and rising temperatures, into ever less suitable, ever narrowing habitats.
It’s code red, like the disappearing frogs, the diminishing colonies of bees, the lifeboat polar bears. Adrian imagines the birds winging, branch to branch, feathers ablaze, pushed finally to the Arctic Sea, oil floating in great slicks across the waves to greet them.
He slides his phone toward him on the table like a deck of cards he’s about to cut. Picks it up. Slides his thumb across the glass. Hits voicemail, finally deciding that it can’t hurt to listen to the damn thing. He hopes June’s all right, actually. He certainly doesn’t wish her harm. It’s just the landscape of his mother is too vast and strange for him to traverse. He isn’t her caretaker, after all. He isn’t her steward.
Cowardice twists in him. He spins the phone. Can’t do it.
A subtle ringing in his ears, he returns to the laptop. One click away like a bleating siren: “Common Birds in Decline,” saying the average population of North America’s most common and beloved birds has fallen 68 percent since Star Trek first aired. This, while Adrian was buying winter jackets, memorizing the states and their capitals, learning to use chopsticks, and getting married. Where there were thirty birds—Eastern Meadowlarks, Field Sparrows, Snow Buntings, Whip-poor-wills—now there are six. Like a POW bracelet around his wrist, Adrian wears the sickening awareness that every time he eats breakfast, one endangered species of bird—the Prairie Chicken, the Tricolored Blackbird, the Mottled Duck, the Whooping Crane—vanishes from the world. Where there were 400,000 birds, there are 1,000. Where there were 60,000 birds, there are none.
Adrian looks again at the phone. Reanimates the screen. Hits voicemail and presses the arrow.
June’s voice starts, “I think we were disconnected, but . . .”—hesitates—“Anyway, Adrian, I really need you to come home.” There is a short silence. She hangs up.
• • •
Kingston. The nonhour of four in the afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving, 1981. In school that morning, Adrian had celebrated the great mythical coming together of the Indians and the Pilgrims. There was disagreement among historians about when and where the holiday had first been celebrated in the Americas, Mrs. Garvey said, though it had been celebrated by European Christians since the sixteenth century and by European pagans and Native Americans for millennia. Anyway, Thanksgiving is about goodwill, trust, and gratitude. Gratitude for family and the plenty of the earth, Mrs. Garvey said. It’s so great when everybody gets along!
When she asked if anyone in the class had ever met a Native American, Adrian kept his hand down like everybody else. He hadn’t really, because his mother’s father, a full-blooded Catawba, had died when his mom was small. Adrian and Evan didn’t even know about him until they moved to Kingston, when June mentioned this in a way that made them feel they didn’t need to talk about it again. Adrian didn’t know if she’d hid it because she was mad or ashamed or if she just forgot. They had thought their mom was just a regular American and that they were regular Americans. Plus, she didn’t look like an Indian. It was easy to forget. At the end of the day, Mrs. Garvey gave out caramels. We’re thirteen-year-olds, not little kids, thought Adrian—still, he stashed one in his pocket for later.
• • •
Adrian had taken over the snow shoveling (and mowing) from Evan, who recently graduated and left for Jackson Hole. Evan went to see the West, to work with his big hands and strong muscles apprenticing with a master log-house builder his mother’s partner, Suzanne, had known from an old stint at tile work. Their mom didn’t tempt Evan to go to college. She let him leave with her favorite sleeping bag, Toll House cookies, her almost-brand-new skis, and three hundred bucks. Adrian had admired the whole thing. It wasn’t something he himself would want (he wanted to go to college and preferred lemon-meringue pie to cookies), but it was admirable from all sides.
Evan had pulled tight onto his neck when they hugged goodbye. When their eyes locked, Evan looked like Adrian felt in the night—very small in a world unbearably large—but when Evan released him, he had that same old “fuck you” face on. He strutted out the front door, parted the Hudson Valley air with the exhilaration of the Wild West, and filled the yard with waving and yelling. Gesturing all about him like a rogue prince, he called back to Adrian, “Hey, you’re in charge!”
Now Adrian grasped the handle of the snow shovel with both hands. Since he hadn’t shoveled yesterday, the snow had melted i
n the heat of the day and refrozen again in the afternoon, so he had to gouge. That was okay; his mom had promised to make spaghetti for dinner that night before some gallery thing she and Suzanne had to do.
With an uneven vibration in his arms, slush jumping into his boots to melt into his socks, he shoveled all the way up one side of the driveway toward the curb: gouge, gouge, shovel—throw . . . Gouge, gouge, shovel—throw . . . Then he turned, straddling the outside line of the jagged aisle he’d just created, breathing heavier, exposing sparkling concrete, scraping his way back toward the house, singing—
“I wish that I had Jessie’s girl! I wish that I had Jessie’s girl!” Pivot ’round the corner, and one “Where can I find a—”
His father stood before him.
Adrian’s feet sunk deep as he stared at the apparition puffing steam like himself. His thoughts flew to the garage, the kitchen, the tools, the cutlery. He was off guard, impossibly small, and dressed like a child gone sledding.
“You look at me like I’m some kind of monster,” his father said, low. “Do I look like a monster to you?”
A blood-red cardinal rushed to a leafless magnolia. That’s exactly what he’d heard his mother say to Suzanne: Dean is a monster. He acted like one, and his hair was long now, and he had a stubbly beard and no jacket even though it was freezing.
“Nah,” his father answered himself. “Just surprised to see me, I bet.” He had some kind of briefcase.
Adrian swiped at a drop of sweat that ran into his eye in spite of the cold.
“Are you crying?”
“It’s sweat. I’m working.” Adrian held himself up against the handle of the broad shovel.
“I didn’t know where you guys were. Did you realize that?” his father said, flicking ice crystals from Adrian’s chest.
Adrian shrugged out from under him. “Quit it.”
His father let his hand fall to his side, and he stared a hole straight into Adrian’s chin.
