by BK Loren
From the window, me and Mom watch Zeb out in the field, the skinny, angled silhouette of him. He’s walking with my best friend, Brenda, and the little gun he just stole is still in the front pocket of his baggy jeans. I can see it hammocked there, swinging every time he takes a step. He’s carrying his hunting shotgun over his shoulder, too. He stops walking, sets the butt of the shotgun on the ground, and leans it so Brenda can balance it for him while she stands next to him. He lights a cigarette, and the smoke curls from his nostrils. Mom shakes her head, and I can’t tell if it’s the old house making her sad or Zeb. “How many times I’ve asked your brother not to carry that gun outside. And with Brenda right there with him.” She stops chopping, and it’s like an electric current runs all the way down her left arm, coming out through her trembling hand.
“Shooting birds,” I tell her. “He promised he wouldn’t shoot birds any more.” Zeb knows me and Mom both love birds.
“He’d better not be shooting birds, or anything else for that matter.” She’s angry, and firm, but there’s nothing she can do to stop him. Not in her condition. “He shouldn’t be smoking, either,” she says. “I hope he doesn’t smoke when you’re with him.”
“He does.” I regret saying it soon as I hear it out loud.
She shakes her head. “Where’s Brenda’s father, anyway?” she asks. “Letting her run around all day like he does. That man had no business adopting a daughter, taking her off an Indian reservation, to boot.” She whispers the adoption part shamefully, like she always does.
Zeb and Brenda walk through the old house, the east wall fallen down so me and Mom can see inside it like a huge, square skeleton outlining the place where Mom grew up. Zeb and Brenda duck out of sight when they sit behind the crumbling wall. At first I can see the smoke from Zeb’s cigarette trailing above the crumbled wall. But pretty soon, it disappears too.
I lift my hand from the cutting board, rest it on Mom’s shaky hand, and she starts peeling potatoes, as if I hadn’t touched her at all. “That’s grandma’s rocking chair in that house, isn’t it? The chair where you first felt Zeb kicking in your tummy.”
She looks out at the old house, says nothing. I stay close to her, our fingers brushing occasionally as we work.
“You must’ve moved out of that place fast, leaving all that stuff inside it.” She keeps peeling and I keep talking, and I can see her wanting me to shut up, but I don’t. “Wish we could go visit that house together someday, you and me.”
Finally she stops busying herself. She sets the peeler aside and rests her palms in mine. I feel the shudder of her disease surfacing on her skin, and I brace myself against it, let her trembling enter my own body so maybe I can take it away from her. The morning I spent stealing with Zeb washes away, and the world slows down to something smaller, something better.
She shuffles with her Parkinson’s feet over to the chest of drawers under the TV and pulls out the old photo albums. Most of the time when I ask about the house, she finds something else to talk about. Today, she pulls out these old photos. I sit next to her and she shows me. The house in the pictures looks small but sturdy, like something from my Little House on the Prairie books. I trace the outline of it and let my fingers pass over the tidy barbed-wire fence my grandfather built. It looks new, but it’s sagging and straggly in the field now. I see the horses grazing in the background. “Nuisance,” Mom says, almost smiling. That was the name of her family’s horse.
I see the old mare, but I can’t stop looking at a grove of apple trees and some pines landscaping her yard, because they’re the same trees I see every day, still standing in the field now. I turn the page and look at a faded black-and-white photo of Mom when she was younger than I am now. She’s standing under the shade of my favorite climbing tree, with her own brother on one side of her, and another kid, a tall, lanky boy, on the other side. All three kids have on overalls with frayed hems that hang about six inches too short, and their bare, boney legs are splashed with mud. They wear leather shoes, not tennies, and they hold a line between them with six fish dangling from it like huge clothespins. They’re smiling like they’re about to burst.
“We had lots of fun when we were kids,” Mom says.
“We could have fun there now. You and me. Go fishing there someday.”
“There’s some good fish in that pond. Used to be.”
“Still is. I catch good fish there all the time.”
She nods, and her hand stills long enough for her to turn the page, but it goes back to trembling soon as she rests it in her lap. I watch her, and I know what they say is wrong. I know this disease will not keep getting worse in her. I know she’ll fight it off, strong as she is. We sit there, me and Mom, and I look from the black-and-white photos out into the field, where the blue sky aches above the wheat-colored grasses and the trees still stand like they used to a hundred years back.
Just then Brenda and Zeb stand up. Zeb lights another cigarette, and Mom’s trembling comes back. “Damn Zeb,” I whisper, and Mom turns her head enough so that I know she heard me. But she doesn’t say a word. Brenda shoulders the shotgun for Zeb now, and they walk together out toward the pond, hitting each other as they walk until Brenda finally breaks off from him and heads back toward home. Couple minutes later, when Zeb’s alone in the field, I hear the pop of his gun, and I feel Mom jerk against it. I close my eyes, quit looking out the window. I don’t want to see what he’s shooting.
BY NOW, THE DAY has worn Mom out. So I help her to her bedroom, and she naps. I lay next to her reading one of my library books till I can’t stand the indoors air anymore. There’s no trembling when she sleeps, so I bend over and kiss her on her cheek. I can’t kiss her when she’s awake because her trembling scares me so much. But when she’s sleeping, it’s like she’s almost normal. I leave her sleeping, and I head out to the field. I walk out to my favorite spot by the pond and lay down, my arms crossed under my head, thinking. The coolness of the earth seeps through my thin T-shirt, chills my back.
The day is working its way toward evening now, so I start to get up, and I see Zeb walking toward me, alone, no guns this time, far as I can tell. I want him to leave. I want this field all to myself, I want this sky. If Mom can’t be here with me on account of her Parkinson’s, I want to be alone. I don’t want my brother walking the same ground as me. But he keeps heading toward me in a straight line, and I see his hands clasped in front of him. He’s holding something close to his chest. “I don’t need whatever you got for me, Zeb. Don’t want one of your damn presents,” I call out to him.
He doesn’t answer, just keeps walking till he stands right in front of me, opens his clasped hands, and sunlight streams out of them, the bright yellow feathers on the breast of a meadowlark, a bird he shot and killed earlier today. At first, I want to walk away from him and never see him again. But then I see his sadness, and something gives way in me. The world feels shrouded now, like me and Zeb are the only people in it. I move closer to him, open my palms under his, and he empties the bird in. It hits with more weight than I’d expected, its head spilling over the side of my palms like water from a fountain, limp. “You did this,” I tell him.
He flinches at my words, and I feel the bird’s body. It is warm in the way only living things are warm. I can feel its heart beating too, the pressure of its breathing.
“I think it’s living, Zeb,” I whisper. Against his toughness, his eyes widen with hope. I hold that bird in the hollow of my palms, like my hands are praying around it. “It’s the color of daffodils.” I pet the meadowlark’s throat. “Does it get colored that way when it sings?”
“A bird can’t get colored from singing,” Zeb says. But I know he’s wrong. The yellow of this bird is bright and saturated with the sound of the meadow in springtime. There’s this bubble around me and Zeb now, a world within a world made of me and my brother, but somehow Brenda’s voice pierces it. She calls from across the field, and me and Zeb both start walking away from her without thinking a
bout it, our shoulders pressed close together, forming a barricade against her
Pretty soon, though, we hear Brenda’s voice right behind us. “What’re you two doing? Whatchya got?” We keep walking till she hovers long enough, asking us over and over, and finally I stop and turn around, open my hands to her, and watch her fall silent. She bends closer, then looks at Zeb. She eyes him mean, then she pulls her long, black hair into a ponytail and looks at me, questioning.
“You were here, Brenda, you know how this bird got shot.”
“We were just walking with the guns,” she says. “Not shooting them. There’s no damn reason for killing a bird like this.”
Zeb just looks at her. He has nothing to say, just takes Brenda’s anger like it was due him. The world changes then, and what felt like a shroud around me and Zeb shifts and becomes a quiet that engulfs me and Brenda. Zeb steps back. “What’re you planning to do with that bird, Willa?” Brenda asks.
“Gonna doctor it.”
She whispers but at the same time keeps her anger going. “Can’t doctor it, Willa. Far as I can tell from looking at it, Zeb shot it full on.” She’s five inches taller and two years older than I am, held back in school the same year I jumped ahead, not on account of her being stupid, but on account of her father taking her out of school to nurse his hangovers too many days, when he isn’t even her real dad. So me and Brenda are in the same grade now, but she still thinks she knows more than I do.
“You can’t even see where this bird’s been shot,” I tell her. “I could make a splint if the wing’s broken, could feed it with an eye dropper till it gets stronger. I’ve seen people do it on TV.”
She reaches into my hands and lifts one wing of the bird with her forefinger and thumb. The meadowlark’s flight feathers spread out like a deck of playing cards. She points to the holes peppering the body under the wing, the distinct scatter of birdshot. It weakens me. “Looks like rain gone hard on the skin,” I tell her. “That must have been what the bird thought when it hit. Rain gone hard on the skin.”
“It didn’t think anything, Willa. It’s a bird.” She glares at Zeb standing behind me now, and I expect him to come at her hard, the way these two fight most days. But he just reaches in and touches the bird one last time, no arguing or temper, and then he walks away, leaves us both standing there without him. It’s what I wanted all along, for him not to be near me, but when he walks away, I feel an ache, something that only fades when I fight against it.
The only thing that matters now is the meadowlark. “Look,” I say to Brenda, whispering again. “Nothing got in its eyes. They look like tiny black seeds, don’t they?” She comes in closer to me, and we huddle around the bird. I close the bird’s eyes with one finger. Its lids are wrinkled and scaly, like a reptile’s. I glance up, see Zeb on the edge of the field, his back hunched as he walks away, his arms crossed over his stomach, like he might be feeling sick.
Brenda sees me looking at him, shakes her head. “He’s an asshole,” she says. Then she goes back to whispering. “This bird is suffering,” she says.
“Yeah. It is.”
She tosses her arm around my shoulder, and together we walk toward the pond. The evening sky has turned swollen and quiet.
“This bird is suffering,” Brenda says, again, and she’s not talking to me, she’s just repeating things into the air. When we reach the water, she squats down, opens her palms, and asks me to hand the bird over, which is something I cannot do.
“It’s my bird, Brenda.”
“You can’t own a bird, Willa.”
“I know. But I know what you’re planning to do with it.”
“Because it’s best.”
I can’t stand what she’s saying, and I want to come at her like Zeb does sometimes, with fists. She’s tall and big boned, and when she’s not with me, people tell me she’s grumpy and hateable. But I know it’s just her being scared and pissed off at things other people don’t understand. I also know, deep down, that what she’s saying is true. The bird is suffering, and there’s nothing to change that or turn back time. “Well, let me do it then,” I tell her.
“Will you?” she says.
It’s hard to do, but I nod, yes. She agrees, and we both kneel down side by side on the banks of the pond. I could not do this without her being there with me. I could not do it alone. I know this in the pores of my bones.
I look out across the field, sun on the down side of the day and the jagged mountains turning pink along the ridges, dark blue underneath. I think, This will be the last sky this bird will ever see, and I know there’s no way to make it any different.
I feel the cool water of the pond wrap around the backs of my hands. It trickles through the gaps between my fingers, pooling around the bird, which struggles as soon as I dip it in. I didn’t think it had any fight left in its body, but it does.
I’ve been told it’s a caring thing to do, no matter how hard it is. You’ve got to help a suffering thing die. So I keep my hands clasped tight, close my fingers around its narrow neck, and I twist the head. I feel a crack, and the bird goes dead. Tears well up in my eyes.
“Is it done?” Brenda says.
“It’s done.” The meadowlark buoys to the surface of the pond, looks half the size it was when it was living, its slack skin and fragile bones visible beneath its sulfur yellow feathers. “Goddamn Zeb,” Brenda whispers. She reaches into the water, scoops the bird up in her palms.
“What’re you doing?” I ask. She starts walking, and I follow. “Where’re you taking that bird?”
“Going to bury it.” It feels right, so we walk together to a place by the edge of the field where we know the claylike dirt of this land turns softer, having been farmed for so many years by my own family. There, we both start digging with our hands. “Think we should put it in a box?” I ask.
“No box.”
“Like a person. So it can go on from here.”
“No box. Just earth. It’s all it needs,” Brenda says.
When the little pocket we hollow out is about the size of a big avocado, we stop. She takes a moment, then asks me if I’m ready. “Go ahead. Put it in,” I tell her. Together, we place the bird in the grave, let our fingers slip out from underneath it. We cover it back up with soil.
“Better get back home now,” she says. She stands up and walks away fast.
I stay. I pick up two stalks of dried wheat, one long, one shorter. I wrap the shorter stalk around the longer stalk about three quarters of the way up, make a cross for the grave.
“Let it be, Willa.” Brenda’s voice stretches back across the field, the way sounds echo on a summer evening. I press my finger into the earth, poke a dependable hole there, set the bottom end of the cross into the ground. Then I run to catch up with my friend.
A few steps from where we both split off to go to our own houses, I look back. The cross has fallen. The grave is an empty mound.
Willa
I HADN’T THOUGHT ABOUT Zeb for a long time. Or maybe I thought about him all the time, his presence like a dull hum circling my brain, the way birds of prey circle without being noticed by animals busy on the ground. The peregrine falcon flies fifteen thousand feet above the earth and has been clocked in a dive at over two hundred miles an hour. A songbird has little chance of maneuvering out of a peregrine’s line of sight. The falcon hits its mark midair.
The phone call came like that: a quick hit, a surprise, but not a surprise. It was just a matter of time.
“He’s gone into the woods,” the voice said.
From my house on the Chuparosas Mesa, I could see the late summer weather moving in from the north, beyond the Sangre de Cristos, low clouds drifting across the New Mexico border from Colorado, the home I’d left behind, a place I could never squeeze out of my bones—the field where Zeb and I played when we were kids, the mountains that surrounded the place. That land felt like blood relation, to me, like the heart-and-soul substance of a family that had long since been undone. The voic
e on the phone kept on, and all those memories I thought had vanished came rushing through me, vivid and clear as the present day. They shook me. What the voice was saying shook me, too. So much time had passed, twenty-five years or so. How could they revive this incident now?
“There’s no time statute in killing someone,” the voice said. “You understand that, Miss Robbins, don’t you?” He addressed me formally, not out of respect, but condescension.
“I understand a lot of things.”
“Precisely. That’s why we’re calling you. We figure you might be the only one who could track him through the San Juans effectively. Pretty rugged territory there, you know.”
“Track him?”
“Bring him out of the woods.”
My gut was in a knot, but this last bit made me smile a little. Zeb had finally found a way to live in the place he loved, the backwoods of the San Juan range in southern Colorado, his favorite place when we were growing up. “Look, he was a kid,” I said, finally. “We were both kids.”
There was a grunt on the other end of the line, followed by a rehearsed litany of recent offenses they couldn’t pin on Zeb, but which this guy said he “just knew” Zeb had committed. His voice had started out all cool and calm in the beginning, but as he talked about Zeb, I could hear him getting more and more agitated, even excited. “Yeah, your brother, he does all these petty little thefts, you know, minor pot deals, punk pranks: defacing property, breaking into stores and changing the damn prices on things, shit like that.”
“He changes prices?”
“Yeah, lowers them to his liking. Maybe he thinks it’s funny. Hell, I don’t know. But he doesn’t do it in his own little hippie town. No. He makes a trip down the mountain to the chain stores to do it, one after the other, doesn’t leave a damn trace, except for writing numbers all over everything. Shit like that, you know, and so me and my guys, we drive up the mountain and we haul his ass in, question him, and—” He stalled to catch his breath and his voice came out almost whiny. “We question him and the sonofabitch looks squeaky clean.”
