by Russell Hill
Eventually I asked her to have lunch with me at the counter of the drugstore. When I found out she liked black licorice, I bought a box of it, and brought a new strand to the dime store every day. When I talked about birds, she listened and when I loaned her my copy of Audubon's Birds of America, she brought it back the next day with pieces of paper marking a dozen birds.
"These are my favorites," she said. She had marked the Louisiana heron, the belted kingfisher, the snowy egret, the ivory bill, and of course an American robin.
Both of us wanted to get away from Arlington Heights. Robin lived with her parents, too, but she didn't have a separate place like my garage. She came over in the afternoons after the dime store and the hardware store closed and watched me work on birds and eventually she stayed for a night. My parents must have known. They said nothing. Robin stayed more often.
I sold Oskar. A pet store in Elgin paid a hundred and eighteen dollars for him. I sold my stuffed birds and got another fifteen dollars. I sold all of my taxidermy stuff for another ten dollars. I had four hundred dollars saved from Jerry's Hardware and I had a car, a 1939 Ford coupe, green, with a windshield that cranked out in front, and upholstery that sprouted tufts of stuffing. Robin had eighty-nine dollars saved from her job at the dime store and I cashed in the savings bond that my parents had bought when I turned twelve. They had visions of eventual wealth, but a bond bought for eighteen dollars was worth only twenty-five at maturity, so I cashed it in and got nineteen dollars. Paul bought my baseball mitt and my army surplus flashlight for two dollars. I collected my last week's pay from Jerry and we had six hundred and seventy-three dollars when we left Arlington Heights at the beginning of the summer. It would be enough to take us to the Arkansas-Louisiana border and live for several months. The Big Woods were there, and that was where Tanner had seen the Ivory Bill. When I told Robin that's what I wanted to do, she had said, "Me, too!"
"Me, too, what?" I said.
"If you want to see that bird, I want to see it, too."
"You know what it is?"
"You talk about it all the time."
"Not all the time."
"If it wasn't a bird, I would be jealous."
I reached out and touched her arm, slid my fingers down to her wrist, reached up and touched her face.
"You don't have feathers," I said.
"Is that good or bad?"
"It's good." I slipped my hand inside her shirt, touching the nipple of her breast.
"Woodpeckers don't have tits either."
"I don't have tits."
"You do. They just don't stick out like a sore thumb."
I squeezed her nipple between my thumb and forefinger.
"If you keep doing that, they're going to stick out like sore nipples," she said.
"We're going to find the Ivory billed woodpecker," I said, "and we're going to tell the world what we saw and they're going to let up a fucking cheer like you never heard. You and me are going to be famous,"
5.
We drove down through Illinois and crossed into Missouri and continued south until we came to Arkansas. The landscape changed from flat fields to rough hills and in the distance we could see the Ozarks. We stopped for that first night, exhausted, at a motor court that was made of stone, a long, low building with a sign in front of the office that said, NO WORKING ON CARS IN FRONT OF YOUR ROOM . There were swamp coolers in the window of every unit and they were wheezing, and it was hot, humid, and heat lightning played off the mountains to the west. I paid five dollars for a room and we left the door open. It smelled musty and damp and Robin and I sat outside sharing a cold beer that I bought in the little market down the street.
"This was a hot springs," the man behind the counter in the tiny office said. "Used to be quite the place. William Howard Taft came here once."
I wasn't sure who William Howard Taft was.
"If you turn on the cold water, it won't run cold," he said. "Comes from the hot springs. Nice hot shower, though."
We watched the heat lightning touch down, outlining the mountains. Across from us someone sat in the shadow of a wall, smoking, and when he inhaled, the cigarette glowed and there was a brief outline of his face. Farther down the walk there was a cone of light on the ground and as insects hit the light and occasionally fried themselves and dropped, several large toads waited just outside the circle of light. They snatched the insect bodies before they hit the ground.
It was after midnight when we went to bed. It was still unbearably hot and we lay on the damp sheet and made love, our bodies sticking to each other and then, as the night wore on, a wind came up, cooling our naked bodies until, at some point, we pulled the sheet over ourselves and lay, our bodies entwined. We woke with the barking of dogs. A rooster crowed and at first light we dressed and got into the car and drove until we came to the next town where a diner was open. A sign in front showed a man in a chef's hat flipping a pancake, and there was a single light bulb that glowed in the center of the pancake. Robin asked the waitress if she could have the child's breakfast.
"I'm not all that hungry," she said.
"Sweetheart," the waitress said, "if it's on the menu, you can have it." She turned to me. "Where'd you find this little bitty thing," she said. "She ought to eat more than a child's breakfast."
"She was the prize in a Crackerjack box."
"Well, aren't you the lucky one," the waitress said, with a wink at Robin.
That morning we drove until we were almost in Louisiana. Now the farms were small and there were woods here and there and the towns seemed scruffy. I had circled The Big Woods on the map and when we got near I stopped at a gas station and asked where The Big Woods began.
""You mean the deep woods?" the man said
"That's right."
"They's all over," he said. "You go on down to Crossett and they're just south of there but they run a ways into Louisiana." He pronounced it 'Lewzeeanna.'
"You go far enough," he said, "and you get into Despair Bayou."
We looked for a motor court in Crossett but there wasn't one. There was an old hotel in town, a two-story brick building that had seen better days and we got a room for three dollars. It wasn't much better than the room we had the night before, but it was a place to stay and we found a diner where we had chicken fried steak and grits and greens and bread that must have been baked by someone's mother, soft and moist and warm. We put pats of butter on it and they melted and we wrapped the bread around pieces of the steak and ate them like sandwiches. Robin was ravenous.
I said, "You're not eating like a bird tonight," and she said, "Yes I am. I'm eating like a raptor."
"Which one?" I said.
"One of those big ones that eats stuff that's been killed. Rabbits and maybe even deer. There was a picture in the Audubon book of a bunch of them sitting down around a deer and eating, just like it was a family dinner."
"Those weren't raptors," I said.
6.
She wore a black tee shirt with a torn neck, and a necklace. I remembered the necklace from the dime store. One afternoon, waiting for her to get off work, I had bought it. We went for a coke at the drugstore and she put it on, admiring herself in the mirror behind the counter. It was a silver chain with tin hearts alternating with black beads. The hearts were so tiny that you had to look closely to see that they were hearts. As I paid for the cokes, she stood, thumbing through a magazine from the rack next to the check-out counter and I noticed a man watching her carefully, and at first I wondered what his interest in her was and then it came to me that she looked quite beautiful, the white of her throat and the freckled plane of skin below it, the tiny necklace and the black cloth. She wore no bra-she rarely did-and her nipples were faint bumps where the roundness of her small breasts showed. Her small hands turned the pages idly.
It was oppressively hot. Humid. When I left the car I could feel my shirt peel from the car seat. We walked down the road and there were puddles in the ruts and clouds of mosquitoes, so many th
at we pulled up clumps of grass and used them to wave away the mosquitoes as we walked. The road skirted the edge of the trees and suddenly
entered the woods, ending abruptly at the water. Ahead of us was a dark expanse of green, still, almost like the mirrored lakes in the toy train diorama in the museum in Chicago. But this water smelled of decay and there were immense cypress trees rising from it. We could feel the heat. It shimmered in the air. There was a foreboding, a heaviness that pressed against my chest, stilled my heartbeat. It was a place of snakes and ancient creatures, things that the rest of the world thought no longer existed, but I knew that somewhere in that permanent dusk there were ivory bills, a female in a nest hole, the black crest at the back of her head curving forward, and the long gliding flight of the male, his red jester's cap and his ebony wings floating toward the nest, wings suddenly turned up to brake his flight, talons hooked into the cypress, his sharp tail holding him erect against the trunk.
There were bird calls somewhere and the constant whine of insects. Robin turned to me, her face shining with sweat
"It's too fucking hot," she said. She pulled the neck of her tee shirt away from her chest and blew down into it.
"It's perfect for the ivory bill," I said.
"Is this where we look?"
"This is it. We'll need a boat"
"How do you know where to start?"
"Tanner said they find dead or dying trees and they peel off the bark and eat the insect grubs beneath them. So they have to keep looking for dead trees. That's what we'll look for."
"We could get lost in there."
"We'll take a compass. We'll mark trees."
"Everything feels old," she said. "Really old."
"It is."
7.
We looked for a place to stay. We asked in Crossett and the woman at the chamber of commerce gave us a list of rentals but nothing seemed right. We drove back toward The Big Springs and as we passed a farm, I noticed a house off to one side, at the edge of the woods, and it seemed empty. I stopped the car and we walked through the field to the house. It was small, a single room with a sink on one wall and a hand pump at the end of the sink. A small wood stove was in the center of the room. There was an empty iron bed frame in the room and a sagging set of empty shelves. There was an outhouse behind it.
"What do you think?" I said.
Robin looked around. The screen door sagged on one hinge and she pulled it toward her.
"I could fix that," I said, pulling the door closed.
"We'd be all by ourselves," she said.
"Nobody would bother us."
"I like it," she said.
We went back to the car and I drove back to the entrance to the farm. There was a solid farmhouse, brick, with a big front porch, and two barns off to one side. A stock tank was at the edge of the lawn that stretched behind the house. I knocked on the door and eventually a woman opened it, wiping her hands on her apron.
I asked about the house. It wasn't for rent, she said. Her husband appeared at her side and asked who we were and why did we want to live in a shack on the edge of the woods.
"I'm an ornithologist," I lied. "I'm studying the ivory-billed woodpecker and there may be some still in The Big Woods. My wife and I need a place to stay that's close enough to the bayou so we can go into it regularly."
""Nobody goes in there except hunters and the Singer people."
"Who are the Singer people?" I asked.
"Singer Sewing machine. They own most of it. They're busy draining it and cutting down the trees."
"We'd pay a fair rent," I said.
"There's no running water. There's a hand pump but there's no toilet. Only an outhouse."
"That's OK with us," I said.
He looked at me. "There's no furniture," he said.
"We can find something."
"I'm not sure what an ornithologist is," he said. "but you kids can have it if you want. Five dollars a week too much?"
We stood in the single room and looked at each other and Robin began to giggle.
"We have a house," she said.
"Yes."
She took the edge of her tee shirt in both hands, raising them to strip it off over her head, shaking her hair out of the neck and tossing it on the counter next to the sink.
"Let's fuck," she said. "Right now. Here. In our own house." She reached up and pressed her nipples to her chest. "Come here," she said. "Show me how birds fuck. Show me how they make love."
"They don't make love. They just do it so there will be more birds. I don't think they feel about it the way I feel about you."
"You said geese mate for life. They must have some feeling for each other. You said if a hunter shoots one of a pair the other one hangs around and cries."
"Maybe," I said.
She was stepping out of her Levis. She stripped her panties off and stood naked in the afternoon light that filtered through the dirty kitchen window. She raised her arms and stretched until she was on tiptoe. Her tiny breasts were flattened against her chest and the bones of her hips formed a vee rising from her legs.
"Imagine I'm a bird," she said. "What kind of a bird do you want me to be?"
"Right now you look like an egret," I said. Her skin was white, almost porcelain, and her neck seemed longer and as I looked at her, I imagined the egret, wings outstretched, rising to leave the water in the ditch by the roadside, lifting its wings gracefully, catching the air.
"What does the egret sound like?" she asked.
"Not pretty. It's a croak. As if you startled a big frog."
She let out a hoarse belching sound and lowered her arms, lifting them again.
"Fuck me," she said. "Now."
8.
In the evening the fireflies came out. They winked in the edge of the field, in the dark of the woods, and if I caught one in my hand, the tiny end of it glowed briefly, enough to reveal the lines on my palm. It was a sexual attractor, that much I knew, and there was even another insect that mimicked the firefly, turning on its little light so that when the male firefly came calling, it ate him.
Moths whirled up into the light above the door, a single bulb that brought mayflies and cicadas and moths, some almost as big as my hand. The cicadas were fierce looking creatures, armored insects that gave off a constant buzzing that filled the night, rising and falling, something we learned to sleep with.
We needed a boat. The Woods were permanently under water and we would have to use a boat to get deep into them and if we went farther into the bayou, it would be a necessity. I asked at the gas station in Crossett and at the grocery store and went to the weekly newspaper and eventually I found a man who wanted to get rid of a boat. It was a skiff, shallow drafted, with oars and it was tight.
"You got a truck?" he asked.
"No."
"How you going to get this to where you're going fishing?"
"There's no trailer with it?"
"No." He looked at me as if I had asked if there was a magic carpet.
"Could I put it on top of the car?"
"I suspect you could. Wouldn't be easy."
I found two pieces of two-by four behind the house, borrowed a drill from the farmer, drilled holes in them and in the car roof and bolted them to the top of the car. When I went back, the man looked at what I had done and shook his head.
"You might get some leaks in them bolt holes when it rains," he said.
"I might. I can live with that."
We hoisted the boat onto the makeshift rack and I paid him fifteen dollars for it.
"That's a fine boat," he said. "I caught many a bass out of that boat. It's a good luck boat."
I hoped he was right.
The mosquitoes were fierce. They came in clouds, and our arms and faces darkened with them. We only stayed in the bayou an hour before we were forced out. I left the boat chained to a tree, and I piled branches over it so we wouldn't have to load it back onto the car. Back at the house we rubbed alcohol onto the welts and trie
d to figure out how we could go back into the woods and stay without being eaten alive.
"We could wear long-sleeved shirts and pants with legs," Robin said.
"Yes, but what about our faces and hands?"
"We could wear masks and gloves."
"And die in the heat."
We drove back into Crossett and went to the drugstore, where a white-coated man in a cubbyhole at the back of a little store filled with creams and bottles and stretchy bandages for trick knees asked what he could do for us. I told him we lived in a little house on the edge of some woods and at night the mosquitoes were fierce.
"You could use oil of eucalyptus," he said. "Some people swear by it. It smells like Vicks Vaporub, and that's because it has eucalyptus oil in it, too. Some people rub garlic on themselves. That seems to keep them off, but you smell something awful. Never did like the smell of garlic."
"How much is oil of eucalyptus?" I asked.
He came out from behind his counter and searched along a shelf.
"Good-sized bottle for a buck," he said, holding up a brown bottle with a kangaroo on it. "It's not cheap."
"Why the kangaroo?" I asked.
"Comes from Australia."
We bought a bottle of eucalyptus oil and the next day smeared ourselves with it. It worked fairly well but there were still welts when we left the woods about noon, so we added garlic. I bought several big bulbs at the little grocery store in Crossett and we mashed them against a board, rubbing the juice all over each other before applying the eucalyptus oil. That day we worked our way far back into the woods, rowing silently through columns of great cypress trees. We saw a snake swimming, its head just above the water, leaving a sinuous wake. It was a cottonmouth. There were herons, great blues and whites, and we could hear their loud croak before they lifted off. They were easily disturbed and no matter how silently I rowed, I could never get close to them. We lay back in the boat and looked up into the trees but, of course, there was no sign of an ivory bill.
