by Russell Hill
"It's going to take a while," I said.
"I could dress up like an ivory bill," Robin said.
"Why?"
"I would be a kind of decoy and if one flew through the trees and saw me, it might pause, come closer so we could see it."
"What makes you think you could look like an ivory billed woodpecker?"
"They're big," she said.
"Not that big."
"No, but I'm small and if they saw me from far away they might think I was one of them."
"How could you make yourself look like an ivory bill?"
"I could cut my hair and dye it red and comb it back in a crest. We could make a cape out of black and white feathers." She reached out to touch my face, trace her fingers down my nose. "Your nose isn't big enough," she said. She traced her nose with the tip of her forefinger.
"Yours isn't either," I said.
"But I'm small and skinny and I have little tits and you always say I'm like a bird."
"You could wear white tights on your legs."
"No, I would have to be naked."
"Why?"
"Just because. If I'm going to be a bird I can't have anything human on me."
"Jesus, Robin, even if you smear yourself with oil and garlic, you'll still get eaten alive by mosquitoes!"
"No. We'll smear mud on me. On my whole body. If we mix it with chalk, it will be white, like the underside of the ivory bill."
"You're serious."
"Yes," she said. "You could stay in the boat near the bottom of the tree and make your knocking noise."
I think at that moment I loved her more than anything in the world. It was a crazy idea and there was no evidence that it would work, but it was a testimony that she shared my madness for the ivory bill
9.
We talked about how we could find black feathers. Sometimes there were crow feathers in the field next to the house, but it would take years to collect enough to make a cape big enough to cover Robin's back and legs. A farmer who kept turkeys might be the answer but we didn't know such a farmer and besides, turkey feathers weren't the rich black that we needed. It was apparent that I would have to kill some crows and we would have to pluck their feathers. Flocks of crows came over the house each morning, headed east and then, again, at dusk they returned. Robin called it the Crow Show. The cacophony of their raucous cries filled the air and they went on to the woods at the far edge of the pasture where they settled in for the night.
"I could shoot some," I said.
"I don't want you to shoot them," Robin said.
"There's no other way. If we get twenty or thirty big feathers from each crow, I shouldn't have to shoot more than six or seven."
"I don't want to hear about it," she said. "I don't want anything to do with it."
I went into Wilmot in search of a gun. There was a little grocery store that sold fishing and hunting licenses but the man said he didn't have anything like what I seemed to want. I told him I wanted something I could kill rats with. "They're running all over the place," I said. "They come out of the fields and they get in the basement and my wife is going nuts."
"I know what you mean," he said. "What you need is a .22. You say you want something cheap. Maybe a bolt action, something real simple, one shell at a time. You go on over to Crossett," he said. "Try the pawn shop there. He might just have what you're looking for."
So I drove to Crossett and found the pawnshop, a narrow cave-like store filled with guitars and old power drills and fishing reels. There was a case in the back with rifles and another locked case with handguns and yet another with watches and jewelry. All of it was crammed into a dark space with counters on both sides, clothes and musical instruments hanging from the ceiling like shadowy stalactites.
I was shown a bolt-action .22 with a scarred butt and the blue worn down to dull metal.
"Don't look like much," he said, "but it shoots straight."
"It's for rats," I said.
"That'll do."
We haggled until he agreed to ten dollars with a carton of shells thrown in. I put the rifle on the floor behind the seat and wondered if I could actually kill a bird. But ornithologists did it all the time, that much I knew. The study skins that lay by the thousands in drawers in museums were testimony to dead birds. Audubon killed birds so he could study their feathers, get the precise shape of a beak, the curve of talons.
I took the gun, the box of shells, and a paper bag with hard-shelled corn across the field in late afternoon. The corn was waist high, and I threaded my way through it until I came to the opening at the edge of the woods. There was a narrow strip along the fence where it wasn't plowed and I took some of the corn and spread it, throwing a handful out onto the dirt along the fence, some into the grass that grew around the posts. Then I went to the edge of the woods and sat against a tree with the rifle in my lap. I opened the box of shells and put it next to my leg. I put one of the shells into the chamber, closed the bolt and turned it down. I pulled back the knurled cock until it clicked. I was ready. If I remained motionless long enough, I knew, birds would ignore me.
Eventually birds came, but they weren't crows. Some doves came out of the woods behind me and they were soon joined by a thrush. But no crows. I tried to remember where I had seen crows foraging and I had the image of crows in a newly plowed field, a flock of them strutting up and down the furrows, new arrivals coming in, wings spread as they braked, feet outstretched. I waited for nearly an hour. Birds came and went. No crows. Eventually the Crow Show began, their scolding shouts announcing their approach, a cloud of them going overhead into the woods behind me. I thought about looking for the rookery but I knew it would be dark by the time I found them, too dark to aim. Finally, I tore off a piece off the cartridge box and stuck it in a crack in a fence post. I chambered a shell and rested the barrel of the gun on my upraised knee, carefully squeezing the trigger. The .22 made a loud pop and when I went to look at the piece of cardboard there was no hole. But the post was torn just below it so I tried again, raising the barrel so the little vee of the sight was above the cardboard. This time there was a neat hole in the cardboard. When it began to get dark I went back to the house.
Robin had dinner ready. Robin only knew how to make one kind of dinner. Boiled hot dogs and canned beans. She opened a can of beans, put it in a pot and heated it until it was bubbling. She boiled the hot dogs and cut them into pieces using a pair of scissors, dropping them into the beans and stirring the mixture with the point of the scissors. A slice of white bread went with it. So I mostly cooked.
"You shot a crow?" she asked. "I heard."
"None came. I practiced hitting a piece of cardboard. I need to find another place where crows congregate."
"I don't want to know," she said.
10.
I found a field near Louanne where a farmer had planted late corn. Louanne was not much more than a post office and a few buildings that leaned on each other. The field was isolated and there were crows picking their way across the newly furrowed field.
The crows lifted into the air, yelling in irritation at me as I went across the field to the far side. I settled in against the fence as I had done before. It wasn't long before the crows
came back, dropping, one by one, into the field. I waited as they came closer, and then pulled one leg up so that my knee was in front of me, rested the .22 on my kneecap and carefully sighted in on the nearest crow. I waited until it lifted its head, raised the sight just above it and squeezed the trigger. The .22 popped, not loud enough to be heard at any distance, I hoped, and the crow cartwheeled over. The other crows whirled up again and I waited. Apparently a dead crow was no deterrent, for they soon settled back in. By the time the sun had heated things up and I began to bake, I had killed four crows. I retrieved them from the field and pulled out the biggest feathers. I kicked a hole in the soft earth under the fence where I knew it wouldn't get plowed up and buried the bodies. I gathered the feathers into a bundle, took off my shir
t and wrapped them up. There were forty or fifty shiny black feathers.
I hunted crows while we worked on the cape. I hunted wood pigeons, too, since we needed white feathers for the two bands that fell from the shoulders. I lied about how many crows it took to make a bundle of feathers. Robin and I tied the feathers in bunches. We laid three feathers together and, using heavy black thread, tied them into a small fan. We laid the next fan on top of the first and tied the two together, linking the central feathers. We continued until we had a long band of black that went from Robin's neck to her feet. Then we made another band and another and eventually laid them side-by-side, stitching them together to make a feathered cloak. The white pigeon feathers were stitched in between two black bands and the contrast was startling. Pieces of Robin's black tee shirt became the arm holes and once the thing was complete, it hung down like a long black and white cloak, shimmering in the sun.
"It's perfect." I said, "but the leading edge of the wing has to be white."
"My arms will have white mud on them," she said. She lifted her arms so that the cloak spread, almost as if wings were lifting out, and her thin white arms were like a part of the wings.
"Lord God," I said.
"What's that mean?"
"That's what they used to say when the saw the Ivory Bill. Lord God. Like it was something so spectacular that was all they could say."
"You think I'm spectacular?"
"Lord, God," I repeated.
Robin cut her hair, leaving only a fuzzy covering on the sides of her head, the center combed back into a crest. She dyed it bright red and combed it up with pomade so that it came to a sharp point, smoothing it with her hands, teasing it into the shape of the crest of the ivory bill, and she preened, stepping around the room, naked, approaching a wall, pressing up against it with her arms down at her sides, pretending to whack her nose at the wood.
"KENK!" she cried out and then looked at me with a grin. "Want to fuck a woodpecker?" she asked.
"If the crest is red, then it's a male," I said.
"So?"
"You're something else," I said.
"Yes. I'm the Lord God bird."
11.
We took the boat farther back into the woods, and Robin practiced climbing the big cypress trees. We found a dead one, the kind that an ivory bill might favor, only there were no handholds or footholds. I brought a long length of rope, tied knots in it every few feet, and weighted one end with a stone. I threw it over the lowest branch, nearly thirty feet above the boat. It took repeated tries before it looped over the branch. I held one end while Robin climbed the rope, pulling herself onto the branch, pulling the rope up after her and throwing it over the next branch, only a few feet over her head. She climbed until I called out for her to stop.
""You're high enough," I said.
"I can go higher," she said.
But I was nervous, seeing her small body perched on a branch sixty feet above the water. There were stumps and bracken below her and I could see her falling and I told her it was enough, she should come down.
She laughed and raised her arms, like wings, moved them up and down, pushing her body up against the trunk. I heard the nasal KENK! echo in the rank air and she made the sound several more times before she began to descend.
We finished the cape and she practiced climbing with it, discovering that she had to climb first, then raise the cape with the rope, putting it on when she got as high as she wanted to be. I was still nervous when I saw her so high above the surface of the water, but she seemed at ease.
"I feel like a bird up there," she said.
"You're not a bird. You can't fly."
"I know that. You don't have to tell me that," she said
"I'm not sure I want you to keep doing this," I said.
"Tomorrow we put the mud on me and we find a tree so far back in the woods that there will be a bird." Her voice was prickly, and I knew that if I objected again, there would be a fight. We would cover her body with white mud and she would climb a tree and put on the cloak and she would become the Lord God bird. At least once.
12.
That morning I went to the little creek at the edge of the woods and filled a bucket with clay from the bank. It was a viscous gray, like grease, and I brought it back up to the house where Robin waited. We had a bucket of chalk, chunks picked up from plowed fields. I pulverized them into dust and we mixed it with the clay until it was a pale white.
"This stuff is going to dry and then it will come off," I said.
"I'll take some with me when I go up. I can smear it on whenever I need to." She had a determined look on her face.
She stood, naked, in the center of the room while I smeared the mud under her arms, on her back, between her legs, her feet and her toes, her arms, fingers, her face. I touched my muddy fingers to her small breasts and traced the whiteness over and over again, coating them until her ruby nipples disappeared. When I rubbed it into the hair at the base of her belly the skin turned white but the hair remained a rich black in contrast. I dipped my fingers into the mud and smoothed it until that, too, was no longer visible. When I was finished she looked ghostly, a pale blue figure, like some kind of African goddess, or a stone figure from the museum in Chicago.
I draped the feather cloak over her and we drove to the woods. By now the sun was higher and when she walked, the mud cracked, but it stuck to her skin and she lay back in the boat while I rowed. We went for nearly two hours, farther back into the woods than we had ever been, pausing now and then to blaze a mark on a tree. It was like Audubon's painting, the flat, still water, small shafts of sunlight filtering into the gloom, and all we could hear were the creaking of the oars in the oarlocks and the softness of the water with each stroke. We stopped at noon and drank from the canteen and ate some cheese and bread. I had my back to where we were going and Robin looked past me until she said, "There. That tree."
It was a huge dead cypress and the bark hung in strips, like scabs that had been picked loose from an old wound. Robin waited while I threw the rope, and then she climbed to the first branch, and waited while I attached the cape and a can of mud to it. She pulled them up and I watched her climb to the next branch and the next and the next.
"Stop now," I called out, but there was no answer.
I backed off with the oars, retreating from the trunk until I could see up into the canopy of the trees and she was there, the cloak over her back, her pale arms at her sides, her head against the tree. The bright flash of her hair caught the sun and there was a black and white pattern to her body, mottled, the crow feathers oily and iridescent and she was the bird, no beak, but it didn't matter, she had become the Ivory Billed woodpecker, the Lord God Bird, and I let the boat drift while I watched and then came the sound, the KENK! Like an old car horn, and another cry. I took out the two blocks of wood from beneath the thwart and hit them together, making the sharp two-stroke bang of an ivory bill, and I did it again and again. And then Robin and I were silent for a long time. But I could feel her silence in her still presence high above me and I waited. Surely the Lord God bird would come. How could it not come?
13.
We kept going farther back into the woods. I bought a sheet of mosquito netting that fit over the boat so we could spend the night there. Robin came down out of the tree and slipped over the side of the boat, soaking until the mud came off, washing herself and climbing back in, waiting in the late evening heat to dry off before she put on a tee shirt and shorts. We stretched the mosquito netting over the boat and lay below it, listening to the night noises of the woods. There were strange cries, a chorus of frogs that was deafening, and the constant whine of insects. In the morning we ate cold sandwiches I had made of fried eggs and bacon between slices of bread. Robin coated herself with mud from the bucket we brought and climbed again. I made repeated knocks with my blocks of wood. Several times pileated woodpeckers came to investigate, but there was no sign of the Ivory Bill.
A week later, I was in C
rossett buying shells for the .22 when I overheard two men talking to the clerk.
"I'm not shitting you, Earl. We was in the Woods and we was back in there, maybe a mile or two, looking for coons and I thought I saw one of them Lord God birds, and I put the glasses on it, and I swear it was a girl all dressed up like a woodpecker."
"No," Earl said. "You got to be bullshitting me."
"No," the man said. He was a stocky guy in his thirties, a buzz cut and a growing belly that hung just over his belt. "I swear to you on my mother's grave. It was a girl, only she was all white, I mean a spooky white, and she had some kind of a coat over her, looked like feathers, and there she was. Her hair was stuck up like that birds' head shows in them pictures, and at first I thought, holy shit, I seen one of them birds. But when I looked at her through the glasses, she had little tits and there was her pussy, only it was all caked with something, but it was a female, no doubt about it."
He turned to his companion. "Junior saw her too, didn't you?"
Junior nodded.
"I give him the glasses and he took a look, but she was coming down out of the tree and by the time we got there, she was gone."
""You been drinking that 'shine' your uncle makes?"
"I'm telling you, God's truth," and he raised his hand, as if he were taking an oath.
The clerk turned to me. "How can I help you, sir?" he asked.
