The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  She had the animal firmly trapped. It writhed and raked at capture and she couldn’t help thinking of the small, blond man in the moccasins, how he’d kept her pinned among the coats. The fish’s mouth opened and closed, so much oxygen available but none filtering in through its gills. Its body struggled to gain breath—suffocation amongst bounty. She looked into its desperate fish eye and recognized the shock, felt it in her past. Is this what they call compassion? The moment of communion was taken over by a predator fist as she paused above the now tired, slowed fish, bringing her scarf-wrapped hand down in a hammer motion on its head. Fresh red blood trickled from the gills and stained the scarf, blooming in the wet fabric like a wild poppy.

  The spirit drained from the fish and she fumbled for her hunting knife in her pocket. As the slick entrails slid out from the salmon, she decided that it was her life, and she would live it how she wanted. She was the fish and she was the man in the moccasins and she was wrested from the false promise that life would be simple if she just believed in some martyred ghost. It was all just a story. And she knew that stories change each time you tell them. After gutting the fish, she scaled the skin with her knife and let her mouth sample the raw pink flesh underneath. It tasted as delicious as anything she had ever eaten. She plunged her mouth in for more, feeling no remorse. She was blooming and she was free. As the fish filled her belly and evaporated the pains of hunger, she made a decision—she wouldn’t let anyone else tell her story for her. She would be her own captain.

  On the way back up the banks, heading to her fir-needle bed, Alice spoke her first words out loud to the baby. Her belly was full of salmon, gurgling and galloping through the nourishment, and the baby, maybe the size of a small avocado, made its first puttering motion from side to side in her belly. The shock of the sensation caused her to stop. She put her hands on her belly and said, Thing. You are a lucky little thing. You weren’t even an idea and then you were. Some babies are a series of hemming and hawing before they are made. They are a series of: Are we ready? Should we wait a year? You? You simply jumped the line and came from the strangest of all cannons into my womb. And me? I’ve just now decided that I love you. I know that your being here is not your fault and I promise I will never make you feel that it is. You are a lucky little thing, aren’t you?

  Moments after Alice spoke the words out loud, she looked up and there was a young man, maybe in his mid-twenties, with a long black ponytail and a baseball cap with “Toledo Boomers” crouching on a boulder above, watching her. He looked like he was probably from the nearby confederated Siletz tribe. It occurred to her that she very well might be on tribal land.

  “Hello,” he said. “Did you enjoy that salmon you just stole from me?”

  “I’m sorry.” Alice looked around to see if there were more people, as if she were suddenly surrounded. “I didn’t know it was yours.”

  “I’m just teasing you,” he said, jumping down off the rock. “Looks like you needed it more than even the bears, the way you ripped into that fish.”

  The reality that she had been unknowingly watched during her most primal, private of moments made Alice’s heart race. She wiped her mouth with a delicate motion as if to hide evidence of the carnage with her sleeve.

  “Come and I’ll show you the best salmonberry patch nearby. Name’s Alex, but people call me Boomer.” He pointed to the embroidered beaver-like creature on his hat and held out his hand.

  “Thank you, but I think I should be on my way.” The whole strange-man-offering-fruit thing was all too familiar and made Alice extremely uncomfortable. “Do you know which way the ocean is from here?”

  “It’s that way,” he pointed up beyond a ridge to the west. “But you’re a good thirty-plus miles from the ocean, here.”

  “Damn,” Alice said. “Thought I’d walked halfway there already.”

  “Looks like you found an old road, so good on ya. Did you know this was once a highway out to the coast? Around the time of the model T’s. Ran right between the rez land,” he waved with his left hand, “and state forest,” he motioned to the other side of the trail with his right hand. “But now all that’s left is a half-collapsed covered bridge and this little trail here through the old growth.”

  The way Boomer looked up and regarded the trees with awe as he said this, the way his face was open to what he saw up there, made Alice feel like maybe she could trust him enough to guide her to some berries. But she decided to keep the thought to herself and busied herself looking at the ground instead. She dragged a foot over soft soil and through a patch of false Solomon’s seal, revealing a black millipede with yellow spots along the edge of its body.

  “Hard to imagine a car ever driving through here,” she said, finally letting her neck crane back and letting her eyes follow Boomer’s gaze up a hundred-year-old Sitka’s peeling bark to the sky. As they watched, a small fat-bodied bird came careening out of the sky from the west and landed without an ounce of grace into the tree canopy. It settled onto a mossy branch out of sight.

  “Ah!” Boomer pointed. “A marbled murrelet. They come all the way in from the ocean to nest in these old trees. That’s a good omen for you and your baby. Very good spirit to have around.” He smiled up at the sky but didn’t look at her as he said this.

  How did he know she was pregnant? She squatted and inspected a drooping pink wildflower next to her, a bleeding heart, and weighed her options. She had no idea where she was and this man could help her find food. He knew about the baby. Had he heard her talking to it? Should she trust him? Or should she just walk away and hope she could find her way to the coast where she would do what? Find some sort of job and never go back to her parents? Run away and become a waitress or work at the mill? Boomer interrupted her thoughts.

  “You know, my grandmother was a very wise woman and well respected in the tribe. She used to tell me that even when life gives you shit, you can use it for fuel.”

  Alice looked up at him, her expression a mixture of amusement and confusion.

  “I’m paraphrasing of course.” He smiled a wide and self-satisfied smile. “So, do you think you’d like some berries and then maybe we can talk about when you’d like to get back to your parents?” Boomer stood up and extended a hand down to her. “I think that’s probably wiser than running away to become, what? A seal in the ocean? Was that your plan?”

  Alice stood up and dusted off her jeans and thin jacket. She heard another bird come flailing into the canopy and wondered where they had been all night and why they would come home so early in the morning. What were those little beasts up to flying over the ocean, under the stars? She was suddenly flooded by images of her parents praying together for her return, pacing the neat rows and rows of the orchard looking for some clue as to where she had disappeared to, hoping she wasn’t dead. They would have the entire congregation looking for her, while surely planning how to kill her when she did return.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “Let’s take a look at those salmonberries then we’ll talk parents or seals.”

  “Sounds like a worthy discussion,” Boomer said, handing her a half-eaten granola bar from his pocket, which she shoved into her mouth whole.

  “Fanks,” she said, chewing, as they walked single file along the overgrown road.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Just curious. Why do they call you Boomer? You hardly make a sound as far as I can tell.”

  “Yep. Stealthy and silent. You know what a boomer is?”

  “Not exactly. No.”

  “It’s a mountain beaver, a species found in the northwest. My parents said I always wanted to be down by the river or sitting among the ferns as a kid, so they started calling me Boomer.”

  “Ah. Things haven’t changed then, have they?” Alice said, looking at the fern-covered hillside and nodding back at the river quietly shushing its retreat in the background.

  “I gues
s not.” Boomer put his hands on his small potbelly. “I wasn’t exactly a skinny kid, either.”

  “I bet you were adorable,” Alice said, her guard falling hard to the forest floor. “A little chunky Boomer.”

  “Not a whole lot changes, I suppose, when it comes right down to it.” He led the way up a hill, the two moving together naturally through the underbrush, Alice using the same footsteps as her guide. “There are some parts of ourselves formed early in our lives that we just can’t shake. Like, what did you love most when you were a little kid?”

  “Hmm.” Alice paused. “I think I’ve always loved birds. They can go wherever they like. On a whim they can fly to another state, or hell, another country. Total freedom.”

  “Then I’ll call you little bird,” he said. “And you,” he paused to point and speak directly to her belly, “are the littlest bird of all.”

  They walked in silence for a while before coming to an area with the densest salmonberry bushes Alice had ever seen, almost as though someone had cultivated them. The plump orange-pink berries hung as heavy and thick as raspberries and the two ate quietly, side by side, until they could eat no more. When they were done, Alice followed Boomer out of the forest and to his truck without discussion. As she watched the green blur by along the highway, she knew that when Boomer took her straight back to her parents, her mother would probably grab her arm, pull her in, and yell at him to get off their property. She might call him a pedophile or a dirty Indian. Her father would stand by and say nothing. They would lock her away again in her room and she would let the bloom and beautiful chaos she felt newly opened in her chest slowly fade until she was an old bouquet, desiccated and dried like her mother’s awful dusty cornflower decorations nailed to the wall. She had always disliked those displays—the crucified cornflowers gathering layers of dust like little flower corpses. The green blurred more and more as she blinked back the tears brimming in her eyes. She put her sleeve up to her eyes to catch the tears and cracked the window to let the air dry away the pink.

  “You okay, little bird?” Boomer asked as they bore left off the highway onto the gravel of her parents’ driveway.

  “I will be, thanks,” she said, unconvinced by her own words.

  And so, as she had predicted, upon return to the orchard and her parents’ doorstep, her mother did grab her away from Boomer with her vicelike hands, powerful from years of trimming trees and harvesting. She then asked who the dirty Indian was. Boomer backed away from the front porch with a closed, inscrutable face. Her mother slammed the door and threatened to bind her with the belts again, but seeing as she wasn’t resisting, and at the quiet request of her father that she take pity, at the last minute she decided that a deadbolt on the outside of her door would suffice. She shamed her daughter for leaving and shamed her for returning. In a way, the predictability of her mother’s response felt like a security blanket. Alice would have been thrown off if her parents had behaved in any way other than their strict, bigoted manner. The silence of her father in such matters often confused Alice. If he didn’t feel the same as her mother, then why didn’t he speak up? Why didn’t he put his foot down when her mother went too far? Instead, he just retreated into the shadows like a troubled narrator in a stage play, as if to say, But this is not my story to tell. He would retreat into the orchard to trim and measure and try to make sense of things alone. Meanwhile the door to her room shut behind Alice and was locked, her mother’s footsteps resounding hard as they retreated down the hallway. As Alice lay back on her bed, the little baby flipped around like the salmon she’d killed.

  A package had come for Alice while she was away in the forest, “flaunting her heathen ways before God and nature,” as her mother had said. After her mother had already gone to bed, Alice heard the bolt slowly unlatch from the outside, and her father slipped in with the package tucked under one arm. He handed it to her in the cover of dark and whispered, “From your friend Sal. I saved it from the incinerator. Don’t tell your mother and keep it hidden under your bed.”

  “But why does a present from my best friend have to be secret, Dad?” Alice whispered, made bold by the dim light, as she glanced at the return address.

  “I’m not sure, hon. You know how she is. Best not to poke the beast.”

  He slipped out and latched the door gently from the outside. Alice sat up, turned on a desk lamp, and examined the package. It had been half-opened, presumably to make sure it wasn’t drugs, pornography, or worse. The postmark read Needles, Arizona. She finished unwrapping the brown paper and unpacked the box stuffed and well padded by little Styrofoam peanuts and wadded-up newspaper. She tore the wrapping the rest of the way to reveal a little antique beveled collection box with velvet lining and little wooden dividers separating bird eggs into their own sections. Some were big and speckled, others small, smooth or taupe. One egg was no larger than a curled-up potato bug. The great variety of sizes, colors, and shapes brought a smile to Alice’s face. A little card inside read simply:

  Thinking of you.

  Love,

  Sal

  The baby fluttered excitedly in her belly as she laid her finger on the smooth surface of the largest egg. Alice placed the collection on the shelf and looked out her bedroom window over the green belt in the direction of the ocean, remembering what it was like to be out there in the wild, to be in bloom. Regret flowed through her. She should have at least made it to the ocean before she came back to her prison cell. Her parents had never taken her to the beach and she had always wondered what kind of salty magic might be held in the place where such vast, watery mystery met the shore. Why had she not asked Boomer to take her there before returning to the orchard? She put her hand on her belly and promised the littlest of birds, her very own, that she would help it find patches of salmonberry and seek that thing in life that would make it feel alive, always. She would help it fledge and learn to fly, even if someday that meant it would fly away from her.

  Waking

  Burning Woods, Oregon, 1983

  Alice’s parents died one after the other, their exits from the earth like one tree falling in the forest and knocking the other flat to the ground in its wake. First it was her father who died of a heart attack while working the rows, and then her mother one week later of an unknown ailment resembling—the romantics postulated—heartbreak. Others blamed her mother’s passing on shock. Alice secretly wondered if her mother hadn’t given up the ghost on purpose, as she had found an almost empty, small bottle of arsenic inexplicably mingling among the cordials and sweet wines in the cabinet after their passing. To compound the mystery, her mother had drunk more raspberry wine in the week after her husband’s passing than in the rest of her life combined. Inebriated one night, she grabbed Alice by the arm and almost told Alice she loved her. Instead, she looked into her face and asked very seriously if Alice planned to do all her chores for the week or just laze about like a damn cat all day. Holding the little bottle in her hands, Alice remembered the mad gleam in her mother’s eyes as she asked this inane question, then Alice threw the poison bottle in the trash and put the idea out of her head. There were plans to be made, boxes to be filled, and funerals to plan.

  Before their deaths, Alice’s parents had taken on a significant role in raising her young daughter. But an infantilized Alice had always struggled with their dominion over Lily. They told Lily that God’s wrath was full of fury. Alice would whisper to her before bed that God was a jokester, for how else could one explain things like giraffes, four-leaf clovers, or love? Her parents told Lily she had to eat her liver even though it made her gag. Alice passed her a small ziplock bag under the table and, before they got up, tucked all the chewed up liver pieces away in her cardigan pocket to dispose of later. She was more like a big sister to Lily than a mother. So when they died, Alice spent a lot of mornings looking into the mirror and telling herself she was going to be fine, that it was time for her to become a woman, to become
a mother. On the outside she was ready to take on the role, but a kernel of doubt stayed planted deep within.

  She projected a confident, womanly countenance to the nosy, overly dramatic people of Burning Woods. She let them know that she was in control by the way she steeled her face when they rolled out their condolences, and with them an array of their own anxieties. It seemed to Alice that each person projected their own sense of mortality and experience on her parents as they whispered the story over and over in grocery lines or after church. It became a sort of absurd game of telephone as the tale stretched and evolved and moved from ear to ear. Alice kept her face stoic, steady. She stopped going to church and whisked her way through the store like she was on a mission.

  People who hardly knew the family speculated on every minor detail of their passing. It is in this perverse way that the newly dead spin into fame. But in a world of mill accidents, logging mishaps, farming imbroglios, and assorted other hardscrabble exits from the earthly plane, the passing of two young grandparents in succession ultimately was not completely out of the ordinary. They were just two more grandparents led back to the earth—or, in the parlance of their church, to their maker. In death, theirs was a dramatic fifteen minutes of fame.