The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  The next morning, Lily squinted into the sun and put on her sunglasses as her mom drove her to school. From behind her glasses, she glanced sidelong resentment at her mother in the driver’s seat. Her mother’s stories just didn’t add up. It felt like a growing chasm of lies between them eating up the days with silence. They passed the grocery and the bait and tackle and, of course, Dickerson’s Feed and Seed, with its slick, expensive signage and line of glossy tractors in primary colors for sale in the yard. Grass may be gold in Burning Woods, but well, then, chemicals are diamonds. She had heard her generally quiet grandfather say this one evening after a hard day of spraying the orchard, his fingers stained blue from the fungicide. The Dickersons, of Dickerson Feed, Grain, and Fertilizer, were by far the wealthiest family in all of Benton County. They drove a fleet of Dodge dually pickups, and when they would stop at the only stoplight in downtown, they’d rev up all six cylinders under the hood to let everyone know they were there, the engine growling like it might devour whoever dared cross its path.

  Every morning in front of school, Dempsey and Todd Dickerson poured out the back door of the extended cab, all arms and legs swinging like two baboons, carrying their takeout breakfasts in paper bags. Their older brother, Slay—no one knew his real name—gunned the gas and took off like he was late for an important business meeting.

  As Lily and Alice drove up to the curb, Lily tried to adjust her sunglasses as if she could hide her identity from the boys sitting up high on a cement wall, swinging their legs, punching each other, and laughing. As she passed the boys on her way into school, she half expected feces to be flung.

  “Hey, your mom was in the other day buyin’ pesticides. I thought hippie freaks didn’t use that stuff.”

  Lily raised her sunglasses on top of her head and looked back at her mom idling in her diminutive aqua truck, clearly straining out the window to hear the exchange but pretending to check out something on the side mirror. Her hair was pulled back tight in two braids, but the blonde fringe around her face surfed the wind coming in the window like it was trolling for trouble. Lily glanced back and could swear Alice was flexing her biceps.

  “Boys,” she paused. “It’s way too early to talk shop.”

  Both Dempsey and Todd held sixty-ounce sodas and looked like they were on meth, they were so jacked up on caffeine, despite it being only 7:43 a.m.

  “Well, tell your mom she can come by any time and I’ll give her a personal tour of the feed barn,” Dempsey, a fifth-year senior, said, nudging his younger brother.

  “I’ll be sure not to do that,” Lily said, lamenting the weak comeback.

  “Not!” the boys pounced on her weakness. “I thought you were like a brain or something. Where’s that brain now?”

  The boys took synchronized pulls off their sodas and filled their cheeks to capacity without swallowing. Lily felt justifiably worried they might spray down upon her a fine mist of whatever disgusting drink they held in their cheeks when Max came out of the front doors. He was wearing dark jeans and a tight, black vintage shirt printed with a bouquet of wildflowers underscored by the word Montana in pink. He squinted his eyes at all three of them, assessing the situation. Lily’s chest tightened at the mere sight of him.

  “Dickerson central out here,” he said. “Tell me, guys, is it true that ‘erson’ means limp? Or is my Old English slightly off?”

  The second bell rang and the hall monitor waved everyone inside, the Dickerson boys swallowing the warm liquid they’d been saving in their cheeks and mumbling something inaudible in baboon speak before jumping off the wall, throwing their emptied cups into the trash with two close-range cheater jump shots before walking inside.

  “Thanks, flower,” Lily said. Max smiled. “All of nerd-kind is reaping the rewards of your rain dance. Those dopes are totally afraid of you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said, putting his hand over his chest and bowing dramatically. Lily glanced back at the street and saw her mom still sitting in her truck watching them with a dark face as they walked inside the school doors.

  ◆

  When Max drove Lily home that afternoon, it was unseasonably warm and muggy. Birds sang in the trees with a manic intensity, like they had missed the memo that it was spring and were trying to catch up by performing double time. Lily smiled as they eased up her long gravel driveway, content with their emerging ritual rides home, but when they pulled up next to her mom’s parked truck, she noticed someone had crossed off the word “bicycle” on the bumper sticker and written in a childish font “blow job.” The message seemed little changed, as she imagined fish had little need for those either.

  She could just make out her mother spraying fungicide in the far orchard, dressed in head-to-toe protective gear, full blue suit and bonnet, face mask and booties. She waved them inside and came down off her ladder and across the orchard. Despite the voluminous blue suit, the urgency in her brisk movements was apparent.

  Once on the stoop, she was flushed and sweaty as she stripped off the suit and left it outside in a quarantined bin. She wore tiny jean shorts and a tank top with no bra that left little to the imagination. Lily was just relieved she was not entirely naked under the suit.

  “Hi, there. I’m Lily’s mom, but you can call me Alice,” she said, taking off her gloves one by one like an inspector.

  “I’m Max. Nice to meet you.” He stuck out his hand but she waved him off.

  “Poison fingers, sorry.” Alice waggled her fingers and went over to the sink to continue the conversation, yelling over the sound of the water as she washed her hands with goo from an orange container for what seemed like a very long time.

  “You spraying for bugs, then?” Max sort of yelled.

  “Not bugs that are the problem right now. Fungus. There’s a blight that has all the filbert growers up in a tizzy. We lost almost half our crop last year.”

  “Wow. Lame,” Max yelled, the word “lame” booming in the silence as Alice turned off the faucet.

  “Totally,” Alice said, smiling and leaning back against the sink. “My grandparents didn’t exactly choose the best land for growing filberts up here in the mountain foothills, but I suppose they didn’t really know any better back then.”

  “So the biome is better down in the oak savannah, then?” Max asked, almost in challenge.

  “I suppose the valley floor supports a stronger growing environment, yes.” Alice cocked her head to one side.

  The two locked eyes for what seemed like way, way too long to Lily. The two were in a sort of bio-speak battle. She glanced back and forth between the two of them, quietly mesmerized by her two closest people finally meeting. There was probably something she could say to break the silence, but she feared another “you bet your quarks, buddy” moment and chose silence instead, settling her feet on the carved lion paw feet under the table. It was her mom who finally wrested herself from the gaze of Max and went to open the fridge.

  “Juice, anyone?” She didn’t wait for a response and got three small handled mason jars down from the shelf. “I hate to use so many chemicals but it’s use them or lose them these days,” she said. “The world of filbert farming is just not what it used to be.”

  “I suppose that could be said of a lot of things,” Max said, sitting down at the table and crossing his hands in his lap demurely. “The unnecessary occupation of foreign countries, the recent Rwandan massacre, the greenhouse effect, what have you. It’s a messed-up world in general.”

  “I suppose it is now,” Alice said, looking pleased. “Would you like to stay for dinner, Max?” she asked in a hopeful, childlike way. Lily would bet money there was no hot meal planned to back up that offer. “Stay a while.” Alice waved in encouragement, having conceded the battle.

  “Thanks, but I have to be going. I have a date with my uncle to dehydrate an unfortunate elk. I’ll take a rain check, though.” He flashed them both hi
s widest smile.

  “Yes, do,” Alice said, and as the screen door closed behind him. “Don’t breathe too deep on your way out to your truck, dear,” she added.

  “See ya,” Lily said with raised, perturbed eyebrows long after he’d gone, digging a bobby pin into a preexisting rut in the wooden kitchen table.

  “Lily, don’t,” Alice said, swatting at her daughter’s hand.

  “No. YOU don’t,” Lily responded under her breath as her mom got the newspaper from the front porch, letting it fall on the table with a thud on her return.

  “Excuse me? Please, speak up.”

  “Mmm.” Lily put the bobby pin down but pressed the flesh of her thumb into the widening divot on the table. The table was so scratched and worn it must be have been hundred years old, she figured. When Lily was a kid, she used to hide under it when her grandmother and mom were fighting about boys, God, the righteous path, or whatever else they found to fight about, and she would play with the carved wooden lion paws, stroking them fondly. She would pretend that the table could come alive and carry her off into the forest where they would hunt rabbits together and the lion would raise her like its own cub. She concentrated and waited for the wood to turn to soft fur under her fingers. Then she would be free.

  “Wow. Freaking hot suit.” Alice interrupted Lily’s thoughts and fanned herself with the paper, inspecting the face of her sullen daughter but deciding to sidestep an argument. She chugged her juice before going to the fridge and refilling her glass with wine. “Seems like a nice boy, that Max.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Lily pretended to read the comics page.

  “Interesting and smart.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Handsome. With a bit of drama to him.”

  “Mmm. Hadn’t noticed his drama,” Lily said. “Whatever that means.”

  “Yeah right you hadn’t noticed.” Alice rolled up the rest of the newspaper and slapped her gently on the arm before heading to shower off the day, refilling her wine glass on the way. In the stairwell, she paused and leaned against the doorway, pushing her chest out like someone in a dirty movie.

  “Just be careful with that boy, Lily. Don’t do anything I would do.”

  “Mom. Gross.”

  “I just don’t want you making the same mistake I did.” She shook the rolled up newspaper like a long, pointing finger at her daughter.

  Lily raised her head slowly from her pretend fascination with the comics.

  “And I suppose I’m the mistake to which you refer?” She raised her nose and used their mutual mock professor voice with a combative question mark at the end.

  “You know what I mean. Don’t be smart.”

  “Can’t help it.” Lily returned her eyes to the paper. “I must have gotten it from Original Donnie.”

  Original Donnie was a useful moniker in distinguishing Lily’s biological father from Donnie Jr., her pet duck. Donnie Jr. had been a present from a traveling worker with stringy sun-bleached hair, named Lobo, who sold drums out of his VW Vanagon and had an unshakable scent of old curry. After working side by side in the orchard during one fall harvest, Lobo had it pretty bad for Alice. Lily had just turned seven, and at the end of harvest when the job was over and it was time to go, Lobo lingered a week or two, unpaid, half-assedly fixing things around the farm.

  One day, Lobo presented Alice with a duckling in a little ribbon-wrapped basket, a faint glimmer of hope in his watery blue eyes. But Alice could hardly stand to look at Lobo, as he reminded her of the long-gone but never forgotten weed-and-speed dealer who had assaulted her among the wraps and coats on the commune so long ago. She refused to eat strawberries, spurned any and all beers, and was certainly not about to date a doppelgänger to her rapist. She turned around and immediately regifted the duck to Lily, who squealed with joy. Then Alice told Lobo with certainty that it was time for him to hit the road.

  All Lily had been told at that point about her father was a name—Donnie—so she named the girl duck after her long-absent dad. Her mother remained tight-lipped and veiled about any other pertinent facts. As far as she was concerned, sitting in the long grass playing with her new downy duck, seven-year-old Lily felt a duck was as valid a replacement for her father as any creature on the planet. Donnie the duck would have to do.

  ◆

  That night in her bed, thinking about Alice and Max’s eye lock, Lily felt troubled. What she had overheard her mother saying to Darla started to settle into her brain for the first time: she was an unwanted child. Heavy thoughts settled under her thin lids. The moon was almost full and had the intensity of a searchlight, frozen and bright on her bed. Lily regarded her two partners in insomnia—a poster of a glowing zombie, almost animated in the moonlight, and a coyote on the far hill just beyond the orchard’s border winding his long song up toward the light in the sky. She thought about what should happen next in her life, and after rejecting a couple pretty good career options (fortune-teller, tattooed lady), she finally decided that she should probably continue on with her earlier plan to get Max drunk and make out with him. In the middle of the night with the cold moonlight on her face, it just seemed like the right thing to do. She had never been kissed, but she could imagine the lapping and swirling as clear as a Siuslaw River eddy.

  Making a plan helped to ease the burden. The blueprints for an evening of drinking and kissing developed quickly as she worked out the important elements on paper. She decided the liquor should be drunk out of teacups, that it would have to take place during the upcoming lunar eclipse to maximize romance, and that her outfit should not be too complicated to get into, but not too easy to get off, either. She drew diagrams and made lists. Undoubtedly, her classmates did not have such planning and foresight with their own first engagements with drinking and fucking. She had heard stories in the hallways at school of kids drinking electric-blue Boone’s Farms and doing donuts in their four-bys, then having sex in the back of oversized cabs or throwing up on each other, or sometimes, on off days, both.

  Naked Antiques

  Deep in the Mojave Desert, 1978

  Dear Alice,

  How have you been, my dear? How’s that little bean growing inside you? I’m down in western Arizona right now working for the USGS doing bird surveys. It’s hard work and a real strain on the body, which is starting to make me feel old way beyond my years. My bones ache. But still, I love my life, as it is the one I chose.

  Have you ever heard of the sacred datura? It is a plant that grows here in the Mojave Desert and is a powerful hallucinogen. Well, it’s too strong for most people to take it straight (remember how loopy I get off two pulls on a joint!), but another field tech told me about using the petals steeped in water to help with sore muscles, and so I decided to steep a bath tonight at the field house to ease my aching legs and back. Even though I’m not, I feel like I’m too old for this all-day off-trail trekking shit, I tell you. Post holing through the desert sand really puts strain on the ankles. Ha! I sound like such a Golden Girl. But which one? I’d like to think I’m Rose, but I’m probably Dorothy, right? Obviously, you are Blanche, you sexy lady, you.

  I digress! Back to the bath. I put the flowers and steeped them in the hot water before lowering my aching body into the tiny, cramped field house tub. What happened next was something that is hard for me to describe. I never quite had the way with words that you do, but I’ll try. The only way I can explain what happened is that I became a butterfly. As my muscles relaxed I suddenly felt as though I had these wings attached to my back. I knew that they had always been there, but I had just never noticed. When I got out of the bath, I let my wings flutter and dry and then I put my clothes back on and went out for a walk just before sunset. My skin sang in the warm winds and my wings bounced as I stepped over the uneven mesa. I walked along and let the strong oily scent of the creosote expanse fill my senses. I inhaled deeply and dragged my fingers through the
little tough bunches of leaves and stood in the warm breeze, feeling the relief of the sun dropping below the horizon. I stood there alone and content just listening to the desert breathing. And then suddenly, without warning, I felt this great emptiness within myself revealed. After that, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, I could feel you standing there with me. I thought to myself—I wish more than anything I could hold Alice in my arms right now. I wanted to wrap my new wings around us and cocoon us into the darkness. I wanted to fly away with you forever. Just then a sidewinder struck up its mechanical rattle nearby and brought me back into myself. The snake passed in front of me with its strange sideways slither and carried on into the darkness undisturbed. And just like that, my wings were gone.

  So here I sit in front of this piece of paper, writing this strange tale to my oldest and dearest friend. I’m not sure if it sounds crazy because spending so many hours alone in wild places has sort of dampened my ability to judge such things as what’s “appropriate” or “sane.” But I know that you will accept my tale and not ridicule me for it. You are the most accepting person I know and I miss you terribly and feel as though there is purpose in the different turns our lives have taken. I would love to see you again soon. Maybe after breeding season is over? I miss you something fierce.