The Book of Dead Birds

by Gayle Brandeis

  Albino Cockatiel, Name: Man Jang.

  Ava, daughter, age 14,

  see bird look at self in window.

  She find Sun’s old face make up

  under my bed, put in birdcage,

  circle open like a shell.

  He love mirror inside,

  bob head up and down,

  watch white feathers

  flick and spread on top.

  Next day he tip over, pink dust

  all over cheek. Maybe he try

  to eat powder and choke.

  Maybe sun hit mirror

  and burn him with too much light.

  5/17/85

  I don’t know where I should be right now. Part of me wants to go back to San Diego. Being here is ridiculous—so much death. The woman, the birds. The birds I haven’t helped yet. And how can I go back to San Diego if I haven’t helped the birds? And how can I stay here, walking around by myself on the beach, knowing some murderer is out there? Darryl probably has people teaming up now. He probably won’t let anyone go out on their own. Maybe he’d volunteer to come with me on my rounds…

  I want to see what’s going on at the hospital, but I can’t seem to get out of bed. I can’t seem to answer the phone, even though it rings several times, even though I know it may finally be my mother, finally calling me back. Frieda eventually comes over to check on me.

  “It’s a shame, what happened to that girl.” She puts a Tupper-ware batch of chicken and rice soup in the fridge for me to microwave later. Her hands still smell of broth when she comes over to the bed.

  “And, Ava.” Frieda’s breath smells of broth, too; it wafts over me like a chicken-scented humidifier. “It’s a shame you had to find her, but life goes on, honey…”

  I bury my head beneath the pillow. Frieda pulls it off.

  “We’re all scared, Ava, all of us. There’s still a killer out there somewhere. Emily’s gone near out of her mind with fear, and what’s that gonna do for us? Nothing. Nothing! Lying around feeling sorry for yourself isn’t gonna help that girl you found none. She’s gone. We here gotta keep on living, even with some maniac running around. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and get out of that bed!” Frieda slaps a hand against my blanketed thigh.

  I keep my eyes closed as my body gently rocks on the bed from the reverberation of Frieda’s slap. I don’t think it’s myself I’m feeling sorry for. I think of my mother, the blank look on her face when she read about the prostitute killed in Korea. I remember the way she closed her bedroom door behind her.

  “Ava, open your eyes.” Frieda shakes me by the arms, but I can barely feel it. “Snap out of it! We need your help.”

  I let my eyelids slide open; they feel like they are about a mile long the way they drag over my irises.

  “What kind of help could I possibly give you?” I ask Frieda before I flip onto my stomach. So far I’ve only helped the statistics people, the cleanup people. I exhale loudly into the musty sheets.

  “You know that kung fu stuff, right?” Frieda asks. I roll back over and sit up. Frieda cocks a knowing, penciled-on eyebrow.

  Now, every Tuesday and Thursday morning in the Aloha Room after the regular breakfast crowd leaves, I find myself teaching tae kwon do lessons for women. At around ten, Frieda shoos Ray out of the restaurant and puts a cardboard sign on the door that says CLOSED FOR SELF-DEFENSE PURPOSES, under which Emily has scrawled “Yea, we girls are gonna kick your butt!” Someone else has crossed out “girls” and written “WOMEN!” over it with a green pen.

  The regular group, besides Frieda and Emily, consists of four women in their sixties—Betty, Pat, Myrna, and Sue, who normally play bridge those mornings but decided to try something new; Lonnie, a gravelly-voiced park ranger; and Rayanne, who owns the Pretty Poodle grooming shop in Salton City and looks a bit like a poodle herself.

  I have never taught a self-defense class before. I have never taken a strictly self-defense class before, just the straight martial art. I hope the women in her class can’t sense how lost I feel.

  I start each session with a formal bow, just as all of my tae kwon do classes have begun. The bowing atmosphere in the Aloha Room is vastly different from that at the dojang. I remember how solemn the bows had felt there, how quiet, and almost sacred. Here, the bowing is accompanied by a bunch of groans and “Oh, my back!’s,” plus pseudo-Asian voices saying “Ah so,” and variations on “Confucius say bend over.” I consider scrapping the whole bowing thing but can’t bring myself to do it. I bow even when I practice by myself.

  The bridge ladies, in their soft pastel jogging suits, are surprisingly intense once it comes time to do the hyungs, the forms. I would not want to be cornered by them in a dark alley. Frieda, still wearing her Hawaiian shirt, is amazingly focused, too, although her blocks and punches lack a lot of oomph; she looks more like she is dancing than learning how to protect herself. Emily spends much of the time with her hands on her hips, exasperated, which is strange, since she is a tap dancer and must be at least somewhat coordinated. Short, stocky, windburned, Lonnie is almost frightening in her ferocity; she lets out harsh yells with every kick and punch, like someone from a Godzilla movie, if not the monster itself. Rayanne looks near tears half the time and approaches each new form with timid hands and feet, a poodle trying to avoid a puddle.

  “So when are we gonna start the fighting?” Frieda asks one Thursday morning, after an hour of hyungs. “We’ve just been kicking the air…”

  “Yeah, we could beat up a light breeze just fine, is about it,” adds Emily, who hasn’t even been beating up the air very much.

  “I wanna feel some booty under my foot!” Frieda slaps Emily’s hand.

  “Sparring is kind of tricky,” I hesitate. “You have to be really careful not to hurt the other person. It takes a while to learn the kind of control you need—you have to use full power, but deflect it, not use it on the other person, pull away before you hit.”

  “Kind of like Rick,” says Emily. “He needs to work on that—he always says he’s gonna pull out in time, but sometimes he just can’t control himself, you know how he is. It’s a good thing I can clench myself up tight in there, so those sperms of his don’t get through.”

  “Clenching isn’t gonna stop any babies from starting, sweetie pie,” Frieda says. “You need to get that boy some condoms.”

  “Do you mind?” Rayanne blanches, puts a thin hand over her pursed mouth.

  “Well, this is a protection class, is it not?” Frieda demands. “We gals gotta look out for each other.”

  “Besides.” I clear my throat, try to veer the conversation back into its original direction. “We need some mats. This floor is too hard for sparring.”

  “I know a gym teacher down at the high school in Indio,” says Lonnie. “I’m sure we could drag some mats over here, no problem.”

  “You look into that,” I tell her, “but we still need to work on our forms some more before we start getting at it.”

  There is a collective groan.

  “This is important. We don’t want to hurt each other, right?”

  “Couldn’t we get one of those guys that dress up in big foam suits with a big foam head and everything and you can just pummel away at ’em and they don’t feel a thing?” Frieda asks. “I saw one on a rerun. Roseanne, I think.”

  “Yeah,” a few other voices murmur. The bridge ladies nod in assent.

  “I don’t know where we’d find a costume like that,” I say.

  “Well, I volunteer Rick, costume or no,” says Emily.

  Frieda slaps Emily’s hand again, then looks at her watch. “Okay, girls,” she says, “time to clear out. I gotta start the lunch stuff.”

  The crowd of women suddenly disperse, like a drop of dye spattered onto water.

  “Hey,” I call out, “we haven’t done our closing bow!” But no one hears me. The bridge ladies are already out the door, and Lonnie and Rayanne are struggling with their shoes. Frieda and Emily have disappeared into the
kitchen. As the grill hisses on, sending the hot smell of grease into the air, I bow to the plastic hula woman who swivels from the ceiling, slightly deflated, her left foot almost flat as she bows subtly back.

  A couple of nights later, Emily and Frieda invite me to join them for cards at Emily’s place. I’m not much of a card person—my mother often played the flower card game, just never with me—but I say yes, if only to avoid another nervous evening alone in the trailer. I’m surprised by how nice it is to spend time with other people, surprised by how sad I was when I found out that Abby went back to Colorado shortly after the body was found. I’ve never been much of a people person before. Maybe the birds are shoving me into human company.

  At the faux-wood laminated table, Emily is holding an open package of ramen. She crunches a corner of stiff, pale noodles off the folded block, still in their cellophane wrapper. The foil flavor packet peeks precariously out of the corner. Either it will fall or Emily will bite into it by accident and get a mouth full of monosodium glutamate.

  “I didn’t know you could eat ramen raw,” I tell her.

  “It’s not raw, exactly.” Emily’s teeth pass through the noodles with a sound I wish I could sample. It could be used for part of an iceberg breaking off, or someone walking on leaves. I have to remember to carry my little recorder with me at all times. “It’s already fried and everything. It’s just faster this way.”

  “Ramen only takes three minutes to cook, Emily.” Frieda shakes her head as she shuffles the deck of cards.

  “I just like it, okay?” Emily crumbles off a chunk of noodle, holds out her hand to offer it to anyone. Frieda and I decline. “Plus they’re cheap—eleven cents a pop, cheaper than those chow mein noodles, and it’s pretty much the same thing. So deal already.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” says Frieda.

  “You don’t know if you can what?” Emily washes the dry noodles down with a swig from her bottle of peach wine cooler.

  “Deal with your ramen-eating shenanigans.” Frieda sounds mournful.

  “Deal the cards, you idiot!” Emily sits down. A spray of hard white crumbs land on the table in front of her as she rubs her hands together. “I wanna take you girls for all I can get.”

  I wonder how many packets of ramen noodles I have consumed in my lifetime. They were a staple in my house growing up—sometimes my mother and I had them for dinner every night of the week, sometimes with a bit of Buddig’s paper-thin lunch-meat turkey, the cheapest meat we could find, sliced in. This was usually after there had been a sting at the massage parlor where my mother worked, when she went for weeks without pay before the business opened up again in another location. When I was ten, she stayed in jail for two days after one of those stings. I pooled all of my change together and bought eight packs of ramen at Lucky’s so that I would have something to eat until she came home. I avoid ramen whenever possible now.

  Frieda dusts some of the crumbles off the scratched-up table and dives into the card game with a fierceness I have not seen in her before, certainly not in self-defense class. I have trouble focusing on the cards—the smell of the noodles between Emily’s teeth is too distracting—and I’m quickly out, owing three dollars.

  I drift away from the table, leaving Emily and Frieda to battle to the death themselves. I look at the knickknacks in the china cabinet—Precious Times figurines, little blonde angel babies—the dusty silk flowers, the Miss Tomato ribbon, a Kmart portrait of Emily with her boyfriend, his hand up her shirt.

  I step outside. The sky is clear, the smog swept away by a warm breeze that makes the palm trees sway gently. They look like women dancing while they do the dishes—humming a little tune, not performing, not even aware they are moving, just following the music in their heads, their hands full of suds. A few orangey dates, too small to eat, are strewn about on the ground. I roll one around with the toe of my sandal. Somewhere a bird calls out, a sweet, healthy cry, and I try to telepathically tell it to fly away, get out of here; this place won’t support your song.

  “It’s hot out here.” Emily steps outside. She lifts her arms over her head, as if to take the heat in, and I catch a whiff of her deodorant and the sweat it isn’t entirely preventing. Emily wiggles around a bit, like the palm trees, but I can tell Emily is conscious of her own little dance. Emily is used to being watched, and she moves accordingly, sashaying her hips from side to side as she climbs a few stairs when a man is behind her, throwing her head back to laugh when some guy tells a joke, bending her leg up onto the chair, so whoever it is can get a peek of her panties. She holds a wine cooler out to me, and I take it hesitantly, twist off the top. It is sickeningly sweet, but it is cold.

  “Where’s Frieda?” I pick at the label on the bottle.

  “She’s cleaning up.”

  “You let Frieda clean up your house?”

  Emily takes a swig. “I sure as hell don’t like to do it.”

  We sit down on the small concrete platform by the front door.

  “The stars are amazing tonight.” I look at my bottle. The wine looks like it is glowing inside, radioactive, the way Emily’s porch lantern shines through it. The bubbles stream up like shooting stars.

  “That’s Cassiopeia up there,” Emily points out. “And Cygnus, the swan.”

  I look up and lift my bottle to the sky, sending a toast to all the swans in Estonia. I wonder how they are doing—the news never followed up on the story, and the Estonian consulate never answered my letter. I hope they are faring better than my poor pelicans.

  “Plus the dippers are out, Ursa Major and Minor.” Emily’s hot pink fingernail skitters around more. “And Draco’s right there, too.”

  “How do you know so much about stars?” I ask.

  “Well, actually…” Emily arches her back to see the sky better, and probably to stick up her breasts, although if it is for my benefit, it isn’t working. All it does is show me the line of sweat beneath them on Emily’s neon-green tank top. “I don’t know if I told you how I lived in San Bernardino for a while?”

  I shake my head.

  “I was living with this guy who owned a billiards and bar stools store, Kenny. I worked there part time for a while. My main thing was to wear these little skirts and bend over the pool tables. I sold a lot of pool tables.” Emily demonstrates, sticking the back of her white shorts into my face.

  “I’ll bet.” I turn away, swallow down some more of the sweet wine while Emily sits back down.

  “Kenny was very into me making something of myself, you know? So I took some classes at the junior college. I signed up for world history or something or other and film appreciation—like you have to go to college to learn how to watch a movie! I flunked out, though. The classes were at the same time as my soaps.”

  “Hmm.” I can feel the alcohol kicking in; I don’t drink very often. My shoulder blades tingle.

  “Kenny was furious. He said how am I going to be an educated woman if I don’t go to class? So I signed up for this class—I thought it was cosmetology, you know, makeup and all that? So I signed up, but when I went to the first class it wasn’t about lipstick or hair care or anything!”

  “What was it?”

  “It was cosmology.” Emily shakes her head and laughs. “Stars. The universe and shit.”

  “And you took the class?”

  “The teacher was cute. We did it in the planetarium this one time. He put on the stars and everything. It was cool.”

  “And you learned a lot?”

  “I got a B, but that’s only because I didn’t do the homework. He told me if I was as good a student as I was a lay, he would have given me an A-plus-plus!” Emily lights up a cigarette, obviously pleased with herself.

  “What about Kenny?”

  “That asshole? I found him doing it on a pool table with this floozy from accounting. She didn’t even look good in a short skirt!”

  “Well…” I don’t know what to say.

  “So I moved back here. I figured that’
s all the bettering of myself I needed to do.”

  “I see…”

  “So anyway, that’s the Corona Borealis.” Emily points back up at the stars with her cigarette. The lit end of it whizzes like a comet in front of my face. I wonder if I should ask her about the two constellations that supposedly come together once every summer, the ones from the Korean folktale about the star-crossed lovers who can only see each other when birds form a bridge across the Milky Way.

  The screen door suddenly opens against our backs. Emily and I scoot out of the way to let Frieda through.

  “Jeez, it’s hot out here,” she says. “Why don’t you girls come back inside?”

  “Just what I was thinking.” Emily throws her wine-cooler bottle out into the yard. It crashes against something, but Emily doesn’t seem to care. She just stubs out her cigarette, and with a swivel of hips she is back inside.

  “I think I’m going to head back home.” I stand up. “Tell Emily I said thanks for the hospitality.”

  “Will do, hon.” Frieda gives me a little hug. “You be careful now. Keep your keys out in front of you.”

  “Sure thing. See you tomorrow.”

  Frieda goes back inside. The screen door clinks behind her.

  I look for Emily’s bottle so that I can bring it home and put it in my recycling bin along with the bottle I have almost finished myself, but it had shattered in pieces on Emily’s green gravel yard. The force of it had taken part of the ear off one of Emily’s little gnome statues. I suddenly flash on Jeniece, her hearing aid. She must be with Ray tonight. I wonder what they do together—watch TV, play cards, build burial mounds?

  I look up again at the sky, my hands full of glass. I try, and fail, to find the swan again before I get into the car.

  The ride home is a bit squirrelly; I try to focus on the road, but I feel like the tires are sliding over ice. By the time I make it back to the trailer, my mouth is completely dry. I pound down a glass of ginger lemonade, then a glass of water, but it doesn’t help. My thirst doesn’t feel connected to my tongue, the back of my throat; it’s a tipsy thirst that shoots through my bones.