The Absence of Sparrows

by Kurt Kirchmeier

  “It just won’t,” I told him. It couldn’t.

  Pete picked up one of the cases of soup cans and made a face. “Chowder?”

  “Most of the good stuff was gone.”

  “Already?”

  I shrugged again.

  “I hate chowder,” he complained.

  “Me too,” I said.

  We took the stuff inside.

  An hour went by, and still we had power and light. Dad talked to somebody over the phone, probably one of the farmers he sold insurance to. When he got off he said that Paulson was in the clear now, and that the glass storm had apparently veered off east before unraveling.

  That was the word he used: unraveling. I imagined the darkness coming untangled like so many dark threads from a ball.

  Mom breathed a sigh of relief. Pete seemed strangely disappointed.

  “I just wanted to see it,” he explained. “I didn’t want it to go right over us or anything.”

  Uncle Dean returned with only a single jerry can, his jaw clenched in anger.

  “What’s wrong?” Dad asked him.

  “Someone broke into my shop last night,” he said. “Took the generator and some of my tools. Only left me with one bloody jerry can. Busted into my pop machine as well.”

  “What?” said Dad. “Are you kidding me? Did you report it to Wayne yet?” Constable Wayne Sheery, he meant. Dad and Uncle Dean were both friends with him, and he came over sometimes for coffee or barbecues.

  Uncle Dean nodded. “Doubt it’ll do me much good, though.”

  “Who on earth would do such a thing?” Mom asked, at which point Pete and I shared a look, our minds both zeroing in on a pair of identical faces. Pete turned to Uncle Dean.

  “Lester and Lars,” he said. “I bet it was them.”

  Dad started to say something about how we had to be careful when it came to throwing around accusations, but Uncle Dean narrowed his eyes and said, “The Messam boys? Why would you say that?”

  “We saw them last night on their bikes,” said Pete. “Riding around.”

  “When?” asked Uncle Dean.

  “When Dad went to pick you up.”

  Uncle Dean turned to Dad. “They might have seen me in your truck. If they did, they would’ve known that I wouldn’t be at home.”

  Uncle Dean didn’t just work at the shop; he lived there, too, in a tiny low-ceilinged apartment right above it.

  “Possibly,” Dad admitted. “Still, we can’t just go over there and start pointing fingers. James is liable to point something back at us if we do.”

  A gun, he meant. James Messam was ex-army, and a drinker, too.

  “That man is dangerous,” said Mom. “Just leave it to Wayne.”

  “There’s nothing Wayne can do,” Uncle Dean replied. “Two boys riding their bikes isn’t exactly evidence.”

  “No,” Dad agreed. “It isn’t. It could’ve been someone else, too. We don’t know for sure.”

  Pete was convinced, though. Later that night he looked at me and said, “We can’t just let them get away with it. They already get away with everything.”

  I almost asked him what we could do, but then I stopped myself. I was scared that he might have an answer.

  FOURTEEN

  The next day brought with it more blackouts and more shattered bodies, but not much new in the way of actual information. Griever’s Mill escaped being hit again, and Paulson was spared this time, too, although the impact from yesterday’s storm was still being felt by everyone there. Sixteen people had turned to glass, with two of them shattering just a few hours later. The rest remained intact.

  Politicians made more speeches, asking everyone to please remain calm, to keep the peace and trust that those in charge would get to the bottom of things, to which Dad scoffed. “That’ll be the day, when I put my trust in a politician.”

  Uncle Dean went down to the police station to do a follow-up and to give a full account of everything that had been taken in the break-in. He mentioned the Messams while he was there, but was told that there probably wasn’t much to be done without any proof. Constable Sheery said he could talk to the twins, but that was it. He couldn’t even look around their property without a warrant. His hands were pretty much tied.

  “Fat load of good just talking to them is going to do,” said Pete. He was sweating and breathing hard from swinging an ax.

  Dad had given us the task of building up the woodpile alongside the garage. I think he thought if he kept us busy, we’d worry less about what was going on. But for me it had the opposite effect. It wasn’t just the glass plague that I had to worry about now, but also the possibility of accidentally hacking off my toes. Not that that was likely to happen with Pete doing all the work, mind you. I offered to take a turn, but he said he was fine. I could tell that the gears were turning inside his brain.

  He set another log up on the cutting block and gave it a whack, catching only the edge this time instead of the center. A splinter of bark went flying into the garage wall and almost hit me on the way by, while the rest of the log tipped sideways off the block. It was a lazy swing. Pete was getting tired.

  “Gimme that,” I said.

  He ignored me, and instead just put the head of the ax to the ground, leaning his weight on the handle.

  “We’re gonna have to get it back ourselves,” he told me.

  “What?” I asked him. “The generator? Are you crazy?”

  “We’ll need it if the power goes out for good.”

  “Who says it’s gonna go out for good?”

  “Nobody,” he replied. “But it might. The guy on the radio says it’s possible.”

  I rolled my eyes. “As if he’d know. He’s just a reporter.”

  Pete shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not this guy.”

  He explained that he’d found a new station, one that he hadn’t been able to tune in to before. Apparently it was just one person talking, mostly about the glass plague.

  “You can tell he’s smart,” said Pete. “And not just smart like a schoolteacher, but really smart, like a genius.”

  I didn’t have much trust in Pete’s ability to tell a genius from a nutball. One thing I did trust, however, was my gut when it came to the Messams, and my gut was telling me that even if the twins did steal Uncle Dean’s generator, it might be best just to let them have it. I said as much.

  “That’s the problem,” Pete replied. “Everyone is so scared of the twins that they can get away with whatever they want to. And their dad is just as bad, maybe even worse. This is our chance to teach them a lesson. To show them once and for all that we’re not going to take it anymore.”

  I shook my head. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “They’d kill us!” I said.

  “Only if we get caught,” Pete replied, talking now as if the plan were already a go and we just had to work out a few small details, like how to stay alive and out of the hospital.

  “We’ll just have to be quiet and fast,” he went on. “Like ninjas.”

  “Ninjas carrying a generator,” I reminded him. “And that’s if we even could carry it. Those things aren’t exactly light, you know.”

  “It’ll be fine,” he assured me. “We’ll take the little red wagon with us. It’s still in the garage.”

  “The wagon?” I said doubtfully. “No way, it’s too small.” As far as I knew, it had never carried anything heavier than the twenty pounds of flyers that Pete and I used to deliver every Saturday morning.

  “It’ll work,” Pete insisted. “I’ll pull and you can push.”

  “I’m not pushing anything,” I told him. As far as I was concerned, the whole idea was nuts.

  Pete just stared at me for a moment. “So you’re going to make me go on my own?”

  “I’m not making you do anything,” I said. “There’s no point in you going either, not by yourself. You won’t be able to get it without me.”

  “I could see if it was there at least,” he said. “And if it is, t
hen maybe I could make an anonymous tip to Constable Sheery.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said.

  He shrugged, then hefted the ax again and reset the log on the cutting block. “Never mind,” he told me. “It’s fine. Stay home if you want to. It’s not like I really believed that you’d come anyway.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He raised the ax and brought it down hard, splitting the log clean through the middle. “I just knew you’d be too scared is all.”

  “Don’t be like that,” I said, crossing my arms.

  “Like what?” he asked, all innocent.

  “You know what.”

  He shrugged again. “I’m just saying, somebody needs to do something.”

  We stared at each other for a second, him with his ax and his sweaty forehead, me with my arms crossed in front of me.

  “If I come,” I finally said, “then you have to promise me that we’ll just look. That means no wagon. We’ll take our bikes instead, and if the generator is there, we’ll do like you said before and give Constable Sheery an anonymous tip.”

  Pete wasn’t exactly used to letting me have my way, so he hesitated for a second before agreeing.

  “All right,” he said, “we’ll just look around.”

  “Promise?”

  He nodded. “I promise.”

  “Pinky swear?” I asked him.

  He pinky swore.

  “When?” I asked him, hoping he’d say tomorrow or maybe the next day, time enough for something to change his mind.

  Instead, he said, “Tonight, after everyone is sleeping. We’ll sneak out. Just be ready.”

  He handed me the ax and then went inside, leaving me to wonder what I had just gotten myself into.

  FIFTEEN

  As much as I loved birds, there was one that I actually used to have recurring nightmares about. The bird was a loggerhead shrike, and in my dream it stood nine feet tall instead of nine inches, its hooked bill like some Dark Age tool wrought from the blackest iron, meant for carving flesh.

  Pete was always in the dream with me, both of us hanging in a jungle of giant thorns by the collars of our shirts, the air thick with heavy white fog. The thorns all around us were slick with blood, and flies the size of footballs buzzed past our heads.

  The shrike was never there at first, so the dream always started the same, with a moment of pure confusion about where I was and how I’d gotten there. I’d reach back to feel the thorn through my shirt, and then turn my head sideways to find Pete beside me, not thrashing in the hopes of escape, as I always expected he would be, but simply hanging there like a wet towel, with tears running down from his eyes, knowing, it seemed, that there wasn’t any point in struggling or screaming. That the two of us were doomed no matter what.

  “Pete!” I’d yell at him. “Pete!” And then he’d look up at me with an expression of absolute hopelessness, while the shrike would pass overhead, its shadow just barely visible through the haze. A moment would go by, and then the shadow would appear again, this time settling right above us as the bird came to perch.

  I’d hold my breath in the hopes that it might not hear me, that it might not realize I was there, but then it would occur to me that the bird must already know, and that the reason we were hanging on thorns was because it put us there, for a later meal. I’d feel myself shaking, my heart pounding, and then the hooked bill would suddenly slice down through the fog, the bird’s masked eyes looking first at Pete and then at me, the motion almost reptilian in its jerkiness. It wasn’t just looking, but trying to decide who to eat first. Thankfully, I always woke up before it made its choice.

  This was no thanks to Pete, though, who was usually already awake and looking over at me from his own bed, my nightmare groans and my thrashing under my covers having stirred him from his own dreams, which were probably about scoring overtime goals or reeling in trophy-sized northern pike.

  I’d sit up in my bed with my heart still banging, awash in residual terror but also relief. Embarrassment and anger would quickly follow. I couldn’t understand why Pete never woke me up, why he always just watched and waited. I figured it was maybe spite, that he was letting me suffer in order to get back at me for interrupting his own sleep. Eventually I asked him.

  “I figure if you get to the end of the dream, then maybe you’ll stop having it,” he told me simply. This was before he understood what the dream even was. I hadn’t told him for fear that he’d laugh at me, which he did when I finally shared.

  “A bird?!” he said, totally mystified. “That’s what you’ve been having nightmares about?”

  “A giant bird!” I tried to explain. “One that impales things!”

  He was obviously having trouble getting past the image of a twittering songbird, the kind that might fill a Disney-inspired forest with cheerful warbles from an open perch, with not a single shrike-like predator to be seen. Even after I told him about how shrikes truly did impale things, he still shook his head and laughed, as if it only got funnier the more I talked about it.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have told you,” I finally said, but in the end I was glad that I did, not only because it felt good to get it off my chest, but because of something Pete asked me two days later.

  “I don’t get it,” he said, pretty much out of the blue. “Why would a bird impale things? I mean, what’s the point?”

  I didn’t know, which made me feel a little bit silly. Here I was having recurring nightmares about a bird that I hardly understood anything about.

  The truth was, I’d made a point of not learning about the shrike. All I knew was that they often impaled their prey on thorns and barbed-wire fences, and that their Latin name meant “butcher bird.” The only photo I’d ever seen of one was on page 91 in Mom’s field identification guide, a photo that showed not only the bird—black and white and gray with a distinctive bandit mask—but also a cute little mouse, just hanging there, impaled through its tiny neck. The mouse’s eyes were open and moist, and even in that tiny picture, which probably measured no more than two inches by two inches, it seemed as if light still shone there, as if the poor rodent were still alive.

  The picture reminded me of Vlad the Impaler, and the story of how he’d once taken his evening meal while out on the grounds of his fifteenth-century castle, surrounded by the skewered bodies of hundreds of enemies whom he had impaled on the sharpened trunks of sawed-off trees. He’d wanted to look at them and listen to their screaming while he ate.

  It was hard to believe that such a terrible story could actually be true, but according to my history teacher, Mr. Donner, it was. He taught us about it in class and finished the lesson by saying that Vlad the Impaler might have been the purest embodiment of cruelty that there ever was. I couldn’t help but agree with him, which I think was why the picture of the shrike and the mouse bothered me so much. It almost seemed like photographic proof that birds could be just as bad as we were, never mind that this didn’t fit with what I already understood about birds, how everything they did was out of economy, their every action a careful measure of energy gained versus energy spent.

  But maybe I hadn’t given shrikes a fair shot, and had taken their “butcher bird” reputation a little too literally. Clearly there had to be a purpose behind their morbid behavior. I just didn’t know what that purpose was. So I went to the library to do some research.

  I could’ve just stayed home and asked Mom, but I felt like this was something I had to learn on my own. Like it was important in a way that went beyond the simple absorption of ornithological facts.

  Shrikes, I discovered, had been unjustly vilified. The reason they impaled their prey could not have been simpler or any more innocent. It had to do with the talons on their feet. They weren’t designed like the talons found on larger birds of prey, so they weren’t particularly well suited for holding and gripping the things that they killed. This made it harder for shrikes to tear away edible pieces with their sharp bills. Impaling was jus
t their way of overcoming this disadvantage. It was kind of like a human using a fork to pin down a pork chop for his knife.

  I continued reading, and discovered that small rodents and songbirds actually made up only a fraction of a typical shrike’s diet. Mostly they just fed on insects, which didn’t require any impaling at all. They simply caught them and ate them, like thousands of other birds all around the world, including the plain old house sparrows that lived in our backyard.

  The more I learned, the more foolish I felt, and by the time I slid the books back into place on the alphabetized shelves, I had not only overcome any fear that I’d once had of the bandit-masked birds, but had also developed a newfound respect for them. Shrikes, I supposed, were sort of like the ghosts in a lot of horror movies. As soon as you understood who they actually were and what their reasons were for haunting in the first place, you couldn’t help but sympathize with them.

  I never had a shrike nightmare again. That ghost had moved on into the light, leaving me to wonder what other frightening things in life might be made less so with a little knowledge and understanding. I’d reconsidered the Messam twins, thinking how growing up with a violent father might have forced them down a path they could’ve otherwise avoided.

  I’d decided that the next time they zeroed in on me for a knuckle sandwich or an atomic wedgie, I would try to talk to them instead of running.

  Less than a week before my eleventh birthday, I got my chance.

  “Just wait!” I said as they cornered me in the boot room at school. “You don’t have to do this. Just because your dad is mean and angry all the time doesn’t mean you guys have to be, too. You can be better than that.” It came out precisely as I had rehearsed it, but the next part didn’t exactly go as planned.

  The twins stared at me as if pink and purple polka dots had just broken out all over my skin. Then they casually picked me up, flipped me upside down, and stuffed me into the nearest garbage can. With only my legs sticking out of the can, they tipped it onto its side and proceeded to roll me all the way across the playground and down the alley behind the school, occasionally kicking the garbage can and laughing all the way.