Plumage (14 page)

“Well, damn it, if you hadn't dragged me off the minute we got in—”

“I thought I saw the parakeet.”

For a moment she thought he was actually going to rend his garment. Instead, he tore off his plastic apron and threw it on the ground. “
FUCK
the parakeet!” he cried when he could speak. “May a bird of paradise fly up the parakeet's nose! I wish I'd never heard of the goddamn parakeet, I wish I'd never seen the goddamn parakeet, I wish the goddamn parakeet never existed!”

Sassy opened her mouth to say that she wished the same, but realized, with a widening of her eyes, that it was not true.

“No,” said Racquel in a supreme frenzy of bitterness, “I wish I'd never met
you
. Chasing a Caro-fucking-lina fucking para-fucking-keet into a madland,” he added, subsiding somewhat, “and I'm eternally screwed.”

Despite the insults to her person, Sassy felt compunction. He deserved an explanation, she decided, regarding the para-fucking-keet. “Racquel,” she told him, “sit down.”

“On the goddamn ground?” But he sat, probably because he had worn himself out. Sassy made herself comfortable on the velvety moss and faced him.

“If I can tell you this,” she said, looking into his eyes, “I can tell you anything.”

She briefed him, fumbling for words to explain her predicament—a budgie in the mirror instead of herself? How could she expect him to care? It was laughable. Ludicrous. So ridiculous she could not look at him any longer as she spoke. She looked at her own hands, the celestial-blue polish chipping off her fingernails. But she felt him silently listening.

“Good Lord,” he said, very low, when she had more or less finished.

She took a long breath of relief because he was not laughing at her.

“That's scary,” he said.

She had not expected such understanding, especially given the mood he was in. He was so wonderful, damn him and his fancy feathers, he made her want to cry. She swallowed hard before she could speak, and she still didn't dare to look at him, lest she come undone. “All the folklore says that a person's reflection is the soul,” she said to the ground. “Like, a water spirit might snatch your reflection in a stream and take your soul away. Or in a room where someone died, the soul went into the mirror and you had to cover the mirror or it might take your soul too.”

“Stop it. You're giving me the shivers.”

“But do you believe me?” She still couldn't believe it.

“If I wasn't sitting here, I'd say no, you're crazy.”

She nodded. “I felt like I was crazy. Like there was nobody I could tell. I mean, where could I go for help? You don't go to your family doctor and say you're seeing a parakeet in the mirror. He would have put me in the wacky ward.”

“Sassy,” Racquel said, “look at me.”

She did; she looked at him, seeing maybe more than he wanted her to. There he sat in that drag-queen dress, and it wasn't even his best effort, a kind of muted red-orange taffeta-and-illusion thing with only a few lime-green feathers overlying the bustline. He couldn't compete with the courtship display Sassy had just witnessed. The birds weren't following him around today.

He gazed at her levelly. “Sassy,” he said, “I know there's something about mirrors. I mean, obviously. We're sitting here. But listen. As far as I'm concerned, if you're missing your soul, it's not the parakeet that took it away. It's that ghoulish ex-husband of yours.”

Mating season.

Kleet perched alone, well hidden amid treeplume, and did not sing. At this singproud pairdance time, Kleet felt his loneliness most keenly. It was always with him, for he had no flock and no hometree. There were many birds in the sweetleaf tree-tops, but in all his fledged life he had never seen another parakeet like himself. He remembered no nest, no motherkeet, no parentkeets of any kind. He remembered only flying through the forest and then the sojourn in the strange and wondrous hardair warmworld where there were many good things to eat and much music, songnotes out of strange textured nest-holes—and Deity.

Deity, his warm walking treebeing. His chest warmed and swelled at the thought, stirring his breastfeathers.

Yet—still, even after the advent of Deity, he had found no sweetkeet.

He had encountered no parakeets at all.

His breast quivered, and he offered to Deity a small chirp: *Please?*

Surely Deity—surely Deity could not mean him to live the rest of his life alone? Now that he had encountered Deity, surely all would come to him, surely he would find a female to make his life complete, surely she would allow him to touch bills with her and nibble at her headfeathers and display to her his plumage and strut flirt tease step on her tail and—mate with her—

All around Kleet, suntop treeplume rang with the caws and warblings and chirs and whistles and skreeks of wingmales calling for mates. But Kleet could no longer find courage to lift his head and sing forth his own sweetmate song.

*Please,* he asked Deity again very softly. *Please?*

Racquel was getting footsore, Sassy saw. He was limping. “It's not much farther,” she told him.

“You sure?”

“No,” she admitted. “Actually, I think we should be there by now.” She was trying to lead them to the waterfall-to-die-for and the river in which she had seen the head of Orpheus, faithful lover of Eurydice, drifting and singing. She was doing this not because Racquel had showed any interest in sightseeing, but in an attempt to locate the cowboy, or for that matter, anyone who spoke English. She hoped that a friendly native guide might be able to point them toward one or more of the items on the loose operating agenda they had agreed on, including, but not limited to, Find Food And Shelter, Find An Oval Mirror, Get Me The Hell Out of Here (Racquel's top priority) and Find Parakeet (Sassy's goal, but far down the list for Racquel, who continued to favor ear piercing as Sassy's next move toward establishing identity).

“Face it,” grumbled Racquel, picking his way ouchily over the moss, “we're lost.”

“Well, naturally. This is the forest for lost things.” Despite all common sense and her already-hungry belly, Sassy felt breezily at ease here, with sunlight sifting down gold into silvergreen shadows and birds flitting and singing all around. More—she felt profoundly at peace here, and loopily happy, so much so that her good humor was evident and Racquel was finding it hard to bear.

He scowled at her. “Give me a break.”

“Okay. We might as well sit down.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“But it's no use going on if we're lost.”

“We won't get anywhere by sitting on our butts!”

“Sit on the ground, then. Just sit already. I want to look at your feet.”

He rolled his eyes but did as she said. Sassy sat down also, lifted his sizable feet into her lap and studied the soles, suddenly and shamefully aware that she was not sure what color they should be on a black person. Was ecru the equivalent of pink? She didn't see any bleeding cuts, but there were some raw-looking patches. Racquel hadn't complained, but he had to be really hurting. “Look,” she said to him, “you stay here. I'll go back and get that plastic thing you left—”

Racquel gave her no opportunity to complete her thought, a vague one postulating plastic slippers. “No, you don't! You're not leaving me. I know how that goes.”

He spoke with such vehemence that she knew it would be no use to argue with him. She thought some more. “Well, we can pull off the hem of your dress—”

“We're not ruining my dress!”

She sighed, hitched out from under his feet, rose to her knees and for no conscious reason began to comb his long hair with her fingers. His eyes widened, but otherwise he did not react, so she kept combing. His hair was dry now, its texture pleasantly coarse, like that of a horse's tail. It made her think of the Rapunzel hair tech with many many braids, and because her fingers wanted to, she began to braid Racquel's hair.

After a minute he tilted his head back for her, and his shoulders eased downward, relaxing as Sassy braided tiny plaits around his face. She wished she had bright cotton strings or slim ribbons or something to wrap around them, but the braids stayed even though she had not even a thread to bind the ends. This should have surprised her, but did not; in this world small miracles seemed possible. Not far away, standing in the shadows, two tall white cranes were—voguing, that was what they were doing, in hypnotic slow motion, their long necks and great wings dipping and aspiring in the graceful postures of their dance. Right by Sassy's face something iridescent flashed by, then another in pursuit; there was a rainbow whirl and tussle in the air. Sassy did not look to see whether they were fighting or mating. Same thing sometimes. Anyway, she did not want to watch birds court or mate anymore. It hurt. She was finding too much of what she had lost.

Braiding, she worked her way around to the back of Racquel's head. He sighed. Not moving, he said slowly, as if to check his reality, “Anytime you look in a mirror, all you see is a blue parakeet?”

“Yes.”

“And other people's reflections are birds to you too? I'm a—whatchacallit?”

“Hornbill.”

“And that's how you knew I was—”

“Male. Yes.”

Silence. The rainbow wrestlers flew away. Above Sassy some bird was calling, calling. Intent on Racquel's head, she did not look up.

With just a hint of pathos Racquel asked, “What does a male hornbill look like?”

“Strikingly handsome,” Sassy replied at once, laying it on thick. “Savagely elegant. Shining black with bright barbaric wattles and an absolutely daring bill. And,” she added, “the most adorable eyelashes.”

Racquel contemplated this in silence as Sassy finished a fringe of braids around his neck. She had forgotten how much she liked braids. Maybe she'd grow her hair long, she thought, so that she could braid it every day. Old ladies were supposed to keep their hair short, but so what. She would wear hers long and gray and she would braid it in plaits and pigtails and buns over her ears and she would decorate it with yarn and flossy bows and fake flowers. And it would give her fits, probably. It would never be as thick and user-friendly as Racquel's. She plaited coils at his temples and there was still plenty of hair left to play with. She stroked it up to the top of his head and began French-braiding a sort of Heidi crown for him.

She asked him, “Do you have any brothers?”

“Two.”

“Older?” She was kind of hoping that he had one much older, a lot like him but of a masculine persuasion and maybe widowed.

“Younger.”

“Oh.” Damn. “Do you see them much?”

“No.”

The flat word dropped like a stone. Sassy could almost hear it cavitating all the birdsong in the air.

“I got nothing in common with them,” Racquel said more quietly. “They're brothers.”

It took Sassy a moment to figure this out. Of course his brothers were brothers—oh. “You mean like in a gang?”

“Street brothers, yeah.”

She didn't dare to ask anymore, but he went on anyway. “My parents, I got nothing in common with them either. I mean, they're okay, I see them at Christmas and whatever, but—we can't talk.”

Sassy picked up a tiny iridescent blue wingfeather from the ground and tucked it into his hair.

EIGHT

“Racquel,” Sassy asked, “what have you lost?”

“Huh?”

She stood still to give him a break from limping along after her. In the green twilight between the trees, deer grazed on the moss; one of them was pure white and looked soft-focus, as if it were posing for a Breck shampoo ad. Two ibises stood on the rocks like spirits; overhead two small pomegranate-colored birds fluttered and giggled, beak to beak, while others called, out of sight in the green labyrinth above. Sassy wondered whether Racquel was seeing it with the same yearning that she was, or even seeing the same scene. What he found depended on what he had lost, and she knew that he must have lost something; everyone has lost something. Life was loss, in her experience. “What are you finding?”

“
Huh
?”

“Here. In—”

“In this damn jungle?”

“It's not a jungle!”

“Yes, it is.” He glared at the deer. “Look at them. Graze, graze all day, but wait'll you lie down to sleep and they sneak up and stick their horns in you.” Before Sassy could recover from speechlessness, Racquel shifted his glare to the ibises. “Those ten-inch beaks, you know what they're for? They're for picking your liver out after the horny sneaks kill you.”

“Racquel, they are not!”

“Are too.”

“You big baby, nothing is going to hurt you!”

“Says who? What they got such big beaks for, then? I tell you, something is going to kill us if we don't die of starvation first.” His glare widened into a stare of desperation. “Tell you what. You grab one of those funny-looking birds, and I grab the other, and we wring their scrawny necks—”

“No!” Sassy recoiled from him the way she would rear back from a snake. “Don't say things like that!” Unthinkable to kill the bird-spirits of this paradise; didn't he know that?

“—make a fire,” Racquel was saying, “and—screw it, forget the fire, I'll eat them raw.”

“You're talking just like a man,” Sassy told him. Oddly, seeing him as a man made her willing to forgive him. Men were supposed to be insensitive and require humoring. “Get a grip, doofus. Raw ibis is never served in the finer restaurants.” Mushrooms were, however. And mushrooms grew everywhere, their moonstone colors underfoot nearly as vivid and various as the birds overhead. Feeling an eerie sureness prompt her, Sassy bent and grabbed several periwinkle-blue ones, caps, stems and all. Straightening, she took a large bite out of one. “Manna,” she declared, offering a handful to Racquel.