Soar (3 page)

I follow her into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, reach past the milk jug, and take out the orange juice carton. There's only one swig left.

Mom stands at the kitchen sink. She puffs on a cigarette and blows two smoke streams from her nose. I hate Mom's bad habit. She quit cold turkey once. But after the doctor gave us the news about Dad, she started up again. She said it was too much stress, and that she needed something to take away everything that was happening. I told her that tracking birds was healthier and more fun, but she wasn't interested.

I roll my eyes, without her seeing me.

“Here's your ice pack,” she says, handing the ice pack to me. “Put it on your bump for ten minutes. It'll help with the swelling. Oh, and I stopped by the Freeze Queen. Burgers are on the table.”

I take a red plastic cup from the cabinet. I pour the last gulp of orange juice into the cup, and I slam it back in one gulp.

“How old is the new girl?” Mom asks.

I pitch the empty orange juice carton into the trash. “I don't know. Thirteen, maybe.”

I rummage through the greasy sack on the counter and pull out a Buck Burger. That's right, these burgers are only a dollar. Mom says it's a deal you can't pass up. I unwrap the burger and rip off a bite. “Can you open the window, please?”

Mom raises the window above the sink, her keys clinking together like wind chimes. She takes another puff from her cigarette. “Well, does she seem like a nice girl?”

“Yeah,” I say. “She seems nice.”

“Don't act so excited, Eddie.” She blows smoke out the window while laughing at herself. Her laugh makes her cough the same phlegmy cough Dad used to have, only Dad's cough was from stomach cancer, not from puffing on a cigarette. “Maybe you two can become friends, especially if she lives down the street.”

I shrug. “Yeah, maybe.”

Mom holds her cigarette out the window, flicks off
the ashes, and looks at me. “Eddie,” she says. “You're gonna have to move on at some point. Camilla's not coming back.”

The words hurt me inside, but I know they're true. “You're right,” I say, and smile at her. She messes up my hair and kisses my forehead.

“Big birthday coming up soon,” she says. “What does a soon-to-be-thirteen-year-old boy want these days?”

“Oh, I don't know. New binoculars? Another bird journal?”

“Of course.” She rolls her eyes. “Go rest up. You got school tomorrow.”

I walk into my room with my wrapped-up dinner. If I could have anything I wanted for my birthday, it would be to have my dad back. But that's not happening, unless it wasn't really him lying in that casket that I watched get lowered six feet underground.

I plop down onto my bed and think about Switzerland and Camilla Caflisch. She was a foreign exchange student from Switzerland. She came to West Plains in fourth grade. Everyone called her Catfish because her last name sounds like it and she has a tiny mouth like a fish.

Mrs. Rollins introduced Camilla to the class and then assigned me as her pal for the day. Camilla was more interesting than any of the other girls. For one thing, she had a cool accent. She also invited me over for dinner one night, and we had potatoes and cheese and no meat. No meat! Can you believe that? I told her I'd never had a dinner like that before. Mom always has meat on the table, even if it's wrapped up in a greasy sack. When Camilla laughed at my joke, her mouth didn't look like a fish mouth. It looked more like a Carolina chickadee's beak.

Camilla and I were best friends. We did everything together. She introduced me to tennis, which I still can't play, and I introduced her to birds.

At the end of fourth grade, Camilla went back to Switzerland. We wrote messages to each other all summer long. She told me about the Swiss Alps, and how she was doing a lot of hiking. She also said her family might move to Hong Kong because of her dad's job. I told her everything would be okay and that she was cool enough to make friends anywhere. After that I didn't hear from her again. I'm pretty sure they have email in Hong Kong. Maybe her dad didn't like that she was writing to a boy all the time.

The only bad part about being assigned Camilla's pal for the day was the name everyone started calling me. Fish Boy. The kid who made it up is the same kid who's the top suspect for stealing my bike.

His real name is Raymond, but he goes by his middle name—MOUTON.

“Mouton” rhymes with what a cow does—MOO—and what time I wake up to go birding—DAWN.

MOO—TAWN.

I didn't see Mouton take my bike. But since he's an overgrown ogre who lives in my neighborhood and we've hated each other since kindergarten, there's a good chance it was him.

I'm not letting him get away with stealing my wheels. I'll get my bike back if it takes me all year to do it.

I'll bet a hundred and forty-nine dollars on it.

O
ne night two years ago, Dad and I were eating Buck Burgers at the Freeze Queen. Mom was working late at school, so it was just the two of us.

Dad didn't look so good. He was pale, and sweat was beading on his forehead. He put his burger down, coughed twice, and took off to the bathroom. He didn't even say “excuse me” like he normally did. He just zipped away, holding napkins over his mouth.

When he came back, his eyes were wet, and tiny red dots covered his face. Normally Dad was a handsome guy. I wouldn't know, but that's what I overheard Mrs. Rollins say to the teacher's aide who helped out on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. Right then Dad wasn't in the same bird sanctuary as handsome.

A lady who worked at the Freeze Queen came up to our table and said, “Mr. Wilson, are you okay?”

Dad dabbed his eyes with a napkin and said, “I'm fine. Can we have one banana split with two spoons, please?”

She looked concerned for Dad, but she said “You got it” and walked away.

The next day, when I asked Dad to go on a bike ride, he was too tired. When I asked him to hang the new hummingbird feeder, his arms were too sore. The next weekend, I showed up in the living room with my binoculars slung over my shoulder and asked him to go look for the golden eagle. For the first time, he said no. “Sorry, Eddie, I don't think I can do it today.”

He turned away from me, but not before I caught his expression. Pain, fear, sadness all rolled up into one.

He never said no to birding. That was his life.

One day I finally asked, “Dad, are you going to be okay?”

“Yes, Eddie,” he said. “Okay as a blue jay.”

Dad wasn't a bird-watcher. He was a birder. There's a big difference, and he made sure I knew about it.

“If you can't hear 'em, you're only a watcher,” he told me. “A real birder sees, hears, feels, and tastes. You have to respect every part of the species, or it won't respect you back.”

Dad taught me everything about birding. One night I scooted real close to him on the couch while watching a spy movie.

“Dad, I want to be the best birder in the whole world,” I said. “How do I do that?”

He stopped the movie and turned to me. I knew this was going to be a long answer. But that was what I wanted.

He rested his hand on my shoulder. “If you want to be the best, Son, then you have to be creative. You have to think like a bird. You have to
become
the bird.”

“
Become
the bird,” I said. “What does that mean?”

“You have to ask yourself, if you were that bird, and you were trying to survive, what would you need at that exact moment? Not two days from now, not one week from now, not a year. Ask yourself what that bird needs at that very instant. Food? Protection? Nesting materials? Companionship?”

“What's ‘companionship'?” I asked.

Dad smirked and said, “It's about filling a big, empty hole inside you with feelings for someone else.”

“You mean like you and mom?”

He smiled and said, “Exactly.”

Dad also taught me the Rules of Birding (he called it the Wilson Way):

1. Get as close as you can.

2. Never take your eyes off it.

3. No one gets in your way.

Dad actually made his living as a park ranger, but he took birding seriously and treated it like his second job.

He also loved to tell stories, and sometimes he would exaggerate. One time he told me about a deer jumping over him and his friend while they were riding a scooter. Every time he told the story, the deer grew bigger by two feet!

Up until the time when Dad saw the golden eagle, there had never been one spotted officially in West Plains. According to birding experts, they only visit Indiana in the winter. Dad said he saw the golden eagle in late October, and that's when he thought it would come back. I'm going to be there when it happens.

* * *

I spend a lot of time with birds. When I'm not at school or at home, you can usually find me at Miss Dorothy's place. That might explain why I don't have many friends.

After Camilla went back to Switzerland, I didn't want to start making friends again, only to be forgotten. Then about a year later, Dad got sick, and well, everyone at school pretty much avoided me after that. Maybe they didn't know how to act around me, or what to say to me. I don't blame them. It's hard seeing people suffer.

In a lot of ways, birds are like people. Everyone thinks they just fly around, chirp, and poop on bikes and cars. But they're more unique than that. They're like having a whole group of friends with different personalities. Some birds are outgoing and aggressive, like the northern mockingbird, while others are quiet and shy, like the whispery mourning dove.

But birds are also different from humans.

For one, birds always stick by your side. They never go away, like people do. Sure, they might fly away for a short time, but they'll eventually come back. Go outside and look up. You'll see or hear at least one or two birds. If you don't, just wait thirty seconds. I bet you won't be disappointed.

Raptors are the best, the birds with sharp eyes and beaks.

One time when I was in fifth grade, I saw a red-tailed hawk swoop down and pick up a squirrel. It took off to the sky and never came back. I'm sure the red-tailed fed its family and was only trying to survive in the wild, but I couldn't help but feel sorry for the squirrel. Dad could tell that it bothered me, so that night he explained the food chain to me.

“Here's how it works, Eddie. At the top of the triangle we have humans, like me and you and your mom. Below us are sharks and crocodiles, animals who can kill almost anything but don't benefit from having an intelligent brain like you and me. Then come the other species, and one of those species is birds. Now, birds are special creatures. For one, they fly. Two, they have feathers. Three, they're better-looking than anything else on earth, besides you, your mom, and deer.”

That last part he said while pointing his finger at me, like Papa pointing his finger at Silvio for squawking at me so rudely.

“It's a tough world out there, Son, but birds always find a way to adapt and survive. Just imagine what
it would be like to fly. Picture that in your mind for a second.”

Dad closed his eyes. So I did the same. It was like we were having a moment of silence for birds' ability to fly. But I didn't picture myself flying. I pictured Mom standing next to a deer.

“What about an ostrich?” I finally said. “It's a bird, and it can't fly.”

Dad laughed. “Ostrich? That's not a bird. That's a giraffe that never evolved.” He patted my back and mumbled, “Ostrich. You sure keep me on my toes, Eddie.”

Dad chuckled at himself and started coughing. He hacked, deep and hard. Then he covered his mouth, and two streams of blood oozed out from between his fingers. It wasn't the light red blood that comes out when you nick your finger while cutting out science flash cards. This was dark blood. The kind bad guys spit up in spy movies when saying their last words.

Dad took off to the bathroom and shut the door. He coughed for a while, and then the toilet flushed.

I sat there on the couch and pulled my legs up to my chest. I held on to my knees, wondering if Dad was right about him being okay.

* * *

At my desk in my bedroom, I open my journal and flip through the birds I've seen this year. I've split them into three categories.

Commons: finches, robins, sparrows, juncos. (These birds are everywhere.)

Betters: orioles, jays, cardinals, hummingbirds. (More interesting than Commons.)

Then there's the best category of all: Raptors. (Unfortunately, some eat Commons and Betters.)

So far this year I've only seen three raptors: Coop, an eastern screech owl, and a sharp-shinned hawk. Coop doesn't really count, because she nests in a giant oak in the woods behind Miss Dorothy's house. Last year I saw a barred owl, and the year before that I saw a red-tailed hawk and an American kestrel.