The Weight of Feathers (11 page)

“If I can hold my breath and twirl around in a tank, I can get a job,” Lace said.

The wildflowers from her hospital nightstand sat on the dresser, half-withered.

Palomas only brought flowers to hospitals when someone either had a baby or was so close to death the priest was on his way.

“Did you all give me up for dead?” Lace asked.

“Of course not,” Martha said. “Why?”

Lace picked up the milk bottle. “Then why these?”

“We didn’t bring you those,” Martha said.

“You didn’t?”

“Should we have?” Martha looked hard at Lace’s middle. “Are you pregnant?”

“No.” Lace set the bottle back on the dresser. “If you didn’t bring them, who did?”

“The nurse said the guy who brought you in, but I don’t know. I never saw him.”

The feeling of the Corbeau boy’s hands rushed over Lace’s body. It whipped against her like blown sand.

The cornflowers. Outside the liquor store, he’d had one on his vest. It came unpinned and fell when her cousin hit him.

Wild roses. Red blossoms. The orange-haired Corbeau girl Lace had seen by the river wore them on her head. They grew wild on the Corbeaus’ side of the woods, those undaunted blooms that carpeted the abandoned campground.

El gitano
. The gypsy boy brought her the wildflowers.

He didn’t know the girl he’d taken out of the woods was a
sirena
he’d set a trap for. He didn’t know when he was freeing her from the brush that she’d just escaped his net. All he knew was that he’d saved her life, and she’d called him names. He’d brought her flowers, and she’d chased him out of the room.

Now he was angry with her. This was no different than Justin and Alexia and her brother stealing the Camargue and being cursed with the skittishness of young horses.

She had to get the Corbeau boy’s forgiveness, like returning that stolen colt.

A soft knock clicked against the door. Lace left her clothes on the bed and answered it.

Tía
Lora stood in the hall, hands full of fabric pink as a grapefruit, the cloth she’d brought with her to the hospital. It glinted, sagging with the weight of glass beads.

A new
cola de sirena,
a mermaid tail made to replace the one that had been lost.

Lace wondered if shreds of her old one still clung to that colander, the current pulling them like streamers.

This one was finer than the lost one, the beading more intricate, the embroidery on the fin tighter, more delicate. A sign of
Tía
Lora’s faith that she would swim again.

“You will come back,”
Tía
Lora said.

Lace had to find the
gitano
boy.

Tía
Lora set the tail’s weight in her palms, the thread still warm from her hands.

Lace took it. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”

Un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l’auras.

One that you hold is better than two you will have.

Cluck braced his hands on the worktable. Half the wings still needed fixing. Alula feathers had gotten knocked out of place. Primary remiges had come loose, secondaries had fallen out. Wires had gotten bent or snapped; they’d snagged on branches when his cousins came down from the trees. Some the chemical rain had ruined.

Cluck watched from the trailer window as a woman in a skirt suit met his mother at the back door.

He knew why the woman was there. He could tell by the chamber of commerce pin on her lapel. The Almendro Blackberry Festival would go on. Calling off those days of farm stands and crafters’ booths would be the same as a white flag, a sign that the town had curled up in its corner of the Central Valley to die.

Now she’d come to find out if Nicole Corbeau felt the same way.

His mother kissed the air next to the woman’s cheek.

Cluck rolled his eyes. His mother did that with anyone they needed to issue them permits. It always charmed them, made them walk away a little lighter, feeling sophisticated, unbearably French.

Great. Not only were they staying in this town, now the Palomas would too.

They should’ve just moved on to Madera County a couple of weeks early. Or scheduled a stop on the Monterey Peninsula, where slices of the ocean showed between the trees.

But his mother wasn’t willing to burn bridges. No more than she was willing to let the Palomas win.

Cluck couldn’t wait to save up enough money for community college, for an apartment that didn’t move. He’d study like his grandfather had. He’d get a job anywhere but Almendro. He’d get a house he and
Pépère
could live in, and
Pépère
wouldn’t have to go around with the show anymore. They’d be
les célibataires,
two bachelors in a house with a lemon tree.

Eugenie came in without knocking. Cluck let her get at the old mirror against the wall so she could check her feathers. Some Corbeaus, like Dax, pulled all theirs out. Most, like Eugenie, just checked for loose ones before each show. They never wanted the audience to sees feathers fall from their heads.

“You didn’t go see that girl again, did you?” Eugenie asked.

“Right. Because she was so thrilled to see me last time.”

Eugenie ran her fingers through her hair. “What was she so upset about?”

“I don’t know.” Probably him. A lot of people got upset about him.

“Did you tell her what happened?” Eugenie asked.

He cleaned the adhesive off a set of wire cutters.

“Do you know her?” Eugenie asked.

He straightened a few bent wires.

“Who is she?” she asked.

He threw down the wire. “I don’t want to talk about this, Eugenie.”

Eugenie pulled a last feather. “You’re cranky today,
n’est-ce pas?
”

“You think?” Cluck called after her, waving a hand at the wings he was piecing back together. A few were so stripped of feathers, he could only save the frames.

Cluck couldn’t even use the family’s feathers, shed or plucked. He’d tried it once, weaving a few in among the peacock feathers. His mother found out before his grandfather realized what he was doing. “These are not spare parts to use for show,” she had said. The bruise Dax left him with took two weeks to fade. But if they strapped feathers to their bodies, Cluck wondered, why shouldn’t they be their own?

His grandfather had told him, “We put ourselves on show enough for the
gadje,
” and Cluck understood. It was the same reason the blond Corbeaus coated their dark feathers in flour, to hide them. The show was all costumes and peacock feathers, lights hung in trees, tightrope walking.
La magie
of their bodies did not belong to the
gadje,
the people who were not like them.

His grandfather came in and tossed a paper bag on the worktable. “I bought you something.” The bag fell over, its contents sliding out. A folded pair of brown corduroy pants, and a long-sleeved crewneck shirt the red of wet cranberries.

Not this again. Since Cluck turned eighteen, his grandfather had been trying to get him into Levi’s. Last month,
Pépère
bought him a T-shirt the gray of a wet stone. In April, he’d left a jean jacket on Cluck’s bed.

But Cluck liked wearing
Pépère
’s old clothes, and the feeling that they might make him like his grandfather. The things that made Alain Corbeau would soak into Cluck’s skin.

This new shirt wouldn’t. The red was so close to the shade streaking Cluck’s feathers that he didn’t like looking at it. It made him blink first.

“One day I will die and you will have to burn my things,”
Pépère
said. “Then what will you wear?”

Pépère
had told Cluck what his family back in
le Midi
did with the possessions of their dead. Nothing that belonged to the deceased was sold, especially not to anyone else Romani, who would never want to buy it anyway. Little was kept, only a few valuables given to family members. The rest was burned, especially clothes and sheets. Anything death had made
mochadi,
unclean.

“I don’t think we do that anymore,
Pépère,
” Cluck said.

“We did it where I come from, and one day you will do it for me. What will you do then, wear nothing?” His grandfather pushed the bag toward him. “If you don’t want to wear them, it’s your business. But you will keep them.”

Stubborn. That was the other thing wearing
Pépère
’s clothes might make him.

His grandfather coughed into his handkerchief.

Cluck could hear the force tearing the back of his throat. “
Pépère?
”

In the days since the mixing tank blew, his cough had gotten worse. The chemicals in the air irritated his smoke-worn lungs. He wouldn’t say so, but Cluck knew. The adhesive had settled, but the vapor still thickened the air. One more reason Cluck made sure his grandfather slept inside, not in the trailers that stayed hot at night and chilled in the morning.

“And those geniuses think they know how to run a chemical plant,” Cluck said.

“It wouldn’t be the worst they’ve done,” his grandfather said between coughs.

“What?” Cluck asked.

“
T’inquiète
.” His grandfather folded the linen square. “It must be time for another cigarette,
n’est-ce pas?
”

Pépère
paused as he reached for the pack, his eyes following Cluck’s hands.

Pépère
took hold of Cluck’s forearms. He turned Cluck’s wrists, showing the burns on his palms. “What’s happened here?”

Cluck kept his head down. The girl shooing him out of the room, calling him
gitano,
had stuck him with the feeling that taking her from the woods was some awful thing he’d done. He didn’t want
Pépère
knowing about any of it.

“It’s from getting my shirt off,” Cluck said. He didn’t have to lift his head to know his grandfather’s stare was on him. He felt it like a draft through a window. “The reaction with the cotton.”

Pépère
gripped his forearm tighter. “I have never in your life given you reason to lie to me.”

Cluck felt the words on his shoulders, sure as hands. His grandfather had taught him everything about feathers. Remiges for flight, retrices for balance. And it was thanks to
Pépère
that Cluck had learned to work with the fingers he had. Nine years ago, his left hand had been so broken, he couldn’t do anything with it. He learned to use his right, buttoned his shirts with it, forced out messy writing. It felt backward as putting a shoe on the wrong foot, but he did it. His fingers healed into a half-fist and grew restless, charged like the static on a metal knob. They wanted to work. But under Dax’s eye, and his mother’s, he couldn’t let them.

When
Pépère
found him in the Airstream one night, his right fingers fighting with a needle and thread, he set a hand on his shoulder and said, “Use your left, boy.” Cluck had hesitated, sure it was a trick, but his grandfather took the needle from his right hand and slipped it between his left thumb and forefinger, the only two digits on his left hand that weren’t stuck curled under. “
Notre secret,
”
Pépère
had said, shutting the trailer door.
Our secret
.

Cluck had no right to lie to the man who kept his secrets.

“There was this girl,” Cluck said. “She was out there.”

Pépère
let go of his forearms. “A girl.”

“She had on a cotton dress. My hands made it out better than she did.”

Pépère
’s eyes looked dark as palm ash. “You took off her dress?”

“As much as I could, yeah.”

His grandfather let out a breath and put a hand to his temple. “The people here, they think things about us.”

Cluck didn’t need reminding. It was enough that they were performers, that they traveled from town to town. But a few of them, like Cluck and
Pépère,
stood out worse, a different kind of dark than the people around here were used to.

“If you touch a girl in this town,”
Pépère
said, “it doesn’t matter why, people will talk.”

“You think I should have left her there?” Cluck asked.

“I think you should have told me. Then at least I’d know what you’d gotten yourself into.”

“I haven’t gotten into anything,” Cluck said.

But
Pépère
was already halfway out the door.

Cluck’s stomach felt tight as a coil of wire. His grandfather was the one person he couldn’t take disappointing. To everyone but
Pépère,
Cluck was nothing more than the red-streaked semiplumes that grew under his hair. A poor substitute for flight feathers. Dax was a primary remex, long, straight, showing. Cluck was a lesser covert feather, hidden, structural. Or an afterfeather, the downy offshoot branching from the central vane.

Needed but easy to forget.

Boca de miel, corazón de hiel.

Mouth of honey, bitter heart.

The other
sirenas
would say not to go, that she’d get herself killed. That family would peck Lace to death like the crows they were, or turn her whole body to black feathers.

But the only way to escape the exile of the
gitano
boy’s hands was to face them. Justin, Alexia, and her brother had made their apology, broken free of the curse that stolen Camargue colt brought on them. As long as the Corbeau boy didn’t realize she was a Paloma, she could do the same.

The feather burn wouldn’t heal on its own. She couldn’t wait it out. She needed the boy who’d made it. She needed to show enough remorse, enough fear and reverence for the strength of his family’s
magia negra,
that he’d forgive her, and use that same
gitano
magic to lift the feather from her arm.

First she needed an offering, a sign of her contrition, the way a maize farmer’s daughter who had ignored the goddess
Chicomecoatl
might have brought her flowers during a famine. So Lace walked the dirt-dusted roads to the outdoor market where her aunts sent her cousins for tomatoes and Casaba melon.