The Weight of Feathers (16 page)

But taking his hand was less of a betrayal to her family than touching any other Corbeau. These people, Cluck’s own family, hated him. They didn’t say it but she felt it, like heat under the earth. His hand looked like it had gotten broken all at once, maybe slammed in a door, or crushed under a costume trunk. If these people loved him, they would’ve gotten him to a doctor in time to save his fingers.

If she hated him, she’d be like them, their scorn of Cluck Corbeau the same as a shared eye color. It would make her one of them.

But she could defy this family by touching him.

She shut her eyes, took his hand, let him pull her to standing. The grain of his burns gliding over hers stung. The heat of his hand radiated through her wrist. If she squeezed her eyes shut harder, she could hear
Abuela
’s gasp like the rush of the river’s current.

But it didn’t kill her. And it didn’t make her father and
Tía
Lora feel any farther away.

“Nice work last night,” Cluck said. “You’re good. And fast. Where’d you learn?”

“Community theater on the weekends.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Eighteen.”

“Sure, you are.”

“Seventeen.”

The raise of his eyebrows showed the swelling along his temple. If he didn’t keep ice on it, he’d get a bruise.

“In September,” she said.

“Does your family know where you are?”

“No,” she said.

“Are they looking?”

“Fat chance.”

He shrugged, a look telling her he wouldn’t push it. He kept the ice on his jaw and stepped into the hallway.

“Cluck?” she said.

He turned around.

“All those feathers,” she said. “Do you kill peacocks for them?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Where do you get them?” she asked.

He thumbed a blood spot off his lip. “You really want to know?”

Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée.

A door must be open or shut.

Cluck opened the Morris Cowley’s passenger side. He watched Lace stare into the truck cab. The look on her face wasn’t fear, the skittishness of a bitten animal,
un chat
échaudé
qui craint l’eau froide.
It was suspicion.

People always found something they didn’t like about his family. They were Romani. They were French. They were show people. The traveling kind.

“Did you think we brought a flock with us everywhere?” he asked. “If you want to know where I get the feathers, we’re gonna have to drive there.”

“What’s your real name?” she asked.

He laughed. He liked that she wanted to know that before she decided whether she was getting in the truck, but it didn’t mean he was gonna tell her. Everyone called him Cluck. His real name wasn’t any more of her business than her family was his.

“Sven,” he said.

“No, really. What’s your real name?”

“Rupert.”

She shook her head and got in. “What’s your real name?” she asked, a last try.

He didn’t blame her. In the fairy tales Eugenie told Noe and Mason, the number three was a charm. Anything—kissing a lover to break a curse, piercing an enemy with a dagger—had to be tried three times before it worked.

But he wasn’t a locked door or enchanted tree. He wasn’t telling her his real name just because she kept asking.

“
Le bâtard,
” he said, the words slipping from his mouth before he could pull them back. This was what his older relatives called him when they thought he couldn’t hear. Even when he was little, this was his name to them.
Le bâtard.
Bastard. It didn’t matter that Dax and Cluck had the same father, that he had left them both without marrying their mother. Dax was fatherless, but Cluck was
le bâtard
.

“How do you spell that?” Lace asked.

“I’m kidding,” he said.

It was fair. She didn’t know his name. He didn’t know why she wasn’t with her family. It wasn’t his business. He didn’t care to add to the stories about
les Roms
stealing
gadje
children, but the flinch of her eyelashes made him think she was telling the truth, that nobody was looking for her.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked after he started the truck.

“Rogue rhinoceros,” he said.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked again.

“Jousting accident.”

She looked out the window as he pulled the truck onto the road. “It wasn’t your dominant hand, was it?”

“No. It wasn’t.”

It was a lie and not a lie. He’d started out left-handed, still was when no one but his grandfather was watching. His family’s French blood disapproved of left-handedness. Witches greeted Satan
avec la main gauche,
they said, so no Corbeau would write or stitch with his left hand. “We only see ghosts if we look to our left,” warned one aunt. “
Le Diable
moves our left hand more easily than our right,” added another. A third, “The Devil watches us over the left shoulder.”

Mémère,
according to
Pépère,
always called them superstitious old women and shooed them out of her kitchen when they started talking that way. Cluck would’ve liked to see that.

“You’re lucky,” Lace said. “It could’ve been the hand you used more.”

“Yep. I’m lucky alright.” He rolled down the window. Highway air rushed through the cab. It brought the smell of diesel fuel and wild sorrel, and the sharp green hint of onion fields.

He noticed Lace pinching the air, catching one of his feathers. She held it by the calamus and turned it between her fingers.

The back of his neck grew hot. He kept his eyes on the highway’s white lines, pretending he hadn’t noticed.

She held it in the wind, letting the air ruffle the downy barbs. He felt it, and the chill made him shiver.

When they got to Elida Park, Lace folded the feather she’d caught into her palm, and tucked it into her pocket.

He helped her down from the truck, and the sight of the cats and peacocks made her catch her breath in her chest. Calicoes and tabbies sprawled in patches of light, and the great birds strutted across the crabgrass.

“Where’d they all come from?” she asked.

“The cats come because the locals feed ’em,” Cluck said. “The birds are here thanks to some idiot who ordered a cock and hen from a mail-order catalog ten years ago.”

“Mail-order peacocks?” she asked. “Was this before or after the rogue rhinoceros?”

“It’s true,” he said. “His wife couldn’t take the way they shriek, so he just left them here. Unfixed, so you know the rest.”

An orange tabby sunned itself on the lower rung of a wooden fence. A young peacock swept by, its fan down.

Lace winced, waiting for one to attack the other.

“Don’t worry,” Cluck said. “They get along enough.”

He picked up a shed feather, pulled garden shears from his back pocket and clipped it. He threw the lower half to an adolescent tortoiseshell cat. It chewed on the hollow shaft, back feet kicking the feather barbs.

“How do you get enough feathers if you pick them up one at a time?” Lace asked.

“I don’t. They’re not shedding much now, but come the end of summer, they’ll molt.” The feathers would half-carpet the ground, like
la couleur
of fruit blossom petals turning the ground pink in spring.

A gasp parted Lace’s lips, one breath away from a laugh.

Cluck knew why before he looked up.

They both watched the white peacock shake itself out of the tall grasses. The bird took one slow step, then another, his body so covered in white Cluck always expected it to dust the ground like powdered sugar.

Cluck crouched so he’d look smaller. It made the birds shed their skittishness like molted feathers. He didn’t ask Lace to. She wasn’t much taller than the peacock’s upright tail fan.

The peacock took one step into the sun, like toeing cold water. In full light, he looked made of the fringe off white bearded irises.

He dropped a single tail feather, long as Cluck’s arm, and left to follow after a peahen with eyes like black marbles.

Cluck lifted the plume off the grass, cradling it so the stem wouldn’t bend, and clipped the hollow shaft of the calamus.

“You’re gonna touch that?” Lace asked.

“I’m not gonna catch anything.”

“No,” she said. “I mean because it’s white.”

He got up from his crouch. “And?”

“I don’t know. I thought since yours are black.”

He laughed. “I have black feathers, so I won’t touch white ones? No.” Was that one of the rumors going around Almendro? Just because the name of that other family meant “dove”? None of them despised the Palomas for their name, or even for the white scales that showed up on their bodies. It had never been about doves or birthmarks.

It had always been about what they’d done.

He handed Lace the eyespot. “If you look close, it’s not all white.”

She held it in the light, tilting the left side down, then the right. Most of the feather was pale as bleached linen, but from different angles, the iridescence on the eyespot showed tints of color. Pollen-dust yellow. Traces of blue, like bits of sky and robin’s eggs. Dusk colors, violet blue and bluish lavender. A pink that matched Lace’s mouth when her lipstick wore off.

Now she laughed, light as the colors on the eyespot.

“It’s because of the white,” he said.

“Because white has every color,” Lace said.

Pépère
would like her for knowing things like that.

They stood there as the light fell, watching until the peacocks scattered.

Having her there made him look at the birds a little less. When she was watching, he could watch her. He could study how her skin and her eyes and hair were all gradations of the same color, lighter to darker. The only parts of her face that broke the sequence was the pink on her lips and the deep red on her cheek, like crushed raspberries. If he stopped thinking of how much it must have hurt her, that patch on her cheek was beautiful.

“You hungry?” Cluck asked when he started the Morris Cowley. “Or do you always wait until the middle of the night to eat?”

She reached over the gearshift and shoved his upper arm.

“Oh, good,” he said. “You’re becoming a Corbeau.”

Her eyes opened a little wider.

“I was kidding,” he said.

The park disappeared into the rearview.

“It’s not catching, I promise,” he said. “You’re not gonna grow feathers from being around us.”

She nodded and looked out the window. She may or may not have believed him.

Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.

Tell me who you’re with and I’ll tell you who you are.

Before she and Cluck left the roadhouse where they’d stopped, Lace bought two postcards. One showed a field of wild poppies, the other a pasture flecked with cows. Both smelled of syrup and fryer grease.

She set them on the dashboard and filled in the River Fork’s address, the truck’s speed making her pen wobble. If she and Cluck stopped before the county line, they’d have Tulare postmarks.

Cluck glanced across the front seat. “Who’re you writing to?”

“My family,” she said.

On both, she wrote “Greetings from Terra Bella
, con cariño,
” and then the four curled letters of her signature.

“I thought they didn’t care where you were,” he said.

“I never said they didn’t care.” She added
Tía
Lora’s name and room number to the poppies, then her father’s to the cows. First names only, in case Cluck had good enough vision to read her handwriting. “I said they weren’t looking.”

The latch on the passenger side door clicked, and it swung open. The pavement rushed past like white water, and Lace choked on her own gasp. Fields flew by, speed turning them to liquid. The scent of new onions stung her throat.

“Dammit,” Cluck said, like he’d cut himself or touched the handle of a hot pan.

The wind ripped the postcards off the dashboard. They twirled like leaves and flew out toward the road. They shrank to two white flecks against the sky, and then vanished.

Lace’s body felt insubstantial, untethered. She grabbed at the door, but couldn’t reach.

Cluck pulled her toward the middle of the front seat and set her hand on the steering wheel. “Hold this.”

She gripped the wheel so they didn’t swerve. It didn’t take much to make the truck drift, but a lot of tug on the wheel to get it straight again. The truck’s weight pulled on the steering column.

“Cluck,” she said, but he was already leaning behind her, reaching for the door.

He tried to keep one foot over the brake. Cluck’s side grazed her back, her hip against his, his hair brushing her arm.

Cluck clicked the latch back into place and swung the door shut, one hand on the back of the seat to steady himself. She shifted her weight to move out of the way, and ended up half on his lap. Their bodies tangled like roots as they got back to where they’d been.

She wouldn’t have caught Cluck’s laughs if she hadn’t been so close to him. They were short, quiet, the same low pitch as the air pulling past the cab. They intertwined with Lace’s, her hands still sparking with the feeling of him giving her the wheel like she knew how to hold it.

The truck streaked off the highway and through town, and they pulled onto the Corbeaus’ rented land.

“Sorry,” Cluck said. “That happens sometimes.”

“You could’ve told me,” Lace said, the breath of a laugh still under her words. “I would’ve held onto the door.”

“No one’s ever in this thing who doesn’t already know.” He downshifted. “Besides, it’s never happened before when the truck’s not speeding.”

“You
were
speeding.”

He set it into park. “Really?”

“By about ten miles,” she said. “Why didn’t you just pull over?”

“It was a soft shoulder. We would’ve gone straight into a ditch.”

“Then get the door fixed.”

He leaned over her and opened the passenger side. “It’s a problem with the striker.” His fingers followed the latch’s grooves. “It’s a tough part to find.” He turned his head, and then flinched, like he hadn’t realized how close he was to her.