The Weight of Feathers (20 page)

Her mouth left a smudge of lipstick on his. She rubbed it away. He closed his eyes and held her hand there, kissed her thumb and took it lightly between his teeth, holding onto it. It trembled the veins that held her heart, that feeling of his teeth on her thumb pad and fingernail.

The feather on her forearm flared with heat.

She kissed him so hard he kept his breath still on his tongue. He left the taste of black salt on her mouth. The woody flavor of charcoal. The sugar and acid of citrus peel. The soft metal of iron.

A knock rattled the trailer latch.

“Cluck?” said Eugenie.

Lace ducked down behind a counter.

“What are you doing?” Cluck asked.

“She’s gonna wonder why I’m in here.”

“She’s gonna wonder why you’re on the floor. Just say you’re helping me fix something.” He opened the door.

Lace stayed down.

Eugenie handed him a few rolls of satin ribbon. “Closest match I could get.”

Cluck held the tail of one against another spool of ribbon. “Good enough.”

Eugenie’s eyes wandered over to the counter, her feet following. She stood over Lace, hands on her hips. She already had on a dusk-blue dress, but Lace hadn’t done her face yet.

“I lost a needle,” Lace said.

Eugenie shrugged and left her to it.

Lace tried to follow her out. Cluck shut the door behind Eugenie and held his arm to the small of Lace’s back, the same as he had in the tree last night.

He wore his loneliness like his scar. Most of the time his sleeves covered it, but when she cuffed them back, he couldn’t hide it. She wanted to tell him she was not afraid of what he was, this red-streaked thing in all the pure, perfect black. But the words dissolved between their lips like ice crystals.

She pulled her mouth off his. “I still have to put makeup on half of them.”

“You’re fast.”

“Later,” she said.

She stepped down from the trailer and left Cluck to the wings, the taste of violet-black salt still under her tongue. She made up the last of the performers, and the Corbeaus drained toward the woods like sand through fingers. Lace put away the powders and colors, cleaned the brushes, swept the flour off the wood.

A small shadow broke the light. Lace turned her head. A girl no older than five or six stood near the vanity. She had hair dark and coarse as Cluck’s, but eyes pale as dishwater.

She sipped from a plastic cup. “Will you do me next?” she asked.

Next? Who was ahead of her? The performers had gone, and no one was out here. Cluck’s grandfather was inside. Yvette had Eugenie’s younger brothers and the rest of the children in the house, cutting construction paper with craft scissors. Georgette, thanks to a heavy dose of cough syrup, was sleeping off a cold. “She chooses now to be sick,” Nicole Corbeau had said.

Lace pulled out a chair. “
Bien sûr,
” she said, one of two or three French phrases she’d picked up.

The girl set her cup down and closed her eyes, letting Lace give her a dusting of powder. She swung her legs, her shoes brushing Lace’s skirt. “When I’m in the show I’m going to wear a purple dress, like Violette’s.”

That told Lace what color eye shadow to use. She washed on the lightest tint of lavender.

The girl reached out for her cup, eyes still squeezed shut. Before Lace could help her get it, the girl’s small hand knocked it over. Grape juice splashed across the desk and onto Lace’s skirt and top.

The girl’s eyes snapped open. She took in the mess, and her face scrunched up. Lace knew that look from her younger cousins. It meant she had about five seconds until the wailing started.

“It’s okay.” Lace mopped up the spill. “I’ve done it a hundred times.”

The sugar soaked through Lace’s skirt, stinging the burns on her thighs.

“In fact,” Lace whispered. “How about we don’t tell anyone? I spill stuff so much, if we tell, they’ll think I did it, and I’ll get in trouble. So we won’t tell, okay?”

The girl nodded, a smile showing her baby teeth.

Lace breathed out, her shoulders relaxing. The last thing she needed was Yvette and the girl’s mother wondering what she’d done to make her cry.

She blotted the juice from her skirt, but the sugar still stung. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

The little girl nodded.

Lace went to get a clean dress from her suitcase.

The sound of
arundo
reed pipes echoed through the yellow trailer. They reached out from the other side of the woods like fingers. She wondered if the girl had heard them. She wouldn’t have known what they were. But they might have sounded enough like the cry of far-off wolves to startle her into tipping over the cup.

Lace peeled off the blouse and skirt, and splashed water over the stains.
Happy?
she wanted to call back to the
arundo
sounds. They’d quieted now that she was out of her skirt and top, her foolish choice. She’d put on a dress that would hide her
escamas
.

The trailer latch clicked, and the door opened.

She couldn’t grab her dress fast enough.

Cluck stood in the doorway. His eyes found her lower back, where the arc of white birthmarks crossed her skin. No paillettes hid her
escamas
now. She felt them glow under his stare.

He stepped down from the trailer. “Go inside, okay, Jacqueline?” Lace heard him tell the little girl.

The little girl skipped inside. The house’s back door fell shut behind her.

Lace pulled on her dress and followed Cluck into the trees.

“Son of a bitch.” He let out a curt laugh. “When you said you did a lot of swimming, you meant it.”

She buttoned her dress, trotting to keep up with him. “Cluck.”

He stopped. “Did your family send you?”

“No,” she said.

“Are you here to sabotage us? Or just to spy?”

“My family doesn’t know where I am.”

“Right.” He kept walking.

She got in front of him. “It’s your fault I’m here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This.” She held her forearm to his face, letting him see the garnet-colored scar. “You did this to me. You put this on me, and now my family doesn’t want me.”

“I didn’t do that to you. The plant did that to you.”

She blocked his way. “It’s because of your feathers.”

“They’re part of my hair. They can’t do anything to you.”

He knew. He had to know.

“If you thought I did this to you, why were you keeping my feathers?” he asked.

“I thought it would give me something on you,” she said.

“Something on me,” he said. “So when you came here, it was to try to get me to fix that.” Not a question.

He looked at her, and the truth sank through her, a stone through a river. He’d thought she’d come here because she wanted him.

The night she first came here, she was so quick to hold down thinking of him that way. Now something ticked inside her, an urgency to tell him that yes, she came here about the scar, but she had already wanted him that night. She should’ve come here for no reason other than that she wanted him.

If she’d known how his hands would feel as they spread over her body, or how his mouth tasted like black salt, or that he was beautiful in ways that made him ugly to his family, she would have. She would’ve left the hospital still in her blue gown and gone looking for him.

But she could see the last few days crossing his face. The two of them scrambling over each other in the front seat of his grandfather’s truck. Her fingers catching in the feathers under his hair. Him holding her in the high branches, and her letting him, giving him her body so completely that she would’ve fallen if he’d let go.

“Cluck,” she said.

“This was all because you thought I could take that off you?” he asked. “Wow, you really know how to commit, don’t you?”

The place where his hands had slid over the small of her back went cold. Now he thought she’d kissed him, cupped each of his red-striped feathers in her palms, for no other reason than that she wanted the mark off her arm.

“Luc,” she said, calling him his real name without thinking, some wild grasp at getting to him.

All he gave her back was a hurt smile that said he thought it was cheap for her to try it, and almost funny that she thought it would work.

“You and your family,” he said. “You really think I have nothing better to do than curse you? What kind of old wives’ tales do you all tell each other?”

“Our old wives’ tales? You’re one to talk. You won’t even admit you’re left-handed.”

“I’m not.” He almost yelled it.

She picked up a pinecone and threw it at him. He caught it with his left hand, his thumb and index finger gripping the scales.

He hurled it at the ground.

“If you don’t believe me,” Lace said, “ask my family why I’m not with them.”

He gave that same dry laugh. “Sure. Why don’t I just stop by? I’ll bring a salad.”

“They don’t know who you are,” she said. “My cousins sure didn’t.”

“Your cousins?” Then it registered. “The guys at the liquor store. Those were your cousins.”

“You really think I’m here to spy? Go ask my family where the pink mermaid went. They’ll tell you I’m not with them anymore. Or they’ll pretend I’m dead, or I never existed, I don’t know. Go ask them.”

Water glinted at the inner corners of his eyes. His jaw grew hard, eyes stuck on the pinecone. “I think I know enough, thanks.”

He took a step away from her.

“Cluck.” She reached out and clasped the curved-under fingers on his left hand.

“Don’t.” He pulled his hand away, not rough but decisive. Final.

Her guilt over hurting him drained away, and the empty place filled up with anger. He took every time their lips brushed, her body up against his, and threw it all out like scraps of ribbon.

“I don’t want to see you around here again,” he said.

“Or what?” Lace asked. “You’ll get the shotgun and take care of me?”

“No. That’s
your
family, remember?”

The burn on her forearm pulsed. He’d seen the dead crows. He knew about her uncles with the Winchester. She dug her nails into her palms, thinking of Cluck finding one of those birds, eyes dull as black beach glass.

“At least we’ve never killed anyone in your family,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Twenty years ago.”

“You’re kidding, right? Why would my family sink the trees they were performing in?”

“I’m guessing they didn’t mean to, and whatever they meant to do went wrong.”

“Like what?”

“Like drown everyone in our show,” she said. “The flooding at the lake messed up our part of the river. It was calm, and then halfway through the show it was white water. It could’ve killed half my family.”

“And the next time my family turned around, all of you had taken over the lakefront. You perform where a member of my family died. And a member of yours. You perform in your own family’s graveyard. You get that, right?”

“There wouldn’t be a graveyard if it weren’t for all of you. You killed my great-aunt’s husband. Did you know that?”

“Did you ever think your great-aunt’s husband was the one who did it?” Cluck asked. “What other reason did he have for being there?”

“The same reason your brother knew exactly what our tails looked like. He spied on us. Just like my great-uncle spied on all of you.”

Cluck dropped his hands. “I’m so glad you have it all figured out.”

Sadness crept back into his face. The feeling of wanting to kiss him struck her, hard and sudden. To show him that her touching him had been in defiance of her own family, and she had not cared. To slip back into the rhythm of her mouth and fingers responding to his.

She was hollow with the knowledge that if she had any other last name, he would’ve let her.

“For the record,” Cluck said. “Every burn you have, you can thank your family.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“My grandfather worked for the plant until your family got him fired,” he said. “If he’d been there, this wouldn’t have happened. He would’ve pushed for the damn overfill pipe. That was his job. To keep things like that from happening. You want to blame someone for that scar, blame your family. Because they did this to you before you were born.”

“My family’s not the one who put the net in the river,” she said.

One slow blink, and the anger in his face fell away. “What?”

Lace thought of Magdalena, fighting the nylon net, and Lace fighting one of her own, a string of their last air bubbles floating across the eight years between their half-drownings.

“The night you found me,” Lace said. “I’d gotten caught in a net. If I hadn’t, I would’ve gotten out of the water a lot faster. I could’ve gotten home.”

“How do you know it was a net?” he asked.

“Last time I checked, blue nylon doesn’t grow in rivers.”

His eyes went over the ground, like he was looking for those bright threads among the leaves.

“But don’t take my word for it,” she said. “We’re all liars anyway, right?”

The corners of his eyes tensed, the anger coming back.

When he left she didn’t follow him. The feather burn vibrated on her forearm, searing into her, claiming its place on her skin.

Qui se fait brebis le loup le mange.

He who makes himself a ewe, the wolf eats.

He got out all the white peacock feathers. The ones he’d hidden in trunks, under the mattress, under the false bottom of a wooden drawer. He’d burn them all. They’d be nothing but ash. The next time he went to Elida Park, he’d leave the leucistic peacock’s eyespots where they fell.

Nothing settled. Nothing stayed still.

He’d brought a Paloma into his family. He’d let her sleep in the same trailer with Clémentine. He’d held her body against his, her mouth on his.

And he couldn’t count on Dax doing what their mother said. Sure, Dax never listened to Cluck, not nine years ago, and not now, but he listened to their mother.

Just not this time. The Palomas coating the branches with Vaseline, Camille’s fall. These were reasons Dax must have felt justified giving some younger cousins the go-ahead to set another one of those nets. They wouldn’t have gone after the Palomas without Dax’s blessing. Dax would have told them something about how he couldn’t give permission for that, not anymore, and it was too bad he couldn’t. They would’ve known what that meant.
Do it. Do it and don’t get caught, because if you get caught, I’ll deny you ever brought this to me.