Wringer (13 page)

He knows how it will end.

He can see it. His bird terrified in the smothering darkness of the box—it's like a coffin—when suddenly one wall springs up and light pours in and he's free to go. He steps out onto grass and feathers, thinking, Hey, where's the bedroom? He takes another step, looks around. There are people, people everywhere, more people than he has ever seen. But he is not afraid. The people he has known, the boy and the girl, were always good to him. He almost thinks of them as pigeons. He wonders if they—

The blast knocks him off his feet, drives him sideways, like the other blizzard long ago. There is pain in his wing. It drags. It will not move. He cannot stand straight or walk right. He tries to fly but labors only inches into the gray, sour cloud and flops back to earth. The people are noisy. The people are laughing and cheering and whistling. They are happy. He has never seen so many happy
people. He wobbles toward them. He wants to be with them, with all those happy faces.

And then he sees that one face is different, one face is not laughing, is not happy. He knows the face. He would know it anywhere. Dragging his wing through the feathers that cover the ground, he heads for the face, he is limping toward the face when the second blast comes—

 

He whispered, “Nipper…Nipper…”

At the old train station on Friday, a swelling gobble of noise had come from the crates. Here they were silent. If Palmer had not known better, he would never have believed there were thousands of pigeons behind the wooden slats.

“Nipper…Nipper…”

He whispered into the crates. He stood on tiptoes and crawled on hands and knees, peering into the dark strips of space between the slats. Orange eyes flashed in the dark. He could not hope to reach the ones on top.

“Nipper…”

Nipper was here. He knew it. Somewhere in the canyon wall of crates towering above him.

Unless he was already shot.

“Nipper…” “Hey, kid—”

A workman coming around the corner, pointing. “Let's go. Move it. You can't be back here. Out with everybody else.”

Palmer thrust a hand as far as it would go into one of the spaces. He wiggled his fingers, feeling only darkness.

The man was coming. “Kid—
now
!”

 

Summer has nearly two months to run, but the shooting field, covered in feathers, has a look of gray, demented autumn.

A man with a bamboo rake pulls shotgun shells into piles.

The mound of green plastic bags grows taller than the wringmaster's neon pink cap. Sometimes a bulge of plastic moves.

The line of shooters is never more than seven or eight deep, yet it never ends. The golden pigeon never blinks.

People point hot dogs at wounded, scurrying birds, yell to wringers, “There! There!”

The boxmaster makes a mistake. He opens
two hatches at once. Out fly a pair of pigeons—
boom
—knocked from the air with one shot. A double kill! A rare deuce! Four points! The crowd goes wild.

The biggest cheer of all goes to a yellow cat, which streaks onto the field, snatches a wounded bird and streaks off into the trees.

Gunsmoke and afternoon sunlight.

Someone tosses a Frisbee onto the field. The shooter on line fires. The Frisbee lurches and falls. A wringer dashes out, snatches the disc and pretends to strangle it. The wringmaster laughs. The crowd howls. The scorekeeper maintains a stern face, disqualifies the shooter.

People come and go, changing the composition but not the shape of the crowd.

Only Palmer stays through it all.

Sunsmoke.

 

Palmer cursed the sameness of the pigeons. Some of them had dark feathers—charcoal—and as they exploded on the ground and in the air, Palmer thanked them for so clearly not being Nipper.

But three out of four birds that walked out of the white box looked just like his: gunsmoke gray.
Nipper had no special markings, nor had Palmer ever thought to fix a band to his bird's leg or neck, for he knew without reading a book that of boys and pigeons, it is the boy who, so to speak, wears the collar, that it is never the pigeon, but the boy, who is lost.

Not knowing which gray-feathered bird might be Nipper, Palmer believed that every one was. Over and over, a thousand times, he was sure he saw Nipper killed. A thousand times he felt the sting of the buckshot. A thousand times he saw Nipper's neck wrung.

Occasionally a pigeon flapped into the air and stayed there, feathers intact, not only stayed there but rose higher and higher into the gray cloud, then above it, above the treetops, into the sky. A miracle! As the bird circled the field Palmer silently celebrated, his shoulders shrugging up and down in support of the wonderfully working, unshot wings. Around him people shot their fists at the sky and cursed. Others cheered the bird, toasted it with bottles of soda pop hoisted high. Still others jeered the not-so-sharpshooting shooter.

Eventually each miracle bird flew out of sight, and each time Palmer whispered, “Let it be
Nipper.” Then he would hear the next gunboom. He would see wringers galloping through the featherfall. He would see the swollen plastic bags across the way, gorged on pigeon corpses, and for an unspeakable moment he would be inside, in a stinking muggery of limp necks and orange eyes dead as buttons, and he was sure that his bird was one of them. Fertilizer.

It did not occur to Palmer that he had not eaten all day until a crewcut little kid with a cup of grape water ice stood beside him. The little kid mimicked every gunboom by pointing a purple-stained forefinger and barking, “Pow! Pow!”

While an empty white box was being replaced by a loaded one, the little kid looked up at Palmer and said, “Are you a wringer?”

“Do I look like it?” Palmer replied, not wanting to be bothered and already not liking this kid.

The kid was untouched by Palmer's sarcasm. “How old are you?” he said.

“Twenty-five,” said Palmer.

The dumb kid continued to stare up at Palmer as he slurped his water ice. “I'm seven.”

“Hooray.”

“In three years”—he held up three purple fingers—“I'm gonna be ten, and then—”

Boom

The first bird emerged from the freshly stocked white box, new shooter shooting.

The kid swung and pointed. “Pow! Pow!” And kept jabbering at Palmer. “And then I'll be—”

Boom

“Pow!—a wringer. I'm gonna wring their—” He tried to show what he would do but spilled purple slush over his own wrist.

Boom

“Pow! Pow! I'm gonna wring more than anybody. I'm gonna—”

Boom

“Pow! I'm gonna—”

Palmer was no longer hearing the yammering kid. He was looking up. The second pigeon out of the box had been another Nipper look-alike. It took a few casual steps and stopped to peck at the ground—a perfect target. Incredibly, the shooter had missed. The pigeon had taken off and was now higher than the afternoon sun. Another rare one, a miracle bird.

Blocking the sun with his fist, Palmer watched the bird circle the field, as the others had done. Palmer's shoulder muscles flexed to the rhythm of its wings, urging it on. It circled a fourth time. And again. It was not leaving. It was simply circling, circling. In fact, impossibly,
it seemed to be getting closer
.

It was Nipper.

Palmer simply and suddenly knew it.

And just as suddenly the horror of what he was doing struck him. For if Nipper truly was searching for him—and found him—

Palmer's own stupid, unthinking, upturned face was nothing more than bait luring his pigeon back to a second chance at death. This time the shooter would not miss.

Palmer covered his face with his hands.
No,
he prayed,
No No No
….

Too late.

As the bird broke from its circle and began its long downward swing, the little kid beside Palmer pointed and screamed, “Look! It's coming back! It's coming back!” Palmer knocked the water ice from the kid's hand as the people began to look up.
Fingers pointed, more faces turned. The shooter, who had been walking away, stopped and turned. His hand dipped into the pocket of his vest. The only sound was the outraged howl of the purple-plastered kid.

Palmer stepped away from the people then, into the clear, onto the shooting field, the better to be seen, for he knew now that there was no stopping it. Downward came the bird, lazily looping through the haze, gray in gray descending, gliding, a summer sledder down a slope of sunsmoke.

And landed on Palmer's head.

At that point even the howling kid shut up. His boggling eyes joined a townful of others aimed at a spot just above Palmer's forehead. Nipper's toes clutched and moved on his scalp, and for a strangely wonderful moment he felt himself crowned. The shooter was slipping shells into the twin barrels of his gun. And suddenly out of nowhere there was Beans, swiping at Palmer's head even as Nipper chuckled, sending the pigeon to the ground. Before Palmer could react, Beans was on the bird, scooping it up and sprinting to the center of the field. He hoisted the bird above his head and
gave a long, ripping screech of triumph. He ran to the shooter, who stood stone-faced at the chalk line, shotgun at the ready. Mashing its wings, Beans shook the bird in the shooter's face. “It's yours! It came back! Kill! Kill!” He slammed the bird to the ground and ran for cover.

Palmer was running too. He saw the shooter shoulder his gun. His scream—“No!”—made a puff in the gunsmoke cloud. He splashed through the fallen feathers, which were deepest here in the territory between the shooter and the white box, like October leaves. He plunged facefirst, landing, sliding through the gray softness into his hobblywobbling bird. He pulled it into himself, curled himself around it, the comical, many-voiced, eight-toed friend blizzard-blown into his life one day. He closed his eyes and buried his face in the bed of feathers and waited for the shot. The
boom
.

He waited.

And waited.

And heard only silence.

He dared to lift his head and look around. The wringmaster was holding one arm out, making a gate behind which the wringers gaped. The wring-
master's other hand had Beans by the collar.

The shotgun stood on its heel at attention.

Palmer got to his feet. He ignored the blood-tacky feathers sticking to his face. He held Nipper close.

Standing there in feathers up to his sneaker knots, Palmer felt a peace, a lightness that he had never known before, as if restraining straps had snapped, setting him free to float upward. For a moment, feeling in his fingertips the quick beating of Nipper's acorn-size heart, he believed he could fly. Through a pigeon's eye he looked down from the sky upon the field, the thousands of upturned faces, and saw nothing at all to fear.

He reached out then, held his pigeon out to the people, slowly turned so they all could see, so they all would know.

Someone whistled.

Someone shouted, “Bang!” and laughter followed.

People booed.

Cradling his pigeon in both hands, Palmer walked from the field. The crowd parted just enough to let him through. He felt the cold stares
of the people, he smelled the mustard on their breaths. A hand reached out. He flinched. It was a little hand, a child's hand, touching Nipper's wing, stroking it. A child's voice saying, “Can I have one too, Daddy?”