Plumage (20 page)

Two men sat him up, one on each side, their arms behind his back, supporting him. Robin Hood himself placed a cup of something good to his lips. Warm meat broth. Racquel stared into Robin's eyes, as friendly as a golden retriever's, as he drank.

“Thank you,” he whispered when, after he had gulped most of the broth, Robin took the cup away.

Robin's jaw dropped. “He speaks English!”

“The Moor speaks the King's English!”

“A few words of it, at least.”

“I have heard of birds that speak English.”

Racquel said to the men helping him, “I can sit up by myself now. Thank you.”

“More than a few words!”

“But listen to the quaint foreign twist he gives his speech!”

“How came he here?”

Racquel said, “I have lost …” But how to explain to them in a way that they would understand what he had lost? “I have lost my—my companion.” But they would think he meant a man. And maybe they would not understand how emotion was making him watery inside, rocking the boat. “My—” Friend? Yes, Sassy was very much his oddball friend, but she deserved a stronger word. “My sweetheart.” These men belonged to a more innocent time; maybe they would not attach a sexual handle to the word.

They smiled, but not nastily. “The Moor came here with his leman!”

“A dark damsel, belike!”

“This I must see. We must find her.”

Robin asked Racquel, “You have lost her? How?”

“She disappeared into the oval pool.”

The hubbub ebbed into an owl-feather silence. Racquel could not tell whether they understood the oval pool or not. They all sat in a circle around him gazing at him, and the only movement was the tawny flickering of the firelight on their green jerkins and beard-shadowed faces.

Slowly Robin said, “She came here from—from another land? Like you?”

“Yes.” Realizing that an incorrect assumption might ensue, Racquel added, “But she is white. Like you.”

“Ah.” Robin's acceptance was casual and complete. His men murmured a similar acceptance, then sat in silence again.

“She's still here in a way,” Racquel said. Heartache made him say it even though he felt they could not possibly understand. “She's in the treetops somewhere. She's so beautiful. Like a spirit. Robed like an angel. All shining, with great wings. A feather guided me here.”

“Ah!” This time it was a gasp, a sharp breath sucked in like undertow, and Robin drew back from him. All the others had gone rigid, and in their faces he saw—fear? Awe?

Worried that he had committed damage of some sort, Racquel tried to undo it, babbling on. “I mean, that's sort of her, but sort of—I don't know. She's just a little gray-haired hotel maid really. Older than I am. Kind of dumpy. Her name is—”

“Shhhh! Hush!” Robin lurched forward and seized him by the shoulders to stop him. The contact made Racquel realize that Robin needed a bath, but there probably wasn't an awful lot of opportunity in this place for personal hygiene. Anyway, despite his shabby shirt and touches of visible grime, Robin struck him as a nice-looking fellow, not handsome exactly but emanating goodwill with as much ease as he exuded body odor. “You are not strong enough to say that name,” Robin whispered with greatest concern. “None of us dare.”

“Wha?” The query was startled out of Racquel more by Robin's grip than by his words. Robin softened his grasp and his tone as he answered.

“You are a blessed one,” he murmured. “To see her is the greatest of luck and blessing. To touch—” He drew back again. “You have not touched her, have you?”

Racquel thought about this, and concluded that he had not. “No.”

“Then you are not yet an immortal.” Robin essayed a smile. “Come, eat of the King's venison, my Moorish friend.” His smile warmed. “Eat, rest, sleep. In the morning we will speak more of your trouble. Perhaps my men and I will be able to help you.”

ELEVEN

“But how did it happen?” Lydia asked, placid but puzzled. “I mean, why?” Sassy had told her how. Parakeet poop on the pate.

Sassy shook her head, indicating ignorance. “I don't think it could have happened to you.”

“Huh? Why not?”

“Because you're so—so complete.” Sassy did not know how better to explain her growing sense that she needed to be put back together again, re-membered, because she had been Frederickized. If she had not given herself so wholly to the marriage—make that given her
self
, given Sassy away—then none of this would be happening to her. And that would be—

That would be kind of a shame, actually.

Son of a gun.

Fondly she glanced across Lydia's bird-possessed apartment at Kleet, who sat twittering and cooing with his new budgie buddies. “I used to think he did it to me for some reason,” she said, pointing at Kleet with her pinkie to be polite. “But why would he?” Now that Kleet was her companion she could not imagine that he had ever intended to harass her. “If he did, I'm sure it was some sort of weird accident.”

“Well, let me ask him,” Lydia said.

It was a concept so simple yet stunning that it took Sassy's breath away. With her mouth feeling for air she sat where she was. Lydia, however, heaved her poop-streaked bulk up from the sofa and crossed the room, treading nimbly around perambulating conures, to the perch where Kleet gabbled. She offered him her pudgy forefinger and he hopped on readily. Pivoting so that she created a kind of privacy with him, away from the other budgies, Lydia lifted him to within a few inches of her eyes, pursed her lips and whispered a series of kissy-sounding chirps to him.

“Twee!” he cried, lifting his head. “Twee! Twee!”

“Tree?” Lydia sounded puzzled. “He says you're his tree,” she reported to Sassy.

“
Huh
?”

But Lydia had turned her attention back to Kleet, who was emitting a jazzy riff of soprano tweets. “He's very serious about this,” Lydia murmured, listening intently. Sassy could see that he was; in his excitement Kleet fluttered his wings, nearly lifting himself off Lydia's finger. His twittering rose to a whistling crescendo, then subsided. Lydia nodded, puckered her lips and clicked her tongue at him.

“Thank you,” she added, apparently for Sassy's benefit, as Kleet had already turned away and taken flight, zooming back to his perch by the mirror.

“Well.” Lydia plodded over to sit by Sassy again, looking a trifle bemused. “Kleet's stuck on you like he's stuck with glue. He says you skreeked him and he skreeked you back. He worships you, and I mean that the way it sounds. If I'm understanding right, you're a kind of tree-goddess where he comes from, which I guess is that place behind the mirror you told me about.”

Incapable of comprehending most of this, Sassy bleated, “
What
?”

“I think he wants to mate you,” Lydia went on, “or he wants you to find him a mate, or something. I couldn't follow very well.”

“He can't mate me!”

“Honey, I'm just telling you what I think he said.”

“Since when do birds mate with trees? And how would he know about my name anyway?” A tree name, for gosh sake. Once more and with feeling Sassy deplored her mother's choice of nomenclature for a helpless newborn.

“Your name?”

“Sassafras.”

Lydia sat up straight and said in humble, breathless tones, “Well, I'll be licked.”

Sassy complained, “I don't want to be his tree. Did you ask him how I can get my own reflection back?”

“He don't have no idea you got one. He don't understand about mirrors. I mean, look how parakeets talk to mirrors.”

True. To parakeets that was another parakeet or something in the mirror. On the far side of the glass, like visiting somebody in jail.

“A mirror is just hard air to him. Air you can't fly through. Except sometimes you can, it looks like.”

“Aaaak,” Sassy said, because for an eyeblink she was Sassy yet not Sassy, she was a plain brown hen bird stuck with a dandified mate, or no, now he was no mate and she wanted not sure what, world egg, world tree, yellow green scarlet azure sun bright plumage tree world, she wanted to see, to be—“Aaak!” The flutterflight of her own thoughts startled her like a grouse going up. “I'm going crazy.” She grabbed her head in her hands, fingers dug into her stringy hair. “I'm so confused.”

Lydia balled her hand into a fist under her chin and leaned on it, her elbow on her knee. Fist, chin, elbow, knee, all settled together into comfortable rondures; Lydia looked like she could stay that way all day, studying Sassy. Sassy emerged from her own hands, met Lydia's barn-owl gaze and didn't know what to say.

“How'd you get that way?” Lydia murmured.

“What way?”

“Kind of ash-gray.”

She should talk. She wasn't the healthiest thing herself, kind of dough-colored. Sassy said, “I feel okay,” which was amazingly true. “Crazy, but okay.” Although with everything she'd been going through it was a wonder she felt okay. And no wonder she felt crazy.

“Not like you're sick,” Lydia said without moving. “More like you're kind of thinned out. No aura to you. Or maybe it's that you're mostly aura and not much else. You're kind of shadowy.”

Sassy blinked and checked her face with her fingertips. Was it possible that her appearance had changed and she didn't know it, now that there was a budgie in her mirror? Her face seemed to be all there, but how could she know anything for sure anymore?

“I thought so the first time I saw you,” Lydia said, “but I didn't like to say anything.”

And now that she had said something, it was mostly incomprehensible. Sassy demanded, “What do you mean, shadowy?”

“What I mean is, like you said, I don't think Kleet could have skreeked you if you'd been right to start with.”

“Would you speak
English
? What do you mean, no aura?”

“No color,” Lydia muttered, though perhaps not in reply to Sassy's existential yawp. She looked distracted. Uncurling like an oversize grub from the sofa, she made her massive way into the kitchen. Through the door Sassy could see only Lydia's blue-polyester backside, but she could hear her rummaging. She studied the polyester snaggles on Lydia's butt for a moment. Then Lydia turned and, rather like a manatee beaching, emerged from the kitchen, presenting a shoe box with both uplifted hands.

“Can you believe I used to peddle Maybelline?” With the air of one laying an offering on an altar she placed the shoebox, which said Hush Puppies, Quiet Your Barking Dogs, on Sassy's lap.

Sassy looked at her, then opened it. It was like opening somebody's crayon box jumbled with yummy hues. Tiny sample-sized tubes of cheek color, eyelid color, lipstick—Sassy had not known that lipstick came in so many colors. Involuntarily she gave a gasp of delight, quickly revoked as she wondered what good the stuff would do her. She didn't wear makeup, for the Lord's sake. The last thing she needed right now was lipstick.

“Take 'em along,” Lydia was saying.

“What for?”

“Put some on you. Might help.”

“I can't!” Sassy sounded like a whiny child, even to herself. She softened her tone. “How am I supposed to put makeup on?”

“Oh. Duh.” Lydia rolled her eyes as she remembered that Sassy could not see herself in a mirror. “I'll put it on you, then.” She dumped birds and books off the coffee table, then settled her cushy butt on it, her plump knees against Sassy's bony ones. “Take those glasses off,” she said, and when Sassy didn't move, Lydia lifted the eyeglasses off Sassy's head herself and set them on a corner of the coffee table. To Sassy, everything blurred, going soft-focus and prismatic like the romantic scene in a movie, the room a rainbow of parrot macaw lovebird. She gazed entranced yet she hated being without her glasses. She hated being helpless. Lydia was pawing in the box then rubbing something onto a forefinger. “Let's put some color in your skin first.”

As she lifted her hand to dab, Sassy pulled back. “Lydia, this is silly.”

“Is it as silly as seeing a budgie in the mirror?”

Sassy sighed and closed her eyes, letting Lydia paint her.

At the first touch her face felt more real. Which was odd, because there is nothing more fake than makeup—is there? But Sassy belayed such thoughts, halted mental activity of any kind, her focus all on the soft dab stroke feathertouch of Lydia's fingers smoothing creamy quiddity onto the skin of her brow, temple, cheeks, chin. It felt wonderful. Sassy closed her eyes and soaked it in as if—as if—starved, that was it, like a plant starved for rain, like—
Most of my life
, Sassy realized with a pang of hindsight,
I have been starved for touch
. Such a simple, nurturing thing, human touch. Such a peaceful, right thing, to sit back feeling Lydia coloring her eyebrows almost hair by hair, hearing only her own breathing and the twittering of the birds, many many birds.
Forest
, Sassy thought hazily.
Canopy. Ivy, ferns, butterflies drifting up like black sparks
.

Lydia said, “Open your eyes a minute so I can see what shadow to use.”

Sassy blinked. For a moment everything looked strange because it was not the forest, just Lydia's apartment. Cages. Ripped magazines, poopy newspaper. Ezekial dinging his bell. Dirty birds.

Lydia stared into her eyes with a frown that deepened into a trembling pout as if Lydia wanted to cry. Very low, Lydia said, “Sassy, do you
have
an eye color?”

“Of course.” Didn't she? “Kind of greenish, last time I noticed.”

“When was that?”

“When was what?”

“When was the last time you noticed?”

“I guess it's been a while.” Might have been years ago. Sassy didn't want to think about it. She closed her eyes again.