Plumage (22 page)

Racquel limped back carrying two mushrooms like creamsicle-colored portabellas, one in each hand. The outlaws had discreetly taken themselves off somewhere—probably still babbling about her barbaric face paint, Sassy thought. Standing up, she asked Racquel, “Did I get it all off?”

“You look fine.”

“That doesn't answer the question.”

“Sassy, who cares? So you look like a watercolor rainbow, so what? You can use some color.”

“Gee,
thanks
,” she said with edge, turning back toward the water.

“Sassy, let it go! If I can go around in this getup, you can have some makeup on you.” Racquel chose a level patch of sward and settled himself cross-legged. “Sit, for God's sake. You look about ready to fall over.”

Sassy sighed and sat with him. “Do you think I've lost weight?”

“Who says you need to lose weight?”

God love him
. Sassy found herself smiling.

He handed her a mushroom. “So give me a full report, woman.”

She did. She told him about Frederick, about her own unsatisfactory responses to Frederick, about the cop (omitting her inquiry about Devon Shelton's family), about Lydia. Kleet sat on her knee, stiffly erect, keeping a hard, beady gaze fixed on Racquel as Sassy talked and ate. “He doesn't like you,” Sassy said, bemused.

“Great. He's a bigot bird. Whites only.”

“I don't think it's
that
,” Sassy blurted, appalled. “I think he's jealous, that's all. According to Lydia, I'm his mate.”

“You're confused,” Racquel complained to Kleet. “You're supposed to give her back her reflection.”

Sassy said, “It—it's not just that anymore.” First she had thought that if she could only find the parakeet it would solve everything. Then, when she had stranded Racquel in the forest of lost dreams, she had thought if she could only find him again she wouldn't care about anything else. Now …

“So what is it now?” Racquel asked.

In stumbling words she tried to tell him about the lipstick epiphany at the hotel mirror, about—her. Lord, what was it about that sassy young thing in the mirror that brought tears to her eyes again just thinking of her? If she couldn't find her again, she might as well lie down and die. It was that simple and that desperate, this yearning. “She—hugged me …” Trying to speak of her strange shadow angel, Sassy choked up too much to say any more.

Racquel had stopped eating and was giving her a look that she could not quite read. Frightened? Exalted? Shy? “It's the bird-girl, right?” he said quite softly, as if this were a thing to be spoken of in a whisper. “The winged spirit who lives in the treetops? The one who never touches the ground?”

Sassy jolted bolt upright, crying, “You've met her?”

“Briefly.”

“Racquel, I've got to find her again. I've
got
to!”

“That shouldn't be so hard.” Racquel sat still giving her that same strange look. “You don't know who she is?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don't know, uh, her name?”

But this had to be the spirit no one dared to name. “How would I?”

“Huh,” Racquel muttered, his gaze drifting down to the ground, his lowered eyes suddenly so grave that Sassy wrenched her attention away from her own wretchedness for a moment and wondered what was worrying him.

Everything, probably. Good grief, look at the fix he was in. She had told him that someone had filed a missing persons report on him, that his gender was no longer a secret, that his employees were keeping PLUMAGE open—but how long could they do that? She said, “We've got to get you back to your store. Your life.”

“No rush,” he said.

Racquel had never felt a more solemn responsibility. All his own problems paled by comparision. In the tawny glow of the outlaw campfire he studied Sassy.

“'Tis a hungry little barbarian!” Robin said to him with a belch, watching by his side as Sassy chowed down on hot venison and a trencher of bread.

Racquel nodded, smiling—but his smile quickly flickered away. Barbarian—all too apt. Sassy reminded him of something he had read about people in some primitive culture who had never seen themselves. Did not recognize photos of themselves. Did not own mirrors. Had no idea what they looked like. It had sounded idyllic at the time—wouldn't it be great not to know or care what you looked like? But the blind spot in Sassy was way more serious. How could she not recognize—her winged spirit, her soul, her self? She had lived with mirrors all her life; what had she seen in them before the budgie showed up?

Robin asked, “Is it the custom of barbarians to whiten their hair?”

Racquel gave him a surprised glance. “No.”

With greater surprise Robin raised his fair brows. “But she is not old!”

“She's over forty.”

“No! 'Tis not possible. Her back as straight as a girl's, every tooth entire, scarcely a line on her face—”

Racquel looked thoughtfully at his own half-eaten dinner and said nothing.

In a voice that sank to a whisper Robin asked, “In your world, are all folk immortals?”

The mood Racquel was in, remarks like that were enough to keep him awake at night.

Sassy slept, he saw. Nothing like roast meat and exhaustion to make a person sleep like a baby. The parakeet perched on a limb just above her, drew one lavender foot up, tucked its head under its wing and slept. The outlaws slept—even the so-called sentries, Racquel noticed. He imagined sentries were just a formality anyway in this place. He thought about this and many other things as he sat staring, sometimes at the embers of the fire, sometimes at the gibbous moon, sometimes at Sassy, her face rapt and innocent in sleep. When had he become so very protective of her? Sitting guard over her, for God's sake, trying to think how to help her—what was he trying to be, some kind of hero? Hearing the owls softly talking, he gave himself a rueful smile, knowing that wearing a jerkin and tights—well, the wretched cross-gartered garment they called tights—had something to do with it. Leaving aside matters of personal hygiene for the moment, he did like being an outlaw. He liked the company of manly mead-drinking men who accepted him with no questions asked. This was the forest of lost things; had he found something he had lost?

Or was he himself a lost soul now?

Toward dawn he lay down and dozed. When Little John greeted him with “Breakfast, Moor!” and he awoke, he found that he had reached no answers regarding himself, but he had come up with a plan of sorts for Sassy.

“I need to find her,” Sassy was telling the outlaws over lumpy porridge. “Where can I find her?”

“Anywhere,” Robin answered after a silence. “Everywhere. Nowhere.”

Racquel's plan required talk, not action. But he could see that he was not going to get Sassy to sit down and listen. He thought of his sore feet. He sighed and rolled his eyes when no one was paying attention to him. Then he told Sassy, “You and I can go have a look-see.”

“Show me where you saw her!”

“Okay.”

That was a damn devious thing to say. He did not know the way to the oval pool. He had a feeling that the geography in this place was fluid anyway, that the pool might not be where he had left it even if he remembered and could retrace his steps. But it didn't matter. He just wanted a chance to walk and talk.

Or limp and talk. Whatever.

He could feel the outlaws smiling at his back as he and Sassy left. Sweethearts, they were thinking.

Kleet rode on Sassy's shoulder, silent and still. Not even nibbling at Sassy's ear. Subdued, or maybe sulking. Hard to tell what a parakeet is thinking behind those little beady eyes. If
thinking
was the word for a parakeet's cerebral processes.

“What's the matter with your parakeet?” Racquel asked.

Sassy said, “Same thing that's the matter with me sometimes.”

“Huh?”

“Everybody else seems to have a lovie.”

Oh. Yeah, Racquel knew the feeling. And the damn sun was shining, making halos on the huge trees and even poking a few stray beams down into the shadows below, and every single bird in the damn forest—except Kleet—seemed to be caroling its fool feathered head off. The little birdies in this place didn't just go tweet, tweet, tweet either. Some of them weren't so little and they yawped, they squawked, they yodeled, they yelled, they barked and brayed and sang opera and whistled like hailing a taxi. Racquel saw flashes of tangerine cerise vermilion in the green canopy overhead, red orange yellow like every color of Sassy's rainbow face yesterday and then some. Sassy's face turned upward, wide-eyed, sweet and hushed, gazing at the birds, the forest.

God, she loved this place and its damn birds. Jeez. But her gaze gave Racquel a thought of how to begin.

“Sassy. If you were a bird, what kind would you be?”

She blinked, detached her gaze from the treetops a moment and gave him a glance askance. “I seem to be a budgie.”

“Forget that. If you could choose. What would you be?”

“Huh. I don't know.” She halted and turned to peer at him. “If you could have a tail, what kind would you have?”

“Huh?”

“You know. Like your cock tail.”

“
What
?”

She puffed her lips at him in frustration. “Would you have a quetzel tail or a coatimundi tail or a jaguar tail or what?”

This was way more imagination than he had expected of Sassy. Maybe she wasn't as bad off as he thought. “Honey, I got a black tail as it is.” Directing her back to his agenda, he said, “I asked first. What kind of bird would you be?”

“I—I don't know.” She faltered to a halt and stood staring at two yellow orioles doing the kissy-beak thing. “Mating season,” she murmured.

Racquel bet it was always mating season here. But he said nothing. He waited.

“I think I would be one that mates for life,” Sassy said. “A swan, maybe. I don't know.”

He knew it. He knew she was that kind of dreamer. He loved her for it. And hated it for what it had done to her.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “One of the look-alikes. You don't want to be some drab little nest-sitting female.”

The look she gave him was puzzled, almost shocked. She started walking away from his words. She turned the subject away from herself. “What would you be?”

Racquel thought fast. “I wouldn't want to be a bird unless I was a duck,” he declared.

“
Huh
? You want to waddle and quack?”

“No, but—” But only ducks had dicks. And he'd finally figured out why; because they did it in the water. Which sounded like fun. “Cloacas just don't cut it, you know?”

“Oh!” She blushed, but then she actually smiled. “Racquel, you keep surprising me.”

“What I do best, honey.”

But then he couldn't think of a way to steer Sassy back toward any topic that might help her put herself back together. They walked on in silence through mossy shadows, while Sassy gazed up into the trees again—this forest was just a huge mess of biggreen honeyleaf vine blossom moss birdsinging sun-shadow butterfly white yellow things flying all over the place, and in a cerebral sort of way he could see why she loved it, but it did nothing for him below the neck. It was all so damn—natural, that was the problem. Random. Ivy and stuff piled up every which way. You've seen one orchid, you've seen them all. Now Sassy stood spellbound, gazing at a pair of scarlet macaws, but Racquel found himself much less interested in the living birds than he would have been in their vivid feathers artfully arranged on, say, a red felt toque. Or a snakeskin belt. Or something earth-toned in batik. Or—

Out of nowhere Sassy said, “I guess maybe I wouldn't want to be a swan. I like bright colors too much.”

Racquel took a deep breath before answering. “You do?”

“Yes.”

He tried to sound very casual. “Hey, why don't you dye your hair, Sassy?”

She stopped staring at the birds, turning her head to stare at him instead. A stare with edge. “What for?”

“You like color—”

“So I should go around with magenta hair?”

“No, I didn't say that!” God, he'd hit a nerve. Kleet sensed it too, whirring off of Sassy's shoulder to a perch on a nearby tree fern, from which he watched with his head cocked. Racquel eyed Sassy similarly. “I just meant, you know, dye it auburn or whatever. Jeez, you're white, you've got all sorts of options. What's your natural color?”

Flat as roadkill Sassy said, “Gray.”

“You were born with gray hair?”

“No, I was born with no hair. I guess maybe I should shave it all off.”

God, she was pissed. He hadn't expected her to get so pissed. He'd never
seen
her so pissed, her face red and stretched like she wanted to cry. “Sassy—”

She snapped at him, “I guess you think I should get silicone in my boobs, too?”

Now he was getting pissed too. “They do it with saline these days.” Just to be annoying, he added, “I thought of having implants myself. But breasts can be a pain in the ass.” Or not in the ass, that would be a trip, but anyhow, they were a nuisance, they got in the way just reaching for something on a high shelf. “I decided to stick with detachables. How'd we get from hair to—”

“And have my lips plumped?” Sassy cried so fiercely he almost stepped back from her, so sharply that the macaws took fright, shrieked and flew away, their squawks as harsh as Sassy's voice. “I guess you'd like me to have my face lifted, right? And my eyebrows tattooed on, and a rhinestone surgically implanted in my belly button, and maybe some fat sucked out of my—”

“Sassy, for God's sake! All I said was—”

“All you said was I'm not good enough the way I am!”

“I didn't mean it that way!”

Tears started down her taut face but they seemed to just make her madder. She blundered away from him.