Theft (3 page)

He doesn't answer, just keeps walking till he stands right in front of me, opens his clasped hands, and sunlight streams out of them, the bright yellow feathers on the breast of a meadowlark, a bird he shot and killed earlier today. At first, I want to walk away from him and never see him again. But then I see his sadness, and something gives way in me. The world feels shrouded now, like me and Zeb are the only people in it. I move closer to him, open my palms under his, and he empties the bird in. It hits with more
weight than I'd expected, its head spilling over the side of my palms like water from a fountain, limp. “You did this,” I tell him.

He flinches at my words, and I feel the bird's body. It is warm in the way only living things are warm. I can feel its heart beating too, the pressure of its breathing.

“I think it's living, Zeb,” I whisper. Against his toughness, his eyes widen with hope. I hold that bird in the hollow of my palms, like my hands are praying around it. “It's the color of daffodils.” I pet the meadowlark's throat. “Does it get colored that way when it sings?”

“A bird can't get colored from singing,” Zeb says. But I know he's wrong. The yellow of this bird is bright and saturated with the sound of the meadow in springtime. There's this bubble around me and Zeb now, a world within a world made of me and my brother, but somehow Brenda's voice pierces it. She calls from across the field, and me and Zeb both start walking away from her without thinking about it, our shoulders pressed close together, forming a barricade against her

Pretty soon, though, we hear Brenda's voice right behind us. “What're you two doing? Whatchya got?” We keep walking till she hovers long enough, asking us over and over, and finally I stop and turn around, open my hands to her, and watch her fall silent. She bends closer, then looks at Zeb. She eyes him mean, then she pulls her long, black hair into a ponytail and looks at me, questioning.

“You were here, Brenda, you know how this bird got shot.”

“We were just walking with the guns,” she says. “Not shooting them. There's no damn reason for killing a bird like this.”

Zeb just looks at her. He has nothing to say, just takes Brenda's anger like it was due him. The world changes then, and what felt like a shroud around me and Zeb shifts and becomes a quiet that engulfs me and Brenda. Zeb steps back. “What're you planning to do with that bird, Willa?” Brenda asks.

“Gonna doctor it.”

She whispers but at the same time keeps her anger going. “Can't doctor it, Willa. Far as I can tell from looking at it, Zeb
shot it full on.” She's five inches taller and two years older than I am, held back in school the same year I jumped ahead, not on account of her being stupid, but on account of her father taking her out of school to nurse his hangovers too many days, when he isn't even her real dad. So me and Brenda are in the same grade now, but she still thinks she knows more than I do.

“You can't even see where this bird's been shot,” I tell her. “I could make a splint if the wing's broken, could feed it with an eye dropper till it gets stronger. I've seen people do it on TV.”

She reaches into my hands and lifts one wing of the bird with her forefinger and thumb. The meadowlark's flight feathers spread out like a deck of playing cards. She points to the holes peppering the body under the wing, the distinct scatter of birdshot. It weakens me. “Looks like rain gone hard on the skin,” I tell her. “That must have been what the bird thought when it hit. Rain gone hard on the skin.”

“It didn't think anything, Willa. It's a
bird
.” She glares at Zeb standing behind me now, and I expect him to come at her hard, the way these two fight most days. But he just reaches in and touches the bird one last time, no arguing or temper, and then he walks away, leaves us both standing there without him. It's what I wanted all along, for him not to be near me, but when he walks away, I feel an ache, something that only fades when I fight against it.

The only thing that matters now is the meadowlark. “Look,” I say to Brenda, whispering again. “Nothing got in its eyes. They look like tiny black seeds, don't they?” She comes in closer to me, and we huddle around the bird. I close the bird's eyes with one finger. Its lids are wrinkled and scaly, like a reptile's. I glance up, see Zeb on the edge of the field, his back hunched as he walks away, his arms crossed over his stomach, like he might be feeling sick.

Brenda sees me looking at him, shakes her head. “He's an asshole,” she says. Then she goes back to whispering. “This bird is suffering,” she says.

“Yeah. It is.”

She tosses her arm around my shoulder, and together we walk toward the pond. The evening sky has turned swollen and quiet.

“This bird is suffering,” Brenda says, again, and she's not talking to me, she's just repeating things into the air. When we reach the water, she squats down, opens her palms, and asks me to hand the bird over, which is something I cannot do.

“It's my bird, Brenda.”

“You can't own a bird, Willa.”

“I know. But I know what you're planning to do with it.”

“Because it's best.”

I can't stand what she's saying, and I want to come at her like Zeb does sometimes, with fists. She's tall and big boned, and when she's not with me, people tell me she's grumpy and hateable. But I know it's just her being scared and pissed off at things other people don't understand. I also know, deep down, that what she's saying is true. The bird is suffering, and there's nothing to change that or turn back time. “Well, let me do it then,” I tell her.

“
Will
you?” she says.

It's hard to do, but I nod, yes. She agrees, and we both kneel down side by side on the banks of the pond. I could not do this without her being there with me. I could not do it alone. I know this in the pores of my bones.

I look out across the field, sun on the down side of the day and the jagged mountains turning pink along the ridges, dark blue underneath. I think,
This will be the last sky this bird will ever see
, and I know there's no way to make it any different.

I feel the cool water of the pond wrap around the backs of my hands. It trickles through the gaps between my fingers, pooling around the bird, which struggles as soon as I dip it in. I didn't think it had any fight left in its body, but it does.

I've been told it's a caring thing to do, no matter how hard it is. You've got to help a suffering thing die. So I keep my hands clasped tight, close my fingers around its narrow neck, and I twist the head. I feel a
crack,
and the bird goes dead. Tears well up in my eyes.

“Is it done?” Brenda says.

“It's done.” The meadowlark buoys to the surface of the pond, looks half the size it was when it was living, its slack skin and
fragile bones visible beneath its sulfur yellow feathers. “Goddamn Zeb,” Brenda whispers. She reaches into the water, scoops the bird up in her palms.

“What're you doing?” I ask. She starts walking, and I follow. “Where're you taking that bird?”

“Going to bury it.” It feels right, so we walk together to a place by the edge of the field where we know the claylike dirt of this land turns softer, having been farmed for so many years by my own family. There, we both start digging with our hands. “Think we should put it in a box?” I ask.

“No box.”

“Like a person. So it can go on from here.”

“No box. Just earth. It's all it needs,” Brenda says.

When the little pocket we hollow out is about the size of a big avocado, we stop. She takes a moment, then asks me if I'm ready. “Go ahead. Put it in,” I tell her. Together, we place the bird in the grave, let our fingers slip out from underneath it. We cover it back up with soil.

“Better get back home now,” she says. She stands up and walks away fast.

I stay. I pick up two stalks of dried wheat, one long, one shorter. I wrap the shorter stalk around the longer stalk about three quarters of the way up, make a cross for the grave.

“Let it be, Willa.” Brenda's voice stretches back across the field, the way sounds echo on a summer evening. I press my finger into the earth, poke a dependable hole there, set the bottom end of the cross into the ground. Then I run to catch up with my friend.

A few steps from where we both split off to go to our own houses, I look back. The cross has fallen. The grave is an empty mound.

I HADN'T THOUGHT ABOUT Zeb for a long time. Or maybe I thought about him all the time, his presence like a dull hum
circling my brain, the way birds of prey circle without being noticed by animals busy on the ground. The peregrine falcon flies fifteen thousand feet above the earth and has been clocked in a dive at over two hundred miles an hour. A songbird has little chance of maneuvering out of a peregrine's line of sight. The falcon hits its mark midair.

The phone call came like that: a quick hit, a surprise, but not a surprise. It was just a matter of time.

“He's gone into the woods,” the voice said.

From my house on the Chuparosas Mesa, I could see the late summer weather moving in from the north, beyond the Sangre de Cristos, low clouds drifting across the New Mexico border from Colorado, the home I'd left behind, a place I could never squeeze out of my bones—the field where Zeb and I played when we were kids, the mountains that surrounded the place. That land felt like blood relation, to me, like the heart-and-soul substance of a family that had long since been undone. The voice on the phone kept on, and all those memories I thought had vanished came rushing through me, vivid and clear as the present day. They shook me. What the voice was saying shook me, too. So much time had passed, twenty-five years or so. How could they revive this incident now?

“There's no time statute in killing someone,” the voice said. “You understand that, Miss Robbins, don't you?” He addressed me formally, not out of respect, but condescension.

“I understand a lot of things.”

“Precisely. That's why we're calling you. We figure you might be the only one who could track him through the San Juans effectively. Pretty rugged territory there, you know.”

“Track him?”

“Bring him out of the woods.”

My gut was in a knot, but this last bit made me smile a little. Zeb had finally found a way to live in the place he loved, the backwoods of the San Juan range in southern Colorado, his favorite place when we were growing up. “Look, he was a
kid
,” I said, finally. “We were both kids.”

There was a grunt on the other end of the line, followed by a rehearsed litany of recent offenses they couldn't pin on Zeb, but which this guy said he “just knew” Zeb had committed. His voice had started out all cool and calm in the beginning, but as he talked about Zeb, I could hear him getting more and more agitated, even excited. “Yeah, your brother, he does all these petty little thefts, you know, minor pot deals, punk pranks: defacing property, breaking into stores and changing the damn prices on things, shit like that.”

“He changes prices?”

“Yeah, lowers them to his liking. Maybe he thinks it's funny. Hell, I don't know. But he doesn't do it in his own little hippie town. No. He makes a trip down the mountain to the chain stores to do it, one after the other, doesn't leave a damn trace, except for writing numbers all over everything. Shit like that, you know, and so me and my guys, we drive up the mountain and we haul his ass in, question him, and—” He stalled to catch his breath and his voice came out almost whiny. “We question him and the sonofabitch looks squeaky clean.”

I almost laugh a little, but what the guy says next takes away any chance of that. His voice goes from being frustrated and excited to mean and deadly serious. “We have him on
this
, though,” the man said. “Homicide. Killing a man.” His cocky laughter came like a machine gun now. “Killing a man is no petty theft, you know. Zeb's done. We have him now.”

My gut sunk. I knew exactly what he was talking about. There was no way to pretend. “I don't understand. There's no new evidence.” Any proof they'd gathered since Zeb had killed Chet had to be over twenty-five years old.

“We don't need much evidence, Miss Robbins,” he said. “We have a confession,
written
, along with his description of what happened that day, right down to the last detail. Things only the killer would know. You know what he did? He emailed it to us. Sent it to a few state offices too, just to make sure, you know.
Emailed it
, like a damn party invitation.”

I could feel my throat tightening, my mind reeling back to the time it all happened. I felt the person I was now shrinking away underneath the kid I was back then, stealing right alongside Zeb. “It doesn't make sense. If my brother turned himself in, why would he run?”

“You tell me how your brother's mind works, and we'll both know.” He had a point there. Zeb's thoughts had always been a jungle. “Probably some stupid impulse decision, and we got email to thank for that, right? Can you be here Monday?” he said.

I gulped for air, felt my lungs fill with the New Mexico evening. I loved this place now, and I couldn't imagine leaving it. From the living room where I stood, I could see Magda standing in my kitchen, making fresh chorizo that smelled of smoke and chilies. I looked out the window and saw her husband, Cario, walking across the open desert, a blue-jeaned, blue-shirted dot on the purple horizon. Every evening and every morning, Cario and Magda made the trek from their little adobe home, about a quarter mile away, to my place. We shared breakfast, dinner, conversation. Some nights, Christina stopped by on her way home from work, too, and the four of us had good food, a rich and vibrant love between us, though love was a word I was careful with around Christina. Still, this was the life I had made for myself, my makeshift, mongrel family. I'd lived here most of my adult life, had built my home from the ground up, had found peace, a way to live comfortably—things I never thought possible when I was growing up with Zeb.