Plumage (10 page)

Racquel tripped, fell hard on his hands and knees, and bellowed, “I hate this fucking place! Aaaaa!” He reared back. “Snake!”

Sassy stood appalled not so much by his language as by his sentiments. Like a gold-satin ribbon, the snake flowed away between the ferns, more elegant than any necklace Sassy had ever worn. She could have sworn she saw a jewel, a jacinth, nestled between its eyes.

Racquel stood, his crimson silk skirt torn, his knee bloodied, and all his feathers ruffled. “Would you hurry
up
!” he yelped at Sassy.

“I'm not the one tripping and falling,” she told him. “Try taking those stupid shoes off.”

“And go
barefoot
?”

“You'd probably be better off.”

“I
earned
these Guccis, I ain't taking them off!”

“Calm down,” she told him.

“I just want to get bloody
home
!”

“Fine.” Although Sassy meant to return to this place the minute she had talked with the cops and collected her graham crackers. “How do we do that?”

“It's around here someplace,” Racquel muttered, swiveling to stare in all directions. In the trees, clinging to the boles, and on the ground all around him, more various than any Easter bonnets ever made, a congregation of birds turned their heads in unison to watch him.

“What are you looking for?” Sassy asked.

The mirror.

“It goes away the minute you're through it.”

Racquel gawked at her. “
What
?”

“It turns invisible or something.”

He teetered toward her. “So how do we get out of here?”

“That's what I'm asking you.”

“You mean
you
don't know?”

“How should I?”

“Oh, bloody God.”

“Oh, poop,” Sassy muttered.

That otherworld cry echoed through Kleet; his heart beat like butterfly wings, beat so hard that it shivered his breast feathers as he sculled mightily at the air.

Perhaps it had been for her, Deity, that the One Tree had beckoned from the egg-shaped hardair pool. Perhaps it had taken no account of him at all. Perhaps that was why he was alone. Perhaps that was why she was here now, somewhere, and not in that other world.

Here—but where?

He flew swiftly, frantically, but at random. Far below him he heard a commotion of many birds but ignored it, for the cries echoed of merriment and mating; Kleet wanted no part of that, he who had no mate. He flew on.

He had found Deity and lost her and now she had summoned him once again and please—

*Please,* he begged greenplume treefree and azure worldegg as he flew, *Please let her skreek me once more.*

But only watertrickle and leafwhisper answered him. Deity did not call out to him again. Kleet flew until he was weary, searching, but glory forest is vast, shadowland is vast, sky even more so; he could not find her.

Sitting at ease against a mossy tree, Sassy watched the birds, which were in turn watching Racquel rampaging around. There were upside-down-on-the-tree-trunks birds like nuthatches with curved bills, something like a pheasant with a fluffy white turkey tail and a grotesque cobalt-blue head, something with a puff of yellow plumes on its back, a jay not blue but green, little shrimp-colored birds, a pair of knobby-legged storks, two big hen-shaped birds with blue faces and punk featherdos, two cassowaries—there were many many birds, but not the one Sassy was looking for. There was a pair of hyacinth macaws, but there was no parakeet.

The macaws perched side by side on a bowed sapling, making kissy noises through their beaks and nibbling at each other's faces. Sassy looked away. Nobody was likely ever to nibble her face again. Nobody was going to love her ever again.

Arguably, nobody ever had loved her, except maybe her mother. Who now no longer even recognized her on the rare occasions when she forced herself to visit. Alzheimer's was hell.

“If you would stand up and
help
,” Racquel yelled, “we'd stand a better chance.”

Sassy sighed. By “help,” Racquel meant blunder about trying to run into an invisible mirror. He had been doing so for some time. Sassy had suggested going to find somebody, the young couple perhaps, and ask for directions, but Racquel wouldn't hear of it. In certain ways he was quite typically male.

“I know it's around here someplace,” Racquel grumbled, feeling at the air, the broken feathers of his bustle rattling. “Sassy, c'mon!”

Sassy rolled her eyes and got up. Ambling dreamily, she made modern-dance moves at the air in order to placate Racquel. She felt none of his urgency, except that she was starting to get really hungry. “How did Alice do it?” she called to him.

“Huh?”

“Alice. How did she get back through the looking glass?”

He halted to look at her. “I read that book.”

“So did I, years ago, but I don't remember.”

“Neither do I. Dammit!”

A pause while they stared at each other with knotted looks, straining to remember how Alice did it.

“Dammit,” Racquel grumped. “Hell. It was kind of a stupid book.”

“That's what I thought.”

“Yeah. It was just clever, that's all.”

“Clever and political. Satiric.”

“Yeah. I didn't give a rat's ass what happened to Alice.”

“That's the way I felt! I'm glad there's somebody else in the world who feels that way.”

The conversation had drawn them closer to each other until they stood face-to-face, surrounded by birds that continued to be fascinated by Racquel even though his feather-studded hair sculpture, Sassy noticed, hung broken and draggled like his tail feathers. “Your hair moved,” she remarked.

“Oh. I guess now your life is complete.”

Only later Sassy sensed providence in this sarcastic comment. Then, she knew only that she felt something, or someone, watching her—she, Sassafras, not her feathered friend. She looked past Racquel's left shoulder and saw. Shy, behind all the others, in the shadows between the trees something human-sized gazed back at her. Sassy felt her heart startle like a deer and leap like a skylark as she saw a face like a magnolia petal, dewy smooth oval blush and cream, strange yet strangely familiar. She glimpsed hands lifting toward her, upsweep of dawn-colored wings, a shimmer of robe—or was it a cloak of heavenly feathers trailing down? She did not care; she noticed without knowing that there were no feet, that the presence floated, not touching the ground—but her gaze was all for that face too shadowed, too far away to recognize. She gasped, yearning. She reached out to run toward—

As Racquel turned to see what Sassy was gawking at, he caught the edge of his gold strappy sandal on something and lost his balance. Automatically Sassy grabbed for his hand to help him, and as he fell backward through a flat place in the air, he pulled her with him.

After four days had gone by and he hadn't heard from Sassy, Racquel went to see her.

He took something new from the stock, a feathered and sequined baseball cap, to try to make her laugh. Racquel had a feeling it was going to be hard to get Sassy to smile. Not that it hadn't been pretty damn funny when they came back, landing practically on top of the cop, who was there with his ever-loving warrant searching the place. But then the cop was so shook up he'd blundered into the mirror and knocked it over. And it broke. Broke to smithereens. And Sassy just stood there and cried.

Getting out of a taxi in front of Sassy's apartment building, Racquel sighed, because he was breaking a promise to himself. He had sworn he was going to stay away from Sassy from here on out. But God damn, she had turned to him and cried in his arms. Sobbing against his artificial bosom. He swallowed hard just thinking about it.

He went in.

Damn, how can people live in these places?
It's not as bad as where I grew up
, Racquel reminded himself, waiting for the elevator. No dark broken steps, no winos, no smell of urine. But the cinder-block walls painted institutional beige, the mustard-brown vinyl flooring, the low acoustic-tile ceiling, the posterboard signs No Soliciting No Loitering No Recreational Wheeled Conveyances No Public Displays Of Affection—might as well say No Living. Racquel wore fuchsia to defy places like this. Specifically, in this instance, he was wearing a fuchsia tunic fringed with dip-dyed cassowary over a bias-draped plum skirt. And a touch of cassowary at the neck. The right accessories meant everything.

No functioning security system in this place, either, he noticed as he knocked at Sassy's door.

“It's open.” Her voice sounded wan.

He went in, walking through a front room piled with books to find her sitting at her kitchen table amid more books, mostly about birds. She did not get up to meet him. She barely looked at him.

“Hey, woman.” He slapped the glittery baseball hat onto her head. She did smile, and she took it off to see what it was, but she did not show enough interest to head for a mirror and admire how it looked. And she was cute as hell in that hat, dammit, with her heart-shaped face, her big eyes and her little pointed chin. Even her big honkin' glasses were cute under that hat. But she did not put it back on, just laid it aside.

“I haven't seen you around.” Racquel sat down at another chair at the table, which was one of those tasteless aluminum-tubing-and-plastic laminate kitchenette affairs, with aluminum-and-plastic chairs to match. Heinous.

“I lost my job,” Sassy said.

“I know. Doesn't mean you can't come see me.”

“I haven't felt like going anywhere.”

Racquel moved a pile of books to the floor and studied her. Sassy looked like she didn't give a rat's ass about anything. No makeup—of course, when had he ever seen Sassy in makeup? How long had she been letting herself go? Since he had known her, anyway. There she sat all slumped, with her hair not combed. Wearing sweatshirt, sweatpants, and they didn't even match.

“I'm almost sure it was ivory-billed woodpeckers I saw,” Sassy said.

“Huh?”

Sassy pressed her hands on the large book lying open before her as if pressing flowers. A bird book, of course, with big colorful pictures. “Ivory-billed woodpeckers,” said Sassy. “And Hawaiian honeycreepers. And a moa. I saw a moa. And those were passenger pigeons I saw flying over.” She spoke in a monotone, like a grieving person telling the story of how it happened, the cancer, the motorcycle accident, whatever it was. “And those weren't hyacinth macaws. They were Spik's macaws. There's only one left alive in the wild. I saw two.”

“What are you talking about?”

Sassy closed her book softly, as if putting a baby down to sleep, and turned the cover toward him so that he could see the title:
Rare, Endangered, and Forever Gone
.

“The last ivorybill anybody's seen was in Cuba in 1988,” she said. “But I saw a pair.”

“Where?”

“You know where.”

Faced with her steady gaze, Racquel started to babble. “Sassy, that—it can't be real. We just think we're remembering the same thing. It's like when people drop acid together—”

She gave him a look so flat and weary it hushed him. “That parakeet,” she said. “The one that was in the hotel. It's not an escapee from some pet store. It's a Carolina parakeet.” She showed him the picture. Green body, yellow head, orange eye patch. Blue primaries on the wings. Yellow rump patch. Yep.

“So?”

“They're extinct.”

Racquel pressed his lips together and looked at the linoleum floor, against which Sassy's bare feet curled together like white, shivering puppies.

Sassy said, very low, “The voice said that what I found would depend on what I'd lost.”

“Voice?”

“Voice from—wild, from the treetops. Near the waterfall.”

Racquel was sorry he had asked. He didn't want to know any more, and it was no damn good for Sassy to keep brooding about it and grieving about it. The mirror was broken. She couldn't go back there, and it was a damn good thing, because “there” was insane. He looked up at her and said, careful to keep his voice gentle, “Sassy, you've got to come out of it. Think about living in
this
world.”

She did not reply immediately. He could see that his words made little impression on her. But finally she said, “What for? So I can go back to cleaning hotel rooms?”

“You can get a better job.” With a Vanna White gesture Racquel indicated the stacks of books. “Look at all the stuff you know. You ought to be one of those ortho-knowledge-ists.”

Sassy barely smiled.

Racquel let himself get serious. “Damn it, Sassy, what you've lost, you've lost
here
, not in some freaky fairyland.
Here
. Now. But you gotta fight back. Put that hat on, woman.”

She looked at it, but did not make a move toward it. She said, “I don't wear hats.”

“Why not?”

“I just don't. They're not who I am.”

She sounded quite sure. Racquel studied her almost in admiration; she knew who she was, weirdness and all? There was only one of her?

“It's a pretty hat,” Sassy added as a polite afterthought.

Racquel asked, “So who are you?”

“Huh?”

Jeez. She was the one who had brought it up. “Why don't you wear hats?”

“I'm too old.”

“Since when?”

“And I'm too plain.”

“Sassy—”

“Just let me alone, Racquel, would you?”

“No.” He sat back in his chair staring at her. God, she'd lost even more than he had thought. “How are you going to get it back if I let you alone?” He could help her; he knew he could.

“Get back what? My husband?” Sassy soured her mouth to show that she was bitterly joking. “No, thank you.”

“Not your damn husband! I'm talking about
you
, Sassy! I'm talking about being a woman.” Racquel's passion jarred him to his feet; he couldn't help it. Jesus, being a woman—it was the biggest, best, most beautiful project anybody could undertake, worth devoting a lifetime to, which is what it usually took, what with foundation garments and cosmetics and depilatories and everything you had to know, yet there sat Sassy born with the gender he had always wanted, and—how had she lost that sense of herself? How had it happened that she just didn't care anymore? Racquel blurted, “You got so much going for you, Sassy, I just want to shake you! Don't you sometimes, just sometimes, want to wear something besides
sweatpants
?”