Plumage (15 page)

“Are you crazy?” he yelped, flinching away from her. “That could be poison!”

“It's good. Like blueberry bread.” Sassy ate greedily as Racquel watched her with white-rimmed eyes like those of a spooked horse, as if he were waiting for her to topple in agony or perhaps to emulate Alice in Wonderland in sudden feats of gigantism. Sassy did neither. She devoured all the mushrooms, belched with satisfaction, and told him, “They're really very good.” Remembering he was a man, she added, “Meaty. Like portabella.”

“I'm happy for you.” Judging by Racquel's sardonic tone, he had more to say, but he was interrupted by a jingling sound and the muffled rhythm of hoofbeats. The deer lifted their elegant heads and bounded away, and with their harness ringing two young men came riding on swan-necked white steeds, richly caparisoned, and the youths rode them in cloth of gold—afterward Sassy could remember little of their clothing definitely not purchased at Wal-Mart, for her gaze was caught on their warrior faces, scarred yet deeply innocent, and alight as if all their sorrows were over.
Lovers
, Sassy thought with hot angst prickling her eyes. Lovers in the most fundamental sense—they loved each other.
Faithful friends, faithful comrades, faithful lovers
. One of them looked at the other and smiled for no reason. He carried a curling horn, an elephant's tusk rimmed with silver.

“Hey!” Racquel bawled at them, flailing his arms and pointing at Sassy. “She just ate the freaking mushrooms!”

The warrior youths turned, smiled, and lifted their right hands in courtly greeting as they rode past. One of them called something in some liquid, melodious language.

“Wait!” hollered Racquel.

But they rode away. “Roland and Oliver,” Sassy said as they jingled into the shadows. “I think.” Judging by Oliver's horn. In the
chanson
it was called an
olifant
.

“Like I care?” Racquel folded to the ground, letting his legs spraddle ungracefully in his skirt, his despair visible; he clutched his braided head in his hands. “It's probably next Tuesday by now at home.”

Sassy stood wondering where there might be a pearlescent pinion to guide them. That was why she had eaten the mushrooms, she realized with a flutter of insight; their nacreous mottlings were like those of the feather she had followed her first time in shadowland. And the mushrooms were good, she knew they were good—but was she to wander lost, eating manna, for forty years, or eternity, or what? Where was her yahweh, her guide? To see a feather was good luck, the knight in a shining Stetson had said; to catch one …

She looked up, searching the distant treetops for a sign, but saw nothing except birds in love.

Limping along, his astonishment deepening to match his despair, Racquel kept watching Sassy as she watched the tree-tops and turquoise sky, the labyrinthine green of creepers and mistletoe, the gigantic oaks and pines and—and mimosas for all he knew. The orchids far overhead, the lapis-lazuli frogs clinging to the leaves, the black-and-scarlet butterflies bobbing in sunrays, the moss-colored shadows, the birds. He watched the way she gazed, her face rapt and deeply innocent, as if her troubles were all over. There was something almost supernatural about Sassy in this place, something ethereal about her face, as if she could stay here and be a cataract running between the rocks or a songbird in the green canopy or one of those people on a horse, an eidolon.

Looking at Sassy, prompted by her uncanny certainty as well as by the emptiness of his belly, Racquel decided to go ahead and eat the damn mushrooms. Right by his bare sore feet he found a cluster of fungi wearing little wisteria-colored caps like toques and asked Sassy, “This kind?”

“Yes, those are good. Sit down a while.”

They both sat. The mushrooms tasted like coffee cake or maybe more like boysenberry Danish or a bran-apple muffin; in any event, they made him want a cup of espresso, and of course he couldn't have it. Too bad. Sassy didn't say a word while he ate; Racquel glanced over at her and saw her staring up at a pair of those little blue parrots she said were the most endangered bird in the world. The way those two looked, dancing cheek to cheek on their branch, they were about to take care of that problem by making more.

“You watching to see how it's done?” Racquel asked a lot more harshly than he intended to.

Sassy gave him a sideward look and a half smile. “I don't know why I'm watching.”

She was probably thinking about that uxorious louse Frederick.

“It kind of hurts,” Sassy said. “Lovebirds.”

Racquel didn't know what to say, so he promptly opened his mouth and barfed out something stupid. “Huh. He'll leave her the minute he's done with her.” Whichever one “he” was. The two blue—macaws, that was it, macaws were different than parrots somehow—the two chambray-colored birds looked exactly alike.

Sassy had turned back to watching them. “No, he won't,” she said. “They mate for life.”

That eerie sureness of hers again. Almost frightened, Racquel blurted, “How do you know?” and realized that he sounded rude.

Sassy did not react to his tone even to look at him. She gazed at the blue macaws nibbling each other's faces as she said, “Most birds, you'd be right, the male would up and leave. Most birds, the female is plain and the male is the gaudy one, a dandy.”

“Hey, I like that in a male.”

“I figured you would.” Sassy gave him her sidelong smile again. “The female is plain, so she gets to sit on the nest; she blends into her environment. Just like the typical housewife.”

“Another endangered species.”

Sassy swiveled to gaze at him as if he had said something amazing. “Darn,” she said, her voice hushed. “You're right.”

One of the blue macaws turned coyly away, sidling along the branch; that would be the female, Racquel opined to himself. The other one fluttered his wings and nipped at her tail.

“So anyway,” Sassy said, focused on the macaws again, “with most birds, the male gets the freedom. Just like with people.”

Racquel didn't like her bitter tone. “He has to bring home some worms now and then, doesn't he?”

“Bring home the bacon. Traditional hubby.”

“Aren't there birds where the wifey gets to bring home the bacon?” Odd, Racquel realized; he knew scads about feathers, but almost nothing about birds. There was an aphorism somewhere in that thought, like not seeing the forest for the trees.

Sassy said in a low voice to the forest, “I think there's one species somewhere in South America with the female brightly colored and the male sits on the nest.”

The female macaw had taken a pose like a sculpture in blue lapis, proud-breasted, proud-winged, tail up and head thrown back so far that head and tail nearly touched.

“But those two are colored alike,” said Sassy with a wistful note in her voice. “And birds like that, like the Canada geese, hawks, swans—you can't tell the difference between males and females, and they share everything. The nesting, sitting on the eggs, the feeding, everything. And they mate for life. They're faithful.”

Racquel blurted, “What the hell makes you think you're missing a soul?” It seemed to him that she had more soul than most people.

She gave him a startled look. “Well,” she said after a moment's hesitation, “I'd forgotten that I really do like hats.”

She did? That was a change of key. Of course, Racquel now realized, she couldn't see herself in the various hats he had tried to put on her.

“Oh!” he said.

“And braids,” Sassy added.

Well, those were serious matters to have forgotten, okay. But still—

Racquel's attention was diverted as the male macaw advanced on the poised female, his eyes shining like tiny silver dollars. “He's getting ready to stick it in!” Racquel cried with enthusiasm as if he were Joe Husband watching a football game. Too late, he realized that he sounded a trifle crude.

Sassy gave him an expressive look, very Jane Housewife, but said merely, “They're not
that
much like people. Male birds don't have a stick-it-in. They have cloacas.”

“Huh?”

“Cloacas. Kind of a vent. A hole. The only ones who have—you know—” She actually blushed. “Some waterfowl,” she murmured. “Ducks.”

Racquel could barely conceive what she was trying to say. He cried, “
Only ducks have dicks
?”

Sassy blushed harder. “Yes.”

“But—
why
?”

She gave him that look again and turned away without replying, standing up to turn her back on the mating macaws as well.

For a timeless time, as they walked on, Sassy thought about something Racquel had asked: why did she think she was missing a soul, and not just a reflection? She had not known how to answer Racquel's question; it was hard to describe the emptiness—not just the loss of Frederick, but a great loss made up of many small losses over the years. She had ended up explaining it to Racquel in terms she had thought he might understand—hats, hair. But there was more, far more. She vaguely remembered that she had once been a person who liked organza, eyelet, daisy lace, dotted swiss. Who had taken a pair of bell-bottomed blue jeans and put a scalloped flower-embroidered hem on them. Who had preferred filmy nighties to flannel ones. Who had wanted to have someone rub her temples when she had a headache and give her a backrub whether she had a backache or not and—and love her, all of her. For a moment she ached anew, remembering what it was to have that body-love in her. But she could not remember well enough to say it. These days she seldom even noticed that she had a body.

She remembered how she would try to give Frederick a backrub and he would pull away.

Riding in her heart where dreams of goodness used to be, there was only a knot of bitterness.

Racquel was probably right. It was probably Frederick who had emptied her of her soul, not some parakeet.

“Now I'm thirsty,” Racquel said.

Sassy peered at him, bemused by his tone; he wasn't complaining. He was just stating a fact. Really, he hadn't complained much once he got past the first shock, Sassy realized. Even the way his feet had to be hurting, he just padded along. He had physical courage. She admired that.

“Now that I'm not hungry anymore, I'm thirsty,” he amplified, apparently thinking from her stare that she hadn't heard.

“Well, we should look for water then.”

As if her voicing the thought had made it happen, a silvery gleam appeared in the distance, amid greenshadow.

“Was that there before?” she asked Racquel.

“Huh?” He looked where she pointed. “Hey!” He limped rapidly toward it, leading the way downhill between green-velvet boulders the size of sofas to the pool.

“Whoa,” Sassy said.

As if she had ordered him to halt, Racquel stood there. For a moment they both just stared, for it was strange to find such a pool in the midst of wilderness. It looked like the reflecting pool from some royal garden. Edged with cadet-blue and gray-green and shrimp-pink stone—some sort of quartz, Sassy thought, or marble, or maybe even jade, she did not know, and she made herself a mental note to drop by the library and take out some books on rocks when she got home—if she got home … Edged with stone of the subtle colors Sassy loved, the pool nestled in a glade, a smooth-lawned sort of glen, and all around it grew nodding white flowers similar to daffodils. It was odd, those garden flowers, and the pool without a stream leading into it or out of it, and the glade—a man-made dell, it seemed, a gently rounded dingle, a clearing, although not so large that it would let in sunshine except at high noon. Sheltered all around. Not a breath of air moved, and the pool lay glassy still in greenshadow, and even the birds made no sound in that circular glade in the cup of which the rock-rimmed pool lay as if in the palm of God's hand, a perfect oval looking glass for the sky.

Between Sassy and Racquel and the pool stood a six-foot freshly painted signpost bearing messages in several languages, the English of which decreed:
DANGER. NO SCRYING
.

Eyes wide, Racquel asked, “What the hell is scrying?”

“It's some sort of magic …” Sassy tried hard to remember; she had read something about scrying in one of her books on mirrors. “It's a kind of divination with mirrors or shields or anything shiny. I think you have to be a virgin to do it.”

“Well that lets me out,” Racquel said without missing a beat. “How about you?”

“Give me a break.”

“Hey. If I'm not a virgin, I can't scry, can I? So no problem. I'm going to get my drink.” Surprisingly quickly for a guy with sore feet he headed past the sign toward the pool.

“Racquel, wait!” Sassy called. This place gave her pause, as the old stories used to say.

Racquel did not wait, but sang falsetto, “It's my party, and I'll scry if I want to,
scry
if I want to,
die
if I want to …” He did not continue the song. On his hands and knees among white flowers at the edge of the pool, he went very still.

“Are you okay?” Sassy got herself moving and headed toward him. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.” He cupped his hands and lifted water to his mouth.

“Racquel—”

But nothing untoward happened. He drank. Sassy stood beside him as he dipped his cupped hands again and again. With ripples spreading, the water looked like—like water, nothing more. Pretty. Intricate, the way the circles of wavelets interlocked, like a wedding-ring quilt in shades of shadow-green and aquamarine.

Racquel finished drinking and lumbered to his feet. “What did you see?” Sassy asked him once more.

“Nothing much.”

“Racquel, come on.”

“I just saw myself. My reflection.” With her gaze on him, he sighed, and added, “Except I was a guy.”

“You mean it showed you the truth about yourself!”