Someplace to Be Flying (10 page)

First they were waiting for her to miss. Now they’re just wondering how long she can stand there at the table, bright-eyed and smiling, playing like she just got up. I think of telling them, she can stand there forever and she’s never going to miss, but I hold my peace because I’m curious, too. Not about how long she can keep it up, but what she’s up to.

Corbæ and canid. The trouble between our families goes all the way back to the first day. We’re talking the long ago, spirit time, not the way you count years. We’ve never had much use for calendars
—
not the way you do. The cycles of the sun, the moon, the seasons are all we’ve ever needed, same way we always had territories instead of “owning” the land. Property’s something you came up with. Raven says it’s because you think in terms of boxes. Everything’s got to fit in one
—
you even live in them.

Territory’s a different thing. It’s not permanent. We mark out what we need when we’re mating, when we’re feeding the kids, then let it go. Don’t build anything permanent on it, don’t leave much of a mark at all. Some raggedy nest, maybe, feathers, scat, nothing the rain and time won’t wash away. And we never keep it just to ourselves, you know, saying that flower can’t grow here, sparrow can’t feed, the sun can’t shine here, the wind can’t blow, fox can’t walk through, spider can’t make its web. Makes no sense to us. Oh, maybe some of us are living in boxes now, but mostly we live how we always did, follow the old ways, walk in the world, tall but leaving only footprints, living on spirit time.

People, they don’t know what to make of us. Most of you think we never were, or if we were at one time, we’re not anymore. But we’re still here, old spirits all around you, only you’re not paying attention to us. When you do happen to stumble upon us, you think you’re seeing a ghost, or a faerie, or some little alien come down from the stars, going to stick a needle in you, steal you away in a silver saucer. You don’t want to believe we could be real. Puts too much responsibility on you. Makes you uneasy, remembering what you’re doing to our cousins.

But we don’t get involved with judgments or retribution. I don’t say this to put you at your ease. You either live a life of kindness or you don’t. The payback comes when you finish your business in this world and cross over to the next. Good people have nothing to worry about. Everybody else, well, you’ll be getting yours. Yon didn’t borrow that Old Testament “eye for an eve” from us the way you did so many other stories. One of your people happened on a glimpse into the Mystery that started it all. Everybody’s got to pay her due and let me tell you, nothing gets by her.

But I was telling you about Cody. Maybe you know him better as Dogface, Old Man Coyote, though mostly he doesn’t look so old; always in somebody’s business, making it his own. Truth is, I like him more than I don’t, which says about as much about my good nature as it does about his charm. And he is charming
—
a good-looking, dark-haired man with eyes the color of a moth’s dark wings, as drawn to trouble as to a flame.

First day we’re walking around, furred and feathered and scaled, taking it all in, that sweet mystery of being alive, here and now, living in Zen time. Corbæ, we saw it happen, sun born, moon called up from the sea, stars scattered across a darkness blacker than our wings. We were siblings then, slipped up out of the before from in between the stars to take in the show. We’re sitting there in the forever trees, watching the darkness catch fire
—
“It’s like fireworks,” Zia says, and none of us have seem them yet, but we understand. The lights settle down and then we’re watching the long ago take shape, hill by river by forest by sea. We’re watching our brothers and sisters sit up and blink, look around themselves, already forgetting everything except for what they can see in front of their noses.

And everybody’s got their own skin, fits them well because they’re born to it, no complaints. All except for Cody.

Oh, Cody.

He’s walking among the brothers and sisters while they’re not quite awake yet. Steals the bobcat’s bushy tail, the hare’s courage, the ant’s independence, the dolphin’s legs, the turtle’s fine-pointed ears. Takes this and that and a bit from everybody and then he sees us sitting up there in the trees, watching him.

Oh, Cody.

Who’re we going to tell? Why would we even care?

But that’s where it starts. Cody, scheming, scheming. Always has to put one over on the corbæ. Sees any kind of a blackbird and it starts up a meanness in him.

Because we know.

Doesn’t matter that we’d never tell, that there’s no one to tell.

It’s enough that we know.

Margaret starts in on a new rack and sinks five balls off the break. She steps back from the table and downs a shot of Jimmy’s hooch, then calm as you please, sinks the rest of the balls, works the table so fast that balls are leaving smoke trails behind as they drop into the pockets. Somebody sets up a new rack, but she pauses again. This time it’s to give Cody a considering look.

Feels like they’ve been at it for weeks, or she has, sinking rack after rack. Cody, all he’s been doing is standing by the table, getting quieter and quieter, so still the air feels thick around him. He takes that look she gives him, then reaches into his pocket and tosses a small black pebble onto the pool table. Paying off his debt with a piece of magic. A little chunk of long ago, old time, weathered and smoothed. It sits there on the green felt, sucking light into itself.

“You know,” Margaret says. She looks at that pebble, but leaves it lie. “There’s not one of us cares about what you did. You ever hear of a corbæ could leave some pretty thing just lying around without sidling up and putting it in her pocket? Maybe you invented borrowing, but we took to it like it was ours.”

Cody’s heard this before. Heard it more times than he can remember, I’d guess.

“So give it a rest,” she tells him.

Cody doesn’t say a word. Just looks at her, then he snaps his cue in two, tosses the pieces onto the table. Picks up his hat and walks out. I see something in his eyes as he leaves, something in the shadows under that low brim. The desert’s in there and the timberlands. All the lonely, wild places where he roams
—
not because anyone makes him, but because he claims he wants to.

I think of what Margaret said and suddenly I flash on what this is all about. It’s not that we saw him, there in the long ago, taking a piece of this, a piece of that for himself. It’s that he thinks we don’t care. It’s that no matter what he does to get our attention
—
outrageous, helpful, mean
—
he thinks we don’t care.

I turn to Margaret, see her putting away her cue. She turns to me before I can say anything.

“I know, Jack,” she says.

Then she heads for the door. I stop long enough to pocket the pebble before I follow her out into the night. I hear the crowd start to stir as I walk toward the stairs.

“Christ,” someone says. “Pull me a beer, Jimmy.”

Jimmy doesn’t move. I catch a look in his eyes and know that he’s seen past our skin. Maybe not Margaret’s or mine, but for a moment there, he saw Cody’s wild face, the long snout and whiskers, and it turns something around inside him, you know, the way the crow girls can make you see things differently, just by being who they are. It changes him. Reminds him how long the world’s been here before ever he was born into it. Reminds him that somebody was walking it in that long ago, and they’re still here, walking it now.

“Hey, Jimmy,” the guy who wanted the beer repeats.

“I hear you,” Jimmy says, but he stands a moment longer, looking out the door, before he finally goes and pulls the draft.

I could use a beer myself, but I keep on walking. By the time I hit the street, they’re both gone.

I take out the pebble and look at it again. Smooth, old. A little piece of enchantment that doesn’t do anything.  It just is.  I figure I’ll give it to Raven. Maybe he’ll put it in that magic pot of his, unless he’s gone and lost it again. He used to collect pieces of the first day in that pot, started up doing that a long time now. Don’t know what he ever did with them all. Could be the way things are, he’s got no use for them anymore. But I’ve got no use for them either. Once I started remembering on my own, I dtdn’t need a piece of nowhere to get to the place where history was hiding m my head

But that makes me think. Maybe there’s more to my considering I should give this black pebble of Cody’s to Raven than something I’m only doing out of habit. Maybe it’ll bring him back from whatever place it is that he’s gone

THE HOUSE ON STANTON STREET

Ultimately you understand there is order in the

universe, even if there is no order in your

immediate circumstances.

—J
ANE
S
IBERRY
,
FROM AN INTERVIEW IN

T
HE
O
TTAWA
C
ITIZEN
, W
EDNESDAY
,

A
UGUST
23, 1995

Newford, Labor Day Weekend, 1996

Like its neighbors, the Rookery was set back from Stanton Street, separated from the public thoroughfare by an expanse of dutifully tended lawn, unruly flower beds, and the line of hundred-year oaks that marched along either side of the street, two once-tidy rows of manicured shade trees, enormous now, and more or less gone feral. The houses stood surprisingly close to each other, barely a footpath apart at times, tall Victorian structures built of red and brown brick with delicate ironwork and wood trim, gabled and dormered, hip- and mansard-roofed, some with balconies, some with small towers, all sporting large front porches. As if to make up for their cozy proximity to one another, their properties ran the full length of the block between Stanton Street and the carriage lane in back, with room enough for sprawling gardens and coach houses—those curious, outdated relics from an older time, most of which had been turned into garages or extra apartments.

Behind the Rookery, the lawn grew in patches, too much of it shaded by an immense elm that easily rivaled the oaks lining the street in both its stately height and the untamed spread of its branches. Ferns, lilies of the valley, and trilliums grew thick in the spring shade. Dead man’s fingers and other fungi dotted the lawn in the fall. In summer, the heavy blossoms of the rosebushes crowded the granite of the walls separating the Rookery’s backyard from those of its neighbors, while the coach house was so overgrown with ivy that it disappeared behind a shimmering veil of green. Between the coach house and the lane in back was a small vegetable and herb garden.

There were no bird-feeders hanging from the lower branches of the elm or the posts of the back porch. The only songbirds making their home here were a small parliament of bohemian crows and one bad-tempered raven that seemed more than capable of scavenging their own meals. The boisterous flock ruled the backyard, certainly, and most of the neighborhood with a corvine charm that those not so enamored with their presence would describe as noisy and bullying.

Mostly, Rory enjoyed their good-tempered shenanigans, but that might only be because he considered them to be the most normal inhabitants of the property—barring himself, of course.

Or perhaps it was because of the crow lodged in his surname: Crowther.

Rory had the ground-floor apartment, twelve hundred square feet of high-ceilinged rooms that were austere when he first went to view them nine years ago, but were now so completely filled with the furniture and clutter he had brought into them that the original floor plan was almost unrecognizable. His office was a junkyard of paper, books, and magazines, but the spare bedroom that served as a workshop where he made his jewelry was the worst: a confusing jumble of supplies and finished work haphazardly stored in ever-ascending stacks of boxes and containers set precariously against the walls, leaving navigable only a narrow corridor running between the door and the area around his worktable.

Upstairs on the second floor, there were two apartments, one untenanted at the moment, the other rented by the most remarkable, self-contained woman Rory had ever met. Her name was Annabel Blue—Annie to her friends. How familiar that might ring against the inner ear would depend entirely on how closely one followed the Newford alternative music scene, music that was truly an alternative to the charts as opposed to alternative acts who appended the adjective to their resume simply for its rather dubious street credibility. She had her own record company that she ran out of the apartment, Uneasy Records (“Because my music makes for uneasy listening, instead of easy,” she explained to him once), storing boxes of the as-yet-unsold cassettes and CDs in the basement.

Annie stood only an inch under Rory’s five-ten, long-limbed and raw-boned, a striking woman with expressive eyes so dark they seemed to swallow light. Her coal-black hair had been cut short and dyed a startling blonde this past summer, at the same time as three more earrings and a nose ring joined the seven earrings that already climbed up the lobes and outer ridges of her ears. Two of them she’d bought from Rory: a simple dangling crow’s feather, cast in silver, and a small stud in the shape of a
torii
—a Shinto shrine-gate symbol. She had a bracelet tattooed on her right wrist and another on her left ankle, intricate Celtic ribbonwork, starkly delineated with black and red pigments. Her wardrobe ran to faded jeans and clunky black workboots, T-shirts with the arms torn off in the summer, baggy sweaters and men’s sports jackets in the winter.