The Weight of Feathers (19 page)

They didn’t know. The old man hadn’t told him.

“I think I broke the lock,” Lace said. “I’m trying to get it open.”

“With a steak knife? You’ll kill yourself.” Clémentine pulled a pin from her hair. “Here.”

Lace set the suitcase down and pretended to fiddle with the lock.

“What’s the matter?” Eugenie asked.

Lace turned the suitcase so they couldn’t see the lock, and kept moving the hairpin. Her heart felt squeezed tight, giving off blood like juice from a plum. Maybe the old man had told only Cluck, and would leave her to him.

“I shouldn’t have said anything about Alain,” Lace said.

Clémentine sat on the built-in bed. “Alain Corbeau’s an old mule. If he felt a heart attack coming on, he’d say he was too busy, could it come back next week.”

Lace jerked the hairpin like it had done the trick. “Thank you.” She handed it back to Clémentine.

Eugenie hopped up on a counter. “If it makes you feel better, he’s angrier with Cluck than he is with you.”

Lace dropped her shoulders, the tension swimming down her back. Maybe Alain Corbeau hadn’t told Cluck. But his stare told her it was not her place to interfere.
Entre dos muelas cordales nunca pongas tus pulgares,
her uncles would say. Don’t put your thumbs between two wisdom teeth.

The old man’s face would never tell her anything. She wanted to look at Cluck and find out what he knew.

“Where’s Cluck?” Lace asked.

“He’s at his tree,” Eugenie said.

“His tree?”

Clémentine swiped a cotton pad over her face, rubbing off her eye makeup. “Every place we stop, he has his tree.”

Eugenie gave Lace vague directions to the cottonwood. But Lace did not go there first. She found Cluck’s grandfather leaning against the Morris Cowley, a half-burned-down cigarette between his fingers.

He took the pack out of his shirt pocket and held it out to her.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m trying to quit.”

He hummed a quick laugh and put the pack away.

She wanted to ask why he hadn’t told Cluck who she was, but bit back the question in case she’d been wrong. If Alain Corbeau hadn’t recognized the Paloma in her, hadn’t seen the feather on her arm, she wasn’t telling.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But Cluck had to know.”

“It made the boy feel better,” the old man said. “And it was nothing to me. Doctors are
les crétins
. They can’t make me do what I don’t care to.”

The end of his cigarette glowed against the dark, a flake off a harvest moon.

Lace tried not to touch the burn on her cheek. “You used to work at the plant?” she asked.

“Years ago.” He put out his cigarette and went inside.

Lace followed the clean, honey scent of wild roses through the trees. It drifted over the old campground, heavier and sweeter at night, like gardenia.

She spotted the white of Cluck’s shirt and the pale soles of his bare feet, moon-brightened. In the dark, they were all of him that stood out. The black of his hair, his dark trousers, the light brown of his face and hands faded into the tree.

“Well.” He saw her and climbed down, hands and feet gripping the branches. “If it isn’t the only person my grandfather likes less than me right now.”

“That’s not how Eugenie tells it,” she said.

Cluck got down from the lowest bough. “She’s probably right.” He gave her a worn-out smile.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just angry.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t take care of himself. Never has.”

She set her hand on the trunk and looked up. “How do you climb without shoes?”

“I’m not sure I could climb
with
shoes. I’ve been doing it without since I was five.”

“What do you do up that high?”

“I just like being up there. It’s quiet.”

No one in her family liked heights. They’d never understood why anyone put themselves somewhere they could fall from. But now she wondered if being up high was a little bit like swimming, when the shelf of a lakeshore dropped out to the water’s full depth. The light thinned out before it reached the bottom. The distance to the lake bed felt endless as the night sky.

The difference was gravity. There was no falling to the lake bed. If she stopped swimming, she drifted toward the light.

“Looks dangerous,” she said.

“You can’t avoid everything dangerous.”

“I try.”

“Oh yeah? How’s that going?”

She slapped his upper arm, pulling her hand back as soon as she touched him. The last time she’d done that, he’d said it meant she was a Corbeau. She felt the words like a stain.

He grabbed her hand before she let it fall to her side. “Thank you,” he said. “For telling me. If you didn’t, nobody would.”

She held onto his. She never got to see his wrecked hand this well. It was always doing something with wires and feathers.

She guided his thumb against her palm. “Does that hurt?” She touched his curved-under fingers.

When he slow-blinked, his eyelashes looked blue-black, like the river at night.

“No,” he said.

Their hands weren’t crossing the space between them, her right to his right. His left hand held her right hand. Nothing between their bodies.

He’d reached out for her with his left hand. Without thinking, he used his left hand.

“Are you left-handed?” she asked.

He pulled his hand away. “No.”

“But you just…”

“I work with both. It makes you ambidextrous.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Lace had been sewing since she could hold a needle, and that had never happened, not even when she broke her right wrist jumping into a shallow pond.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked.

“I told you. Bull fighting.”

The more she asked the same questions, the more he lied. It made her own lies smaller, easier to stuff into her suitcase with her tail, pink as
agua de sandía
.

“So what’s special about this tree?” she asked. It was a plain cottonwood, dull brown, the leaves full but the ordinary green of a Bubble Up bottle.

“This, I’ll have you know, is a perfect climbing tree.” He set his palm against the bark. “It’s got a good trunk. You can’t climb a tree if the trunk’s skinnier than you are. It’s got to be at least two, three times as thick as you.” He touched one of the lower boughs, twisted and hanging down. “It’s got branches low enough to reach. You can’t get up there if you can’t get on the first branch. The branches are close enough together to climb, and they’re sturdy. They don’t have to be as strong as the trunk, but they have to be pretty solid.” He stared up into the tangle of boughs. “You want to see?”

“Sure.”

He got onto the lowest branch and held out his hand to her.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“You want to know what’s special about this tree,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

“I don’t climb trees.”

He looked at her like she’d said she didn’t eat, or didn’t own a Bible. “You’ve never climbed a tree?”

Her mother kept her out of trees. No
damita
dirtied her dress on maple boughs or fiddle-leaf figs.
Abuela
kept Lace’s male cousins on the ground too. Branches were where the crows lived, she told them.

“If I do, will you tell me your real name?” Lace asked. If she knew his name, she could fold it into the same place she hid his fallen feathers.

“Sure,” he said.

“Really?”

“I promise.” He took her hand and pulled her up, showing her where to brace her heel on the trunk.

“See?” he asked when she’d gotten her footing. “Easy, right?”

She pressed her back against the trunk.

“Stop looking down,” he said. “I’m not gonna let you fall. If I did, I’d have to find a replacement by call time tomorrow.”

“Very funny.”

She set her hands and feet where he told her to, pulling herself up. He went with her, following after on some branches, going ahead of her on others to help her up.

Her arms liked the work. They’d missed fighting the river’s current. Now they snapped awake.

The wind raked the branches, and she laughed at the leaves brushing her hair.

“See,” Cluck said. A branch blew between them, and he held it aside. “You’re a natural.”

“I’m up here,” she said. “Now what’s your real name?”

“It’s Luc,” he said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What’s so embarrassing about that?”

“I never said I had an embarrassing name. I just like people calling me Cluck.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because my brother hates it.”

“That’s mature.”

He picked a leaf out of her hair. “My mother likes him better.”

“You don’t know that.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I do.”

She pulled a scrap of twig off his shirt collar.

“I gotta hand it to my mother though,” he said. “None of that ‘I love my kids the same’ stuff. I appreciate the honesty. It’s refreshing.”

“Nobody loves their children the same.”
Abuela
had always liked Lace’s mother best. She had the spirit and spine to tell
Abuela
off, but not the nerve to go against her. Justin, Oscar, and Rey’s mother loved Justin a little more, because he had realized, before he had words for it, that his place as the oldest brother would have to spread and grow to fill the space their father left. If Lace had brothers or sisters, she was sure she’d be her father’s favorite, and sure she wouldn’t be her mother’s.

A black, red-streaked feather settled between Cluck’s neck and shirt collar. He didn’t seem to feel it. Maybe he’d gotten so used to the downy barbs against the back of his neck, he didn’t notice them any more than Lace did her own stray hairs.

She picked the feather out. Her fingers grazed his neck, and he shivered.

“Why do you do that?” he asked.

“What?”

“Save those things.”

“Do you want me not to?” she asked.

“I just want to know why.”

She held it up to the sky. The moon brightened the red. “I like them.”

“You’re alone there.”

She slipped it into the pocket of her jean jacket. She felt it through the fabric, hot against her rib cage. One more feather for the collection in her suitcase.

The wind brushed another one from his hair. It swirled down, settling on a lower bough. She climbed down after it, from one branch onto the one under it.

She let go of the higher branch, and her right foot slipped. Then the dark looked like she’d imagined, the same as the deepest lakes on bright days, the light reaching down and then vanishing.

Cluck’s arm hit the small of her back. His hand gripped her side, and her
escamas
glowed like a fever. “Put a little of your weight down before you put all of it down.” He held her up, tight enough that the feather in her pocket burned into her. “Shift too fast, and that’s what makes you feel like you’re falling. If you think you’re falling, it’s more likely you will.”

His mouth almost brushed hers. The way he held her made her stand on her toes, sharpening the feeling that the ground underneath them was the same endless depth as those lakes.

He didn’t stop her pressing her fingers into him. She didn’t stop him when he took her top lip between his. Her hand found the feathers under his hair, soft and thick as river grass, and she kissed him back. She opened her mouth to his and pretended the sky was water.

Quien no tiene, perder no puede.

He who has nothing, loses nothing.

When Lace passed Cluck in the hallway the next morning, he nodded in greeting but didn’t make eye contact. The minute he walked into the kitchen that afternoon, Lace left, Eugenie in midsentence. They did that until call time, him not looking at her, her leaving any space he entered, and she took it as a shared understanding that what happened last night would stay in the trees.

Then the sun turned from gold to copper, the slight change in light that came just before it went down. If how he kissed her was something that had to stay in those branches, she wanted to know if it also had to stay in the night before. Or, if tonight, once the show was done and the sky was dark, they’d do it again.

She made up an excuse to stop by the blue and white Shasta, something about costumes.

She forgot it as soon as she shut the trailer door behind her.

Cluck’s dress shirt had been flung onto the built-in bed, and he worked in his undershirt.

He saw her and set down a wire cutter.

The feeling of his mouth still glowed hot on hers from the night before.

He put his hands in the pockets of his dress pants. Odd, considering how much she knew he had to do and how little time they had before the show. Then his eyes flicked down, and she realized his hands might have been in his pockets because he wasn’t sure whether to put them on her.

She caught his eyes as he looked back up, and held them. He took one step toward her. He didn’t take another one, but it was enough to tell her he was in if she was.

She kissed him as hard as when they were in the cottonwood. He held her waist, felt her body through her clothes. She held him against the trailer wall, and he shoved the empty wire frame of a pair of wings out of the way. It rattled against an age-spotted mirror.

He slid a hand under her shirt and onto the small of her back, his palm half on her bare skin, half on the waistband of her skirt. A skirt she thought she would not wear as long as she was among the Corbeaus. His fingers pressed against her
escamas
. As long as he didn’t look, he wouldn’t see the birthmarks. The texture of her healing body would hide them.

It hurt, his hands on her burns. It stung like a hot shower, pins of water and steam stabbing in. She was ready for it. The sting reminded her she was a body knitting itself back together. It was why she liked his hands on her. His wrecked fingers knew how to handle something ruined.

He kissed her like her lips were not chapped and scarring. Ran his tongue over the curve of her lower lip like it was soft. Like the rose and lemon oil she spread on her mouth at night made a difference. Maybe he did not feel it because his were just as rough. He and Lace were sewn of similar fabric, the raw edges of their families’ cloth.