The Weight of Feathers (21 page)

How stupid did Lace have to be? Hadn’t she seen what his cousins wanted to do with the mermaid tail? If she was smart, she’d run. Not just back to her side of Almendro. Farther. He didn’t want his cousins finding out and getting at her. If they hurt her, it would just make things worse with the Palomas. The fighting would take anyone who got in the way. If Clémentine or Eugenie or her younger brothers got hurt, the guilt would dig through him, wear a hole in him.

He didn’t want Lace Paloma dead.

He just wanted her gone.

The scent of her clung to him. The smell of citrus peel. The perfume of roses growing fast as weeds, their brambles twisting around new tree roots. That perfume had seeped into him, and he felt the thorns snagging.

Dax threw the trailer door open. It banged against the siding.

“I can’t believe you did this.” Dax slammed the door shut. “Paul or Bertrand, sure. But you? I taught you better than this.”

Cluck put a few feathers down. “What?”

“You and that girl.” He shoved Cluck against the counter.

The edge hit Cluck’s lower back.

“Everyone in the house heard you arguing,” Dax said.

The pain echoed up Cluck’s spine. He should’ve been careful. If he’d wanted to have it out with Lace Paloma, he should’ve gone deeper into the woods. Now they all knew. Dax knew. Cluck had hired a Paloma. And if they let him live, it’d be no less of a miracle than if
Sara-la-Kali
had appeared to him. His Romani blood meant she should protect him, but he was the last Corbeau a saint would ever show herself to.

Maybe they’d throw him to the water spirits who combed their fingers through the river’s depths. Maybe they’d decide that if
Sara-la-Kali
didn’t save him, he deserved to die.

Dax’s face reddened even through his stage makeup. “We have what, five women here who aren’t related to you? You managed to keep your hands off four of them, so what happened with her?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Cluck said.

“What, you’re gonna lie to me now? Tell me you’re just friends?” Dax grabbed his shirt collar. “Friends don’t fight like that.”

The weeds growing in Cluck’s rib cage let him take a breath. Maybe Yvette had seen them yelling, but she might not have caught what they were saying.

This was about him and Lace arguing the way a boyfriend and a girlfriend did.

“I thought you cared about this family,” Dax said.

“I do.”

“Then why did you do it?” Dax threw him down.

Cluck hit his lip as he fell. The Formica split it open, and blood trailed to his chin, hot as honey.

He slumped against the wall, holding his temples. He could have fought back, but didn’t. It always made it worse. Fighting back turned one bruise to four.

“You think we have rules for the hell of it?” Dax asked. “This, this kind of stuff is why we don’t date anyone who works for us. Because we don’t need anyone getting into some little
prise de bec
when we’re trying to run a show.”

Relief settled into Cluck’s chest. Dax didn’t know anything. He wouldn’t go after Lace. He’d smack Cluck around a little more and consider his point made. Clémentine and Eugenie and this family’s children would stay as safe as they could be.

“You slept with her, didn’t you?” Dax’s voice vibrated through the trailer.

Cluck wiped at the blood on his lip. Right thumb. Around Dax, he’d gotten used to using only his right hand. “That’s what you think?”

Dax crouched down and grabbed his hand. The blood seeped into Cluck’s thumbprint.

Just stay still.
It was all Cluck had to do, and it’d be over. Dax would get bored with him, and leave.

“Why her?” Dax asked. “You could have gone after some girl in town. Why did you have to go after one who works for us?”

Some girl in town
. Cluck knew what that meant. In each town where they stopped, he overheard his mother and her sisters make fun of girls with silly, hopeful smiles and too-short jean skirts. “She looks like a nice one,” his aunts would say. “You could give
le cygnon
to her.” His mother didn’t even bother checking if he was in earshot.

It was half-joking, half-planning. One day he’d be too old not to talk to girls, and when he was, his mother, no doubt with Dax’s help, would steer him toward one who would treat him like a thing to be tamed, controlled, contained. His family wanted him with a woman who would pet him and keep him from biting anyone. A girl with a drawer full of pink lipstick and a heart for some blue-eyed local who hadn’t liked her back. She’d get as bored with Cluck as Cluck would get with her.

Lace hadn’t bored him or gotten bored.

Dax jerked Cluck’s right hand. “Why her?”

Because it was hard to make her laugh, and hard to scare her.

“Why do you hate us?” Dax asked, sadness pulling at the corners of his eyes. Pity that Cluck had been born the thing he was. Frustration that he hadn’t fixed Cluck. “Why do you hate this family?”

“I don’t,” Cluck said.

Dax held Cluck’s hand open.

Cluck tried to pull it away. “Don’t do this.”

Dax held onto it.

This couldn’t happen again. As far as Dax knew, he’d broken him like a colt, made him right-handed. What else did he want?

Where’s the net,
cygnon
?
The question from nine years ago knocked around in Cluck’s head. The nickname Dax tried to make stick.

Nine years ago Cluck had found a net hidden under his brother’s bed, bright blue nylon. His cousins had been leaving rope nets in the lake and river for years, and the Palomas always found them. But in the water, the nylon would be invisible. A mermaid could get caught in it, and drown.

It may have been the Palomas, but it was still killing. So Cluck took it, hid it. As soon as Dax found it gone, he knew. He threw Cluck into a wall to try to get him to say where he’d put it.

What did you do with the net,
cygnon
?

Cluck wouldn’t tell. He wasn’t letting there be blood on his family’s hands. The next blood drawn might be Eugenie’s, or his grandfather’s, or his younger cousins’.

But Dax had caught him fidgeting with a loose button, passing it between his left fingers.
What are you doing using this hand? You’re supposed to use your right,
crétin.

Now Dax spread out Cluck’s right fingers. “Which one did you touch her with?”

“I didn’t,” Cluck said.

Dax pinched his third finger. “This one?”

Cluck looked away and didn’t answer.

Dax grabbed a needle and shoved it into Cluck’s right hand. Without thinking, Cluck gripped it with his thumb, index, and third finger.

His older brother was nothing if not practical. Even nine years ago, he didn’t go for the fingers Cluck needed most to help their grandfather with the costumes.

Right hand this time, because Dax thought Cluck had learned.
Pépère
had kept the secret, so everyone thought Cluck only held needles with his right fingers now.

Cluck didn’t fight. Fighting would just lose him use of more of his hand.

Dax took the needle and held Cluck’s ring finger. He bent it back, the pressure building at the joint. Cluck felt himself getting smaller, the edges of him pulling in, until he was half his age again. Folding his tongue, pressing it against the roof of his mouth, clenching his back teeth to keep from crying, because if he started crying, Dax would think he had him, and he’d break every one of his fingers until he gave him what he wanted.

A tear found the cut on Cluck’s lower lip, the salt stinging. It wasn’t the pain coming. It was all the lies after.
I closed my hand in a door. I fell. I got my fingers caught in the wire.
Trying them on like his grandfather’s old clothes, seeing which one fit. Coming up with one good enough that even
Pépère
would believe it. And the fear of what his mother would do to him if she knew he’d stolen something from Dax.

It was
Pépère
arguing with his mother about why she hadn’t taken Cluck to a doctor. His mother screaming that—
Nom de Dieu!—
she hadn’t known anything was wrong with the boy’s hand.
Pépère
yelling that it was her fault for not watching her sons, that now he’d watch Cluck since clearly she didn’t, that now the doctors couldn’t do anything unless they had the money to get his fingers broken again and reset. The knowledge that Cluck had done it wrong, curling his fingers under to protect them when he should have set them straight.

That one tear soaked into the cracks on his lips. Then there was just the taste of salt. The memory of nine years ago, of Dax bending back the fingers on his left hand.
Where’d you put the net?
But Cluck wouldn’t tell. Dax snapped his pinkie to show he wasn’t kidding, but Cluck wouldn’t tell. Surprise shot across Dax’s face. Then he broke Cluck’s ring finger.
Tell me what you did with the net.
Cluck still wouldn’t say. An almost-fear had flared in Dax’s eyes, the clean, new knowledge that even though Cluck was small, and ugly, and stupid, he would not talk when hit.

Dax had broken Cluck’s third finger anyway.

This time Dax had his right hand, his right ring finger. This time shutting up wasn’t a way to get half his hand broken.

It was how to survive this.

But a question had gotten into Cluck. It’d been burrowing in since he walked away from Lace. And he wasn’t as good at keeping quiet as he was nine years ago.

He looked up at Dax. “Did you let them put another net in the water?”

Dax held Cluck’s hand still, the pressure steady for that one second, not easing up, not pushing harder.

“Did you?” Cluck asked. Pain got around the words, strangling the sound out of them.

Dax wrenched Cluck’s finger, and the bone cracked like ice in hot water. Cluck clenched his teeth to keep himself quiet. They cut his tongue, and blood spread through his mouth.

The pain tore through his arm up to his shoulder. This was Dax’s flight call to Cluck, the stab of a new bone break, something that hurt enough to make him remember.

It would remind him to stay with the flock.

Dax dropped his hand.

They shared a breath out.

Dax left, slamming the trailer door. The vibration splintered through Cluck’s finger. He gritted his teeth against the pain. That feeling of cracking ice, bound around his finger like a ring, pulled every other feeling from his body. The memory of his mouth on Lace’s. The warmth of her under his hands. The grain of cottonwood bark on his palms and the soles of his feet.

Dax must not have checked the yellow trailer. He hadn’t seen Lace had already left. Her things were already gone.

Qui ne risque rien n’a rien.

He who risks nothing has nothing.

“Where are you going?” Eugenie asked.

Cluck kept his hand at his side so she wouldn’t notice his finger, bent out of place.

“We need milk,” he said. They always needed something. Bread. A crate of peaches or strawberries. Eggs, bought a flat at a time. The least
le bâtard
could do was make himself useful.

He taped his ring finger to his middle one, three bands to hold them together. If he’d known to do this when he was nine, if he’d had enough unbroken fingers to pair them up, maybe he’d still be Luc. Not
cygnon
. Not Cluck.

The bones in his finger wouldn’t settle. He’d lost the feeling of his veins and muscle holding him together. He’d burnt out into pieces, like firewood gone dark. The wind breathed on the few live embers left, keeping them lit. The little knives stabbing into his ring finger every time he moved his right hand. The cut on his tongue. The wet salt of blood, drying on his lower lip. Where Lace had set the glow of her mouth, a burn’s left-behind heat. The rest of him was as broken as wood crumbling into ash.

He scratched at his lower lip. The cut opened again, and he tasted the salt in his blood.

He wasn’t going after her. If she was there, he didn’t want to see her. He just wanted to know how much of a liar she was, if she believed that
conte de bonne femme
. Some story about the scar she’d gotten when one of his feathers stuck to her arm.

Keeping his head down worked. The woman at the lakeside took his money, told him to enjoy the show.

The audience gathered on a low cliffside, just high enough to see down into the water. His grandfather told him that before the lake took those trees, there’d been a wide beach between the drop and the waterline.

Cluck stood behind everybody else who spread blankets on the rough grass and rocky ground. The sun had gotten low enough to make the lake glow. The blue-green was translucent as a dragonfly’s wings. He could see straight down to those sunken trees, bare of leaves, an always-winter. Those reaching branches made him shudder, the stark look of dead things.

An old man stood on the bank, holding a pan flute as long as his torso. His fingers, dark and wrinkled as a shelled chestnut, gripped the woven band. He blew a first note, wide and empty as the sky. The first mermaid, a purple one, took her cue and swam in. A few more bars, and another came, bright yellow like a nectarine. Another couple of minutes, and they’d all gathered. Turquoise and indigo. The mint green of tarnished copper.

They moved like kelp, the shapes of their bodies rippling like a current. They didn’t fight their costumes. Instead they looked like they’d gone their whole lives with their legs sealed in the shimmer of beads and sequins. They bent backward and touched their own fins. They joined hands, and the sheer fabric trailing from their tails became the points of enormous stars. Pairs of mermaids touched their fins and arched their backs to form hearts.

They gathered and then dispersed like damselflies. They swam together and then staggered. Like his family’s show, it had the magic of seeming unplanned. The truth was probably that it took weeks of rehearsal. Every time they set up in a new place, they would’ve had to relearn the current of rivers, the depths of lakes, how fast to move, how far down to go.