The Bird Saviors (3 page)

    A northwest wind blasts a thin scrim of dust over his windshield. Ward turns on the wipers and merges into traffic. On either side of the freeway, tall white wind turbines straddle the interstate like an invasion of alien propeller giants. Their enor mous blades rotate slowly. A herd of antelope grazes in the stretched- out morning shadows of the turbine towers.

    He heads into the outskirts of Pueblo, a no- man' s- land of abandoned strip malls with jagged- teeth windows, ratty vacant lots, and dusty Mexican restaurants. The blackened husk of a burned XXX adult bookstore. A dark brown sky spreads in the west.

    His cell phone rings and rings. He fishes it out of the console, sees the caller ID display, and cringes: his sister- in- law. After the rings stop the beeps begin, telling him he has voice mail, telling him to be connected, demanding that he pay attention, for God's sake. Telling him no matter how much he wants to be alone he can't be. He listens to the message, the only way to stop the idiotic beeping.

    Nisha's voice is all about broken promises, suicide- hotline desperation. The electric bill is over four hundred dollars, she says. If he doesn't pay, they're going to turn off the power. It's his house, so he has to pay it, doesn't he? Legally? Isn't he financially liable? This is a country of laws, isn't it? True, she happens to be living there now but she has no job and no money. What does he expect? It's his house she's sitting, right?

    Please help me please. Why did you leave me? You touched me and that's okay. I wanted you to. But you left and you don't talk to me now? Are you ashamed of me? Of us?

    Ward listens as her voice fades in and out on the spotty connection. Nisha's voice resembles her sister's. Like voice mail from the dead. This isn't her only similarity: The last night Ward stayed in his home he slept with Nisha. Even her body, her spicy smell, was like Sita's, like sleeping with a twin. Only needier. She wanted to marry him. She wanted him to bless her with child. She said her time was running out.

    The next morning he walked out of the house, leaving her naked in his bed, her sleeping body sprawled atop the white sheets, her mocha skin and darkly painted eyes, arms wrapped around a pillow and black hair tumbled and thick. He will pay the power bill. If it comes to it, and it will, he will deed the house to her and assume both the financial and moral debt.

    On voice mail she begs him to come back. Come home soon, she pleads. Don't forget me now. You can't forget me, can you? I know you can't.

O n  t h e  o t h e r  s i d e of town George Armstrong Crowfoot tries to avoid the severed head. He has bad dreams and a thing like that, once seen, skyjacks your nightmares like a special guest star. Like a relative with a shot liver who won't go home and won't quit asking where you hid the whiskey. George has never seen a severed head except in movies, and he figures special effects are good enough.

    Mosca won't shut up about it. The infamous head. Said to be that of outlaw Black Jack Ketchum, hanged in Clayton, New Mexico, in 1901. When the trapdoor opened and Ketchum's body dropped twelve feet to the noose bite, his head popped clean off, shocking the crowd of morbid onlookers. Now Jimmy Rodriguez, aka Mosca (the Fly), says he won it in a poker game.

    Right, says George. I believe that.

    What? You think I'm lying? You calling me a liar?

What I find hard to believe is you winning a poker game.

    You never seen me play, says Mosca. I got a poker face. I got luck.

    George Armstrong Crowfoot does not believe that either. Mosca works with him on patrol for the Department of Nuisance Animal Control, and George knows anyone who stoops that low likely isn't a lucky bastard. Not to mention that Mosca is skinny and tattooed, like an overgrown Chihuahua. Crowfoot frowns and sniffs. Oh, Jesus. What's that smell?

    Mosca sniffs the bowling- ball case. Oh, Black Jack's got an aroma, yes, he does. Mosca worries open the zipper. Behold the mighty, he says.

    The skin is leathery, shrunken. Stiff as dried masking tape. A rictus pulled back to evince a death- scream grimace, reveal a set of long yellowed teeth. A black mustache all wiry and tangled above the grimacing maw.

    George frowns at the head and says, Black Jack Ketchum was hanged in 1901. This individual looks to be only a few years departed, you ask me. Wouldn't Ketchum be not much more than a skull by now?

    It's Black Jack's head, says Mosca. I shit you not.

    Whatever you say,
hombre.
But before you get your panties in a wad, maybe you ought to take this to the Antiques Roadshow people. One of those queens will set you straight.

    I don't need any queen to tell me what's what.

    Antiques Roadshow, repeats Crowfoot. They talk about provenance and whatnot.

    What's provenance?

Proof of where it came from.

I don't need proof. I got a head.

Right.

    He's well preserved is what he is. Like my grandmother. We had to dig her up for an inquest thing. To prove if my grandpa poisoned her or not. For the insurance, you know.

    And did he?

    Probably, but they couldn't prove it. Grandma looked pretty good, considering. Like she'd been dead only a month or two.

    I don't know about your dear departed. But I tell you it doesn't take a genius to figure that ain't Ketchum.

    Is too.

    You been had.

    Mosca considers the withered human head in his lap. The wispy black hair, ears like dried apple slices. A flake of yellow epidermis peels away from the edge of a sunken, gaping eye socket. Mosca picks at it, trying to neaten the skull. It's like trying to scrape the label off a mayonnaise jar. All he manages to do is to loosen a bigger hunk. He licks his finger and dabs at it.

    Damn, he says. I didn't mean to do that.

    George shakes his head and backs out of the driveway. You can probably hock it.

    You think?

    George shrugs. Hock shops value the odd. It might fit right in. I mean, it's a head all right. Even if I doubt it's Black Jack's.

    Mosca stares at the grimacing, leathery mug. People will pay good money for the head of Black Jack Ketchum. Man I won it from said it was worth a grand at least.

    Crowfoot shrugs. You might get something for it. I don't know about a grand. Maybe a hundred bucks.

    Shit. I get more than that. He's a famous outlaw.

    Ketchum was. This dude, he probably robbed a liquor store and forgot to grab a top- shelf bottle of tequila, the dumbshit. Crowfoot grins. That's if you ask me.

    Mosca says, Fuck it. He stuffs the head back into the bowling- ball bag, crams it between his feet on the floorboard. I'm going to make some money off this head if it's the last thing I do.

    That's just peachy, says Crowfoot. They drive taciturn and moody through the streets of Pueblo to the Department of Nuisance Animal Control office, where they check in and get their assignment for the day. Crows and cowbirds near a feedlot. Exterminate with all due diligence. The boss man Silas tells them to get started pronto.

    Halfway across town Mosca says, You hear about the fatso kidnappings?

    Crowfoot holds the steering wheel with one finger, his hand in his lap, staring at the landscape of pawnshops, strip clubs, and palm readers that clatters by the pickup's window like lemons and cherries on a slot machine. After a moment of silence he says, You want the truth? I bet Black Jack Ketchum's head is buried along with his name.

    They're kidnapping fat people and liposuctioning them skinny to sell the oil on the black market. That's what I heard.

    The sky looks darker the farther west they travel.

    What do you mean, "they"? asks Crowfoot.

    You know, says Mosca. The lipo gangs. The ones who sell it

on the black market to the illegals and migrants living in the boxcars down at the freight yards.

    Crowfoot squints at the storm clouds massed before them. Looks like we're about to be in the shit, Señor Fly.

    Jesus Christ. I don't need another day off, says Mosca. I need some work is what I need. By hook or crook.

    George is thinking he needs a better pair of boots. And a better job. He used to think this grunt work was a step up from hauling trash since part of the job was shooting things. Years ago maybe George would have enjoyed the pure sport of it— the aiming, the hitting of the target— but now when he's called out to exterminate another murder of crows sighted near town, he feels the spider- on- your- neck creep of guilt. And today's detail is just pathetic, sent to the west side of town to track and kill a flock of cowbirds massing on feedlot scraps. A job like this would make Crazy Horse turn over in his grave.

    Interested in a little extra cash? asks Mosca. I got something going on the side. Bet I could get you on, easy.

    You're full of bets today, aren't you?

    Mosca grins. I'm a betting fool, that's for sure. I tell you about this, you promise not to breathe a word? It's somewhat wide of the law, if you catch my drift.

    Do I look like a snitch?

    Mosca explains that he's part of a crew of cattle providers. With the price of beef higher than ever, a man can make good money liberating a few head of cattle at night, taking them to a slaughterhouse out of state. Black- market beef.

    You have to know your way around a steer, says Mosca. I'm guessing you probably do. Plus it helps to have some muscle. It's all quick and fast and these dudes I work with, they don't fuck around.

    You're cattle rustling?

    You could call it that. I like to think of it as a Robin Hood kind of deal. Taking from the rich and selling to the poor.

    That's supposed to be giving to the poor.

    We can't be that old- fashioned, can we?

    I don't like the sound of it.

    I didn't either at first. But once you get used to money, it makes you feel like the king of Denver.

    They near the western edge of town. The wind picks up and grit blasts the windshield. Crowfoot flips on the wipers. The rubber blades squeak and shudder on the cold glass, clearing two arches. Mosca says they're screwed. No way in hell they're going to do any bird killing in this duster. They watch as the dust storm rears up in front of them. It comes on like a cloud of bricks.

    Crowfoot and Mosca sit in the cab and wait it out. The sand sifts across the windshield in a hypnotizing swift drizzle. It's as if time is moving faster than it should. Mosca says sometimes it seems that the end is near and this is nothing but hourglass sand running out.

    They watch as the dust storm swallows a billboard advertising topless dancers in the Wiggle Room.

    After a half hour the storm slackens. The wind dies and the dust sifts down on the back side of the wind gusts. Traffic begins to crawl. Mosca and Crowfoot drive on, straining to see the taillights of the vehicles ahead.

    Crowfoot asks for more dope about this cattle- rustling gig.

. . .

R u b y  h u r r i e s  a c r o s s the prairie, the roiling bulge of the dust storm looming like the debris cloud of a demolished building. She coughs and squints, the grit in her eyes and mouth. A gulch opens before her. She stumbles at the edge and into the shadows she falls.

    She trips and slides down the steep ravine walls. Cactus rakes her face, neck, and arms. She hits the bottom of the gulch hard, landing in a jumble of stones and grass. When she comes to a stop, she winces and rocks in pain. Her left arm burns and aches. She clutches it to her side. She feels for wounds, finds a swelling on her head. Her hand is wet. She holds it before her eyes. She can see nothing but a finger and palm shadow in the brick- red haze.

    The dust storm swirls above the gulch like a bloody tornado. She huddles in the hollow of a boulder, finds a windbreak behind it. She curls on the grassy floor of the dry- wash streambed, feeling the stab of cactus spines embedded in her cheeks and arm. She can feel the sand trickling into the gap of her collar and down her back. After a time she rubs crusty tears from her eyes and can see again. She pulls off the gauze mask and sits up, coughing and wheezing. All about her dust covers the grass and stones. She struggles to her feet, cradling her arm close to her side. Her elbow is swollen and shot with hot pain.

    Not far away a coyote stands motionless. She stares numb and confused in its direction for several moments before she notices it, still as the landscape, the gray of its fur contrasting with the dust- covered boulders and stones.

    She stares at it and takes a step forward. The coyote drops its head and backs away, keeping its eyes on her, until after a few feet it turns away and trots down the middle of the gulch floor.

    She follows the coyote's prints in the dust. The gulch is a dozen feet deep, with sides of steep, corrugated dirt. At its lip are hard- packed overhangs, pocked with the mud cones of Cliff Swallow nests.

    She comes upon two illegals in white cowboy hats, carrying
bolsas
, their faces covered by bandannas. Only their eyes and black hair are visible in the wedge of skin above their noses and below their foreheads.

    Ruby pulls her gauze mask over her nose to hide her face. She stands coughing as they near. Her heart beats so hard she feels faint.

    The illegals look like sand people. One of them has a bandage on his hand, brown blotches on the gauze, the stain of blood seep. They nod at her and pause.