The Bird Saviors (4 page)

    She nods back and takes to coughing again.

    One of the illegals removes his hat and holds it in both hands.
Está enferma?
he asks.

    
Sí. Mi boca está lleno de arena.

    
Lo siento. Puedo ayudar?

    
No, gracias. Estoy bien.

    The man nods.
Bueno.
He looks behind him, in the direction she's headed. The one who has not spoken, who has the bandage soaked with blood and coated with dust on his hand, removes his hat and slaps it against his leg, brushing free a plume. A rifle hangs from his shoulder.

Ruby moves away. V
aya con dios
, she says.

Dondé está su casa?
asks the one with the rifle.

    She keeps walking. She listens for their movements. She tenses to run even as she yet steps carefully through the sand and cactus. Her heart in her throat, she struggles to suppress her cough and to breathe, to be able to hear any sound of movement behind her.

    Ruby moves toward town slowly. She feels snowflakes in her eyelashes like the smallest of blessings. A glorious hush falls upon the world. With the dust storm behind her and the snow squall upon her, she has no sense of east or west, past or present.

    She thinks of the warmth and comfort she could find if she reaches the vet's office where her mother works, if she reaches someone to take her fever, to hold her up. To keep her from falling. To keep her safe. To return her to her baby girl, to squire them both away from Lord God and all his righteous rants and ravings.

    She's faint and weak and begins to doubt her eyes. The falling snow looks red, soft crystals floating down like bloodstained feathers. She knows she's close to town but suddenly a quartet of horses appears galloping, snorting and shaking their heads.

    One is a palomino, a pale golden blur in the blizzard of red snowflakes. The others are chestnut and roan, shaggy manes and arched tails. Their eyes are bright and wild as they gallop past. One of the roans, a stallion, slows and whinnies, tossing his head up and down.

    Ruby remains still, frightened by the power and excitement of the horses. They canter around her for a moment, this quiet girl eerily motionless in the middle of a desert field, a girl out of place. It's like something out of
Lives of the Saints
, a miraculous girl there to tame the wild heart of the horses, only it is the animals who seem puzzled by her presence, who gallop over the hill to flee from this curious pilgrim of the cactus and prairie grass.

    At Pueblo Boulevard, the hiss of tires on snow- wet asphalt. A siren Dopplers in the distance. It sounds like Lila crying, trapped in a wooden box with Lord God, watching out the windows as the world becomes swallowed by dust. A car's deep bass speakers throb. Ruby limps through the weedy parking lot of an abandoned Circuit City next to a defunct Blockbuster Video. The haggard facade of a beauty shop tagged with gang graffiti. Smashed windows of a camera shop next door. Shattered glass and fast- food paper bags litter the asphalt.

    Ruby crosses the wide boulevard, forced to hurry on her sprained and swollen ankle through the honking traffic. The vet's office is a few miles farther. She reaches the median and waits for the walk signal. Cold spray from the passing cars' tires wets her cheeks. She slips her gauze mask over her mouth once again and stares stoically at the signal of an amber hand. Cars honk.

    Mosca and George Armstrong Crowfoot sit in a line of cars at the red light and see Ruby trying to cross, standing in the median, covered with red dust. It's freezing cold and the jacket she wears is thin. Mosca rolls down his window and tells her, Get inside, honey pie. Get warmed up. No sense being out in the cold like that.

    She shakes her head and won't look at them directly.

    Come on, sweetheart! Where you headed? We take you wherever you want to go. You're going to catch your death out there.

Ruby hunches her shoulders and stares at the traffic signal.

    Come on,
chica
! Get in here and we warm you up! We won't bite. Promise. 'Less you want us to.

    Crowfoot feels sorry for her and watches as she hurries through the traffic, darting behind their pickup, to the other side of the intersection, caught by a green light halfway through, running with a hitch in her step in the pink snow.

    Cars honk behind the pickup until it roars away. Finally the light changes and Ruby crosses the second lane of traffic. She limps down the sidewalk beside a snow- covered golf course. A Christmas stillness envelops it, the rolling greens coated a pure pinkish white, strips of red storm dust visible in the hollows of the sand traps. She passes a cemetery beside a seedy business district. Colored Christmas lights festoon the eaves of Vietnamese massage parlors and shabby strip clubs/casinos promising all- nude dancers and half- price drinks. She walks beneath a sign proclaiming, all nudes, all the time

! The snow settles upon
cinder- block liquor stores and palm- reader shops advertising
vi
siones del porvenir, amuletos para buen suerte, y pocíones contra
mal ojo.
She walks on, feverish and dizzy.

    On Polk Street Ruby comes upon La Iglesia de los Niños de Jesus Cristo. Her skin burns. A heavy weakness fills her bones. She can no longer see clearly. She rubs her eyes and holds out her good hand, watches the snow settle upon it like pink icing.

    The sky above ripples. Ruby limps through the churchyard, tears the gauze mask from her face, and gasps, spots in her eyes. When she reaches the steps of the brick church, her vision clouds purple. She sits on the cold steps.

    The snow grows heavier, falling in great fluffy flakes. Her hair is soaked and limp. Near her stands the church's nativity scene, a small hut of recycled lumber, a roof of juniper bows and straw, papier- mâché wise men, Joseph and Mary, a wheelbarrow in which lies a plastic doll, the baby Jesus. A square of straw- strewn earth surrounds it.

    She rises and limps to the shelter of the hut, bone- weary and feverish. Into the wheelbarrow she curls her body around the doll, its blue plastic eyes open wide with artificial lashes fat and spiky.

    She lies there, shivering, delirious. A flock of seagulls hovers over the crèche, their black eyes like polka dots upon the swirling red snow. After a time a nun appears. You cannot sleep here, she says. Please. It is a sacrilege.

    Ruby only blinks at her, blood and scratches on her face. The nun makes the sign of the cross and hurries back inside the church, leaving Ruby there, holding the plastic baby Jesus in her arms.

I t  h a s  b e e n  t w o  y e a r s and thirteen days since ward Costello's wife and baby girl passed away. On the outskirts of Pueblo he passes a billboard that reads, when americans believe in god, god will bless america. A dark blue deportation bus roars by, filled with illegals, mainly women and children, their sorrowful faces near the windows. They watch him through the smeared glass of his windshield.

He feels swollen. As if it is all too much for him. He's had this

odd itching for a while now, since his wife had and daughter have been gone: a feeling that all his past, all his memories, is just a blink away, the width of an eyelash, the click of a tongue, everything, right there. The slightest movement or hiss of wind can bring it all rushing back. A trapped sensation that there's nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, from this tsunami of the past. The more he focuses on the present the more he can't wish or will it away.

    This he remembers: her long, dusky eyelashes, her incredible warmth, the smell of her and her alone on the cotton pillowcases, the feel of spooning next to her, the curve of her smoothness against his lap. The bliss remembered. Waking up to call her by name, a single word, baby.

    He exits I- 25 in downtown Pueblo. He drives west, the sky ahead like a hammered sheet of copper, traffic moving in fits and starts. He passes a truck hauling cattle, the whites of their bovine eyes rolling at him through the slats in the cattle trailer. He heads down 4th Street, through a moribund district of brick shops long closed. His eyes burn like they've been soaked in Tabasco. His heart beats too hard and fast and the dividing stripes in the road seem to rise in the air above his car like flying white snakes.

    He rolls down his window to let in the cold. When his scalp begins to tingle and goose bumps cover his arms, he rolls it back up. The heater blasts hot air, so he feels cold and feverish at once. He worries it could be a touch of the sickness, even though he's supposed to be immune now.

    He heads toward an odd darkness in the sky, toward the prairie that divides Pueblo from the Sierra Mojada, foothills to the Rockies, where he plans to do his bird- population study. After sleeping in the car and no shower, he smells sour and homeless. He keeps expecting a motel to pop up on the western edge of town, where it would be convenient. None do. Hispanic teenagers in muscle cars rumble in the other lanes, blasting Tejano hip- hop.

    Sitting at an intersection he closes his eyes and the next thing he knows a pickup behind him is honking and he's faint and frantic, pressing down on the accelerator and giving the driver behind a guilty wave. He passes pawnshops and massage parlors and Mexican restaurants. He squints at the street signs and sees he's crossing Pueblo Boulevard, on the edge of town, a sign indicating to turn right for the city zoo. All the billboards are in Spanish. He keeps driving until he realizes he is beyond everything. The landscape here is tan and rust- colored rock on cliffs above the road, and below it cottonwoods and Russian olives, pale green and dusted with road drift, along the banks of the Arkansas River.

    Here what little is left of town looks like Mars conquered by Cortés. In a sudden moment of panic he loses his way. A cloud wall of dark red dust swallows the road and he slows to a crawl before pulling onto the shoulder. The car shakes in the wind. Sand and dust pummel the windshield.

    Ward closes his eyes and leans against the steering wheel. His thoughts bob and float. A memory lurches up like a zombie: how as a boy he would mow the grass of an aunt and uncle's house. His mother would drive him there on weekend mornings and drop him off, return to pick him up hours later. The mowing didn't take long and he'd have hours to kill in the musty- but- clean house of the old couple. He must have been eight, nine years old. His cousin was much older and was already grown, but in his old room there was a large box of vintage comic books. Richie Rich, Caspar the Friendly Ghost, Archie, Spiderman, the Flash. He remembers how happy he was just to sit in the room and read the comic books. How peaceful it was. How long ago it seems.

    Later he wakes in a daze, a spot of drool on his crossed arms. He rubs his eyes and sees that the storm has passed. Weak and brain- befogged, he does a U- turn in the empty road and heads back toward town, crosses the Arkansas River and the railroad depots. A neon sign the shape of a buffalo, upon which rides a cowgirl holding the loop of a lariat. The Buffalo Head.

    He pulls into the parking lot and kills the engine. The car ticks like the sound of his brain defusing. He stares at a horse tied to a stanchion near the office. A faint snow begins to fall. Ward rubs his eyes and blinks. A horse? He wonders if the fever is affecting his vision. The snow looks pink.

    In the motel office Ward stands at the check- in counter, blowing his nose. His head is clogged, each beat of his pulse causing a throb of ache in his temples. To his left is a platter of glazed doughnuts, a coffee machine with an urn full of black liquid. He takes a seat on the ugly brown sofa near a wall- mounted, taxidermied buffalo head. The lobby paintings are all cowboys herding steers across a river or coyotes against a full moon. The lamp- shade stand is made of deer antlers. Ward sits and stares at the painting of cowboys and steers as if stunned by a slaughterhouse air gun. His face is pale and he can smell himself, feel the waxy sweat upon his fevered forehead.

    After some time he awakens in the chair, his bladder full and hot with pain.

    Are you okay?

    It's the clerk. She's behind the check- in counter now, leaning forward to see him. A bleached blond chewing gum. Hey, mister. You okay? she asks again.

    He finds himself staring at the garish electric sign of the motel. A cowgirl with loopy neon lariat, riding a stylized buffalo. The yellow- and- blue light streaks like glowing tattoos upon the deep blue skin of dusk. No, he says. Not really.

H i r a m p a g e opens his pawnshop with a premonition of something wonderful about to drop into his lap. Not one month ago he saw a red- haired preacher's daughter sitting in a pew of the Lamb of the Forsaken temple and knew she would become his third wife. He has a way with these things and it isn't to be argued with.

    Hiram is forty- eight but looks older, discount- store distinguished. He's a tall, broad- shouldered man with a wide, shrewd face, a high forehead and white hair. Handsome enough to use his looks for his own gain. Although raised in a Mormon family, he enjoys a drink now and then, but who doesn't? The chastised pride themselves on overcoming vices, but it takes a man to manage them for his own enjoyment.

    The secret to success is constancy of purpose, he often says, a quote from no less than Benjamin Disraeli, a British prime minister from the nineteenth century. The man was an accomplished as a British statesman despite being a Jew. Hiram attends an FLDS church every Sunday and professes to believe in the mirage of the one true prophet. A foolish idea if there ever was one.

    His pawnshop lurks on Northern Avenue, at the edge of Mexican town, a good place for poor folk desperate to sell something for much less than it's worth. The shop itself is an ex– convenience store, its wide glass windows girded by burglar bars. In place of the Slushy machine stands a firearms display.