The Weight of Feathers (12 page)

People tried not to stare. Their eyes flashed toward the red heart on her cheek, pity passing over their faces. Their sympathy prodded her. Lace held her throat tight, to stop herself from screaming at them.
You think this thing on my cheek is the worst I got that night? Go ask the boy with the wrecked hand what he gave me.

She clutched the coins and dollar bills in her dress pocket. “What’s good right now?” she asked a woman at a fruit stand.

The woman sucked air in through her teeth and touched her own cheek, like looking at Lace might make her grow an identical wound.

“Chin up,” the woman said. “You’re lucky. Three of our men died that night.”

Lucky
. It was a word Almendro held close. Those alive were
lucky
. The town, still alive, was
lucky
. But Lace knew better. Almendro seethed with the fallout. Any man in a suit collected a set of glares whenever he crossed a street. Some plant workers’ wives, her father told her, protested outside the plant’s fence the last few mornings, but most of them had jobs too, and children, so the picketing dissipated as one after another left for their shifts.

Lucky
was the word this town pinned to its shirt collar, a good-luck charm. It helped them ignore the tension, between wanting to know what had happened, and hoping half their jobs would not be gone by the time the trees shed their marred bark and ruined leaves.

Lace paid for a flat of peaches and the strangest watermelon she’d ever seen. Midnight violet, almost black, speckled with dandelion yellow, and one gold spot the size and color of a Meyer lemon. Moon-and-Stars, the paper sign said.

She stepped out from the awning, and a mist of rain dotted the paper sack, the drizzle so light Lace couldn’t hear it. She kept still, two steps from the fruit stand’s edge. The drops hit her skin. They clung to the fine hairs on her arms. She picked at each water bead, pulling at the thin shields of scabbing grown over her burns.

The memory of sirens bore into her temples. The dusk turned to night, quick as a cloth torn off a table. The clouds overhead swirled and the rain turned hot. It stuck to her, turning her clothes to ash. It would streak through her body until she was nothing but a rib cage and a rain-seared heart. She had to get them off. Every drop. She dug her nails in to rake them away.

Little threads of blood showed.

She stepped back under the awning, her pulse shuddering in her neck. Her hands trembled, the threads of blood vibrating like river grass underwater.

“You okay?” the woman asked.

Lace nodded, keeping her back to the woman. She gaped at the air, getting her breath back, waiting out the rain.

A few days earlier, she’d thought of rain as little different than the spray off a river. It was all the same, wasn’t it? All water. But now she knew better. She wasn’t willing to offer the sky her blind trust that the drops coming down were water and not poison.

Yes, all the clean, venomless storms she’d run through, all the sudden showers and downpours, told her that this rain, and every one after, should be plain water. But she wouldn’t count on it. She’d never give the sky that faith again. In place of that faith now lived her suspicion that all rain was hiding some secret she wouldn’t know until she found it burning into her skin.

She should have known all along not to trust the sky. It was where the crows lived.

Eso es harina de otro costal.

That is wheat from a different bag.

The closer Lace got to the Corbeaus’ side of the woods, the more the scent of feathers pushed up through the trees’ smells. The rain had let up, leaving the air clean and woody like damp bark, but that scent still hovered.

Lace caught a thread of it every time those black feathers blew to the Palomas’ side of town, and here it was strong as
Abuela
’s perfume. A dull earth smell. Something waxy like crayons. A sweetness like powdered honey that Lace might have liked if she didn’t know where it came from.

Lace set her suitcase at the base of a cottonwood tree. She buried it under wet leaves.
Los gitanos
couldn’t steal it if they didn’t know it was there.

She held the bag of peaches in one arm, Moon-and-Stars in the other. The sight of the old Craftsman house made an unsteady feeling jitter down her arms. But she reminded herself that the Corbeau boy couldn’t have known she was a Paloma, that if he had, he would have left her to turn to smoke, and that stilled her.

From far off, the Corbeaus’ camp looked like children’s toys. Lace had heard rumors about the travel trailers, but until tonight, she’d never seen them. They were primary-colored like alphabet blocks—clover green, weed daisy yellow, apple red, crayon blue. One was plain aluminum. Another pink with tail fins like a jet. Strings of globe lights hung between them.

The wings on the performers’ backs towered over their heads and spread out past their shoulders. Lace had never seen so much teal and bronze. Feathers brushed when one passed another.

The men wore no shirts, nothing but the flesh-colored bands that held their wings on. Lace tried not to laugh at the shine of their chests, wondering if they used Vaseline or vitamin oil. Women in antique dresses sat at outdoor vanities, rows of lightbulbs illuminating the mirrors. Their enormous wings filled the glass. They fixed their hair in soft waves and pinned curls, trailing under flower crowns.

One who didn’t have her wings on noticed Lace, a flash of movement in her mirror.

She caught Lace’s eye in the reflection. “You are early, and lost.” She patted her hair and turned around. “The show doesn’t start for an hour. You buy the tickets down the road.”

Recognition pressed into Lace’s collarbone. She knew this narrow frame, the copper hair, the sleepy flirtation in the woman’s eyes. Lace had met her in the woods.

But nothing registered on the woman’s face. Lace didn’t have on her stage makeup, only lipstick, and base that did a poor job hiding the burn on her cheek. She didn’t have on her tail, and her hair wasn’t wet. She looked nothing like
la sirena rosa
.

“
Qu’est-ce que c’est que
ça?
” The woman pulled back the edge of the paper sack with her forefinger. “Are you from the grocery store?”

Lace shifted the bag so their arms wouldn’t touch. “No. I’m looking for someone.”

“Who?” the woman asked.

Lace tried holding her hand above her head to show the Corbeau boy’s height, but she didn’t know his height. She just knew he was taller than she was. “Dark hair, longish,” she said, hovering a flat hand over her shoulder. “He has”—Lace closed and opened her fist, thinking of his left fingers, curled under—“a hand.”

“Two, I’d guess,” the woman said.

“He wears old-timey clothes.”

“You mean Cluck.”

“His name’s Cluck?”

“He answers to it.” The woman gestured for Lace to follow. She stopped at a blue and white teardrop trailer. “Cluck.” She banged her palm on the siding.

The door flew open. Lace put up a hand to keep it from hitting her. The boy in the old-fashioned clothes stepped down from the trailer.

He had his hair rubber-banded in a low ponytail, but it was a little too short to stay pulled back. A few pieces had fallen out and gotten in his face.

She’d only ever seen him in the dull neon of the liquor store or through the cloud of what the nurses had put in her IV. Now he looked different. His eyebrows, low-arched, dark as his hair, gave him a serious look she’d never seen when he was talking. The way his eyelashes screened his irises when he looked down made him seem a little sad. The inner curve of his lower lip had a lavender tint that should’ve made him look sick or cold, but it just added to that sadness that started around his eyes.

He held a pair of peacock-feather wings. The breeze stroked the feathers, and the gold and sea glass colors shimmered.

Lace caught the shine of bright aqua, the same blue as the nylon net, and her stomach clenched. She tried to forget that she’d come to apologize to the Corbeau who’d probably left that net for her, the boy who’d had no reason to be on the Palomas’ side of the woods except to put those nylon threads in the water.

Cluck didn’t see her in the door’s shadow.

“
As-tu fini?
” the woman asked.

He turned her around by her shoulders and tied the satin ribbons to her torso, crossing them over her front so they looked like part of her dress.

The woman slid her thumbs under the ribbons, checking that they’d hold. They were the same bluish purple as the bodice, and almost vanished against the chiffon. “
Tu as de la visite
.” She pushed the trailer door shut, throwing light on Lace.

Cluck jumped when he saw her. He pulled off the rubber band and shook a hand through his hair. Not like he cared what he looked like but quick, out of habit, like taking his hat off before going into a church.

The woman skipped off. Her wings twitched as she ran. The plumes all moved together like a field of oats, wind-rippled.

“Here to take another shot?” Cluck asked. Sadness tinged his expression. She couldn’t have hurt his feelings. The Corbeaus didn’t bother with any opinions but each other’s. As far as he knew, she was just some girl from Almendro. What did he care what she said about him?

She pulled her eyes down from his face so she wouldn’t have to see that look.

He had his sleeves cuffed up to the elbow. A thread of blue vein ran along the muscle in his forearms, like an irrigation ditch snaking through a field. It gave Lace an idea of what the rest of his body must have been like under the loose fit of those old clothes, the kind of thin muscle that made him strong but not as big as the other men.

Abuela
would murder her for thinking about a Corbeau with his shirt off. Lace tried to make herself stop, sure that
Abuela
would sense the thought from across town. But the more she tried to force it aside, the more the thought came floating back, like a balloon bobbing up after being held underwater. It was like the game she and her cousins tormented each other with.
Don’t think of a Christmas tree. Don’t think of an alpaca.
And then all they could think about for the rest of the day would be a whole herd of alpaca, or a pine forest big enough for every Christmas tree in the world.

She shoved the watermelon and the bag of peaches into his arms and flicked away the memory of that net. She pushed down the knowledge that he put into the water something that almost killed Magdalena, and could have killed her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For what I said. For how I acted. I’m sorry.”

“Heavily medicated?” he asked.

“Something like that,” she said. “I just came to say thank you for what you did.”

“Anytime,” he said. “Well, not anytime. Never again, I hope.”

“So we’re okay?” she asked. The sooner he forgave her, the sooner the feather would heal. Her apology was the same as her cousins returning that Camargue colt.

Something behind Lace got Cluck’s attention. “Great.” He stopped a girl who looked about his age, wings on her back. He said something to her in French and set the paper bag and watermelon into her arms.

The girl eyed the watermelon. “I don’t think it’s ripe. It’s purple.”

“It’s supposed to be purple,” Lace said.

The girl startled, realizing Lace was there. Were they all this jumpy whenever anyone who was not a Corbeau came near the Craftsman house?

The girl eyed Lace, then took the fruit toward the house.

Cluck sprang toward one of the vanity mirrors, where the red-haired woman leaned over a pale-haired one, dotting color on her eyelids. The red blossoms on her flower crown almost touched the vanilla roses on the other woman’s head.

“Eugenie,” he said. “What are you doing?”

Eugenie paused her fingers. Her free hand was full of makeup brushes, the bristles color-drenched.

Cluck grabbed the brushes out of her hands. “Where’s Margaux?”

“She never showed.”

“Again?”

“She has a new boyfriend. I don’t think she’s coming back. Not this run anyway.”

Lace followed him. She needed his word, for him to pronounce her forgiven, like a priest.

He felt her shadow cut across the light. “Sorry,” he said, half looking over his shoulder. “My flake cousin flaked again.” From across the yard, the sound of ripping fabric distracted him. It sounded thin, like the shantung or dupioni her mother wore to church on Easter Sunday. Old or expensive.

“Here.” He shoved the bouquet of makeup brushes into Lace’s hands. “Hold these for a minute, will ya?” He took off toward the Craftsman house.

With a bare foot, the pale-haired woman pushed a vinyl stool toward Lace. The sole was brown, like it had been painted. It was the only thing dark about the woman. She had a pinkish forehead, and hair blond as bean sprouts. Half the women here looked like her. Where had their
gitana
blood gone? Had they cast it out like
el Diablo
?

The other women, except for the redhead called Eugenie, had hair as black as Cluck’s. But even some of them were pale as whipped-up egg whites. Same with the men.

Cluck was one of the darker ones, his forearms like the lightest peels of jacaranda bark. It almost made her sorry for him. He had that wrecked hand, and he didn’t match his relatives. Even Lace’s family teased Leti and Reyna for being light-haired
güeras
.

“Do you want to sit?” the woman asked, her consonants sharpened by a French accent. Lace wondered if it was real or put-on. The Corbeaus had been in this country as long as the Palomas, cursing them and stealing their business.

She sat down. The vanity was crowded with pots of color and powder compacts. Blue and green glass bottles, clusters of pastel rhinestones, and canning jars of cotton balls filled any extra space.

An open bag of cake flour leaned against the mirror. Lace didn’t ask.

The makeup brushes looked like they hadn’t been cleaned since spring. Pastels tipped the eye shadow brushes. Face powder and blush stained the bigger ones. The smallest ones had been dyed red with lip color and violet with eyeliner.