The Weight of Feathers (2 page)

Lace bent toward the asphalt. If
Abuela
left her coffee cup on the ground, any Paloma daughter knew enough to pick it up.

Volez de ses propres ailes.

Fly with your own wings.

A knock shook the trailer door.

“Ten minutes,” Cluck said, scrambling to replace a broken wire. During the season, fixing wings was a full-time job. His mother’s
qu’il pleuve ou qu’il vente
policy meant they performed through every summer storm, rain damaging the feathers and wind warping the frames.

“Five,” his mother said. Her shoes crunched the ground outside.

He tied his hair back.
Pépère
hated when he did that. He thought ponytails were odd on both boys and girls, something strange and American. He’d fluff the back of Cluck’s hair with his hand and say, “What is this?”

But
Pépère
was already down at the show site, checking Cluck’s work. Without the wings, there was no show.

Chemical smells blew in through the window. Boiling water. Rusted metal. Hot adhesive in the nearby plant’s mixing tanks. Reminders that his grandfather used to check the temperature and pressure gauges, the pipe-washing logs, the vent gas scrubbers.

That was twenty years ago. Now the plant ran so hot the smell of plastic and ash blew clear to the highway. One day the whole system would overheat and shut down like a fried car engine, his grandfather said. The owners hadn’t replaced the old overflow tank, just to save a hundred thousand dollars. And the plant’s trainings didn’t even cover how workers shouldn’t wear cotton near the tanks. Last year, a pipe burst, and a spray of cyanoacrylate burned through the shin of a man’s jeans.

Cluck’s mother kept the show coming here because of the Almendro Blackberry Festival. Each year the town celebrated a variety of blackberry first cultivated by a local fifty years earlier. It was a point of pride around here, the berries growing so easily in backyards and ceramic planters that the brambles trailed on brick walkways and crabgrass lawns.

The festival brought in enough tourists for a quarter of the season’s ticket receipts. But if it were Cluck’s call, they’d go west to the coastal forests, or north and east, where wildflower fields fringed the groves of trees. They’d never stop in the town that had turned on
Pépère
.

A pebble bounced off the trailer’s window. “Cluck,” one of his cousins yelled through the pane.

Cluck cut a few feathers. He wished all his fingers worked. He’d gotten used to three being nothing but dead weight, but when he had to rush, he missed them.

“Did you go back to France to get the feathers or something?” Cluck’s cousin laughed at his own joke. A few of his younger cousins gave him an echo.

“We didn’t wear wings in France,
crétin fini,
” Cluck said under his breath. In Provence, the Corbeaus had been
les fildeféristes,
tightrope walkers. They’d moved from town to town, fastening their ropes to church steeples. Onlookers swore
les Tsiganes
had sold their souls to the devil so he would take from them their fear of heights.

Now the Corbeaus were a tentless circus, performing anywhere they found enough trees. Their
fildefériste
blood had thinned out enough that they now walked branches, not tightropes.

Cluck came out of the costume trailer, arms full of feathers and wire, and put the repaired wings on the last few performers.

He had to dodge to keep from bumping into anyone. The ring of travel trailers was busy as a yellow jacket’s nest. Performers cycled through the pink Airflyte to get iodine for their feet. Cluck’s mother and Yvette kept the books, receipts, and maps in a half-white, half-red 1962. Lights and cables came out of the aluminum 1954 Cardinal. Anyone with a twisted ankle or a cut palm waited for Georgette in the 1956 Willerby Vogue with the melamine-green underbelly. And a 1963 Airstream was the junk drawer of the trailers, half schoolroom for the younger Corbeaus, half workshop when
Pépère
and Cluck needed the extra space.

Cluck watched Clémentine and Violette skip off into the trees, carrying burlap bags of petals. Each night they refilled them with cornflowers and seven-sisters roses that grew wild in the woods, the same kinds they wove into flower crowns.

They looked like wood fairies, their wings made of forest and sky colors.

His mother snatched the spare feathers from his hands. “What were you doing, trying to grow wings yourself?” She followed after the performers, her shoes clicking on the rocky ground. Only his mother would wear high heels in the woods.

Cluck got to the show space in time to see the performers taking their places in the boughs. The wings drew the audience in, but they made the performers’ jobs harder. It took years for a Corbeau to learn to wear them without knocking the wide span into branches or snagging them on leaves.

Cluck knew. His grandfather made him climb trees wearing a set of wings when he was fourteen. Cluck had been scrambling barefoot up maples and oaks since he was old enough to walk, hiding in the higher branches Dax couldn’t get to. But his first time up with those wings took him twice as long. The weight pulled him back or pushed him forward. Hitting the outer wires on the boughs made him fight to keep his balance. “If you’ve been up there wearing them, you will be better at making them,”
Pépère
had called up from the ground.

Now Cluck only went up into the show’s trees twice each run, once to hang the glass chimes and once to take them down. In each town where his family stopped, he had his own trees, always far from the show space.

Pépère
found him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Good work.”

“Yeah, tell that to my mom,” Cluck said.

It was
Pépère
and Cluck’s job to make getting up there easier. For the climb, the wire frames folded against the performers’ backs like lacewings or stoneflies. Once they reached a high branch, a few tugs on two ribbons or cords opened the feathered span.

Thanks to the width his mother and aunts insisted on, the wings, once open, acted as sails. They caught all wind. If a performer didn’t have the strength and balance to fight the pull, they fell. A generation before Cluck was born, a sudden gust knocked a great-aunt from a silver maple, and she fractured two lower vertebrae. She walked again, but never climbed.

“Don’t worry about my daughter,”
Pépère
said just when Cluck thought he hadn’t heard him. “She doesn’t like to see you do anything better than her precious
vedette de spectacle
.” He moved a few trees away to light up a cigarette, far enough that the wind wouldn’t bring the smoke to the audience.

Cluck smiled. Only his grandfather could call Dax the star of the show and make it sound like an insult.

He watched the trees. The performers let themselves be seen, looked as though they meant not to. They leapt onto lower branches. The strongest ones, like his brother, pulled up the lightest ones quick enough to make them look like they were flying. The women danced as if the thin boughs were wide as the sky. The men stood as their partners, lifting them, offering their hands, and hoisting themselves higher up so easily it looked like their wings had done it. The more graceful of his cousins ventured far onto the boughs of valley oaks, their weight bowing the wood.

He would’ve loved to see any Paloma try it.

Cluck’s mother stopped a few steps from him. Every Corbeau, from five-year-old Jacqueline to Cluck’s grandfather, knew her stare was an order, a flight call keeping a flock together.

“You’re slower this year,” she said, a warning, and then left to count ticket receipts.

Cluck put his hands in his pockets and let a long breath out. “No, I’m not,” he said when she’d gotten far enough not to hear him. “I just hate this town.”

Más vale pájaro en mano que ciento volando.

A bird in the hand is worth a hundred flying.

Lace didn’t have to ask why her family had set out for Almendro so early.
Abuela
wanted to make sure the Corbeaus couldn’t steal the lakeside.

The Corbeaus had held their own shows there twenty years ago, forcing the Palomas to set up along the river. But after the night the water rose up onto the shore and swallowed the Corbeaus’ favorite trees, the Palomas claimed the lake. Those trees, now on the lake floor, were the only ones near the water strong enough to hold the Corbeaus’ bodies and wings. But
Abuela
still worried that their
magia negra
could make birches and young magnolias grow big as sycamores.

“Those
cuervos
should never have taken the lake for themselves when we’re the ones who need the water,”
Abuela
said. “And now we’ll keep it. I don’t care if it means we come here in February.”

“We’re gonna freeze our asses,” Alexia whispered as the mermaids wriggled into their tails at the river’s edge.

But none of them could blame
Abuela
. This was the town where the Palomas and the Corbeaus always crossed paths. Sometimes, in other counties, they overlapped for a couple of days, the end of one family’s run coming up against the start of the other’s. But Almendro was their battleground, even before that night at the lake twenty years ago. And if one family didn’t show, the other won by default.

Lace and her cousins slid down the bank, the heat fading with the light. The water felt cold as the first minute of their motel showers. Their skin puckered into gooseflesh. They held their grumbling under their tongues, but their grandmother still sensed it.

“The spring in Weeki Wachee was colder than this,”
Abuela
said. “Seventy-two degrees.”

A shiver of excitement crossed Lace’s
escamas
whenever
Abuela
talked about Weeki Wachee. In that little spring-fed town,
Abuela
had performed with a dozen other women in ruched elastane. Playing to the aquarium glass built into the side of the spring, they combed their hair with carved conch shells, chased each other’s spangled tails, kissed sea turtles. They smiled underwater without making bubbles, something Lace practiced in every motel pool from Magalia to Lake Isabella.

In a little more than a year, she’d be there, sharing the spring with wild manatees, swimming in the town that made her grandmother a famous beauty.

The Paloma
sirenas
weren’t Weeki Wachee mermaids. They didn’t perform in front of plate glass. They were less like circus girls and more like the world’s tallest thermometer (134 feet, for the record high in Baker, California), mechanical dinosaurs made out of scrapped car parts and farm equipment (Lace and Martha snuck off to see them in Cabazon), or the world’s largest concrete lemon (ten feet long, six feet wide, five miles outside El Cajon).

But the real tourist trap was the Corbeaus’ show. Lace had never seen it herself, but from what Justin told her, all the Corbeaus did was climb trees with wings on their backs. At least the Paloma mermaids were quick, darting through the water, dancing in the drowned forest. Vanishing and reappearing.

“They want to work to see you,”
Abuela
reminded them. “Don’t start
la danza
too early. You let them find you first. They find you, they feel smart.”

“Half of them are here for a festival about a berry,” Lace said as she fixed Martha’s smudged lipstick. “How smart can they be?”

Abuela
stood over Lace, her shadow great as a jacaranda tree. “You make them feel smart. You make them feel special, or you’re not doing your work.
¿Entiendes?
” She looked around at Lace’s cousins. “All of you. You understand?”

“
Sí, Abuela,
” they murmured.

Abuela
turned back to Lace. “
¿Entiendes?
”

Lace did not round her shoulders the way Martha or Reyna did when
Abuela
looked at them. She kept her back straight.

“
Sí, Abuela,
” Lace said, barely parting her teeth. Always
Abuela,
never
Abuelita
.

Emilia—
Abuela
called her
la sirena aguamarina
—leaned toward Lace. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “That’s a good sign. The day she starts calling you fat and saying your poses are sloppy is the day she’s decided you’re one of us.”

Emilia would know. Her hair glittered with strands of paillettes and river pearls that marked her as a lead mermaid. She swam in last, perched in the center of those sunken trees, posed for tourists. But when she first joined, it was months before
Abuela
even let her choose her own tail, a blue-green like Colorado turquoise.

They all wore tails bright as tissue paper flowers. Butter yellow. Aqua and teal. The orange of cherry brandy roses. The flick of their fins looked like hard candy skipping across the lake.

Lace’s own, pink as a grapefruit, branded her as the youngest, in her first season. Same with her hair, loose, no decorations. At the end of this season she’d earn a gold-painted shell or a strand of beads. Then another every season after. When the light hit Martha’s wet hair, sequins shimmered like constellations. Reyna and Leti wore clusters of shells at their hairlines. Her older cousins had so many strands clipped in that their hair looked made of paillettes.

They used those same plastic coins, sheer as beach glass, to cover their birthmarks. Their
escamas
were not some spectacle to be displayed in the show.
Apanchanej,
the river goddess who had blessed them with their love for water, had given them these marks, and they were not to flaunt them. Lace had barely gotten the high school equivalency all Paloma girls had to earn to join the show when
Abuela
filled her hands with paillettes and told her, “I don’t care if you have three GEDs. You cover your
escamas,
or you don’t swim.” So every
sirena
did, even though the waterproof glue made their skin itch.