The Weight of Feathers (24 page)

Those thoughts stayed on him. He felt them sticking to him like his feathers stuck to the back of his neck when his hair was wet. That feeling, strong as the prickling of vanes and barbs, made him want to check his body for some mark she’d left on his skin. There had to be something on him that would tell her how much he wanted to touch her, a thing clear and dark as the imprint his feather had put on her.

“You’re blushing,” she said. “I thought you were French.”

“Not that kind of French.”

She flicked her tail again. The glass beads looked like the million bubbles of water just starting to boil.

If any of the family caught them, they’d have worse trouble than stories about
Melusine
and the
nivasia
.

“Get out of that thing before somebody sees you.” He knelt on the bank. “Where’s your dress?”

She went under again, staying close enough to the surface that he could make her out. Her hair was as dark and blue-black as the river until the sun lit it up and turned it red-brown. Her back looked like a sandbar glinting with mica. He couldn’t tell the scarring from the rippled water.

Her tail reminded him of raw pink salt. As she moved, the light found the clusters of glass beads.

She surfaced. The sun on the water broke into pieces.

She swam up to the bank and rested her forearms on a rock. “You coming in?”

“I don’t swim,” he said.

“You don’t know how?”

“I know how.” He wasn’t going to win any contests for holding his breath, but he knew how not to drown. How to get out of a colander and how to fight a current. His grandfather had taught him so he would keep safe around rivers, not so he could swim in them. “I just don’t.”

“Fine.” She wrung out her hair and let it all fall to one side of her neck, leaving one of her breasts bare under the water. He hoped the distance between them was enough to hide where he was looking. “But I’m not getting out until you get in,” she said.

Pépère
didn’t much care for water, so Cluck didn’t either. It had to do with the Romani traditions, what parts of their bodies they could wash at which places in the river, how if a man didn’t know the current, something clean could be made
mochadi
. Unclean.

But Cluck had never learned all the rules. His mother had told him he was too young to understand, and then, when he was older, too stupid. That he shouldn’t worry about it because they were lucky enough to have running water. They didn’t have to think about the Romani laws that ran in his grandfather’s blood like silt in streams.

Lace brushed a hand over his thigh, leaving her wet fingerprints on his pants. “You coming in, or not?”

His shirt was already unbuttoned and off, from almost going in after her. So he pulled off his undershirt, his socks and shoes, but kept his trousers on. If his grandfather had worried over Cluck taking Lace’s dress off the night of the accident, he’d have strong words about Cluck pulling off his pants to swim. Going shirtless was bad enough. If Cluck wore nothing but his boxers around a girl,
Pépère
would know. He’d just know, the same way he knew, years ago, that Cluck was lying about having made himself right-handed.

Cluck didn’t jump or slide in. He found where the bank sloped instead of dropping off, and waded in one slow step at a time. The water soaked his ankles, then crept up his trouser legs.

If
Sara-la-Kali
and the Three Marys wanted to pull him back, he’d let them. But they didn’t, so he let the
nivasi
near him.

Lace dove down again, too far for him to see her shape.

He waded in up to his chest, the water cooling his skin. “Lace?”

She grabbed him and pulled him down. He stumbled forward, and went under.

He opened his eyes and saw the colors of her. The black of her hair, her skin the brown of river alluvium, the rose salt of her tail. Light streamed through her like she was made of water.

He ran out of air fast. When he tried to get to the surface, she held him down. He fought her, and she held him tighter.

The muscles around his lungs tensed and then cramped. She was killing him. The truth that she was a Paloma, a
nivasi,
dug into his skull. She would murder him before she would love him. She would keep him under and drown him.

Water got into his throat, and he couldn’t fight her anymore. She wrapped her arms around his chest, pulling him into the dark. Then she dragged him out of the water and up onto the bank.

The light stabbed into him. Air flooded into his lungs, shoving the water out.

She turned him onto his side and held a hand to his back. “Breathe.”

He coughed up the water.

She held onto him. “Breathe.”

He sat up and gasped to get his breath. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“I was trying to move you,” she whispered. “Look.” She turned his head.

The muscles near his lungs eased and then tightened again. Two figures showed through the tree cover. Two of the guys from the liquor store.

They threw pinecones into the river and pulled wild pomelos off a tree.

“What are they doing here?” He didn’t have to try to keep his voice low. He didn’t have the air to break to a whisper.

“Our families are closer together than you think,” she said.

He hadn’t thought about it since the accident. He’d gone out looking for Eugenie, and Eugenie never would’ve seen Lace if they didn’t share a band of woods with the Palomas.

Lace’s cousins found all the ripe pomelos, tugged down each yellow-green fruit. The tree seemed to straighten its shoulders, free from the extra weight. Lace’s cousins moved on, toward the Palomas’ side of the woods.

“What the hell can you do with those things?” Cluck asked. Pomelos were bitter as cough syrup, especially the wild ones.

“
Aguas frescas,
” Lace said. “With enough water and sugar, you can make anything drinkable.”

She pulled herself up on the bank, her tail dragging through the mud. “I’m sorry I almost drowned you.”

His breathing evened, but the guilt of thinking she was trying to kill him made the tensing of his lungs worse. “Better you than them.”

She lay on her back, squinting into the sun, and covered her breasts with her palms. The sun shone off her wet hands.

“It’s because I was hungry,” she said, like he’d asked her a question.

“What?” he asked.

“The night we met. I was buying that much from the liquor store because I was hungry. I wouldn’t eat all day because if I ate I looked fat in my tail. Then after the show I was really hungry, so I’d eat everything. Then I had to not eat the next day. Same thing every day, trying to fit into my tail.”

He looked at how the tail clung to her hips and legs. “Seems like it fits to me.”

“Thanks to hospital food.” She patted her thigh through the fabric, her other hand sliding over so her arm covered her breast. “But these show everything.”

She sounded like Clémentine and Violette with their honey and chili powder. The show’s filmy dresses floated near their bodies, hiding a lot more than that tail. It didn’t matter to them. They downed those chili powder mixes a few weeks before the show season started.
We don’t want to be fat fairies,
n’est-ce pas?

It wasn’t just the women. Before the shows, the men oiled their chests, and after, they argued over who the girls in the audience had looked at most. Cluck had given up competing early. His body was strong enough to do what it needed to do. He’d never be much to look at, and he’d never be as big as Dax, but he could do his work.
Pépère
had taught him that mattered more than how a man looked with his shirt off and wings strapped to his back.

“My grandmother was a mermaid in Florida,” Lace said. “They swim with manatees and sea turtles there.”

“Sure they do.”

“It’s true.” She turned onto her stomach. The ends of her hair brushed the bank. The mud darkened the back of her tail. “I’m gonna get there one day. Be one of their mermaids.”

If Florida was anything like his family’s show, they’d throw her out by the time she turned thirty. Thirty-five if she was really good.

“Is that what you want?” he asked.

“It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

“Then you should do it. But you should know it’s not all you can do.”

“Sure.” She turned over again. “I’ll just get a job with my rocket science degree.”

“I mean it,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of people I know for sure are smarter than I am.” It didn’t matter how bad or how ugly he was.
Pépère,
always asking for the wingspan of the snowy owl, or when cobalt chloride was pink and when it was blue, had made sure Cluck didn’t grow up stupid. “My grandfather’s one of them. You’re one of them.”

She squinted into the sun. “How do you know?”

“You fooled all of us, didn’t you?” he asked. “You could do anything you want.”

“I want to do something I’m good at,” she said. “I was getting good at this.”

“You’re good at a lot of things.”

She reached over for a black-red feather that had stuck to his collarbone.

Her fingers skimmed his chest, and he flinched.

Maybe this was how the peacocks felt at molting season, having him come around to pick up what they’d shed.

“Can’t you collect somebody else’s?” he asked.

“I like yours.”

“But they grow in red.” The reason sounded as weak as the idea that he would hate white birds. It sounded like a superstition with no more weight than
les contes de bonne femme,
the old wives’ tales. He’d never needed to give it words. His family had always understood better than he had, and they did not tell strangers.

Lace held the feather up to the light and blew on it, fluffing the barbs. A slick of river water still shone on her mouth. He wondered if it would taste more like her or more like the river.

“Cuervo,” she said, soft as breathing out.

“What?” he asked.

“My last name should have been Cuervo,” she said. “It’s my father’s last name. But my grandmother made him change it to marry my mother.”

“Why?”

“It means ‘crow.’”

Cuervo
.
Corbeau
.

Cluck knew what Lace meant, that they weren’t so different, that the space between them was made only of names and colors. But the bitterness went into Cluck like the slip of a paring knife. He would have wanted the choice not to be a red-streaked thing among all his family’s perfect black.

Now her father took aim at the black birds in the woods, shooting his own name.

Lace propped herself up on her elbows. A thin layer of silt coated her breasts.

The scales on her back caught the light. He counted five, each perfect, like the adhesive rain hadn’t touched them. The reaction between the cyanoacrylate and the cotton of her dress should have burned them as much as the rest of her, hiding them. Instead they arced across the small of her back, smooth as coins of scar tissue, iridescent like the leucistic peacock’s eyespots. She moved her hips, and a handful of colors showed.

The blade of that paring knife pulled back, the wound mending shut.

She moved, and the waist of her tail slipped down an inch.

He counted a sixth, a seventh, each iridescent as a blue mussel shell.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he said, counting them again, this constellation of moons glowing under her skin.

Árbol que nace torcido, jamás su tronco endereza.

A twisted tree will not grow straight.

Cluck took her right ankle in his hand. “It won’t hurt. I promise.”

His hair was still wet with river water. It dampened his shirt collar, graying the white cloth.

Lace’s soaked the back of her dress, turning the thin fabric cold. Her dress was a little like the one the adhesive rain ruined, off-white, saffron-colored flowers instead of blue. She was already forgetting the lost one. The details were falling away. How many petals the blue flowers had. Whether the
agua de jamaica
stain that stayed, stubborn, through so many washes was on the right sleeve or the left.

Tía
Lora had made them both. Missing her clutched at Lace.

Now that she thought of her great-aunt, the act of showing herself to Cluck Corbeau in nothing but her tail felt like a betrayal. With her costume top gone, Lace hadn’t known what to wear on top—a bra? The camisole she slept in? So she’d just worn the tail, and the way Cluck looked at her made her feel brave and sure, like his stare was covering her so no one else could see her.

Cluck soaked a brush in a dish of iodine. It smelled like nail polish remover, salt, balsamic vinegar left out too long. Lace’s stomach tightened. Smells like that no longer reminded her of painting her nails, but of the solvents they used on her in the hospital, the morphine holding her under. The smell wrapped around her throat.

He ran the brush along the bottom of her foot. The feeling of bristles on her arch made her twitch.

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re ticklish, aren’t you?”

The iodine soaked into her foot, darkening the sole so it was almost as brown as her hair. “What’s this for?”

“It’s good for climbing trees.” He held her other ankle and painted the sole of her left foot. “It seals your skin. Keeps things from getting in, makes you less sensitive to the grain of the bark.”

The night she found him in his tree, the soles of his feet had been pale as his palms, shades lighter than the rest of him. They stood out like the moon. “You don’t use it.”

“I’ve been climbing trees barefoot long enough I don’t need to.” He rinsed off the brush, twisted the iodine bottle shut. “My cousins all do it. It helps with the show.”

The iodine dried, leaving the soles of her feet tight and leathery.

He pulled her to standing. “Close your eyes.”

She did. “Why?”

His fingers brushed her shoulders and set a ribbon against her rib cage. The heel of his hand grazed her right breast, a band of thin satin following after.

Weight pulled on her back. A feather skimmed her neck.