The Weight of Feathers (5 page)

Their tails hung over the shower bar, the pink and orange fins dripping into the bathtub. Martha’s arm stuck out of the comforter, long fingers grasping the TV remote. Lace clicked off the set.

Makeup covered the pressboard dresser. Base and mascara. Cream eye shadows in a dozen shades. Red lipsticks. All waterproof. Sea-colored rhinestones to stick at the outer corner of each eye and on their false eyelashes. It was Lace’s job to put color on each of her cousins, the same as it had been before she joined the show.

If her cousins showed for call late from flirting with local men, Lace barely had time to do her own makeup. Not that it mattered.
Abuela
kept her in the background, a mermaid who flicked her tail and then disappeared into the shadows of sunken trees.

Lace took off her dress and twisted to look at her
escamas,
jeweling her lower back like coins of water. Each one was round, the size of a dime, raised a little like a mole. They shone like the cup of an abalone shell. A sprinkling of scales off a pale fish, a gift from the river goddess
Apanchanej
.

Las sirenas
all had them. Alexia’s spotted the back of her neck. Sisters Reyna and Leti wore theirs on opposite shoulder blades.

Martha was lucky. Hers encircled her lower calf like an anklet, hidden by the costume tail. Any paillettes she wore were for decoration.

Lace sank down on her side of the bed. Her skirt fluffed, and a wisp of black wafted out. She pinched the air and caught it between her fingers. A feather, dark as obsidian, streaked with the red of wine and pomegranate seeds. She’d never seen one like it, with all that red.

The color turned her throat sour. It made her lower back prickle. If it brushed her birthmarks, it might make each one peel away like a scab.

She took the feather out to the parking lot, struck a match from one of the motel books, and lit it. The fire ate through the plume. She let it fall to the ground and then stamped it out until it crumbled to ash.

Entre l’arbre et l’écorce il ne faut pas mettre le doigt.

Don’t put your finger between the tree and the bark.

Cluck watched his grandfather lean an elbow out of the Morris Cowley’s driver’s side window. The wind from the highway made the end of his cigarette glow.

“Those things’ll kill you, you know,” Cluck said.

“So will the things they eat in this country,”
Pépère
said. The soda in the liquor store horrified Alain Corbeau, those colors bright as neon tubes. He thought Kraft Singles contained, within a few square inches, all American evils. His career at the adhesive plant had only strengthened his belief that chemicals belonged on the flaps of envelopes and between layers of pressboard, not in the stomach.

Cluck laid two new peacock feathers out on the dashboard, both pale as swans’ wings, thanks to a recessive allele. Leucism. It left nothing but white, and the faintest flashes of sunrise colors if the light hit the barbs the right way.

Locals swore the white peacock of Elida Park was a myth, no more real than a green flash at dusk. But today the bird had dragged his train across the grass and left behind these two perfect tail feathers.

Cluck’s grandfather lifted one off the dashboard. It let off a little blue. “What will you do with them?” he asked.

Cluck held the passenger door handle. Whenever the truck upshifted, its weight pulled on his fingers. The latch was so old that if
Pépère
sped, it might come unhooked, and the door might fly open. “Same thing I do with the blue ones, I guess.”

His grandfather set the feather down. “Your hard work will never be worn, then. You’ll never catch anyone in this family in white wings.”

Pépère
parked the Morris Cowley behind the Craftsman house, their home for the weeks they’d be in Almendro. The plumbing squealed, the floorboards groaned back and forth, and on windy nights, the attic murmured to the second floor.

Cluck didn’t have to hear it though. He slept in the costume trailer, a blue and white 1961 Shasta Compact. It saved his cousins from arguing about who had to sleep in the same room with him, calling
not-it
like they were still in grade school lessons. To them, his left-handedness and the red in his feathers made him dangerous as a
matagot
. Worse luck than a black cat brought across a stream. When the family went to church on
la veille de Noël
or
le Vendredi saint,
they did not bring him. So
Pépère
stayed home with him, reading from Luke. “Let them have their Latin and their
hosties,
” he told Cluck.

Pépère
pointed out the window. “
Regarde
.” He lifted his hand toward a flitter of movement. A red-winged blackbird, all dark feathers except for a brushstroke of deep coral on each shoulder, crossed the sky.

This was his way of telling Cluck not to mind the red in his own feathers.

Pépère
set the parking break. “I left Eugenie’s wings for you. She tore the right one.”

“Again?” Cluck slammed the door.

“Malheureusement.”

“I’ll get to it.”

First Cluck got the tire pressure gauge from inside the costume trailer. If the Shasta would sit for the show’s run here, he had to make sure the tires weren’t sinking into the ground.

He’d just put the gauge to the front right tire when Dax grabbed him by the back of the neck.

“You just had to go start something, didn’t you?” Dax slammed him against the side of the trailer. He caught a handful of Cluck’s hair, pulling at the back of his scalp.

“What?” Cluck asked.

“Don’t ask me what.” Dax flicked Cluck’s temple. “This.”

Pépère
had made Cluck forget the bruising, the soreness. He always made him forget, no matter who gave him the bruise. Locals. Dax. His mother, when he was small, catching him in the eye with her elbow and then telling him “
Le petit imbécile,
stay out of my way.”

“You went to start a fight,” Dax said.

The smell of Dax’s aftershave dried out Cluck’s mouth, his tongue a parched sponge.

“I didn’t start anything,” Cluck said.

“Then where’d you get this?” Dax pressed him into the aluminum siding so hard the ridges cut across his body.

“Some guys in town,” Cluck said.

“What guys?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me.” Dax pulled him off the side of the trailer enough to slam him into it again.

Cluck held himself up, but didn’t fight. “I don’t know.” A metal seam pressed into his cheek.

“If you went to settle the score, you better tell me now.”

“What?” was all Cluck could get out.

“Don’t go near them.” Dax held him harder, wringing out the muscle at the back of his neck. “Got it?”

“Who?” Cluck turned his head.

The rage in Dax’s face shifted, the edges ground down.

He loosened his grip, dropped his hand. “You don’t know.”

The back of Cluck’s neck cooled.

“They’re in town,” Dax said. “That family.”

That family
.

The Palomas were already here. They came back every year, never any guilt. Because of them, Clémentine’s oldest brother had lost his first wife twenty years ago. Cluck had heard stories about her, the woman with so much grace on the highest branches none of them could believe she had no
fildefériste
blood.

La magie noire
the Palomas carried in their birthmarks had taken her.

The Palomas meant for every performer to die, drowned with those branches when the water flooded up onto its shores. All to steal the lake they thought belonged to them. It was only by the grace of God that the rest of the Corbeaus managed to swim against the pull of their own wings, scramble onto rocks, claw at the shore.

The Palomas lost one of their own too, a man who must have been at the lake to draw the water onto the land,
la magie noire
ready in his hands. But the Palomas still set up their show where the trees had been, on that man’s grave and the grave of a Corbeau.

Cluck’s family moved to the other side of the woods, as far as that stretch of forest would let them get from a family that danced where one of their own had died.

Cluck’s neck prickled to hot again. This was where the Palomas had ruined their grandfather. And every year they came back to rub it in.

“Does
Pépère
know?” Cluck asked.

“Since when is it my job to tell him?” Dax shoved him, this time to let him go. “You swear the fish didn’t do that to you?”

The fish
. Dax didn’t like saying the name Paloma any more than Cluck did.

Cluck pulled on the hem of his shirt to smooth it. “It was some guys from around here.”

“You’re sure?”

“Another local told them off.” The girl in the red lipstick knew the man at the liquor store enough to give him the finger and get a laugh. And Cluck would have known a pack of Palomas. He would have seen
la tromperie
in their eyes. His mother called the Paloma girls
les sorcières
. They must have been, she said, to draw an audience when all they did was swim.

“What are they doing here this early?” Cluck asked.

“They know our schedule,” Dax said.

“We should’ve canceled the stop.”

The words drew their mother’s shadow toward the trailer. The idea must have summoned her, called her like a spirit.

She stood with arms crossed, thin elbows resting in her palms. “This family hasn’t canceled a stop since we came to this country.” She’d starched her linen shift dress so well the breeze didn’t move it. Her eyelashes looked sharp as chestnut spines. “Not for rain. Not for the earthquakes. Not even for snow, not that either of you would remember that year.”

It was what set them apart from the Palomas, who had to cancel their shows every time it rained. The drops disturbed the water too much to let the audience see them.

“Not another word about canceling shows, understood?” his mother asked.

Dax’s “
Compris
” and Cluck’s one nod satisfied her. She went back inside, slamming the kitchen door.

“Don’t go near them,” Dax told Cluck.

“I never have,” Cluck said under the screen door’s rattle.

“But you’re thinking about it.”

Every Corbeau thought about it. Cluck never did anything though. Dax and his cousins were the ones who used to place nets where the Palomas swam. They’d only stopped when Dax and Cluck’s mother ordered them to. “Only cowards set traps for little girls in costumes,” she told them; true men did not go after women. Cluck had tried telling them before that someone would drown, and all he’d done was earn a few more bruises from his brother. Dax only listened to their mother.

But Dax throwing out the nets hadn’t kept the Palomas from slicking the tree branches with petroleum jelly last year. The Palomas had even been smart enough to pick branches shadowed by leaves, so the performers wouldn’t see the light shining off them. They were lucky Aunt Camille had broken her leg and not her neck.

Pain throbbed through the roots of Cluck’s hair. “I won’t do anything,” he said, though God knew he wanted to sometimes. Fighting was the only safe way to touch a Paloma. Half this family believed if they ever let a Paloma brush their arm or bump their shoulder, they’d wither and die like wildflowers in July sun. But fighting was safe. The rage made it true and good. The anger and honor of defending this family shielded them like a saint’s prayer. Hitting and kicking were safe. Anything else could bring sickness.

“You better not.” Dax followed their mother, his slam of the door as fast and loud as hers.

Cluck set a hand on the trailer door frame and pulled himself up the step.

Eugenie sat on the trailer’s built-in, her skirt rippling over the threadbare mattress.

There were only two reasons Eugenie showed up in the costume trailer. Cluck only had to check her hands to know which. Sometimes it was a torn dress, usually one of
Mémère
’s chiffons or silks, skirts she had danced in at Eugenie’s age. Eugenie would hold the fabric out to him, and he stitched up the tear.

This time his cousin’s palms cupped not one of their grandmother’s dresses, but a plastic bag of freezer-tray ice cubes. She said nothing, just held it out to him the same way she offered a ripped dress.

He took it, his nod as much of a thank you as he had in him.

She got up from the built-in and hopped down from the trailer door, the hem of her dress dragging after her bare feet.

The bag wet his palms. He didn’t know where she meant him to use it. His temple, the back of his neck, where his ribs hit the trailer siding.

Cluck made out the sharp, far-off call of red-winged blackbirds.
Pépère
always meant for the sight of them to make Cluck feel better about his own feathers. Cluck could never bring himself to remind his grandfather how easily crows killed them.

Una oveja que arrea a los lobos vale más que la lana.

A sheep that herds wolves is worth more than her wool.

Lace’s uncles stood at the picnic tables in silence, half-juiced fruit filling their hands.

They were never this quiet when they made the
aguas frescas
. Every afternoon, their laughing carried all the way to the motel with the scent of limes and oranges.

Had they just killed a crow? Last summer, Lace had seen a black-feathered bird peck the heart from a halved passion fruit. Her uncle loaded the Winchester 1912 her father used for scaring off bears and coyotes, and shot it. Lace could still remember its eyes, shining like mercury drops.

Lace searched for the crow or the shotgun. Instead she found
Abuela,
standing between wooden picnic tables, her presence hushing the men.

“
Rosa
,”
Abuela
said. The wrinkles in her face thinned to cracks.

Rosa
. Pink, the color of Lace’s tail. Her name to her grandmother.