The Prettiest Feathers (3 page)

“I don’t blame him, lady,” he said. He was smirking. The other policeman, on the passenger’s side, laughed.

I sped away.

I thought about John Wolf—how efficiently he had handled the men in the bookstore. I wished that he and his gun were beside me. I wanted him there when I walked to my door. I wanted him to see me safely inside, to check each room,
each closet. He isn’t like other men. He makes me feel safe. Protected.

But I also sense a great risk in getting to know him. He is too attractive for comfort—a bit taller than I, and nearly as thin, but sinewy, especially through the chest and upper arms. The stitching on his tailored leather jacket was taut, suggesting that he was smaller when he bought it. I wondered if he was bulking up, lifting weights. A new convert to physical fitness.

His eyes intrigued me. At first, they were a gentle blue, but as we talked, I watched them turn gray. He wore wire-rim spectacles, which he put on after placing his sunglasses in his pocket. But the lenses looked plain, nonprescription. It crossed my mind that his glasses weren’t necessary; perhaps they were a prop, a fashion accessory. Or a disguise.

His hair is thinning, although he seems to be too young for that. Forty at the very most. But the hair that remains—and there is still an ample amount—looks as soft as a whisper. His skin has a soft look, too. I don’t mean that he’s effeminate; not at all. It’s just that there’s a feeling of velvet about him. And fluidity. He seems to be without bones, beyond bones, moving with a grace that we with knees and knuckles could never duplicate.

And there was one more thing I noticed about him: he was spotless. Freshly shaved. Well manicured. Even his shoes shone with fresh polish. I found that seductive, yet off-putting, as if he weren’t made for touching. But that was only a guess. I wanted to find out for sure.

W
hen I was a child, my mother always promised that she would tell “him,” my stepfather, to leave. “Once he’s gone, our lives will improve, son,” she said. But he never left. He sat in front of the TV sucking down quarts of Schlitz and watching baseball when he wasn’t hammering on me. But, because my sister was their kid, she could do no wrong, received no hammering.

We lived in a rural state, in a house that he had built from somebody else’s sheets of leftover plywood, odd lengths of two-by-fours, and slabs of wallboard in different thicknesses. The yard was filled with lath and chunks of plaster destined for the dump. I chose some of this, a few bits of that, but never took much of any one thing because I didn’t want to attract attention to myself.

After school each day, before anyone else was home, I pushed my treasures down inside the front of my jacket, careful of the nails. I walked back through the woods, crossed the brook, and hiked up the small slope on the property to
the quarter-acre clearing that in another era had been an orchard.

I started my work under the first of the remaining three apple trees because it offered the greatest concealment and the ground was easy to work. I pulled out the few clumps of grass by hand, leveled the dirt, pried the rocks loose with my fingertips and, where I could, used these natural cavities to begin excavation on cellar holes for the hardware store, the post office, a general store, a garage, old New England capes and rambling Victorians, the train station, a municipal building with the police station underneath, and, at the edge of town, in a prime location, my school.

I began this work in the early spring, just after the snow was finally gone and the brook was no longer swollen with runoff. The days were longer and warmer, and I would work until my mother called me down for supper. Often, if the man I was supposed to call Father had drunk enough beer and fallen asleep in his chair before the light was gone, I would return up the hill. Most nights, though, I sat at the kitchen table and worked on math, or a paper for English class, or read a chapter in my science book.

I did the schoolwork, and I did it well, although not so well that it would attract too much attention. But while one part of my mind was calculating percentage problems for a coat marked down during a sale, another part was like a spirit that could drift up and out of my body, up through the woods, to hover in the evening air above my town. My mother called it daydreaming, and she could tell when I was doing it, but I was doing the math problems, too, and my grades were okay, so she left me alone.

I don’t know when I first sensed that I could remove myself like that, but I had been doing it for a long time—since long before I began building my town. My first real memory of it is somehow connected to my pregnant mother’s disappearing for three days. I lived at an uncle’s house until they brought the baby girl home from the hospital.

When I returned home, I was allowed into the bedroom to say hello to my mother, who was half dead from exhaustion—and to glance down, briefly, at the shriveled pink piglet asleep at her side. I was told to call it “sister.”

They
called her Sarah.

One day in May of that year, I failed to hear my mother’s call for supper. The work on the lower end of Main Street had been complicated by the need for a bridge. My first attempt—using twigs that had dropped from the apple tree—was a failure, so I was working with lath, supporting the span with sections of old metal wire casing. She walked up the hill behind me.

Somehow I knew that she was standing there, but it was more than just the sense of another’s presence. I knew that it was my mother.

I didn’t acknowledge her. I didn’t allow my awareness of her to distract me until I was certain that my efforts on the bridge would be successful. Then, slowly, I turned my head and looked up at her.

She was smiling. I told her about the town, about my problems with the bridge, and about my plans for expansion. She continued smiling, nodding her head, glancing occasionally back toward the house. Then she said that I should wash up; my stepfather would be home soon. It was difficult to know if she was impressed by my handiwork. I thought perhaps she was, but then she was being pulled back toward the house, too. I wondered if she would say anything to him.

At the supper table I paid more than the usual attention to the tones of voices, facial expressions, gestures. Everything was ordinary—the same as always. My mother served. My sister played with her food. My stepfather ate.

Mother said a few things about what went on in the factory that day. He pushed his plate back, went to the refrigerator for a quart, then walked into the parlor and turned on the TV. I watched my mother, examined her face, and knew that she had said nothing to him about my town. It was a secret,
the first I had ever shared with anyone, and it appeared to be safe.

My sister reached across the table, teasing, tapping on my fingers. When she was only a few months old, still in a cradle, I reached down one day and clasped her hand where it emerged from the receiving blanket. I felt as if I were off in another part of the room, watching myself do this—watching myself squeeze her fingers, wishing for her bones to break. Now, years later, as we sat at the dinner table, it was as if she knew, as if she remembered what I had done and was threatening to tell. I knew that wasn’t possible, that she would have no memory for what had happened so early in her life, but then she would look up at me with a sort of smile at her mouth, and squeeze my hand.

In the beginning with the man I was supposed to call Father, and later with my sister, I believed that my mother could have stopped everything from happening. I knew there was no need for us to have him in the house, but she had done nothing to change that. At times she even seemed to prefer his company to mine.

She had said so little about the changes ahead of time—just that we would be moving in with him, and that I should call him Father. Then she had expected me to be happy that I had a little sister.

She tried to tell me what my feelings were. She was putting them together with her own feelings—confusing them, blending them. “You’ll like having a man in your life,” and “You’ll love being a big brother.”

These were not my feelings, but I kept silent, didn’t complain. And in time, I was no longer certain what my feelings were, or if I had any at all. The one thing I knew for sure was that my mother could have prevented all the bad that had come into my life, but she had chosen not to.

I found the folding knife on the last day of school as I walked along the side of the road toward the bus stop. It was lying near a torn bag and some broken bottles, the roadside debris from somebody’s drunk the night before. The morning
sun reflected up from the fragments of green and clear glass, a sharpness of light almost cutting into my eyes, attracting my attention, begging that I see the flat brown handle resting in its bed of glitter. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, afraid to look at it, my heart racing. I kept it in my pocket all of that day through school, knowing that there was something magical about finding the knife, and realizing that if anyone knew I had it, it would be taken away from me.

It was only when I was up at my town that afternoon that I took the knife out of my pocket, ran my finger along the wooden handle, examined both sides and each end of it, then carefully, lovingly, exposed the single, four-inch blade.

The knife would be useful in my work on the town, in making things fit together the way they were supposed to, or carving out a door here, a window there. It would allow me to make things go more smoothly. And, for the first time, it provided me with a sense of power, of control—a feeling that there was nothing I couldn’t do.

On the second of my mother’s visits to the town, she said that she admired my work, that she thought it might be a nice place to live. “But,” she wanted to know, “where are the people?”

I got up from my knees and stood gazing down at my world. “People would just mess things up,” I said. “There wouldn’t be any … order.”

Eventually I placed a few cars and trucks on the main street of the town, evidence that it was inhabited, but I would do no more as far as people were concerned.

On Sundays I lost half the day because of the family’s attendance at church. In the early morning I was sent to Bible class, where an intense young man read passages and talked about the paradise that would be there for all of us who accepted Jesus as our personal savior. After class I would join the family upstairs for the services.

There wasn’t any one minister. The men took turns standing up at the front and talking about the right way to live a spiritual life in a world that was afflicted with sin. After
one talk about sin being in every home because it was coming through the TV set, my stepfather unplugged ours and put it in the attic. But when it was in the newspaper that the intense young reader of Bible passages was going to jail for committing lewd and lascivious acts on his young charges, my stepfather disconnected the family from the church and brought the TV back down to its old place in the parlor.

I wanted to know what those two words—
lewd
and
lascivious
—meant. On the day of my mother’s third visit to my town, I wanted to ask her about them. There was mystery and power attached to them, and I knew that she could explain—but there were so many things she hadn’t explained, ever. And there were all those times she changed things around so that they seemed to mean something different from what they really meant.

She was distracted that day—preoccupied—so I didn’t ask her about the words. Her mind seemed to be filled up with something. She didn’t say much—just sat on a stump and gazed off at the mountains in the distance.

“What kind of bird is that?” she asked.

I listened to the bird’s deep, throaty, owl-like phrases coming from the brush. She knew I would have an answer for her. I roamed the woods, climbed into the foothills, absorbed every sound and smell and track of an animal—then read voraciously until I knew all the vibrations of the world in the wild.

“Mourning dove,” I said.

“It doesn’t sound sad, exactly. Just thoughtful.”

My town was in danger of becoming a city. The buildings were crowding in upon one another, growing taller, creating an architectural congestion that I wouldn’t wish on rats. I knew I would have to tear some of it down, destroy it, and I feared that once I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

A long time passed before I spoke again to my mother, and, by the time I did, she had started back down the hill
through the creeping fog of late afternoon. “Some people hunt them,” I said to her back.

For as long as I could see her, I watched her go. She was dressed in light colors, and the mist was gray, almost white. She drifted like a ghost, down and out of sight.

I followed her. I don’t know why. Moving at an angle across the side of the hill and through a stand of birch trees, I got to the edge of the yard just as she disappeared through the back doorway. I stood in the dampening silence and waited. I don’t know what for.

Her bedroom light went on. I stepped to the back of the house and stared through her window.