Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks. “Can parakeets even live in the wild?”

He holds Magnificent over the edge of the basket and opens his hand to free the bird. It doesn’t explode from his grip the way Fiona expected it might. Instead it just rolls off the end of his fingers. They both move to the edge of the basket and watch it fall, watch it spin, both of them waiting for it to do what birds do. She wills it to flutter and to fight back.

“What happened?” he asks. “I lost sight of her. Which way did she go?”

She points east uncertainly. “I’m pretty sure that way.”

The man nods. “Good,” he says. “For a split second I got worried her wings were clipped. My daughter never mentioned it, but still. You sure you saw her fly?”

“I’m fairly certain,” Fiona says.

Thirty minutes later, the balloon comes to rest in a park west of town, and not long after that Tom arrives in the truck. They pack up the balloon and then give the passenger a lift back to his car.

“What about that video?” he asks. “Do you think it caught her flying away? I wouldn’t mind having a copy of that.”

“Let me check it.” She unhooks the small black box from the bottom of the basket and removes the camera. She pushes a button and taps its side. She holds it up to her ear. She pushes another button. Possibly she’s overperforming. The man watches with interest. She doesn’t know how to explain it, she says, but the machine malfunctioned. Maybe it has faulty wiring. Or maybe she forgot to press record. She can be that way sometimes: a head full of hot air.

“Shame,” he says, but writes her a big check anyway.

• • •

That night she visits her father, the real F.O., at his apartment, an out-of-the-way building on the north side of town. The view from his second-story balcony is of a Suds ’n Rinse. He makes spaghetti for them with sauce from a can and spins the noodles tight around his fork. He wants a full report on her mother and what’s-his-face , his perpetual name for the man Fiona’s mother has been seeing for eight years now, ever since the divorce. Her mother and what’s-his-face just got back from a trip to Disney World with what’s-his-face’s grandkids, Fiona tells him. What’s-his-face is now busy constructing a pond in his backyard with a black tarp and a garden hose. What’s-his-face knows the scientific names of all the frogs in the Southeast, and Fiona’s mother finds that just adorable.

“Okay,” her father says, “I get the picture.”

They’re rinsing dishes now. Between the bristles of the scrub brush Fiona sees remnants of scrambled egg. Her father coughs into his armpit and rubs his nose with the back side of his mottled hand.

“How’s it up there?” he asks, and nods up to the ceiling, his usual way of asking about the business — and of filling any awkward silence with words.

“It’s so-so.”

“What’s eating you?”

“The business is fine,” she says, and then tells him about her morning, about Magnificent, about how strange it was to watch a bird fall like that, to see it swallowed up by gravity. She leaves out the part about his ashes.

They move to the couch in the den. Her father offers her a peppermint candy from the green dish on the coffee table. He props his feet up, the bottoms of his athletic socks brown and threadbare.

“Here’s the thing,” he says. “Birds are dying every day. There are probably a billion birds in the United States at this very moment. Think about that. You’d think we’d see them drop dead more often. You’d think there’d be bird bodies all over. Where do they go?”

Fiona has never really considered it. She tries to imagine not just one bird falling but a thousand. Then, instead of birds, she imagines people — her mother, her father, the man with the parakeet — all of them twirling down, featherless, naked. She bites down into her candy.

“I only saw it happen once,” he says. “It was a bluebird, I think. Your mom and I were on our way somewhere. Dinner, maybe. It hit the pavement ahead of us. It must have fallen from a long way because it popped right open. It was a mess. Came down over my shoulder. I thought someone had thrown it at me, that it was a joke. I actually looked around to make sure it wasn’t.” He sucks on his peppermint and reaches for the remote. Their plan is to watch whatever movie is on cable, but Fiona can’t stay long. She’s supposed to stay over at her boyfriend’s place tonight. “But it was for real,” he says. “The bird really did fall right out of the sky. Your mom was nervous about it. You know how she can get. She said it was a bad omen.”

He flips through the channels, looks forward.

“What happened next?” Fiona asks, certain he’s withholding crucial details, that there’s more to say about this story.

“I don’t remember,” he says, distracted. “We walked around it, I guess.”

The plane landed but his brother wasn’t onboard. The woman at the airline counter pouted her lips (sympathetically?) as Bert tried to explain the situation to her over all the commotion, the reunited families crowing, the baggage carousels whirring, the muscular officer hustling by with his skinny brown drug dog.

The woman behind the counter consulted her computer again and then leaned forward to report that, unfortunately, she had no record for a casket on that flight. She asked if Bert had maybe made a mistake. If it was possible that he’d confused the day or the flight number.

He had the correct information. He unfolded all his paperwork across the counter. He could provide her with confirmation codes and receipts and State Department emails — whatever she wanted. She was a small woman with a tight, pink face. No longer pouting (sympathetically or otherwise), she stared down at the mess he’d created on her counter as if willing it to combust and swirl away in a puff of papery ash.

“My brother, Rob Yaw,” Bert huffed. “He was supposed to be on that flight. Are you telling me you lost a human body?”

“Hold on,” she said, backing away from the counter on ballerina feet. “Let me check with my manager. Stay here.”

From his pants pocket Bert fished loose his wife’s cell phone — he’d lost his phone for the hundredth time — and dialed Mrs. Oliver. Mrs. Oliver worked for the State Department and had been his primary contact throughout the exasperating process of getting his dead brother back into the country. The department wouldn’t be paying for the transit. Apparently that was the family’s burden. But Mrs. Oliver had promised to do everything in her power to help.

“They’re saying he wasn’t on the flight?” she asked. “Interesting. Okay, let me see what I can find out for you. I’ll have to call you back. Stay where you are.”

Bert hadn’t even considered leaving. After all, there was always the chance that his brother’s remains would arrive on the next flight, which would land in…

“Not until tomorrow actually,” the woman behind the counter informed him. She had just returned with her manager in tow, a fat-faced man with small George Bush eyes and a gray soul patch under his lip that he kept licking. The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder in their matching blue and orange airline vests, gazing at the computer, bleary-eyed, somber.

Bert imagined his poor brother’s unclaimed casket on a carousel in some forgotten part of the world. A baggage claim mausoleum: no casket, just a body, his brother’s skin waxing under the lights of the arrival gate cafés and newsstands, all those people watching Rob, famous for nothing but this, as he cycled around and around with all the other lost bags.