Thomas Mcguane - Something to Be Desired

The road came up under the butte, so close that the rock wall was just outside the window of the car. They drove around to where the end of the butte melted back into the surrounding hills and drove partway out onto the butte itself and stopped. Here the wind had a warm westerly sweep from the valley floor, and they could see the small dust devils from a great distance. The cars on the river road didn’t seem to be moving at all.

“I can see some hawks now,” said Lucien. “They’re in the thermals.”

“What’s thermals?”

“Warm rising air. Easy for the hawks to fly in. You get the pigeon. I’ll get the camouflage net and the rest of it.”

Lucien watched James trying to carry the pigeon’s cage and look into its side at the same time and thought, as the little boy stumbled along, I can see a beginning.

They carried the gear a half mile out onto the warm top of the butte. Lucien watched James until the boy began to see the hawks. Sometimes the heated gusts would come through the deep grass in cat’s paws and they would have to lean into the wind as they walked. Suddenly James looked straight at Lucien and grinned, put down the cage and said, “Gotta rest up.”

“I shot a big pronghorn out here when I was a kid,” said Lucien.

“With your dad?”

“Nope. By myself. Then I couldn’t haul it home. An old cowboy came along with a dog and a pair of binoculars looking for his cattle and we packed it on his horse and we walked out together even though he had real bad knees, real bad. I always thought that was something special. I told the kids at school it was my dad that packed it out, but actually it was this old cowboy and I didn’t really even get his name. We gave his dog some antelope. When I was bigger I had some horses of my own, just crow bait—”

“What’s ‘crow bait’?”

“Used up. I lived with my mother and we didn’t have money, not much of it anyway. But even with those old horses, I could go. I could go clear over the top. I could go anywhere.” Why am I rambling on like this, Lucien wondered.

James looked all over the top of the butte. “How did we end up in the State Department?”

“I don’t know. College. I used to make pictures of all this stuff. I got sick of pictures of this butte. But I never got sick of the butte. I came up here a while ago when there’d been a chinook and there were these wild old patches of snow and I came that close to making one more picture of the place. But I felt like I’d covered that. I just wonder if you have a clue about what I’m saying.” James was smiling nervously, one lens of his glasses glinting shut, trying so to please.

They kept on until they came to an oval of rocks on the flattened ground. “I’m ninety-nine percent certain that this is where the Indians caught their birds.” Lucien like so many had always felt the great echoes from the terminated history of the Indians — foot, dog and horse Indians. How could a country produce orators for thousands of years, then a hundred years of yep and nope? It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that the glory days of the Old South were forever mourned while this went unmentioned. Maybe the yeps and nopes represented shell-shock, a land forever strange, strange as it was today to a man and a boy with a caged bird and makeshift camouflage. Well, thought Lucien, it’s not a bad spot for coyotes, schemers and venture capitalists.

Lucien laid out the trap carefully. He put on the heavy gauntlets, and they each put on their goggles. He removed the pigeon from the carrying cage and seized its feet in his fingers. The wings beat hard and scared James. The two of them got under the camouflage and Lucien held the bird outside the netting atop their reclined bodies.

The camouflage consisted of numerous yellow and olive strips sewn to a piece of netting. From underneath it, the wind seemed diminished and the sky behind the mesh harsh and clear, vast as a cathedral. The longer they stayed under the net, the more it seemed to curve high over them, as though its sides were somehow not far away and its center absolutely vertical overhead.

“What’s going to happen?”

“We hope a hawk will come to us.”

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll see what he is and we’ll put one of those bands on his leg and turn him loose.”

“Why’s a hawk going to come to us?”

“He’s going to try to get our pigeon.” The pigeon was murmuring faintly. It had shortened its neck and flared its feathers in peace. Lucien could feel that the clenching of its feet in his hands had stopped. He could sense the heat of the pigeon’s body on his own chest and thought he could let go of it without losing the bird.

“I think he’s sleepy,” said James.

“Don’t you get sleepy.”

“I won’t.”

Time passed slowly. Lucien’s arm was cramping and James was quietly knocking the sides of his tennis shoes together. Then James fell asleep. So Lucien, not concerned about their talk, was able to drift off in a fashion himself. Oddly, he thought about Dee; she’d been with him when he thought he was going to crack, or maybe had cracked. He wondered if she could really be as brutal a floozy as she seemed, always clambering onto all fours to receive her sacrament stern-on. Wonderful how that kind of cartooning took the heat off, made time fly. When he was young he used to shadowbox for the same reason, dancing around, throwing punches, going fifteen rounds in his own world. Then came drinking. Then came Emily and the Lost Sweetheart and the spring, the Lost Sweetheart Spring. Why couldn’t he stand success? Suzanne was success. Suzanne was whole. Why was he just beginning to see that?

The pigeon moved. Lucien remained still but noted his head was erect once more, his limpid eyes unmoving. Lucien looked on up to the sky. There was the hawk. The falconers called it waiting-on: the hawk made no motion in the circle of sky but hovered with a blurred wing-beat straight overhead, taking the pigeon’s position. The pigeon felt this happening to him. Lucien knew that if he nudged James it would spook the hawk and they’d lose him. Instead he regulated his own breathing and watched until the distant wing-beat stopped, the hawk tightened its size and fell.

When the impact came, James jumped up screaming and began to crawl off. Lucien sat up, holding the hawk by the feet in one gauntleted hand. There were feathers everywhere, and the hawk beat in a blur of cold fury, striking at Lucien with his downcurving knife of a beak and superimposing his own screech over the noise of James. “We’ve got him, James!” James, quiet now, looked ready to run. The hawk had stopped all motion but kept his beak marginally parted so that the small, hard black tongue could be seen advancing and retreating slightly within his mouth. “It’s a prairie falcon. It’s the most beautiful bird in the world. I want to come back as a prairie falcon.”

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere very soon. Reach me a band and the pliers.” James handed these things to him gingerly. It fascinated Lucien that he was such a timid boy. Lucien hadn’t been particularly timid and he rather liked having a boy who was. But James was shaking.

Each time the bird’s wings beat, Lucien could actually feel the lift in his forearm, could feel the actual pull of the falcon’s world in the sky. He had seen hawks on the ground, graceless as extremely aged people, and he knew their world was sky. He’d seen old cowboys limp to their horses, then fly over the land, and he knew what their world was too. He wanted his own life to be as plain.

By concentration and by ignoring the prospects of a bite, Lucien managed to get the band on. “We’re married at last,” he said to the hawk. James raised his eyebrows. Lucien held the terrifying bird out before him and released his grip. The falcon pulled vertically from his glove and with hard wing-beats made straight into deep sky, swept straight off and was gone.