William Vollmann - The Atlas

Beaks, not tails! said his friend.

No, tails. A beak is a tail. A bird got two tails.

Is that girl your girlfriend? a boy asked me. He was one of the ones I knew from backfloating and glistening, heads and bodies sparkling with windy light.

Probably.

Is she always naked?

Probably.

Is she pregnant from you?

No.

Why? he cried in surprise.

Sometimes girls came to visit, too. I lived in a fine spot that summer, in a place between two lakes where my friend was a chalk-yellow flower with the lemon-yellow center, and another friend was the long woolly sausage of a willow bud. Brown birds danced through the moss. When my guests got close I'd hear them exclaim at all the birds. — One girl said: My grandmother saw a big black bird in the morning when she was young. Bigger than this little house. It tried to catch kids. — I'd hear the girls unzipping my back doors since my front door was broken; I'd hear them unlacing their boots as they knelt upon the giving, prickly-brittle mound of lichens. I knew them; I'd seen them on Sundays listening to the the little white-robed trio at the altar; I knew those girls' slender arms and the way their shirts worked up to flash their bikini-breasts in the water. They called each other sluts and talked about the boys whom they wanted to fuck. They shot my pistol. They asked for liquor, which I didn't have. Sometimes boys and girls would come together. When my tent was crowded, a boy would just pull his coat over his shoulders and his girl's shoulders so that they could kiss in private. That reminded me of the bridge, too, where the women tented inside towels or quilts as they changed. Everything had begun to remind me of the bridge by then. It was as if this island where water pulsed around me between long blue windblown pond-fingers were inside a paperweight. There was nothing but this. Alone in my tent at night, chilly from my day's swim at the bridge, I dreamed of grabby willow-islands and also good flat stones to cross, but grassy mossy bogs on either side. The world went chill and grey as more clouds thrust their elbows across the sky. And in the morning when I heard my friends coming, I knew that we would go together to the bridge. I felt interested in their loves, being but a spinning camera eye which could not and must not love them because I would never come back. — The girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid and the boy who always got into trouble loved each other, I think, but they never visited me at the same time. My best Polaroid was of him, and that was why she stole it.

Do you swear? she'd said.

No.

Why? she said contemptuously. Do you use drugs?

Sometimes.

Why not all the time?

When at last she jumped, unannounced, long after everyone had given up on her, I saw the dance of her white breasts through her wet T-shirt, the fierce downward point of the running shoes she'd swiped from one of the younger kids and then she was in the air but still very far away and then with the ripping-cloth noise of a gyrfalcon swooping to protect its nest she plunged into the cold brown water with a roar and a splash, bobbing back up immediately among the other orange faces rising and falling in the dark water which was occasionally stained orange by the bridge's reflection.

The boy she loved, the one in the Polaroid, was the boy who'd slit his wrists because he was caught breaking into the mayor's office, "just to see what was there," and his mother (he was adopted) said that none of her real offspring would have done that, so he said: I'm gonna die, Mom.

He sat in my tent, playing with my scare pistol. — I think my uncle saw I slit my wrists, he beamed. I told my cousin if my Dad don't change, I'm gonna go all the way!

Minutes later he was swimming and laughing.

After the girl who loved him jumped, he clambered up the chickenwire-lined gravel wall of the bridge, passing the small girl who clung peering at a baby bird, until he stood beside me in the spot where his admirer had stood, and in lordly summer silence the two of us surveyed the black turtles' backs of rocks under the greenness and brownness, and kids' skinny phosphorescent bodies making waves like obsidian arrowheads.

Dive in, Jobie! cried she who loved him. Splash me good or I'm gonna quit!

He pretended to look away from her upturned face. Then, smiling, he dove. The river exploded with his splash (the lake where the river came from was a swollen gray cloud with orange bloodstains on it).

Oh, my toe hurts! cried a water-spouting girl.

What about my balls? he shouted, and they all laughed.

The girl who loved him stood where the water was only knee-deep, her wrists clasped across her breasts, watching him and shivering. — Let's go to the other side an' dive! she said. Then she crept all the way into the cold water.

The boy in the Polaroid's cousins were clinging to him and he was shouting: Get the hell off! and they were all laughing. He was so strong and perfect; he fought the strange current inch by inch with girls hanging on him and shouting: A world record! and when by dint of great shoulder-flashes and whirling arms, spray shooting from his rich black hair, he succeeded in touching the rock where the bird's nest was, he only smiled modestly and said: Clear water, anyway. — But the girl who loved him stood shyly on the other side where he had not come to dive, and she was alone.

The shaggy boy's little sister, kneeling in a wet blue shirt, was not alone although nobody kept her company down at the river's mouth where she could still see three figures poling very slowly out in an aluminum canoe, the bow tipping down almost to water level with every stroke of the tall figure, and then they vanished behind a sailing ship in the middle of the harbor. The shaggy boy's little sister was wringing out her swimming clothes in the brown water, tossing and turning them quietly as if she were cooking strips of bacon She was the ten-year-old who'd burned her nose smoking a cigarette. Water ran down her pouting lips.

Coming back from the river with the white crosses of the graveyard ahead of me, I found the sun more rubicund, fractured with splinters of dark cloud. I took the high road, the only road, already seeing the hemisphere of my tent across that lakey plain which was interrupted by half-sunken rocks, clumps of grass, tussocks shared by mossy lichens and flowers, and the occasional dwarf willow colony creeping across the flatness like sturdy wire unraveling leafily in any direction. Summer was rushing in tune with the yellow rhapsody of wind-dancing buttercups. The darkness was oozing back. I inhaled the reddish sun-jelly, the sweets of evening seemingly comprised of melted berries.

When I stepped on one gray slab it grated down upon another rock with a terrifying snarling laugh.

After half a dozen hours of being tentbound by a windy rain, I heard birds sing again and came out to find one of the strangest and most beautiful skies that I had ever seen: pale beams of light descending like spider-legs from a gray cloud's body, and then other patches and pools of the same light, more and more fantastic in shape, strings of flying pillars like leads in pack ice. Scarcely an exhalation of air. The birds called, the grasses did not flinch, and then a gust came after all.

I walked through town. The boy from Arviat had a brown bird in his hand, a little brown baby. He let it go. He said: Maybe if I keep it the mother is sad. And maybe in just a few minutes it will starve.

One time I was playing with a baby bird and it died so quickly from starving. — I went through that low flat town of small houses and passed the nursing station, the well-fenced reservoir (which still had chunks of ice inside), and came back to the open road, the bay on my right, a long low snowsquiggled purple cape on the horizon, and then clouds and wind.