Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

She shut her eyes, took his hand, let him pull her to standing. The grain of his burns gliding over hers stung. The heat of his hand radiated through her wrist. If she squeezed her eyes shut harder, she could hear Abuela ’s gasp like the rush of the river’s current.

But it didn’t kill her. And it didn’t make her father and Tía Lora feel any farther away.

“Nice work last night,” Cluck said. “You’re good. And fast. Where’d you learn?”

“Community theater on the weekends.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Eighteen.”

“Sure, you are.”

“Seventeen.”

The raise of his eyebrows showed the swelling along his temple. If he didn’t keep ice on it, he’d get a bruise.

“In September,” she said.

“Does your family know where you are?”

“No,” she said.

“Are they looking?”

“Fat chance.”

He shrugged, a look telling her he wouldn’t push it. He kept the ice on his jaw and stepped into the hallway.

“Cluck?” she said.

He turned around.

“All those feathers,” she said. “Do you kill peacocks for them?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Where do you get them?” she asked.

He thumbed a blood spot off his lip. “You really want to know?”

Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée.

A door must be open or shut.

Cluck opened the Morris Cowley’s passenger side. He watched Lace stare into the truck cab. The look on her face wasn’t fear, the skittishness of a bitten animal, un chat échaudé qui craint l’eau froide. It was suspicion.

People always found something they didn’t like about his family. They were Romani. They were French. They were show people. The traveling kind.

“Did you think we brought a flock with us everywhere?” he asked. “If you want to know where I get the feathers, we’re gonna have to drive there.”

“What’s your real name?” she asked.

He laughed. He liked that she wanted to know that before she decided whether she was getting in the truck, but it didn’t mean he was gonna tell her. Everyone called him Cluck. His real name wasn’t any more of her business than her family was his.

“Sven,” he said.

“No, really. What’s your real name?”

“Rupert.”

She shook her head and got in. “What’s your real name?” she asked, a last try.

He didn’t blame her. In the fairy tales Eugenie told Noe and Mason, the number three was a charm. Anything—kissing a lover to break a curse, piercing an enemy with a dagger—had to be tried three times before it worked.

But he wasn’t a locked door or enchanted tree. He wasn’t telling her his real name just because she kept asking.

“ Le bâtard, ” he said, the words slipping from his mouth before he could pull them back. This was what his older relatives called him when they thought he couldn’t hear. Even when he was little, this was his name to them. Le bâtard. Bastard. It didn’t matter that Dax and Cluck had the same father, that he had left them both without marrying their mother. Dax was fatherless, but Cluck was le bâtard .

“How do you spell that?” Lace asked.

“I’m kidding,” he said.

It was fair. She didn’t know his name. He didn’t know why she wasn’t with her family. It wasn’t his business. He didn’t care to add to the stories about les Roms stealing gadje children, but the flinch of her eyelashes made him think she was telling the truth, that nobody was looking for her.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked after he started the truck.

“Rogue rhinoceros,” he said.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked again.

“Jousting accident.”

She looked out the window as he pulled the truck onto the road. “It wasn’t your dominant hand, was it?”

“No. It wasn’t.”

It was a lie and not a lie. He’d started out left-handed, still was when no one but his grandfather was watching. His family’s French blood disapproved of left-handedness. Witches greeted Satan avec la main gauche, they said, so no Corbeau would write or stitch with his left hand. “We only see ghosts if we look to our left,” warned one aunt. “ Le Diable moves our left hand more easily than our right,” added another. A third, “The Devil watches us over the left shoulder.”

Mémère, according to Pépère, always called them superstitious old women and shooed them out of her kitchen when they started talking that way. Cluck would’ve liked to see that.

“You’re lucky,” Lace said. “It could’ve been the hand you used more.”

“Yep. I’m lucky alright.” He rolled down the window. Highway air rushed through the cab. It brought the smell of diesel fuel and wild sorrel, and the sharp green hint of onion fields.

He noticed Lace pinching the air, catching one of his feathers. She held it by the calamus and turned it between her fingers.

The back of his neck grew hot. He kept his eyes on the highway’s white lines, pretending he hadn’t noticed.

She held it in the wind, letting the air ruffle the downy barbs. He felt it, and the chill made him shiver.

When they got to Elida Park, Lace folded the feather she’d caught into her palm, and tucked it into her pocket.

He helped her down from the truck, and the sight of the cats and peacocks made her catch her breath in her chest. Calicoes and tabbies sprawled in patches of light, and the great birds strutted across the crabgrass.

“Where’d they all come from?” she asked.

“The cats come because the locals feed ’em,” Cluck said. “The birds are here thanks to some idiot who ordered a cock and hen from a mail-order catalog ten years ago.”

“Mail-order peacocks?” she asked. “Was this before or after the rogue rhinoceros?”

“It’s true,” he said. “His wife couldn’t take the way they shriek, so he just left them here. Unfixed, so you know the rest.”

An orange tabby sunned itself on the lower rung of a wooden fence. A young peacock swept by, its fan down.

Lace winced, waiting for one to attack the other.

“Don’t worry,” Cluck said. “They get along enough.”

He picked up a shed feather, pulled garden shears from his back pocket and clipped it. He threw the lower half to an adolescent tortoiseshell cat. It chewed on the hollow shaft, back feet kicking the feather barbs.

“How do you get enough feathers if you pick them up one at a time?” Lace asked.

“I don’t. They’re not shedding much now, but come the end of summer, they’ll molt.” The feathers would half-carpet the ground, like la couleur of fruit blossom petals turning the ground pink in spring.

A gasp parted Lace’s lips, one breath away from a laugh.

Cluck knew why before he looked up.

They both watched the white peacock shake itself out of the tall grasses. The bird took one slow step, then another, his body so covered in white Cluck always expected it to dust the ground like powdered sugar.

Cluck crouched so he’d look smaller. It made the birds shed their skittishness like molted feathers. He didn’t ask Lace to. She wasn’t much taller than the peacock’s upright tail fan.

The peacock took one step into the sun, like toeing cold water. In full light, he looked made of the fringe off white bearded irises.

He dropped a single tail feather, long as Cluck’s arm, and left to follow after a peahen with eyes like black marbles.

Cluck lifted the plume off the grass, cradling it so the stem wouldn’t bend, and clipped the hollow shaft of the calamus.

“You’re gonna touch that?” Lace asked.