Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

Mixing up his razor and his toothbrush. It was so strange she almost believed it. But he’d made a little too much of a point of showing the blood-dotted handkerchief while he said it. For how unimportant she was, he cared a little too much about her taking his explanation as truth.

“And you?” he asked. “Why are you here?”

“I do the makeup now,” she said.

“I know what you do. Why are you doing it here?”

His eyes drifted toward the feather burn on her arm. She’d covered it the same way Nicole Corbeau had taught her to do her face, layers of foundation and powder as thin as the dried husks of tomatillos.

To anyone except Lace, it wasn’t there. But the old man studied the patch on her arm like he could see it.

He knew.

He met her eyes. She read the bargain in his face, the offer, an exchange of silences. Don’t tell, and I won’t tell.

She shut the door and pressed her back to the hallway wall. The sound of his coughing stabbed into her forehead. Maybe this man was the Corbeaus’ version of her father, skeptical of las supersticiones. As long as she didn’t make trouble for him, he’d let her stay.

If she told, she’d lose any chance of getting the scar lifted, along with this small, feathered thing growing between her and the boy called Cluck.

But the sound of the kitchen faucet came back to her, this time with the things Cluck had said about his clothes. They’d belonged to this man, coughing a mist of blood into his handkerchief. This man Cluck wanted to be like so badly he wore collared shirts in the heat of a Central Valley summer, hoping the invisible things that made his grandfather who he was would rub off like a scent.

If Cluck could lose him, he needed to know.

Lace heard Cluck’s voice upstairs. She stood in the front of the wooden staircase and looked up at the second floor. She could’ve called his name, but then Cluck’s grandfather would hear her. He could tell her secret in a few words. The Corbeaus would trap her in this house, and she’d never have the chance to tell Cluck that his grandfather had a secret of his own.

She took a breath in and ran up the stairs, quick as las sirenas slid into a cold river.

The second floor barely looked different from the first. A few closed doors. A few open. An unscreened window at the end of the hall. But even with the hardwood under her feet, she felt the distance to the ground. The third and fourth floors of motels had never bothered her, but here, she was sure a coin tossed out a window would fall forever. This house may not have belonged to the Corbeaus, but by renting and staying in it they’d filled it with their reckless love of heights. They made their living by not fearing falling.

Cluck stood at the end of the hall, talking to another Corbeau about lights and cables. She took a few steps down the hall as fast as she’d taken the stairs and put her palm to Cluck’s shoulder blade.

He turned around. “What’s wrong?” His eyes flashed over her face.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” she whispered.

Cluck said something in French, and the other man nodded and left.

“What happened?” Cluck asked.

She dragged the words off her tongue. The coughing. The blood. The handkerchief.

Cluck did not flinch. He got on the phone and didn’t put it down until he found a doctor three towns over who could take a last-minute appointment.

“How do you know he’ll go?” Lace asked.

“I’ll tell him the appointment’s for me,” Cluck said. “I’ll say I want the company.”

That bought Lace time. Cluck’s grandfather wouldn’t know she’d told, not for sure, until they got to the doctor’s office. That gave her a chance to run.

“What if he doesn’t believe you?” Lace asked.

“He will.” Cluck’s eyes ticked toward his hands, scarred from pulling at the cotton of her dress. “I can’t believe this. How many years working at the plant? And he acts like all those chemicals are just dye and water.”

The floor wavered under Lace. “Your grandfather worked at the plant?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Cluck said. “For most of his career.”

Lace didn’t know any of the Corbeaus had done anything outside of this show.

Cluck pulled on a blazer, soft with half a century of wear. “You know where the thread is. If someone tears a dress, you think you can handle it?”

“Yes,” she said. She’d do everything they expected tonight, painting all their faces. If she left them, took off without doing her job, it would be one more wrong against Cluck. One more stolen Camargue horse. She might wake up with a feather on her other arm, her back, her neck.

But once the show started, she’d run.

Cluck set a hand on her upper arm. “I’m glad you told me.”

She nodded, bit the inside of her cheek, kept her face from telling him that when he came back, she’d be gone.

Celui qui veut être jeune quand il est vieux, doit être vieux quand il est jeune.

He who wants to be young when he is old, must be old when he is young.

Pépère barely acknowledged the nurse who took his pulse and blood pressure. When she told him the doctor would be right in, he looked out the window like he was waiting for a bus.

The nurse flashed Cluck and his grandfather a smile, bright as the flowers on her scrubs, and shut the door behind her.

Pépère nodded at her, his mouth in the same pinched smile he gave children. Cluck knew that look. His grandfather gave it to Dax and to Cluck’s cousins when they were small. How Cluck escaped it, he didn’t know. Probably because his hand bothered the rest of them so much they didn’t want to be near him. Pépère took their disdain as a recommendation.

“I don’t like that gadji, ” Pépère said.

Cluck leaned against the sink and flipped through an old copy of Popular Mechanics . “The nurse?”

“Your new makeup girl.”

“You don’t like her for telling me about the blood on your mouchoir .”

“You let her follow you around like she is your little sister.”

Cluck cringed. Yes, that was exactly how he wanted to think of Lace.

“I understand,” his grandfather said. “You saved her life. She has nowhere to go. You want to care for her like she is some stray cat.”

Cluck turned the page. “So which is it, Pépère, is she my sister or my cat?”

The doctor came in, asked Pépère a few more questions, told him, “You should stop smoking.”

“I’ve told him that my whole life,” Cluck said. A waitress from Calais had gotten Pépère started on cigarettes before he left le Midi for the United States.

“Yes, it is the smoking.” Pépère stood and shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for your help, Doctor.” His way of ending an appointment he hadn’t wanted. Feign repentance of his half-century cigarette habit, and be on his way. This was why Cluck’s mother didn’t drag him to doctors anymore.

Cluck hadn’t even told his grandfather the appointment was for him until they’d parked and gone in. He’d said he was going in to see someone about his hands, still spotted the pinks and reds of worn brick. Only Pépère ’s pity had kept him from suspecting on the drive over.

Like Cluck cared what his hands looked like, as long as they worked enough to make the wings. His guilt felt like an elbow jabbing his ribs. But if he hadn’t lied, Pépère never would have come.

The doctor scrawled on a prescription pad. Wrinkles softened the skin around his mouth. His hair had more gray than Pépère ’s. Pépère must have been hoping for a resident. They were always pleased thinking they’d converted a smoker. Easier to con.