Someplace to Be Flying (25 page)

She started to pull away, but Lily kept her hold on Margaret’s arm.

“What’s going on?” she said.

Margaret loosened the grip of Lily’s fingers, not roughly, but with an economy of effort that told Lily she was far stronger than she looked.

“Nobody knows,” Margaret told her. “But anyone who’s earned the enmity of the cuckoos is automatically our friend.”

“But—”

“Since they seem to be so interested in you, we thought it’d be better if I came down here to look out for you in case one of them followed you.”

Lily felt as though she’d stepped through Alice’s looking glass, from the world that made sense into one where nothing did.

“So you do know those girls who—”

Margaret gave her a push toward her gate. “It’s too late to talk now. He’s coming back.”

“But—”

“I’ll be in Newford soon. If I see you there, I’ll try to explain more.”

“But—”

“Go.”

Lily let herself get caught up in the flow of people hurrying through security. She found herself beside Sharon Clark, the makeup woman from the video shoot, who immediately started enthusing about this gallery she’d been in this morning where she’d gotten the sweetest earrings… .

Lily looked back to see Margaret confronting the tall and dangerous man she’d referred to as a cuckoo. She hadn’t meant he was a lunatic, Lily realized, because now the words of the raggedy girl who’d rescued her in that Newford alley returned to her.

The cuckoo is a pretty bird, he sings as he flies,

He sucks little bird’s eggs, and then he just dies.

She meant animal people. They were all animal people. When Margaret said “crows” and “magpies” and “cuckoos,” they weren’t tribes. It was who they were. Just like in Jack’s stories.

And then, as though to confirm that they had pulled her into some other world where all the rules were changed, she saw Margaret produce a switchblade, the knife dropping into her hand from her sleeve as smoothly as the raggedy girl’s had back in Newford, the blade jumping from its handle. The cuckoo moved to one side and disappeared. No. He didn’t quite disappear. It was as though he’d stepped around an invisible wall, out of sight. Margaret followed behind him. And they were gone. Just like that.

Gone, and no one had noticed. No one was paying any attention. . , .

Lily’s shortness of breath returned. Vertigo made her sway and she would have fallen except Sharon took her by the arm.

“Lily?” she was saying. “Lily, are you all right?”

“I … I …”

None of this could be real, Lily thought. And straight on the heels of that came, why was it happening to her? What did these horrible cuckoo men want from her?

“Lily?”

Finally she managed to focus on Sharon’s worried features. She swaHowed hard. Made herself breathe.

“I … I’m okay,” she said. “Thanks. I just had a little … dizzy spell, that’s all.”

“Does it happen a lot?” Sharon asked. She kept a hand on Lily’s arm as they continued toward security, steadying her.

“No. It must just have been … all this heat.”

It was the first thing that came to mind and seemed lame to her, but Sharon nodded with understanding.

“My mother-in-law’s like that,” she said. “She went to Las Vegas for Christmas one year, and of course she’s got to go see the countryside, like there’s any kind of countryside in Nevada. Anyway, the next thing we know we’re getting this call from the state police because …”

Lily kept smiling, but tuned her out. She stole a last glance at the hallway before it was her turn to go through the metal detector, but there were only other travelers going by, carry-ons slung over their shoulders, pulling suitcases with narrow straps. Margaret and the cuckoo were still gone. It was as though they’d never been.

Lily turned suddenly to Sharon, interrupting her story.

“There was a woman seeing me off,” she said. “Dark-haired, wearing a jean vest and a baseball cap, lots of jewelry. Looked sort of Native American. Did you see where she went?”

Sharon gave her a puzzled look. “I didn’t see anybody with you.”

Lily gave a slow nod. That explained why there hadn’t been a great outcry when two people simply vanished from the hall of the airport.

“I must have lost track of her in the crowd,” she said.

If you could call the dozen or so people who’d been waiting to go through security a crowd.

“Are you
sure
you’re all right?” Sharon asked.

Lily nodded and gave her a bright smile. “So you were telling me about your mother.”

“My mother-in-law,” Sharon said, happy to be derailed back into her story “Well, it turns out the rental had no spare tire, so …”

Not everybody can see diem, Lily thought. Was that why the cuckoo had attacked her in Newford, why the one here had followed her into the airport? That didn’t seem to make a great deal of sense—why should they care if she could see them or not? It wasn’t as though she’d seen them doing anything. But what else could it be?

And then she thought of? Margaret, gone to wherever on the heels of the cuckoo. She hoped the bird girl was able to hold her own as Lily had thought she was when she’d first seen her.

IN A FIELD OF GRACE

Tell me, babv, have you seen a crow girl like me

Now shifting, now lifting away on that breeze

Does it make your heart long for those black shiny wings

To rise up in the sky, to give life to your dreams

—M
ARY
A
NN
H
ARRIS
,

FROM
“C
ROW
G
IRLS
”

Hazard, Summer, 1940-

I followed the crow girls up north that summer, an old jackdaw winging in their giddy wake. They don’t slow down for much, but I kept pace. I only look like I’m too used up to be any good. And I can look better, need be. We tend to settle into a skin, get used to it, we’ve worn it so long. I could work up something as slick as Cody any clay of the week if you gave me a reason, but I had no need of handsomeness that trip. The crow girls were meeting some northern cousins for a hooley in the woods and I was only tagging along. I can fly strong, steady as the girls, but once they get to considering a party, just thinking about how they can carry on wears me right out.

My joining them was only an excuse to visit those piney wood hills.

Everybody’s got a true home—maybe not where they’re living, but where their heart lives. Mine’s in a meadow, deep in a hidden hollow of these old hills, hemlocks growing up one side of the hill, birch and cedar and pine walking up the other, creek easing its way down the middle, the water icy cold even at this time of year, like it’s still underground, like it never seeped up between the rocks and started on its way down to the river. The meadow’s yellowy-green with thick grass, starred with constellations of wildflowers, and smells like summer: heady and sleepy and unworried. Bees humming, june bugs whirring, the wind soughing through the trees and grass, a few clouds trailing through a sky so blue it’s like to swallow you whole. There’s an old rock, right up near the top of that hollow, smooth on the sun side, mossy on the shade. I find that rock and stretch out, sun pouring down on me like honey, and you know I’m home.

Why don’t I stay, I love it so much?

It’s complicated. Place like that makes you forget. You fill up on the beauty and you stop remembering yourself, who you are, what skin you’re supposed to be wearing, that you’ve even got a choice. You disappear into something bigger than yourself and that’s okay, but I’ve been there, done that. Lots of us take that route, but I worked so hard to get back to remembering, I’m not ready to lose myself again—not so soon. And if I lose myself, I lose the stories, and I’ve spent too long collecting them this time out.

But I’m eager to see the place all the same, just like anyone’s eager to get home. You know you’re going back out the door, the next day, the next week but that doesn’t keep you from settling in, recharging the soul, catching up on all the local gossip.

This time, everybody’s talking about the fox girl. Not full-blooded canid, but she’s got as much of Ray in her as she does from her mother’s side of the family. The human side. She’s a skinny, raw-boned girl, eleven, maybe, no older than twelve. Got a long, narrow, heart-shaped face and the red hair from her father’s side. Goes tumbling through these woods like a nettle, curious about everything, into everything, gets so close that all the bits and pieces she sticks her nose into cling to her when she goes. Twigs and burrs and seeds. A wild girl.

I’m not looking for her, though I’m curious. I circle above the meadow, drifting down from the blue in long lazy circles. The crow girls have already meet up with their cousins and you can hear their hooley from two hills away. Me, I get settled into my hollow, soaking up the sun and beauty, not scared of losing myself because the girls have promised to come by and pick me up on the way home.

So I’m lazing there, catching up on the gossip. Like I said, I’m not looking for her, and this wild fox girl, she’s not looking for me, but we meet up all the same. Me sitting up suddenly, sleepy from the sun. Her bursting out of the forest at a run, stopping dead in her tracks when she sees me there on that rock. I think maybe this is her place, too. Her rock. Her heart home. Maybe that’s why I don’t change my skin and fly away, why she doesn’t bolt back the way she came. We know each other and we’ve never met.

“Hey there,” she says, bold as brass, not scared, not even nervous.

“Hey, yourself.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jack.”

“Everybody calls me Nettie on account of that’s my name. Not the name I was born into, my mammy says, but the one I grew into.”

“Makes sense to me,” I tell her. “You live around here?”

She waves her hand vaguely off to the other side of the hemlocks. “Me and my mammy have a house back in yonder.”

“And your father?”

“I don’t have no pappy on account of he’s a no-good bum who run off on my mammy, ‘cept she don’t seem to mind much.”

I didn’t know then that Ray’s been through these hills, stopped and tarried a spell with a good-looking widow and nine months later she’s got herself a girl-child to raise by herself. Maybe I should have guessed, but fox blood all smells pretty much the same to me and it’s not like Ray’s got a monopoly on sowing wild oats. All those fox men have a taste for honey.

But I take a liking to this raw-boned child. Maybe it’s only a whim, or maybe even then I could see she was more like me than a fox, collecting stories like Margaret collects trinkets, keeping them not to have them, but to pass them on. And I’m thinking it’s a shame she’s got the blood and doesn’t know what to do with it except run wild through the woods. Leaving her on her own like this no better than a cuckoo, dropping its eggs in a corbæ‘s nest.

“Maybe I’ll be your pappy,” I tell her.

She gives this a moment’s consideration.

“You gonna run off on me like the last one did?” she asks.

“Probably,” I tell her. I’m not going to start off with lying to her. “But I’ll always come back.”

“I don’t need a pappy,” she says then. “But I do need a husband. I hear they’re useful.”

I have to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she wants to know.

“You’re just too young to be thinking about courting.”

“Jenny-May’s only a couple of years older’n me and she’s got two kids.”

It’s enough to make you weep. Too many of them get old fast and die young in these hills. If the mines don’t take them, the travails of their life do. You try farming these hills, or breathing when your lungs have an inch of coal dust coating them.

“That doesn’t make it right,” I tell her.

“Now you sound like my mammy. The way she sees it, everything’s got a wrong and a right.”

“And you don’t agree?”

She shrugs. “Things just is, is all.”

You could take that for cynicism, but I see it for the innocence it is.

“If you could have anything,” I say, “what would it be?”

She doesn’t even have to think about it. “Only one thing I’d want and that’d be to fly.”

“Fly?”

She grins. “Like the crow girls.”

“How do you know about them?”

“I’ve seen ‘em. They meet with the wild crow boys in our woods most every year. I’ve seen ‘em dancing and laughing up yonder, happy as can be. And I’ve seen ‘em flying.”

Foxes don’t fly, I think, but how do I tell her that?

“I could be a red crow,” she goes on, grubby fingers reaching up to touch her hair, red as Ray’s tail. “On account of my hair.”

“All the crows I know are black,” I tell her, “except for a white crow I saw once, and that’s no color at all.”

“What crow was that?” she wants to know.

“The white crow that showed the Kickaha how to grow corn,” I say, and then I tell her the story.

She lies on her back in the grass as I talk, wriggling like a worm on the end of a hook, but I know she’s listening because every time I stop for a moment, she goes still and cocks her head in my direction. I’m betting she could give it back to me, word for word, if I asked. When I’m done she lies there looking up into the blue. There’s someone circling high above. A hawk. No relation.