We Lay Flying

“You’re in college?”

“Yeah.” I’m ashamed.

“Why are you working on a farm?”

“I like it out here.”

“What are you studying?”

I don’t want to say. “French.”

He laughs. “Will translate for food?”


* * *

Every place I’ve lived has a cultural tattoo. In Western Kansas, the post rocks. In Watertown it was lake effect snow. Palmetto Bugs in South Carolina. Horny Toads in Texas. Each deserves a chapter of its own. But in Missouri, all I knew were scars. Milo and fescue, baled hay and oak cords. And small town youth desperate to kill themselves off.

* * *

We stop digging when we hear Bruce call. “C’mere, boys.” Bruce drags on a filterless Pall Mall. “Those NRA groups are at the lodge. Larry’s ready to go.”

We follow him to the barn. He pulls open the door and the air fills with feathers and panic. Twenty cages, stacked upon each other, line the near wall. The prettiest birds I have ever seen pace inside wire mesh.

“What are those?”

“Pheasants.”

“No, I know pheasants. The smaller birds.”

“Chukars.”

Bruce lays his cigarette on the ground, next to the nearest cage. It burns softer, but burns still, smoke diminishing as if trained, and only years later do I know this as truth. The very paper engineered to burn steady, near-invisible lines of self-pacing constructed along the length. Bruce, old Bruce, working like us, on a farm with no hope, but happy, nonetheless, takes the gray, striped bird from the cage, quickly, the way you cannot imagine an old man could, the speed and precision of a spider. He pulls the shaking bird from the cage and tucks it beneath his arm. He bends over to retrieve the Pall Mall and sets it in his mouth.

“Like this.”

He grabs the bird, which within a man’s grasp now looks like a pigeon, with both hands around the body, and starts to shake it, spin it, around and around until his arms and the bird look like a time-elapse photo of a merry-go-round. The neck, seemingly short, stretches out like a rope, like elastic, with each forceful revolution. He does this for an impossibly long time, but, really, only the amount of time it takes his cigarette to burn from one line to the next.

He stops. The bird has its mouth wide open; its tongue hangs limply from its mouth. He sets the bird on the ground at my feet, where it tamely and obediently remains in subservient confusion.

“Like that.”

* * *

“He’s sick.”

“With what?”

“Probably AIDS. Who knows.”

This boy that I loved. Who worked the farm with me. Who sincerely cared about me finishing school. Who lent me books to read, and begged me not to tell the others. That he could read. That he liked to. My foster child friend, my foster friend, who killed all those birds with me and became so depressed afterwards that we drove around town until we could find the harder drugs; Who had a chance.

“I’m leaving next week. Where is he?”

“No one knows. He’ll turn up.”

“I’m leaving. I won’t see him.”

“Where are you going?”

“Romania.”

“You’re crazy! Ha! Why the hell—“

“Give him this.”

I handed him a book. A book I always meant to read, but never did. I wanted him to.

* * *

The first bird I try to spin into vertigo simply flies away when I release. Bruce laughs. “You’re gonna have to spin it a lot longer than that.”

We learn. We become experts at bewildering, confounding and disconcerting caged birds. We set them in patches of milo and fescue. We drive away to the sounds of barking dogs and shotgun blasts. We watch the sky as red-tailed hawks make long, shallow dives to take the rest. Men and birds-of-prey taking their turns on the helpless. This land , alien to the chukars, smells like hopelessness. The chukars fly, in half-hearted escape, and each, returned to earth.