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Her souped up words were whizzing around the Web by then, charging minds, the phrases spinning like DNA with life of their own: Rhythms not Schisms..We eat you, Death! Sing what your cells know! Maybe you've heard these, whether you knew what they meant or not — or cared. Maybe you're young enough to have sung them, but can her zippy maxims make a bit of difference now? I don't see how. They've got her doing kick-boxing in some new playstation action game — have you seen it? Their Woman of the Green Masque growls like Barbie gone feral, making little pink grunts with sounds of oof and eef. She ought to sue them, but she won't. "They can't use your words like they're flapping plastic flags," I said to her last week. "To close some sale, any sale, they don't care! Words ought to mean something!" Sometimes she'll look at me like I'm a speckled egg that has fallen from its nest and needs tucking in. It isn't pity; she did this long before I got cancer. "People need juice in their words," she reassured me. "Suck out their meaning with a soda straw and they'll just dry out and blow away." She happened to be busy at the moment, turning over horseshoe crabs stranded on the beach in her front yard, making sure not to harm any cruel-looking tails. I'm sure she's right. People know the difference, but they might get worn out by an avalanche of dry paper. How many meaningless words can you sort through before exhaustion sets in? She wouldn't like my drawing the curtain back further, but I've got to explain what I know before it vanishes, and me with it. Listen, what that nastiest reporter revealed last week — despite her earnest wish to remain anonymous, I might add — happens to be true, only not the whole truth. The Woman of the Green Masque is none other than Ann Winslow Woolf, come naked into the world and richer than Croesus, born of rare privelege on both sides of her diverse genetic line — but I say, let's not hold that against her. Rich, Annie's family may have been, but they weren't all that different from your family or mine, just as vapid and cruel, as boring and surprising, only more so — money being a thick kind of lens, I've learned, either enlarging or shrinking a person, depending on what it's aimed at and how it's looked through. Annie's larger than life to you now, but in her case it wasn't only the money that did that. She was always weird, though not in a celebrity kind of way. They want to kill me, she smiled just yesterday with a shrug, and it's crazy and not such an exaggeration. You'd have a clearer idea of what I mean if you'd been following the stories like I have from the earliest times, back when Annie was still a secret — meaning before she became "dangerous." Only a small circle of us knew her back then, and we thought her half-mad but harmless. She was never a chess-player, no Machievellian strategist. She hadn't a mean bone in her body, her whole trouble right there. You or I, running into her at Crispin's CornerMart in Wellstone, where she and I both still live, wouldn't have guessed she was anyone. I probably saw Annie a good dozen times before I spoke to her, tempted to take her home that day as I remember. I wanted to give her hot cocoa. She looked cold in only a sweater coat and rubber boots. Her hair needed combing. "Rough breeze blowing up?" I commented on it at the register. She stood near some tinsel, Christmas lights blinking behind her, red and green winking through long wisps of hair that stood upended from where she'd pulled off her wool cap. She didn't get my joke. Ten years ago; she must have been close to thirty but looked much younger. Rose Crispin gave me a look intended to warn, watch out, that one's a little kooky, which is Rose's word for a cronk. Mind you, here on the outer Cape it takes a bit to gain that reputation, and Rosie didn't know the half of it in those days. We both watched Annie squirm, looking back over her shoulder seemingly in hopes I was speaking to someone behind her. She didn't exactly grin, only half her mouth rising to the occasion. It was more a shuddering with shyness, her body rearranging itself in an effort to become invisible, pale hazel eyes meeting mine only when it was the last place left in the room to look. Nodding then, the lifted corner of her mouth collapsed, and sober, she leaned closer to confide, "It's not so bad now, but yesterday? It blew in another Snowy near my place." "Get out," Rose and I both said in unison. Rose wrote the local birding column in those days, in The Wellstone Record where I still publish my poetry. About a month before, they had reported a rare Snowy Owl, sighted out near the elbow on the Cape, close to Chatham. Now a second sighting, even closer? I wondered if it would still be there for the Christmas bird count coming up soon. "Where did you see it?" I demanded, wondering about her tone, as if she imagined a conspiracy, and I felt pixilated, watching her withstand our attention. Her eyes sought escape and then doubled back, wanting us to follow her. Her breath panted from the top of her chest, excited, and about damned little, it seemed. She answered, "Down past the sandy hook out Pilgrim Road. Do you want to go see?" With that last bit, her face grew open as a child's, eager to please. "You go," said Rose, as she pushed her polaroid camera toward me, the one kept behind the counter for all such birding emergencies. She knew I wasn't due at the Kettle Pond Nature Center until two o'clock, and Pilgrim Road was practically on my way. I shrugged a maybe, not agreeing out loud, looking to Rose for reassurance that my well-being, meaning my wallet with its six bucks, wouldn't be at risk in such a venture. How kooky a cronk was this girl? Had she ever bonked a person over the head? Did she do drugs? She looked to me like she might have smoked a few brain cells. My own past carried whiffs of green cigarette, so I had reason not to compound matters for myself. I'd moved from Boston to this oceanside village to outrun my inclinations. "Bring us back a picture," Rose gestured with a smile that read my mind, nodding in a heartening way toward the bulletin board where all the accidentals get posted Now if Rose had really believed in a second Great White, as I liked to call the birds myself, she wouldn't have volunteered me for the job. She'd go herself. No one here had spotted more than a single Snowy Owl in a winter since 1983, and those two had been out on the Vineyard on the tail of a nor'easter. I was cornered. "Annie Woolf," said Rose, "meet Jean McKenna. Jean, this here is Annie." "I'll follow you out," I said. "Okay," Annie shrugged, "but wouldn't it be faster if I rode along with you?" I remembered then that my truck had been the only vehicle out in the lot. "You didn't walk here from all that way?" I protested, having determined her walk must have been a good four miles one way. It was my first insight into the habits of Annie, and a hint of what was to come, if I'd had the good sense to avoid it. But at least I had an explanation for why the young woman looked thin as a yogi, and now I was curious. Annie pointed out her house on our way, a narrow two-storied cape, tall and faded turquoise, about as close to the ocean as you can get without being swept out with the tide. The back of the house fronted a weedy, sandy drive, and metal garbage cans sat next to a tacked-on green fiberglass entry, ugly as they come. Around this structure, someone had once painted a giant funhouse mouth, red lips with teeth, its corners pulled up and laughing, with two second- story windows topped with eyebrows. Sun and sand had weathered this so that you had to really look to see it and then couldn't quite believe that you had. I'd heard people talk of this in town but never knew where it was, or if it were true. "Home sweet hovel," Annie smiled as we drove past, and it was then I noticed that her teeth were white and even as that clown's. I had no idea of either set of teeth's enormous expense at the time, nothing of the famous artist, Pablo Pablooma, or the years of orthodontics and cosmetic capping that her mother, the Winslow, hoping for an ally in me, once insisted on confiding over a cocktail at her mansion, the place Annie liked to call "The Lair." Its real moniker gets intoned by tour guides on the ocean road, who take gawkers past "The Ship," or as Annie called it on bad days, "The Horse-Ship." Oh, but don't let me get ahead of myself here. Rich bitches are a crucial ingredient of Annie's story, though not yet. First must come this birding adventure with the young woman that Rose and I had imagined in need of help. We reached the end of Pilgrim Road, which peters out into a beach and the shore, marked by a barrel. "Up this way a little," Annie said, hopping down from the Kettle Pond Ford Ranger, the truck I liked to consider my own, though it wasn't. A little way for Annie was apparently another four miles or so. Walking four miles in sand along the ocean in winter feels like eight. We were lucky the morning wind had fallen calm by then, low pressure huddling down, warming a bit. Earlier, when leaving my house, I'd noticed a last and tragic rosebud on my trellis, its swollen pink hopeful in a morning shot of sun, but by now seared rust, I knew, the sand around us not its usual warm gold, but taking on the silver cast of ice. A busy world and some traffic moved above the dunes, out of sight, but it seemed a private world here, no winter clammers in sight, no shore birds, save an occasional gull. We found a big snarl of green fish line filament that Annie put away in her pocket, to spare the seals that sometimes gathered here and got ensnared, like the birds. Further down and out aways, a long-beaked fellow, alone, bounced on the waves just offshore. Annie called it a loon, though it lacked the famous checkered plumage I was used to, and she told me that, like the harbor seals, loons wintered over here. Come spring and breeding season, the plumage would color up and he and his mate would fly north to sing summer lake songs. The sky over water that day was bleached a dingy white, backlit by sun that never showed its face, only glowering its luster, and the water, though grayer, was thickening with white chunks, warning of worse winter to come. "Probably it's already gone," I said several times about the doubted owl, hoping to turn back, but Annie shook her head and kept on walking. "I'm getting a little worried," she said. "I first saw it yesterday, twice, but I thought he looked a bit off this morning." Her eyes searched the sky, then swept the beach, and she never slowed down. Feeling desperate, I wanted to gain her attention somehow. "Are you sure it wasn't a Greater Black-Backed Gull?" I asked, and this birders' insult earned me a look and her speeded up pace. I could barely keep up. My calves tightened into painful balls, my toes were cramping. "Off? You said it looked a little off. What does that mean? Off its feed? Off its rocker?" She stopped to meet my eyes, judging my intent. I could see I wasn't the first to have thought her odd. She gazed out to the right, as if searching. "Something .troubling," she answered. "It let me come close, down low on some driftwood, nearly eye level. I watched it a very long time. I think it was trying to, I don't know, speak to me." She stopped, having heard what she'd just said. She looked alarmed. "I mean in here," she tapped her head to assure me. "Understand?" She must have seen from my expression that I didn't. I tried to fool her, but she saw through me, eyes running away from my facial accusations, doubling back to double-check. Okay, I was thinking her a cronk, already telling Rose about it in my mind: Annie thinks she can talk to the birds, Rose, and I'm pretty sure she has a joker painted on her house. Write that up in your column, why don't you? That sounds mean, I know, but what Annie had said brought up a memory of iris blossoms I once swore had mustachioed lips that sang to me, while under the influence of a substance some boyfriend had given me. I hated remembering that. We started to walk again, side by side, unable to look at each other, back to scanning the horizon. After several minutes, Annie stopped again. "Look," she said. Over a creek mouth ahead of us that chopped with the movement of some homecoming school of fish, a white wingspan floated, a good six-feet wide, barely visible. Pale, the bird was, head round and large for its body, a wide, arched outline over washed-out water, dissappearing into milky sky, reappearing, lower. Its earless and wide-eyed expression bore solemn threats to my mind, though why I thought so when I didn't want to, I couldn't say. It seemed ominous it was earless and more so that I had noticed, because all birds are earless, but this seemed other than bird and more than meat and intent as its great eyes stared forward, face disc-like, ghostly, hovering. I knew from Rose's birding column that Snowys are normally found over colder lands in the treeless arctic. Occasionally the lemming population around Baffin Bay crashes, and the birds will follow rodent prey south, where they aren't at home. They never stayed for long. An irruptive species, Rose had called it, one that occurs only rarely. I must have wintered on the Cape for years by then, and had never heard anyone speak of seeing a Snowy until the paper had come out with the news that month. Then the old fishermen and clammers at Larry's PX on Route 28 told stories over their coffee. The sight will stop you cold, they said, the size of the thing, its face. "Like Grace isself," said one, bowing his head to convey his want of prayer, and the others nodded, agreeing words couldn't convey it. They'd meant a ghoulish dignity, some haunting royalty carried in silence so awful that in the moment my eyes followed the bird's coursing, I was sorry for having doubted they'd seen it at all except in their dreams. I remembered their struggle for words and saw how much would have to remain unspoken. Hardly prepared for it to fall to earth — impossible it could ever stop soaring — I watched it tilt and plummet, stopped cold myself. Its talons outstreched, the beast rose again. I expected a fish from that water, but it came up with a bird in its claws, one the size of a football, caught in mid-pass and with a fish of its own in its mouth. "A razorbill," Annie said outloud, excited, and then I remembered hearing of these birds that swum underwater to hunt fish, a relative of the penguin though not so large and still able to fly. Smaller than a penguin, bigger than a lemming — that vested bird had come zooming up out of the water with its catch, straight into the gullet of a wintry beast it could not have imagined any more than I had. The owl flew away with its double catch over our heads to a utility pole above the dune line and, perched there, swallowed the fish, tearing out the guts of the smaller bird. We stood and we stood and we watched this. In between our watching, we eased closer, while the owl studied us with oval, intelligent eyes. I waited for it to turn its head round in the smooth quick way I knew owls could, wanting to be certain this was only a bird, and that it didn't recognize me and know me by name, which began to seem possible, though I didn't tell Annie this. Intent on our drawing nearer, the bird appeared to decide that the rest of its razorbill meal could wait. Belatedly I got out Rose's camera, remembering my assignment. I was busy fooling with the camera's settings, when I heard Annie make a small sound. I followed her gaze back to the owl, which apparently had dropped to the ground when I wasn't looking, only not as death-wielder this time, as death-greeter. Its wings spread out on the sand near the creek mouth and flopped helplessly, razorbill fallen nearby too. The owl couldn't seem to move closer to its prey, though he tried. When we reached him, we discovered his lack of resignation to being dead. Annie touched the feathers on the nearest wingtip, and the owl struck at her with speed, with dark beak. It did no real damage. Annie stepped back quickly enough from the jab that she stumbled into the creek's shallow water, scrambling out again on her hands and knees. The bird stared her down in a golden, unblinking stand-off. Whatever he was saying to Annie now seemed better left unsaid, the effort ending him. Seeing this, Annie crouched closer. She dropped down on her elbows in the sand and put her nose to the bird's feathers. Her jacket pulled up from the motion, and I noticed then a leather scabbard on her belt, the gleam of a knifeblade buried in it. "What are you doing?" I demanded, shocked when she pulled the knife out, her weird ceremony like some occult offering, I thought, watching her hair come loose as her knit cap fell off, wavy strands of it streaming out, pale over paler fallen wings, as if she'd been empowered to fly herself by the great bird's loss. Where had that breeze come from, as if summoned? Why would she carry a blade that wide? I noticed her hand then, coloring the pale sand a pink from the blood of a small puncture wound. Annie seemed indifferent, busy pulling out a piece of blue braided yarn from her pocket. It tangled with the green wad of fishline we'd found, and she had to finally cut it with the silver blade. "Smell it," she said, straightening up to sit on her haunches, gesturing toward the yard-long wing. What on earth — smell what? That yarn? Her wound? The steel? She meant the owl, gesturing again, ignoring that her pants were wet up to her knees and her hand was bleeding. A good thing the air was only moving in a sigh. I knew she must be freezing.
"I want Dr. Ahmapour to see this," Annie said, and this was my first experience with Annie's copious pockets, which often came to our rescue over the years. How did she know what to put in there ahead of time? She pulled out a zippered pouch, and stuffing in the fishline, separated the unused length of cord colored bright blue, using the shorter cut piece to tie around the bird's legs. "This bird isn't old. It's well muscled, not hungry. It flew a minute ago like it came out of some myth," she said. "And then it does this last dive?" she added, breath coming up short. "And croaks in about a minute and a half? Something's wrong." I nodded, agreeing, as I watched her knot the cord around the bird's feet. It seemed that I nodded a long time, because Annie seemed "off" to me by then, too intense. I noticed the swelling of her hand, badly bruised around the small stab, and her eyes flew wilder, searching. I wondered, Did birds carry rabies? It occurred to me how little I really knew about birds and their diseases. What did I really know about Annie, or about anything really? Only that death comes easily and knife blades sharpen keen--and how things can go wrong sometimes without anyone meaning them to, which I worried they were about to when she asked me out of the blue, "Did you know Maria Almeda?" She jerked the knot to test its hold. I mouthed the name that I recognized, feeling my heart hold its bloody breath. "You mean that young woman who killed herself?" I watched Annie's response, thinking of Maria Almeda's photogenic portrait, which, along with the first Snowy Owl reported, had been on all the front pages of all the Cape's papers that past month. Her parents were well known for their little restaurant in P-town. Old-time Portuguese natives from way back and good folks, people kept saying about this second child they'd lost in just a few years, a heartbreak that made everyone on the Cape wonder why awful things had to happen to nice people. "You read the newspapers," Annie commented. "But I mean did you know her?" Her tone sounded scornful, and she wound the cord an extra time, knotting it again. She looked up, and I shook my head, not bothering to explain that, like everyone on the Cape, I knew someone who knew someone who knew her. It's that way with everything that happens here, one of the reasons I like it. If something happens to you, somebody notices. "She told me about a weird smell on an American bittern she found on the beach here last time at my place. About four months ago. I mean she mentioned it, no big deal, just something she was curious about." I imagined a scene with this other woman, beautiful and dark in the papers, kneeling on the beach and sniffing feathers with Annie and me, all three of us bobbing up and down like drinking bird-toys. I wanted badly to get home. "The papers said Ms. Almeda worked for the government in Boston," I volunteered, wanting to make things normal again. "Maria was going to quit that and go into business with me here on the Cape. She's the one who got me interested in birds years ago, she and her brother, Salvadore." The other dead Almeda, Sal. I recognized the name. Annie had known them both then. What else had she been keeping from me? By then Annie looked fierce. Her motions jabbed and jerked. She stood up, stomped her feet into her boots. That change in her surprised me as much as the Snowy's stab had when we'd neared it. I must have thought the word "stab" with some conviction, because she read worry in my face and, pooching her mouth, she looked out at the horizon, then back at me, heaving a sigh to say she was human, she had a heart. "Come on, let's get going." I cleared my throat as I grabbed the bird's cord from her hand. Annie had stopped bleeding, but that swelling had to hurt. "We'd better hurry and get us both out of these wet clothes, and get you some first-aid cream," I said. At some point on the walk home Annie dug deeper into her pockets and pulled out a high-tech silver poncho, and next a fistful of home-made gorp. We took turns wearing one and eating the other, while carrying the great bird, swinging it by its feet as long as we could to keep it unmussed, and then dragging it on the wadded matt of fishline finally. Its weight was teaching us what Coleridge's Old Mariner had meant about the horror of a dead albatross round your neck. It was bad enough hauling this smaller great bird, huffing and puffing, worn out by the wind's growing bluster, with the threat of the sun getting low, and yet another four mile hike that felt like sixteen by the time we got back. At the truck, we loaded the thing in, not easily, its stiffened pale wings nearly spanning the entire bed. It looked impossible against extruded metal painted red, its death too alive. All the way back, heater on full-blast, I obsessed about its golden-eyed vision, white against red, and about Maria, whose beauty, in the same way, seemed at odds with flat gray newsprint, her death implausibly crimson as the bird's. |