The Weight of Feathers (6 page)

Tía
Lora caught up, her eyes tight. Worry pulled at her mouth.

“After the show, you stay,”
Abuela
told Lace.

This was it. Tonight
Abuela
would tell Lace off for throwing ice on Justin. He and Matías,
los soldados
.
Abuela
blessed the work of their hands. It didn’t matter that Justin knew Lace was right. To
Abuela,
it would never be Lace’s business to correct him.

Lace nodded.

“After the show you make yourself pretty and show your tail,” her grandmother said. “Let them take pictures of you.”

“What?” Lace asked. Only
Abuela
’s favorite mermaids draped themselves on rocks after the show. “Why?”

Abuela
put her hands on Lace’s shoulders and pressed down, like she did to bless her when she was sick. “
Una oveja que arrea a los lobos vale más que la lana,
” she said.

The sound didn’t break the squish of fruit under the men’s hands.

A sheep that herds wolves is worth more than her wool
.

This was a reward. This was for Justin and the bucket of hotel ice, for telling him to keep Rey and Oscar out of fights.

Abuela
understood. She knew even better than Lace did that if Justin and Rey and Oscar hit whoever they wanted, soon the Palomas would get run out of town.
Abuela
treated as sacred the fights with the Corbeaus, all those bruises and the broken arms. But
Abuela
would not bless sending a local home with a black eye.

Lace would never have Martha’s shape, thin and jeweled as a violet eel, or Emilia’s wide, pageant-queen smile. But she had thick hair that fell to her waist, mermaid’s hair, and she was
una niña buena
. A good girl.

Her grandmother had decided this was enough.

“
Gracias, Abuela,
” Lace said, accepting the blessing.

Her grandmother crossed the afternoon shadows, the crepe myrtles and salt cedars casting the shapes of their leaves.

Lace’s great-aunt squeezed her shoulders, laughing like she’d remembered a joke. Each of her uncles picked her up and spun her once, for luck, “
Para que nada cambie tu rumbo
.”
So nothing will turn you around.
It was always their blessing to
las sirenas,
because the river’s depth was so dark a mermaid could forget which way to the surface.

An hour before the show, Lace layered on pink eye shadow, added a last coat of red lipstick, rubbed in more cream blush. At the sound of their uncles’
zampoñas
, the mermaids swam in from their different spots along the lake and river, like creatures called from faraway grottos.

They held their breath and took their places in the underwater forest, made of trees the Corbeaus had sunk twenty years ago. This was
Abuela
’s greatest triumph, that every time they came to Almendro they used the stage the Corbeaus had built them, the grove the Corbeaus once called their own. Now audiences who sat on the ridge just above the shore could see down to the lake shelf, where the trees locked together into tangles of branches.

The mermaids treated those branches like a coral reef, settling into the hollows, perching on the edges of submerged boughs. They swam in pairs, then clusters, then each out in a different direction. They circled, then broke away. Their bodies formed the shapes of hearts or stars. They lined up so their tails made a rainbow.

No canned music. Just the reed pipes and the soft rush of the river emptying into the one side of the lake and flowing out the other. The applause came in bursts, like the mermaids were fireworks blooming into sparks.

They draped their bodies to look as though they were sunning themselves, even though they were underwater and the light had fallen enough to turn the edges of the lake copper. A few of them dove in and out of the lake like flying fish.

It was being under that Lace loved most. The lightness of her own body, the water trying to lift her toward the surface. The silhouettes of the underwater trees, like a forest on a fall night. How everything looked blurred like she was seeing it through stained glass. How water that had felt cold when she slid into the river now felt as warm as her own body. Even the sharp sting in her lungs as she swam out of view to take a breath.

Just as the audience began to believe they were spying on unknowing mermaids,
las sirenas
looked at them. They swam up to the rocks, hiding and flirting like water nymphs. The tourists caught those flashes of color on camera.

At the end of
la danza de las sirenas,
Lace and Martha posed on the steep bank, fanning their tails out on a rock. The trees filtered the last sun, and the sequins lit up like raw quartz.
Los turistas
left the low cliffs where they’d been watching and took the path down the slope, to the narrow stretch of beach.

A girl in jelly sandals the color of hibiscus flowers took a few steps toward Lace. Her eyes wavered between the shimmer of Lace’s fin and her painted face.

“Do you want to touch my tail?” Lace asked, like she was told to, in the voice she’d heard her older cousins use, soft as the whispers of river sprites.

The girl opened her small hand and stroked the fin, first hesitant as touching a snake, then surer, like petting a cat. To her, the soaked elastane and sequins might feel a little like a mermaid’s scales.

Their season’s receipts were at the mercy of children and their favorite
cuentos de hadas
. The Corbeaus called her family’s show kitschy, as artless and plastic as souvenir snow globes. Matías and his brothers had thrown punches when Corbeau men made fun of the bright colors, the glitter, the wide-eyed looks
Abuela
made the
sirenas
wear, as though dry land was magic they’d never imagined. But Lace’s mother told her that tourists probably couldn’t even take their children to the Corbeaus’ show. “They’re French,” she said. “I bet they take their clothes off halfway through.”

When the crowd thinned, and the families left, the mermaids watched
Abuela
. At her nod, they slid back into the water, smooth as knives. Martha swam toward her far corner of the lake, Lace back to her spot up the river. She kicked down to where the river’s current didn’t pull.

A shriek like a car alarm echoed through the water.

Lace startled, losing her rhythm, and the current swept her.

She spread her arms to swim, but her tail jerked her back.

Her fin fabric was caught. A colander had gotten the end of her tail.

Lace doubled her body over and felt at the fin. Her hands found not just river roots, but tangles of slick threads.

The nylon of a fishing net.

The Corbeaus. They hadn’t put a net in the water since what happened to Magdalena. But tonight they’d left one in the river for Lace and her cousins.

She pulled at her tail. The fin stayed. The net had balled and wrapped around her, holding her to the colander. She twisted and swam, but the roots and the net only gave enough to let her fight.

A string of bubbles slipped from Lace’s lips, the last air she had left. The dark water turned to stripes of light. Red like the Cheerwine in the liquor store refrigerator case. Green as lime soda. Electric blue like the Frostie bottles.

She’d been taught to protect her tail like it was as much part of her body as those little girls thought. But now its weight and its trailing fabric were killing her.

She braced for ripping the fabric to hurt, and tore the fin in half. The tail split up the side. She kicked out of the river roots. The empty tail dangled from the colander, leaving her naked except for the fake pearls of her costume top. She floated toward the surface like a bubble.

Her grandmother would wring her neck for leaving her tail, but not as hard as she would if Lace washed up dead. A mermaid drowned in the North Fork. What would that do to their ticket sales?
Abuela
would use every
yerba buena
in her suitcase to bring Lace back to life just so she could kill her again.

The net came with her, caught on her fingers. The threads, aqua as a swimming pool, almost glowed in the dark water, this awful thing like the one that nearly killed Lace’s cousin.

She shook the nylon threads off, and they sank back toward the river roots.

Lace surfaced to the noise of far-off screaming, and a long call like a tornado siren. Louder than her gasping. Louder than her coughing. Louder than her sucking the air from the dark.

Her half-drowned brain fizzed at the edges, making her hear things. She got her breath back and shook her head to clear it all.

But the screaming stayed. So did the siren’s yell. She rubbed her eyes and temples, circling her bare legs to tread. She pressed behind her ears to clear the water. But the noises kept on, joined by a thrumming through the ground. A whole town running at once.

She lifted her head to the sky, a shade of blue from dark.

A cloud swirled over Almendro, so thick it seemed made of liquid. It looked deeper as it moved, solid as water. Tilting her head up made her dizzy with wondering if it too held a current and tangles of roots, a mirrored river banding the sky.

Qui vivra verra.

He who lives will see.

It took Cluck ten seconds to get up the cottonwood. He didn’t even have to paint iodine solution on the soles of his feet the way his cousins did. Climbing had turned his rough as bark.

The moon looked wedged between the hills, yellow as tansy buttons. It got free and rose, paling. He could almost make out the ringing of distant glass chimes, the show’s only music.

Then sound broke the sky open. The moon shuddered. The siren’s first scream filled the dark, turning the stars to needles. It grew, spreading out from the plant like air thinning a balloon’s skin.

Cluck put his hand to the tree’s trunk and steadied himself. His heartbeat clicked in his ears. Another drill. By now, Almendro had gotten used to them. When Cluck’s grandfather worked as a safety engineer, the plant ran drills more than regulations mandated. Now they just blared the sirens to make the plant sound compliant, while telling employees to ignore the noise and keep working.

The ground wavered like a pond’s surface. The porcelain vines flickered with life, lit up with the chatter of small creatures. Sparrows flitted to their nests. He made out the dark shapes of wild rabbits and prairie voles darting into burrows. Squirrels scratched up trees. Two stray cats slipped into a hollow trunk, a gray fox into its den. They scrambled like wasps into a nest, sensing rain coming.

Cluck lifted his eyes to the moon. Wisps of white-gray cut across its gold, like curls of smoke off his grandfather’s cigarettes.

He looked over his shoulder. A ball of cirrus clouds rose from the chemical plant, a nest of white thread. He swore he felt the cloud reach out through the night, the threads tangling in his hair, cutting through his throat toward his lungs. The closest he’d ever come to
le vertige
. Not from height, but from the distance across Almendro’s sky.

The moon pulled back. The cloud spread out from the plant, a blanket unfurling. The siren throbbed between his temples.

Cluck half-climbed, half-jumped down.

He ran through the woods, calling his grandfather. “
Pépère
,” then “Alain,” then “
Pépère”
again.

Cluck ran down the hill. He found his mother sitting on a costume trunk, counting ticket receipts.

He caught his breath. “We have to stop the show.”

She looked up from her ledger, pencil paused.

“We have to stop the show now,” he said.

She shook her head and went back to her numbers.

He slammed the book.

She backhanded him. He knew that kind of slap, meant to knock sense into him as much as to reprimand. Suggesting they stop a show was little distance from cursing the family name. They’d gone on through sprained wrists, jammed shoulders, nosebleeds. If one fairy twisted her ankle, the rest kept on. The first night Margaux took off with a local, they put Violette in her place, like changing out a lightbulb.

Cluck turned his face to his mother again, his cheek hot.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

He lifted his hand, toward the siren’s swell. The glass chime sounds died under its rise. But even the audience ignored it. The sirens annoyed the residents of Almendro, but they were used to them. The tourists took their cues from the locals and figured no tornado or air raid was coming.

“It’s not a drill,” Cluck said. He pointed to the sky. The ball had thinned to a veil. It spread out over the town, opening like a trumpet flower.

To his mother it must have looked like cloud cover. Nothing more. She had begun to tip her chin back down to her work when Cluck heard his grandfather’s voice.

“He’s right,”
Pépère
said. Cluck could see the readiness in those hands, his fingers half-bent. But what would he do with those hands? The plant had locked him out years ago, so he wasn’t there to check gauges or turn off valves.

Cluck’s mother watched the sky. The veil thickened and grew uneven, like
la religieuse,
the hard layer coating the bottom of a fondue
caquelon
.

The pen fell from her hands. “
Et maintenant que faisons-nous?
” she asked Cluck’s grandfather.
What do we do now?

It was the first time Cluck had heard her sound like
Pépère
’s daughter, her voice open and fearful, instead of annoyed, put-upon, as though the old man were an aging dog. Her words so often brimmed with “
Et alors?
”
What now?
Now they were full of “
Papa
, take this, fix it.”

The three of them didn’t whisper. The audience couldn’t hear them. A hundred yards, the trees, and that siren took the sound.

But the audience saw the cloud. Children watching for fairies spotted it first, thinking it was the magic of winged beings. They squealed and waved at the fairy cloud.