Boyce said he didn’t believe me, but I said it was true, and after Keller Bigsby I would find Darlene Boyle, who was #9 on the list of my beatings. Darlene was the star center on the girl's basketball team her junior year, but she must have had a breakdown during the summer. At the start of her senior year she wore a beret and a trench coat and sat at a table where people listened to the Cure while scribbling in their diaries. I once found one of her diaries on the cafeteria floor and naturally began reading it. I still remember some of the lines in a poem that Darlene wrote:
My mother is a sinkholeA friend of Darlene's saw me with it and said I better give it to him right then--then he held out his hand like I was going to slap him some skin. I gave it to him immediately and told him he could have it. But then I said, “It sucks.” He said I didn’t know what real beauty was and Darlene was like a dove. I said, “Put a piece of paper in front of both of them and they’ll eventually crap on it.” Unfortunately, my response was said in front of a lot of people and it got a lot of laughs. (Sidebar: I have never said something that received such an immediately positive response from people who would otherwise trade my existence for a warm diet soda injected with tuberculosis.) Darlene’s friend stormed off. Later, when I walked out of seventh period social studies I watched a purple-haired giant charge at me from down the hall and pin me to the ground. All I could do was scream, “Not a dove! Not a dove!” After Darlene was pried off me, Boyce and Sammy wanted to know if I had been admitting I was wrong or pointing out she was in no way peaceful. I said I didn’t remember, mainly because it still hurt from where she buried her fingernails into the base of my skull.
Is the bitch in me, too?
Do you want me to be me,
Or must I be another you?
After I hung up with Boyce I couldn’t get back to sleep so I went through some of the last stuff still unboxed in the house. And I finally found it. The thing that maybe I was looking for all along. It was an old strongbox.
When my mother went blind she really started becoming an angry woman. Before you always got the sense that she made fun of everyone because she had a secret piece of knowledge that she had sworn to wizards never to reveal to another mortal. And the only way she could deal with that loneliness was to hurt people's feelings. At least that’s how I envisioned it.
Not long after she went blind my uncle took me on a long car ride to talk about how we were going to adjust to her being that way. We were driving down a country road up north and I suddenly screamed for my uncle to stop the car. I jumped out of the car and ran over into the weeds. Then I held up what I found. I held it by the wings and its head kind of slumped in the center. “It’s a dead cormorant,” I shouted, and then asked my uncle to pop the trunk.
I took the bird home and really had a long look at it. It wasn’t rotted yet and looked in perfect shape. My uncle made fun of me for staring at that dead bird, but eventually he strated to be fascinated, too. He asked me how it died and I said I didn’t know, that there was no visible injury. “So it’s some kind of weird virus, then,” he said. “Thanks, Cyrus.” I told him it’s possible some contagious virus killed it, but it’s also possible it just died, up in the air, and after it came back down to earth we took it to give it a good home. Taped to the underside of the lid of the strongbox was a picture of my uncle with his arm around the cormorant, holding up a wine bottle as though they were trading swigs. He really started to love that bird.
My uncle wanted to stuff the bird, but I said no. My plan was to bury the cormorant, but my uncle said we should bury it so we could dig it back later. Then we could bleach the bones. I asked him what we’d do with them, and he said, “What won’t we do with those bones?”
We wrapped the cormorant around an old towel and then buried it deep in the backyard. My father and I used to bury dead birds we found, and occasionally we dug them up to reassemble the bones to see how they looked. In fact, we had done it so many times that I actually forgot about the cormorant. And then one day I came back home from spending some time with Sammy and Boyce. I guess I walked in really quietly, because neither my uncle or mother noticed that I was standing there, watching my blind mother feeling the bones of that cormorant with a big smile on her face. I thought maybe she was smiling because she thought, “Ha, ha, bird! You’re dead!” But my uncle was telling her all these facts about the cormorant that I had taught him, like how they spread their wings to dry in the sun, how they sometimes use dead birds to build nests for their young, and how they deliver water to their babies in their large beaks.
When my mother died my uncle put the cormorant bones into the strongbox and kept it with him. When he died though I had no idea where it went. But last night I found it, and spent some time assembling the bones. My uncle wasn’t there to tell me anything about it (I would have had to tell him “I know that—I’m the one who told you”). My mother wasn’t there to get oddly emotional about it for a few moments, before she put it down in order to announce that the best part of being blind was not seeing her ugly neighbors anymore. And my father wasn’t there, and he hadn’t been there for a long time.
So this afternoon I took the cormorant bones to work even though I wasn’t scheduled and showed them to Marcel. Rex wanted to see but I told him to go find his own dead waterfowl. I took it to Arby’s and even though I’m pretty sure it’s against code to lie the bones of a dead bird on the counter—and certainly the woman in the line next to me believed it to be—Sammy still let me assemble them next to the register and tell him the bird’s story. Sammy said the same thing as Boyce when I showed it to him and his family: “Wow— a bird story I haven’t heard before.”
I wasn’t sure what to do with it after that. Bury it at my uncle’s grave? At Hank’s grave at the Roger Malvin Country Club? Instead I took it to Applebee’s this evening, and right after the place closed I buried it by the flagpole out front. I just kept digging until I hit the box we buried my mother’s ashes in. I put the cormorant box on top of hers and then filled the hole. I had a moment of silence for my mother and the cormorant, then poured out some salt on Applebee's flowers.
I got home just a little bit ago and sat down to write this. I’ve packed up so much of this house that you'd think it had already felt empty. And it did, but it really does now because I know there are no more birds hidden anywhere.
So now I’m pretty sure I’m ready. I'm leaving to see Rachel.
