Nobody else remembers this, but when I was a kid in Sacramento there used to be a weekly Saturday street fair in back of the Alpha Beta on El Camino. We lived on Franco, so I could just walk back there through the backyard and over the fence, and my best friend Amy used to ride her bike over to my house and come with me. This thing was probably a figment of the early 70’s. If it happened now it would be a regular farmer’s market with none of the good stuff, but in 1975 there were a few people from the neighborhood with eggplant and persimmons, and a bunch of regulars who drove or rode in from Davis or Folsom, and who sold stuff you could never get away with today.
There was a skinny Chinese guy with a charcoal stove made from an oil drum and some rebar, who cooked up little pan-fried dumplings full of soup and a meatball, and when you ate them they exploded and got all over your shirt. He also sold skewers of candied crabapples off one of those lollipop trees you see in drugstores. Those were really weird-tasting. I ate them pretty often, but I think it was mostly because they made my head feel shrunken and not because they were actually good.
There was a creepy white guy in a leisure suit who sold homemade comics starring C. Auguste Dupin (the detective from Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”) run off on a mimeograph machine so all the lines smeared and bled purple in all directions, and sold out of a vinyl suitcase. I have to guess he had to spend half his time getting busted by the drug cops. He certainly looked like an unsuccessful coke dealer. He did a roaring business among us kids, but that just meant he left with a sock full of nickels. He must have been doing it basically for charity (or for art’s sake), which now strikes me as kind of sweet, but he would be run off as a probable child molester if he tried it now.
There was an Earth Mother-looking woman in her late twenties with ugly sandals and a bandanna on her head who brought a machine that was probably fourth-generation scavenged from a boardwalk someplace—Pismo Beach, maybe? It was an eye-doctor-looking piece of gear made of bakelite and hammertone steel. You put your eyes up to it and turned a crank, and it showed you 3D movies of blimp and rocket and submarine launches. Always launches, for some reason. That was always good for a quarter.
There was a semi-precious-stones guy who was probably being punked by some kind of pyramid scheme. We avoided that guy.
But the Go-Kart guy! That thing had to be illegal. It had one of those screamy model-airplane engines that run off methanol and castor oil. It had some kind of big flywheel and took forever to get up to speed. But when it did, you could go twenty, thirty miles an hour. And this is the thing: It’s not like there was a track. We drove that thing on the street! No harness, no helmets, no nothing. And nobody died! We had to save up for weeks for that one.
And there were games: The one where if you can get a ping-pong ball in the right fishbowl you win a fish, a weird Zen archery one where if you hit the bullseye you won a cricket in a wooden cage, and there was the Canary Man.
The Canary Man had a top hat sitting upside-down on a folding card table. It cost a buck to reach into the hat. Sometimes you’d come up with a canary, sometimes not. If you got one, you had to figure out how to get it home. He sold cages for five bucks, but we never had that much. My dad finally took pity on me and helped me bang a cage together out of lumber, dowels, window screens, hinges and eye-hooks, with a little handle off a kitchen drawer on the top. Amy and I would risk our necks getting that thing over the fence every week, then we’d waste our bucks, then we’d carry it back empty.
One week I stuck my hand into the hat and touched feathers. I made a gentle fist and lifted out a tiny alarmed creature. I could feel its heart beating (so fast it was more like purring) and its lungs sighing in and out. Amy yelped in surprised delight and opened our cage. All four of our hands helped the bird inside: my one to let go and the other three to form a screen pressing forward to prevent escape. Amy shut the door. The bird sat on its dowel and blinked at us. We stared back at it for a subjective hour and then rabbited over the fence and into my bedroom. We set the cage on my dresser and then thundered around collecting seeds (my dad had some for baking bread) and a little dish of water. Then we did the four-hands thing again getting the food and water into the cage, then we crouched there and watched for a real hour. The bird did nothing but fibrillate, of course. But that didn’t matter to us. It was great! Finally my dad called us for lunch, and we had some peanut-butter tofu, and millet, and kumquats, and honey-cakes, and all that stuff my dad was into then. It was actually pretty decent, but he doesn’t still cook that stuff and I don’t still eat it (except the kumquats and honey cakes.) When we got done drinking our tea (do kids still drink tea, or was that a California thing?) we ran back to the canary. Most of the seeds were still there, and most of the water, but there was a rip in the screen, and the latch was open, and the door, and they bird was gone. We ran all over the house looking for it, but it was really gone, so we lay down on my bedroom floor and stared at the ceiling and felt bad.
Next week we took the patched-up cage back to the fair. Did I mention the Canary Man didn’t speak English? He looked sort of North African? Drove an old Hudson. Anyway, I wasted my buck but Amy got lucky. We took the bird back to her mom’s apartment and ate regular stuff (white bread and baloney and mayo and grapes and Fritos and stuff) with the cage sitting right there so we could watch it. All day, so much fun watching the silent canary. But in the morning: Inside of the cage has scratches in the wood, some of the tacks are pulled out, screen is bent and: no canary.
Next week no canary.
Week after that no canary.
We took to bringing little offerings to the canary man: lemons from my backyard, warm cashews if my dad made some, Turkish smokes we scored off Amy’s uncle, stuff like that. The canary man accepted our little presents but we still kept wasting our bucks.
Towards the end of the summer: I get a canary. We take it back and stare at it. Looks just like the other ones.
“Looks just like the other ones,” I say.
“Yeah,” Amy says.
“I mean, exactly,” I say.
“Yeah,” Amy says.
We stare a while longer.
Amy takes off without saying anything. That’s one good thing about being best friends.
She comes back a while later with some nail polish she’s been wearing on her toes all summer. It’s clear but pearly.
We paint the canary’s toenails. It goes okay but when we’re done the canary passes out.
“Is he dead?” Amy says.
Maybe the fumes killed him, like in a coal mine. It sure stinks in here.
I poke him. He feels alive.
We put a fan in the window. He lies there on my bedside table, not moving.
We get hungry. We put him in his cage. He lies there. We have a snack.
When we get back he’s gone. The screens are all slashed to hell.
My dad is mad at me for wasting my money. He doesn’t have any more leftover screen. He tells me to sew it up.
I don’t sew it up. I sulk, and Amy sulks too. That’s another thing about being best friends.
Anyway, a couple weeks later I pull a canary out of the hat. I check his feet. Still a little pearly.
“You cheater!” I yell, and I throw the canary at the Canary Man.
The canary flaps a lot and settles onto the Canary Man’s head. The canary man doesn’t look sorry. That makes me mad. Amy’s mad too. She dumps her used chopsticks and empty Coke can in the top hat and we run off.
I’m actually kind of ashamed of this next part.
Amy’s cousin Sean lives up in the Sierras in a ghost town that used to have lumberjacks. And he forages and hunts and fishes for a living (and probably sells a little something-or-other on the side but who cares.) And he has a tame gray fox and a bunch of tame chickarees and a tame sparrow hawk that he uses for hunting, where he gets to wear one of those awesome falconer’s gloves with the tassels. (I have no idea why the sparrow hawk didn’t harass the chickarees.)
Sean is in Sacramento for a few days doing whatever he does. Amy and I were there when his friend dropped him off. He looks like a fairy-tale prince stepping out of the Jeep, with his long red beard and his sparrow hawk sitting on the deerhide patch he sewed on the shoulder of his jean jacket. I had such a crush on him.
Anyway, we get Sean to come with us the next Saturday with the idea that the hawk will mess with the canary and piss off the Canary Man. The Canary Man is not happy to see us, but we’ve come prepared with all his favorite stuff: the cashews, the honey cakes, something from Sean in a recycled Skoal tin… and we pay our bucks, right? I waste my buck but Amy gets lucky and pulls out the canary! She’s all smiles. The Canary man looks relieved. But then Amy raises the canary up in the air and throws it down hard back into the hat. The hawk sees this and streaks down after the canary. The Canary Man screams, grabs Amy with one hand and grabs for the falcon with the other. The hat gets knocked off the table, the Canary Man has his arm way down inside it, and Amy is yelling and crying. I try to get Amy away from him, but I fall down and get the wind knocked out of me.
When I get my breath back I’m looking up at a sheep. There’s a thunk as the head of a spear lands in the ground by my shoulder. A boy slides down the spear and lands next to me. “Hola,” he says.
“Don’t you get splinters?” I ask him in Spanish.
In answer, he holds out his hands, which are covered in thick calluses.
“Hey,” I say, “have you seen a canary, and a hawk, and an old guy, and a girl?”
“Sheep,” he says, and starts to walk. “Nothing but sheep. Every day sheep. Rams, ewes, lambs. They’re dirty, they’re ugly and they’re stupid. You want some bread?” He pulls some bread out of his backpack and tears me off a hunk.
“You live around here?” I ask.
He points straight ahead at rocks and scrub. “Over there,” he says. “My cousin came out and took over so I could have a night off from,” he spits on the ground, “sheep.”
“Um,” I say. “If you were a canary, a hawk, an old guy and a girl, which way would you go?”
“Not that way,” he says, cocking his head back the way we’ve come, “unless they like sheep.”
He is using the spear as a walking stick, and also as a kind of portable firepole to get down off big rocks. He’s pretty good at it. I have to scramble down every rock with my hands and feet and it makes us slow. “Aren’t you kind of young for a shepherd?” I ask.
“It’s that or fish,” he says. “And I hate fish.”
I shut up.
We reach the crest of a ridge and now I can see what he was pointing at. We’re looking at the sea, and down near the edge of it is a village. I’m happy to see it. I’m tired, I’m thirsty, and I want to sit down.
Two small boys and a small girl run up from the village and walk with us the rest of the way. “My cousins,” the shepherd says. The kids spend the whole time whistling but they can’t agree on a tune. When we reach the village a small smiling woman in a blue dress comes out to meet us. She looks older than my mom. “My aunt,” says the shepherd. “I call her my aunt but actually she’s my mom’s cousin.”
“Does she live here?” I ask.
“It’s her house,” the shepherd says.
“Where’s your mom?”
“She died when I was little,” he says. “I’ve lived with my aunt all my life.”
The woman has her head tilted, waiting for us to finish. “Who’s your friend?” she asks.
“A girl,” the shepherd says. “She’s looking for a canary.”
The woman laughs and waves her hands at the vine-covered house and the twisted tree overhanging it. There are canaries everywhere, fluttering and singing. “Your search is over,” she says. “Come in and have some supper.”
“I’m Tanya,” I say, holding out my hand. “I’m actually looking for my friend, who was grabbed by a man who was chasing a hawk that was chasing a canary. I would love some supper.”
The woman makes a face like I’ve told a joke she doesn’t get. She shrugs and says, “I’m Amalia. Welcome. Come and wash up.”
She shows us to a table with a pitcher, a basin, a bar of soap and a towel. The shepherd lifts the pitcher, and I let him pour water over my hands and into the basin. “What’s your name?” I ask as I soap.
“Marco,” he says. “I’ve never heard the name Tanya before.” He pours more water so I can rinse.
“I’ve never met a kid named Marco before,” I say. “Your aunt seems nice.”
“Yeah,” he says, and I help him wash. He dries his hands on the towel and we go in to dinner.
The dining room looks a little like a scene from Madeline or The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. There is a big table with lots of kids around it, and Amalia, and no other grownups. There’s a platter of grilled fish, and a big bowl of potatoes, and a bowl of green sauce with a ladle, and pitchers of water.
Everyone bows their heads and Amalia says a prayer, and then everyone looks up expectantly. Amalia stares at Marco until he serves me first: a small piece of fish and a pile of potatoes, and he holds the sauce bowl for me while I take some. Then he serves himself.
“I thought you hated fish,” I whisper.
“It’s that or mutton,” he whispers back. “And I hate mutton.”
It’s quiet while everybody eats. The food is good but there’s only enough of it so I don’t feel hungry anymore. I’m not exactly full. I can see the little kids all looking at the empty serving bowls.
“Go,” Amalia says to the little kids. “Don’t forget to wash.”
The kids clatter around clearing the table and then disappear.
Amalia is now staring at me in a not-completely-friendly way. “So,” she says. “You’ve lost a friend?”
“Yeah,” I say. “She was grabbed by a man who was chasing a hawk that was chasing a canary.”
She sighs. “Please start at the beginning.”
I try to explain about the street fair. Marco has his arms crossed like he doesn’t believe a thing I’m saying. When I mention the Canary Man’s hat Amalia suddenly looks interested.
“What kind of hat?” she asks.
I don’t know the word for “top hat” in Spanish. “Um, a ‘top hat,’” I say, saying “top hat” in English.
She looks at me blankly. I wave my hands in the air, trying to mime a top hat.
“Draw it,” she says, and goes and gets paper and a pencil from a cabinet.
I’m not good at drawing, but I scribble my best top hat.
When I finish the drawing, Amalia looks strangely sad and says, “Come with me.” She grabs the drawing and puts it in a pocket of her dress. “You too,” she says to Marco.
We go out into the street and kick dust down a few houses and around a corner. We walk into a little house that’s the twin of Amalia’s. “My cousin’s,” she says.
An Amalia clone comes out to meet us and Amalia speaks rapidly to her. She mimes a top hat. The cousin’s shoulders slump. “My brother Ruy,” she says, looking at me. “I’m so sorry.”
They talk some more, then pause to think. After a quick glance at Amalia, the cousin takes a step forward, sticks two fingers in her mouth and lets off a series of swooping whistles so loud that I reflexively duck. After a moment a pitch-perfect echo of the whistles rings out from far away. Then another even-quieter echo, then silence. Marco, Amalia and the cousin stand passively, as if waiting for something.
Minutes tick by. I scratch behind my ear.
Off in the distance there’s a noise. It repeats, a bit louder. Then a third time, loud enough to make out clearly. It’s another whistled phrase. Marco raises his eyebrows. Amalia nods. Marco begins to jog away, and I chase after him. “What’s happening?” I ask.
“We’re going to the forest,” he says.
We hurry back to Amalia’s house to find Amalia somehow already there, packing food into a canvas rucksack. Marco digs in a drawer and pulls out an old-looking army canteen, and Amalia fills it and hands it to me. I sling it across my chest, looking back and forth between Marco and Amalia, hoping one of them will explain. Marco puts the backpack on, retrieves his spear from the corner where it was leaning and walks out the front door. Amalia looks at me impatiently until I turn and run after him.
Just like we were in a story, the moon rises full and casts enough light for us to travel through the shadows of an antique postcard. Marco offers to let me use the spear but I turn him down and continue to climb like a monkey. A monkey’s tail would be useful, for balance. About the time I’m feeling half tired we enter a deep ravine. I would hate to be here during a heavy rain. Every year in California you hear about a couple of kids who get caught in an arroyo in a storm and are washed away. I can see now how that happens. I’m grateful that I’m wearing sneakers and not my usual sandals. The rocks have sharp teeth and I seem to be kicking every single one in the dark.
Marco is leading by sound and also by smell. I hadn’t noticed it until I stopped being able to see, but he smells strongly of sheep and boy-sweat. Maybe there’s a stream where we’re going. I could push him in.
I can hear my tired blood banging in my ears when the ravine finally opens up and we emerge into moonlit tree-shadows. The leaves sound wrong: not like California leaves.
Marco is standing still, staring up at the canopy of tree-branch silhouettes. I take a long drink from the canteen and offer it to him. He ignores me.
Something rustles. Marco whistles softly, then waits. He whistles again. Then waits. Then whistles. He’s whistling with a ghost.
“Marco, what is it?” I whisper.
He waves at me to hush. More whistling.
“Who are you talking to?” I hiss. I’m tired of invisible secrets.
He points. I narrow my eyes. Ahead and above there’s a hornet’s nest or an angular fruit. Finally it resolves itself into a bat, very gently fanning its wings.
“You can talk to bats?” I ask.
He waves again for silence. The bat-shape drops from the limb and swoops between the trunks. Marco darts after it, running in a crouch. I follow as best I can.
When I catch up Marco is holding something out to me. I reach for it and he drops it into my hand. It’s soft. And stiff. It has claws. The corpse of a canary. I jerk my hand and the dead canary falls on the ground. “Is it…” I ask.
“They were here,” Marco says. He’s digging in the knapsack. “The bat says they went to a place I know, in the waves.” He comes up with a tiny bit of something.
“‘In the waves?’” I ask.
The bat-shadow arcs down and takes the something from Marco, then disappears. “Dried fish,” Marco says. “I guess it’s a treat for them.”
‘In the waves?’” I ask again.
“Come on,” he says, and begins to run.
Some bored Sunday afternoon I watched a show on UHF on the little black-and-white TV we kept in the kitchen. Dad probably wasn’t around or he would have chased me outside. They were doing a show on a Brazilian sport called “queda,” which seemed to be all about tripping and collapsing as clumsily as possible then getting back to your feet as gracefully as possible. I didn’t see the point until that moment in the forest. The tree roots were working together with energetic malice. Pretty soon I had bruises all over my hands, arms and hips. I guess it was pride that kept me from screaming at Marco. He didn’t seem to be having any problems at all. I kept wishing for him to go sprawling and crack his forehead against his damn spear, the showoff.
The forest must have been down in a big bowl. When we reached the rim we were back in Marco’s natural boulder-strewn habitat and he redoubled his pace. Son of a bitch! I had the worst side-ache of my entire life. I can’t believe I didn’t crack my head against a rock and shape up dead or paralyzed out in the middle of all that sheep-scrub. The usual gods of bad luck must have been off their game—out having a beer or something—and I lived through it. My feet were dragging in the sand before I tuned in and smelled the sea. I fell on my knees, and then let my whole self fall in the sand, making a me-mold, face and all. Can’t breathe that way, though. I hauled myself up to my elbows. Marco was standing at the water’s edge, whistling and listening.
“Are there bats in the sea?” I yelled.
He was listening, but not to me.
“You got cousins in the sea?” I yelled.
He came back, laid his spear down next to me and held out his hand for the canteen. I gave it to him. He took a long drink, screwed the cap back on and collapsed in the sand. I prodded him with my foot but he was fast asleep. Always one step ahead. I stretched out beside him and closed my eyes.
When I woke up it was early dawn. Marco’s spear and rucksack were still beside me but Marco was gone. Good riddance.
I dug some bread out of the backpack and ate like a dog. Then I drank most of the rest of the water and then I looked around for Marco. His head and bare shoulders were bobbing above the waves a long rock-throw from the edge. I took off my shoes and shuffled blister-footed to the muck at the tide margin. Marco’s clothes were washing back and forth along with the well-chewed carcass of a sparrow hawk. I watched it roll.
I shook my head and stripped to my underwear. My dad would have been really uncomfortable. He was never really the naked kind. The water was shallow and stayed shallow for many yards. Then it began to warm, which was weird. In my experience the warmest water is usually at the edge. By the time I got to Marco it was bath-temperature. “Hot spring?” I asked. He nodded and whistled. Something whistled back. There was a dolphin here with us, treading water just out of arm’s reach. Marco whistled again.
“They were here too, right?” I asked.
The dolphin whistled.
“They didn’t stay long,” Marco said. More whistling. “She says they went to the island.” He pointed at a horizon full of nothing. “We have to swim.”
“You swim a lot with your sheep?” I asked.
He flopped forward and began to crawl. I kicked after him, letting the warm waves stand in for angry tears.
In swimming pools and mountain lakes I was a strong swimmer. Everybody said so. I watched swimming on TV. I had a poster of Lynne Cox in my bedroom at home. I planned to join the swim team. But even Lynne Cox had a reasonable suspicion that there was something on the other side of the water. When you don’t know how far you’re going you can’t pace yourself. Or maybe I was just weak. Weaker than I thought. After a while I just rolled over on my back and hoped to die—first choice the dolphin swims up and tows me, second choice drowning—but Marco swam back for me and dunked my head so I got a throat full of seawater, and after that I chased him all the way to shore and when we were standing on the sand I hit him until he fell down.
We did seem to be on an island. It wasn’t much bigger than my cousin Jenny’s very big yard in Walnut Grove. Marco, when he got up, started walking toward a huge, weird-looking tree in the middle of the island. I had to watch my feet to keep them from getting cut up on the same toothy rocks as on the mainland. I hated those rocks. As we got close I could hear that the tree was sizzling with whistles. From the furthest branches on in, the ground was covered in a thick layer of canary poop. I pulled up short. There was Marco, buck naked wiry hairless boy, flat feet striding through inches of bird shit toward the trunk of a tree like a mass of twisted eels. I threw up. It was noisy. I made a yacking, yelping sound like a kicked puppy or a seal with strep. Bile got up my nose. Snot got in my eyes. My hair was pasted to my face. My salty underwear was chafing my butt. My ears were full of plankton and I could feel them squirming. I puked on and on, until I was balled up in air-raid position, hands clasped behind my neck, squeezing myself too tightly to breathe. I stayed that way for a long time.
When I finally unbent and looked out through matted eyelashes Marco was up against the trunk of the tree picking at it with one hooked finger. I squeezed my eyes back shut and held them until I heard his feet squash up near me. “Here,” he said.
I looked. He was holding out a handful of rubies. “It’s a dragon tree,” he said. “This is dragon’s blood.”
I pinched one of the beads of dried sap out of his palm and peered at it. “Eat it,” he said. He plucked a bead of his own and gulped it like a pill.
“I’m sick,” I said. “Can’t you see I’m sick?”
“Eat it,” he said. “You’ll see.”
I choked bitter acid and tried to find some saliva. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t swallow.”
“Eat it,” he said.
I scrunched up my whole face but he didn’t soften. “Can I chew it?” I asked.
“I don’t care,” he said.
I stuck the bead in my mouth and chomped down. It broke. It tasted like sap. “It’s stuck in my teeth,” I said.
“Swallow,” he said.
I tried a dry swallow. It didn’t feel like anything was getting down.
“Now look,” Marco said. He pointed at the canaries in the eel tree. I mean dragon tree.
“Canaries,” I said. “Canaries with diarrhea. They stink. I hate them.”
“Watch,” he said.
I watched canaries rustle and whistle. I really did hate them. The sap slowly came unstuck from my teeth.
“Can we go?” I said.
“Wait,” he said.
One of the canaries dug in its pocket for a pen. It was a man around my father’s age. It wrote something on a scrap of paper and dropped it toward us. I reached out and caught it. “Ayudame,” it said.
The tree was full of people: Young men, old ladies, babies. Little boys. Beautiful young women. Girls. “Amy,” I yelled.
There was a rustling of wings and a shift in the whistling.
“Amy,” I yelled again.
“That way,” Marco said, and began to run. I ran after him, shit squirting between my toes.
“Amy,” I called.
I could hear her whistle. I’d know that whistle anywhere. “Help me,” she whistled. She had beautiful brown wings. She was missing a shoe.
“Help me,” she whistled.
Marco grabbed a low limb and hauled himself onto it. I followed, my feet caked and slick.
Like a couple of nimble apes, we raced through the branches. It was a maze. I could hear Amy, but I couldn’t reach her. “Help me,” she whistled again and again. It was her song.
We reached her limb. I began to shimmy along it, scraping my thighs and my belly. “Amy,” I said.
From high above there was a loud cry. Not the cry of a canary. The flock lifted into the air and flew away in a whirring cloud. Amy flew with them, darting out of my grasp. My hand clamped down on air and I lost my balance. I fell from the limb and crashed into the branch below. The flock blurred away. I was blind with pain. The tree was empty. I fell from one limb to another, screaming or maybe silent. Then I was flying, and then I hit the ground with a horrifying splat.
Marco was whirling toward me, arms over legs over arms until he was standing on the ground by my shoulder. He dragged my broken self to its feet and dragged it behind him. “Come on,” he shouted.
We stumbled out of the tree’s shade and watched the canaries, harassed by a shrieking bird of prey, shift like smoke. “I saw the sparrow hawk dead on the beach,” I said. “It was dead.”
“That’s a falcon,” Marco said, as if that mattered.
The falcon dived and cut the flock into two teardrop-shaped halves, then pivoted as though it had caught something. The sky filled with falling people. The falcon, tangled in a man’s shirt, splashed into a sea of crying, floating bodies. Marco and I were already running, diving and swimming toward the survivors. We did our best to cajole the swimmers and haul the floaters toward the island. We were trapped in a raft of limbs like Sargasso weed. I reached shore with my head pinned under the arm of a corpse. Something squirmed inside it. I jerked loose and stared, terrified, as the falcon pulled itself free of the tattered remains of Ruy, the Canary Man.
The sun was low on the horizon before we were able to lead a slow parade of swimming survivors back toward the mainland. Amy swam beside me, swimming and floating by turns, too tired to sink. Mario swam in the rear to watch for stragglers. The falcon circled just above the waves as though keeping watch over us. We reached land just as the last rays of light left the sky. The crowd fell apart like a threadbare rag. Small groups crept off in six different directions despite Mario’s efforts at crowd control. Several people lay down and passed out. Amy clung to me and took shallow breaths.
“Mario,” I said, “how will we get home?”
He walked silently away. We followed him, unwilling to be alone. Twenty minutes down the beach we reached a smooth bowl of lava with a pool in the center. Mario stepped up on the lava’s rim and walked unhesitatingly down into the pool like a suicide or a baptism, until the water covered his head. Amy and I watched the ripples die. There was a scream from above as the falcon stooped and dove into the water. Again the ripples slowed and stilled. We held hands and took a step forward. So this is what it feels like finally to drown.
When I could no longer hold my breath I opened my mouth and was struck in the temple by a rusty can of Teem. A canary with beautiful brown wings perched on its rim. I floated, gaping, and tried to get my bearings.
“Tanya!”
It was Mario, sitting far above the water on a moored barge. A barge: the port! We were in West Sacramento! I followed Mario’s pointing finger to an algae-slimed ladder, pulling the can and canary along like a little toy boat. I hauled myself out of the oily water and suddenly felt very naked. Mario had disappeared. I sat and shivered on the dock until the police arrived and took me in.
My dad was twice as angry as I’ve ever seen him. He stalked out to our car with me in a cop-blanket trying to keep up with him. He didn’t talk to me all the way home, and then he drank a juice glass full of gin in the middle of the day and I went to my room. The canary was perched on my windowsill, waiting to be let in. I slid the screen up and the canary hopped onto my finger and let me lift it into the broken cage.
Six weeks later on a Saturday Dad took me to San Francisco, which I loved. While he was slurping congee at our favorite dim sum place on Grant, I sneaked upstairs to an herbalist’s shop I had always been curious about. The walls were lined with hundreds of drawers and pigeonholes, and the counter with flasks and bell jars full of dead vermin and magic beans. The druggist looked at me over his glasses. “Do you have any dragon’s blood?” I asked.
When we got home I took the dragon’s blood and the canary over to Amy’s mom’s apartment. The last cops and reporters had broken camp just that morning. She had new grey hairs and deep bags under her eyes. “Eat this,” I said.
Amy and her mom had many good years together thanks to frequent trips to Chinatown. But canaries only live for twenty years or so and Amy passed away almost fifteen years ago now. I ran into somebody who looked like Mario one time up in Humboldt, but he wouldn’t acknowledge me or even respond in Spanish. Amy’s cousin Sean went off the scene some time around 1980 with a Barbary falcon on his shoulder. I have spent almost my whole adult life in the Midwest, which is really not too different from the Central Valley. I don’t see my dad much, and nobody else even remembers any of this stuff.
Image CC-BY-SA by Alan Manson
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