Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(32)

2


I worked at an information desk in the university library. Greenwich Village with its old buildings, underground streams, and centuries as a port for ships from around the world, has a lively rat population. We always got questions about the rats of New York. The hawks and the camera meant we began to get questions about birds eating rodents.

One patron, scruffy and middle aged, wanted to know how the hawks caught live rats in the middle of the day when humans so rarely saw them by daylight. I’d wondered the same thing and trotted out what information we had. But none of it was what he was looking for. Then, as bothersome patrons so often do, he revealed what was actually on his mind. “It’s fresh meat. Nothing from factories! Right here in the city,” he said, seeming almost dreamy.

I showed him a list of rat-borne diseases and found he didn’t want to know. The next day he appeared with a newspaper article. It seemed that fans of the nestling hawks had persuaded City Pest Control to stop putting down rat poison in the park. They feared the eyas, as baby hawks are called, would die from eating poison.

The guy went away with a look of what seemed to me an unhealthy satisfaction. I found myself thinking about the public’s fascination with the lives of birds of prey.

Even before the nestlings, hawks had been around Washington Square Park off and on for quite a while. One sunny afternoon a couple of years before, I was walking through the park on my way back from lunch when I saw a crowd. It was maybe two hundred people, lots of them tourists, but plenty of students and local residents. They stared up silently and watched a hawk in the branches of an old tree tear into a squirrel with its claws and beak.

That hawk and others seemed to like an audience. I had once seen one stand on the back of a park bench as she stared with unblinking eyes at a terrified squirrel just barely hidden behind a small bush. She did this with people not that far behind her, like she knew we all had her back.





3


Things like that were on my mind early one morning a week or two after the hawk’s first appearance at my window. I went to my desk and there he was on the ledge outside the window. I was sure it was the same one. He was utterly motionless and staring at something farther down the back alley.

My camera was on the desk and I picked it up. Maybe I was too sudden. The bird swiveled his eyes and beak in my direction, looked me in the face, spread his wings, rose up, and disappeared before I could take a shot.

I was surprised by my own regret at a missed photo opportunity and how I was becoming engrossed with hawks.

But the full shock of recognition came when I decided to put on the mask. It was on one of my bookshelves, the souvenir of an interactive play I’d attended. In one scene we in the audience put on carnival masks and cavorted in a noir Renaissance Venice.

This one wasn’t a full-face, Phantom of the Opera model. But it was larger and far more ornate than a mere Lone Ranger–type mask. I donned it and found myself looking from the mirror to the window through slots set in a black and silver feathered face.

It was like I expected the hawk to come back and be taken by the mere sight of me. That didn’t happen. But I did snap photos of myself in the mask and put them up on Facebook. For a day or two, it amused online friends who were bored by their jobs.

A couple of old acquaintances sent me joking, “Are you all right?” emails. I assured them that I was.

What bothered me a bit was that beneath the joke, I was actually disappointed that I couldn’t entice the hawk back; let him know he was among friends. This was not an eccentricity I wanted to think about.

In late summer on the Hawk Cam, the red-tail fledglings sat on their windowsill and stared at the nooks and crannies in the neighboring buildings and at tourists feeding pigeons and squirrels amid the trees and flower beds across the street in Washington Square Park.

They began to make short gliding hops to other windowsills and to the branches of trees. When that happened, the parents stopped feeding them.

One day, the older one flew off, a few days later the younger did the same. The parents were no longer around the windowsill. When, after a week or two, none of them had reappeared, the Hawk Cam was turned off and that episode of the raptors in Washington Square seemed to be over.

Right around then I had a jumbled dream of childhood, which featured the Atlantic Ocean, large birds that talked to me, and cousins of mine about whom I hadn’t thought in years.

Waking up, I remembered snatches of the dream and matched them to my memory of a train trip from Boston out to Cape Cod that my parents and I had taken when I was six years old.

This was where my father’s family came from. I remember an aunt and uncle greeting us. My two boy cousins, Neil and Frankie, eleven and eight, in faded jeans and nothing more, stared at me in shirt and tie and shorts and shoes like they couldn’t believe it.

They were bigger and older. Neil seemed halfway to adulthood and was fascinating and scary.

Maybe the second day of the visit I was out with my cousins in their tiny sailboat, which had a mast but no sails. The sun was mostly behind clouds; the light was silver with a touch of gold.

We all wore swimming trunks and paddled with oars.

Looking around I saw we were beyond sight of land. I’d heard their father tell them not to do that. I was uneasy and noticed both of them but especially Neil, smiling like they’d gotten away with something. I wanted to go back but didn’t dare to say anything. Neil looked at me like he knew just what was going on in my head and was amused.