Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(33)

As we paddled, out of nowhere, a gull alighted on the mast. Neil nodded and said, “That’s our guide. They always look toward land.”

The gull’s eyes were sharp. They reminded me of the pirate parrot’s eyes in the movie Treasure Island. I looked away and the bird suddenly screeched. Turning, I saw it trying to fly away from where it had roosted. A huge bird, an eagle as I found out, was on the gull with talons planted in its back. The gull, screaming, tried to wrench free.

The eagle tore off the head, ripped apart the flapping wings, and flew off with the twitching remains. I cried and almost pissed myself. My cousins were wide-eyed. But Neil said, “He’ll lead us home.” We followed the eagle with the dead gull in its claws and in a few minutes I saw land.

They laughed at my tears. Neil looked down at me and said, “You got to raise your right hand and promise before God not to tell anyone how far out we went. Break your word and you go to hell!”

And because he wasn’t bothered by the birds and the blood and because I was terrified, I raised my hand and promised.

“And you don’t tell anyone,” he said, “about what happened to the gull. Or the same thing will happen to you.” I nodded, and at that moment he was a big and scary as the eagle.

The adults were all in a bad mood when we showed up. I think my parents and I left the next day. I never saw any of that family again. Except maybe Neil some years later.





4


“I forgot about the seagull and the eagle until years after it happened,” I said. I’d just described the boat trip to my best friend Lois. We go way back to college. She was in New York on a short visit and I amazed her by talking about birds of prey.

“The first time I thought about those birds again was when I was in my teens in Boston,” I told her. “There was this guy who dealt meth and who liked to go after kids. So he was called Super Chicken Hawk.

“He had his lair in this old apartment building over near the Charles River. It had large windows looking out on the water. And stuck right inside the apartment nailed onto one of the window frames was this big old iron birdcage. It had a little, narrow entrance drilled in the windowsill, so small birds could get in from the outside but not large ones. He had finches building nests and singing in his living room, which was nice but creepy.

“The trick with this guy was getting him to sell you the speed without letting him get into your pants. He was weird enough that after a couple of visits I stayed away for maybe a year. When I went back there were some older guys, even a woman, people in their twenties, maybe thirties, standing around, looking whacked out and amused.

“There was a much different birdcage, large enough to hold a crouching person, and there was a bare-ass kid inside it. He had to scrunch down because of these big wings he was wearing. He kept his face turned away so I couldn’t really see him. But what he reminded me of, the way he held himself, was my cousin Neil, who I hadn’t seen since the boat trip. The chilling coincidence was that a gull was hanging in the air outside, looking in at us.

“When I tried to get a closer look, Neil, if that’s who it was, raised his shoulders so that the wings covered his face. He didn’t want me to see that but didn’t seem to care other if people in the room looked. That made me double down on the idea he knew me and I knew him.

“The dealer/hawk was all over me. Sold me the speed but said, ‘Next time I want you in the cage,’ and the people liked that.

“It was a long time before I went back and when I did, it was all gone. The downstairs door was wide open and I could hear drilling and hammering somewhere in the building. Then I found the door of Super Chicken Hawk’s apartment hanging on its hinges. It was empty. The window that had the cage was broken. The only trace of anything that had once gone on there was some feathers on the floor.”





5


Lois shook her head. “With you I never know what’s real. I mean, I like the feathers left on the floor and the weird and twisted underground in Boston circa 1960. But the dangerous bird motif and your long-lost cousin locked in a cage? I have trouble with those items.”

“I know I can be a chore.”

“I met you a couple of years after that in college,” she said. “And at one point in our extended adolescences, I got to see you interact with a bird and it wasn’t nearly as scary and a lot more hilarious than the story you told me.”

At first, I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she asked, “Remember the Educated Chicken?” For a moment I didn’t. “Down in Chinatown fifty years ago, on Mott Street and Pell, there was this sleazy arcade. We used to come into the city from school on weekends. And you’d always insist on going there.”

It all came back to me. I even saw it through a drunken teenage haze just like the first time. A gray hen strutted across a tic-tac-toe board and hit the center square with its beak. The Educated Chicken always went first. I’d put an X on another square but already I’d be at a disadvantage. Before I knew it the bird had filled in a row of X’s and I’d lost.

My college friends, kids at least as drunk as I was, were hooting, yelling, “You going to take that from a chicken?”

My answer was that no bird would ever make a fool of me. Everything I hadn’t spent on beer and grass, I lost playing tic-tac-toe.