Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(34)
It became a weekend ritual. I can remember shoving one quarter after another in the slot. I’d beg or borrow it from Lois if I was broke. And the chicken would come strutting out and hit the center square, leaving me as badly off as ever.
“We’d have to drag you back to the car when the arcade closed for the night,” Lois said. “One time you stood on the sidewalk of Mott Street and Pell, shaking your fist at the arcade and saying you were coming back as a eagle to kill every chicken in the place.
“Even the people hanging around that corner at three A.M., who you have to figure had seen a lot, were impressed.”
We both laughed, and this memory of the chicken ran through my head like a cartoon. But the idea of me long ago threatening to come back as a great bird caught me.
6
Lois had departed and the Village was all autumn leaves and early dusk as I walked through Washington Square a week or two later. A crowd had gathered and was looking up—not at a hawk but at something even more remarkable.
The guy, who I remembered for his questions at the information desk about fresh rat meat, stood naked on a tree limb. He was making a weird kind of cawing sound and crying, “Feed me! Bring me my food!”
Some people in the crowd laughed. I felt that I kind of understood what he was going through and wanted to get close, maybe talk him down. But as I headed that way, park workers with ladders appeared and first a cop car, then an ambulance arrived with sirens blaring.
They wrapped him in blankets and he was bundled into the ambulance. The guy was more than a little disturbing.
7
I was walking home in the early-morning hours from a party on the night before Halloween. All Hallows the next evening is beyond a doubt the biggest date of the year in the Village. But on this night the neighborhood was quiet.
The street where I live abounds in all manner of bars and restaurants and a few remnants of the glory days of Greenwich Village. But there’s one store that really only stands out very late at night. CIGARS, HOOKAHS, TOBACCO reads the sign that blazes over the door, an oasis for certain wanderers. The silver light in the front window reaches onto the dark sidewalk.
On the almost empty street, I passed that shop and something inside hooked my eyes. I’d caught a glimpse of a young guy bent down and looking away from me. I thought he was somehow familiar even before I saw the wings on him.
This was the kid in the birdcage but now in another city and another century. And no, I don’t drink much or get stoned much these days. I walked back, looked in the door and saw him again but only in profile. He was wearing tights, a pair of wings and shoes that looked like bird feet. Another guy was adjusting the wings for him. I understood this was practice for the Halloween parade.
He did look like Neil, or looked the way my cousin might have looked if he’d become a dancer and stayed eighteen forever. In reality, Neil died of a heart attack some years ago. Maybe he never got much of anywhere. But right now he seemed a lot more alive than I was.
By afternoon the next day my street was full of drunken vampires, male witches, female princes, and scandal-plagued celebrities in multiple sizes and shapes. In tribute to last summer’s fad, a couple of human-size hawks came out of a bar on Bleecker Street. They were tacky—not even close to what I was looking for.
That night I went to a party at the house of a friend of a friend whose front windows overlooked Sixth Avenue and the passing parade. We nibbled hash brownies and I dutifully applauded the float loads of musicians and the many-legged dragons, monstrous cartoons, and singing mermaids who shimmied, strutted, and marched up the avenue.
I waited impatiently. But when the Raptors appeared they were entirely worth the wait. They swooped from one side of Sixth Avenue to the other with bloody beaks, glistening wings, mad, staring eyes that flickered, then stared again. The Neil I’d seen the night before was all shimmering feathers and savage glances as he swept forward.
People yelled and applauded. This was Raptor worship and I was impressed. The kid, whoever he was, showed artistry. It seemed that his wings, not his legs, carried him.
Even knowing it was all performance, I still expected him to rise off the street and fly. When he remained earthbound and the Raptor cult passed on up the Avenue, I was disappointed.
But like a retort aimed at my doubt, a form flew out of the dark sky and hovered motionless above the marchers. Everyone at the party told one another this was a trick and tried to explain it. When the hawk rose into the sky and disappeared they lost interest. But I was hooked all over again.
I wanted to fly out the window and follow the man who’d been followed by a hawk. Instead I ran down the stairs, kind of wobbly from age and the brownies. The building was only a couple of blocks from the parade’s end.
By the time I got there, the Raptor contingent was lost somewhere in the chaos at the finish line. I caught glimpses of them through the crowd but couldn’t get close.
8
An eagle stood at a podium and spoke in savage cries to a roomful of birds of prey and to human devotees of birds of prey with feathers pasted on their bare skins. All of them screeched at each thing he said.
I stood in a dark hall in that old building and looked into the lighted room. The bird at the podium swiveled his head my way and looked me over.
“Another featherless one, frightened and fascinated by our ways,” he said quite clearly, and I found myself moving toward him while birds and humans stared and cried out. All of this seemed familiar, like I’d done it before but couldn’t remember when.