Pew(22)

Well. It’s overrated, family. You’re lucky if you get born into one where you belong. It’s really a lot more rare than people want to say. You know, I ran off to the city when I was—Jesus … was I seventeen? Well, we know how that story ends, don’t we?
She swallowed hard and lit another cigarette.
But the thing is—I found a place to sleep for a few weeks, way out in some neighborhood, I couldn’t even tell you where it was now—I was in way over my dumb head. But it was a Latvian neighborhood and I got a little job sweeping up hair at this beauty parlor owned by this old Latvian lady—I can’t even remember her name now, that’s how stupid I am. I mean, I don’t even think I’d even heard of Latvia—I was just real dumb. Still am. But she was so nice to me, and so funny, and I was just this ugly little girl with no money, no friends, and I hadn’t done anything or seen anything. She’d had such a different life—leaving her country, leaving everyone she ever knew, really starting over—but I felt I had more in common with her than anyone I’d grown up with, more than anyone I’d known down here, more than my own family. Immediately, I felt it. I can’t explain why. I don’t know why it is a person can feel so misplaced, even from the beginning, you know—even as a little child I felt there had been some kind of accident that got me born here. I guess my mother, the whole family, really, felt the same way, that there had been some sort of mistake. And now where am I? Ten miles from where I was born, puttering around all day, napping and smoking too much and trying not to eat the whole kitchen.
She stubbed out her cigarette and sat still and quietly for a while.
I don’t mean to be so negative. I know that’s not what people like. Sometimes it’s just hard to really think about your life, all the years of it you can’t take back, to think about what it is.
For a long time we waited for that last sentence to vanish, and when it seemed it had gotten far enough away from us, she stood up and began pacing the porch.
I’m not going to tell, she said over her shoulder. That you said something. You know that’s what everyone wants, don’t you? That’s what they’re waiting on? Some of them think you’re a mute, of course, that it’s medical, nothing to be done anything about, and you may as well let them keep thinking that. Me and Hal won’t rat you out to nobody. Maybe nobody’d believe us anyway. She leaned over the porch railing, maybe looking for the cat, then she turned around—This place, you know, it’s not so terrible, but it’s not so nice either.
She crouched to turn on a small radio on the floor. Someone was singing with a piano and Tammy sang along in a small, half-embarrassed way. A red car drove up and parked in the one part of the yard where the vines and roots had been cut back. A slight man emerged from the car and climbed the porch steps, smiling at Tammy all the while. He wore a green shirt with the name HAL on a patch sewn over his heart. When she embraced Hal, Tammy seemed almost twice his height—she had to hunch to kiss the top of his bald head. They touched each other so naturally, so easily, it was as if each of them had a kind of wind vane tuned for the other.
Name’s Hal. He smiled and waved one hand sharply at me. He sat on the old sofa where Tammy had been. She’d gone inside the house but soon came back out with a bowl of potato chips and a dark red drink for him, ice singing in the glass. I was staring at a few large and brightly colored feathers that hung above us, spinning in the ceiling-fan draft.
You ever seen a peacock? Hal asked.
Oh, here we go. Tammy lit a cigarette and paced at the edge of the porch.
Vaguely, I sensed a memory of waking up on a lawn somewhere and seeing two large birds—peacocks—staring at me from across the grass. One of them spread out a great tail of feathers, and the other did the same. They swayed there, necks long and twitching. Each feather seemed to be watching me for a moment, watching me through the silence and heat, then they’d closed up those fans and darted away, dragging all that finery across the grass, running for their lives.
Pretty things, Hal said. Tammy always liked them so I saved up to have some out here. They came mail order, came in a crate shipped overnight. They were just so beautiful. I couldn’t hardly believe it—bright blue, sort of purple at some angles. Real pretty like that. But, anyway—what we did was put them in the old chicken coop, which had just been sitting empty since we built the new one, but by the next morning something had gotten in there and ate up two of ’em, blood and all those blue feathers all over the lawn, and Tammy—sweet one that she is—she went around collecting the feathers, just crying and picking up feathers.
I’m using some of them to make something, Tammy said. In their memory. I don’t know what yet, but they were just too beautiful to go to waste, rotting into the ground like that.
Anyway we moved what was left of the peacocks to the new chicken coop while we tried to fix up the old one, Hal said. I guessed maybe a wild dog or something had ripped into it. I figured that the peacocks would be just fine in the coop with the hens for a while.
I hate this part, Tammy said to herself, pacing the longest edge of the porch. We should have known better.
They’re all birds, Hal said, so I didn’t think there’d be a problem. And it did seem all right at first because all the hens piled up to one side of the coop, piled on each other like a bunch of dogs or something, afraid of them peacocks, really, but before I knew it, the biggest hen in there found the littlest peacock and pecked the damn thing near to death. I don’t know what came over that bird—I still don’t know—though it just about made me believe in some kind of evil spirit or something—I mean, I’d just never seen a hen so riled up, making these weird gurgling noises, running real fast—so fast that I couldn’t even catch the damn thing to slit its throat—had to use the rifle. Imagine that—shooting a hen. Bullet tore that little thing right up. Pretty much ruined it.