Calliope: Voice of the Writers
The Great Novel Race 2008:
Tumbleweeds
by Erin Trauth
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Chapter 4: The Birdsong
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The next morning, I woke up achy and still really tired. I snuck into the living room to make sure Jasper and Mama were gone for work, and sure enough, there were no cars in the driveway. I decided right then and there, over a bowl of thick apple cinnamon oatmeal, that I’d forget about the imaginary cowboy for a while, and just try and make it through the summer until school began without making everyone so damn angry. I was making trouble everywhere I went, it seemed, and laying low and staying out of Mama and Jasper and everyone else’s hair seemed like the best plan to me. Little did I know, just a few days later, it wasn’t going to be me causing the whole town to flip right over and go crazy like it did.
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When I saw the girl for the first time, she was propped up against the side of a dying, dried-out old palm tree that stretched high above the earth, her back arched in a little half-circle the followed the tree’s spine. I was out on the creek again, spying on the house across the water to figure out who had just moved in a few days before. The tiny white house had been abandoned for years and years, with big wood boards nailed over the windows and a “No Trespassing” sign pasted on the front door. But in the past few days, a long, beat-up red Chevy truck had been parked in front of it, and the boards and sign were down. Still, I hadn’t seen any people come in or out.
I almost didn’t see the girl, who looked to be about 15, strutted up against one of the many gazillion-year-old trees that lined the shore halfway between the white house and my own broken-down old shack. The girl’s knees were locked and bent toward the sky with both of her elbows propped above them. Her hands were squeezed into tight balls beneath her chin, and her head rested heavy on her small hands. She didn’t look the least bit comfortable all balled up like that, yet there was a quiet peace swirling around her, kind of like I thought an angel might look like. Her wide brown eyes were looking out onto the waves that lapped softly on the shore of Chutney’s Creek, and she looked like she was searching, or maybe listening for something. Whatever it was, she had gone somewhere else, far away from there. The girl wore an oversized, grass-green men’s work shirt tucked into dark, frayed jean shorts that spit out a pair of lanky bronze legs. One arm of the shirt was rolled up to her elbow; the other sleeve was unrolled and had white speckles all over that looked like bleach. Her feet were bare. A river of shiny beige hair flowed down into spiraling curls around her shoulders, and though I would later find out that her hair was hardly ever brushed, it appeared as though it had been worked for hours into a streaming crown of wavy, woven silk. The girl's skin, bronzed cocoa by the sun, was clear and tight, like a Barbie’s might look if she were alive. She looked like a little bit of every movie star, every model I had ever seen, pretty much everything I had always wanted to be like combined. She was a big difference to the mess I looked at in the mirror every day, with my eternally frizzing mop of strawberry curls and dull, pale, often pimpled skin.
The girl didn’t even notice when I came up behind her, my bare feet crunching hard against the thick Bahia grass; she didn’t even look when I plopped down and sat down right beside her. She was still staring out at the water. She didn’t even blink.
"Hey." I said, looking at her toenails, nude and unpolished, but still delicate at the same time. I looked at my own feet, a mess of bony toes stuck to feet with big black circles on the heels from walking around barefoot all summer.
The girl glanced toward me, her meditation broken. She uncoiled herself from the tree, and I watched silently as her broad chocolate eyes took me in. Somewhere close, suddenly, a bird called out, loud and long, like it was desperately looking for something.
"Did you hear that?" she asked, not looking like she minded I was right next to her all of a sudden.
"Oh,” I said. “Yes. The bird, right?”
She shook her head. “It’s a baby mourning dove, I think. I’ve been trying to figure out where she is.” she said, turned her eyes back out toward the creek. “Mourning dove mamas never leave their babies alone…but I think she’s been deserted.”
“How do you know what kind of bird it is?” I asked.
“I’m gonna be a bird keeper when I’m older,” she said, flashing a perfect row of off-white teeth in my direction. “I know what all birds sound like….I can almost even hear what they’re saying, most of the time. And that little bird; she wants her mama now.”
I was starting to think she was a bit loony, talking to birds and all. I changed the subject. "Well, I was just wondering if you knew who lives out there,” I said, squinting through the sun and pointing to the tiny white house across the creek.
"We do now," she said, flashing the teeth at me again. “Just moved in a week or two ago.”
"What's your name?" I asked. I wasn’t sure if I was excited to have a crazy bird girl living just across the creek now. We didn’t need much more crazy around there.
"West. West Gilford."
"West?"
"Yep.”
"Like, West West? The Wild West? The direction?"
"Yep,” she said, bowing her head down in a nod. A strand of the pretty beige hair fell over her right eye. “Who are you?”
“I’m Carolina. Carolina Wells. I live that way,” I said, throwing an index finger in the direction of my tiny, brown, beat-up house. I hoped she couldn’t actually see it behind the mass of trees surrounding us. I was not ready to let her see it, not ready to let her in.
“Okay. Well, I’ll call you Carolina.” she said, like she had just gone right there on the spot and named me herself. “You wanna go find the mourning dove with me?”
I wasn’t so sure we’d be friends, but what else did I have to do? It was the end of the hottest summer Cocoa, Florida had ever seen, the kind of summer that actually made me want to get back to school, and it was either go home to play another round of Uno with my baby brothers in our sweltering sauna of a house and wait for Mama to come stumbling in at some point, or spend a while looking for a sad baby bird with the beautiful future bird keeper. The bird cawed again, this time longer and even more sad-sounding, and for a moment, I swore I thought I heard her call my name somewhere in the OOOOcoo-OH-ooo-OOOOOO. I know it could’ve just been the heat, but I was a strong believer that if God’s got animals calling out your name in the middle of broad daylight, you’d better listen, so I picked right up and followed West out to the woods.
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