The Weight of Feathers

“Those things’ll kill you, you know,” Cluck said.

“So will the things they eat in this country,” Pépère said. The soda in the liquor store horrified Alain Corbeau, those colors bright as neon tubes. He thought Kraft Singles contained, within a few square inches, all American evils. His career at the adhesive plant had only strengthened his belief that chemicals belonged on the flaps of envelopes and between layers of pressboard, not in the stomach.

Cluck laid two new peacock feathers out on the dashboard, both pale as swans’ wings, thanks to a recessive allele. Leucism. It left nothing but white, and the faintest flashes of sunrise colors if the light hit the barbs the right way.

Locals swore the white peacock of Elida Park was a myth, no more real than a green flash at dusk. But today the bird had dragged his train across the grass and left behind these two perfect tail feathers.

Cluck’s grandfather lifted one off the dashboard. It let off a little blue. “What will you do with them?” he asked.

Cluck held the passenger door handle. Whenever the truck upshifted, its weight pulled on his fingers. The latch was so old that if Pépère sped, it might come unhooked, and the door might fly open. “Same thing I do with the blue ones, I guess.”

His grandfather set the feather down. “Your hard work will never be worn, then. You’ll never catch anyone in this family in white wings.”

Pépère parked the Morris Cowley behind the Craftsman house, their home for the weeks they’d be in Almendro. The plumbing squealed, the floorboards groaned back and forth, and on windy nights, the attic murmured to the second floor.

Cluck didn’t have to hear it though. He slept in the costume trailer, a blue and white 1961 Shasta Compact. It saved his cousins from arguing about who had to sleep in the same room with him, calling not-it like they were still in grade school lessons. To them, his left-handedness and the red in his feathers made him dangerous as a matagot. Worse luck than a black cat brought across a stream. When the family went to church on la veille de No?l or le Vendredi saint, they did not bring him. So Pépère stayed home with him, reading from Luke. “Let them have their Latin and their hosties,” he told Cluck.

Pépère pointed out the window. “Regarde.” He lifted his hand toward a flitter of movement. A red-winged blackbird, all dark feathers except for a brushstroke of deep coral on each shoulder, crossed the sky.

This was his way of telling Cluck not to mind the red in his own feathers.

Pépère set the parking break. “I left Eugenie’s wings for you. She tore the right one.”

“Again?” Cluck slammed the door.

“Malheureusement.”

“I’ll get to it.”

First Cluck got the tire pressure gauge from inside the costume trailer. If the Shasta would sit for the show’s run here, he had to make sure the tires weren’t sinking into the ground.

He’d just put the gauge to the front right tire when Dax grabbed him by the back of the neck.

“You just had to go start something, didn’t you?” Dax slammed him against the side of the trailer. He caught a handful of Cluck’s hair, pulling at the back of his scalp.

“What?” Cluck asked.

“Don’t ask me what.” Dax flicked Cluck’s temple. “This.”

Pépère had made Cluck forget the bruising, the soreness. He always made him forget, no matter who gave him the bruise. Locals. Dax. His mother, when he was small, catching him in the eye with her elbow and then telling him “Le petit imbécile, stay out of my way.”

“You went to start a fight,” Dax said.

The smell of Dax’s aftershave dried out Cluck’s mouth, his tongue a parched sponge.

“I didn’t start anything,” Cluck said.

“Then where’d you get this?” Dax pressed him into the aluminum siding so hard the ridges cut across his body.

“Some guys in town,” Cluck said.

“What guys?”

“I don’t know.”