Wildside

  “Did I see a second floor?” she asked.

  “Yeah. There’s three bedrooms up there, but it gets really hot. Uncle Max’s room is on this floor, at the back.”

  I couldn’t stand to wait anymore. The tension was building, had been building, for over a week.

  The evening had made it worse. “What are you doing this summer, Clara?” I asked. My voice was ragged and anxious. All four looked at me, surprised.

  Clara tilted her head to one side and looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Uh, I was going to work part-time at the stables, to pay for the feed and board on Impossible, and I was going to get at least one other job. We don’t all have scholarships.” She glanced sideways at Marie as she said this.

  Marie shrugged. “Scholarship isn’t going to help that much. I’ve got a job interview with Dillard’s the week after graduation.”

  “Rick?” Some of the tension was still there, and I took a deep breath. Then, more calmly, I continued, “What about you? This summer, I mean.”

  The corners of his mouth tightened. “Dad wants me to spend it in Dallas working for his company. I don’t want to, but if I don’t find a job here that pays well enough, I’ll have to.” More reluctantly he said, “Child support payments stopped last February, when I turned eighteen. Even with your coaching in calculus, Charlie, I didn’t qualify for any of the scholarships I applied for.”

  I turned to Joey. Before I asked the question he said, “I’m going to join the army.”

  “What?” Marie was as surprised as any of us. “What do you mean?”

  “You know. Go down to the recruiting office at Northgate, walk in, sign up. That’s what. Do you think I’m going to get to college any other way with my grades? I’ve got four sisters and a little brother; Dad was laid off six months ago, so all we’ve got is the money from Mom’s secretarial work. Lisa is talking about dropping out of A&M so she can get another job. No way I’m going to make it on my own.” He sipped from the last of his water, his eyes on the floor. “To be honest, I’m not sure I want to go to college. Sure didn’t do Dad any good.”

  Marie shrugged helplessly and put her arm around Joey’s waist. He kept his eyes down, but leaned into her.

  The silence was like a still pond and I dropped my pebble with great care. “Payback time,” I said.

  Joey looked up. “Huh?”

  “You guys owe me for tonight, right? For driving you around.”

  Marie said, “Sure.” Joey nodded, his eyes narrowing, wondering what the cost would be. Rick just said, “For other things, too.” Clara’s reaction was more like Joey’s.

  “Here’s the deal. I’ve got a secret. It’s not illegal. It’s not immoral. Some might say it’s not even possible. But it’s a secret and I want it kept that way. You promise not to tell anyone what I’m about to show you. Not your friends, your brothers, your sisters, your parents, your priest.” I looked at Joey when I said priest. “That’s the payment I want. To give me your word and keep it.”

  “I haven’t been to confession in four years, Charlie. And if it’s not immoral, why should it matter?”

  “Just promise.”

  Marie said, “Okay, Charlie.” She looked a little hurt. She was my best friend, and she didn’t know what I was talking about. Well, I didn’t tell her everything since she started going out with Joey.

  Joey looked relieved. The cost, it seemed, was acceptable to him. “Sure, Charlie. It’s a deal”

  Rick said, “I promise.”

  Clara licked her lips. “Well, if what you said about it not being illegal or immoral is true, then I promise as well. If it turns out that you’re lying about that, then all deals are off.”

  I gritted my teeth together. “Of course.”

  There was a set of barrister bookshelves next to the door. I lifted the glass door on one shelf and pulled a book from it. The place was marked with a reddish brown feather. “Look at this.” I put the book down on the coffee table, open, facing the couch. Marie and Joey came over and looked down. Clara and Rick leaned forward.

  Joey said, “Mourning doves, aren’t they?” Joey and his father hunted.

  Clara read from the caption. “Ectopistes migratorius. Male and Female Passenger Pigeon, see Pigeons—Columbidae, order Columbiformes.”

  Marie said, “Passenger pigeons? They’re extinct. Wiped out by hunting in the late 1800s, right?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Though technically, the last one died in captivity in 1914. Her name was Martha. Bring the book. Follow me.”

  I led them back outside, to the barn. It was set partially back into the hill. The first story was mortared fieldstone with wood siding on the hayloft above. I unlocked the padlock and swung open one side of the large double door, found the light switch, and pulled the door shut behind us.

  The barn was square, about thirty feet by thirty feet, with a hard dirt floor. There were five stalls on the right-hand side and an ancient gasoline tractor parked on the left along with various attachments: a plow, a disker, a small utility trailer, and an old rotary hay mower. At the back left-hand corner, a worktable stood with all of Uncle Max’s tools hung in neat rows on the wall above. A table saw beside the bench stood under a canvas tarp.

  I glanced at the back of the barn, where several hay bales were stacked nearly to the ceiling and felt a sharp stab of grief. I looked away quickly and led the guys to the back corner stall. The pigeons started cooing when I opened the door.

  There were twenty cages, handmade of chicken wire with wood framing. They were stacked five by four, one bird per cage.

  Marie and Rick looked at the book, then back at the cages. Then back at the book again. Clara grabbed the book from them and flipped to the textual description. She read, “Grayish blue above, reddish fawn below, resembling Old World turtledoves, but larger, thirty-two to forty-three centimeters in length, with a longer pointed tail and a greater wingspread. Males have a pinkish body and a blue-gray head.”

  Halfway through the description, Joey backed out of the stall and began looking around. He climbed up the ladder to the loft, but all he found was hay. By the time he lifted the tarp on the table saw and looked beneath it, the other three had emerged from the pigeon stall.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Marie.

  Joey was frowning, his lips pursed. “A time machine,” he said.

  All four of them looked at me. They seemed a little afraid.

  “Wait a minute,” said Rick. “These don’t have to be passenger pigeons. Didn’t the description say they were similar to turtledoves in coloration?”

  “These are much bigger,” said Marie.

  “Back breeding. Selecting for size. Breeding for larger and larger turtledoves. Is that what was done, Charlie?”

  “No.”

  Marie took a stab at it. “Then what about cloning? Didn’t you say that the last passenger pigeon died in 1914? They had refrigeration, then. Did they freeze some tissue and did somebody clone these, using doves or pigeons as host mothers?”

  I shook my head.

  Finally Joey just asked, “What are they, Charlie? What are those birds in the corner?”

  “They’re passenger pigeons.”

  He digested that. They all did. Finally he said, “So, where’s the time machine?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  Clara almost shouted. “Then how did you get them?”

  I folded my arms. “I’m not going to tell you. Not yet, anyway.”

  Rick smiled, then, and the others looked at him, puzzled. “So, what are you going to tell us, Charlie?” I could see that some of the possibilities were occurring to him.

  “How’d you like enough money for college, without working for your dad in Dallas this summer? All of you. How’d you like enough money for college at any school in the country? Full board and tuition without any jobs on the side?” I paused, a bubble of hysterical laughter breaking out. “Hell. If it works out, enough money for the rest of your lives.”

/>   CHAPTER TWO

  “IT’S LOADED SO BE CAREFUL.”

  Graduation was an ordeal. Marie’s valedictory speech was okay—I’d helped her with it—but the last thing I wanted to do was listen to the Reverend Bates and the president of the school board as they tried to simultaneously prepare us for the future and immerse us in our past “happy days” at Bryan High.

  It was so far from my experience that I was beginning to know how Joey felt after the prom.

  Luckily I brought a book.

  Dad surprised me by swapping shifts with another pilot so he could be there. That morning, for graduation, my parents gave me a leather flight bag, a Blackhawk headset with liquid cushion pads on the earphones, and an AVS flight computer.

  I’d been using Dad’s headset and flight computer unless he was Pilot-In-Command, then I wore a cheap crew headset that hurt the ears after twenty minutes.

  There was mingling, after, and my hand was shaken by kids who never even noticed me while we were in school. Mom stood and talked with Mr. and Mrs. Prentice and Mr. Nguyen, watching everything with wide eyes. At least she left the notepad at home…this time. I saw Dad hang up the pay phone in the hall and come back into the auditorium.

  Joey was tugging at his collar and wanting to go, but his parents were having a great time. “I’d just as soon never see this place again,” he told me just before Dad came up.

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “Congratulations, Joey,” said Dad, shaking Joey’s hand. “What are your plans?”

  “Thanks, Captain Newell. For the summer, I’m going to work in, uh, wildlife management.” He shot a look at me.

  I’ll kill you, I mouthed.

  Dad nodded amiably, then turned to me. “I took the standby spot to get free for this and my number just came up. A pilot failed his physical and I have to replace him on the DFW-KC-O’Hare run tonight. You want to fly me up?” He spread his hands. “Only if you want to. If you’ve got plans or a party or something, I can take the commuter.”

  I was surprised. I had over 360 hours, but I didn’t think Dad trusted my flying. In fact, when I’d gotten my Instrument Flight Rules ticket two months before, he’d acted more surprised than pleased.

  “What’s the weather?” I asked cautiously.

  “Marginal VFR here—ceiling at fourteen hundred. It’s socked in at Dallas—nine-hundred-foot ceiling. No cells.” No thunderstorms, he meant. “Supposed to get better, not worse.”

  “Okay.” I paused. “Uh, we should get going. The Mooney’s empty.”

  “You didn’t fill it last time?” Irritation.

  “She was still hot. You can get more in her if you fill her cold.”

  He shrugged. “True, but you could’ve waited for her to cool down.”

  I looked down. You could get water condensation in the tanks if you left it empty. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  Mom drove us home and we changed and Dad packed an overnight. I drove us in my truck, a used and battered Mazda, to Easterwood and left it. I’d be coming back. Dad filed an IFR flight plan into DFW while I got the Mooney fueled and did the preflight. Then Dad came over to the plane and did it all over again.

  The flight was tense. I fumbled my response to the Fort Worth Traffic Control Center and received Dad’s standard lecture on keeping radio communications short and to the point, there’s a lot of people up in the air gotta use the same frequency, don’t you know? Then I had thirteen-knot crosswind component on the landing and bounced the plane, something I haven’t done in months, not even for the IFR examiner who’d made me pretty nervous.

  I offered to pick Dad up when he was done with the next series of flights but he said, “No. That’s okay. I’ll take the commuter down.”

  On the way back everything went right. I handled my clearance, ground control, tower, and departure communications with brevity and clarity, my radio navigation brought me right into the landing pattern for Easterwood, and the landing was smooth as silk, one faint “chirp” from the tires as they spun up to speed.

  Of course Dad wasn’t there to see it.

  I put the plane in the hangar, cleaned the bugs off, and went home.

  The Monday after graduation, Joey, Rick, and I drove down to Houston in my pickup and shipped four male passenger pigeons to four different addresses. We used a freight company that routinely handled live animals. I paid cash for the freight and I lied about my name, address, and phone number.

  One week later, we drove back to Houston, bought twenty dollars in quarters from a bank, and made a few calls. The first phone booth we used was at the Galleria, the huge mall on the west loop. Rick stayed with the truck; Joey and I took the quarters in.

  It was a weekday morning, the mall just open. On the ice rink on the bottom level, a girl was doing axels while her instructor counted aloud. We found a phone in a quiet alcove and I dialed the first number, then put in four dollars as directed by the computerized voice.

  The phone rang twice and was answered, “National Zoo.”

  “Dr. David Elsner, please.”

  “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “The Lazarus Company.”

  She put me on hold and then a man’s voice said, “This is David Elsner.” He sounded wary.

  “Did the pigeon arrive all right?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m the one who sent you the pigeon. The Passenger pigeon. You know, Ectopistes migratorius?”

  “All right. Yes, the pigeon seems to be fine.” His voice lowered and became very intense. “Where did you get it?”

  “Well—that’s my secret. I’m pleased that he arrived okay.” I paused. “Pity that they’re extinct—they’re such pretty birds.”

  His voice got louder. “Where did you get it? Don’t you know it’s illegal to traffic in endangered species?”

  I winced and gritted my teeth. “Passenger pigeons are not on the endangered species list, Dr. Elsner. I’m not doing anything illegal.”

  “Well, they will be if they survive as a species! Are there any others?”

  “I was just coming to that.”

  “Ah.”

  “I have four females for sale.”

  “We’ll take th—uh, how much?”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars each.”

  “What! A hundred thousand dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s outrageous!”

  I paused. Was it? I’d thought about it a lot, but I didn’t have anything to compare it to. In fact, I thought it was cheap, considering. “You’re absolutely right, Dr. Elsner. It’s outrageous. You should go to another supplier.”

  “What? What other supplier?”

  The computer voice asked for more money. I shoved quarters in.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Elsner. I didn’t quite hear that.”

  “What other supplier?”

  “Of extinct species? Well, there’s uh…gee, I don’t know of any other suppliers.”

  His voice was grim. “I see. You know, if you’re capturing these in the wild, you are endangering the species. The population has to be tiny.”

  “I’m pleased to tell you that this is not the case.”

  “What’s not the case? That you aren’t taking them from the wild? Or that the population isn’t tiny?”

  He was digging as hard as he could.

  “Sorry. I take it you’re not interested in purchasing the birds?”

  “Uh—I have to talk to the acquisition board. Can you give me two weeks?”

  “There are other zoos. I’ll give you until the day after tomorrow. I’ll call you at the same time.

  Good-bye.”

  “No, wait a—

  I hung up.

  We moved to a different pay phone on Westheimer, just inside a supermarket, and called the Nature Conservancy. The conversation was similar to the first one, a mix of desperation and hostility. “We buy land—habitats—not animals!”

  “So, you’re not interested?”

/>   “I didn’t say that.”

  I gave them the same two days.

  From a phone on West Gray I called the San Diego Zoo. They definitely wanted the females and they had authorization to proceed. I looked around to make sure the guys were out of earshot. “Here’s our bank account. Electronically transfer the hundred thousand within the next two days and we’ll ship the birds to you.”

  “What? No contract? No paperwork? How do we know you have them?”

  “I already delivered my evidence of good faith. Remember? It eats pigeon feed and shits.”

  “How about half before delivery, half after?”

  “There are other zoos.”

  They agreed that there were other zoos. They also agreed to my terms.

  The next phone was on the Northwest Freeway, on our way back out of town.

  “Sierra Club.”

  “I’d like to speak with Mr. Saunderson.”

  “May I have your name?”

  “The Lazarus Company.”

  “Uh, your name please?”

  “John Smith.”

  “One moment please.”

  I listened to classical music as she put me on hold. My watch read 3:02. I started the stopwatch function. At forty-five seconds I hung up.

  “Another phone,” I said. “Somewhere else.”

  We drove away from the freeway and stopped at a 7-Eleven.

  “Sierra Club.”

  “This is John Smith of the Lazarus Company, again. Your phone system hung up on me. I need to talk to Mr. Saunderson.” I started the stopwatch again. The hold music stretched on and on. I hung up.

  Rick looked at me, his eyebrows raised. Joey looked annoyed. “How are we going to sell them the pigeons if you keep hanging up on them?”

  “I could be wrong, but I think they’re trying to trace the call.”

  Rick said, “On what grounds? Don’t they have to get the police involved to do that? We didn’t do anything illegal.” He stood beside me at the phone. Joey was leaning against the hood of my truck.