Bald-headed Birds

An eight-foot stinking projectile comes hurtling out of low lying scrub. A flustered bald-headed buzzard looking like a scalped crow scampers out from behind the shrub, its beak glistening with the remnants of its last undigested meal before it dashes clumsily across the dirt and takes flight. It’s a striking spectacle for the young boys.

“Gross! Why’d you make it puke?”

“It’s not my fault you’re so ugly it got scared.”

The buzzard catches a thermal and drifts high above the boys’ heads, out and over the barren basin.

“They piss on themselves, did you know that?”

“Gross.”

The older of the two snickers, “But you do too.”

The smaller boy turns red, scarlet from a father’s furious belting and shouts, “I do not!”

His friend laughs and strides ahead. Where they’re going neither know, away from putrid bird breakfast sopping wet with bile, clawed into something unrecognizable by tobacco-yellow feet.

“Don’t worry, in a couple years you’ll grow out of it.”

“When did you stop?”

“About a year ago.”

Weily whuffs, giving in. It’s too hot out to be angry. They pass the way-marker, moving off the trail into denser brush that scratches their naked calves and freckled cheeks. They forge a blind path forward, fringed with dead grasses and pitted rocks to trip and fall and rip their knuckles where Ray wears his rattlesnake scar. It’s a twisted strip of raised skin, an undulating wave of pinkish flesh running from wrist to elbow. His mother thinks it’s ugly but Weily says it’s, “The coolest.” Weily doesn’t have scars of his own. His grandma won’t let him. Ray tells him that bottle cap cuts when he tries to make his own don’t count.

An hour now they’re walking through vast nothingness, the glimmering horizon line playing coy. There’s not much to them and the boys are drying out. Yesterday Ray’s older brother made a proposition around the dinner table when Weily was sleeping over.

“Catch me one of those bald-headed birds and I’ll give you a fifty to split.”

Ray’s brother slides winnings from a poker game over the varnished wood of the kitchen table, flattening the creases from riding his back pocket all day.

“I bet you won’t bring it home ‘fore it goes dark tomorrow.”

Ray rises to his brother’s challenge. “We’ll do it!”

“Is that right, Weiland? You’re gonna fetch me a feather?”

“More than that, we’ll get you the whole bird!”

When he speaks his brother’s breath is acrid, tobacco amusement. “Tomorrow will tell.”

The following morning the boys skip breakfast, feeling determined and shove a few strips of jerky into the far depths of their pockets. It lasts them all of twenty minutes walking through the desert. Weily complains of a stitch in his side and Ray steps on his toe to give him something else to think about. Last night’s castoffs, gristly lumps of raw membranous meat from his mother’s beef stew are brought along in a crinkled water bottle.

“What does he want a bird for?”

“Beats me, Weils.”

Ray’s brother comes home from Vegas every few months, his face wild and wide-eyed, a wad of bills in his breast pocket protruding like a tumor. Other times he comes almost limping through their front door and staggers to the table, slumps over and sighs. The sound is deep and damning. Ray’s parents holler and hate at him, hit the back of his head and refuse him dinner for a night or two.

He sobs, “I won’t do it again, I promise ma.”

Money makes his brother mad, mean and sloppy, leaving his dishes in the sink to grow mold, unconcerned and lazy like his shit doesn’t stain the toilet bowl. Ray hides in his room until the tension lifts. In the beginning he dares the boys to steal a packet of smokes or pilfer a carton of beer from the local bottle shop, trivial tasks to keep the young boys busy while he entertains women from the Club in their living room. With time the challenges escalate and with an armful of bounty in the crooks of their elbows the boys come home to see the windows open, curtains billowing, the room stinking of tobacco spit, sweat and perfume like funeral parlor funk.

“Two guesses what went down,” Ray tells Weily who breaks out in a blush.

The meagre amounts of money goes to different things, to fix the wheel on Ray’s bike where it bent and snapped under the unforgiving rear tire of his brothers’ pickup truck, buying tickets to watch a flurry of films in a single day, to buy handfuls of boiled candy and blister their tongues sucking on them for hours as they roam the busy downtown market.

Now they’re shuffling across the desert, their eyes squinting into the haze, scanning for any nearby buzzards to lure close enough so Ray can wrestle his arms around a feathery body and trap it. In the distance shapes shimmer and suggest and for a while it’s only a trick of the heat. In time they spot a trio of buzzards perched on the topmost spikes of a cactus surveying the sierra, their wings spread, chestnut fringes catching sun.

Ray asks his friend, “You gonna get ‘em?”

Weily gulps and it’s loud. Ray hears him.

“Too chicken?”

Weily ends up with several barbs spearing his skin, his attempts at getting to the birds unsuccessful. He cries until Ray pulls them out. Snot trails down his chin wetting Ray’s fingers.

Eventually he stops crying and Ray says, “C’mon, we’re goin’ this way.”

“I wanna go home.”

“We haven’t got a bird yet.”

“My face hurts.”

“Cry more, flush it out.”

By late afternoon the burn intensifies and Weily throws up on a stack of rocks.

“What if the cactus was poisonous?”

“You’ll be fine.”

Sniffles follow Ray over the ridge where the grass grows greener, thicker at the bottom of the range. Weily peers over Ray’s shoulder, standing on tip-toe.

He shrugs the shorter boy away, “Get off of me.”

Dirt coats their hands and settles into their zigzag lifelines, swathes their skin so they’re just another couple of plodding creatures in the desert. As the sun begins to wane they find the road. They’re tossing the plastic water bottle back and forth, walking parallel to the bitumen when Ray asks his friend if he knows what the buzzards like to eat.

“What’s that?”

“Dead things.”

Ray laughs when his friend dry heaves.

“They clean up the mess the rest of us make on the road.”

They sound off dead things, “Raccoons, snakes, lizards...”

Weily jogs wide circles around his friend, arms outstretched, cutting into the air, cooling his skin.

“We better find one soon.”

“Why do you want the money so bad?”

Weily shrugs and falls into step alongside Ray.

“We’re gonna use it to get outta here, right?”

A few years ago the boys make a pact under pinpoint stars, lazing around on the dirt in Weily’s backyard. They were going to grow up, get jobs and take a bus out of town for somewhere better, bigger, with more people than they could count on both hands, somewhere with sprawling, green countryside that didn’t need to be watered by man, a place Weily’s father won’t find him, won’t come home skunk drunk and shunt him about, wounding the furniture and his son’s skin.

Ray’s voice is soft, “Yeah.”

For a moment Ray regrets coming out here. A bloody crust has formed on his friend’s eyelid and it looks too much like the time Weily came stumbling down their gravel driveway clutching his bleeding head. His father hit him, split the back of his head open and Weily ran. Refuge was the space under Ray’s bed.

A sundry of buzzards line the crisscross branches of a tree like bad apples, black and swollen. Weily wonders if he can knock one down with his slingshot. Ray stops him.

“You’re trouble, y’know that? He didn’t say he wanted a dead one.”

Scaling the tree is harder than it looks, spotted bark rough under their hands. They work together through the tangle of lopsided limbs and before Ray can snag his hand on shining obsidian plumage, the gathering of vultures takes flight.

“Well damn!”

Weily’s neck is angled back to watch them go, his mouth open in awe. Four out of his twelve teeth were lost in fights and fizzy pop. Flashes of gray glimpse in and out as the birds extend their wings. In a moment of forgetfulness Weily mimics them and falls from the branch with a dull thud. Ray jumps down to check on his friend gasping for air.

“What’d you do that for, you idiot? Maybe I’ll just shave your head and stick some feathers on you and give you to my brother.”

He lifts Weily with weak arms and they begin walking again, following in the direction the birds flew. They find a roost in a counterfeit cave formed of fallen rocks. A handful of eggs dot the cavernous space like rot speckled teeth. As the boys venture further, Weily goes to grab an egg and Ray yanks on his shirt.

“What’re you doing?”

Before they can back out of the nook, an audible ‘crunch’ is heard and the boys look at their feet. Weily is very still.

“Oops.”

Stringy, gray-green muck clings to the bottom of his shoe and he kicks out, sending tendrils of slime into the dark heart of the cave.

“Weily!”

Exasperation grips Ray and he marches back out into the heat. Trekking through the prickly hum of the desert they hear a faint hissing and their eyes dart downward for snakes. Finding none, they approach a cluster of cactuses where the noise grows bolder, becoming a deafening rasp of sound. A cactus formed in the shape of an outreaching hand for God cradles a nest in the very top. The boys arrange a ladder of rocks they carefully climb before peering over the crest of thorns. Amongst threads of dead grass and twigs is a pair of baby vultures. Two bundles of marshmallow fluff with chocolate button faces in their center stare back at the boys, their wings outstretched and back, defensive, spitting up a storm.

“Oh man, look at ‘em! How are we gonna get them down?”

Ray purses chapped lips and eyes the spasming tufts.

“We can’t just take one of them, the other one will be all alone.”

After some frowning, Ray pulls at his friend’s shirt.

“We’ll carry them down in your top.”

“Why’s it got to be mine?” Weily’s hands fight to keep his shirt on. “That’s no fair!”

“Fair doesn’t matter.”

They’re struggling, rocking their precarious platform.

“Take it off!”

Meanwhile the vultures go quiet, their juvenile wings judder and bump the sides of their nest. The stalk of the cactus remains steadfast and razor-sharp beneath them. A thread in Weily’s shirt catches on a cactus spine and there’s an awful moment where the boys realize how easy it would be for Weily to fall into it, skewered, punctured like the bully does a balloon next to the birthday girl’s ear. At the last second Ray grabs for his friend, overbalancing and Weily slips, plummeting from their perch. He lands hard on his back sending a plume of dirt up from the bare ground.

Ray can’t move, staring unbelieving down at Weily like his eyes will open and he’ll jump up and start hollering and be okay. None of those things happen and eventually Ray clambers down the rocks and lifts Weily up by the collar of his t-shirt.

“Weily?”

He’s a limp doll in Ray’s arms but his belly rises and falls and Ray breathes a little easier. He props Weily up against the blackened trunk of a dying tree and goes back for the baby buzzards. Mindful of nips and nicks he fetches them from their nest to the ground one by one. They screech and tremble in his hands and Ray trudges across the plains in a homeward direction, carrying his unconscious friend by piggyback with the two chicks in a sling fashioned from his own shirt.

“This is the stupidest fifty we ever made, Weils.”

Ray hitches his friend’s legs higher on his hips. The sky darkens overhead, clouds roll in from the east and humid air clings to Ray’s pinkened cheeks. Rain is on the way.