Rise: A Collection Inspired by Lift
By Rebecca K. O’Connor
Copyright 2011 by Rebecca K. O’Connor
Cover Art Copyright 2011 by Raymond Swanland
Smashwords Edition
ISBN 978-1-4580-0760-5
Cover design by Raymond Swanland
“Turning Tide” was previously published in divide Issue 5, Spring 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the copyright owner except for brief quotations used in critical articles or review
Table of Contents
When I was writing Lift much of the work happened outside of writing the actual manuscript. When my imagery seemed flat, I wrote poetry. When it seemed I couldn’t get out of my skin enough to find my actual feelings and motivations, I wrote fiction. I took photos to try to refocus. I spent hours driving or on the treadmill or took a long shower when I couldn’t get past a blank page. If that didn’t work I treated my blog as a confessional. And of course on good days and bad I found inspiration in the field with my hawks.
This process left me with a few essays, short stories and poems that added to the narrative of Lift, but didn’t fit. Or perhaps, they could have fit, but asked questions I wasn’t ready to answer. My favorite memoirists write to explain the world to themselves, not to explain themselves to the world. All the same, what you discover about the world always includes some uncomfortable truths about yourself. I hope these pieces make you ask questions about yourself and the world as well.
You may notice that everything is written in first person. Perhaps that is the result of spending so much time thinking in the form of essays and memoir. Even when pieces are not about me, I am happier writing directly from the protagonist’s head. I like it there. It’s much more uncomfortable putting yourself in someone else’s head than in their shoes. I write best when I’m squirming.
I’ve been urged to place “A Good Falconer Lets Go”, a fictional short story, first because it introduces some of the basic ideas of falconry as the main character discovers them and every piece in this collection deals with an aspect of falconry. The collection ends with an excerpt from the novel I’m currently working on. Oddly, it is a novel I thought I was writing to escape all of the questions and truths I wasn’t ready to address after writing Lift. What I found is that I am still asking and digging deeper. I’ve just added the question, “What if?”
I hope you will not only read my work, but let me know what you think. If you are intrigued about falconry or wondering what I else you might read, ask me. Writing is a lonely business. I love to hear from readers. You can find me at www.rebeccakoconnor.com.
Fly High!
Rebecca K. O’Connor
June 2011
1. Life is simple, as simple as a glorious sunrise and a good hunt.
2. Honesty is the foundation of every great relationship.
3. Trust is delicate and requires constant care.
4. The living creatures we love the most do not “belong” to us.
5. The best meals are fought for and toasted.
6. Grace, style and precision are a combination often dismissed as luck. If you work hard, you will always be “lucky.”
7. Magic comes in moments of desperation. So don’t give up.
8. Anything is possible. So keep your eyes open.
9. Sometimes life requires having a little faith in something that is too high above you to see.
10. The things you discover while looking into the skies are worth the occasional stumbling. So keep looking up
This is a short story about a boy, nearly a man, and his hawk. It’s not about me or anyone I know, but a composite of the people I met and the terrain that I hunted on while I lived in Florida, training birds for Disney’s Animal Kingdom. This story ties together the falconry I left in the California hills to the falconry I found hunting in the swamps. And maybe it also echoes my own leap of faith as it tries to illuminate the way the first year of falconry can begin to mold the falconer into something new.
~~
In the dark he dreams of a fire that laps away all the Florida moisture, cracking the air with its bellows, swallowing even the night. He tells me this when I bring him cold cans of Pepsi and Hershey bars from my freezer. We sit outside his trailer while he cools his hands on the gentle bend of the aluminum can. Then he says that fire is why he moved from California to Florida, to the edge of the swamp water. He won’t talk about his past. Whenever he seems about to, the words catch and he sighs and he only says that the nightmares get worse in the summer. Then he calms himself by reminding me that in Florida it rains every afternoon and that’s why there’s plenty of swamp water and not many fires. I’ve never understood this talk of fire and swamp, but we always have to get past it to talk about the birds.
“Make in slow,” Rube tells me today, “and be more patient. Your hawk has to believe you won’t steal the rabbit in her feet. She has to be willing to lower her head and look away from your eyes before your slip your hand underneath her. Treat her like a lady.”
“I went slow. I always go slow.” I look at the hands clutching the Pepsi and search for puncture wounds and bruises. Rube’s hands are dirty and gnarled, but whole and healthy. This irritates me, because his red-tailed hawk looks like a monster perched next to mine and my right hand aches. My bird, Terra, had looked me right in the eyes when she reached out and footed my ungloved hand. She let go of the rabbit she had caught with one foot, grabbing me and squeezing until her talons bit bone. She didn’t let go until the pain turned to water in my eyes, dripping from my face onto her hackled neck.
Rube drinks half his can without a breath and then chuckles softly, “She got you good, didn’t she, boy?” He shakes his head at me. “You gotta go slow with a lady.” He leans over and peeks at my hand. “She got you good for a hawk with such small feet. Never catch a jackrabbit with those feet.”
I can only sigh and open a can of Pepsi for myself. This is another conversation we have often, the jackrabbit talk. I’ve never seen one. They’re some kind of desert hare, some overgrown bunny. To hear old Rube talk, they’re as big as dogs. Terra doesn’t need to catch one. My bird catches swamp bunnies just fine.
“Try giving her pieces of meat from the glove. You know, tidbits, while she’s on the rabbit. If she’s getting food from you, she has no reason to think you’ll take her rabbit.”
I nod, thinking I should have come up with that idea on my own. He knows things like that, he has to. Most of his meals come from his hawk. “How’s the chocolate?” I ask.
“Could you bring some salt next time? I’m almost out.”
“Sure.” Salt I can afford. Salt and chocolate. I steal the pop from Ma, but she hasn’t noticed yet, which is good. She hates Rube. Never met him, but hates him. She says she can smell him on me when I come home. She says I smell like rotting oranges. It’s not Rube that smells like that, though. It’s just the groves where his trailer sits. He’s about the cleanest person I’ve ever met, but I couldn’t say how he manages it. It seems just plain rude to ask him how he gets so clean and I hate to upset him.
The last time I pissed him off, he wouldn’t talk to me for two weeks. He even took a shot at me with his pellet gun. Thankfully, his aim is bad and he missed. He was screaming that if I was gonna shoot him, he would shoot me right back. I wasn’t using a gun though. I had been shooting video with the Sony I got by saving two years of handiwork money and buying it on eBay. Rube had told me never to video him, not even working his hawk, but I needed the footage for my movie submission. I needed it to get into film school, but Rube didn’t care. The rule was no photos and no new-fangled video either. I wondered if it was some crazy religion, if living off the land had made him fear for his soul being captured behind glass or transposed in a negative. The pellet gun made it clear that Rube’s fear of being photographed was something more and I was curious, but had bigger worries.
I would have written Rube off, never spoken to him again, but Terra had been loose for a week and I didn’t know how to make a good enough trap to catch her back. I was sick with worry. It was my fault because I had tied the knot that held her to her perch wrong. She had escaped with all her equipment; jesses, swivel and leash dangling from her legs, swinging against tree branches, trying to tangle her up and hang her upside-down. A hawk can’t take hanging upside-down long. It kills them. I figured I deserved a pellet in the leg for losing her in the first place.
After he missed two shots at my knees, I guess Rube saw the look on my face. He stopped firing and spoke to me, his voice slurring a little. When he gathered that we were talking about the life or death of a hawk he pulled it together. He set his gun down and asked me if he hadn’t taught me how to tie a hawk down. He had, of course. I knew better. I had rarely done worse.
“We’ll get her back.” Rube said more to himself than me.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, knowing he understood what I meant, that I wouldn’t cross the line again. All the same I had to ask, “Someone looking for you, Rube?”
“Boy, everyone is looking for me,” he said and began to gather baling wire and hardware cloth.
Rube made me a dome-shaped trap with nooses all over the top of it. Then he stuck a mouse inside. We found Terra roosted in a tree and dropped the trap underneath it. Rube spit on the mouse to keep her busy cleaning her face. The vain movements of the mouse kept the hawk interested and even though she wasn’t hungry, she finally came down to the trap and tangled her toes in the filament, caught.
I swore I would never lose Terra again, but Rube watched me tie a falconer’s knot over and over. It’s a simple quick release knot, but it has to be tied with one hand. You are meant to tie it with your bird on the glove and your right hand free to wrap the knot around a perch. It took two hours before Rube was satisfied that I could tie a one-handed knot that couldn’t be undone by a hawk. He didn’t have to make it clear that a falconer’s knot was life or death. I got it. That night I twisted my sheets between my fingers while I slept and my right hand ached so bad the next day that I could barely hold my toothbrush.
The hawks are everything to Rube. I got that the first time I met him, thinking I was going to make a documentary on the crazy orange grove vagrant. I figured he had a story, but didn’t know he had a hawk. When I met Sasha, his red-tail, I wanted to know more than what I could capture on film. So I stopped trying and let him talk. I kept coming back to listen too, bringing him gifts like a pale foreigner appeasing a native. Before I knew it, I was his apprentice, a falconer myself and forgot to ask the other questions I wanted to know, spellbound instead by the religion of the hawk. I still don’t know how Rube survives, how he manages the basics of living from day to day. I know how to straighten a bent tail feather, how to sharpen a dull talon, but I don’t know how Rube keeps clean. Like I said, it’s too rude to ask. An apprentice doesn’t ask their master how they bathe.
I imagine Rube gets soap somewhere. Maybe he makes it from ashes and lye. He could take showers on the nights they turn on the giant sprinklers in the grove. He has said that in California the grove water comes from cement pipes and makes little rivers through the dirt trenches. He used to put pots beneath the pipes to catch the fresh water. So maybe he stands in the sprinklers at nights and scrubs. I doubt he bathes in the pond beside the orange trees, what with the gators and all. I saw a water moccasin in there once. I wouldn’t stick my little finger in that water.
He has some money, I know. Somehow he affords the roo skin and the bells. I can’t afford kangaroo, but it’s the best material for hawk equipment, anklets and soft, strong straps. Rube makes me stuff for Terra, braided leashes and the straps he calls jesses. I guess that makes us square in trade. I don’t need to ask questions. I’ll bring him salt next time. I’d bring him soap too, but I don’t want to get shot at.
When I get home my Ma wrinkles her nose at me. “Boy, someday that old man is gonna get run out of those groves. He’s got no business setting up camp there. Maybe then you’ll give up that smelly old bird and concentrate on graduating.”
“You know I’m gonna graduate, Ma.” She shrugs and I know what she’s really saying. She’s saying that I could make something of myself if I would give up hunting with the hawk and dreaming of making movies.
“I want you to go to a university when you finish at the community school. You should concentrate on your grades. Only kid in this family with brains enough.”
“I’m the only kid in this family, Ma.”
“Don’t smart off at me. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I say, because I do.
She throws up her hands at the tone of my voice. “You could be a doctor or a lawyer.” We’re never going to agree on this.
“I gotta wash up.” I leave her pacing in the kitchen and muttering about how she could be eating sirloin instead of Hamburger Helper. I wish we were eating sirloin too and if Dad hadn’t died when I was little maybe we would be, but I doubt it. Dad would have spent the money on a bottle of Beam and eaten the Hamburger Helper. Even now the smell of whiskey makes me think of my dad’s slow smile. No luxury in this world could have kept my father from drinking himself to death and sometimes I listen to Ma and understand why. Then I remind myself that she’s my mother.
I wish I could explain to Ma that the hawk has taught me the best things in life are the things you fight for yourself and win. The best meals are freshly caught meat, better than sirloin, better than some dim-witted steer born to be eaten, but never to live. I know this for certain when I watch my hawk eat. She dips her beak into the cavity I’ve opened for her to eat the best parts, the richest bits. It isn’t gruesome and the way her eyes get heavy and narrow with the taste, I imagine it being salty, sweet and rich. I’m tempted to slip a finger in my mouth and see. Someday I will. Someday I’ll know what a wild meal tastes like, how it feels to be a hawk stretching against a humid sky. For now though what I have is a tiny bedroom across from my mother’s and the tang of cheese powder mixed in the grease of cheap ground beef. Some people have less, I know.
After dinner I hear another voice downstairs, mingling with Ma’s into an annoying jangle of laughter. I can tell it’s Annemarie and wonder what the two are conspiring about. Undoubtedly it has something to do with me. I feel my jaw tightening because I don’t want talk to my girlfriend right now. I’m trying to edit my documentary and Final Cut Pro has crashed three times. My software and my Mac are out of date and slow, but I’ve got to make what I have work. The deadline for the Florida Arts Nature Documentary contest is in two weeks and I’m not even close to done. I don’t have time for Annemarie right now.
“Hey, baby got a minute?” Annemarie purrs like she’s got something in mind.
“Not really,” I answer without looking up. I can tell from the silence that she’s pouting and I don’t really want to be mean to her. “This is really important, Hon. I’m sorry.” I shouldn’t have softened my words. She makes them into an invitation.
Annemarie pulls my chair away from the desk and eases into my lap, straddling me. She’s such a tiny thing, five feet to my six and change. I can barely feel her weight in my lap, but she makes sure I can see the curves peeking out of her low cut top. “Really important?,” she teases, pulling back her shoulders and lifting her chin. I can still see the crown of her head though, the dark roots starting to show.
“Cut it out, A.M., this is serious, okay?” I try to look around her at the screen and she pouts again, making sure I can see her bottom lip sticking out.
“You make it serious. There’s nothing in Los Angeles.” She shrugs when she says this, meaning that Los Angeles doesn’t have her and I think she’s right. There is nothing in Los Angeles and that’s exactly what I need; no pressures, no demands. In LA everyone is making movies and flying hawks.
“Movies get made in L.A., Annemarie, not in Polk County, Florida.”
“We can make our own movies,” she hums as she tickles the sensitive skin below my ear with her acrylic nails. “Get the camera and we can make a movie right now.”
“I said knock it off,” I say, sounding angrier than I think I am. I grab her wrist with one hand and push her off my lap with the other. Filmmaking and porn are not the same thing, but I’m not going waste time explaining that to her.
“What the hell is the matter with you, Chris?” She heads for the door like she’s going to tell on me and she probably is. So I open the program back up and put on my headphones. There isn’t a girl within a 100 miles of here as smoking hot as Annemarie, but she doesn’t make me feel lucky. She makes me feel tired.
It’s near midnight when Ma walks by my room to go to bed. I hear her grumble, “If you don’t get your shit together that girl is never gonna marry you.” She doesn’t pause for a response or I might have said, “Good.” Although, as I shut down the computer, calling it a night myself, I can’t help but imagine Annemarie’s pale skin as she sits on top of me, balancing with her palms on her heels, her back arching as she moans.
***
I fly Terra every day after my classes at Polk County Community College and come home feeling a little less tense. There’s a lot to learn about this hunting with a hawk business though and I try to get by to see Rube about once a week.
Rube lives on the other side of town and my old VW bus isn’t real dependable. There’s plenty of room in the back for a hawk though and it serves as my hawk house even during the day. Ma won’t let me build a place to put Terra so the bus works just fine. Annemarie, of course won’t ride in it, but I can’t say I blame her. I hose out the back when I get a chance, but there’s always a smell of ammonia and decay. It’s not the smell death so much as it is nature distilled, the rank smell of living. Not that this interpretation would make much difference to Annemarie.
When I drive over to see Rube today I can tell he’s in a mood. He’s pacing and distracted. He doesn’t seem to notice me at first and then looks puzzled for a moment when he does. Then his eyes clear and sparkle a bit.
“How’s
your hand, boy? You learn how to reach beneath a lady yet?”
I
want to tell him there are no ladies around here to practice on, but
the shine of humor has already left his eyes. “My hand’s good,”
I say instead. “She hasn’t grabbed me all week. I can switch out
her field jesses no problem now. I think she trusts me.”
Rube doesn’t respond. He’s pacing again and doesn’t answer me when I ask him if he’s okay. I brought him chocolate and Pepsi along with the salt I promised, but he hasn’t touched anything.
“Hasn’t rained much, has it?” He asks and I shake my head that it hasn’t. “Gonna be fires, you think?”
“Nah. Rube, we don’t get much fire in Florida,” I answer even though he knows this himself.
“In California in the summer, the brush fires get so thick, the smoke crosses the sun and makes the afternoon orange.”
“You’ve said,” I say, hoping to stop him mid-thought, but knowing he’s going into a rant I won’t be able to stop.
“So much fire, the ash falls from the sky and coats everything in fine dust. At night before you take a shower, you smell like fire, your clothes and your hair…”
“Who died in the fire, Rube?” I ask even though I figure he won’t answer. I mean, the man won’t even tell me his last name.
“Everyone died in the fire,” he says and surprises me, surprises himself, I think. His eyes clear for a moment. “Everything.”
“No fires here,” I say carefully. He nods, but doesn’t speak another word. He does that sometimes. All you can do is leave.
I stay out until dark, just driving around and thinking. I should be working on the film or cleaning my VW, but instead I burn through gas I can’t afford and can’t even say what I’m thinking about exactly. When I get home Ma is sitting at the kitchen table, an open box of wine and a stack of photo albums in front of her. This, I think, is why I don’t want to make feature films. This is a mediocre scene from a bad movie and when you think about it, that’s all life is. A bunch of bad scenes loosely strung together. That’s why I shoot documentaries, why I want to do nature films. Humanity by definition is cliché. Nature is always new.
“Thinking about Dad?” I ask Ma, already knowing the answer and she just nods so I sit down next to her. “He was sick. Alcoholism is a disease. No one could save him.” Ma looks at her box of wine and taps her glass. “The way we drink is different, you know that,” I say in response.
“You’re not old enough to drink,” Ma says faking a smile.
“I will be next week.”
“We should have a party,” she says as she refills her wine, the box at the edge of the table and her glass between her knees.
“Only if you bring a date.”
“I’ve got you,” she says, patting my cheek and sipping from her glass. Maybe it’s just the florescent lights, but her cheekbones shine sallow, making her look ill and the creases around her eyes make her look so old. I want to tell her that she has to let me go at some point, but instead I reach out and squeeze her hand.
“I’m tired. I think I’ll go to bed.”
“Sure you don’t want a glass of wine,” she offers.
“No thanks. That box crap will give you the runs.” I say, kissing her cheek. She smacks me on the shoulder and laughs.
“That Annemarie would make nice daughter-in-law and you’re not gonna find a prettier one.”
“Maybe someday, Ma.”
Upstairs there’s something I want to do before I go to bed and it has nothing to do with Annemarie. I proxy on to the school computer and look up the Los Angeles Times archives. I know Rube has been in Florida for at least three years and I figure his real name is Ruben. I search words like “Ruben,” “fire,” “died” and “tragic”, but it still takes me three hours to find what I’m looking for in the old newspapers. All I need to know is in the headline and it pretty much says what I already knew. “Family Dies in Wildfire - Husband and Father Ruben Landers Missing.”
“So are you gonna keep her through the moult?” Rube asks me.
“I thought I would fly her through the moult.” I’ve been out every day since I read his headline and there’s only been a fifty-fifty chance that I can get him to talk about the birds. I think I understand why we only talk about the birds.
The winter is ending and the falconry season is about to end as well. It’s getting to the time when we stop flying the birds, instead feeding them as much as they can eat while they drop old feathers and grow new ones, a brand new set of fragile armor for a new season.
“Don’t fly her through the moult, son. She’s worked hard this season. What’s her head count?”
“Sixty.” I know I’m smiling because Rube can’t resist a wink.
“Damn good count. Damn good. She deserves a rest. First feather she drops, you make her fat and sassy. Give her a nice cool place to rest. Hunting is miserable in the summer anyway.”
“You won’t be putting your bird up, though.” I know this is the wrong thing to say, but it’s too late to swallow back the words.
“Can’t.”
He pulls off the tab to his can and examines it. “You crop her up
at least once a week, don’t you? That’s really important. Once in
a while you have to let them gorge. Their bodies are built for
that.”
“I do, Rube. I never hunt on Fridays. I let her have
all she can eat on Thursday.”
“Good. I even crop up Sasha once a week.”
“What do you eat that next day?”
“Chocolate and soda.” He grins. Then his face falls. “No rain.”
“Driest winter on record,” I reply, worried for him. “Well, I’m gonna be late for my own party.”
“Happy Birthday,” he says. “You know, I’d let her go if I were you.”
“What?” I ask thinking he must be talking about Annemarie, but not sure why he would be. “Let who go?”
“The hawk,” he says as if I’m stupid. “You’re young and I know you love her, but you can have another. You can have a lot of other hawks.”
“I spent so much time training her…” I trail off because I’m not sure who’s talking, a master falconer or a broken man.
“A good falconer lets things go.” His eyes are burning beneath the scruffy grey brows when he finishes this thought, daring me to disagree. I look at Sasha, a bird I know he’s had for years and then back at him puzzled. “Never said I was a good falconer,” he adds.
I open my mouth, but don’t know what to say. There’s no reason to argue with a crazy man. No reason at all.
“Get to your party before all the good booze is gone.”
“Oh, it won’t be gone. I could bring you some-- ” Rube cuts me off with a wave of his hand and disappears into his rusty Airstream.
When I get home there isn’t even time to shower. Not even six yet and everyone is already there drinking and eating as if the party was for them. That’s just the way it is, though and it’s nothing to be upset about. Ma and I are all the family we have, but Annemarie has got a lot of relatives. It looks like they’re all at my house too, along with a handful of friends our age.
There’s catfish, okra and some alligator, I bet, sizzling in the fryer. I grab a handful of peanut M&Ms from the big bowl on the kitchen table and a beer from a big plastic tub, shaking off the ice. I don’t have to look to know there’s a big slab of red velvet cake in the fridge that Ma made especially for me. Catfish and alligator and I can’t get her to cook up some of my rabbit, go figure. All the same, this is my kind of party.
“Hey, Baby,” Annemarie squeals, leaping up to wrap her arms around my neck and I catch her legs around my waist, trying to keep my beer upright. “Happy Birthday.”
“Hold on tight for a sec,” I say and down my beer with her legs and arms cinched around me. Dropping the bottle to the floor, I slip my hands under her ass and kiss her.
“That’s my boyfriend. I was wondering where you’ve been,” she says dropping to the floor.
“Oh I’ve been around,” I say grabbing her hand and leading her back to the bucket of drinks for another beer and then out to make the rounds and talk to friends. This is my kind of fun, I think again and wonder why I think Florida is so bad, why I’m in such a hurry to get out.
“Chris just finished a short for the Arts Council Contest. He’s sending it out tomorrow,” I hear Annemarie say to a group of friends and her cousins a while later and think that maybe she gets me after all. I’m still on my “this ain’t all so bad” high and she’s smiling at me from across the room. “Maybe he’ll show us, give us a premier viewing.”
“It’s just a nature documentary,” I yell to her, waving my hand to call the idea off, but she’s already pressed against my side.
“Come on, Baby. Your Ma wants to see it too.” She says this so sincerely that I smile at her and agree, leading everyone up to my bedroom.
I’m nervous, but I boot up the computer and explain the contest to my small audience. If I can put a couple of awards on my résumé, getting into film school will be a sure bet. So I have to keep shooting, editing, entering contests and crossing my fingers. My ma listens with a pinched look on her face, but Annemarie is still smiling with encouragement.
So I turn off the lights and start the short film, the title page popping up and the music swelling. It reads, “Native Wings,” and pulls out from a close shot of Terra’s eye. Mostly the piece tells the story of a series of unsuccessful hunts. The landscape and the swamp bunnies are rendered as elusive beauty that the young hawk cannot capture. Through the music and the choice of shots you see the hawk grow weary and weak. When at last the land provides, the rabbit bound in the hawk’s feet, the music swells again. Annemarie gasps and when I look up, she has turned away. The camera is unflinching about the kill and my girlfriend is appalled. The rest of my audience is still watching though, transfixed by this gift of death. I smile to myself when the video ends with Rube cooking up some rabbit for himself. You only see his hands, the back of his head, shots I took on the sly, but he’s there. I’m really proud of this film and think it says a lot about what the land is worth, about why wilderness is always Eden, but I only hear mumbles and grunts when I turn on the lights.
I glance at my ma first and she has a fist to her mouth, her eyes blinking back tears. She walks out of the room without touching me or saying a word. Annemarie speaks up then asking about the music. I explain that a music major at the college made it especially for the film.
“Couldn’t you have used Nickleback or something,” she asks and actually means it.
“I can’t just use anybody’s music. It’s against the law.”
“That’s a shame,” she sighs. “There’s this great song on their new album. You know it right?” I don’t, but I know where this is going. “It’s called…‘If Everyone Cared’. Wouldn’t that be perfect?” Her cousin Cindi chimes in agreeing that she loves that song. “You know that song, Chris.” She tilts her head at me coyly. I’m sure at some point it was ‘our song’ for a week.
“I doubt if the Art Council are big Nickleback fans, Annemarie,” I snap back at her, but she just shrugs it off.
“So is this how you get started making big films?” This from cousin Tony who is rubbing his chin thoughtfully, unconvinced.
I glare at Annemarie, comprehending what she’s done. She couldn’t have been clearer if she had just said, “See, Baby. No one understands this crap you’re doing. Listen to your mama and go to law school.”
“I need a beer,” I say and leave everyone standing around the computer in my room.
In the kitchen my ma is smoking a cigarette alone at the table. “Jesus Ma, not in the house,” I say grabbing a beer and heading outside to check on Terra.
“Hey,” she calls, stopping me. I turn, but with my jaw clenched, not wanting to hear what she has to say. “You got a lot of talent, Christopher.” She flicks the ash off what I’m sure is a menthol, maybe a Newport. “Where you going?”
“Just checking on the hawk, Ma.”
“Good. You’ve been drinking and the freeway’s a mess. There’s a big fire off the interstate.” She turns away to look out the sliding glass door, although there’s nothing to see but darkness.
“A fire?” I ask no one in particular, but cringe when it’s Annemarie that answers.
“It’s been burning since this morning, don’t you listen to the news?” I shake my head and she continues. “It’s two hundred acres now, but mostly underground. Isn’t that crazy? It’s a muck fire.”
I didn’t even know that the swamp could burn. I don’t know why I didn’t think about the Scots using peat for their fires. Of course it’s flammable. How do you stop an underground fire?
“You can’t stop a fire that’s burning underground and there’s no telling where it might pop up.” Annemarie answers like she’s reading my mind.
“Ma, thanks for a great party. I’m going to call it a night though.” Ma doesn’t answer, just nods her head. I think the party is over for her too, but Annemarie follows me up the stairs.
“Are worried you about the fire? It’s okay,” she tells me, rubbing my back. It’s all I can do not to flinch. My room is cleared out and it seems the other party goers caught on to the mood, because I can hear people saying goodbye downstairs. Annemarie though, looks like she’s going to make herself comfortable for the night. She settles on the bed while I shut off the computer.
“Fire is an important part of the ecosystem here,” she continues, carefully pronouncing ‘eco.’ “Did you know that the slash pine forest requires fire to eliminate the ground cover, germinate the pine seeds, and allow new tree growth?”
“You’re kidding me, right?” I say, but she doesn’t understand what I’m asking.
“It’s true,” she responds earnestly. “The mature pine trees don’t burn. So don’t worry about the fire.”
“Fires that I can see don’t worry me,” I tell her. Wondering why we’re having this bullshit conversation about fires in the first place. “Go home, Annemarie. I don’t want you here.”
She stares at me with the empty eyes of a goldfish for several seconds before she finally screws up her face into anger. “I’m not going to put up with this shit from you much longer, Chris. There’s plenty of men waiting to take your place.”
“I know, Annemarie. Good night.” I say without emotion and she leaves slamming doors and banging on walls as she makes her way.
***
When the sun comes up Terra begins to bounce around a little in the back of the bus. I can hear her bells even from my bed. She is anxious for the hunt like always, but I’ve already made up my mind that this one is going to be different. I wonder if she’ll even realize that she’s free when I walk out into the field. I wonder if she ever thought she wasn’t free. It was her that chose to come back to me.
I smell the smoke as soon as I step outside to check on Terra and get moving. The radio said the fire could burn for months beneath the top soil, smolder beneath the water. No telling when they’ll be able to put it out.
I stop by Rube’s trailer on the way to the field, but I know what I will find. There is an impression of an Airstream in the grove, a few indentations of things that had sat too long. That is all. Not even a Pepsi can or a feather left. I can’t imagine where he might have gone. Maybe he hitched the trailer to his old diesel truck and headed for the gulf in the hopes of sinking to the rims in seawater and finding Atlantis.
Terra leaves my glove in the field I’ve chosen with lighter wings, as if she can measure the weight of the missing falconry gear. If she can, it doesn’t change her response to me. She watches me intently as I stomp through the brush trying to find a bunny to scare up, to flush into the open for her. If she were a wild hawk she would have to sit here all day and wait for one to move on its own. That’s what this relationship is really based on, convenience. It makes more sense to let me do the work, to let me take care of her needs. So she stays with me.
When at last a bunny bursts from my feet, I watch it run for the pond instead of a rabbit hole. The sandy soil doesn’t work for burrows. Dig a hole and it will fill with water or cave in on itself. Instead the swamp bunnies have thick greasy fur and webbed feet. They get away by swimming. This one doesn’t make it to the pond.
On the edge of the groves, beneath a giant blooming lantana, Terra catches the swamp rabbit. It’s a graceful turn, a thump of talons and flesh and then a spreading silence. The hawk eats all she can and drags the carcass beneath a bush, eager to hide it, even from me. It’s as if she’s figured it out now. There are no tethers and no reason to keep trusting me completely. She flies to the crook of an Australian pine to linger while her food digests. She never looks down, so there’s no reason to say goodbye. Not to anyone. My ma will understand and Annemarie doesn’t need to. I’m going to Los Angeles where the fire burns above the ground. I’m leaving right now.
I have told the story of how I discovered my first peregrine in many ways, but this is from my blog www.operationdeltaduck.com and perhaps my favorite version.
~~
“Come here,” he said, “I want to show you something.”
I put down the book I was reading, a book about dragons telepathically connected to their handlers, and I stood up to follow him. I had two favorite worlds; one of them spun from small type and imagination, the other a place of individual wonders narrated by my grandfather. I was always willingly to trade the first for the second.
I couldn’t always count on my grandfather’s world being less fictional than fantasy novels, however. After all, it turned out there really weren’t crabs that lived in the snow and charcoal didn’t actually grow on trees. None of this really mattered to me, though. Lines blurred and there was just as much magic in the symmetrical chambers of a paper wasp’s nest or a faint line of geese sounding impossibly near, heralding the way north.
“She’s up there,” he said. He pointed. The rickety rooftop antennae that normally funneled signal to the television below had collected a falcon. “She’s a peregrine.” He said this like she was a Cadillac, more expensive, attractive, better built than any other bird he had ever shown me. “And she’s a falconer’s bird.”
I don’t know how he recognized this after inspecting her, why he understood anklets and bells, why he also knew someone hunted ducks with her. He didn’t know any falconers. It may have been that he had just read A True Story of Friendship and Espionage by Robert Lindsey, about falconer Christopher Boyce, seller of classified information to the Soviet Union, and convicted of spying. After all, Boyce was local and his story captivated. Or perhaps Boyce was fresh in my grandfather’s mind, having recently escaped from Lompoc, proving that the meticulous mind of a falconer was also practical for orchestrating successful bank robberies. Seventeen of them to be exact. I can’t be sure, because my grandfather never told me about Boyce. His storyteller’s sensibilities kept him from spinning tales that were impossible to believe, even if they were true.
Instead, my grandfather told me about this bird’s falconer, how he lived, where he would hunt. He described how they worked together and the care he had to take to keep her flying and returning. He knew for a fact that she was just stopping over, on her way back to him. I believed every word.
I think there are stories that, once heard, forever remain a whisper in your ear. They are true in their own way whether or not they are fiction. You don’t recognize their power when you first hear them. I went back to my book after the falcon flew away. My grandfather returned to his saw, slicing pine, dovetailing wood pieces into the whole, slowing piecing together what would become a chest of drawers. Neither of us knew he had given me a falcon to chase and that I would never be able to resist.
Falconry changed my life in a moment, but I didn’t include that moment in Lift. Every journey changes us, but it jarring to realize you’re in the middle of a metamorphosis. There was a time when a vision quest was a common passage and it is still possible to walk a stark path that changes you forever…if you seek to, you might find your life changed in an instant.
~~
I was a process server with an attorney services business, serving evictions, foreclosures, and sundry subpoenas and complaints. We were in the middle of the last housing crash and I was 23, working 14-hour days and immediately despised by all whose misfortune led me to their door. I was living in an apartment above my father’s garage because I had just sent a stalker, who had walked into my rented condo and nearly shot my baby brother, to jail. Yet even the cloistered press of butting up against my father’s life couldn’t squeeze away the night frights. My father and I were in a lot of ways strangers and the grandfather who raised me was downstairs accepting the last of his days with what I now understand as grace. At the time, what I saw was him slowly leaving us with a sadness and a readiness that I refused to accept. Nothing was right with the world, unless I was flying my hawk.
Dirt hawking, chasing ground quarry with a hawk, pushes your physical limits. It is like any journey that changes you. There are trials. Trip on wires, stumble into squirrel holes, scrape yourself on gnarled vines, beat bush, bake in the sun and race after slips. When the hunt is over, you’re as exhausted as the hawk, but you feel complete. The punishment is part of the bliss and I was slowly finding enlightenment.
Sadie, my red-tailed hawk was having a lackluster afternoon. We were only playing at hunting. She would follow and chase after the slips, the rabbits shooting out in front of us, but she pulled off right before contact, tipping her wings and balling her talons into useless fists. I should have been frustrated, but I was only going through the motions myself. I kept pushing forward; glad to be outside, but mind was on work and my long sleepless nights.
The young jackrabbit that sprang up from my feet was half-grown, but he was strong and fast. He put me in the present. There was something about his vigor that made me want to feel his fur beneath my palms, to have him. It felt wrong. It felt hawkish, but I wanted him and so did Sadie. She was far behind the hare, but gaining speed. Her wing beat snapped, wings tight and forceful. When she closed the distance between them, the hare began to change up its stride, bobbing and weaving like a boxer in retreat. The long ears folded back telegraphed the jackrabbit’s race and Sadie’s tail mirrored the motions, making the contest into dance. I was fixed between two rows of vines, my palm pressed to cover the whisper of my words, “Go. Go. Go.” And I wanted to think I wasn’t sure who I was urging on, that no matter which won I would be pleased, but I was cheering for Sadie. When she took the rabbit in a tumble and the dust of impact, I sprinted to help without a cheer, but joy spurred me forward.
Alone with my panting hawk, the jack rabbit in her feet, I ended the hare’s life and opened its chest so my hawk could begin to eat. The hare’s fur was coarse and dirty even though the rabbit was young. I wanted to think I had brought peace to a difficult life, but I knew it wasn’t that simple. I looked up with sweat stung eyes, stretching aching muscles and realized I was out of this time and yet a piece of the whole. I was a hunter thanking the rabbit that fed her hawk, sating the sand with perspiration and blood, just as we took the life that sprung from it. The air was spiced with fermenting feral grapes; the song birds hidden in the vines now accepting us with their evening chatter. We were part of something immense and curved back on itself, but also invisible.
The rush hour hive of vehicles passed close enough to make out my features, but couldn’t see me. I stood up and squinted into driver’s side windows, but no one glanced my way. No one saw the blood that coated my fingers or the way the sandy dust mixed with my sweat, slicking my hair to my face and neck. I knew that was the world I must return to, but I also knew the space I was in would call me back. It would keep calling even if I covered my ears and screamed about money and responsibility.
I was owned now by a wild and dangerous place that would steal hawks, destroy dogs and break my heart. Yet she would give back more than she took. I knew I could hold on and when it was time, let go of what made me ache and yearn, even my grandfather. It was only five acres of forgotten vineyard, a watermark on the page of progress in Ontario, California, but it was everything and I was a falconer.
Nevertheless, it’s hardly fair,
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.
-Rudyard Kipling
~~
Don’t wait until you are thirty-four to get your first dog. You will do this because you are waiting until you live in the right place, have enough resources, can make the time and carry fewer distractions. These are the things that you will say when you have run out of excuses to be kind to yourself. You should have a dog, because you have always needed a dog, but at thirty-four you have waited too long.
Like chicken pox, a puppy was meant to be a childhood passage. How else will you discover that a puff of puppy breath dissipates the tang of tension from the air? That burying your tears in dog fur heals a betrayal ten times faster than sobbing into a feather pillow. And your assertion that your closest friend is the best listener in three counties will be smashed by the champion skills of dog. You will realize that your doglessness has been a handicap. Now you are an adult and it’s not too late to catch up, but like chicken pox, there are repercussions for waiting.
When you have to give her back to the ground, your first dog, your best friend, you know too much. You know what has been taken from you and that nothing in life is repeatable. This sort of pain is meant to be dulled by a child’s belief in magical possibilities; ghost dogs and reincarnation. At thirty-four the best you can do is stay silent and still, to pray you won’t lose something else or feel something more.
You will be dating someone who demands you talk about your pain even though you don’t have the strength or the words. This person will shout at you for shutting them out. Then you will realize then that there are two kinds of people. Your beau is the sort who insists that closing your dog in a kennel by the bed is cruel when you could instead shut her out of the room. You’ll end the relationship and wonder how many more lessons in canine wisdom you need.
Your next dog will be nothing like the first. This will be a blessing and an ache. She too may leave too soon or just in time, but will run you through your paces as will the canine coaches that follow. It will be as if they know they have much catch up work to do and so they push. They will punctuate their lessons with pink-tongued smiles, standing upright and pressing two paws to your heart. They will be merciless with their love.
You will try to be a good pupil and hope that is enough. You would be a better person had a dog trained you early in life and you will be a better person now, but if you still have a choice, if there is still time, don’t wait until you are thirty-four.
What is more dangerous, the blade of a knife, the talons of a raptor or the choices we make ?
~~
There is a click as the knife locks open and this is enough to raise the hackles on my red-tailed hawk’s neck. Her talons tighten on the stilled rabbit and I know she’s anticipating my bare hands pulling her prize away, preparing to reposition her talons between my finger bones to make her painful point. I turn my head and watch her from the corner of my eye to lower the threat level, so that we aren’t two predators competing through a stare. I don’t want the rabbit and I wouldn’t win anyway. I only want to help, but I have no way to explain other than showing her.
She’s earned her meal, but I can’t let her eat the whole thing. I want to fly her tomorrow. So she needs to have some appetite. Two front legs, the heart and lungs will be just enough and not too much. The heart and lungs are the most rewarding bits to a hawk, rich in flavor and nutrients, but I have to break in for her, guide her choice of meal. I ruffle the rabbit’s fur with my left hand, easing my way to the hawk’s feet, hoping she doesn’t grab me while the knife waits in my right hand. I think while I wait that I’ve carried this knife a long time and yet this will be the first time I’ve ever used it, but then, this isn’t the purpose I had in mind for it.
I paid $150 for my Spiderco, slick silver, heavy and cold, with a round hole in the arch of the blade. The hole allows for traction so a finger can flip the knife open smoothly and quickly. The clip on the outside is ideal for attaching to a belt, but tight enough to hook on my Doc Martens. It fits comfortably behind my ankle bone, snug between sock and leather, but it’s never comfortable enough to forget. I tell myself this is good, to remember the knife, but when I get into trouble it’s always the first thing I forget.
I didn’t know the pale and anxious blonde woman when I served her divorce papers, but I guess she had trouble differentiating between process server and home-wrecker. She punched me, a weak blow to my chin. I countered with a decent right cross, its energy more from training than anger. Her family dragged me away before I could consider the knife in my boot.
They were kinder than the smoldering tower of a man I served with an eviction a month later. The resonance of his silence immobilized me as his dark hands lifted me at my waist. He held me away from his body, carrying me to the street, discarded. When he turned back for his house, I scrambled away. Locked in my truck, I held the folded knife to my lips, waiting for my legs to stop shaking enough to work the clutch.
Once I felt the wiz of a stray bullet chipping bark off the tree in front of me in the dark. It was a bad neighborhood in East Riverside and the bullet wasn’t aimed at me, but that wouldn’t have made a difference had it found my chest. The sound of the bullet brought me to my knees, yet none of these assaults brought out my knife.
An attorney friend asked why I don’t have a gun. He said he would help me get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, that a 21-year-old process server could lower her eyes before a judge and be granted permission. I shook my head “no” and patted my boot. I bought my boyfriend a Ruger for Christmas, but every time we went to the shooting range I left shaking. My aim was excellent, but a gun in my hand hadn’t made me feel comfortable. The silence of a resting Ruger feels similar to that man carrying me to the curb, unpredictable. I liked the passivity of a knife better, but I found it a new home in my hawking vest, a tool for the first hunts in my new passion of falconry.
The redtail bows her head and warns me with her eyes that I’m pushing my luck, but I leave my hand in position and look away. I brace for the pain, but it doesn’t come and my hawk returns to her meal. I brush a finger across her yellow toes, feeling the dip of a missing scale, the ridges where the others come together. She stops looking up, stops worrying about me, so I slip the knife through the rabbit’s chest, opening a hole to the cavity beneath the skin. I put the bloody knife behind me, beneath a grapevine in the sandy soil. I reach over, stretch the rabbit’s skin, and show her the opening. She drinks the blood and then eats the heart and lungs, her eyes narrowed in raptorial bliss.
When she’s eaten enough, I slip her off the carcass for a leg I hold in my glove, quickly hiding the rest of today’s meal in the game pouch at the back of my vest. She rests easy on my fist and I stand to look over the dying vineyard. Another jackrabbit jumps up two rows over and gallops away from us, he’s moving fast, but his ears are up so I know he could be moving faster, ears flattened at full speed. I want to watch him disappear, dissolve into a speck of wild, but the sun is setting, and I have an eviction to serve on Manzanita Street a few blocks over. I turn to leave, but then turn back, deciding to watch anyway as the hare makes his way to the road line on the south side of the field. He can’t disappear without crossing the busy street and is smart enough not to try. He stops, fading in his stillness from my view. Walking back to the truck, I relive the hunt in my head, the hawk’s powerful flight, her wingover into the equally powerful hare, the desperate, dangerous battle concealed in a cloud of sand. It could have tipped either way, but it was my hawk that had won the meal and was coming home unscathed. I smile that my red-tail has finally allowed me to reach between her legs, to assist with her meal. I don’t think about the knife. I don’t realize the Spiderco remains in the field lost to me forever.
I thought I knew everything about red-tailed hawks. I thought I was a predator myself. I was wrong.
This piece was published in divide Issue 5, Spring 2008.
~~
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