Crow Jazz Page 2

  Over the years, I have made do with scrapbooks and other memorabilia that pass for memory. I scan the alphabet to trigger lost names. Some things have surfaced unbidden, passing as stories filtered through crow gossip, the news media and my imagination. I start every account by saying, as memory serves me, in case it doesn’t. Some people think I am a congenital liar.

  These days, journalism and storytelling are under assault. I don’t care, the truth set me free, and the truth is, I am a child of the forest freed from the past by the effect of one golf ball that landed smack in the middle of my forehead. I had the sense knocked out of or into me on my tenth birthday, and that explains everything. Eureka! Thank you Zeus for decades of ditziness, just what my father wanted in a daughter.

  Just like the crack in my head (“There is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.”), my tooth cracked without warning. There is a note on my dental chart that says, WATCH THAT MOLAR, but no one told me, or I wasn’t listening, or I forgot on account of my brain injury. Little did I know that molar was the source of my leaks. Someone should tell the Deranged Rooster whose hens lay golden golf balls to have all his surrogates, escorts and aids checked by a dentist. Leaks can be involuntary, sometimes radioactive.

  We were on the roof, having a beer. NO, I did not open the bottle with my teeth, although I have done stuff like that, just to prove I really was as stupid as my father wanted (Smart women never catch husbands, and there were already three, count ‘em, three old maids in my family, all of them alleged lesbians.). All I did was sneeze, hard and loud, so hard I dislocated my jaw, and when my teeth clamped down, the tooth split in half. That is a small event in a life that includes witnessing the era of King Leer, but still, I noticed. My tongue groped around. Tongues magnify everything; but before I had a chance to locate the pebble in my mouth, I had swallowed it.

  My fly-swatting husband suggested I wait with a colander to see if it emerged enamel, gold or amalgam. We could save the situation if my rogue body part turned out to be a 10-karat nugget.

  I said, “No way,” and made an appointment with my dentist, who made a few jokes and a sensible decision. No prince, no crown. He fussed and drilled and made a huuugely filling, blocking the light with amalgam. “You never know. The world might end tomorrow.” I worried that with the jarring, the rest of my teeth would fall out. If my body were programmed to reject foreign lumps of metal, I might choke on the filling and die in his chair. If the default mechanism failed, I might have to endure rape by the pain police, another extraction with the dentist’s brogue braced in my crotch, drenched by a downpour of dental sweat, my gums broken and aching, rogue bits of root drifting to my brain where they would surely precipitate an aneurysm, the fatal stroke of fate.

  “This might work,” he said, and I hung onto the word “might” like a drowning person in a lake filled with piranhas. Might. I conjured the image of a mighty girl fighting back, hurling sword ferns at an army of men with drills. As it turned out, his solution was not only good enough, but even better. I started getting radio signals halfway through the procedure, and before I left the office, the crows were singing, most of my memory had been restored.

  The first thing I remembered was The Ranger.

  THE TEA PARTY

  “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

  —VOLTAIRE

  Moon, a girl of too many words way too many for an eleven-year-old, has been clammed up for a week. Her think position is head down, teeth tight, but this unnatural silence is unnerving.

  The parent units are alarmed. “Wherefore art thou, Moon?” Windsong, our mother, tried teasing, but Moon has remained clenched, making a growling sound somewhere between purring and roaring, for a whole week.

  “Meow?” I tried, my falsetto, a family joke because we sing the Rossini cat duet boy girl instead of boy boy, both of us comfy trebles.

  “Moon, please. “I’m worried.” Our mother is at the breaking point. She says my sister and I have fried her nerves with our hormonal behaviour. And now this.

  “I think she’s transforming.” I am actually curious. Maybe we’re hearing child labour, and Moon is getting ready to shed her skin and turn into something else, New Moon.

  “Cat? Rabbit? Probably cat. Sounds like cat,” I ask. This morning Moon is swinging and knitting, and I am standing behind her, pushing even though she is quite capable of managing two things at once without my help.

  I check her bum for a tail emergent. No tail yet.

  “Speak,” I insist for the zillionth time. “Earth calling Moon. What’s up?” I ask.

  She surprises me by opening wide and freeing her first post-incident words, “I’m throwing a tea party for the Grim Brothers,” she spits out, then puts on the brakes, kicking up dust, scuffing her shoes, a star demerit offence.

  “When?”

  “Today.”

  “Am I invited?”

  “That depends.”

  Moon is my sister, but not always my confidante.

  “You have certain deficiencies.”

  “Like?” I pause and revise.

  Because we are the children of uber-grammarians, “like” is a word we are not allowed to use. “Like” is the crutch of the metaphorically challenged, and metaphor is everything to Moon.

  “Such as?”

  “Refusing to dress up on your boy days.”

  In the world of facts and alternative facts, that’s a fact, but aren’t we flexible, temperate? We live in a temperate zone, where it rains every time a cloud hits a mountain.

  I love rain. I worship rain. I love dancing in mud puddles and drinking rainwater straight up, straight from the sky. Look up! I love flushing the toilet, the deep gargle sound of the toilet throat, the tat of drips and drops hitting leaves, wet pavement and mud puddles, but the Grim Brothers’ golden showers were so over the limit I wanted to break their heads on the sidewalk.

  This behaviour scares me off girl days. I’m the one who watched in horror from the safety of the hedge when Moon’s glasses fell off her face and bounced on the sidewalk.

  Yes, we have pavement, concrete, impervious surfaces. The sidewalk defines our world. Inside is Paradise, the old Persian word, outside is traffic, cars in a hurry, bodies outlined in chalk, chalk for ingesting, nothing like rabbit skin glue. I know these things because Windsong made us read The Rubaiyat and is currently teaching us how to make paint.

  Windsong struggles to keep us safe, now more than ever, now that bullying is empowered by the regime change, in our life circumscribed by whispering branches and squealing tires. Inside, I can ride my bicycle bareheaded. Outside, I have to wear a helmet. How’s that for a metaphor, Moon?

  “OK, Moon. You win. But don’t forget we are persons, and persons are capable of intentional blindness.”

  I am a restless two-spirit kid, with two completely separate minds, both of them able to decide when fight or flight is the better option. She’s chosen fight, the blind leading as usual. It’s like, there’s that word again, wearing specs, one pair for reading the past, one pair for looking into the future.

  “You are too smart for your own good, Sun.” This is what the units say when we out-think them. We are home-schooled, unfettered, freethinking post-millennial brats if you believe the conventional wisdom, which isn’t very smart these days, and we’ve been having conversational downturns, ever since the red-faced flop-tummied Red Queen turned out to be four giant babies screaming, “Off with their heads,” and worse.

  “Blindness,” she says, “is involuntary.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Don’t contradict me,” she says in a perfect Windsong snit voice, gale force with salt in it,” or I’ll stick this needle in your boy bun.”

  “You expect a hot air leak?”

  “Worse, way worse. You’re so full of shit your eyes are brown.” At least mine work, I think but don’t say.

  “You might miss and poke my eye out. Then where would we
be?”

  “Two blind nice.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “It’s a joke, stupid.”

  She’s knitting with the spines of eagle feathers, and they have very sharp points.

  “My feathers have magic.” She points one at me. “I could do a spell and turn you into anything I want.”

  “I am what I am,” I say, “born two-spirit and staying that way. Do you really want to have a conversation about that?”

  “You are an anomaly.” She’s proud of the word, proud of me. I can tell this whole tea party thing is her revenge sister act. Last Saturday the Grim Brothers bombarded us with slogans and peed on our fence, splashed the swing, even. When Moon ran to tell Windsong, her glasses fell off and she stepped on them. Today, I suspect, she has a plan.

  “An anomaly you need to defend? Is it a tea party or a war party to defend my honour?”

  “It isn’t always all about you. I just want to teach them a lesson. In general. They’ve been pissing me off about a lot of things, the rabbits for one. The Grim situation is heating up.”

  “But revenge tastes better cold,” I repeat one of Windsong’s favourite proverbs. Windsong is a Buddhist. Another favourite is, “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of all your enemies will float by,” but Moon clearly has no time for that.

  “Don’t let the devil use your brain,” I have now shot off every arrow in my quiver, the last my favourite.

  “Too late,” she says.

  She points her feet at the traffic and pumps her huge legs. Every time my sister tells a lie, her legs grow longer. Soon they will drag on the ground, and we will have to move her swing to a higher branch, or shorten the ropes.

  “Watch out for the cars,” I say. I don’t blink again, because, if I lose focus, Moon will extend too far and lose her platypus feet and her pink patent party shoes, size eight already.

  She has that fierce planning-the-campaign look. How many cups and saucers? Should the sandwiches be served crust on or crust off?

  “Off with their crusts,” she says out loud. The Brothers are greedy pigs, and Moon must be counting on her secret recipe, whatever that is.

  “Rabbits aren’t sluts. Rabbits aren’t sluts,” she chants, her voice getting higher and louder. Stitches fly off her needles as fast as rabbit sex, which we time with stopwatches and record in one of our infamous notebooks. The Grim Brothers have threatened to catch our bunnies and put them in cages.

  “Breed ‘em and eat ‘em. Off with their heads.”

  She swings, no hands, her feet sailing over the picket fence, touching the sky and missing the traffic by inches while her hands keep knitting. Back and forth, back and forth, my head moves with her. I hold my breath when she slows down and casts off, keeping her slippery angora act together. She’s still got her feet, shoes, socks, ankles and toes on. She keeps knitting. The Cossacks are coming. They will deliver the Brothers to Moon’s tea party in a basket of kitty litter, a Trojan pussy.

  “We do have a problem.” She stops the swing, dragging her shoes on the ground.

  “What is it?” I am tired of standing here waiting for the turn that never comes. Moon only gives up the swing when she has to pee, which she does in the bushes, quickly, using leaves for toilet paper, once stinging nettle, ha ha.

  Our dad, Ocean, who plays the piano but not as well as Moon, says she swings like a metronome (Look out, I’m gathering likes, like it or not, an Ungrammarian). Back and forth is her game, always thinking, always knitting little things on her little needles, arms wrapped around the swing ropes.

  “The Grim Brothers are carnivores. They eat meat.”

  “Egg is perfect, future meat, no excuses necessary.”

  “Pussies don’t eat eggs.”

  “OK, tuna too.”

  “Naa.” We both hate tuna fish sandwiches. “How about shredded rooster?”

  “Sometimes we have to compromise to get results.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I think it was Windsong.”

  “She also says, ‘You are what you eat,’ Sun.”

  “We are not going to turn into chickens and fish, or carrots for that matter. The person she’s quoting died of cancer. She was living on toxic organic bone meal.”

  “We could put bone meal in the sandwiches. I helped Ocean plant poppies and he put a handful in every hole, and there’s some left over.”

  “We could give them bone meal enemas,” my General muses. We both overheard Windsong tell Ocean she was thinking of having a tequila enema when Agent Orange declared war on Mexico. Our mother needs all the help she can get. My ambiguities have sent her to opioids, which constipate her. Life is complicated for Windsong.

  “Logistically impossible. We can’t hold them all down at once.”

  “Too true. Silly idea.”

  “So gay,” I say. All my ideas are gay, she says, even though I am a two-spirit person. Not gay, gay and or girlie.

  The Grim Brothers loathe my girl couture; give me the tiny finger whenever they pass our house. They’re threatening to unfrock me, before capturing the rabbits, before they beat up all the kids with natural tans: the Geeks, the Afreaks, the Gooks, and the Hispanics.

  This inspires my two-spirit central control mechanism and gives me a desperate brain wave. “We could feed them beans, frijoles refritos. That would blow their minds and…”

  “No, no, no, As ye feed, so shall ye eat. We will have to eat whatever we feed our enemies, and I am sick of refritos.”

  “So tuna then?”

  “No again, Sun. I will make the tea, and you will gather the rabbit food and the rabbits. Then you will help me serve the guests.”

  “Serve them right,” I think. There is work to do.

  “First we will set up the table together, the yugeliest tea party ever. That’s when you will lure the rabbits to the shed and lock them in, while I make the sandwiches. When the Brothers arrive, I will put on the kettle, and you will help me serve. But you cannot sit down with us unless you put on a dress and a hat.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it will piss them off.”

  “But I’m experiencing puberty, both kinds, different days. I don’t want to wear a dress today.”

  “That’s fine, but these people require homogeneity. Since they are all boys, we must be girls. They are not capable of reading your subtleties, your ambiguities. Besides, I am making hats for them. You will wear one too.”

  “What if one of them…”

  “Grabs you by the pussy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Trust me. That will make them crazy. Nothing beats grabbing a pussy and catching a snake.”

  “I get it, capture the Queen and we checkmate. Is that when the pussy riot begins?”

  “There are one or two more moves in the game. Trust me.”

  By this, she means, she has options. If whichever brother grabs the pussy survives his homoerotic surprise, there will be another. Moon loves options: the handy brother and sister switch, her many Plans A and Plans B, which include compromise, but not capitulation. Never.

  “We will save you and the diggers.”

  Moon and I are descended from Diggers, a protestant farming cult. In the Nineties, our parents, both religious nut cum hippy spawn, met in a commune that grew hemp and traded Columbian exports with Mexican drug dealers. Dig. Dig. Dig. They did well by the barter system, drugs for dust. Their work on the Mexican border, digging for drug lords, was so rewarding they were able to get out of the dig business, buy three beautiful acres and retire at the edge of the Rainforest.

  They built our house, planted an orchard; and then the rabbits came and ate the bark. The bunnies were tenacious and greedy, so Windsong and Ocean locked them up in dream hutches with gardens and straw beds and collected their fur for spinning. Before long, they discovered the captured bunnies had Houdini DNA. They tunnelled their way out of jail and invaded the Grim Brothers’ compound, enraging their parents.

 
; The Grim parents built a fence, and our rabbits continued their rabbit business.

  Wherever there is a wall, there is a way under or over it. In our diaries and maps of alternative facts, which we show to our psychologist, we have compiled circumstantial evidence that Mexican rabbits helped El Chapo burrow his way to freedom, temporary freedom because he has been recaptured and brought to New York for trial by a jury, he can only hope, of stoned Hispanics.

  “You did your research.” Our shrink was impressed.

  “We’re dead against walls,” I told her.

  The Grim Brothers have been building the biggest wall ever, a Great Wall, yuuge, between their house and ours. They’ve been piling up dirt and rocks and rusty car parts, burying broken glass and hurling insults.

  “Gonna grab you by the pussy.”

  “PUSSY!” the three satirical crows on the fence sing in lock step.

  “Moi? Good luck. I can’t wait.”

  Moon is now off her swing, picking up swatches of pink from the ground where she dropped them and putting them in her knitting bag. “Four hats,” she says. “Four boys.”

  “Hurry up. It’s almost time.”

  “How do you know they will show?”

  “I wrote an invitation they can’t refuse, pricked my finger and sealed it in blood, then I nailed it to their front door. Look, I made two copies.” She pulls a folded piece of paper out of her bag.

  Moon DeBurgh Ronson

  requests the presence of the Grim Brothers

  at a chocolate fountain party

  to discuss taxidermy

  in the meadow

  Saturday June 10, 2017, 3 pm

  Party hats provided. Please leave knives, slingshots, peashooters, itching powder, fart cushions etc. with your mother, who will decide whether or not you’ll get them back.

  “Taxidermy?” I ask.

  “Bait,” she answers, grabbing the stair rail because her new glasses aren’t ready yet, and she’s making do with the old ones. “Now, you go bait the rabbits.”

  Summer’s hardly started, but we already have baby carrots, radishes, lettuce and parsley in our rabbit-proof raised beds. I’m picking a big basket full, and the bunnies are noticing. I see them peeking through the chicken wire. I can almost hear them salivating.