a fake,” Ben said, his breath cool against my cheek. “Dammed.” I looked out over the brilliant water in the rose-gold desert and thought of my childhood home. Up north and east, there were huge lakes, mad rivers, flat gray water and glittering green water and water like obsidian, black water that tore ass around boulders, rippled against banks of wet ferns. I told Ben all of that and he kissed me.
“Where I come from,” he said, “the water’s salt, the marshes are salt, the air is salt.” He shook his head. “The women, too. Salty.” He leaned forward and looked up through the cracked windshield. I moved away. I was still spooky about a man thinking I was crowding him.
“Oriole,” he said and pulled off on the shoulder. “Hooded, I think.” He opened the glove compartment and pulled out binoculars. I watched while he slid out of his seat and hunkered down next to the truck. The back of his shirt was patched with sweat and he was barely breathing. “Get out,” he said. “Crouch next to me.” He handed over the binoculars. “It’s not hooded. It’s a rare one. For here.”
The dust we’d kicked up glittered in the sun. The bird shimmered. It was soft orange, black-capped and winged and had perched on a red-flowered weed as though posing for a poster. Tessa looked at the bird. She looked at Duane’s sweat-drenched hair, how he held his body absolutely still. She saw that he was in the grip of something urgent as lust and private as prayer. She saw that for the first time since their first kiss, she was invisible to him.
Distant thunder whomped to our right. The sky was clean, morning sun shuddering off the truck hood. Gray and brown birds fluttered up through the skeletal bushes, feathers bobbing on top of their heads, goofy as one of Felice’s retro hats. “That’s quail,” Ben said, “that sound. Mollie, we are in paradise.” Ben climbed back in and we rattled down a dirt road toward the lakeshore.
“You like birds?” I said.
“I do,” he said, “immoderately.”
“You never told me that.” I could hear a possessive little whine in my voice.
He laughed. “You don’t know everything about me.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with me. I felt like a spoiled bitch, one of those chicks who has to own everything about her man. I wondered if it was the raw September heat and the way everything around us looked not just dead, but reduced to bone.
The truck’s interior was an oven and when I started to latch my seat belt, the buckle burned my hand. Each bounce of the truck slammed me against the door. The lake sparkled viciously ahead, looking alien in all the cholla and prickly pear and spindly palo verde. I thought of rhinestones and how their cheap glitter set my teeth on edge. Tessa thought it was just beautiful. You could tell the kids would be out of Duane’s old Blazer before it came to a full stop. They’d run straight into the sparkling water, sneakers, shorts and all.
Ben parked near the shoreline. I stepped out into the relentless light. I could feel the sand burning through the bottoms of my flip flops. “Hey,” Ben said as though it had just come to him. “We’ve got food. We’ve got water. Let’s stay a while.” He didn’t look to see if I agreed. “I read there’s Great Blue here,” he said. “All year round. Maybe we’ll stay till evening and drive up to Flag in the cool. They’ll come to feed at twilight. You’ll love them. You’ll see.” He threw out his arms and took a deep breath. “Smell that, Mollie. Water and desert. I love it. It’s the smell of the impossible.”
I took a sniff. The place smelled all too possible, like a low rent dumpster in mid-August—stale beer, piss, rotting worms, plastic diapers and Arby’s wrappers everywhere. There was the mean glitter of broken glass all over the sand and rocks. There was not one second of silence. When the ski-doos cut out, the motorboats cut in. Everybody on the shoreline had a boom-box. Everybody was competing to be the winner in quickest death by noise. Only Tessa had the good manners to wear earbuds. She listened to Rosanne Cash, a soft smile on her face.
“Ben,” I said, “what’s a Great Blue?”
“Heron,” he said and walked toward the water. I followed. My head throbbed. Itchy bumps were rising up behind my elbows and knees. I tried to summon Tessa, couldn’t seem to find her. Maybe she’d disappeared into the crowd at the snack shack or onto one of the huge rafts—or into the back of the Blazer with Duane, where they’d put on the air-conditioning and were lying next to each other, keeping an eye on the kids playing.
Ben waded out into the murky water. “Tadpoles!” he said. His voice was gleeful. I followed him and stood at the water’s edge. “Come on out,” he said. “You gotta see this.” I walked out next to him. He bent and cupped his hands. The tadpole settled down against a strand of lakeweed.
“Ha!” I said. “He’s not there. You can’t see him.”
Ben lunged and came toward me, his hands cupped in front of him. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Me? The tadpole champion of Patchogue, New York?” The tadpole jittered in the tiny puddle in his palms. Tessa shivered. She thought of her hubby, how he’d catch her in his big hands, how he’d grin down at her, triumphant.
“Put it down,” I said. “Imagine if two big hands scooped you up and held you where you couldn’t breath.”
Ben looked at me. “Hey, weren’t you ever a kid?”
“Not so you’d notice,” I said and proceeded into the pity party I’d started with the first damn oriole, a pity party I stayed in all that endless hot stinking afternoon. By the time the power boats started to thin out, I was sitting in the water, willing to risk cholera just to feel a little bit cool. Ben had wandered off, stooping to poke at crud on the shoreline, raising the binoculars to his eyes to scan the lumpy brown hills. I was just starting to get comfortable in the cooling air when he hunkered down beside me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not sure what for, but I’m sorry. We’ll grab a motel up in Payson for tonight, maybe run over to the little casino. I’ll make it up to you.” He nuzzled my damp hairline and set his wet hand between my shoulder blades. I felt ashamed. I heard his breath catch and he stood up. “Look,” he said. “Great Blues. Two of them.”
As I raised my head, two gleaming shadows flew low over the water and fluttered down to a dead cottonwood down the shoreline. Ben handed me the binoculars. “Go ahead, honey,” he said. “Look. Please look.”
I held the glasses to my eyes. The birds were like nothing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t compare them to anything, the way we humans do. They weren’t angels. They weren’t a dream. They were more than all of those. They dropped to the water in slow motion and began to hunt, their silvery-gray and blue feathers catching last light.
“Are they real?” My voice was soft and high as a little girl’s. Ben held my shoulders lightly in his fingertips.
“They are.” We watched them for a long, silent and perfect time. The light faded and the Great Blues went on about their business, stretching out their long necks, stepping through the water slowly and carefully.
I convert fast and when I do, I’m hooked. Gin, good olives, love and birds: they’re all the same. I like them, I want more. The next day we bought me binoculars in Flag, picked up Ben’s meager possessions and drove the short way back to Tucson. I saw ravens up in the mountain pines. I saw crows and learned the difference. Ben saw a red-tailed hawk on a telephone pole and I missed it. There were no more Great Blues. That suited me fine. I was happy with the pictures in my mind, how the light had silvered on their feathers, how they had moved so slowly, how the brown hills had gone black, the saguaro rising up like guardians.
We reached home early evening and sat out on the front stoop poking through Ben’s stuff. The recipe was in a cloth-covered diary that said, “My Year.” I could hardly read the cobwebby writing, but Ben said it was enough to bring it all back.
“I watched my dad every fall,” he said. “This was my great-gran’s recipe book. My dad never taught me anything but to say, ‘Look out,’ or “Move, kid.’