Nothing for several minutes other than the hordes streaming by, then the strange bird emerged. Long, slender wings, a reddish breast, and it was fast. Much faster than the starlings and twice their size. The cloud shifted, swallowing it, as the entire flock drifted slowly east, farther into the plains.
The bird looked familiar. Not one from his journals, but one he’d seen a picture of before. Something tropical perhaps that had drifted north? Every once in a while a single representative of a species would be spotted, hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles from where it was normally found. The birder who saw it could only hope that someone else confirmed the sighting or that he got a picture, otherwise it would be discounted and couldn’t be legitimately added to a life list. If he could add a new bird to his list, maybe that would make things better. A new bird! He could concentrate on that. Something good to cling to.
The flock grew small in the distance.
Carson sighed, put the binoculars back in their case, then packed the rest of his gear into the truck. He checked the straps that held his motorcycle in place. They were tight. The tie-down holding the extra batteries for the truck and motorcycle were secure too. From his spot on the hill he could see the dirt road he’d taken from the highway and the long stretch of I-25 that reached north toward Denver and south to Colorado Springs. No traffic. The air above the Denver skyline was crystalline. He strained his ears, tilting his head from one side then the other. He hadn’t heard a car on the highway behind him all afternoon. Grass rustle. Moldy-leaf smells, nothing else, and when he finally opened the truck’s door, the metallic click was foreign and loud.
Back at his house in Littleton, he checked the photoelectric panels’ gauges inside the front door. It had been sunny for the last week, so the system was full. The water tower showed only four hundred gallons though. He’d have to go water scavenging again in the next few days.
“I’m home,” he called. His voice echoed off the tiled foyer. “Tillie?”
The living room was empty, and so were the kitchen and bedrooms. Carson stepped into the bathroom, his hand on his chest where his heart beat fast, but the sleeping pills in the cabinet looked undisturbed. “Tillie?”
He found her sitting in the backyard beneath the globe willow, still in her robe. The nightgown beneath it was yellowed and tattered. In her dresser he’d put a dozen new ones, but she’d only wear the one she had in her suitcase when he’d picked her up, wandering through the Denver Botanical Gardens two years ago.
He sat on the grass next to her. She was fifty or so. Lots of gray in her blond hair. Slender wrists. Narrow face. Strikingly blue eyes that hardly ever focused on anything.
“How’s that cough?” he asked.
“We never play bridge anymore, Bob Robert.”
Carson stretched out. A day with binoculars pressed to his face and his elbows braced on his knees hurt his back. “Tough to get partners,” he said. Then he added out of habit, “And I’m not Bob Robert.”
She picked at a loose thread in the robe, pulling at it until it broke free. “Have you seen the garden? Not a flower in it. A single geranium or a daisy would give me hope. If just one dead thing would come back.”
“I’ve brought you seeds,” he said. “You just need to plant them.”
She wrapped the thread around her fingertip tightly. “I waited for the pool man, but he never came. I hate skimming.” She raised her fist to her mouth and coughed primly behind it twice, grimacing each time.
Carson raised his head. Other than the grass under the tree, most of the yard was dirt. The lot was longer than it was wide. At the end farthest from the house a chicken wire enclosure surrounded the poultry. A couple hens sat in the shade by the coop. No pool. When he’d gone house hunting, he’d toyed with the idea of a pool, but the thought of trying to keep it filled and the inevitable problems with water chemistry made him decide against it. The house on the other side of the privacy fence had a pool as did most of the houses in the neighborhood, now empty except for the scummy pond in the deep end. In the spring he’d found a deer, its neck bent unnaturally back, at the bottom of one a block over. Evidently it had jumped the fence and gone straight in.
“Are you hungry?” Carson asked.
Tillie tilted her head to the side. “When will the garden grow again?”
He pushed himself off the ground. “I’ll fix eggs.”
Later that evening, he tucked Tillie into bed. The room smelled of peppermint. From the bulge in her cheek, he guessed she was sucking on one. In a little-girl voice, she said, “Can you put in my video?” Her expression was alert, but her eyes were red-rimmed and watery. He smiled. This was as good as she got. Sometimes he could play gin rummy with her and she’d stay focused for an hour or so before she drifted away. If he asked her about her past, she’d be unresponsive for days. All he knew about her came from the suitcase she carried when he’d found her. There was a sheet of letterhead with a name at the top: “Tillie Waterhouse, Marketing Executive,” and an athletic club identification card with her picture and name. But there was no Tillie Waterhouse in the Denver phone book. Could she have wandered away from the airport when air travel was canceled? The first words she had said to him, when she finally spoke, were, “How do you bear it?”
“Did you have a good day?” He turned on the television and pressed rewind on the VCR.
Her hands peeked out from under the covers and pulled them tight under her chin. “Something magical is going to happen. The leaves whispered to me.”
The video clicked to a stop. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. The television flickered as the tape started, a documentary on the 2001 New York City Marathon a decade earlier. It opened with a helicopter flyover of the racers crossing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn. The human crowd surged forward, packed elbow to elbow, long as the eye could see. Then the camera cut to ankle level. Feet ran past for five minutes. Then it went to face level at a turn in the course. The starting crush had spread out, but the runners still jogged within an arm’s length of each other, thousands of them. Carson had watched the video with her the first few times. The video was a celebration of numbers. Thirty-thousand athletes straining over the twenty-six mile course through New York City’s five boroughs.
“Here’s the remote if you want to watch it again.”
“So many American flags,” she said.
“It was only a month after that first terrorist thing.” Carson sat on the end of her bed. Some runners wore stars and stripes singlets or racing shorts. Others carried small flags and waved them at the camera as they passed.
“I won’t be able to sleep,” she said.
He nodded. “Me either.”
Before he left, he pressed his hand to her forehead. She looked up briefly, the blanket still snug against her chin. A little fever and her breath sounded wheezy.
Later that night he made careful entries in his day book. A breeze through the open window freshened the room. He’d spotted a mountain plover, a long-billed curlew, a burrowing owl and a horned lark, plus the usual assortment of lark sparrows, yellow warblers, western meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds, crows, black terns and mourning doves. Nothing unusual beside the strange bird in the starling flock. Idly he thumbed through his bird identification handbook. No help there. Could it actually be a new bird? Something to add to his life list?
Tomorrow he’d take the camera. Several major flocks roosted in the elms along the Platte River. He hadn’t done a riparian count in a couple months anyway. After visiting the distribution center, he’d go to the river. With an early enough start, he would still have ten hours of sun to work with.
He shut the book and turned off his desk light. Gradually his eyes adjusted as he looked out the window. A full moon illuminated the scene. From his chair he could see three houses bathed in the leaden glow, their windows black as basalt. His neighbor’s minivan rested on its rims, all four tires long gone flat. Carson tried to come up with the guy’s name, but it remained elusive. Generally he tried not to think about his neighbors or their empty houses.
He couldn’t hear anything other than the wind moving over the silent city. Not sleepy at all, he watched the shadows slide slowly across the lawn. Just after 2:00 a.m. a pair of coyotes trotted up the middle of the street. Their toenails clicked loudly against the asphalt. Carson finally rose, took two sleeping pills and went to bed.
“The woman who stays with me is sick,” said Carson. He rested his arm against his truck, supplies requisition list in hand.
The distribution center manager nodded dourly. “Oh, the sweet sorrow of parting.” He hooked his grimy thumbs in his overalls. Through the warehouse doors behind him Carson saw white plastic wrapped bales, four feet to a side, stacked five bales high and reaching to the warehouse’s far end. They contained bags of flour, corn, cloth, paper, a little bit of everything. Emergency stores.
Carson blanched. “It’s not that. She just has a cough and a bit of fever. If it’s bacterial, an antibiotic might
