“We didn’t touch it.” She dragged a hand across the stain, trying to brush it off. “Just looking.”
“Birds have all kinds of diseases,” I said. “You shouldn’t mess with them.”
“We know that.” The girl with the ponytail backed away, and the other followed. They were about the same height. Same coloring, dark eyes set in pinched faces. Sisters, maybe cousins.
“Oh yeah? Then you should know even poking at a dead thing with a stick can let loose bacteria in the air. You’re probably breathing it in right now.”
Both girls caught their breath at once, as if they might hold it until the danger passed. I stepped back and made room for them to move through the bushes. They did, avoiding my body, rushing forward after they cleared the palm scrub behind me.
I squatted beside the bird. It was a fairly large specimen, but too far into rigor for me to consider mounting. I grabbed one of the discarded sticks and used it to flip the bird over until it was spread out in the dirt, wings opened wide, breast thrust upward, back curved. Judging by the set of its neck, probably two days had passed. The wound in its side was right below the rib cage. It was circular and dark, a small depression likely caused by a pellet gun.
Though the bird was already in decomp, the wings were in good shape. Using my pocketknife, I dislodged them at the juncture nearest the torso. As I worked, a palmetto bug crawled from the opening in its body and scurried out into the brush.
Digging a hole with the heel of my boot, I nudged the remains into the divot and scuffed the leftover pile back over it. I set the wings on the picnic table and waited for Lolee to finish. She was barely visible out on the water, tooling around on the back of the Jet Ski. The driver turned sharply and the force slung her off the back. When she surfaced, she flailed and yowled. He reached down to help her back on and she tugged him down into the water with her, dunking him over and over again.
She looked so much like Brynn it burned a hole in my chest. I stared up hard into the sun until the world turned blue and spotty. When my eyes met the table again, everything moved, as if I’d looked at a Magic Eye painting too long. Everything dots, squiggles, fuzz. Nothing made sense, no matter how hard I tried to decipher it.
“Can I have those?” I’d stuffed the egret wings inside a grocery bag and my mother couldn’t stop staring at them.
“Why?”
I was going to put the wings in the leftover bin once I finished cleaning them. I’d already pulled out the dish soap next to the sink at the back of the shop.
“A project.”
Who knew what that meant. I’d been contemplating what my brother had told me about my mother’s art—how she’d thought it was something she’d do with her life, before she’d married our father and had two kids. I didn’t know much about it. Especially not sculpture. I wasn’t sure what the body parts of animals would have to do with that. If anything, I assumed she’d go take a pottery class. One of those ones where women drank wine and made a coffee mug to take home at the end of the night, something she could do with some of her friends.
“What kind of project?” I asked.
“An art project.”
She didn’t elaborate, just held out her hand. I looped the handles around her fingers and she clenched them, bringing the bag in close to her chest. I imagined the bugs climbing up along the plastic, crawling out onto her blouse, and shivered.
“You should let me clean them first.”
“Don’t you have other stuff to do? Aren’t there deer mounts backed up in the freezer?”
She’d already pulled out plenty of things from the bin and scattered them across the table. There was a bat that I’d gathered a couple of years ago, a hole in one of its webby wings like a punctured kite. She’d also snagged a ratty foxtail, petrified frogs, a busted turtle shell, and a pelt from a black-and-white cat run over by one of our neighbors.
“Do we have any more of this kind of stuff?”
“We’re running low,” I said, poking at a hunk of armadillo armor. It leafed open like mica. “This is about it.”
Roadkill was a great way to keep the bins full, but I’d been lax in my early-morning runs since I’d taken over the shop. I couldn’t be bothered to troll the sides of the highway, scouting for carrion that hadn’t soured in the blistering Florida heat.
I considered handing over road duty to Bastien, who’d vacated the premises after I’d caught him directing my mother toward the bin of parts. The image of him scooping up possum guts in the ninety-degree weather brought me a small measure of comfort.
“I’d just like to know what you’re gonna do with this stuff.” There was a little hole in the side of the plastic bag. Even thinking about mites made my hair itch.
She rifled through the cabinet next to the sink, scrounging out several jars of glass eyes and pigment paints. There was a nick at the back of her head, which had been shaved again. The cut had dried with a bit of toilet paper stuck to it. It reminded me of the times I’d watched her shave her legs in our bathroom sink when I was little. Shaving cream dripping from an ankle; running endless hot water that steamed up the room and left my skin feeling slick.
“I’m putting together some stuff for Lucinda Rex,” she said. “Just a small presentation.”
I wished for what felt like the millionth time that my family could stay separate from the women in my life. Already I envisioned my mother inviting Lucinda over for dinner. Maybe she’d sit between Milo and me at the dinner table, running a hand up and down both of our thighs. Perhaps she’d move in there and sleep in my old bedroom. I pinched myself, hard, on the tender skin of my inner arm.
My mother turned back to the cabinet. “Do we have any black dye?”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“You know what I mean, smart-ass.” She’d already thrown open every drawer in the workshop. Bottles and jars littered the countertops, crammed full of buttons and thick stitching thread and the pristine gleam of cutlery: knives and stout ruffers and scrapers and pliers.
She turned back around and pointed at me with one of the long awls we used to gouge holes in the pelts after tanning. “Well?”
My mother looked healthy. Her cheeks had filled out a little and her skin was a better color: pinker, less sallow. What could it hurt to let her have this one small thing? If it was going to help her deal with Dad’s suicide, should I begrudge her access to the shop and the things that were already hers to begin with? I didn’t know if that meant letting my mother make her weird sexual art or not. If it were anyone else, I probably would’ve found it funny: badgers fondling rabbits, a pink flamingo ducking its slender neck to fellate a squirrel. Animals meant to look ferocious suddenly turned vulnerable, predator and prey equalized by the set of a jaw or the placement of paws. The work was good. The fact that it was my mother creating it was what turned me off.
I knelt beside the cupboard below the sink and dug through the boxes of hair dye from the Dollar General. Most of the time we bought whatever was BOGO, so the selection was limited.
“We don’t have black.”
“How about off-black or soft black?”
“We have nutmeg, deep copper, beige brown, and absolute platinum.”