The Pigeon Coop

The important thing is that the pigeons are dead.

This fact pins the boy to the earth, freezes him in this moment: nearly twelve years old and utterly powerless. Grass-stained jeans and his mother’s hand-me-down Prince t-shirt. He clutches a Folger’s can filled with birdseed and stares into the mass of bloody feathers in the pigeon coop.

Years from now, he will still be in this moment when he says that people either spend their lives running from their childhood or running back to it. He will be trying to sound intelligent in front of a girl he hopes to sleep with, a poet who describes her work as “chewy,” who uses words like crepuscular, slack-jawed, ammonite. They will be drinking cheap beer at a bonfire near the state university. She will ask him to elaborate, to give an example.

But that is then, and the pigeons are here now—no, were just here, have crossed over from here to there in a way that the boy cannot articulate, yet understands on a visceral level.

The house behind him is quiet. He’s up early to feed the pigeons, and his parents have not yet awoken, not yet blistered the air with their jabs and hot glares toward one another.

The pigeons have been in his mother’s family for generations—from her father’s father— and are a source of both pride and annoyance to his parents. To his mother they are the descendants of a WWII messenger pigeon. To his father, they smell like shit. Neither bothered to name the animals, referring to them only in the collective sense. “The pigeons,” “the feathered rats,” “the damned birds.” That the boy should take care of the pigeons was the one thing his parents agreed on.

It is his one responsibility, and it is everything. He has given every bird a name, has observed their habits while he pours birdseed into the feed trough—the way Frito patiently waits for the other birds to clear away before eating—the way Taco and Nacho are inseparable, will interrupt their feeding to twine their emerald-and-purple-ringed necks together—how Milky Way swoops down before the others, pushes his hefty, mottled brown and white body against competing birds to keep the seed to himself.

The poet will smile at the fact that the birds are named after snacks and candy. The boy will say he hadn’t really thought about it, that he picked things that made him happy.

Beyond feeding his charges, the boy is responsible for cleaning their coop. Running warm, soapy water over the floorboards. Mopping up the crusted bird filth. He says he doesn’t mind because this is his job, and he is trying to be strong.

He sees his parents come home from work, drained and tired—they are both nurses in the local hospital, their shifts sometimes aligning, but often not. When the pigeons catch bird mites, the boy insists on being the one to administer the medication. They are his patients, and he makes the rounds of his little clinic taking care of them, dripping beads of ointment under Frito and Milky Way’s neck feathers before moving on, making a list of who has received treatment and who hasn’t.

His parents stay up all night washing clothes, scratching at the microscopic bites covering their bodies, washing every fabric in the house to eradicate the mites. The three of them driven nearly insane by the bugs’ ceaseless hunger. They eat dinner in their underwear, and the boy feels a vague and pervasive shame—at being so naked in front of his parents, at the softness of his round belly, at the sores from the mites and the sense that this is all somehow his fault. The boy’s mother looks from the table—the bowl of instant potatoes, the grocery-store rotisserie chicken and steamed vegetables—then to her family, and now she is smiling, laughing, pointing at a blob of potatoes caught in her husband’s chest hair, and he is laughing too, tosses a chopped carrot at his wife, which lands expertly in the hooked clasp at the front of her bra. The boy looks on in strange fascination as his parents dissolve into squealing children.

That night, his mother tells him that the only other named pigeon in the family was the first one, which his great-grandfather had rescued from a bombed-out hole in the streets of Paris. He’d named the bird Nigel, after a British sailor he met in North Africa. The boy’s mother says it’s the only story her grandfather told about the war.

He will say the same thing to the poet—will tell her of the lack of stories, the past buried and dead and better for it. She will be curious, will keep asking questions even after taking him home, after they breathe the same stale beer scent into each other’s mouths, their hands enjoying the slow pace of exploration. He will want to stop talking, will be tired of digging into this memory. The poet traces a spiral on him—her fingernail the barest pressure in the hollow of his chest, circling outward through wiry hair, then over his smooth stomach. Ammonite, he thinks, pictures her lips mouthing the word, an endless line moving out from a fixed point. Everything grows from the center.

He will tell her what his mother did not tell him—about the pen and ink sketches of soldiers he later found in his great-grandfather’s notebooks. Of men in formation; the war reporter scribbling on a steno-pad; the sneering jowls of men of rank; the curly-haired sailor, who appears again and again in the pages. Sometimes shirtless with seabag slung over his shoulder, cap askew. Other times just his face—thin mustache and arched brows, slightly crooked nose, cigarette held taught in pursed lips. Always looking away. The ink stark on the soft, cream-colored paper. The internal timeline of the pages is random, haphazard—one moment in Africa then Paris and back with no sense.

The boy does not understand these pages until much later, until there is a name for the unanswerable feeling he has while looking at them. The poet will kiss him again, will guide his hands back to her. Perhaps he will think about the offhand comment he made that night—perhaps he will think there is a place where, once you reach, you stop running. He will think about the notebooks, the drawings from his great-grandfather, will close his eyes, let his head fall backward. He will remember the final drawing in the notebooks. The sailor again. The lines of ink fierce and quick, carved into the page as if the artist were trying to etch this moment into permanence, knowing he would fail, knowing that this could not last. Is it a memory, or something hurried in the moment? The shirt slipping off the shoulder or being put back on?

The next morning, the pigeons are dead.

First thought: this, too, is his fault. He didn’t apply the medication correctly and the mites have actually eaten the birds, after all he still feels the itch of their bites and his mind is leaping at anything to understand what he is seeing through the mesh windows of the coop—the blood, the mutilated bodies, the feet and wings lying solitary in dark stains on the wood slats.

Before he can bring himself to open the door, he hears a noise.

There is an animal, slunk low to the floor, dark and hirsute. The boy has never seen a fisher cat before, but he has heard their cries in the woods: a high-pitched screaming sound, like children lost in the night. It will be years before he connects those sounds to the animal he sees in front of him, and the boy grows up wondering why no one acknowledges the sounds of the lost children.

Desolation and shame become hot, tearful anger as the boy realizes that he is not to blame, that this animal has murdered Frito—no, maybe Frito is still alright, has hidden in a corner and avoided the beast’s jaws.

But there are no sounds of cooing, no fluttering feathers.

The boy stands there, still holding the coffee can filled with bird seed. After a minute, he goes back into the house, creeps quietly to avoid waking his parents.

He searches through the garage for everything he has been told to avoid, the cruelty native to childhood inspiring every act of vengeance racing through his brain. He looks at the hammers and wrenches. The axe for splitting wood. The slim chainsaw his father has used on tree limbs. Finally, he stops at the gallon tank of gasoline next to the riding lawn mower. How many times has he been warned, told not to touch, told this was dangerous?

It is easy to find the grill lighter, harder to carry the gas tank. The metal container hits against his shins, and the pain feeds his anger.

As he pours gasoline on the pigeon coop, he is grateful as its acrid, chemical smell obscures the thick iron scent of pigeon blood. Gas splashes onto his jeans and bare feet. He circles around the coop, the tank growing lighter in his arms as the gas flows out. He needs to act, act fast before his parents wake up, and clutches the lighter in his small, tight fist, his finger tense on the trigger, the corners of his vision darkening as the entire world collapses down to the space between his finger and the lighter’s trigger.

It is a cool, silent morning. The leaves have begun to yellow, the geese not quite ready to fly south.

A scratching sound comes from within the pigeon coop. The fisher cat is clawing at the walls and door, and the boy realizes it is trapped.

Perhaps it slipped in through a cracked floorboard, or the hole the boy pushes dirty mop-water through. Perhaps, after gorging itself, it is now too big to slide back through the hole, or the way is hidden by matted feathers.

The lighter is heavy in the boy’s hand. He wants the coop to burn, wants to hear the fisher cat howl and shriek, trapped among the broken bodies of his birds.

There are things he will not tell the poet, will not have words for even after they sleep together, as she rests her head on his chest and he spits strands of her hair from his mouth.

If it was a story, it would have a better ending, he will say.

What he will not be able to say is that he wanted his parents to stop him, wanted it to be like a story. His father would take the lighter from his hands, his mother would find the pigeons with horror. They would rob him of his vengeance but also shield him from needing to make the choice at all. They would not only see each other—they would see him.

Instead, when his parents wake, they only see the aftermath. The empty pigeon coop, the stink of gasoline. There is shouting and concern as the boy struggles to explain. The threat of pyromania prompts therapy appointments, which prompt the parents to schedule their own appointments, and when they finally separate later that year the boy will understand, will feel the uncoiling of a tense spring of anticipation.

He will tell the poet how he simply could not ignite the lighter.

The important thing is that the pigeons are dead. His hands shake. He hates how soft he is, wants to keep hold of that hot, leaden anger in his stomach, but he can hear the scratching and yowling of the fisher cat. Its desperation, its fear in confinement.

He opens the door, steps back. After a cautious minute, the fisher cat emerges, sniffs the air, and lopes past him. He watches as its sleek body disappears into the underbrush at the forest’s edge. ⏱︎