Us Lost Boys

Us boys. We were like two covers of a hard-backed novel, stitched tight. You couldn’t tear us apart if you chucked that book over a canyon cliff and swung it ‘round on a rope. 

Albert was always a quiet boy. Quiet, but not the normal type of quiet. He was rowdy as anything when he talked to adults, to the teachers, too, and to me, but put him in a room with another kid and he’d balk and jump out the window like his pants were caught on fire.

He and I got into lotsa trouble together, though. It was fun. We always had a good time. There was this one time, I remember, about a year after he moved in next door—they immigrated in from somewhere-or-other in Germany (I can’t remember now), but his English was fine as anything—we pulled a fast one on the lady across the street.

She was a cranky creature. Always ringing our doorbell at nine-thirty in the evening and telling us she could hear us laughing in our living room from all the way across the street. My Ma would tell her we were sorry, and then she’d close the door and we’d all go back to laughing at whatever dumb thing we’d been laughing at. She had lotsa birds, I remember. She was a Bird-Lady. Not a Cat-Lady. No, she was different. Weird. I only ever saw them through her windows, but there were parrots all over the place in there. Cages hanging down all over the ceiling, and parrots inside them, outside, perched on the cabinets and pecking at the cracker plate on the dirty coffee table. I swear I saw a peacock in there once, strutting around all jewel-like, but I didn’t see it again after that, so I can’t be sure. Albert told me I’d probably made it up and started believing it after I’d gone around saying it for a while. He’s probably right. I do things like that a lot.

It was the day after Thanksgiving, the 29th. It was a pretty sick prank. Sick, as in, messed up. Cold. But we thought it was clever, so we went through with it. I came up with the idea. Albert didn’t want to at first, on account of not wanting to get in trouble with my parents—my parents were the only adults he was real quiet with, he never sassed them—but I convinced him to. And then he thought of how we’d get away with it. 

At eight o’ clock that night, when it had just turned to nighttime, we went round her house. We didn’t tell my parents, or his parents, ‘cause they all thought we were real nice kids, and they would’ve stopped us. That would’ve been no fun. So, we told our parents we were going over to the other one’s house, and we snuck off to the Bird-Lady’s. Albert, being a real quiet, nice kid when he felt like it, and the Lady never having come ‘round his house complaining, went to the front and rang the doorbell. I went around to the back. I heard her when she opened the door; she said, “Oh, are you selling something? Why, you’re such a cute little young ‘un; how much is it?” That fawning voice made my mouth go all sour. And he said, “Well, no, ma’am. I’m not selling anything. I just wanted to ask, would you have a moment to take a survey? It’s for my school project.” “Oh...Ah, well, why not? Go on, hit me, young ‘un!” And he went on to ask her a load of dumb questions like where she lived and whether she knew all the fifty states and could she name them please. She couldn’t. I’d’ve liked to stay and listen to all those dumb questions and that Bird-Lady’s dumb stuttering, but I went around to the back of the house. See, the windows were fastened at her place, fastened tight like she thought someone was coming 'round to steal her parrots any second. But Albert, he’d taught me this trick where you slip a card in through the window and switch the clip. We only ever did it to each other’s houses, to scare the other kid while he was sleeping. But that, that's what I did. I switched open three of those back windows, which were dirty as anything, and you can guess what went down after that, after I got the heck outta there. All I’ll say is, she had a good lot less parrots than she’d had before. We never got found out. I’m pretty sure she suspected me—not Albert, though. He was too nice. A nice, quiet kid, you know?

For a couple of weeks people in the neighborhood kept finding parrots perched in the trees, or flying in through the windows like red angels of death. Fred, he lives three houses down, and he told me and Albert at school his family had been eating dinner real silent, when a great scarlet thing flapped in and cannoned through all the food, squawking “In your cage! In your cage!” He said he wondered how Bird-Lady had lost track of her darn parrots. I said she must be losing her touch. 

Me and Albert were out in the backyard a week or so after that, horsing around and thinking about putting up a treehouse like they do in movies, so we could have secret meetings and all that. We were sitting there under the tree, laughing at some dumb thing we couldn’t even remember when something fell outta the branches, right between me and Al. It was all red, and green, too, like some mangled backwards Christmas tree, which was funny because we’d just put ours up the week before. It was one of those parrots. Still jerking and stuff like a madman, twitching and everything. Albert shrieked real high. I swore. But that feathered thing, it was so grotesque, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. There it was, half-bleeding, and scrawny, too, lotsa its feathering sloughing off, and I couldn’t look away. I really couldn’t. I wanted to touch it, or stop the bleeding, or something, whatever you do with a dying bird, but I couldn’t move my fingers. They were all stiff. And then, after a little while, the wretched beast went still. It just laid there. And I, I didn’t move. Even though Albert shouted and cursed and danced around in circles, I couldn’t move. 

‘Cause, I realized, it was my fault. I opened those windows. I freed the parrots. And now here was one wretch, dead, right in my backyard and one hair from my right hand. Right outta the tree. All of a sudden, too. Albert said something about payback, and I looked down. There was blood everywhere. Blood in my eyes. On my fingertips. 

by HALEY CREIGHTON

We didn’t ever do something, pull something like that again. Never. Never did pull tricks like that again. And the Bird-Lady down the street, she got new birds about a year after that, when she’d done stamping around posting warnings and threats on all the telephone poles in the neighborhood. She got a load of these black red-winged birds, a whole throng of them. Mourners. Sometimes, you can see them flying about in the windows, perching on the sills. And you can hear ‘em, calling out in the night like the mourners they are, wailing for that scarlet thing dead.