The boy in his Sunday clothes stared at the pelicans scattered blackly on the shore like slick and globous stones, right where the monster had left them. He remembered them flying in great lines above the oil rigs at dawn, dropping singly into the ocean like Saint Peter in his doubt and then floating fishful and satisfied, as though everything had been resolved.
That was before the monster.
The oil rigs were quiet now, and it was rare to see even a single pelican, and the fishermen who still went out in desperation from time to time caught things that were not good to eat. The beaches here, then there, were covered in the traces of the monster’s forays: dead fish in their thousands and sands coated bubbling black. Even people had disappeared into the shining ooze, but no one from Mikey’s town, at least no one anyone talked about.
So they all stayed and prayed and shut their eyes and said the monster would go some other place, until it came, and then they said that it wouldn’t strike the same place twice so soon. And now when they saw that it had, they would say something else. Mikey clambered down the rocks and drew near to one of the pelicans. A creature from another, nighted universe, a photonegative world. The eye, steely blue and stark against the tarred feathers, stared up at him. He knelt and put his head close to its face to see. The bird suddenly shuddered and Mikey jumped back, surprised and terrified in his hopes.
He saw then that many of them were breathing, some trying to move, some even standing, trying in vain to extend their sticky, heavy wings. He thought of Ezekiel and the field of bones, the stirring, groaning army of the dead, one of those Bible stories that haunted his nightmares. Like the flood, rising and carrying the bad people away, and he knew he wasn’t one of the good ones. Like Leviathan, God’s laugh at doubters—and he knew he was a doubter—or Jonah’s whale, God’s punishment for the disobedient—and he knew he was one of them, too. Like the monster, creeping along dark waters, coming to shore by night, swallowing more and more of the world and of everything they lived by.
Mikey thought of the pelicans flying. He thought that if they were not to fly again that it might kill him, as sure as the monster might—as sure as the monster would. He stared for a minute at the dying bird beside him. Then he ran home, half an old documentary in mind, snuck quietly in the back so as not to disturb the Bible study, and returned to the beach with a bucket and a couple of towels and the big bottle of dish soap. He drew near to his first bird. As he reached out, the beak snapped up suddenly and scratched his arm. He jumped back, tears in his eyes. But then he bit his lip and went to the bird again. It seemed this effort had exhausted the bird, and Mikey ignored the little trickle of blood on his arm as he gently rubbed the oily remnants of the monster’s touch away. Once he pressed his face to the bird’s bad-smelling down and felt the trembling heart, and he didn’t have a word for it but home.
All day he was at them. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do, really, and he paid for it with more cuts and scratches and a few near misses at his eyes. But slowly he got the hang of it. He held their bills shut, and if he gripped them just so, they stayed still as statues as he worked the oil out of them. Most of them were too tired to fight their salvation.
In his memory of the documentary, they came out clean and fresh and recovered in some special room, and then, somehow, the film cut to a shot of them flying like nothing had ever happened. That wasn’t what happened with his birds. Despite his best efforts, patches of the oily black stuff still clung to them. When he released them, they often just flopped back down on the beach. Sometimes they managed to stand and ruffle up their half-cleaned feathers. None flew.
It was afternoon, his towels black and soaked, his arms and coat and slacks a ruin of oil and mud and scratches. His eyes stung where he had tried to wipe away sweat and tears. And then he saw it. Maybe it was that first one. He wasn’t sure. But its wings beat and it made a halfhearted little turkey flap across the beach. Some big stone in his heart went with it, and he found himself yelling for sheer joy Oh Jesus yes.
“Michael!” His mother’s voice, anger, shock, shame, and the big stone crashed right back down.
“Oh sweet God have mercy,” she screamed across the beach, in a voice that had in it no mercy at all. She did not run to him, but only stood, her face pale, and as he approached, dragging the towels, she turned her head and called back, “Abe, what are we going to do with him?” He felt his jaw going tight and hard, and out of the corner of his eye, he watched his pelican flop down onto the beach again and lay sprawled there, one wing out.
“How could you,” she said, as he came near her. “Ah! My towels! What’ll we do with you, what’ll we do with you, I just don’t know . . . .”
A titan shame settled across his shoulders. But a little Satanic voice in him said that they were only towels, only clothes, that the birds had to fly again and they would have died and maybe they still would die, but at least he tried, and he started to say it aloud when Dad came snarling out of the house. “Just what do you think you’re doing?” he snarled. “What are you doing, down here, ruining your good clothes like that? You got a brain, don’t you?” And then, “What if that thing had gotten you?”
He thought he would try to explain, that the monster would get them all, that if it had gotten the birds, it would get all of them no matter how tight they locked their doors and shut their eyes, and that the birds had to fly again, they had to, but he couldn’t explain, and he yelled, “I hate you! I hate you!” He threw the towels down and felt all the hot tears coming that he couldn’t control, and he hated that too.
Mama shook her head and sighed heavily. “Michael, no.” And Dad at the same time, “Quit crying. What were you thinking?”
And what are you, what are you thinking, what kind of thing are you, banged around his ears and his head like a gong as he followed them home and as he pulled his clothes off and threw them into the steel bucket his mother had put on the porch and went shivering, shamed and almost naked into the house.
When he came down his mother was waiting.
“Your father went out for more soap so we can do the dishes tonight. And I want you to kneel down and ask God to forgive you.”
“For what,” he mumbled.
He could see rage bubbling under the skin of her neck, the vein of her forehead.
“Your fourth and fifth commandments, for starters. Say them.”
He glared at her.
“Say them.”
He mumbled honor father mother Sabbath holy.
“Kneel down.”
He got down on his knees, white rage in his chest, thinking of the pelicans flying, and then all of a sudden his heart sinking and the rage turning in on himself, blazing hatred at the monster he was. The stupid, disobedient kid he was. What kind of thing, what kind of person goes down to where the monster made its kills? What kind of person goes in his Sunday clothes and plays with dying birds? Tears again, hating the tears too, hating himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
His mother knelt down next to him and took his head in her hands. He felt it again, the home feeling, and he tried to think how the one could be right and the other wrong.
“Think, next time,” she said. “Think.”
“I’ll be good,” he said quietly. “I’ll be good, I just . . . .”
“What are you doing?” came his father’s voice. “He doesn’t need any of that. He needs to learn consequences. Up. Up to your room. And you’ll stay there through dinner. Cost of those clothes means you’re out a meal tonight, and that’s getting off easy.”
The white rage came back, but then the desire to be good, the feel of his mother’s hands around his head settled over him, and he nodded and walked slowly up to his room. He felt dirty inside, wrung out like a rag, angry and tired, the feeling that nothing would be clean again.
The vision of the dead and dying pelicans would not let him go. He saw their oil-spotted feathers. He saw them flying in popcorn ceiling of the room, and thought in his parents’ voices disaster, disaster. You’re a disaster. This is a disaster.
He heard them eating their dinner downstairs, sometimes their voices rising over what to do with him. He thought now, while they are busy, now, I will sneak down and finish the work. But the Satan voice put courage in him. I am not wrong, said the voice. They have to fly, and if they don’t it will be the monster killing us all.
“I’m going back out,” he announced as he came downstairs into the kitchen with an armful of bath towels.
Dad froze with his food halfway to his mouth.
“You go out that door, you aren’t coming back in tonight.”
His mother said, “Abe.”
“I mean it. Up to you, Michael. Up to your room or this isn’t your home tonight.”
“Abe, the monster,” said his mother. They were talking as though he wasn’t there. He opened the screen door to the porch and picked up the bucket and the dish soap, and stood there watching them decide his fate.
“Thing won’t come back. Was just here. It rolls around the Gulf,” he grunted. “Anyway, what’s he going to do, sit there and let it eat him? Boy’s got no more brains than that he deserves it.”
Mikey was thinking why is he doing this, he hates me, and I hate him, and I will stay out all night, and if it eats me maybe it should, and then you’ll go to Hell because you killed me. But under that another thought persisted, that he had to get to the pelicans, that there were so many of them, and that maybe some of them might fly, and that would be the one good thing he could do.
He slammed the door behind him, spilling suds from his bucket. He heard it lock behind him, and his mother’s voice raised saying, “Oh, sweet Lord, help us.”
The black beach was peaceful as the grave. The moon gone skinnydipping in the dark waters lit the oily lumps that were the birds.
Mikey went to work. He was rougher than he meant to be, and he kept telling them, “It’s for your own good,” as they pecked and clawed and flapped at him. But once he had them in the hold, they were quiet, and as the night went on, both he and the birds grew calmer. It was hard to see, but it seemed like the monster’s oilstuff was coming out better.
Little by little, as the moon got smaller and higher, the brown and bedraggled bird-shadows on the beach began to outnumber the slick black ones. Alright, he said. Alright, something. But still the birds did not fly. They stood, like dumb things, like shocked things, like things that did not know what they even were anymore.
But he kept at the work. The towels he had taken were soaked and black again. He took his shirt off and used it, and then his pants, and then tried his best to rinse the towels in the waters of the Gulf.
The moon was climbing down exhausted; his skin now was stained and cut and his arms beyond exhausted. Barely able to hold the beaks and bodies of even these exhausted, dying things. He collapsed at last, saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But when he sobbing got up and began walking along the beach like a night orderly in a field hospital, he realized that he had finished. Every bird that lived—and there was one dead one for every two he’d gotten to in time—had been cleaned.
Not cleaned completely. All of them bore the marks of the monster and the water and his own crude handling. Feathers askew and smears of black. But touched, at least, by someone trying to help, pulled free at least a little from the thing that was killing him.
He found himself sobbing, with exhaustion and relief and despair all at once. They were all just there, not a one of them flying. Some were starting to walk. That was something. But they had to fly. If they wouldn’t fly this was all for nothing. The monster would come back. No one would say it, no one would believe it, but of course it would come back.
The one he’d cleaned first was just about where it had landed when his mother arrived. He thought, this one. It can do it.
He went close to it and shouted. It blinked at him. He ran toward it, and it raised itself and hopped away. “G’on,” he said. “Fly, will you.”
It waddled along the beach and he ran after it, but it would not fly, not really. When he drew close it would do its little turkeyflap at an angle to get away from him, hit the ground again, then moved clumsily away as he chased it across the stones. He felt like an idiot, in his underwear, chasing the bird around the beach.
“You stay here it’s going to get you,” he said. “Stupid bird.” The bird regarded him.
He yelled, “G’on! G’on!” but the bird just looked at him. At last, with a roar of rage he circled around behind the bird and began chasing it toward the dark water. “G’on!” he yelled. The pelican wobbled its way toward the sea. A fierce smile fell over Mikey’s face and he charged.
The bird ran down to the water line and the boy rushed after him, and the bird looked for a minute as though it would just walk into the water unconcerned, but all of a sudden, as its feet touched the water, its wings spread, and it flew. Not the jerky turkey squall that it had done, but flying, real flying, the graceful thing that Mikey remembered. It took off and was out into the dark night, a weightless shadow in the moon.
The boy crashed into the edge of the water himself and fell down heedless of the stones on his naked belly, relishing the sting of saltwater on the many cuts the birds had gifted him, laughing and laughing and laughing, yelling “G’on! G’on! G’on then!” The pelican traced a line and was gone, and as the boy threw his head back he saw more of them taking wing, as if they’d just been waiting for the one to show them, and he laughed and laughed and laughed, feeling that rock in his gut being lifted and tossed a hundred miles away.
Then the monster came.
It slid shiny black and silent over and out of the water like an enormous puppy being born, like the thing after. It seemed slow and fast at once, like a gentle wave getting ready to cover the world. The boy gasped and got to his knees, staring stupidly for a second, then tried to scramble up on the beach. Gently, without any effort, the monster took him, and he fell.
It swept over him greedily, coating him in an instant like a second skin. Mikey gave a choking gasp and then it was over his face and the moon went out. He struggled with his hands and pulled it away from his mouth long enough to take another breath, then felt it slide over his mouth again. He felt it moving into his mouth, coating the insides of his cheeks. When he tried to scream, he choked and gagged in his dark caul, and he felt the monster oily and slick working its way down into his throat.
Then there was a sudden searing pain on his forehead, and the lights came back on. Everything was confused. He felt something cut his cheek, and then he could breathe. He felt hundreds of darts stabbing him, hundreds of tweezers pulling at has skin, and finally he could see what was happening.
The pelicans were all around him, stabbing at the monster, pulling it away from his flesh. Hair and arms and legs were all agony as they did it, but they were making him free. He managed to stand and started to struggle painfully up the beach. The monster was trying to follow, but the pelicans harried it, drove at it, and when it reached up to grab them, they flew.
They flew.
The sight of it gave Mikey’s quivering legs new strength. He charged away from the water and gained the high place above the beach. He turned and watched the pelicans in their relentless assault. Some of them were too slow, and the monster dragged them under. But there were many, and they seemed wholly unafraid, and though the monster was huge, it did not seem to want to push past the throng of assailants.
He was covered in patches of black, sticky film, but the stuff on him was dead, no longer moving across his body. He dropped and vomited. When he looked up, the pelicans were still at it. More of them were being dragged under and he yelled “No! No! G’on! G’on! Get out of there!” And at last, the remaining pelicans took to the air, and the monster slid back with the waves into the night waters.
He sat shivering and shocked, watching the line of birds winging its way into the night sky, and then he fell down.
He woke with a flashlight bright in his eyes, and the hands and arms of his father and mother around him, anxious voices and tears, tears even from his father, and I’m sorry even from his mother, and everything so strange and warm as they wrapped him in a towel and carried him gently home through the unlocked door and the hot bath.
As they hovered over him and washed his hair and body as though he were a little child he didn’t know what he thought. Only maybe that he was glad they had come. Only maybe that they didn’t want him to hurt after all. Only maybe that he had done a good thing, and they had been wrong. Only maybe that there was something between them now, thin and impenetrable as the oil slick on his skin had been, that there was another home for him now, and it wasn’t here. Only, maybe, the thought of flying, light as anything, over the dark and haunted waters, into some other world.
