Quail
by Jason M. Vaughn
Water Rock Land Ice City God by Jack Flores
It is the ninth of July in small-town Northeastern Kansas, an hour before sunset. Just home from work, tired, generally achy, I ease down into my chair—in the air-conditioned sunroom—to read or watch TV or daydream for a little while. My mother, if she were here in this moment, would no-doubt smirk and shrug and say that it “might be a good time to check those dating apps. Maybe the perfect girl’s just getting home now too.” But I don’t check the apps. I swing up the footrest, settle the palms of my hands on this recliner’s firm but velvety arms, and shut my eyes.
Hearing several random pops from the distance (someone discovering leftover fireworks?), I remember not the colorful sky-bloomings above the far horizon on the night of the fourth, not the things I didn’t do, but the quail that called to each other during the day of this most recent fourth of July, a “Bobwhite” answering a “Bobwhite” over and over through the sunny hotness while I watered a barely-hanging-on weeping cherry tree in my front yard. At forty-five, I am not living with roommates in a ramshackle yet hiply-charming foursquare, nor merely alone in some studio apartment or even an old two-bedroom house, but in my parents’ ranch-style prefab on their new plot of pastureland. “Why?” one might wonder. “That’s a long story,” I might say, and then proceed to tell about my history of severe Crohn’s disease (from 20 to 38) and the social anxiety that’s been a major challenge for me since the age of five, as if these details are clearly explanation enough for a person’s aloneness. But no matter what responses I might give, my front yard is, at this time, my parents’ front yard. Our front yard.
And as I sit in our sunroom on the afternoon of the ninth, thinking of those July-fourth bird calls and wondering if each could somehow have been received (by a quail) as a different word or phrase and not simply the quails’ name again and again, I find myself suddenly laughing. Because I’ve just envisioned a montage—a quail saying “Bob White” with an affected seriousness, as if practicing new deliveries; another quail turning its head to better hear its name shouted from a distance on a windy day (“Bobbb Whiiite”); and yet another quail sitting behind a desk in an office, signing Bob White on an important document and then whispering to itself with pride, “Bob White.” Immediately after the laughter, my phone rings.
It’s Mom. She has gone over to feed the miniature donkeys and Maggie’s given birth and nobody even knew she was pregnant. “Can you bring me a big trash bag? It’s dead,” she says with a frustrated sigh. “But it looks too small. It must’ve been born dead, don’t you think? It’s definitely too small. If we’d only known she was pregnant, we could’ve…”
Driving to the farm across the road, where the donkeys are staying until Dad can get fence put up, I follow the gravel drive around to the back of the neighbors’ house, past a weather-beaten barn and through an open gate into the north section of their land. I park here, the drive lost in bushy grass that ruts along for a little stretch until the terrain abruptly plunges away in a wide pretty sweep featuring blue hollows and rippling pasture and a pond ringed with strong trees. Getting out, I walk around the car and through a different gate (unchaining it, then chaining it shut again) that leads into a separated easterly quadrant of dry sparse brome and clumps of ragweed, the air vibrating with itchy, stifling heat and insect sounds. A lean-to stands a hundred yards down this field with its red paint mostly rubbed away, its warped corrugated metal roof only dimly shining, but I can’t see Mom or the donks. I stop to listen. Can’t hear them, either.
Thinking they must be around the other side of the structure, I start walking toward it, clenching in one hand a wadded-up “heavy-duty” garbage bag the color of kindergarten suns. The open side of the lean-to faces to the south. As I draw up along the west end of the building, I see that that southerly side is fronted with a cracked and pockmarked mat of dusty pale dirt. After a few more tense steps, my gaze panning left in a slow arc, a complicated scene spills out for me in too much detail to catch all at once. I freeze, not breathing for a moment.
Mom is there, standing still in her loose paint-speckled chore clothes. She stares down at a glisteny dark mass that’s like a smear as Maggie, and Eddie (the father donkey), move with restless wheeling motions around it, Maggie kicking at Eddie’s head and neck in between her attempts to revive the baby by biting the bridge of its nose with a hollow knocking sound. The biting is as painful to see as it is to hear. There’s a desperation in Maggie’s eyes, and in her unhesitating violence. Could there be more going on than just some action that instinct drew out of her? Could there be frustration? Anger? I’m reminded of how doctors used to slap human babies to help introduce them to breathing outside of their mothers. Something we learned from the animals? Though skinny (shriveled might be a better word), this lifeless dark-gray newborn is bigger than I expected.
Mom explains matter-of-factly that part of “the sack-thing” was around its head when she first found it lying here. She’s wondering if it died of suffocation, if it could’ve lived if she had just gotten here sooner to assist.
Thinking that’s a possibility but knowing better than to answer this, I can’t seem to help bleakly saying “It looks normal-sized to me.”
Mom cries for a moment with little half-held-in staccato sobs, uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn. Then she is back to normal, telling me she wants us to take it away from here so Dad can deal with it when he gets home.
One might imagine that I’d feel slighted (masculinity-wise) by her comment. But I’m feeling actually a dull relief. Maybe because Dad’s always handled most of the farm stuff? Maybe, subliminally, I’ve seen what she said as a hint at camaraderie between us—i.e., I’m here to help her now, so he has to help later? Probably the biggest reason for my relief is that, thanks to already being tired when I came over, I’m just not in the mood to dig such a big hole. If I felt affronted more often, and was more growly in general, would women (in their enigmatic-ness) be suddenly throwing themselves at me like the birds now and then launched at our large sunroom windows? I feel terrible for admitting this, but I almost shake my head at the idea that Mom is probably somehow connecting the baby donkey’s death to the fact that I’ve as of yet failed to provide a grandchild. It’s troubled me in recent years how easily she can be reminded of that lack. It’s troubled me how easily I can be reminded of it. The lack being connected, of course, to that search for the ‘perfect’ girl. And to those very imperfect dating apps, since successfully meeting attractive strangers in public—without having first met on an app—has proven to be almost impossible.
Maggie’s continuing kicks are too unpredictable, too violent. Toward Eddie, at least. But it doesn’t feel safe for Mom or me to be so near to that business, either. So I ask her to distract Maggie, to shoo her off a bit and try to block her sightline as I slide the baby into the bag.
To describe the sad grotesqueries of what I’m attempting to move, the flimsy-seeming firmness of the bones under the mucousy fur, the one forehoof looking like smooth white wax, the rectangular expressionless face with eyes I’ll see always as gently closed, the colors of that mollusk of the afterbirth (the reds and purples, the grays, the silvers) and the places where thin strands of it have begun to dry and take on a quality of stretched plastic—well, I’ll never have a good-enough picture in my memory to do justice to any of these details. But in a moment, pressing past revulsion, I’ve grabbed a hold of one of the sticky back legs and tugged the body into the durable yellow bag and then lifted the bag off the ground and gripped it closed with a strange hope that I didn’t harm the animal somehow.
Only later, a little over a year later, while beginning to write this down, will I find it interesting that I didn’t immediately notice some visceral connection between Maggie’s ordeal and the countless disgusts and agonizing evacuations I experienced with Crohn’s. Whatever she actually felt (and I’ll recall that Maggie had seemed very distressed), I will think—with a guilty chuckle—that she at least didn’t have to get a temporary colostomy, didn’t have half a foot of her colon cut out and then feel an urge to move to L.A. and try to play “life catch-up” via coffee dates and an attempt at breaking into the screenwriting industry. I will then wonder if what she suffered on that day of loss might have actually stayed in her body and mind a lot longer than any human could imagine.
But back across the road now, at the rear of our house, standing on the concrete pad outside of the two-car garage, Mom gives Dad a call, me leaning against her car and staring off at darkening clouds that will only bluff and pass by, the baby miniature donkey loitering patiently in the trunk. Dad’s gone up to visit cousins in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He won’t be home for a few days and may not be able to answer his phone. He answers. And Mom tells him what happened in a run-on breathy manner (punctuated with flaps of her hands) that I believe is intended to lighten the situation, again asking “It must’ve been born dead, don’t you think?” Dad agrees, then says to place the baby in the garage refrigerator’s freezer to keep things from getting worse before he’s able to bury it—he will take care of everything when he gets back.
After I’ve lifted the light body (almost as big as a medium-sized pooch) into the vacant frost-squeaking space, I tuck the garbage bag snugly around it and say, “Sorry, baby donkey. Sorry, baby.”
“We should’ve known to watch for it,” Mom croons. “Maggie must’ve looked at least a little bigger…”
And now I move through a span of time that I will not remember so well. What almost always happens in this house at night is that, after dinner, we read for a while (my parents in the sunroom, me in my bedroom). Then, somewhere between 7:30 and 8:00, we meet in the sunroom to watch TV. This particular night may be the one on which Mom and I stream a few episodes of that British series, Victoria. Or maybe I sit and go through emails on my laptop while she watches a Hallmark movie she’s DVR’d. I can’t say for sure. But we probably don’t bring up the baby anymore.
Three years later, still trying to remember more details from that span of time between closing the freezer and going to sleep, I will come upon an idea that surprises me. I will think that maybe the intermittent proddings of my extroverted mother are somewhat like the bites that Maggie gave the bridge of her baby’s nose. I will think that when my mother acts as if speaking to attractive women I’ve never met before is nothing difficult, when she says “Just do it” or “What do you have to lose?,” when she reminds me that I am “not getting any younger” and “almost fifty,” etc.—that maybe these words are merely her style of trying to rattle me awake, to bring her not-fully-formed offspring back to life. I will think that maybe she’s just doing what a lot of mothers do, and (possibly) not chiefly to help a grandchild come into being but instead to help me have the life she knows I want. By then, I will be living in a townhouse in a small neighboring city, still visiting my parents often, still single, but in a home of my own. I will also be forcing myself out, every Saturday night, into the bigger, busier, frightening-er KCMO, working—with the help of Xanax and too much alcohol—to find my elusive wife, hoping to know her when I see her and then somehow be able to speak to her in only the right ways. I won’t feel that I have any answers, but I’ll at least be trying something.
Back on that particular July day, however, hours after we have finished watching or not watching TV, I wake up suddenly in the middle of the hot night, certain I’ve heard something terrible. And it occurs to me that I should get out of bed and check the garage refrigerator’s freezer. Almost as immediately as this thought comes to mind, I realize how ridiculous it is. Nevertheless, drawing the sheet down to my belly button, to cool myself under the steady paddling of the ceiling fan, I pause to listen. It was a thumping sort of rustling that I thought I heard, the sound of a long-limbed animal clumsily trying to reposition itself (or even stand up) inside of a restrictive sac.
It is hard to explain how I feel, picturing what I’m picturing. You can guess, though, can’t you? It’s in the gut but also all-over. Like fear but not quite. Like regret but more muddled. Because I am thinking of rare medical “miracles.” I’m thinking, What if the baby lived? What if it’s only now coming to—still unborn, as far as it knows—in the weird rigid womb of that freezer, stiff-jointed and achy as it begins to test its muscles, crying an immature braying because it can’t get any purchase, or because it’s just uncomfortable (because it doesn’t feel anything but discomfort), calling out not even for its mother because it’s never had the chance to know her?
It would’ve frozen by now, I assure myself, still thinking headshake-inducing What-ifs. No, it would’ve frozen. It’s frozen!
Again, thankfully, desperate for any other thought, I remember the quail that called and called to each other on the fourth. I focus on them. Focus. And maybe because I often consider the possible parallel-universe versions of myself (the “me”s who hadn’t avoided foundational relationship experiences in their teens, who hadn’t gotten severely ill, who’d married and then had children right out of college), I start wondering if—like those quail—there are also miniature donkeys calling to each other, not across a pasture but across the thread-like or ocean-like intercosmic spaces. However desperate this is, I wonder if somewhere there may be a double of today’s baby donkey that made it, and if that living one (or an infinite number of them) can somehow hear a call from the one (or the infinites) that died. And maybe, like the quail calling only their names over and over but somehow saying countless phrases, maybe those baby donkeys, too, through their specific braying, can say a lot of things with just one set of sounds.
I roll onto my side and pull the sheet up over my suddenly-chilled shoulder and think that I’ll think of sleep until the thinking becomes being asleep. It doesn’t work, of course—I continue to hear the imagined crackly thumpings thumping.
Hoping to distract myself again, my erratic thoughts happen onto wondering what life (or death?) might be like if, by some terrible design, I was forced to exist without a wife or a child—to have, essentially, only me for company—and to speak only one short word or phrase over and over forever. Though I can’t quite sense how this would feel, I imagine that I’d probably eventually see my existence as a real shame, a waste of consciousness, something to be deeply sad or angry about. But maybe I wouldn’t see it in that way… Considering this and considering it, feeling a sadness each time the closed eyes of the baby donkey materialize in my mind, I can almost almost convince myself that death is merely a signal, a hail, a hello (“Bobwhite” back and forth across the afternoon), and that, of all the remarkable matters in all the limitless anywheres, the most beautiful is just a good conversation with someone who says nothing as naturally as your name.
Jack Florek works primarily in oils and acrylic paints on canvas. He earned his MFA from Rutgers in 2000. He is an American citizen living near Toronto, Canada.
Jason M. Vaughn lives and writes in Tonganoxie, KS. His work has appeared in various journals, including 5x5, The Kansas City Star, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Monkeybicycle.