The Bird Saviors Read Online Free PDF

spiky.
    Â Â Â Â She lies there, shivering, delirious. A flock of seagulls hovers over the crèche, their black eyes like polka dots upon the swirling red snow. After a time a nun appears. You cannot sleep here, she says. Please. It is a sacrilege.
    Â Â Â Â Ruby only blinks at her, blood and scratches on her face. The nun makes the sign of the cross and hurries back inside the church, leaving Ruby there, holding the plastic baby Jesus in her arms.

    I t  h a s  b e e n  t w o  y e a r s and thirteen days since ward Costello's wife and baby girl passed away. On the outskirts of Pueblo he passes a billboard that reads, when americans believe in god, god will bless america. A dark blue deportation bus roars by, filled with illegals, mainly women and children, their sorrowful faces near the windows. They watch him through the smeared glass of his windshield.
    He feels swollen. As if it is all too much for him. He's had this
    odd itching for a while now, since his wife had and daughter have been gone: a feeling that all his past, all his memories, is just a blink away, the width of an eyelash, the click of a tongue, everything, right there. The slightest movement or hiss of wind can bring it all rushing back. A trapped sensation that there's nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, from this tsunami of the past. The more he focuses on the present the more he can't wish or will it away.
    Â Â Â Â This he remembers: her long, dusky eyelashes, her incredible warmth, the smell of her and her alone on the cotton pillowcases, the feel of spooning next to her, the curve of her smoothness against his lap. The bliss remembered. Waking up to call her by name, a single word, baby.
    Â Â Â Â He exits I- 25 in downtown Pueblo. He drives west, the sky ahead like a hammered sheet of copper, traffic moving in fits and starts. He passes a truck hauling cattle, the whites of their bovine eyes rolling at him through the slats in the cattle trailer. He heads down 4th Street, through a moribund district of brick shops long closed. His eyes burn like they've been soaked in Tabasco. His heart beats too hard and fast and the dividing stripes in the road seem to rise in the air above his car like flying white snakes.
    Â Â Â Â He rolls down his window to let in the cold. When his scalp begins to tingle and goose bumps cover his arms, he rolls it back up. The heater blasts hot air, so he feels cold and feverish at once. He worries it could be a touch of the sickness, even though he's supposed to be immune now.
    Â Â Â Â He heads toward an odd darkness in the sky, toward the prairie that divides Pueblo from the Sierra Mojada, foothills to the Rockies, where he plans to do his bird- population study. After sleeping in the car and no shower, he smells sour and homeless. He keeps expecting a motel to pop up on the western edge of town, where it would be convenient. None do. Hispanic teenagers in muscle cars rumble in the other lanes, blasting Tejano hip- hop.
    Â Â Â Â Sitting at an intersection he closes his eyes and the next thing he knows a pickup behind him is honking and he's faint and frantic, pressing down on the accelerator and giving the driver behind a guilty wave. He passes pawnshops and massage parlors and Mexican restaurants. He squints at the street signs and sees he's crossing Pueblo Boulevard, on the edge of town, a sign indicating to turn right for the city zoo. All the billboards are in Spanish. He keeps driving until he realizes he is beyond everything. The landscape here is tan and rust- colored rock on cliffs above the road, and below it cottonwoods and Russian olives, pale green and dusted with road drift, along the banks of the Arkansas River.
    Â Â Â Â Here what little is left of town looks like Mars conquered by Cortés. In a sudden moment of panic he loses his way. A cloud wall of dark red dust swallows the road and he slows to a crawl before pulling onto the shoulder. The