To Be a Wounded Bird in Paradise

A short story by

Michael L. Woodruff

I’ve always believed the downtown Plaza in Santa Fe was where the unenlightened rich dumped their crazy children—the neo-hippies, already intellectually crippled and emotionally stunted, egocentric and suicidal. I imagine their parents giving them quick hugs, a touch on the cheek, the look of regret, and a generous credit card limit. They boot them out the back of their expensive SUV’s, Lincoln Navigators, Cadillac Escalantes, all of them the color of a brilliant day, instructing them to find themselves. They bring with them a new idea on suburban living: the smell of rustic school buses gutted, turned into contrived homes filled with books on Nietzsche, new business literature and software games. They are clean but unkempt—owning the newest smart phone, the touch of dried timber, and the smell of the forest. 

The truth they know, the truth they find quickly: There is eternal bliss in New Mexico, found in the vast spaces of the desert, canyons and rock formations, peppered by adobe shacks, the scent of roasted green chilies in the fall, and the whistle of a sun-burnt sky at dusk. And if that isn’t enough—the mountains are lush with ponderosa pines that smell like vanilla complete with bubbly streams that rattle like chimes as they cut through the trees. The sky is gluttonous with fresh air. It’s the land of enchantment, pure and simple, the tan of the sand mixed with the red of the clay, Haiku deserts and emerging arts—contemporary renditions of Shakespeare and the face-lifted plays of Sartre and Eugene O’Neil and thickly painted abstracts—local art-blobbed imitations of Gauguin, worth less than the cost of the paint and the canvas it took to create them—the dark colors of inexperience and pretense. 

I know my depictions are not fair; they are wrong. 

People are much more than we imagine. But it’s the way of seeing the world—through judgments. And we all make them, daily. They are attempts to understand the workings of human behavior that play out around us. We interpret the world we encounter as subjective as it might be. And we are always wrong, but it’s all a part of the tapestry we weave in our thoughts. It’s how we learn.

And in the end, after everything is said, this is a hell of a way to start my story, telling you that I’m wrong concerning the thoughts I entertain, but facts are facts, and it’s important to knowing how things unfold later. I watch a circle of young people in the Plaza, my target of judgment, laughing and playing out their day, innocent and careless, slightly younger than myself, while I wait for Terese. And then my impressions just come: They are uncontained thoughts.

•

My girlfriend sits properly, always a lady beyond her years and begins with the silence of seconds, the hint of eternity in her sigh:

“I’m not sure where we are going, Jeffrey.”

My elbows are on my knees, in the chaste position, facing forward into the walkway. A child screams in the distance, a Dionysian whelp, the smell of coffee somewhere near, and I bob my head when I think it’s appropriate. 

“I’m not sure what you mean. I thought we were fine.” 

“Our future: We’re stagnating, Jeffrey. You’re not moving forward with me. Sometimes, I think you just don’t get it. We don’t grow. You’re like a little child. You can only take, you never give.”

•

The Plaza amasses with the clatter of people surrounding us, different people: sometime shoppers, confused and stalking; female tourists dressed in layers of pseudo-New Mexican dresses that wrap around their bodies like dried corn husks, made of Tibetan brocade, silver and turquoise jewelry, and big cowboy hats with fanned-faux feathers. The neo-hippies wear wool Sherpa hats with knotted-knit ties that lie down the front of their chests and dry-tumbled cotton pullovers, dressed in the colors of the earth. They are defiant and season-sprung, newborn gazelles in an exhausting field of play. And the old hippies, the real thing in their tainted clothes; they are the leftover sky from an ancient time, a confused angst, their ideals having backfired economically. They have tortured feet, making their way through the baked-in landscape, the look of the old cool, now becoming the new homeless. They are smudged, loosely layered, aged laundry on clothes hangers. They have chaotic hair: covered-uncovered, broken guitars, and dreams hatched through the ogle of a whim—an imagined truth and yellowed paperbacks, seldom read anymore, Allen Ginsberg and Richard Brautigan: bent fans that lie ignored next to them—abandoned friends. These dinosaurs who ruled the ‘60s into the ‘70s are windows into a deferred desperation, utopias never actualized, and yet, they find a way to survive.

The Plaza is engulfed by adobe and white aspen faces, unique unto themselves with rectangular columns, white teeth and paint-penciled windows with mouths that can only consume currency. They have extravagant window dressings—cowboy saddles and Mexican blankets on the slope of the desert, embraced by the arms of a dried cholla plant. These businesses wedge, side by side, next to each other, New World-comfortable cousins, taking the air out of the trees. They loom over the Plaza, ready to swoop up anxious money, the tease of green chili at their noses. 

I try to listen to my girlfriend dissect our relationship among this kinetic patchwork. There is just enough oxygen dripping from the trees to take short breaths. I inhale all I can get, taking in the movement around me—jittery people, all moving galaxies circling the Plaza—the collision of atoms, the look of innocence, expecting to see something different—the chic New West. Where do they sell the turquoise cowboy boots? There is a hush in the universe. 

•

A well-groomed man, clean with short dark hair, wearing a suit with an open collar, chases a crippled sparrow across the Plaza with a stick, trying to get it to take flight. The bird reluctantly falters forward, face-first into the cement walkway. He’s followed by a collective of wide-eyed demon children. They skip about like excited ants. They’re on an amusement park ride, adventure-soaked, cheering the bird along. The suited man puts the stick at the back of the bird’s ass and scoots it. The bird flutters, broken wing eschewed, across the walkway. It only has the click of a second to take a gulp of air with each momentary pause, and then the whole lot of them, the suited man and the menacing children, chase after it with blazing zeal, their butterfly nets in tow, their enthusiasm gone amok, pushing their arms into the sky, the scream of the gods with the imagined power to sweep the bird into flight.

Fly bird, fly! they screech.

The bird is in a tumbled paradise, oppressed by the invasion of anxious giants, trapped: without a dance, without a chance. 

It stops near an old man picking through a Bob Dylan song, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. The old man looks like steel wool with toothpick legs and a red bandana. His guitar is drunk with abuse. He has a thin braid of gray hair hanging meekly, a bashful penis, down the back of his neck inside his collar. His clothes smell of stale pot. He’s in the world, but not of the world, a voice crying in the wilderness, living on locust and honey and largely ignored by the locals and the tourists who pass him; his voice is a graveled whisper for mercy.

“Are you listening to me, Jeffrey?”

“Of course, I’m listening to you; you’re concerned that we are running out of things to talk about.”

“Jeffrey, I’m talking about our connection to each other: our future, our very existence. This is serious!”

She’s stunned, her mouth agape. She wears a calico skirt that lies in folds over her knees, restful and fresh. Her arms push between her legs forcing the dress below her knees, creating an inviting crevice. Her blouse is thin, stone-washed and threadbare with the smell of lavender. She’s pastel purple with soft, baby brown hair. She never leaves her apartment unprepared for the world. She’s as light as the inked clouds above. She always rises.

Sometimes even on the warmer days in autumn, the litter of yellow and brown on the ground filled with a meekness that chills, there are strips of blur in the sky—razor thin like aluminum, barely discernible—a refraction in the day. It divides the light from awareness, and then the awareness from pure bliss, creating a slight buckle in the air. Light and heat siphon from the sun creating a conduit linking the people in the Plaza, and the collective voices coalesce. I listen carefully to the conversations, and they sound suspiciously close, playful, right next to me, but looking around they are farther than I think. The voices are sparks, human energy, that flit from person to person across the Plaza. The language is a connecting chain. Santa Fe is a metaphysical city, spiritually blushed with New Age remedies and potions. And though there is clarity in the sound, I can’t make out the words. It is scratchy, a form of kinetic static—the many changes in the air wearing thin the substance of the morning. This slumber party is closing in. People are ready to come together to make universal music. They are becoming a part of the same tribe, everyone drinking the New Mexico punch—horchata and rum. It happens daily in the Plaza. All the characters are costumed, masked, and ready for their dance—Zozobra on the fly. It’s enough to make you pull out the smoke, flick the lighter, and suffocate in the collective innocence.

An old woman sits on the bench across from us pouring through the paper bags stacked around her knees. There is an empty grocery cart behind her. All of her worldly goods lie before her like well-behaved children—the taking of inventory. She’s a big ball of tussled fabric, layered and exotic with gray wires coming out of the bottom of her knitted cap, the sparkle of mescaline glitter in the threads. I have no idea what she’s looking for, but she never finds it. Squirrels laze around her bench, sniffing at specks: small twigs and gravel—foraging for food. She’s illegally dropping bread pieces, and the critters gather. No one cares except the bold red and white sign, anonymous at the edge of the Plaza, exhorting people not to feed the animals—it’s a wasted effort—a pollution of words. 

The old man coughs, starts a new song, and coughs again. Damn it. He stops. He begins abstractly picking at the nylon strings on his guitar searching for the perk of a direction. He stops again, pulls out a silver flask and tips a drink. I don’t hear it, but someone breaks wind, and I think it’s the guitar player; it transverses the thin air of the Plaza. It’s laced hemlock, amid the chirp of birds—blind witnesses, hidden in the broken arms of the trees. Someone cut a fart! My girlfriend halts her exhortations, cringes, waving her open hand in front of her soured face. And as quickly as we are assaulted by the smell, it diminishes. The Plaza relaxes and exhales, but the air is left with a compromised weight. 

The wounded sparrow skitters between me and the old woman, the blow of dust off the concrete from its good wing, and the gaggle of the demented mob follow. They’ve become narrowly focused. And now, it’s a game. 

“I do love you, Terese. I can’t imagine my life without you.”

“There it goes! There it goes! Look! Look!”

“I’d like to believe you, Jeffrey. But I’m not feeling it.”

“Oh! Under those people. Over there by the trash can! Hurry!”

The children jump about like the popping of blue corn—atoms in motion. They nick the edges of the Plaza, the vulnerable bushes with their energy. The small boys pull on their shorts, the sniffle of noses, and they run toward the bird. 

“Don’t let it get away! It’s moving that way!”

“What more are you looking for, Terese. I need a clue.”

My girlfriend’s skin is perfect silk—a softness in her face. And even when she filters her frustration, she’s the sheen off the desert sand, a mirage of beauty. Her eyes have the glint of glass specks, a micro-gem, centered and focused—the certainty of God’s wisdom. 

“A clue, really Jeffrey, a clue?”

The old woman continues searching through the bags around her. When Terese takes a short pause to reflect, closing her eyes, shaking her head in doubt—a display of her disappointment, I ask the old woman what she’s looking for and she says: Something. It’s cryptic and knowing. And, I’m guessing it must be in there, somewhere, very deep. She’s foraging through her bags like a hungry bear. Her clothes bulk up around her. It makes it hard for her to reach down and in. Her body must be a furnace. 

Down the street, east of the Plaza, the old St. Frances Cathedral is mute, away from the busyness of the Plaza. People slip in and out of its double doors like careful spies, to bless themselves and to take pictures. Jesus still tenders considerable clout in the surrounding Santa Fe area, predominately Catholic, and his mother, the Virgin Mary, heals the infirm up the highway at El Santuario de Chimayo. There are crutches on the walls to prove it. It’s a family endeavor. 

Navahos in worn blue jeans and T-shirts line the north side of the Plaza watching the acid-throttled tourists ping their way through. They lay blankets out to display turquoise jewelry and silver wrist bracelets.

A girl pulls out a bottle of bubbles, stands and blows streams of purple and pink-glinted balls, the bounce of a dance, over the heads of her friends. The bubbles are happy smiles, attracted to each other in small clusters that pop, snapping into a light sprinkle of mist. Some of the bubbles lift into the tangle of the cottonwood trees, stiff chaperons with stern frowns, turning their faces away from the frolic beneath their limbs. She dances the perimeter of her friends, the flaying of legs and arms, while one of the boys reads poetry, and they all laugh and start to sing songs, loud and off-key. They are the Manson family with a bath. 

I take quick glimpses behind me to spy the suited man trying to force the bird out from under one of the benches. I try to mask my interest so Terese doesn’t notice. I make sure she hears my yeses. Nothing makes her happier than knowing she has my sober attention. I keep the occasional eye contact, agreeing with everything she says, humbled and defeated. The suited man moves his brittle stick under the bench and slaps at the bird’s back feathers. The waving of the stick fans the bird toward us.

No! God no, please don’t let the bird fly over here. I got enough on my mind. 

It’s all I can do to keep my thoughts on my girlfriend in this chaotic place. There’s a stew of energy that simmers. There are no secrets. The morning air carries whispers, the seduction of the desert wind. And we are a part of it. I’m not sure why she chose this place for a serious talk. So I ask. 

“The Plaza is so pretty, Jeffrey,” she offers. “It is filled with life. It has energy. The weather is beautiful.”

The reasoning she offers always reduces things to their essential elements: the things she wants. Complexity never enters the equation. Obstacles are an empty desert to walk through. 

“It’s a bit busy.”

“Go! Go! Go!” The throng is on the hunt.

She waves away my criticism. I would have preferred a quiet conversation in a lonely café north of town—the Village Market in Tesuque. It has time-washed lumbered walls filled with ancient experience. It would have made it easier to sort this all out. 

“If we just spent more time together, Jeffrey, like this, sharing our dreams and aspirations, doing more than just having sex, it would help.”

“Dreams and aspirations?”

“Yes. You see, this is what I mean. You are detached from our future.”

“Oh! Oh! This way! It’s going into a hole. Stop it!”

“You don’t like sex?”

“No, I like sex just fine, Jeffery. I just want more. I want our intimacy to go beyond the physical.” 

“It almost flew! Try it again!”

I shake my head in acknowledgement. “That’s good. Spending time together like this is good. I have dreams and aspirations, too, Terese. I just thought we were enjoying our moments.” 

The bird flutters, moves toward me. It bumps along the concrete and juts to the right.

Good, I think.

And then it shoots back onto the walkway and stops at my ankles. It circles like a reluctant spaceship, landing in the stir of dust. Its chest beats, in and out, the flutter of life, trying to hold on. Its wing and body are contorted, the twist of feathers. Its eyes are steely balls: deaden. It begs for mercy. 

The suited man walks up to me, his stick in one hand and a Styrofoam cup in the other hand. I want him to go away, to disappear. He drinks the last of what appears to be cold coffee. His face is filled with satisfaction. I’m between the sparrow and its tormentor. Everyone gawks at me. I’m now the center of the universe, the last thing I want. Even my girlfriend stops talking. The people in the Plaza become my audience. What is he going to do? There is the quizzical burble coupled with curious looks. And I want to say, I’m just here because my girlfriend made me be here. They lift up to steal peeks over the benches, to where the suited man stands over the desperate bird. 

“Someone needs to take this bird to the vet,” the suited man says. His face is as vacant as his words. The Holy Ghost has caught up with him, sniffed out his sin. He stands naked before God, the evidence in his hand—the stick. The bird believes it has found reprieve. But I’m not the perfect savior. The salvation I offer comes with a price. The children look for enlightenment, their faces blank slates, and they are ready to wet their pants, if necessary. 

“Are you going to take the bird to the vet?”

“I’m an intern at the hospital. I’m in my second year. So I have some medical experience.” 

Call the vet, man! It’s a shout from the other side of the Plaza, from one of the neo-hippies. Yeah! Call an ambulance! There’s laughter.

“Are you going to take the bird to the vet?”

“It looks really hurt,” the suited man continues. “I think its wing is broken. I don’t believe it can go on like this much longer.” 

“It’s exhausted, I’m sure,” I say. 

“A little mercy, man!”

“The poor thing,” the old woman whispers. She has the passion of Mother Theresa in her voice. “The little bird is shaking like a frightened child—such a pity: tsk tsk tsk.” She pulls her sweater close to her body. 

“Are you going to take the bird to the vet?”

He stops talking and lingers in front of me like a lost soul caught in the throes of infidelity; his face is ready to melt. He wants to shout: It’s not my fault! It’s not what it seems! But he has nothing left to offer. His wisdom is exhausted. 

“Honey, let’s go, please,” his partner says. She grabs the back of his suit jacket. She’s fragile middle class, the drip of brown bangs over her eyes. 

There’s a tension that drops over the Plaza. Large issues have come to the forefront. Resolutions are being demanded. And I’m in the middle of it all. 

I stand, and I absorb the cluster of humanity closing in on us, a curious stadium of ancient proportion ready to thumb down, ready to see the tearing of flesh. I ask the suited man if I can have the Styrofoam cup. He gives it to me and I turn around, lean down toward the bird and scoop it gently into the cup. 

“Yeah, man! Good move!”

Everyone waits to see what’s going to happen; their necks are craned; it’s a drama worth the price of a ticket. The old woman tenses up, the crack of concern in her eyes. Oh, the poor sweet thing. The neo-hippies stop their mindless frolic and spring to their feet. Even the guitar player tapers the pick of the strings. He ends with the thump on the face of the guitar. It’s all High Noon under the spray of a sun-drenched day.

I look up at the intern; he has taken himself out of the picture, his partner stands just behind him still pulling at his suit jacket, please, Bill. Let’s just go. The flirtation between them turns to desperation. They are as naked as Adam and Eve, not so much as a leaf to cover their shame. 

I squeeze the Styrofoam cup until I can hear the crack of bones. It echoes throughout the Plaza. It finds the ripple in the air and travels through the Plaza. It’s like the drop of a penny on tempered steel. There’s almost an echo. Oh God!—a voice. And then I calmly walk over to the trash barrel, dispose of the bird and make my way back to the bench next to my girlfriend. 

“I’m sorry honey, what were you saying?”

“I . . . forgot.” Her jaw drops. Her words have been replaced by the scent of lavender from her hair.

A wave of trepidation floats across the Plaza. There’s a rise in kinship, forged by circumstance. Everyone is now connected, brothers and sisters. They form a humanitarian bond. If only they had a rope to punish the murderer; there are broad-shouldered trees aplenty in the Plaza. 

“What a cruel thing to do. No heart, man, no heart,” one of the neo-hippy guys says. The initial enthusiasm is muted. “It was just a little bird, man.”

Terese doesn’t understand the world unfolding, she’s embarrassed to be next to me, but my secret is that my crucifixion brings the world closer together. We are a cluster of one, or they are a cluster of one. And the bird ceases to suffer—two miracles. I stand, facing the crowd and traverse the Plaza for dissent. Now is the time to say it. These are the words written across my face. People shrink, falling into their prior preoccupations. 

The old man picks at the chords on his old guitar with greater uncertainty. The songs just don’t seem to come, but the awkward notes sprinkle the air with solace. And the old woman finds her something—oh, here it is, a faux gold-plated clock, peeling, and she winds it, the zip, zip, zip of its spring. There’s a change of heart working its way through the Plaza softness. The bird is already forgotten.  

I let out a long sigh as I sit again next to Terese. There’s a silence. Neither of us can find the words necessary to slice through the air between us. The warble in the day warps our reason. She’s forgotten why we were here. There is a change in the disposition between us, and a rustle in the leaves above us lightens the sky. The Plaza, now, has the smell of bark.

“Our place in paradise is short-lived, Terese.” 

My mind is moving rapidly trying to connect the day’s events into one neat package. 

“We make the best of the things that happen. I get what you are trying to tell me, Terese. I will never pretend to be perfect. I address my faults as they come. And I try to fill the spaces in my life with exotic moments of experience. I wait for them. I want to share these moments with you—us being together. They are innumerable. And more times than not, the decisions I make are wrong, but I try. I don’t get everything just right. And each decisive moment comes when I least expect it. These experiences, the crippled bird for instance, as unwanted as it was, are the only things we take with us into the next world; the lift of suffering is all that matters.” 

Terese pulls back, grabbing my hand; she has the flutter of the day in her eyes. It’s soft and alert. I’m now her hero, the savior she’s never expected, the savior I never wanted to be. It’s a late revelation. The energy of the galaxy circles around us: human dust—the particles of DNA, the remnant of the day. The ghosts accumulate, circling the Plaza, and they find their rest.  

“Honey, that is so beautiful, you always find the right thing to say at the right time. Where does it come from? Sometimes, I underestimate your ability to empathize. I’m so sorry. I need to pay more attention to the world we have.” 

Where does it come from? I’ll tell you where it comes from—it comes from the desperation of a moment. I knew where she was taking us, this conversation in the Plaza, the whole drifting away and growing apart stuff, and I needed to stop it, necessity being the mother of invention. So I performed a mercy killing. And it worked. 

She leans over and kisses my cheek. Thank you, I whisper. It’s enough. 

We sit back on the bench, the chirp of invisible birds surrounding us, and we watch the circus of human activity in the Plaza, the invention of life, damaged people as performers, on call, daily, pushing their wounded lives to the forefront, acting it out. There is refraction in the air dividing the light from awareness, and then the awareness from pure bliss, putting a slight buckle into the atmosphere, razor-thin, barely noticeable. It’s the conduit that connects us. The neo-hippies are now my tribe. I listen to them sing off-key, and I smile: To every person their dance.

Michael L. Woodruff is a graduate of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. His stories have appeared in a number of literary publications. He was born in Los Angeles, California, and currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.