Me and Joey Kill a Bird With a Rake

And I was kind of thinking we actually hadn’t as my arm rode the bouncing rake back up. That it’d just fly away unbothered. And it kinda looked like it would the way it stared at us for a moment before suddenly falling apart on my back porch like its stitching had just given out. Joey and I stared. I wondered what he was thinking, although something told me it was wrong to ask in this moment and I was still holding a rake with feathers in the prongs so I walked it to the garage and got a shovel instead. 

My mom gets what I’ve been told is a “rez accent” when she talks to Brenda, Joey’s mom. Brenda gets one too. Sometimes I lay in bed and practice saying things in the lilting monotone way my best memories serve me of their conversations until I feel like more of a racist than Nez Perce tribal member 5519. When I’m around Joey I think Nez Perce tribal member 5519 thoughts, whatever those are, it’s hard to explain. I’m sure they’re nothing like whatever Joey’s tribal enrollment card says as I come back to him with a shovel. He watches me approach from across the grass. 

The air of reverence has dissipated so he greets me with a grin and says, “No fuckin’ way I thought it’d do that, man. That’s some shit out of a cartoon, the way it fell apart like–” and he mimics the stiff to floppy ragdoll motion the bird made with his hands so I have to laugh. It’s a little bit funny. Then he turns and I get to look at the bird again. 

The sight would have felt more real if the bird had exploded in confetti at the sound of a horn. It’s surprising how something so real looks completely fake. I’m using so real to say blood and organs and bones and all that stuff that helps keep us alive. Real. They’re not helping the bird much now as it lays dead on the porch, its eyes watching the skies it had fluttered about that morning. The guilt I’m feeling is less from the bird’s body which still looks fake, and more from how I realize I don’t know what kind of bird this is. I think it’s a robin. The feathers on its stomach are red. I realize Joey is watching me as I stand with the shovel like a psychopath in silence so I stop thinking and scrape the bird up as best I can, leaving a couple feathers behind on the wood. 

I once knocked my mom’s feathers from where they hung in her room while vacuuming. My dad glanced from his phone as I picked them up. “You know when you drop an eagle feather in your mother’s tribe, you have to give tobacco before you can pick them up again to show respect.” I look at him. He looks back. I wait. He looks back down at his phone and I put them back on the wall. I turn the vacuum on. 

I’m wondering if this is what Joey is thinking about as I scoop shredded robin into a small pit by some fern. I wonder if Nez Perce tribal members with two native parents think real Nez Perce thoughts, whatever those are. It doesn’t say anything about that on our tribal enrollment cards. Besides, I don’t even have any tobacco. 

“Do you have any tobacco?” I ask Joey. He looks at me puzzled, but reaches into his pants pocket and offers me his pen. I shake my head. 

“You want like a blunt?” He asks putting it away. “Right now?” Joey looks down at the pit I’ve filled in and back up at me with sympathy. “It’s a bird. You good?” I’m good. I don’t know why I asked that. So I could embarrass myself? I decide smoking a blunt for this dead bird is close enough and we hotbox his car up the street, him rolling with the nimble fingers I also got. People praise me for how fast I can type with them, and how I can make a piano sound onstage in a starched white shirt. I watch Joey roll the blunt from the passenger seat as Frank Ocean plays, bending his middle finger under and up to support the paper, brow furrowed in a laser focus threatening to burn a hole through his masterpiece.

Afterwards, we march inside to raid my kitchen, me finding the peanut butter as he takes an apple from a bowl on the table and begins to slice it to my right. I’m thinking Nez Perce tribal member 5519 thoughts as I listen to his cutting. 

In a book once I read about how the word for people like me are apples. Red on the outside and white on the inside. When I undress and catch the section of skin past my boxers that’s paler than the rest of my body, the guilt I’m supposed to feel at feathers on the ground, waiting for tobacco, is there. That’s just how skin in the sun works though, and Joey has his own space as pale as mine where no red feathers fall and the heat of tobacco burns on my lips. When the bird landed on my porch and I watched Joey walking past me with a rake turn on his heel and bring it down with a shudder, I knew that when he handed it to me I would take it. 

And my nimble fingers wrapped around his as he laughed and slipped the rake into mine. I guess I knew what would happen but I figured when the confetti blew I would speak Nimiipuu and Joey would promise to be good and grow old with me someplace apples stayed in trees. An hour later we ate their slices on the table in stoned silence and a bird landed on my porch.

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Liam Bull is a senior majoring in Creative Writing with a focus on philosophical conversations through fiction and dynamic photography.