ONLY OF SURFING. It amazes Cash what people will advertise, as if convictions mean so little they can put on a new one each morning after a shower.
The birds come every day now, mysteriously increasing their numbers overnight. Cash can see them right now as he walks down Main toward the Trading Post to pick up Rose.
She has repeated to him the theory that pigeons are migrating here from Salt Lake City, to escape the falcons that are nest-ing on the ledges of tall buildings there. The balance of nature is upside-down, Cash thinks: the predators are moving to the cities and city birds taking over the land where the buffalo roam. He finds he mistrusts the pigeons. One minute they flash their silver underwings all together, all one color, and the next, their white backs, changing from moment to moment like a card trick.
This evening Mr. Crittenden wants to talk with him, a fact Cash dreads. He finally noticed that the beadwork Rose does in the store is nothing near the quality of what she brings in. Rose hedged, fearing she’d lose her job, but finally confessed it was made by her Cherokee friend. Mr. Crittenden wasn’t angry, it turns out, but wants to meet Cash to ask about his methods. Cash has been in the store more than fifty times, but Mr. Crittenden never wanted to meet him before now.
“Foof, it’s muggy,” says Rose when he walks into the store.
“I wish that rain would get here and get over with. It’s not the heat gets me, it’s the humanity.”
Cash smiles. “That’s the whole truth.”
“Mr. Big Shot stepped out. He’ll be back in a minute.”
The cluster of tin bells over the door jingles behind Cash, but it’s a customer, a tall, thin man wearing sandals and gray-speckled socks. He nods at Rose, who is at the register.
“Take a look around,” she tells him with a broad smile Cash understands, and dislikes. “Does it look like that storm is coming in? We need some rain. We haven’t had rain in a long time.” Cash grins. He likes Rose better now because she is speaking to Cash in code, saying, “This one is going to look at everything in the entire store, and then buy some postcards.” When she asks, “You folks drive a long ways?” she’s predicting a big buy. “Front case is all marked down, rock bottom” means “All the jewelry in Jackson won’t help this homely soul.”
Cash stands near the window, looking out. He doesn’t see the white birds but he knows they’re up there still, moving in their rich, lazy wheel above it all, showing off, taking their freedom for granted. They aren’t real birds like the ones he hunted in childhood, whose eggs he shimmied trees to snatch, birds who catch insects and build nests and feed their young. These are tourist birds. Like his own restless dreams that circle with no place to land.
The man in sandals leaves finally, without even buying a postcard. “Yep, long drought,” Cash says, and Rose laughs.
The tin bells jingle again, and they look up to see the white cockaded head of Mr. Crittenden. They stop talking, but the quiet that has come in with him is heavier than an absence of talk. He acknowledges Cash, then stands for a minute with his hands resting on the glass jewelry case, his thin elbows angled out. He always wears a white shirt and black bolo tie. Rose is curious about whether he is married; Cash says, just look at the pressed shirts he wears to work, but Rose maintains he could afford to send them to the laundry, which is true. She’s heard a rumor that he owns his own airport somewhere, and another rumor that he has cancer.
Neither of them believes the cancer story. If he planned on dying anytime soon, why would he spend so much of his time counting beads?
He nods at Cash again, and with a tight throat Cash follows him into the office, a small room crammed with ledgers and anthropology books and strange pets. Mr. Crittenden has seven or eight shrieking birds back there, and a python in a jewelry case half filled with dry sand. Rose warned Cash about the snake; she has to come in here to get her paychecks under its cool eye. The air chokes him with bird smells and loneliness. Mr. Crittenden gets down two large books that smell of dust. When he opens them, their insides are slick as white glass.
“This is very old beadwork,” he tells Cash. He slowly turns the pages of black-and-white photographs. “Do you recognize the patterns?”
Cash does, some of them, but is afraid to admit to much, so he only nods or shakes his head at the photographs. While Mr. Crittenden turns the pages, a nervous gray bird in a cage near the window makes clicking sounds and picks at its neck as if it has a skin disease. Occasionally it raises its head and screams, and then the rest of the room rings with whistles and the scratch of dry feet on thin metal bars. Cash holds his air inside him for as long as he can between breaths.