8:37 am.
A kid, a boy, maybe 7 or 8, is taking a piss out on the edge of the fields, where the woods start, behind the elementary school. It’s recess and all the other kids are making a racket a hundred yards in his rear. There’s screaming and laughing and high voices calling out names but it’s all one thing: like a big fire: as if so much energy is marauding at once that it’s not possible to separate the good from the bad. The noise is unstoppable and likely untouchable. It has no equal in this world.
It’s a cool bluebird day in March and the sun is a lemon leaking on the kid’s hair. He aims his healthy stream at a penny-sized moth trapped in a spider web. The moth makes attempts to free itself but nothing changes. It is losing, worn out; everything it does is useless. The kid zips up and leans in to the trapped creature at the precise moment that a lady teacher on patrol spots him and starts hollering his name, warning him to come back.
“You don’t look so hot,” he whispers at the insect.
There is no spider present. The boy ponders the coming moment. He could set the moth free. He could crush it to death. He could leave it to suffer, smirking like a Hollywood villain. Or he could leave it unchanged, so the spider has lunch when he finally returns.
The teacher calls his name again and this time her voice is nearby. She is coming. She is closing in. He turns to her and squints. She’s maybe 25, a newbie, like a lot of the teachers out here in the sticks.
“There’s a moth in a spider web,” he tells her as she approaches him “I think he’s in trouble.”
Her silver flat shoes are soaked with dew; the grass has been growing but the janitors haven’t mowed. She is annoyed.
“Dakota, why in the world are you all the way over here and not responding to me calling you?”
He looks at her more intently.
“I had an emergency,” he mutters.
She looks around, tries to figure things out.
“Did you urinate out here?” she asks.
The kid doesn’t answer. He hangs his head and starts trudging back into the symphony on the blacktop. She turns her face towards the parking lot, her new used Subaru, its rolling thunderstorm green sparkling in this late morning light. Sighing now, she looks at the moth the boy had been watching and she sees that it is dying. It is wet with dew. As she turns back towards the school, she senses a glowing ember rising down within her. Her lips move in silent prayer for the prisoner. Another sigh, her feet soaking wet, this day is young and takes forever.
8:55 am
In his car, the man looks at his phone and then up at the road. Then back down at his phone. Then up at the road again. This creates a sort of dance he does, his neck craning and rising, as his vehicle, a blue Honda, jerks ever-so-slightly towards the yellow lines that separate the passing cars from his. He always looks up though, right when he needs to. That is a currency that is valuable and he knows it. The ability to have come this far with being able to drive and also order things on Amazon at the same time/ or text his wife/ or check the weather/ or search for a podcast on the effect of the full moon on people with cancer they don’t even know about yet/ it’s kind of incredible, he tells himself. “I know these roads like the back of my hand,” he thinks. He smiles and makes a little sound that is kind of like a little girl’s squeak when she is happy or excited.
Two minutes later, he’s off his phone and listening to some country music on his stereo when he notices a bald eagle standing in the road ahead. It’s enormous. It appears like a small barn rising up from the ground. He slows down, checks his rearview and pops his blinkers; there’s no one coming behind him. He eases his car to the gravel of the shoulder and kills the engine. The creek by the roadside is a distant hiss. He is between two steep ridges, land posted for trespassing. His heart beats hard as he watches and immediately he sees that the eagle is picking at something. It’s something else in the road.
It’s another eagle, wing up in the air, shifting slightly in the soft breeze. It’s dead, he observes. There’s a smear of its guts shining red and although he isn’t close enough to see what exactly happened, he knows that this is not the first eagle to have been killed around here lately. There’s been a couple. All shot with a rifle. The state police, the FBI, Facebook, everyone is aghast. Everyone has lost their minds because there’s a serial killer loose and he’s killing bald eagles.
The other eagle, the one he first spotted, seems fine but determined. It pokes at the dark ruffled feathers, its bright yellow beak clipping at the body of its friend. Or partner or whatever. “So close up like this,” the man thinks to himself. “So close to an eagle. So close to the legend of the land.”
He looks in his rearview and there’s still no traffic and so he gets out of his car and stands. The living eagle takes him in now, as if he expects the man to help somehow. “But what could I do,” the man wonders. “It’s sad,” he thinks.He’s watching the one eagle with its fixed gaze piercing his face when it decides, for whatever reason, to fly. The rush of its wings is sudden and massive/ the levitation of a god from some era gone by. For what seems like minutes but is only a moment or two, the man locks eyes with the living eagle as it rises in the air and then shoots hard forward, swooping his head only inches away. The man is breathless and scared. He steadies himself on his car hood and watches all that majesty simply float up into the hills. The last thing he sees are the two talons dangling, shining like dried corn cobs. The bird runs straight and true, revealing nothing of itself as it is swallowed by the tall hemlocks, ingested by the dark of the forest.
He fears someone coming along but none do. To see things for himself, he moves along. The dead eagle feels strangely unrigid when he taps it with his boot. There is a single gaping wound in the neck and eagle blood is leaking out onto the road. It’s fluid. Recent. The quiet smashes him hard with a stone. No sound. No singing birds. Only the murmuring creek on its way to the sea.
He spins. Back in his car he guns the gas and skirts around the lifeless form as he moves away from the scene. At the first turn, a quarter mile away, he takes it, and then the first turn after that, so that he feels good about not being spotted. “I was never there,” he tells himself. “I was never there,” he practices in case the law comes calling.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
