feathered breasts, trying to determine if there were species other than
nighthawks in these multitudes. The poor light and the blur of movement
made it difficult to conduct even a cursory census.
By the time the last of the enormous flock soared past, not a single
bird had dived at us or shrieked. Their passing had such an otherworldly
quality that I almost felt as though I had been hallucinating, but a
sprinkling of feathers in the Jeep and along the blacktop confirmed the
reality of the experience.
Even as the last small bits of fluffy down descended on the breeze,
Bobby threw open the driver’s door and scrambled from the Jeep. He was
still gripping the shotgun when he turned to stare after the departing
flock, although he was holding the weapon in one hand now, muzzle
pointed at the pavement, with no intention of using it.
I got out of the Jeep, too, and watched as the birds swooped up from the
end of the street, arcing high across a sea of stars, disappearing into
the blackness between those distant suns.
“Totally awesome, ” Bobby said.
“Yeah.”
“But …”
“Yeah.”
“Feels a little sharky, too.” I knew what he meant. This time the birds
radiated more than the sorrow that I had felt before. Although the
flock’s choreography had been breathtaking, even exhilarating, and
although their amazing conspiracy of silence seemed to express and to
inspire an odd sort of reverence, something dangerous lay under their
performance, the same way that a sun-spangled blue sea could look so
totally sacred even while great whites churned in a feeding frenzy just
under the surface. This felt a little sharky.
Although the nighthawks had climbed out of sight, Bobby and I stood
staring at the constellation into which they had vanished, as if we were
in full-on early Spielberg, waiting for the mother ship to appear and
bathe us in white light only slightly less intense than God sheds.
“Saw it before, ” I told him.
“Bogus.”
“True.”
“Insane.”
“Maximum.”
“When? ”
“On my way here, ” I said. “Just the other side of the park.
But the flock was smaller.”
“What’re they doing? ”
“I don’t know. But here they come again.”
“I don’t hear them.”
“Me neither. Or see em. But they’re coming.” He hesitated, then slowly
nodded and said, “Yeah, ” when he felt it, too.
Stars over stars under stars. A larger light that might have been Venus.
One, two, three closely grouped flares as small meteors hit the
atmosphere and were incinerated. A small winking red dot moving east to
west, perhaps an airliner sailing along the interface between our sea of
air and the airless sea between worlds.
I was almost prepared to question my instinct, when, at last, the flock
returned from the same part of the sky into which it had risen out of
sight. Incredibly, the birds swept down into the street and past us in a
helix, corkscrewing along Commissary Way, boring through the night in a
whirr of wings.
This exhibition, this incredible stunt, was so thrilling that inevitably
it inspired wonder, and in wonder is the seed of joy.
I felt my heart lift at this amazing sight, but my exhilaration was
constrained by the continuing perception of a wrongness in the birds’
behavior that was separate from the charming novelty of it.
Bobby must have felt the same way, because he couldn’t sustain the brief
laugh of delight with which he first greeted the sight of the spiraling
flock. His smile dried out as his laugh withered, and he turned to stare
after the departing nighthawks with a cracking expression that was
becoming less grin than grimace.
Two blocks away, the birds twisted up into the sky, like the withdrawing
funnel of a fading tornado.
Their aerobatics had required strenuous effort, the beating of their
wings had been so furious that even as the drum like pounding
diminished, I could feel the reverberations of it in my ears, in my
heart, in my bones.
The birds soared out of sight once more, leaving us with just the
whisper of the onshore breeze.
“It’s not over, ” Bobby said.