Chapter 29 – Elemental
As he walks out the sliding door, someone tries to enter. They freeze when they see him, fear-tart rolling toward him.
I’m so tired, he thinks. I’m not even trying to scare them and they still get scared.
“Whoa. Nice suit. Guess we’ll see you later, gator.”
Humans smell one way and say another. Right now, he doesn’t have the energy to understand why.
And seeing me later? I doubt that. I think Hooks is done with me.
He isn’t sure where to go. Then a thought crosses his mind, and he starts trudging away.
At a bus stop near Hooks, a FlaminGo bus pulls up. The driver opens the door and looks down at him.
“Why the long face, croco?” he asks with a chuckle. “Get on. If you’re going that way, I’m going that way.”
Big Sal gazes up at the bus driver. He isn’t sure what the scent coming from the driver means, but it reminds him of deep water moving beneath a still surface.
“Sal!” calls Petra, running out the door, but she’s too late.
Big Sal taps his card. A loon warbles, and the bus doors slide closed behind him.
The bus heads in the direction he had been thinking of. He stands, holding the overhead railing, and takes a deep sniff, hoping to smell another book. But the bus is almost empty. The few people aboard stare at their phones without registering him.
It’s kind of nice for a change.
He sighs and rubs his face with a hand.
What did I think I was doing here? It’s all wrong. And I don’t even have a place to go back to.
His mind feels slow and numb.
No squirrels, no owls, no grouse.
A strange longing swirls in his belly.
Then, No elephants, no foxes, no other crocodiles.
This time, the longing seeps into the center of his chest.
The bus turns onto Handyman Road, slows, and stops. Big Sal smells cold water, the faintest trace of algae and something strangely clean. He turns toward the front doors.
Before he can step down, a man with close-cropped hair and kind eyes starts onto the bus. His eyes find Big Sal before Big Sal smells the lemony-persimmon scent.
“Ohh, I know that look,” says the man.
Big Sal says nothing. He sighs, steps around him and trundles off. The bus starts up with a fwip-fwip-fwip that echoes down the road. A CRANK News truck emblazoned with Don Maroon’s face pulls away from the far side of the pond, heading the opposite direction.
The pond isn’t far, and as he approaches, he smells something familiar.
Heron.
Splashes and rapid strikes tell Big Sal where the bird is long before he reaches the water. Too distracted to notice him, the bird scrambles through the shallows, trying to eat everything he can.
Setting his purse beneath a tree, Big Sal settles into the pond. A few cattails fringe the edge, but nowhere near as many as he’s used to. There is hardly any algae, and the water smells more like a bathtub than a pond. The cold closes around him, almost like home.
But not.
Eyes closed, he drifts across the surface like only a crocodile can.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! What—what are you doing?” exclaims the bird.
Opening his eyes, Big Sal finds the heron beside him. He had smelled the bird drawing closer but hadn’t bothered to move. No belly beast stirs inside him. The heron may as well be sticks and spiderwebs, more memory than food.
“Just napping. I’m sorry you lost your home. It used to be mine too.”
The heron squawks, shivers, and stares at him.
“Big Al?”
“Sal. Big Sal now.”
“Aren’t you going to eat me?” the bird finally says. “I mean, I’ve been eating fish and water bugs. Isn’t this how it works?”
“Mmm. Not hungry.”
He closes his eyes. “I did what they told me to do, and I still got it wrong. Now I can’t go back there. Or home. Our home.” He sighs. “I’m tired. Very tired.”
The heron’s scent changes, filling with confusion. It reminds Big Sal of Carney the Crane, the bird who taught him to stand. Carney had once tasted so good. Now Big Sal wishes Carney were there.
“Can you sing?” he asks the heron, opening his eyes.
“What?”
“Can you sing? Like songs?”
“I, uh. I don’t know. What kind of songs?”
“Uhm.” Big Sal whistles the “still standing” tune that Carney sang for him, so long ago.
He remembers walking into the Zit & Grit and whistling it. The band had joined him, and then the entire room. For the first time, he had felt welcomed. Accepted. He thought he had found that again in Ankerton.
Now he isn’t so sure.
“I don’t know that song,” says the heron. “But let me see. Ah, uh. Hm.”
The heron’s song echoes across the rippling water and weaves through the cattails. It begins with words about a long and lonesome highway, somewhere on one side of Omaha. Later, the song follows the traveler onto a stage beneath the lights. Big Sal lets the loneliness of it wash over him.
When the heron finishes, Big Sal says, “I was like that for a bit. In the spotlight. It didn’t feel so lonely. I felt accepted. I liked it.”
“I wouldn’t know,” says the heron. “The highway part reminded me of leaving Stinkwater.”
“Yeah. I get that.”
For a while, neither says anything. Neither moves. The fire in the sky burns through the clouds, then sinks beyond the city.
The sky never becomes as clear as it was from the roof of the truck. Instead of Stinkwater’s haze, Ankerton’s city lights dim the stars.
Still as a tree, the heron sleeps beside him on one leg.
Good.
In the morning, before Big Sal opens his eyes, the scent of dragonfly blasts into his left nostril like a hose.
He sneezes violently.
With a beat of wings and hardly a splash, the heron rises into the blue sky. The dragonfly that had been sunning itself on Big Sal’s nose tumbles away, buzzes once around his head on shimmering wings, then darts for the cattails.
Big Sal watches the heron shrink into the distance.
I wonder where he’ll go.
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Chapter 29 podcast drops August 22
Chapter 30 text drops August 29
