Thomas laughs really hard. “That’s quite a busy schedule for God. You’d think he’d have some helpers, like Santa’s elves.”
“He does,” I say. “They are called God’s leprechauns.”
He laughs some more. “God’s leprechauns. I like it.”
“I try,” I say. I pick up the rifle and force a frown, so that I look the way a guy holding a rifle should look. I aim at the roof, and then, before I can think about it too much, I squeeze.
The pop jolts my head. Dust flies about five feet from where the pigeons are. Better than Thomas, but still a miss.
“No pigeons were killed as a result of this shooting demonstration,” I say. He grins. I put the gun down and add, “Anyway, I’m cool that y’all are spiritual or whatever, but just for the record, I’m pretty sure God doesn’t exist.”
He shrugs and takes the BB gun back from me. He raises the gun, aims, and says, “Reminds me of a joke I saw written on a bathroom stall. Someone wrote ‘God is dead,’ and signed it ‘Nietzsche.’ Then someone crossed that out. Underneath it, they wrote, ‘Nietzsche is dead. Signed, God.’ ”
I laugh. “So here’s what I don’t get,” I say. “You believe in God, but you’ve been to Africa and seen all the hardship and crap.”
He nods, his gun still aimed at the roof.
“So God lets that crap happen? Why? Why is God so mean?”
Thomas fires, and this time, the pop is accompanied by a pigeon tumbling off the roof.
My hand involuntarily grasps my own throat.
It’s funny, because it’s just a pigeon. And it’s not like I wasn’t just shooting at it myself. Maybe I didn’t put it all together. That the activity we were doing while having a nice talk could actually end a life. Even if it’s the life of just a pigeon.
I look to the other pigeons to see their reaction. Are they aware of what just happened? Do they know they’ve just lost their family member? Was that a mother? A father? A child?
That pigeon is over. Life done.
Thomas is too focused on his kill to notice me. He strides over to view the bird. I look down and see that its wing is still flickering some. Thomas lifts the BB rifle, aims, and fires down into it.
I sit down on the gravel, numb. Thomas goes inside, and moments later he returns with a dustpan and a black garbage bag. He uses the end of the rifle barrel to push the lifeless pigeon onto the dustpan, and then he throws that life away.
I sit there with my chin on my knees, watching and wondering what just happened to me. Because it’s just a pigeon. And Thomas is just a man, not like a god. Or maybe he is just like a god, because God smites things every day, every second. This all-loving thing you’re supposed to pray to, who loves you and provides for you. He’s a killer. He’s all-powerful, and terrible stuff just happens, over and over and over again, and God doesn’t stop it. Like with my dad. I think about this and I hate the world.
Thomas takes the garbage bag down the road to a green Dumpster and deposits the expendable just-a-pigeon life, and then he comes back and he sits next to me on the ground. We both sit there, arms wrapped around our knees, staring at a roof with one less bird.
“I don’t think God is mean. God just is,” he finally says. “A long time ago I gave up the idea that God was some great puppet master, that one day he decides there needs to be a tornado in Kansas. Things happen, and then there’s God.”
I don’t respond, because what would I say? Real men don’t have feelings over pigeons. I 100 percent don’t know what a “real man” is, but he doesn’t cry over spilled pigeon.
He looks over at me and swats me on the shoulder. “You okay, kiddo?”
“Tired,” I say, rubbing my eyes.
Thomas scoops up a handful of pebbles and shuffles them around in his hand. He sifts a couple of pebbles back onto the ground through the hole between his thumb and his forefinger. “Okay,” he says. “Just checking.” He says it in the way that people talk to damaged goods, and I don’t want to be damaged goods. But obviously I am.
Thomas heads inside, and I’m left sitting on the gravel, pondering bird families. Somewhere out there, a pigeon dad is in mourning for his son. He is wondering what he could have done differently, like tell his kid to stop playing on trailer park roofs. And he wonders: Where do all the bird memories go after death?
And what happens when you die? Do you just stop breathing?
Try to imagine: You are breathing. Then you stop. Breathing.
Forever.
I’M STILL SITTING outside, trying to get a grip, when Laurelei’s old olive Chevy spirals a cloud of dust toward me as it pulls in to the covered spot next to the trailer.
Aisha springs from the passenger seat like a totally different person than she was yesterday. Laurelei waves at me and heads inside, and Aisha jogs over.
“I know, I know. You hate meditation,” she says. “But that was … That was seriously serious. I’m all, like, Zen’d out and shit.”
I recline on the gravel, my elbows scratching against the rocks, which is not at all comfortable. Aisha kneels down the way basketball coaches kneel to check out a hurt player. Elbows on knees. Calves flexed.
“You okay?”
I nod.
“You don’t really look that okay.”
I look up at her and I don’t know what gets communicated, but in about a half a second she’s yanking me to my feet and we’re walking away from the trailer.
We silently stroll the dirt ring of the trailer park, past a trailer that has multicolored toilets in front of it, like some sort of art project gone terribly wrong.
“You wanna talk about it?” she asks.
“It’s stupid. I don’t know what it is,” I say. “It’s just …”
“Yeah,” she says, and I have a feeling she doesn’t have a clue what “it” is. Since I definitely don’t.
I concentrate on kicking up dust as we continue to walk. All the trailers are covered with crazy, tacky stuff that’s hard to categorize. Street signs taken from the side of roads; macramé masks that would make a two-year-old cry; lonely, forlorn lawn ornaments; and other castoffs from the isle of misfit trash. I feel like I belong here.
I keep walking, and finally I begin to think that if I don’t say something, Aisha’s gonna just decide I’m fine, and I’m not fine. Part of me wants that, for her to not know what’s going on in my brain. Another part of me is so fucking tired of people not knowing.
So I just talk. “Do you think, like, pigeons mourn when a family member is shot?”
“You and your birds.” She laughs. I don’t, though, and she stops laughing when she realizes that I’m not.
We stop walking. She looks into my eyes, and I avert them from hers.
“I’m such a loser,” I blurt. “All Thomas did was, like, shoot a pigeon off his roof with a BB gun, and my head got all wacked, and —”
I look down at the dusty road beneath us. I say, “I’m a loser and a freak and an idiot.”
Aisha does the weirdest thing. She puts her hand on my forearm and squeezes. She speaks really softly, which I don’t expect from her. “I feel messed up sometimes too,” she says, looking directly in my eyes.
I can’t quite return the look. “You?” I ask the ground.
“Ugly,” she says. “I feel ugly.”
“You are the least ugly person in the world, and you can trust me on that one.” I am studying a patch of gravel-less dirt. It’s so much easier to talk without eye contact.
“You are the least loser person in the world,” she says, but I just can’t believe those are the same thing. I am definitely more loser than she is ugly.