WE ARE FLUSHING PHEASANTS

Ann Logan arrived in the fall, landing in Newark then driving on the open roads of rural New Jersey through green forest countryside she had thought she would never see again.

The drive northeast to the foot of the mountains took three hours. The car was a classic Porsche the shape of an upside-down bathtub and the color of stained porcelain. She had always wanted to drive a Porsche. But she couldn’t afford one. Classic Rentals for Cheap solved that.

Ann was slender and pretty and stood only 5’1”. She wore a lime green top, size 2P XS with tapered blue jeans. She was darker than mahogany. She looked nothing like the eight-year old black girl who had moved away from these parts. Now thirty-one, she felt certain people in her old hometown would never recognize her.

Just one year after her father died mom sold the house for a pittance. The very children Ann had called friends were accused, but acquitted of beating him to death. Mom and Ann then fled the tiny town of Walcott. Ann was a frightened girl in the backseat of a car as mom sped away.

Watching them were the children – particularly the teenagers – whom Anne felt had betrayed her. Betrayed her father. Betrayed the town. Lied about what they did. Denied it all. Mr. Logan was the aggressor they claimed. We defended ourselves. But Ann knew otherwise. She knew what she saw.

Still, Ann and her mom disappeared never to be heard from again.

Until now.

Since leaving, she had spent twenty-three years in the big city. Twenty-three years trying to forget. Mom passed away a year ago, a broken woman. Ann just had to return now. To settle things. To fight for what’s right.

For the classic Porsche, the final fifty miles was a tough uphill climb. Through the forest, maples dropped leaves like large hands. Blanketed fields and hillsides. Smothered streams, roadside fruit stands and covered pavement. Leaves landed on the hood of the Porsche palms up, overlapping, adjoining, gold, red, orange locked together, only to spiral off in the wind. A fleeting hold on her. A repelling force.

She thought about her suffocating final year of life in Walcott. The isolation of her home. The cold stares at school.

This trip was about the things she needed to do. It might be her last chance to convince former friends to do the right thing. Probably, the last time she would see them. She knew they would likely slam doors in her face. In small towns people stick together. They would not be kind to her.

As Ann drove down the final mountain road onto main street Walcott leaves fell in layers and the day turned early afternoon. To check out changes in the village, she stopped for a diet cola at a new place called, Springer’s Burgers. It was located at the center of town. She sat at an outdoor table and tried to slow her heart rate. Stop her growing anxiety.

Walcott was a valley town. Main Street anchored by six cross roads. From where she sat, she counted twenty-eight small shops. Mostly brick. Turn of the century trim. Doors painted bland colors, like maroon. Three more than she remembered. Fewer than two thousand people lived in and around the village. The surrounding countryside was vast. Farms like patched quilts to the horizon. Several ranches. Land dotted by tack shops and farm equipment sales.

Homes were just outside town. Evenly divided by economics. The white section and a black section. Her friends had represented all colors. Ann and the others passed easily between the two areas.

She sipped her soda as Mary’s Donuts did a brisk business next door. One trucker after another blew by. Mostly gasoline carriers or empty logging trucks returning for loads well beyond Walcott.

Tourists whipped by, too. Most on their way to the glass lakes of New Jersey, or the thrills of the big cities. Tiny Walcott did not interest them. It was not a tourist site. It was far from the coastal towns of Seaside Heights, Tom’s River and Belmar. For all its racial turmoil, the town was the proverbial fly on the wall. Or as the boys used to say, A gnat on the ass of a donkey.

For an hour Ann did not see a single person she recognized. Or that recognized her. Yet shoppers flooded tiny stores. That extra time helped to calm her nerves. She both hoped to spot someone she knew and hoped she wouldn’t. She had no idea what altercation might occur. Afterall, when her father died the incident was racially charged. Front page local news. Mom’s strong stand had made certain of that. Her lawyer tried to put some of her friends in juvie and indict the parents who protected their children. Yet he could not break the code of silence. Legal threats didn’t work. Even faced with jail time no one caved. Deny, deny, deny.

Ann checked her phone to make certain she remembered the route to the month-to-month apartment complex. This was a delaying tactic. Of course, she remembered the route. She could never forget. The apartment was close to the river. Near where her father died. The complex was called Pheasant Run. For good reason back when it was built. Pheasants populated a field that led to the river. She wondered if the descendants of the pheasant families from her childhood now lived there.

Just then she noticed a woman drop packages in a parked car, then glance in her direction.

Ann turned away. A minute later the woman walked up. Ann? she asked. Ann Logan?

She looked up from her seat. Sarah Brighton, Ann realized. Tall blonde, skinny as a rail. They had not been particularly close. But she had been one of the ‘gang’. She had been there that day.

Nice to see you, Sarah, Ann said.

Quiet a moment. Then Sarah said, You look well.

Sarah continued to look down at her, sun behind her pale shoulders, hair aglow. She was not skinny as a rail anymore. What brings you back to Walcott? she asked.

Ann did not stand up. Quietly, she said, Face my demons. The demons.

Sarah sighed. Momentarily closed her eyes as if in pain. Please, Ann… You’re not here to dredge up all that trouble again, are you? It’s the past…

Ann shot up from her chair. She still held her cola, lid intact, ice rattling. She barely came up to Sarah’s shoulders. The past? she said tersely. You must be kidding? My father died. That never passes.

I didn’t mean it that way, Sarah said.

My dad was beaten to death.

Oh, Ann…

How dare you.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound insensitive.

You didn’t sound insensitive. You were insensitive.

Ann stepped back. Aware that people were watching.

I’m not here to anger anyone, she said, I just need closure. To talk to people.

Please, Ann. There’s no reason, too. You were the youngest and far across the pheasant field. Your view was obscured by tall reeds.

No.

Your memory is clouded.

Not true.

Your father attacked the boys.

Not the way I saw it.

You didn’t see it. The police went through all this, Ann. We endured a ten-month court battle. Please don’t do this to yourself. Please don’t do this to us again.

Ann breathed deeply. Her therapist Dr. Warner had taught her this method to calm down.

You needn’t worry, Sarah, she finally said. I hadn’t planned on discussing it with you. You were only two years older than me. The older boys could convince you of anything… Like they tried to do with me.

They didn’t convince me. I saw it. Your father was the aggressor.

You’re all liars!

Sarah abruptly walked away. She climbed in her car without looking back. After she shifted into drive Ann saw her put her phone to her ear.

The gang was now alerted. Crazy Ann Logan was back in town.

Now the tough part. Tomorrow, Ann would begin her work. The truth was going to come out. This whole fiasco was going to end one way or the other.

That night she remembered.

Her father gasped his last breath in mom’s arms.

The gang had just made their way to the river to fish. She followed along. In size, the ‘littlest’ of the bunch. Boys ranged in age up to sixteen. Two on the high school varsity football team. Both linemen.

The gang followed behind along a narrow dirt path. Within eyesight of the pheasant field behind them, and further ahead the slow-moving river. The kids were sweaty, tired, but laughing. Back then she had thought that they would all be lifelong friends.

In her dreams Ann remembered the tickle of dewy grass on bare legs. Like wet paper wild flowers stuck to her ankle.

Approaching the river Ann remembered the sun between the distant twin peaks of Walcott Mountain. Just ahead the long snaking river seemed surfaced with glass shards. The glitter wound to the horizon until it disappeared behind the mountain range.

Then it happened. At the river the boys got into an argument with a slight black man who as she understood, had been fishing in their spot. Before she knew it, they attacked him. All seven of the biggest boys ages 12 through sixteen went at him. They overpowered the man. Ann’s father had come down to the banks of the river to bring her home for dinner when he tried to defend him. He had shouted at Ann to run. She charged into the field of pheasants. The flock pumped wings and took flight all around her. She felt quickly smothered by a wild orgy of flying birds.

Through tall reeds Ann heard screams in the shadows far behind her. She stopped running, but couldn’t see. She kept jumping in the air for a better view. More pheasants broke the sky. Wings, feathers, large strong birds. In the brief time it took for the pheasants to take flight and disappear into the blazing sun – it was over.

Her childhood friends ran. They had ignored Ann’s screams from the pheasant field. The other black man, his face bloody, had fled, too, never to be heard from again. He had been a transient, just passing through. But her father barely clung to life.

Ann charged through the pheasant field toward home to fetch mom. She caused another wild ruckus of birds. Then up a hill and down. When Ann and her mom arrived back at the river the boys were gone. Sarah was gone. Her father’s dark skin had turned ashen. Lifeless eyes stared vacantly at the sky, eyelids fluttering like the wings of birds. Blood on his face and knuckles, his shirt and pants. Blood on the reeds and soil.

Every day since fleeing Walcott that memory returned like the repeated hard slamming of a screen door to Ann’s home that summer. Lawyers, police, county social services, a barrage of reporters, black family friends, in and out. Like the door, the memory opened and closed, over and over, every hour of the night.

And now she woke in sweat. Steve Carlson, leader of the gang, biggest of the boys, had led the beating, prosecutors said. He was first on her list.

Just before sunrise Ann arrived on the other side of Walcott to confront him.

The previous day’s unexpected hot sun had shriveled the leaves of the trees, curling them inward. Heat had dried the dirt alongside the 1960s apartment complex. Any movement kicked up a dreamlike haze. Heavy dust, thick and stifling coated her skin. Like clothes she couldn’t shed.

Steve lived in apartment 1A. First floor, first door. First parking spot. Still number one all the way. Back when Ann lived in Walcott, he was age sixteen. Twice left back in school. Befriended younger kids who looked up to him. Biggest of the boys at six-two. Brown hair and eyes. A mean streak when provoked. Ann wondered if he’d changed.

She knocked on a battered door. Waited a long time.

She had planned what she would say. Not caught off guard this time. But best laid plans, she knew, aren’t always best.

The complex stood two stories, flat roof, square slider windows, yellow stucco, avocado green trim. A line of carports to the side. Two overflowing green dumpsters around back where a soon to be deployed soldier and two friends emptied the contents of an apartment.

The door flung open. Steve filled the doorway. His big head of mop hair almost grazed the top of the frame.

Hello, Steve, Ann said. Do you remember me?

He leaned against the frame. Ann recognized the cold indifference in his hazel eyes. She knew it well.

Yeah, he said. Ann Logan. You didn’t grow much.

We run short in my family.

Someone warned me you were in town, Steve said. What’re you doing back?

I grew up here.

Not really. You left when you were… what seven?… Eight?

I have a right to come back.

No one disputes that. I don’t dispute that.

All I want to do is talk.

That’s what you don’t have the right to do.

I can’t talk?

Not if people don’t want to listen.

Ann glanced away. Regrouped her thoughts. Remembered to soften her voice.

All I want is to hear your side of the story, she said.

You heard it in court. Twice.

I was a little girl then. Nothing made sense. Now I’m an adult. Help me to better understand.

Look, Ann, if you’re here to start trouble, think twice.

I just want to hear it directly from you…

Leave, if you know what is good for you.

Is that a threat?

Just warning you that no one has forgiven you. You put us through the ringer. We got kicked out of school. Other kids wouldn’t go near us. They called us, animals. I got into fights with black kids for no reason. Plus, I got no scholarship offers in football. All because of what you claimed you saw.

Just tell me your side.

Stop it, Steve said. That’s not what you want. You want us in jail, period. You didn’t believe us then, and you won’t believe us now.

I’ll listen…

Your accusations ruined our lives. Get in your car. Drive back to where ever you came from. No one wants to see you.

Steve slammed the door shut.

The evidence says you beat him, she shouted.

Steve flung open the door hard. It smashed against an inside wall and bounced halfway back.

We were defending ourselves, he screamed in her face. Get that through your thick skull! Your father was the aggressor. We’d already finished with the transient. He stole the lunches we had hidden down by the river. We gave him one, but he wanted them all. Your dad saw his bloody nose. He didn’t give us time to explain. He assumed racism. You hear? The guy was a transient. Not a black transient. No one saw him that way. Of the boys, three of us were white, one Cuban, one Filipino, two black. Does that sound racist?

Why did you keep beating my father? Ann asked back.

We didn’t. He kept trying to get up to hurt us. Nick got a broken nose. We were kids. We were subduing him. The jury agreed. Now get the hell away from me or I’ll press charges for harassment.

Then he slammed the door again.

You were my friends, she yelled.

And you were our friend, Steve shouted back through the door. But you threw it all away!

Ann then cried in the Porsche. That had not gone the way she had planned. I have to stop leading with my emotions, she knew. Just let them talk. Maybe someone will confess.

Ann began to wonder if returning to Walcott had been a huge mistake.

Just ahead pickups pulled horse trailers along a crossroad on the way to a local ranch. Twice, the dust trail from eight tires turned the air brown. From her car she couldn’t see a thing. She decided that today she would try one last former friend. Lori Pascale had never testified. She had been a year younger than Ann. Another straggler. Another little girl who followed the gang and was never told not to. Because of her age lawyers considered her testimony useless.

But Ann felt she might be sympathetic. Maybe the key to unlocking the code of silence.

She sped to the home listed online. Lori was easy to find.

An hour later the pair sat for coffee in Lori’s kitchen.

Small house, tiny kitchen, itty-bitty garden. A potted spider plant hung in a window above the sink. A cat warmed in the sun on a windowsill. Lori put out sliced pound cake on a small kitchen table. They sat close.

Lori was Hispanic. Tall, cute, brown hair.

You look well, Ann said. I’ve missed you.

She was amazed how much Lori still looked like the little girl she knew. Such a small face and small eyes.

Accounting work in a small town doesn’t pay well, Lori said. But enough to get by. Mostly it’s bookkeeping work for small businesses like Mary’s Donuts. Some individual tax returns.

Lori said nothing else. She seemed sad. She had divorced last year, Ann knew. From Sydney. One of the gang. Could that be the problem?

Did you know I was here? Ann asked.

I’m not part of the barking chain.

Do they still hang out together?

Without me.

Why?

I prefer that.

Because of the divorce?

No. Sydney left town.

Because of what happened? Ann asked.

No.

Lori sipped coffee. She had added chicory.

I wish it hadn’t happened… I mean with your father, Lori said. But my reasons for avoiding the gang are… Well, I’m more of a loner now.

Have any of them ever threatened you?

Lori sat back wide-eyed. No, she said. Why would they?

Because of what you saw.

No, Ann.

Honest?

Yes.

Do you want to talk about what you saw?

No.

Why?

Because it hurts. Seeing you hurts.

Ann now had hope.

Lori placed a hand on Ann’s. She used to do that when they were little. Her touch was still gentle.

My mom wouldn’t let me attend the trial, Lori said. I was so young. I’m not really sure what went on there. Most of what I know I heard years later.

It was terrible, Ann said. I showed up every day. All that arguing.

The incident could have been avoided, Lori said. It was all so unfortunate. They could have let the transient alone.

Tell me, what you saw, Ann pleaded. That’s all I ask.

Hesitancy in Lori’s eyes. Slow to comment. Then finally, she spoke.

I didn’t see much, she said. But no one ever really asked me. I was probably forty feet away not paying attention. I had been twirling in circles to make myself dizzy. And I fell down. Then the shouting started. The boys darted about. But I only saw their heads. I saw your father’s arms up. I think to protect his face. I saw the transient run. But that’s it.

Why is that all you saw? You had stopped twirling, right?

Yes. But I was distracted.

By what?

The pheasants. To my right was the pheasant field. Suddenly a good fifteen of them rose up out of the reeds. Moments later a second larger group burst into the air. The entire sky above the reeds filled with flying birds.

That was because of me, Ann said.

That’s why I didn’t see what happened, Lori said. Besides, I was still dizzy. My head was spinning. It was all spinning. The surroundings were whirling. The sky, the colors, the ground, the reeds, even the river. Your father seemed angry. The boys seemed angry. It came to a head. And now, it’s so long ago.

Which means?

My memory has faded with time. The only thing that sticks with me was seeing the pheasants rise from the field.

Did they repeatedly kick my father while he was on the ground?

I couldn’t see that. I was short, remember? There was a lot of brush. But forensics confirmed he’d been kicked in the head twice.

The pound cake was left untouched. Lori admitted that seeing Ann brought back bad memories of years of strife in the town. Years of sadness.

It became a race thing, Lori said. Kids at school, black against white… Hispanic kids in the middle. We didn’t hang out together anymore. Things changed. We all felt it. I didn’t look at classmates the same. And I could see in their eyes that they didn’t look at me the same anymore, either.

I hope you find closure, Lori said at the door.

She watched Ann drive away. She hoped she would never see her again. Ann was the catalyst that had propelled her youthful innocence into cynical adulthood. That person who forced her to grow up. The reason she now saw color. She resented her for that.

From Ann’s point of view, her old friend was hiding the truth.

Ann drove the Porsche hard. Ground the gears. Anything to flee, to burst through the air, to lose herself. She had planned to stay until winter. No amount of pressure would force her out. But now she knew in her heart that she didn’t belong. She decided to leave.

To her left monotonous pavement leaving the mountain climb dropped straight and narrow like a ruler. To her right in the direction of the small main street of Walcott the road wrapped the mountainside like a boa constrictor smothering prey. When it reached the bald top, it uncoiled on the other side. She chose the steep climb then turned left at the bottom.

She realized in two miles she would be at the river and the pheasant fields.

She could say her last goodbyes.

Before taking this trip, Ann hadn’t been sure if it was a good idea. Her goal seemed insurmountable. But Dr. Warner had told her to seek closure. She decided to do it. There were so many unanswered questions. She had hoped the answers would be waiting for her in Walcott. But she was wrong.

Most of all, she wanted to come to grips with why – and at what point – color became an issue for her and for the children of Walcott? Or for anyone? She didn’t feel the catalyst was the death of her father. She felt it had been coming long before that. Rearing its head slowly over time. How does a human being go from not caring about our differences to only caring about our differences? She wanted to understand that moment when youthful innocence is lost. When race becomes a factor in interactions with others. How do colorblind children become adults who only see color? Maybe she would never discover the answers to these questions. But she had to try. For Ann, it was more than the death of her father. It was the reasons why.

As the little car rounded wide bends with dramatic vistas of mountains and shadows and deepening foliage, her anxiety heightened.

Dr. Warner had told her this would happen. He suggested she confront her feelings of doom.

That awful moment when her father died had made a permanent impression on her psyche. Like finger writing in wet cement. It hardens and is always there.

Half mile until the death site.

She breathed deeply. Loudly repeated, ‘No,’ a technique Dr. Warner had taught her to force out bad thoughts. Yet the pillar-like trees on the lower hills, layers of shadow and huge boulders that shone like dark polished eggs closed in on her.

Just ahead the long river ran fast. Dusk was coming.

In the open window her hair had become tangled and Medusa-like. She pulled to the side of the road near the pheasant field. To see it again. To relive it. Walk to the riverside. Pay her respects.

Everything came into unsettling focus.

At a little hill that seemed smaller now, Ann waded into the pheasant field that led to the river. Near the bend she would see the spot where her father had died.

For years, friends of her father had left flowers at the site. She was certain that would no longer be the case.

She was now deep in the field. Tall reeds still taller than her. Alone in the dusk where nothing moved.

Like dreams in the haze, she envisioned her friends. All of them young and impressionable. Kind and gentle. We were innocent then, she cried painfully.

In those days the children lined up at the foot of the field. Ann insisted she stand in the middle. In unison they slowly walked through the reeds. Stalks taller than all of them. She could hardly see the sun. The pheasants always hid and nested there. To lead predators away from their nests they would take to the sky.

The children tapped sticks. Slowly forward in a line through the tall reeds as if to scare off a tiger outside a village. In her memory she realized their faces were black, brown and white. A Puerto Rican boy with an accent. A friend of Indian descent next to him. Her Filipino pal, the nicest of the boys. Other black kids. She saw all of them now. Yet at the time they were colorless. Friends without races. Alike in youthful innocence. United by laughter, shared experiences and the excitement of flushing pheasants.

She decided racism begins with a single comment. A joke overheard by a child. An adult remark, giving it credence.

A whispered racist statement. An acquaintance repeats it.

Stereotypes are passed along. Friends mutter them in anger. Uncomfortable nods become chuckles. The cumulative effect piles up. Children begin to believe the comments are true. After a while they notice ethnicity. For her friends, Ann was certain, on that fateful day, the transient and her father were black. Everything in that moment had gone from color-less to black and white.

That had to have happened to them, she realized. Could it be anything else?

Today just as then, Ann did not want to hurt the pheasants. None of the children did. But they enjoyed the discovery of finding them where they couldn’t be seen. All children enjoy discovery. The hope is that in that process of discovery no one is hurt.

When pheasants flushed from heavy reeds, they came full force at face level. For a brief second, each one rose gradually while struggling for lift. Then they sped by. Sometimes they hit the children in the face. Or came so close that she and her friends felt feathers brush sharply across the tops of their heads. It’s amazing how big a pheasant looks up close, wings outstretched, thick body about football size, all a blur as one whizzes past. Wings frantically beating a vibration in her ears.

And yet Ann always saw their eyes. No matter how fast a pheasant shredded air past her, she met eyes with them. She had never been able to determine if the Pheasant’s wild-eyed stare meant anger, fear or both. It was a dark, foreboding look, all noticeable in that split second.

When her racing heart beat as fast as the wings of pheasants, Ann came to understand that when pheasants flee, they are not so different from humans.

They were born. They were free. They realized there are predators. Things different from themselves. They lost their innocence.

All animals and humans are afraid of the unknown, of perceived threats, Ann realized. We follow instincts. We react in unpredictable ways.

Now so many years later, as the reeds swayed in the wind, life and death swaying with them, Ann regretted that she too noticed the things that adults noticed. She longed for the innocence of pheasants, of children, of youthful beating wings not flushed from the nest. The circumstances of her father’s death had changed her. She held a lifelong grudge. She felt that racism had long been hidden deep within her friends and had been flushed like pheasants in one violent act.

Ann heard rustling.

Pheasants. Quick movement. Strong wings thudded repeatedly. Bodies rose, lifting over the reeds.

Now, just like then, pheasants flew all around her, the air wild with wings, the sky a blur. A bird knocked her down landing her face up to the sun. She remembered now being knocked down as a child, too. She had hit her head hard on a rock. Almost lost consciousness. A pheasant had lifted just above her. She had seen a dark eye focus on her. Saw a glimmer, a reflection of herself in the pheasant’s eye. A split second like an eternity. She heard her father call out. When she glanced up her head spun and her vision was impaired.

But now she suddenly remembered.

He had charged angrily into the fray to pull the boys off of the transient. He had interpreted it as a racial attack. It angered him. Father’s arms seemed entangled with theirs. The boys pleaded, Stop, stop. But he didn’t.

For the first time she saw it all clearly. Ann bolted from the pheasant field in tears. It was time to go home.

Had she walked further she would have seen that left behind at the site where her father died were fresh bouquets of red and yellow roses. Put there by Steve, Sarah, Lori and others in the gang. Just as they’d been doing for two decades.

John C. Weil’s short stories have appeared in NOVA, Chiron Review, Mystery Tribune, Adelaide, Suspense Magazine, Canary, Tuck, Wild Violet, Halfway Down the Stairs. He has been a finalist in the Screencraft Short Story Competition and twice a finalist in the Los Angeles International Film Festival Script writing Competition.