Free The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy by Ryan Winfield Page B

in and drawing out the panicked pigeons, flipping them backwards with quick jerks, their necks giving with thin cracks, their fluttering hearts stuttering then ceasing to beat as they go limp in our hands.
    “It’s all in the wrist,” he says.
    At first it takes me several attempts each, but as the pile grows, I get to where I’m almost as quick as he is.
    With the net now empty and a pile of dead pigeons at our feet, he produces a tiny ivory knife from some hidden pocket in his waist. He snatches up a pigeon and cuts a ring just below the tail. Then, in one slick motion, he strips the bird clean of feathers and all, tossing the skin onto the ground where it lays deflated and slimy, wrong side out, perhaps closer resembling some feathered salamander ancestor of a bird. Next, he slides his blade up the rib cage, reaches in and pulls out a handful of slippery guts, tossing them onto the pile, too. I gag a little.
    “This is disgusting,” I say, looking at the pile of parts.
    “It’s called field dressin’,” he says.
    “Well, it looks a lot more like field undressing to me.”
    He chuckles and hands me the dressed bird, pointing to the water. I look at him, confused, the slimy bird cradled like a venomous slug in my palms. He takes the pigeon back and dips it in the lake and runs his fingers inside its disemboweled breast rinsing it clean. Then he rips free a handful of grass and stuffs the grass inside the bird and puts the bird in the bag.
    He nods. I nod.
    Then he strips another. Skin, guts, head—the pile grows. He hands the bird to me and I rinse it clean, fill it with grass, and slip it into the sack, just like he showed me.
    He smiles. “It’s Jimmy, by the way.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Jimmy,” he says. “My name’s Jimmy.”
    “I’m Aubrey.”
    “Sounds jus’ like a girl’s name.”
    “Well, Jimmy sounds like slang for a pecker.”
    “What’s a pecker?”
    “Never mind. Aubrey’s a boy’s name, too.”
    We work this way for half an hour, faster and faster, until it takes us less than half a minute to complete a bird. When we finish, the netted sack is bursting with pink approximations of pigeons and three separate piles lie at our feet—feathers, guts, and blank staring pigeon heads looking up into the sky where three red-headed vultures now circle, waiting for us to leave.
    “How ya gonna carry yers?” he asks.
    “Carry my what?”
    “Yer half,” he says, nodding toward the pigeons.
    “I don’t want any.”
    “Suit yerself,” he says, hefting the sack over his shoulder, leaning under its weight, and walking off without another word.
    I chase after.
    “Wait! I want to come with you.”
    “You’s cain’t.”
    “I don’t have anywhere to go,” I say, running ahead of him and blocking his path. “You can’t just leave me out here alone.”
    “Sure can,” he says, moving around me and walking again.
    “I’m coming anyway.”
    “I told ya no,” he says. “They dun’ voted already.”
    “Who voted?”
    “Ever-one.”
    “Voted about me?”
    “Well, who else?”
    “You voted to leave me?” I shout, my voice louder than I expected and echoing back to us from the caldera walls.
    “I ain’t voted.”
    “Well, why not?”
    “’Cause I ain’t been born yet.”
    “You talk funny,” I say.
    “So do you’s.”
    “Well, I don’t like you.”
    “I don’t like you’s neither,” he says.
    I fall in behind and follow anyway. After a few minutes, he glances over his shoulder and scowls at me.
    “How come you’s followin’ me if ya dun’ like me?”
    “Why do you keep talking to me if you don’t like me?”
    He laughs and walks on.

CHAPTER 9
Thank You, Robert Frost
    He walks fast.
    Even with the pigeons weighing him down.
    It’s hard for me to keep up, following his shadow across the caldera, climbing out behind him, trailing him south.
    When the plateau rejoins the ocean, he follows its edge as it wears away and drops in natural steps down to rolling