"Is he from around here?"
"I don't know."
"I've seen them around, up in the hills. Looked just like that one, the one I saw. Probably is him." And she laughed again. She wasn't drunk—hadn't even got half her coffee down when she'd run from the house, let alone had a drink—but the laugh sounded like the laugh of someone who'd already had a few. She was just feeling good being here with the snake and the crow and the stuffed bobcat, none of them intent on teaching her a thing. None of them going to read to her from the New York Times. None of them going to try to catch her up on the history of the human race over the last three thousand years. She knew all she needed to know about the history of the human race: the ruthless and the defenseless. She didn't need the dates and the names. The ruthless and the defenseless, there's the whole fucking deal. Nobody here was going to try to encourage her to read, because nobody here knew how, with the ex- ception of the girl. That snake certainly didn't know how. It just knew how to eat mice. Slow and easy. Plenty of time.
"What kind of snake is that?"
"A black rat snake."
"Takes the whole thing down."
"Yeah."
"Gets digested in the gut."
"Yeah."
"How many will it eat?"
"That's his seventh mouse. He took that one kind of slow even for him. That might be his last."
"Every day seven?"
"No. Every one or two weeks."
"And is it let out anywhere or is that life?" she said, pointing to the glass case from which the snake had been lifted into the plastic carton where it was fed.
"That's it. In there."
"Good deal," said Faunia, and she turned back to look across the room at the crow, still on its perch inside its cage. "Well, Prince, I'm over here. And you're over there. And I have no interest in you whatsoever. If you don't want to land on my shoulder, I couldn't care less." She pointed to another of the stuffed animals. "What's the guy over there?"
"That's an osprey."
She sized it up—a hard look at the sharp claws—and, again with a biggish laugh, said, "Don't mess with the osprey."
The snake was considering an eighth mouse. "If I could only get my kids to eat seven mice," Faunia said, "I'd be the happiest mother on earth."
The girl smiled and said, "Last Sunday, Prince got out and was flying around. All of the birds we have can't fly. Prince is the only one that can fly. He's pretty fast."
"Oh, I know that," Faunia said.
"I was dumping some water and he made a beeline for the door and went out into the trees. Within minutes there were three or four crows that came. Surrounded him in the tree. And they were going nuts. Harassing him. Hitting him on the back. Screaming.
Smacking into him and stuff. They were there within minutes. He doesn't have the right voice. He doesn't know the crow language.
They don't like him out there. Eventually he came down to me, because I was out there. They would have killed him."
"That's what comes of being hand-raised," said Faunia. "That's what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain," she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation.
Not even with sadness. That's how it is—in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was telling the girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there's no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It's in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn't require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It's why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It's insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity? All she was saying about the stain was that it's inescapable. That, naturally, would be Faunia's take on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are. Reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection. She's like the Greeks, like Coleman's Greeks.
Like their gods. They're petty. They quarrel. They fight. They hate. They murder. They fuck. All their Zeus ever wants to do is to fuck-goddesses, mortals, heifers, she-bears—and not merely in his own form but, even more excitingly, as himself made manifest as beast.
To hugely mount a woman as a bull. To enter her bizarrely as a flailing white swan. There is never enough flesh for the king of the gods or enough perversity. All the craziness desire brings. The dissoluteness.
The depravity. The crudest pleasures. And the fury from the all-seeing wife. Not the Hebrew God, infinitely alone, infinitely obscure, monomaniacally the only god there is, was, and always will be, with nothing better to do than worry about Jews. And not the perfectly desexualized Christian man-god and his uncontaminated mother and all the guilt and shame that an exquisite unearthliness inspires. Instead the Greek Zeus, entangled in adventure, vividly expressive, capricious, sensual, exuberantly wedded to his own rich existence, anything but alone and anything but hidden. Instead the divine stain. A great realityreflecting religion for Faunia Farley if, through Coleman, she'd known anything about it. As the hubristic fantasy has it, made in the image of God, all right, but not ours—theirs. God debauched. God corrupted. A god of life if ever there was one. God in the image of man.
"Yeah. I suppose that's the tragedy of human beings raising crows," the girl replied, not exactly getting Faunia's drift though not entirely missing it either. "They don't recognize their own species. He doesn't.
And he should. It's called imprinting," the girl told her. "Prince is really a crow that doesn't know how to be a crow."
Suddenly Prince started cawing, not in a true crow caw but in that caw that he had stumbled on himself and that drove the other crows nuts. The bird was out on top of the door now, practically shrieking.
Smiling temptingly, Faunia turned and said, "I take that as a compliment, Prince."
"He imitates the schoolkids that come here and imitate him," the girl explained. "When the kids on the school trips imitate a crow? That's his impression of the kids. The kids do that. He's invented his own language. From kids."
In a strange voice of her own, Faunia said, "I love that strange voice he invented." And in the meantime she had crossed back to the cage and stood only inches from the door. She raised her hand, the hand with the ring, and said to the bird, "Here. Here. Look what I brought you to play with." She took the ring off and held it up for him to examine at close range. "He likes my opal ring."
"Usually we give him keys to play with."
"Well, he's moved up in the world. Haven't we all. Here. Three hundred bucks," Faunia said. "Come on, play with it. Don't you know an expensive ring when somebody offers it to you?"
"He'll take it," the girl said. "He'll take it inside with him. He's like a pack rat. He'll take his food and shove it into the cracks in the wall of his cage and pound it in there with his beak."
The crow had now grasped the ring tightly in its beak and was jerkily moving its head from side to side. Then the ring fell to the floor. The bird had dropped it.
Faunia bent down and picked it up and offered it to the crow again. "If you drop it, I'm not going to give it to you. You know that.
Three hundred bucks. I'm giving you a ring for three hundred bucks—what are you, a fancy man? If you want it, you have to take it. Right? Okay?"
With his beak he again plucked it from her fingers and firmly took hold of it.
"Thank you," said Faunia. "Take it inside," she whispered so that the girl couldn't hear. "Take it in your cage. Go ahead. It's for you."
But he dropped it again.
"He's very smart," the girl called over to Faunia. "When we play with him, we put a mouse inside a container and close it. And he figures out how to open the container. It's amazing."
Once again Faunia retrieved the ring and offered it, and again the crow took it and dropped it.
"Oh, Prince—that was deliberate. It's now a game, is it?"
Caw. Caw. Caw. Caw. Right into her face, the bird exploded with its special noise.
Here Faunia reached up with her hand and began to stroke the head and then, very slowly, to stroke the body downward from the head, and the crow allowed her to do this. "Oh, Prince. Oh, so beautifully shiny. He's humming to me," she said, and her voice was rapturous, as though she had at last uncovered the meaning of everything.