Passage

CAUTION: Oh, much cursing.

In the beginning, Merrill took little notice of his companion. The Gateway was a popular portal in a storm, and this late October afternoon, the worlds outside the reinforced concrete refuge were fit neither for man nor beast nor, as Merrill oft reflected, those somewhere in-between.

It wasn’t a particularly pithy observation, but the combo of vestigial wit and self-deprecation was worth the occasional goodwill of some woke liberal arts/social sciences undergrad in need of a nobility fix or minimart clerk in need of amusement or simply a but –for-the-grace moment.

It had clicked with the dead-eyed brother at the FastFill, and Merrill was toiling over a wad of mozzarella and pepperoni and slightly charred crust when it strutted past. They were relatively benign competitors at Merrill’s rung of the food chain, and so he ripped an affordable scrap from the tip. His arm froze in the middle of an underhanded arc.

The plump creature halted, half-turned, and cocked its head awaiting Merrill’s decision. It was a stately head.

“Ectopistes migratorius,” Merrill rasped, just before the Purple Line bus splashed past.

Miraculously, his rainy day companion held its ground, studying the singed triangle poised in the man’s bony, calloused fingers. The spell was broken as some kid in a Jeep with a glass pack rushed the light beyond The Gateway and the bird turned from the proffered pizza.

“Here, here!” Merrill called frantically, tossing the scrap into an evolving puddle just beyond the north end of the portal, and the creature strutted after it. “No, no, no,” Merrill implored, tearing another beak full from his dinner and thrusting the rest toward the pigeon. “Look, look!”     

It glanced back, then opted for the morsel free of human entanglements. As Merrill blinked in horrified prayer, it made quick work of the soggy crust, paused, and emerged into the gray afternoon light.

Merrill avoided venturing beyond The Gateway – i.e., the Main Street rail overpass – into Campustown. The Amtrak bridge was the conduit between the past and Merrill’s present and imminent future. South of the portal, Merrill was a sociological mystery, a cautionary enigma, the ragged but persistently prescient eccentric and tragically intriguing derelict. In the world now before him, he was something far worse.

But, seeing the possibility of redemption and repatriation, Merrill clambered to his feet and into the driving downpour, into forbidden territory, in pursuit of the first passenger pigeon to show its graceful face in more than 100 years.

**

“Ah, and I thought my TA showing up stoned was the pinnacle of my day,” Whitting said. “How in the world did you make it past campus security?”

“Ectopistes migratorius.”

Merrill’s successor rearranged his papers in a blase bit of business. “I’m afraid you’re about a century too late.”

“A male, in apparently healthy condition. I interacted with it.”

“I hesitate to ask.”

“I fed it,” Merrill snapped. “I was, well, I was waiting out the storm, and it…happened by.”

“And where was this?” Obviously, self-indulgent amusement was the only reason a couple of kiddie cops weren’t currently showing Merrill the curb.

“The Main Street underpass. It just appeared, and I gave it some of my, er, lunch so I could study further.”

Now, the department honcho winced. “And did you? Have the opportunity to study further?”

“A bus spooked it, and it headed toward campus. I, ah, gave chase.”

“Of course you did. And I presume it eluded you. Merrill, you saw a mourning dove.”

It was the final insult. “The Annotated Taxonomy of Columbidae is still viewed as the definitive resource on the family, even if I may no longer be. The passenger is sexually dimorphic, if you don’t know, and this specimen had the distinctive two-tone gray coloring of the male, and iridescent bronze neck markings. I believe I know the difference between Zenaida macroura and the passenger pigeon.”

“The major difference being that the last Ectopistes migratorius died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.” Whitting glanced up with a smile, and Merrill turned to see a lanky young man with a ponytail and a spit-and-polish young woman in a slate uniform.

“Professor?” the campus cop inquired, rehearsed steel in her eyes.

“It’s fine,” Whitting told the officer. “Merrill’s an old friend. However, it’s been, what, eight years, since he left campus, so perhaps you could guide him back to the Quad? Thanks. Oh, just a moment.”

Beaming, Whitting pulled his wallet from his slacks and withdrew a twenty. “Great seeing you again. I have an awards reception this evening, so please, dinner on me tonight.”

“I had an early supper,” Merrill grunted. He turned to Whitting’s redeemed teaching assistant. “Give it to your pet oxpecker.”

**

“It was an accident. I was driving through campus.”

“Damn, Professor!” John (if that was his name — it seemed to vary) obviously had anticipated something more salacious, but he was a considerate audience when sober. “You kill some kid?”

“It was a goose.”

“Say again?” The emaciated nomad took a long draw on a Marlboro of uncertain provenance as the pair sheltered inside the Purple Line kiosk across from the FastFill. Merrill no longer had the tech to determine whether John was a rough 35 or a street-hardy 75, but he always greeted the ex-academic as an old school chum, suspending his solicitations at Main and Garfield to discuss the comparative intelligence of Corvidae versus Octopoda, the injustice of $1.25 chips at the Dollar Tree, the human flight-or-fight response, the potential for extraterrestrial life in high government office, the merits of Dunkin’ versus FastFill day-olds, or the succession of “motherfuckers” and “bitches” with whom John had transacted that day.

Merrill was adamantly averse to misogynistic micro-aggressions, but between 6 and hospital shift-change, the Purple Line stop was a no-spin, no-judgment zone for free-ranging discourse. John had perked approvingly when Merrill adopted his preferred descriptor for the Biology/Enviro Sciences chief.

“It was around five, and the streets were swarming with youthful herds released into the wild to forage for beer and pizza.” Merrill’s ‘za-deprived gut complained. “It was spring, and the Quad, the commons, every parking and green space on campus, also was swarming with Branta canadensis. Pardon, Canada geese.”

“Motherfucking geese.”

“An understandable sentiment. The University’s treatment lagoon drew them by the thousands. Breeding and gathering and indiscriminately defecating. Plus the requisite conflict that occurs between territorially aggressive species.”

John chuckled — you didn’t have to be a tenured professor in this town to relish the image of youthful hubris kneecapped by an unhinged gander.

“Robin and I were catching the new Wes Anderson at the University Theatre, and the spring hatch was at full bloom. I stopped by the observatory to allow a procession of goslings and their parents to cross Douglass. It was a somewhat protracted affair—”

“Motherfucking geese.”

“—and there were several cars and service trucks backed up behind me, a few rather impatiently and a few vociferously impatient. But the gaggle finally cleared my lane, and I applied the gas, perhaps a little too quickly.” Merrill took a breath of dank October mist. “She stepped out from between two cars, 20 feet from the corner crossing, plugged into her iPhone in an apparently animated debate. I leaned on the horn, and she offered me the middle finger.”

“So you hit her?” John grinned.

“Christ, John. I swerved to avoid her.”

“Oh, shit.” Despite a disregard for narrative flow, John had a firm grasp of foreshadowing.

Merrill nodded. “Mother, father, the entire brood. I managed to brake before colliding with the statue of Frederick Douglass, but I’d—“

“Killed the entire motherfucking family. Shit, Cyril, it was a plain accident. Bitch come forward?”

“That young woman was first on the scene. As I regained my bearings, she began beating on my windshield and shrieking at me. Murderer, I believe she called me, but it got lost in the tumult as a large throng of students surrounded my Leaf shouting far more imaginative curses and attempting for lack of a better term to capsize me. You know, these smaller EVs are deceptively sturdy. At any rate, the campus police showed up to rescue me, then summoned the Millington Police after reviewing the avian carnage. Who administered a breathalyzer test and a curbside sobriety test. Might I add that this was two weeks after the campus-wide protest for Philando Castille.”

“Yeah, they don’t like that shit,” John sympathized. “But you were clean, right?”

“Of course,” Merrill growled. “Sorry. Yes, I passed all their tests, and luckily, the observatory’s cameras documented the entire incident — including my deference to the gaggle and the jaywalker’s indifference to my dilemma. But the damage was done, courtesy of a few dozen amateur cinematographers and the local media.”

“But you sullied the motherfucker!” John said, flicking his twice-baked butt into the gutter.

“That was their claim,” Merrill muttered.

“No, bro. You Sully’d it — like Denzel, you know.”

“Oh. Tom Hanks. I appreciate the analogy, and had I been a decorated ex-fighter pilot instead of one of the Midwest’s premiere ornithologists and Environmental Sciences chair, and had landed in the Hudson instead of inches short of demolishing a shrine to a pioneering abolitionist, I’d be cataloguing Columbidae this moment. Because I was tenured, the University couldn’t very well release me on the basis of social optics, but after the department’s grant money began to dry up, after Ingrid Newkirk refused to speak at commencement, the Board bought me out for a lucrative sum Robin and the Audubon Society legal team managed to scoop up with interest.”

“Motherfucking geese,” John shook his head. “So what’re you gonna do about it?”

**

While the passenger pigeon was a communal roosting species, if it indeed had become separated from a larger flock, it would still seek a roosting site that could provide long-term, unmolested shelter and abundant food for a potentially indefinite period. The bird bathed in shallow water, and routinely drank at least once a day, typically at dawn.

The ditch.

Main and Southern diverged respectively north- and southbound, and the Maple Creek drainage ditch that terminated at Southern, mid-point between the FastFill and The Gateway, cut a roughly 10-foot, five-mile swath through Millington’s west side. The ditch was home to woodchucks, opossum, field mice, the sporadic red fox, and more than 50 avian species by the latest birder reports. It was a viable base for the errant passenger pigeon. Documentation was crucial.

As soon as the yuppie disappeared into the minimart, Merrill emerged from the shadows beyond the Free Air hose. The Palisade stood alone at Pump 7, and the yupster had even left the driver’s door ajar. Merrill sprinted diagonally to the silver SUV and glanced through the street side passenger window, resisting the temptation to rejoice as he spotted the iPhone docked on the console, unlocked and illuminated.

The former University chairman hunched low and crept around the grill. Squeezing between pump and Hyundai, he leaned into the cab and disengaged the charger cord. The untethered smartphone slid onto the black driver’s doormat, and Merrill borrowed liberally from John’s lexicon as he felt for the device. At last, Merrill’s fingers closed about the phone, and he extracted himself and banged a hip on the diesel nozzle.

“The fuck you think you’re doing?” The voice was shriller than Merrill might have assumed. The man’s fingers closed around Merrill’s phone hand, and Merrill yelped as they tugged at the phone. Apparently, you could only do so much with Gold’s Gym, and the biologist actually was winning as a quarterback in a red FastFill shirt burst though the minimart doors.

Merrill’s free hand found green plastic, and with one smooth arc, he brought the nozzle around and clipped his aggressor. The iPhone jerked free, and Merrill rebounded off the open Palisade door and froze in the white island light as he regarded the man on the wet asphalt holding his bloodied throat and the night clerk frozen in horror twenty feet away. Professor and clerk snapped to simultaneously, and Merrill broke into a flat run toward the darkness of the closed auto parts store lot beyond.

“Motherfucker!” the clerk screamed as he lodged between pump and Palisade.

“CY-RIL!” a familiar voice hollered gleefully from across Main. 

**

Merrill set up camp in a thick reach of the ditch well off Southern. The base of a large tree provided a damp but stable niche on the steep bank, and despite of or possibly because of his adrenalized encounter at Pump 7, he fell off almost immediately, the iPhone 13 tucked into his hoodie.

The day arrived like a switch flipped, courtesy one of the last of the fall Osage oranges thudding to the bank inches from Merrill’s right ear. Struggling to his feet, he slid into the muddy, slowly coursing stream. As Merrill scaled the steep bank, he heard it, and began slipping again as he strained to identify the source of the harsh clucks, twitters, and coos.

Now, of course, no one had heard firsthand the vocalizations of the passenger pigeon in more than a century, but the ornithologist had reviewed behavioral scientist Wallace Craig’s 1911 musical notations of the bird’s courtship “kee-kee-kees” and “te! te! te!s,” and an indigenous student had directed him to a cousin whose oral repertoire included the “song” of the passenger pigeon carefully replicated through five generations.

This was indeed a male, and, reenergized, Merrill clawed his way to the top, drenched and filthy, fingers chapped and bleeding, but unbowed. His soggy Goodwill Skechers slapped juicily against the mud and grass as he followed the beautifully harsh call, and he shed them as he moved stealthily east. Finally, as Merrill spied the AutoLand sign above the tree line, he located George on the north bank within a half-block of Southern. The Cincinnati Zoo had named the last passenger pigeon of the 20^th Century after Martha Washington, and Merrill reasoned the Founding Father was appropriate for the first of the 21^st.

Merrill settled a safe 30 feet from the pigeon, which now emerged from water’s edge flapping beads from its wings, having attended to its morning ministrations. Audio first, then, God willing, a dozen or so closeups of Ectopistes’ singular markings for Whitting and his crew of ravenous oxpeckers. Heart racing, he dug the phone from his insulated parka, praying his unplanned dip hadn’t ruined the device.

Merrill grinned triumphantly as he tapped the screen and the owner’s face – considerably more chipper than the previous evening -- popped up. He ceremoniously swiped at the image.

And a digital touchscreen appeared. “Enter Passcode.”

“Motherfucker!” Merrill shrieked.

**

Merrill crossed the creek slowly, methodically, cursing his decision to ditch the Skechers as sticks and stones and discarded soda and malt cans embossed his soles. Robin had inexplicably enjoyed the Mission: Impossible films, and the biologist tried awkwardly to mimic Cruise’s spy moves along the northern bank. George was roosting placidly on the scrubby grass, and if it could hear Merrill’s dual crackles and curses, he wasn’t letting it ruin his morning.

It was the only way left, and as he crept toward the unsuspecting Ectopistes, Merrill already could picture Whitting’s expression.

Merrill initially though it was a raccoon. It leapt suddenly from the brush above, and the first thing the ornithologist fixed on were the stripes. But as it loped toward George, he realized it was too large, too sleek. A mid-sized dog, clearly an exotic breed – a long, rather rat-like tail, and the stripes actually tapered zebra-like from rump to neck. The head wasn’t quite right or proportionate to the long graceful body. Canine and feline elements seemed to blend, along with, what…? Merrill chided himself for neglecting his mammalogy, then put the situation into context and broke into a dead run.

“No! NO!” he commanded. “Bad dog! Scat, vamoose, you bastard!”

To no avail. Before George could react, the creature was upon him. Merrill froze for a nanosecond as its jaws unhinged unnaturally and clamped about the pigeon’s neck, then railed impotently at the dog/cat/WHAT?-thing. Feathers began to fly, and a light spray of blood spattered the mud.

Then, finding that reserve of animal instinct he’d drawn upon to beat a millennial out of his phone, Merrill spotted the dead branch at his feet, snatched it up with the slightest pop in his 62-year old lumbar, and charged. He brought the club down on the predator’s head, and it yelped and fell back into the water. George took the opportunity to take its leave, but from the abnormal angle of its left wing, he was left to flee on foot.

“NOOOO!!” Merrill shouted anew, and gave chase, finally intercepting the extinct George at the bottom of the dead-end slope below the street. As his fingers closed about the bird’s plump and blood-smeared body, George became a blur of claws and beak as Merrill pulled himself one-handed up the incline. As he reached the sidewalk, Merrill stumbled forward, hugging the pigeon to his chest, George breaking his fall.

Merrill staggered to his feet and examined the limp creature in his arms. The Gateway beckoned across two lanes and a half-block, and, well, proof was proof at this juncture. For a moment, Merrill pondered the social exchange rate for throttling the poster child for Man’s bloodlust and folly.

The sound of something large and pissed tearing up the hill behind cemented Merrill’s decision. Tucking George under his arm, Merrill made a diagonal beeline across Southern. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the bloody, indefinable “dog” galloping maybe 10 feet behind.

The backlit purple bar in Merrill’s periphery was accompanied by a sharp, flat, shattering call, like the war cry of a thousand vengeful Branta canadensis.

And before the air horn’s echo died on the chilled October air, the passenger pigeon and the thylacine had rejoined the ranks of the extinct. Merrill left behind a questionably sustainable 8.1 billion.