SUN BEAMS:..."Birds Of The American West"...

 

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

TAOS, New Mexico |...Well, yeah, how else to see it? They were out in force and surely up to something, Dell Flamingo told himself as he watched the steady flocks of birds arrive on the powerlines running full-across the front of his property, arrive, hang in for some chirpy chatting and then it was off to somewhere else.

"We humans are too-damned settled in our ways," he said aloud, to himself really.

Then, as if needing an accompanying human sound, he cleared his stuffed nostrils in the day's rare high humidity and set his aging rifle down. Shooting a line of happy birds was not the morning's drill. These wingsters doing nothing wrong.

His best friend, and neighbor, a hard-headed man named Clement Hopkins, loved to come out of his ranch home a-firing at them. Old Man Hopkins equated all farm birds with Nazis, or so he had said one wind-blown afternoon when ambling Dell had ventured up the road and spotted him in his good-looking front yard that included the only hedge fencing in town.

Dell had only a few minutes.

Hopkins was fast-planting fresh flowers alongside what looked like a dying tree. That dead-or-alive juxtaposition lived out west, was Dell's feeling. Invariably you saw the wife's new, automatic-transmission SUV parked alongside Dad's rusted old pickup. The family dog aged as a cat had kittens. The sun popped-in and then popped-out, perhaps feeling unwelcome in this, what was flannel country.

Back home, Dell's wife, Candy, asked him how the day was going.

"Oh, I don't suppose you'd ever believe it, dear, but I had the whirlies while checking-out the birds on the lines," he said, to which Candy, a former non-headlining topless dancer, replied, "Killing harmless birds on a daily basis is certainly a ticket straight to Hell, Dell."

Yeah, he went on, he'd stop shooting them, at least until after the Christmas holidays.

"Should venture that same sentence to Hopkins, I suppose," he added, reaching for the bottle of Mylanta...

-30-

[Editor's Note:...Once more, from the stack of short stories gathering dust at my feet...]