Le Chant Des Oiseaux: Prologue
The spring Sam turned twelve spawned a summer of vicious heat. The temperature soared into the triple digits, the humidity trailing not far behind. No matter where their father steered the Impala, Georgia across to Louisiana, up to Oklahoma, past Kansas and into Pennsylvania, the three of them, Dean, Sam, and their dad, spent days melting into the leather seats, their shirts shucked to maximize the breeze hurtling through the open windows across their salty, slick-sweat skin.
Evenings found them traipsing from motel to motel searching for a working air conditioner to ease the oppressive heat that soaked into their bones all day. Dean prayed for a swimming pool to float in; all the better for water to soothe his sweltering body. Never mind the pools where often green from chlorination so high it burned his eyes and nose. Or the detritus of previous guests’ stays, garbage blown into the water, the dead squirrel come to slacken its thirst only to succumb to the poisonous mixture.
John was mostly incommunicative. Grunts of assent when either boy pleaded for a pit stop, or sighs of disapproval when they would both beg for one more day to luxuriate in the moldy cool air of a water-stained motel room. “We’re not on vacation, and hunting don’t take a backseat to nothing, boys. The demon’s out there, and there’s always things to hunt. C’mon, now.”
Except there wasn’t anything to hunt. Not that whole summer, marked off between Memorial and Labor Day. Werewolves, selkies, wendigos, not even a demon come to play puppet master topside for a while blipped on the hunting radar. Across their travels, the newspapers alternated between glumly reporting on the endless drought and unrelenting heat, with half-witty recounts of watermelon festivals and strawberry pie eating contests.
It was maddeningly, suffocatingly boring. Next to his dad in the passenger seat, Dean took to honing knives, cleaning guns, impromptu karaoke, anything to keep his mind occupied. Anything to keep from feeling the heat prickle his skin and fry his brain. Sometimes he’d tease Sam, try to get a reaction from him, but it was often too much work. Their ceaseless meanderings from state to state with nothing even so mundane as a salt-n-burn to break the monotony, coupled with sweat constantly trickling down his face, sticking his back and legs to the seat wore him down. Sixteen years old, and an old man muttering about how hot and tired he was already.
If not for feeling like a piece of salted meat day after day, Dean would have mercilessly taunted Sam. Sam in the backseat, bandana tied around his forehead to staunch the sweat from dripping into his eyes, body newly growing into lithe, skinny lines, and face always, always, in a book. It didn’t seem to matter that the pages would soak in the ambient water, becoming difficult to turn and likely adding pounds of weight to already heavy tomes. Or that the ink occasionally smeared from his slick fingers turning the pages. Sam kept at it, asking Dad to find a post office so he could mail a book back to a library two states and fifteen towns past. Trips to the Salvation Army for fresh - relatively speaking - clothes, often found Sam leaving with nothing more than a handful of new books and a single pair of socks his father had thrust at him in selfish disgust. “At least so your feet don’t stink, Sam.”
Dean wouldn’t have minded, really, that Sam spent the summer reading. It kept him quiet, almost docile. And in the following years amidst slamming doors, shouting matches, and, finally, Sam’s flight away to Stanford, Dean would think he’d imagined that Sam had ever just been along for the ride, happy enough to endure sun blazed days spent criss-crossing crumbling state roads and nights spent coughing in artificially frigid air. Not to mention the food stops at diners so dilapidated, it was a wonder the ceilings didn’t collapse on their heads. No, he wouldn’t have minded at all if the books had actually been about something. Folklore, Latin, myths, witches, hell, even sprites. But Sam read none of that, seemed wholly uninterested in any of it, at all. Sam read books about birds.
Audubon's Birds Of America, Field Guides to North American Birds, The Art of Ornithology; Birds of Delaware, of Maryland, of Maine, of Ecuador; The Nature of Penguins, Long-tailed Parakeets, The Domestic Duck; Peterson Field Guide to Advanced Birding, I’d Rather be Birding, The Birdwatcher’s Companion; and on and on until Dean half-feverishly thought Sam was trying to conjure a way to sprout wings.
September came disguised as a brutal thunderstorm to pellet the Impala with hailstones, finally shattering the heat wave. John pulled into the next town, found them shelter of sorts, and enrolled them in school. John took to hustling pool for a while, then was tipped off to an on-going poker game before he eventually had to turn to scamming credit cards. It wasn’t much, never was, but they ate and slept and were still for a while. Dean shuffled through his classes, aiming mostly to stay just until he had to; till he could procure a GED. Sam put down the bird books, started acing algebra tests and scoring winning soccer goals.
Their dad was two days past his promised October return date, and Dean was serving up the last of the tomato soup for dinner. “So, you over your flight of fancy there, Sammy?” Dean grinned, amused by his pun.
Sam blew across a spoonful of soup, swallowed it down. “Yeah.”
“Guess if we’re ever trapped by Mothra or something, you’re gonna be pretty handy, huh?”
Sam swirled his spoon in the soup bowl, shaking his head. “Nah. It was just cool to read those books, you know? Because…”
“Cause why, Sammy?”
“Because,” Sam dropped the spoon, folded his arms on the cracked formica table, sighing, “because all those people, they wrote about them, watched them, drew them. But most of them, they never got it, you know? Never got what those birds had that they didn’t.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Freedom.”
“Whattya talkin’ about? We got freedom.”
“Not like them, Dean.” Sam picked up the spoon, spun it around in the soup, again. “The freedom to just spread your wings and never look back.”
~*~
Master Post || Chapter 1