Tidal Tale (1)

Kiku took two short hops down the branch. He wanted to be in the sunlight—his head was still damp and matted from the afternoon thundershower—but he also wanted to be able to keep an eye on the girl in the lime-green bikini top standing not far from the garbage bin. More precisely, he wanted to keep an eye on the grilled squid on a stick that she’d been playing with, more than eating, for a very, very long time.

This branch, this tree, was his favorite spot overlooking the beach. He had several other good locations--a crumbling wall, the tile rooftop of an old temple--and he’d go there if there was a lucrative looking picnic taking place nearby, but this old pine branch felt good under his feet and he appreciated the way the twisted branches kept him less exposed. Besides, it was right next to the Fujimi beach house, which rented out parasols, boogie boards, and served a fairly extensive menu from ramen to barbecue. There were two garbage bins, and they could be gold mines.

He was in the middle of scratching the tough feathers around his lower beak with the top edge of his wing when he felt, rather than saw, a shadow sweep across the sand, and he looked up at the hawk that had just started another circle high above. He stopped what he was doing, hunched his wings to make himself look larger, and flapped them noisily. “Craaaahk!” He paused just long enough to know that he now had the hawk’s attention. “Craaaaahk!” It wasn’t a full-throated call, but it was loud enough for the hawk to get the point: that squid belonged to Kiku.

The girl in the green bikini top was now chewing on the end of the stick. The squid was only half gone, and her progress was so slow Kiku found himself hopping up and down, now on this foot, now on the other. He knew that she was going to leave some of it. Girls like her always left something, mostly the dried out tail, but if he was lucky, he’d get more, maybe even some of the charred body. He also knew what he was going to do with it when she was finished, if she finished.

Kiku had seventeen caches spread from the northern to the southern ends of the beach, the farthest of them several hundred meters inland, the highest an abandoned nest. When he was younger he'd had many more, but his memory wasn’t as reliable as it used to be, so he’d learned to be smarter about his placement. The squid was going to go high up on the side of the tunnel entrance in a lip that had formed out of eroding concrete. It was the second best location he'd ever found. The best was a real cave, a shallow spot just above the high tide line. When the concrete tetrapods were hauled in a few years ago to form a breakwater, the wave action changed completely, and when Kiku had returned one day to dine on his stash of day-old fried noodles, complete with crispy pork and vegetables, he found the cave full of water, his meal plundered by crabs.

The girl in the green bikini top still stood below him next to the bin. With one hand, she was crumpling the wrapping that had come with the squid, rolling it in her palm with her thumb as she stared with seeming disinterest at the beach house, where a good-looking young man in cut-off jeans and a jinbei top was serving bowls of shaved ice to some little kids. With the other hand, she was mindlessly spinning the stick of squid down by her leg, not realizing it was throwing specks of sauce on the towel wrapped around her waist. Kiku was sure she'd have to make a move soon. Toss it, he thought. Or eat it. "Caaaaaaahw!" he cried in frustration, and she looked up for a moment and then went back to her spinning.

I'm going to fly down there and take it right out of her hands, Kiku thought. It was at times like this that he wished he were one of those dumb hawks. He'd seen them take things from people’s hands hundreds, no, thousands of times, without giving it a second thought. You’d never catch a crow getting that dangerously close to anything. Kiku knew the extended reach of all kinds of animals, from man, dogs, and cats, to badgers, raccoon dogs and wild boars. He had never even been touched by anything other than another crow, and it was never going to happen. He once had done all his foraging with other crows, but over the years he found it more effective to be alone. The number of visitors to the beach had decreased, and the pickings were too slim to share.

“Caw. Ca-a-haaaw.” He hoped the girl would hear his hunger in the low-throated call, but she didn’t move. He thought about giving up. There was a dead cat in several parts in the middle of the road just up from the convenience store, but he was hoping to get to that later, after the afternoon traffic had thinned. And he was sure that, the minute he flew off, the squid would end up in the bin and soon after that in the beak of that circling hawk.

Toss it. Toss it. Toss It. Kiku started a mantra, hoping the girl in the green bikini top would get the message. Toss It. Toss it. Toss it. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to concentrate. Toss it. The pain came like a spear in his side, and his eyes opened in shock. He was looking up at the sky, but he wasn’t flying. He was falling backwards. He didn’t remember letting go of the branch and there wasn’t time for another thought before he hit the gravel at the foot of the pine tree, raising a small cloud of dust. He struggled to his feet, and didn’t bother to try to raise his right wing. It hurt like crazy and he wondered if it was broken. He knew he had to get away from whatever had hurt him, so he hopped as fast as he could down the gravel path towards the river.

“Fuckin’ freak,” the young man said, dropping the second of the large stones he’d picked up.

“Who is that?” said the girl in the green bikini top.

“Nobody,” said the young man. “He’s a nobody that’s been around for years. He went to school with my father, and they used to beat him up because he was too smart for his own good. He was supposed to go off to Tokyo University or something, the first ever from this village.”

“But how did he get like now? With all the long, matted hair, and and beard, and filth?”

“Don’t really know,” the young man said. “Don’t care. My dad says the pressure got to him. His family had a pet crow, but the day before he was supposed to go off to college he strangled the bird and took off into the hills. He came back later, but he’s been like that ever since. He doesn’t really bother anybody, but he scares people. Like you.”

“He is so creepy,” the girl in the green bikini top said. “Sitting up there in the tree like that. He just kept staring at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. It was like he wanted to take a bite out of me or something.”

Hidden by the bank, where he crouched on the rocks that bordered the river, Kiku watched as she let the squid stick fall to the sand and followed the young man back to where the kids were tilting their bowls of shaved ice up to their mouths to get the last drops of the sweet syrup.