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The smile was the very first thing that slid off of Not-Dad’s face.
Actually the smile kind of peeled off just a little bit at a time, like a Band-Aid that had been stuck onto somebody’s too-wet skin. The smile slid down Not-Dad’s chin and then it slid off into mid-air and then hung there about halfway to the ground and then I realized that that smile was nothing more than the scrap of a dried-up willow leaf and then it drifted down to the dirt.
The next thing that fell off was Not-Dad’s eyes, sliding down his smoky grey cheekbone like a pair of see-through snails. They blinked at me in mid-air and then fell to the dirt like a pair of insincere tear drops. I almost chuckled when I realized that the jet black pupils of his eyes had been nothing more than a couple of sun-dried blackberries.
I watched as that great orange beak slowly pushed out from the plane of his face and his lips peeled back from that beak like a pair of freshly-skinned river eels. I watched as dirty black feathers poked out from his skin and I could smell something that reeked a little like old cheese and sour milk. I saw his arms spread back like they were being pulled by a hidden master puppeteer and a pair of shiny long black wings grew out from his shoulders and his elbows and his fingertips like he was wearing a long feathery midnight shadow.
Then his shoes melted away and the blue of his faded denim jeans washed out into pale winter sky tones before fading into nothing as a pair of mean and angry raven legs and talons pushed out from his hipbones to take their place.
“You have got a pair of good eyes,” Raven said to me. “I wonder if I ought to beak them out of your head and see just what they really would taste like.”
Now I had faced way too many bullies in my life to let a big old overgrown mynah bird put the scare into me – even if he was actually scaring me half to death.
I wasn’t going to let him know.
“I would not recommend that,” I said. “You would probably choke on them. I have got a pretty hard old stare and it gets worse when I am looking at crows.”
“I am a Raven,” Dad-not-Dad said.
“I know who you are,” I said. “I made you up out of wishful thinking and now I am no longer afraid of you and I am no longer afraid to stand here on my own two feet and I reckon that you might as well just blow away like the smoke from a birthday candle. I have outgrown you and I no longer have any kind use for the story you keep trying to tell me.”
“That’s all that you have left,” Raven said. “Is nothing but old boring stories.”
“That’s fine by me,” I said. “I’ll stick with my stories.”
“The truth is better than that,” Raven said. “only I can tell you the truth.”
I thought about that.
There was an awful lot about this whole situation that I did not understand.
I knew that Dad had been real and I knew that he had married Mom and I knew that he and Mom had done whatever parents do to make children and they had made me. But then I knew that Dad had spent every minute after that trying to stay away from me and my Mom.
I don’t know if he was the Raven or if the Raven was just trying to pretend that I was the son of a Raven.
I don’t really if I ever know.
I just know that being with Mom makes me happy and Warren makes Mom happy which makes me even happier and three kinds of happy adds up to an awful lot of goodness and if I live to be a hundred and three it won’t really matter if I ever find out the truth of what the Raven really was trying to tell me.
“The truth is cold,” I told him. “I’ll stick with my stories every time. A good story is like a good campfire. It keeps you warm at night and it teaches you how to dream and there are way too many facts in this world already. I’d rather dream awhile and let the facts take care of themselves.”
“You don’t know the truth of it,” Raven said.
“I know most of it,” I said. “And what I don’t know I can always guess at and if my guessing is wrong – well, I can live with that too. A fellow doesn’t need to know everything there is to know. Mostly all that is worth believing in are the things that are mostly unbelievable.”
“What kind things are those?” Raven asked.
“Things like love and peace and happiness and the way that happy endings seem to happen when you most figure that they won’t,” I said. “All of those rules that people tell us – well those aren’t anything more than stories and stories are sometimes the most important truth of all.”
Raven just sneered at me.
“Suit your own self,” Raven said.
Then he spread his wings wide open – so wide that if the sun hadn’t been going like it was I was pretty certain that he could have blocked out the sun with one single shrug - and then, just as he was about to take wing the Ghost of Sam Steele reached out from the shadows of the Labrador wilderness and caught that Raven by the scruff of its black feathered neck.
“You have the right to remain silent,” the Ghost of Sam Steele said. “In fact I would most sincerely prefer it if you would stay that way.”
Raven cracked his wings backwards, throwing the Ghost of Sam Steele down into the dirt. Then he kicked some of that dirt into Sam Steele’s eyes and then he laughed a mean little laugh and spread his wings again and was just taking flight when Nanna Bijou – the Sleeping Giant of Thunder Bay – now wide awake and bigger than ten mountains all rolled into one – swatted Raven like a Labrador black fly, flattening that Trickster God down into something that looked a steamrollered pancake shadow.
“Anything you say or do can and will be held against you,” the Ghost of Sam Steele went on. “Assuming you actually live to survive your apprehension.”
A bird flew overhead and dropped something sticky and white upon Raven’s forehead, just to add insult to injury.
I could hear the thin crackling sounds of raw electric guitars, jackhammers, bagpipes and three guys yelling MISUNDERSTOOD-NUMBER-TWENTY-THREE, MISUNDERSTOOD-NUMBER-TWENTY-THREE, MISUNDERSTOOD-NUMBER-TWENTY-THREE bleeding out from the poorly fitted headphones that I had given Nanna Bijou.
He was still wearing them, playing them as loudly as he could, and grinning so hard I swear he might have inadvertently broken a couple of his own teeth.
Raven looked up at that big old Mountain God and he rolled his eyes so loudly I swore that I could hear them rattling like a cup full of dice.
And then all of a sudden Old Shuck was standing on top of Raven – with all of his great purple Death Dog weight pressed upon Raven’s shoulder bones with all of Old Shuck’s great purple Death Dog weight.
“You have the right to an attorney,” the Ghost of Sam Steele finished up. “And you have the right to a box full of Band-Aids and it looks to me like you might actually need them.”
And looking down at Raven I am pretty sure that he did.