Pigeon in the Bamboo

Magnus Swenson watches his wife's taillights disappear down the county road for the fourth evening this week, and the familiar knot tightens in his stomach like a bird gripping its perch.

Monica is twenty-six, two years younger than him, and she has never once given him a real reason to doubt her. He knows this. He repeats it to himself while he stands in the driveway holding a bucket of pigeon feed that is slowly going warm in the evening sun. She told him where she was going. She told him who she'd be with. She kissed him on the cheek at the door and said she'd be back by eleven.

And still, here he is, feeding birds at seven in the evening and sulking about it.

The trouble started six weeks ago, when the bamboo fair came to Kitehenaw. Monica was a freelance designer with a freelance designer's schedule, which meant that when a project interested her, she vanished into it like a man into a corn maze. She had taken on the fair's signage and wayfinding work, and then somehow that had turned into an art display, and then somehow that had turned into Thursday nights with the astronomy group on the rooftop next door. There was a man involved. There was always a man involved, in Magnus's imagination, and his name was Julio.

Julio is thirty-nine, the fair's organizer, owner of what Monica described as "a genuinely impressive telescope." Magnus had met him exactly once, at a farmers market, and Julio had shaken his hand for slightly too long and said the word "solstice" four times.

Magnus dumps the feed and goes inside to make the phone call he has been circling for three days.

"Let me get this straight," Madeline Goodwin says, before he has even finished explaining. Madeline is thirty-one, a fellow pigeon racer, and the kind of friend who never lets an idea die of natural causes. "You want me to walk into a bamboo fair, wearing what, exactly, as a bamboo crafter, so that you can follow your wife around like a, what's the word."

"There's no word!"

"There's absolutely a word."

"Madeline."

"A creep," she says, cheerfully. "You want me to help you be a creep in a bamboo maze. What do I even know about bamboo?"

"You know pigeons. Bamboo is just tall grass with commitment issues. Nobody will ask questions."

"They absolutely will ask questions, Magnus. It's a craft fair. The entire point of the event is people asking each other questions about crafts." There is a pause, and he can hear her losing the argument with herself, which is how every conversation with Madeline ends. "What's in it for me?"

"I'll take your Sunday shift at the loft for a month."

"Two months and I get to pick the cover story."

"Done," Magnus says, and immediately regrets it, because Madeline picking a cover story is how rumors get started in three counties.

Her cover story, when it arrives by text that night, is worse than he feared. She has decided she is a visiting weaver from Saskatoon with a professional interest in woven pavilion structures, and she has ordered a loom bobbin off the internet to carry as a prop. Magnus stares at the message for a long time. He reminds himself that he asked for this. He reminds himself that marriage is about trust, and that apparently his version of trust involves a disguised thirty-one-year-old weaver from a city she has never visited.

Saturday, the solstice, arrives hot and cloudless. Madeline picks him up at two, dressed in linen and looking genuinely annoyingly convincing, and drives them out to the fairgrounds with the bobbin on the dashboard like a warrant card.

"Rules," she says, turning in at the gate. "One, you don't know me inside. We arrived separately. Two, if anyone asks, I'm Trudy. Three, if Monica sees you, you are there because you love bamboo, and you have to commit to that."

"I do love bamboo."

"Nobody loves bamboo, Magnus. People tolerate bamboo."

The fair is bigger than he expected. From the parking field it looks like a stand of tall grass gone mad, whole pavilions woven from pale green and yellow stalks, walkways threading between them in patterns that have clearly been designed by someone, possibly his wife, who wanted visitors to get lost. Music drifts from somewhere deep inside. There are stalls selling woven baskets, woven furniture, woven things he cannot identify, and one stall selling what appears to be bamboo-flavored ice cream, which he refuses to think about.

Madeline peels off at the entrance with a wink, and is absorbed into the crowd within seconds, already telling someone about her fictional loom. Magnus pulls his cap down and follows.

He is, he will later admit, terrible at this. He has the stride of a man following someone, because he is a man following someone. He drifts past a stall of wind chimes, doubles back, drifts past it again, and the woman selling the chimes starts watching him with the expression people reserve for shoplifters.

The astronomy group is supposed to set up on the rooftop of the feed store that borders the fair, but the rooftop is not accessible from inside, so Monica must come and go through the fair itself. Magnus works his way toward the center, where the paths converge around a display he recognizes from Monica's sketches: a spiral of live bamboo planters, her design, her project, ten weekends of work. It looks good. It looks, he thinks with an unwelcome twist of pride, better than he told her it would.

Which is when the pigeon makes its move.

He had forgotten the bird. That is the honest truth of it, and he will be reminding himself of that fact for years. One of his racers, a cock bird named Admiral, had been riding in a carrier on the back seat since the morning and had apparently crept out into the front of Magnus's vest, warm and dormant and invisible, the way pigeons do when they intend to ruin your life.

Admiral chooses this moment, the exact moment Magnus stops in front of his wife's bamboo spiral, to erupt out of the vest like a feathered grenade.

Magnus shouts. The wind chime woman screams. Admiral, who has won three long-distance races and has the survival instincts of neither, rockets straight up into the pavilion rafters, banks off a woven beam, and comes down the main concourse like a gray bullet, scattering a tea ceremony, two basket weavers, and a string quartet that had been playing, up to that point, quite peacefully.

"Pigeon!" someone yells, as though the word helps. "There's a pigeon loose!"

There is very much a pigeon loose. Admiral hits a stall of woven lanterns and takes out the top third of it in a burst of bamboo and indignation, then climbs again, pursued now by a small crowd of crafters who have decided, with the fearless unity of hobbyists, that the bird must be caught. Magnus runs after them, then realizes running after them makes him look responsible, then realizes he is responsible, then runs anyway.

"Grab him low, he'll pull," a man shouts, which is true and also deeply annoying coming from a man selling ice cream.

Admiral, sensing the mob, does what champion racers do. He goes long. He streaks down the widest avenue of the fair, low over the crowd, clipping the hat off a woman who will tell this story at every dinner party for the rest of her natural life, and vanishes through the entrance arch into the open air of the parking field.

The crowd stops. The quartet picks up, shakily, in the middle of a different piece than they had been playing. Magnus stands bent over with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, cap sideways, vest flapping open, one gray feather drifting down past his nose.

And across the concourse, beside her bamboo spiral, holding a coil of twine and a clipboard, stands Monica.

She is looking straight at him.

For a moment neither of them moves. The fair moves around them instead, crafters drifting back to their stalls, the quartet easing into something calmer, a child asking her father what a pigeon is. Monica lowers the clipboard.

"Magnus."

"Monica."

"What are you doing here?"

He considers, briefly, lying. He is bad at lying even on a good day, and today his cap is sideways and there is a pigeon feather stuck to his shirt, so he says, "I was following you."

Which is not even the whole of it, because Madeline is somewhere in this fair wearing a fictional Saskatoon loom, but it is the core of it, and Monica's face does the thing it does when she goes from surprised to hurt to angry in about a second and a half.

"You were following me."

"Yes."

"For six weeks I felt something was off about you, and now you show up at my fair with a bird."

"The bird was an accident," he says, and hears how it sounds, and adds, "mostly the bird was an accident."

She sets the twine down on the edge of a planter with great care, the way she does when she is angry enough to be polite. "We are going to talk about this. But I have a rooftop to get to before dark, and you are going to come with me and explain yourself like an adult, because I am not doing this in the middle of the concourse next to the ice cream stall."

So he follows her, properly this time, at her side, which is a new experience and not a comfortable one. She leads him through a woven arch, past the basket stalls, to a service door in the side of the feed store that she unlocks with a key from her lanyard. The stairwell smells like grain. At the top, a hatch opens onto the roof, and the roof is full of people.