Patty Healy was sitting at the kitchen table picking out all the Wilmas from the Flintstones vitamins bottle when a scarlet tanager flew into the glass window and died on the patio. Her best friend Bridget Murphy was going to come over in one and a half hours plus six minutes, but Bridget wasn’t here yet. So, it would be all on her own that Patty Healy had to watch the tanager, which she knew was a tanager from the Young Birder’s Guide to Birds of North America, die a terrible death. It was so bright red that it was perhaps sadder than if a different, uglier bird had died, and Patty Healy felt deep in her heart that it wasn’t fair that the first time she ever saw one, it had to be dead.
She picked up one of the Wilmas, wishing that it was Bridget she was talking to, and said out loud, as an idea formed in her head already, “the fallen tanager.”
It would be the summer that Patty Healy and Bridget Murphy would do everything they did for the fallen tanager. They would make a list and everything on the list had to be worth doing and they would complete all of it, including figuring out how to find the fallen tanager’s family and learning how to speak bird. In preparation, Patty ate every single Wilma in the jar, because everyone knew that even though Bridget Murphy was so beautiful, she was kind of lazy and also list-averse, and Patty would have to do the extra work.
First, Patty started by going out to the patio to pick up the tanager and put him in a shoebox, from which she dumped a diorama. The diorama had not turned out the way it looked in Patty’s mind. It was supposed to be of the Cold War, in the moment just before nuclear disaster, but all Patty had to work with were Bridget Murphy’s My Little Petite Ponies, which were too happy-looking for the violent overthrow of capitalism or communism, even when you drew anger on them with red sharpie. Bridget hadn’t helped. This shoebox was better as a grave.
Secretly, Patty Healy was on the side of the Soviet Union. She liked their hats.
This was a real tragedy, Patty knew, a tanager dead on a patio. It was so small and red and probably had so many songs left to sing. She started thinking of the list in her head already, how learning to sing every song the tanager didn’t get to sing would go right underneath learning to speak bird. If you can speak, you can sing, as they say.
By the time Bridget Murphy showed up, Patty had basically forgotten about her. There was so much to do this summer, now. The list was growing in Patty’s mind. But Bridget Murphy did show up in pink jellies and a yellow dress, chewing gum like always. She walked up the path and looked at Patty, who was holding the shoebox grave with the lid not quite closed, and said, “You know Mrs. Moran, the lady who looks like an adult of the Coppertone girl? There’s a rumor going around town that she—“
“We have no time for rumors,” said Patty, although Mrs. Moran was really pretty and kind of known as being bad and Patty was a bit curious for a brief moment. She shook her head, brushing away the rumor, and opened the shoebox so Bridget could see the tanager, so she could see, and share, the weight of the tragedy.
And one good thing about Bridget Murphy was that she did share the weight of tragedies. A frown of pain like the print of a bird’s foot stamped the space between her wrinkled brows, and she stopped chewing her gum.
“Well, wow…” Bridget said, placing a palm on her chest like she might start saying the pledge of allegiance. “What was his name?”
“Bolshevik,” said Patty in a very serious tone, “and he needs us now.”
Then, she leaned over and vomited a pool of orange bile onto the patio floor. She was ready.
+++
The list got longer and stranger as the days sunk by, and once three had passed, Bolshevik had decomposed from an unrecognizable blob into just nothing. Bridget added things to the list like finally starting to shave and maybe kissing Kevin Flynn, but Patty had bigger things in mind. Armed with the strength of all the Wilmas in the bottle, she scribbled things like “discover the meaning of humanity” and “figure out what makes wind” and “become legends.”
Bridget had wanted to bury Bolshevik, but Patty just couldn’t do it. That would be like burying a revolution, and Patty loved revolutions even more than she loved furry hats.
So, the symbolic shoebox grave went under Patty’s bed at night, and with them everywhere they went. On the lid, Bridget wrote: Here lies Bolshevik, Weymouth, MASS, 1989-1989 in purple crayon.
They had already learned to speak bird when Bolshevik was just a smelly blob, and mastered the songs of his ancestors by the time he dissipated.
On the last day of fourth grade at the Wessagussett Primary School, instead of saying the pledge of allegiance, Patty and Bridget sang, Free children of a state unprecedented, today we sing our proud song about the mightiest party in the world, about our greatest man ever.
Except, of course, they sang it in bird.
Our greatest man ever, of course, was Bolshevik. Fallen men were always the greatest, according to, like, every book you ever read in school and every funeral you ever had to wear an itchy black dress to, especially when their hearts were pure and they fought for justice.
Bolshevik was trying to tell them something, and it didn’t make him any less great—or perhaps it made him greater—that he hadn’t known what glass was.
Glass was stupid. It was just a weak, cruel trick humans made.
As they walked out into the world on the last day of school—as they walked out into the summer—Patty leaned over and whispered into Bridget’s ear, in bird, “There isn’t enough room in the world for two superpowers, and we are the only ones who can make it right.”
Bridget nodded solemnly, and she took Patty’s hand and they walked forward into their future. By now, the list had been scribbled on and so many things had been crossed out that the only word left was justice.
The world was starting to look like the way the diorama had in Patty’s mind. It was red and loud and free and theirs. When they walked past Mr. O’Brien’s house, who was the man who supposedly took advantage of Mrs. Moran, according to the rumor, Patty leaned down and picked up the pokiest rock in the whole yard and threw it straight through his front window.
“For Bolshevik!” she shouted.
“For Bolshevik,” Bridget said. She crossed her heart—she was always doing that—and then she pulled her dress down to cover her scabby knees, which she was also always doing.
Patty looked at Bridget’s knees and said, “you’re staying at my house tonight, and every night afterwards, because it’s summer now, okay?” She was saying it not really to Bridget but more to Mr. O’Brien, and to Kevin Flynn, who had kissed Bridget but not her after they shaved their legs with Patty’s mom’s razor, and also to Vlad the Impaler and Pol Pot and Idi Amin and Miles Standish and maybe Oliver North (but nobody really knew what that guy’s deal was) and obviously Hitler and, especially, to Bridget’s dad, who was the scariest because he was the closest.
“Okay,” said Bridget.
“Okay,” said Patty. Maybe she wasn’t as pretty as Bridget but at least she was mostly just ignored, rather than being made to kneel on raw rice just for being pretty and small. Patty was glad that she wasn’t pretty. One of them needed protection enough for the both of them.
“Do you need to ask your mom if I can stay?” Bridget asked.
“She’s never not okay with you staying,” said Patty, “especially in summer.”
“Do you need to get, like, any of your stuff?” Patty asked. Bridget was a girl who had stuff. Like, caboodles and caboodles of stuff.
Bridget looked up at the sky as if checking for stormy clouds and said, in bird, “I’m actually starting to think stuff is stupid.”
“It is,” Patty said, and they turned and walked down Pecksuot Road, away from Mr. O’Brien’s house toward Patty’s.
And so, in the name of Bolshevik, they snuck out every night as soon as Patty’s mom came home from her shift at The Mooring and fell asleep on the living room sofa. They picked all the flowers from snotty Miss Byrne’s precious garden and left them in a bundle on Mrs. Kenny’s doorstep, because Mrs. Kenny was recently widowed and she walked around town like a sad ghost. With a thin magnet from Patty’s junk drawer, they stole coins from all the parking meters on Main Street and left them in a burlap bag in Mr. Murphy’s mailbox, because the factory had just laid him off and he needed a hip replacement, which sounded fascinating and terrifying and expensive. They let all the air out of Mr. Walsh’s tires, because his wife, Erin, looked suspiciously sad.
After they finished, they would crawl back through Patty’s bedroom window and into her twin bed and fall asleep just as the orange light started slanting up over the maple trees. They slept as long as they could, with the shoebox grave under the bed and Bridget’s hot breath on Patty’s arm, until it was dusk and time to eat more Wilmas and leave again. The whole world was an open window, and they tried very hard not to rub it in for Bolshevik.
The nights all bled together into one long night, and pretty soon, they both knew, Bridget’s dad would make her come home.
They walked down Pilgrim Road to the beach one night, holding the shoebox grave. They stood at the cliffs, which weren’t even actually cliffs, only hills with steep sides, but legends needed cliffs and this was the closest thing available. From the Wessagussett Yacht Club, they heard the insult of the Fine Young Cannibals and smashing glass bottles and the laughter of adults who rarely got what they wanted out of life but who also didn’t try very hard.
Bridget was obviously in the same moment as Patty, also irritated that the adults were so loud at a time when they wanted to be alone in their legendhood, because she said, “I know why Weymouth was a failed colony.”
Weymouth was where they lived, and where Bolshevik died, and where many people were tired-looking and hard, and Patty knew there had to be so much else, but she had never seen it so she had to just believe that the pictures she saw in books were real. What was so great about Bolshevik was that it was likely that he had come from South America, according to the Young Birder’s Guide to Birds of North America, so he was not only a fallen hero but he was also proof of the more.
“Me too,” said Patty. They had learned it so many times in history class, but with emphasis on the wrong part. “Because they only sent sixty men here from London and they weren’t as sturdy as the Pilgrims even though all of them were assholes, but most of all because they left the women behind.”
“The ocean is a woman,” Bridget continued, and a big wave smacked the sand. “And everything that happened here sucked.”
“Exactly,” said Patty, “and only the legends, but real ones, can actually make a revolution happen.
Bridget squinted. The pleated skin under her eyes bunched together and wrinkled softly. And then, as if musing aloud to herself, she said, “One of these times he’s going to kill me, you know. My dad.”
Patty knew she was right, if things kept going like they had been, because men in America were powerful but also stupid and forever on the news killing each other and hurting and causing blood and fear. But, the list would help reverse that. That’s what it was for.
She also realized, all of a sudden like the whirr of the window air conditioner kicking on, that not all fallen men were great. Some of them were just fallen and some of them needed to fall without greatness, never to be spoken of again.
“I won’t let him,” she whispered in a way that was more severe than yelling. She whispered it not only to Bridget and to Bolshevik but also to the ocean, who was a woman, and to all the leaves and all the rocks and all the glass and all the men in America who were hurting others, or who hadn’t hurt yet but were about to or wanted to, or didn’t want to but still would.
“Okay,” said Bridget. “I believe you.”
Of course, she said it in bird.
And Patty loved Bridget for believing her because, sometimes, she knew that no one else did but she also knew it only took one.
But still, Bridget knew more than anyone that seeing is believing and so they walked past her house on their way back to Patty’s, and, seeing that Bridget’s dad’s car wasn’t in the driveway, Patty decided this would be the ultimate battle.
“This is the ultimate battle,” she said to Bridget in bird, and she said it, too, to Bolshevik. He was always listening and watching and making sure that they were delivering justice. This was the moment when, because Bridget’s dad wasn’t home, an open yet restricted battle went nuclear.
Bridget squawked, but it sounded a little bit fearful.
Patty knew in her heart and from every book worth reading (which is why she hated reading the history books about the Wessagussett Colony) that when there was a rivalry, the underdog was meant to win.
Holding Bridget’s arm on one side and cradling the shoebox grave in the other arm, she walked right through the front door into the kitchen and headed straight for the room where the guns were kept.
Only, Bridget’s dad was in there—his car must have been left at The Mooring or somewhere—because he was in there and he was cleaning the guns and then he was yelling and he was breaking things and he was asking where have you been, you stupid little brat—it’s been almost a week—and a string of other words Patty frankly didn’t want to remember.
This was going to be much worse than rice. He was home and he was drunk and he was cleaning his guns. He kept yelling words, and Patty thought of sticks and stones, but only because she was ignored, unlike Bridget. Sticks and stones were all Patty’s mother had, when she had anything at all.
Patty thought fast. Without setting down the shoebox grave, she let go of Bridget’s arm and grabbed an empty whiskey bottle off the counter and threw it as hard as she could. It smashed into about seven billion pieces at Bridget’s dad’s feet.
“For Bolshevik!” Patty shouted, and she was—she really was, just like she promised—about to deliver justice, but then she looked at Bridget’s face and she remembered all the other stupid books she read where summers ended and underdogs lost.
She remembered she was nine. Nine seemed so much older five minutes ago.
“You have to go,” Bridget said calmly, pushing Patty toward the open front door, and the calm was so scary. “You have to get out of here. Now.”
“I can’t just…”
Bridget put a firm hand on Patty’s arm—the hand of an adult. She looked quickly behind her, and back, straight into Patty’s eyes.
“It’s not that you’re on the wrong side, Patty,” Bridget said, cradling her elbow in her hand, “it’s just that the right side isn’t strong enough.”
That part, she definitely didn’t say in bird.
So, Patty did, but only to the front yard. She heard violence. She wanted to cover Bolshevik’s ears, but he had none to cover. Instead, she opened the shoebox grave and tipped it upside down and said, not to Bolshevik, but to Bridget, who she loved, “Please be free.”
Setting the shoebox down on the frayed, brown grass, Patty took off her shoes. She placed them inside what she now knew was a diorama that was always just an idea and never, ever a reality—just a cardboard grave for a thing that decomposed too fast to even need a grave, a non-war with a shadowy ending that never got talked about because other things were closer and scarier and realer. She started walking home because it took so long to grow up and no amount of Wilmas could change that. She hoped she stepped on glass on the way home and the pain of it would be as sweet as a fallen hero. She thought of all the revolutions she would start, when she was older, and how none of them would ever matter as much as this one.
