Magnolia Estates
Heather McElhatton

The garden party promised to be long, horrible and poorly attended. The heat was immense. After a brief cloudburst, the lawn became a museum of wet mirrors, light reflecting off every surface and steam rejuvenating the mosquitoes. The legs of the metal lawn chairs cut into the soggy grass, so the people sitting leaned slightly to the right or left, forwards or backwards, off balance, as if they might be momentarily shot to the moon. Everything Marcus hated converged in front of him. His fat neighbors in white croquet outfits pecked across the wet grass like loose chickens, small ham salad sandwiches were served on wilting paper plates and the host brought out an antique wood-handled hunting rifle to show his guests.

They sat on a lawn inside Magnolia Estates, a geometrically precise community forty minutes outside Atlanta, where every identical yellow house was built in concentric circles around a natural pond, an unnamed brackish oval heavily wooded by ancient Magnolia trees.

Marcus had purchased one of the yellow houses closest to the pond, and next to these neighbors, a couple he had only met last week. Being the new neighbor, this garden party was more or less in his honor, maybe less than more, considering no one had introduced themselves and Marcus was sitting alone on his metal lawn chair, glowering at the pond.

The pond was murky green and host to a terrifying array of wildlife. It was a soft spot on the earth, a swampy footprint of stagnant water and bilious algae that clouded like glaucoma. Water moccasins slept in rotting tree stumps and mud wasps festooned the gnarled trees with yellow paper nests. The shoreline was crusted with roiling fire ant mounds, and a multitude of birds and insects agitated the brilliant air above with flapping, darting, whirring wings.

The only thing about the pond that didn't terrify Marcus were the egrets. Large white, graceful birds that would arrive every night when the sky burned off and drew lavender. They came in from the east with six-foot wings and long, slender necks, and would roost in the Magnolia trees; jostled together on crowded branches. The birds kept coming, two, five, ten at a time, until nightfall when they numbered in the hundreds, and the Magnolia trees were white with sleeping birds.

When he first moved in, Marcus tried to explore the pond more closely. He went down to the waters edge, hoping to find a walking path, but as he approached a stand of wheat-colored cattails, something turned violently in the tall grass, and crashed into the water. Marcus spun on one tennis shoe and sprinted back to the house, never to venture the pond again.

It fatigued him now to think that he had insisted on living near the pond. He paid fifteen percent extra for the privilege. Now, standing in the backyard of his neighbor's identical yellow home, he realized the pond was more of a nuisance than a privilege. The rest of the complex made fun of the "Pond People" for choosing to live closer to the raccoons, water moccasins, and other poisonous vermin.

"Where are the swans?" someone asked. "Weren't there swans?"

The development had purchased the pair of identical white swans, one male and one female to beautify the pond. But after the swans ate all the Palmetto grass down to sharp nubs and were routinely attacked by a family of territorial raccoons, they began to march through backyards of Magnolia Estates begging for food. They honked loudly and lunged and pecked at anyone who came too close to them, especially the children, who tried to pet their heads. Little Ashley Paulson was the talk of the development after the female swan bit her tiny finger so hard she needed three stitches and a set of rabies shots right in the stomach. Marcus didn't know why, but when his neighbors talked about the poor little girl, who had developed an infection and a deep fear of chickens, he realized he was rooting for the swan. He had seen the Paulson girl torturing turtles down by the pond once, and if she was too stupid to know it was a swan and not a chicken that bit her, he really didn't see what the fuss was about.

Besides, he hated to see people and nature trying to cohabitate in the same place. The animals didn't stand a chance. His neighbors were dumping ant killer and weed control and putting up chicken wire to keep rabbits out of their gardens, and it all made him angry. He was a vegetarian. He didn't believe in harming animals any more than he believed in harming people, although if he had a choice, he would definitely pick to harm a person over an animal any day. Even an alligator. Now the swans were gone. The residents of Magnolia Estates felt a certain responsibility for having them, and so they fed them from a distance, hurling wadded up white bread and Twinkies at their black webbed feet. This went on for awhile, until one died of unknown causes, and the other, a possible suicide, stepped out in front of a furniture delivery truck.

This was what Marcus was thinking about when the hostess, a thin, pretty woman with a heart-shaped mouth poked him hard in the arm. All he caught was the word "paradise."

"Paradise?" Marcus blurted, embarrassed by the attention. "This may be paradise, but last week someone mugged me at the Food Lion." The hostess acquired a sour look and stepped back. Marcus bit his lip hard. He hated when he did this. A nervous habit. Spontaneous lying. No one had mugged him at the Food Lion, it was just sometimes he lied when he was nervous, and said the first thing that popped into his head.

"Someone mugged you at the grocery store?"

He'd taken an oath never lie again now that he lived here, in this nice place, surrounded by nice people, but he hadn't counted on the heat, or the mosquitoes or the hunting rifle, or the tuna salad. Her metal spatula glinted like a silver fish against the green lawn as she pointed it south. "At this Food Lion right here?"

"Just some kids," he said weakly. "Kids in the cheese aisle." Cheese aisle? he thought. Where had he come up with cheese aisle?

She looked at him the way all women looked at him, as if she'd just eaten something mildly distasteful, like slightly turned cream or undercooked chicken. He waited now for her to drop it or go away or politely start talking to someone else. It was inevitable. He didn't belong here anymore than the fire ants did. He was the wrong species. He was poor.

His thoughts disgusted him. He wasn't poor. He had been poor when he was growing up. That was over now, and no one could tell. No one could ever tell where he'd come from. He'd hidden the evidence. Only, growing up in a painted cinderblock house with government cheese sent by a Communities in Crisis volunteer had ruined his perspective. He knew it. The picture of his old house rose now and superimposed itself on the green lawn. It was in West Georgia, in what was commonly referred to as a "garbage house." The sort of house frequented by friendly, weary police officers and even friendlier, wearier social workers.

He tried to focus on his neighbor's green lawn. The yard in front of his childhood home was nothing more than a dirt lot lined with oil barrels, which were filled with rusty carburetors and the tangled webs of black widow spiders. In back of the house there was a windowless blue Valiant up on blocks with a weedy, blooming Mimosa tree growing out of the trunk. The damp, sagging back porch was full of cardboard boxes and paper bags that had donated clothing and toys in them. Their town was so small there was no Salvation Army—if you had any garbage you didn't want any more, you just dropped it off in front of Marcus's house, and his brothers would throw it in the porch.

But his family never used the clothing or the toys. Instead they used the heavy cardboard boxes and bulging paper bags as building blocks for forts and tunnels to crawl through. They had clothing fights with each other, and lit the toys on fire in the yard.

His parents had crammed their cinderblock house full of every piece of crap they could find. Hung onto it like fools gold. Lawn furniture in the living room, car seats on the porch. Sears catalogues stacked waist-high around the kitchen table, yellowing newspapers, Lotto tabs thrown into kitty litter pans, broken lamps wrapped in rag carpets, unused coupon books keeping the doors open, chipped angel figurines lying in the floor, tricycles overturned, black and white televisions in the front yard, coffee cups used for soup bowls, Christmas decorations left up year-round, his sister's cheap makeup that littered the bathroom like an exploded display at Walgreen's.

Stray pets wandered through their lives too. Animals of all varieties and stripes and not one with a collar or a rabies vaccination and some without a name. Hermit crabs that died like beef jerky in their aquariums, goggle-eyed goldfish that went belly up when no one fed them, mangy dogs that knocked over the trashcans looking for food, feral cats that had legions of kittens under the house, and once a white parrot who wouldn't speak.

Now anything that even faintly smelled of poverty disgusted Marcus. Waterlogged sofas on the highway. Women with broken shopping carts, wheeling them down alleys. Fried Chicken. Auto auctions. Dollar stores. Basketball courts. Youth centers. Plastic lawn furniture. Trailer parks. Discount liquor stores. Dirty sheets. Walmart. He couldn't set foot in a Walmart. Instead, he picked his way through life with the precision of a lace maker, weaving away from the ugly.

Inside his newly purchased house at Magnolia Estates he kept the clutter to a minimum. He had almost no furniture and a radio that let the low, soothing tones of National Public Radio course through the unfurnished rooms. The walls were smooth and white; the floors wall-to-wall white carpet, vacuumed and clean. He liked everything clean and white like a bakers apron. At night he sometimes put on his white bathrobe and lay down on the clean white carpet and stared at the white stucco ceiling. It was like being inside a white vapor cloud.

Marcus looked up from the lawn, his eyes watering. The hostess had not left, but was just standing there, waiting for him to explain himself. Beads of sweat pearled on his damp forehead, which he blotted with a damp cocktail napkin. He wanted to lean forward and put the sweaty napkin down, but he didn't want to show the sweat circles he could feel forming under each armpit. His hand began to tremble.

"It was over quickly, " he said, "and I wasn't hurt."

"But what happened?"

"I was shopping on Sunday night, and a couple of kids put a gun to my head in the cheese aisle."

The hostess called her husband.

Thinking about the white parrot from his childhood showed just how badly things were going. He bit his lip hard to remind himself. He hated thinking about that damned parrot. It was the one time in his childhood he'd gotten involved with one of the household pets. All the other ones he avoided. Let die or get sick or be destroyed by his older brothers. But the parrot was different. He'd never seen anything like it. His mother brought it home from a flea market where she worked on weekends, and said Marcus could teach it to talk.

He named the bird Apollo, and built him a lean-to cage; a rickety affair made of plastic egg crates and chickenwire, and put it on a table in his bedroom by the window. He lined the inside of the cage with torn out pictures of the Amazon, and spent all his money on grapes and birdseed. The bird was elegant, with feathers like snow drifting against itself, and large dark eyes—completely out of place in their shabby house. Marcus spent hours trying to train it, but it refused to ever speak a single word. The bird seemed to know it was in a house of disrepair, it picked at his food and looked nervously out of Marcus's door whenever it was left open, as if it knew danger was nearby.

The bird had died suddenly. Probably was sick when they got him, but he'd never know, and that was the problem wasn't it? He would never know if he was responsible, if he could've done more. Certainly now he could do more, he thought as he surveyed the manicured lawn and the fancy cocktails. Now, even though he wasn't rich, he could afford a vet. If he had that parrot right now, he could buy that bird a new kidney or a new liver or anything it needed. He had buried that white parrot in the dirt, under maybe an inch of soil, as far down as his bony seven-year-old arms could dig, but the dogs came around with it two days later, maggoty and ripped in half. His mother had pried the torn bird from the dog's mouth and threw it in the trashcan outside.

The beefy husband arrived at his worried wife's side. "What now?" he boomed, raising his sweating drink like a wet studded diamond into the air. "Kids at the grocery store mugging you? Were they Mexican? There's that Goddamned youth center near here."

"No," Marcus said decidedly. "They were white." Now he was glad for the cheese aisle story. It was forcing him to forget the white parrot. "Yes," he said. "And they were wearing matching white windbreakers.

"They were white?" the husband turned to the wife. "There's that youth center they opened. Dragging all sorts from the city out here. Even the white kids have turned now."

"And one of them was named Scotty," Marcus said. He picked the name Scotty because it was the name of his host's oldest son. They had bored Marcus to death by showing him Scotty's endless array of Varsity soccer trophies in a special order glass cabinet in the living room. The hostess took a step forward and leaned in towards him, her hand on her chest. "Did you say Scotty?"

Her husband frowned. "Hey Eddie!" he shouted to another man standing a ways off from them. "Come listen to this. Marcus here says white kids mugged him at the Goddamned grocery store."

Marcus pressed two fingers to his twitching eyelid. The guests began to gather slowly around his plastic patio chair until they blocked out most of the breeze. He went on with the details of his story. The more details you used, the easier it was. As he spoke, and the sun began to set, more egrets came across the lake. One by one they glided on wide wings just inches off the ponds murky surface. Marcus strained to watch them through the waiting guests.

"In the cheese aisle?" someone asked. "Right there by the cashiers station?"

Marcus squinted hard in concentration. "Yes. I wanted Tillamook Cheddar. I remember because they were out of Tillamook and I had to settle for Vermont, which was fine because it was on sale."

"Vermont Cheddar was on sale," someone concurred. "Last week. Four dollars for a quarter pound!"

A small gasp issued from the group. His story had more merit, was somehow more believable, truer, because one of his neighbors had also bought discount cheese.

The shadow on the lawn was longer now, and the turtles and toads and crickets along the water's edge began singing. The blooming racket became so loud that the husband shouted over them. "Don't mind them," he said. "You go on with your story. We're gonna get the exterminator to spray again." Then he turned and shook a fist at the pond. "I'd like to see them fucking chirp while getting hit with liquid dicofol!" When he turned back, his face was shining. "We almost had them gone last summer. Go on now. Tell the story."

Marcus squeezed his eyes shut and continued. "They had that tinned music playing," he said. "and I was vaguely aware of these three young white guys dressed in grungy clothes at the cheese aisle."

"Well Scotty never wears grungy clothes," the hostess said with relief in her voice. "I've been ironing that boys clothes since he was a baby."

Instead of enjoying the attention, Marcus felt uneasy. Usually, his little white lies disappeared quickly, like sugar in water, but this little lie seemed to be getting bigger as it went down. The egrets too, they were making him uneasy. They were starting to honk in the trees, and he had a nearly insuppressible urge to stand up and tell them to be quiet, that his neighbors would kill them all if they didn't shut the hell up.

"How'd you know they were mugging you?" someone asked.

"What the hell does that mean?" the husband barked. "I think he'd know if someone was God damned mugging him. Wouldn't you know if you were being mugged?"

The guest went red on the face, and the husband patted Marcus on the back. "What did those bastards do then? Those white kids from the youth center."

"I was bent over digging through the cheese bin," Marcus managed, "and I felt something tapping against my head. At first I thought it was a radio, but I looked up and it was a small black gun."

"Why the hell would you think it was a radio?"

"Scotty never wears grungy clothes," the hostess said blankly.

"Why in hell did they pick on you?" the husband asked. "You're a big fella, why would three kids mug a big guy like you in broad daylight?

"It wasn't daylight," Marcus said with a hint of irritation in his voice, as though he had already explained what time of day it was and the husband was being forgetful. "It was night."

All he had to do was picture the incident in his mind, like recalling a scene in a movie, and he could make it real. He pictured the Food Lion. The fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, the tinny music, the smell of floor cleaner. He even started to feel bad he was mugged. Why would someone pick on him? He was a nice guy, a hard worker. Hadn't he worked hard to get out of his bad situation? Hadn't he taken a janitorial job at the University and mopped up curdled Freshman vomit and used, slippery Senior condoms? Hadn't he worked his way through college, never less than three jobs at a time, and didn't he send cash home every month, still to this day to that awful cinderblock house? Yes he had. He had paid his way out, and now three thugs who didn't want to work hard had tried to take it away from him.

The egrets were crowding in the trees now, flapping against one another and positioning for space. It was a scene is usually loved to see, but tonight they made him nervous. Queasy. "I gave them everything I had," Marcus said gravely, and then added, "the worst part was I lost a picture of my family in my wallet that I'll never get back." And now the image was as real as a true memory. He accepted a fresh drink, and took a slow sip that made his head thrum with lovely dizziness.

The Egrets began a high-pitched shrieking, and cacophony of shrieks and shrills. "Oh enough," the husband boomed, "fucking birds. Shitting on everything."

"Honey…" the hostess called after her husband, but he was no to be stopped. He stomped away, his solid back marching like a Virginia ham across the lawn, and he disappeared into the house. Marcus watched the egrets. There were too many of them for this one tiny pond. He supposed there wasn't enough fresh water around as it was, and so they had to make do with this. The guests began to talk amongst themselves, and a fight broke out in the trees amongst the egrets. The white parrot shot across his mind. There was something else about the memory, something shadowy he couldn't remember.

Marcus heard the distinct lock and load of a rifle. He looked up to see the husband had returned, and was standing next to him shouldering the hunting rifle he had brought out earlier. He was aiming at the birds across the way. His face was sweating and the thick folds of fat on his neck creased as he bent into the gun.

"Honey you can't kill them all," the hostess complained.

"I'm just going scare them out of my fucking yard!"

The hostess sighed. "Last month it was an alligator. He fed him a poisoned chicken and we found him dead the next morning, floating big and green as a prison bus."

"They don't belong here," the husband bellowed.

The hostess sounded like a small metal wind-up toy with a tin voice. High-pitched and shrill. "Just don't step on my pansy's," she said. "Can't you see you're stepping on the pansy's?"

It was impossible to separate the explosion of the gun from the explosion of the birds. They lifted in one swirling mass, one white tornado sweeping away from the trees into the sky. The sound sent for the residents of Magnolia Estates, who laid down their dinner knives and garden hoses and looked up, into the flapping vortex of departing birds.

Marcus stared into the cloud of white feathers, and he remembered. He had killed Apollo. He'd left the bird outside his cage accidentally that day when he'd left for school. He'd been trying to feed it green grapes when his brother pounded on the door and told him they were leaving. Marcus jumped up to get his things together, and forgot to put Apollo back in his cage. He balled his fists up into knots and a sharp pain shot through his stomach. There was nowhere the bird could go. The door to his bedroom was open, the cage was locked, the window closed. By the time Marcus had climbed up into the humid school bus, the bird was down on the floor, and the dogs had him.

Now Marcus stared back at the black water of the pond. There was a general laughter around him, a nervous tittering as people unplugged their ears. The egrets were gone, but the trees were still alive with escape, the green branches bouncing and swaying as if the birds still fought for space. Marcus felt a splitting sensation in his head, a migraine with wings.

The dogs had torn Apollo to pieces. There must have been a chase, no one was home to say, but Marcus found each dog protectively guarding his half of the shredded bird outside on the dirt lawn, the beak separated from the head, the head separated from the wings.

The discomforting chatter of the guests swelled and fractured like a cluttered room. They went back for the buffet table, scattered and separated across the lawn, chickens lost outside the roost. Marcus was forgotten.

He leaned forward in his chair and squinted at the water. The plastic legs of his chair dug into the damp grass. "You got one," he said quietly. He wasn't sure at first, on the far side of the pond the white feathers were half submerged in the dark water, but the wind blew and the bird thrashed slightly, so a bloody egret wing caught in the breeze. It was still alive. The head arched up, and the elegant long neck, and then came back down hard on the water. The bird was trying to get up.

Marcus set his glass down and stood up. There was a cooler breeze now, as the sun had sunk down completely, and the dark blue sky overhead revealed a faint imprint of the moon. He started to walk towards the pond.

"Where you going Marcus?" someone called, but Marcus didn't turn around or answer. He was not to be stopped. As he walked, the ground beneath him became softer and softer, until the wet muck on the pond's edge pulled at his shoes. He stepped over the scratchy cattails and marsh grass, sinking in the soft mud, soaking his socks and shoes. Across the pond the egret was waiting for him now, and that was all that mattered. There was an emergency vet clinic on Highway 95, the one he drove by every day to work, and that was only twenty minutes away. He didn't think about the fire ants or the water moccasins or the strangers standing behind him on the lawn with their drinks and confused expressions. The white parrot flew across his memory, wings un-ripped, talons reaching. The drywall crumbled away, the yellow houses melted. Yellow sugar cubes dropped in water. His hands shot out ahead of him, his body lunged forward, and he took a flying leap. His feet left the earth, his face hit the water, and he was in.

© Heather McElhatton