Coo Read online

  Dedication

  For

  Alice Peach

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Once Upon a Time

  Chapter One Roof

  Chapter Two Hawk

  Chapter Three Ground

  Chapter Four Officers

  Chapter Five Hunger

  Chapter Six Snow

  Chapter Seven Tully’s Home

  Chapter Eight Goodwill

  Chapter Nine Pigeons Leave, Flock Stays

  Chapter Ten Food Bazaar

  Chapter Eleven Sick

  Chapter Twelve Aggie

  Chapter Thirteen Pigeons Should Have a Merry Christmas, Too

  Chapter Fourteen A Christmas Card

  Chapter Fifteen Aggie’s Apartment

  Chapter Sixteen Feeding Pigeons Is Not Illegal, Sir!

  Chapter Seventeen No One Counts Pigeons

  Chapter Eighteen Pigeon Roof

  Chapter Nineteen Lucia

  Chapter Twenty The Flock in Peril

  Chapter Twenty-One The Pigeon Hospital

  Chapter Twenty-Two Roohoo

  Chapter Twenty-Three Bread, Peanut Butter, and Flowery Shampoo

  Chapter Twenty-Four The Taxi Ride

  Chapter Twenty-Five Escape

  Chapter Twenty-Six No Dumpsters in the Woods

  Chapter Twenty-Seven Healing

  Chapter Twenty-Eight Surprise

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Once Upon a Time

  April breezes, warm and mild as clean laundry, fluttered across the dark rail yard.

  The trains rested on their hushed tracks. In an hour dawn would break and the Monday-morning commute would begin.

  For now no people were about, not even the workers in big helmets and neon vests who tended the yard overnight.

  The pigeons who lived on the roof of the abandoned factory beside the yard were deep in slumber, too.

  All but one.

  A charcoal-dark yearling with a white stripe across his wings couldn’t sleep. Instead he roamed around the alley that ran next to the factory, peering up at the small hut that glowed there.

  Sometimes things came flying from the hut’s windows. Candy bar wrappers, banana peels, old newspapers.

  And food.

  Inside, the night watchman munched on a strawberry glazed from Donut Time, the shop around the corner. On the tiny television screen perched on his desk, a weather reporter pointed to green and red radar clouds of rain on their way to the city. Reception was terrible, and the picture kept going gray. The donut was stale. Teetering atop the TV, the watchman’s coffee maker hissed and dripped.

  Hardly anyone came into the factory yard through the back alley. Most nights the guard dozed, only sputtering awake when his walkie-talkie crackled with chatter from the rail yard crews. The messages were never for him.

  The weather report ended and a news segment about the dangers of sugar began.

  The guard stopped chewing to look down at his belly.

  He slid open the tiny window over his shoulder and tossed the strawberry donut into the darkness. Eyes tugging shut, he sighed, and soon even the coffee pot’s beep as it finished brewing wasn’t enough to wake him.

  The pigeon with the bright white stripe was still nibbling the pink donut when a young woman holding a small, tightly wrapped bundle came to stand at the bend where the alley led out to the street.

  He paused, a crumb of glaze in his beak. One of the first things a pigeon learned was how to act around humans. When one came near, you scuttled away, unless it had food. Even then, you kept your distance. Humans were unpredictable.

  Like this one.

  He watched as she tiptoed closer, walking far more softly than humans usually did, and placed the bundle on the step of the watchman’s hut. She exhaled a sharp breath. Then she briskly disappeared the way she had come, melting into the deep shadows.

  Cautiously, the pigeon stepped over to the bundle. It was larger than a loaf of bread and wrapped up in cloth. He had never seen anything like it left in the alley before.

  Hopping up on the bundle, he looked in.

  He flapped back in shock.

  A tiny human lay in the blankets. Drowsily she waved her little fists. One nearly knocked the pigeon over, but he dodged it and came closer. The baby’s eyes were squeezed shut and her nose wiggled.

  The pigeon knew for sure that big humans never left tiny humans alone. All squabs needed care. Something was very wrong.

  Nestled in her warm bundle, calm in the early morning shadows, the baby blinked open her eyes. Above her was the purplish morning sky. Her eyes were too new to focus on the faint stars scattered in their spring constellations. A train screeched lightly in the distance and she flinched. But she didn’t cry. She flexed her plump fingers and waited.

  While the guard dozed in ignorance, and her mother’s footsteps faded into silence, one of the strangest, most miraculous, most uncanny events in city history unfolded in the little alley beside the rail yard.

  The pigeon stared into the face of the baby. The baby stared back at the pigeon.

  The pigeon zoomed up to the dovecote on the roof where his flock slept and woke them.

  Not everyone thought his plan was a good one, but some of them were curious enough to skim down to see what he meant. An abandoned human squab—strange indeed.

  As a dozen birds scrutinized her, the baby’s eyes widened. Then she smiled.

  “Rain soon,” said Burr, the pigeon with the white-striped wing. He could smell it in the air. “Needs shelter, squab.”

  “True,” a burly pigeon named Hoop said. “Bad for squabs, rain.”

  “Lift squab up, us,” Burr said. “Take her to dovecote, us.”

  The others hesitated.

  “Right, Burr is,” said Pim, a very old bird. “Needs care. Hurry.”

  While the baby turned her small head every which way to look, twelve pigeons nicked their beaks into her bundle. Some grasped her wool shawl; others the soft pink blanket sandwiched beneath; two or three managed to hook into the cotton romper she wore snugly snapped against her body.

  The pigeons began to flap their wings, soothing as a swaying cradle.

  Faster and faster they flapped. Loose feathers spiraled into the darkness. They flapped still harder.

  A warm breeze tumbled down the alley, tickling the weeds as it went. When it reached the birds, it pushed under their wings.

  The baby’s swaddling tight in their beaks, the wind whistling through their feathers, the pigeons lifted off.

  In his hut, the dozing night watchman stirred. What was that rustling? He stood up, scattering donut crumbs from his lap and knocking an empty coffee mug to the floor.

  Outside, the pigeons startled at the noise. One lost grip of the shawl in his beak, and the bundle shuddered.

  Burr flapped his wings faster. Never had he flown so hard.

  The birds recovered. Hoisting the bundle in spurts and staggers, they heaved above the watchman’s hut, over the chain-link fence, up and up and up.

  The pigeons steered a few feet to the left and landed on the roof outside the doorway of their cozy dovecote.

  The baby opened her eyes and looked around at her new home.

  Chapter One

  Roof

  Every day for Coo and her flock began the same. Even the day when everything changed.

  Coo woke when the sun rose, crawled from her nest of newspaper on the dovecote’s floor into the brightness of the roof, and looked over her collection of plastic bags. She liked to put on a new outfit in the morning, something the pigeons didn’t understand at all. Her hands brushed against a red bag she loved and she sighed. Like many of the others, it was
painfully small now. Instead, she stuck her feet into the holes she’d ripped in the bottom of a large yellow bag, shimmied her arms through the handles, and padded it out with some newspaper.

  Freshly dressed, she picked over the pigeons’ morning haul of dumpster food for the least-smashed donut and settled down to nibble her breakfast while she watched the trains slide along their tracks in the ragged brown field below. Beyond, hazy in the distance, were trees and fences and a hodgepodge of big and small buildings packed together. She watched the tiny figures of other birds, ones she didn’t know, glide in the sun between the jumbled rooftops.

  The air was cold and smelled clean, like autumn. A frigid rain had fallen overnight. She wiggled her chilly toes and added more newspaper into her plastic-bag booties. It was getting to be the time of year when it would take even more layers of padding to stay warm. Hoop and Ka had already started foraging for the newsprint she’d need and grabbing extra bags for her whenever they found them. Small piles were growing in the back of Coo’s nest, the bags sorted carefully by color, but she needed more of both to get through the winter.

  She wanted more newspapers for other reasons, too. For years she’d liked looking at the pictures in them, but now Coo pored over them with an interest that felt like hunger, even though she had long ago learned you couldn’t eat paper. She liked looking at pictures of faces—human faces. She collected her favorites and kept them far in the back of the dovecote, safe from the wind and rain.

  From inside her romper she pulled out the clump of papers Ka had dragged up for her that morning. Mostly the paper was covered with gray scratch marks, but there was one big black-and-white picture in the middle. Coo stuffed more donut in her mouth, then smoothed the paper out.

  A face. Not a pigeon face. A human face. Eyes, nose, ears. The face was making a frown, and Coo copied it, feeling her lips turn down.

  “Human,” she said, and pointed to it. “See, Burr?” Coo spoke the pigeon’s language—the only language she knew.

  Burr perched on her knee, pecking at fallen crumbs. He was an old, slim bird the color of the roof when it was wet, with a bright white stripe across his wings. The stripe was beautiful but also dangerous. It made him easy for hawks to spot. Not that Coo really worried about it. Hawks never hunted pigeons when she was nearby.

  “Doing what, human?” Coo asked.

  Burr didn’t know. The pigeons never knew much about the pictures in the paper. Coo felt a pang. That feeling of hunger returned. It was not in her stomach. It came from somewhere else, somewhere much harder to understand.

  The flock was milling about the roof. New Tiktik, a bright-eyed yearling, was cleaning her speckled gray feathers in the crisp, rain-scrubbed sunshine. Ever-grumpy Roohoo hunched in a ball of purplish-red feathers on the roof ledge nearby. As usual, he was unpigeonishly alone. Other pigeons swooped overhead and pecked the weeds around the dovecote doorway. Old Tiktik, one of the oldest in the flock besides Burr, sipped water from a puddle.

  Coo dropped the paper and went to stare into the puddle. Round, broad, and bare, and ringed with matted yellow-brown hair. Big eyes. No feathers at all. She opened her mouth and so did the rippling picture in the water. A big dark O.

  Coo looked up from the puddle and over the roof edge. A human dressed in neon orange was walking along the crisscrossing tracks. For years Coo had hidden when she saw humans down below, but recently she’d become more curious—and brave.

  She leaned over the raised ledge of the roof and studied the shape of its face. Yes, it was definitely like the faces on the newsprint, and the face she saw when she looked into puddles. Her face. She popped the last chunk of donut into her mouth and ran her sticky fingers over her nose and lips and cheeks.

  Although she’d almost always known she was not like the birds, for years she didn’t care.

  Not anymore. Now she wondered and worried about the ways she was different.

  Her family had feathers; she had skin and hair. They had hard beaks; she had a soft nose. They could fly; she could jump and walk, but no matter how much she flapped her arms, so far they’d never lifted her from the ground for more than a moment.

  The loneliest feeling in the world was watching the flock take off and being left behind all alone on the roof. Coo longed to fly.

  Coo often asked Burr why she couldn’t. But why wasn’t something that interested her flock much. Coo wondered about why all the time. She asked again, and Burr answered as he always did.

  “Human, you. Like the healer.” Burr meant the plump human who plodded down the alley most afternoons to scatter seed and bread for the flock, and who also, mysteriously, sometimes scooped up sick birds and returned them many days later, all well.

  “Can’t fly, humans? Ever? Why?” Coo asked, even though she knew he didn’t know.

  Burr couldn’t answer every one of Coo’s questions, but he could travel all over the world beyond the roof without getting lost, live through winter in just his feathers without ever getting cold, and forage grub all year long. Coo couldn’t do any of that. She relied on the pigeons to bring her food to eat. She’d never been down from the roof since she was an infant, not once, though she had attempted it, in fits and starts, a few times. The truth was she was afraid of the ground. The very thought of walking around in the world she peered down upon, the one the birds flew over effortlessly, made her shiver.

  If only she could fly.

  It came up every so often. Mostly only the younger pigeons who didn’t know better mentioned it, especially the curious ones like New Tiktik.

  “Fly yet, you?” New Tiktik asked over and over when she was still a newly feathered squab, not noticing how it made Coo turn warm and blush. Blushing—feeling embarrassed—was a human thing.

  “Never fly, her,” huffed Roohoo the last time New Tiktik had asked. “Look—no wings. No feathers. Not a bird! Flying? Humans? Never! Kick pigeons, them. Watch out, all. Kick, Coo. Ouch!”

  Coo had glowered at that but said nothing. She would never kick a pigeon and Roohoo knew it, but it was best not to argue with him. He was the cleverest bird in the flock, and the most stubborn. It was impossible to win an argument with him.

  Scooping Burr onto her shoulder, Coo wandered away from the roof’s edge, and from the puddle and its puzzles.

  The roof was a broad and bumpy square. It was Coo’s whole world. Once, long ago, before her time with the flock, someone had painted it silver, but most of the silver had since flaked off, revealing grayish-black tar beneath. In the cracks of the tar grew plants that rose green and leggy each spring, bloomed in many colors in the summer, and then turned brown and died each fall.

  One side of the building ran along a street, beyond which was an abandoned lot dense with weeds. Cars—those big, pigeon-squashing monsters, only spoken of in hushed tones—seldom traveled it, but Coo avoided that side of the roof anyway, sticking to the two sides that bordered the rail yard and the one that ran along the alley.

  On that side sat the most important part of Coo’s home.

  The dovecote.

  It was a round, stout little building a bit taller than Coo herself and wide enough for her to lay down inside. It had a small open doorway and a pitched roof, and was packed with shelves of nesting boxes for the flock and a many-layered floor of feathers and newspaper for Coo. Its whitish-gray paint was flaking and streaked brown with age.

  Coo never really thought about where the dovecote had come from any more than she thought about the roof itself or the other things on it. Long before her time, some human had built it. The flock had a dim knowledge of this: a human who made pigeons race one another, and fed them, and then disappeared. But that was many years ago, a dozen or more murky generations of pigeon memories. The flock had long since turned wild.

  That morning Coo padded across the roof, passing what had been her favorite clump of summer wildflowers, their bright pink blooms now drooping gray. She sat in the slight shadow their stalks made. Here was her collection of pebbles, st
icks, and piles of leaves, carefully arranged in groups. She was playing a long-running game of Find Food with whatever pigeons she could snag for her pretend flights. She dashed back and forth flapping her arms like wings, looking for pretend bagels, donuts, and fruit under the cracked red plastic chair that sat by the dovecote. Pigeons didn’t play that way on their own, and their confusion always slowed down the game.

  She was scooping up pretend donuts that were really rocks and handing them to Burr—Burr was always patient about standing where she told him and doing what she said, even if he never really understood the point—when Roohoo appeared.

  “No sense, you.” He landed next to a brownish speckled leaf that was really a pretend banana.

  Coo had long since stopped trying to rope Roohoo into her games, but he still watched, carefully observing so he could criticize her.

  “No sense, no skills,” he sniffed.

  “Not true,” said Burr. “Hush, Roohoo. Coo helps. Has skills, her. Know this, you.”

  These were Coo’s skills: her thin, wiggly fingers plucked gum from feathers and glass shards from toes. She chased eggs that rolled from nests and put them back so they would hatch, and rescued the squabs who tried to fly too soon and fell squeaking onto the floor of the dovecote. With her sharp nails she quickly tore open the plastic sacks of bread the pigeons had learned to fetch, two birds to a bag, and heave back to the roof. She could even stuff leaves and bits of newspaper into holes and cracks to fix the leaks that sprung in the roof of the dovecote. She kept the roof and dovecote tidy, too, cleaning up the newsprint full of pigeon droppings and the plastic bags she used for the toilet.

  Best of all, Coo could scare hawks.

  Before Coo, the roof had been to the hawks what the dumpster was to the pigeons. There was no tastier snack to a hawk than a plump, trash-fattened pigeon. The hawks had grazed on the roof regularly, coasting slow and silent overhead while Coo’s flock huddled in shivering terror inside the dovecote. But since she’d grown large enough to run and screech, no hawk had bothered the flock. Nothing made Coo prouder than that.