By Ed Gutierrez

The air was dry and hot and the fields of yellow grass rolled out before his van. George was glad he hadn’t seen anything since the gas station and followed the electrical lines to the hidden town. His blond hair was long and tangled; his back stuck to the vinyl seat. George was in no rush to end a summer weekend and return to Madrid, his temporary home for the past few years. There was absolutely no rush to return to his small apartment on the top floor where he lived alone. He had never explored Western Spain before and was somewhere near the border with Portugal. Who could have predicted that when he left Madrid on Friday, he would meet a truck driver, see Roman ruins and ranches with fighting bulls and a town full of storks? That was one of the thrills of traveling: the pleasantly unexpected renewing his reasons to be alive.

He had enjoyed his lunch of goat cheese and strips of jamon serrano when he had pulled off the highway onto a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and parked under the shade of some olive trees. His mini-fridge, powered off a lighter in the dashboard, was still well stocked for several more lunches. His sleeping bag was in the back, folded up tight, and the seats reclined into makeshift cots for siestas and over night snoozing, if he didn’t want to bother with a youth hostel.

He thought about the truck driver back at the gas station again, the thickset man with his crew cut and overalls looked a little like one of those baseball coaches George used to have when was little, growing up in that small East Texas town. That town too had a lot of 18-wheelers passing through and George felt a little déjà vu at gas stations. The truck driver invited George to a drink of hierbas.

"As long as you’re here, " said Diego, that’s what the woman behind the counter called him, "you might as well stop by a little town near here and check out las ciguenas. You like birds? Big birds?"

"I guess," George told the ice blue eyes that hadn’t glazed over from years and kilometers of highways. "Not native to where I come from. I saw plenty of herons in Kyoto though. By the river. That’s where I lived before I came here. Is a heron like a stork?"

"Kii-O-Tow?" the truck driver said, his ice blue eyes round with amusement. "See any geisha?"

"I knew a guy with their phone numbers," said George, goose bumps breaking out on his scalp, massaging it, a sensation that sometimes descended upon him when he talked with strangers.

The truck driver gestured and gesticulated, his arms and shoulders pulled by invisible strings, opened his eyes wide to their optic nerves, exclaiming that if George was interested in odd cultural things like bullfights and raw fish, he’d like las ciguenas whose nests grew so heavy, roofs caved in and telephone and electrical lines shorted out, cutting off the entire town. A town full of ciguenas, a must see, a tourist attraction no tourists knew about. George had seen a few storks before in Spanish towns. Usually a lone sentinel keeping guard next to, or in, a nest crowning a cathedral or city hall ayuntamiento. But George had never seen a whole town of storks. He imagined the storks flying and flapping, cawing and squawking across laundry lines and balconies, the sky above the town jammed feathery and busy, adults flying past traffic lights on their daily business, scavenging from garbage cans with their ladle-like beaks and kite-size wings, the babies distending their necks to maximum tautness, crying for grub. One of the local stories was that after a wedding at the church, the young newlyweds, lovers since junior high school, stepped out of the front door and a stork who lived directly above, in the belfry, dumped his load on their heads. The couple was divorced within the year.

"Because of the bad omen from the beginning," winked the truck driver.

"Muy mal," agreed George.

And they drank another round, even though George suggested that they stop. Drinking and driving was harshly penalized where he came from. The last person who needed to be tipsy was a trucker hauling tons of high quality ceramic goods. That only made the truck driver insist more, thereby causing the woman behind the bar to matronly side with George and return the bottle to the shelf. Diegito insisted however and George downed another shot of the strong, sweet, piss-yellow liquid with a touch of anis that burned an invisible path from his throat to his stomach.

The hollows were as big as bean bags, thought George, looking up on main street, a line of nests along a ridge of the church like an outbreak of strange chimneys, each one the same monstrous size. These nests were close. Eagle size, so large that, even if he had been standing on the roof a few feet away, he couldn’t have peered over their thick sides, miniature tornadoes in their infant stages. Swirling with branches. One nest had a Champion’s supermarket bag cemented into its side, the red and white logo of the stick man athlete clearly visible. Another had what looked like Popsicle sticks sticking out of it.

George walked down the main street away from his van, able to hear a pin drop, wondering where the storks were. It was always the same in these little towns. The old folks were left to themselves for most of the year, briefly entertained by their relatives once the summer festivals started in August, and abandoned again once again. He had rolled up the windows, careful to lock the doors. Even if it were a small town and no one seemed to be around, he played it safe. So many years of traveling had streamlined his dress and behavior. His plain, light collared shirt reflected the harmful sunrays and could be considered either formal or informal, depending. He didn’t wear shorts because he didn’t see Europeans customarily wearing shorts. Besides, the jeans could be worn repeatedly without showing dirt. He didn’t wear jewelry so as not to tempt the thieves.

A few old people sat outside their front doors, sitting in a semi-circle, facing the street as if they were at the beach, palming their canes, flapping ribbed fans. He couldn’t distinguish everything they said and wasn’t sure if it was because his Spanish was still not perfect, or if his hearing wasn’t as sharp as it used to be, or if they spoke in some strange dialect. George was sure they were aware of his presence. Being from a small town himself, he knew how it was in these small towns, how everyone was related to each other, how the news spread. George nodded at one old man with a kidney bean shaped birthmark on his bald head.

He turned into a side street, not sure where he was going, a blind instinct telling him to explore the back streets. Ripped posters peeled off the plaster walls and announced the town’s summer festival (the storks drinking sangria with everyone else). The light and temperature decreased a shade and the walls were gray with triangular wedges of a deepening blue above, shadows falling across the walls in sharp, cool trigonometry. George saw another nest, lower, clogging up and bending a second storey gutter, and he stopped and listened. As he listened, a swallow swooped pell-mell down the alleyway towards him, skimming in quick bobs at knee level, rising and falling while continuing its forward zip, whooshing past pink and yellow sheets that had been hung out of a window, making them tremble with its fly-by, then rising at the last second to clear George’s head.

Then more people around another corner. A middle aged, unshaven man rested his palms on the dome of a segmented cane. Across from him sat an old woman in a black dress. Her skin was grooved so deep pine needles could have fit into them. She had white hair whose every strand had lost every last molecule of pigment, but none of its thickness. The old woman’s black dress had ruffles around the collar and cuffs, as if she had been planning a party and ended up attending a funeral forever. George guessed she must have been around a hundred. Farther down the alleyway, a man in overalls stood on a ladder, rolling a fresh coat of white paint onto a white wall. George plucked up his courage.

"Perdoname," George said, "but…where are they?"

He flapped boneless wrists.

"You just missed them," the man in the chair said, matching George’s informality. George immediately liked the guy with a week’s old beard and felt the goose bumps breaking out again.

"By how much?"

"They flew away this morning. So quiet around here now you can hear the sunset. Would you like?" he said, pointing with the flat foot of the cane to an empty lawn chair next to him, the kind that George used to use on family picnics.

George settled himself into the plaid hug of the crisscrossed straps.

"They sure are big," said George, pointing to the gutter.

"They return to the same nest year after year. That’s why los nidos get big as they do. They keep adding new building materials. Wouldn’t be surprised if they had TVs in there." George thought that was pretty funny. " Where are you from?"

George knew he had an accent he would never be able to mask. "Well, I live in Madrid now," George knew that was not the answer, "… but I’m from Texas, originally." He told the man about the pine trees that carpeted the horizon from the airport and the mosquitoes that drew blood. The rehashed summary of the place of his birth seemed more distant each time he repeated it, as the years went by, nostalgia making it seem better and more defined, dulling the reasons why he had left in the first place.

"Si señor. Sure is quiet now. Las cigüeñas make lot of racket at night, if they hear something unexpected, they crank up."

"Like guard dogs?"

"Flying guard dogs," he said. George followed his line of site past a boarded up bar to the foothills with the sun still perched above. "Last one saw him go myself. You just missed them. Flew off to the dam in a great noise this morning."

"Come back in the spring?" George asked.

"Around December. Or thereabouts. They used to come back in spring but now they come back earlier. Getting hotter quicker you know."

The painter had paused in his rolling of white on white. "Global warming," he shouted. George jerked before the syllable "Glo" was out of his mouth, the unexpected loudness magnified by the funnel of the walls. "The storks will be at the dam a while longer," said the painter. "Before heading down to Africa. Won’t they Miss Garcia?"

Miss Garcia, the old woman in black, said nothing. The old woman stayed tilted in her chair, leaning back like a truant at school. She was either senile or deaf, George figured, but still in pretty good shape.

"There’s a dam?" asked George

"Built in 1963," said the man in the picnic chair nearest George.

"Are you crazy?" said the painter, stroking the wall again with another layer of white, gesturing with his wet roller through a beauty parlor with dusty mannequin heads in the window in the direction of the dam. "That dam was built before 1955. I should know. I was married in 1955."

"What are you talking about?" said the man in the picnic chair, tapping the ground with his cane, cherry wood probably, each rap emphasizing the painter’s utter lack of the facts, his voice tone changing to express disbelief at the painter’s grossly misinformed opinions. George knew from experience they were not arguing or angry with one another.

The centenarian let the chair’s other two legs to the ground and slumped into herself, as quiet as George was. After about fifteen minutes of listening to bickering trying to pinpoint when the first brick was laid for the dam, George decided it was time to move on. He got up, thanked the threesome in a small croak, and edged out towards the foothills to stretch a little and enjoy the last warmth of the day.

Spanish sunsets were long. He followed a dirt path that lazily ascended through fields of dry brittle grass. In fields like these he had once flown kites and shot off model rockets. The fields must have been brimming with crops before the young people started moving off to the cities, thought George. In his hometown there would have been baseball diamonds and football fields and rodeos. Here the hills were dry and brittle, ready to burst into flames with a dropped cigarette, looked a little like those in Northern California, where George had attended university before dropping out and flying overseas. He didn’t mind teaching gerunds and prepositions and personal pronouns and "If I were…" as opposed to "If I was…", the difference between "borrow" and "lend", etc., over and over again, if it meant he could have freedom he wanted after class.

George hunched forward and walked up the scored, gradually rising path, enjoying the flex of his loosening muscles, the dying warmth caressing his body, the sun a hand-span away from the horizon, a burning bale of hay. He saw where the fields ended and the dam began, where the storks were supposed to be. The expanse of water, a huge elliptical slick of cobalt, drowning the last gasp of the horizon. He thought of those lakes on the other side of the earth where, so many years ago, during holidays and summer vacation with family and friends he thought would never disappear, he had once water ski-ed, learned how to be a Boy Scout, fished for bass and catfish.

Next to the path he saw a lamppost with its light already on, despite the sun still not having been sucked in by the ridge. As he approached the post, he could hear its upper part humming and smelled something bad, death a couple of days old. At the bottom of the post was a dead stork, balled up in the tight claw of rigor mortis. The grass was dry and sharp and pricked at George’s knees when he kneeled down. Holding his breath, he could see the black markings at the wingtips, its corn yellow talons, its beak, like crimson wax. He supposed the bird could stand almost a meter if the spindly, folded joints were fully extended. A line of ants streamed out of one eye socket. The bird must have landed on the bulb, been zapped by an exposed wire, and fallen straight down.

"Heck," muttered George, startled at the sound of his own voice.

He couldn’t hold his breath anymore and moved away, gazing down at the town sunk into the shallow bowl of the land. He saw the peak of the church steeple and the toy-set of the town. The nests were dots from there. George wondered what the rest of the people in the town might be doing. Preparing jamon y judias verdes in fried olive oil? Getting a communal beer at the one bar he must have missed? Playing those card games of four over green felt tables. He was getting a little hungry and thought about the mini-fridge in his van.

All of a sudden he heard a distant click and whirr. A brilliant rainbow streaked against the sun. A flashing thing, a helmeted rider, a female on a mountain bike in a body hugging suit hurtled toward him with pads protecting her joints. She balanced, half standing, on the bicycle with fluorescent orange sporting shoes in shiny toe clips. Her black suit was skin tight, marked with yellow and blue stripes around the hips and shoulders, accentuating her figure and golden braids flew out of her notched, glowing helmet. He could hear her breathing as she approached. She raised a gloved hand. The fingertips of the gloves were cut off. The bike careened slightly. She almost lost her balance and crashed in front of him. George smiled involuntarily, raised an arm in response, watched the clicking unison of speed and grace glide and diminish down the hill towards the town in glinting, silver flashes. He knew she was young and beautiful, not of that town, probably with a mind difficult to keep up with.