It was no problem making her out in the dim light of the saloon. She was a deep-dish redhead with a figure that just wouldn’t quit, and she left a trail of interrupted conversations and distracted looks behind her. When she passed my barstool, she focused on me for a second, then looked away, smiling as if to herself.
Before I knew it she materialized beside me in a puff of some heady perfume, an unlit cigarette in her long fingers. Her green predatory gaze swept over me briefly, then rested on the bartender’s back as he fixed a cocktail. Tough luck for him this time.
I scraped my Zippo off the bar and lit her cigarette, watching her eyes acknowledge me briefly in the lighter’s flare. I fumbled out a deck of Luckies, stuck one to my lower lip, and lit up, my eyes fixed on hers. Why not, I wondered: I was on a job, but my contact was late, and she was something special.
“Sure,” she said, glancing at the gold watch on her wrist and then away. “Sure, why not? Rye and ginger, OK?”
“I don’t remember hearing myself ask if you wanted a drink,” I answered, as quickly as I could. I was going to say something wiser, but she interrupted me.
“You’re Willie, right? Willie Wren? You’re waiting for the Fat Man, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, matter of fact,” I said, relaxing a bit and hooking a finger at the bartender. When he went off to make her drink I went on, “I thought he was coming in person.”
“He’s taking care of something–for you. So he sent me.” She sent a smoke-ring over the bar like a warning shot. “So, you got a complaint?”
“No, no–no complaint.” I gave her a smile I reserve for nervous and difficult clients.” So what did the Fat Man ask you to do? Hit me up for a drink?”
I tossed a slug of bourbon against my tonsils, feeling my gut warm, my eyes carefully on the bottles behind the bar. When she didn’t answer, I looked her way, and found her looking at me.
“Yeah, Willie,” she breathed, her voice husky, her fingers fanned at her throat, “Yeah, the Fat Man says to tell you one thing–grosbeaks.”
“Grosbeaks?” I croaked. I hadn’t expected this. “What kind of grosbeaks?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said, and wet her lipstick with rye, tidying up with the pink tip of her tongue.
“C’mon, lady, don’t kid around,” I boiled over. “What do you mean, grosbeaks? Is the Fat Man playing some kind of game?”
She didn’t say anything, just gave me a lash with those hot green eyes.
“Look, I came here, didn’t I? Why don’t you level with me?” When I saw her look my way I butted my smoke roughly and stood up. “Have it your way, baby,” I said. I picked my binoculars up off the bar and looped the strap behind my neck.
“No…wait, Willie–don’t go.” She took my arm, her voice urgent. “Listen…he did say grosbeaks, blue grosbeaks.”
I didn’t think she knew what she was saying. How could she? I looked down, saw the pair of Jason autofocus binoculars concealing her cleavage. They still had a price sticker on them. Something was screwy here.
I lurched toward her, stopping with my face a few inches from hers. “Blue grosbeaks?” I demanded, my voice harsh.
She looked up then, her eyes wide open. “Yeah, Willie. Like I told you. Blue grosbeaks, at Crown City Wildlife Area. Lots of them. That’s all he said. Honest.” I saw her hand move to her purse, and inside a cute .25 automatic nestled beside her unthumbed field guide. “Don’t you believe me?”
I bowed my head. My heart was leaping like a beached fish. “Well, baby, I don’t know what to believe right now.” When I finally raised my eyes she was gone.
* * * * * *
June 3 Avids trips are unusual, and we didn’t expect extra folks to show up, after a typo in the Song Sparrow announced our departure at a pusillanimous 8:30 AM, and only nine hardy birders showed up for a long drive to the southernmost tip of Ohio at Crown City Wildlife Area (CCWA) in Gallia & Lawrence counties. We went there for the grosbeaks, the highest known concentration of them in the state, and other grassland birds. As it was, an early wrong turn produced a good representation of the woodland breeders of southern Ohio before we got back to the upland grassy areas. CCWA looks, at least from certain angles, like a well-watered Wyoming landscape, where the observer involuntarily looks for lark buntings and prairie falcons. Instead, we saw Henslow’s and grasshopper sparrows, dickcissels, prairie and blue-winged warblers, and…blue grosbeaks. Oddly, not a single bobolink was found. In the end, adding in the usual roadside birds, all of our species seen were in the CCWA, except for a hummingbird later in Jackson County. A lovely place actually, unnatural as it is as a habitat here; redolent with yellow clover, with vistas of steep rolling slopes in every direction, and deep damp deeply-wooded ravines on either side down to areas where the alleged boom economy hadn’t reached, apparently.
Our plans called for a stop at Lake Katherine SNP for woodland birds. Here we found few, singing having slowed considerably by early afternoon. But banks of flowering mountain laurel, sandstone cliffs, and towering hemlocks were consolations, as were mushrooms, galls, butterflies, moths, wildflowers, and a five-lined skink.
Bird-wise, however, things got worse as we couldn’t even find Liberty WA only ten miles to the west. Later in the day, we ran in to CAS president Dave Horn, who explained that locals who resent government in any form sometimes remove signage to the area. Our final stop, Calamus Swamp, encountered the breakup of CAS’s dedication ceremonies there–local dignitaries, hundreds of members, cars overflowing onto berms for hundreds of yards along 104–but not much in the way of birds. So we quit while we were more or less ahead, not too unhappy with the bird list that follows. It certainly lacks breadth, but has depth for grassland and woodland species.
Total Species = 76
A = Crown City Wildlife Area
B = Lake Katherine SNP
C = Calamus Swamp
D = Calamus Swamp to Columbus
R = Seen en route to that location
