IN THE AFTERNOON WE WENT to the bird sanctuary at High Island, which wasn’t an island, just a little town with a church and a motel that we drove around till we finally found the entrance. Jenny liked birds. I was indifferent, but stubborn: If we looked for something we had to find it. Even once we parked the car and walked into the sanctuary, the place seemed birdless, till we turned the corner and there they were, dozens of them, a wall of roseate spoonbills in trees that reminded me of the wallpaper in my grandmother’s dining room. A couple of alligators swam in the water below. “Horrible,” said my friend Jenny. “I think they’re darling,” I told her. But really, I thought they were beautiful and terrifying in a way that made me feel alive. Jenny herself was a spoonbill, in a pink fake fur coat she’d bought the day before in a New Orleans thrift shop. I was surely one of those gators—big-eyed, voracious, the tagalong friend until I bit.
We were young then. We’d been driving since Boston in a Dodge Charger, which we were supposed to deliver to a couple who’d retired to Vallejo, California. Jenny had found their index
