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the bathtub. Martha’s arm stuck out of the comforter, long fingers grasping the TV remote. Lace clicked off the set.
    Makeup covered the pressboard dresser. Base and mascara. Cream eye shadows in a dozen shades. Red lipsticks. All waterproof. Sea-colored rhinestones to stick at the outer corner of each eye and on their false eyelashes. It was Lace’s job to put color on each of her cousins, the same as it had been before she joined the show.
    If her cousins showed for call late from flirting with local men, Lace barely had time to do her own makeup. Not that it mattered. Abuela kept her in the background, a mermaid who flicked her tail and then disappeared into the shadows of sunken trees.
    Lace took off her dress and twisted to look at her escamas, jeweling her lower back like coins of water. Each one was round, the size of a dime, raised a little like a mole. They shone like the cup of an abalone shell. A sprinkling of scales off a pale fish, a gift from the river goddess Apanchanej .
    Las sirenas all had them. Alexia’s spotted the back of her neck. Sisters Reyna and Leti wore theirs on opposite shoulder blades.
    Martha was lucky. Hers encircled her lower calf like an anklet, hidden by the costume tail. Any paillettes she wore were for decoration.
    Lace sank down on her side of the bed. Her skirt fluffed, and a wisp of black wafted out. She pinched the air and caught it between her fingers. A feather, dark as obsidian, streaked with the red of wine and pomegranate seeds. She’d never seen one like it, with all that red.
    The color turned her throat sour. It made her lower back prickle. If it brushed her birthmarks, it might make each one peel away like a scab.
    She took the feather out to the parking lot, struck a match from one of the motel books, and lit it. The fire ate through the plume. She let it fall to the ground and then stamped it out until it crumbled to ash.
     
    Entre l’arbre et l’écorce il ne faut pas mettre le doigt.
    Don’t put your finger between the tree and the bark.
    Cluck watched his grandfather lean an elbow out of the Morris Cowley’s driver’s side window. The wind from the highway made the end of his cigarette glow.
    “Those things’ll kill you, you know,” Cluck said.
    “So will the things they eat in this country,” Pépère said. The soda in the liquor store horrified Alain Corbeau, those colors bright as neon tubes. He thought Kraft Singles contained, within a few square inches, all American evils. His career at the adhesive plant had only strengthened his belief that chemicals belonged on the flaps of envelopes and between layers of pressboard, not in the stomach.
    Cluck laid two new peacock feathers out on the dashboard, both pale as swans’ wings, thanks to a recessive allele. Leucism. It left nothing but white, and the faintest flashes of sunrise colors if the light hit the barbs the right way.
    Locals swore the white peacock of Elida Park was a myth, no more real than a green flash at dusk. But today the bird had dragged his train across the grass and left behind these two perfect tail feathers.
    Cluck’s grandfather lifted one off the dashboard. It let off a little blue. “What will you do with them?” he asked.
    Cluck held the passenger door handle. Whenever the truck upshifted, its weight pulled on his fingers. The latch was so old that if Pépère sped, it might come unhooked, and the door might fly open. “Same thing I do with the blue ones, I guess.”
    His grandfather set the feather down. “Your hard work will never be worn, then. You’ll never catch anyone in this family in white wings.”
    Pépère parked the Morris Cowley behind the Craftsman house, their home for the weeks they’d be in Almendro. The plumbing squealed, the floorboards groaned back and forth, and on windy nights, the attic murmured to the second floor.
    Cluck didn’t have to hear it though. He slept in the costume trailer, a blue and white 1961 Shasta Compact. It saved his cousins from