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“Negrito, ven acá,” says Abuelo. “I got a new one.”

He only calls me Negrito when he forgets himself. My Pop doesn’t like it. There’s nothing wrong with it, Mamí says: It doesn’t mean anything. Pop just says I know, but I don’t like it.

Personally, I don’t mind. Abuelo’s excited. He’s always excited when there’s a new one. “See if you can spot it,” he says.

The new one isn’t in the pairing loft. It’s the same three babies in there, poking their heads up from behind the bricks in the corner. And the mom: a funny little check with dirty-snow wings and a glowing purple nape, cocking her head at me.

Abuelo is standing by the racing loft, grinning his yellow grin. Swaying his hips, just a little. He doesn’t move around a lot. He’s still fit and all, but when you’re old, I think maybe you save your movements up, in case you might need them later.

He built the lofts himself, like all fliers do. Big cabinets of wood and chicken wire, painted a blue more like the river than the sky. And he built a shelter with a bed and an ancient boom box, so he could spend more time up here on the roof with his birds, and he surrounded it all with a potted forest of maple and dogwood trees. The trees used to be a little taller than me, and now they’re a lot taller than me. Above them, a train of dirty gray clouds chugs across the sky. From where the coops are you can see the big blue tower under construction on 132nd Street, by the waterfront, and the raggedy-tooth skyline of Harlem across the river, and you can hear the traffic on the Major Deegan and Willis Avenue, and the bak-bak-bak from the back lot.

There are forty-six pigeons in the racing loft, all nestled on their shelves, murmuring. Each one has a blue band on its leg. A few of them also have yellow bands: those are Jeremy’s birds, the ones Abuelo lured away. Jeremy is the only other flier left in the neighborhood. I’ve never met him—just seen his flock, turning pinwheels over St. Ann’s Avenue.

There were forty-six last time I counted them, too. But I look at them all, just to be sure. Abuelo always tells me I’m good at spotting patterns, and I am. It’s easy—all you have to do is look. Start with the basics, like overall color and wing markings, then work down to the details: the taper of the tail, the crop of the bill, the color of the eyes. It doesn’t take long to confirm that these are the same forty-six birds I saw on Monday.

So where’s the new one? It’s not one of the feral pigeons strutting around beneath the coop. There’s a couple I haven’t seen before, but Abuelo wouldn’t be so excited about them. He’s still grinning at me.

I nod at the birds in the racing loft. “Are they hungry?”

“Not right now,” says Abuelo.

I can tell they aren’t, but Abuelo likes it when I ask.

There’s an ice cream truck tinkling away somewhere in the direction of Jeremy’s building. And another, fainter, to the north. I’m sweating. There’s been a lot of rain lately, and today the air is fat. I like it on the roof because the air moves around, but some days that’s not enough. Abuelo doesn’t sweat, though. Not unless he’s building something.

Bak-bak-bak. That’s Mamí in the back lot. Hammering again.

The new one is a visitor: I spot it in the branches of a maple tree. “There,” I say.

Abuelo laughs. “You got it,” he says. He makes a little turn, still doing the side-to-side with his hips, and picks up a book from a table. “Here,” he says. “I forgot my reading glasses.” This is what he always says when there’s a new breed. It means, Look this one up for me, Sebastian. He gives me the book. It’s the Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America.

Lately, there’s been a lot of new breeds. That’s a pattern too.

The visitor is in the pigeon family, but it’s no tippler or figurita. It looks delicate, like a mourning dove. A natural flier. Not like the rock pigeons who have to hustle their way into the sky before they find their grace. It’s twilight-colored, with lightly checked wings and a rosy-bronze neck. A black bill, bright red feet and eyes. Elegant long tail feathers.

I can feel Abuelo watching me while I look through the Field Guide. After a few minutes, he leans in. “You find it?” he asks. He’s grinning like I’m about to tell him the punchline to his favorite joke. I close the Field Guide and hand it back to him.

“No, Abuelo,” I say. “It’s not in the book.”

“Ah,” he says. He looks pleased. It’s a punchline he wasn’t expecting. “Not in the book.”

***

Full story available in Zone 3: A Literary Journal (Vol. 36, No. 1), Spring 2021