Blackbirds (15 page)

  "You're only twenty-two."

  She snorts. "Which makes me your elder, young man. Can I keep telling my story, here? Your readers are going to be on the edges of their seats."

  "Sorry."

  "So, okay, Dad dies, young girl is left alone with her overly religious, practically Mennonite mother, Evelyn Black. Mother is a repressive force – you know how they always say The Man gonna keep you down? My mother is The Man. Her oppressive thumb makes young girl into a Bible-reading teen who dresses a lot like a forty-year-old librarian, so much so that you expect her to smell like dusty carpets and old books.

  "But that's hardly the truth of who she is. It's just what she thinks she
should
be. It's what her mother tells her is right, is proper. Chaste and charitable, prim and proper, mouth and vagina buttoned up so tight the whole package threatens to strain and pop and take out someone's eye. Ah, but the girl has all these little secrets. To you and everybody else, it's hardly overwhelming, but to her mother, it's the motherfucking Apocalypse. The girl likes to sneak comic books. She likes to stand near other kids listening to their – gasp – rap albums and the Devil's own heavy metal. She gets a secret thrill watching the other kids at school smoke. And then she comes home and doesn't watch TV because they don't
have
a goddamn TV, and she reads her secret comic books and listens to her mother rant about morality, night after night, over and over, the end."

  "The end?"

  "Not really. Obviously. It's just the beginning. The young teenaged librarian – let's call her 'Mary' – is starting to suffer a breakdown. Not in front of anybody, but she goes back to her room at nights and cries herself to sleep, and she has these thoughts where she pulls out great bloody clumps of her own hair, or she knocks her teeth out with hammers, or other selfdefacing horrors. She doesn't act on any of them, which in some ways is worse: It further tightens her, squeezing her until she's ready to explode.

  "Thing is, it's not like the mother is exactly a bad mother. She's not physically abusive – she doesn't whip the girl with wire hangers or anything, doesn't smack her in the tits with a curling iron. She's not exactly
nice
though. She insults the girl daily. Sinner, slattern, slut, whatever. The girl represents a constant disappointment. A big black smear. A bad girl, even though she's a good girl. Maybe the mother can smell the promise of sin. Maybe the mother senses the taint of buried evil."

  "So," Paul asks, "what did you do? You did something. You couldn't take it anymore, and you did something."

  "I had sex."

  Paul blinks. "So?"

  "Right. So what? You come from a world where twelve-yearold girls are texting – excuse me, 'sexting' to each other about how they gave some guy a blumpy–"

  "A blumpy?"

  "C'mon, really? A blow-job while the guy is on the toilet doing Number Twosies? Blow-job plus dumpy equals blumpy?"

  Paul goes pale. "Oh."

  "Yeah.
Oh
. Point is, you come from a place where kids do it, and nobody's surprised. I come from a place where your mother tells you how your lady-parts are really the Devil's mouth, and you don't feed the Devil, oh no. Feed the Devil and he wants more, more, more."

  "You fed the devil."

  "Just once. His name was Ben Hodge. We did the deed. And then he killed himself."

 

 

 

Miriam wants an orange Fanta so bad she can taste the chemical fake-fruit burn on the back of her tongue. But the machine is a Mello Yello, some kind of rip-off of Mountain Dew. She doesn't care. She wants what she wants, and she doesn't want to think about what she doesn't want to think about. Not that it matters, as she has no money for the machine. Oops.

  She thinks,
I want an orange soda. And I want vodka to mix into the orange soda. And, while we're at it, I'd also like to stop being able to see how people are going to bite it. Oh, and a pony. I definitely want a goddamn pony.

  Her thoughts are so loud, she doesn't hear the car enter the parking lot.

  Miriam presses her head to the machine. Then she sees it – a dollar bill.

  "Bonus," she mumbles, reaching for it.

  It's a ruse. A filthy lie. A fake dollar that, when opened, reveals a Jack Chick Christian tract. Some story about how playing games like
Dungeons and Dragons
is basically the same as suckling hell-milk from a demon's tit.

  Miriam crumples it up, goes to throw it, and finds herself face-to-face with a gawky, bony Italian-looking dude in a trim black suit.

  "Jesus Christ," Miriam says.

  The Italian nods, though he is clearly nobody's Lord and Savior (despite a faint resemblance in the nose, which is so low and severe it could be a fishing gaff). Miriam sees a small woman approaching, a short chubby thing with black eyes like hot coals and a set of bangs that look like they were cut with a hedge trimmer and a ruler.

  "Evening," the woman says.

  "Scully," Miriam says to the woman. To the man, she nods: "Mulder."

  "We're FBI," the tall fucker says.

  "I guessed that. That was the joke." She clears her throat. "Never mind."

  "I'm Agent Harriet Adams," the woman explains. "This is Agent Franklin Gallo. We'd like to ask you a few questions."

  "Sure. Ask away. If you're looking for Christian propaganda in cartoon format, I got some of that sweet gospel right here." She opens her palm and shows them the crumpled Chick tract. Her heart is leaping in her chest like a spooked gazelle – she can hear her blood in her ears; she can feel the pulse in her neck pounding like a kick drum. Is this it? Has her past caught up to her? She wonders, how many cigarettes would she be worth in the slammer? All those orange jumpsuits and unshorn women. Shit. Fuck!

  What are her options here? Kick the tall fucker in the crotch? Slit the stubby bitch's throat with the Chick tract, hoping for a wicked paper cut?

  She sees the woman's gaze flick to the left; then she hears feet on sidewalk. Heavy feet.

  Louis's feet.

  "Everything all right?" he asks, walking up.

  The two agents size him up.

  "We're looking for someone," the woman says, and holds out a photo.

  Miriam's throat tightens. She's glad as hell they're not looking for
her
– but there Ashley is in the photo. Some party. Red Christmas lights. Laughing. That smug eyebrow. That mouth curled forever in a dickish grin. It's him.

  Louis sees it. Miriam waits for him to give up the ghost. If they find Ashley, he'll roll over on her. Which means they'll find her. She can't have that.

  "You know this guy?" the Italian asks.

  The woman says, "His name is Ashley Gaynes."

  "That's a dude, not a chick," Miriam says, verbally feinting left.

  "He's a male, yes," the woman says, frowning.

  "But his name's Ashley."

  They stare at her like they want her dead.

  She holds up her hands. "Oh. I just figured – never mind."

  "Have you seen him? Or not?"

  "Ummm. Nope. I see a lot of dudes. I haven't seen this dude."

  The woman thrusts the photo upward, so that it's unavoidably in Louis's line of sight.

  "And you, sir? Have you seen this man?"

  Louis seems irritated. He tightens. "I'm sorry, who are you people again?"

  Miriam leans in, and says in a Southern affectation to match his real one: "Baby, they said they're the FBI."

  "Can I see some ID?"

  The Italian rolls his eyes. The woman says nothing and shows hers. The man, exasperated, follows suit.

  "No," Louis says. "I haven't seen him. Sorry, y'all."

  The Italian steps in, cocks his chin, pops his knuckles. "You take one more look at that photo, and you think real hard about it–"

  "Frankie," the woman says, putting her little mitt on his chest. "We can stop bothering these people. They don't know anything. Thank you for your time, folks."

  The two of them turn and head back toward a black Cutlass Ciera parked a few spots down from the motel office. They seem an odd couple, Miriam thinks. Like a pair of pooches: a little bulldog tottering next to a bony Great Dane.

  "They're looking for your brother," Louis says. He doesn't sound happy.

  "My brother. Yeah. Thank you. Y'know, for not selling him out."

  "I don't feel comfortable lying to the law," he says as they watch the black Oldsmobile exit the lot. It drives off down the avenue, an inky shadow lost to the darkness.

  "That's because you have a handful of redeeming traits like honor and integrity and honesty and other positive qualities that are generally foreign to me. It means a lot to me. Really."

  He takes a deep breath. "So what happened back there?"

  "These two FBI agents–"

  "No. In the room."

  She knew that, she just felt like avoiding it. "I don't know. I freaked out. I wanted an orange soda."

  "An orange soda."

  "Like I said, bitches be crazy."

  "Any chance we can talk about it? Or just hang out, watch some TV?"

  He's reaching, she thinks. It's sweet. But –

  "I can't. I have to go. I have to tell my brother, and go kick his ass for making me lie to a pair of federal agents."

  "Can we do it again?" he asks.

  His face is sad, pleading. This is a lonely man, she thinks; he must be, he wants to spend time with
her
. But then there it is, a flash, a shadow over his face – a pair of gouged-out eye sockets, four strips of electrical tape, blood pouring, maggots crawling, rust flakes falling from a shitty fish-gutter knife. She shudders.

  "I'm an awful person," she declares. "I'm a hideous little nogoodnik. I have horrible thoughts. I do horrible things. I curse, I drink, I smoke. I basically have shit in my mouth and my head, and it always comes pouring out of me–"
Like a stream of maggots
, she thinks. "And you don't need that. Louis, you're a genuinely nice guy. A
good person
. You don't want to be with me. You'll just get covered in shit. My shit. My problems, my emotions, my everything. I am like a bucket of sewage turned over your head. Go find a nice girl. Someone in a sundress. Someone who isn't so comfortable with the words 'mother', 'cock', 'fucker', and 'sucker'."

  "But–"

  "No but. This is it. You're sweet."

  She gets on her tippy-toes and kisses his chin.

  "Have a good life," she says, and she wants to tell him the truth. She wants to say that this is it for him, he doesn't have long – she wants to exhort him to go get a prostitute, go eat the nastiest and most expensive cheeseburger he can find, and for God's sake stay away from lighthouses. But she says none of those things. A tiny part of her hopes that if she can stay away from him, that will be the secret. The trick. That will be what saves him. It's a lazy, passive theory – but since being proactive hasn't earned her a damn thing yet, it's all she has.

  "Wait!" he calls after her, but it's too late. She's in the Mustang. She coaxes it to life.

  And she sprays gravel peeling out of the parking lot.

 

"Another bust," Frankie says, rubbing his eyes. He yawns. "We're never going to find this little pecker. Ingersoll's going to have our balls for brunch."

  "I don't have balls," Harriet says as she pulls the car over just past the motel entrance. She leaves the car running but dims the lights.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Waiting."

  "For what?"

  "For the girl."

  "What girl? That girl we just met?"

  "Yes. They were lying."

  Frankie blinks. "What? Who? Paul Bunyan back there and his little snippy bitch?"

  "Both of them. The girl lies better than the man. So much so that she almost had me. But she tries too hard. The man's lies, on the other hand, were utterly transparent."

  "How do you always know this stuff?"

  "The eyes. Ingersoll taught me that. They lie, so they blink. Or they look up and to the right, accessing the creative portions of the brain. Pupils shrink. An eyelid trembles. It's a panic response. I can sense it. Most prey animals respond by a twitch of the head, a sudden shift of the eyes. Lying is a fear response. Those two were scared."

  As the car idles, they hear the popping of gravel.

  In moments, a white Mustang comes racing past. Tail-lights twinkle.

  "And the horse is out of the gate," Harriet says.

  She eases the car back onto the road, silent and deadly as a shark.

 

 

 

"Ben Hodge."

  Miriam says the name, lets it hang out there like so much dirty laundry on the line.

  "Let's just get this out of the way: Ben was weak. Weak like I was weak. Here was this kid in school. Not ugly, but not a quarterback, either. Mop of dirty blond hair. Freckle-cheeked. Dull eyes, but sweet. We had a lot in common. We were both loners, more by necessity than by any actual desire to be that way. We both were homely nobodies. Both had dead dads and oppressive moms – you know about my mother, but his? Ugh. A haggard, horrible woman. A
cave
woman. She was – no shit, get this – a
logger.
You know, climb up the trees, hug the stump with your thunder-thighs, chainsaw spraying sawdust."

  She pauses, because she is remembering.

  "Go on," Paul says.

  "We weren't friendly, he and I. Never said two words to each other. But sometimes I'd catch him staring at me, or he'd catch me staring at him. We'd pass each other in the halls, stolen glances, all that clichéd crap. So one night, it happened. My mother was not a drinker by and large. Condemned it like it was the milk of Satan. And yet, I knew that once in the bluest moon she'd take a nip from this nuclear green crème de menthe bottle she kept under her bed. I stole it, and I went right to Ben's house, and I did the stupid teen thing where you throw shit at the other person's window to get them to come out – I threw twigs because with my luck I'd throw a pebble and break the window. His house was one of those country farmhouses with the old, warped glass. Fragile.