Blackbirds (26 page)

  "That actually works."

  "It does not, shut up. I'm fucked here, which means you're fucked, too."

  "He stabs out my eyes."

  Miriam's heart goes cold. "I know."

  "I call your name before I die. Isn't that strange?"

  "No," she lies.

  "I'm going to die."

  "Everybody dies."

  "I die badly, painfully, tortured to death."

  "It is what it is."

  "You did this to me. You have to undo it."

  "Fate gets what fate wants."

  Her mother turns to her.

  She looks into Miriam's eyes. Even though she's sitting, she reaches up with arms made long, so long they stretch across the room, and pulls Miriam to her. The world shifts, drags, smears in long blurs and streaks of light.

  Her mother says: "And thine eye shall not pity, but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot."

  Miriam stammers, "I don't understand–"

  And then the dream is rudely ended.

 
 

 

Rudely ended by a fist, actually.

  Harriet's fist. Right in Miriam's solar plexus. The air sucks out of her lungs. She'd double over if she could, but she can't, so instead she just coughs like she's trying to expel a squirming knot of angry weasels from her chest cavity.

  "Awake now?" Harriet asks.

  Miriam blinks away the haze from whatever drugs Frankie stuck into her. She notices that Harriet is wearing black gloves.
So I don't see how she dies? Is she really that much of a control freak?

  "In a manner of–" She wants to say
speaking
, but she only wheezes and hacks, trying to find breath to fill her windbags.

  "The solar plexus is an excellent place to hit," Harriet explains. "At least, it is if your target is untrained. It's a massive bundle of nerves. Fighters know to toughen and tighten that area. They strengthen the muscles there to form a braid of armor. For everybody else, though, it's a beautiful and easy target to strike."

  Miriam draws one last gasp, feels like her body has caught up with itself.

  "Thanks for the MMA fighting lesson, Tito Ortiz."

  "I don't know who that is."

  Miriam licks her dry, cracked lips. "Not really a surprise. So, hey, thanks for waking me up out of my dream. It was getting a little too creepy in there for me; my head is no longer a safe place to visit, I think. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

  Harriet's hand forms a flat hatchet blade, and she chops it right into Miriam's neck.

  Miriam gags and gasps anew. Her face goes red. Her eyes feel like they might suck back into her brain or pop out and roll across the floor.

  "Mastoid process," Harriet clarifies. "Protects the windpipe. Hit that, and it forces the target to gag. The gag reflex is an instant limiter in a fight. It represents a terrible panic state for the body, which offers supreme advantage to the attacker."

  When Miriam can breathe again, and when she's curtailed the urge to dry heave the dust and acid that's probably lining her stomach, she speaks.

  "Why the–"
Hack, cough
. "– play-by-play?"

  "Because I want you to know that I know what I'm doing."

  "Again, why?"

  "So your instinct will be to fear me. Eventually, my very presence becomes torture. If a man abuses a dog enough, soon the dog fears all men. The dog becomes weak. The creature exists in the
flight
mode of
fight or flight
, always ready to piss itself and turn tail."

  Miriam almost laughs. "Trust me, I fear you. I fear the unmerciful shit out of you. Though, truth be told, I also fear that haircut of yours. It looks like someone cut it with a fire axe. Jesus, you could probably slit somebody's throat with those bangs."

  Harriet just delivers three hammer punches to Miriam's armpit.

  Miriam's body is a switchboard of pain. She cries out.

  "Armpit. Another major bundle of nerves."

  "What do you want?" Miriam shouts. "You want to ask me something? I'll tell you! Just ask. Stop it, please. Just stop."

  "Begging. That's new for you."

  Miriam almost weeps. "I like to remain versatile. Like a shark, swim forward or die. So, just ask me what you want to ask me. I'm an open book."

  "I have nothing to ask you."

  "You're not trying to find out how Hairless dies?"

  Harriet shakes her head.

  "Then why are you doing this?"

  Harriet smiles. It's a scary sight. Her teeth are small, tiny white pebbles in that ankle-biter mouth. "Because I really enjoy it."

  
Shit. She's going to kill you.

  Miriam has to find a way out of this. To forestall it, then stop it.

  Miriam reaches: "Hairless wants you to torture me endlessly? Seems strange that you're just going to abuse your new coworker into bloody, babbling uselessness."

  "He doesn't know. This isn't his desire. It's mine." Harriet's eye twinkles. "Sometimes a girl has to take a little time for herself."

  "And a mani-pedi just wouldn't do?"

  Harriet puts one foot up on the tub's rim.

  "You and me," she says, "we're alike."

  "That's true," Miriam says, going with it. But she thinks:
On Bizarroworld.

  "We're both survivors. We both do what we have to do to make it to the next day. But even more important, you and I enjoy what we do. You're a monster, and I'm a monster, and we embrace it. I embrace it more than you, of course. You still pretend that you're troubled, tortured, a little drama queen with the back of her hand pressed to her head –
oh, woe is me
. I've moved past that."

  "Nothing about you is troubled or tortured?" Miriam asks.

  "Nothing that bothers me anymore. I've let it all go."

  "How'd you manage that?"

  "Ingersoll showed me the way."

  "Hairless? And how's that? I bet it's a real interesting story."

  Harriet tells her.

 
 

 

I chopped up my husband and ran him through the garbage disposal.

 
 

 

Miriam waits to see if there's more.

  Harriet stands firm-jawed, flexing her fists.

  Somewhere, crickets are chirping. Tumbleweeds are tumbling. Between Miriam and Harriet sits a giant gulf, a wide open space occupied by a howling wind and not much more.

  As a delaying tactic, this does Miriam little good.

  "That's it?" Miriam says.

  Harriet seems confused. "What do you mean?"

  "That's not a story. That's the end of a story."

  "It suits me fine."

  "I just figure," Miriam says, "that there's more to this tale. You don't just one day up and chop up your husband and stuff him down the – garbage disposal? Really?"

  "It's doable," Harriet says without inflection. "Not the bones. But the rest."

  "Your husband."

  "My husband."

  Once more, silence. The house around them settles: creaking, squeaking, a quiet cracking like the sound of a spoon hitting the burnt sugar crust of crème brûlée.

  "I just – I just feel like a story is hiding in there somewhere."

  Harriet steps up over the tub's lip and elbows Miriam in the face. In the jaw, actually. Miriam sees a burst of white light followed by a sucking vortex of outer space, like a black hole coming for her on a galloping horse. Once more, she tastes blood. Her tongue idly searches out a wiggly tooth toward the back of her mouth.

  Miriam turns her head and spits scarlet sputum against the faded tile.
Spat
. She thinks first about hawking it into Harriet's eye, but at this point, she can't imagine that would be productive. Maybe later.

  "Oooo-kay," Miriam says, already feeling her lip going fat and numb, "so you just one day up and decided to hack up your husband and shove him into the garbage disposal."

  "It was deserved, if that's what you're asking."

  "It's not. But it sounds like, contrary to what you were suggesting earlier, there's more to the story." Miriam blinks. "I think I'm drooling blood."

  "You are."

  "Oh. Good to know."

  Harriet's cell phone vibrates. She opens it, looks at the screen so that Miriam cannot see. Her face shows no emotion, but she does pause and seem to consider.

  Then, finally, Harriet shrugs and tells her story in full.

 

 

 

Walter never made sense to me.

  I married him because it's what you did. It's what my mother did. My grandmother. It's what all the girls in my neighborhood did. They found men, and they supported those men through thick and thin. In my life, women were crutches. Stepping stools. Vacuum cleaners with breasts.

  My husband never had any sense of elegance, no grasp of sequence or consequence.

  When a storm rides up the coast, it leaves debris. Loose boards, paper cups, flotsam, jetsam. Nothing but discards and broken things.

  That was Walter. He'd come home from work – sales manager at a pigment plant, where they sold dyes and pigments to cosmetic manufacturers, mostly – and his process was a casting off, a dismissal of the order I'd created.

  That's what I remember most about Walter. The signs of his passing.

  He'd have pigment on his shoes, and there'd be blue footprints on the carpet.

  He'd kick those shoes off under the coffee table and leave them there.

  Dirty handprints on a shirt, a curtain, the armrests of his chair.

  A tie hanging on a doorknob or the headboard to our bed.

  A greasy highball glass on the corner of the nightstand.

  His very touch was like cancer. He'd take a good thing – organization, cleanliness, perfection – and subvert it, diminish it, dirty it up and dry it out.

  Our intimate life was no different. He'd lie atop me, grunting and thrusting. Always with that grotesque slapping of skin, like the sound of a chorus of frogs or toads forever applauding.

  His hands were always so sweaty. His hair, too, by the end of it. I felt drowned in the stuff. He ate submarine sandwiches during the day. Oil, vinegar, onion, garlic. It came out in his sweat; wherever he touched me, he left that odor behind. I felt greasy. Pawed. Molested.

  Walter was a clumsy ape.

  Three years into our marriage, Walter wanted to have children. He told me so right after dinner. We never ate together; it was always him at the coffee table and me in the other room, at the breakfast nook, waiting for him to be done so I could go try to clean up his messes before they left a permanent mark.

  That night I'd made rigatoni in pink sauce, a vodka sauce. I remember this as plain as day. One of the noodles had jumped the edge of his plate – he was always so sloppy with his eating – and sat there on the carpet. It was like a worm, burrowing in. The melted Parmesan cheese had already stuck to the fibers. The pink sauce had already soaked in. I thought, I'll need to steamclean the whole carpet. Again.

  That's when he said it.

  He stood up, put his hand on the small of my back as I bent over to pick up the fallen noodle, and said it so matter-of-factly.

  "Let's have kids."

  Three words. Each word a clump of dirt. Each a dirty noodle on the carpet.

  I stood up and I had my first moment of rebellion.

  I said, "We'll have children when you stop acting like a dirty little baby."

  Walter had a chance there. He could have saved himself. He could have said something nice or just said nothing.

  But he opened his mouth and said, "You watch your goddamn mouth."

  And he did this… thing. He grabbed my wrist – the wrist that led to the hand that still held that stupid rigatoni noodle – and he gripped my wrist tight, so tight it hurt. He meant for it to hurt. I saw it in his eyes.

  I pulled my hand free.

  "That settles that," he said.

  Then I walked into the kitchen.

  I went to the blender. It was old, an Oster two-speed with the beehive base and the heavy glass pitcher.

  I picked it up by the handle, and I marched back into the living room.

  Walter had slumped back down in his chair. He looked up at me as I stood there.

  "What are you doing with that?" he asked.

  And I bashed it over his head.

  It didn't knock him out, but it hurt him very badly. He fell out of the chair, bleeding, and couldn't stand up no matter how many times he tried.

  I pulled him into the kitchen.

  I got out the block of kitchen knives, plus a meat tenderizer, plus a meat cleaver.

  I cut him apart. Starting out and moving in, so he was alive for much of it. Fingers whittled down. Toes. Fillets of calf, thigh, bicep. Two hundred pounds of flesh. And buckets of blood settling into the grout-lines of the kitchen tile.

  I put his bones in trash bags. I put his meat into the garbage disposal.

  The disposal was a good one. It only jammed at the end, with his scalp hair. It broke it, actually. Smoke drifted up from inside the drain's mouth.

  I didn't know what to do, then, so I called the police and waited.

  They arrested me. I didn't resist.

  No bail for me. The community was apparently quite shocked at the turn of events. Our neighborhood was quiet, middle-class; the most that ever shook the sheets was a domestic abuse charge, or maybe some kid setting off car alarms.