Blackbirds (6 page)

  Miriam sees a glint: Gray Pubes, clutching his nuts with one hand, draws a knife.

  Hot Dog's hands shove her forward.

  Fat Dude's raising the busted pool cue above Ashley's skull.

  It's all happening so fast and, yet, so slow. She's dull at her edges. Half-drunk, frankly.

  Time to end it. Time for Momma's Little Life Saver.

  Miriam reaches in her pocket as Gray Pubes advances on her. She sidesteps Hot Dog. Fat Dude bellows something, and his fingers – even the broken, crooked ones – curl tight around his weapon. Miriam's hand finds what she's looking for. She has it out. And she's using it.

  It's pepper spray. Fine grain. Shoots in a stream, not in a fog. Good for dogs, bears, and Fat Dudes.

  She whips it around wildly. The stream hits Fat Dude's eyes, and he howls, swatting at the stream like somehow that'll help. A blade swishes through air and she blasts Gray Pubes, too. Hot Dog makes a play, grabbing her wrist with his hand –

  
A baby deer on wobbly legs runs out into the middle of the road and stops there, standing in the darkness, framed by the bright circle of a motorcycle headlight. Hot Dog's too busy kissing some old tattooed chick with a volcanic archipelago of cold sores around her mouth to see, and by the time he extracts his tongue from her snaggletoothed maw, it's too late. He turns the bike, just missing the deer's little white flicking tail. Tire catches gravel. The bike skids, then flips. Hot Dog isn't wearing a helmet. Face meets road. Gravel and asphalt form a belt sander. It takes half his face off like it wasn't more than ground beef. Eye tumbles from shattered socket. Rag-doll body folds end over end, his spine bowing, then snapping. The chick flies overhead like some confused superhero, her arms pinwheeling. She cries out. The baby deer runs into the brush.

  – and Miriam sidesteps, thrusts the pepper spray into his mouth, and fills his throat with the stuff. It only takes two seconds before he falls backward, throwing up onto the bar's cold concrete floor, face red, eyes like blisters, snot and sweat in a steady stream.

  Miriam pulls Ashley up.

  "We have to run," she says.

  Fat Dude claws at his eyes with a broken hand.

  Ashley grabs the other half of the broken pool cue and smashes it over Fat Dude's head. Miriam shoves him.

  "I said,
run
!"

  Ashley bolts, laughing.

  On the way out, Miriam hurls a twenty dollar origami boulder behind the bar, where Paleface is hiding. Her shoulders hit the door, knocking it open. The outside air hits her, along with the smell of wet asphalt and spilled beer. It's almost dizzying. She damn near trips on a hunk of broken parking lot. The piss-yellow street lights are otherworldly. The distant sound of cars on the highway fills her head. She feels lost. Where to go? Where to run?

  Ashley's hand finds the small of her back.

  "This way," he says.

  She follows. He fumbles in his pocket for a set of keys, and before Miriam knows it, he's popping the driver's side door of a white late-1980s Ford Mustang.

  "Get in!" he yells.

  Like the cockroach from Del Amico's motel room, she does as told.

  The car's interior is dark, cluttered, dingy. Vinyl is torn in places. Coffee cups and plastic soda bottles form a sticky trash pile at her feet. A pair of playing card deodorizers dangle from the mirror, but they've long lost their ability to conceal the cigarettes-and-feet funk.

  Ashley twists the key in the ignition, but the engine gutters. It turns over again and again –
guh-guh-guh-guh,
a stuttering asthmatic – but never starts.

  "What the fuck?" she asks. "C'mon!"

  "I know," he barks back at her. His foot taps the gas pedal.

  
Guh-guh-guh-grrrrr-guh.

  The bar doors – a hundred feet away, maybe less – explode open.

  Fat Dude tumbles out. Even in the ruined-liver light of the parking lot, Miriam can see the white ring of spit spackling his rage-howl mouth, the mucus swinging from his nostrils and eye corners like he's some frothing bull.

  She can
also
see the shotgun in his hand. She has no idea where it came from – behind the bar? – but it doesn't matter, because it exists, and he has it, and he's pissed.

  "Go, go, go!" Miriam screams. "Gun!"

  The car heeds her panic and rumbles to life. The engine pops and shudders, but it's up-and-at-'em-time. Ashley throws it into reverse, and guns it backward – unfortunately, toward the angry mountain with the pump-action shotgun.

  The gun goes off.

  The back windshield explodes against the seats. A rattle and patter of glass bits.

  The Mustang, like the wild horse for which it is named, bucks when Ashley slams it into drive. The car kicks back a cloud of stone and exhaust. It gallops forward like someone's trying to stick a riding crop up its ass. Another booming roar from the shotgun, and Miriam hears pellets punch little holes in the back end of the car, but it's too late for Fat Dude.

  The car busts out of the parking lot, tires squealing. Ashley laughs.

 
 

 

Night.

  A small house sits on a curvy back road. Wisteria – beautiful in its own way, but listed as a weed species by the great state of North Carolina – chokes one half of the house, binding it in thick vines like strangling fingers and purple flowers like clusters of pale grapes.

  Somewhere, a dog barks. Crickets chirrup.

  The sky is black, and host to a million visible stars.

  A white Mustang sits in the driveway, a big hole in the back window and a starburst of little holes perforating the trunk.

  Inside the house, a deeper darkness. Everything is still. Shapes and the shadows of shapes merge seamlessly to maintain calm immobility.

  Then: sound.

  Outside the front door, keys jiggle in the lock. Then someone drops them. Someone giggles, and someone says, "Shit." The keys are back in the lock now. More jingling. More fumbling.

  The door flies open, nearly rocked off its hinges. The shadows of two shapes circle each other, reaching, then withdrawing, then reaching again. They have a mad gravity, crashing together. The two bodies slam into each other, a supernova; they pivot, pirouette, hips into a side table, mail knocked on the floor, a piece of framed art sent there soon after. Glass shatters.

  A palm slams against the wall, searches blindly for a light switch.

  
Click.

  "Fuck," Miriam says, "that's bright."

  "Shut up," Ashley says, and pins Miriam against the arm of a pale microfiber sofa, his hands on her hips, holding her fast.

  He presses his face against hers. Lips meet lips, teeth on teeth, tongue on –

  Ashley sits in a wheelchair, and he's an old man whose hairless scalp is a checkerboard of liver spots and other marks. His frail hands rest, steepled in his lap atop a blanket the color of Pepto-Bismol, and

  – tongue, and she bites his lower lip and he bites back. She raises her knee and wraps her leg around his bony denim-clad hip and pulls him tight, and then flips him around so he's the one against the couch's arm.

  She takes off her shirt in one fell swoop. His hands grip her sides tight, hard, painfully –

  an oxygen tank sits on the floor next to him, the tube snaking up under the pink blanket and back out, up to his nose. He's small like a crumpled cup, like a slowly composting sack of bones ill-contained by a powder blue bathrobe, but his eyes, his eyes are still young, flashing like wicked mirrors. Those eyes look left, look right, suspicious, or looking to see who is suspicious of him, and

  – and the balled-up shirt disappears over her shoulder. Again they kiss.

  Clothes peel away, leaving a trail of fabric from the living room into the bedroom.

  Before too long, it's
all
skin on skin, and as they topple onto the bed, she gasps –

  – and the bed isn't long for this world; they tumble to the floor. She bites his ear. He pinches her nipple. She digs nails into his back. His hands are on her throat, and she feels the blood ballooning in her head, a dull roaring pulse that grows with each beat, and she closes her eyes and shoves her thumb in his mouth…

  
and all the while Ashley sits, his body still, his eyes moving. He pulls
the blanket up to his chest, and as he does so, it reveals his legs. A plastic
flip-flop dangles from his right foot, but he has no left foot. The left leg
dead-ends in a stump past the faded plaid pajama bottoms. It has no
prosthesis. Ashley stares down at it, wistful, sad, scowling.

  Her foot touches his, and it sends an electric, awful thrill through her body. She feels equal parts ecstatic and disgusted, like she's one of those people who gets hot under the collar at car accidents, but she doesn't care. She's lost to it. Dizziness enrobes her. His hands tighten around her throat. He laughs. She moans. Her leg kicks out. Toes cramp.

  Her foot lifts up the bed skirt, and she sees a glimpse of something – a metal suitcase, a combination lock, a black lacquered handle – but then her vision is filled with Ashley, her ears lost to the sound of the pulsing blood-beat.

  Miriam pulls Ashley's hands off her throat, and she flips him over onto his back. His head cracks into the leg of a nearby table, but neither of them care. She chokes him now. He cranes his head and bites the flesh just south of her clavicle. Miriam feels alive, more alive than she's felt in a long time, nauseated and giddy and wet like a storm-thrown wave, and she wraps her hips around his and she feels him inside of her –

  Miriam cries out, not a whimper but a
bang
, riding the intense mixture of emotions inside her to a throttling orgasm.

  It surprises her.

 
 

 

A red snow shovel hits dead in the center of her back. It slams her to the floor. Her chin hits hard tile; her teeth bite through her tongue. She tastes a mouthful of blood. The shovel comes down again, this time against the back of the head. Her nose breaks. Blood squirts.

  Everything is ringing, distorted, a high-pitched whine.

  She looks up through teary eyes.

  Louis sits on a toilet in a stall. His pants are up. The rickety walls can barely accommodate his broad shoulders, big body. Both of his eyes are gone, replaced with Xs formed out of electrical tape. He clucks his tongue.

  "You're a real man-eater," he says and whistles. "Del Amico. Me. That old bastard out of Richmond. Harry Osler up in Pennsylvania. Bren Edwards. Tim Streznewski. See a penny, pick it up. Am I right? Oh, and let's not forget that little boy out there on the highway. So many dead boys. The names go on and on, all the way back to… what? Eight years ago. Ben Hodges."

  Miriam spits out blood. "Women, too. And I don't kill them. I don't kill anybody."

  Louis laughs.

  "You keep telling yourself that, little lady. Whatever helps you

sleep at night. Remember, just because you're not pulling the trigger doesn't mean you aren't a killer."

  "It's fate," Miriam says, red drool swinging from her lower lip. "It's not me. It's how fate is. What fate wants–"

  "Fate gets," Louis says. "I know. You say that a lot."

  "My mother used to say–"

  "It is what it is. I know that old chestnut, too."

  "Fuck you. You're not real."

  "Not yet. But just shy of a month, I will be. I'll be another skeleton in your closet, another ghost in your head. Dangling and swinging and moaning and groaning."

  "I can't save you."

  "Apparently not."

  "Go to hell."

  He winks. "Meet you there. Watch out for that–"

  The shovel comes down between her shoulder blades. She feels something break deep inside of her. Her thighs grow wet. The pain is intense.

  "– shovel."

 
 

 

The morning after.

  Five men (counting the frat-tards). One death. Lots of violence. A banner night for Miriam Black.