Haunted Legends (20 page)

She was home now. Tears of pure joy fell down her face. It was all so beautiful. Her son was laughing, and she was home.

Afterword

La Llorona—“the crying lady”—is a popular legend in Central and South America about a ghost woman who wanders about looking for her children (whom she had drowned in life, either to win or punish her lover), weeping. Multiple versions of the tale exist. In some, she can only be seen by people who are about to die. I liked the idea of another grieving woman going to Mexico to heal, seeing La Llorona, and finding comfort in her, a feeling of peace within the horror.

Carrie Laben was raised near Buffalo, New York, in a place best described as “about a mile from Six Flags.” After stints in Ithaca and Brooklyn, she now lives in Montana, where she is working toward her MFA. She spends her spare time bird-ogling. Her short stories have appeared in
Clarkesworld, Apex Digest, ChiZine,
and the
Phantom
anthology; she is currently at work on a novel.

To this day they say it was just a bird, some kind of big ugly Mexican stork. Only I looked these storks up at the library and they’re white. So that’s bullshit. The Devil Bird was black.

My aunt Mary, my mother’s sister, saw it two or three days after it first made the news. She was driving back from our place in the dusk after spending all afternoon helping Momma address wedding invitations—this was just before Momma married Walter—and as she passed the Stewarts’ hay-field, she saw something moving and stepped on the brakes, assuming that it was one of their idiot dogs and might run out into the road.

And something did come out into the road—not running, but flying low, a shadow just above her headlights that flapped loosely and turned, as it passed over her hood, to stare her right in the face. That was what she kept repeating, when she had driven back to our house and scared Momma nearly to death banging on the door. That it had looked in her face.

She wouldn’t sit down, and so Momma wouldn’t sit down either, and so we all kept circling the kitchen, Aunt Mary pacing and Momma doing that pregnant-lady waddle that still makes me nervous to this day—they always look like they’re going to fall over, and I know I’ll be blamed if I don’t catch them—and me dodging from corner to corner, trying not to get in the way.

“I wish Walter was here,” Momma said, holding her belly. “I hate to think of him driving around out there with something on the roads. It’s bad enough I have to worry about drunks and drug smugglers or who knows what, and now this.”

“It had red eyes,” Aunt Mary repeated, though I couldn’t see the need; Momma was upset enough. But Momma hugged her. “A face like some kind of monkey. And a tail, pointed on the end. Tell me what it could be but the Devil?”

“Maybe it was a pterodactyl?” Walter had brought me a book on dinosaurs not long before and I was showing off.

“Go upstairs, Jimmy,” Momma said.

“If it’s a pterodactyl, they eat fish. They won’t hurt us. Or Mr. Lyon.”

“I said get upstairs.”

She hadn’t said where upstairs, so I sat in the hall in the dark where I could still hear them, just in case anything interesting happened. But they were quiet for a long time, and then Aunt Mary said, “I have to get home.” She sounded like she might cry.

“You can’t drive while you’re all worked up like this—look at you, you’re still shaking.”

“Mom and Pop are probably tearing their hair out. They expected me half an hour ago.”

“Call them and say you’re staying the night here.”

“They won’t believe me. If I tell them what I saw, I mean.” By now I was pretty sure she was crying, and I was grateful that Momma had had the foresight to send me away when she did.

“So tell them it took longer to do the invitations than we thought. We’ll do a few more, so it won’t be lying.”

“They think I’m spending too much time on the wedding already.”

“They wouldn’t want you running into a ditch.”

“I have to go home. You know how they get.”

By then I was pretty sure no fresh pterodactyl details were going to emerge, and the floor was getting uncomfortable, so I went to my room and set up an observation post by the window at the foot of my bed, flashlight in hand, waiting for Remington and Max to bark so I could get a glimpse of the pterodactyl. I figured there was no way I was ever going to fall asleep. But somehow I still found myself waking up when it was time for cartoons in the morning.

I was watching Wile E. Coyote get hammered into an accordion by the sheepdog that he’d be saying “Goodnight, Ralph” to before the next commercial when Momma came from the kitchen. She had a cup of Folger’s in one
hand and a bowl of cornflakes in the other. She handed the cornflakes to me and plopped onto the couch, which sagged; the spoon rattled in her coffee cup.

She took a long pull of the coffee and we lost ourselves in the coyote’s sufferings, and then in ads for the
Six Million Dollar Man
and Cocoa Puffs, and then in Bugs Bunny’s acrobatic evasions of Yosemite Sam. Only after Sam, his mustache-ends singed, had given way to the next commercial did Momma set the coffee cup on the floor and put her arm around me.

“Mr. Lyon will be staying with us tonight,” she said rapidly. “He’ll get your bed, so you’ll have to sleep on the floor of my room.”

“Aw, Ma.” I knew I didn’t stand much of any chance of seeing a pterodactyl from the ground floor, even if Momma would let me sit up, which she wouldn’t.

“It’ll be like camping out,” she said.

“Well, could I camp out? In the backyard? I won’t get scared and I won’t bother you guys and I won’t try to start a campfire this time.”

“No!” She must have felt me flinch, because she squeezed my shoulder. “Honey, it’s not safe. The Stewarts saw that thing fly over their barn last night, and this morning one of their cows is dead.”

“Can I go see?”

“The only thing you’re going to go see is the sink.” She pulled her arm away and picked up the coffee again. “I need all my canning jars washed, and you just won yourself a ticket to wash them. Go to see a dead cow? Honestly. Like you’ve never seen one before.” She lifted herself back to her feet, shaking her head. “You can wait until the next cartoon is over, then you get your rear end in the kitchen.”

Even back then, Momma had a lot of canning jars—they were wedding presents from when she’d married my father, so even though they were just old mason jars, she would get upset if one of them got broken. It was disrespectful to his memory, or bad luck, or both. So it took me most of the morning to get through washing and rinsing and drying them all. For lunch we had eggs in baskets, which was one of my favorites, and I thought about asking to go up to the Stewarts’ again, carefully, so that she at least wouldn’t come up with more chores for me. But just as I thought I had figured out how to ask, the phone rang.

“Get that for me, sweetie, would you? If it’s about a bill or like that, I can’t come to the phone.”

But it was Aunt Mary, so Momma had to get to her feet again, leaving her eggs half-eaten. I lurked in the doorway, waiting to ask my carefully-formulated question.

Momma listened for quite a long time, and then she said, “But why?” and then, “But Pop’s got a gun too,” and then, “Look, I know they don’t like what me and Walter did, but we’re doing our best . . .” and then, “Jesus, Mary!” and I tripped backwards through the doorway because it was so strange to hear her swear.

Momma seemed surprised at herself too; she was silent for a long time, and she was quiet when she finally said, “OK, all right. I’m sorry,” and I crept away upstairs—I wasn’t going to bug her about dead cows just then.

I was in my room, looking at my book trying to get an idea of what I would see if I saw the pterodactyl, when Walter showed up. I saw his truck pull into the driveway, and ran downstairs to show him; I wanted to show him that I’d put his gift to good use. I liked Walter a lot, and didn’t understand why Pop and Grandma and Aunt Mary didn’t—sure, he had slightly longer hair than me or Pop, but he drove a truck with a U.S. Geological Survey logo on the side and to my eyes that made him sort of like a kind of police, or something, and surely that canceled out long hair.

When I got down the stairs, he was busy talking to Momma in a low voice and I didn’t think it would be a good idea to interrupt.

“Pack up an overnight bag, Jimmy,” Momma said when she heard me on the stairs. “We’re all going to your grandparents’ house.”

By the time I got outside with my things, Walter had already loaded the dogs in the truck and Momma was sitting in the passenger seat, looking back at the house like she expected it to fall down when we got out of sight.

We drove through the pounding afternoon sun and I strained my neck trying to scan both sides of the road at once for traces of the pterodactyl, but I saw nothing but grass and steers and the occasional tree. Walter drove in silence—he wasn’t his usual happy self, and even in my pterodactyl-crazed state that made me a little nervous—one hand resting on the curve of Momma’s belly. I wondered if Walter thought the bird was the Devil. It didn’t seem like him. He’d taught me that toads couldn’t give me warts, and which snakes I actually needed to be afraid of and which I could leave alone. I couldn’t picture him scared of a dinosaur, any more than my dad would have been.

It was half an hour to the old ranch house where Pop and Grandma and
Aunt Mary lived. Remington and Max were as glad to get out of the back of the truck as I was, and before I’d peeled myself from the vinyl of the seat they ran toward the shade of the house and the place where the leaky hose left a little moisture.

As they reached it, though, instead of plunging in and rolling with belly-to-the-sky glee like they usually did, they slowed, sniffed, and then backed away. Walter tried to put them back into the truck but they didn’t like that idea either, and went all skittish, and he had to hold both their collars.

Pop, leaning in the doorway, nodded. His old hound Lucy was lurking behind him, tail tucked in, rather than laying in her usual spot by the driveway.

“So, you came too?”

The dogs were giving Walter a lot of trouble; he didn’t look up. “I figured if the situation is that serious you’d be glad of all the help you can get.” He wrangled Max into sitting down, but Remington was still acting peculiar.

“Whatever it is, they don’t like it,” he said as he came unsteadily down the steps toward us. “What about you, Jimmy my boy? You scared of that Devil Bird?”

“No, sir.” He took my shoulder, and I smiled.

“You wouldn’t have let it get your momma, now would you have?”

“No, sir!” I wanted to tell him that it was a pterodactyl, but the first time I’d told him about the dinosaur book he’d dismissed it as nonsense.

“I should give you my gun, now that you’re the man of the house.” I glanced up at him—a chance to shoot a pterodactyl would be beyond my wildest dreams—but he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at Momma. “Anyway, your grandmother has some Cokes in the icebox, go inside and have yourself one.”

Inside it was dark and a little cooler, and Grandma and Aunt Mary sat by the radio. I pulled out a Coke and sat by them, listening to the radio announcer describe how the Big Bird, as they called it with a laugh, had scared one Alverico Guajardo out of his trailer by running into the side of it. Bright red eyes, the man said, the size of silver dollars, a face like a gorilla, but with a long beak, wings like a bat, definitely a pterodactyl clue; I couldn’t wait to tell Walter. Apparently a lot of the Mexicans a little farther south had been seeing it for years, or so they said. Every time the DJs laughed, Aunt Mary would flinch, but she never said anything.

Walter and Momma and Pop still hadn’t come in by the time I finished my Coke. The DJs had gone on to talk about the weather and the boring stuff that the state legislature was up to. I stood up and made for the door, but Grandma caught me by the wrist.

“Give an old lady a hand with these,” she said, pushing a bowl of wax beans into my arms as she rose. “Thank you, Jimmy. You’re a good boy.”