Three Slices (20 page)

And tonight, for now, it will be me. I retie my cravat and settle my hat as I stride the beaten path to where the audience waits, barely breathing, for the excitement we alone can provide.

This is my circus, and these are my monkeys, but still, I am hungry for more.

Read more by Delilah S. Dawson

1. Now: The Bird Doctor Is In

A
N UNGRACIOUS
breath of air, a grunt, and Miriam’s eyes jolt open. Her face, tacky with saliva. Her skull pounds like a bouncy house full of rowdy kids. She pulls her face away from a pillow. Doesn’t know how she got here. Doesn’t even know where the fuck she is.

Room’s dark. She sits up. Tries not to make a sound.

Ahead: a rectangle of darkness lighter than the shadows around her. Gray, not black. A faint liquid shine to it—moonlight, starlight, something.

A window.

She feels her head. A light crusting of blood. Granular, flaky, like the charred end of a steak left too long on the grill. Her tongue tastes blood, too. Inside her mouth: a stinging pain. A cut on the inside of her cheek.

Her neck hurts, too. There her finger probes, finds a small wound.

A tranquilizer dart
. She remembers coming up to the house, opening the door—something striking her in the neck. Then the world going topsy-turvy.

Her brain tries to catch up to her predicament.
I came here. Where is this? Why did I come here? Shit, shit, shit. Think, dum-dum. Think!

Everything, a cloud. Thinking right now is like running in mud.

She stands. Bedsprings squeak. Her foot hits the floor and that squeaks, too, and suddenly she’s thinking,
I’m making too much noise
, and a whip of fear lashes back, catches her right on the chin, and suddenly she’s worried about alerting—who? Someone. Her stomach falls out like a broken elevator and her heart rate spikes like Pikes Peak and right, right—Colorado, she’s in Colorado. Collbran. She’s chasing—chasing the notebook, chasing the name, Mary Stitch, the woman Sugar’s mother met here, the woman who can help her, can
cure her
, or at least show her the way out of this curse...

But that’s all big-picture stuff. The little picture is: what?

Where is she?

What the hell happened to her head?

What hasn’t happened to your head?
a cruel little voice reminds.
Your head’s been knocked around so much, it’s like a battered wife. How many concussions is too many, Miriam? At what point does your brittle head crack like an egg and spill everything out—Humpty Dumpty won’t go back together again
.

A tentative step forward. A small table. A lamp.

She reaches. Fumbles for a lamp chain.
Cuh-click
.

Light.

An attic. Unfinished. No drywall—blown-in insulation, exposed wood. Cobwebs. A big shape under a cover: a pool table, maybe. And some of it starts to come back to her: right, right, right, a modular house, two-story, set back on a property not far from the center of town, stuck way off one of those numbered nowhere roads here—58 and some fraction of a Road or something.

Then she sees it hanging by the door.

Every part of her goes cold. Her mind rushes backward through time, through memory, back under the river, in the gray churn of the rising waters—a young girl clutched in the hands of an old woman, bodies down there in the sweeping dark.

The river is rising...

Here, in this room right now, a living memory. Too real. Impossibly so. Hanging by the door, on a hook: a ratty brown cloak.

Attached to it, a mask. A hood. One she knows all too well. A long metal beak with nose holes punched out of it. Eyes are dead black goggles bolted into the leather. She can almost smell the funeral flowers burning. Can
hear
the man singing from inside the mask—
“May this a warning be to those / that love the ways that Polly chose / turn from your sins, lest you despair / the Devil take you without care.”
“Wicked Polly,” trilled by Carl Keener. The Mockingbird Killer—or one of them. Him and the whole Caldecott clan.

And there is his mask.

Downstairs: a man screams.

Then it’s swiftly silenced.

Miriam feels in her pocket for her knife. It’s not there.
I have another one. I’m sure of it. Somewhere...

Footsteps coming closer.

It is what it is
, Miriam thinks. And her hands curl into hard fists.

2. One Week Ago: The Bar Bet

T
HE MOON
shines, captured in the waters of the Vega reservoir. Miriam sits at the bar, staring out the window at it, lost in the black waters, the white ribbons of light, the bands of clouds sliding over it all. She pops a chicken wing in her mouth—one of those funky ones with the two bones instead of one, where you have to navigate the gristle in your mouth—and vacuums the meat off it. The wing sauce is habanero hot, and it lights her up like a sacrificial pyre. After that, a sip of the margarita in front of her and a quick towel-off with a wet-nap before she takes a look down at the calculator watch on her wrist.

8 PM.

Late, late, late.

Of course.

You’d think a psychic would be on time.

There she sits. Idly kicking her boot-toe into the side of the bar. Behind her, the lodge is quiet—tables of dark wood, empty of guests. Still early in the season. Even though it’s spring, there’s still snow on top of some of the mountains, and up here, the chill in the air is something that crawls into you like worms using your skin for a blanket. A far cry from Florida.

Florida
. Jesus. Ashley Gaynes. Her mother. Not to mention the thing with Louis. That phone call...

Fuck. Shit.
Shit fuck
.

Grief sucks at her like a leech.

It’s good to be far away from all that. Because now she has a chance. A chance to change not just the fates of other people, but this time? Her own.

Movement next to her. Barstool groans against the floor as a man sits. He’s got a face like a hatchet—all sides of it leading to a sharp, pointy front: chin, nose, the silver peak of his close-cropped hair. Even his beard is shorn high and tight, so clean and crisp, it looks like it could cut paper if you slid a piece along it.

The bartender—a woman built like a plow ox—comes up, says, “Whaddya say, John?”

“Janice,” he says. Voice gurgly and growly. Once a smoker, maybe. Or just a guy who lived a rough life and gargled rocks. “Same old.”

“Whaddya drinking?”

He gives her a grumpy, incredulous look. She laughs, and then pours him a beer off the tap. Dos Equis. He sips a bit of foam off the top, licks it from his lips, then says, “Hey, get me an elk chili, will you?” She nods and he calls after her, “Unless you got a prime rib back there for me.”

She barks over her shoulder, “Keep dreaming, John.”

Then she’s gone through the kitchen doors.

He snorts: a hollow, maybe mirthless laugh kept to himself, for himself.

Miriam feels his eyes drift to her.

“You like prime rib?”

“Is this a dick joke? A come-on line?”

He’s taken aback. His head lifts as his neck goes straight. “What?”

“I say,
Yes, I like prime rib
. And then you grab your salt-and-pepper yambag and give it a little jostle before saying,
Well, little lady, I got some prime rib right here
. And then we laugh and laugh and you think I’m going to go home and give your old dong a young-girl go, and what’s really going to happen is I’m going to take my hot-sauce hands and smear them into your eyes, and then while you’re there crying, I’m going to kick the stool out from under you. You’ll fall like a sack of potatoes, maybe crack your head. And I’m going to walk out and the bartender’s going to laugh at you as you piss yourself. The end.”

“That’s quite a story.”

“I like to think of myself as a storyteller.”

He sips the beer. “For the record, I was legitimately asking you about prime rib. Actual prime rib. They do it here Friday and Saturday nights. Tonight’s Monday, though, so.”

She takes a drink from her margarita. Licks a little salt off, lets it crunch between her teeth. “Oh, then yeah, I like prime rib. The bloodier, the better.”

He holds up his beer. She takes hers and clinks it. “Cheers,” he says.

“Back atcha.”

They sit there for a little while. He finally says, “I’m not that fuckin’ old.”

“Great.”

He turns. Now he’s invested. Maybe even his feelings are hurt a little bit. Miriam always thinks it’s hilarious how men act so tough like they’re all steel rebar and beef jerky. In reality, men are soufflés: they puff up big but shrink fast at the slightest bump, shudder, or temperature dip. (Or maybe, she thinks, they’re like the balls that dangle between their legs: they shrivel fast when it gets too cold and sweat lots when it gets too hot.)

“How old do you think I am?”

She arches an eyebrow. “I’m not a carnival game.”

“Spare a Methuselah such as myself a moment of your insight.”

She sighs. Groans. “Ugh. God. Okay.” She looks him up and down. “You’ve got some mileage on you. Deep lines like tire treads, maybe a little dust and grit pressed in there. You’re the rubber that met the road, huh? Still. You look tired, but your eyes, they got sparks jumping between them.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“My age, goddamnit.”

“Oh. Right.” She clucks her tongue. “Let’s go with...sixty.”

“Sixty. You think I’m sixty years old.”

Miriam shrugs, noisily slurps her margarita. “Am I wrong?”

John pauses. Pops his lips a few times. Then he laughs big and loud. “You nailed that right to the wall. I turned sixty just last week. You have a talent.”

“Must be psychic,” she says, and again raises her glass—she taps the base of hers against the top of his sitting there still on the bar. “Anyway. Happy birthday. I hope you got all that you wished for. And a blowjob. Everyone deserves oral sex on their birthday.” She narrows her eyes and points an accusing finger. “Not that I’m offering, mind you.”