Blackbirds (2 page)

  He staggers backward, buttbone
thunking
against the wall, moaning, grabbing.

  "You only get one freebie with me," she hisses. "Swing and a miss, asshole."

  
Click.

  The time is now 12.42.

  "One minute," she says, easing off the bed.

  He still doesn't get it. They never do.

  "Shut up," he whimpers. "You fuckin' whore."

  "This is how it's going to go. Any second now, we're going to hear a car honking out in the parking lot–"

  A car honks outside. Once, then twice, then a third time when the driver lays on the horn just to get the message across.

  Del looks from Miriam to the window, then back again. She's seen the look before. It's the look of a caged animal. He doesn't know where to go, where to run, but the truth is, he can't run anywhere. He's trapped. What he can't understand is
how
, or
why
.

  "What comes next, you ask?" She snaps her fingers. "Somewhere, outside, someone starts yelling. Maybe it's the car honking guy. Maybe it's the dude the car honking guy was honking
at
. Who cares? Because…"

  She lets her words trail off, only to be replaced by someone yelling out in the parking lot. The words were indecipherable, just a muted, Neanderthal rant.

  Del's eyes go wide.

  Miriam forms her thumb and forefinger into a gun, and points it at the alarm clock. She lets the hammer – her thumb – fall.

  "Boom," she says, and–

  
Click.

  The time is now 12.43.

  "You have epilepsy, Del?"

  The question registers, and she knows now that he does. It explains what's about to happen. A moment of calm strikes him, a kind of
serene confusion
, and then –

  His body tightens.

  "And here it is," Miriam says. "The kicker, the game ball, the season ender."

  The seizure hits him like a crashing wave.

  Del Amico's body goes rigid, and he drops backward, his head narrowly missing the corner of the motel dresser. He makes a strangled sound. He sits upright on his knees, but then his back arches and his shoulder blades press hard against the matted Berber.

  Miriam rubs her eye.

  "I know what you're thinking," she says as Del's eyes start to bulge like champagne corks ready to pop. "Jeez, why doesn't this broad stick a wallet under my tongue? Couldn't she do me a solid? Or maybe you're thinking, hey, I've had seizures before, and none of them killed me. A guy can't
actually
swallow his own tongue, right? That's just a myth? Or maybe,
just maybe
, you think I'm some kind of batshit highway witch with magical powers."

  He gurgles. His cheeks go red. Then purple.

  Miriam shrugs, wincing, watching it unfold with grim fascination. Not that this is the first time she's seen it.

  "Not so, my friendly neighborhood whore-puncher. This is your destiny, to choke on your own mouth meats, to expire here in this God-fucked motel in the middle of Hell's half-acre. I'd do something if I could, but I can't. Were I to put the wallet under your tongue, I'd probably only push the tongue in deeper. See, my mother used to say, 'Miriam, it is what it is.' And this, Del Amico, is that."

  Froth bubbles out over Del's ashen lips. The blood vessels in his eyes burst.

  Just like she remembers it.

  His rigid body goes limp. All the fight goes out of him. His wiry frame slackens, his head tilts at a bad angle, his cheek hits the floor.

  Then, insult to injury, the cockroach runs out from under the bed. It uses Del's twisted upper lip as a step ladder, and squeezes its fat little body up into his nostril before disappearing.

  Miriam takes a deep breath and shudders.

  She tries to speak, tries to say she's sorry, but –

  She can't stop it. She runs to the bathroom and pukes in the toilet.

  Miriam kneels like that for a while, her head leaning up against the base of the sink. The porcelain feels cool, calming. She smells mint. The clean scent of cheap mouthwash.

  It often hits her like this. Like some part of her is dying along with them, some part that she has to gag on and purge and flush away.

  And, as always, she knows what will really make her feel better.

  She crawls out of the bathroom, over Del's cooling body, and fetches her messenger bag from the far side of the bed. Fishing around, she finds what she's looking for, and pulls out a crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights. She taps one out, plugs it between her lips, and lights it.

  Miriam exhales smoke, a jet from each nostril. Like steam from a dragon's nose.

  The nausea recedes, a septic tide washing the poison back to sea.

  "Much better," she says to whoever is listening. Del's ghost, maybe. Or the cockroach.

  Then she goes back into the bag to find Item Number Two: a black notebook with a red pen tucked in the spiral. The notebook is almost at its end. Just ten more pages left. Ten blank pages, a great gulf of awful potential: an unwritten future that's already been written.

  "Oh, wait," she says. "I'm getting sloppy over here. Can't forget this–"

  Miriam goes and grabs Del's pants and digs in for his wallet. Inside, she finds just shy of fifty bucks and a MasterCard. Enough to get her on the road, put a meal in her belly, move her on to the next town.

  "Thanks for the donation, Del."

  Miriam props up some pillows against the bed's headboard and leans back. She flips open the notebook, and she writes:

 

  Dear Diary:

  
I did it again.

 
 

 

I-40. Quarter past one in the morning.

  It's just finished raining. The highway glistens.

  The air smells of wet asphalt, which is an odor Miriam associates with fat nightcrawlers stretched across moist macadam.

  Car tires
shoosh
and
hiss
by. Everything is a smear of headlights in one direction and brake lights in the other.

  Miriam's been out here now for twenty minutes, and she wonders why this isn't easier. Here she is, tight white T-shirt – a tight, white, wet t-shirt with no bra in sight – and her thumb out for a ride. Prime, Grade-A Road Trash, she thinks. And yet, nobody stops.

  A Lexus speeds past.

  "You're a dick," she says.

  A white SUV rumbles by.

  "You're a
super
-dick."

  A rust-fucked pickup approaches, and she thinks, this is it. Whoever's driving this junk-bucket is sure to think he can score with this thin slip of road pussy. The truck slows; the driver wants a looky-loo. But then it speeds up again. The trunk's horn honks. An empty Chick-Fil-A cup pirouettes through open air and narrowly misses her head. Hillbilly guffaws Doppler past.

  Miriam turns her hitchhiker's thumb into a middle finger, and she yells out, "Eat a dick and die, fuckpie!"

  She expects them to keep going.

  But: red flash. Brake lights. The truck stops hard, then reverses onto the shoulder.

  "Shit," Miriam says. Just what she needs. She half-expects the identical twin of the dearly departed Del Amico to step out of the truck, scratching his gut through his wife-beater. What she gets instead is a pair of frat boys.

  They're grinning.

  One's got that fireman's build and a pair of clear, mean eyes beneath a mop of blond. The other's shorter – squat, really. Fat, freckled cheeks. Tarheels cap overlooking a pair of puckered butthole eyes. Clean suburban white-boy clothes.

  Miriam nods. "Nice truck. The Tetanus Express."

  "It's my dad's," Blondie says, coming right up on her as cars continue to pass. Squats – that's how she thinks of the other one – trundles up behind her.

  "It's a real nice ride," she says.

  "You
need
a ride?" Squats asks from behind her. His tone isn't friendly.

  "Nah," she says. "I'm just out here flippin' the bird to pass the time."

  "You're a Yankee," Blondie says. Ironic, because he doesn't have much of the Southern pluck to his voice. Those icy eyes roam all over her. "A cute Yankee."

  Miriam massages her temples. She thinks for a moment about indulging these two frat-tards in some clever roadside banter, but the truth is, she's damp, she's tired, and the blacked eye is really starting to pound.

  "Listen. I know how this goes. You two boys think you're going to 'get some.' Maybe tag me at both ends, maybe just push me around, maybe see if I have any money. I get it. Like any good scavenger, I know predators when I see them. You know what, though? I
just
don't have the time. I'm fucking tired, for real. So. Get back in your lockjaw jalopy, and head back to the highway from whence you came."

  Blondie steps up on her. He doesn't touch her, but he's noseto-nose.

  "I like the way you use your mouth," he leers.

  "Last warning," she says. "You see the black eye, and you think I'm good to go, but sometimes a girl lets herself get hit for all kinds of complicated reasons. I won't let that happen again tonight. You picking up what I'm putting down?"

  Apparently not, because Squats puts his sausage fingers on her hips.

  Miriam reacts.

  Her head snaps back, pops Squats's nose –

  – and he howls, and Miriam thinks to turn up the volume by reaching back and gripping his crotch in a crushing claw. Blondie's taken aback, but she knows she doesn't have long. She spits in his eye, which buys her another second, so she uses her free hand to punch him once, then twice in the throat –

  Squats tries to slap at her, a clumsy grizzly bear move, but she steps out of the way and his meaty palm swishes through air. Miriam's elbow catches him hard in his already-busted, alreadybleeding nose, and Squats goes down.

  Blondie, face red, still choking, rushes at her with all the finesse of a tumbling boulder. She pulls her upper torso back to dodge him, but lets her knee hang out there and catch him right in the bread basket. Blondie grunts, a hard
oof
of air, and slips on some gravel. He goes down.

  "You think I come out here and I don't know how to protect myself?" she screams at them. She picks up a handful of gravel and pitches it at Blondie, who moans and protects his head. Miriam hawks up another lugey and spits it in his hair. For good measure, she grabs the Tarheel hat off Squats and pitches it onto the highway. "Assholes."

  Then: harsh white. Headlights. Big shadow grumbling.

  The hiss of hydraulic brakes.

  A bobtail – the truck-part of an eighteen-wheeler, this one without its trailer – pulls up onto the shoulder, gravel popping underneath its massive tires.

  Miriam shields her eyes, sees the driver's silhouette.
Jesus,
she thinks
, it's a goddamn Frankenstein. Where are the torches and pitchforks when you need them?

  The Frankenstein is holding a crowbar.

  "Everything okay here?" Frankenstein asks. The voice booms, even over the rumble of the idling truck.

  "We're just having a little friendly tussle," Miriam yells over the truck's engine.

  She can't see his face, but she sees that Frankenstein pivots his cinder-block head, getting a good luck at Squats and Blondie. He shrugs. "You need a ride?"

  "Me, or the two moaning assholes?"

  "You."

  "What the hell," she mumbles, then heads over to the cab to get in.

 

 

 

Miriam takes a drink from her water bottle.
Nope, still not vodka
, she thinks.

  Above her head, sparrows rustle their wings in the eaves of the warehouse – dark shapes, stirring.

  She lights another Marlboro. Bats the ashtray back and forth the way a cat might play with a mouse. Blows smoke rings. Drums her fingers so her nails – some chewed to the cuticle, some left long – click on the top of the card table.

  Finally, the door opens.

  The kid comes in, a notebook and pages tucked under his arm, a laptop bag hanging at his side, a digital recorder dangling from a cord around his neck. His hair is a mess.

  He pulls up a chair.

  "Sorry," he says.

  Miriam shrugs. "Whatever. Paul, right?"

  "Paul. Yeah." He offers to shake her hand. She stares at the hand like it has a dick and balls attached to it. He doesn't get it at first, but then it dawns on him. "Oh. Ah. Right."

  "Do you
really
want to know?" she asks.

  Paul pulls his hand back and gently shakes his head no. He sits down without saying another word. He gets out the notebook, a couple copies of his 'zine (headlines like ransom notes, printed on pages of fluorescent fuchsia, eye-punching lemon, nuclear lime), and delicately places the digital recorder in the center of the table.