Blackbirds (29 page)

  "Last question. You smoke?"

  The woman nods, hasty, shaky.

  "Give me your cigarettes."

  The driver fumbles a box of Virginia Slims from the cupholder in the door.

  "Uck. You smoke these?" Miriam asks, then waves it off. "Whatever."

  Miriam takes the pack, and her finger touches –

  It's twenty-three years from now and the woman steps off her porch. She's a bag of bird bones, and she trembles her way out the driveway as a light snow drifts around her, carried on whorls and corkscrews by a cold wind. The woman goes to the mailbox, gets the mail, and then takes one step on a shoe-sized patch of black ice. Her leg kicks out, her head hits the mailbox, and she lies there. Hours pass. Evening comes. Snow builds up on her face, but she's still not dead, and she manages to pull out a slim little cigarette from her pink robe and light it up before finally succumbing to the slow dragging hands of hypothermia.

  – the woman's finger as the pack passes between their grips.

  Miriam blinks. Shakes it off, then thumbs in the cigarette lighter, gets it warmed up, and plugs one of the thin little pipe cleaner cigarettes into her mouth.

  "Now," Miriam mumbles around the unlit cigarette, "get the fuck out of this car before I hit you in the face with the gun and break all the tiny bones in your ear. Keep on smoking, by the way. Good for you."

  The lady throws open the door and scurries out of the car like a cat that just got shot in the ass with a pellet rifle.

  Miriam lights her cigarette, slides over the seat divider, and throws the Subaru into drive.

  Her lungs fill with magic nicotine. Her foot stomps on the pedal.

  Movement. Sweet movement.

 
 

 

No movement.

  Shitty, dead-fish-floating-in-the-water lack of movement.

  Miriam was cooking with gas. Then she reached the causeway crossing the Barnegat Bay and traffic locked up tighter than a handful of tampons crammed up a nun's asshole.

  Now it's car after car. Kayaks and boat trailers and pale yuppies and kids watching Spongebob Squarepants on DVD screens in the backs of the front seats. Even this late in the day, people are desperate for a taste of the beach, a whiff of sand and surf (the surf smelling like rotting mollusks and the sand home to old hypodermic needles and clumpy, filth-caked condoms). The sun has long faded, just a bleary smear against the dark clouds hovering above the island. It's like a line of tourists driving toward the Rapture.

  Miriam lays on the horn.

  The last cigarette from the pack is down to its nub. She grits her teeth and flicks it out the window, and it bounces off the hood of a silver mini-van next to her.

  The mother in the passenger seat – a blimpy hippo already sunburned so badly it looks like she's been wandering the desert for forty days and forty nights – shoots her a sour stare.

  Miriam thinks of shooting the woman back, with bullets.

  Miriam elbows the horn again. She's feeling claustrophobic. This is coming down to the wire. She's been sitting in traffic for far too long now.

  She needs a sign.

  "I need a sign," she says, panicked.

  "Here comes one," Louis says in the back seat. He peels up his electrical tape and reveals not a gaping socket as usual, but a ruined eye that looks more like a thumb-squished grape than anything else. For added effect, he winks.

  Then he's gone.

  Miriam desperately looks around to see what he's talking about.

  Sour, sunburned lady? No.

  Carload of dogs and screaming children in front of her? Probably not.

  A small plane flies overhead. But since she doesn't have any kind of Batman grappling hook on her belt, she thinks that plan is pretty much fucked from the get-go.

  Then she sees it.

  A biker – no, a
cyclist.

  He's lean and ropy, dressed to the nines in red-and-blue spandex like he's the Superman of the bicycle crowd.

  As he whizzes past on the side of the causeway, Miriam throws open the passenger side door.

  His front tire meets unyielding resistance.

  The cyclist flies over the open door. She hears, but does not see, his head hit the pavement. At least he's wearing a helmet.

  Miriam's up and out of the car and on the bike before she even thinks about it. The front tire's bent a little from where it smacked into the Subaru's door, but even wobbly, it's locomotion.

  She checks the cell phone.

  She has less than an hour now.

  "My bike!" the cyclist cries.

  Miriam steers unsteadily past.

 
 

 

The Barnegat Lighthouse – Old Barney – stands ahead.

  The winding sandy path is hemmed in by a rickety post-andrail fence, which is itself hemmed in by black shrubs with yellow flowers.

  Gulls cackle and complain overhead, where black garlands of clouds look like distant bands of blackbirds.

  The tides rush in, rush out, an outlying murmur.

  Miriam steps over the yellow police tape that's meant to block people from going in, and she steps past the sign announcing "Under Construction" and another sign explaining that soon the lighthouse will be home to a new lantern and state-of-the-art polycarbonate windows.

  It feels like she's on a rollercoaster ride – cresting the hill, though no hill awaits. Her stomach is home to squirming eels. It expands and contracts. Sinks and swims.

  Her feet fall on sand that shifts beneath them. She sucks in a breath and kicks off her shoes. A sense of the inevitable precedes her, running ahead like an eager dog. She feels like she's a little girl forced to approach a mother who waits with a leather belt in hand.

  She walks.

  It feels like she's not approaching the lighthouse, but that it's approaching her.

  
You can't change anything.
Her own voice, not Louis's, chiding her in her head.
Just remember that. You're not here to change anything. You're just here to bear witness. It's what you do. It's what you are. You're the war crow on the battlefield. The chooser of the slain.

  She reaches the end of the hedges. The sand path continues toward the lighthouse. The lighthouse has a white base, a brick red top.

  Frankie mills about outside. He's a tall drink of motor oil on the bright beach, a dark shape on an illuminated X-Ray, a long dark shadow in sympathy with the sky above. He paces. Rubs his nose. Itches his ear.

  Hairless, the man Harriet called Ingersoll, is nowhere to be seen.

  It's almost time. Miriam doesn't have to look at the cell phone to know it.

  But she pulls out the phone anyway. Gun in one hand, phone in the other, and diary tucked in her pants, she thumbs the
redial
button on the phone.

  Then she starts walking.

  Frankie's phone rings. It should. She's calling it.

  He answers, and she hears him in stereo – his voice on the phone and his voice ahead: "Harriet?"

  Miriam wings the phone at his head like a fucking boomerang. It whips hard across the bridge of his not-insignificant nose, and he staggers, blinking back tears.

  She thinks to shoot him, but –
No. Ingersoll will hear the shot. Don't do it.

  Instead, she hurries up and drives the barrel of the gun deep into Frankie's solar plexus.

  "The solar plexus is a massive bundle of nerves," Miriam hisses.

  Frankie fumbles for his gun, but Miriam's knee to his wrist knocks it from his hand.

  As he wheezes, his face turning red, she chops him in the neck with the butt of the pistol.

  "Mastoid process triggers your gag reflex."

  True to her information, he doubles over, gagging. He doesn't dry heave; he vomits what looks like a half-digested hoagie.

  She wonders how she's going to kill him. Hunched over in a Sumo position, puking on himself, he's trying to crabwalk backward.

  
Fuck it
, she thinks.
Strangle him to death.

  Miriam gets behind him and takes her gun arm and brings the crook of the elbow up under his throat. She pulls back hard enough to choke a pony –

  – and she lets go. Frankie, gasping, stumbles forward into his own hoagie bile.

  He tries to stand, but Miriam presses the gun to the back of his head.

  "You're going to be a grandfather someday," she says.

  "OK," he croaks, blinking back tears.

  "You don't really like this life, do you?"

  "No. Christ, no. I hate it."

  "You have the keys to the Escalade?"

  He nods.

  "Take them. Go to it. Get away. You don't want to be here."

  Another nod.

  "I see you again," she says, "I'll make sure you never get to be a grandfather."

  She moves past him and heads into the lighthouse as thunder tumbles over thunder, not far away now, but very close.

 
 

 

The lantern room is encased in glass – or, rather, some windows are glass, some have already been replaced with polycarbonate panes.

  They haven't yet replaced the lantern, though.

  Louis is bound to a wooden chair next to it. The lantern is a bulbous thing, like a giant insect's eye. Louis is held there by brown extension cords over hands and feet. His head is affixed to the base of the lantern by what seems to be a whole roll of electrical tape.

  Ingersoll plays with the rusty fillet knife. The scent of fish guts plays at his nose.

  He stole it from a fisherman asleep on a nearby jetty. Broke his neck, and let the poor fool crash into the surf – though not before snatching the knife from beneath his chair.

  Ingersoll rolls the bones that he empties from his satchel. They clatter across the lantern-room floor at his feet, and he sorts through them the way one might sort through dried beans looking for stones. His finger shifts the bones this way and that. Like he's reading them.

  He's not, of course. He can't read them. He does not possess his grandmother's gift of vision, not like he wants to. He pretends, sometimes, and this act of pretending is sometimes so good that he convinces himself.

  This time, he tries as hard as he can to see what will happen here.

  One of the windows above his head is broken. Wind keens through it.

  "A storm is coming," he says.

  His target, Louis, is still bleary-eyed, beaten and half-drugged. His head lolls as he stirs to some greater semblance of alertness.

  Ingersoll sighs. The bones are telling him nothing. Once more, as always, he must invent his own truth and direct his own future.

  "Why would I kill you?" he asks aloud. "You are meaningless to me. But you've seen my face. And my new employee, Miriam, is awfully fond of you, and this I cannot have. You will forever cloud her vision. She is mine, my friend. Not yours."

  He twirls the knife between gaunt fingers. "Besides. I enjoy causing you pain, and I am fond of the fact that Miriam has already seen this scene play out, hasn't she?"

  Ingersoll admires the knife. He smells the rusted, pitted blade.

  "Get away from me," Louis stammers. "Who are you? Who are you people? I don't have what you want!"

  "That no longer matters," Ingersoll says with a shrug.

  He moves fast – a coiled spring, unsprung. He stabs Louis in the left eye with the knife. It does not go to the brain and only ruins the eye, a choice the hairless man has made. Louis screams. The attacker withdraws the knife. It makes a sucking sound as he extracts it.

  His thin lips form a mirthless smile.

 

The Barnegat Lighthouse has 217 steps.

  Each is an agony. Each a troubled birth, an expelled kidney stone, a black widow's bite.

  The steps are corrugated steel painted in flaking yellow. They wind in a tight spiral through a channel of black brick.

  It is like ascending the throat of some ancient creature.

  What she's going to behold plays out in Miriam's mind again and again like a YouTube video set to repeat. The broken window. The wind through the gap. The rusted knife. The sound of an eye being ruined. Her name, spoken by Louis in sadness and surprise.

  Again and again. An endless circle of steps and visions.

  Thunder again, outside. Muted through the brick. She wonders:
Am I late? Is that the thunder that plays in my vision?
When she witnesses a death for real, she often looks for these clues, these cues – visual, auditory, whatever. The honking of a car horn. A commercial on the television. Something somebody says.

  When she finally comes upon it, when she finally staggers into the lantern room to witness this tableau of horror, this shoebox diorama of death, she doesn't expect it.

  It takes her by surprise and steals her breath, even though she feels like all her life has been rushing toward this moment in one vacuum gasp.

 

Ingersoll doesn't hear her coming, but when she arrives, he offers her little more than a flick of his gaze and the hint of an admiring smile.