Blackbirds (9 page)

  – and she yanks away, but then some red-headed teen brushes up against her –

  – and she brings her hands tight to her chest, the way Mighty T-Rex might walk, and she barrels into the bathroom, leaving someone behind her asking, "Just what the heck is wrong with that girl?"

  It's a question she can't help but echo.

 
 

 

"Fate's an immovable object," Miriam says, tracing her finger up the neck of the bottle. A warm haze saturates the edges; the scotch is doing its glorious, God-given duty. "The course is charted. Fate's already got everything mapped out. This conversation we're having? It's already on the books. It's already been written. We feel like we have control over it, but we don't. Free will is bunk, bupkiss, bull-puckey. You think that you go buy a coffee, you kiss your girlfriend, you drive a school bus full of nuns into a fireworks factory, that's your choice.
You did that
. You made that decision and acted upon it, right? Bzzt. Wrongo. All of our lives are just a series of events carefully orchestrated to culminate in whatever death fate has planned for us. Every moment. Every act. Every loving whisper and hateful gesture – all just another tiny cog in the clockwork ready to ring the alarm for our ultimate hour."

  Paul says nothing. He just stares, wide-eyed. He tries to say something, then didn't.

  "What?" she asks.

  "That's… dark."

  "No kidding."

  He shifts uncomfortably. "So you've tried to change things."

  "Yup. For the first couple years, I tried a lot. Let's just say it never worked out."

  "And then one day you just stopped trying?"

  "No. One day I met a little boy with a red balloon."

 
 

 

The bathroom is unisex, and the place only has one. Someone's rattling the doorknob. She mumbles for them to piss off, but she doesn't have the heart to say it loud enough for anybody to hear; a rare moment.

  It's like a closet in here. Tight. Bright. Blue. Everything is blue. Robin's egg blue. Sky blue. Picasso's blue period. The blue of
someone choking on a meatball and dying
blue.

  She hears the distant clang of a red snow shovel. She feels its heavy weight on her back.

  In the mirror, she sees a glimpse of ghosts from future and past: Del Amico, his throat almost comically swollen with his own tongue; Ben Hodges, the back of his head blown out like a juiced pomegranate; the old man, Craig Benson, stroking his bent erection with hands curled into arthritic claws; Louis, an electrical tape X over each eye, mouthing her name again and again. A shiny balloon floats up, and for a moment, it seems to blot out the light above her head, even though she knows it's not real…

  The door rattles again. The ghosts are gone. Miriam pushes her way out of the bathroom, past some blonde country yuppie in pink.

  The waitress approaches, carrying an almost-impossible armload of plates.

  "Your friend said you were done eating?" she asks Miriam, gesturing to the plates with her chin.

  "Uh. Yeah. Yes, thanks." She pauses. The words come out of her mouth before she even thinks to speak them: "Do you have a Honda? A Honda hatchback?"

  "No," she says, and Miriam's heart leaps like a bullfrog with a dart stuck in his ass. A tiny glimmer of hope grows wings and starts banging against her insides, a bee against a window. "But, you know what? I have been thinking about getting one. Old Tremayne Jackson down on Orchard Lane, he has one sitting out in his driveway. Was his daughter's, I guess, but she got a scholarship – first one in the family to go to college – so now the car's just sitting there, collecting pollen and leaves and whatnot on the hood. He said he'd sell it to me, but I hadn't decided yet. Heck – maybe I'll go for it! I'd forgotten about it until now."

  Miriam's insides tighten. She screams within her own head. The thoughts rage at her, throw things, kick down mental doors and hurl bricks through windows:
See what you did? See how it all happens? You say something, and bad shit happens. Before she wasn't sure about buying that goddamn car, but now you open your lippy bitch mouth, and now she's got the idea planted in her head like a bad seed growing an ugly tree, and one night she's going to get crunched into that tree by some drunk dumb fuck in a pickup truck – way to go. You have to keep trying, don't you?

  And even then, a littler voice chimes in:
Tell her no. Tell her that Honda hatchbacks are known to spontaneously burst into flames when you turn on the radio. Or better still, go down to Orchard Lane and stuff a rag in the gas tank and blow that sucker to Timbuktu. Or maybe take fate into your own hands right now – grab a butter knife off the counter and saw this stupid woman's head clean off. If you kill her first, it doesn't count, right?

  But Miriam just smiles, shrugs, and pushes past.

  The waitress watches her go, equal parts confused and pleased.

  Miriam sits, and Ashley's polishing off his coffee.

  "So, how's Flo bite it?"

  "Car accident. Truck slams into her." He cocks an eyebrow. "What, do you want me to prove it? Hold on, we just have to get to my time-traveling Delorean parked out back by the dumpster. We'll go back to the future and you can see I'm telling the truth."

  "All right, all right, let's say I believe you."

  "Lucky me."

  "I have a proposal for you."

  "No, I will not marry you. The baby's not yours. It's a mixedrace baby, and last I checked, you don't look Eskimo."

  "I want to work together."

  "Work." She says the word like she's looking at a dog turd. "Really? Us? Work together?"

  "Like a volleyball team. You set 'em up, I spike it. Let's be frank, Miss Black – you need my help bad."

  "I need neither shit nor shinola from you." Under her breath, she adds: "Not that I know what shinola is."

  "The old bastard. Benson. With the dick pill problem. He had a safe, right?"

  "So?"

  "
So
, people keep things in safes. Important things. Money. Guns. Jewels. Gold doubloons, whatever. I can crack a safe."

  "Who can actually do that? Is that what they're teaching at community college these days? You're telling me you can actually crack a safe."

  "You bet."

  "I don't need what's in a safe. I told you, I don't get greedy." She reaches into her bag, finds some money, tosses it atop the bill. "There. I'm paid up. This is where we part ways. Thanks for the fun time last night. All that… violent monkey sex? With the choking and shit? It was a lovely time. But I'm done here. You have a great life."

  She stands.

  He puts his hand on her wrist. He tightens his grip. It doesn't hurt. Not yet.

  "You're only going where I tell you to go," he says, giving her a flash of that winning smile. He loves this, she can tell. "I will call the cops. I will sell you up the river. Furthermore, I've got one more little surprise for you."

  Miriam ponders breaking his nose. It'll draw attention, though.

  "I did a little look-see into your past. It's not like a girl like you has a big trail, but it did lead me to your mother. She's alive and well. Maybe you knew that, maybe you didn't. But I can see the way your lip is twitching that this is getting to you. It's okay. I have a mother, too, and I know how it can be. Love and disappointment, those perpetual dance partners, right? You bail on me, and I'll go to her. I'll tell her everything. Maybe she'll believe me, maybe she won't. But I think she'll know the scoop. I think she'll be sad to know that you're out there, banging rednecks and losers, stealing from the dead, and just being an all-around tramp. You want that?"

  Her teeth grit together so hard, she thinks they might snap into little pieces.

  "Are we in business together?" he asks.

  "You going to tell me what's in that metal suitcase under the bed?"

  "Nope." He smirks.

  "I hate you," is her response.

  "You love me, because we're the same." He stands up and reaches in to get a kiss. She turns her cheek, and that's where it lands.

  Ashley lets go of her wrist and heads to pay the bill.

  Everything feels like a wave crashing down on her. She closes her eyes and thinks, maybe this is how it has to go. This is fate, after all. Destiny. The undertow will pull her down one of these days. It'll drag her out to sea. Forever lost within the swaying seaweed and fish bones.

  The diary will be done, and that will be that.

  It is what it is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

Maker's Bell, Pennsylvania.

  A black Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera with Florida plates slides down the streets and alleys, the roads a drunken spider's web of cracks meeting at pothole junctures. The whole town calls to mind a lunarscape: gray, cratered, dust-blown. The car rumbles past house after house whose windows are half-lidded eyes, whose porches and doors are forever yawning. Many look empty. Others appear occupied, but only by the dying – or the living dead.

  The car pulls up to a driveway of uneven limestone gravel. A wooden mailbox sits out front, the mallard duck it was shaped as now barely recognizable. The paint has flaked off. The wing – the mailbox's flag – swings limp and loose, squeaking in the wind. The duck sits crooked, like one day soon it will tumble off its roost, dead.

  Three black numbers – iron, rimmed with rust – identify the house as 513.

  The doors to the car open.

  "This the place?" Frankie asks of his partner, Harriet.

  "It is," she says, her voice flat.

  They get out of the car.

  The two figures are opposites of each other in many ways.

  Frankie is a tall drink of water with a Droopy Dog face and a Sam the Eagle nose. Harriet barely cracks five-foot two and echoes Charlie Brown – pudgy, round face with small and deeply set eyes.

  Frankie Gallo is Sicilian somewhere down the line. His skin is like greasy, cakey cinnamon. Harriet Adams is whiter than an untanned ass, bleached like ocean-soaked bone.

  Frankie's hands are large, the knuckles bulbous; Harriet's hands are little mitts, wormy fingers connected to flat, fat palms. His eyebrows are two caterpillars lying dead; hers are auburn slashes penciled in above her pinprick stare.

  And yet, despite these differences, the two share an aura of menace. They belong together. He in his dark suit, she in her wine-colored turtleneck.

  "Jesus, fuck, I'm tired," Frankie says.

  Harriet says nothing. She stands, staring, like a mannequin.

  "What time is it?" he asks.

  "It's 8.30," she answers without looking at her watch.

  "It's early. We didn't eat breakfast. Want to go get some food first?"

  Again, she says nothing. Frankie just nods. He knows the drill. Business before pleasure. And with her it's always business. He likes that about her, though he'd never say so.

  The house in front of them has gone to shit. A blue Victorian with shuttered windows. Ivy has been pulling it apart with slow fingers for the last twenty or thirty years.

  A chill wind kicks up, sweeping leaves off the porch and jangling tangled wind-chimes. Two gray cats, startled by the noise, dart down the steps and around the back of the house. Frankie makes his own noise in response.

  "Ungh. She a cat lady?" he asks.

  "I have no idea. Does it matter?"

  "It matters." His eyes scan the house's face, and he spots what he doesn't want to find: an orange tabby peering out of a second-floor window, a tortoiseshell cat with a monkey-colored face hanging out on the porch roof by bent gutters, and a trio of white kittens peering out from under an out-of-control roseglow shrub.

  He sighs, rubs his temples. "Yep. She's a cat lady."

  "Then let's just hope she's alive in there," Harriet says, and she starts walking to the front porch. Frankie stops her, grabbing her shoulder; he's one of maybe two people in the world who is allowed to do that without ending up dead.

  "Wait. What does
that
mean?"

  "I never told you about the Cat Lady of Brookard Street?"

  His eyes widen. "No."

  Harriet's mouth tightens. "When I was a little girl, we had a cat lady in town. We called her Mad Maggie, though I don't know that Maggie was her name. She had a great many cats, dozens upon dozens, and she kept getting more. She'd take in strays. She'd go to the shelters and take the ones marked for death. Rumor suggests she even stole cats from other people to add to her collection."

  "Oh, fuck. I hate cats. I don't want to hear the rest of this story."

  "The woman was very, very old. My mother said that when she was a child, Mad Maggie was an old lady even then. She had her routines: come out, get the mail, get the paper, water the mostly dead flowers that grew up out of a spare tire planter by her mailbox, repeat. Most hours of the day, she'd stare out the window. Then one day, we didn't see her anymore."

  "Christ. Is this going where I think it's going?"

  "Soon a smell emerged. It wafted from the house when the wind blew. Sickly sweet, like spoiled meat."

  "Great. She died. Probably from catching cat AIDS or something. Let's go inside."

  "That's not the end of the story. Yes, she died, and no, I don't know from what. But the story is her body sat there for days. She had no family. Nobody came to check on her. And more important, nobody took care of the cats. They started at her extremities – fingers, nose, eyes – and then moved inward. The muscles. The organs. Everything."