The Bird Eater (5 page)

She exhaled a gasp, lifting her arms to shield herself from the onslaught of birds, screaming out as they pecked at her flesh, tarnishing the flawless tapestry of her dress with dashes of red. She swatted her arms around her face in a frantic attempt to scare them away, only to lose her footing and fall back into empty space.

She drifted backward in slow motion, her eyes wide, her mouth an O of startled surprise, her red hair fluttering about her face like water, folding in on herself bit by bit, each crash against the stairs setting her limbs akimbo. Coming to an abrupt stop at the foot of the stairwell, she released a strangled cry of pain; but despite her collapse, she began to crawl, stretching her arms toward her only source of hope—the front door, so close yet so far away.

The boy leapt down the stairs with a laugh, whooping as he danced around the weeping bride like a savage, stomping on her hands, mashing her fingers against the hardwood floor. When the woman rolled onto her back—her hands held out in defense—Evangeline’s face was replaced by Edie’s pleading gaze, but the boy paid no mind. He drew a kitchen knife from the back pocket of his pants, straddled his victim with a dangerous smile, and brought the blade down swift and unswerving, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing until her screams dwindled down to nothing and her blood ran free.

Aaron jerked upright in his old bed. His heart leaped into his throat.

Someone was crouched just beyond the closed closet door, motionless, watching him sleep.

His mouth went dry at the possibility; the kitchen window was broken, someone could have gotten in. His mind reeled. The gun: it was still in the trailer, as though it was of any use out there. His brain expanded and contracted with the thudding of his pulse. He opened his mouth to speak, nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard the shuffling of footsteps downstairs.

His gaze darted to the open bedroom door.

There were people in the house; someone other than the person gargoyling in the corner of the room, staring at him through the dark.

He could hear them distinctly as they dragged their feet across the hardwood floor.

Aaron’s attention shot back to the figure in the corner of the room, but now all he saw was his jacket hanging from a hook on the outside of the closet door. An overactive imagination.

A girl’s whimpering moan had him bolting out of bed, not sure what the hell he was supposed to do. There was no denying that someone was inside. His heart pounded so hard against his ribs it made him queasy with agitation. A single thought jammed his circuits:
Say something;
let them know you’re here.

“Hello?” His voice rattled inside his throat, dry and unnerved. He grimaced at how weak he sounded, forced air from his lungs and spoke again. “This is private property.” He paused, listened. “I have a gun”—an afterthought. He shoved the window curtain aside and looked down into the side yard, but nobody was there. He imagined he’d see a car parked just shy of the driveway along Old Mill if he could see the road from where he stood, but he’d have to dart into Edie’s bedroom for that. He inched his way toward the open bedroom door, his pulse rattling his teeth.

Maybe he was being robbed—but why would they choose to rob the place
now
, after someone had moved in? Maybe it was a couple of idiot kids rummaging around downstairs to purposely freak him out—that kid, the one who had been exploring the abandoned high school. There had been something menacing about the boy, who couldn’t have been older than thirteen or fourteen years old, something disconcerting about his cockeyed grin.

Aaron was sure that all of Ironwood already knew who he was—the new guy living in the dilapidated house. The waitress and the water guy, the person he’d called about replacing the window and the cashier at Banner Goods—there were more than enough locals to start rumors and kick-start curiosity.

Aaron sidled up to the upstairs banister and looked down the flight of stairs, his palms sweating, his stomach knotted and gurgling around too much peanut butter and bread. “Is anybody there?” No answer. He stood in the silence, holding his breath, his ears straining to pick up the faintest hint of sound.

There was a crash from below: a piece of furniture being toppled over.

His stomach dropped. He bit back a yell. The hair on his arms stood on end. Reason told him to stay where he was, but instinct was pushing him down that flight of stairs one bare foot after the other, the grit that still clung to each step grainy against the soles of his feet. The thought of calling the cops didn’t enter his mind until it was far too late. Reaching the bottom step, he pressed his back flush against the hallway wall, nearly choking on rapid bursts of breath.

There was another shuffle in the front room.

His eyes darted in the darkness, searching for something he could use as a weapon. Aaron slinked down the hall, the broom he’d purchased less than a day before propped against the wall. He snatched it from where it stood, and readjusted his grip on the handle, ready to swing the thing as hard as a major league batter the moment he spotted an intruder.

He stopped at the threshold of the living room, preparing himself for whoever might be there, expecting to see a couple of punk kids tearing into the few boxes of things he’d brought in from the U-Haul and stacked against the wall beside the front door. The rustling continued near one of the front windows, its source concealed by the dusty couch in the center of the room. His head spun at the possibility of someone hiding back there, waiting to leap out at him just like Cooper had warned.

You want to get your head on straight, you stay here. You want an ax murderer to chop the fucking thing off, you go to Arkansas
.

Aaron had laughed off Cooper’s warning over a couple of beers on his last night back home, but he no longer found the idea funny. Swallowing against the lump in his throat, he took a few slow steps forward, the broom held aloft, ready to swing at anything that dared jump out at him from the shadows.

“I hear you,” he warned, trying like hell to keep his voice steady. “You’d better make yourself known before I shoot you in the fucking face.”

No reply.

He gritted his teeth hard enough to give himself a headache, increased his grip on the broom handle so tightly his hands ached with the strain. Slowly stepping toward the sofa, he prepared himself for what seemed like the inevitable attack, bending at the knees so his center of gravity was low, carefully placing his feet in a way that, if someone came barreling out from behind that couch, they wouldn’t bowl him over when they rushed him. With a final raspy breath, Aaron leaped around the sofa’s arm and readied himself to swing, only to exhale a breath and lower his weapon.

A starling lay on its side, writhing next to an overturned end table, one of its wings limply stretched outward. The initial sight of it made his blood run cold—the bride, the stairs, the oncoming surge of flapping wings.

“Christ,” he breathed, shoving his fingers through his hair. He had cleared out the pile of dead birds from the corner of the front room just that afternoon, occasionally finding another carcass in various rooms throughout the house. Twisting where he stood, he searched for some way to pick up the animal. He’d lifted the others with his hands gloved in garbage bags, but this one would require a bit more finesse.

Pushing a window curtain aside to peer toward his uncle’s shed, he considered trekking outside to search for a flat-edged shovel. It would serve well as a gurney while allowing him to keep his distance, the image of Evangeline standing at the top of the stairs trying to fight those birds off still fresh in his mind. But before he could decide on whether he wanted to dig around the shed in the dead of night, he saw something shift just beyond Edie’s flowering rosemary.

It was the weird kid who had slammed his hands against the diner window—the same one who had flapped his hands like an avian shadow puppet and flashed an impish grin.

“Hey,” Aaron blinked at the boy through the window.
“Hey!”
He rapped on the glass despite the kid staring right at him.

The boy wasn’t fazed. He simply gave Aaron a sour smile and turned away, ducking into the trees.

Five

The camcorder’s picture jostled as Aaron crouched on the gravel driveway, pointing the lens at his front driver’s-side tire. There was a slash in the rubber the size of a knife blade.

“See that?” he asked the camera, turning the lens on himself. “Cooper warned me about psycho killers, but not about bastard kids with butterfly knives.”

He swept the camera along the tree line, searching for the culprit among the leaves. A few seconds later, he was sliding the recorder onto the roof of his Tercel and looking back at the tire. The last time he’d caught a flat, he’d bolted on the donut tire and driven it to a local shop—one that had failed to stick the spare back in his trunk. He had meant to call them about it for weeks, but after a month had passed in an alcohol-induced haze, he had lost his opportunity to complain. Of course, he hadn’t bothered to replace the stupid thing with another, thinking,
What are the odds?
Now, the odds were staring him right in the face. Murphy’s law. As far as Aaron was concerned, Murphy was a grade-A dick.

He fished his cell phone out of his pocket and stared at it as his brain tripped over itself, struggling to remember the name of the mechanic’s shop he’d seen in town, the one Eric had mentioned was owned by Cheri’s husband.
Free tire rotation with every oil change.
“Not like it matters,” he muttered, dialing 411, glaring at the flat while waiting for the call to connect. He could call the mechanic’s shop all he wanted, but unless he had some magical way of teleporting the Tercel from here to there, he was going to need a tow.

As odds would have it, the tow truck that arrived was marked
VAUGHN MECHANICAL
across the front doors. The truck crunched up the driveway; its massive tow hitch rising from where the truck bed should have been, swinging and clanging behind the vehicle like a broken arm. Aaron knew it was irrational, but the sight of that massive grille momentarily gutted him. For a split second, all he could see was that grille screaming toward him; he could hear the screech of rubber, the explosion of safety glass, could smell the sharp odor of gasoline mingling with the scent of rain. He pulled himself out of that flash of nightmare when he noticed the driver sitting in the truck for what seemed like longer than necessary, but the man eventually ambled out of the dually, pulling the hem of a too-short T-shirt down over his potbelly—a shirt that sported a cartoon drawing of a giant fish, the tagline beneath it reading:
Quit staring at my bass.

Aaron met the guy in the driveway while shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun. “Hi,” he greeted, the driver already inspecting the slashed tire on the Tercel. “Thanks for coming out,” Aaron continued. “I know it’s out of the way.”

The guy looked up from the tire, allowed his gaze to linger on Aaron for an awkwardly long moment, then glanced to the house in the background with a dubious expression. “That’s okay,” he said after a beat. “Just doin’ my job.” He gave Aaron another look, bushy eyebrows furrowed across the ridge of his eyes like a fuzzy shelf. “You the Holbrook kid?” he asked.

Aaron couldn’t help but blink in surprise.

“Yes?” The reply came out as a question, Aaron not sure whether or not being “the Holbrook kid” was a good thing or not.

The driver screwed up his mouth like he was ready to spit, peering at the house again before turning his attention back to Aaron’s car. “Looks like you got yourself a flat,” he announced.

Aaron bit the inside of his mouth to keep from grinning like an idiot. If anything should have been recorded for posterity, Mr. Bass was it. “Looks like it,” he said, desperate to keep a straight face.

“Don’t you got a spare?”

Aaron released a faint laugh. “I did,” he said, leaving it at that.

“But not no more,” Mr. Bass finished for him, scratching his head beneath the plastic mesh of his company hat.

Without saying another word, Mr. Bass climbed back into his truck and threw it into reverse, as though he’d decided to forget the whole thing and go back to the shop without Aaron or the handicapped Toyota. But instead of taking off down Old Mill, he backed the dually into position, climbed out of the truck for the second time, and began to hook the two vehicles together in unholy matrimony.

Once the hookup was complete, Aaron joined the driver inside the cabin of his gigantic truck. He snapped his seat belt into place and stared down the slight decline of the driveway, ignoring the fact that the inside of the pickup reeked of Corn Nuts and sweat.
Par for the course
, he thought.

Mr. Bass spoke again only after the tow truck and its load were safely out on Old Mill Road.

“Son,” he murmured, shooting Aaron a distrustful glance. “Rumor has it you’re supposed to be dead.”

There was a shoddy missing dog poster tacked to a corkboard inside Vaughn Mechanical’s lobby. Sitting in a metal folding chair between two racks of tires, Aaron couldn’t look away from it. It hurt to look at, from the way the Xeroxed black-and-white photograph was too dark to make out any distinct features to the handwritten text offering a reward, the writing straight at first only to sadly arch down the page in a hopeless frown.

Aaron lifted a lidded Styrofoam cup of soda to his chest—a smiling soft-serve cone maniacally grinning from the cup’s curved side—and bowed his head to catch the straw between his lips, his gaze still fixed on that terrible full-page sign. The thing was useless, omitting essential information like breed and distinctive markings. It didn’t even list the animal’s name. The flier spoke volumes about that particular corner of the Ozarks. Rough. Undereducated. Reeking of a weird sort of desperation.

“Holbrook?” A beefy-looking guy stepped from beyond a double-hinged door and slunk behind the counter. He was a metal head; the kind of guy who wore sleeveless tanks and biker boots and saw
GWAR
live in concert. Aaron didn’t need to stand next to the mechanic to know the guy would tower over him by a good few inches, at least six foot three, and a hundred pounds heavier than Aaron’s current weight. Aaron wondered if this was the man Cheri Miller had chosen to spend the rest of her life with—a guy so unlike himself it was like night and day. The guy wiped his hands on a rag and swung his rocker hair over his shoulder with a flourish, pulling it back with dirty hands before twisting it into a rope and coiling it at the back of his head—an old lady’s bun, messy, almost immediately unraveling beneath the weak hold of an office-grade rubber band.

Aaron rose from his seat between the racks of tires and approached the front counter, his soda in tow. After an hour of waiting for his tire to be replaced, he’d marched across the street to Mr. Ice Cream for a drink. Now he was no longer thirsty, and the cup was little more than a watered-down nuisance. But because Vaughn’s lobby didn’t have a trash can, Aaron continued to drink the lukewarm cola out of absentminded boredom. Arriving at the counter, he looked down at a handwritten invoice dotted with greasy fingerprints.

“Sign here,” the guy said, tapping the bottom margin of the top carbon with a chewed-up blue BIC.

Aaron grimaced at the total at the bottom of the page—nearly two hundred bucks including the tow. After Evangeline had insisted on separating, Aaron lived off of disability and dipped into his share of savings to fund a fast-burgeoning drinking problem. Now, having reevaluated his goals, he was determined to spend every last penny on resurrecting Aunt Edie’s house to its previous glory. If it helped him win Evangeline back, it was worth the cost; but the cost would undoubtedly be higher than expected, and car maintenance wasn’t the way he wanted to spend his cash. He begrudgingly scribbled his name across the bottom of the invoice and the mechanic grunted, eyeing the feathered wings that wrapped around Aaron’s neck like two delicate hands. The mechanic tore the top copy away from a yellow carbon beneath it, slid the canary-colored copy across the counter and murmured, “Wait here, I’ll get your keys,” before stepping back into the garage.

Aaron folded the yellow copy into eighths, tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans, and looked back to the corkboard that was now less than a few feet from his shoulder. The picture of the dog was even harder to make out up close, like one of those optical illusions you have to look at from yards away. The little bell above the front door jingled, pulling his attention back to the lobby. A woman struggled with the door, her arms loaded down with fast-food bags and a full drink carrier. Aaron took a quick step away from the counter, holding the door open for her just as the drinks tipped in her hand, one of the sodas leaning precariously to the side. He made a move to save it, but he wasn’t quick enough. The drink tumbled to the ground and exploded against the linoleum, splashing across Aaron’s sneakers and the bottom of his jeans.

“Shit,” she hissed, dropping the bags of food onto the closest lobby chair. Pressing her hands to her temples as she watched the caramel-colored mess fizz against the tile, she murmured, “Goddamnit, I’m so sorry,” noting Aaron’s wet shoes.

Aaron was smiling long before their eyes met. It was her…his first flurry of butterflies, his first kiss, his first taste of puppy love.

“It’s okay,” he told her, “Though if you could get me a discount on my tire change, that would be great.”

Unlike Eric, who looked like an overgrown child stuffed into a polo, Cheri appeared nothing like the fourteen-year-old girl he’d left behind so long ago, somewhat awkward and all-eyes. She had always been pretty, but now she was stunning. Easy loops of red hair framed her face. Her bow-like mouth was reminiscent of early twentieth-century starlets; and her wide, doe eyes—which still looked too big for her face—gave her an almost alien beauty.

Cheri released a quiet laugh and nervously shoved strands of long red hair behind her ears. She opened her mouth to speak, paused, gave him a curious look. “Have we met?”

Aaron smiled down at his cola-soaked sneakers. Even with his eyes diverted, he could still feel her staring at him, trying to place his face.

“Maybe I’m just going crazy,” she told herself. “Don’t move.” She turned to step behind the counter, but Aaron moved, wading out of the center of the mess to stand on a square of dry tile. The soda was seeping through the canvas of his sneaker and into the tops of his socks.

Cheri returned with a roll of paper towels, a trash bag, and a spray bottle of cleaner. Aaron reached for the towels, tore off a long strip, and helped her mop up the sticky lake. It took her a minute, but she eventually looked up at him again, still baffled, struggling to place where she’d seen him before.

“You’re not from here,” she concluded.

“Used to be,” he said, tearing off a fresh square of towel and patting the tops of his shoes.

“Yeah? Somehow I doubt that.”

Aaron raised a questioning eyebrow and she shrugged.

“Nobody comes back here once they leave,” she told him. “It would be like breaking
into
prison. Once you’re out, you don’t look back.”

“Eric Banner came back.” Aaron casually dropped the detail.

Cheri stopped sopping up cola and peered at him instead. Her lips parted as she leaned back on her heels and searched his face, watching him from behind a scarlet veil. Aaron’s heart twisted when she gave him a look he still remembered—a look that struggled for understanding. She had worn the same expression when he had tried to teach her how to play chess in his bedroom, had worn the exact same look while trying to comfort him after Uncle Fletcher had died.

“Do I really look that different?” he asked her. “Come on, Scary.” A nickname he’d given her long ago, born of her penchant for all things spooky—movies, books, the Cure.

Cheri’s brown eyes glazed over, shimmering with disbelief. “Oh my God,” she whispered, so quiet that he hardly heard her. “Aaron…?” She was on her feet before he could confirm her suspicion, her arms coiling around him, her face pressing into his neck.

It felt strange to have a woman other than Evangeline so close. He had expected to tense up as soon as she was in his arms, but he caught himself inhaling her scent instead—shampoo and red berries, a lingering undertone of cigarette smoke. His nerves prickled as the sound of a small, choked sob surfaced from the folds of his faded T-shirt. Eventually, Cheri took a step back, frantically wiping at her eyes, looking genuinely surprised at her own response.

“Christ, I hardly recognized you. What are you doing here? When did you get back?” She held the pointer finger of each hand beneath her eyes as she rolled them up to the ceiling, trying not to smear her mascara.

“Getting my tire replaced.” Aaron nodded at the unmanned counter. “Came back a few days ago.”

“What the hell happened?” A new voice. The metal head mechanic stepped around the counter, Aaron’s keys dangling from his fingers.

“I spilled the soda.” Cheri sniffled, turning away from her husband so he wouldn’t notice her red-rimmed eyes. “It’s no big deal. Aaron, this is Miles.” Cheri motioned toward the guy approaching them.

“You know each other?” Miles asked, tossing Aaron the keys from the other side of the shop. Aaron was slow to react. The keys flew through the air and hit him in the chest. With his right hand full of wadded-up towels, he tried to save the keys with his left, but they tumbled to the ground, landing in a syrupy pool.

“We knew each other as kids,” Cheri said. “We haven’t seen each other in…” She shot Aaron a look.

“Twenty-one years.”

“Jesus.” Cheri stared at him, surprised by how much time had passed. “Seriously?”

Aaron nodded. “We were fourteen.”

Miles stared at Aaron for a long moment, as if sizing him up, though there wasn’t much to size—Miles was a beast, his work shirt stretched tight across a bulging chest. Cooper would have made his usual crack—a full-grown man wearing Baby Gap—the kind of guy who let off steam by pressing weights in the garage and bought whey protein in bulk.

“Cool,” Miles said, bereft of any real emotion or interest. Not bothering to apologize for dumping Aaron’s keys in a lake of soda, he turned and walked away from them both.