by Marnie Vinge
She walks closer, no longer concealing herself. In her time as Tom’s Girl Friday, she’s learned that confidence in situations where you don’t belong takes you quite a long way. Sid hears her crunching through the grass behind them and turns swiftly, and his rifle smacks him in the face as he does.
“What’re you doing down here?” he asks. The other two men turn, spooked.
“Tom said I could go for a walk after dinner,” Birdie lies. Her eyes meet Ollie’s.
“Yeah, he told me as much,” Ollie vouches for her, and honors the unspoken agreement between the two of them.
Sid looks between them and then over to Jeff, who shrugs, unwilling to get in the middle of Birdie’s business. If he’s uneasy around Tom, he’s petrified by the women running this place in the shadow of their fearless leader. We’re the puppet masters, Vanessa had once joked to Birdie. At the time she hadn’t thought much of it, but as Tom descended deeper and deeper into the role that he’d created for himself, she saw that Vanessa really believed it. And what was more, it was true. Even if Tom didn’t know it.
Birdie smiles at Ollie, revealing the gap between her two front teeth. It’s a feature that caused her endless grief as a child and an adolescent. It wasn’t until she met Tom that she embraced the flaw. She had begun to smile without a hand covering her mouth after she met him.
Ollie smiles back stupidly.
Birdie steps up beside the group.
“What is that?” she asks with a sharp intake of breath.
Standing on the other side of the creek, on the border of Wade’s land, is a ghoulish scarecrow. A bull’s skull sits atop its shoulders, held on by barbed wire that runs through the eye sockets. A ribcage with spindly, elongated bones protrudes at the chest and parts the buttons of the plaid shirt draped over it. Articulated arms fashioned from the leg bones of cows terminate with hooves still sporting hair at the ankles. Birdie thinks she can smell blood. She knows she can smell decay.
“They left a note with it,” Ollie hands Birdie a folded piece of paper. She opens it. ANY DAY NOW it reads. Birdie feels a chill that doesn’t originate on the night wind. She hands the note back to Ollie and rubs her arm.
“Right?” he asks. “Creepy.”
She nods and looks past the skeleton, over onto the Bower property.
“Yeah,” she says.
It is creepy. It’s a step above the dead cats that Wade left on the cattle guard a month prior.
“We should take it down,” Jeff says. “Orders.”
Ollie and Sid nod. The three of them begin to dismantle the strange idol. Darkness descends on the land like a blanket and the stars and moon begin to illuminate the grass around them in shades of silver. The bones almost glow.
A shot crackles across the field in the darkness. The remaining pieces of the scarecrow crumple to the ground and the guys hit the dirt. Birdie isn’t fast enough. Another shot sounds and she feels the impact at her shoulder. She hits her knees and falls to the side, her body reeling from the shot.
“Birdie!” Ollie cries out.
Birdie hears more gunfire. This time originating from their side of the creek. She hears the scuffle of boots against the dirt, clambering their way to her. Ollie appears like a vision. An angel, his silhouette silver against the moon behind him. He kneels down. More shots ring out.
“Oh, God,” he brushes hair from her face. He reaches for her flannel shirt and rips out two buttons getting to her wound. He puts his weight on it and Birdie yells out in agony. Unbearable pain spikes her adrenaline and makes white spots dance behind her eyelids.
Her vision tunnels and she’s falling.
Down. Down. Down.
Into nothingness.
IONE
We are never closer to the worst parts of ourselves than after searing rejection. Suddenly, that usually quiet voice of self-doubt grabs a megaphone to make daily proclamations about the state of things: It’s because you’re stupid. Or fat. Or both. Or maybe you’re just fundamentally unlovable. Then it gets into specifics. He would never have waited for you. You’re an idiot to have chosen your career over him. The thing is, no one is immune. I’m successful. I have a career. I have a life that I’ve built from ashes. Even though I know this, the voice is loud, speaks clearly, and demands to be heard. And I, the captive audience, am forced to listen.
I tell myself these things are untrue. The thought crosses my mind that I made the right choice, that if Wes could wake up and decide he didn’t love me, it would have happened anyway eventually. Better now rather than later.
I wonder if it happened as quickly as that. I wonder if he met the new girl before or after he decided he was done with me. Was she the catalyst? Or had he made up his mind the minute I boarded that airplane last year that he wouldn’t wait on me? As I think this, I know in my heart that I wouldn’t have waited on him. No matter how badly I wanted to, I wouldn’t have suffered that indignity. Not for him. Not for any man. Never again.
I pour myself another glass of white wine from a bottle I was given as a gift. The giver of the bottle had hoped I might save it for a special occasion. Tonight feels special enough. I put it in a coffee tumbler and get in the car. The nice thing about white wine is that it doesn’t stain your clothes when you hit bumps on your gravel driveway. The driveway stretches out almost a half-mile and going up to get the mail has seemed like a monumental task. A chore I’ve left undone for the past week as I’ve wallowed in self-pity. At the gate, I get out and grab a stack of bills. I get back in the car and make a quick U-turn in the rural road just in front of my property.
For just a second, I wonder if getting the mail constitutes drunk driving. I’m not drunk yet, but with any luck, I will be soon.
I’ve spent the last week locked in a cycle where I wake up around eleven, have coffee, ignore all my calls and texts for the day, mindlessly surf Facebook comparing my life to the lives of my colleagues and former classmates, and then drink myself to sleep when the sun so much as threatens to set. Sometimes I throw in a true crime documentary to spice things up. I measure my time at night in bottles of wine and hours of Netflix. Tonight is feeling especially bland, so I’m tempted to start Inside the Criminal Mind. Four episodes. Two bottles of wine. I could finish that in an evening. Goals are important.
I’m the only person in my former circle of friends who lives alone. The rest of the girls I went to college with either got married, engaged, had children, or a combination of all three. In any case, their homes don’t groan and echo in the night in a way that only a large, uninhabited house can. They have boyfriends and husbands to investigate the noises that a house makes when it settles. They have someone to hold on to until sleep seizes them and leads them gently into a dream. I just have the house. And the remnants of my grandparents’ curious collections.
The place is enormous and in gothic revival style, built by my grandparents and given to me as my inheritance. I attempted more than once to coax friends and relatives into living with me, but something about the way their eyes met the taxidermized bobcat in the foyer or my grandmother’s collection of mourning jewelry in the China cabinet always told me that I’d be flying solo so long as this was the plane. If the bobcat and the jewelry had been the worst of it, I might have found someone to share the place with. But the macabre décor extends beyond there. A menagerie of once-living animals lurks in the hallways and displays of moths and butterflies adorn the walls of each of the guest rooms. In spite of the morbidity of it all, I can’t bring myself to part with any of it. It meant something to my grandparents and, for better or worse, it means something to me, too.
I get back to the house and take the mail (and my wine) inside. I toss the stack of bills onto the counter where they fan out like a stack of cash. Instead of opening any of them, I retreat back to the couch and grab my cell phone on the way. Seven unread texts wait for me, but I avoid the messaging app. In place of that, I log onto Facebook for my daily beating.
Pictures of babies crawling for th
e first time or videos of them making rudimentary noises seem ever-present. Their mothers cloud my feed with updates that I’m sure would hold more meaning for me if I had a child of my own. As it is, I can’t relate.
These posts bother me less than the ones featuring career updates. Promotions, celebrations, colleagues getting book deals. My enthusiasm for my writing has waned since the blunder with Wes. I’m letting the situation burrow deep into my psyche and it’s poisoning my work like termites eating a house from the inside out. I haven’t written a word since I returned home. The iron is hot, and I haven’t struck.
I’ve had my fill and I log off, feeling sufficiently insufficient. I sip my wine and thumb through my apps, looking for distraction. It’s then that I see Tinder. An app that a Norwegian girl had encouraged me to download during my last month in Europe. I’d obliged but never completed my profile. I didn’t want to tell her that I’d rather bury myself in more work than acknowledge any aspect of my life that might be lacking. But now, alone in the house on a Friday night, the idea of messages from random strangers pouring into my inbox isn’t so unappealing. I’m lonely and I’m weak. So, I fill the profile out.
I google advice on the perfect tagline for your Tinder profile. Articles abound. This is a hot topic. Some argue going for the bottom line: if you’re looking to hook up, say as much. Others assert that you should beat around the bush—there are codes. These articles suggest terms like fun if you’re after sex. After settling on something pretty bland that doesn’t sit too far at either end of the spectrum, I begin swiping.
It’s a rush at first. After a few minutes, I begin getting matches. There’s Brad, a construction worker; Liam, a lawyer; Tommy, a doctor; and Philip, an employee at a local bookstore. I go to his profile first. He’s young—twenty-two—almost ten years my junior. His black hair is swept down over his eyes in a look that would have been popular when I was in high school. He has a lip piercing and striking blue eyes. He messages me.
I feel my heartbeat quicken as I touch the little icon bearing his picture with a red dot indicating that I’ve got a message waiting from him. I open the chat box.
Wyd, he says.
It takes a moment for my brain to search through a rolodex of acronyms. I respond and tell him Not much. Properly capitalized and punctuated. He doesn’t respond in kind.
We go back and forth for a little bit. He’s flirty and fun. He reminds me of a younger me. I can almost feel the agony of those first years of college breathing down my neck as I talk to him. He’s not looking for anything serious and I have to admit to myself that, in spite of the decade of living I have on him, I’m not either. Finally, he asks, wanna hang out?
I’m momentarily paralyzed. With another gulp of liquid courage—the end of bottle number one—I tell him that I do, indeed, want to hang out. In a moment of less-than-stellar judgment, I tell him he can come to the house. I’ll leave the gate open.
I scramble around, cleaning up take out boxes and empty wine glasses. After a bit, the house looks presentable enough though I recognize that a part of me doesn’t really care. I just want another warm body in the same space. The fact that it’s not Wes’s warm body isn’t lost on me.
I recall the scent of his aftershave again. A moment that I’ve savored multiple times in the last week, leading to the bittersweet realization that it was probably the last time I’d ever smell it. At least on him. The thought occurs to me that I could buy a bottle to keep here. This wins the award for the saddest thing I’ve thought all day.
I kill another glass of wine while waiting on Philip. He shows up in an ancient Geo Metro that, like his haircut, reminds me of high school and those first months of college. That period of adjustment to real life that was just a primer for the adjustments waiting on the other side of my degree. He comes to the door, rings the bell, and I answer. He stands there and holds out a sack from Chipotle. He comes bearing gifts.
I smile and swing the door wide, taking the sack from his hand. I try to be a good hostess. He steps in and makes eye contact with the bobcat.
“Don’t mind him. He hasn’t bitten anyone in a really, really long time,” I say.
Philip smiles nervously as though he’s just stepped into the H. H. Holmes murder hotel.
I grant that my grandparents’ choice of décor isn’t the friendliest. And I also admit that their preoccupation with death might have done something to stoke the embers of my own, leading to the publication of my first book. But tonight isn’t about psychoanalysis. I just want to eat the Chipotle and not sit on the couch alone.
Philip’s youth makes me uneasy. Partially because it reminds me of my age and partially because it makes me feel a bit like a creep. I’m thirty years old. Cringing to myself as I pour another glass of wine and Philip gets comfortable on the couch, I imagine Wes’s disapproving furrowed brow above his throwback Ray-Ban glasses. A quick drink of the wine helps to wash away the image of his face. I return to the living room and join Philip.
He digs through his pockets and produces a small plastic bag, some rolling papers, and a lighter. I haven’t smoked weed since college and my first thought is that it’s going to stink up the house—another painful indication of our age difference—and my second thought is that I’d like a vacation from reality. So, I let it slide.
“Do you smoke?” he asks.
“Oh, yeah.” I realize that I sound too much like an older person trying to appear cool to today’s youth.
He eyes me with skepticism. I flash a smile to win him over. He smiles back and rolls a joint. While he does, I ask him a few questions about himself. His answers are minimalist. Yes. No. I don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes. I find out nothing about Philip through my line of questioning and it doesn’t seem that he wants to find out much about me. Finally, he makes a comment.
“Quite a place you’ve got here. You rich or something?”
“Not really.”
He grunts in response and lights the freshly rolled joint. He passes it to me, and I cough tremendously after my first hit. He laughs, clearly aware that I don’t smoke nearly as often as I’ve indicated. I pass it back and excuse myself to get some more wine. I offer him some. He declines, telling me that alcohol is poison. I shrug and kill the second bottle.
I return to my place beside him on the couch. About a foot of upholstery sits between us. That and the ten years I’ve lived beyond him. We make small talk, stilted and awkward until the weed kicks in, then we’re laughing. That quickly descends into the metaphysical, a favorite topic of stoners everywhere, I think. I’m ill-equipped for this talk. My brain is spreading out like the smoke, tendrils licking at whatever thoughts pass in front of them. It goes in twelve different directions at once, blossoming like a time-lapse video of a blooming flower. Philip has a better handle on the situation.
He passes the joint back to me and I hold up a hand.
“I’m good,” I say. The statement is a monumental effort. The herculean task of matching sounds to thoughts seems to stump me. I’m higher than I originally thought. He shrugs as if to say, More for me, and I’m okay with that.
Before he finishes the joint, I turn on the television with the intent of finding a documentary on Netflix. I’m not sure that I want him to stay for the entirety of Inside the Criminal Mind, so my goal is to find a one-shot show. But before I can navigate off of regular television to the Netflix app, the local news pops up.
A perky blonde whose name escapes me looks into the camera. Her eyes shine in the studio lights, looking almost watery. They’re almost too alive. It occurs to me that being surrounded by death might color my perception. She delivers the story with the solemnity of a eulogy.
“Last night we brought you breaking news of a shooting that took place between two ranches in the panhandle of Oklahoma. Marcy Williams has more details on that story tonight. Marcy?” The anchor waits for a response, and the feed cuts to a dark-haired young woman standing next to a field at dusk. She takes her cue.
“Yes,
Jess. We are here at Wade Bower’s ranch in Kenton, Oklahoma. Bower reported shots fired near the creek on his property that runs beside the property of self-help guru, Tom Wolsieffer.”
The name is like ice-water through an IV. I sit up straighter and lean into the broadcast.
“Revelation Ranch, as it’s come to be known, has been Wolsieffer’s home for over six months. The ranch has hosted self-help events in the past and Wolsieffer boasts thousands of followers for his controversial book, The Way. Many of those followers have made Revelation Ranch their new home.
“It seems that last night, shots were exchanged on the border between the two ranches. One man is dead. Wade Bower maintains that Tom Wolsieffer’s men shot first and there are reports that a woman, Birdie Hauer, Tom Wolsieffer’s main spokesperson, was shot in the crossfire. Miss Hauer is nine months pregnant. However, no one has been brought out of Revelation Ranch for medical treatment. Authorities have been unable to reach Tom Wolsieffer or those responsible for the shooting of the ranch hand. The FBI has been called in and this is being treated as a hostage situation with over five hundred people inhabiting Wolsieffer’s Revelation Ranch. Back to you, Jess.”
My jaw goes slack, my mouth gapes in an O. A wrecker with a wench couldn’t pull me out of the psychological ditch I’ve just plowed into. I had heard of the book, The Way. I’d seen the book in the airport on my way to Europe last year. The wave of disgust that had washed over me as I stood in that little bookstore comes back to me now. I’d put Tom behind me, I thought. But hearing his name now was enough to raise the dead.
And more, hearing Birdie’s name.
Nine months pregnant. Jesus Christ.
And she had been shot.
