Mockingbird

by Chuck Wendig

  Doing any more than hanging that one thing would feel like she owns the place. Like she actually lives here.

  She does, of course. But reality has never been her strong suit.

  "Hullo, bird," she says in her best Mister Snuffleupagus. She taps the crow skeleton – which she crucified on to some popsicle sticks with fishing line and twistties. The dead bird spins lazily in the afternoon light.

  Louis assured her that the bird skeleton was disgusting and that it did not belong in the trailer, much less above the kitchen sink where they wash dishes.

  She told him it's the only thing she wants in this place, it's the only thing she really has in this place, and that were he to try to remove it, she would sit on his chest while he slept and smash his balls flat with a ball peen hammer. Miriam further assured him that this was why that hammer earned that name, because it was for smashing both balls and peens, so he should take great caution.

  They haven't been getting along.

  They'd been lovers. He was gentle and sweet. He convinced her to stay in Jersey. He used some of his saved-up money to buy a place, said they could live there, said it'd be fine because he wasn't here all that often what with his long hauls up and down the East Coast and oh, hey, she could get a job and start to settle down and and blah blah blah normalcy–

  Miriam doesn't want to think about it.

  Her head gash throbs. She touches it with a finger. Sticky. Mealy. Pink fluid, not red, wets her fingertip.

  Can't help poking the wound.

  Once, hope bloomed that she and Louis could make a real go of it. But hope turned to resentment and it wasn't long before the Airstream felt less like a place to settle down and more like a tin-can tomb.

  Now they're roommates. And friends. And enemies. And every once in a while she still gets that urge and she climbs on top of him like a little girl in a big saddle and they share a mercy fuck. Maybe the mercy's for him. Maybe it's for her.

  Who knows. Who cares.

  Louis is gone two weeks out of every three.

  This is one of his "gone" weeks. But it's ending now. He could be home at any point. She smells the air. No Old Spice – the old Old Spice, not the new Old Spice, which smells to her like the urinal cake in a Ukranian bathhouse.

  The longer he stays gone, the less that smell lingers.

  Just when it's all gone she knows it's time for him to return.

  She goes outside to have a cigarette.

  No smoking in the house, he said to her.

  It's not a house, she replied.

  But it's a home, was his response.

  Her answer to that was a gagging noise, finger thrust deep throat.

  FIVE

  Tweak

  Miriam sits next to the dead marigolds, smoking cigarette after cigarette, thinking that just one more will cure her of the tightness in her chest, will help her breathe a little easier. She flicks ash into the gnome's broken head.

  Hours pass.

  Evening comes. Still light out. Cicadas give way to crickets. A breeze stifles her sweat.

  It isn't long before the first scavenger – an ugly human dingo, a mangy man-coyote – comes sniffing around. One of her neighbors. One she hasn't yet met.

  He's lean, rangy, got a funny tilt-and-bounce to him like he's hearing music nobody else can hear. Long brown hair pulled tight at the sides and bound with a rubber band at the top.

  She sees the marks up his arms where he's been picking. Notes the teeth; none are missing but, judging by their color and consistency, it won't be long before they start breaking off like icicles.

  The cat piss smell is hard to miss, too.

  He's one of the tweakers. She doesn't recognize him, but that's normal – they've got a rotating bunch coming in and out of there.

  "Sup," he says, shuffling over.

  He probably thinks he's going to get some trailer-trash pussy. Either he heard about her from the others and thinks he can conquer the unconquerable, or they're fucking with him and told him she's easy. They're probably watching from the tree-line. Jokers.

  "Ahoy," she says.

  "You look nice." It's an almost sweet thing to say. But then she catches his thousand-yard stare, which looks clean through her.

  "You look like a human-shaped pile of scabs."

  "That's not a very nice thing to say."

  "There's that word again. Nice. You don't know me very well."

  He steps closer. Fingers rubbing together. "But I want to."

  "Dude. This is not a good night for me," she says. "I don't know what your basehead buddies told you, but this girl's legs are closed to the likes of you."

  "Fuck you, bitch." His eyes flash with anger.

  Now he starts walking toward her, his hands balled up into twitchy fists.

  Seems we're gonna do this, she thinks.

  He lunges.

  With spidery fingers he grabs at her wrists–

  The needle goes in what looks to be an old man's arm, dead in the center of a spider-web tattoo the nexus of which is already a cratered mess of track marks, skin like the surface of the moon. He lets the needle hang there over the bunchedup blaze-orange sleeve of his prison jumpsuit, and his head lolls back, gray hair draped over shoulders, toothless lower jaw creaking open, a slow and happy hiss leaking from the back of his throat. The heroin-horse goes stampeding through his arteries and galloping over his heart and then to his brain and the drug-beast stomps the gray matter flat. One last convulsion, a blob of pukey mouth froth, and a final slump of the head as he dies where he sits.

  –but it's not hard for her to twist out of his grip and shimmy to the side.

  He swats at her again but she ducks and weaves.

  "True story: You die in prison," she says, already panting. Shit, she's out of shape. "Pumping some of that sweet Mexican Brown into your arm."

  He kicks at her, but it's not exactly a Kung Fu move. More like a fat-kid-trying-to-hit-a-kickball move. "Fucking what? I don't–" He grunts. "Shoot that shit."

  "Not now. But in the future, you will."

  He throws a clumsy fist, and she catches it, pivots, and jams the arm into the small of his back. The tweaker cries out more in frustration than pain.

  "Funny thing is, when you die, you look like you're, what, sixty, sixty-five years old. But this happens in fifteen years, my man. Meth ain't milk, buddy. It does not do a body good."

  She underestimates him and, frankly, is basking in the glow of her own amusement. It gives the basehead an opportunity, and he takes it. The fucker is squirmy like a snake – a snake cranked up on a powerful methamphetamine – and he tosses back an elbow that happens to hit her smack dab where the bullet carved a small trench in the side of her head.

  Fresh blood runs straight into her eye.

  The tweaker shoves her. Hard. Knocks her down.

  Sand at her elbows. Grass tickling her neck. Blood in her eye. The basehead is laughing now. He tries to spit on her, but it mostly just dribbles up over his chin and hangs there. He kicks dirt.

  Scabby grabs at her ankles. She doesn't bother kicking. Part of her thinks, This could be it, this could be my last day here. After all, it's not like she knows. She can find out how anybody else is going to die, but her own doom remains a mystery. A mystery that gnaws at the ends of her fingers.

  Earlier today she thought the gunman had her. Now some meth-junkie.

  Only problem: She doesn't want to go out like that.

  "I killed a man today," she hisses through closed teeth.

  This gives the tweaker pause. Her hand closes around something in the grass, not far from the dead marigolds, near the trepanned gnome.

  "You ain't no killer," he says, grinning.

  She lashes out with the golf putter. The weapon cracks him hard across the forearm – he howls and lets go of her – but she's not done. She springs up and swings with the putter, again bringing it down across his forearms. He's not even yelling anymore. Now it's just a whimper, like a blubbering kid paralyzed
by a swarm of yellow jackets stirred. The addict's ankle catches on a mound of uneven ground – out here, with the sand and tree roots, it's all uneven ground.

  His turn. He falls.

  "Fuck away from me," he says, still simpering.

  "You ain't no killer," she repeats, mocking him. "Who knows what I am? You sure don't."

  She raises the putter over her head. Miriam's the hand of fate. She saw his death: heroin overdose. But the power is in her hands to change that. Putt his ass off this mortal coil, that's one less tweaker rapist asshole in the world. She'd be doing everybody a favor.

  He cries out. Blows a big old snot bubble.

  The putter falls from her hands.

  "Get out of here," she mumbles, nudging him with her toe.

  It's like he doesn't recognize a reprieve when he sees one.

  She kicks sand in his ear. "I said get the fuck out of here!"

  The tweaker yelps, crab-walks away until he can manage to stand, then ducks between a pair of double-wide trailers.

  Miriam goes inside. Lights another cigarette. Hears Louis' voice inside her head, chastising her not to smoke in here, but right now, she doesn't care. She can't care no matter how hard she tries.

  She finds herself in the bathroom, or what passes for one. It's so cramped you can barely turn around. The door isn't even a door, just an accordion you pull closed. Beneath her, a carpet the color of diarrhea. If you're going to carpet the bathroom, at least going with a shitcolor has a practical side.

  The blood is sticky on her brow. Like a pawing cat, she spins the toilet paper roll until she's got a bunched-up heap of tissue on the floor. Rip. She uses it to dab at her head, looking at the black and red crease across her hair.

  Hair that once was a different color depending on the day. Blue purple blonde green whatever. Blackbird black. Vampire red.

  Now just chestnut. Her original color.

  Trimmed down the side by a bullet's furrow.

  It's then the walls feel tight. Tighter than usual. She can barely breathe, so she stubs out the cigarette in the sink.

  "Fuck it," she says to nobody but the dead bird. Her voice quavers, rain on a tin sheet. Palms slick. Stomach sick. "I'm done."

  She goes and packs a bag.

  SIX

  This Way to the Great Egress

  A long stretch of Jersey highway – highway 72, Barnegat Road – where the heat vapors lick the gray macadam, the yellow dotted line melting between them like pats of butter.

  Two-lane road. Cars pass. Going to the shore. Coming from the shore. Families packed in minivans. Frat fucks hooting out of open-air Jeeps, bad music blasting. Someone on a bike dressed in tight lycra emblazoned with endless corporate logos as though he's a sponsored cyclist rather than just another asshat with delusions of significance.

  She sees the first bike and thinks, Ah, right. Bike. Should've ridden my bike. But then she thinks, no, that's not the plan. The plan is, go back to the old way. The normal way. The Miriam Black way.

  All she needs is her hitchhiking thumb and her getaway gams.

  Time to say goodbye. To be rid of the anchor that is Louis and this life and once more become a free radical churning thorough the arterial byways and circulatory highways of the United States of America. A cancerous mote.

  Except, for some reason, she doesn't stick out her thumb.

  She just walks.

  "I'll catch a ride somewhere ahead," she says, talking to nobody except the black turkey buzzards orbiting overhead on breathy vectors of hot air rising off the roads. Seeing her, they probably think she's going to drop dead here at some point. They'll pick her bones the moment she hits the ground.

  She doesn't intend to offer them the satisfaction. Ugly birds. Bald so they have no problem plunging their shriveled dagger-like heads into the gooey meat of a rotting beast. You were a vulture once, she thinks. You will be again.

  Sweat shellacs her brow. Drips in her eyes. Stings.

  To the left and right, trees. Mostly pine. Thin, wispyneedled. Stuck up out of the sand, sometimes whispering in the wind. Power lines overhead like strings of black licorice. Sometimes a house – a mini-mansion here, a rat-hole there. Then back to the pines and their slanting shadows.

  Evening twilight starts to bleed night-blood. Sun down, moon up. Soon she sees the pitch pines – stunted and twisted trees that grow here in the dead sandy soil, trees that thrive thanks to the occasional forest fires that burn through, killing the underbrush so that the pines live on, unmitigated by their scrubby competitors.

  Pitch pines mean she's in the Pine Barrens. A long stretch of nowhere. Home to the Pineys – the weird off-the-grid inhabitants of this trackless waste. Home too to the mythical Jersey Devil, a donkey-headed chupacabra type with bat wings and a witch mother, at least if you believe the stories.

  As night officially takes hold and the cars traveling this route die back, Miriam thinks she might just wander off the road and into the trees where the Pineys or the Devil may take her.

  And yet, she keeps on walking.

  It was a year ago that she was tortured in a small cabin here in the Barrens.

  Her legs ache. Tongue dry. Feet bottoms burning. Old calluses reawakening.

  She has a bottle of water. She takes a sip. Then another. Then it's gone.

  How many sips has she been taking?

  Shit.

  She thinks finally, maybe it's time. Time to hitchhike. Time to commit to this old life, commit to her lack of commitment. She knows that most of these cars will just take her back to the island, though. Irony of ironies. Like trying to pull yourself out of quicksand and only sinking deeper.

  Still, she puts out her thumb as the dark road glows in the light of headlights coming from behind her. Whoever it is, fine. Fate shall play its role. Kindly grandmother? Stoned sorority girls? Jack Torrance from The Shining?

  Fate has other ideas. Twisted as the pygmy pines.

  The rumble of an engine strikes a too-familiar chord. She looks back: the headlights are big, bright, two searing suns fast approaching, burning away the night.

  Brakes engage. A hydraulic squeal.

  Part of her is saying no, no, no, NO.

  But between every no is a yes.

  "Miriam?" Louis's voice calls over the truck engine.

  She's torn like tissue paper: Her muscles want to run, but her bones want to go to him. The tug-of-war ends when she just sits down. Drops like a puppet with its strings cut, down into the weeds next to the highway.

  Eventually she hears the door open, the door close, and then Louis Darling stands behind her, a massive shape – comforting and scary all in a single measure, warm and soft like a bear, but she knows that he could twist her head off like the bloom on a Black-Eyed Susan.

  "Come on," he says. And he urges her up and into the truck.

  To her own surprise, she goes.

  SEVEN

  Coffee and Cigarettes

  "I'm not going back to that fucking trailer," she says, sitting in the passenger seat. The truck rumbles along.

  Just the cab. No trailer. Everything inside the Mack looks new. Because that's how Louis keeps it. It stinks of Armor-All and pine scent and, yes, that lingering Old Spice odor.

  "Okay," he answers. In that one word, the soft Southern drawl – the accent subtle, not strong like the hard pluck of a banjo – feels comfortable. Like a ratty old pillow.

  He looks over at her with that one eye. The other is a ruined eyeless pucker hiding behind a black eyepatch. My fault, Miriam thinks.

  "I'm also not going back to that fucking island."

  "All right."

  "In fact, if you take me even remotely back toward the direction of the Jersey Shore, I'm going to take out your one good eye. With my thumb." She runs her hands through her hair, makes a wordless animal sound.

  For a little while, he just drives. Looking at her as much as the road. It feels all too familiar. Him the cautious guardian. Her the frazzled lunatic.

 
"You got shot," he says finally.

  "What? Oh." She feels her head. Again the bullet-dug ditch has crusted over: a scabby topography beneath her searching fingertips. "Right. Yeah. Wait. Who told? How'd you even find me?"