by Chuck Wendig
Their old TV in the corner, and atop it, a smaller flat screen using the dead box as a base.
"Just tell me," she says. "How did Mother… go?"
He narrows his eyes. Studies her while slurping milk. "How'd you know?"
"I can smell it."
"Yeah? Oh. Well. Uh. One day she just up and left us. You of all people know how that is."
You of all people.
"But how did it happen?"
He snorts, and she hears a snot gurgle in his sinuses. "Jeez, well, I don't know the mechanics of it. I just know that one day she made a decision and that was that."
A decision.
Suicide? A do-not-resuscitate?
"Was she sick?"
"I'd say so." He seems angry. "I still don't understand it."
"Christ, Jack, stop dancing around it. How did she go?"
"I don't know!" he says, suddenly flustered. "Bus, I guess? And then, damn, I guess a plane? I think it was a plane. Not my business how she travels."
"Bus. Plane. Travels?" Miriam pictures the Grim Reaper flying the friendly skies, jauntily tipping his captain's hat and adjusting his shiny bat-wings pin. "Jumping fucking Jesus, what are you talking about?"
"Your mother. How she got to Florida."
"Flor… fucking Florida?"
"Man, you ended up with a pretty sour mouth, young lady."
"Shut the fuck up, Uncle Jack. You're saying she's in Florida. Not dead."
He looks at her like she's got some kind of brain disorder. "Yeah, that's what I'm saying." He laughs. "You thought she was dead? That's funny. Nah, she just high-tailed it down south."
"Why didn't you just say that?"
"I thought you knew! You said you knew. That you could… smell it." He wrinkles his brow, noisily sips the dregs of colored sugar milk from the bowl. "Come to think of it, that was a pretty strange thing to say."
"Yeah, you think?" Miriam feels her internal organs slowly untwisting and realigning to their cardinal positions. "So what's with the smell in here?"
"What smell?"
That smell is him, isn't it? Him or the dog.
"Never mind. When did Mother go to Florida?"
"About… two years ago, I guess. Went down to help build some new church and decided she wanted to stay."
Florida. Ugh. There goes the Grim Reaper again, except this time he's riding a jet ski along the coast. Swooping up old folks left and right with his reaper's blade. Fun and sun and skin cancer and colostomy bags.
It's hard to picture her mother there. That little walnut of a woman. Severe, like a kidney stone. Pale, too. Doesn't tan so much as blister.
Miriam tells herself she's happy that the reunion didn't happen. Not today, maybe not ever. But that curdled feeling – what's that about? Is that the stirred mud of disappointment clouding these waters? Disappointment over… what? She's not going to get to see Mommy Dearest? Mommy, who treated her like a second-class citizen every day up until she revealed she was pregnant?
"So," Jack says, setting the bowl down on a stack of hunting and fishing magazines. "How you been?"
"Delightful," Miriam growls, plucking a cigarette from a pack. "Can I?"
"Long as you give me one."
She flips a cigarette into his lap. He rescues it, and by the time he's got it between his hangdog lips, there she is with the lighter.
"Where you been?" he asks.
"Around."
"Been a long time since we've seen you."
"We? Come on. I saw you maybe once every couple years." Whenever you needed money. Or a place to crash. Or to hide out from the cops. Her pious mother, harboring a lawbreaker. The woman's excuses were always different. God forgives. Or, that's what family does for one another, Miriam. We take care of each other even when it hurts us to do so, and you'd know that if you weren't so selfish.
"Doesn't mean an uncle can't miss his niece."
"Quit it. You didn't miss me. Please."
"Well. Maybe not. Your mother did."
She shrugs. "I'm sure."
"Don't get the wrong idea about me. I've changed."
"People don't change, Uncle Jack. They just put a new face on old problems."
"That's awfully cynical for a young woman like you."
"And I'm usually so rosy."
He pulls out a crumpled tissue from his pocket, gives his nose a good blow. "I get it. What happened to you was some rough stuff. With that boy and the…" His voice trails off. "I'm just saying, I get why you took off. But you should've come back. Or called. Your poor mother got left holding the bag. You sucker-punched her and ran."
"Well!" Miriam chirps. "This has been super-fun. I'm going to go now."
She blows smoke, turns tail to leave.
Jack doesn't get up. "Uh-huh. Go on, run away again."
"I'm sorry. Did you just say what I think you said?" She wheels on him. "You got a lot of nerve, Guy-WhoUsed-To-Steal-Cars-And-Hide-Them-In-Our-Garage. Oh! Remember that time we didn't see you for two years and then one day you drove drunk into that old oak tree right across the street? The power was out for days but did you hang around? If I recall, you stumbled out of the car and just… wandered off, like Moses out into the fucking desert. You were a bum then and, by the look of this fucking midden heap you live in, you're a bum now. I'll see you later, Jack. Tell Mother I said… well, tell her whatever you want."
Now she's really leaving. Stepping over that squirrely little froo-froo dog, striding through the doorway to the health hazard that passes for a kitchen.
Jack comes up out of his chair and follows hot on her heels.
"Oh, I'm bum, but what are you?" he's saying as he dogs her escape. "You don't look like you have a pot to piss in. Sure. Okay. I'm just a bum. I get that. I don't have shit. But that's not all my fault. I'm learning disabled. And I got depression issues. Give your damn uncle a break."
She stops in the doorway, turns to face him. Sees now just how haggard he looks: the hollow pits below his cheekbones, his sunken eyes, those teeth the color of tobacco spit. But she doesn't find pity stirring there. Only anger. Maybe it's for him. Maybe it's for someone else.
"Sorry you're both sad and stupid," she says. "But that's not my fault. I've got my shit under control, Jack. You know I used to think you were pretty cool? God knows why. Why don't you just tuck your little pity party between your legs and fuck-off back to your fleabitten Barcalounger, yeah?"
"You got mean," he says.
"I got honest," she hisses. "All the bullshit was beaten out of me on a high school bathroom floor."
He reaches for her, but she pulls away.
She doesn't want to see how he dies. It's going to be a pathetic, meaningless demise. He'll probably leave a lit cigarette in his lap lying there in that chair, and he'll combust like a dried-out Christmas tree. Or maybe he'll hit his head on something and that dog will eat his face.
Miriam marches off.
"Why'd you come here anyway?" he calls after her, standing there barefoot on the front steps.
She doesn't bother answering him.
"Don't you at least want your mother's number? Or address?"
She keeps walking.
Because she has work to do.
THIRTY-FIVE
Think Ink
She walks the rest of the way. Down Dark Hollow. Back to the main road. The rain soaks her to the bone and beyond. It's another half-hour into Ash Creek, which even now isn't much more than a quadrant of streets with a stoplight at each of the four intersections. Not much else going on here. Plenty of cars. All of them passing through, passing by, leaving this town in the rearview.
As she did, years ago.
Some things look the same. The sausage-and-onions joint is still there. The ice cream parlor next to it is boarded up, the pink plywood cone hanging loose from the sign, the paint scraped away by the tireless assault of time. On the corner is the five-and-dime, and it's still called that, too. Benner's Five-And-Dime. Not that you can buy jack shit for fifteen cents anymore. E
ven a crusty gumball from the machine outside costs a quarter.
Other things have changed, though.
Pappy's Gas is now an Exxon.
The little park in the center of town is gone. Now it's a block of boxy little condos and townhomes.
Luberto's Brick Oven is now a Rite-Aid.
And where the Pepper Pot café once sat is now Ink Monkey Studios.
Miriam has to smile. Her mother would have pissed her pantaloons over that. A tattoo parlor? My word. Might as well construct the Tower of Babel and dare God to knock it over like a big ole Jenga game. A bazaar of sin and depravity. Get your umbrellas and your dinghies and a pair of lions because surely the next Deluge is fresh on its way!
She still can't believe her mother is in Florida. Florida. Land of the Mouse. Of the gator. Of Cubans and old people and cockroaches so big you could ride them to work.
Whatever.
She goes inside the tattoo joint. A charming little bell rings.
Ding-a-ling.
She expects dingy, grungy, industrial – low-lit, the smell of cigarettes and incense, maybe the stink of spilled beer. Something growly on a CD player.
But it's clean and bright. Polished Pergo floor. Shiny display case with T-shirts and bumper stickers and lighters all branded with the studio's logo.
Ugh.
Behind the counter, tat designs are on display: sugar skulls and dragons and American flags and faux-mystical Asian bullshit.
In the corner, a little box TV hangs bolted to the wall. playing local news.
A customer leans over the counter. A girl with Miriam's build. Powder-blue jeans pulling away from her pink blouse, showing off a whale tail that's the same pink as the streaks in Miriam's hair.
She's chatting with the dude on the other side, a young guy. His spiky hair is meant to look like he doesn't care, but it probably took him two hours to sculpt it with some kind of putty product. His earlobes hang low, shot through with a pair of fat-ass lug-nuts.
Between the two of them is an open book. Tattoo designs.
"I just don't know," the girl says. "This is my first tattoo. I want it to matter. I want it to mean something."
She flips the page as the guy nods knowingly.
Miriam rolls her eyes.
She scooches right up next to the girl, giving her a little hip-bump.
Miriam faux-giggles, then says, "Gee, sorry. Ex-cuseay moi! Oh, hey. Did you ever think about getting a butterfly? Or a unicorn? Or, oh-my-god, an Asian symbol that means 'butterfly landing on a unicorn's horn'?"
The girl blinks. She's not sure if this is a joke. Her gaze darts to the guy behind the counter, and she asks, "Do you do that?"
"Eh," he says, stymied. "Maybe?"
Miriam flicks the girl's nose–
She's a hundred years old. It's her birthday. Big cake. One candle, not a hundred, because Lord knows she won't have the wind to put out a hundred candles. Kids and the children of kids and others have gathered to celebrate and she leans back to build up a gusting breath in those old cheesecloth lungs and she moves to exhale and – a blood clot fires into her brain like a .22 bullet and the stroke kills her dead. And as she topples backward, her feet sticking up in the air like the witch who got crushed by Dorothy's house, a little blue butterfly – now stretched like an image spread across Silly Putty – decorates her ankle.
–and the girl recoils.
"Ow! Hey!"
"No, dummy, they don't have that. If you want your tattoo to mean something, you don't just come along and pick it out of a stupid book. You come in here knowing what you want. You slap down a design on the counter and you say, 'I want this fucking tiger sketched permanently on my ass-cheek because by golly, you know what? I am the eye of the tiger! I'm ready for the cream of the fight. And I'm rising up to the challenge of my rival'."
"Maybe I'm not ready."
The tattoo artist watches this unfold. Blasé and largely unaffected.
"You're not ready, dingbat. A tattoo is an expression of your inner self inked on your outer self. It's some deeply spiritual shit."
"Oh god, you're right. What tattoo did you get?"
"A pair of handlebars right over my booty-crack. So when a guy is plowing me from behind, he has something to fake-grab onto. Am I right?"
The girl looks horrified.
Miriam snaps her fingers. "If you're not going to get inked today, why don't you go get a fro-yo across the street."
"But they're all boarded up."
"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said, fuck off."
The girl pales and hurries out of the store.
The dude behind the counter blinks. "That was interesting. You do realize she was a customer?"
"She'll be back. She gets a butterfly. Trust me. Oh, and you don't seriously have an Asian symbol that combines both butterflies and unicorns, right?"
"No. I don't think so."
"Good. Then we can continue. You Bryan?"
"I'm him. Why?"
Miriam wants to shake his hand but – she holds back. Contain yourself, girl.
"I called. About the swallow tat."
"Oh. Right. Here we go." He bends down, and with a grunt pulls out another book – this one a real mamma-jamma, stuffed to the gills with pages and pictures. "I take photos of all the ink I lay."
He starts flipping pages. Skeletons on motorcycles, names of wives and girlfriends, ivy around a bicep, the Devil's face on the inside of some chick's thigh.
He flips one page, and on it is a coil of barbed wire around some girl's wrist.
Miriam ill-suppresses a shudder.
Next several pages: swallow tattoos. Dozens of them. In pinks and blues, feathers like clouds, sweet eyes, many with banners in their beaks showing off names of loved ones. Bryan gets to the last page, taps a photo taped there. "Here."
The Champagne cork does not so much much pop off the bottle so much as it thuds dully against the floor.
"That's not it," she says. Shit.
This one's on some guy's bicep, for one. And while the forked tail and swooped wings are there, it's got way more going on: lots of detail in the feathers, in the eye. "This isn't right. The one I'm looking for is on a dude's chest. It's got roughly the same shape as this one, but less detail. Dude, it's like I said on the phone. Just a shape. The only detail's the eye, and even then, it's just a little round hole where the artist didn't ink."
"Nah. Sorry. This is the only one in the–"
The last word he says is "book," but the sound goes all distorted and wobbly, like someone's playing with knobs and levers in the sound booth that is Miriam's own head. She feels hot, and her vision tries to fold in on itself.
She takes a step backward, and it's then that she sees.
On the television in the upper corner of the room.
A girl's face. On the news.
A skull hovers over it. Mouth open. Streaks of blood from the sockets.
Everything snaps back to normal.
Bryan asks, "Is everything o–"
But she silences him with an index finger.
She listens. And watches.
"The girl, eighteen-year-old Annie Valentine, was seen being dragged into the back of a Type A school bus by a man in a hooded sweatshirt. The witness reported seeing blood on the girl's head."
"A school bus," she mumbles.
They show the picture again. It looks like a snapshot pulled off Facebook. Long, straight dark hair. Unex ceptional face. The kind of girl you marry, not the kind of girl a guy dreams about. She looks drunk in the picture. She's holding up a plastic cup of something piss-colored. Bud or Coors or some other watery light beer.
The skull hovers, fading in and out.
Just like what she saw over Tavena White's face.
A sign. Like a road sign, pointing her toward her destination. But here her destination is bad mojo, a bridge out, a storm-swept river that's oh-so-hungry.
"No, no, no," Miriam says. It's happening. It's happening now. Not in two years. N
ow. Maybe it's been happening all along.
"What? You know that girl?"
"I… don't." But how can she say what she's thinking? The truth won't help her. (She hears Wren's voice in her mind: Psy-cho.) All she knows is, now she's on the clock. Maybe she was always on the clock, but two years is a pretty good stretch of time. But now a girl's been taken. She might already be dead.
