Blackbird

by Averil Dean

  Celia hissed dismissively. She grabbed her clothes from the dresser drawer and flung them into the suitcase.

  “This is love to you? Keeping secrets—”

  “Secrets! Secrets are all you know. Don’t preach to me.” Anger snapped his chin back, inflated him with an acid buoyancy. “You live for that shit. Keep me with this knot in my gut for years, Celia, for a decade already, worrying over you and me and Eric, and your fucking secrets. Don’t tell me.”

  “Well, that’s all over now, isn’t it?”

  She swung her case off the bed and headed out the door. Rory followed her down the hallway, grabbing for her arm. A furious pressure roiled through his neck and ears.

  “Maybe it is,” he said. “Maybe you wanted this to happen, so we’d be done with all this sneaking around.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, that’s it exactly.” She dropped her suitcase and turned to him. “Tell you what, let’s just take this party right into your mother’s bedroom. Surprise! Surprise!”

  “Hey, let’s. Let’s be done with it, then.” His voice boomed in his ears. “You really want to know why he left?”

  The color ebbed from her face, leaving dints of white around her mouth and splotches of violent crimson on her neck and the tops of her cheeks.

  “Yes.”

  “Bullshit. You don’t want to hear it. You just want someone to blame.”

  Her mouth snapped shut as a hard tremor shook her body.

  “Well, here I am. You can blame me and you wouldn’t be wrong. Or you can blame my mother, or your father, or you can blame yourself if it makes you feel better.” He jerked his chin, dropping his eyes to her clenched fists. “Go on, then. Hit me if you want to. Hit me, but don’t pretend you really want to know.”

  She started to turn away, but Rory caught her by the shoulder. Her eyes shifted left and right like a hunted animal.

  “Go on,” he said. “He’s dead. He’s fucking dead, and I’m not sorry.”

  She pushed him away with both hands. He moved to block her, and a second later felt the ringing crack of her hand against his cheek, stronger than he thought she could be. He ground his teeth to bite back his reaction even as his muscles tensed for a fight.

  “Go on—get it out of your system. There’s more where that came from, right? What are you waiting for?”

  But as she raised her hand to slap him again, he ducked, grabbed her arms and pushed her through the bedroom doorway.

  “What did she mean?” she cried.

  “Fuck, Celia, what does it matter? To us? Now? He’s dead. He left us and he died. What more do you need to know?”

  “Why are you being like this? My dad was good to you.”

  Rory hissed with disgust. “Christ, you’re oblivious. What do you remember about him, anyway? Because I think your memories must be different than mine.”

  “He treated you like a son.”

  “A son! He wouldn’t teach me a goddamned thing. Remember the camping trips? Me running around after him, wanting so bad just to help, and all he could say was how he had no time to go around cleaning up after me. He wouldn’t even let me take a whack at a tent stake or rig up the fishing gear. Fuck, I couldn’t even gather the right kind of wood for the fire. Everything I did was wrong. It was that way at home. It was that way everywhere. He treated me like a nuisance.”

  “He was trying to teach you.”

  “Bullshit. To him I was...”

  A word hovered on the tip of his tongue. It was a word he could never take back, and they’d had enough of those for one night. Rory swallowed it back.

  “He was a pain in the ass. He was never my dad.”

  “Well, he was mine. Mine!”

  She turned away, both hands over her face, crying mutely with the tears trickling down the sides of her thumbs.

  Rory’s anger dissolved. She was asking exactly what he’d be asking in her place. The only surprising part of her reaction was that it hadn’t come sooner.

  He pulled her into his arms. Her body seemed to run like sand through his arms as they sank to the floor. Her cheek against his was hot and sticky with tears.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I really don’t want to know.”

  Two Days Earlier

  JULIAN SHUT THE DOOR and trotted down the front porch steps. The rumble of men’s voices faded to silence as he crunched along the snowy trail, leaving Zig Campanelli’s cabin behind him like a square of amber in the blue Alaskan dusk.

  He took a deep breath, exhaled a plume of steam into the cupped silence of the night sky. The atmosphere at the cabin seemed strained this year. Always before it had been himself and other men his age: Campanelli, of course, and Vann James and Charlie Sims. All of them restless, nomadic, alighting occasionally in some younger woman’s nest, but falling or flying out of it before anything might happen to seriously undermine their autonomy. The yearly ski trip gave them all something stable to latch the time on to, the way family men had holidays and kids’ birthdays and weekends. As a group they’d always found the humor in that, congratulating each other on the latest lucky escape.

  But this year was different. Their machismo had become a little strained, their voices self-consciously loud and laced with the rhythms and slang of a younger generation. It was embarrassing to hear them talk that way around Eric Dillon, a man who actually was young. His presence made Julian feel exposed, fraudulent—and resentful, in spite of the fact that it was Julian who’d invited him, who’d overcome every objection, who had paid Eric’s way and brought him here.

  “You should come with me,” Julian had said. “There’s room in the cabin. You and Rory keep talking about how you want to ski the Chugach.”

  “Rory won’t be able to make it,” Eric said. “He can’t take that much time off work.”

  “I know. But I’m not asking him—I’m asking you.”

  A memory of Eric’s hungry, hopeful face slid through Julian’s mind. That disbelieving pride showing for just an instant when Eric realized he was being invited and not Rory.

  Still, convincing him had taken some doing.

  “I don’t know, man. Celia’s got a list of stuff we need to do long as my arm. Kind of shitty of me to bail on them for a month.”

  “Some advice, kid?” Julian said. “The money man comes and goes. You bought the place. You bought yourself some freedom. If Celia complains, you just remind her of that fact. I guarantee she’ll quiet down.”

  “Celia won’t complain.”

  “You think it will piss Rory off?”

  “No,” Eric said slowly. “No. They’ll want me to go.”

  It had been in his mind, even then. Rory and Celia alone in the hotel. But Julian had worked on him, a word-by-word excision of Eric from the Blackbird that took the better part of a week. Eric was smart, but he was young and insecure and intensely competitive. Eventually he caved, as Julian suspected he would, to the idea of getting one up on Rory.

  Julian stopped now, rocking back on his heels as he looked around. Before him was a small lake with a jagged edge of ice like broken teeth, the shore whiskered with grass poking up through the snow. He felt himself alone in the silence, small and still as prey. There were bears in the area. Big cats, maybe wolves. But Julian’s hand in his pocket was curved around a gun, and he was a damned good shot. It was the last thing his older brother, Tony, had taught him, in the snowy woods outside their family’s winter home in Connecticut.

  “Hold your breath and squeeze,” Tony had said. “Don’t close your eyes, you pussy, you really want to do this with your eyes closed?”

  He snatched the gun away and squeezed off a couple of shots, both of which went far wide of the mark.

  “Do as I say, not as I do.”

  He laughed, a loud, happy barking sound, shrugging his big shoulde
rs. Tony was always laughing in those days. He was a clown, a buffoon, but looking back Julian understood what he hadn’t at the time: that it was Tony’s youth and good looks that made him so popular. His behavior would have been considered boorish from an older man; only Tony had never reached the point of maturity. They all could remember him now as he had been before the accident. An overgrown puppy with more balls than brains, rollicking through the halls at school and at the supper table and down the slopes as if it had never once occurred to him that he might fall.

  Amazing, really, the way people lit up when Tony was around. He had the whole long table in stitches at that last Christmas dinner, everyone screaming with laughter as though they’d never heard anything funnier than Tony’s description of his Austrian ski coach—whose accent didn’t sound remotely like the way Tony was bleating it out. But the table itself seemed to shiver with laughter, and no one minded at all when, using his knife and fork to demonstrate the position of his skis during one spectacular wreck, Tony left a flotsam of food particles around his plate and even managed to upend a full glass of red wine.

  “Oh, Anthony,” their mother cried. But she was laughing as she mopped up the spill, accepting his elaborate apologies and the dozen quick kisses he pressed to the back of her hand.

  “Mamacita! That wreck was so big it’s still going on!”

  She just shook her head, her face full of love and tolerance and more than a little exasperation, all wrapped up in a pinkish glow of motherly pride. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “Plastic on everything, Mom. I’ve been saying it for years...”

  Later, gathered around the piano with their aunt pressed into service at the keys, he led them all into song, deliberately mangling the lyrics to the delight of their four young cousins. “Nine ladies drinking, eight midriffs showing, seven hussies stealing, six teens a-laying, five gooold teeeeth...”

  Julian looked around in disbelief at the faces around the piano, all turned toward Tony. No one the least bit annoyed or wanting to clamp their ears shut as Julian did.

  Tony didn’t even care that he couldn’t hear the pitch. He sang all the time, in spite or even because of how badly he could butcher a tune. He knew all the songs from Hair and would belt them out, his head thrown back, bellowing like he thought he was Treat Williams. He sang in the shower, the kitchen, the car, the street. He especially liked to sing outdoors, nostrils flaring, wildly off-key, full of what their mother called “Anthony’s joie de vivre.”

  Tony knew the singing annoyed his younger brother. He would sometimes catch Julian in a headlock and scream songs in his ear, rubbing the top of Julian’s head with his knuckles at the same time.

  Their father loved it. He was a big man himself, but sickly, with four older brothers who’d tumbled around him like puppies but with whom he never could join in. He told Julian to accept Tony’s roughhousing as a sign of affection, and he’d give Tony a good-natured pop to the back of the head when he went too far.

  Tony was their father’s favorite, but Julian always knew he was loved. Maybe not as much, but enough.

  Really, it should have been enough.

  “Don’t think about it, Jules,” his brother used to say. “I can see you’re thinking about it.”

  Which always triggered an irritated response from Julian.

  “I’m not.”

  “Man, you should see your face. You look like an old woman.”

  “I’m trying not to—”

  “Yeah. You’re trying not to miss.” Tony laughed. “You’re such a pussy, Jules. What am I always telling you?”

  And Tony would repeat his favorite mantra: “Don’t think about it.”

  Kind of a bad joke at this point. Tony hadn’t formed a thought in twenty years. Hadn’t done more than shit and drool, as a matter of fact. He spent his days eating oatmeal from a spoon, staring at Jeopardy! with blank black eyes while their mother called out the answers between bites, scraping the slobbered oatmeal off his chin and pushing it tenderly back through his lips until Tony’s thick tongue finally worked it backward to his gullet and he swallowed it down.

  Julian felt sorry for his mom, who, before Tony’s accident, had kept flowers on every table and powdery sachets tucked between the folded sheets in the closet, dishes of fancy molded soaps in the bathrooms. Those had long been replaced by medicinal cleansers and stacks of adult diapers in a blue cloth hamper. There were no more dinner parties. No one to impress. Her world had shrunk to the size of a flat-screen TV. Tony’s condition had trapped her in a freakish maternal parody: white-haired mother with a giant diapered baby, whose hands curled under his chin like an infant’s fists, cradled against his chest.

  Julian called her often and sent flowers at every holiday. But he rarely went home to visit, and never at mealtimes.

  With his toes at the frozen shore, he took the gun out of his pocket. The weight of the thing never failed to surprise him. He remembered the way it had felt in his hand when Tony walked up to reset the tin cans they had piled on a stump at the edge of the woods. He had been entranced that day by the line of bare skin at the back of Tony’s neck, between hairline and collar like a chink in armor. Looking at it, the gun had suddenly seemed too heavy to lift and too unstable. Julian didn’t trust himself to raise it. He had stood in place, the gun dangling at the end of his arm as the scene around him wavered behind the fog of his own breath.

  The cans haphazardly stacked, Tony had turned to face him. As their eyes met, he stumbled quickly away, only a step, but with an expression of wary surprise that Julian had never seen before. As if, for a moment, he sensed the proximity of danger and even where the danger was coming from.

  Afterward they laughed it off.

  “I’m not turning my back on you,” Tony had said. “Not with that look in your eye. What were you thinking about, Jules?”

  What was he thinking about.

  On the hill above him, a shadow moved across the window. Julian raised the gun until the square of light was obscured by the barrel.

  What was he thinking about.

  He hardly knew.

  Five Days Earlier

  CHARLIE PUSHED BACK from the table and closed his laptop.

  “Looks good for tomorrow, kids,” he said.

  “Hot damn,” Zig said. “You got the bird set up?”

  “Yup. It’ll be here at seven.”

  Julian grinned across the chessboard at Eric.

  “Ready to meet the Lady, dude?”

  Eric looked up, blinking. His eyes had gone a glassy pink and he was cradling his head in one hand. He’d been staring at the chessboard for a while but couldn’t seem to decide on a move.

  A smart kid. Brilliant, actually. He’d beaten Julian several times over the past few days, but tonight Julian was nursing a second beer, while Eric was annihilated on Vann Jimmy’s San Francisco Kush.

  Needs must, Julian figured. He didn’t like to lose.

  “The Lady’s a bitch,” Charlie said. He held up one hand nearly vertical, his fingers pointed at the floor. “Eight hundred feet, straight down. She’ll rip your balls off, you approach her the wrong way.”

  Vann Jimmy wrapped his arms around his body. “Hold me. I’m s-s-scared.”

  Eric leaned forward and finally shifted his chess piece. Julian checked it immediately with his queen.

  “Fuck me,” Eric muttered.

  Julian took a pull of his beer. “The Lady is a bitch, straight on. But you can approach from the side. Much more doable.”

  “Much more pussy,” said Vann James.

  “It’s not pussy for a man to know his limits,” Julian said. “We’re not trying to get dead here.”

  “Might as well be dead, you let fear choose the way down a hill.” Vann James flicked the lighter and held it to the swirled glass
pipe. The flame-light danced along the scar on his cheek.

  “‘A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool,’” Julian said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Bulwer-Lytton.”

  Vann James snorted out a cloud of smoke.

  “Oh, Jesus. You are the only man I know who would quote that guy unironically.”

  Eric stretched out a hand and lifted his knight.

  Clever kid, thought Julian, annoyed.

  A pity they weren’t competing on the slopes. A loosened binding or buckle, a little something in his drink that would show up later on a piss test. It was harder to engineer a swerve like that in chess.

  Charlie had picked up his phone and was tapping at the screen.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Vann James. “Are you texting that chick again?”

  “Nope,” Charlie said. “Not me.”

  Zig returned from the kitchen with a fresh beer. He twisted off the bottle top and tossed it toward the garbage can.

  “You got to let her miss you, man,” he said. “You got to let her get dry.”

  “Really,” Charlie said without looking up. “This works so well for you?”

  Zig laughed, saluting him with the beer bottle. “Yeah, I’m full of shit. I tried to get my chick to send me a crotch shot, and she was like, ‘Oh my gawd, I’m not that kind of girl.’”

  “Yeah, but you wish she was,” said Vann James.

  Zig wobbled his head.

  “Sometimes. But, I mean, you also don’t want your chick’s business all over the internet.”

  “No, I get you. You want a classy slut.”

  “Hell, it’s not even that so much.” Zig dropped into a chair and stretched out his legs. “It was that when I was younger, sure. But you get older, you want to work a little. You want a woman who’s got some pride, who knows better than to get involved with the likes of you. Because when you get that woman, who gives it up in spite of herself? Mmm...”