Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  • • •

  Even the bad part of town has a bad part. The sort of place where bars don’t check IDs because they sell them inside, where police don’t go because they’re outgunned. We drove past that neighborhood and stopped at a sports bar instead. I found it hard to believe that anyone who worked with Edison would be caught dead there. From the ridiculous bird clock over the bar that sang every hour, to the Raiders memorabilia on the walls, to the jukebox with a horrid selection, it seemed to me the last place people like Edison would meet. Of course, this made it perfect.

  Also they had bar trivia. Not the kind for extroverts, with the goofy guy on a mic and people spilling beer on slips of paper, but the kind where you played on a touchscreen against people you couldn’t see in other bars around the country. Trivia for sociopaths.

  Question 9, Category Food Facts: “Which nut has a poisonous shell?”

  “Cashews,” I said. But Abe (surname unknown) tapped “Almonds” and we lost the round.

  “Shit!” he yelled, pounding his fist on the table. Abe was one of…us? It had surprised me he was black—even more than being surprised that Edison had brought me here not on a whim, but to meet more of his colleagues—but I immediately buried the thought, thinking it racist to presume only white men could serial kill. Abe was big and bald and looked like he could rip your head off with tweezers, if he could avoid crushing the tweezers.

  “It’s almonds!” he complained. “This game is fucked up.”

  “No,” I said, “Cyanide just tastes like almonds. Supposedly. Cashews have a poisonous shell.”

  Question 10, Category Pop Culture: “Which film featured the hit Aerosmith song, ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’?”

  “Armageddon,” I said.

  This time Abe listened, but still threw a fit when I was proven right “What the fuck? Were you even born when that movie came out?”

  Edison had forbidden me to discuss things like my age or actual name, of course, so I was stuck for a moment. Fortunately Josh (real name undisclosed) jumped in to defend my honor.

  “A better question is how you know that movie, Abe,” he said, “since there are no black guys—”

  “Michael Clarke Duncan, mother fucker,” said Abe, ignoring the racist assumption from the white guy—apparently this was just how he and Josh got along. “Green Mile?”

  “He was in Armageddon?”

  “He was one of the main characters. How do you not remember?”

  “I guess I’m color blind,” said Josh, shrugging.

  Josh and Abe were both dressed in brand new dark-blue jeans, dark-colored T-shirts, and gray hoodies, slightly different shades but the same styles, like they had bought each other Old Navy gift cards last Christmas. The resemblance ended there; Josh was thinner, hairier, and taller than Abe, with a pleasant, fuzzy sort of smile hidden beneath a short-cropped beard. Nice, and thus a sure bet he had someone’s limbs in his freezer. I liked him anyway. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was like the team hacker or something. Like a league of super villains.

  “The best thing about Armageddon,” said Josh, not content to drop the issue, “is the part with the space madness.” His voice dripped sarcasm. “Sometimes astronauts just go crazy.”

  “It’s true,” said a man at the door. “I heard that John Glenn ate four guys and they covered it up.” When he stepped around the corner my heart dropped into my stomach. It was Joe from Buffalo. From the night on the lake. Joe who knew what I hadn’t done. He looked like he had just stepped out of my memory; not a single detail had changed.

  He walked straight over to the table and sat down next to Josh, across from me and Abe. I did my best to ignore him, but he decided to be a dick and stare right at me, grinning.

  “You know each other?” asked Abe, unnecessarily loudly.

  “Yeah,” said Joe, too casually. “You could say that. Isn’t that right, Nickie?” I felt my face get red. Thankfully I had given these guys the same alias I’d used in Buffalo.

  When we’d arrived, Edison had immediately preoccupied himself with a man named Nick (actual name a secret), who had thus far ignored me to a degree bordering on suspicious. I had pegged him as a leader of some sort, and if nothing else would have, he cemented in my head the certainty that this visit had been arranged in advance, at a place they treated as some kind of office. He was kind of a dick—with his hipster glasses and slicked-back hair, but what mattered more was that he screamed business, of the wrong sort. Well-dressed, though. If he’d gotten a gift card from Josh, he’d thrown it out and gone to Men’s Wearhouse instead.

  When Joe said this, however, Nick’s studious avoidance of me evaporated. Even though he and Edison were standing by the pool table, a fair distance away from our booth, it was quiet enough in the place that he must have heard or seen what was going on. And I was suddenly the focus of his attention. If I’d learned nothing else from Edison, I knew this was bad.

  • • •

  “What is he doing here?” I ask. Joe is the last person I expected to see here, and he happens to be the only one who can undo some of the half-truths I have been spinning about Xtian. Nick was of course very interested in why I had brought her here without telling him. We had talked about nothing else the entire time, which was growing tiresome.

  “He was invited,” Nick says, eyes locked on Xtian. “Unlike her.”

  For a moment I expect that one of us is about to kill the other, which seems inevitable, really, given enough time. But instead of starting something I will have to finish, he just says, “I know him, but I don’t know her, and I don’t like not knowing people, Edward.” This latter being one of the names he knows me by. I prefer variations on a theme with my aliases.

  “So get to know her.” I sweep my arm invitingly. Far better he talk to her directly, before Joe gets a chance to muck things up. “All yours.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Yes, she is.”

  I wave for Joe to come visit with me, hoping to peel him away from the situation until I can get a better idea what the hell is happening, but he just smiles and peruses the drink menu as Nick slides into the booth beside him. I wish him luck, there—the wait staff has been off their game tonight. Probably for the best. I could squeeze in beside Abe, but instead I casually drift over and lurk off to one side just in case I need to kill everyone. Joe first, I think. Then Nick.

  “About time we got introduced,” says Nick. “I see you apparently already know Joe.”

  Thankfully he is not talking down to her, no attempt to mask anything or treat her differently because she is a girl. She probably finds this refreshing but I find it disconcerting.

  “Apparently,” she says. Josh, unrealistically preoccupied with his phone, smirks.

  “How did you two meet?” Nick asks, looking between her and Joe.

  “If you don’t already know,” she says, “then you’re not supposed to.”

  Nick does not look happy about the response, but really, it is just about the best one she could have come up with. Regional cells are almost always separated. What happens in Buffalo stays in Buffalo, and so on. People sometimes move—floaters like myself—but information does not move, and regardless of the exceptions, Joe does not fucking move. He’s operated in Western New York and southern Ontario for well over a decade. My own presence here is questionable, but Joe absolutely should not be here.

  “Edward said you’re his partner,” Nick says. Xtian does not respond, so he adds “I asked you a question.”

  “Actually, you didn’t,” says Xtian. “You made a statement.”

  Nick smiles, and then viper-quick, reaches across the table with his right hand, grabbing Xtian by her chin. No one else moves. Protocol is to come to the table unarmed, so I know he is not planning to shoot her. He is simply establishing the pecking order.

  “Please take your hand off my face,” she says. A bit rattled, I can tell, but playing it cool.

  “You’re very polite for someone in your position,” says
Nick.

  “You’re very impolite for someone with a gun aimed at his balls,” she replies.

  For the first time, I realize she has her hands under the table, and I remember that she had her 3032 when we left the apartment this morning. And we have not been home yet to ditch it.

  Abe laughs. On anyone else it would seem wrong, but for him it is a genuine, deep Santa Claus sort of laugh. A scary, homicidal sort of Santa, but honest nevertheless. About the only honest thing in his head. I do not know him that well, but I know he has some deep, dark secrets. He hides them very well, though.

  “Little girl, you get a free soda for that,” he says, rising, ignoring the danger.

  “It’s pop,” says Joe. Abe ignores him and asks Xtian what she wants.

  “Vanilla Coke, please,” she says in that little baby doll voice I am growing to dislike. Her hands are still under the table, her eyes still locked on Nick’s.

  “How dare you,” says Nick, letting her face go to lean back in his chair. But he is talking to me. “How dare you bring her here, to this table, with a weapon?”

  “Slipped my mind,” I say. “You know I never carry.”

  “A clean shirt, of all things,” he adds. What Xtian would call a “noob.”

  “She ain’t clean,” says Joe. Nick waves him off, and Joe shuts up. I begin to wonder if maybe Joe knows more about what happened in Buffalo than what went down on the boat.

  “Come on, Nick,” says Abe. “I’ll get your next one, too.”

  Nick glares at Abe, but Abe makes it clear he wants to talk about something, and the two of them head off to the bar together. Possibly to plot our deaths. You never can tell. They would not be the only two imagining murder scenarios right now, that much is for sure.

  “Gun,” I say, sliding into Abe’s former spot, beside Xtian. “Now.”

  She sticks out her tongue and then disappears below the table for a moment before reappearing beside me. I am the only one who notices when she slips the gun into my hand while crawling under the table. Then, like nothing happened, she is skipping off to the jukebox.

  “How much you want for her?” asks Josh, fiddling with the trivia game while I break the gun down in my lap, then slip the pieces into my coat pockets.

  “Not ripe enough yet. Or is she … Edward?” Joe cocks his head at me, trying to goad me into a reaction. I clearly note the emphasis on the name, telling me plainly that he was discarding the “Tom” he knew me by previously. I mentally file this away under “inevitable.” I am not worried about it. I know things about him, too. Not just the things he tells everyone, either; I know which of those things are true.

  “She’s as old as your daughter,” I say, picking one of them. “So you tell me.”

  This is about as close as I am comfortable getting to the sort of vile insinuation he just tried, and to his credit he gets it, holding up a hand in feigned submission. I raise an eyebrow at him since no one is watching, and he nods. The unspoken agreement: we will both drop this, whatever it is, at least for now. Good on him. Nobody has to die. At least not tonight.

  • • •

  Nick and Abe got back to the booth about the same time I did, and somehow we all fit inside, one big unhappy dysfunctional family. Almost immediately, people started talking weird. It took me a few seconds to figure out that it was the same sort of code they’d been using on the boat, back in Buffalo. Here, of course, it made more sense to be sneaky. We were in public.

  “When are we meeting next?” asked Edison. Since it didn’t seem like we were quite done here yet, I suspected immediately that there was more to it than paying the bill, and I was right.

  “After graduation,” said Nick. Then, oddly, he repeated himself. “After graduation.”

  “You’re still in school?” I asked, and immediately got four and a half dirty looks.

  “Shut up, little girl,” said Nick. “Go update your Tumblr.”

  Beside me, Edison gave a little shake of the head, so I just wrapped my lips around my straw and kept quiet.

  “That’s a long way off,” said Edison, turning back to Nick.

  “And?”

  “Just saying, it’s odd.” Edison looked around the table, and there were some shrugs, but apparently no one else had a problem with whatever they were discussing, so he dropped it and they moved on. I tried to keep up, as best I could under the circumstances, but the majority of what followed meant nothing to me at all. At the time it sounded like five guys discussing a vacation or something. And I guess maybe that’s what it was. A hunting trip.

  “Decide on a place yet?” asked Josh.

  “Local,” said Nick. “No back roads. Straight shot up an interstate wherever we go.”

  “Overnight stay?” asked Edison.

  Nick shook his head.

  “Just a day trip. Joe will be in charge of bringing a packed lunch.”

  Joe began to hum the Oscar Mayer song. Everyone pretended not to notice.

  “Casual attire, of course,” said Nick. Groans around the table.

  “Isn’t Canadian currency made out of tree bark?” asked Joe. Nick shot him a dirty look.

  “Isn’t American currency made out of the skins of natives?” asked Abe, who I would later learn was from Vancouver originally. Relevant to nothing, of course.

  “That and broken treaties,” said Josh.

  The table went quiet as Nick pulled out a disposable burner flip phone like they all seemed to use. He dialed, listened, and then spoke rapidly in what was either French or Japanese before returning to English, for our benefit.

  “Yeah, that flight out of Quebec isn’t working for me.” He listened, then asked “Athens?”

  “I like gyros,” said Josh.

  “In Germany it’s pronounced like ‘Oreos,’ did you know that?” asked Joe.

  No one cared. However, everyone seemed happy with whatever had just been decided, so Nick said “do it” into the cell and then closed it.

  “Three-hundred,” he said, without further context.

  “And how are we splitting the check?” asked Josh. I suspected he wasn’t talking about our bar tab.

  “Looks like six,” said Nick, surveying the booth. For another ten minutes, they argued over numbers, with eyes continually coming back to me. Ultimately it seemed like they settled on whatever “three-fifty” meant. It felt like unnecessary obfuscation. No one else was listening, were they? I tuned out, figured I’d be told what mattered, and forgot most of it almost immediately.

  But I remembered the end part.

  “I think we’re all settled,” said Joe. “Except for the time. We got a rough estimate?”

  In the corner, the jukebox spat out the last few chords of some old song about murder, then went silent.

  Nick considered, watching the screens over the bar. “Blackbird,” he said.

  • • •

  Nick leaves soon after with Joe, and in the less oppressive atmosphere I decide to let Xtian socialize, catch up on current events with the men she will soon be working with. If nothing else, she can grow accustomed to the superficial insults and false camaraderie, all masking a deep distrust that is more important for her to learn than the coded language. Everyone is a colleague, and a rival. Everything, all of it, is a falsehood. Masks beneath masks, layers of an onion. Most of the things we know about each other are lies.

  After more mindless conversation and a few drinks, Josh and Xtian head off to play nine-ball for a while as I catch up on lies with Abe. I try to drop some hints about Joe, but if he knows any more about that situation, he is not sharing: there is nothing in him tonight but the same millimeter-thin gilding of emptiness, diet cola on an empty stomach. Lacking substance.

  “Did you see?” he asks. “Gold is down another seven-fifty. Good time to buy.”

  “You work for Rupert Murdoch?”

  “Maybe I just think, you know, society is about to collapse.”

  “Should be investing in lead then,” I mutter.

 
; Abe gestures vaguely towards the bar. Televisions are showing highlights of the Seahawks trouncing the 49ers, at that moment, but I get his point. News. Terror. Politics. ISIS is suddenly everywhere, even though they have been around for years. Amazing what a marketing campaign will get you. A new kind of destruction—and distraction—every month.

  “It’s all coming down,” he says. “Slowly maybe, but it’s coming. And whoever has the money when it’s all over is gonna be in charge.”

  Abe goes on like this for a while, me nodding along, but thankfully before he can start talking about the earth being flat, Xtian walks over with Josh and asks if we can leave.

  “The Ladies’ room here is ghetto,” she says, “and Josh says the Men’s is worse.”

  “I wouldn’t touch a toilet in this place with Abe’s dick,” says Josh.

  “You come near my dick and I’ll cut it off,” replies Abe, brandishing a spoon.

  “We have a bridge to cross,” I say, ignoring the banter. “Can you hold it?”

  “My kidneys are about to blow,” says Xtian.

  “Shame,” says Josh. “Kidneys are worth five grand a piece.”

  We wander outside to find a bush or something, but there is nothing around but cars, so we head for mine. On the way, Xtian asks what was going on with the Oreos. It takes me a minute to figure out what she is talking about.

  “Oy-rows,” I say, enunciating. “They were being goofy. They meant Euros. European currency. That’s how we’re getting paid.”

  “Oh!” she says. “Okay, but what was the graduation thing?”

  “After graduation,” I said. “A.G. It means three.”

  “Why’d he say it twice then?”

  “Because he needed to say it twice. Three, three. March third.”

  “What’s A.G. have to do with three?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I say. “I thought you had to pee?”

  She goes behind our car as I sit inside, door open, listening to the old engine mutter. I know how it feels, and I am twenty years its elder. My leg throbs, my neck is stiff, my shoulder hurts, and that is just an appetizer. Pain is nothing new, of course. I can trace my entire life history back along a trail of endless pains and aches. My earliest memory is breaking my arm at age six, and it has been all downhill from there. But there is more of it, lately. Pain.