by Chuck Wendig
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TO ALL THE FOUL-MOUTHED WOMEN WHO GET SHIT DONE
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PART ONE
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MAGPIE AND MIMIC
INTERLUDE
AMERICA’S HOT MOIST LAND-WANG
Miriam stands at the door to her mother’s house in Florida. The wizard van at her back. She has just arrived. Though it’s wet here, so wet the air feels like she can grab a hunk and wring it out, she can still taste the Arizona dust in her mouth, gritty like beach sand. Steam rises from under the hood of the van. It’s on its last legs. She says as much into the phone.
Gabby answers: “Every cowboy loses his horse at some point.”
“I’m not a cowboy.”
“It’s just a saying.”
“Is it a saying? I’ve never heard it before.”
A pause. Gabby says, “I think I just made it up.” Another pause. “You gonna be okay at your mom’s?”
Miriam wants to say, I’m not okay. My brain is literally broken. My heart is broken. My wizard van is broken. Everything is fucking broken and I need you. I need Louis. I need someone. I don’t want to be alone. She says none of those things. Instead, she steels herself with a scowl and says, “I’m good.”
“I can come there. I can visit.”
“No.” That word, too sharply spoken. “Don’t. It’s fine. I need time alone.” That’s a lie, but one she’s told herself often enough that she has begun to believe it. “I’m going in. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“I miss you.”
I miss you too, she thinks.
Instead, she just hangs up and goes inside the house.
ONE
PURGATORY AND LIMBO
Now.
The game: Egyptian Rat Screw.
The opponent: Rita Shermansky.
The location: Delray Beach, Florida, in the house that once belonged to the late Evelyn Black but now belongs to her daughter, Miriam.
The time: 7:35 PM, late August. Months after the events in Arizona.
It’s hot and everything is slippery. The air conditioner in the house is making a sound like a buzz saw trying to chew its way through a coconut.
Miriam’s mind is not well connected to her body. It’s like there’s a three-second delay—she wills her eyes to look left or right, she demands her hand move to the deck of cards on the table, she urges her hips to shift in this uncomfortable dining room chair, and each time she makes the command in her mind, three seconds later, her body wakes up like an old, slow dog before deciding to comply.
That’s wine for you.
She hates wine. It’s a mom drink. Basically vinegar. She thinks of it as a pickling solution—a bruise-dark brine of grape juice gone awry. But her mother had a lot of it. Miriam’s gone through it all, but now she’s settled into the same habit: going to the little wine store on Atlantic Avenue, picking out a bottle of something cheap and red, and coming home and drinking it all in one go.
It sucks. She hates it. It’s gross.
She does it anyway.
Miriam closes her eyes, lets her nostrils flare, and sucks in wisps of cigarette smoke from the cloud hanging thick about her head. It smells like life. Like death. Like cancer. Like all her synapses firing at once.
“You can fuckin’ have one, you know,” Rita says.
It’s a not-uncommon offer. With it comes the compulsory gesture: Rita jostling the pack of Newports and turning the tips of the coffin nails toward her.
As always, Miriam shakes her head.
“No,” she insists, the word sloppy as it gushes out of her mouth. “I’m trying to be healthy, I’ll have you know.”
Rita sniffs. “That explains the wine, then. A real tonic.”
“Wine is good for you. It’s fruit juice. And alcohol is antibacterial. Totally medicinal. Doctors say that—” She thrusts up her finger to make a point, and then she forgets what the point was going to be. “Doctors say you should just shut the fuck up and shuffle the cards, Rita-Rita-Smelly-Feeta.”
The old woman lifts her lip in a fishhooked sneer. Rita Shermansky is seventy-two years old and looks like if you took a skeleton, glued little veal cutlet muscles to each of the bones, then wrapped it all in soft orange deerskin leather. She’s fit as a fiddle. Taut as an anchor line. Puts the tan in tangerine. The woman plays tennis, golf, racquetball, some made-up shit called pickleball, and bodyboards. She also smokes like a house fire, drinks like a diabetic bulldog, and curses like the ghost of a pirate who has been wandering the afterlife looking for a treasure chest full of fucks that’s long ago been emptied. Her voice is a throaty, mosquito-wing whine. That whine perfectly conveys that shrill New Yawk accent of hers.
Rita dies in eight years.
Her death is ludicrously pleasant. She goes to sleep one night. She dreams of being on top of the Empire State building, the wind making her eyes water. Then death steals her away, gentle as a practiced pickpocket. She never wakes up. Lucky old bitch, that Rita.
“C’mon,” Miriam needles her. “Let’s play.”
“We have time?”
“Pssh. Pfft. We have time. Mervin isn’t going anywhere.”
Rita raises a drawn-on eyebrow. “Merv’s going somewhere, honey.”
“Just cut the deck.”
Egyptian Rat Screw works like this: Everyone gets an equal cut of the deck. Nobody gets to peek at the cards. You flip over cards, flinging them into the middle pile, one after the next, player after player. The goal is to win the stack of cards and to rob the opponent of theirs. If the card is put on another card of the same rank (number or face), you can slap the pile. First hand on the pile gets the stack. Or, if a player puts down a face card, the opponent has a number of tries (three for a king, two for a queen, one for a jack) to put down a face card, too. Failing to drop a face card means the player gets the stack, boom.
None of it has anything to do with Egypt, rodents, or fucking.
This is Rita’s game. She’s vicious. Fast like a lightning strike with card-dropping and hand-slapping. Worse, she hits like she’s trying to kill a wasp.
Miriam puts a four of diamonds down on top of a four of clubs, and in a rare moment of her mind and body pushing past the wall of wine to sync up, she slaps. Bam! First on the pile. Rita’s slap is close behind: whap.
Pain blooms in the back of Miriam’s hand. She recoils. “Jesus tits on a banshee,” she says, shaking her hand as if to fling the pain away. “You’re not killing actual rats here, you old bat.”
Rita shrugs it off, like she always does. “Honey, back in the day, if we played this game, I’d put on my old wedding ring and turn it diamond-side down.
You get slapped with that, it’d pop the skin of your hand like a hole-puncher. Blood right on the playing cards—but we’d keep playing.”
Miriam takes another sip of the wine. It tastes like raisins and anger. She winces. “You rolled hard back in that so-called day. You have some kind of competitive Egyptian Rat Screw league? Smoky basements and money changing hands? Italian mob? Chinese tong? Illuminati?”
“Let’s just say I had an interesting life once.”
“C’mon. Tell me. For fuck’s sake, Rita, give up the goods.”
Rita’s eyes sparkle behind pinched folds of flesh as she takes a hit off her Newport. “You’re talking. Which means you’re shitting up the flow of the game.”
They keep playing. Back and forth. Face cards hitting face cards. Hands hitting hands. Stash goes this way, then back, then the other way once more. Rita’s winning. Rita always wins. Miriam’s drunk and slow and her hand is starting to throb, but Rita—despite this being her fourth gin and tonic (just a finger-flick of tonic)—doesn’t lose a step. And doesn’t seem to feel pain.
Finally, Rita takes the stack.
Game over.
“Almost time,” Rita says. “Merv’s nearly off the clock.”
Miriam looks over Rita’s shoulder at the clock on the microwave in the kitchen. She has to squint to get the blue LCD numbers to hold still. It’s like trying to psychically control ants. Wouldn’t that be a horror show? she thinks. Ants? Yuck.
Finally, the time stops dancing. It’s almost eight. Rita’s right. Merv’s hour is nearly upon them.
“Lemme ask you something,” Rita says.
“No.”
“What are you running from?”
“Not running from anything.” Miriam urps into her hand. “In fact, I’m sitting right here. I am as stationary as a motherfucking sea cucumber.”
“You drink at night.”
“I drink starting at noon. It’s very precise. If I drank before noon, then I’d be an alcoholic.” This is literally her logic. She tells herself the fact that she can wait to drink is a sign she is not a certifiable boozehound.
“You jog in the mornings.”
“I run in the mornings. Jogging is for old people.”
“You don’t have a job.”
Miriam snort-laughs. “Could you imagine.”
“Yet I still see it in those bloodshot eyes of yours. You’re running from something, honey. Maybe you’re running from it in your head, but running is fucking running, you hear me?”
Another puckered-lip drag off that Newport. Another plume of smoke. Miriam feels lost in it for a moment, like a boat in the fog. What am I running from? I’m not running. I’m just staying real still like a scared little fish, hoping the big bad shark of life swims on by. There’s so much she doesn’t want to think about, and trying not to think about it just means she’s thinking about it—Louis, his fiancée Samantha, Samantha soon dying by Louis’s hands, Miriam’s dead mother, Miriam’s ex Gabby, the little boy Isaiah, Miriam being out there in the Arizona desert, dead but not dead, birds stitching her wounds with their beaks like she’s some kind of Satanic Disney princess, then the news that she has a traumatic brain injury ready to blow.
“Fuck this,” Miriam says, lurching to a soggy stance. “It’s time.”
“It’s early.”
“It’s time. I’m going. You can come or not, I don’t care.”
Rita shrugs. “I’ll come. I still want what’s mine. But I hafta pee first.”
TWO
ATAVISM
It isn’t the heat, it’s the humidity. That’s what they tell you. Miriam never really understood that—heat is heat, hot is hot, and it sucks whether you’re roasted over an open fire or sautéed in a pan.
Then she experienced Florida in August.
It’s not like being sautéed. It’s like being boiled in a saucepot of your own sweat. It’s like tucking yourself up under the devil’s scrotum. The moistness. The slick sweat and stink. You can’t get it off of you. The humidity clings like a mummy’s swaddling. So, when Miriam steps outside, it washes over her like Hell’s hot breath.
She wrinkles her nose against it. Her stomach surges with sudden nausea. Her hair is longer now, the only dye in it is blackbird black, and she runs her fingers through it just to try to cool down. It doesn’t work.
For a moment out here, she’s alone in this subtropical suburban neighborhood, staring out over the little bungalows and ranchers tucked in amongst the cradling shadows of palm trees and massive crepe myrtle. Insects buzz: a chorus of crickets and katydids.
The noise, the heat, the half-dark, the loneliness. It puts her at the bottom of a funnel, and everything runs toward her. Drowning her. In six months, Louis is going to kill Samantha on their wedding night. In two years, Gabby might commit suicide. Then there’s the message that the psychic Mary Stitch left behind for Miriam after the horrific events in Arizona: You have to reverse what happened. Undo what was done. The thing that made you who you are. You want to get rid of it? Then you, dear Miriam, have to get pregnant. After all that goddamn time searching for her, combing the country for the one person who was supposed to tell her some way, any way, to unravel Miriam’s curse and end this god-fucked ability of hers—and this is what she says? Get pregnant, Miriam?
More like get fucked, Mary Stitch, you murderous terroristic whore.
I can’t get pregnant. Did that once. Ruined my insides. And besides, Miriam? A mother? You’d be better off leaving a baby in the care of a pack of starving Chihuahuas.
It takes a village to raise a child, but just a single Miriam to ruin one.
Futility seizes her. It’s a crushing fist around her heart. Grief and frustration push through the wave of winedrunk and threaten to drop Miriam to her knees. She can’t stop Louis from killing his bride. She can’t save Gabby from suicide. She can’t save herself from whatever it is that awaits her. She couldn’t even save the people in that courthouse in Tucson. Has she made any difference in the world? Any difference for herself or for those trapped in the gale-force winds of the hurricane that is her life? I’ve got nothing left, she thinks. I’m useless as a pair of tits on a lawnmower. Busted-ass brain and all. She feels woefully alone. Even the Trespasser has abandoned her. Hasn’t been haunted by that imaginary fucker in months.
And then suddenly, Rita is behind her. A steadying hand on Miriam’s shoulder—one of those bony slapping rat-screw hands.
“Look like you saw a ghost,” Rita says.
“No,” Miriam says, failing to keep the tremor of despair out of her voice. “No ghost. Just waiting for you.”
“You got agita, honey. But we can talk about that later. Right now—”
“Merv.”
“Merv it is.”
Mervin Delgado lives three houses down. He’s got a tan rancher and about a thousand wind chimes. Metal ones, wood ones, chimes made from shells. Even the slightest breeze makes his house tinkly-ting-tingle like it’s a fairy wonderland.
The details on Merv are these:
Two kids, three grandkids, all of them living out of state. Wife died five years ago from lung cancer. He’s seventy-eight, retired, used to be in the Navy, then worked as a pilot for the airlines. He looks like a couple of old potatoes stacked on top of each other. Has bunions, will tell you about them. Has many conditions, in fact, and will tell you about all of them: his hip pain, his osteoporosis, how he had MRSA once on his shin, how his liver numbers are off, how he’s thinking of getting one of those cool jazzy chairs you can ride around Walmart. Miriam knows all this because she’s spent some time with the little lump. But as soon as they hit on the topic of birds, it was, like, jackpot. Now that her powers include the ability to jump into birds, she’d rather know a little something about them. And Merv’s got a huge boner for birds. (Bigger than his wind chime boner, even.) He will spend hours talking about them. He likes egrets and bitterns and other Florida birds, but songbirds, too. He told her, “My favorite bird is the mockingbird. Fi
ercely protective of their babies, but they also make such wonderful, diverse songs.” That was the last time she spoke with him, because Miriam may have been a bit drunk and may have gone off the rails a bit, yelling at him about how the mockingbird was a shit bird with no self-respect and no identity or song of its own and fuck that bird and anybody who likes it.
Merv seemed a little stunned as she stormed off.
She feels bad about that.
And now it doesn’t matter, because he’ll be dead in five minutes.
The way Merv is going to die is this: He’ll start by having the worst headache he’s ever had in his life. It’s probably hitting him right now, in fact. He’ll clutch at his head. He won’t be able to feel his face or scalp—it will feel less like he’s touching his own head and more like he’s pawing at a cantaloupe sitting on top of his shoulders. Then the hemorrhagic stroke will punch him in the brain, a little invisible bullet. He will fall down. He will crack his head on the travertine tile of his kitchen. His legs will flop around like those of a puppet in the hands of an epileptic puppeteer. Then he’ll be dead.
Fairly fast, all things considered.
Not exactly peaceful, but Miriam knows that—with the exception of Rita and precious few others—death sucks for everybody. There’s no nice way to go; there’s just gradations of how bad it can get. People use the phrase pass away, but nobody just passes away. Passing away sounds like a rowboat gently slipping from its dock. It isn’t like that. Death is brutal. People throw up blood. They spend minutes, hours, or days in the growing, creeping certainty of what’s to come. They piss and shit themselves. They cough so hard, it’s like breathing glass. They hallucinate. It’s different for everyone and the same for everyone, too. We’re all snowflakes in the same damn blizzard.
They walk up to Merv’s house. Miriam isn’t being particularly stealthy and Rita hisses at her to stick to the shadows. Miriam gives her the finger, but fine, the old woman is right, so she escapes the halo of light cast by the streetlamps above. Together, they sidle up alongside a couple ferns so they can slip into Merv’s postage-stamp backyard.
