Thunderbird

by Chuck Wendig

  Their mouths find each other— lips hovering just over lips, breath shared. Gabby’s fingers find the side of Miriam’s hips, an electric spark—

  You’re not done yet . . .

  A sound in Miriam’s ear like an airliner taking off just inches from her head. A deafening roar. The crack of a hunting rifle. A crying child in a Subaru.

  She pulls away. Yanks back the shower curtain and hops out— almost losing her shit in the process, her hand stabbing out and catching the sink so she doesn’t fall. Cursing under her breath, she steps in front of the mirror, face buried in her hands. She hears the curtain rings rattle and slide.

  Miriam peeks between fingers.

  Gabby stands there, looking lost, hurt, shocked.

  Someone stands behind her. In the shower.

  Louis. Not-Louis. The Trespasser. Clothes soaking through from the shower spray. He smiles. His teeth are broken rocks. A scorpion dances on the end of a dead tongue. His one eye is milky and split— a pale grape cut in half and shoved in the socket. He holds a fillet knife in his hand, presses it against his lips as if to say shhhh, and then brings it around in front of Gabby’s throat—

  Miriam cries out: “Watch out!”

  Gabby startles. Looks left, right, confused.

  The Trespasser is gone. Or was never there to begin with.

  “Shit,” Miriam says. “Shit!”

  “What the hell?” Gabby asks. “What is wrong with you?”

  Miriam growls: “Better off asking me what’s not wrong with me. It’d take less time.” Then she storms out of the bathroom, feeling angry at— she’s not even sure who. Herself   ? Sure, yes. Gabby? Yep, her too. Trespasser? Louis? Stevie McArdle? Gracie the truck thief  ? Everyone and anyone. Her anger is big enough for the whole damn world, it seems— a bonfire at a fireworks factory.

  In the other room, she kicks open her suitcase, starts flinging out clothing— she finds a white T-shirt, jeans, a pair of granny-panties. Gabby stands behind her, framed in the bathroom door.

  “You’re fucked,” Gabby says.

  “Uh, durr,” Miriam says. She starts to get dressed.

  “Why am I here?”

  Miriam thinks:

  Because you need me.

  Because without me, you kill yourself.

  I want to save your life.

  Not that Gabby knows any of that. Sure, Gabby is up to speed, mostly, on the story of Miriam’s life— its shape, if not all of its contents. Miriam told her how she met this other psychic, a woman named Sugar who knew how to find things. And how Sugar’s own mother— a woman named Dora— was a psychic too, and in her diary explained that she met this girl, this Mary Stitch girl, who knew how to escape one’s own curse. (Dora, of course, did not share that bit in her diary.) How for the last year, Miriam’s been following this too-sparse trail of fucking breadcrumbs, looking for someone who may not be real, may not be alive, may not be able to help. Gabby’s along for that ride. But she doesn’t know the rest. She doesn’t know where her road ends— unless Miriam can find a way to get Gabby to take a fork in the road and go another way.

  “Well, Gabs, that’s a question we all must ask now and again.”

  “Quit with the sarcastic self-defense mechanism. I mean it. Answer the question.” Her voice gets grimmer, sterner. “Why did you bring me? We fucked once, you took your little vacation to Lesbian Island, and then you left me behind— just more wreckage in your unbelievably screwy life. You could’ve just let me sweep myself up. Put myself back together. But you rescued me. Or that’s what I thought you were doing. It was something else. It was the opposite, wasn’t it?” Here, now, her voice on the edge— wavering now like she’s losing control, like the anger’s going to explode into sadness. “Are you punishing me?”

  “Jesus, no. No!” She wants to tell her what happens. She wants to tell Gabby how she dies. On the off chance it’ll save her. Gabby knows what Miriam can do. She knows the power and Miriam’s proven it. Maybe telling her would give her power over it. But Miriam knows how these things go. It’ll only confirm it. Gabby will realize, This is the kind of person I am, the kind who can’t hack it. And that will be that.

  “Then, what?”

  Miriam stands at the mirror. Her hair is a fucking mess. It’s in that stage between too short and not short enough, where all it wants to do is stick up and out like it’s trying to grab hold of something, anything, and catch a ride off her skull.

  Gabby asks it again: “Then what is it, Miriam? What are we doing here?”

  Miriam wheels.

  “I need a friend,” she says. “Okay? I have . . . like, no friends. And I’m tired of being alone. And I thought after everything, maybe you didn’t want to be alone either, and so I made the mistake of dragging you into my human tire-fire of a life. But now I can see: bad idea. You’re right. I’m punishing you. Being with me is a punishment. I get that.”

  “Miriam—”

  “No, I don’t say that as if I’m some kind of martyr— I mean it honestly. I am a thumbtack you step on and it gets stuck in your foot. Every step a misery. I get it. You should go. I’d say borrow the truck but that got stolen—”

  “Wait, what?”

  Miriam feels the mercury in her thermometer rising fast enough to break the glass. “Yeah, no, things are super-great right now. Been wandering the American West for the last year trying to find something and someone that probably doesn’t exist. I finally decide to love a guy and he gets married. My mother is a fucking cucumber. I’m quitting smoking and I want a cigarette so bad, I’d drive a busload of orphans into the tiger pit at the zoo, and I’m trying to get healthy, which is completely dipshitted, because as it turns out, getting healthy feels worse than being unhealthy somehow, and sure, yeah, I hallucinate a ghost or demon or my own superego and sometimes that trespassing motherfucker points me toward these fun little adventures, like this morning— where a woman stole my truck and my phone at gunpoint but only after some guy with a rifle in the desert tried to shoot the both of us!” And the roller coaster of her rising pitch and angry words suddenly hits a patch of broken track and stops dead. She takes a deep breath and thinks but does not say: Then I became vultures, killed the guy, and ate him.

  She implodes like an origami swan in a squeezing grip.

  Begins to sob.

  It’s ugly-crying time. She can barely breathe. There are snot bubbles.

  Gabby, still naked and wet and cold, comes up behind her and holds her. Stroking her hair. Shushing her. Miriam, through a spit-slick mouth says (words gummy with tears and snot): “I’m supposed to be making you feel better. You’re not supposed to be consoling me!”

  “We can get back to that later,” she says, kissing the top of Miriam’s head. “For now, let’s just go with this.”

  INTERLUDE

  COLORADO

  The old man’s got a head like a potato. Waxy, yellow, misshapen. An old spud, at that— deep wrinkles, skin so loose it feels like it might slough off at any moment, and a scattering of nodules and old-man barnacles growing from his face like the tubers pushing out from a potato’s eyes.

  He sits there at an old, cobwebby piano. A player piano. He makes these sounds as his tongue licks his lips or sticks tacky to the roof of his mouth. The sound of someone peeling an old bandage off a not-quite-healed wound. His elbow bumps the piano keys. A discordant chord plays.

  “You’re ahh, ahh, asking about the, uhh, ahh—”

  “The house. The cabin. Up by the reservoir.”

  “The fourth cabin.”

  “The third cabin.”

  He makes a sound in the back of his throat like a refrigerator running— a low, almost mechanical whine. “Right, right, right. You want to rent one.”

  “I do not want to rent one,” she asserts. “Like I said on the phone”— and here she’s really very proud of herself because she doesn’t say what she mentally inserts, you old shriveled testicle—“I want to ask about s
omeone who rented it.”

  “I can’t give out that kind of information.” He shifts again— another bang of the piano keys, another wonky eruption of not-quite music.

  “This would’ve been a while ago. Just shy of thirty years, actually.”

  “Ohhh, I don’t know that I can remember that far.”

  “Let’s try to conjure some old ghosts just the same, shall we? A woman came here. A pretty thing. Hair like strawberry wine. Freckly faced. Her name was Beth-Anne, but she went by a nickname—”

  “Sweetie,” he says. His voice quiet. His gaze distant, like he’s remembering. She can see it in his eyes— like a mirror that takes a while to serve up its reflection. “Florida girl. She was, ahh, pregnant. Early. Just a . . . a . . . a bump.” And here he offers a small smile and touches his own stomach, mimes his hand sliding over a pregnant belly. And then his face falls. He’s really starting to remember now. “You should probably leave now.”

  “Do you remember why she came here?”

  “You have to go.”

  Miriam gets up. Starts to wander toward the kitchen. “I’m going to get something to drink. You want anything?”

  The old man scowls, his face scrunching up like a wad of aluminum foil. “Now, wait just a minute—”

  But Miriam is already up. She’s in the kitchen, a galley kitchen. If she thrust her elbows out, she’d bump into the cabinets—cabinets lined with ugly beadboard paneling. Avocado oven, banana-yellow fridge. Rust at the bottom of both. Black mold around all the fixtures— lights, outlets, cabinet handles. A smell of bacon grease and a deep dark damp permeate.

  The old man— Weldon Stitch is his name, lived here in Collbran his whole life— totters into the kitchen, blocking her way out. “This is very rude. You’re very rude. You don’t just go into a man’s kitchen and, and, and—”

  She shushes him, then stoops and opens up the drawer at the base of the oven. A bottle rolls forward. Single malt. A good bottle: Aberlour, fifteen-year. She plucks it, sloshes it about, spins the cap and lets it fly off. It lands in the sink.

  “That’s mine,” he says.

  “And now it’s mine.”

  Then it hits him. “How’d you know—”

  “Where to find it? I’ve been in this house before, Mister Stitch.”

  “You’re a thief. A thief !”

  “Used to be. Of a sort.” She swigs from the bottle. It’s an easy, affable whisky. Not like the shit she’s used to drinking. “This is good, by the way. It’s smooth, like a baby’s ass. Speaking of that— you don’t remember me, do you?”

  Again, his eyes searching her face. He doesn’t have it . . .

  Until he does. Ding.

  “Danny’s.”

  “The hardware store and bait shop. That’s right.”

  “You bumped into me.”

  She grins. “I did at that. I saw something then. Do you know what I saw, Mister Stitch? I saw a scene. Five years, three months from now. The police raid this very house. Not local cops— not the guys you know. Staties. You’re how old now? Seventy? Still, soon as they’re at your door, you prove you’re not some doddering old dong, and you go out the back window, quick as a shot.” She claps her hands together. “You’re fast, and by the time they break into your house, they don’t realize you’re heading toward the shed in the back. You forget the key, so you don’t have time— you grab a brick from a nearby pile, who knows why you have bricks sitting around except that you’re a messy old hoarder, and bam, you break off the padlock. Then you duck inside the shed and you reach past all the shoeboxes and stacks of magazines and floppy disks— really? Floppy disks? You reach up and grab— you know what I’m saying. You grab the can of lighter fluid. And the book of matches. Both of which are sitting there for just this occasion. You start squirting the fluid everywhere. Your hands are weak, though, and while fast, you’re not particularly dexterous, and you get it everywhere. So, when the time comes to strike a match and set your horrible little shed on fire— whoosh. You go up in flames too. You try to get out but already the fire blocks your path. And you burn. And you die. You die screaming, flailing around like an old bear who just tore open one helluva beehive.”

  The old man just stands there, quaking.

  And then, like in the vision, he moves fast.

  His hand darts. Grabs a kitchen knife from the block nearby. Shing.

  Thing is, he’s fast for an old man.

  She’s fast for a hard-living piece of road trash. And before he can bring the knife against her, she clubs him in the head with the bottle of Scotch.

  Tunk. He drops. The bottle gurgles, splashes. Loses half of its very fine liquid. Miriam scowls. Knife clatters. She kicks the blade away, under the oven.

  At her feet, Weldon Stitch mumbles and blubs. His hands paw at the floor and he tries to get up. But his head is fucked up now: an apple gone rotten.

  His chin drops back to the floor and he moans.

  “Death is clarifying,” Miriam says, taking another pull from the Aberlour. The bottle makes a fwoomp sound as it sucks away from her lips. “You learn a lot about how a person lived by how they die. Not always. Sometimes, it’s just some random, goofy happenstance. I touched a guy once and found out that he’d one day die when a washing machine comes off the back of a tractor trailer, slides right onto his hood, shears through the windshield and roof of his car, and takes his head off clean at the neck. Random. But! Even there? That was the guy. That’s who he was! He spent most of his life in the car on sales calls. He died how he lived like so many do. Coke habit, fatty food, cigarettes, skydiving, whatever. I saw your death and I was like, gosh and golly, what is in that shed? So, I went out there— first I found the key in here, on that pegboard by the front door that looks like a trout— and it’s no surprise to you what I found, you fucking monster.”

  “Leave me alone. I’m a good man.”

  “Say most terrible men.” She clucks her tongue and crouches down over him like a gargoyle at the corner of a cathedral. “This isn’t how I figured it would go, but here we are, Stitch. You’re still alive, and here’s the deal: I’m going to let you live if you give me some info.”

  “I don’t have anything you want.”

  “You know where your sister is. Mary Stitch. She was your first, wasn’t she? You’re a bit older than her. Twelve years or something like that.”

  “I never touched her.” But she hears in his voice the tremors—the deception inside him is tectonic. It makes him shake when he lies. “She’s my half-sister. Different mother.”

  “You tell me where she is, I let you live. You can destroy all the evidence out in that shed. You can go on your merry way.”

  “I don’t know where she is,” he mumbles. “I swear it.”

  Miriam thunks the bottom of the bottle right next to his head. The floor shakes. “I’ll promise I’ll pulp your skull like a pomegranate, Stitch.”

  “Okay. Okay! She— okay. Last I heard, she was in Santa Fe.”

  “Santa Fe.”

  “Uh-huh. She was part of some . . . some biker thing there. Shacked up with a fella. I don’t know his name; she— she— she wouldn’t tell me.”

  The smell of shit and piss hits her nose. Stitch has lost control.

  “That it?” she asks. “Anything else? I find out anything else, I’m going to come back here, Weldon. And I’ll set fire to you myself.”

  “An RV park. She was staying in an RV park. Los Surenos or Suenos or something. Mexican-sounding.”

  She pats Weldon on the back of his head.

  “You did good, pig,” she says.

  Then she slams the bottle down on the back of his head. There’s a crunch. Blood doesn’t spray, but it slowly spreads beneath him like jam from a shattered jar. His body shakes like he’s on one of those vibrating motel beds, and then one leg kicks out— sending his slipper spiraling away— before everything goes still. Miriam tries to drink from the Aberlour, but the base of the
bottle sticks in the back of his head. She lets it go and it stands there, mocking her.

  Shit.

  After that, she goes out to that shed, grabs a couple of the shoeboxes there— each heavier than she’d like, dense with the horror that got the sick old fuck off— and throws a couple of them on top of him. She closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to see what’s on there.

  Then she gets a phonebook. It’s near the phone that hangs on the wall near the kitchen. A rotary phone, of all things.

  She finds the number for the local FBI office.

  She dials it.

  A woman answers.

  Miriam gives her Weldon Stitch’s address.

  Then she says, “You’ll find a dead guy here. Kid-toucher. You should come and clean him up. Send this along to an ‘Agent Grosky,’ will you?”

  ELEVEN

  TAXICAB CONFESSIONS

  Night in Arizona.

  The taxicab— a minivan with a cherub-cheeked, avuncular driver named Juan— shoots down Route 60 toward Phoenix. The city lighting up the desert dark like magma carving channels through the glass and concrete canyons.

  “You think this meeting is a good idea?” Gabby asks. “Is it safe?”

  Miriam shrugs. “No idea. It’s a swanky little boutique hotel in Phoenix—”

  “Scottsdale,” the cab driver says, interrupting. “You said Scottsdale?”

  “Whatever,” Miriam says, frowning. “Isn’t it all part of the city?”

  He gives her a look that says, No, no it’s not. She holds up her hands in mock surrender, then rolls her eyes.

  “This is your life, isn’t it?” Gabby asks.

  “Huh?”

  “Just . . . traveling around, kicking up clouds of dust.”

  “More or less. But I’m tired of that. I’m tired of my life. That’s why we’re doing this. That’s why we’re going to meet this asshole, see if he knows where Mary Stitch is. She’s here. I just know it.” Or so she’s been told. Of course, she’s been told this before, and Mary Stitch— a.k.a. Mary Scissors, or sometimes, Mary Ciseaux— had already been gone. She doesn’t stay long in one place. But Miriam can feel it in her gut like pinching fingers— she’s close. Real close now. Just gotta keep going. Kill the curse.