Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  Chapter 2 - Sunday,

  September 11

  David Beaumont shared a small apartment on the north side of Liberty with a quiet guy named Bernie Wilkins, a friend from high school. The apartment wasn’t in the nicest part of town, the part known for long tracts of low-rent housing and a stretch of bars that seemed to attract drunken fights on Friday and Saturday nights. David didn’t particularly like where he lived, but that would all be changing very soon.

  Bernie wasn’t a bad guy to live with, but he was even messier than David, and David was certainly not nit-picky about keeping the apartment spotless. Several long weeks often passed between the times when someone straightened up and more likely than not the sink was full of dirty dishes and old beer bottles. Sometimes something in the sink would start to go bad and stink up the kitchen, and someone would finally get around to washing them. The empties, most of them David’s’, stacked up and were disposed of infrequently.

  Sunday morning, September 11th, was a beautiful day, although a little warmer than normal for that time of year, and the sun rose and hung in the sky for several hours before David Beaumont came out of his sad-looking building and looked up into the glare of the bright blue sky. By 10:30 A.M. the temperature was already hovering up around the 80-degree mark, or at least that was what the bank sign across the street from his building told him. The day had all the earmarks of another scorcher, just another in a long string of them, and if David heard the term ‘Indian Summer’ bandied about one more time, he thought he just might kill somebody.

  He walked across the street and climbed into his 1989 Mazda, starting it up and listening for a moment to the rickety metallic clatter coming from beneath the dented blue hood (with a small but ever-growing patch of reddish rust up by the windshield wipers), a sound that was supposed to approximate that of a powerful motor but sounded more like a tortured, dying lawn mower, desperate for someone to pull its plugs and put it out of its misery. Bernie was supposed to have fixed that annoying rattle last week, but here it was, back again. Well, that’s what I get for buying Japanese, he thought. Or maybe Bernie was just slipping, a not-uncommon occurrence.

  After he rolled both windows down (the passenger window only rolled down about half-way before catching on something inside and refusing to go any further), he popped the gearshift into DRIVE and pulled away from the trash-filled gutter, heading south toward the better parts of town. Something under the hood made a loud TAP TAP TAP as he accelerated away from the curb, and he made a mental note to ask Bernie about it. He’d already drunk half of the six of Heineken that Dave had bought him to fix his car - maybe David would have to hide the other three to get Bernie to finish the job.

  But the stereo worked just fine, and David popped in a CD from his favorite band, Rush. Today it was “Hold Your Fire”, one of his favorites. There were several really good songs on this one, but probably his favorite was “Time Stand Still,” one about how life seems to speed by in a blur unless people make a point of noticing things.

  Rush was David’s favorite band by far, and listening to them was more need than habit. Other people talked about their favorite bands, like Aerosmith or Green Day, and David had given them all a try, playing their CD’s at work from the playlist, but none of them had ever come close. Rush had a way of playing together that made them sound like one unit, like one person, intent on crafting the best sounding, most well-constructed music ever recorded. He knew he could count on an argument whenever he announced his favorite band, but then look how long they had been around! Rush had put out something like 15 albums, each good and new and different in its own way, and that was a musical and recording heritage that could never be taken away from them.

  And as much as he liked them, he still had yet to buy every CD they had put out. He enjoyed getting their new ones as soon as they came out, but he only bought their catalog titles one at a time, and then only once in a while. Every new song by them was a precious gem, whether it was truly new or just new to him because it was off of one of the old albums he hadn’t heard yet.

  On every Sunday morning, or every other Sunday morning, he tried to make time to get up and go visit his Aunt. She had been the one who had taken him in and raised him after his mother had died in the delivery room, and she was a lot like a mother to him, scary as that was to say. He didn’t actually think of her as his mother, but sometimes, when other people would talk about their mothers and pass along cute stories or memories about them, he would find himself thinking about his Aunt, or remembering something they had done together. He would remember the shouting matches, or the thrown bottles, or the days or nights that he had spent locked in his room, trying to get out. They weren’t pleasant memories, most of them, and he usually swept them aside, instead trying to imagine what these other people were talking about, with their happy memories.

  David had never had a mother. Or a father, for that matter.

  But getting up and going to see his Aunt was about the closest thing he did to going to visit his folks or anything like that, and once in a while he even managed to enjoy one of their little visits. Not often, but once in a while.

  His mother’s sister had only one interest, one far more compelling than seeing her only family and sitting around talking about the things that were going on in his life. She didn’t care really what was going on his life, no more that she cared about anything else that went on in the world that swirled around her. No, she seemed to be content with her hobby, which consisted of spending most of her time trying to empty every bottle of vodka she could get her hands on. Or, if there wasn’t any around, sending out for some. She got drunk most every night, but on Friday’s and Saturday’s she really went for the record books, and most Sunday mornings she was usually still too hung over from the night before to be good company.

  Sometimes, he wasn’t even sure why he went over at all.

  Sure, she had raised him, but she had seemingly ceased caring about him years ago, before that turbulent period in his life when he had turned 16 and moved out. He knew that he visited her out of some kind of love (though exactly what brand or version of love, he did not know), out of regret for the missing parents he had never known, out of a deep but intangible sense of loss - a loss that he still felt guilty about even though he hadn’t lost her and she had clearly chosen the path she was on without any help or hindrance from him. But she was his only family, and he sometimes felt like he could’ve done more to stop her downward spiral, something to slow her fall.

  But he also visited her out of some twisted sense of commitment, almost as if she was now the child and he was some kind of parent. His grandparents on both sides had died long before he was born, and with his parents gone, he was the last one to look out for his Aunt Gloria.

  He didn’t like to think about it, but another reason he probably went and saw her was because he was hoping that she would tell him something about his dad. He hated his father, always had, but David had never felt like he had gotten the whole story. He hoped in vain that maybe, on one of these visits, his drunken Aunt would tell him something new that would give him a little more insight into his father’s life. He didn’t want to hate his father, but he always had, and sometimes a hatred that lasted that long and went that deep was hard to get past. He’d heard all the stories so many times that he was tired of them, tired of hearing about how his father had been a hero and had saved the town. And he’d heard the Story so many times, that story about his father’s last night on this earth and the gunfight out on the Interstate, that David thought if he heard the Story one more time, he’d kill someone. The Story was now legend in his little town, and David hated it.

  David wove his little car through the streets of Liberty and pulled up in front of his Aunt’s squat little two-story house. He climbed out of his car and was almost all the way up the stained driveway before the Mazda’s engine finally sputtered to a wheezing stop. The yard around the house was disheveled and unattractive, the heat of the past weeks scorchi
ng the grass a shade of yellow that reminded David of bile. The yard was normally attended to irregularly by a neighbor, but he had evidently found better things to do than seed and water the lawn of the sister-in-law of the town’s most famous legend.

  David walked up the cracked and pitted sidewalk and rang the doorbell next the front door, already starting to regret coming over here. Sometimes, like right now, he couldn’t wait until he could take his money and climb into his car and drive away into the sunset, away from this place and all of these people. None of them seemed to care about him at all, except maybe Bethany and his Aunt, and that was only when she was sober, which wasn’t very often.

  A distracted part of his mind noticed how worn and beaten the old house looked, even though the house really wasn’t that old. The shutters on either side of the large living room window were cracked and broken and looked like they might fall off their hinges at any moment. It did not make a pretty picture, the house just standing there squatting in the warm morning air, looking old and used up.

  Nothing happened for a few minutes, and David leaned over and rang the bell again, holding the button in for a long time. Finally, he heard movement from inside, the crystal sound of the clinking of a bottle or a glass, and then the door unlocked and his Aunt Gloria was looking at him, bleary eyed.

  “Hi.” He tried to smile but nothing came.

  She held the door open with her tilted head, as if holding the door open with just her hands was too much work. She looked at him for a long moment and then recognition came to her. “Oh, Hi, David. Come to see me?”

  “Yeah.” He saw in one hand a tumbler full of ice and clear liquid. The Great God Vodka, her one and only savior, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bottle.

  “It’s Sunday. Time for my visit.”

  Gloria seemed genuinely surprised, her eyebrows rising. “Is it Sunday again, already?” She tittered, a high, squeaky laugh that David had always hated, a laugh that she usually reserved for those extra-special times when she was particularly plastered. “My, time’s flying when you’re having fun,” she said, pulling the door open a little and waving the glass in his direction. She smiled at him for another moment, and when it finally dawned on her that he wasn’t going to laugh, she turned and shuffled back inside, heading down the dark hallway. Her hair was a mess and the clothes she was wearing looked like they had gone unwashed for weeks.

  He pushed the door open and followed, making his way between piles of various things: clothes, books, mail. Not unlike his own apartment, he thought with a half-smile. Maybe his Aunt and he had more in common than he thought.

  She walked in front of him with short, shuffling steps, almost like a waddle, and every time she lurched forward liquid lapped over the rim of her glass and splashed onto the wooden floor. Her bottom of her dirty housecoat trailed on the floor and streaked the spill into long lines of moisture that followed her out of the foyer and into the living room.

  The house smelled. Actually, it was worse than just a smell. It was more of a stink; it stank of old liquor and old clothes and old, dusty furniture, but underneath all of those smells, another odor pervaded every corner, every surface of the house’s interior. It smelled of loss, of regret, of years wasted away, always in the same place, always doing the same thing over and over. To David, the smell was the smell of death, mute and unstoppable.

  She made it to the ragged brown couch in the living room and flopped down with a loud grunt, managing to not spill any more of her drink or knock her shin against the low glass coffee table. She looked at him, her eyes just thin slits against the morning light, even though most of the shades were closed and it wasn’t very bright in here. With her eyes slits like that, she looked like she might have gone a little crazy somewhere along the line.

  “What brings you out here to see me, David? Is it Sunday, already?” she asked, oblivious. Her words were just starting to slur together, like boats jamming up close together and trying to make out into a narrow harbor before an approaching storm, jostling each other for slips.

  “Yeah, Gloria. It’s Sunday,” he began. “Er...don’t you think it’s a little early for that?” He nodded at the half-empty glass in her hand.

  “Ha!” she blurted out, startling him. “Only 16 and already telling me what to do?”

  Didn’t even remember how old he was. How many brain cells did she have left - they always said in Health class in High School that each drink you took killed off like a thousand brain cells. If that was true, she was probably running on empty.

  “Aunt Gloria, I turn 18 tomorrow.” He doubted she even remembered the importance of tomorrow, and wondered how he was going to bring it up. He needed to warn her.

  Her eyes went wide. “Really, honey? I’m so happy for you!” And then, to his horror, she began to sing the birthday song to him, her voice broken and off-key. He sat and patiently waited for her to finish. It was like something from a bad movie, sitting there watching his drunk Aunt sing to him, and Dave wanted nothing more than to get up and run , run out of that smelly, dank house. But he sat and waited, and finally she finished.

  “Thank you. It’s a big day for me. Do you know why?”

  She looked at him, and he could almost hear her alcohol-clouded mind working on the problem. Too early, or too much booze, or whatever, but she wasn’t going to get it.

  “It’s your birthday, and...”

  Dave filled the long silence that followed her words.

  “It’s my 18th birthday. I start getting my money tomorrow.” He fidgeted, his fingers toying with the TV Guide in his lap, flipping it and bending the pages.

  She was silent, probably thinking back. His father and mother had set up a will that left David most of what money they had, but he would not start receiving it until he turned 18.

  In the years between their deaths and his upcoming birthday, the money had grown substantially, mostly thanks to Abe Foreman. David would receive ten yearly payments of about $25,000. She had received some other money, too, from the will to help in the raising of young David, but most of that money was long gone.

  He had waited a long time for his first payment, and she had to know the significance of it, but if she did, it didn’t register on her face.

  He looked around the living room, avoiding looking at her. There were wide stairs leading up to the bedrooms on the second floor, and he could just see the door to his old room. It had been a long time since he had been in there. This house held many bad memories for him, but some things about it hadn’t been that bad - he remembered a couple of fun times, happy times before she’d really started drinking bad.

  He turned back to her and she was looking up at the banister overlooking the living room where the stairs led up to the bedrooms. “You know what I always talked about doing when I got my first check, don’t you?”

  She nodded, turning to him, and he was surprised to see her eyes had seemed to clear a little. “Yeah, you always hated this town. You’re leaving, aren’t you? That’s why you came here today, to say goodbye and leave me here to rot away, taking off and....”

  “Gloria, I’m not leaving. At least, not yet. I’ve always thought about it, but now I don’t know if it’s really something I want to do. Anyway, I came over today to visit, not to say goodbye. I’m not going anywhere, not for a while.” David wondered if he would ever actually get up the nerve to leave - sure, he wanted to, and he hated this town and its past, but could he actually grow the balls to go through with it? “And I still think you are drinking too early. If you want to drink, that’s fine, but I think you should hold off...”

  She cut him off, her mood instantly changing to a defensive, angry posture: “I’m a grown woman, and I can do what I want to when I want to...”

  “Auntie!” he shouted a little more forcefully than he had to, his hands up in front of him. He hated calling her that because it made him feel like he was still ten or eleven years old, but it seemed like the only thing that would get her a
ttention lately. And he had never quite gotten used to calling her Aunt Gloria. Gloria was the closest he got. “I didn’t come over here to argue with you, okay? I’m not trying to live your life for you, or anything,” he answered slowly, carefully, trying to keep his voice down. He didn’t like to get upset or show his emotions. “It’s just that I want to see you take care of yourself, that’s all. I mean, who would I have to bother on Sunday mornings if you weren’t around?” He didn’t think she even noticed the implication that he would be around for Sundays from now on. Would he?

  That got a smile, a weak one, out of her. “I’m sorry, honey. I know you mean well.” She seemed to drop out of the conversation for a moment, thinking, and then her face came up and she started again. “Abe Foreman was here last night for a while, reminding me of how bad I am with money. I didn’t mean to yell at you, it’s just...” She seemed to be suddenly on the very verge of tears, even though seconds ago she had just been smiling.

  Her sudden seriousness troubled him greatly. “What did Abe say?”

  She rolled her eyes and set down her drink on the coffee table so quickly that some of what was left in it splashed out over the lip and onto her pallid, thin-looking hand. “Oh, the same old, same old. Money, money, money, blah, blah, blah.” She turned introspective again, just for a moment. “He said they might take the house away from me,” she said, her voice low with emotion.

  “What?” As far as he knew, her financial situation was fine, or at least it was now. Mr. Foreman had taken over the finances and done a whiz-bang job, investing some of the money and using the rest to pay off the house ten years ahead of schedule. As far as David knew, his Aunt Gloria‘s financial situation, thanks to Abe Foreman, was in great shape. “Did he say why?”