Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  The rumor was that she was a little crazy. She’d been driving a school bus for something like twenty years, and the kids figured that that would drive anyone crazy. Behind her back (but never to her face) they sometimes laughed about her, talked mean about her, but when they were standing there at the bus stop and saw her yellow #3 bus pull up to the curb to pick them up, they all mentally groaned and shelved any ideas that they might have had about being rowdy.

  She finished up with the last kids on her Monday Drop-off route and returned to the High School, where she parked her bus next to the other four buses that serviced the Liberty School District. Her car, an old Dodge Duster, was parked in a small lot behind the bus maintenance shed, and she got into the car and drove home. Some of the other bus drivers were there in the parking area also, chatting, but she didn’t speak to any of them, and they didn’t speak to her.

  She lived by herself in a smallish one-bedroom house on the southern end of town. She hadn’t consciously chosen to live on the opposite side of town from Mrs. Grace Beaumont, William’s widow, but the distance had not been lost on her when she’d bought it right after she left the police force. In the many years since, she had chosen to avoid the Beaumont’s and Miss Thatcher, Grace’s sister, as much as possible. Just the sight of them brought up bad memories for her.

  She wasn’t far inside the door before she dropped her purse and the groceries and staggered into the living room, crying.

  An hour or so later, she felt relieved and a little bit better. It wasn’t too often that she got into one of her crying jags, but sometimes something would happen to trigger one. It usually wasn’t anything big, but it could still trigger that flood of tears.

  Today, a new kid in town, one who obviously hadn’t yet heard about Norma from the other kids, had climbed on her bus and proceeded to ask her a question.

  “Hey, lady? What happened to your nose?”

  Norma had ignored the little brat at the time, and one of the other kids on the bus had grabbed the girl roughly and pulled her away from Norma, whispering to her why she must never, NEVER ask Miss Jenkins about her bent nose.

  Norma kept all of the rage and anger that she had felt inside until she’d finished her grocery shopping and made it to the door of her house, but then she couldn’t hold it any longer.

  She got up from the couch were she had been crying and went to collect the things she had dropped on her way in. She had dropped the bag of groceries, and the bread and apples were fine but two of the eggs had broken and oozed out of the bag onto the carpet in the entrance area of the hallway. She cleaned them up, put the remaining groceries away, and then changed into an old sweat suit of drab colors.

  Beaumont had always told her that she was like a boy trapped in a girl’s body. He didn’t mean it in any bad way - he’d said it because she was more aggressive and more fitness-oriented than most of the men he knew. On her way back to the living room, she caught a quick flash of her reflection, and she could see what he meant. It wasn’t that she was unattractive or butch or anything like that, but she carried her body with the less-than-graceful movements of a born and bred tomboy. And the oddly twisted nose certainly didn’t make her look or feel any more like a beautiful woman.

  She looked closer at her face in the mirror. It was, in her opinion, truly attractive, or at least it had been up until the point where Jasper Fines had given her that jagged, slightly crooked souvenir to remember him by. It didn’t look as bad as it seemed, because deep inside, she had convinced herself that the broken nose was a twisted, monstrous deformity that had committed her to a life of sadness and loneliness. Things like what happened today on the bus certainly didn’t improve her self-image.

  But she was still attractive. She had dated many men, off and on, over the years. A few times it had grown quite serious until she had thrown on the brakes and ended it.

  She felt, down deep inside, that she didn’t deserve to be happy. Gloria Thatcher wasn’t happy, drinking life away if one believed the small town rumor mill. That David kid wasn’t happy, trapped in this town and constantly being compared to his father. And Sheriff William T. Beaumont certainly wasn’t happy, wherever he was. Maybe he was up in the sky, looking down on them all - would he be happy with what he saw? Maybe he was watching all of them right now, trying to help them out or guide them, but she didn’t think so.

  The thing that killed her, that tore her up inside the most, was the nagging guilt in her gut. She could have done something that dark night. She could have gotten up from the ground where she had laid, pretending to be dead, and helped Beaumont before that madman had killed him. Maybe it would’ve gotten her killed too, but at least it would’ve been a good way to check out of this sorry world. Go out in a blaze of glory, or something like that.

  She could’ve gotten up off of that pavement that night and shot Jasper Fines - she’d realized later that he had dropped her in the first volley before she had even gotten a chance to get her gun out of her holster. When the paramedics had finally shown up, she took her gun off to be treated - and never put it back on again. It was on that night that she realized that she would never be cut out to be a very good cop, and laying there on the ground while her boss, her mentor, her friend was killed - that had only proven it.

  She made herself some dinner, nothing spicy. Her doctor had said that both of the ulcers that were eating away at the interior lining of her stomach were about the same as they had been for years, a pair of painful acidic holes. Even though she had followed the doctor’s orders to the letter and avoided eating or drinking anything that could have aggravated the ulcers’ condition, they didn’t seem to get any better.

  They were like a pair of close companions that she was sure, after so many years of them gnawing and tearing at her insides, would never leave her.

  She made herself a bland-tasting dinner of macaroni and cheese and ate it while watching TV, The Wheel of Fortune. She chased the dinner with several Tums, which the doctor had told her to take religiously to combat the high acid levels in her stomach.

  She felt like putting in a movie, but she didn’t know what to watch. She liked action movies and suspense-filled dramas the best, ones with lots of guns and shooting and car chases, but it seemed like every time she watched a thrilling, exciting movie, the twisting pain in her gut flared up and kept her from sleeping. Just her oldest and closest friend coming to visit. Norma put in a funny, light-hearted video, City Slickers, and sat back to lose herself in the movie.

  “Hello?”

  David was in his apartment. He had gone by and talked to his Aunt on the way home, and after a couple of hours, finally convincing her to at least think about moving out and getting a smaller place. He had talked for quite a while, but the whole time, all he could think about was getting home and making his phone call. He’d left her house and raced back here to the apartment, and now he stood with the phone tucked into the crook between his ear and shoulder, his keys still in the door. It felt as if he were at some type of crossroads in his life, and whatever words he said next would forever change the direction of his life.

  But change was all he wanted right now. He felt good, felt like he was doing something. The check in his pocket, which he would deposit first thing in the morning, would be his ticket out of this town.

  “Hi, is Brian there?” he asked, feeling very tentative but trying to sound like he knew what he was doing. Who says people can’t change overnight? David felt like he was changing with each passing moment.

  The voice, which he had immediately recognized as feminine as soon as she had answered the ringing phone, answered him. “Ah, no, he’s not here right now. He’s at work. Do you want to...ah, like, leave a message or something?” The voice sounded sleepy and somehow awake at the same time, almost as if the speaker was simply lazy and not wanting to open her mouth all of the way to correctly pronounce each word.

  Damn, he thought, almost saying it out loud. It’s like deciding to buy a car and then finding out t
hat you didn’t have enough money to pay for it. Or finding out that the dealer didn’t even stock the kind of car you wanted.

  He collected his thoughts. “Ah, yeah. My name’s David. David Beaumont. I knew Brian back in...”

  “David?” she interrupted. “Did you say David?”

  “Ah, yeah. I’m David, David Beaumont. Brian and I have been writing back and forth for a couple of years, and he...”

  “I know, I know! He’s told me all about you! You’re his friend from high school, right? Yeah, we were just talking about you the other day. Weird, huh?” She talked so rapidly that it was impossible to get a word in sideways, and her voice was high and tinny like a radio with no bass, exactly the voice a mouse would use if it could talk.

  “Yeah, we went to High School together,” he answered quickly, trying to get the words all out before she interrupted him again. He hated being interrupted, especially by someone he didn’t even know. If she had just shut up and let him finish, he would have told her answers to all of her questions. He could’ve told her to shut up, but he didn’t. That would’ve just been rude, and he didn’t want to be rude and upset her, even if he didn’t like her too much.

  “That’s great! Oh, my name is Sheela, but people call me Crystal, by the way. I’m Brian’s girlfriend...what am I saying? I’m his fiancée! How could I have forgotten a thing like that? Sometimes I still call him my boyfriend, even though we’ve been engaged for over a month, and I guess he probably still calls me his girlfriend sometimes, but hey - why complain, right?”

  David wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer or if she had just stopped long enough to take another breath, but he dove into the opening anyway.

  “Yeah, that’s nice. Listen, when will Brian be back? I’m thinking about coming out to visit and I wanted to know about...”

  “Oh, he would just love that,” she interrupted again. “He always complains that no one from back there ever comes out to see him, and here you are on the phone, wanting to come out here and see him. Isn’t that great? He would just love to have you come out - he could show you around, and introduce you to his friends, and everything. Maybe even get you a job at the loading yard, if you want. Hey, are you single? I know some great girls out here. They are all looking for a nice guy. How does that sound?”

  David was getting a serious headache. Maybe it was the voice, or maybe the way she kept cutting him off. “Yeah, that sounds great. Listen, when will he be in? I really want to talk to him before I get in my car and come out there. Does he get home from work soon?”

  “Oh, no. He’s up in Santa Cruz till next weekend, installing some lines for a power company. They lost some lines in that storm last week, I think, and he and some of the other guys from the company went up to install new ones. You’re gonna drive out? Oh, wow, that is great. When I drove here from Texas, it was a long trip, and you’ll be coming even further, won’t you? Wow, that’s a lot of driving. Those long road trips can sure get awful dull, don’t you think? Better make sure you’ve got plenty of good tunes to listen to. That part there from Texas to Nevada, that part was a real...”

  David tuned her out; it wasn’t like he was going to miss anything important. Brian was gone for a while, but David wanted to get going soon, preferable by this coming weekend. Could he trust this motor mouth Crystal, or Sheela, or whatever the hell her name was, that Brian wanted David to come out? She was annoying, but she didn’t sound bright enough to try and deceive him. Between her and the letters, David was pretty sure that Brian wouldn’t toss him out on his can for coming to visit.

  But he really wanted to talk to Brian first.

  Oh well, sometimes things can’t be helped. The old David wouldn’t do it, but it felt so good to be moving forward, to be making changes...

  “...because in Texas they don’t have no laws against open containers, so we used to just drive around for hours, looking for parties and getting drunk at the same time. When I got here, I couldn’t believe that you could get arrested for...”

  “Crystal?" he interrupted hastily. "I’ve got to go now. Are you sure Brian won’t mind if I come out? I wanted to talk to him first, but I guess you are right that he would want to see me.”

  She didn’t seem to be offended at all that he had cut her off. “Oh sure. Come on out. We’ve got plenty of room here for you to crash, and if you decide to stay longer, there’s an empty apartment in this building. Believe me, he’d love to have you come out.”

  The first coherent thing he had ever heard her say. “Okay, then I will. I should be leaving next Monday, the 19th. Can you tell Brian the next time you talk to him? I should be in LA by the 28th or 29th.”

  “Great! Oh, you’ll just love it here.”

  David smiled. They were perfect for each other, Brian and Crystal. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before. Goodbye.”

  After he got off the phone, he got his keys and headed into his bedroom, looking around. He was doing it - really doing it. He had arranged for a place to stay, and now, after he took care of the money, he could start getting ready to leave. He needed to pack, but there was not a lot of stuff to pack, just his clothes and his few books and some other little stuff. The rest could get stored at his Aunt’s house or, better yet, in one of those storage places outside of town. His roommate probably wouldn’t like him bailing out in the middle of the month, but at least David was all paid up. Maybe he’d pay for next month too, just to be nice. He hated to have people be mad at him - and now, money wasn’t a problem. Maybe Bernie would finish fixing up David’s car - he really needed it to be running well before he drove it cross-country. He’d need to leave Bernie a note - God knew when he would see him again. The guy kept strange hours at the garage where he worked, and David could never count on him to be home.

  He pulled down his old red suitcase from the top shelf of his closet and began pulling things off the hangers, folding them up and laying them carefully in the suitcase. He couldn’t pack everything - he still had at least a week here in town, but mostly everything he had that was specifically for summertime wear went into the suitcase. He wouldn’t need them here - the latest weather forecasts showed that cool air was moving in behind the warm air mass that had been parked over the area, giving them such nice temperatures. There was that hurricane he’d heard about on the radio, though the experts expected it to stay out to sea. But there had been scattered reports of high winds and heavy rains in Miami and southern Florida, so the hurricane was causing trouble already. Even if it turned inland and came all this way north, thought, he’d be long gone before it hit.

  No, he packed up his beach clothes, and in the back of his mind, he was already planning what to say to his Aunt, to Mel, to Bethany.

  Yeah, he smiled. He was finally doing something for himself. He was deciding to do something, just do it and see what happened. It felt good to make a decision.

  The National Weather Service issued a hurricane warning for the area of Miami and southern Florida at 5:00 p.m. on Monday night that spoke of high surf and drenching rains over the next 24 hours. Hurricane Mandy was now a category 1 storm, with sustained winds of around 75 or 80 miles per hour, and it was sitting in the Caribbean between Cuba and Miami, centered over Nassau and moving very slowly west, picking up strength. The storm was already one of the largest on record in terms of size, with cloud bands reaching out for two hundred miles in every direction from the central eye. That meant that even though the storm was hours from making official landfall, clouds and smaller storms already battered the southern half of Florida, drenching the state with moisture that it didn’t need - they were still recovering from the last tropical storm that had dumped a couple inches of rain on Florida about two weeks earlier.

  The storm was not expected to make actual landfall in Miami, but turn north and head up the coast. But the storm had grown powerful enough to warn the citizens of southern Florida, and BEACH CLOSED signs went up for a hundred miles north of Miami within hours of the announcement. Those experienced wi
th past hurricane warnings made their decisions, and many people packed up a few important things and left the low lying beach areas, heading inland or even for St. Petersburg and the Gulf Coast side of the Florida peninsula. Some dismissed the warnings as hogwash, so much doomsday thinking, but others took the warnings seriously and got out of Mandy’s way.

  Chapter 4 - Tuesday,

  September 13

  Jack drove north. He had spent Monday and last night in a small town hotel, trying to get the Urge under control. It was difficult, harder than it had ever been before, but then he had never really tried to control the Urge that had somehow slowly taken over him. Before he had ignored it or sublimated it until finally giving in - he had never really tried to fight it by thinking about the Urge and consciously deciding not to follow it.

  No, he couldn’t kill anymore, at least not until he got to Liberty. He had stirred up way too much heat down in Florida, and that combined with the Burger King incident had scared him into temporary hiding. And he had spent a few hours on Monday just sitting and thinking about why he did what he did. He hadn’t gotten any answers, of course, but thinking about killing had kept him from killing, and that was good. Hopefully he would be able to hold off the Urge until he could let loose in Liberty.

  Tuesday morning he had checked out of his hotel in a little town south of Savannah, Georgia, and headed north. The guys on the TV had said something about a hurricane moving towards Miami, and Jack thought it best to stay ahead of it just in case it decided to turn north. He had learned the hard way a long time ago about being trapped by the weather - once, he had been stuck in a Wyoming town for almost three weeks by a huge snowstorm, and his Urge had almost driven him insane over those twenty horrible, frozen days. He had killed as the snow melted enough for him to leave, but he had learned to never let nature trap him in one place for too long.