Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  His stay there was long and filled with hatred and anger. For Jack, without his mother or anyone else to look after him but himself, he learned to be self-sufficient at a very young age. Cruelly so. He cared for himself as a wild animal would if left to care for itself.

  And he developed a taste for the profane and the bizarre, probably as a defense mechanism to separate himself from the dozens of other orphans. His juvenile delinquency grew, his taste for the killing of animals and, eventually, people, was fostered, and Jack Terrington longed for one thing and one thing only.

  He wanted to get out and leave the pain and frustration of Jameston forever. He wanted to leave the town that had caused him so much pain, and see the world.

  She awoke from her fitful, restless sleep and found herself to be lying on the dirty, leaf-strewn floor of a dark forest. She was completely surrounded by dark, brooding trees that towered over her, stretching up into the black sky canopy of leaves far above her head.

  She rolled over onto her side, ignoring a sudden twinge of sharp pain from her shoulder, and saw that the great green trees completely surrounded the small clearing she was in, blocking her view in all directions except one. A dark trail led away from the clearing and off into the darkness.

  The forest was so thick that she couldn’t tell if it was day or night.

  She sat up, and her head spun for one dizzy moment. When it finally cleared, she looked down and saw she was wearing a long silky dress that was amazingly clean and white, even though she had evidently been laying on the ground in it.

  What am I doing in my wedding dress? Where am I? Why am I dressed this way?

  It came to her after a hazy moment of deep concentration that her name was Sally. Why had it been so difficult for her to remember?

  Of course her name was Sally, what else could it be? Her name was Sally, and she was here, in a forest, and she was here because...

  She drew a blank.

  The huge trees stood around her like silent guards, mute in their indifference. She saw that they were all incredibly tall, taller than any trees she had ever seen before - they looked like pillars, massive living structures holding up a dark sky.

  She didn’t know what to do. The narrow trail wound away from the clearing into the darkness, but for some reason she was frightened to start down that trail. As brooding as this mysterious clearing was to her, at least it was a known quantity. She could just lie back down on the cold ground and stay here. The trail wound away, off to who-knows-where? Maybe it was the fact that the trail led off into the darkness that scared her.

  Tommy.

  His name suddenly sprang into her clouded mind like the spooked deer that will leap out in front of a moving car, attracted by the bright headlights. Tommy was her fiancée, her best friend. She and Tommy were to be married in a month or so, and she knew that, for some reason, that dark, forbidding trail that wound away into the woods and the darkness, somehow that trail would lead to him. The unexplainable realization that he would be somewhere on that trail was finally what got her moving.

  As she brushed the clinging leaves and muddy dirt from the dress, she noticed beneath the lace of her wedding dress she was wearing a strange pair of dusty cowboy boots. The design on the boots was very distinctive, a design she had never seen before: rattlesnake skin and leather strips in alternating rows, with a short silver metal chain looped beneath each boot in the space between heel and toe, attached on either side. The metal chains jingled when she moved.

  The weird thing was she couldn’t even remember this morning. Or how she had gotten dressed, or even how she had gotten to this forest.

  She glanced around again at the clearing once more before she left and this time noticed the impression her body had made in the muddy, moist ground.

  Beside where her right hand had been was a group of bright flowers entwined together with green metal wire. It was her bridal bouquet. The colorful bouquet looked very out of place on the muddy, leaf-strewn ground. She stooped and picked it up, cradling it in her arms. Her shoulder protested, screaming in pain, but she tried to ignore it.

  A low, soothing sound drifted over the clearing, and to her confused mind it sounded like a voice.

  A light mist suddenly began to roll into the clearing from all directions at once, cloaking the leaves and ground around her. In a matter of moments the fog began to sweep and roll around her ankles, cold and moist. She turned and saw that the entire clearing was blanketed by a thin, roiling layer of fog. Only the trail leading out of the clearing was innocent of the mist.

  Suddenly, she felt an incredible urge, almost overpowering, to lie down in the fog. It would be so calm, so soothing, to allow the fog to move over her. She could just lay down into the fog and all of the pain would end, and then she could...

  But she wouldn’t. She wanted to see Tommy again, to tell him something, although exactly what it was that she wanted to tell him, she couldn’t remember. All she knew was that it was important that she tell him something.

  Some name that he needed to know.

  She dropped the bouquet into the fog where the impression of her body had been only moments before, and the fog eagerly separated and grabbed the falling bouquet with scrabbling fingers of mist. The fog parted hesitantly as she struggled to walk through it, and several times she caught her feet and legs on misty, unknown obstructions that cloyed and grabbed at her and her dress, ripping it in places.

  Whatever it was that was grabbing hold of her feet and legs felt wet and cold and unyielding, like vines or branches, but she kicked away from it several times and moved on, making her way across the clearing. She didn’t think she was catching her feet on mist-blanketed vines, and that fear drove her onward.

  Most of all she knew that she could not lose her balance and fall down. Somehow she knew that if she fell, it would mean that she would never see Tommy again.

  She made it across the misty clearing and broke out of a wall of fog onto the trail. The fog clearly ended where the trail began. There, from the beginning of the trail, she turned back and could see the churning wall of fog, boiling three feet deep, as it ended abruptly at the trail.

  She took one more look at the clearing and then turned, moving down the trail into the darkness.

  David wasn’t enjoying himself.

  Mel had surprised him. He had figured that Mel was through with him, and David had figured that when he put in his notice, Mel would’ve jumped up and down for joy.

  But he hadn’t. He’d been mad, really mad.

  “So that’s it? You’re going where?” Mel had said, or shouted, to be more accurate.

  David had just told Mel that he was quitting and moving to California, and Mel looked really upset, angry enough to make David want to look somewhere else. David looked down at the water-stained wooden counter, where he had spent so many hours over the past two years, counting money or fixing broken movies or putting together displays or other promotional materials. The counter always exuded a strange woody smell that made David wonder what kind of wood it was. Yeah, he would miss this place, but his mind was set.

  “Yeah, Mel. I guess I just finally realized that there is nothing left for me here in town, and I want to get on with my life.” David wasn’t very good at making speeches or standing up for himself or his opinions, but here he was, telling his soon-to-be ex-boss where to go. He wanted to say even more, to explain about how his father and his aunt and his girlfriends made him feel trapped, helpless in this little one-horse town, but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Mel had been good to him (there had been a dozen days over the past couple of years when David had come into the store expecting to be fired and been surprised to hear Mel give him another chance), and now he was mad.

  And this is how you pay him back? Bailing out on him without even a weeks’ notice?

  No, he wasn’t bailing out; he was trying to change his life for the better. David wanted better, more, and over the weekend he had had a lot of time to think about it. He’d fina
lly realized that whatever it was that his future held, whatever shiny, elusive dream he would follow, he would not, could not follow that dream here in the stifling atmosphere of Liberty. His friends, his family, even his dead father all conspired to hold his spirit, his life in check.

  Mel stood there shaking his head, watching David pull out of the parking lot in his beat up old Mazda. Mel had never really understood that lanky, brown-haired kid, but it didn’t mean that Mel wouldn’t miss him when he was gone.

  The kid was undependable, hard-headed, irrational, and, as far as Mel could tell, punctuality was a word that David Beaumont had never been very familiar with. But on many occasions, Mel had been pleasantly surprised by David. Some of the things that that boy did were infuriating to say the least, but, in many ways, David reminded Mel Rivers of a younger, less independent version of himself.

  Mel remembered once when Pack-It, a company that specialized in producing soft-sided carrying cases for CD’s and cassettes, was sponsoring a nationwide sales contest, and David had expressed an interest in decorating the store to compete in the contest. The contest would be rated on a store-by-store comparison of improvement in Pack-It sales for a two-month period, and in those type of sales contests, the little retailers like Big Video and More had just as good a chance of winning as the bigger retailers like Kmart or Blockbuster. Big Video would never have a chance in beating any of those bigger stores’ figures in total sales, because they were in bigger towns with more customers. But a percentage-increase-in-sales contest was one they could actually have a chance of competing in, with a more level playing field.

  David had heard about the promotion and asked Mel if he could spearhead the event, nationally titled as “Pack-It’s Explosion of Savings!” Mel hadn’t even been planning to enter the contest - he didn’t really get too excited about competing in contests, but when David had wanted a go at it, Mel had agreed without a second thought. It wasn’t like Big Video and More would ever win in something like that, level playing field or not. The sales were just not there.

  Or so Mel had thought.

  “Okay, go for it. You run it, but I want some graphs or something showing our sales figures of Pack-It’s for the last year, and you’ll need to come up with daily and weekly sales goals that we’d need to make in order to even compete in this contest, okay?” Mel had half-expected David to balk at doing the charts and planning the sales event, but David had only nodded and headed over to the main computer, probably to run the sales reports.

  When Mel had come in the next day he’d forgotten completely about the Pack-It’s and David, but when he walked into the backroom, the wall across from the door was covered with two large, colorful charts on big sheets of poster board.

  The first chart showed past sales trends and, continuing that red line, the projected sales for the next two months. Another line, bright green, streaked upwards at a wide slant from the flat red line, showing what they would need to sell to have a chance at winning the contest. From what Mel could tell of the complicated figures on the chart, David meant to triple their sales over the next two months. Impossible, Mel thought. The bottom third of the chart gave some quick rules about an in-store sales contest, and right beneath those abbreviated rules was an interesting line, written in a script that was bigger than any other on the chart: “Prizes to be announced!”

  The second chart listed along the left side every salesperson and employee of Big Video and More (including Mel, he was amused to see) and along the top of the grid ran a series of days that represented the next two months, leaving space inside each grid square to write down how many pieces of merchandise each employee had sold. At the bottom of the grid were spaces for daily, weekly, monthly, and overall totals, and below each of these figures David had written in bright pink magic marker the sales goals and figures.

  Mel was stunned, just standing there in the doorway with the paper in his hand.

  David was a slacker, a lazy boy that was late every other day. Mel had come close to firing him a half-dozen times. Now here he was, putting together this very complicated sales contest OVERNIGHT? From the evidence hanging on the wall in front of him, Mel couldn’t discount the idea that David was VERY serious about this thing, and, as far as Mel knew, David Beaumont had never really been serious about anything in his life before.

  Mel’s estimation of David Beaumont slid out of its rusty position and clicked upwards about two notches.

  David came into the backroom and saw Mel standing there, staring at his charts, and he stopped, waiting. Mel turned to him.

  “Prizes? You are buying prizes to give away?”

  David smiled and pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Well, I was hoping to get some promotional CD’s and movies from that guy I know at CVD to give away. Oh, and I’ve been on the phone with some of the local retailers, trying to wrangle up some promotional coupons or gift certificates. So far I’ve got them from Subway and the arcade up the street.”

  Again, Mel was impressed, more impressed than even he would’ve admitted. “Oh, and you can add on to your list a $30 and a $10 gift certificate from our store, too.”

  David looked up from his notes and saw that there was no joke in Mel’s eyes. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Now, tell me about these figures you’ve got here,” Mel said, pointing at the chart. “You want to triple our sales...”

  David moved over and began explaining his sales projections to Mel, and anyone walking in on them might’ve mistaken them for two serious businessmen, charting out the explosive growth of a big company.

  Two days later, Mel had come in and found a third piece of poster board next to the two others, this one detailing eight different prizes and the order in which they would be given out. They included Mel’s store gift certificates, certificates for free food from Subway, free movie tickets to the Multiplex theaters out at the Liberty Place Mall, a free car wash from the Exxon on the corner, and a top prize of dinner for two at the Outback Steak House up in Woodbridge, near D.C. How David had swung that Mel had no idea.

  Mel had also found a volcano in his store.

  David had constructed a six-foot tall volcano out of wood, chicken wire, and paper-maché. He’d painted the dried paper sides with black and gray paint, streaking it with red dribbles of ‘lava’ up near the top and down the sides. It actually looked amazing, considering the paint probably wasn’t even that dry yet.

  Above, below, and all around the volcano there were stacked and hung and propped up the entire store’s inventory of Pack-It’s, some of it appearing to be coming up and out of the volcano in some massive eruption, and the whole she-bang was topped off with a huge sign with the contest’s slogan: “Pack-It’s Explosion of Savings!”

  Mel had stood there and looked at it for a long time. No one had ever done anything like this in his store (or any other Mel had ever been to, for that matter), and it was impressive, sitting right there where you could see it when you came in the front doors. It was elevated up off the floor with supports to make the volcano look even taller.

  Damned impressive.

  David had evidently stacked up a few of the carpet-covered wooden crates that they sometimes used for display purposes, raising up the whole construction and making the top of the volcano at least eight or nine feet up off the carpet. With the other Pack-It’s piled around the base and attached to the sides of the volcano, the whole thing looked huge, and was sure to increase sales. As Mel stood there and watched, four or five people came up and looked at the display and its merchandise, and two of them picked out pieces to buy.

  Mel reminded himself to order more Pack-It’s, and soon. Lots more. They could conceivably run out, if the sales jumped like Mel thought they might.

  The sales contest had gone on to break all sales records for Pack-It’s in any store on the eastern seaboard, and Big Video and More had won second place in the national contest in the “Improved Sales” category. They had been beaten by a Blockbuster in Colorado Springs th
at had turned its entire store into a jungle-like atmosphere, complete with some real trees and an employee in a rented monkey-costume.

  Hard to beat that, considering David had had no advertising or expense budget and had paid for all the supplies out of his own pocket. But the store had won a cash prize of $500, and Mel had cheerfully given it all to David, minus the money Mel had spent to throw the entire store a pizza party.

  David Beaumont had surprised Mel back then, and he’d surprised Mel again this afternoon.

  Mel turned from his place by the door, starting back to the backroom, and he glanced over at the area where the volcano had stood at the front of the store. The volcano was long gone, withering away up on the roof. Mel had let David store it up there in case there would be a second part of the sales contest. David had worked so hard on that volcano, too hard to make him take it home or to the dump, so Mel had looked the other way when David had dragged it up there. The paper-maché and paint were long gone by now, and the last time Mel had been up that long ladder to the roof, the volcano had been reduced to a rough and weathered skeleton of two-by-fours and chicken wire. Mel still had no idea how David had gotten that thing up there.

  But Mel did know one thing for sure about David Beaumont. He might be a shy, weak boy on the outside, but Mel knew that if that kid put his mind to something, really put all of his effort into it, that kid could work wonders.

  Mel shook his head at the long-gone volcano and headed for the backroom, planning the afternoon’s call to his bookie.

  She walked for what felt like a long time, and the trail wound in and out of the trees, each seemingly bigger and more forbidding than the last. There weren’t any animals, or at least as far as she could tell. The forest seemed completely devoid of life, but Sally still had the feeling that someone or something was watching her. Whether they were encouraging her or not, she had no idea.