Vultures Page 20

  FIFTY-FIVE

  STEVE WIEBE, TRUTH-TELLER

  It’s five minutes into the drive—a very normal drive, Steve using his blinker, stopping at lights, merging lanes with professional confidence and also relative gentleness—before he speaks.

  “That didn’t seem to go well,” he says.

  “No,” Miriam answers. She is balled up in his passenger seat. No seatbelt. Just hugging her knees to her chest. Then she thinks: Shit! The baby. Clumsily, she struggles against the belt and clicks it across her burgeoning lap.

  “I thought I saw a gun through the door. Did I see a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did I just commit a felony?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you just commit a felony?”

  “Also don’t know.”

  “Are we going to jail?”

  “Uhhhh.”

  And that is all they say on the drive back to her condo.

  FIFTY-SIX

  BOILOVER

  Nighttime in Los Angeles. Miriam and Gabby sit in their car. It’s parked in Boyle Heights, south of downtown, sandwiched between a row of little ranch-style houses and a small park near the freeway entrance—in the park sits a messy sprawl of tents, boxes, blankets, and crates. Homes on one side, homeless on the other: an encampment, in fact. They’ve no streetlight to shine on them, so all Miriam can see of them are shadows shuffling around in the city’s half-dark, like ghouls unable to reach their final slumber, kept from the satisfaction of the grave. Poor fuckers.

  Gabby has not spoken to her very much since Miriam called her earlier in the day, after the Motherfucking Plan went Motherfucking Tits Up. They had little time to do much, since Gabby was at work. So, Miriam grabbed everything she counted as essential, chucked it in a couple bags, chucked those into Steve Wiebe’s trunk, and they took off to grab Gabs.

  From there, they transferred those bags to the Miata.

  And now, here they sit, across the street from what Miriam believes to be Abraham Lukauskis’s house. It is not a nice house. Garbage lines the narrow cement walkway, and more garbage is mounded on the porch. It’s entirely dark too. A few black cats slink around the low chain link fence that surrounds the property. There’s no car in the driveway.

  “Maybe he’s not home,” Miriam says.

  Gabby says nothing.

  It’s like sitting next to a simmering pot. Eventually, it’s going to boil over. So, Miriam just stokes the flames to get it over with.

  “Go on; say it.”

  “I’m not saying anything,” Gabby says.

  “You’re mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “Oh, god, don’t pull the I’m not mad, I’m disappointed line, because I really can’t hack that kind of condescending bullshit right now.”

  Silence. It stretches out like a multiplicative void—emptiness feeding on emptiness, the chasm between them becoming positively consumptive.

  “You do get it, don’t you?” Gabby says, shattering the silence.

  “Get what?”

  “How badly you fucked this up. We had . . . everything. Everything we needed, at least. We had a place to live, you had a paycheck, we had health insurance, we had a life. Or the promise of one.”

  Miriam rolls her eyes so hard, she’s pretty sure she catches a glimpse of her own brain. “See, that’s the thing. You want a life, a normal life. The job, the house, the car, probably a cat or some shit. And you chose the literally worst person in the world—the most abnormal human you know—to try to have a normal life with.”

  “But now we have nothing.”

  “I’ve had nothing before. We can do this.”

  Even as she says it, she knows it’s a lie. Usually, she says something like this, she means it whether it’s right or wrong. But now it comes out hollow: a kind of bloated bravado, a balloon filled with nothing but her own hot air. She can’t do this. They just lost access to their doctor, their apartment, their income. She was getting used to those things. No, their shitty little condo in West Hollywood is no magical snow globe: they weren’t away from it all in a snow-speckled, owl-possessed forest on the edge of nowhere. They were in the thick of it, sweating it out alongside the failed screenwriters and Oxy addicts and that drunk guy who dresses like Disney characters down by the Chinese Theater. But it was real.

  And it was theirs.

  And now it’s gone.

  Guerrero will come for her. He knows where she’s headed. Truthfully, Miriam is surprised he isn’t already here.

  Shit, maybe he is. Waiting there in the dark of that house.

  “We should go in,” Miriam says, “maybe have a look around—”

  “I didn’t choose you to do this adventure. We chose each other.”

  “Oh, whatever. At the end of the day, the number one problem is you think I’m something I’m not. And you’re trying to change who I am!”

  “You’re trying to change who you are, and I’m trying to fucking help! Was that all a lie? Were you just telling me that bullshit to string me along so I can drive you places and massage your feet at night? You’re a barely functioning adult and you are on the cusp of having a baby—a human baby, a real, crying, flesh-and-blood-and-poopy-diapers baby.”

  “You’re a flesh-and-blood-and-poopy-diapers baby.”

  Gabby stares.

  Miriam stares back.

  Gabby cracks. She snorts a small, eruptive laugh.

  Miriam laughs too.

  Then they’re both doing it. Cracking up so hard, they can’t catch their breath. Miriam has to brace herself against the dashboard. Gabby has to wipe her eyes. They both make that sound for when you’re going off a laughing jag, a kind of happy deflation—OHHhhhhhh.

  “Fuck,” Miriam says.

  “Fuck,” Gabby agrees.

  “You’re right about it all.”

  Gabby raises an eyebrow. “What did you just say?”

  “I said you’re right. Does that get you wet?”

  “It kinda does, a little?”

  “Listen. You were right. You are right. I have a habit of acting first and then thinking second. Or maybe third. Maybe I don’t think at all. Point is, I do things, and this time, I thought I could make it work—I could pull one over on Guerrero and get the name and be a tricky little bitch and sneak away with all the cookies. You warned me, and I didn’t listen. And now, here we are. About to be eaten by an encampment of homeless people.”

  “We’re homeless too now; have a little sympathy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too.” Gabby sighs. “We’ll be fine. We’ll figure it out. But next time, let me do the packing? You grabbed the most asinine shit.”

  “Shush, I packed fine.”

  “You brought three packages of cookies and left our toothbrushes.”

  “I’m a work in progress.” She chews on her lower lip. “We should probably . . . I dunno, see if this freakshow is home, whoever he is. Guessing he’s a hoarder, or just a fan of garbage?”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “Stay here.”

  “No, we’re not separating. Not again.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  They share a quick kiss, and out of the car they go.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  THE HOUSE OF ABRAHAM LUKAUSKIS

  They wind their way up the cement path, slaloming between bags of trash. There’s little smell—this doesn’t appear to be food waste, or worse, dead rats or human body parts. Miriam gives one a little nudge with the side of her boot; something inside crinkles and whispers, like paper. The next one does the same. Are they all filled with crumpled paper?

  Why?

  Dangling from the overhang over the front door are—

  “Dead birds,” Gabby says, making a face.

  Miriam recognizes them. They’re just skeletons—a little dry skin and feathery bits still cling to the delicate bones. “I knew a guy in Florida who was really into win
d chimes, but this is a whole other level.” Miriam looks upon these dead creatures and knows, intuitively, what they are:

  They’re blackbirds.

  They duck the dead birds gently rotating on strings, and Gabby goes for the front door—but, unsurprisingly, it’s locked.

  “C’mon,” Miriam says. “Around back.”

  She takes a step off the concrete porch and sidles around the back of the house, using a narrow dirt path through the scrubby weeds that threads the space between the clapboard house and the chain link fence. The backyard, if it can even be called that, is about the size of a postcard—and half of it is just more concrete. And half of that is mounded again with more bags of trash. More dead birds hang back here. Mostly blackbirds, but some sparrows, too. A word rises from the mists of Miriam’s memory:

  Psychopomps. In folklore, birds as vehicles, shuttling the souls of the living to the land of the dead. And maybe, she wonders with a shudder, back the other way, too.

  They go to the back-patio door. That is also locked.

  Next to it is a window—big enough for the both of them to fit through, Miriam thinks. She tries it. Locked. But flimsily locked: looks like this place was built in the 1950s and hasn’t seen many updates since.

  Miriam has, in her back pocket, a small-blade knife. She flips it out, slides it under the window, and jimmies it around in there a bit.

  “So, now we’re adding breaking and entering to our rap sheet?” Gabby hisses in the jaundiced, sodium-lit dark of Los Angeles.

  “You bet.”

  The lock pops. The window opens.

  “Et voilà,” Miriam says. “Ladies first.”

  “Does that mean you or me?”

  “I didn’t really think that far. I better go in first, just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “I don’t know. Rats, roaches, bear trap, a slick-walled pit.”

  Gabby winces. “Then shouldn’t I go in first? You’re pregnant.”

  “And hardly helpless. Oops, here I go.” With that, Miriam does a practiced move (that she is admittedly a bit out of practice with), hopping up and pulling herself through the open window.

  She does it nimbly and quietly—though she nearly knocks over a stack of unwashed plates sitting in a sink. She has to sidle sideways and drop into the small, dank kitchen. It smells of weaponized mildew and food that has turned bad not once, not twice, but three times: not so much rotten but utterly forgotten. Has anyone even been here in a while?

  Her hope begins to sink like an injured boat.

  Maybe Abraham Lukauskis is not here.

  Maybe he hasn’t been here in a long time.

  No time to worry about that now—Miriam helps Gabby through the space. Gabby is not practiced in this and never has been, so it takes some doing to make sure they don’t both end up on the peeling, ruined linoleum.

  They each check that the other is all right. “Hope you had your tetanus shot,” Miriam says to Gabby. She sure had one; having a baby, they make you get the DPT vaccine. Shahini was insistent on that point.

  Miriam plucks her phone from her pocket, flips it open, and uses the meager screen as a flashlight.

  Slowly, she turns.

  This isn’t a hoarder’s house, not exactly. It’s something else. The counters are piled with baskets of herbs, polished stones, strange poultices, little piles of bones. A dream catcher hangs in front of the fridge. On the opposite counter, little glass jars line the back—Miriam gets closer, sees that they’re more spices: turmeric, cinnamon, clove, but some of them too contain little bones, or white pebbles, or what look to be rust flakes.

  In what counts for the living room, they find the same thing, only more so: statues of the Virgin Mary, several candles featuring the Virgin of Guadalupe, arrowheads dangling from strings, a round bowl filled with dead rose petals floating in brackish water—

  Gabby suddenly gasps, staggering backward—she makes a low, keening sound, a sudden whine of fear as she balls up her fists and hugs them to her chest. Miriam rushes to her. “What is it?”

  “Cats. Dead cats. Dead cats, Miriam.”

  Sure enough, she’s right.

  There, on a coffee table, three dead adult cats.

  And two kittens.

  So dead, they’re practically mummified. Black as road tar. Brittle as autumn leaves. Crispy like deeply fried chicken. Their mouths are all open, the tiny teeth like needle tips. Eyes long gone, desiccated to nothing.

  “I touched one, I touched one,” Gabby repeats, again and again. “Ew, ew, ew, ew.” Her fingers waggle in the air like the legs of a panicked spider.

  “Lighten up, Francis.”

  “Miriam. Why are there dead cats in here?”

  Miriam does not answer at first. Instead, she moves over to a side table next to a leather couch that has lost most of its shape and turned more into a moldering pile of forgotten cow—there, she leans in and sniffs at a Mason jar, which contains some manner of liquid. The jar is painted with black, clumsily scrawled symbols.

  The sniff is quick and tells Miriam all she needs to know.

  Wincing at the acrid smell, she retreats and says, “The dead cats are probably here for the same reason those jars of piss are.”

  “Cat piss?”

  “I think human, but I’m not exactly a piss sommelier.”

  “You really do take me to the finest places,” Gabby says.

  “What can I say? Only the best for my gal.”

  Onward she pushes throughout the first and only floor of the house. There’s a small anteroom—not really fancy enough for the foyer moniker, unless you say it less like the French (foy-yay) and more like a Midwest hotdish housewife (foy-URR). Piled by the door is a bunch of old mail—plus more trash bags. Miriam creeps along and takes a left into the bathroom—in here, she finds more of the same. No trash, but more candles and statues. Another bird skeleton hangs over the mirror.

  (It’s a cuckoo.)

  (Again, she’s not exactly sure how she knows that.)

  It’s then she looks into the mirror.

  Which, as it turns out, is a mistake. A moment replays in her head—

  There, in another house, in Florida. It was her in a bathroom, Mervin’s bathroom, an old guy who died. She and Rita Shermansky were robbing the place. Bathroom was about the same size as this one. She was going through his medications, and then when she closed the mirror—

  She saw then what she saw now.

  Someone is standing right behind her.

  Then, it turned out to be the Trespasser—who slammed her head face-forward into the mirror. Or, at least, that’s what she hallucinated.

  Now, she has no fucking idea.

  No idea if it’s real.

  Or if it’s the Trespasser.

  She spins around, ready to kick, punch, bite—

  A dark shape, shaggy and baggy, like a mound of rags and writhing ants, stands there in the shower stall. Hidden in the dark of the bathroom. Miriam’s about to say something, to reach forward and grab whoever it is—real or delusion—when she sees something rise up in its hands.

  She realizes a half-second too late—

  It’s a shotgun.

  It goes off, right into her chest.

  INTERLUDE

  ON A BEACH, WITH A BOOK, WITH EVELYN

  The wind hits her.

  It comes off the gray, foam-topped waves and rides across the beach like invisible horsemen. They gallop over her. They surprise her, steal her breath. She knows this place. Miriam has been here before.

  She’s in a two-piece. Black. Simple. Her toes play like mice in the sand. Next to her sits her mother, Evelyn Black. She’s in a black one-piece, with a floppy beach hat over her too-big bug-eye sunglasses.

  Evelyn reads a book: a Harlan Coben thriller.

  “Am I dead?” Miriam asks. She knows the answer when her mother says it out loud:

  “No, Miriam. You’re not dead.”

  “Should I be dead?”

&nb
sp; At that, her mother seems noncommittal. A halfhearted shrug is her only retort. “Life is strange” is all she says. “All is not as it seems.”

  “Someone shot me. With a . . .”

  “Shotgun.”

  “Yeah.”

  Her mother gently takes off her sunglasses. With slowness and precision, she folds in the arms of each with a little click, click, and then sets the sunglasses down next to her in the sand. Gulls shriek above.

  Evelyn regards Miriam.

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “I am.” Miriam tensed up. “You always wanted me to have that kid in high school, but that got all fucked up. Here we go, second chance. It’s what you want, right? Does it make you happy?”

  “It does. Of course it does.” Evelyn sighs dramatically. “It kills me, though, that I may never get to meet the little tyke.” Her mother’s eyes twinkle with mischief. “Get it? Kills me? Wokka, wokka, wokka.”

  “You’re not usually one for the jokes.”

  “The afterlife is rich with time to cultivate new habits.”

  Miriam rolls her eyes. “That’s nice to know. Maybe you can learn to cook for once.”

  “My cooking was very good.”

  “Uh-huh.” She looks down at her belly. Only a faint roundness has begun to show, easier to see now in the two-piece. “You know, I should be more to you than just a baby-maker.”

  “And yet, to you, that’s what I was—the someone who made you.”

  “Yeah, but you made me in different ways. You popped me out of your body—”

  “That’s a rude way to put it.”

  “That’s literally the least rude way for me to have put it, Mother.”

  “Eh.”

  “Point is, what you were to me wasn’t just a mechanism for my . . . entry into the world. You were the person who made me who I am. And you know that’s not necessarily a good thing, right?”

  At this, her mother shrugs as pelicans now fly low and slow over the shore, now zooming out over the water where they casually—like crashing planes—dive-bomb the churning surf to bring fish into their bucketed beaks.