Mockingbird Read online

  The answer crosses her mind before he says it. "Peggy called me."

  Right. Peggy. The bane of her existence all summer – not exactly a friend of Louis's but an acquaintance. He met her dropping off, well, who knows what? Tampons and hermit crabs, she thinks. Peggy said she had a job opening if he knew anybody. Louis told Peggy he had just the girl. And the legacy of misery began.

  "You got shot," he says again. "You okay?"

  "Fine."

  He draws a deep breath. "You got shot. With a bullet."

  "Yeah, that's usually what 'shot' means. This barely counts. Last year I got stabbed in the tit. Deflated my lung like a bike tire. This… isn't anything. Just a flesh wound. So, how'd you find me?"

  "Got the call. Went back to the house–"

  "Trailer."

  "–and you were gone. So was your pack."

  "I could've gone anywhere. North to New York. South to Atlantic City."

  "Those directions wouldn't have taken you through the Pine Barrens." He watches her, warily. "I took a shot. It paid off. I think I know you pretty well by now."

  Something about that galls her.

  "You don't know shit," she spits, the words falling out of her like battery acid from an upended bucket. "You really think you know me? Good joke. Wanna know the punchline?" She's not laughing. "If you knew me, you wouldn't think that locking me away in a trailer for a year would be a super idea. You wouldn't think that my ideal job would be scanning postcards and sand pails and fucking Utz pretzels for the greasy coconut-besmirched touristy throng."

  Louis sighs. "That's what people do, Miriam. They settle down. They get jobs."

  She rears back a foot and kicks his dashboard. Not enough to dent it or crack it but enough that it reverberates through the truck cab.

  "I'm not people!"

  "Miriam–"

  "Pull over."

  "What? No. Wait. There's something I need to tell you–"

  "I said pull the fuck over, you one-eyed sonofabitch."

  Louis grits his teeth, slams the brakes. The truck grinds to the side of the road. "There. I pulled over."

  "I'm out."

  "Again. You're bailing. Again."

  "Again, yeah, a-fucking-gain."

  "You don't want to hear what I have to say."

  "No, I do not."

  "Fine, then. Go."

  "I'm going."

  "Doesn't look like you're going."

  She grabs her crotch. "What's this look like?"

  Miriam throws open the cab door. Leaps out into the gravel.

  Door, slam. The truck shakes with the force of it.

  Louis doesn't hang around. The tires growl on loose stone, and the Mack pulls away in a cloud of dust. It's just greasy, gauzy taillights diffused in a haze hanging low over the nighttime road. A haze that smells of smoke and distant fire.

  Good. He's angry. He should be. It's not often Louis gets angry. Always the diplomat. The peacemaker. Be a fountain, not a drain, he said once. She said back, I like to piss in fountains. And you're a real drain.

  The taillights wink and fade and are gone.

  Miriam keeps walking.

  By now, her dogs are really barking. It's tempting to take off her damn boots and go barefoot, but this is Jersey. Who knows what she'll step on? Or in? Shudder.

  After a few hours, she sees a Wawa gas station and market ahead – glowing yellow and red in the Pinelands dark. Her stomach is growling. Her teeth and tongue itch for a cigarette. She's got some cash but not much, maybe not enough.

  She passes the pumps. Then she sees the truck parked off to the side. Engine off. Cab dark.

  And here he comes. Walking toward her.

  Louis has in his hands the biggest coffee cup Wawa makes. A sixty-four ounce thirst-aborter and sleep-destroyer. Under his other arm is a carton of cigarettes.

  He thrusts them out.

  "For me?" she says, faking demureness. It takes all her energy and it doesn't come across all that sincere but she does it just the same.

  "For you."

  "Maybe you know a little something about me."

  "Maybe just a little."

  "Thanks."

  "Can we get back in the truck? I have something I want to tell you."

  Her radar pings – not a tickle but a painful itch. Like an innocuous mole becoming suddenly cancerous. Just the same, she nods, takes her gifts, and they go back to the truck so she can hear what Louis has to tell her.

  EIGHT

  Step Three: Profit

  Miriam's waiting for the axe to fall. She's always waiting for the axe to fall. Louis and she sit in the truck, still parked in the Wawa lot.

  He looks hesitant.

  She knows what's coming. Mentally, she's fine with it. He doesn't want to be with her. Why would he? Emotionally… well. Emotionally she's a garage full of cats on fire.

  Then he hands her a book. Thin, glossy cover. Portrait-sized. Like a mailer. It's even got the spot for the address on the back.

  She turns it over. "The… Caldecott School."

  She flips through it.

  Glossy photos. Trim text.

  Is your daughter achieving her academic potential?

  The Caldecott School offers your daughter a New Beginning.

  Girls in gray blazers. Navy skirts. High socks. A variety pack of ethnicities, all teens and pre-teens. Studying. Eating lunch. Gazing longingly into microscopes. Happy faces. Eager smiles. All bullshit. No kid is that slackjawed and zombie-eyed for learning.

  Miriam peeks over the edge of the book.

  "Are you… trying to send me back to school?" She ill-contains a snorty laugh. "Because I might be a bit too long in the pubes for that."

  "What? Oh, no. This is a job."

  Miriam swiftly rolls up the mailer and thwacks him on the knuckles. "What did I tell you about getting me jobs? Throwing my ass into a normal 9-to-5 thing is like vinegar and baking soda, sodium and water, like making a cobra and a mongoose live together in a studio apartment and then filming it and putting it on MTV."

  "It's not that kind of job."

  She makes a jerk-off motion with her hand. Then mimes a cheek-bulging blow-job. "Is it… that kind of job?" She salaciously licks the invisible cock.

  "I'm not your pimp. This is a…" He can't seem to find the words. "A psychic job." To clarify, he taps his head.

  "Psychic job."

  "Yeah. Yes."

  "I don't even know what that means. Can I telecommute?"

  It's then that Louis explains. He does charity work now and again, making deliveries for those who need them – in this case, donations of school supplies to a series of schools around the northeast. Boarding schools, charter schools, private institutions, small colleges.

  Schools including this one. The Caldecott School. For girls.

  "I know a teacher there," he says. "Katherine. Katey. Nice woman. Teaches English. Doesn't have any family, not anymore. Not married. She's convinced that she's dying."

  There it is. The stink of death crawling up Miriam's nose. The rustle of blackbird wings. The vulture's hiss before it plunges its head into the wound.

  "We're all dying," Miriam says.

  "That's dark."

  "Just biology, dude. Entropy bites us all in the end. What's that poem? Something something, the center cannot hold?"

  He stares at her blankly. Not a poetry fan, then.

  "She thinks she's dying now. Katey believes she's sick. Her whole family died from some sickness or another. Cancer mostly. A niece from meningitis. A brother from a DVT."

  "DVD? Musta been one shitty movie."

  "D-V-T. Deep Vein Thrombosis."

  "Oh. Oooh. Sounds like a great band name."

  His nostrils flare. His big fingers move to fidget with the eyepatch. An autonomic gesture he makes whenever he's tired of her shit.

  "Point is, she said she was thinking of consulting a psychic. She asked if I'd met any."

  "And so you told her about me."

&nb
sp; "I did."

  "Did you ever think maybe I want that kept private?"

  "You tell everybody."

  "Not everybody."

  "You told the mailman."

  That's true. She did. He had a skin thing she said he should get checked. A black patch that looked like Texas on his neck. He won't get it checked, of course. But sometimes she gets a thrill from yelling at the tides.

  She tosses the Caldecott book onto the dash. Grabs her coffee from the cupholder. It's warm in her hands. Comforting. "I thought you didn't want me to do this… thing anymore."

  "I never said that."

  "You bought me gloves. You strongly suggested I keep them on."

  Again with the eyepatch and the fidgeting. "I just thought it might be a problem. With your job."

  "At least you let me take them off in bed."

  He blushes. After all this time, he blushes.

  She decides to be the jackrabbit. Jump ahead of all this nonsense. "So, Miss Teacher is a total hypochondriac. She thinks she's dying. You mention me, tell her about my disturbed gift. When was this?"

  "Three months ago. Thereabouts."

  "You think she's still interested?"

  He nods. "I already called her."

  "You sly dog."

  "So. What do you think?"

  Her hands are tingling. Like her fingertips are hornet wings tapping against a windowpane. She thinks that all parts of her want this in ways she doesn't even understand – like she's got this yearning, this deep urge tangled up in all her bodily systems, from her teeth and tongue all the way down to the verdant valley between her legs. She can hear its song in the moist and fetid hollows of her mind: a siren's cry singing once more about death and distant highways, about birds stirring in dark places and gold coins slick with the grease of blood. The body wants. The mind seeks.

  Her hunger must be on display. Her face an antenna beaming an eagerness that borders on impatience. Louis studies her.

  "I guess that's a yes, then," he says.

  "I didn't say anything."

  "Just the same." His voice is sad, and she's not sure why. "It's a yes."

  NINE

  No Time For Love

  They crash at a motel that night. Just down the way from the Wawa. The Sugar Sands Motel. The guy who checks them in looks like a true-blue sister-fucker who is himself the son of a true-blue sister-fucker. Eyes too big. Face too small. Fingernails so brittle they look like broken seashells.

  The room is nothing to honk at, either. It still carries that beach motif – captain's wheel on the wood-paneled wall, bathroom cast in pinks and seafoams, a shitty acrylic painting of a lighthouse hanging over the twin beds, which lean toward each other as though co-dependent.

  It stinks of mold and salt water.

  Doesn't matter. Miriam is awake. Alive. Electric. It's not just the caffeine. Nor the nicotine. Her hands throb with a weed-whacker buzz.

  It's sick. She knows it's sick. That distant lingering promise of death has her feeling more alive than she's felt in a year.

  It's gas for the engine. And she can't help but rev the motor.

  Louis sits down on a bed, goes fumbling for the remote control that operates the boxy little TV on the flimsy pine dresser. But she doesn't give him a chance to find it.

  She leaps up onto his back. Bites his ear. Makes a monkey sound. Lets her hand drift down across his chest, finds what she hopes is a nipple and not a button and gives it a good twist.

  "I want my hands everywhere," she hisses. And she does. It's like they're on fire. Part of it is frustrating: She can no longer know how Louis is going to die. She knew, once – stabbed in both eyes atop the Barnegat Lighthouse – but then she went and changed the course of fate and now his demise remains a delicious mystery. As does her own.

  Her other hand moves to his hip. Then starts to ease toward his lap. He breathes heavy.

  But then he bites that breath and grabs her with both hands. Picks her up like she's nothing – he's got at least 120 pounds on her. He pitches her onto the bed. The bedsprings bray like a mule.

  "No," he says. Like he's telling a child to drop that cookie.

  Her hand reaches again for him, this time curling a finger around one of his belt loops. He extracts her hand and puts it back on her own lap.

  "We're not doing this," he says.

  "Seriously?"

  "Yes. Seriously."

  "But this is what we do," she says. "Maybe we don't work so well on an emotional, touchy-feely huggy wuggy level. But we still work. We got gravity, man. Two planets crashing together. Cosmic fist-bumps. Key word: bumps. Like, you know. Bumping uglies. Or maybe the key word is fist? I dunno. All I'm saying is, I feel good. This feels good. Being back on the road with you. This is how we work, you and me."

  "Not anymore."

  There it is. The iceberg that sinks the ship.

  "You're pissed," she says.

  "I'm not."

  "Disappointed, then. Like a parent."

  He says nothing. Goes to sit. Finds the remote control sitting on a table between the two crooked beds, next to a blinking clock radio.

  She gets it. She tells him so. "You want me to be someone I'm not. You wanted me to make a different choice back there. To say, nah, you know what, I'm done with this thing. I don't want to know how people die. Normal people don't do shit like that. Do they? That's why you didn't tell me about this three months ago. Even though you knew I was in misery back on that island. Caught like a rat in a trap. You knew even then that, you give me the choice, I'll choose the wrong road every time. The one you can't stand. The one that reminds you that I am nothing like a normal person. Nothing like your wife."

  Louis' wife. Dead, now. Drowned before Miriam met him.

  Mentioning the wife is an electric shock. She knows it and this isn't the first time she's used it. It's the most direct way through to him. Like cracking open his chest with a rib-spreader and letting a rattlesnake bite his heart.

  Sometimes it gets him mad. This time, he just shuts down.

  He chucks the remote in the table drawer next to a Gideon Bible. Then he goes into the bathroom and closes the door – not with a slam, but with a gentle click.

  INTERLUDE

  The Dream

  She does a Russian kick dance against the bathroom door. Water suddenly seeps out from under it – brackish and murky, like the birth water from a swamp monster's womb. It's cold on her bare toes. It stinks, too. Stagnant. Funky. Fungal.

  Ah. Yes. This. A dream. A vision. A something.

  The door opens, and a woman steps out. Hair matted to a bruise-purple face. Weeds braided in the sloughslick hair. She opens her mouth, and a waterfall of muddy runoff splashes onto her dead bare chest.

  "You," Miriam says.

  Maggots do squirming laps around the corpsewoman's ruined gray nipples.

  "Me?" she belches, more mud-water splashing over her rotten lips.

  Miriam snaps her fingers. "Yeah. You. You're supposed to be Louis' dead wife. I get that. I have whatever… prerequisite dream knowledge I need to figure that much out. But I don't know what she looks like so you're just some… face playing the part."

  In response, the face changes. Bones and skin to liquid and back to bones and skin. From a dead white woman to a dead… Latina woman? The face darker, grayer, deeper striations like poison ivy threaded beneath the skin.

  Then it shifts again. A black woman with shadowdark eyes. A white woman with blonde ringlets gummy with algae. All drowned.

  Then one more change.

  The face becomes Miriam's own.

  Hair dyed with river water. Capillaries burst in yellow eyes.

  "Cute," she says. But it's not cute, and the space between her heart and her stomach goes sour, a caustic curdled pocket.

  Her cadaver-self looks old. The wrinkles are from the water, like the way fingers look after spending too much time in the tub. Just the same, those ancient creases do little to ease the rotten knot in her gut.
>
  "You're on the right path," Corpse-Miriam coos. "The path to the river."