Blackbirds Read online

  – and Miriam sidesteps, thrusts the pepper spray into his mouth, and fills his throat with the stuff. It only takes two seconds before he falls backward, throwing up onto the bar's cold concrete floor, face red, eyes like blisters, snot and sweat in a steady stream.

  Miriam pulls Ashley up.

  "We have to run," she says.

  Fat Dude claws at his eyes with a broken hand.

  Ashley grabs the other half of the broken pool cue and smashes it over Fat Dude's head. Miriam shoves him.

  "I said, run!"

  Ashley bolts, laughing.

  On the way out, Miriam hurls a twenty dollar origami boulder behind the bar, where Paleface is hiding. Her shoulders hit the door, knocking it open. The outside air hits her, along with the smell of wet asphalt and spilled beer. It's almost dizzying. She damn near trips on a hunk of broken parking lot. The piss-yellow street lights are otherworldly. The distant sound of cars on the highway fills her head. She feels lost. Where to go? Where to run?

  Ashley's hand finds the small of her back.

  "This way," he says.

  She follows. He fumbles in his pocket for a set of keys, and before Miriam knows it, he's popping the driver's side door of a white late-1980s Ford Mustang.

  "Get in!" he yells.

  Like the cockroach from Del Amico's motel room, she does as told.

  The car's interior is dark, cluttered, dingy. Vinyl is torn in places. Coffee cups and plastic soda bottles form a sticky trash pile at her feet. A pair of playing card deodorizers dangle from the mirror, but they've long lost their ability to conceal the cigarettes-and-feet funk.

  Ashley twists the key in the ignition, but the engine gutters. It turns over again and again – guh-guh-guh-guh, a stuttering asthmatic – but never starts.

  "What the fuck?" she asks. "C'mon!"

  "I know," he barks back at her. His foot taps the gas pedal.

  Guh-guh-guh-grrrrr-guh.

  The bar doors – a hundred feet away, maybe less – explode open.

  Fat Dude tumbles out. Even in the ruined-liver light of the parking lot, Miriam can see the white ring of spit spackling his rage-howl mouth, the mucus swinging from his nostrils and eye corners like he's some frothing bull.

  She can also see the shotgun in his hand. She has no idea where it came from – behind the bar? – but it doesn't matter, because it exists, and he has it, and he's pissed.

  "Go, go, go!" Miriam screams. "Gun!"

  The car heeds her panic and rumbles to life. The engine pops and shudders, but it's up-and-at-'em-time. Ashley throws it into reverse, and guns it backward – unfortunately, toward the angry mountain with the pump-action shotgun.

  The gun goes off.

  The back windshield explodes against the seats. A rattle and patter of glass bits.

  The Mustang, like the wild horse for which it is named, bucks when Ashley slams it into drive. The car kicks back a cloud of stone and exhaust. It gallops forward like someone's trying to stick a riding crop up its ass. Another booming roar from the shotgun, and Miriam hears pellets punch little holes in the back end of the car, but it's too late for Fat Dude.

  The car busts out of the parking lot, tires squealing. Ashley laughs.

  SEVEN

  Little Death

  Night.

  A small house sits on a curvy back road. Wisteria – beautiful in its own way, but listed as a weed species by the great state of North Carolina – chokes one half of the house, binding it in thick vines like strangling fingers and purple flowers like clusters of pale grapes.

  Somewhere, a dog barks. Crickets chirrup.

  The sky is black, and host to a million visible stars.

  A white Mustang sits in the driveway, a big hole in the back window and a starburst of little holes perforating the trunk.

  Inside the house, a deeper darkness. Everything is still. Shapes and the shadows of shapes merge seamlessly to maintain calm immobility.

  Then: sound.

  Outside the front door, keys jiggle in the lock. Then someone drops them. Someone giggles, and someone says, "Shit." The keys are back in the lock now. More jingling. More fumbling.

  The door flies open, nearly rocked off its hinges. The shadows of two shapes circle each other, reaching, then withdrawing, then reaching again. They have a mad gravity, crashing together. The two bodies slam into each other, a supernova; they pivot, pirouette, hips into a side table, mail knocked on the floor, a piece of framed art sent there soon after. Glass shatters.

  A palm slams against the wall, searches blindly for a light switch.

  Click.

  "Fuck," Miriam says, "that's bright."

  "Shut up," Ashley says, and pins Miriam against the arm of a pale microfiber sofa, his hands on her hips, holding her fast.

  He presses his face against hers. Lips meet lips, teeth on teeth, tongue on –

  Ashley sits in a wheelchair, and he's an old man whose hairless scalp is a checkerboard of liver spots and other marks. His frail hands rest, steepled in his lap atop a blanket the color of Pepto-Bismol, and

  – tongue, and she bites his lower lip and he bites back. She raises her knee and wraps her leg around his bony denim-clad hip and pulls him tight, and then flips him around so he's the one against the couch's arm.

  She takes off her shirt in one fell swoop. His hands grip her sides tight, hard, painfully –

  an oxygen tank sits on the floor next to him, the tube snaking up under the pink blanket and back out, up to his nose. He's small like a crumpled cup, like a slowly composting sack of bones ill-contained by a powder blue bathrobe, but his eyes, his eyes are still young, flashing like wicked mirrors. Those eyes look left, look right, suspicious, or looking to see who is suspicious of him, and

  – and the balled-up shirt disappears over her shoulder. Again they kiss.

  Clothes peel away, leaving a trail of fabric from the living room into the bedroom.

  Before too long, it's all skin on skin, and as they topple onto the bed, she gasps –

  he spies two orderlies chatting and chuckling in the corner, telling some bullshit story to break the monotony of their jobs, to help them forget about how many times they have to shower and scrub and shampoo to wash away that pissy-pants old-people smell. But nobody's watching. The ancient and antediluvian inhabitants of the old folks' home orbit the room in various stages of languor; a woman with orange-dyed hair fiddles with a pair of crochet hooks without any yarn between them. A skinny octogenarian drools. A pot-bellied man lifts his shirt and scratches under his waistband, empty eyes half-following an old Spongebob cartoon on the TV

  – and the bed isn't long for this world; they tumble to the floor. She bites his ear. He pinches her nipple. She digs nails into his back. His hands are on her throat, and she feels the blood ballooning in her head, a dull roaring pulse that grows with each beat, and she closes her eyes and shoves her thumb in his mouth…

  and all the while Ashley sits, his body still, his eyes moving. He pulls the blanket up to his chest, and as he does so, it reveals his legs. A plastic flip-flop dangles from his right foot, but he has no left foot. The left leg dead-ends in a stump past the faded plaid pajama bottoms. It has no prosthesis. Ashley stares down at it, wistful, sad, scowling.

  Her foot touches his, and it sends an electric, awful thrill through her body. She feels equal parts ecstatic and disgusted, like she's one of those people who gets hot under the collar at car accidents, but she doesn't care. She's lost to it. Dizziness enrobes her. His hands tighten around her throat. He laughs. She moans. Her leg kicks out. Toes cramp.

  Her foot lifts up the bed skirt, and she sees a glimpse of something – a metal suitcase, a combination lock, a black lacquered handle – but then her vision is filled with Ashley, her ears lost to the sound of the pulsing blood-beat.

  Miriam pulls Ashley's hands off her throat, and she flips him over onto his back. His head cracks into the leg of a nearby table, but neither of them care. She chokes him now. He cranes his head
and bites the flesh just south of her clavicle. Miriam feels alive, more alive than she's felt in a long time, nauseated and giddy and wet like a storm-thrown wave, and she wraps her hips around his and she feels him inside of her –

  and the lids of his eyes close, and when they open, the clarity is gone. What remains is just a muddy haze. He pulls the oxygen tube from his nose and lets it flop over the side of his wheelchair. His eyelids flutter. His chest heaves once, then twice. A rattling wheeze squeaks from his throat, like a tire's air pushed through a pinhole in the dark rubber. The wheeze turns wet; the fluid in his lungs builds, and he starts to struggle for air, a fish on the dock, his lips working but finding nothing. He's drowning in his own body, and finally one of the orderlies – a reedy black dude with a silver nose ring – sees and rushes over, shaking the old man gently. He picks up the tube and looks at it like he doesn't understand what he's seeing, and the orderly asks, "Mister Gaynes? Ashley?" He gets it now. He sees what's happening. "Oh, hell. You in there, old man?" Ashley's in there for one last second. But then he's gone. The orderly says something else, but it's all fading to black, because dead is dead is dead, a wheezing whimper.

  Miriam cries out, not a whimper but a bang, riding the intense mixture of emotions inside her to a throttling orgasm.

  It surprises her.

  INTERLUDE

  The Dream

  A red snow shovel hits dead in the center of her back. It slams her to the floor. Her chin hits hard tile; her teeth bite through her tongue. She tastes a mouthful of blood. The shovel comes down again, this time against the back of the head. Her nose breaks. Blood squirts.

  Everything is ringing, distorted, a high-pitched whine.

  She looks up through teary eyes.

  Louis sits on a toilet in a stall. His pants are up. The rickety walls can barely accommodate his broad shoulders, big body. Both of his eyes are gone, replaced with Xs formed out of electrical tape. He clucks his tongue.

  "You're a real man-eater," he says and whistles. "Del Amico. Me. That old bastard out of Richmond. Harry Osler up in Pennsylvania. Bren Edwards. Tim Streznewski. See a penny, pick it up. Am I right? Oh, and let's not forget that little boy out there on the highway. So many dead boys. The names go on and on, all the way back to… what? Eight years ago. Ben Hodges."

  Miriam spits out blood. "Women, too. And I don't kill them. I don't kill anybody."

  Louis laughs.

  "You keep telling yourself that, little lady. Whatever helps you

  sleep at night. Remember, just because you're not pulling the trigger doesn't mean you aren't a killer."

  "It's fate," Miriam says, red drool swinging from her lower lip. "It's not me. It's how fate is. What fate wants–"

  "Fate gets," Louis says. "I know. You say that a lot."

  "My mother used to say–"

  "It is what it is. I know that old chestnut, too."

  "Fuck you. You're not real."

  "Not yet. But just shy of a month, I will be. I'll be another skeleton in your closet, another ghost in your head. Dangling and swinging and moaning and groaning."

  "I can't save you."

  "Apparently not."

  "Go to hell."

  He winks. "Meet you there. Watch out for that–"

  The shovel comes down between her shoulder blades. She feels something break deep inside of her. Her thighs grow wet. The pain is intense.

  "– shovel."

  EIGHT

  Die Jobs

  The morning after.

  Five men (counting the frat-tards). One death. Lots of violence. A banner night for Miriam Black.

  Hands on the sink in Ashley's bathroom, she stares at her reflection in the mirror. She smokes a cigarette, blows the plume against the reflection, watches smoke meet smoke.

  All told, it's the orgasm that really bothers her.

  It isn't the sex. Sex happens – hell, sex happens often enough that it's a hobby for her like scrapbooking or collecting baseball cards is for other people. Who cares? Her body is no temple. It might have been once, but it lost its sanctified status long ago (just over eight years ago, that wicked little voice reminds), with too much blood spilled at the altar.

  The orgasm, though. That's new.

  She hasn't had one in… she takes another drag of the Marlboro, tries to figure it out. She can't. It's like doing hard math half-drunk. It's been that long.

  And then last night? Boom. Bang. Fireworks. Fountains shooting off. Twenty-one gun salute, rocket blasting to the moon, a Pavarotti concert, the universe exploding and then imploding and then exploding again.

  A blinking red light. An alarm going off.

  And what was it that did it?

  She presses her head against the mirror. It's cold against her skin.

  "It's official," she says into the mirror. "You're totally broken. Unfixable." She has an image of a cracked porcelain doll being dragged through puddles of blood, mud, and shit and then punted into mid-air, its arms cartwheeling, until it smacks headlong into the grill of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler. The doll looks like her.

  (A red balloon rises to the sky.)

  Time to do what Miriam does best.

  "Time to dye my hair!" she chirps.

  This is her true gift: the ability to shove it all out of her mind. Just crowd it out with hard elbows and headbutts. Zen and the art of repression.

  She opens her bag, takes out two boxes. She bought them a few days before at a grimy CVS in Raleigh-Durham, and by "bought," she means, "with a five-finger discount."

  It's hair-color. Cheap-ass punk color for cheap-ass punk girls. An adult female with any self-respect would never buy a brand like this, would never dye her hair these colors – Blackbird Black and Vampire Red. But, while Miriam legally qualifies as an adult, she certainly doesn't count as one with even a dram of self-respect, does she? H-e-double-hockey-sticks no.

  She pokes her head out of the bathroom door. Ashley lies back on the bed, heavy lids half-closed. The TV is playing (Spongebob Squarepants) some kind of daytime talk show.

  "Long day at the office, honey?" she asks.

  He blinks. "What time is it?"

  "Nine-thirty. Ten. Shrug."

  "Did you just say shrug instead of actually shrugging?"

  Miriam ignores the question and instead holds up the two boxes for display, one in each hand. "Check it out. Blackbird Black. Vampire Red. Pick one."

  "Pick one what?"

  She makes an exasperated sound. "A candidate for the presidency of the Moon and all its Provinces."

  He stares, confused.

  "A hair color, retard. I'm dying my hair. Blackbird Black–" She shakes that box. "Or Vampire Red?" She shakes the other box.

  He squints, face slackened to indicate minimum investment or comprehension. Miriam growls and stomps over to him, dropping her bag. She thrusts the two boxes up under his chin and makes them do a little dance, like the Let's All Go To The Lobby parade of treats.

  "Black, red, black, red," she says.

  "Yeah, I don't actually care. It's too early for this shit."

  "Heresy. It's never too early for hair dye."

  "I dunno," he croaks. "I'm not really a morning person."

  "Let's go through this," she says. "Vampires are cool. Right? Modern vampires, at least, they're all black leather and sexy moves and pomp and circumstance. Plus, they're pale. I'm pale. Except, vampires are slicker than goose shit on a glass window. Suave. Sultry. I'm neither of those things. Plus, I don't really feel like being one of the slag-whore bitches in Dracula's brothel, and all that Goth and emo shit gives me a rash."

  She holds up the other box. "Blackbirds, on the other hands, are cool birds. Symbols of death in most mythology. They say that blackbirds are psychopomps. Like sparrows, they're birds that supposedly help shuttle souls from the world of the living to the world of the dead." A little voice tries to say something, but she shushes it. "Of course, on the other hand, the genus – or is it species, I always get them mixed up –
of the common blackbird is Turdus, which, of course, has the word 'turd' in it. Not ideal."

  Ashley watches and listens. "How do you know all this?"

  "Wikipedia."

  He nods, gamely.

  "Still nothing?"