Haunted Legends (21 page)

So she went outside, while I sat in one of the kitchen chairs, snapping beans and wishing for a breeze, or another Coke, or anything more exciting to do than listening to ads for Gold Medal flour and watching the bluebottles circle suicidally around the fly strip. Aunt Mary still didn’t speak, and when I looked over at her bowl she’d only snapped three or four beans.

I was nearly half-finished with my beans when the dogs started barking like mad. I jumped up, dropping the bowl onto the table, and ran for the front door.

But there was no red-eyed pterodactyl, not even a dark shadow overhead. Just Momma and Pop and Grandma and Walter, standing by the trucks yelling at each other. The dogs leaped in circles and barked, clearly confused about which side they were meant to be on.

“Just because you’ve ruined your own life doesn’t mean you have any right to put Mary in a position where people will talk about her,” Grandma said angrily.

“What are they going to say?” Momma said, her voice wobbly. “That she remembered that blood is thicker than water? Because some folks around here should.”

“Says you.” Pop didn’t raise his voice; he dropped it to almost a growl. “You’re the one who wants to take that boy away from us and from all his father’s kin because you’ve got no more sense than a cow and you can’t lie in the bed you made!”

Walter, angrier than I had ever seen him, took a step toward Pop, but Momma held her arm out to block him. “It’s no good for me or Jimmy here, Pop. You know it. Even before all this. The bills are piling up, and . . .”

“And you think that running away will change the fact that life is hard?” Grandma said. “You go, you leave the boy. At least here he’ll be with decent people.” She took a step toward Momma, and for a moment I thought she might slap her. She’d slapped her before, though never in front of Walter, and I didn’t want to see what would happen.

I stepped backwards, thinking to run back inside and go back to the beans and the radio. But I stepped on Aunt Mary’s foot and yelped. She’d come up behind me in silence.

“The beans fell off the table,” she said flatly, and everyone looked up at us.

I leaped off the steps, evaded Pop’s reaching hand, and ran full-speed into the neighboring cornfield.

I’d gone a long way and my legs and arms were well scratched by weeds and I was sweaty and itching with pollen before I realized that none of them were still chasing me. I threw myself to the ground between the rows of towering corn plants and looked up at the tiny slivers of sky that appeared between the deep-green leaves.

No one had said anything to me about moving. Before, I would have thought it was a great adventure. But I didn’t want Aunt Mary and the Stewart kids to keep having shots at the pterodactyl when they didn’t know any better than to think it was evil, and me never ever see it. That wasn’t fair.

I must have dozed off, hot and upset and itchy as I was, because I woke up to slanting late-afternoon light and the sound of rustling leaves. Someone was in the field, a few rows over from me. Pop’s voice called my name.

He still sounded angry, though, so I kept quiet and still. If they found me I could always say I hadn’t heard him. All cornfields muffled sound, and this one more so than most; judging by where the stalks were trembling, Pop was only a few rows over, but he sounded miles away.

It was only when the voice and movement drifted away to the west that I began to think that I should get home. I was hungry, and I would have killed for another one of those Cokes. And if Pop was out here being angry, he wasn’t at the house being angry.

I started off confidently, in the opposite direction from that Pop had taken, cutting across the rows. I was past caring if I knocked down some stalks—they could blame that on deer or raccoons or the Devil Bird for all I cared.

The field went on and on. I didn’t remember having come in this far—either I’d been running a lot faster than I thought, or I was going in the wrong direction. I angled myself south a little—that was definitely the way that home had to be, and there was no mistaking the cardinal points now. Even deep in the corn the sun’s slant was obvious.

Letting alone the Coke, I would have been happy for a drink from the garden hose or even an irrigation ditch by now. Down among the stalks,
fragments of twilight were starting to appear, and crickets were stirring to life—not to mention mosquitoes. Every few steps I had to shake and slap myself.

Surely Pop heard me moving and was coming back for me now. Surely the others were looking too. Surely the dogs could smell me. I stopped to listen.

Somewhere far away, Pop yelled again. It was hard to be absolutely sure, but I moved toward where I thought I heard him.

Suddenly, I felt a rush of air against my shoulders. The shadow swept over, and I looked up, and there it was.

My pterodactyl dreams fell apart around me. It had feathers, dusty black feathers that ended in wing tips like fingers clawing the air in slow strokes. It had a long spear of a beak, and a face like something that had rotted in a dry barn, grimacing without lips. And the red eyes that Aunt Mary had cried about.

It didn’t look down at me, it passed over and away. I watched it go, the long tail sweeping behind it, ending in a club that almost makes me wistful today, because if I’d only seen that, I could have gone on hoping for a pterodactyl a little longer. Then it was out of sight, blocked by the tall tassels of the corn.

I didn’t remember falling, but I was on my butt in the dust. Scrambling to my feet, I found my hands scraped. I had to get out of the corn. I wanted my mother. I ran.

Somewhere, where I couldn’t judge, a long strangled cry rose into the dusk. A coyote, I thought. Then, no, Pop.

A few seconds later, I ran through a last row of corn and stumbled on the bank of an irrigation ditch. Frogs leaped like a forty-gun salute, and I skidded to a stop just short of joining them in the water. Somewhere someone—not Pop, Walter—was calling my name, and this time I opened my mouth to call back.

It hit me square between the shoulders, and not only was it not a pterodactyl, it was the Devil, just like Aunt Mary had said. The claw that seized the back of my head was hot and rough and as flexible and cruel as any hand. It was pushing me facedown into the mud, I squirmed but it was heavier than any bird ever had a right to be and I was pinned, blinded by grass and ready to choke. My fingers dug at the ground pointlessly.

I thought of Momma. And then I heard her. She was screaming for me,
screaming like her heart would break, and I worried, she wasn’t supposed to get upset.

Suddenly, the weight on the back of my head vanished as though it had never been. I was pulled to my feet, and I wiped the mud from my eyes and scanned the sky desperately. But the Devil Bird was gone.

Walter, behind me, gave me a shake. “Jimmy. Jimmy, can you breathe? Talk to us.”

Momma was in front of me. She stared, white and panting, until I ran to her and buried my faced against her side and sobbed like mad. Walter said, “Lucy!” and she looked down at me and nodded, stroking my hair.

She held me as we lurched together back to the house, and never let me fall.

Pop’s heart attack made the news because of the Devil Bird connection, and there were a lot of people at the funeral that I’d never met, even a couple of kids from the university at Houston. Aunt Mary yelled at some of them in the street until Grandma took her by the arm and pulled her away, and after that she went back to acting normal.

A few weeks later, Momma and Walter, who told me to call him Walter and that I had been the bravest kid he’d ever seen, got married in the courthouse, and I was officially adopted and was James Earl Lyons, and it wasn’t long after that that we were putting as much as we could in Walter’s truck and heading for Portland, Oregon. Momma only brought three of the canning jars, and she always kept flowers in them from then on. None of us ever went back. Momma didn’t go to Grandma’s funeral. She would tell me sometimes that she was sorry, but I never knew for what.

Sometimes, even to this day, people call me, wanting to hear it all again, and I indulge them. Unless they say they it was a stork.

Afterword

The Big Bird of Texas was the subject of a spate of sightings and rumors that caused a local panic in the Brownsville, Texas, area in 1976. It had a disconcerting habit of buzzing houses and cars; witness descriptions
varied, but many included the detail that the creature had a naked head, “like a monkey” or “like a reptile.” The sightings eventually tapered off, but reports of something strange flying around Texas have continued sporadically down to the present. Whether the Big Bird was natural or supernatural, whether it was bird, Thunderbird, pterodactyl, or kin to the Mothman, is still a subject of debate among cryptozoologists. I tend to suspect it was a Mexican stork.

Stork or something else, though, what fascinated me was how this out-of-context creature (and others like it, from Chupacabra to the Dover Demon) became a nucleus around which different narratives could crystallize—narratives that had more to do with the unspoken pressures and paranoias of peoples’ everyday lives than with the substance, if any, of what they’d seen.

The Big Bird never attacked a human being directly; I have borrowed that detail, and the nickname “Devil Bird,” from another alleged giant-bird sighting that took place in Illinois in 1977, in which a ten-year-old boy was supposedly seized and briefly lifted about two feet off the ground in front of multiple witnesses.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels
The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass,
and
The Shadow Year.
His short fiction has been published in three collections:
The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream,
and
The Drowned Life.
His fiction has won The World Fantasy Award, The Nebula Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, and
Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.
He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons and teaches literature and writing at Brookdale Community College.

I live along the edge of the Pine Barrens in South Jersey, 1.1 million acres of dense, ancient forest, cedar lakes, cranberry bogs, orchids, and sugar sand. Black bear, fox, bobcat, coyote, and some say cougar. There are ghost towns from the Revolution, dilapidated shacks and crumbling shot towers that can only be reached by canoe. I’ve hiked through much of it in my years, and still I get a feeling that some uneasy sentience pervades its enormity. If I’m quite a distance from the trailhead where my car is parked and twilight drops suddenly, as it does out there, I feel a twist of panic at the thought of meeting night in those woods. You will, of course, have heard of the Jersey Devil. He’s for the tourists. The place is thick with legends far more bizarre and profound. If you learn how to look and you’re lucky, you might even witness one being born.

Sixteen years ago, when my wife and I and our two sons—one in second grade, one not yet in kindergarten—first moved to Medford Lakes, I noticed, every once in a while, this strange old guy stomping around town. He was thin and bald and had a big gray beard with hawk feathers tied into it. His head was long, with droopy eyes and a persistent smile. He pumped his arms vigorously, almost marching. Rain or shine, summer or winter, he wore a ratty, tan raincoat, an old pair of Bermuda shorts, black sneakers, and a red sweatshirt that bore the logo of the seventies soft rock band Bread. Every time I passed him in the car, it looked like he was talking to himself.

Then one day I was picking up a pizza in town, and he was in the shop, sitting alone at a table, a paper plate with pizza crusts in front of him. He
studied me warily, whispering under his breath, as I passed on the way to the counter. Behind me, a woman and her girl came in. When he saw the little girl, the old guy pulled a brown velour sac from somewhere in his coat. He opened it and took something out. I was watching all this from the counter and wondered if something crazy was about to go down, but the mother let go of the girl’s hand. The old guy slipped out of his seat onto one knee. The kid walked over to him, and he gave her what looked like a small, hand-carved wooden deer. The mother said, “What do you say, Helen?” The kid said, “Thank you.” The old guy laughed and slapped the tabletop.