Mockingbird (3 page)

  She unsteeples her hands and leans forward. "We. That's not the first time you've said that word."

  "We are legion. The demons in your head."

  "So this is all just a hallucination? You're just some asshole I made up?"

  Ben says nothing. His eyes flash with mischief.

  Just then, one of the blackbirds yanks its head upward, and in its beak is something that looks like a stringy tendon. Ben's left arm jerks up in the air. When the bird drops the tendon, the arm plops back at his side.

  The birds, working him like a puppet.

  Cute.

  And then a shadow passes over Miriam. She looks up, sees a Mylar balloon floating up in the sky, moving in front of the pale disc that passes for the sun here, and when she looks back at Ben he's no longer Ben. Instead, he's the gunman. The one from the store. Replete with bloody mouth and a barbecue fork sticking out of his neck.

  "So. How does it feel?"

  "How does what feel?" she says, but she knows what he's really asking.

  "Don't be coy. Your second kill." Again, mischief glimmers. "Or third, if you want to count your dead baby."

  That hits her like a fist. She tries not to show it but just the same she leans back in her chair, looks away, stares out over the gray ocean, over the foam-capped waves.

  The gunman shrugs. "Guess we won't count the baby, then."

  "You need a name," she says to change in conversation. "You may not have a face but I want you to have a name."

  "Will I be Ben? Louis? Mommy?"

  "I'm not calling you Mommy. Fucking sicko."

  "When was the last time you saw her, by the way?"

  She doesn't bother saying anything. He – or she, or it – already knows the answer.

  "I should call you the Intruder," she says finally. "Because that's what you do. You intrude. Here I should be drifting through the darkness before my death, all peaceful and shit, and then you come along. Trespassing on my mental property. Actually, I like that. Trespasser. There we go."

  "Don't pretend like you don't invite me in."

  "I do no such thing."

  The gunman smiles. A blackbird lands on the neckstuck BBQ fork.

  "Besides," the Trespasser continues, except now it's not the gunman who's speaking but the blackbird perched on the fork's handle. Still with Ben's voice. "You're not dead. You're just in shock."

  "I'm not dead?"

  "Not yet. Soon, maybe. You have work to do first. We can't let you off the hook that easy, little fishy. This meeting is just our little way of saying we're glad to have you back."

  "You should've brought cake," she says.

  "Next time, maybe."

 

She has to give her statement to three different cops and each of them urge her to get in the goddamn ambulance already.

  As she sits on the curb, smoking like a cancer factory, the cops tell her that she might have a concussion. And that the bullet graze along the side of her head – that's what it is, a line of parted flesh and lost hair where the bullet dug a burning furrow through her scalp – might get infected.

  Miriam tells them she's not getting in the ambulance.

  She's not going to the hospital.

  She's fine.

  She doesn't have health insurance, and she doesn't have the money to compensate for not having health insurance. The last time she was in the hospital, she got walloped with a bill that had so many zeroes she thought she was at Pearl Harbor. (That bill – and all the others that followed – ended up in the trash).

  The statement she gives isn't all that far from the truth. In fact, she tells them everything – even the part where she backhanded Peggy – except for that mess about psychic visions. It's not that Miriam is averse to sharing that with people. But she's tried it in the past, and it turns out the cops don't care much for the "I had a psychic vision" defense.

  No reason to go kicking over hornet's nests.

  Instead she tells them that she saw the bulge of the gun and saw the man start to pull it out. Nothing that happened contradicts the story.

  Peggy doesn't want to press charges. Peggy doesn't even want to see her or talk to her, which is fine by Miriam.

  She tries to find out more about the gunman. But nobody knows anything. Or they're not talking. Either way, it's Ignorant City, population: Miriam.

  And so hours later, Miriam is free. They give her the old warning: "Don't leave the state just in case we need to talk to you again."

  She hears them. But she doesn't really
hear
them.

  She needs another cigarette.

  She needs to go home.

  If only she knew what that really meant.

 

The LBI causeway is a nightmare because it's always a nightmare, the island constantly binging and purging vacationers. During the summer, the causeway – a white bowing bridge over the gray-and-brown froth that is the Manahawkin Bay – is blocked like a plaqueclogged artery.

  It's the one way on and off the island.

  But Miriam doesn't drive. And that means she can move. The Schwinn 10-speed, the frame pockmarked with syphilitic sea-born rust, carries her past the cars – a swish of colors, a Dopplerian effect of radio stations and conversations.

  The wheels turn with a flywing hum.

  Her head-wound stings in the salt air.

  She smokes as she rides, the cancer plume lost behind her.

  It was a year ago that she first came over this causeway, heading to the island to save Louis from a fate she'd inadvertently assigned him. He was tied to a chair at the top of a lighthouse. Tortured by a monster. She saved him before he lost his second eye – and, subsequently, all brain function – and in turn learned that one special exception to her abilities.

  The only way to divert death is to give it a life.

  Like she did today, with the gunman.
Fork him, that motherforker
, she thinks, the joke pinballing around the inside of her skull. But it doesn't get funnier with each echo. Instead, it makes her feel sicker, stranger, more unstable.

  
You have work to do.

  She shudders even in the heat.

  Finally, the end of the causeway. Bay Ave gives way to Barnegat Road. Pine trees thrust up out of sandy mounds. She never thought pine trees belonged at the beach but here they are. Of course, she never thought medical waste belonged at the beach either, but that's New Jersey for you.

  She ducks down Green Street, past the little surf shop, then past the dinky bait shop, all to avoid the traffic circle. That's another New Jersey thing: the traffic circles. Can't just be a regular intersection. Oh, no. Around and around. A hellish carousel of traffic that would make Dante fall down in a pile of his own sick.

  You could just ride one of those circles forever, she thinks.

  Swirling the drain.

  That's how she feels as she heads home. Like that's all she's doing. Treading water, doggy-paddling, waiting for sharks to come or for her arms to give out or for a boat to come along and suck her into the propeller.

  Home.
Home
. Ugh.

  Home now is a 1967 Airstream Trade Wind trailer parked at the Bayview Trailer Park just outside Tuckerton. The name of the park is a bit of a misnomer, though she eventually discovered it's not a
total
lie – if you climb on top of one of the trailers and then scamper up the nearby telephone pole, sure as shit you can see the murky gonorrhea tides of the bay.

  The trailer park is the standard assortment of miscreants and deviants. Over there, a nice older couple with a fetish for vintage Hawaiian shirts and a pair of the Chattiest Cathies she's ever had the displeasure of meeting. Next to them, a duo of college drop-outs who sell ditch-weed to other college drop-outs. At the other end of the park is a seedier contingent: a guy who makes either meth or bombs (or maybe both), a hoarder who hoards not stuff but Jack Russell terriers (the barking,
the barking
), and a middle-aged divorced guy who always wears flannel shirts even in the heat and who Miriam is pretty sure is a big ole kid-toucher.

  A real friendly crowd.

  A crowd to which she belongs. She knows this. She doesn't like it, but there it is.

  Miriam waves at the nice older couple – the Moons – but is sure not to stop, lest she find herself trapped in a conversational gravity well from which there is no escape but to hack off an arm with a nearby garden trowel.

  She grabs her crotch at the two pot dealers – Scudder and Nils, the former a gangly surf-bum version of Ichabod Crane, the latter a pot-bellied man-boy with a hipster beard and black-rim eyeglasses. They wave back with big dumb smiles. As is the tradition.

  Then: home.

  "Home."

  Whatever.

  Dead marigolds sit out front in a planter made of crooked bricks. Next to them stands a ceramic lawn gnome with a cracked hole in his forehead, a hole she put there with a rusty mini-golf putter she found behind the Airstream. A putter she uses for a variety of purposes: to whack pebbles off the Airstream roof, to scratch her back, to threaten both meth-heads and cockroaches alike.

  The putter lays nearby, in high weeds and grass.

  Crossing the threshold of that trailer cinches her stomach into tightening knots every time.

  "Lockdown," she says.

  Into the belly of the silver whale.

  Metal walls. Shore décor: all pastel and wood paneling and 1980s fixtures. She hasn't touched a thing. The only thing she's done to decorate in here is to hang a bird skeleton above the kitchen sink. She guesses it's a crow. She found it dead about three months back, most of its meat eaten by ants, a few feathers still clinging to dead bones.

  Doing any more than hanging that one thing would feel like she owns the place. Like she actually
lives
here.

  She does, of course. But reality has never been her strong suit.

  "Hullo, bird," she says in her best Mister Snuffleupagus. She taps the crow skeleton – which she crucified on to some popsicle sticks with fishing line and twistties. The dead bird spins lazily in the afternoon light.

  Louis assured her that the bird skeleton was disgusting and that it did not belong in the trailer, much less above the kitchen sink where they wash dishes.

  She told him it's the only thing she wants in this place, it's the only thing she really
has
in this place, and that were he to try to remove it, she would sit on his chest while he slept and smash his balls flat with a ball peen hammer. Miriam further assured him that this was
why
that hammer earned that name, because it was for smashing both
balls
and
peens
, so he should take great caution.

  They haven't been getting along.

  They'd been lovers. He was gentle and sweet. He convinced her to stay in Jersey. He used some of his saved-up money to buy a place, said they could live there, said it'd be fine because he wasn't here all that often what with his long hauls up and down the East Coast and oh, hey, she could get a job and start to settle down and and blah blah blah normalcy–

  Miriam doesn't want to think about it.

  Her head gash throbs. She touches it with a finger. Sticky. Mealy. Pink fluid, not red, wets her fingertip.

  Can't help poking the wound.

  Once, hope bloomed that she and Louis could make a real go of it. But hope turned to resentment and it wasn't long before the Airstream felt less like a place to settle down and more like a tin-can tomb.

  Now they're roommates. And friends. And enemies. And every once in a while she still gets that urge and she climbs on top of him like a little girl in a big saddle and they share a mercy fuck. Maybe the mercy's for him. Maybe it's for her.

  Who knows. Who cares.

  Louis is gone two weeks out of every three.

  This is one of his "gone" weeks. But it's ending now. He could be home at any point. She smells the air. No Old Spice – the old Old Spice, not the new Old Spice, which smells to her like the urinal cake in a Ukranian bathhouse.

  The longer he stays gone, the less that smell lingers.

  Just when it's all gone she knows it's time for him to return.

  She goes outside to have a cigarette.

  
No smoking in the house
, he said to her.

  
It's not a house
, she replied.

  
But it's a home
, was his response.

  Her answer to that was a gagging noise, finger thrust deep throat.

 

Miriam sits next to the dead marigolds, smoking cigarette after cigarette, thinking that just one more will cure her of the tightness in her chest, will help her breathe a little easier. She flicks ash into the gnome's broken head.

  Hours pass.

  Evening comes. Still light out. Cicadas give way to crickets. A breeze stifles her sweat.

  It isn't long before the first scavenger – an ugly human dingo, a mangy man-coyote – comes sniffing around. One of her neighbors. One she hasn't yet met.

  He's lean, rangy, got a funny tilt-and-bounce to him like he's hearing music nobody else can hear. Long brown hair pulled tight at the sides and bound with a rubber band at the top.

  She sees the marks up his arms where he's been picking. Notes the teeth; none are missing but, judging by their color and consistency, it won't be long before they start breaking off like icicles.

  The cat piss smell is hard to miss, too.

  He's one of the tweakers. She doesn't recognize him, but that's normal – they've got a rotating bunch coming in and out of there.