The Bird Eater (4 page)

He pushed his cart up and down the aisles, settling on a loaf of white bread, a jar of chunky peanut butter, and some grape jelly. Until water and power allowed him to survive off of frozen pizza and TV dinners, PB&J would suit him just fine. He and Ryder would have marathons where they’d eat endless crustless sandwiches while watching old
Transformers
episodes.

The girl ringing Aaron up snapped her gum and eyed his tattoos as she ran his purchase over the scanner, her gaze slithering over his arms and neck.

“You a big fan of PB&J?” she asked, dropping the loaf of bread into a paper bag.

Aaron gave her a faint smile as he fumbled with his wallet, struggling to get his credit card free of the plastic holder. Eventually sliding his card through the reader, he waited for his purchase to be approved, unable to help glancing around the place while waiting for his receipt.

“Did you find everything okay?” she asked, flipping her hair over her shoulder. She was wearing an Ironwood Warriors T-shirt beneath her work apron, bright red with a fading screen print of a Greek warrior helmet half-concealed by her bib. “You look like you’re forgetting something.”

Aaron shook his head, nudging his credit card back into his wallet. “Just looking for someone.”

“Who’s that?”

“Eric Banner.” There was no way Eric had stuck around Ironwood, not with the amount of decline that surrounded the place. Eric’s father would have never allowed it.

“You mean the manager?” He watched her expression falter, unnerved but trying to keep her cool—as though she was about to get canned for something she didn’t even know she had done—her high ponytail bobbing every time she moved her head. Aaron imagined he looked just as surprised, every nerve buzzing with a fretted sort of fascination.

“He’s here?”

“Want me to go get him? Was there, like, a problem or anything?”

“No, no problem.” He gathered his paper bag up in his arms. “We went to school together. It was a long time ago. He probably wouldn’t even remember me.”

“Manager to register two.” The cashier’s voice boomed through the PA system, crackling as it cut off a muffled eighties tune. Aaron’s skin bristled with self-consciousness. He looked like hell, hollow-cheeked and long-limbed. Eric would take one look at him and assume he was some wasted meth head who was giving his employee trouble. It was embarrassing to know that Eric wouldn’t have a point of reference to compare him to, that he’d assume Aaron had looked this way his entire life.

As Aaron stood there, watching the girl ring up another order, he wondered if mentioning Eric had been a mistake, wondered if reconnecting with the ghosts of his past was really what he needed. Doc Jandreau would have said yes, but every muscle in Aaron’s body tensed, wound up tight as if ready to spring for the door. He turned away from the bank of registers, deciding it a better idea to simply slink out of the store and into the parking lot, when a question stopped him short.

“What’s up?”

Aaron glanced up from the waxed linoleum beneath his feet, the paper bag flush against his chest, his anxiety increasing two-fold when he recognized Eric’s face—older yet somehow exactly the same.

“There’s a guy here to see you,” he heard the cashier say.

His heart thudded in his ears. Over two decades gone and all that had changed with Eric Banner was that his mom had finally forced him to get a haircut. The unruly mop he’d once worn like a hat was now cropped and well-groomed, making his face look out of place.

“Can I help you?” Eric asked.

Aaron watched the forced, managerial smile quirk the corners of Eric’s mouth upward. It was a guarded smile, the kind a sales associate gives an edgy customer, fingers crossed behind their back that there wouldn’t be a scene.

“Huh.” The girl behind the register cocked her hip and crossed her arms over her chest, as if fascinated by the exchange. “You were right,” she told Aaron. He adjusted the paper bag against his chest, willing her to stop right there, to not say another word—
just let me leave quietly, forget I was ever here.
“I guess he doesn’t recognize you after all.”

Eric blinked, then squinted at the man before him, as though peering through slitted eyes would somehow jar his memory. His gaze scrutinized every inch of exposed ink, every flaw, like the dark hollows beneath Aaron’s eyes, the shiny scar that ran fat and jagged along the inside of his left arm. Aaron dug up the courage to open his mouth, ready to make up an excuse:
I thought you were someone else, another Eric Banner. Wrong person. Wrong town. Wrong life.
But Eric made a move, stepping around the register bay. His hand fell on Aaron’s shoulder while a baffled expression eclipsed his features.

“No way,” Eric said quietly, his confusion shifting to a look of disbelief. “You’ve got to be
kidding
me.”

Aaron couldn’t help but give his old friend a hint of a smile, his initial anxiety melting into a helpless sort of amusement. Eric was wearing the same stupid expression he used to wear when they were kids, a look that had always cracked Aaron up because it was so full of wonder. But before he could say anything about it, Eric pulled him into an abrupt embrace, Aaron’s bag of groceries crushed between them.

“Jesus Christ, what…?” Eric shook his head, struggling for words. “I thought…but you…”

“I know.”

“How?”

Aaron offered up a rueful shrug.

The cashier was staring at them, perplexed by their spastic conversation. “Hey, Eric?” She shifted her weight from one white Ked to another, still snapping her gum. “I’m going on break, okay?”

Eric didn’t bother glancing her way; his attention was glued to Aaron’s face. He idly lifted his right hand in a motion that assured her he didn’t care, just go. She slipped by them, smelling of sugar, her ponytail bobbing with each step.

“When did you get back?” It was the first coherent question Eric was able to stitch together.

“Yesterday.”

Aaron watched as Eric struggled for words, his smile slowly growing wider as the store manager squared off against his own inability to speak.

“Well,” Aaron said after a moment, finding his bearings, “you certainly haven’t gotten any better at holding a conversation.”

Eric exhaled a flabbergasted laugh and hugged Aaron for a second time. “Christ, that’s some ink. I would have never thought.” There was a beat of hesitation. Eric shook his head again, still recovering from the shock. “Uh, how are you? I mean, how’ve you been? Like…”

“Like in the past twenty years?” Aaron asked. “Can’t complain.” A lie if there ever was one, but with so much time spent apart, it was impossible to answer honestly. “You finally got your dream job, huh? Living it up in your dad’s shiny office?”

Eric rolled his eyes. “With the faux wood paneled walls and everything. It’s heaven.”

“What happened?”

“I was out until a few years back. Left right out of high school…” So Aaron had been right; Eric
had
bailed. “I was taking business courses out in Little Rock, had an apartment out there. Full scholarship. And then my dad decided to wax the floor and break a hip. He wrecked himself in the bread aisle, couldn’t run this place anymore.” Eric looked around as if seeing the store for the first time. “My legacy, right? It was supposed to be temporary, just until he got back on his feet, but that was almost five years ago.”

Aaron frowned. “He’s still not well enough to come back?”

Eric snorted. “Sure he is, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to. As soon as you get used to someone else doing your work for you, it’s over. There’s no turning back. Anyway…” He waved a hand, dismissing the matter. “What the hell happened to you? One day you were here, the next day, just like that…”

“I know,” Aaron murmured. “I found her on a Friday, spent the weekend at the sheriff’s office while they tried to locate next of kin, ended up getting driven out to Saint Louis, and I was on a plane a few days later. They didn’t let me go back to the house.”

“They,” Eric repeated. “They who?”

“The cops, then the state. Some lady from CPS asked me to make a list of things I wanted to take with me, but I could hardly think straight. The only thing I wrote down was for her to bring me my goddamn Game Boy.”

“God.” Eric looked dismayed by the memory. “We didn’t know what to think. All I knew after a while was that I’d never see you again. We thought you’d at least be at the funeral. When rumor spread of her possibly being buried on the government dime without any fanfare, people chipped in. The church sent the offertory basket around that Sunday and it came back full.”

Bile rose in Aaron’s throat. They had told him there wasn’t going to be a funeral. He had said his final goodbyes to Edie in the cold fluorescent glow of the coroner’s office. Her lips had turned blue, and her skin had taken on a waxy alien-gray hue; he remembered staring at her hair because of how dry and brittle it looked, it too having lost its color. When Aaron insisted he saw Edie breathing, that there was a mistake, that she was still
alive
, a man in scrubs gently led him out of the steel room by his shoulder, explaining that the illusion of the chest rising and falling was normal, a reflex of the living. A day later Aaron found himself on an airplane for the first time in his life, but rather than being fascinated by flight, he only stared out the small oval window and thought about how he should have touched her, how he hated himself for having been afraid to reach out and put his hand into hers.

His whole world had been torn out from under him; his house, his teachers, his friends—everything simply vanished and was replaced by something new. The Ozarks gave way to the enormous pines of the Pacific Northwest, and the rain…the rain felt like it lasted for years. The world wept for her, just as it wept for him. Sorrow came easy beneath the shadow of clouds.

Edie was replaced by Claire and Joseph Tanner—Fletcher’s childless, distant West Coast cousins whom Aaron had never heard of, let alone met. For a while he hoped his mother would finally surface, that CPS would manage to find her and she’d whisk him away to California or New York or wherever it was struggling actresses lived. That, however, didn’t happen, and on his eighteenth birthday Aaron thanked the Tanners for their hospitality and left their home for a shitty studio apartment. He’d spent most of his time at Cooper’s place anyway. Cooper’s folks felt more like parents than the Tanners had. It wasn’t that the Tanners were bad people, just that the three of them had been strangers. Even after nearly five years together, they had little to talk about. Aaron didn’t hold it against them; he was sure they had been relieved when they spotted their emotionally stilted foster kid packing up his things.

“I didn’t have any way to reach out,” Aaron said. “No phone numbers, nothing like that. These days it would have been easy, but back then…” Back then, despite pining for his friends in Ironwood, he decided to let them go, convinced that it was better that way, that Arkansas held nothing but pain.

“Yeah,” Eric said, looking a little distant. “You always were shit when it came to memorizing numbers.”

They both went silent for a moment, the soft drone of Talk Talk and the blip of cash registers filling the quiet between them. Finally, Eric took a breath and raised both eyebrows in inquiry.

“So, what now?”

“I’m fixing up the house,” Aaron said. “I need to sell it. That’s why I’m here.”

“Seriously?” A shadow of surprise flitted across Eric’s face. “Huh. Well, that’ll be new.” Aaron shook his head, not following. “That house,” Eric said. “It’s a bit of a legend. But that’s a conversation for another time.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I have to get back.”

“Sure.” Aaron nodded.

“You got a phone?” Eric pulled out his cell and the two exchanged numbers. “I’ll call you,” he said. “Man, the guys are going to shit when I tell them you’re back.”

“The guys? People still live here?”

“Hell, Craig never left, but like
that’s
a surprise. He grew up to be a real winner. Mike got out for a while but ended up coming back a few years later. Family stuff. Cheri’s still here.”

“Seriously?” Aaron’s heart flipped. Something about the idea of seeing Cheri Miller again gave him butterflies, the same ones that had brushed their wings along the inside of his stomach when she had pressed her lips against his in the trees behind his house.

“Yep. She got married last year; shacked up with the guy who owns that new mechanic’s shop just down the street, Vaughn Mechanical.”

“Free tire rotation,” Aaron recalled.

“The guy is a meathead, but he works his ass off. He’s still in business, anyway. Everyone else goes under within six months to a year.” Eric lifted his shoulders up to his ears, backing away. “I’ll call you.”

“Okay.” Aaron raised a hand in goodbye.

“Go to Bennie’s,” Eric told him. “Used to be Fred’s out by the old high school. Get the bacon cheeseburger. It’s incredible.”

Aaron gave Eric a parting smile and turned away, Banner’s automatic doors yawning open. It was impressive the way Eric had played his hand, casually suggesting Aaron eat something. Wandering across the parking lot in the warmth of what promised to be a stifling summer day, Aaron paused beside his Tercel, glanced back at Banner Goods, and gave the place a crooked half smile.

Eric Banner. He could hardly believe it.

Eric Banner, and Cheri Miller was still in town.

Four

Aaron sat at a tiny table outside of Bennie’s Burgers, shielded from the sun by a metal umbrella cemented into the ground. He idly chewed on his bacon cheeseburger, washing it down with sugary soda after every other bite, marveling at the quiet even though Ironwood’s main road was only a dozen yards away. The cicadas buzzed in the summer heat, the pulsating rhythm of their song relaxing him, uncoiling every nerve that had ever been wound tight. With the camcorder in the center of the small table, he pointed it toward a thicket of trees and pressed
RECORD
, documenting nothing beyond the calm he felt. It was exactly what his therapist would have suggested; if he got anxious later, he could relive the ease of that moment with the push of a button. He set the remainder of his burger onto a square of wax paper, sucked down another gulp of cola, and stared at the abandoned high school across the street.

The house at the end of Old Mill Road would be a lot of work, but the more he thought about it, the more he relished that fact. He had spent nearly a year of his life doing nothing beyond feeling sorry for himself; he’d spent eleven months crying about things that could never be fixed, too afraid to accept reality to live any semblance of a normal life. It was one of the things that had pushed Evangeline away—his inability to look past what happened, to forgive himself and try to live. But forgiveness had been rendered nearly impossible when he had seen the mangled wreck that had once been the family car.

Cooper had retrieved Aaron’s things only days after the accident, but Aaron insisted that his friend had missed something on the first pass, and the guy working in the little trailer in front of the junkyard had waved him through, pointing him in the general direction he needed to go. After half an hour of searching in the drizzling rain, Aaron’s breath escaped him in a puff of vapor and failed to return. There, in the steely gray of an autumn morning, was the vehicle that had taken both his and his son’s lives. By some strange twist of fate, Cooper had been the closest unit to the accident that night; Aaron’s life had been restored by his best friend’s refusal to give up hope and let Aaron go. It was ironic that, after being given a second chance, Aaron was the one who gave up. He quit his job as an EMT, claimed disability, and disappeared down a rabbit hole of antianxiety meds and alcohol.

Perhaps it would have been different had Aaron not visited the junkyard that morning; perhaps he would have found the strength to let the screaming fade to a dull roar inside his head. Maybe he would have finally understood that he and Ryder hadn’t stood a chance—the guy who ran the red had been going over sixty miles per hour in a massive pickup truck. When the grille hit the side of Aaron’s Honda Fit, it had all but pulverized the sedan. But the fact that the driver of the pickup was stumbling drunk didn’t tell the entire story. Ducking his head into the wrecked Fit, Aaron stared at Ryder’s car seat toppled over in the back. The seat belt was unlatched, the buckle snagged in the plastic base. Ryder’s head had hit against the back passenger window. Seeing the point of impact—the thing that had stolen his son away from him forever—doubled Aaron over in a wave of grief. The guy running the wrecking yard found him kneeling in the mud, soaked to the skin, weeping with his face pressed to the fabric of the backseat. If Aaron had only double-checked to make sure the fucking thing was secure; if he had only taken the time, Ryder wouldn’t have missed his eighth birthday.

His parents wouldn’t have been on the verge of divorce.

His father wouldn’t have been escorted out of a junkyard by Portland PD.

Aaron was still convinced that the only reason he hadn’t been placed on involuntary psychiatric hold was because Cooper was an EMT, because the doctors and nurses in the ER knew Aaron, because they would have felt guilty sticking a former coworker in a rubber room.

Taking the last few bites of his burger, he shook the ice in his empty cup and jabbed the straw into the corner, trying to suck up the dregs. If he could fix up the house at the end of Old Mill, he’d at least prove to Evangeline that he hadn’t completely folded beneath the grief. It was what she was waiting for, some sign that Aaron was still the man she’d fallen in love with nine years before. For a good six months after Ryder’s funeral, he secretly hated her for asking him to stop blaming himself, but Doc Jandreau helped him come to the understanding that Evangeline was blinded by Aaron’s all-consuming sorrow.

You have to let her see that you’re still in there. You have to dig yourself out from under this mountain of mourning.

If he could fix up the house, it would prove that he was still capable of doing something,
anything.
Aaron had to believe that was all Evangeline wanted—to know that some intrinsic part of him hadn’t died out there on the wet pavement, that when Cooper had saved him, he had saved all of him, not just some hollow shell of a man.

His attention wavered when he caught movement from the corner of his eye. There was someone inside the old high school, their shadow cutting across a wall from beyond a shattered window. A ghost of a smile drifted across his lips. Aaron and Cooper had spent many a night pushing their way through ancient houses and old refineries just shy of the northern Pacific Ocean. Bored teens breaking into abandoned buildings was as banal as lonely old ladies surrounding themselves with cats. But just as Aaron was about to pack up and head home, ready to put a dent in the dust and debris that tainted his childhood home, he got an eyeful of the trespasser.

It was the same kid he’d seen at the Blue Ox earlier that morning. The boy stopped inside the building, his ratty hair twisted up into unwashed peaks. Half in and out of shadow and framed by broken glass, his mussed hair nearly looked like a pair of horns. The boy peered at Aaron with a weird sort of scowl, his mouth curling up into a bizarre smile. He slowly raised his hands, linked them together at the thumbs, and with a twist of the lips, flapped them like a pair of bird wings before disappearing into the shadows of the interior.

“What the hell?” Aaron murmured, crumpling his burger wrapper and shoving it into his empty cup. He remembered kids like that from when he still lived here, kids his aunt warned him about, weirdos who could turn a good kid into a miscreant by their presence alone.

As a boy, Aaron was afraid of turning wicked. He subdued his own urges to rip off the wings of butterflies by focusing on music, movies, anything to keep himself occupied. After Edie died, those urges became stronger; he fought against them by smoking stolen cigarettes and drawing razors across his skin where no one would see. Adulthood was easier with tattoos and his job working alongside Cooper as an EMT. Aaron would never admit it, but he got into the profession not because he wanted to help people, but because of a secret love affair with blood, guts, tragedy, and trauma. Arriving at the scene of a suicide or domestic dispute made him feel a little less alien, as though seeing others in the throes of suffering dissipated his own distress.

After Ryder’s sneaker had connected with the ribs of a wandering neighborhood terrier, he taught his own son that channeling aggression was a necessity that couldn’t be avoided. He and a then five-year-old Ryder struck a deal to keep Ryder’s explosion a secret. As long as Ryder promised to never hurt an animal again, Dad wouldn’t tell Mom.

Swinging a leg out from the table’s bench seat, he nearly yelped as a crow swept in for a landing on Bennie’s open patio. The bird landed with the clack of talons against concrete, dangerously close to Aaron’s sneakered feet, and released an aggravated-sounding squawk before hopping across the slab of smooth pavement to an abandoned french fry beneath an adjacent table. Aaron stared at the bird for a moment, surprised by its size, then shot another glance toward Ironwood High. He wasn’t surprised the kid was gone. That was the way those types of kids existed, the way
he
had existed after he’d been torn from this place—here one second, gone the next. Had Ryder been granted a longer life, Aaron had no doubt in his mind that he, too, would be crawling through dilapidated buildings and haunting cemeteries. The apple never did fall far from the tree.

Returning to the house at the end of the dead-end street with a belly full of burger and a head full of memories, Aaron waited for water and power to show up. He grabbed the freshly purchased mop, broom, and small artillery of cleaning supplies out of the back of his Tercel and got to work, focusing on his old bedroom and upstairs bathroom first. He didn’t have the heart to pull down the leaf-brittle posters from his walls. They were comforting in their own way, just like the old CDs that he played one after the other on the small stereo that was caked in spiderwebs but—with a fresh set of batteries—still worked like a champ. Mouthing the lyrics to the likes of Guns N’ Roses and Faith No More, he excavated items that had remained in the same place for over two decades from under a blanket of grime, placing the things he wanted to keep in empty cardboard boxes he had pulled from the U-Haul, dumping the stuff not worth keeping into a pair of garbage bags—one marked
DONATE
, the other labeled
TRASH
.

He dusted off the old baseball bat that had been left standing in the corner of the room—the same one in the photograph downstairs—and pulled out his desk drawer, cracking a smile at a pile of Tootsie Pop wrappers, nearly all of them bright red. He remembered how he and Cheri Miller used to squirrel them away, always searching for the little Indian among the gang of printed characters like a poor-kid’s version of
Where’s Waldo
.

He lifted a bag of marbles from its resting place inside the drawer, spotted a few crumpled dollar bills inside the bright yellow bag—the hiding spot for his life savings—and shoved them into his pocket for safekeeping, refusing to bend beneath the weight of sentimentality that accompanied the constant barrage of memory. He pushed aside a sandwich bag full of Kellogg’s box tops and wrapped his fingers around a toy shoved toward the back of the drawer. It was a small stuffed owl, strikingly similar to the one he’d fished out of the backseat of the Honda Fit before Portland PD escorted him out of the junkyard, eerily reminiscent of the one that was now permanently etched into his skin. That dusty little owl had been one of Aaron’s prized possessions. He didn’t remember where it had come from, just that he had always had it. Perhaps it had been a memento from his mother before she had dumped him on Edie’s doorstep and run off to get rich and famous—if that was actually why she had abandoned him in the first place. Regardless of where it had come from, Aaron had always cherished it; so much so that, when he had spotted a similar owl in a toy shop, he ducked inside the store and bought it six months before Ryder had been born.

He tossed the owl into the
TO KEEP
box, gathered up the dusty sheets and blanket from the bed, and carried them down to the washer and dryer in the basement, only to stop short in front of the two appliances. They were so rusty, so utterly timeworn that he had to laugh. He dropped the sheets at the foot of the two machines and stalked back up the stairs while Axl Rose wailed and Slash killed it on electric guitar.

Stopping in the kitchen to take a swig of lukewarm soda, he stared at the plastic-sheeted window that would be replaced the next day, officially sealing out whoever and whatever had made a habit of wandering through the house. But that small detail still nagged at him; people had broken in—he had seen their footprints in the dust, the wide arcs of sweeping hands along the walls—but they certainly hadn’t come to loot the place. Aaron kept searching for signs of obvious thievery, but everything looked in order. His aunt’s delicate cups and saucers were still tucked away behind kitchen cabinets. Her once-polished silver still rested spoon-in-spoon in the drawer beside the sink. Fletcher’s collection of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers tapes were still perfectly stacked next to a now irreparable stereo. Aaron hadn’t bothered to check Edie’s dresser drawers, but was sure that when he got around to it, he’d find jewelry and family heirlooms.

It would have been less disturbing if the place had been ransacked. At least that would have made sense. But as it stood, it almost seemed as though something had been protecting the contents of the house. The idea of it made his skin prickle up in gooseflesh. He shook off the notion and continued to work despite the steadily rising temperature inside.

By the time water and power arrived, Aaron had finished off two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and mopped his bedroom floor. But rather than celebrating when the lights came on, he groaned instead—dozens of dead moth carcasses were silhouetted against the glow of the few lightbulbs that still worked; yet another couple of tasks to tack on to an already endless list.

He ended up sprawled across his old bed, the floor glinting in the lamplight, the walls clear of spiderwebs and the window so clean that, had there not been a reflection, it would have been invisible to the naked eye. The bathroom down the hall was just as spotless, and as he lay there with his hands folded over his chest, listening to the music of his youth, he couldn’t help but be hopeful that the house served as a metaphor for his own life—it was broken now, but one room at a time, it would be resurrected into something livable, bearable. It would never be as it had once been, but maybe, despite it all, it could be patched together again.

Though, if it couldn’t, that revolver was still safely tucked away in the trailer outside.

Evangeline stood at the top of the stairs, looking toward Aaron’s old room with a thoughtful smile. The sunshine that filtered through the upstairs windows cast a fiery halo around her face, her red hair glinting in the sun. She pivoted on the bare soles of her feet, her wedding dress brushing across the tops of her toes as she twisted in place. Her smile brightened when a boy appeared in the doorway of Aaron’s childhood room—a child that was cast in silhouette. The boy stepped forward as if to meet her, but rather than moving through the upper breezeway, he jutted both arms outward, as if throwing an invisible net toward the bride. Evangeline’s smile wavered, confusion darkening her expression as a cyclone of shadow spun behind the boy, spilling out around him in a flurry of feathered wings.