The Bird Eater (9 page)

Aaron stared at the tangle of dead hydrangea bushes flanking the porch’s balustrade, twisted and dry like skeleton arms. He considered going inside, swallowing the rest of his pills, washing them down with whiskey, and waiting for the final fade to black. He thought about the gun he’d shoved beneath his old bed upstairs, wondered how it would feel to blow a hole through the back of his own skull.

But instead of stumbling headlong into his typical reaction of numbing himself until he couldn’t feel a single thing, he shoved himself off the porch steps and grabbed the shovel that was propped against the stairs. When he’d woken that morning, he had been determined to clear the bushes from the front of the house like a gravedigger clearing the dead, but he’d been derailed by his shattered window, by a collection of six letters etched into his paint. Now, fueled by newfound rage, he sank the spade into the soil at the base of one of Edie’s bushes and jammed it up to its hilt with a downward stomp, but as he dug he realized the irony of it all. He had come here to work out his issues, and the only reason he had for working out his issues was to win back his wife. Now she didn’t want to talk to him anymore, he was stuck here in Ironwood, and something was happening—something he couldn’t explain.

He stumbled backward, pulled his arm back, and gave the shovel a javelin throw into the yard, spun around, and grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the porch step, only to launch it at the balustrade. The bottle hit the wood with a hollow thunk and fell into the bushes that needed digging up. Aaron turned away from the house, his hands buried in his hair. He walked down the driveway, thinking that maybe a few minutes of reflection would help him get his head on straight, but something about putting that house to his back only made him feel more volatile.

Reaching the end of the driveway, he turned to look back at his childhood home, the place that had effectively ruined him, that had cursed him to a life surrounded by death.

His hands balled into fists.

His lungs filled with air.

Standing on the cracked pavement of Old Mill Road, Aaron opened his mouth and let out an anguished yell.

He screamed at that fucking house, willing it back into hell. But rather than sinking into the ground, it stood steadfast in place.

Aaron stared at it for a long while, as if challenging it to do its worst. And then his eyes slid shut, he pulled in a steadying breath, and he walked up the driveway again. There was still hope—that’s what Doc Jandreau had said.

There’s always hope, as long as you keep hoping.

Nine

The baseball boy twisted where he stood, moving painfully slow as he fell into a run, but Aaron was quick. Before the kid was able to bolt out of the room, Aaron snatched the abandoned baseball bat beside the bed, reached out with his free hand to catch the boy by the back of the shirt, and gave him a stern backward yank. The baseball player released a startled yell and threw his weight forward, desperate to escape Aaron’s grasp, stretching his arms outward, fingers groping the edge of the door. He was trying to drag himself out of the room despite his jersey being pulled impossibly tight against his chest.

His struggle was cut short when Aaron reeled back and brought the wooden baseball bat down on top of the boy’s head.

The kid let out a shout, his grip reflexively releasing the doorframe, his arms folding across the top of his head. Aaron didn’t hesitate. He brought the bat down again and again, both hands choking up on the grip. The baseball player’s screams shifted from terrified to garbled, guttural, until he finally went quiet, nothing but the wet slap of wood against hopelessly traumatized flesh.

Aaron stepped back, wiping a forearm across the blood-spattered curve of his cheek. A woman yelled up from the first floor. Edie surfaced from the hallway that led into the kitchen, her head upturned, spotting her nephew as she ran up the stairs. Aaron’s fingers twitched against the bat and his

muscles spasmed; his eyes shot open, staring into the darkness of his bedroom.

He covered his face, rolled onto his side, and swiped a prescription bottle off the bedside table with a sweep of the hand. Shaking three yellow tabs into his palm, he tossed them back and washed them down with a swig of flat beer. And then he faced the wall, pulled the pillow over his head, and squeezed his eyes shut once more.

He spent the next day aimlessly floating from one room to another. One minute he was collapsed on his bed, the next he was sitting at the top of the stairs. He lay on the couch and stared up at the ceiling, wondering how much a house alarm would set him back, how long it would take to install; his muscles aching from a frenzy of the previous day’s work.

In his anger, he had replaced every single one of those goddamn hydrangea bushes, pretending that every shovelful of dirt had been a shovel closer to digging his own grave. After the bushes were planted, he’d replaced the bug netting on both the front and back porch and scrubbed the peeling floor planks until his back lower back screamed bloody murder. Yesterday, he had relished the pain. The physical ache had been a welcome change to the one deep within his chest. Today, the wrenching of his muscles was annoying, grounding him from doing much of anything but lounging around.

He lazed out on the weedy lawn and stared up at the clouds, dialed Cooper’s number a half dozen times but failed to press
SEND
,
deciding he wasn’t up for listening to his best friend launch into his typical
that’s what you get for living out in the middle of nowhere
spiel when it came to the asshole kid, the birds, the cops who refused to lift a finger; not wanting to hear about how stupid it was for him to have called Evangeline the way he had. He knew it had been a mistake.

Blame it on temporary insanity.

Unable to clear his head, he locked up the house and walked down the driveway, his worn-out Asics pounding the cracked pavement of winding, woodland streets. It took him nearly twenty minutes to reach his closest neighbor—a beaten-down house that was surely abandoned despite the crap littering the ground. Crabgrass and thistle swept across the bottoms of the windows in the light summer breeze, and the driveway showed no signs of recent use. A kid had lived there when Aaron was still in elementary school, but they had never been friends. Edie hadn’t liked those neighbors because they didn’t take care of their property. Trash had lined the street just beyond their house and it made her feel like all the effort she put into making their house nice was for nothing. It didn’t matter that the neighbors were a good mile away. Aaron stopped just shy of the weeded driveway and looked up at the dilapidated tragedy, wondering if someone was squatting within those run-down walls, wondering if that fucking kid was staring back at him from behind rotting curtains, his mouth curled up in that ugly leer.

Aaron stopped walking after another mile. He’d gone far enough to satisfy his curiosity, to reassure himself that he was very much alone on that stretch of road. The few houses that peppered the ten miles between his place and the intersection that led to Ironwood proper had been allowed to wither away. They were vandalized, beaten down by the weather, overgrown by the wild. The curving pavement of the dead-end street was nothing but a finger of desolation jutting into the hickories and oaks.

Arriving back home, Aaron considered calling Mike and Eric for an impromptu barbecue—maybe he’d go out on a limb and invite Cheri and her overly intimidating husband over for burgers and brews. They’d have a reunion that was long overdue.

No, that would be a little too weird. He didn’t want Miles knowing where he lived, though he had a feeling the guy already knew. Aaron didn’t want to deal with it; hell, he didn’t have enough luck to press. But he also couldn’t sit out here alone, not today, not after his meltdown the day before. He was slipping farther down the rabbit hole by the minute, having
thrown
himself off the wagon rather than casually tumbling off. Not more than a few months ago, he wouldn’t have thought twice about giving up, but Aaron wasn’t ready to surrender yet. He had to finish what he started, if not for Evangeline than for Edie, for Cooper, for himself.

Turning his cell phone over and over again in his hands, he finally gave in and dialed Eric’s number. Maybe once the house was done he’d be ready for a big shindig, but one person would be enough company for now.

Eric cackled as Aaron battled the flames with a metal spatula. He looked like a fencer, whapping at the fire, trying to cut it down to size while shielding his eyebrows with his left arm.

“Save them!” Eric pleaded from the back porch. “For the love of God, save the beef!”

Aaron managed to salvage a couple of patties at the cost of choking on lungs full of smoke.

“Ah, the smell of summer,” Eric mused.

Aaron ascended the steps and presented a paper plate of barely rescued hamburger meat.

“Nothing like throwing some cow into a towering inferno, huh? Now,
this
is what I call leisure.”

“Next time I’ll hit up a fast-food joint before I invite you over,” Aaron said. “We can avoid this mess entirely.”

“Next time?” Eric raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know…” He balanced a particularly charred patty on the end of the spatula for inspection. “I may not survive
this
time.”

“How about you shut up and make yourself useful? I left some stuff on the counter. Bring it out here, would you?”

“Is it some kind of magical make-my-burger-unburn-itself condiment?” Eric asked, rising from his seat.

“Yeah,” Aaron said, “it’s called ketchup.”

Eric entered the kitchen through the open back porch door. “Oh, foolish one,” he said, raising his voice so Aaron could hear him. “You overestimate the power of the tomato.”

He stepped around the kitchen counter and peered into a familiar bag, his family surname emblazoned across thin brown plastic. He hated working at Banner’s. Hell, if the Superette hadn’t gone under, he would have shopped there just to give his father’s business a healthy dose of competition. He resented his pop, condemned both his father and mother for calling on him after his dad’s accident. Eric had been out in Little Rock, knee-deep in business classes at UALR, working part-time at a locally owned coffee shop just shy of the college campus. It hadn’t been much of a job but he had liked it; the easy atmosphere, his peers coming in off the street in dire need of caffeine, their arms weighed down with books they paid a fortune for and would sell back to the university for pennies on the dollar. Eric had been over the moon when he had put Ironwood in his rearview mirror, his optimism replaced by despondency upon his return. It had felt more like a prison sentence than a homecoming. Sometimes, it still did.

Eric grabbed the plastic bag off the counter, raised an eyebrow at an empty whiskey bottle sitting in the sink, and turned to head back outside. He paused when his gaze snagged on a camcorder and a book sitting at the edge of the old farmhouse table. It was the same table he and Aaron used to play War on when it was too hot to go outside, the same table they had sat around when Aaron’s uncle Fletcher had busted them trying to play poker, only to teach them the rules when Edie’s back was turned.

Eric took a single step toward the table, the wood top dried by decades of neglect, a large fissure running through the center of parched pine. He narrowed his eyes, gingerly moving the camera aside to read the title of the book beneath it.
Coping with Grief.
Eric frowned at it, letting his fingers linger upon the cover before pulling his hand away with a start.

“Did you get lost or what?” Aaron called from outside.

Eric stepped away from the table, turned where he stood, and stepped out onto the small screened-in back patio with bag in hand. Aaron sat at a small table just within the porch’s netting, building himself a sad-looking burger. Eric settled back into his seat, placed the bag in his lap, and emptied it item by item.

“Ketchup.”

He placed a bottle of Heinz at the edge of the table.

“Mustard. Mayo. What’s up with the camcorder; making a sex tape?”

Aaron smirked at the suggestion and grabbed the ketchup, twisting the cap off before working on the protective seal beneath it. “Just eat your burger,” he murmured.

Eric started on the construction of his own char-grilled nightmare. “Seriously, though,” he said, reaching for a hamburger bun. “What’s it for?”

“Documentation.”

“Gee, you think so?” Eric shot his friend a look from across the table. “Documentation of
what
? You want to join NAPS?”

He had meant it as a joke at his own expense, but his suggestion seemed to give Aaron pause, as though he was seriously considering the possibility. Eric perked, wondering if something had happened to turn Aaron’s skepticism of the paranormal into belief, but bringing it up meant dredging up the past; it meant possibly implicating himself as one of the numerous trespassers who had snuck in and out of Edie’s broken kitchen window. Not wanting to piss Aaron off with that tidbit of information, Eric dropped a leaf of lettuce onto his bun and crushed it with a disk of grilled meat instead.

After a moment of silence, Aaron lifted his shoulders and shrugged. “I saw someone on the porch the other night,” he said. “Just standing there, like they were considering coming inside.”

Eric blinked at the news.

“I fell asleep on the couch. I thought it was the cops, but whoever it was disappeared by the time I set foot on the lawn.”

“Wait, you called the cops?”

Aaron didn’t reply.

“You think it’s the same asshole kid who’s been screwing with your car?”

“Possibly.”

“What did the cops say?”

“In a nutshell? To enjoy being harassed, because they couldn’t do shit about it.”

Eric scoffed. “Figures. You need to get yourself armed and alarmed, man.”

“I’ve got a gun,” Aaron said. “Maybe I should use it.”

Eric raised an eyebrow at that.

“I checked the web for alarm systems earlier,” Aaron continued.

“You get Internet out here?”

Aaron rolled his eyes at the suggestion. “I hardly get cell phone service out here. I looked around on my phone while I was in town. For this size house, I’m looking at a grand, minimum. I can’t afford that, not with the amount of work this place needs. And I don’t know what the hell I’d do with it even if I did get one. I have no idea how to install something like that; the wiring is probably all outdated anyway.”

“So you’re going to put the culprits on YouTube instead?”

Aaron gave him a petulant smile.

“Hey,” Eric lifted his hands in surrender. “I’m just saying, a camcorder isn’t going to stop a thief unless you chuck it at their head, and even then, you’d better hope you’ve got good aim. Though, I guess if you set it up on a windowsill or something, you could at least get a positive ID on who’s actually doing the vandalizing. Maybe the cops would do something then. Or maybe it’s a ghost…”

“Yeah. Right.” Aaron’s face went sour. “I think it’s the same kid time and time again. And then there was this boy in town, the same damn kid, I swear. I went to Bennie’s Burgers like you suggested…”

“Yeah?” Eric straightened in his chair. “Did you have their bacon cheeseburger?”

“I did.”

“And did it blow your mind?”

“It was pretty good.”

“
Pretty
good? Dude…” Eric gave him a scolding look. “It’s the best bacon cheeseburger I’ve had in my entire life, and I’ve had a
lot
of bacon cheeseburgers. Bennie’s is, like, the only good thing about this entire town. We should rename Ironwood in honor of Bennie’s achievement. Benniewood. Burgerwood. Bacon-Cheeseburg, Arkansas.”