The Cormorant (8 page)

All the way she’s been listening to whatever random radio stations she can get on the dial, and it occurs to her slowly (but surely) that music basically sucks these days. Hollow, soulless pop music, shallower than a gob of jizz drying on a hot sidewalk. Even the country music sounds more like pop music – gone are the singular miseries of
my wife left me, my truck broke down, all I got left is my dog and my shotgun and the blue hills of Kentucky
and now it’s sugar-fed Barbies twanging on about ex-boyfriends and drinking Jack-and-Cokes and she’s pretty sure Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton are clawing out of their graves somewhere – though, wait, are the two of them even dead? Shit, she’s not sure.

Once in a while she gets a station that plays something worth a damn: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nirvana, Cowboy Junkies, Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, Nine Inch Nails, Johnny Cash
covering
Nine Inch Nails. It troubles her that music from the 1980s is now “oldies” music. Hard to picture a bunch of geriatrics thumping their walkers around to
99 Luftballons
.

Most of the time the dial just finds static. Whispers of dead air. Crackles of voices lost in the noise.

Sometimes she thinks they’re talking to her.

“–
mothers don’t love their daughters–”

“– dead people –
ksssh
– everywhere–”

“– fire on route 1 – St. Augustine–”

“– wicked polly–”

“– river is rising–”

“– it is what it is–”

Now she’s on this hellfire-and-brimstone station. Some preacher hollering on about depravities and Leviticus and the
ho-mo-sek-shul
menace, suggesting that God is so squicked out by two dudes kissing that he’s willing to once more drown the world in another hate-flood. Which, to Miriam’s mind, suggests that God doth protest
too much
. Maybe that’s why he booted Satan out of heaven. Maybe they were blowing each other.

She waits for lightning to strike her in her seat.

It does not.

She cackles.

She finishes off her Red Bull and throws it in the back. It clanks against the other energy drink cans. Those things taste like cough syrup that’s been fermenting in the mouth of a dead goat, but shit, they work.

Eventually, her bladder is like a yippy terrier that wants to go out. And the Fiero – which she has named Red Rocket – hungers for gas.

She steps out of the car at a rickety podunk gas station not far from Daytona Beach, and as soon as she does, the heat hits her. It’s like a hug from a hot jogger. Sticky. Heavy heaving bosoms. All-encompassing. A hot blanket of flesh on flesh. Gone is the rush of air conditioning from the car and already she feels the sweat beading on her brow. Ew, gods, yuck.

This is winter? Thirty seconds in she already feels like a swamp.

Florida: America’s hot, moist land-wang.

Everything’s bright. She fumbles on the dash for a pair of sunglasses and quickly throws them on. She feels like a vampire dragged out into the sun for the first time. How long will it be before she bursts into flames, burns down like one of her cigarettes? A char-shaped statue of Miriam Black.

She hurries into the gas station – a round-cheeked Cuban dude watches her with some fascination, like he’s seeing Nosferatu shy away from the judging rays of the Day God – and darts into the bathroom.

Into the stall. Rusty door closed. Someone has peed on the seat, which always astounds her. Men are basically orangutans in good clothes, so she gets that they ook and flail and get piss everywhere. But women? Shouldn’t the ladies be better than this? Why is there pee on the toilet seat?
Hoverers
, she thinks. That’s what it is. They hover over the seat like a UFO over a cornfield, trying to avoid the last woman’s pee – also a hoverer, in a grim urine-soaked cycle – and then
pssshhh
. Splash. Spray. Lady-whiz everywhere. The cycle continues.

Miriam does the civilized thing – a rarity for her but in bathrooms she apparently reverts and becomes a member of the human species – and wads up toilet paper around her hands to make gloves. She cleans the seat. Scowling and cursing the whole time. Then she sits. And she pees.

In here it’s dark and it’s cool, at least.

Outside the stall, the bathroom door opens.

Someone else comes in.

Footsteps echoing. Little splashes as they step through water.

Then:
clang
.

Something drops. Metal on metal. A loud sound, a jarring sound – it gives Miriam’s heart a stun-gun jolt. A scrape. A
splash
.

She peers under the door.

The bent and bitten edge of a red snow shovel drags along the floor. A pair of muddy boots walks it along.

Miriam’s sweat goes cold.

No no no, not here, not now
.

The footsteps approach. Slapping against the soaked floor.

Miriam feels her pulse in her neck: a rabbit’s pulse, thumping against the inside of her skin like a hard finger flicking. Her throat feels tight.

The boots stop just outside the stall.

Snow slides off their tops. Plop, plop. Melting on the tile.

Red runnels of blood crawl toward Miriam’s feet.

A twinge of something inside her: an infant’s fist twisting her guts. Then the woman outside her door drops something:

A purple paisley handkerchief.

The blood runs to it. Soaks through to it.

Fear transforms. A spitting rain into a booming thundercloud. It’s anger now, jagged and defiant, a piece of broken glass chewed in the mouth – and Miriam roars, kicks out with her own black boot–

The door swings open. It slams against the other door.

Nobody’s there. No woman with a red shovel. No boots. No snow, no blood, no gangbanger’s handkerchief.

Miriam sighs. Massages the heels of her hands into her eyes, pressing hard, running them in circles. In the blue-black behind her eyes, fireworks explode and blur and fade – no sound, just silent flashes of light from her pressing hard on her own eyes.

“At least you have both eyes,” comes a voice. Louis. Not-Louis.

The Trespasser, more like it.

She opens her eyes. A vulture sits on the lip of the sink in front of the stall. Bowing its featherless match-tip head. Beak clacking as it speaks.

“You’re the key,” the bird says, “but what’s the lock?”

“What?”

“Or are you the lock and someone else is the key?”

Miriam’s hands are shaking. “Speak sense, bird.”

“Are you going to see Mommy while you’re here?”

Miriam flings her keys at the big black scavenger.

The keyring rebounds off the sink, then the mirror, then lands in the well of a different sink. The bird is gone. One black feather remains, stuck to the grimy porcelain with a waxy bead of blood.

Miriam finishes peeing, rescues the keys, then hurries out.

ELEVEN

RINGY-RINGY

Outside in the parking lot Miriam gasses up the Red Rocket with the last of her cash, then parks off to the side, plants her butt on the hood, and smokes.

She lifts her ass off the car and plucks three pieces of paper – small, not quite fortune cookie fortune size, but close – from her back pocket.

Three phone numbers.

One: Louis. She hasn’t seen him in over a year. Hasn’t spoken to him, either – she ditched her last phone in the river when she got the hell out of town with old man Albert. Albert, who was supposed to take her south. All the way to Florida if she could manage it. To see her mother.

Which leads her to the next number.

Two: her mother. Back in Pennsylvania, during the Mockingbird murders, she decided – or perhaps
was compelled
– to visit the house where she grew up. Her mother’s house, or so she thought. Instead, that fuck-up Uncle Jack was living there. She found out her mother was living in Florida now, doing – what was it? Missionary work? And after all of it was done, after the Caldecotts were dead and Wren was saved, she really thought that she’d go to Florida, see her mother. But she always found a reason to point Albert in a new direction – train museum, amusement park, crayon factory, sex emporium. He knew she was avoiding something. But old Albert was good enough not to go picking scabs.

Albert’s dead now. He must be. That’s what the visions told her, and they haven’t been wrong yet. Dropped dead in the tall, misty woods. Looking at a picture of his wife. And loving her.

Him and Darnell, the car salesman. Men who died with love in their hearts. Is that even a thing she’s capable of? What does her heart contain? Vinegar and venom? Grave dirt and formaldehyde? Nicotine and dirty snow?

And she thinks,
These two phone numbers are heavy
. Pregnant with the potential for love, for connection, for
re
connection, even resurrection – but here she worries that these relationships are already dead and buried, and if there’s one thing she knows all too well, it’s that once you’ve killed something it stays in the ground where you put it.

Still, she thinks,
Call one of them.

Call Louis. Just to see how he’s doing.

Call her mother. To ask if they can see each other.

But then: that flare of anger. Louis doesn’t understand her. Her mother understood her even less.
These are not my people
, she thinks.

She shoves both those numbers back into her pocket.

Then she grabs the third number.

The man from the Craigslist ad.

She calls him. Tells him she’s here. In Florida.

He speaks slow. Not stupid-slow, just laid-back-slow. Peach Bellinis and sun-baked lounge-music slow. He asks her where she is. She tells him: Daytona. “Well, damn. Still got about a seven-hour trip till you get here.”

She asks him, “Where’s ‘here?’”

“Big Torch Key.”

She hears that gravel-and-grit in his voice, a Springsteen growl tempered by a Neil Diamond smarm. When he says
Big Torch Key
he sings it as much as he speaks it.

He tells her the address. Gives her directions.

“This isn’t about sex,” she says. “I’m not a hooker.”

“It’s all good,” he says, though she’s not sure that answer means anything at all.

Miriam tells him she’ll see him at eight.

He says he’s looking forward to it.

Then she hangs up her cheap-shit burner phone and stretches one last time before dropping her sore butt back into the Red Rocket.

The journey continues.

TWELVE

LIKE MOSES IN A RED FIERO

Driving through the Keys feels like threading a needle.

Ahead of her, a ribbon of asphalt: sun-bleached, sand-blasted, salt-brined. In some places, the ocean is ten feet to one side of the road, and ten feet to the other. To her right, Florida Bay, to her left, the Atlantic Ocean, and she’s carving a line right between them, a finger tracing the windowpane between two sheets of emerald glass.

Palm trees sway. Flocks of pelicans cross the bruise-dark sky like something prehistoric – a cabal of pterodactyls out of their time. Few beaches. Lots of boats. Old motels with their old motel signs:
The Sandpiper
.
The Sunset Cove. The Coconut Cove. Smuggler’s Cove. The Lookout Lodge. The Drop Anchor Inn. The Pelican. The Pines. The Conch Out.
Big tall signs out of the 1950s. Some gone dark, half-collapsed. Others dirty, half-wrecked, but still lit: red light painting
vacancy, vacancy, vacancy
in the deepening night.

Tiki bars and marinas. Ramshackle stands selling fish tacos and homes hidden behind the palms. Men and women walking in the coming dark with fishing rods and bait buckets. Powder blues. Coral pinks. Green trees. Smeary neon.

It’s a kind of dipshit, half-ass, hillbilly paradise – lazy and sunburned and swaying in the wind like the palms on both sides of the road.

This isn’t my place
, she thinks.

Then again, what place is?

She drives down through Key Largo, through Tavernier, through Islamorada, through Marathon, threading the needle and stitching together tiny islands. It all feels poorly held together by the white bones of various causeways, like all it would take would be one hard wind blown from the puffed cheeks of a drunken god to scatter the islands to the corners of the map.