Blackbirds (13 page)

  "This is a dream," she says.

  The balloon turns slowly – on the back is another message.

  A skull and crossbones are where the cake should be. From the skull's open mouth, emerging through crooked, jaunty teeth, a comic strip word bubble:
Happy DEATH-day, Miriam.

  "Cute," she says, and she thrusts up with the knife.

  The balloon pops.

  And it sprays blood everywhere. Black blood. Thick with clots. Miriam wipes it off her face, spitting. It runs down the mirror, globs of rusty treacle. Bits of pale tissue are trapped in the flow like maggots in tree sap. She's seen this before, seen this kind of blood. (
On the floor, on the bathroom floor.
)

  She doesn't know why, but she runs her hand across the mirror, wiping a clear spot away so she can see her reflection.

  What she sees surprises her.

  It's still her, the reflection. But she's young. Chestnut hair pulled back and tied with a pink scrunchie. No makeup. Eyes wider, fresher, that glimmer of innocence.

  Then, movement behind her, in the reflection, obscured by coagulating clumps of gore.

  "Nine more pages," says a voice. Louis's voice.

  Miriam wheels, but it's too late. He's got a red snow shovel.

  He cracks her across the head, laughing. All goes dark. As she's drawn deep into the well of unconsciousness, she hears the squalling cries of a child, and then that fades, too.

 

She wakes to the antiseptic stink of a hospital. It crawls up her nose. It nests there.

  Her hands clutch the sheets. She struggles to get out of bed, to swing her feet over the edges, but the sheets have tangled her, and the bed is edged with a metal rail that she cannot, not for the life of her, seem to overcome. It's as if they form an invisible perimeter. It's hard for her to get air. Her lungs won't draw full breaths. She feels trapped, like in a box, in a coffin.
Sucking breath, tight throat, gasp.

  Hands reach out suddenly – hard hands, heavy hands – and they grab her ankles and, no matter how hard she struggles, buckle her feet into cold rubber stirrups. The palms feel greasy, wet. A face emerges from the edge of the bed, rising up from between her legs.

  It's Louis. He tugs aside a mint-green surgical mask with blood-stained fingers.

  "There's been a lot of blood," he says.

  Miriam struggles. The sheets have coiled around her hands. "This is a dream."

  "Could be." Louis reaches up and scratches the edges of the electrical tape X over his right eye. "Sorry. The tape itches."

  "Get my legs out of those stirrups."

  "If it's just a dream," he says, "why not just wake up?"

  She tries. She really tries. She cries out,
willing
herself to wake.

  Nothing. The world remains. Louis cocks his head. "Still think it's a dream?"

  "Fuck you."

  "Such a dirty mouth. It's why you'll be an unfit mother."

  "Fuck
your
mother."

  "You're like that girl in that movie, the one where she gets possessed by the devil? You know the one. All that vomit. All that angry rage slagging our blessed Lord and Savior."

  Miriam pulls again at the stirrups. Sweat beads on her brow. She grunts in frustration, anger, fear.
Why can't I wake up? Wake up, you stupid girl, wake up.

  "We're going to have to stitch you up," Louis says. He leers toward the exposed space between her legs and licks his lips. "Tie it shut,
nice and tight."

  "You're not Louis. You're just a phantom in my head. You're my own brain, toying with me."

  "It's
Doctor
Louis, I'll have you know. Respect the credentials." He pulls out a needle. It's huge, like a crotchet needle. Like a baby's finger. He sticks out his tongue to concentrate and, even blind, is able to thread a dirty, fraying cord through the eye of the fat needle. "You don't even know my last name, do you?"

  "You don't have a last name," she huffs, trying to free her hands. "You're a figment. A fragment. I don't care about you. I don't care about ghosts and goblins."

  "You feel guilty. That's okay. I'd feel guilty, too. We can talk about that, but before we do, I really need to stitch up your naughty place. That's medical lingo, by the way: naughty place. But I know you're fond of certain words, so, let me rephrase that: I need to sew shut this stinking, worm-choked cunt of yours so that you can
never
have another baby, because the last thing the world needs is for you to breed true once more and crack your whore's pelvis giving birth to whatever little godless maggot decides to wriggle free from your scabbed womb."

  Miriam is horrified – horrified at the words coming out of his (
her
?) mouth. She wants to say something, but her voice is just a squeak, a hoarse squeal. She tries to say no, tries to reach out and stop him –

  But his head dips down and the fat needle pierces her labia, and she feels a gush of blood and she tries to scream but no scream will come –

Long highway – tapering to nothing in one direction, and tapering to nothing in another. Gray, blasted, pale, cracked. Desert on both sides: red earth, pale scrub. Blue sky above, but far off a rolling thunderhead like an anvil tumbles end over end over end.

  Miriam stands on the shoulder of the highway. She catches her breath, as if she just emerged from the icy waters of a winter lake.

  She feels her thighs, her crotch. No pain. No blood.

  "Jesus," she gasps.

  "Not quite," a voice from behind her.

  Louis, again, with those dead-X eyes.

  He smiles.

  "Don't come near me," she warns. "You come near me, I will break your tree-trunk neck, I swear to all that is holy."

  He chuckles, shaking his head. "C'mon, Miriam. You've already established that this is a dream. You already know that I'm you. So are you saying you want to break your own neck? That's very counter-productive. Suicidal, really. You should seek professional help."

  Louis starts to pace, and as he moves, Miriam sees two crows in the middle of the highway. Dark beaks peck at a smashed armadillo, pulling up strings and tendons of red. The dead animal almost looks like a cracked Easter egg. The birds peck at each other.

  "Maybe I'm not you," Louis says, slowly ping-ponging from dusty shoulder to dusty shoulder. "Maybe I'm God. Maybe I'm the Devil. Could be that I'm the living manifestation of fate, of destiny, of that thing you curse every morning you wake and every night before you lay your head to sleep. Who can say? All I know is, it's time to
meet ze monsta
."

  Miriam begins to pace along with him. They are like two predatory cats, stalking each other on two sides of the same cage.

  "Get me out of this dream," she says.

  He ignores the request. "Maybe I really am Louis, though. Maybe I'm his sleeping mind, psychically calling out to you – because, after all, you're so sensitive. Poor little psychic girl. Maybe I know what's coming, and I'm begging for you to make it stop.
Please, make it stop, Miriam
. Boo-hoo."

  "I can't make it stop."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. You still have choices. I'm going to die in two weeks, but instead of trying to stop it – or, at least, trying to make my life a little better during that time – you're going to haunt me like a ghost and steal from my dead, eyeless body."

  "Girl needs to eat." Miriam sneers.

  He stops pacing. "Is that how you justify what you do?"

  "You don't know what I do or why I do it," she says, even though she suspects the opposite must be true. "I'll be with Louis – and trust me, you're not him – and maybe I
will
make his life better for those two weeks."

  "Blowjobs are nice," Louis says. "Try one of those."

  "Fuck you. I can make him happy during that time. But don't ask me to save him–"

  "Save
me
."

  "– because it ain't happening. It can't happen. It won't let me."

  "It."

  "Fate. You. God. Whatever."

  He shrugs. Then he looks somewhere over her shoulder.

  "Hey," he says. "What's that?"

  She falls for it. She looks.

  It's a Mylar balloon. Drifting over the road-top, caught in a heat haze, dripping blood onto the asphalt, where it sizzles as if on a hot griddle.

  Miriam turns to say something to Louis, or not-Louis, or whatever he is, but –

  He's gone.

  He's been replaced by a white SUV, and it strikes her dead in the chest, and she feels something break inside of her.

  The crows caw. A baby cries.

• • • •

When Ashley wakes, he finds Miriam in the corner, soaked in sweat. She's sitting there, back against the two walls joining, and she's furiously scribbling in the notebook.

  "What are you doing?" he croaks.

  "Writing."

  "I see that, Hemingway. Writing what?"

  She looks up then. Mania glints in her eyes, and a mad smile plays.

  "Wrote two pages, that's what. Only seven pages left." Then she goes back to scribbling.

 
 

 

The trailer park reminds Harriet of a graveyard. Singlewides and doublewides. Gray and white boxes. All lined up, one after the next. They're like headstones, she thinks. Or rows of tombs, each marked with dead and dying flowers.

  Frankie kicks a stone. It ricochets off a rusty watering can, pelts a dirty garden gnome in his mushroom hat. "This place is disgusting."

  Harriet steps up and knocks on the door of a doublewide at the end of the row.

  A human mountain – his flesh a tattooed landslide in midcollapse, answers the door.

  Fat Dude. More specifically, naked Fat Dude. Two fingers splinted.

  His frame fills the trailer door. A fire-breathing serpent, inked and linked with another serpent, encircles his belly button crater. The second serpent runs down to Fat Dude's mammoth thigh and coils inward so that –

  Frankie blanches.

  "Oh, c'mon," he mumbles, shielding his eyes.

  "What?" Fat Dude asks, pissed.

  Frankie wrinkles his nose. "Man. You got your
dick
inked?"

  "You lookin' at my dick?"

  "Well, it's right fuckin' there!" Frankie yells, pointing. "It's like a cucumber. A
sea
cucumber. I think it's looking at me, to be honest with you."

  Fat Dude growls, "It'll spit in your mouth if you don't quit flappin' your lips."

  "You sonofabitch–"

  "We need to ask you a question," Harriet interrupts, holding back Frankie.

  "I don't answer questions from dykes and dagos," Fat Dude says, proud of himself.

  "Fuck you, fat-sauce!" Frankie says, stepping up.

  Fat Dude reaches out with his left hand – the one with unsplinted fingers – as if to grab Frankie's lower jaw and rip it off his head. His hand never gets that far.

  Harriet lets out a small sigh and darts in with a fast hand, pinching one of Fat Dude's testicles between her small fingers. She squeezes like she's trying to unscrew a sparrow's head. The mountainous man yelps like a kicked puppy and swings a meaty paw at Harriet's head. She leans backward, and Fat Dude's hand cracks into the moldering doorjamb of his own trailer. His index and middle finger bend backward in a way that's wholly not natural and crack like sticks breaking under a heavy foot. He howls.

  Harriet finds this terribly satisfying. Two more broken fingers. Symmetry pleases her.

  She lets go of Fat Dude's empurpled nut and shoulders him backward.

  It's now possible to see the rest of the trailer – the mound of dirty dishes collecting flies, the couch with fabric so rough it could grate cheese, the bathroom door that's actually just a strip of accordion plastic pulled taut and latched with a rusty hook. A real palace.

  Against the back wall sits a cot bowed deep, Harriet presumes, from Fat Dude's tremendous bulk. At present, a skinny girl, maybe eighteen, maybe younger, sits watching the whole thing unfold with heavy, heroin-lidded eyes. She holds up a blanket as if to feign modesty, but one tiny tit pokes out the top with a cigar-butt nipple standing at attention, a fact to which the girl seems oblivious.

  "Hold his head," Harriet commands.

  Frankie grabs the biker's pale pumpkin head and slams it down against a carpet crusted with food stains and other biological blemishes.

  "Now lift his head."

  Once the head's back up, Harriet thrusts a photo under Fat Dude's nose. His watering eyes try to focus on it.

  "This man's name is Ashley Gaynes," Harriet explains. It's a photo of Ashley at a party, laughing, a cup of something that might be beer in his hand. He and everyone else stand bathed in the glow of red Christmas lights. "A bartender across town said you might know him."

  "Yeah, yeah," Fat Dude squeaks. "I know him. You shoulda just showed me the picture to begin with. I woulda rolled on that little asshole like it weren't nothing. He's the one who broke my… " He can't seem to bring himself to finish the sentence. He lifts the splinted hand off the carpet and waves it like a penguin's busted flipper.

  "Gonna be tough to jerk off now," Frankie says, grinning ear to ear.

  "He have a metal suitcase with him?" Harriet asks.

  "No. No suitcase. Just some blonde bitch."

  "Blonde?"

  "Blonde like white blonde, like beach sands – a dye job. And he drives a Mustang. Early 90s. White. Back window busted out."

  Harriet nods to Frankie, who lets go of Fat Dude's face. It booms into the floor like the boulder tumbling after Indiana Jones.