Blackbirds (19 page)

  "This is interesting," the thin man says. He rubs his fingertip across the scabby, abraded flesh.
Scritch, scritch.
"A new technique?"

  "New tool," Harriet explains. "I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and picked up some items from the kitchen department. That's from a cheese grater. I also broke three of his fingers with a garlic press."

  "Innovative. And culinary."

  "Thank you."

  Ingersoll looks Frankie up and down. "And what did you contribute?"

  "Donuts."

  Ingersoll gets a sour look on his face. "Of course." It is not an unfamiliar look.

  "He's ready to talk," Harriet says. "I knew you wanted to be here for it."

  "Yes. It's time I am involved fully. This has gone on too long."

  Ingersoll pulls a small satchel from his pocket and kneels by Randy's feet. He presses his face against the beef slab hanging to the right, feeling the cool sensation against his forehead. Then Ingersoll opens the pouch and upends it onto the floor.

  Little bones – most no bigger than marbles, some like long teeth – spill out. These are hand bones: carpals like driveway gravel, metacarpals like Lincoln Logs, phalanges like dog treats or the tips of umbrellas. All pale, bleached, clean.

  Ingersoll does not touch them. His own finger drifts above them, as if he is following along with the text of a children's book or a Bible page. He nods and mumbles something in the affirmative. To everyone else, it's inscrutable, but to him, it's something as plain as day, no less clear than the big, white, fluffy letters of a sky-written message.

  "Good," he says, obviously satisfied. He scoops the bones back up and places them in the pouch once more. He kisses the pouch the way he might kiss his mother.

  He stands again, and looks in Randy's red, raw eyes.

  "You stopped buying from us," Ingersoll says. He licks his lips, shaking his head. "That is a shame. I like to think we offer a solid product for reasonable prices. But you can save yourself here, you know. You will whisper in my ear all you can tell me of your new supplier. If I am satisfied, if you tell me what I want to know, then I will spare your life and instead take only one of your hands. Are we clear?"

  Whimpering behind his own blood-caked sock, Randy nods.

  Ingersoll smiles, plucks out the sock between his delicate thumb and forefinger, and presses his own ear to Randy's mouth.

  "Speak," Ingersoll says, and Randy spills it all.

 

Outside the meat locker, Ingersoll towels off.

  The white towels, handed to him by Harriet, swiftly grow red.

  Ingersoll hands over a plastic baggie. Contained within are two hands severed at the wrists.

  "Boil them," Ingersoll says, "till the meat falls off. Like
osso buco
. Once you have the bones free from the meat, bleach them. Purify them with sage smoke. Then give them to me. I will choose which ones if any belong in my satchel."

  Harriet nods, takes the bag. Frankie has a look like he's already tasting bile.

  "You," Ingersoll says, thrusting his finger against Frankie's sternum. The finger is thin, delicate, like an insect's leg, but it still feels to Frankie like it might punch through his breastbone and puncture his heart. "Dispose of the body."

  Swallowing a hard knot of what might be puke, Frankie nods.

  "Now we know where Ashley Gaynes lives," Ingersoll says.

  But he knows now that Gaynes is only the secondary prize. The girl. She's the one he wants. He reaches in the pocket of his white jacket and gently runs his hands across the binding of Miriam's diary.

  He has some questions he'd very much like to ask her.

 

 

 

It's a while before Miriam speaks again. Paul waits quietly, hesitant, pensive, as if any motion from him might shatter everything, might snap the fraying thread holding the sword that dangles above her head.

  "I got pregnant," she finally says.

  Paul blinks. "By who?"

  "By whom, actually. You're a college student, learn your grammar. By Ben."

  "Ben?" He looks puzzled.

  "Yes. Ben? The one I had sex with? The one who shot himself? I'm sorry, did I tell that story to someone else just now? I admit, I fade in and out."

  "No, sorry, I just thought, he's dead, how could he–"

  Miriam snorts. At this point, she is three-quarters drunk. "We're not talking zombie sex; he didn't come lurching out of the grave dirt to fill my living body with his undead baby batter. We had sex one time, and that one time resulted in a pregnancy. That's the circle of life, Paul."

  "Right. Got it. Sorry."

  "Don't apologize, it's fine. I came back that night, escorted by the police, and my Mom already knew what was up, and the weeks after that – and after Ben shot himself – were spent cloistered away in my room with the Bible. I'm surprised she didn't duct tape it to my hands. She found all my comic books, which I kept under a loose floorboard with some CDs. She took it all away. If she could've stapled my vagina shut in the name of the Lord, I'm sure she would've."

  "At what point did you know?"

  She squints, thinks about it. "The morning sickness started… not quite two months after we did the dirty deed? Something like that. I woke up one morning and lost dinner from the night before, then ate some toast and lost that, too. I knew what it was because I'd been terrified of it. My mother's a big fan of consequence, always playing up how one's sins will be repaid by result, like poisonous fruit grown from a bad seed. Oh, you eat too much? That's gluttony, so here's some bowel cancer. What's that? You can't stop banging all those desperate housewives? Oops, looks like syphilis is rotting your cock off. Good luck!"

  "That's an oddly karmic outlook."

  "Don't tell her that. She'd put a knife to her own throat." Miriam mimes the slitting of her throat, her finger playing the role of knife. "Kkkkt! Kill the heretic."

  "So how'd she react to the pregnancy?"

  "I hid it for as long as I could. I just said I was getting fat, and that was a lie I couldn't back up, because I was barely eating enough for one, much less two. My belly swelled but the rest didn't, and so I ended up looking like one of those African kids on TV with flies crawling all over their bloated bellies."

  "So she found out."

  "She found out."

  "And… what? She threw you out? She doesn't seem like the nicest mother."

  Miriam takes a deep breath. "No. It was… totally the opposite. She changed, man. It's not that she became this sweet, adoring mother, but she really changed. She became more protective. She stopped with calling me names and blaming me for everything. She'd come into my room, check on me, see if I needed anything. Christ, she even made me foods I really liked. It was strange. I guess she figured you can't put the snakes back in the can. All that time she'd been treating me that way to stop me from making a mistake, and there I went ahead and made one anyway. Plus, maybe she really wanted a grandchild. Deep down, sometimes I wonder: maybe that's how she had me. Maybe that's why she was the way she was. Not that I'll ever know, of course."

  "But…" Paul says. "You never had the child."

  "Oh, I had him. He's been hiding behind your chair this whole time."

  Paul actually looks.

  "You're very gullible, Paul," she says. "No, I didn't have the baby."

  "So, what happened? How did you lose the–"
Beep beep beep
. Paul's watch beeps. He lifts his wrist, and Miriam sees it's one of those old-school calculator watches.

  "I didn't think anybody had those anymore," she says.

  "I think I meant for it to be ironic," Paul explains. "Turns out, though, it's actually kind of useful. Who needs a Palm Pilot when you have an awesome calculator watch? Plus, it was, like, five bucks."

  "Thrifty and practical, with a bad-ass calculator watch. Good for you. So what's with the alarm? Got a hot date?"

  "Yeah," he says, lost in thought, but then he shakes his head. "Uh, though, it's totally not a hot date. I have to go to my mom's house, have dinner, explain to her for the thousandth time why I chose to go to college closer to Dad's house, even though it's only closer by, like, ten miles."

  "Sounds like fun," Miriam says.

  "Not really. We'll pick this up tomorrow?"

  "Tomorrow," she lies. "Same time, same channel."

  Paul clicks off his recorder and pockets it. He gives a wave, then an awkward handshake, and then he leaves Miriam alone.

  She waits. Not long. Thirty seconds, maybe.

  Then she follows out after him.

 
 

 

The entire meatball goes into her mouth.

  "I'm still amazed," Louis says, watching her with a look on his face like he's watching a boa constrictor eat the neighbor's cat.

  Around bulging hamster cheeks, Miriam asks, "Whuh?"

  "The way you eat. I've seen it every day now, but every time, it's a unique experience."

  "Mm," she mumbles, forcing the knot of meatball goodness down her throat. "Nothing wrong with a girl who enjoys eating a bad-ass plate of spaghetti, sir."

  Louis blinks. "Except it's ten o'clock in the morning."

  "Not my fault this diner serves the whole menu all day."

  "How do you stay so thin?"

  She smirks, reaching across and taking his hand. "Looking for beauty tips?"

  He doesn't pull away, but he doesn't look comfortable, either. Ever since that night in the motor lodge, he's been unsure. Hovering at her edges. He wants her. But he's afraid of something. Or maybe, she wonders, is she the one who's afraid? And he just senses it?

  They haven't done it yet. The deed. The horizontal mambo. The King Kong climbing the Empire State Building. Miriam's not sure why. She almost banged his brains out before. Why not now? It's her way. It's what she does.

  Louis is different. Or maybe she's different. Any time it crosses her mind, she pushes it back out. She's afraid that examining the experiment will somehow ruin it. As if that makes any sense.

  "I have the metabolism of a coked-up jackrabbit," she explains. "Always have. I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want, and my body burns through it like tinder."

  "Some women would kill to be you."

  "Some women are stupid donkeys."

  He laughs. "Okay, then."

  That right there is a moment she enjoys, a moment worth embracing. Most men in her life – hell, most
anybody
in her life – would take a combative sentiment like that and throw their own right back at her. And thus, a spiteful badminton match would ensue, each sharply phrased comment whipping back and forth like a shuttlecock aimed at someone's eye. Louis, he just takes it. He smiles. He laughs. He doesn't feed her energy. He's got some kind of placating
Tai Chi
, some Zen master redirection of her aggro spirit – and as a result, that spirit does not grow into a meaner beast but dissipates into naught but steam.

  Miriam resists the urge to burp, quashing it behind a fist. She pushes the plate aside and grins. "So, where we headed to next, Big Poppa? And, actually, where the hell are we even at? I haven't exactly been paying attention."

  They have been on the road now for a week and a day. A haul from North Carolina to Maryland (shipping paint cans), a haul from Maryland to Delaware (hoity-toity furniture), and now a haul from Delaware (paint again) to somewhere in… Ohio? This has to be Ohio. Flat. Blah. Trees. Highway. Meh.

  "Blanchester, Ohio," he says, getting out a pocket map and unfolding it across the table. He points to it on the map. "Maybe forty, fifty miles from Cincinnati."

  "
Blaaaanchester
," she says, stretching it out like a zombie with a mouth filled with clotting brains. "Straight outta Blanchester, crazy emmer-effer named Chester the Molester."

  "You're very strange."

  "Get used to it, big guy. That's me, dropping science." She reaches across the table and kisses him. They haven't made the beast with two backs yet, no – but the kisses. She's been giving the kisses. It isn't like her. Usually, she doesn't like kissing the men she meets on the road. They push their slug-like tongues into her mouth, and her only wish is to bite the damn things off at the roots.

  "Your science tastes sweet."

  "I got an A-plus-
plus
in human anatomy and sexuality."

  As she pulls away from him, Miriam looks out the window. Across the street from the diner, a pickup truck sits parked. Innocuous, nothing about it pinging her radar – but then the driver returns to his truck and drives off.

  Behind the truck? Miriam sees neon glowing in the window.

  
Psychic. Palms Read. Tarot Readings.

  Louis peels off a couple bills and tosses down a generous tip – but Miriam just stares. She's thought about doing this for a long time, but she's never had the guts.

  "Wait here," she says and stands up.

  "Ladies' room?"

  She shakes her head. "Nope. Psychic next door. I've always wanted to try it."

  "I'll come with."

  "No – you stay here. This is… private."

  She can see his eyes scanning her, trying to put the pieces together. He's been periodically working away at the Miriam Puzzle the same way someone might come back to look at the Magic Eye poster to see if the image will finally resolve and reveal itself. Like usual, he gives up. No dolphins or sailboats to be seen in the chaos and noise. Not yet.

  "Fair enough," he says, and while he's got one of his several envelopes of cash in-hand (like Ashley suspected, Louis has several envelopes stashed around the truck – his "life savings," he told her), he peels off three twenties into her palm. "At least let me pay for it."