Blackbirds (24 page)

  "And I told
you
," Hairless declares through gritted teeth, "that nature was cruel. Chimpanzees, dolphins, wolves. Red in tooth and claw! They understand revenge. This is that. This is revenge! You hobble my operation–"

  Hairless presses the saw blade to the flesh of Ashley's ankle.

  "So I hobble
you
."

  Hairless begins to cut. Bearing down, elbow back.

  Ashley makes a sound like Miriam's never heard before. It's a high-pitched animal sound, a mammalian dirge.

  Harriet drives as jets of blood arc up over her shoulder.

  Frankie blanches, turns away. "This is a rental," he says between screams.

  The saw moves. It eats with metal teeth.

  Miriam can barely parse what's happening. The blurred motion. The splashes of red. Louis's ghost next to her, whistling that
faux
-innocent, "I knew all along" whistle.

  Do something
, her brain yells.

  Her body lies frozen. Like it's disconnected, gone off-line.

  The saw grinds – now against bone. Ashley's eyelids flutter.

  Good
, part of her thinks. Fuck him. This is all his fault. (
This is all
your
fault
, another voice reminds her, a voice that sounds suspiciously like Louis's.) But she knows when Hairless is done with Ashley, it's on to her. What parts of her will he cut off? What parts is she willing to forsake? The hot tears burn streaks down her cheeks, and her mind lights up.

  
Do something.

  
Do something!

  She does something.

  She props her chin on the seat in front of her, uses it to get leverage. Bound feet under her, she pushes up, shoulders herself over into the same seat as Hairless and Ashley. She almost slips off the bloody leather but manages to get her back against the seat, her legs up.

  Hairless regards her with nothing but idle curiosity.

  "A survivor," he says. "I like that."

  She aims her bound feet toward his head. But precise control isn't on the cards when her body's been relegated to the movements of a fat grub or clumsy inchworm.

  She kicks Hairless in the chest.

  The blade slips from his hand, but not before making one last dig. Ashley's foot swings by a strip of skin and ankle hair that looks like a stretched Band-Aid.

  Miriam kicks again, both feet into Hairless's sunken chest.

  The door behind them opens. Maybe Ashley opened it on purpose or by accident. Maybe it was never closed properly. Miriam doesn't know and doesn't care.

  What she knows is that Ashley tumbles out of the car. His body is a shuddering shape, a shadow, and then it's out the door and gone. The space where he was is now nothing but passing pine trees, dark needles against a steel sky.

  Hairless, looking more than a little bemused, leans back, holding onto the
oh-shit
handle above his head with his bony, almost feminine fingers.

  In his other hand, he holds Ashley's severed foot.

  He regards it the way a teacher might regard an apple from a student.

  Miriam knows she only has seconds to act.

  She tries to push back with her legs. If she can get to the opposite door, if she can press her back up against it, her bound hands can grab the handle, pop it open, and she can escape. But the blood – there's too much of it. It's slick. It's like trying to run in a nightmare: feet jogging through wet cement. Grunting, she pushes back again and again, flexing her legs, hoping her feet will offer her some purchase…

  It works. Her back hits the Escalade door. Her fingers work like blind worms, feeling for the door handle.

  "No," Hairless says, as if by saying it, he commands reality.

  "Fhhh mmmuuu," Miriam screams through the tape just as her fingers find the handle.

  "Lock the door!" Hairless cries out – but it's too late.

  The door flies open, and Miriam flies backward.

  She knows it's going to suck. Hitting asphalt? At sixty? It'll be a like a bug jumping on a belt sander. Gravel will eat the back of her skull. It's suicide, probably.

  The idea doesn't make her uncomfortable.

  But her head doesn't hit the passing blacktop.

  A pair of hands has her by the calves. Hairless Her head dangles out the car door, her hair brushing the highway zooming by beneath her. The rush of wind fills her ears. She can smell saltwater, car fumes, pine trees, the cloying chemical curdle that is the state scent of New Jersey. It's freedom she smells and hears, and it isn't long for her world–

  –which reverses, like a tape rewinding.

  Hairless drags her back into the car. His face floats above her.

  She thinks to head-butt it, but it's like he knows what she's thinking, because he presses a blood-slick hand against her forehead.

  The other hand pulls a syringe.

  Miriam struggles. A bead of clear fluid oozes from the tip of the needle, and caught in the wind from the still-open door, it trembles and dances away toward oblivion.

  "We'll talk soon," Hairless says.

  He jams the needle into her neck.

  "Nnnngh!" she shouts against the tape gag.

  The world shudders and breaks apart. Its pieces float toward an uncertain darkness.

 
 

 

The world oozes. Everything is wet paint on a canvas, clumps of color sliding down.

  Miriam feels hands under her armpits. Her feet drag along sand. Bleary late afternoon light pokes through the gray above. Mosquitoes fly. Pale pines cast long shadows, shadows that seem to have fingers, that seem to want to pluck her skin from her bones.

  Ahead of her, Hairless walks. His white blazer is peppered with red.

  
Ashley's blood.

  Ashley's severed foot sloshes along in a clear zip-top freezer baggy in the Hairless Fucker's hand, swinging this way and that.

  Time dilates. Then expands.

  They're nowhere. More trees. An overturned claw-foot tub leans against a mound of moss, the lower half given over to some kind of black mold.

  A tire swing rotates on a heavy gauge chain. Atop the tire, a big black crow sits, turning with the swing as if he's enjoying the ride.

  She steps on seashells. Brittle. They break under foot.

  Miriam tries to say something. Her mouth is still taped. It comes out a soggy mumble. She breathes through her nose: a low, dry whistle.

  Ahead, a small cabin. White siding, the bottom fringed with moss.

  
At least it's not another motel, she thinks.

  She fades out.

 

  Miriam's eyes jolt open. The world rushes in with a windy
whoosh
: a river of blood in her ears, an undertow pulling her back toward full-bore consciousness.

  Miriam finds herself hanging in a shower with faded tiles the color of sea-foam.

  Her hands are bound above, draped over a shower head.

  Her feet, also bound, barely touch the tub beneath her. She has to stand on tippy-toes. She has no traction, only the ability to wriggle like a worm on a hook.

  Frankie stands in the doorway, too tall for it. He stoops to fit himself in.

  Hairless relaxes on the toilet. Streaks of dried blood – the mascara of a weepy girl – mar his cheeks. In his lap rests Miriam's diary. Gently, he shuts it.

  Harriet flaps the electrical tape she's just yanked from Miriam's mouth in front of Miriam's face – a strange taunt – and backs away.

  "I have read this book," Hairless says, tapping the notebook against his leg.

  "Fuck you," Miriam mutters.

  Hairless shakes his head as Harriet squeezes her hand into a black glove. "Such a boring refrain from you. Fuck this, fuck that, fuck me, fuck you. Such a crass little girl. Harriet, I see the ghost of a bruise around this girl's eye. Please, will you wake the dead?"

  Harriet steps up onto the rim of the tub and pops Miriam in the eye with the gloved fist. Miriam's head rocks backward.

  "There we go, yes," Hairless says. "That will remind you to be polite when you are in such esteemed company. Now, speaking of the dead. You have an intimate connection with the dead, do you not?"

  "The dying," Miriam croaks. "Not so much the dead."

  "Yes, and we're all dying, aren't we?"

  "We are. Well put."

  "Thank you. See? That is the politeness I was hoping you might offer. Good." Hairless holds up the book and gestures with it. "I believe what you write in this book is true. I do not think it the fantasy of a deranged girl, deranged as you may be. May I tell you of my
oma
, my grandmother?"

  "Go for it. I'm not going anywhere."

  Hairless smiles. A fond remembrance flashes in his eyes.

 
 

 

My grandmother, Milba, was a witch woman.

  Even as a little girl picking cranberries out in the bog, she could see things. Her visions did not happen unbidden, but by her studying the world around her. She would touch things, things of nature, things of the bog, and those things would show her what was coming.

  If she found the bones of a snake, she could handle them, let them roll around in her small fingers and watch how the bog water ran off them, and therein she might see what would happen to her father later that day when he went to market, or how her sister might suffer a splinter under the nail of her toe.

  She could smash the berries in her palms and read the red guts. They might tell her what weather was coming. By running her hands up the bark of a tree, she might learn what birds nested there, and by breaking the neck of a rabbit kit, she might learn where the rest of the rabbits had their warren.

  Later, when I was a child and we had come to this country, my oma would sit out on the front stoop of our house, sharpening her knives across the sidewalk and steps. She would hull peas or break beans and close her eyes to see what they might tell her. By old age, Oma was small and withered, a bent stick with arthritic claws and a nose like a fish hook, and the neighbors thought her strange the way she babbled, and so they called her a witch.

  They called her a witch as an insult. They did not know she had visions. They did not know the truth of it.

  They would come to learn it.

  There came a day when I had been abused at school again. I was a thin child, sickly, and it did not help that I had been born without a single sprout of hair on my worm's body. It also did not help that my English was not particularly good at the time, and I often had trouble speaking as well as the other children.

  The boy who bullied me, a boy named Aaron, was a Jew. He was fat in the stomach, and had big muscles and curly hair, and he said he hated me because I was a German, a "fuckin' Nazi," even though I was not German. I am Dutch, I would tell him, Dutch.

  It did not matter. At first the abuse was what you would expect. He would hold me down and beat on me until my nose bled and bruises covered my body.

  But as the days went on, he did worse things.

  He burned my arm with match-tips. He pushed things into my ears – little stones, sticks, ants – until I suffered from infections. He grew more brazen, crueler. He had me pull down my pants and he did things to me – he cut my inner thighs with a knife, and stabbed at my buttocks with it.

  So I went to my grandmother. I wanted to know when this would all end. I said to her, show me, show me how it ends. I knew what she was, what she could do, but I had always been too afraid of it – too afraid of
her
– to ask. But now I was desperate.

  Oma told me she would help me. She sat me down and said, "Do not be scared of what I can see, because what I can see is part of nature. It is natural. I read natural things, like bones or leaves or fly wings, and they tell me what is coming. The world has its strange balance, and what I can see is no more magic than how you look down the road and see a mailbox or a man walking – I simply see how everything will balance out."

  Oma had a jar of teeth, teeth she had collected from many animals over many years, and she emptied that jar in front of me. She had me open one of the scabs on my arms from the burning matches, and she took some of my blood on her fingertips and ran them across the scattered teeth.

  Oma told me, "Your suffering will be over soon. Tomorrow night."

  I was excited. I said, "That soon?"

  And she said yes. She had foreseen it. Aaron would meet his end.

  "He will die?" I asked.

  She nodded. I was not sad about this. I was not conflicted. I felt happy.

  The next night, I waited in my bed the way that a child might wait for Christmas morning. I could not sleep. I was too excited, and a little scared.

  I heard a sound outside. Scraping. Metal on stone.

  It was Oma. She took one of her kitchen knives, sharpened it on the stoop, and then went to Aaron's house – which was only down the street by less than a mile. A withered shadow, she crept into his room. And while he slept, she stabbed him. A hundred times.

  She came back to my room and told me what she had done, and she gave me the knife.

  "Sometimes, we must choose what we see down the road," she said.

  And then she went outside to wait.

  They came for her in the early morning hours. She made no mystery about what she had done – her gown was covered in the bully's blood. I do not know what they came to do to her, maybe kill her, but it was too late.

  She had died there on the stoop.

  A bent little shape, a weeping willow, dead.